Award-Winning Historian Speaks at SOF Online Symposium
by Bryan H. Wildenthal
August 28, 2020 — The SOF is pleased to announce an exciting new addition to the lineup of speakers during the free online Shakespeare Authorship Symposium on October 2–3, 2020. (Updates: Read here about the successful Symposium as it took place. The Symposium presentations may be viewed on the SOF YouTube channel playlist here. The full formal program may be downloaded here.)
Donald Ostrowski, Ph.D., a distinguished historian and lecturer in Harvard University’s Extension School, will present a talk drawn from his new book, Who Wrote That? Authorship Controversies from Moses to Sholokhov. The book was published by Northern Illinois University Press (an imprint of Cornell University Press) in June 2020 and is available here on Amazon. Among his more than 150 other publications are Muscovy and the Mongols (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and his edition of The Povest’ vremennykh let (Tale of Bygone Years) (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2003), which won the Early Slavic Studies Association Award for Distinguished Scholarship.
Dr. Ostrowski earned his Ph.D. at Pennsylvania State University and serves as Lecturer in History and Research Advisor in the Social Sciences at the Harvard Extension School. Filmmaker Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, 2019 Oxfordian of the Year, was one of Dr. Ostrowski’s students and credits him with sparking her own interest in the Shakespeare Authorship Question (SAQ).
Dr. Ostrowski’s latest book — Who Wrote That? — appears likely to earn a place as a classic comparative study of nine authorship disputes throughout human history. It is difficult to recall any previous scholarly study of this scope and nature.
The book demonstrates how absurd and ahistorical it is to reject the SAQ as a frivolous “conspiracy theory” — as so many Stratfordian English professors, with little if any training or experience in history, mistakenly have done.
On the contrary: Dr. Ostrowski shows that the “Shakespeare” mystery, when viewed in proper historical context, resembles numerous other questions about authorship that have been debated with the utmost seriousness by some of the greatest minds in human history. He also summarizes the powerful historical evidence supporting the case for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as the true author behind the “Shakespeare” pseudonym.
See also Ramon Jiménez’s review of Harold Love, Attributing Authorship: An Introduction (2002).
[published Aug. 28, 2020, updated 2021]
