Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800

GLOBAL CONNECTIONS

Convenors: Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), Laura Gowing (KCL), Kate Hodgkin (University of East London), Michael Hunter (Birkbeck).

Seminars will take place in the Ecclesiastical History Room at the Institute of Historical Research on the following Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. All are welcome!

TERM 1

7 October 2010 Dr William Poole (New College, Oxford)
The First Chinese in England? The Visit of Shen Fuzong, 1687-88

21 October 2010 Prof. Claire Jowitt (Nottingham Trent University)
The Culture of Renaissance Piracy: the Case of Captain Mainwaring

4 November 2010 Dr John-Paul Ghobrial (Churchill College, Cambridge)
Beggars, Charlatans, and Informants: Eastern Christians in the Early Modern World

18 November 2010 Prof. Maxine Berg (University of Warwick)
The Knowledge of Manufactures: Industrial Surveys in India during the 18th Century

2 December 2010 Dr Pratik Chakrabarti (University of Kent)
Globalization, Conquest and the Making of European Medical Knowledge in the 18th Century


TERM 2

13 January 2011 Dr Emma Spary (University of Cambridge)
Making French Coffee, 1670-1730: Networks, Trade Routes and Knowledge

27 January 2011 Dr Margaret Small (University of Birmingham)
A World in Balance? Geographical Thought in the 16th Century

24 February 2011 Prof. Jean Michel Massing (King’s College, Cambridge)
The Jesuit Jerome Nadal and his Influence from Paraguay to China

10 March 2011 Prof. Francisco Bethencourt (King’s College London)
'Did Abolitionism reduce Racism?'

24 March 2011 Prof. Benjamin Schmidt (University of Washington, Seattle)
Exoticism and Global Things: European Geography ca. 1670-1730


TERM 3

12 May 2011 Roundtable in association with the Centre for Early Modern Exchanges
(University College London)

Monday, September 27, 2010

Early Modern Forum at NYU

The first meeting of the NYU English department's Early Modern Forum
this year will be this Thursday, 9/30. We're going to start the
semester on a lighthearted note, with a group reading of Marston's
comedy Antonio and Mellida. Food, drink, and merriment will be provided.

Please let me know if you plan on attending and if you have a copy of
the play, so I can make sure to have enough copies and refreshments
and so I can arrange for doubling of parts if necessary.

The meeting will start at 6:30 p.m. and will take place in 19
University Place, room 222. If you're not a member of the NYU
community you'll need photo ID to get access to the building.

Sarah Ostendorf
ostendorf@nyu.edu

CFP Emotions East and West – The Cultural History of Emotions in Pre-Modernity II

A new conference on the cultural history of emotions is now being
organized in Istanbul, Turkey. Developed jointly by historians at
Sabancı University (Istanbul), Bilkent University (Ankara), University
of Washington (Seattle) and the network for cultural history of
emotions in pre-modernity (CHEP) at Umeå University, Sweden, the
program will run over three days and include six invited keynote talks
and a full calendar of talks by established scholars, post-graduates
and advanced graduate students in the arts and humanities, in addition
to providing opportunities to sample life in one of the world’s most
fascinating cities.

The conference’s general theme is Emotions in East and West. So far
the history of emotions has been dominated by a western and European
perspective. Our aim is to organize a first conference on this theme
in Turkey which we hope will attract new scholars and students into
the field and bring researchers from east and west together for
discussions on how to develop comparative and multicultural analyses
in the future. We welcome contributions on all aspects of the cultural
history of emotions from as many disciplines and diverse approaches as
possible, including (but not limited to) history, the history of
ideas, art, literature, musicology, politics, philosophy, cultural
anthropology, religion, and gender studies. The conference will
continue to explore the broad themes of the Umeå gathering: for
example, emotions as a historical concept, emotions in religious and
political contexts, visual representations of emotions and emotional
gestures, the language of emotions and its literary manifestations,
music and emotions, the gendering of emotions, sensibility,
sentimentalism, love, melancholy, and despair. In addition we will
especially welcome papers dealing with inter-cultural representations
of emotions (Easterners and Westerners representing each other’s
emotions), emotions and cultural identities, multi-cultural and
comparative perspectives.


The organizing committee is inviting submissions of one-page abstracts
of papers to be summarized as 20 minute talks at the Istanbul
conference. The papers should, in general, treat the topic of the
history of emotions in the pre-modern period. For the Umeå workshop
the “pre-modern period” was presumed to end at the turn of the 18th
century, which is acceptable from a strictly western perspective but
questionable when the focus of the conference broadens to take in the
East, where the nature of “modernity” and the broad moment of its
inception are contentious issues. Accordingly, papers dealing with
non-western emotions in the 18th century (and even later) will be
considered when a compelling argument is made for the “pre-modernity”
of the emotional context. The language of the conference is English.
Please send one-page abstracts before Dec. 01 2010, to:
chep2011@bilkent.edu.tr

Conference Organizers:

Walter G. Andrews, University of Washington (Seattle)

Tulay Artan, Sabanci University ( Istanbul)

Mehmet Kalpakli, Bilkent University (Ankara)

Jonas Liliequist, Umeå University CHEP (network for the cultural
history of emotions in pre-modernity)

Mohammad Fazlhashemi, Umeå University CHEP

For downloading and more information http://www.chep2011.bilkent.edu.tr/

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Privilege and Property, Essays on the History of Copyright

Edited by Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently

The volume contains 15 chapters by leading academics on the history of intellectual property, from its nascent forms to its present state; they show how copyright has affected education and creativity and how this is of utmost importance today. The book is a companion to the new open access digital archive, Primary Sources on Copyright(1450-1900)- www.copyrighthistory.org

The book is available online for free as well as in traditional print forms. The following is a link to its website: http://www.openbookpublishers.com/product.php/26

The Royal Society and the British Atlantic World

Thursday 30 September - Friday 1 October, 2010
The Royal Society, London

A two-day international conference organised by Joyce Chaplin and Mordechai Feingold for the Royal Society Centre for History of Science, with the generous support of the Sackler Foundation.

