Renaissance Lit readers invited to edit Devonshire MS

Alyssa McLeod, on behalf of the DMS Editorial Group, writes ...

The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab at the University of Victoria would like to invite you to participate in an experiment in social edition building. Given Renaissance Lit’s focus on early modern literature, you and your readers would have unique insight into the Wikibooks edition of the Devonshire Manuscript, a courtly miscellany produced by Anne Boleyn’s circle, and we would like to invite you and your followers to edit it.

The Electronic Textual Cultures Lab’s Devonshire MS Editorial Group is testing new methods of collaborating on knowledge curation, guaranteeing credit for multi-authored work, and ensuring the scholarly authority of community-built editions. Guided by an advisory group of leading Early Modern and Renaissance Studies scholars, Dr. Siemens’ team has advanced an authoritative version of the edition to the advisory group for review. Dr. Siemens and his team have also posted the edition in Wikibooks, a flexible platform that allows for contributions by multiple editors.

We would welcome contributions to the edition from you or any of your interested readers.

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE EVENTS AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

February 29, 2012
Steven Shapin (Harvard)
“How Thing Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now”
6:00 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

March 1, 2012
Rayna Kalas (Cornell)
“Writing and Constitutionalism in Milton’s Areopagitica”
6:00 PM, 116 Knox Hall

March 1, 2012
Donna Sadler (Agnes Scott College)
“The Craft of Royal Virtue on the Reverse Facade of Reims Cathedral”
6:30 PM, 612 Schermerhorn Hall

March 2, 2012
Catherine Sanok (University of Michigan) and Patricia Dailey (Columbia University)
“Rethinking Community in the Middle Ages”: A Workshop
10:00 AM, 602 Philosophy Hall
Note: Space is limited. Please RSVP to pdailey@columbia.edu if you are interested in presenting or attending. Readings will be pre-circulated.

March 6, 2012
Lila Yawn (The American Academy in Rome)
“The Painter of the Priapic Ezekiel: Scribe-Miniaturists and Giant Manuscripts (Italy, 11th Century)”
5:00 PM, 523 Bulter Library

March 7, 2012
Susan Boynton (Columbia)
MIME Session
6:00 PM, 201 Casa Hispanica

March 9, 2012
Barbara Traister (Lehigh)
“Holinshed and Shakespeare’s Use of Anecdote”
7:00 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

Society for Renaissance Studies Fellowships

Postdoctoral Fellowships

The Society for Renaissance Studies invites applications for its Postdoctoral Fellowships, which support research in all aspects of Renaissance Studies. There are three awards open to all suitable candidates working in the field, one of which, founded in memory of Ruth and Nicolai Rubinstein, supports research in Italian history and culture.

Applicants for Fellowships must be graduates of British or Irish universities, with PhDs awarded in the last five years, and currently engaged in full-time research, part-time teaching or independent scholarship. The Fellowships are worth £6000 and should not be held in conjunction with a full-time postdoctoral or academic teaching post. The Society has a number of international links, including with the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, which can provide practical support for Fellows wishing to spend time in Florence.

The period of tenure is twelve months from 1 October 2012.

Applications should take the form of a CV accompanied by a 1,000 word description of the project to be undertaken, a brief account of the candidate’s research to date, statement of means of financial support during that academic year and reference letters from two referees.
Study Fellowships

The Society also invites applications for its Study Fellowships for current doctoral students, to support travel or, in exceptional circumstances, other research expenses, for projects undertaken in connection with theses in the field of Renaissance Studies.

The Fellowships are open to anyone registered for a postgraduate research degree in Britain or Ireland. Applications should take the form of a 1,000 word document with the candidate’s institution, department, supervisor, year of study and principal sources of funding, contact details of one referee, and a description of the project for which funding is required, describing the relationship of the project to the finished thesis, and the specific amount of funding required. This should be supplemented by a short budget detailing projected expenditure for travel, accommodation and subsistence during the proposed research trip.

