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.

THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR

SPRING MEETING, 2012
Saturday 17 March 2012
CALL FOR PAPERS

Venue: The Birmingham and Midland Institute on 17 March 2012. There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm, and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm.
We currently intend that each session will have two papers (of approx. 25-30 minutes each), for which proposals are invited.

Please send proposals to Professor Thomas N. Corns no later than 17 February 2012.

Thomas N. Corns
Joint Convener
email: els009@bangor.ac.uk

Renaissance Old Worlds

English Encounters from the Levant to the Far East
The British Library, 29 June - 1 July 2012

The early modern period saw England establishing its first colonies in the New World, but its ideas and expectations about foreign nations, travel and its identity as a political and economic power on the global stage were influenced largely by its experiences in other distant but familiar nations. This conference will investigate English interactions with the ‘old worlds’ of the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East. It will ask how such cross-encounters may have shaped not only the literature, art and cultures of England and the host nations, but also a broad range of intellectual, political, cultural, religious and economic determinants of England’s relationship with the wider world.

Overarching questions to be investigated by the conference include:
(1) How did English cultural memories of the Old World, from art, literature and political events such as conflicts in the Islamic Mediterranean, influence actual travel encounters?
(2) How did information and expertise about distant places circulate, and who were the agents of such circulation (from missionaries, merchants, administrators, and indigenous informants, to artisans and scholars)?
(3) What form did the information take (from maps and texts to material artefacts)?
(4) How did religion inflect political and social negotiations? (How is anxiety about piracy in the Islamic Mediterranean and North Africa, for instance, connected to anxieties about conversion between Christianity and Islam?)
(5) What role did trading companies, both those established by the English and their European trading competitors, play in determining structures of knowledge and cross-cultural encounters?

Proposals are invited for complete panels of three or four papers, as well as individual papers on one of the following themes:
• Interplay between ‘old worlds’ and ‘new’
• Circulation networks
• Visual and material culture (art, cartography, crafts)
• Trade, diplomacy, piracy
• Gift-exchange
• Religion and conversion
• Translation and transformation

Please send abstracts (250 words for individual papers and 500 words for complete panels) and a brief biographical statement (if proposing a panel, one for each participant) to Nandini Das at row@liverpool.ac.uk by 1 March 2012. Papers should take between 15–20 minutes to present, and panels should last no longer than 1 hour and 20 minutes.

Renaissance Reincarnations

*** CALL FOR PAPERS ***

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 *Tuesday 31 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.

'Freedom, Suicide & Selfhood in Shakespeare and Early Modern Thought'

The Stachniewski Memorial Lecture will take place on the 8 February, 5-6, in the Arts Lecture Theatre, Samuel Alexander Building, University of Manchester.

Speaker: Brian Cummings from the University of Sussex:

All welcome. Details: Jerome.Degroot@manchester.ac.uk

The Stachniewski Memorial lecture commemorates one of our late colleagues in Manchester English and American Studies and is held jointly each year with the UCU.

Early Modern Theories of the Soul

UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges: Seminar

Richard Serjeantson (Cambridge): The soul and the human sciences before the Enlightenment

Guido Giglioni (Warburg): Bacon on the soul

4.30pm, Wed 18 Jan, Foster Court Room 114
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

Reading Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)

Dr Emma Smith (Oxford)

Friday 20 January 2012, 6.30 pm, Malet St room B02, Birkbeck, University of London

Organised by the Birkbeck Early Modern Society: membership is available a recession proof £5 for the year; alternatively, you can attend one off lectures at £3 each.

Details: bbkems@gmail.com

New Directions in Tudor Drama

London Renaissance Seminar
21 January 2012, 2pm

From John Heywood to John Lyly, the study of Tudor drama is currently experiencing a outburst of interest and excitement. Featuring established and upcoming scholars, this seminar will explore new approaches to sixteenth-century dramatic culture.

Speakers: Andy Kesson (University of Kent), Mike Pincombe (Newcastle University), Chloe Porter (King’s College London), and Eleanor Rycroft (Lancaster University).

Organisers: Dr Lucy Munro (Keele University) and Dr Shehzana Mamujee
(Newcastle University). For further information please contact
Dr Lucy Munro (l.munro@engl.keele.ac.uk).

Venue: School of Arts, Birkbeck College. Rooms 114 and 112 (refreshments), 43 Gordon Square, London WC1. Coffee from 1.30pm.

