Unravelling Shakespeare's Life

Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture: 23 April 2012: 6.00pm: The Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, University of London

James Shapiro (Columbia University): 'Unravelling Shakespeare's Life'. Cradle-to-grave biographies of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century have steadily drifted toward fiction and toward reading the life out of the works. James Shapiro unravels the writing of Shakespeare’s life over the past two centuries in an effort to understand when and why these trends have occurred, what price we pay for this biographical tradition, and what alternative approaches might offer. Free and open to the public, and followed by a wine reception. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington, Institute of English Studies: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

British Graduate Shakespeare Conference

Call for papers

We invite graduate students with interests in both Shakespearean and Renaissance studies to join us in June for the Fourteenth Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference.

The interdisciplinary conference provides a friendly but stimulating academic forum in which graduate students from all over the world can present their research and meet together in an active centre of Shakespearean research and theatre: Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Undergraduate students in their final two years of study are also invited to attend the conference as auditors.

The conference will feature talks by Peter Holland (Notre Dame), Tiffany Stern (Oxford), Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin), and Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford). Delegates have the opportunity to attend the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III, part of the World Shakespeare Festival, at a group-booking price. Lunch will be provided each day, and delgates are invited to a dance and drinks reception one night.

We invite abstracts of approximately 200 words for papers twenty minutes in length (3,000 words or less). Delegates wishing to give papers must register by Friday 4 May 2012. We strongly encourage early registration to ensure a place on the conference programme.

Our website contains more information about the event and venue,
including prices and downloadable registration forms:
www.britgrad.wordpress.com

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

January 31, 2012
Professor Richard W. Bulliet
7:00 PM, Faculty House

February 1, 2012
Columbia University Seminar
Eric Palazzo (Université de Poitiers)
“Early Medieval Ivories, Liturgy and the Five Senses”
5:30PM, Faculty House, Room 2

February 1, 2012
Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College
The Money Series: “Casualties of Credit”
Commentator: Martha Howell, Columbia University
6:15PM, Heyman Center, East Campus

February 7, 2012
Alan Verskin (Columbia) and Vincent Barletta (Stanford)
“Before the Islamic Law: Mudéjares and Moriscos”
6:00 PM, Casa Hispanica, 201

February 10, 2012
Stephen Booth (UC Berkeley)
“Desdemona's Eyes and the Aesthetics of Blindness”
7:00 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

February 14, 2012
Cynthia Pyle (New York University)
"M. D. Feld and His Work on the Intellectual History of Fifteenth-Century Printing in Italy"
7:30 PM, Faculty House

February 15, 2012
Professor David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania)
“Conceptualizing Literary History: Where Europe Begins and Ends, 1348-1418″
4:00 PM, Bulter 523

Jobs ...

Sheffield. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships, the De Velling Willis fellowships (salary, £37,012-£44,166 per annum). To apply, applicants need to go to the HR site http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs and click on 'current vacancies'. The quickest way of finding the fellowships is to enter the job reference (UOS003892) in the search box.

The closing date for applications is 17 February 2012.

Sheffield also has a range of other lectureships available too. Those of potential interest to TS subscribers are:
Lecturer in History of English Language (job ref UOS003906), closing date 17 Feb
Lecturer in Medieval/Anglo-Saxon English (job ref UOS0030915), closing date 17 Feb
Fiction Writer in Residence (job ref UOS003903), closing date 17 Feb
Lecturer in Public History (job ref UOS003873), closing date 16 Feb
Lecturer in Early Modern European History (job ref UOS003875), closing date 16 Feb
To apply for the above jobs (or for Further Particulars), go to http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs and enter the relevant job reference in the search box.

********

University of Northumbria:
(i) Lecturer or Senior Lecturer level (Grade 6/7) with a specialism in any aspect of early modern English literature (roughly 1485-1700) – job ref ASS11/18;
(ii) Professor of History, post 1500 – job ref ASS11/17.
Closing date for applications for both jobs: 1 March

Beyond Belief: the Bible and the Humanities Curriculum

Join us for a day-colloquium of papers and discussion on the role of the Bible in the Humanities and the Curriculum. The colloquium will be of particular interest for postgraduates and academics researching and teaching literature, history, biblical studies or theology more broadly. Speakers will address literature ranging from the medieval through to the contemporary period.

