Early Modern Theatricality in the 21st Century Thursday

Rutgers, Dec. 1, 4:00 PM - 6:30 PM Friday, Dec. 2, 10:00 AM - 7:00 PM

Alexander Library, 4th Floor
169 College Avenue
New Brunswick, NJ 08901

A reception will follow the proceedings.

All are welcome.

Queries to henry.turner@rutgers.edu

"Enter the ghost in his night gowne": Hamlet after Q1

Zachary Lesser (The University of Pennsylvania) speaking at the CUNY Graduate Center

Friday, December 2, 2pm
The CUNY Graduate Center, Room 5409
365 Fifth Avenue (34th-35th Streets)
New York, NY 10016

The lecture will be followed by wine and refreshments. All are welcome.

Sponsored by the CUNY Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group emig.cuny@gmail.com

SPACE ON THE ELIZABETHAN STAGE, 1576-1599

30 March 2012, University of Leeds

Following the opening of The Theatre in 1576, an innovative relationship developed between the newly-permanent space of the stage and the physical place of the theatre. The performative possibilities were quickly grasped and exploited by the men who came to write for the professional theatres, as they experimented with new ways of staging space in the Elizabethan playhouses: men such as Thomas Kyd, Thomas Lodge, Christopher Marlowe, George Peele, Robert Wilson, and the young William Shakespeare.


We invite proposals for individual papers (max. 20 minutes) on the processes and factors which created a sense of space and/or place in the Elizabethan theatre – including the language of the play-text, the physical presence of the players and playgoers, the actual performance space, and the technologies of the theatre. Possible topics may include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:


- The relationship between the real space of the theatre and imagined space;

- The influence of real factors such as the presence of the audience or even the weather upon the construction of stage space;

- The theatrical representation of geographical difference;

- The material construction of place through props and costume;

- The role of genre in the creation of stage-space;

- Inter-textual geography and the transmission of poetic geography between texts.


Proposals (max. 300 words) are welcome from both established scholars and postgraduates, and should be sent by Friday 20 January 2012 to the conference organisers Dr Laurence Publicover and Dr Chloe Preedy at: elizabethan.stage@gmail.com. We very much look forward to receiving your proposal.

FOOLS AND FOLLY IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE

Saturday 18 February 2012
A one-day symposium hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture at the University of Southampton and Chawton House Library, Hampshire

This one-day symposium on Fools and Folly in Early Modern Europe will bring together historians, art-historians and literary scholars from the UK, Europe and beyond who are currently working on folly. While the 'wisdom' of folly in the early modern period has become a familiar concept, it has lacked significant cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural investigation. This symposium will include papers on Erasmus's character of Folly; the fools of Tudor interludes, French 'soties' and Shakespearean drama; king's fools and court jesters; carnivals and festive folly; and the representation of folly in art. Speakers will examine and consider the many manifestations of folly in early modern Europe and consider its different political, religious and social purposes. The event will also, via roundtable discussions, invite contributions about other research into folly, and related foolish things.

Speakers include:

Professor Luc Duerloo (Antwerp) on Hapsburg court culture Dr Peter Happé (Southampton) on Ben Jonson Professor Richard Hillman (Tours) on Mad Discourse Dr Suzannah Lipscomb (UEA) on Tudor natural fools Dr Alexander Samson (University College London) on Spanish folly and madness Dr Peter Sillitoe (V&A) on Masques Professor David Smith (New Hampshire) on Jan Steen Professor Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh) on John Heywood Dr Anna Whitelock (Royal Holloway) on Archie Armstrong

The symposium will be held in the unique setting of Chawton House Library, an Elizabethan manor house and former home of Jane Austen's brother. Coffee, lunch, tea and drinks will all be provided.

Registration cost: £40. Some postgraduate bursaries will also be available.

For further details and to register, please contact:

Dr Alice Hunt
Lecturer in English
Faculty of Humanities
University of Southampton
SO17 1BJ
Tel: 023 8059 3210
Email:a.hunt@soton.ac.uk

Blogging Returns

The dapper fellows at Blogging the Renaissance tell me their sleeping giant has been revived: here.

Research grants

The Renaissance Society of America: eighteen research grants for RSA members; deadline 31 December

Research projects in all subjects and language areas within Renaissance studies are eligible for support. If you are applying for a grant please be sure that you have renewed your membership for 2012.

