Renaissance Lit

British Graduate Shakespeare Conference

2012-02-01T14:40:00.002Z

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

2012-02-01T14:20:00.002Z

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 ...

2012-02-01T13:03:00.002Z

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

Beyond Belief: the Bible and the Humanities Curriculum

2012-01-30T15:12:00.002Z

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 ...

2012-01-30T10:53:00.000Z

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ADV431/lecturer-a-in-renaissance-theatre-and-drama/

The Fairfax 400th Anniversary Conference

2012-01-30T10:39:00.001Z

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!

2012-01-27T14:35:00.001Z

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

2012-01-27T14:33:00.001Z

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

2012-01-27T11:00:00.001Z

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

2012-01-24T14:09:00.001Z

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

2012-01-23T13:03:00.001Z

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

2012-01-19T17:42:00.002Z

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

2012-01-19T17:21:00.002Z

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

2012-01-19T17:20:00.002Z

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

2012-01-19T17:18:00.001Z

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

2012-01-18T15:49:00.000Z

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

2012-01-16T16:23:00.000Z

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

2012-01-15T11:19:00.002Z

*** 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'

2012-01-15T11:14:00.002Z

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

2012-01-11T15:00:00.001Z

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)

2012-01-11T10:28:00.002Z

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

2012-01-10T09:55:00.001Z

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

2012-01-09T17:48:00.001Z

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.

2012-01-08T17:09:00.004Z

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 ...

2012-01-06T17:08:00.002Z

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.

Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period

2011-12-21T19:06:00.002Z

Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, March 9-10, 2012

Keynote Speakers: Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky, and Daniel
Vitkus, Florida State University

The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the
University of Michigan, is seeking submissions for a conference on the
construction of nations and empires in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
Europe. This conference will engage with the idea of emerging and changing
national identities in this period. More specifically, it will investigate
the particular social dynamics that characterize negotiations between
categories such as the foreign and the domestic or the individual and the
state. How is the status of the nation and its inhabitants defined? How does
the cultural production of nation engage with shifting political realities?
Do changes in geographical borders or ideologies produce new discourses of
difference in terms of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and/or
disability?

We welcome papers that examine how early modern writers, collectives, and
cultures grappled with these questions within a series of interrelated
realms-e.g., academic, artistic, economic, epistemological, geographical,
legal, medical, occult, philosophical, private, public, religious,
scientific, and theatrical. Potential topics might include radical religious
dissent, the rise of Protestantism and/or the Counter-Reformation,
colonialism and expansion in the Americas, the beginnings of the slave
trade, the shift from monarchy to commonwealth in seventeenth-century
England, relations between the East and West, or European interactions with
the Ottoman Empire.

Please send a 250-word abstract to Cordelia Zukerman (czukerma@umich.edu)
and Leila Watkins (lrwatkin@umich.edu) by January 15, 2012.

Conference Organizers: Cordelia Zukerman, Emily Shearer, Leila Watkins

RESEARCH STUDENTSHIPS

2011-12-21T09:43:00.002Z

Queen Mary, University of London, School of Languages, Linguistics and Film

The School of Languages, Linguistics and Film is pleased to announce the
following awards:

1 AHRC (BGP) Research Studentship in Linguistics to cover tuition fees and a
maintenance grant for UK residents (both UK citizens and EU nationals). EU
nationals not resident in the UK are eligible for a fees only award. Non-EU
nationals are not eligible for AHRC awards, with the exception of persons
who have been granted Indefinite Leave to Remain and who can demonstrate a
relevant connection to the UK. We would encourage applications for research
in the fields of theoretical syntax, morphology, and semantics and the
relations between these and/or experimental approaches to these topics.

1 Queen Mary Research Studentship open to any area covered by the School.
Eligible applicants will be working in any one or more of the following
areas: Comparative Literature, Film, French, German, Iberian and Latin
American studies, Linguistics, Russian.

1 Queen Mary Research Studentship in the area of early modern textual
cultures of Western Europe, jointly with the School of English and Drama.

The Queen Mary Studentships will cover tuition fees (home or overseas) and
provide a maintenance grant at the London rate paid by the Research
Councils.

All awards, tenable for three years, are to be awarded in the spring of 2012
to our most highly qualified candidates applying to start a full-time PhD
programme in September 2012. Subject to funding arrangements holders of
research studentships in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film will
have the opportunity to teach up to a maximum of 4 hours per week in the
second and third years of their study.

In order to be considered for one of these awards applicants should have (or
expect to have at the end of 2011/12) an MA or equivalent qualification.

Applicants who are eligible for both AHRC and Queen Mary funding need submit
only one application in order to be considered for either award.

All required application materials must be received in the Queen Mary
Admissions Office no later than 31st January 2012.

Candidates whose applications are received after the deadline will be
considered for admissions, but not for funding.

Prospective students are strongly advised to consult a potential supervisor,
or the appropriate Graduate Studies Convenor for their chosen subject area,
with a 12-1500 word research proposal well in advance of submitting a formal
application: www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/#research

For full details on how to apply and an application form, please visit:
www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate
Email: sllf-pg@qmul.ac.uk / Tel: +44 (0)20 7882 8332

Closing Date: 31 January 2012

Collaboration, Authorship and the Renaissance: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives

2011-12-20T10:47:00.002Z

Queen’s University, Belfast, January 13-14, 2012

Friday 13th January (Seminar Room 2, International & Postgraduate Student Centre)

09.00 — 10.00 Registration/tea and coffee

10.00 — 11.15 Opening Plenary

‘Collaboration or Adaptation? Macro or Micro Authorship’ (Professor Gary Taylor, Florida State University)

11.30 — 12.45 Session 1: Ambiguities and Attributions

*‘“Cursed Locrine, looke vnto thy selfe”: The Ambiguous Labour of “W.S.”’