Programme

Thursday 30 September

9.30am Registration and coffee

10.15am Welcome

Session I. Chaired by Lisa Jardine, Queen Mary, University of London
10.30am Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
What was American about Early American Science?

11.30am Walt Woodward, University of Connecticut
John Winthrop, Jr. and the Nature of Knowledge in an early Colonial Setting.

12.30pm Lunch

Session II. Chaired by William Poole, Oxford University
1.30pm William Newman, Indiana University
The Exchange of Chymical Knowledge between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century.

2.30pm Kathleen Murphy, California Polytechnic State University
To Make Florida Answer to Its Name: John Ellis, the Royal Society, and the Cultivation of Empire.

3.30pm Tea and coffee

Session III. Chaired by William Poole
4.00pm Chris Baxfield, University of Leeds
'Little of Philosophical Information . . . and yet how Evangelical!' Cotton Mather, Christology and the
Royal Society, 1714 - 1724.

5.00pm John Dixon, City University of New York
William Burnet, FRS: Science and Scripture Prophecy in Early Eighteenth-Century Europe and America.

6.00pm Close

7.00pm Conference dinner


2
Friday 1 October

9.00am Registration and coffee

Session IV. Chaired by Richard Drayton, King's College London
9.30am Sarah Schechner, Harvard University
Politics and the Dimensions of the Solar System: John Winthrop's Observations of the Transit of Venus.

10.30am Tofigh Heidarzadeh, Huntington Library
The Emergence of Observational Astronomy in Colonial America.

11.30am Tea and coffee

Session V. Chaired by Richard Drayton
12.00pm John Christie, Universities of Leeds and Oxford
The Time and the Place: American Chemistry in the Late Colonial and Revolutionary Periods.

1.00pm Lunch

Session VI. Chaired by Michael Hunter, Birkbeck College, University of London
2.00pm Jennifer Thomas, Queen Mary, University of London
‘This very valuable present’: The significance of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s donations to the Royal
Society 1770-75.

3.00pm Mordechai Feingold, California Institute of Technology
Amateurs: Historical Reflections on the Advent of Science in Britain and the American Colonies.

4.00pm Tea and coffee

Session VI. Chaired by Michael Hunter
4.30pm Concluding remarks and general discussion

5.30pm Close

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Disguise in the Hispanic Golden Age

Oxford Graduate Symposium in Spanish Golden Age Studies

Saturday 22 January 2011, University of Oxford

Disguises are everywhere in the Spanish Golden Age. Most obviously, its
literary and dramatic works are replete with characters who change their appearance in order to transgress boundaries of gender, race and social class in order to evade authority,confound social hierarchies and achieve their desires. When taken in its broadest definition, ‘to alter an appearance so as to mislead or deceive’, however, it becomes applicable to a far wider range of phenomena than characters who change their dress to become someone else. In this sense, both trompe l’oeil architecture, where a flat surface purports to stretch into three dimensional space, and a lo divino literature, where the Christian narrative is ‘dressed’ as pagan myth, may be considered under this rubric. However, this latter example confounds the second half of
the above definition; its purpose is not to deceive but to instruct. Similarly, at the height of the Counter Reformation, the Catholic theology of the Eucharist depended on
the notion that Christ’s presence was veiled by the accidents of bread and wine, not to
mislead, but rather to edify. Additionally, several definitions of ‘disguise’ emphasise its purpose as effective concealment of one’s true nature. However, in several of the examples above, successful interpretation of a disguise is dependent on the recognition of the subject’s dual nature - of their true being and their disguised appearance.
Throughout the symposium, we will explore all manner of examples of things taking on alternative appearances, in order to consider the following questions:

How was the notion of disguise (both in its sartorial and wider sense) understood in the Hispanic Golden Age? Is there always a necessary element of deception, and can this have an educative purpose? What is the relationship between disguises in literature, the theatre, architecture and theology? How recognisable are both natures of the disguised subject, to creator, to viewer and to other characters? What are the implications when one nature is recognisable to some, but not to others? What can the treatment of the notion of disguise tell us about ways of thinking, creating and reading in the Spanish Golden Age, and about our own ways of reading the period?
Topics may include, but are not confined to, the following:
• Costume and disguise in the comedia
• Satire
• Decir sin decir
• Censorship and subversion
• Court literature and panegyric
• Trompe l’oeil architecture
• Civic and religious architecture
• Private and public spheres
• Celebrations of the Eucharist
• A lo divino poetry
• Religious syncretism in the Americas
Please submit proposals of up to 250 words for papers of no more than 20
minutes, in English or Spanish, to alice.brooke@merton.ox.ac.uk or
naomi.walker@exeter.ox.ac.uk no later than
30th October 2010.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Authorship, Attribution, and Anonymity

The Book History Colloquium at Columbia University is pleased to
announce the following lecture:
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/indiv/rbml/exhibitions/bhc/index.html

Peter Stallybrass, “Authorship, Attribution, and Anonymity”

SEPTEMBER 28, 2010 (TUESDAY), 523 Butler Library, 6pm
This event is free & open to the public.