The 18 grants are:
*RSA Research Grants (9 grants), upto $3,000 each
*Rensselaer W. Lee Memorial Grant in Art History (1 grant), $3,000
*Paul Oskar Kristeller Memorial Grant (1 grant), $3,000
*Bodleian Library Research Grant (1 grant), one-month residence in Oxford for the purposes of research in the Special Collections of the Bodleian Library, with an additional stipend of $3,000.
*Patricia H. Labalme Grant (1 grant) in collaboration with the Giorgio Cini Foundation, supports a one-month residence in at the Centro Vittore Branca on the Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore for the purpose of research in Venice, with a total award of $3,000.
*Samuel H. Kress Foundation Grant in Renaissance Art History (5 Grants); $3,000 each; these grants will support the costs of publication or research leading to publication in the history of art.

For further details of eligibility and how to apply, see https://rsa.site-ym.com/?page=ResearchGrants

"Fair Ophelia" in Victorian and East Asian Visual Cultures

A talk by Alexander Huang
Associate Professor of English, Theatre, and International Affairs at George Washington University

Time: Nov. 28 (Monday) 6:00-8:00 p.m
Place: 403 Kent Hall (EALAC Lounge)
The Departments of East Asian Languages and Cultures, English and Comparative Literature, Film Studies at Columbia, and the Department of Theater at Barnard College present

Ophelia, a muted figure in Shakespeare's *Hamlet,* is a paradox in East Asian literature, drama and film. Even when she appears to depend on others for her thoughts like her Western counterpart, the figure of Ophelia in Asian rewritings signals a strong presence by her absence and even absent-mindedness. A young woman who is vulnerable yet powerful,
Ophelia is undermined and empowered by her femininity. Asian Ophelias have difficulty expressing one?s own thoughts, but they deploy various strategies to let themselves be seen and heard?balancing between eloquence and silence, aggression and complaisance. While Western Ophelias seem more muted, Asian incarnations of Ophelias possess more moral agency. One of the most important sources for East Asian imaginations of Ophelia is the Victorian pictorialization represented by John Everett Millais?s famous Ophelia (1851). This illustrated presentation examines the Victorian legacy and East Asian adaptations.

Alex Huang is the author of *Chinese Shakespeares: Two Centuries of Cultural Exchange* (Columbia University Press), which received book awards from the Modern Language Association (MLA), New York University (NYU), and the International Convention for Asian Scholars (ICAS). He has published widely on theatricality, Shakespeare in adaptation, digital humanities, and Chinese and Sinophone literature. He currently serves as the Vice President of the Association for Asian Performance (AAP), Vice President of the Mid-Atlantic Region Association for Asian Studies (MAR/AAS), book review editor of *Chinese Literature Today, *and on the Modern Language Association (MLA) Committee on the *New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare. *He has appeared on BBC Radio, BBC TV, and other television and radio programs to discuss cultural globalization

Renaissance Reincarnations

University of York, Saturday 17 March 2012

William Shakespeare – a lonely nobody furiously writing away in his garret, or an actor with a penchant for kingly parts? Elizabeth I – a jolly monarch with a partiality for sweets and a fondness for comedies involving dogs, or a cunning strategist thwarting the plans of her dangerous rivals? Philip Henslowe – enterprising money-lender or creative producer?

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we remain fascinated with Renaissance lives. This fascination has given rise to some of the most popular and admired works of fiction and liveliest critical debates of our time. While past studies have discussed Renaissance afterlives in isolation, this conference builds on recent interest in studying the modern representation of the Renaissance period from an interdisciplinary perspective. The aims of the conference are twofold – to map patterns and connections between the afterlives of Renaissance figures from different walks of life by bringing together academics from various disciplines; and to understand the ways in which the cultural stories of Renaissance figures shape our editorial, interpretive, and creative practice.

We invite proposals for individual papers (max. 20 minutes) on the theme of twentieth and twenty-first century representations and reincarnations of early modern historical persons who lived between 1500 and 1700 – from monarchs to musicians, poets to politicians. Possible topics may relate to (but are certainly not limited to) the following areas:

• Early modern men and women in popular fiction, e.g. Rupert of the Rhine’s reinvention in the romance novel, or Leonardo Da Vinci as discussed in The Da Vinci Code;
• Renaissance lives in biographies, histories, and scholarly debate, such as Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare's Wife;
• Stage versions of early modern lives, e.g. the award-winning A Man for all Seasons and The School of Night;
• Screen representations of early modern personalities, for instance Elizabeth’s childhood in The Tudors or Vermeer in Girl with a Pearl Earring;
• Musical and nursery rhyme recollections of historical persons, such as singing John Smith in Walt Disney’s Pocahontas, or the real ‘Georgie Porgie’.