Although the maximum amount awarded for a single Fellowship is £1,500, the Society welcomes applications for projects requiring smaller or larger sums. Priority will be given to candidates at an advanced stage of research. The Society has a number of international links, including with the Istituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, which can provide practical support for Fellows wishing to spend time in Florence.

The deadline for applications for both schemes is 31st May 2012. Applications should be made via the Society’s website after the 19th March 2012, see under Funding > Fellowships: http://www.rensoc.org.uk/funding/fellowships

For further information contact the SRS Fellowship Officer:
Dr Alexander Samson
Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies
University College London
Gower Street
London WC1E 6BT
E-mail: a.samson@ucl.ac.uk
Tel 020 7679 7121
Fax 020 7679 3109

Wesward Ho!

by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, adapted by Perry Mills, and performed by 'Edward's Boys', King Edward VI School, Shakespeare's School.

Date: 10/03/12

Time: 19.30

Venue: Great Hall, Strand Campus, King's College London.

‘Edward’s Boys’ are heading “up West” – “Westward Ho!” was the regular cry of the Thames water taxi-men heading in a westerly direction. This year they are undertaking another Jacobean City Comedy. Westward Ho! is a play in which certain scenes really make sense (if at all) when performed by an all-boy company. It is only then that the audience is fully aware of the ironies and resonances implicit in the text.

In the course of the action certain characters employ this form of water transport in order to head out to Brentford (“Brainford” in the original). At the turn of the seventeenth century Brentford had the reputation of, perhaps, Brighton in the 1950s – somewhere men and women slipped off to get up to no good! Their short tour brings them to King’s College London under the sponsorship of the London Shakespeare Centre.

Tickets: £10 (£5.00 for registered King's students)

For tickets please telephone Sarah Jervis on 01789 293351 or email smj@kes.net

http://www.shakespeare.kcl.ac.uk/event.html?event=75

Invention, Philosophy and Technology in the Seventeenth Century

Call for Papers

This symposium will look the history of invention, technology and
philosophy in the early modern era, the ways in which material life changed
in the period. It will consider how the period constituted the
relationships between science, philosophy and craft, or between trade and
society. Topics might include:

Public works and the provision of society - drainage, water, sewers, food,
mining, weapons, surgical instruments, trade and trade-guilds; the
regulation of the city; is 'capitalism' a helpful category for thinking the
early modern era?; what was the relationship between science and society?;
the early modern 'expert'; innovation and tradition; literature and
invention; automata and the early modern machine.

Symposium - May 23rd 2011

CREMS - University of York.

Speakers include: Claire Preston (Birmingham), Ayesha Mukherjee (Exeter)

Contact Kevin Killeen - kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk

This symposium is part of the entirely digressive Thomas Browne Seminar,
whose designs for bullets made no impact whatsoever on the course of the
civil war. http://www.york.ac.uk/english/news-events/browne/
http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/

THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR

SPRING MEETING, 2012
Saturday 17 March 2012
Venue: The Birmingham and Midland Institute [**PLEASE NOTE**] on Saturday 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.

Programme:

(am) Matt Jordan (independent scholar), ‘Milton’s Apology: Credit and the Origins of Self-Esteem’; James Kelly (Cambridge), ‘Professor Brierley on Milton: a Quarrel on Cue’.

(pm) Colin Timms (Birmingham), ‘Comus at Exton in 1745/48’; Rachel Willie (Bangor), ‘Inscribing Textuality: Milton, Anti-theatricalism, and the Performance of Print’.

The Birmingham and Midland Institute (BMI) was founded by Act of Parliament in 1854, for ‘the Diffusion and Advancement of Science, Literature and Art amongst all Classes of Persons resident in Birmingham and the Midland Counties,’ and continues to pursue these aims. The BMI is located in the heart of Birmingham’s city centre, just a few minutes walk from Birmingham New Street, Snow Hill and Moor Street railway stations:

Birmingham and Midland Institute

Margaret Street,

Birmingham,

B3 3BS

Please follow this link for a map of the BMI’s location, and for further information about the BMI and its Library: http://www.bmi.org.uk/map.html

For further information about the British Milton Seminar, please contact either: Professor Thomas N. Corns (els009@bangor.ac.uk), or Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk).