“Authorship, Attribution, and Anonymity”

In this talk, Stallybrass will be looking at what were perhaps the two
most popular poems to circulate in manuscript in the seventeenth
century. Both are now attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh, and it is under
his name as a poet that they circulate and are read and studied today.
But the two poems circulated quite differently in the seventeenth
century. The first, “Even such is time,” appeared most frequently in
collections of state papers, where it is invariably attributed to
Ralegh. Indeed, for a short poem, attribution plays a striking role: we
are usually told not only who wrote it but also the day and place of
writing. And it is often the only poem in these collections, nearly
always associated with Ralegh’s final speech before he was executed. The
other poem, “What is our life?,” is now also said to be by Ralegh,
although it was first printed anonymously as the lyrics for an air by
Orlando Gibbons and then circulated, in the great majority of cases
anonymously, in poetic miscellanies.

Peter Stallybrass is Walter H. and Leonore C. Annenberg Professor in the
Humanities and Professor of English and of Comparative Literature and
Literary Theory, University of Pennsylvania

Such Total and Prodigious Alteration / The Wounds May Be Again Bound: Readings and Representations of the Seventeenth Century

Chetham's Library, Manchester, 28th-29th January, 2011

During the restoration and eighteenth century, the civil war period was
consistently represented as a traumatic break in the history of England
and the British Isles, separating the institutionally and culturally
modern Augustans from either the primitiveness or idealised simplicity of
the earlier epoch. Today, much academic practice silently repeats the
period’s self-representation as a century divided between pre and
post civil war cultures, whether in research, job descriptions or in
undergraduate survey courses. Among the effects of this division of labour
is a tendency for the earlier Renaissance; decades to be
privileged over the restoration, which is frequently treated as a poor
relation to the eighteenth century.

This conference provides a forum for researchers in all disciplines whose
work spans all or any part of the long seventeenth century. As our titular
quotations from Clarendon's *History of the Rebellion* and
Swift's sermon On the Martyrdom of King Charles I suggest, we also encourage papers on subsequent imaginings of the period that have contributed to or contested the ways in which it is read today.

Concerns include but are not limited to:
· The comparative study of seventeenth-century writing, sciences, visual
arts and music before, during and after the civil war period; their
material and intellectual dissemination; their relationship to ideas of
what constitutes the early modern and the restoration.
· Constructions of the seventeenth century from the restoration to the
present; representations in literature, art, history and film; the
cultural influence of the seventeenth century on subsequent periods.
· The role critical theory can play in our reading of the period and/or
narratives of the long seventeenth century from within literary criticism
and critical theory; e.g. Leavis and Eliot on the Metaphysical poets,
Walter Benjamin on the baroque, Foucault on madness, Habermas on the
public sphere.
· The study of non-canonical and marginalized texts and materials, and
nationally comparative readings of the period.
· The representation and reception of pre-seventeenth-century culture
during the seventeenth century; the place of the past in the
period’s self-representations.

Confirmed speakers include: Rosanna Cox (Kent), Jeremy Gregory
(Manchester), Helen Pierce (York), George Southcombe (Oxford), Jeremy
Tambling (Manchester), Edward Vallance (Roehampton), Jerome de Groot
(Manchester)

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to James Smith (Manchester) and
Joel Swann (Keele) by 15th October 2010: c17.conference@manchester.ac.uk.
We particularly encourage the participation of postgraduate students,
whose attendance will be generously supported by the Society for
Renaissance Studies.

Go to http://www.chethams.org.uk/c17conference.html for more information.

Monday, September 20, 2010

/Performing the Book: Multi-Media Histories of Early Modern Britain/


Call for Graduate Student Papers, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, February 11, 2011

Sponsored by the Rutgers British Studies Center, the Rutgers Program in
Early Modern Studies, the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, and the
Rutgers Medieval and Renaissance Colloquium.

Recent scholarship in media theory, digital culture, and the history of
the material text has opened up new ways of thinking about intersections
of pen, print, sound, and performance in the early modern period. The
categories of “new” and “multi” media, in particular, gather special
relevance in the multifarious literary and performative terrain of
sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Britain. This
conference offers an opportunity for graduate students in disciplines
including English, Music, History, and Performance Studies, to address
the following questions:

How can scholarship on acoustic and performative multi-media in early
modern Britain contribute to or intervene in methodologies associated
with the history of the book? How can we theorize the categories of
“book” and “text” in relation to the circulation and performance of
sound? How can studies of the early modern acoustic world nuance the
received wisdom about bibliographic and literary cultures and
traditions? What media technologies and protocols were understood as new
during this period, and how were they associated with literary, musical,
or theatrical collectives? What does early modern aural performance tell
us, or ask us to reconsider, about the hybridity of media from Gutenberg
to Google?

Visitors will include Bruce Smith (University of Southern California,
English), Christopher Marsh (Queen’s University, Belfast, History),
Leslie Dunn (Vassar College, English), Juliet Fleming (New York
University, English), R. Malcolm Smuts (University of Massachusetts,
Boston, History), and Gary Tomlinson (University of Pennsylvania, Music).

Graduate students are invited to submit 250-word abstracts for 20-minute
papers by September 30 to Scott Trudell (trudell@eden.rutgers.edu).

