Storytelling for the Screen: Hamnet

Director Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet (2025) revolves around Agnes (Jessie Buckley) , a singular woman sensitive to the natural world around her. She finds a home and starts a family with William (Paul Mescal) , a local tutor and aspiring playwright, before tragedy transforms their lives. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name, Hamnet reimagines the life of William Shakespeare and the writing of Hamlet through the lens of the loss of a child. Widely acclaimed upon release, the film earned numerous accolades including acting awards for Jessie Buckley from the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, SAG-AFTRA, and BAFTA, and was nominated for a total of eight Academy Awards. The Carsey-Wolf Center presented a screening of Hamnet in conjunction with the UCSB Library exhibition Infinite Variety: The Many Lives of Shakespeare’s Texts. Jean Feerick (English, John Carroll University) joined moderator Jim Kearney (English, UCSB) for pre- and post-screening discussions of Hamnet and its relationship to Shakespeare’s life and work. Jean E. Feerick is Professor of English at John Carroll University, a Jesuit university in Cleveland, where she is the recipient of the 2026 award for distinguished teaching in the College of Arts and Sciences. Prior to coming to JCU, she taught at Brown University and was the William S. Vaughn Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Humanities Center at Vanderbilt University. Feerick teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern literature at all levels of the curriculum, including recent favorites like Eco-Shakespeare, Renaissance Ecocritical Literature, and Dreamworlds: Utopia Then and Now. She also serves as the manager of biannual visits to campus by a troupe of professional English actors known as the Actors From The London Stage (AFTLS) , which stages a professional production of a Shakespeare play for the Cleveland community. She is the author of two books, including the monograph Strangers in Blood: Relocating Race in the Renaissance (Toronto, 2010) and an edition collection with Vin Nardizzi on The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave, 2012) . Her work on pre-modern race, literature and science, and early modern ecocriticism has also appeared in many journals and volumes such as Shakespeare Studies, The Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama, and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and the Natural World. Her current book project seeks to bring an understanding of Shakespeare’s art to a general audience by blending travel memoir, literary analysis, and consideration of our ecological predicament today. The study explores what Shakespeare’s ideas about humanity’s place within nature might contribute to our efforts to navigate the challenges of climate change. Jim Kearney is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He specializes in early modern literature with research interests that include ethical experience, the history of emotion, phenomenology (including the phenomenology of theater) , various materialisms, religious identity and transformation, and the history of reading. In his most recent book, Shakespearean Ethics in Extremity: Phenomenology, Theater, Experience (Oxford University Press, 2025) , he pursues a phenomenology of ethical experience in Shakespeare’s late plays. He is also the author of the award-winning The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (University of Pennsylvania Press) ; co-editor of Entertaining the Idea: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Performance (University of Toronto Press) ; and co-editor of a forthcoming collection on Experiential & Experimental Knowledge on the Early Modern English Stage (Edinburgh University Press, 2026) . His next research project will address dispossession in the early modern period. This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center. Presented in conjunction with the UCSB Library exhibition Infinite Variety: The Many Lives of Shakespeare’s Texts. Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.