London Renaissance Seminar

SUMMER EVENT
Dr Paul Salzman, (La Trobe) ‘Tempest and Calm: The Political Context for Shakespeare’s First Folio’
Dr Stephen Guy-Bray, (British Columbia) 'Different Renaissance Difference'

July 3, 2008 at 6.00pm
Room 101, School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College
30 Russell Square, London WC1
All Welcome

'Journeys and Encounters' Conference

Saturday 12 July, 11.00 – 16.30

I am delighted to send you the programme for our second student conference. As you will see the range of papers is impressive and it looks as though it will be a really interesting day.

There is no charge to attend this event, but because we aim to provide lunch for speakers and delegates it would be helpful if you could register so that we have an idea of how many people to expect. Please return the registration form either to Laura Jacobs: l.jacobs@english.bbk.ac.uk or myself.

The conference is followed by a reception which will provide a chance to socialise and have fun, and I very much hope to see you on 12 July.

With best wishes,

Stephen Brogan
President, Birkbeck Early Modern Society
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hca/current/societies/#earlymodern
http://www.emintelligencer.org.uk/

[this and previous via LRS]

John Milton

A Symposium to Commemorate the Quartercentenary of his Birth
Saturday 6 December 2008
Convenors: Professor Paul Hammond FBA (University of Leeds) and
Professor Blair Worden FBA (Royal Holloway, London)

This conference marks the quatercentenary of the birth of John Milton on 9 December 1608, which is an anniversary of special significance and worthy of commemoration by the Academy. Milton’s standing is unparalleled in English culture: as the greatest English poet after Shakespeare, as an important political, moral, and theological contributor to the intellectual debates of the Civil War and Commonwealth, and as a far-reaching influence on the poetry and political thought of subsequent generations. This one-day conference takes stock of various aspects of his rich and diverse legacy, but aims specifically to do this in a way which will appeal to a broad audience of those who are interested in our literary and political heritage. The speakers will provide half-hour papers which will seek to present aspects of Milton’s work which will be of interest to both specialists and non-specialists.

Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed

A rare performance of Fletcher's sequel to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew - at The Progress Theatre, Reading, Berkshire, on 20-22 and 24-29 November 2008. Tickets a snip, at £10, with concessions.

Details: www.progresstheatre.co.uk, or email Carolyn Lyle at c.d.lyle@reading.ac.uk

Shakespeare in Berkshire

This year's Progress Theatre Shakespeare is The Taming of the Shrew - but set in the Wild West where men were men and so were some of the women. The sheriff and the undertaker both want to marry the saloon keeper's beautiful daughter, but they must first find a husband for Kate, her hellcat of a sister. When Petruchio and his sidekick ride in, it looks like their prayers have been answered, but these are not the only strangers in town and there's plenty of trouble brewing... Think you know Shakespeare? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Performance dates are as follows: Taming of the Shrew, Monday 14 July to Saturday 26 July (except Sunday). Tickets £25, £20, £14

All performances start at 7.45pm and concessions get £1 off. Also, you can get one ticket to any third week show at half price at the same time as booking a ticket to the Shakespeare.

Tickets for all these events are now on sale via Reading Arts, at the Hexagon or Town Hall. Book online at www.readingarts.com/othervenues/whatson or telephone 0118 9606060. Reading Arts have put their booking fee up to £2.50, so get a group together and all buy your tickets at the same time. Have a look at the Forbury's pre-show dinner deal, too.

More information can be found at www.abbeyruins.com/downloads.html

Teaching Milton and his time

Centre for Enquiry Based Learning
University of Manchester
7 November, 2008

This day conference will examine new pedagogies and new technologies for the
teaching of John Milton and his time. Sessions already scheduled will
address:

Interdisciplinary teaching
The problems and challenges associated with making Milton relevant
New teaching styles such as Enquiry Based Learning
The impact of information technologies and web 2.0 practices upon pedagogy
Teaching textual and material culture in partnership with libraries and
archives

Several sessions have been planned already in partnership with a range of
institutions, libraries and organisations, including Chetham's Library, John
Rylands Library and MIMAS.

Scheduled speakers and participants include Sharon Achinstein, Gordon
Campbell, Tom Corns, Rosanna Cox, Jerome de Groot, Karen Edwards, Thomas
Luxon, Marcus Nevitt.

For details, contact Dr Jerome de Groot, Jerome.degroot@manchester.ac.uk

A Lover's Complaint

Ron Rosenbaum, on whether "A Lover's Complaint" should be kicked out of the Shakespeare canon -- in Slate Magazine: http://www.slate.com/id/2193477/

The Society for Textual Scholarship

CALL FOR PAPERS
Fourteenth Biennial
International Interdisciplinary Conference
March 18-21, 2009, New York University

Program Co-Chairs: Andrew Stauffer, Boston University
[astauff@bu.edu]; John Young, Marshall University
[youngj@marshall.edu]

Deadline for Proposals: October 31, 2008

The Program Chairs invite the submission of full panels or individual papers
devoted to interdisciplinary discussion of current research into particular
aspects of textual work: the discovery, enumeration, description,
bibliographical analysis, editing, annotation, and mark-up of texts in
disciplines such as literature, history, musicology, classical and biblical
studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, history of science and
technology, computer science, library science, lexicography, epigraphy,
paleography, codicology, cinema studies, media studies, theater,
linguistics, and textual and literary theory. The Program Chairs are particularly
interested in papers and panels, as well as workshops and roundtables, on the
following topics, aimed at a broad, interdisciplinary audience:

Textual production and the social sphere
Textual cultures
Digital editing and textuality
The production and editing of “minority” texts
Theoretical and practical intersections between textual scholarship and
book
history
Textual scholarship and pedagogy

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length. Panels should consist of
three papers or presentations. Individual proposals should include a brief
abstract (one or two pages) of the proposed paper as well as the name,
e-mail address, and institutional affiliation of the participant. Panel
proposals, including proposals for roundtables and workshops, should include a
session title, the name of a designated contact person for the session, the
names, e-mail addresses, and institutional addresses and affiliations of each
person involved in the session, and a one- or two-page abstract of each paper to be presented during the session. Abstracts should indicate what (if any)
technological support will be requested.