Sunday, September 19, 2010

The John Edward Kerry Prize


The Malone Society (http://ies.sas.ac.uk/malone) has organized a competition for graduate students to celebrate the life work of one of its members, the late John Edward Kerry (1924 – 2008).

Postgraduate students who are currently working on any aspect of early modern English drama and using Malone Society volumes as part of their research projects are warmly invited to submit a short statement (max 500 words) to Dr Sonia Massai (Malone Society Publicity Officer – email address: sonia.massai@kcl.ac.uk) by 10 October 2010.

Those wishing to enter this competition should ensure that their statements explain how their work contributes to the development of scholarship in their fields and in what ways the Malone Society editions have facilitated and supported their research.

Statements should also include the applicants’ contact details and academic affiliation, the name of the programme of studies being attended and the year of registration, and the name and contacts details of a supervisor or of an academic referee willing to write on their behalf.

The winner of this competition will receive 30 Malone Society volumes, which used to be part of Mr Kerry’s private library, and a year’s free membership, which includes our current volume, The Trial of Treasure, The Malone Society Reprints, vol. 173 (2010), and three complimentary volumes to be chosen from the Malone Society Backlist (http://ies.sas.ac.uk/malone/publications-backlist.htm).

Applicants may also be interested in other Malone Society fellowships and bursaries. Further details are posted at the following address:
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/malone/Fellowships_and_bursaries.htm

SHAKESPEARE: PUZZLES, MYSTERIES, INVESTIGATIONS 29 October 2010

Department of English, University of Chichester

1pm (Mitre Lecture Theatre) Welcome

1.15pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Somerville, Oxford), ‘Two Hobbies and a Purge: three Shakespearian puzzles'.

2.15pm Twenty Minute Papers

Panel A: Room E124

Nick de Somogyi ‘"Shakespeare and the Three Bears"

This paper seeks to correct a pervasive misunderstanding about the identity of one (or two) of Shakespeare's celebrity contemporaries.

Dr. Annaliese Connolly (Sheffield Hallam), ‘Guy of Warwick, Godfrey of Bouillon, and Elizabethan Repertory’. (20 mins)

This paper argues the play is a product of the 1590s and situates The Tragical History in the context of the repertorial strategies employed by companies such as the Admirals’ Men involving foreign wars and character types such as Turkish Sultans.

Patrick Ashby (Bristol) ‘Othello and the invisible Turk’ (20 mins)

The paper suggests that the Venetian sense of collective identity, as depicted in this play, is based largely upon oppositional values, and that this opposition is paradigmatically illustrated in the city-state’s antagonistic relationship with the Ottoman Levant.

Panel B: Cloisters Chamber

Dr. John Lyon (Bristol) ‘Fat Ladies Never Sing: Henry James and the endless Tempest’

There are Shakespearean puzzles and mysteries. Why do readers, critics and editors make fools of themselves in trying to solve them?

Dr. Edward Chaney (Southampton Solent) ‘Shakespeare and Egypt’

The French were far ahead of the English in their interest in obelisks, but their scale and emphasis in England seems to have been inspired by Sixtus V’s projects.

Dr. Ann Kaegi (Hull) ‘Nicks, Cuts, and Henry V’

In this paper I examine the extent to which landmark productions of Henry V, from the Vietnam War to the present day, have continued to cut the play in a manner that suppresses the alignment between sexual and martial discourses (nicks and cuts) within the long Folio version.

3.15pm Tea, coffee and biscuits

3.30pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Tiffany Stern (University College, Oxford)

‘A New Shakespeare Play? The Story of Cardenio’s Double Falsehood’.

Lewis Theobald's eighteenth-century play The Double Falsehood has recently been heralded as a Shakespeare play in disguise. Inside it are said to be fragments of Shakespeare's lost play Cardenio. But is this true? Did Theobald have any Shakespeare manuscripts? And was there a Shakespeare play called Cardenio in the first place?

4.30pm Buffet Tea

5.30pm Twenty Minute Papers

Panel C: Room E124

Prof. Simon Barker (Gloucestershire) Shakespeare at ‘HK’: 1939 – 1945

This paper will describe this wartime context for the short seasons of plays staged at the Memorial Theatre, in order to show how the war years irreversibly transformed the relationship between Stratford and Shakespeare.

Dr. Paul Quinn (Chichester/Sussex) ‘How many children had Lady Macbeth?’: How L. C. Knights asked the right question for the wrong reason.

By constructing a text that turns on the violent deaths of fathers and children, Shakespeare positions his play within the polemical matrix spawned by James I within days of the discovery of Fawkes in the cellars under Parliament.

Dr. Cathy Parsons (Sussex) ‘Gods and Monsters’: The search for religious and national identity in Cymbeline

The use of conventional early-modern anti-Papist tropes of Roman Catholic depravity and evil are set against the construction of innate but endangered Protestant virtue in such a way as to subtly manifest Shakespeare’s unease with James I’s political and religious policies, and the danger to national safety and wellbeing from his seemingly pro-Papist stance.

Panel D: Cloisters Chamber

Barbara Kennedy (Sussex) ‘The belching whale and humming water: efficacious music in Pericles’

As an emblematic symbol of the entire universe, the musical references in Pericles have a thaumaturgic value: music has the power to work marvels or miracles evident in the revival of Thaisa and the healing of Pericles.

Dr. Julie Sutherland (British Columbia/Durham University) Shakespeare’s “Bromance” – Hollywood and Homosociability in Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet.