Convenor: Dr Nicky Hallett, University of Sheffield

Our Keynote Speaker is Professor Helen Wilcox, University of Bangor. Professor Wilcox is a leading authority on George Herbert and a pioneer in the field of gender studies and women's literature. Her three main areas of research interest include early modern English devotional writing, particularly lyric poetry; Shakespeare, particularly the tragicomedies; and women’s writing, particularly poetry and autobiography.

Where: University of Sheffield, Humanities Research Institute, 34 Gell Street, Sheffield, S3 7QY
When: Wednesday, 7 March 2012, from 10-4
Registration: £15 (Students: £10), which includes tea/coffee and lunch (vegetarian)

To secure a place, please contact Victoria Van Hyning by 27 February
email: victoria.vanhyning@sheffield.ac.uk

An HEA Philosophy & Religious Studies Subject Centre Funded Project

Job at Birkbeck ...

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ADV431/lecturer-a-in-renaissance-theatre-and-drama/

The Fairfax 400th Anniversary Conference

A two day inter-disciplinary conference at Marc Fitch House, 5 Salisbury Rd, University of Leicester, 30 June – 1 July 2012

Programme

Saturday

09.30 – 09.50 Registration and Coffee

9.50 – 10.00 Welcome: Dr Andrew Hopper and Dr Philip Major

10.00 – 11.00 Dr Philip Major (Birkbeck, University of London) ‘“Oh how I love these Solitudes”: Thomas
Fairfax and the Poetics of Retirement’

11.00 – 12.00 Dr John Callow (The Marx Library, Clerkenwell), ‘ “In So Shifting a Scene”: Thomas Fairfax as the Lord of Man, 1652–1660’

12.00 – 12.15 Coffee

12.15 – 13.15 Rory Tanner (University of Ottawa), ‘An Appleton Psalter: the Shared Devotions of Thomas Fairfax and Andrew Marvell’

13.15 – 14.30 Lunch

14.30 – 15.30 Professor Jacqueline Eales (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘Anne and Thomas Fairfax, and the Vere “Connection” ’

15.30 – 16.30 Keith Macdonald (University of Leicester), ‘ “The Genius of the House”: Andrew Marvell’s Private Lord Fairfax’

16.30 – 17.00 Afternoon Tea

17.00 – 18.00 Dr Andrew Hopper (University of Leicester), ‘Images of Fairfax in Modern Literature and Film’

18.00 Wine reception

Sunday

09.30 – 10.30 Robert Barcroft (Keele University), ‘Sir Thomas Fairfax and siege warfare during the English civil wars’

10.30 – 11.30 Dr Ian Atherton (Keele University),
‘Remembering (and Forgetting) Fairfax’s Battlefields’

11.30 – 11.50 Coffee

11.50 – 12.50 Dr Mandy de Belin (University of Leicester), ‘Naseby: Landscape of a Battlefield’

12.50 – 13.50 Lunch

13.50 – 14.30 Travel to Naseby on Coach

14.30 – 17.00 Battlefield Tour conducted by members of the Naseby Battlefield Project

17.00 – 17.30 Afternoon Tea in Naseby area

17.30 – 18.10 Return to Leicester on Coach

Conference Details

This conference will investigate the impact of Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–1671) upon his time and contemporaries. It will combine the approaches of historians and literary scholars to examine afresh his multiple roles as a general, politician, landowner, husband and literary figure. His memory, image and reputation in art, literature, media and film will also be assessed.

Registration

To register for the day please send your name, address, email and contact details in an envelope marked ‘Fairfax 400 Conference’ to Lucy Byrne at the Centre for English Local History, no later than 1 June 2012. Please enclose a cheque payable to ‘The University of Leicester’ for £40 per person. This will cover registration, buffet lunches, refreshments and transport to Naseby for the battlefield tour. Please bring waterproofs and sturdy footwear in case of poor weather.

