For Wittenberg University students in Associate Professor of English Cynthia Richards’ literature course, “The Theatre of the 18th Century:

Performing Gender and Race,” the world stage became more personal recently thanks to a collaborative venture with the University of Exeter’s Performing Arts School in England.

Co-designed by Richards and Jane Milling, lecturer in performance studies at Exeter, the course aimed to help students examine their own identities through American and British lenses through the study and interpretation of scenes from two plays, The Widow Ranter by Aphra Behn and Oroonoka by Thomas Southerne.

As part of the class, students on both shores performed selected scenes, digitally recorded their performances and then exchanged the respective DVDs across the Atlantic for review and discussion.

Students also communicated regularly with their Exeter counterparts via e-mail and the Web throughout the course’s duration, and an Internet videoconference, coordinated by Lionel Worman of Wittenberg’s Computing Center using Microsoft NetMeeting software, concluded the joint class on May 4.

“It was surprising how different our perceptions of the scenes were,” Richards explained. “This collaboration showed just how deeply embedded people’s identities are.”