( Peter Kirwan, University of Nottingham)

* ‘Collaboration and Attribution in Two Middleton-Dekker City Comedies’

(Eilidh Kane, University of Glasgow)

13.45 — 15.00 Plenary Paper 2

‘The Taming of the Shrew, the Coming of Sound and Authenticity’ (Deborah Cartmell, De Montfort University)

15.00 — 16.00 Session 2: Collaboration in Elsinore

* ‘Tampering with Hamlet: a model and example of collaborative negotiations’

(Maciej Piątek)

* ‘Intersubjectivity, Memory, and Hamlet’ (Rob Carson, Hobart and William Smith College)

16.15 — 17.15 Session 3: Collaboration and/in Print

* ‘“Ay, that’s the point”: punctuation and speculation in early modern printed drama’ (Ian Burrows, University of East Anglia)

* ‘Edmund Spenser’s Complaints and Paratextual Collaboration’(Rachel J. Stenner, University of Bristol)

17.30 Book launch/ Wine Reception [Venue: Old Staff Common Room]

Launch of The Edinburgh Companion to Shakespeare and the Arts (eds. Mark Thornton Burnett, Adrian Streete and Ramona Wray, Edinburgh University Press, 2011). Opening remarks by Gary Taylor.

Saturday 14th January (Seminar Room, Postgraduate Centre, 18 College Green)

09.30 — 10.00 Registration/tea and coffee

10.00 — 11.15 Plenary Paper 3

‘“The play of mr fletcher & owrs”: Writing and Rewriting the Early Modern Play’

(Professor Grace Ioppolo, University of Reading)

11.30 — 12.45 Session 4: Politics and Practices on the Collaborative Stage

* ‘Thomas Nashe as Dramatic Collaborator’(John Pendergast, Southern Illinois University)

* ‘“The play has no true centre”: Collaboration and Politics in Sir John van Olden Barnavelt’ (Conor Smyth, Queen’s University Belfast)

13.45 — 15.00 Session 5: Authors and Auteurs

* ‘Author and Auteur in Queer Edward II’ (John Blakeley, The University College Plymouth St Mark & St John)

* ‘Thor and back again: Kenneth Branagh and the evolution of the Shakespearean auteur’ (Kevin Murray, Queen’s University Belfast)

* ‘Shakespearean Authorship and Authority: Conjunctions Between Early Modern Enchantment in Dryden and Davenant’s Enchanted Island and Postmodern Disillusion in Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet’ (Thea Buckley, University of Birmingham)

15.15 — 16.30 Session 6: Collaboration in Modernity

* ‘Sharing Shakespeare? Authorship from a Theatre Perspective’ (Varsha Panjwani, University of York)

* [Final title tbc] (Elizabethan Reyes, University of Dallas)

* ‘From Song to Screen: Rewriting Shakespeare’s Sonnets in the Music of Henry Lawes and the Scripts of Star Trek’ (Faith Acker, University of St. Andrews)

16.45- 18.oo Session 7: Collaboration and Digital Media

* ‘Collaborative Theatre in the Fable Universe: Choices in Gameplay’ (Jonathan Malone, Queen’s University Belfast)

* ‘“fuckyeahshakespeare”: Re-Authorising Shakespeare in the Digital Commons’

(Conor Smyth, Queen’s University Belfast

6.00 p.m. Conference Dinner

Villa Italia (39 University Rd, Belfast). Approx. cost: £25-£30

For further information (e.g. re: travel, accommodation) and to book a place, contact the organisers (Conor Smyth and Kevin Murray) at: collaboration2012@qub.ac.uk as soon as possible.

FACULTY POSITIONS

2011-12-20T09:59:00.002Z

Literature
NYU Abu Dhabi

New York University Abu Dhabi seeks to appoint two leading scholars at
the level of associate or full professor in the fields of Shakespeare
Studies (especially Global Shakespeare) and World Literature, with
preference for scholars working in the field of Arabic Literature. The
successful candidate will have the opportunity to play an integral role
in fashioning an international research university oriented around the
liberal arts. We are looking for a literary scholar who maintains an
active agenda of research, has substantial publications, and has
demonstrated commitment to undergraduate teaching. Experienced junior
scholars with substantial records of publication may also be considered.
New York University has established itself as a Global Network
University, a multi- site, organically connected network encompassing
key global cities and idea capitals. The network has three foundational,
degree-granting campuses: New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai,
complemented by a network of over 15 research and study-away sites
across five continents. Faculty and students will circulate within this
global network in pursuit of common research interests, the promotion of
cross-cultural understanding and solutions for problems, both local and
global.
Entering its second year, NYU Abu Dhabi has already recruited a cohort
of faculty who are at once distinguished in their research and teaching.
Our first two classes of students are drawn from around the world and
surpass all traditional recruitment benchmarks, both US and global. NYU
Abu Dhabi’s highly selective liberal arts enterprise is complemented by
an institute for advanced research, sponsoring cutting-edge projects
across the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Sciences, and Engineering.
The terms of employment are competitive and include housing and
educational subsidies for children. Faculty may also spend time at NYU
New York and other sites of the global network, engaging in both
research and teaching opportunities. The appointment might begin as soon
as September 1, 2012, or could be delayed until September 1, 2013.
Applications for tenure-track positions are due by February 1;
applications received later will be reviewed until the positions are
filled. To be considered, candidates should submit a cover letter,
Curriculum Vitae, statements of research and teaching, all in PDF
format. Junior candidates are asked to submit sample publications and
three letters of reference as well. Please visit our website at
http://nyuad.nyu.edu/human.resources/open.positions.html for
instructions and other information on how to apply. If you have any
questions, please e-mail nyuad.humanities@nyu.edu.

FULLY-FUNDED POSTGRADUATE RESEARCH SCHOLARSHIPS (UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK)

2011-12-14T14:23:00.001Z

Closing date for expressions of interest: 9 January 2012

The University of Warwick is offering a number of Postgraduate Research Scholarships across all its faculties. These will also be open on a competitive basis to applicants in the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. In general, these scholarships (e.g., the Chancellor’s Scholarships and the Chancellor’s International Scholarships) provide the remission of fees and a maintenance allowance, without teaching or other obligations. Full information on these scholarships is outlined at http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/academicoffice/gsp/scholarship/funding/phd

The Centre for the Study of the Renaissance is the largest interdisciplinary centre of its kind in the UK, with over 30 academic staff members having interests and expertise in the period 1300–1650. Supervision can be offered in (and across) most fields, including Classics, English, French Studies, Italian, History, and History of Art (see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/about_us/people/). The Centre has a vibrant research culture, including a lively seminar series (STVDIO), a number of major international research projects, and strong connections with other institutions and associations, such as the Warburg Institute in London, the University of Venice, the University of Bonn, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the Renaissance Society of America.