Ms Lucy Byrne
Centre for English Local History
Marc Fitch Historical Institute
5 Salisbury Road
Leicester, LE1 7QR
http://www.le.ac.uk/elh/

Please send queries to the conference organisers, Dr Andrew Hopper ajh69@le.ac.uk and Dr Philip Major philip.major@bbk.ac.uk

MISSING TEXTS - last chance!

Missing Texts
A Conference organised by the Material Texts Network at Birkbeck, University of London
Saturday June 2, 2012
Call for Papers (deadline: 1 February 2012)

The Material Texts Network at Birkbeck convenes and encourages innovative work on the materiality of texts. We invite 300-word proposals, from scholars working in any period and discipline, on the theme of ‘Missing Texts’. Papers might consider

Texts or works that have been erased, over-painted, defaced, cancelled, or destroyed
Missing works that exist only through photographs or other archival traces
Texts or works that are better known through photographs, and are themselves rarely on display
How do we know a text is missing? How do archives record missing texts? If a missing text must leave a trace to be felt as missing, are texts ever really missing?
Texts or works overlooked for ideological, or other, reasons, in catalogues, inventories, & canons
The role of missing texts in literary works
The fetishisation of the 'missing' ur-text in textual studies and editorial procedures
Pages torn from books, lost quires, blanks, unfilled miniatures, incomplete jottings on fly-leaves
Letters, in which only one side of the correspondence is preserved
The use by authors of the topos of the lost text, the text-in-the-making, the text-never-finished (‘all this will be properly explained in our forthcoming masterpiece…’)
What happens when we find a long-missing text or work? How do we identify and read it?
How do scholars address the loss of archives when writing, for example, histories of African and
Asian nations where there are more Western texts than local ones? What kind of scholarship develops around these gaps?
How do missing texts relate to redactions?
Why do texts go missing in archives? What are the historical moments of great archival loss (for example, the archives destroyed in the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon, or the losses in German libraries during the World War II)
Are texts more likely to go missing in particular media (manuscript more than print? Print more
than digital?)
Can a text ever go missing in the digital world?


Please send 300-word proposals (for a 20 minute paper) and a brief CV to
Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk) and Dr Gill Partington (g.partington@bbk.ac.uk),
by 1 February 2012.

The Royal Body Conference, 2-4 April 2012, Royal Holloway

The idea of the king's two bodies, the body natural and the body
politic, founded on the distinction between the personal and mortal king
and the perpetual and corporate crown, has long been of interest to
scholars of medieval and early modern kingship. In later centuries the
natural body of the monarch remained a contested site, with the life,
health, sexuality, fertility and death of the king or queen continuing
to be an important part of politics. Now royal sex and scandal is the
very stuff that sells newspapers, and royal christenings, weddings and
funerals continue to capture the popular imagination. Indeed the 'royal
touch' of Aids victims or sick children remains a potent image. So what
is the significance of the natural body of the monarch to their subjects
now and the importance of it for the concept, and survival, of monarchy?

This conference will explore the bodies of monarchs across Europe
ranging form the medieval period to the present. By considering how the
monarch's body has been washed, dressed, used, anointed, hidden,
attacked and put on display, it will investigate how ideas of
king/queenship have developed over time.

Conference website: http://www.royalbody.com

The Early Medieval~Medieval~Renaissance~Reformation~Early Modern Postgraduate Forum

CALL FOR PAPERS
'Whores and Virgins, Heroes and Villains', Friday 16th and Saturday 17th March 2012
Westmere, Edgbaston Park Road, University of Birmingham

Papers are invited for the 2012 EMREM two-day interdisciplinary symposium, to be held at the University of Birmingham. The theme for this year’s event is 'Whores and Virgins, Heroes and Villains from the early medieval to the early modern period’. How were social labels such as ‘whore’, ‘virgin’, ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ used and understood in the EMREM period? How were people idealised and demonised in literature, art and other media? By what criteria were people celebrated or condemned, and to what extent were the boundaries between such categories blurred? How were those who failed to adhere to society’s standards treated and portrayed? Who decided what was acceptable behaviour and to whom did such concepts of respectability and ‘goodness’ apply?

