Renaissance Endings

Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies, Roehampton University
FIFTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE: RENAISSANCE ENDINGS
28 OCTOBER 2006
KEYNOTE SPEAKER: DOMINIC DROMGOOLE

And all our beauty, and our trimme, decayes,
Like courts removing, or like ended playes.
John Donne

Papers are invited for the fifth annual conference of the Centre for Research in Renaissance Studies, Roehampton University, London SW15 5PJ. The conference theme is ‘Renaissance Endings’. Dominic Dromgoole, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe and author of Will and Me: How Shakespeare Took Over My Life (Allen Lane, 2006) will give the Turner Lecture in Renaissance Studies (keynote lecture). Invited speakers will include Christie Carson (Royal Holloway London), Tobias Döring (Ludvig Maximilians University Munich), Gordon McMullan (Kings College London) and Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast).

Papers are invited from academic staff, independent researchers and postgraduate students on the following or related topics:

- Representations of death: epitaphs, funerary arts, relics; Death as spectacle; Death as actor; 'sad stories of the death of kings'

- Textual and theatrical endings: strategies of closure, epilogues, and postscripts; theatrical endings, including final speeches, final silences, final exits; closed and open bodies on the early modern stage

- Avoiding closure: famously unfinished texts; adaptations and sequels; rewriting Shakespearean endings in theatre and film

- Periodicity: 'courts removing'; dynastic endings; the end of the 'Renaissance' (contemporary and modern perspectives)

Interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives will be particularly welcome.

Proposals (250-300 words) for short papers (maximum 2,500 words) should be submitted by 14 August 2006 to Jane Kingsley-Smith (j.kingsley-smith@roehampton.ac.uk). Accepted papers – to be submitted by 18 September – will be circulated by Seminar Chairs before the conference, and participants will be invited to speak briefly to their papers.

For further details including maps and a registration form please go to www.roehampton.ac.uk/renaissance and follow the link to ‘conference’

If you have any queries about the conference or would be interested in chairing a session please write to:
Dr Jane Kingsley-Smith (j.kingsley-smith@roehampton.ac.uk), or
Dr Clare McManus (c.mcmanus@roehampton.ac.uk), or
Professor Robin Headlam Wells (r.headlam_wells@roehampton.ac.uk)