The Centre invites applications from both UK and overseas applicants. In order to compete for Warwick’s Postgraduate Research Scholarships, applicants will need to follow the steps outlined below. Materials will need to reach the the Director of Graduate Studies, Dr David Lines (D.A.Lines@warwick.ac.uk) by 9 January 2012.

Negotiating Early Modern Women

2011-12-07T14:38:00.002Z

Call for Papers

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading, UK
Early Modern Studies Conference July 12th-14th 2012

A series of panels within Reading University’s Early Modern Studies Conference (2012) will be devoted to the exploration of writing by early modern women. We would welcome proposals for panels or individual papers addressing any aspect of early modern women’s writing, but we are particularly keen to receive proposals addressing the critical assumptions underlying current scholarly practice. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Why do we study writing by early modern women?
Can we justify the study of ‘women’ as a category?
Is there such a thing as ‘women’s writing’?
What can the work of individual women, or specific groups of women, reveal about women and gender in the period more generally?
How do we understand the relationship between writing by men and that by women?
What does women’s writing reveal about the early modern canon as a whole?
Is it possible to reach conclusions about women and their use of literary genre?
What new directions might we take in the study of early modern women?
What, currently, is the place of theory in the study of early modern women?
Editing and editions
Women and prose
Women and literary form/genre

Proposals for panels should consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of four papers. Each panel proposal should contain the names of the session chair, the names and affiliations of the speakers and short abstracts (200 word abstracts) of the papers together with email contacts for all participants. A proposal for an individual paper should consist of a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.

Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email to Dr. Alice Eardley by January 31st 2012: a.r.eardley@reading.ac.uk

For further details see: http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc/conferences/emrc-conference.aspx

Ornamentalism

2011-12-07T10:15:00.003Z

*The Humanities Initiative at NYU presents*
Bella Mirabella
*Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories*
THURSDAY, DECEMBER 8, 2011
5:00pm
20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor

A panel celebrating the publication of *Ornamentalism: The Art of
Renaissance Accessories* (University of Michigan Press, 2011), edited
by *Bella Mirabella*, Associate Professor at Gallatin, NYU. With panelists *Virginia
Cox* (Italian Studies, NYU), *Patricia Lennox* (Gallatin, NYU), and *Caroline
Weber* (French, Columbia).

In recent years much scholarly attention has been devoted to clothing in
the Early Modern period. *Ornamentalism: the Art of Renaissance
Accessories*brings accessories to the center of the material cultural
stage and to the debate about the role of fashion in the Renaissance and beyond. The volume, focusing on Italy and England, including accessories worn by men and women,
looks at the use of accessories from a multi-disciplinary perspective.

This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. Please
reserve your place here.

“Welding Economic and Political Freedom in Early Modern England and the English Caribbean”

2011-12-06T17:21:00.002Z

Valerie Forman (NYU Gallatin) at the Columbia Early Modern Seminar:

Thursday, December 08, 6:10 pm
754 Schermerhorn Extension (IRWAG seminar room)

Valerie Forman is the author of Tragicomic Redemptions: Global Economics and the Early Modern English Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

CFP: Renaissance Borders

2011-12-05T10:01:00.001Z

Annual Princeton Renaissance Studies Graduate Conference
Princeton University, April 13-14, 2012

From the beginning, conceptualizations of the Renaissance have been
concerned with borders: between the classical past and the modern present;
between pagan and Christian; between the civilized and the barbarous. Even
as the idea of the Renaissance has endured various critiques over the past
half century, this attention to borders has only intensified. In current
debates about secularization and periodization in Renaissance studies, the
boundaries between past and present and between the sacred and the profane
have taken on a newly charged intensity. And these period-specific border
disputes relate to more general questions in the humanities today: the
future of interdisciplinarity; the role of material culture in the study of
art; political theology and the development of the liberal state; and
Jacques Ranciere’s reading of aesthetics as a “distribution of the
sensible.”

We invite graduate students from across the disciplines to submit abstracts
addressing the issue of borders in the Renaissance, broadly conceived. Topics
of interest might include:

- - National territory, identity, and art

- - Marginalia

- - Relations between the disciplines

- - Levels of style, genre, and class

- - Periodization

- - Secularization

- - City and country

- - Economic, political, and aesthetic distribution

- - Citizen, human, creature

- - Exceptions and emergencies

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words to
renaissanceborders@gmail.com by February 1, 2012.

Lear at Columbia University ...

2011-12-01T14:42:00.000Z

December 9, 2011
Faculty House, Room 2, 7:00 pm
Ivan Lupic (Columbia)
"Naked Thoughts: Poetry, Politics, and Counsel in Shakespeare's King Lear"

Early Modern Theatricality in the 21st Century Thursday

2011-11-29T14:33:00.000Z

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

2011-11-28T14:28:00.000Z

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

2011-11-25T09:38:00.001Z

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

2011-11-23T15:48:00.000Z

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

2011-11-22T17:51:00.002Z

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

Research grants

2011-11-22T17:49:00.000Z

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

2011-11-21T16:54:00.000Z

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

2011-11-21T10:34:00.001Z

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 ...

2011-11-21T10:32:00.002Z

Details from the Guardian here.

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

2011-11-16T17:13:00.002Z

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...

2011-11-16T14:26:00.001Z

... 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

2011-11-15T14:10:00.000Z

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

2011-11-13T21:30:00.002Z

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

2011-11-13T21:28:00.001Z

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

2011-11-09T12:53:00.002Z

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!

