Arts Professor of TheaterAffiliation:NYU Abu Dhabi Education: BA English Literature, Leeds University; Honorary Doctorate of Letters, University of Cambridge
Research Areas: Comparative Theatre Formation Across Cultures
Wole Soyinka is a towering figure in world literature and a multifaceted artist-dramatist, poet, essayist, musician, philosopher, academic, teacher, human rights activist, global artist, and scholar. He has won international acclaim for his verse, as well as for novels such as Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. His works encompass drama, poetry, novels, music, film, and memoirs; he is considered among the great contemporary writers.
Soyinka is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Mandela’s Earth and Other Poems, two novels, books of essays, and memoirs, including The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness, and numerous plays.
Soyinka has held positions at other higher education institutions, including Harvard, Yale, Duke, Emory, and Loyola Marymount in the US, as well as highly regarded institutions throughout Africa and Europe. He is also an active member of international, artistic, and human rights organizations.
Soyinka's class, “Culture and Citizenship,” will explore issues of citizenship and culture and how works of art can be said to be pertinent to a country or culture and contribute to the work of shaping national or cultural identities. The seminar will draw on diverse genres of literature from a range of times and places — from ancient Greece to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Turkey and eighteenth-century England.
Courses Taught
What is the relationship between citizenship and culture? When and how do they overlap? How do the rituals by which our identities are conferred and regulated relate to either or both of these concepts? Are we simply born into citizenship? Into culture? When and how do these categories evolve? To what extent can works of art be said to "belong" to a country or culture or to contribute to the work of shaping national or cultural identities? Emergent literatures from what we might call nation-spaces are often subjected to simple deeds of ownership, albeit not without contestation. Indeed, the same texts, examined more carefully, may negate such casual attributions. What happens when memory exerts its brooding influence, upsetting the categorical claims of citizen that derive from the cultural field? This seminar draws on diverse genres of literature from a range of times and places - from ancient Greece to the Harlem Renaissance to contemporary Turkey, from eighteenth-century England to the unfinished business of the Biafra war of secession – to ask if there are any inherent and permanent values to be placed on household expressions such as Nation, Culture, and other like terms.
Previously taught: Fall 1 2022
This course appears in...
Core Curriculum > Cultural Exploration and Analysis
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Introductory Literature Electives
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Literature Histories
Minors > Literature
This course introduces students to the art and craft of playwriting by drawing from Eastern, Western, Middle Eastern and African traditions. The course engages students in a rigorous study of form, content, structure and philosophy in order to arrive at a methodology that each writer can adapt and develop in order to write plays that are ambitious in terms of the ideas and forms they deal with. The main objectives are: to develop one's voice as a playwright; to develop tools and techniques to realize that voice; to write a one act play.
Previously taught: Fall 2016, Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Spring 1 2023
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Creative Writing
Majors > Literature and Creative Writing > Literature Topics
Majors > Theater > Arts Practice
Minors > Creative Writing
Minors > Theater
In 'Faith, Ideology and Power,' students create theatrical texts which foreground the ideological complexities of faith, capitalism and other structures of power within which contemporary societies operate across the world. Conversations, readings and exercises will guide students to examine their own ideological conditions and question the presence of power in modern times. Research will be student-driven and focus on the different scenarios that students and professors bring to class. A central theme for the writing will be the rise of religious bigotry, the use of such bigotry and other discrimination to control populations, and the ways in which common people deal with such ideologies. The course serves as a studio program for new theatrical writing on these and other critical political and social issues.