Inquiries and proposals should be submitted electronically to:

Professor Andrew Stauffer, email address: astauff@bu.edu
Department of English
Boston University
236 Bay State Road
Boston, MA 02215

and

Professor John Young, email address: youngj@marshall.edu
Department of English
Marshall University
One John Marshall Drive
Huntington, WV 25755
(304) 696-2349
(304) 696-2448 (fax)

All participants in the STS 2009 conference must be members of STS. For
information about membership, please contact Secretary Meg Roland at

mroland@marylhurst.edu or visit the Indiana University Press Journals
website
and
follow the links to the Society for Textual
Scholarship membership page:
>. For conference updates and information, see the STS website:
.

Papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication in
TEXTUAL CULTURES.

John Young
Associate Professor of English
Marshall University
(304) 696-2349
youngj@marshall.edu

Writing Wales: 1500-1800

National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, 3-4 July 2008

This interdisciplinary conference explores representations of Wales in historical and literary texts written in Welsh or English between 1500 and 1800. It provides unprecedented opportunity for scholars across disciplines and conventional period demarcations to engage in a discussion of the different ways Wales was ‘written’ in the early modern, eighteenth-century, and early Romantic periods. Confirmed keynote speakers are Geraint H. Jenkins, M. Wynn Thomas, and Jane Aaron.

There is still time to register for the conference. Registration forms can be downloaded, together with the final conference programme, at www.imems.ac.uk/writingwales.php or www.aber.ac.uk/english

For further details, please contact Stewart Mottram (sfm@aber.ac.uk)

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries

The third SCAENA Conference, 'Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Performance and Adaptation', will be held at Anglia Ruskin University, 18 - 20 July,
2008.

Keynote papers will be given by Catherine Belsey, Judith Buchanan, Peter Holland, Charles Marowitz, Ann Thompson and Stanley Wells.

For further details please go to the Conference website:
www.anglia.ac.uk/scaena
In 2008 we are celebrating 150 years since our foundation by John
Ruskin.Visit www.anglia.ac.uk/150years for more information.

“I remain, &c”: Addressing the Eighteenth-Century Letter

St Edmund Hall, Oxford
11th-12th September 2008

http://eighteenthcenturyletters.blogspot.com

We invite proposals for an upcoming conference on eighteenth-century letters.

Whether viewed as the dominant carrier of polite discourse, an expression of the self, or simply a markedly accessible literary form, the letter in the long eighteenth century has been the recent focus of critical study. Recent work by scholars such as Clare Brant and Lisa Jardine, and institutions such as the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters, attests to the potential of this written body of evidence for truly representative study of the period.

This conference interrogates eighteenth-century letters as material artefacts, their means of circulation, and pursues the theoretical ramifications of that interrogation. In addition, it will provide graduate students with guidance on how they may incorporate letters into their own research, through practical advice (where and how to find them) and practice-based seminar papers (scholars discussing their methodologies). The conference will consist of four distinct (but not sealed) sections:

“That word interlined is morning”: Writing letters

Are letters immediate or for posterity? Handwritten or printed? Intimate or declamatory? The letter eludes generic sorting; how do we address the issues surrounding the epistolary voice? Possible paper topics may include

- The consonance (or dissonance) of epistolary style with recipient, or purpose.
- Lives and letters; lives in letters; biography and editing.
- Letter writers calling attention to the material process of letter writing
- Letters as anthologies, commonplace books, or literary criticism
- The institutions governing (or failing to govern) the writing of letters.
- Anonymity/pseudonymity; amanuenses and scribes; forgeries
- Letters and the state.

Through the Lion’s Mouth: Circulating/Sending letters

Letters are a circulatory form. The means of distribution of letters can have a huge effect upon their meaning. Possible paper topics may include:

- The post office; the coffee house; coteries
- State correspondence; espionage; censorship
- Overseas and domestic letters
- Words and things: letters accompanying goods; letters accompanying people; letters accompanying books.
- The lives of letters: sending, receiving, stealing, collecting, selling, archiving, publishing.

“Such bold and lively Strokes”: Reading letters

How/where/when did recipients read letters? How do we read letters, or read the readings of letters? Possible paper topics may include:

- Letters in the litter: the billet-doux.
- Letters and the body: the swung-dash; the construction of intimacy/enmity
- Shared/stolen readership of letters: reading aloud; letter’s and literacy; forwarding; copying out
- Letters and the law; letters and faith
- Imagined, desired, or figured readers
- Translating letters

“Podefar was misken”: Sorting Letters

The conference will conclude with a round-table discussion led by specialists in the field addressing the different uses of letters in research (finding letters in the archive, different forms of publication, theories of letters). Researchers will reflect upon their own practice and provide professional guidance, with discussion to follow.

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers, particularly from graduate students. Closing date for submissions is Friday 27th June. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to:

postmastergeneral@hotmail.co.uk

Stephen Bernard (Brasenose)
Claudine van Hensbergen (St Edmund Hall)
John McTague (St Catherine’s College)