This paper proposes to trace filmic representations of homosociability in Shakespearean drama in an effort to understand how far we have (or have not) come in our understanding of male-male love.

Dr. Duncan Salkeld (Chichester) Shakespeare, the Clerkenwell madam and Rose Flower

This paper elucidates details in the 1594 Gesta Grayorum entertainment that point towards Shakespeare’s acquaintance with a prostitute, Lucy Negro, alleged to have been the ‘dark lady’ of the Sonnets.

6.45 pm Keynote Lecture

Prof. Stanley Wells and Dr. Paul Edmondson [Title TBC]

8pm Close

Conference Fee: £25 (Concessions, £15)
To register, contact Lorna Sargent, Administrator,
Department of English, University of Chichester,
College Lane, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6PE,
email: l.sargent@chi.ac.uk, telephone 01243 816163
or Duncan Salkeld at d.salkeld@chi.ac.uk,
or 01243 816184

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Reading, Writing and Travelling


Submissions are invited for a collection of essays on the theme of Reading,
Writing and Travelling, 1600-1830. Essays might explore a variety of
intersections between reading, writing, and travelling in texts with any
geographic focus within this historical timeframe, addressing such issues as:

* how travel is informed, and mediated, by other texts, or how writers
negotiate with prior representations of places and peoples;
* the use of different literary forms (narrative, letters, journal,
memoranda) to channel travel experience, and how this impacts on the nature of
the representation;
* the evolution of travel writing from e.g. field notes or rough diary
entries to published narrative;
* historical changes in modes of organising and making sense of travel
experience;
* the influence of gender on representations in writing of travel and the
travelling self;
* the historical reception of travel accounts, or ways of theorising such
reception;
* the purported educational benefits of travel, or of the reading or writing
of travel accounts.
Other interpretations are possible, of course. Essays should be up to 7000 words
in length. Please send an abstract of c.500 words as a Microsoft Word
attachment (.doc or .docx) to Robin Jarvis (Robin.Jarvis@uwe.ac.uk) and Melanie Ord (Melanie.Ord@uwe.ac.uk) by 31 October or as soon as possible thereafter. The deadline for completed essays will be summer 2011.

Shakespeare's Globe Gesture Lab

November 5th -7th 2010 at Shakespeare's Globe

Advising artists about imitation, Leonardo da Vinci suggested they "take
pleasure in carefully watching those who talk together with gesticulating
hands, and get near to listen to what makes them make that particular gesture"
(fol. 1). The Shakespeare's Globe Gesture Lab will conduct a similar
experiment by bringing together theatre practitioners, drama scholars,
cognitive theorists and psychologists to investigate the relationship gesture
and thought have to performance. What is the relationship between gesture and
thought? How do actors incorporate gesture into their performances? How
conscious is the actor's hand? Can we develop a theory of acting or a method of
actor training by studying historical gestures?

Over the three days, theatre practitioners will conduct experiments on the Globe
stage and academics will give papers on a variety of topics related to these
questions and together discuss the dynamic relationship between the hand and
mind in performance.

Experiments include: Ben Naylor and Anna Morrissey (The Central School of Speech
and Drama) 'The Bulwer Project' ; Tom Cornford (University of Warwick)
'Thinking with Your Hands: Michael Chekhov's "Language of Gestures"'; Stephen
Purcell (Southampton Solent University) and Andy
Kesson (University of Kent) '"Here, where you are": Investigating Dramatic and
Theatrical Space'

Speakers include: Dr Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin College, Virginia), Professor
David McNeil (University of Chicago), Professor Evelyn Tribble (University of
Otago, New Zealand), Dr Terri Bourus (Indiana University), Dr Farah
Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare's Globe), Professor Geoff Beattie (Manchester
University)

Registration opens in October. For more information, please contact Dr. Farah
Karim-Cooper on farah@shakespearesglobe.com
*

Call for Papers: Conversion Narratives in the Early Modern World


June 9th -11th 2011, University of York, UK
*Keynote speakers: Irene Fosi (Chieti) and Nabil Matar (Minnesota)*

The period between 1550 and 1700 was one of widespread religious conversion,
prompted by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, encounters between
European states and the Ottoman Empire, and the expansion of global trade and
exploration. This conference will investigate the variety of ways in which men
and women created stories about conversion. It will ask not only what
constituted conversion (whether understood as a change or as an intensification
of faith) in
this period, but also how narrative shaped people's expectations of religious
change and enabled them to articulate their experience in a variety of ways.

The conference forms part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded
project 'Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1700'. We welcome
submissions that deal with any aspect of this topic, and are particularly keen
to receive papers that will help us to develop a global perspective. The
project is interdisciplinary in scope, and we invite not only literary and
historical, but art historical, anthropological, and other approaches.

Possible questions may include but need not be limited to:

* How did the experience of conversion differ according to region, faith,
status, age and race?
* What genres of narrative were used? How did these interact with the
particular circumstances in which people converted?
* Did men and women have different understandings and experiences of
conversion?
* How did conversion narratives circulate? How do manuscript and print
accounts differ from each other?
* How popular were these texts? How were they appropriated and revised? What
was their audience?
* How did conversion relate to other border-crossings, including trade,
diplomacy, slavery, exploration and colonization?
* What role did the material world play in shaping conversion?
* How did the experience of conversion relate to ideas about the self?
* What methodologies are appropriate to the study of conversion and
narrative?