Keynote speakers: Professor Martin Butler (University of Leeds) and Professor William Sheils (University of York).

Proposals (max. 300 words) are welcome from both established scholars and postgraduates, and should be sent by Friday 20th January to the conference organisers Dr Varsha Panjwani and Dr Chloe Preedy at renaissance.reincarnations@gmail.com. We very much look forward to receiving your proposal.

New Paradise Lost film ...

Details from the Guardian here.

Jeff Dolven (Princeton) on Spenser: "Besides Good and Evil."

Friday, November 18, 2pm

Room 5414, CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, between 34th & 35th Sts.)

Wine and refreshments will be served.

Sponsored by CUNY's Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group.

T'he Renaissance Republic of Furniture...

... From Political Theology to Political Ecology.’
Julia Reinhard Lupton
Thursday, 8th December 7:00 p.m.
Swedenborg Hall
20 Bloomsbury Way
London

A free lecture co-sponsored by the School of Humanities, Kingston University London, and the London Graduate School

Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral programme

Eight very generously funded Fellowships are available on the international, interdisciplinary Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctoral programme, Text and Event in Early Modern Europe (TEEME). TEEME is run by the universities of Kent, FU Berlin, Porto and CU Prague, and all students will spend a minimum of one year in two of these institutions. Both Home/EU students and overseas students are eligible to apply! Deadline for applications: 15th December 2011 (for a September 2012 start). Please see the programme websitewww.teemeurope.eu for further details, visit us on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/teeme/), or contact the programme coordinator Bernhard Klein:b.klein@kent.ac.uk

Call for papers: News in Early Modern Europe

University of Sussex, 5th-7th June 2012, www.sussex.ac.uk/cems/emnews

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Sussex is to host a multi-disciplinary postgraduate conference on the subject of News in Early Modern Europe. We invite proposals for individual papers of 20 minutes or panels of up to three speakers that address any aspect of this theme. Although the conference is particularly directed towards postgraduates, we welcome scholars at all levels of their career.

Plenary speakers include: Joad Raymond (University of East Anglia), Andrew Pettegree (University of St Andrews).

Please send abstracts of papers (of no more than 200 words) or panel theme with list of speakers and abstracts to Simon Davies (S.F.Davies@sussex.ac.uk) by 31st January 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

New Research in the Medieval and Early Modern Period

Inaugural Conference of the North-East Medieval and early Modern Symposium
Location: tbc
Time/Date: 26th January 2012, 09:00 - 17:00
Are you a Postgraduate Researcher working in the period c. 1400- c. 1700? This new Symposium is a forum for Postgraduate Researchers throughout the North-East. At its inaugural conference, the Symposium aims to explore the breadth and depth of research in the North East from c. 1400-1700. The Symposium is interdisciplinary and intends to build up links between PG researchers in our field, establish a forum to present work in progress, and explore opportunities for collaboration and publication.
Call for Papers: Past and Future Tenses: New Research in the Medieval and Early Modern Period
Potential speakers are asked to submit abstracts of 200 words max, for 15 minute papers drawn from their research on any aspect of literature, history, art, society or culture, c. 1400- c.1700.
We also welcome expressions of interest from researchers interested in helping to organise the Symposium.
Please e-mail abstracts and any questions to Simon Moore (Newcastle University) (s.j.moore2@ncl.ac.uk) by 19 December 2011
About North East Medieval and Early Modern Symposium
Supported by the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group at Newcastle University (http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems) NEMS exists to build a strong community of Postgraduate Researchers in our field across the North East Universities. We are an informal and welcoming group, offering opportunities to share your research, participate in interdisciplinary discussions, and collaborate on the organisation of events and conferences, and on publication projects. Initially, we will meet twice yearly to hear research papers and socialise with colleagues. NEMS is entirely free to attend, and each meeting is followed by a drinks reception.