CFP: Digital Shakespeares

Digital Shakespeares: Innovations, Interventions, Mediations
A Special Issue of The Shakespearean International Yearbook
Edited by Hugh Craig and Brett D. Hirsch

If data is "the next big idea in language, history and the arts", as
Patricia Cohen has suggested, where are we now in Shakespeare studies?
Are we being "digital" yet?

The guest editors of this special issue of The Shakespearean
International Yearbook invite papers to critically explore digital
innovations, interventions, and mediations in Shakespeare studies, in
particular, the application of digital technologies and methodologies
— such as computational stylistics, data mining and visualization, 3D
virtual modelling, electronic publishing, etc. — and their impact on
Shakespeare research, performance, and pedagogy.

Papers theorizing "digital", "networked", or "new media" Shakespeares,
as well as papers interrogating the ways in which the digital
influences the performance of Shakespeare on both stage and screen,
are also welcomed.

Abstracts of c.200 words should be emailed to Hugh Craig (hugh.craig@newcastle.edu.au) and Brett D. Hirsch (brett.hirsch@uwa.edu.au) by 10 April 2012. Full articles of accepted
abstracts will be expected by August 2012 to allow for review,
revision, and publication in 2013.

Edited by Alex Huang (George Washington University) and Tom Bishop
(University of Auckland), The Shakespearean International Yearbook surveys the present state of Shakespeare studies, addressing issues that are fundamental to our
interpretive encounter with Shakespeare’s work and his time, across
the whole spectrum of his literary output. Each issue includes a
special section under the guidance of a specialist Guest Editor, as
well as a production diary or record of a notable Shakespeare
performance.

CFP: Transition and Transformation in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures

Durham University, 5-6 July 2012

Keynote Speakers: Professor David Cowling, Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Durham and Professor Margaret Cormack, College of Charleston, South Carolina

The Medieval and Early Modern Student Association of Durham University is holding its annual interdisciplinary conference for postgraduates and early career researchers and seeks papers on the theme of "Transition and Transformation in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures". Attached please find the complete call for papers.

The conference will also feature a special exhibition of the Durham manuscript collection by Professor Richard Gameson, to be hosted in Durham Cathedral, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to imrs.mrpdg@durham.ac.uk by no later than 31 March, 2012. Registration for attendance and the conference banquet will be sent in May.

Libraries: New Research Directions - 8 June 2012

An Early Modern Research Centre colloquium at the University of Reading

This colloquium aims to bring together people researching the history of libraries over a wide chronological period and from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Papers and discussion will focus not only on particular cases but also on broader methodological questions about the current practice and possible future directions of library history. Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Fee: £15 (£10 students and unwaged)

For further information, including a programme and booking form, please visit the Reading EMRC website: http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/events/emrc-events.aspx

The Boy Actor and the Professional Actress in Shakespeare

Pamela Allen Brown (University of Connecticut)
Thursday Feb 16 at 6:00
Society for the Study of Women in the Renaissance
CUNY Grad Center Rm 9506
365 Fifth Avenue (btw 34th-35th Streets)
New York, NY 10016

TEXTS AND TEXTILES

a conference organised by the Centre for Material Texts, University of Cambridge
to be held 11-12 September 2012 at Jesus College, Cambridge

The shared origin of text and textile in the Latin texere, to weave, is a critical commonplace. Many of the terms we use to describe our interactions with words are derived from this common linguistic root, and numerous other expressions associated with reading and writing are drawn from the rich vocabulary of cloth. Textiles are one of the most ubiquitous components of material culture, and they are also integral to the material history of texts. Paper was originally made from cotton rags, and in many different cultural and historical settings texts come covered, wrapped, bound, or decorated with textiles. And across the domestic, public, religious, and political spheres, textiles are often the material forms in which texts are produced, consumed, and circulated.