Abstracts of c. 300 words should be submitted to conversionnarratives@york.ac.uk
by 1st December 2010. Submissions of
panels and individual papers will be equally welcome. For more information
about the 'Conversion
Narratives' project visit www.york.ac.uk/conversion

Be the next Greenblatt?


[this via Tom Healy's LRS ...]

Berkeley are looking for a junior Assistant Professor in Renaissance-Early 18th Century Literature.

Information can be found at http://academicemployment.chance.berkeley.edu/DetailsJobSearch.cfm?recordID=990; closing date is 1st November.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

From Coronation to Chari-Vari: The Many Uses of Ritual and Ceremony in the Early Modern World

A one-day colloquium at Birkbeck, University of London

Thursday 23rd September 2010 6.30 pm
Location: Birkbeck, University of London, room tbc
Key-note speaker: Professor Jeroen Duindam, of Groningen University

Prof. Duindam is an expert on early modern rituals and has published Vienna and Versailles: The Courts of Europe's Dynastic Rivals, 1550-1780 (Cambridge, 2003) and Myths of Power: Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam 1995). At the moment he is co-editing Royal Courts in Dynastic States and Empires: A Global Perspective (Brill Leiden, 2010). This event is free to attend and open to all, and will be followed by a party.

Colloquium

Date: Friday 24th September 2010 6.30 pm
Location: Birkbeck, University of London, room tbc

As part of Birkbeck's thriving research culture, this event will bring together scholars to discuss the purpose and reception of ritual and ceremony in the early modern period. Early modern life was shaped by ritual and ceremony. These rites had many functions, such as marking time, denoting power, place and order, and defining the sacred. Ritual could provide a temporary release from the hierarchically ordered world or mark an attempt to assert and confirm social categories which were otherwise potentially unstable.

EMPHASIS (Early Modern Philosophy and History of Science Seminar) 2010-2011

Venue: Room 104 [1st Floor] Senate House, South Building, Malet Street, London WC1E.
Time: Saturday, 2-4pm. Refreshments provided.

16 October 2010 Renaissance Natural History
Fabian Kraemer (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin): ‘Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Twofold Pandechion: Collecting Words and Images in Late Sixteenth-Century Natural History’.
Angela Fischel (Humboldt Universität, Berlin): ‘Connecting things, words and
images: Strategies of gaining and circulating knowledge in sixteenth-century natural philosophy’.

6 November 2010
Catherine Wilson (University of Aberdeen)
‘“Vain Philosophy”: A 17th century Theme’.

4 December 2010 Rethinking Representation in Early Modern Natural Philosophy
Alexander Wragge-Morley (HPS, University of Cambridge): ‘Force and Signification in Natural History, 1650-1720'.
Florence Grant (Kings College, London): ‘Style and experiment in eighteenth-century natural philosophy’.

8 January 2011
History and Natural Philosophy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries:
Per Landgren (University of Gothenburg, Visiting scholar at Oxford): ‘Natural History and the Aristotelian Concept of History’.
Dmitri Levitin (University of Cambridge): ‘Pious corpuscularians and idolatrous Aristotle: Robert Boyle on the history of philosophy’

5 February 2011
Soul and Intellect in the Seventeenth Century:
Michael Edwards (Jesus College, Cambridge): ‘Time and the passions of the soul’
Daniel Andersson (Oxford): ‘Intellectual virtues in late seventeenth-century England’.

5 March 2011
Penelope Gouk (University of Manchester): ‘Music and the emergence of experimental science’.

16 April 2011 Occult Philosophy in the Renaissance
Didier Kahn (Sorbonne, Paris IV/CNRS) ‘Gerard Dorn and the pseudo-Paracelsian tract Monarchia Triadis in unitate (1577)’
Jean Pierre Brach (École pratique des Hautes Études, Paris): ‘Currents and aspects of Number Symbolism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’.

7 May 2011
Anna Maria Roos (Oxford) ‘Spiderman: Dr. Martin Lister (1639-1712) and early modern theories of insect vectors and disease’

4 June 2011
Hannah Dawson (University of Edinburgh)
Title tbc.

For the most up-to-date information on the seminar please consult the seminar website:
http://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/seminars/Emphasis/index.htm

To be added to the EMPHASIS e-mailing list, please contact the organiser:
Dr Stephen Clucas: s.clucas@bbk.ac.uk

Material Readings in Early Modern Culture

Announcing a new series from Ashgate Publishing Company

Series Editors: James Daybell, University of Plymouth; and
Adam Smyth, Birkbeck College, University of London

This series provides a forum for studies that consider the material
forms of texts as part of an investigation into early modern culture.
The editors invite proposals of a multi- or inter-disciplinary nature,
and particularly welcome proposals that combine archival research with
an attention to the theoretical models that might illuminate the
reading, writing, and making of texts, as well as projects that take
innovative approaches to the study of material texts, both in terms
the kinds of primary materials under investigation, and in terms of
methodologies. What are the questions that have yet be to asked about
writing in its various possible embodied forms? Are there varieties of
materiality that are critically neglected? How does form mediate and
negotiate content? In what ways do the physical features of texts
inform how they are read, interpreted and situated?

Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of
essays. The range of topics covered in this series includes, but is
not limited to:

· History of the book, publishing, the book trade, printing,
typography (layout, type, typeface, blank/white space, paratextual
apparatus)
· Technologies of the written word: ink, paper, watermarks,
pens, presses
· Surprising or neglected material forms of writing
· Print culture
· Manuscript studies
· Social space, context, location of writing
· Social signs, cues, codes imbued within the material forms of texts
· Ownership and the social practices of reading: marginalia,
libraries, environments of reading and reception
· Codicology, palaeography and critical bibliography
· Production, transmission, distribution and circulation
· Archiving and the archaeology of knowledge
· Orality and oral culture
· The material text as object or thing

Proposals should take the form of either 1) a preliminary letter of
inquiry, briefly describing the project; or
2) a formal prospectus including: abstract, brief statement of your
critical methodology, table of contents, sample chapter, estimate of
length, estimate of the number and type of illustrations to be
included, and a c.v.

Please send a copy of either type of proposal to each of the two
series editors and to the publisher:
Dr James Daybell, james.daybell@plymouth.ac.uk; Dr Adam Smyth,
adam.smyth@bbk.ac.uk
Erika Gaffney, Publisher, egaffney@ashgate.com

Thursday, September 09, 2010

Early Modern Exchange

The UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges is delighted to invite you to a
series of seminars for the autumn term. Seminars will take place at 4.30pm
on Wednesdays in Foster Court 243. For maps and directions, please see
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/maps/

Details are as follows:


20th October. France and England: Medieval to Early Modern

Jane Gilbert (UCL, French), France and England and Medieval Literature
Ardis Butterfield (UCL, English), Literatures of France and England
Paul Davis (UCL, English), French Influence on Restoration Drama


17th November. Renaissance Virtues: Privation and Manipulation

Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary), title to be confirmed.
Angus Gowland (UCL, History), European Melancholy
Jeremy Robbins (Edinburgh), The Place of Virtue in Baltasar Gracián's
Aphorism


15th December. History of the Book

William Sherman (York, English), Mapping the World of Knowledge: Hernando
Colon and the Biblioteca Colombina
Henry Woudhuysen (UCL, English), Continental Books in late 16th and 17th
century England: Gabriel Harvey and Ben Jonson


Information can also be found at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/eme/Events or by
contacting Helen Hackett (h.hackett@ucl.ac.uk) or Alexander Samson
(a.samson@ucl.ac.uk). All welcome; we hope you can join us.

A STAGED READING OF GAMMER GURTON'S NEEDLE

RED BULL THEATER REVELATION READINGS, directed by EVERETT QUINTON

www.redbulltheater.com
212.352.3101

Join this hilarious search for a needle in the haystack of
pre-Shakespearean sex.

“Best Play-Reading Series” – The Village Voice

LOCATION
Theater at St. Clement’s
423 West 46th Street, between 9th & 10th Avenues
Subway: A/C/E to 42nd Street, Exit on 44th Street
Parking: 415 West 45th Street, between 9th & 10th Avenues

Purchase at www.redbulltheater.com or call
212-352-3101 or 866-811-4111 (toll-free)

RED BULL THEATER
"The most exciting classical theater company in New York."-Time Out New York
JESSE BERGER
ARTISTIC DIRECTOR
www.REDBULLTHEATER.com ( http://www.redbulltheater.com)

Communication and Exchange

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading, Conference in Early Modern Studies, 18-20 July 2011

CFP Miscellanies and Commonplacing

Papers are invited for panels on miscellanies and commonplace traditions, focusing on early modern poetry. As the conference’s informal theme is Communication and Exchange, we would particularly welcome papers which explore the ways in which print and manuscript miscellanies reveal patterns of exchange, circulation and influence. We would also be interested in papers on the ways in which miscellany and commonplace collections suggest the popular or elite status of particular poems and poets. Lastly, we would welcome papers which combine a focus on the material culture of miscellanies and commonplace books with attention to formal issues, such as rhetoric and poetic form, genre and influence.

Please send 200-word abstract to Dr Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading) and Dr Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (Oxford)

m.f.ocallaghan@reading.ac.uk

elizabeth.scott-baumann@ell.ox.ac.uk

CFP The Gathered Text

To complement panels on ‘Miscellanies and Commonplacing’, papers are invited for a panel addressing the notion of ‘the gathered text’. Papers on this panel are likely to be bibliographical in focus, but it is hoped that they will also engage with broader literary or historical ideas. Texts might be drawn from a wide range of different genres, both literary and non-literary. Topics for discussion could include (but are not limited to) the sequences of gatherings or quires in particular early modern texts; the construction of composite volumes out of two or more previously independent texts; the use of gatherings as a unit of literary composition or production; gatherings as evidence of censorship or marketing practices; gatherings as a register or index of the production process.

Please send a 200-word abstract to Dr Rebecca Bullard (Reading).

r.bullard@reading.ac.uk

Further details of the 2011 EMRC conference are available at:

www.reading.ac.uk/english/research/deal-EMRC.aspx

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

SHAKESPEAREAN CONFIGURATIONS

An International Symposium on Shakespearean Forms from the 16th to the 21st century

Salle Jourda, Bâtiment de Recherche Marc Bloch (BRED) University of Montpellier (France), Wednesday 29 September to Friday 1 October 2010

Jointly organised and funded by the Universities of Montpellier (IRCL), York and Bergen

Shakespearean Configurations is a follow-up from last year’s conference held at the University of York (UK) during which participants took a fresh look at configurations—and reconfigurations—of Shakespeare from the first quartos to the most recent visual incarnations. They also offered new materials and new approaches for studying the packaging of the plays and poems through time, between cultures and across media.

