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INTERNATIONAL
SHAW SOCIETY |
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The International Shaw Society, Inc. (“The ISS”), a society
devoted to the very enjoyable and enlightening study of the life, times, and
work of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), was officially
founded in 2004, largely for the purpose of keeping Shaw talking, his
favorite thing, even though he's been dead since 1950. The acronym “ISS”
emphasizes Shaw’s continuing presence, his “issness,”
in the contemporary world, if only as a talkative spirit with very relevant
things to say, and said in a way that is rare in its relative sanity,
humanity, and civilizing good humor.
If you like humor of the hyperbolic and ironic sort, “smiling comedy,”
as he called it, Shaw is your man. What keeps a dead author
alive? While alive, Shaw was of the opinion that it was "sedulous
self-advertisement" that kept him going and that the only bad publicity
was an obituary (unless you wrote it yourself). But Shaw's
afterlife on earth now depends on theater productions and discussion of his
life and works, and that’s where the ISS comes in. Likely to meet anywhere in the world and
global in its online reach, the ISS now has members in thirteen countries, on
five continents, and grows apace, about half academics and half not, with a
generous sprinkling of theater artists in both halves. The ISS invites you to
join in the fun and enlightenment of encountering Shaw's plays and discussing
the author and his works. The
history of the founding of the ISS comes first in this account, but you can
skip that to get to what it is doing now by clicking here. Otherwise, read on. In 2001,
at a Shaw Conference sponsored by Marquette University in Milwaukee, the
conference concluded with a panel discussion of how Shaw Studies, heretofore
dependent upon enterprising individuals for the hosting of conferences at irregular
times, might in the near future become more organized and more regular in its
meetings, and English Professor Richard Dietrich of the University of South
Florida (Tampa) proposed creating an International Shaw Society to accomplish
that, first by enlisting teachers, scholars, theater artists, and just plain
Shaw enthusiasts to meet at least annually for the seeing of Shaw’s plays and
discussing them, and simultaneously to share this with younger people by
encouraging their attendance with the offering to them of travel grants,
scholarships, and the like. It turned
out that others, especially Emeritus Professor Sidney Albert of California
State University at Los Angeles, had had a similar idea and wished to pursue
it in the proposed general form. Also
attending this conference at Marquette was Leonard Conolly, an English
Professor at Trent University, who had hosted in 1989 at the University of
Guelph in Canada the first of three Shaw Conferences of the pre-ISS
individualist sort, the second being at Virginia Tech in 1993 under the
auspices of Professor Bernard Dukore, the third being the Marquette
Conference in 2001, organized by Professor Michael Patrick Gillespie. This also illustrates that such conferences
were few and far between, with none scheduled for the future, an anomaly in a
field well populated with both major senior scholars and promising younger
scholars. Professor
Conolly, a Canadian then residing within driving distance of the Shaw
Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, and an inveterate attender
at Festival plays, soon joined with Professor Dietrich in the email
recruiting of Shaw-interested people to the Shaw Festival to further discuss
forming an International Shaw Society.
Of course necessary to that was finding a place in Niagara-on-the-Lake
to meet. Instrumental to this was Denis Johnston,
Co-Director of the Academy of the Shaw Festival and Audience Outreach
Director, who listened sympathetically to Conolly’s argument for establishing
the ISS and launching that in a meeting at the Shaw Festival. Johnston then persuaded the Shaw Festival
administration to host a “Shaw Summit” in the summers of 2002 and 2003 at
which leaders in Shaw Studies could meet to discuss the proposal and vote on
proceeding. At the 2003 meeting, when
the vote was in favor of establishing the ISS, Johnston and Conolly further
persuaded the Festival to launch and co-host in 2004 on July 23-26 the first
of what became annual Summer Shaw Symposia, and to ally in that endeavor the
ISS with the Academy of the Shaw
Festival, constituting a natural joining of forces. More precisely, the ISS was
successfully founded in principle at the first of two “Shaw Summits” on
August 24th, 2002, at the Shaw Festival, with the details of its scope and
operation yet to be worked out. To
discuss and vote on such matters, a second “Shaw Summit” was scheduled in the
new Shaw Festival Theatre Library on August 20th, 2003. About a dozen, mostly senior Shaw scholars
attended the first meeting and twenty or more the second. Others were consulted by email. Two main proposals were discussed,
one conceiving the ISS as an unincorporated, all-volunteer organization that
would meet annually in Canada at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario.
This ISS would confine itself to an annual symposium co-hosted by the
Festival, which would be open to all and not dependent upon dues-paying
membership in the ISS for funding.