2011-11-09T10:28:00.001Z

'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

2011-11-09T10:12:00.001Z

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

2011-11-09T10:08:00.003Z

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

2011-11-02T10:21:00.003Z

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

2011-11-01T15:21:00.001Z

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

2011-11-01T14:14:00.000Z

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

2011-11-01T09:43:00.001Z

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/

Two early modern posts

2011-10-31T15:55:00.001Z

We have just advertised at University College Dublin, both starting in January 2012: a one-year Teaching Fellowship (salary E33,645 p.a.) and a one-year Post-Doctoral Fellowship (salary E31, 730 p.a.). Both positions are for one calendar year, and full details can be found on the UCD website. The Post-Doctoral Fellow will work on an exciting new project based on the rich collections of the numerous rare books libraries of Dublin, and IT/website-building skills will be an advantage.

For informal enquiries about the teaching fellowship, please contact Prof. Anne Fogarty (anne.fogarty@ucd.ie); for informal enquiries about the post-doctoral fellowship, please contact Dr Jane Grogan (jane.grogan@ucd.ie).

Please note: the application deadline is 13th November 2011.

Applications must be made online, through the UCD website: http://www.ucd.ie/hr/jobvacancies/

Dr Jane Grogan,
School of English, Drama and Film,
University College Dublin,
Belfield, Dublin 4,
Ireland

Visiting Professorship

2011-10-31T15:54:00.002Z

Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Visiting Professorship of British Literature English Department; University of Connecticut

The English Department at the University of Connecticut invites applications for the Lynn Wood Neag Distinguished Professorship of British Literature. The appointment for this one-term visiting professorship is for the spring semester of 2012 (January 9 to May 18).
The applicant should be an established scholar of British literature from a British university. Specific expertise in Scottish literature is preferred. The Neag professor will teach two courses-one undergraduate and one graduate-and will present one public lecture. Generous compensation suitable to a professorship in the United States, supplemented by housing and a reimbursement for transportation up to $2,000 (US). Please send a letter and c.v. to Wayne Franklin, Head, Department of English, NEAG, University of Connecticut, 215 Glenbrook Road, Storrs, CT 06269-4025 or e-mail your letter and c.v. to robin.worley@uconn.edu. Consideration of applications will begin immediately.

Postdoc ...

2011-10-28T09:01:00.002+01:00

Research Associate (80%)

Ref HUM0219

Canterbury

Fixed Term

Salary Type Pro Rata

Salary (£) 30870 - 35788

HUM0219, School of English, Closing date: 13 Nov 2011

The Role

This post has arisen as a result of the award of an AHRC Project Grant to Dr Sarah James, for a large-scale manuscript study of vernacular versions of the Elucidarium circulating in England between the 12th and 15th centuries. The post-holder will assume major responsibility for examining and recording details of the fifty-six extant continental French and Anglo-Norman manuscripts, and will work collaboratively with Dr James on the interpretation of the data collected, in order to better understand the patterns of production, transmission, ownership and use of the vernacular text during this period.

The Person

The successful applicant will have a PhD in some aspect of medieval studies. You will have demonstrable knowledge of Old French/Anglo-Norman. In addition, you will have experience of working with medieval manuscripts.

Full requirements of the role can be found in the attached further particulars.

The School of English

The School of English currently has c. 850 full-time and part-time undergraduate and postgraduate students. Its permanent academic staff of 28 includes an excellent cohort of highly promising and productive early career researchers alongside senior staff with international reputations. The School also employs over 40 part time Assistant and Associate lecturers who are fully integrated into the life of the School.. English at Kent is based on a commitment to the traditional fields of the discipline, to consolidating the School’s distinctive strengths, and to innovation. Key areas of research such as medieval and early modern studies, American literature, postcolonial studies and modernism have been strengthened by recent appointments.

Website: www.kent.ac.uk/english

Further Information – http://jobs.kent.ac.uk

Closing date for applications: 13 November 2011

Interviews are to be held: Week commencing 5 December 2011

Monumental Shakespeares: Remembering Shakespeare in 1916 and after

2011-10-28T08:56:00.002+01:00

A work-in-progress colloquium
King’s College London | 10th December 2011

How was Shakespeare ‘remembered’ in opposite hemispheres in 1916? How were memories constructed, fabricated or supplanted by acts/objects of memorialisation or commemoration of Shakespeare, in the wake of the Tercentenary? What do we mean by these categories of ‘remembering’?

Remembering Shakespeare is a problem. Whatever the popular myth that all the world is Shakespeare’s stage, the evidence of his commemoration is that the public finds it difficult to make up its mind about how to remember Shakespeare and thus how to find appropriate material form for the memorialisation of a key marker of cultural specificity and hegemony. Shakespeare has a foundational role in various discourses of national culture – yet how should he be remembered? With a theatre? A statue? A library? A city square? Published works?

Funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Monumental Shakespeares’ is a collaborative research project, held jointly by King’s College London and the University of Western Australia, and involving researchers working in London, Perth and Sydney. The project aims to elucidate the processes of commemoration in London and in Sydney for the Shakespeare Tercentenary in 1916, an occasion that gave rise to significant debates over the best ways to memorialise England’s ‘National Poet’ in the British Isles and across the Empire. The project seeks to juxtapose two material outcomes of the Tercentenary: the National Theatre in London – the eventual product, decades after the event, of fractious arguments over the appropriate way to mark the anniversary of Shakespeare’s death – and the Sydney Shakespeare monument – also the result of debates about appropriate forms of public commemoration and, as an inevitable counterpart to engagement with England’s ‘national poet,’ about the politics of imperial relations. It also examines each within the larger contexts both of the varying forms of Shakespearean memorialisation and of the history and theory of commemoration. A comparison of these two drawn-out commemorations and of the debates and contexts from which they emerged will provide a focus for analysis of cultural heritage across nations and across time.