Historicizing Performance in the Early Modern Period

The John Rylands Library, Deansgate, Manchester, January 20, 2012

09.00 – 09.45 Registration and coffee
09.45 – 10.00 Welcome
10.00 – 11.00 Panel 1: Death and Ritual
Maggie Vinter (John Hopkins University), ‘How to do things while dying: Volpone and the ars moriendi’
Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester), ‘The Performance of Bad Death: The Strange Tale of the Shoemaker of Breslau’
11.00 – 11.15 Coffee Break
11.15 – 12.15 Panel 2: Music
Liam Haydon (University of Manchester), ‘Performing Perfection: Milton and the Music of the Spheres’
Dolly MacKinnon (University of Queensland), ‘If ever beene where bels have knell’d to Church’: The performance of parish bells in early modern England

12.15 – 12.30 Convenience Break
12.30 – 1.30 Keynote Lecture
Julie Sanders (University of Nottingham),
‘Within the Castle Walls: Historical Sites as Performance at Kenilworth and Ludlow’
1.30 – 2.30 Lunch
2.30 – 3.30 Panel 3: Space
Catherine Clifford (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham), ‘From Wood to Stone: Whitehall Palace, the Banqueting House, and the Performance of Architecture in Court Drama, 1581-1621’
John Peacock (University of Southampton), ‘Architectural Performance: Inigo Jones and Bernini’

3.30 – 3.45 Convenience Break
3.45 – 4.45 Panel 4: Theatre and Ritual
Alison Findlay (University of Lancaster), ‘The State of Ceremony in Macbeth’
Brian Schneider (University of Manchester), ‘Extra –dramatic’ performance in early modern Prologues, Epilogues and Inductions
4.45 – 5.00 Coffee Break
5.00 – 6.00 Keynote Lecture
Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford),
‘Bitter, Black and Tragical’: Tragic Peformance on the Shakespearean Stage
6.00 – 6.30 Drinks.

Registration: £10
Speakers and guests are invited to join us for dinner at a local restaurant; to book a place please let us know when registering (dinner not included in the registration fee).
The Society for Renaissance Studies has granted us bursaries to help postgraduate students with the costs of travel and accommodation. If you want to be considered for one of the bursaries, please let us know.
To book a place at this event please contact Michael Durrant and Naya Tsentourou at Historicizing.performance@manchester.ac.uk by 7th January 2012.
The event will be taking place at the Seminar Room of the historic building of the John Rylands Library at Deansgate. Due to limited space, please register early to avoid disappointment.

We hope to see you there!
historicizingperformance.wordpress.com

The British Animal Studies Network Lives Again!

'Wild,' Friday 25-Saturday 26 May 2012, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.

Thanks to the generosity of the University of Strathclyde, BASN is being revived - and it now has its own website: www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk.

The first meeting of BASN-Glasgow will take place from 2.30pm on Friday 25 May to 5.00pm on Saturday 26 May 2012 at the University of Strathclyde in central Glasgow. There will be a small charge for attending the meeting to cover the cost of refreshments (which will be vegetarian and vegan). Details will be issued in the new year.

As with all previous BASN meetings, this one takes as its focus a key term in animal studies that it is hoped will be of interest to scholars from a range of disciplines. This meeting's title is 'Wild'. Invited speakers who are already confirmed for May are Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen), Hayden Lorimer (Glasgow University) and Richard Nash (Indiana University).

As well as these invited speakers we are also issuing this call for papers. If you are interested in giving a paper addressing the topic 'Wild' from whatever disciplinary perspective please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words with a brief biography (also of no more than 200 words). These should be included within your email - i.e. not as attachments. Please send them to basn@strath.ac.uk. The deadline for abstracts is 13 January 2012. Presentations will be 20 minutes long, and we hope to include work by individuals at different career stages. Sadly we have no money to support travel, accommodation or attendance costs.

Topics covered at this meeting might include (but are not limited to):

* The reintroduction of wild animals
* Wildness as a philosophical construct
* Wild animals in captivity
* Wildness as a cultural trope or theme
* Ferality and wildness
* Encounters with the wild - safaris, walking, urban wildlife

Also, if you'd like to join the mailing list for BASN, and receive information about this and future meetings/events please go to http://www.britishanimalstudiesnetwork.org.uk/Home.aspx and click on the 'Register for Updates' link.

We look forward to seeing you in Glasgow in 2012.

Professor Erica Fudge, School of Humanities, University of Strathclyde, 7.28 Livingstone Tower, 26 Richmond Street, Glasgow G1 1XH
Phone: +44 (0)141 548 3054 (Ext. 3054)
http://www.strath.ac.uk/humanities/courses/english/staff/fudgeericaprof/

Anne Askew

The Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance will hold its
November meeting on Thursday, November 17, 6 pm at the CUNY Graduate
Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street, in room 9206.

