Year Started

1981

Education

• Ph.D. Modern Literature, Shakespeare, Chaucer The Graduate Center of CUNY
• M. Phil Modern Literature, Shakespeare, Chaucer The Graduate Center of CUNY
• B.A. Cum Laude English Literature Brooklyn College

Teaching Interests

• Shakespeare
• Text and Performance
• Modern and Renaissance Literature
• Literature and Film
• Public Speaking
• Art History

Research Interests

• Shakespeare
• Text and Performance
• Modern Literature
• Poetry and Poetics
• Russian Literature and Translation

Biography

Professor Laury Magnus is Professor of English in the Humanities Department, of which she has been a member since 1981. She holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of City University of New York. Her current scholarship is devoted to Shakespeare, text and performance, and she is an associate member of the editorial team of the forthcoming New Variorum Hamlet (MLA), and of the ever-expanding website Hamletworks.org. She teaches world literature and composition courses and independent studies in Shakespeare, literature and film, the literature of World War I, art history, modern literature, drama, and public speaking.

Close reading, studying works in their historical context, and working out interpretative problems through discussion as well as scene staging and/or film analysis are what she enjoys most in her teaching. While teaching on Zoom, she has added Reading and Interpreting Aloud practices to engage her students more fully. She leads a Zoom reading and Interpretation session for interested KP faculty and staff and colleagues from other colleges, as well as a Saturday night “Reading Classics Aloud” group for young adults. She has recently designed a Humanities Concentration, “Film Studies in History, Literature, and Comparative Cultures.” In her English classes, she has designed a new “Literature and Life” journal project, which enables students to relate what is going on in their current lives to the literature they are reading and discussing in class.

Professor Magnus's most recent books, Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds, Hearing and Staging Practices, Then and Now (2020), and Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen (2012), have been published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and co-edited with Dr. Walter Cannon. These books investigate how Shakespeare crafted scenes of hearing, mis-hearing, overhearing, eavesdropping, asides and stage whispers, creating a kaleidoscopic dramatic soundscape with audiences both onstage and off. Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds expands on Who Hears in Shakespeare? with discussions of sound and music, also featuring interviews on “Shakespeare’s Soundscape in Original Practices” by world-renowned actors of the American Shakespeare Center’s Blackfriars Theatre in Staunton, Va.

Professor Magnus has published Chapter 26 on "Shakespeare on Film and Television" in The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare (2012), and a chapter on “Macbeth in Performance” appears in Macbeth: A Critical Reader (Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2013). Her “Essays on Characters” in Hamletworks.org. include essays on Ophelia, Laertes, Fortinbras, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, The Gravediggers, and Osric. She has edited four performance-oriented New Kittredge/ Focus editions of Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors and Measure for Measure. She has published performance reviews of Shakespeare’s plays for The Shakespeare Newsletter; her essays and reviews have also appeared in Shakespeare Quarterly, Literature and Film Quarterly, Connotations, Assays, and College Literature. Her non-Shakespearean books include a book on repetition in modern poetry and a co-translation of the Russian novel The Precipice, by Ivan Goncharov, with her husband, the noted translator Boris Jakim.

Professor Magnus is a long-time Associate Member and Executive Board Member of the Columbia University Shakespeare Seminar and the Shakespeare Association of America. For many years, she served as Director of the Arts and World Affairs Program, bringing plays, concerts, and lectures to the Kings Point Campus and organizing TMs to the city and to The American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, (which hosts a terrific workshop on “Shakespeare and Leadership”) for cultural events. The ASC is managing to survive during our COVID pandemic and has even managed live performances of plays as well, both in Staunton and through their traveling troupe. (Dr. Magnus first visited the ASC for a prestigious 2004 NEH seminar there and in London, and the ASC’s lectures and workshops on Shakespeare in Performance changed her scholarly life).

In former years, Professor Magnus was Faculty Advisor to Hear This. She is currently a member of The Mariners' Chorus. Finally, In the last six years, she has started the highly popular Kings Point Dance Club, which features Swing and Latin dancing.

Finally, Professor Magnus claims the distinction of being the first woman to have achieved the academic rank of full professor at Kings Point.