In the light of the CMT’s current research theme on ‘the material text in material culture’, we invite papers which consider any of the many dimensions of the relationship between texts and textiles. There are no historical, geographical, or disciplinary limitations. Areas to be addressed could include:

the shared language of texts and textiles
- construction and deconstruction: to weave, spin, stitch, knit, stitch, suture, tie up or together, piece, tailor, gather, fashion, fabricate, mesh, trim, stretch, wrap, unfold, unpick
- challenges and problem-solving: knots, tangles, holes; to lose the thread, iron out creases, unravel, cut, keep on tenterhooks
- pieces and fragments: rags, patches, patchwork, scraps, strands, threads, rhapsodies, patterns, seams, loose ends, layers

the stuff of books
- bookbindings and covers
- incunabula – ‘swaddling clothes’
- medieval girdle books, book chemises
- paper and paper-making
- cutting, sewing, and stitching in and on books
- scrapbooks, albums, collages
- book ribbons and bookmarks
- carpet pages
- textiles in illustrations, frontispieces, title pages

textile texts
- needlework and words: tapestry, embroidery, samplers, quilts, hangings, carpets, banners
- the needle and the pen
- printed textiles
- sacred/religious texts and textiles
- love-tokens, keepsakes, charms, and relics
- cushions, badges, handkerchiefs, flags, scarves, uniforms, livery and other textual/textile ephemera
- professional and amateur work
- relationships and networks of gifts, patronage, exchange
- pattern books, sample books, costume books


Proposals of up to 25O words for 20-minute papers should be sent to Jason Scott-Warren (jes1OO3@cam.ac.uk) and Lucy Razzall (lmfr2@cam.ac.uk) by 30 April 2012

Historical Futures: New Directions in Early Modern Historicism

A colloquium sponsored by the CUNY Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group.

Keynote: Thomas Fulton (Rutgers), "History and Historicism, Past and Present."

Friday, February 17
2 pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre

The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (btw 34th-35th Streets) New York, NY 10016

There will be a reception after the event.

All are welcome.

"How Things Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now"

Steven Shapin, Harvard University
*Wednesday February 29th, 6:00 PM*
Columbia University, 64 Morningside Drive, Faculty House, 2nd Floor

In dietetic and natural philosophical frameworks of the period from Antiquity to the seventeenth century, the subjective experiences of taste, and indeed the experiences of digestion, testified to the make-up of the world?s edible portions. That is, such subjective experiences might be both philosophically and practically reliable.
How did that framework help early modern eaters make sense of their bodies and that portion of the world that constituted their ailment?
How did that sense-making capacity change over time, as new medical and scientific frameworks emerged from the eighteenth century and, finally became scientifically dominant in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

Steven Shapin is Franklin L. Ford Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University.

Spectatorship and the Making of Early Modern Courtly Space

Postgraduate conference at the University of Frankfurt/ Main (prospective date: 16 and 17 November 2012)

When Elizabeth I., in her famous address to Parliament in 1586, claimed that princes were set on stages for all the world to observe, she fashioned the court as a visual arrangement with the monarch at its centre. Courtly life in the early modern period takes place in a highly theatrical setting; it is about performance, self-display, and successful engagement of the monarch’s attention by making oneself into an object of visual interest. While courtly spectators monitored each other’s performance in a highly competitive world, Elizabeth’s gaze was fashioned, in many performances and poetic representations, as the formative agent both of the courtly self and of the social order as a whole. The burden of permanent observation, however, not only troubled courtiers and ladies but also the monarch, who was bound to fulfill the visual expectations of her subjects, to look the part, as it were. And while forms of courtly self-fashioning and monarchical self-representation changed after the death of Elizabeth, the focus on public display, both of courtly success and monarchical power also characterized the early Stuart courts.