Postgraduate speakers from all fields of EMREM studies are welcome to share their research and build networks at this friendly and well-established symposium.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
• Cultural stereotypes
• Social mores and sensibilities
• Sexuality and sexual appetite
• Crime, criminality and misbehaviour
• Didacticism
• Heroism
• Gender relations
• Sexual deviance
• Exclusion and disempowerment
• Literary traditions
• Church doctrine
• Artistic depictions of the saintly and of the demonic
• The ‘ideal’
• Virtue and vice

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please send proposals of approximately 300 words to: emremforum@googlemail.com by Friday 17th February 2012.

There is limited funding available to help cover external speakers’ travel and accommodation expenses. Refreshments and numerous networking opportunities will be provided.

Early Modern Ladies-in-Waiting

Call for Papers – Edited Collection

The essay collection edited by Nadine Akkerman and Birgit Houben is provisionally entitled The Politics of Female Households: Ladies-in-Waiting across Europe, and it considers evidence for the many different ways in which women above stairs shaped the early modern European courts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The collection will be part of Brill’s prestigious new “Rulers & Elites: Comparative Studies in Governance series”. See:
http://www.brill.nl/publications/rulers-elites

For this collection the editors would still welcome contributions on the following female households: those of Elisabeth de Valois, Marie de’ Medici and Anne of Austria. Contributions about the ladies-in-waiting at the Savoyard, Italian, Portuguese and Polish courts would also be particularly appreciated to ensure the volume covers most European courts in the Early Modern Period.
Contributors could for instance pay attention to the channels of cultural production, such as dancing in court masques and the distribution of literary manuscripts, or the channels of political patronage, as their constant access to the female monarch allowed them to influence policy-making, to operate as political go-betweens, to convey intelligence or even act as spies.

Essays should be of a maximum of 7,000-8,500 words (inclusive of quotes and references).

Please ensure that papers submitted for consideration are received by April 2012 with publication assured in the summer.

For more information please contact the editors, enclosing a 300-word abstract of your proposed contribution
n.n.w.akkerman@hum.leidenuniv.nl
birgit.houben@ua.ac.be

Call for papers: News in Early Modern Europe

Papers of 20 minutes or proposals for panels of up to three speakers are invited on any aspect of the theme 'news in early modern Europe', for a multi-disciplinary postgraduate conference to be hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex, 5th-7th June 2012.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

News in print; manuscript news; the changes in news reporting across the period; reading the news; politics in the news; religion in the news; censorship and regulation; news and the state; sermons and the delivery of news; news and the stage; news ballads; news from capital to provinces / from city to country; the international exchange of news; the reporting of new ideas and discoveries; sensational news; the consumption of news across genders; specialist news; coteries and news networks; secrecy vs sharing; private vs public; current events in literature; news and credit; the relationship between news and history; digital approaches to working with early modern news.

Please send abstracts of papers (max. 200 words) or panel theme with list of speakers and abstracts to Simon Davies (S.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk) by 31st January 2012.

DR WILLIAMS'S CENTRE FOR DISSENTING STUDIES

Seminar in Dissenting Studies, the Lecture Hall, Dr Williams's Library, 14 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0AR. All are welcome. Those with an interest in Dr Williams's Library and its collections and in the history of Protestant dissent are especially invited to attend.

Wednesday 8 February 2012 5.15 to 6.45 pm

Philipp Hunnekuhl (Queen Mary, University of London)
'The Triumph of the "Failed Literator": Henry Crabb Robinson on Metaphysics, Science, and Literature'.

