In collaboration with Dr. Hilaire Kallendorf in Hispanic Studies and Dr. Laura Estill in English at Texas A&M in College Station, Dr. Kathryn Vomero Santos of the Department of English at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi has been involving her undergraduate students in the process of building a digital scholarly edition of Bartholomew Yong’s English translation of Jorge de Montemayor’s pastoral romance Los siete libros de la Diana, one of Shakespeare’s sources for The Two Gentlemen of Verona (and other plays like As You Like It and Twelfth Night). With the assistance of a $6,000 “Teaching Shakespeare to Undergraduates” grant from the Folger Shakespeare Library and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Dr. Santos worked with the staff and faculty at the Texas A&M University Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture to pilot the first stage of this project through a series of assignments and guest lectures in her Fall 2016 ENGL 3341 Renaissance Literature class. In October, Dr. Kallendorf traveled to Corpus Christi to deliver a lecture on the Diana and its Spanish contexts, and in November, Dr. Estill conducted a session on Digital Humanities and Shakespeare studies via Skype. Following these lectures, Dr. Santos then taught her students how to use a web-based software called TypeWright, which allowed them to transcribe the text of the first printing of La Diana and then encode that transcription with a markup language called TEI, or Text-Encoding Initiative. Dr. Estill also taught the students enrolled in her ENGL 212 and ENGL 412 courses at TAMU how to use TypeWright so that they could work on the transcription as an extra credit assignment.

To celebrate and publicize the work that the students completed on this project and to contextualize the value of studying one of Shakespeare’s Spanish sources at TAMU-CC, a Hispanic-Serving Institution in South Texas, Dr. Santos organized the Hispanic Shakespeare Symposium, which took place at TAMU-CC on Friday, February 17, 2017, and featured a student research panel, a lunchtime discussion on Shakespeare and immigration, and keynote addresses by Dr. Eric Griffin of Millsaps College and Dr. Ruben Espinosa of the University of Texas at El Paso. The event was attended by members of the TAMU-CC and larger Corpus Christi community and received coverage both in the student newspaper, Island Waves, and in the local paper, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Dr. Santos plans to teach the same assignment sequence as part of her Fall 2017 section of ENGL 3341, which will allow more students to contribute to the project and learn from the experience. She has also received a $4,500 grant from the TAMU-CC Division of Research, Commercialization, and Outreach to work with her research assistant, Ms. Chanel Kern, to complete the research and planning for the critical introduction and bibliography that will accompany the digital edition of La Diana.