In courtly entertainments, but also in diplomatic correspondence and foreign travel narratives, the court emerges as a complex visual field in which images of the monarch, visual relations between sovereign and courtiers and the spatial arrangements in which these exchanges take place interact with each other in the making of courtly subjectivity on the one hand and a regal aura of the monarch on the other.

In this conference we want to investigate practices (and their literary representations) which focus on visuality and the role of spectators and audiences, and which, in the process, generate and fashion courtly space, such as dancing, fencing and jousting, theatrical performance and spectacle, collections and fashions, progresses, masques and – with an eye at the prospective date of the conference – accession day festivities.

We invite contributions from all fields of early modern English culture with a marked focus on court activities. Please send a short abstract of c. 150 words and a short CV to s.scholz@em.uni-frankfurt.de and Tatjana.Trikic@googlemail.com. Although the conference is particularly directed towards postgraduates, we welcome scholars at all levels of their career. We can cover accommodation and travel costs within Europe for speakers but we encourage you to apply for funding if your own institution can provide travel grants.

Shakespeare and the Soundtrack

Funded three-year PhD international studentship: Queen's University, Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, has been awarded funds for the support of PhD studentships in certain strategic priority areas. Funding has been awarded to the School of English for the international studentship described here.

Supervisors: Professor Mark Thornton Burnett (School of English); Dr Ramona Wray (School of English)

Project: Shakespeare and the Soundtrack

Shakespeare on film is often seen as a primarily verbal or visual phenomenon; by contrast, this project argues that the filmic representations of the likes of Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles and Kenneth Branagh are enhanced, complicated and finessed by the ways in which the soundtrack stands in for, or translates, the Shakespearean word. The role of music in Shakespeare film takes multiple forms, including lush refrains, action genre pop scores, classically-inspired requiems, and romantic themes, but a common denominator is the synecdoche-like place of musical motifs with reference to language.
Tracing the means whereby music operates, the study investigates points of connection between multiple acoustic levels, placing together examples that disclose unexpected comparative possibilities.
For example, in addition to exploring some familiar Anglophone instances ? among them, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear ? the project enfolds discussion of less well-known films from China, Japan and India, such as The Banquet, an adaptation of Hamlet, An Okinawan Night?s Dream (an adaptation of A Midsummer Night?s Dream) and Yellamma, an adaptation of Macbeth. Here, the focus is on how particular forms of instrumentation ? indigenous styles of strings, percussion and woodwind ? work not only to mediate Shakespearean rhetoric but also to place it in alternative cultural registers that are aurally apprehended. Essentially, then, a comparative study, ?Shakespeare and the Soundtrack? allows methodologies that have previously operated only in narrow national and educational contexts to cross-fertilize, elaborating models of intertextual dialogue and demonstrating how creative modes of words and music offer valuable lessons for our own and media responsive global age.

Qualifications:

Candidates with a range of different combinations of knowledge and skill may be considered. For those whose primary background is in literature, the equivalent of Grade 7 Theory in Music might be helpful, but other evidence of musical understanding might be acceptable. For those whose primary background is in Music, some relevant literary modules at university level, or equivalent evidence of knowledge, would be helpful.

Eligibility:
International / non-EU students (students from China, Japan, India, Australia, Canada and the US, for example)

Closing date for applications:

2 March 2012

http://www.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofEnglish/

Unravelling Shakespeare's Life

Hilda Hulme Memorial Lecture: 23 April 2012: 6.00pm: The Chancellor's Hall, Senate House, University of London

James Shapiro (Columbia University): 'Unravelling Shakespeare's Life'. Cradle-to-grave biographies of Shakespeare in the twenty-first century have steadily drifted toward fiction and toward reading the life out of the works. James Shapiro unravels the writing of Shakespeare’s life over the past two centuries in an effort to understand when and why these trends have occurred, what price we pay for this biographical tradition, and what alternative approaches might offer. Free and open to the public, and followed by a wine reception. If you would like to attend please contact Jon Millington, Institute of English Studies: jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.