Jacobean Indoor Playing Symposium

London Shakespeare Centre
Saturday 4th February 2012, 10:00-18:30
Anatomy Museum and Theatre, Strand Campus
King’s College London

Following the announcement by Shakespeare’s Globe of their plans to construct an Indoor Jacobean Theatre on the London Bankside, the London Shakespeare Centre invites you to a one day symposium on recent research in to the London theatres and their cultural, architectural and political contexts.
Panels include papers on repertory, audience and lighting in the indoor theatres, on Inigo Jones at the Queen’s House and Somerset House, on digital resources for early modern theatre, on John Webb and the Worcester College Drawings, and discussion of the Globe’s Indoor Jacobean Theatre Project.
Speakers include Dr Gordon Higgott, Sarah Dustagheer, Dr Bridget Escolme, Prof Martin White, Prof Julie Sanders, Philippe Roesle, Prof John McGavin, Prof Alan Read, Oliver Jones, Jon Greenfield and Peter McCurdy.

Registration fee: £25 waged / £15 unwaged (includes refreshments and lunch)
For more information please visit http://www.shakespeare.kcl.ac.uk/events.html
For booking, go to http://estore.kcl.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=2&prodid=36&deptid=18&catid=20

DRAFT PROGRAMME*
10:00 Registration and Coffee
10:30 Welcome and introduction to the Globe’s Indoor Theatre project
10:45 Panel 1 - Indoor Playing
o Sarah Dustagheer (Kings)
o Bridget Escolme (Queen Mary’s)
o Martin White (Bristol)
12:05 Panel 2 – The Queens House
o Clare McManus and Sophie Carney (Roehampton)
12:50 Lunch
13:35 Panel 3 – Geopolitics of Playing
o Julie Sanders (Nottingham)
o Philippe Roesle (Kings)
o John McGavin (Southampton)
14:55 Panel 4 – Inigo Jones and the Strand
o Alan Read (Kings)
15:40 Coffee
16:10 Keynote – John Webb and the Worcester College Drawings
o Gordon Higgott (English Heritage)
16:55 Panel 5 – The Globe’s Indoor Theatre Project
o Ollie Jones (York/Globe)
o Jon Greenfield
o Peter McCurdy
17:55 Closing remarks
*Programme and paper tiles subject to confirmation by conference organizers.

Missing Texts -- CFP, deadline 1 February.

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.

V&A scholarships ...

The V&A/RCA History of Design MA programme, run in partnership by the
Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art, invites
applications for 2012/13. Applicants this year will be considered for
the award of the American Friends of the V&A Scholarship and the Friends of
the V&A Scholarship.

The programme is a two-year full-time programme, based at both the V&A
and the RCA, offering three specialist pathways at MA level:

Renaissance: History of Design and Material Culture 1400-1650
Asian: History of Design and Material Culture 1450-present day
Modern: History of Design and Material Culture 1650-present day

Our small seminar-based classes provide a unique environment for the
study of the aesthetic, social, cultural, technological, economic and
political contexts for design. The course specializes in object-focused
scholarship ranging across architecture and interior design, fashion and textiles,
furniture and product design, ceramics, metalwork, glass, prints,
drawings and digital media, giving students direct access to the V&A¹s
unrivalled collections and the highly specialized art and design practices of the
RCA. As well as placing emphasis on primary research and object analysis,
the programme offers a broad-ranging theoretical and methodological basis
for the study of design and material culture. Our graduates go on to work
internationally in universities and colleges, museums and galleries, as
well as in a host of other art and design based professions such as
curating, journalism, media research and design policy.

American Friends of the V&A Scholarship Students applying from the United States of America are eligible for this new award, the American Friends of the V&A Scholarship. The AFV&A Scholarship will be offered to a student applying from the USA who
intends to work in a museum after graduating from the V&A/RCA History of Design
MA programme. It covers full overseas fees for the two years of the course
and also a maintenance grant of up to 3000 GBP per year. Overseas fees for
2012/13 are 26,000 GBP per annum.

Friends of the V&A Scholarship Students applying from the UK or the EU are eligible for the Friends of the V&A Scholarship. The FV&A Bursary will be offered to a student applying from the UK or EU who intends to work in a museum after graduating from the
V&A/RCA History of Design MA programme. The Scholarship covers full
fees for the two years of the MA and also includes a maintenance grant of up to
3000 GBP per year. Home/EU fees for 2012/13 are 9000 GBP per annum.

The awards are given on a competitive basis, judged at interview.
Students should indicate their interest in and suitability for the Awards on
their application form. The priority deadline for application for 2012/13 is
16th January 2012, and interviews will be held in March 2012. For more
information please contact the course administrator, at:
hod@rca.ac.uk. Further details on the course, entry requirements, college fees and
funding can be found at www.rca.ac.uk

If you are from the USA you should note that the Royal College of Art
is designated as an eligible institution for American students to apply
for a Guaranteed Student Loan under the new Direct Loan Program. The RCA¹s
School Code is 00942300.