David Loewenstein, English, University of Wisconsin, will speak
on "Anne Askew and the Culture of Heresy Hunting in Henry VIII's
England." Professor Loewenstein suggests reading the following pages
of THE EXAMINATIONS OF ANNE ASKEW, edited by Elaine V. Beilin (Oxford
UP, 1996): First Examination: pp. 19-24, 27-30, 34, 42-5, 56-7, 62;
Second Examination: pp. 91-3, 97-9, 103-4, 112, 119, 121-2, 127, 130,
134, 149-50.

Early Modern Recipe Books

Women's Social Networks, Domesticity, Science and Medicine

Friday 25 November

Newcastle University, Research Beehive Room 2.20

10 a.m. Registration (tea and coffee available)
10.15 Introduction and welcome (Kate Chedgzoy, Newcastle)
10.30 Catherine Alexander (Newcastle), 'Collaboration and community in Jane Loraine's cook book, 1684-6'
11.30 Sara Pennell (Roehampton), ' "The best I ever ate": culinary knowledge and practice in early modern English manuscript recipe texts'
12.30 Lunch (provided)
1.30 Jayne Archer (Aberystwyth), 'Opus Mulierum: alchemy in early modern women's recipe books'
2.30 Jenny Richards (Newcastle), 'Reading, reproduction and Thomas Raynalde's The Birth of Mankind: Otherwise Named, The Woman's Book'
3.30 Tea and coffee
3.45 Response by Suzanne Trill (Edinburgh) and final discussion

There is no charge for attendance at this event, but so that we can cater appropriately, please contact Emma Short by November 18 to let her know that you would like to attend.

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

November 7, 2011
Butler Library, Room 523, 4:30PM
Carol Braun Pasternack, UC Santa Barbara
"Bloodlines: Purity, Warfare and the Procreative Family in Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica"
"Remaking Sex: The Holy Family and the Rest of Us in 'The Advent Lyrics'"
Email for RSVP and readings: pdailey@columbia.edu, visit here for details.

November 8, 2011
Faculty House, Room 2, 7:30PM
Marie Tanner on “Programmatic Antiquarianism in the Design of New Rome: Titus and Nicholas V.”
For RSVP and details, visit here.

November 9, 2011
Butler Library, Room 523, 6:00PM
Peter Mack, Director, Warburg Institute (London)
"Print and Innovation in Sixteenth Century Rhetoric: Agricola, Erasmus
and Melancthon"
Visit here or contact Michael Ryan (mtr2109@columbia.edu) for more details.

Missing Texts

A Conference organised by the Material Texts Network at Birkbeck, University of London
Saturday June 2, 2012
Call for Papers

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.

CUNY Graduate Center

The Renaissance Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center invites you to

Jean Feerick (Brown University), "Groveling with Earth in Kyd and Shakespeare's Historical Tragedies"

This Friday, November 4, 3:00-4:30pm (reception following)

Room: C-197, CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, between 34th & 35th Sts)

Non-CUNY attenders should bring ID to sign in at the front desk.

Making, Breaking and Repair

Wednesday 9 November 2011
10.00-12.00
Anatomy Theatre Museum, 6th Floor, King’s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS

Making, breaking and repair are powerful metaphors for talking about lived experience and
the natural world. We can deepen our understanding of these ways of thinking and speaking
through a focus on material processes - both contemporary and historical. Despite the recent
turn to materiality in literary and historical studies there have been few attempts within these
disciplines to engage with material practices – to learn to think with things as well as with
language. This session will bring together different perspectives on material and materiality.
A panel of speakers from a wide range of backgrounds will present their practices of making
and repair, and their approaches to things that are broken, damaged or incomplete.

All welcome.

Session Outline:

'Historic clock-making practices', Matthew Read (West Dean College)

'Repair revolution - the story of Sugru', Jane ni Dhulchaointigh (Inventor of Sugru)

'Alchemy and incompleteness: practically making the philosophers' stone', Jennifer Rampling
(University of Cambridge)

Closing Remarks – Florence Grant (History, KCL) and Chloe Porter (English, KCL)

Open discussion and tea.

For further information please email florence.grant@kcl.ac.uk or chloe.porter@kcl.ac.uk.

This event is part of the Festival of Materials and Making, hosted by the Institute of Making,
King’s College London. http://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/