Participants would just pay for the symposium through the Shaw Festival
box office, and included would be tickets for whatever Shaw plays were
produced that year, which would be the focus of most of the papers accepted
for the symposium. The other proposal was to
incorporate the ISS as a not-for-profit institution in the United States,
from which most of its dues-paying members would come, branching out to the
hosting of not only an annual Summer Shaw Symposium at the Shaw Festival but
also of more largely attended conferences far and wide, eventually outside
North America, wherever co-hosts, mostly universities, could be found to
share costs and wherever productions of Shaw plays would be available to work
into the conference schedule. Seeing Shaw on stage has always been at least
as important as discussing Shaw’s works. After lengthy discussion, a
decision was made, at the second “Summit” in Canada, to apply for
not-for-profit, tax-exempt status in the United States, and Professor
Dietrich was elected Acting President to oversee the transformation of the
ISS into a full-fledged, legally-established, dues-paying literary society,
committed to providing meetings, both in North America and internationally,
for established scholars, theater artists, and general enthusiasts, but also
to aggressively recruit younger members, with much of its funding devoted to
the latter. As of January 30, 2004, the ISS was
legally established as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation with the U.S.
federal government and the state of Florida (where the ISS Founding President
resided). That accomplished, Professor Dietrich was elected as its Founding
President, in which capacity he served for the first six years of the ISS,
2004-2009. The Founding Vice-President
was Don Wilmeth of Brown University, the Founding Treasurer was Lagretta
Lenker of the University of South Florida, and the Founding Membership
Secretary was Lori Dietrich. Richard Dietrich also served as the Founding
Webmaster and began building a website at www.shawsociety.org. The second ISS President was
Professor Leonard Conolly of Trent University, serving from 2010-2012. The
third ISS President is Michael O’Hara, Professor of Theater & Associate
Dean of the School of Fine Arts of Ball State University, beginning in 2013. Other officers serving with President
O’Hara are Ellen Dolgin of the Dominican College of Blauvelt as Vice
President, Sharon Klassen of Redeemer University as Recording Secretary, and
Mary Christian of Central Georgia State University. What it’s doing now (or Back to the history): The ISS has grown in size and
influence as the years have passed, and now is in charge of the editorship of
the biannual journal SHAW: The Journal
of Bernard Shaw Studies (Pennsylvania State University Press). In addition to its co-hosting the annual
Summer Shaw Symposium, now in its 14th year, at the Shaw Festival,
it has co-hosted occasional symposia in Chicago with the ShawChicago
Theater Company, has featured the work of David Staller’s “Project Shaw” in New
York at its New York conference, and the staging of Shaw plays by the
Washington Stage Guild, where Shaw has served as their staple playwright. The
ISS has also co-hosted eight major conferences in fourteen years, initially
at the University of South Florida’s branch campus in Sarasota on the
Ringling Estate in 2004, afterwards at Brown University in 2006, The Catholic
University of America in Washington, D. C. in 2009, the University of Guelph
in Canada in 2011, University College Dublin, Ireland in 2012, “Shaw’s
Corner” in Ayot St Lawrence, United Kingdom, in 2013, Fordham University at
Lincoln Center, New York, in 2015, and an eighth conference in 2017, “SHAW at
THE SHAW,” in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, co-hosted with the ISS by The
Shaw Festival and York University, adding up to four in the United States and
four internationally, in Canada, Ireland, and England. The ISS is also very active on the
internet, with many links off its homepage at www.shawsociety.org to much important and enjoyable information. Specifically, across the very top
of this website is a series of links to meetings, journals, and book series,
all of which are seeking manuscripts for books or papers and/or list relevant
publications. In addition to the need of ISS symposia and conferences for
“talks” to be delivered and the need of the biannual SHAW: The Journal of Shaw Studies for articles every year, the
ISS has been much involved in the recruiting of book manuscripts for three
series, The University Press of Florida’s Shaw Series, edited by R. F.
Dietrich, the University of Toronto Press’s Shaw Correspondence Series,
edited by Leonard W. Conolly, and the Palgrave Macmillan “Shaw and His
Contemporaries” series, edited by Nelson Ritschel and Peter Gahan. Click on the links provided at www.shawsociety.org if you have a manuscript you wish to have considered. Down the left side of the ISS homepage are
links to various interests of a more academic nature but including the
ever-popular search engine—“Search Shaw”--for those seeking the quotations of
the most quotable of authors and any other kind of reference, and down the
right side are links to a variety of Shaviana that should appeal to all. Among the more innovative websites is one
called “GeoShaw,” maintained by Gustavo A.
Rodriguez Martin, which tracks Shaw’s movements on Google Earth, and “A
Virtual Tour of Shaviana,” edited by Kay Li, that illustrates the great
variety of Shaw’s life and times.
Click on “Newsletters” to get a more detailed and vivid account of the
sorts of things the ISS has been up to over the years. The links for all are at www.shawsociety.org. In the middle of the homepage,
under the ISS logo of a jesting juggler Shaw, is a link to theaters where
Shaw plays can be seen. Under the
photo of the devilishly smiling Shaw to the left of the logo is a series of
links to pages that explain why one should join the ISS and a form provided
for doing that at shawsociety.org/2018-membership-form.htm. Just change the year for years
later than 2018. As one of the principal goals of
the ISS is to encourage younger generations to experience the delights of
reading and seeing Shaw's works and participating in the discussion of them,
the ISS offers a generous program of support in the form of scholarships,
travel grants, and prizes, most of which are allied with particular events,
such as symposia and conferences. To that end, in fourteen years seventy-six
young scholars have been awarded ninety-six Travel Grants to attend such
events. To learn more about that and how to apply, please go to www.shawsociety.org/iss-travel-grants-2017.htm, which features the offerings of the year 2017 that can serve as a
model for future years as well. Just
update the year in the address as the years pass. One thing the ISS makes clear is
that, like the author they study, Shavians enjoy exploring the world as Shaw
did and leaving nothing unexamined, and they look forward to meeting with
kindred spirits to continue the adventure of listening to and debating with
the very lively spirit of GBS.
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Webmaster: dietrich@usf.edu |
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