Professor, Humanities

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.

Professor Magnus's most recent book, Who Hears in Shakespeare? Auditory Worlds on Stage and Screen, published by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press in 2012 and co-edited with Dr. Walter Cannon, investigates 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.  A forthcoming second book will appear in late 2019 or 2020: Shakespeare’s Auditory Worlds, also published by FDU Press in their Shakespeare on the Stage Series. It expands on topics in Who Hears in Shakespeare? with discussions of sound and music and also features 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 the chapter on "Shakespeare on Film and Television" for 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 frequently publishes 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 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 (which hosts a terrific workshop on “Shakespeare and Leadership”) for cultural events. She has been a long-term Faculty Advisor to Hear This as well as a long-time member of The Mariners' Chorus.  More recently, she has started a Kings Point Ballroom Dancing Club.  Professor Magnus also claims the distinction of being the first woman to have achieved the academic rank of full professor at Kings Point. She is the Kings Point Mace Bearer.