The 1916 tercentenary exemplifies Shakespeare’s perceived value as hegemonic cultural capital, and, drawing on pioneering work by Coppélia Kahn, Clara Calvo and Ton Hoenselaars – all speaking at the colloquium – we seek to explore the event’s afterlife, its influence on the subsequent understanding of Shakespeare in performance, in criticism and in popular culture in the UK, Australia and the wider world. While it focuses on Shakespeare, the project also aims more broadly to address larger issues of commemoration, cultural memory and national identities in the early twentieth century.

The Colloquium

We are very pleased to welcome to King’s an exciting range of international speakers, who join the project’s own researchers for this day of discussion and exchange. The colloquium aims to open up new lines of enquiry and to extend the rapidly developing field of study that the Shakespeare Tercentenary has provoked over recent years. As well as presenting a series of papers around the topic, the colloquium will include – thanks to the generosity of the National Theatre – an exhibition space in which to view rare items relating to the research. as well as a round table discussion with leading experts in the field.

The Speakers

Clara Calvo (Murcia), Gavin Clarke (National Theatre), Ailsa Grant Ferguson (King’s), Ton Hoenselaars (Utrecht), Ann Isherwood (King’s), Coppélia Kahn (Brown), Gordon McMullan (King’s), Philip Mead (UWA), Andrew Murphy (St Andrews), Catherine Silverstone (Queen Mary) and Monika Smialkowska (Northumbria).

Please contact Dr. Ailsa Grant Ferguson atailsa.grant_ferguson@kcl.ac.uk for further details and registration.

Society for Renaissance Studies Book Prize

2011-10-24T10:36:00.001+01:00

In 2012 the Society for Renaissance Studies will award for the first time a biennial book prize of £1,000 to encourage original research on any aspect in the field of Renaissance studies and to recognise significant accomplishments by members of the SRS.

The SRS Book Prize for the year 2012 will be awarded to the author of the best monograph in Renaissance Studies published between 1 January 2010 and 31 December 2011. The winner will be announced at the SRS 5th Biennial Conference, University of Manchester, 9–11 July 2012. To be eligible the monograph must be written in English by a current member of the SRS. The prize will be awarded for a book with a topic where the majority of material is within the chronological period 1300–1650. Books about Renaissance history, art, architecture, philosophy, science, technology, medicine, religion, music, the literatures and languages of Europe, and of the countries in contact with Europe during the Renaissance, are eligible. Books will be judged on the following criteria:

1. contribution to Renaissance Studies;
2. quality and originality of research;
3. clarity and eloquence;
4. thoroughness and accuracy in documentation;
5. methodological skill and/or innovation.

Nominations for the prize may be made by publishers or authors. Three copies of each work must be received by Professor Andrew Hadfield, Chair of the SRS Book Prize Committee, postmarked by or on January 15, 2012. Each entry should be labelled ‘SRS Book Prize 2012’ and addressed to: Professor Andrew Hadfield, Chair of the SRS Book Prize Committee, School of English, Arts B Building, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN.

An announcement of the award will be published in the Society’s publications Renaissance Studies and The Bulletin as well as on the SRS website.

For information about joining the Society of Renaissance Studies please see: http://www.rensoc.org.uk/SRSJoinUs.html

Grants!

2011-10-24T10:34:00.002+01:00

The Society for Renaissance Studies intends to make a number of grants of up to £1,500 each to support conferences or colloquia within the field of Renaissance Studies planned for calendar year 1 January 2013–31 December 2013 and held in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. These awards will not be made to individuals to attend conferences, but to the organizers of conferences to provide assistance with organizational support and/or the travel and subsistence costs of certain participants, including postgraduate students. The closing date for the receipt of applications to support conferences in 2013 is 31st January 2012 and further details, including application forms can be found on the SRS website at http://www.rensoc.org.uk/

Professor Claire Jowitt
Conference Officer, Society for Renaissance Studies

Manuscripts in the Secular World

2011-10-17T12:02:00.002+01:00

The next Frank Davis Memorial Lecture, which will take place on Tuesday 25 October and which will be given by Dr John Goodall (Architectural Editor, Country Life). This lecture, entitled The Library and the Architecture of the Book: Manuscripts in the Secular World from 1400 to 1650, will be at 5.30pm in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre.

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

tel: 020 7848 2909

Email: researchforum@courtauld.ac.uk

www.courtauld.ac.uk

The John Edward Kerry Prize

2011-10-17T12:01:00.002+01:00

The Malone Society has organized a competition for graduate students to celebrate the life work of one of our members, the late John Edward Kerry (1924 – 2008).

The Society is very pleased to announce that Matthew James Kubus (PhD candidate at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon) won the Prize in 2010.

In addition, the Prize has proved to be so popular that the Malone Society Council has decided to run it annually and to award 30 volumes to the best applicant each year.

About the 2011 competition

Postgraduate students who are currenly working on any aspect of early modern English drama and using our 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 November.

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 contact details and academic affiliation, the name of the programme of studies being attended and the year of registration.

Word and Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL

2011-10-11T16:16:00.000+01:00

The current exhibition at the UCL Art Museum is entitled 'Word and Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL', and is co-curated by the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges. A video and podcast of the exhibition are now available. For an audio-slideshow, please see:

http://www.youtube.com/UCLTV?feature=mhee#p/c/794B0AE51832BE14/0/g2BBhFBTzQw

For a downloadable audio-only version, please see:

http://soundcloud.com/uclsound/word-and-image

The exhibition is open at 1-5pm, Mon-Fri, until 16th Dec 2011. For maps and a routefinder to the UCL Art Museum (formerly the Strang Print Room), please see

www.ucl.ac.uk/locations/ucl-maps/

Helen Hackett and Alexander Samson
Co-directors, UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges

Faith and Doubt on the Elizabethan Stage

2011-10-10T15:41:00.002+01:00

CALL FOR STATEMENTS

Workshop at the Shakespeare-Tage 2012 in Bochum ("Faith and Doubt on the Elizabethan Stage")