The theme of the conference was prompted by two sweeping developments in Shakespeare studies: the sustained attack on the idea of an authentic, original text produced by a single, isolated author; and a corresponding attention to the reformulation and assimilation of Shakespeare’s texts in cultures very different from the one in which they were created.

Participants in this year’s conference are invited to continue investigating these themes. They are also encouraged to explore more specifically the relation between the editing and/or configuring of Shakespeare’s works through time and the various ways in which these works were appropriated by readers and audiences.

Contributors will employ a range of materials, including early printed versions, bindings, illustrated editions and paintings, library and museum collections, stage sets and later forms including photography and Manga Shakespeare.



Agnes Lafont and Jean-Christophe Mayer, Montpellier

Bill Sherman, York

Stuart Sillars, Bergen



Conference organisers

Contact and registration : vanessa.kuhner-blaha@univ-montp3.fr





PROGRAMME



wednesday 29 september



2:00-2:15 Welcome



Theatrical Adaptations and Configurations





2:15-2:45 Atsuhiko Hirota (Kyoto University), “Kingdoms of Tate’s Lear and Shakespeare’s Lear: A Restoration Reconfiguration of Archipelagic Kingdoms”

2:45-3:00 questions



3:00-3:30 Agnès Lafont (University of Montpellier), “Mythological Reconfigurations on the Contemporary Stage: Giving A New Voice to Philomela in Titus Andronicus”

3:30-3:45 questions



Coffee



4:15-4:45 Varsha Panjwani (University of York), “ ‘What is the chance?’: Shakespeare fighting for limelight at the Swan”

4:45-5:00 questions



5:00-5:30 Florence March (University of Avignon), “Richard II in la cour d'honneur of the Popes' Palace, Festival d'Avignon 2010”

5:30-5:45 questions



8:00 Dinner in town



thursday 30 september



Visual Configurations: Painting, Architecture, Photography, Mangas





9:15-09:45 Dympna Callaghan (Syracuse University), “From the Colossal to the Diminutive: Anthony and Cleopatra Versus Hamlet”

9:45:10:00 questions



10:00-10:30 Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen), “Photography and Victorian Shakespeare”

10:30-10:45 questions



Coffee



11:15-11:45 Svenn-Arve Myklebost (University of Bergen), “Abbreviation and Ekphrasis: Iconotextual Shakespeare Translation”

11:45-12:00 questions



LUNCH (on campus)





Textual Configurations: Editing, Publishing, Educating





2:00-2:30 Bill Sherman (University of York), “Standing upon Points: Re-configuring Shakespeare's Punctuation”

2:30-2:45 questions



2:45-3:15 Erica Sheen (University of York), “Un-American Shakespeare” (title t.b.c.)

3:15-3:30 questions



3:30-4:00 Sarah Stanton (Cambridge University Press), “Publishing Shakespeare”

4:00-4:15



Coffee



4:45-5:15 Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford), “ ‘Read it, but buy it first’: Buying Shakespeare”

5:15-5:30 questions



5:30 Planning Session – The Future of the Shakespeare Configured Project



8:00 Conference dinner (Brasserie du Théâtre, Place de la Comédie)



friday 1 october





The Material Text—Reading, Collecting, Curating

9:15-9:45 Jean-Christophe Mayer (CNRS and University of Montpellier), “Shakespeare and the Order of Books”

9:45-10:00 questions



10:00-10:30 Alan H. Nelson (University of Berkeley), “Shakespeare and the Bibliophiles: The Next Generation”

10:30-10:45 questions



Coffee



11:00-11:30 Noriko Sumimoto (Meisei University, Tokyo), “Updating Folios: Customising Readers’ Reconfigurations of Shakespeare”

11:30-11:45 questions



11:45-12:15 Jeffrey Knight (University of Michigan), “Shakespeare’s Early Curators”

12:15-12:30 questions



CLOSING LUNCH (on campus)

Monday, September 06, 2010

Seminars in Early Modern Preaching: King David


6 November 2010
Old Whiteknights House, University of Reading

11.00-11.30 Registration and Welcome

11.30-13.00 Panel 1: Sixteenth Century

Chair: Dr Mary Morrissey (University of Reading)


‘with one worde spekynge his herte was chaunged’: John Fisher on the penitence of King David and King Henry VII
Dr Cecilia Hatt (University of Oxford)

George Peele's The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (written ca. 1588, printed 1599)

Dr Lyndsay Croft (University of Loughborough)


13.00-14.00 Lunch

14.00-15.30 Panel 2: The 1620s

Chair: Dr Hugh Adlington (University of Birmingham)

King David as a model for Penitence: Hildersham on Psalm 51 and Psalm 35
Dr Lesley Rowe (University of Warwick)

King David in John Donne’s Psalm 32 sermon series
Dr Mary Ann Lund (University of Leicester)

15.30-16.00 Tea/Coffee

16.00-17.30 Panel 3: Civil War and Restoration
Chair: Mary Anne Lund (University of Leicester)

King David and the Restoration 1660-1685
Dr David Appleby (University of Nottingham)

‘Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy righteousness unto the king’s son’: William
Laud’s Accession Day sermon, 1631.
Professor Alan Cromartie (University of Reading)

17.30 Closing Remarks

A registration fee of £10 includes colloquium fee, morning coffee, lunch, and afternoon tea. Please book by Friday 29 October. For details of registration, travel and further information, please email Dr Mary Morrissey (m.e.morrissey@reading.ac.uk) or Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk).




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