Philipp Hunnekuhl is currently completing his PhD thesis on Henry Crabb Robinson's literary criticism, funded by the AHRC and Queen Mary, University of London. He is a special subject area editor on the Crabb Robinson Project (http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/drwilliams/research/crabb.html) and a contributor to its introductory collection of essays, to be published by OUP. His most recent publication is a chapter on Crabb Robinson in the forthcoming volume entitled Informal Romanticism (2012), edited by James Vigus, from which the present paper has been developed. He is also, with James Whitehead at King's College London, assistant editor of the Hazlitt Review.

Henry Crabb Robinson has been regarded, traditionally and very much in line with his own self-depreciative judgement, as a mere intermediary between the more prominent literary figures of his day. Having been excluded from the British universities due to his dissenting allegiance, he studied philosophy, science, and literature at Jena from 1802 to 1805. He aspired to thus become a professional 'literator' after his return to England – a 'person concerned with textual criticism, commentary, and analysis', according to the OED. This paper traces his intellectual development, and it argues that although the plans to lead such an exclusively literary life did not materialise, his 'philosophical erudition unique among British writers in the early nineteenth century' (Vigus) is reflected vividly in his largely informal and fragmented critical commentary on literature. This turns his professional failure into a stunning success as a literary critic. In order to support this claim, the paper will be drawing on a significant amount of as yet unpublished manuscript materials from the Crabb Robinson collection at Dr Williams's Library.

Birkbeck Early Modern Society’s programme

Friday 24 February: Dr Matthew Shaw, ‘Early modern time: the case of the French Republican Calendar’, Malet Street, room B02.
Friday 27 April: Dr Helen Smith, 'Materialising the book: print and practice in Moxon's Mechanick Exercises’, Malet Street, room B02.
Friday 25 May: Dr Alice Hunt, ‘Oliver Cromwell and the rituals of the Republic’, Malet Street, room B30.
Friday 22 June: Prof. Diane Purkiss, 'Were Shakespeare's witches really domestic?' room tbc.
For details of the EMS aims and events please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/current-students/societies-student-groups/early-modern-society

For a whole lot more visit http://www.emintelligencer.org.uk

Exchanges

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges will host the following seminars for the rest of this term. All seminars are at 4.30pm on Wednesdays. For more information, see www.ucl.ac.uk/eme. For maps and a route finder, see www.ucl.ac.uk/locations/ucl-maps/. All welcome.

A poster is attached; please display it if you can. Many thanks.

War and the French Sixteenth Century, 1st February, Foster Court 114
Wes Williams (St Edmund Hall, Oxford), Battle-Scarred Stories: Rabelais and/in Scots Translation
Andrea Frisch (Maryland), The French Wars of Religion and the Boundaries of Tragedy

Borderlands, 29th February, Roberts Building 110
Sizen Yiacoup (Liverpool University), Chivalrous Moors: Warfare and Cultural Hybridity in the Castilian Frontier Ballads
Claire Norton (St Mary’s College, Strawberry Hill), Blurred Boundaries: the Mediterranean World as a Site of Interaction and Integration

Catholic Aesthetics, 21st March, Roberts Building 110
Peter Davidson (Aberdeen), Rubens’s design for the 1635 ‘Arch of the Mint’ and the Virgin of the Andes?
Lilla Grindlay (English, UCL), ‘Some Out Of Vanity Will Call Her the Queene Of Heauen’: Polemical Representations of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Religious Discourse

Associate Research Fellow: The Stuart Successions Project

The Stuart Successions Project invites applications for an Associate Research Fellowship. This AHRC-funded post is available at the University of Exeter on a fixed-term basis from 1 April 2012 to 31 March 2015. The successful applicant will work under the direction of Professor Andrew McRae and Dr. Paulina Kewes.
The Stuart Successions Project project aims to revitalize debates about political literature and values across the Stuart era by focusing on writing produced at moments of succession. It will produce an online database, cataloguing the field of succession literature, and generate a range of editorial and analytical work.
Applicants will possess a relevant PhD (preferably, though not necessarily, in English), or have a doctorate close to completion, and be able to demonstrate excellent knowledge in the discipline and of research methods and techniques to work within established research programmes.
For further information, click here.