Believing in Shakespeare:
Faith and Doubt on the Elizabethan Stage

Shakespeare’s plays were conceived and first performed in a climate of religious and political change, when private beliefs always had a public dimension and when religious allegiance had literally become a matter of life and death for many men and women. Our seminar aims at re-assessing the roles of faith and doubt in the public arena of the Shakespearean stage. We are not interested in examining, once again, the question of Shakespeare’s own denomination, we would rather like to enquire into the configurations of belief on the Elizabethan stage: Do the plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries support religious devotion or do they invite distrust and scepticism? How can faith be established, how can it be perceived and proven? When does faith have to be realigned or even recanted? Do the plays themselves require faith on a metatheatrical level, as Paulina famously demands in The Winter’s Tale? And in how far is it possible to differentiate between religious belief and the suspension of disbelief in the playhouse? In what ways do the plays relate to topical religious debates, be it at Shakespeare’s time or today? What stance do they take towards more universal metaphysical questions? And how do they envision non-Christian religion, which stance do they take, for example, towards Jewish and Muslim beliefs? How have specific theatrical (or filmic) performances dealt with the religious aspects of the plays – have they suppressed, emphasised, or altered them?
Our workshop plans to address these and related questions with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage (20-22 April 2012 in Bochum, Germany), which will focus on “Faith and Doubt in Shakespeare’s Plays”. As critical input for the discussion and provocation for debate, panellists are invited to give short statements (of no more than 15 minutes) presenting concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic. Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) and all further questions by 15 November 2011 to the seminar convenors:
Dr. Felix Sprang, University of Hamburg, English Department: felix.sprang@uni-hamburg.de
Dr. Christina Wald, University of Augsburg, English Department: christina.wald@phil.uni-augsburg.de

See also: shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/publikationen/seminar.html

+++++++++++++deadline 15 November 2011++++++++++++++++

The Uses of Space In Early Modern History 1500-1850

2011-10-04T16:57:00.001+01:00

Seminar Series 2011-12
International History Department, LSE, London

The study of space and place is an increasingly important research-field in the humanities and social sciences. This series explores how spatial ideas and approaches can be used to understand the societies, cultures and mentalities of the past. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines will reflect on the uses of space in two respects: how spatial concepts can be employed by or applied to the study of history; and how particular spaces were used for practical and ideological purposes in specific periods

Series Organiser: Dr Paul Stock p.stock@lse.ac.uk

Place: LSE New Academic Building, room 2.14

Time: 18.00

All welcome

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/internationalHistory/events/theUsesOfSpaceinEarlyModernHistory1500-1850/homeTheUsesOfSpaceInEarlyModernHistory1500-1850.aspx

Schedule of Speakers

13 October 2011: Dr David Lambert (Warwick) 'Mastering the Niger: Spaces of cartography, accounting and slavery, 1797-1845'.

27 October 2011: Dr Paul Keenan (LSE)

10 November 2011: Prof Matthew Johnson (Northwestern) 'Everyday Living in English Vernacular Houses, 1500-1800'

24 November 2011: Dr Rachel Hewitt (Oxford) 'Mapping History: Cartographic Revolution in the Eighteenth Century'

8 December 2011: Prof Jerry Brotton (Queen Mary) 'The Cartographic Rhetoric of Early Modern Globalism'

12 January 2012: Dr Andrew Rudd (Open University) 'Geographical morality on trial: Edmund Burke and the impeachment of Warren Hastings'

26 January 2012: Prof Robert Mayhew (Bristol) "Relocating Malthus's 'Essay': Reflections on spatio-temporal contexts and narrative history"

9 February 2012: Prof Michael Heffernan (Nottingham) 'Disciplining Space: Geography and Cartography in the Paris Academy of Sciences 1666-1793'

23 February 2012: Dr Amanda Flather (Essex) 'Gender and the use and organisation of sacred space in early modern England'.

8 March 2012: Prof Beat Kumin (Warwick) 'Value added? The spatial turn in the historiography of the Holy Roman Empire'.

The Uses of Space in Early Modern History is organised with the support of the International History Department and LSE IDEAS. The series is funded by the LSE Annual Fund www.lse.ac.uk/annualfund

University of Birmingham, Early Modern Literature, Culture, and Society

2011-09-28T14:38:00.002+01:00

Seminar Programme 2011-12

Autumn Semester

Wed 28 September (Week 1) Jonathan Willis (Birmingham): ‘Laying down the Law: The Ten Commandments in the Early English Reformation’

Wed 12 October (Week 3) Christopher Burlinson (Cambridge): ‘Keeping Texts: Elizabethan Puritans in England and the Netherlands’

Wed 26 October (Week 5) CREMS ANNUAL LECTURE: Lecture Room 5, Arts Building, 5.15 pm, Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge): ‘Visual Cultures of the German Reformation’

Wed 16 November (Week 8) Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading): ‘Collections and Coteries: Reading Verse Miscellanies’

Wed 30 November (Week 10) Jill Francis (Birmingham): ‘Gardening networks and exchanges: the notebooks and correspondences of Sir Thomas Hanmer of Bettisfield’

To take place in Room 103, Arts Building, 4.15 pm, except for the CREMS annual lecture, which will take place in Lecture Room 5, Arts Building at 5.15 pm.

Contacts: Dr Elaine Fulton (e.k.fulton@bham.ac.uk) or Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk)

THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR

2011-09-28T14:36:00.002+01:00

BMS 44, AUTUMN, 2011
Saturday 22 October 2011
FINAL NOTICE

Venue: In the Birmingham and Midland Institute [**PLEASE NOTE NEW VENUE**] on Saturday 22 October 2011. There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm

Programme: (am) Mandy Green (Durham), ‘Elegia VI and the Epitaphium Damonis, and Elegia I and the Milton-Diodati prose letters’; Ryan Netzley (Southern Illinois University, Carbondale), ‘What Happens in Lycidas?: Novelty, Possibility, and Events’.

(pm) Islam Issa (Birmingham), ‘Milton and Islam: Paradise Lost in Arabic in Twenty-First-Century Egypt’; a discussion led by Gordon Campbell (Leicester) on ‘Milton and the King James Bible’.