British Graduate Shakespeare Conference

Call for papers

We invite graduate students with interests in both Shakespearean and Renaissance studies to join us in June for the Fourteenth Annual British Graduate Shakespeare Conference.

The interdisciplinary conference provides a friendly but stimulating academic forum in which graduate students from all over the world can present their research and meet together in an active centre of Shakespearean research and theatre: Shakespeare’s home town of Stratford-upon-Avon. Undergraduate students in their final two years of study are also invited to attend the conference as auditors.

The conference will feature talks by Peter Holland (Notre Dame), Tiffany Stern (Oxford), Paul Menzer (Mary Baldwin), and Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford). Delegates have the opportunity to attend the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Richard III, part of the World Shakespeare Festival, at a group-booking price. Lunch will be provided each day, and delgates are invited to a dance and drinks reception one night.

We invite abstracts of approximately 200 words for papers twenty minutes in length (3,000 words or less). Delegates wishing to give papers must register by Friday 4 May 2012. We strongly encourage early registration to ensure a place on the conference programme.

Our website contains more information about the event and venue,
including prices and downloadable registration forms:
www.britgrad.wordpress.com

MEDIEVAL & RENAISSANCE STUDIES AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

January 31, 2012
Professor Richard W. Bulliet
7:00 PM, Faculty House

February 1, 2012
Columbia University Seminar
Eric Palazzo (Université de Poitiers)
“Early Medieval Ivories, Liturgy and the Five Senses”
5:30PM, Faculty House, Room 2

February 1, 2012
Carl Wennerlind, Barnard College
The Money Series: “Casualties of Credit”
Commentator: Martha Howell, Columbia University
6:15PM, Heyman Center, East Campus

February 7, 2012
Alan Verskin (Columbia) and Vincent Barletta (Stanford)
“Before the Islamic Law: Mudéjares and Moriscos”
6:00 PM, Casa Hispanica, 201

February 10, 2012
Stephen Booth (UC Berkeley)
“Desdemona's Eyes and the Aesthetics of Blindness”
7:00 PM, Faculty House, Room 2

February 14, 2012
Cynthia Pyle (New York University)
"M. D. Feld and His Work on the Intellectual History of Fifteenth-Century Printing in Italy"
7:30 PM, Faculty House

February 15, 2012
Professor David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania)
“Conceptualizing Literary History: Where Europe Begins and Ends, 1348-1418″
4:00 PM, Bulter 523

Jobs ...

Sheffield. The Faculty of Arts and Humanities has two 2-year postdoctoral fellowships, the De Velling Willis fellowships (salary, £37,012-£44,166 per annum). To apply, applicants need to go to the HR site http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs and click on 'current vacancies'. The quickest way of finding the fellowships is to enter the job reference (UOS003892) in the search box.

The closing date for applications is 17 February 2012.

Sheffield also has a range of other lectureships available too. Those of potential interest to TS subscribers are:
Lecturer in History of English Language (job ref UOS003906), closing date 17 Feb
Lecturer in Medieval/Anglo-Saxon English (job ref UOS0030915), closing date 17 Feb
Fiction Writer in Residence (job ref UOS003903), closing date 17 Feb
Lecturer in Public History (job ref UOS003873), closing date 16 Feb
Lecturer in Early Modern European History (job ref UOS003875), closing date 16 Feb
To apply for the above jobs (or for Further Particulars), go to http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs and enter the relevant job reference in the search box.

********

University of Northumbria:
(i) Lecturer or Senior Lecturer level (Grade 6/7) with a specialism in any aspect of early modern English literature (roughly 1485-1700) – job ref ASS11/18;
(ii) Professor of History, post 1500 – job ref ASS11/17.
Closing date for applications for both jobs: 1 March