The Birmingham and Midland Institute (BMI) was founded by Act of Parliament in 1854, for ‘the Diffusion and Advancement of Sciences, Literature and Art among 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 map of the BMI’s location, and for further information about the BMI and its Library: http://www.bmi.org.uk/

Thomas N. Corns and Hugh Adlington, Co-convenors

Othello

2011-09-27T14:21:00.001+01:00

... is the subject of Fairleigh Dickinson University’s 19 annual
Shakespeare Colloquium, which will be held on Saturday, October 22, 2011,
from 9:30 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. in Madison, New Jersey. The colloquium is free
and open to the public. All New Jersey teachers who participate are eligible
for Professional Development Credits.

Speakers will be Allison Deutermann of Baruch College, CUNY; Ian Smith of
Lafayette College; Jeffery Alan Triggs of Rutgers University; and Eric
Johnson-DeBaufre of Drew University.

Allison Deutermann will discuss the significance of the character Iago’s
refusal to confess at the end of the play. Ian Smith’s presentation, “Race,
Comedy, and *Othello*” will examine the role of racism in creating social
harmony for an exclusive majority in the play. Eric Johnson-DeBaufre will
link the issues of male friendship and shared expression as they appear in *
Othello.* The colloquium will conclude with Jeffery Alan Trigg’s comparison
of Shakespeare’s play with Arrigo Boito’s libretto for Giuseppe
Verdi’s 19thcentury opera *Otello*.

The colloquium is supported by Fairleigh Dickinson University, The Columbia
University Seminars office, and individual donations. Organizer and project
director for the colloquiums is Dr. Harry Keyishian, Professor Emeritus of
English. For further information, please call 973-443-8711 or email Dr.
Harry Keyishian at harrykeyishian@gmail.com. Fairleigh Dickinson University
is located at 285 Madison Avenue, Madison, NJ 07940.

UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges

2011-09-26T16:12:00.000+01:00

Seminars, Autumn 2012, Wednesdays 4.30pm

5th October: Portraiture and Dolls Houses, FC 114
Maria Loh (UCL, Art History), 'Cross my heart, hope to die, stick a needle in my eye': Early Modern Portraiture, Friendship and Mourning
Hanneke Grootenboer (St Peter's, Oxford), Room for Contemplation: Heidegger, Bachelard and the Early Modern Doll's House

2nd November. Careers in the Early Modern, Galton Lecture Theatre, Torrington Place 1-19
Lucy Worsley (Historic Royal Palaces, presenter of the BBC series If Walls Could Talk)

Laura Massey (Rare Books Seller, Peter Harrington Books).

16th November: Guest Lecture by Jeanne Shami (University of Regina), FC 114
Women and the Early Modern Sermon

30th November: Borderlands: FC 114
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

For maps and directions, please see: www.ucl.ac.uk/locations/ucl-maps

For more on the UCL Centre for Early Modern Exchanges, please see: www.ucl.ac.uk/eme

Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies, 12-14 July 2012

2011-09-26T16:11:00.000+01:00

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading

The Reading Early Modern Conference continues to establish itself as the place where early

modernists meet each July for stimulation, conversation and debate. As in previous years,

proposals of individual papers and panels are invited on research in any aspect of early

modern studies relating to Britain, Europe and the wider world. This year, the plenary

speakers are Professor Paul Yachnin (McGill), director of the ‘Making Publics’ project, and

Professor John Morrill (Cambridge).

We would welcome proposals for individual papers and panels on any aspect of early

modern literature, history, art, music and culture. Panels have been proposed on the

following themes and further panels or individual papers are also invited on these topics or

any other aspect of early modern studies:

• Making publics

• Gathered texts: print and manuscript

• Politics and Biblical Interpretation

• Negotiating early modern women’s writing

• Passionate bodies, passionate minds

• Prince Henry: role, rite, and rhetoric

Proposals for panels should consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of four papers.

Each panel proposal should contain the names of the session chair, the names and

affiliations of the speakers and short abstracts (200 word abstracts) of the papers together

with email contacts for all participants. A proposal for an individual paper should consist of

a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.

Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email to the chairman of the

Conference Committee, Dr. Chloë Houston, by 9 January 2012, c.houston@reading.ac.uk.

Proposals are especially welcome from postgraduates. The conference hopes to make

some money available for postgraduate bursaries. Anyone for whom some financial

assistance is a sine qua non for their attendance should mention this when submitting

their proposal.

Fairfax 400 Anniversary Conference

2011-09-26T16:10:00.000+01:00

Call for Papers
Marc Fitch House, University of Leicester
30 June – 1 July 2012

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 in this exciting weekend conference which will also include an afternoon tour of Naseby conducted by members of the Naseby Battlefield Project.

Please could prospective speakers email the conference organizers by 1 January 2012 with your contact details, a title, and a 300-word abstract of your proposed contribution.

Conference organizers:

Dr Andrew Hopper ajh69@le.ac.uk

Dr Philip Major philip.major@bbk.ac.uk

Job in New York!

2011-09-23T12:06:00.001+01:00

Barnard College seeks an entry-level Assistant Professor specializing in
sixteenth-century non-dramatic English literature. We expect that
candidates will have the PhD. in hand by the time of employment. The
appointment is to begin on 1 July 2012.

Preferred qualifications include additional expertise in a sub-field such as
sixteenth-century poetry and prose in a language other than English;
sixteenth-century literature of discovery and colonization (comparative or
English); trans-atlantic studies; women writers of the sixteenth century;
sixteenth-century English and Continental religious culture;
sixteenth-century science studies; sixteenth-century art and poetics; or
interdisciplinary scholarly and critical approaches that engage discourses
of gender, race, and class. Opportunities exist for involvement and
teaching in the Africana Studies and Comparative Literature programs.

Candidates should send only a CV, an application letter, and three letters
of reference to Achsah Guibbory, Chair, Dept. of English, Barnard College,
3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. Applications should be postmarked by 1
November 2011.

Barnard College is an Equal Opportunity Employer and encourages applications
from women and individuals from underrepresented groups.

The Tempest Study Day

2011-09-20T18:53:00.001+01:00

... hosted by the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in association with Jericho House, will take place on Monday 3rd October. The Study Day will interrogate the sound world of the play, drawing on the company’s work reconstructing historical music and investigating its interaction with the performance. Leading Shakespeare and Early Modern Music experts are gathering to explore these themes.

Speakers include:

* Professor Ann Thompson, Director of the London Shakespeare Centre at King’s College, London
* Anthony Rooley, Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, Switzerland and The Consort of Musicke
* Dr Gwilym Jones, Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London and Visiting Lecturer Shakespeare’s Globe
* Jonathan Holmes, Artistic Director of Jericho House and Director of The Tempest
* Emily Baines, Musical Director of The Tempest and The Fellowshippe of Musickers
* Professor Gordon McMullan, Professor of English at King’s College, London

To book, please go to: http://www.barbican.org.uk/education/event-detail.asp?ID=12635

Further information on Jericho House’s The Tempest:

The Tempest premiered in 1611 with the most extensive sound world of any play yet written. Most of the music Robert Johnson wrote for the play has been lost, though some songs famously survive. This project begins from the hypothesis that Johnson transferred musical ideas and techniques from his contemporaneous work on court masques to his design for The Tempest, the most masque-like of plays. If so, these ideas would have included extensive improvisation and unconventional instrumentation by large groups of musicians. The result of doing so is not only a more voluminous use of sound, but rather a startlingly new musical dramaturgy for the time, one which casts sound, text and action in a highly novel light, and one which was not again repeated in the period. It is this dramaturgy which has been the subject of our research, and which has led us to see the play very differently. We view it essentially as a collaboration between two authors, from which substantial areas of musical text are missing, and so very much of a piece with the collaborative nature of other of Shakespeare’s late romances. Jericho House’s production stems from these ideas.

For more information on the production, or to book tickets, see: http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=12493

Please email research@gsmd.ac.uk for any other enquiries.

The representation and role of owners, donors and patrons in medieval art

2011-09-19T15:33:00.001+01:00

Friday 11th May 2012
Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
University of Kent at Canterbury

Keynote Speaker: Dr Julian Luxford, University of St Andrews

CALL FOR PAPERS

Medieval art teems with examples of owners, donors or patrons whose presence is expressed in a variety of ways. Representation ranges in form, frequency and subtlety from heraldry, and actual portrayal, to choice of image subject matter. It is interesting to consider more closely the details of the owners, donors and patrons beyond mere identification and to explore the role and influence of the man or woman, lay or religious, upon the iconography employed in the artwork itself. The ‘Me Fieri Fecit’ symposium seeks to generate discussion not only on the who but also the why of ownership, donorship and patronage of medieval art.

Themes for discussion might include, but are not limited to:

Representation and portrayal Making a statement

Motivations: personal, political, religious Use of evidence

Religious versus lay Levels of influence

Absence of presence in major works Gender trends

Effects of giving & receiving on iconography Identity

This symposium welcomes proposals from doctoral students and established researchers. Expressions of interest and abstracts of 250 words, for a 20 minute paper, should be sent to Jayne Wackett at jaw62@kent.ac.uk by January 15th 2012.

"Formatting Early Modern Culture: Manuscript, Print, Film, Hypertext"

2011-09-19T15:30:00.001+01:00

XXIII SEDERI CONFERENCE (SEVILLE, 2012)

"Formatting Early Modern Culture: Manuscript, Print, Film, Hypertext"

CALL FOR PAPERS

We are pleased to announce that the XXIII SEDERI Conference will be held
in Seville (Spain) on 14-16 March 2012.

The Conference aims to centre on topics related to the formatting and
circulation of Early Modern English texts. But contributions on other
aspects of the culture, language and literature of the Renaissance
period are welcome as well. The following plenary speakers have already confirmed their attendance:

Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford University)

Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame)

Deborah Payne Fisk (American University, Washington DC)

Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)

Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London)

The Organising Committee welcomes proposals for papers (20' presentation
+ 10' discussion) or round-table seminars. Contributors must submit the
following information:

About the paper or round-table:

Full title

A two-hundred word abstract

About the contributor(s):

Full name

Postal address and electronic mail address

Institutional affiliation

Proposals must be sent before 18 December 2011 to sederi23@us.es

Please notice that English is the official language of the Conference.

For further information, please check on the Conference webpage, or
write to the email or postal addresses below:

Juan A. Prieto Pablos
XXIII SEDERI Conference
Departamento de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana
Universidad de Sevilla
41004 Sevilla (Spain)
email: sederi23@us.es
http://congresos.us.es/sederi23

Manuscript Identities and the Transmission of Texts in the English Renaissance

2011-09-15T17:07:00.000+01:00

Friday 25 and Saturday 26 May 2012, Humanities Research Institute, Sheffield University

As part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project ‘Early Modern Manuscript Poetry: Recovering our Scribal Heritage’, this conference will explore the role of manuscripts in the production of individual and corporate identities in early modern culture, including the commissioning, copying, circulation, and collection of manuscripts. The conference welcomes multidisciplinary approaches and is keen to consider the relationships between manuscript and print identities in the period.

Topics might include: ownership and commissioning; selection criteria (authorial, thematic, generic, miscellaneous); scribal identities; collection and donation; manuscripts and place; the construction of poetic, religious, political, and regional identities in manuscript; coteries; circulation and dissemination; manuscript afterlives; editing

Speakers include: Julia Boffey (Queen Mary, London), Arthur Marotti (Wayne State University), Steve May (Sheffield University), Mary Morrissey (Reading University), Fred Schurink (Northumbria University), Jeremy Smith (Glasgow University), and Henry Woudhuysen (University College, London)

Please submit 200-word proposals for 20 minute papers by Friday 30 September to Alan Bryson (a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk) and Cathy Shrank (c.shrank@shef.ac.uk). Enquiries should be directed to a.bryson@sheffield.ac.uk.

Historicizing Performance in the Early Modern Period

2011-09-15T13:57:00.001+01:00

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

Plenary Speakers:
Professor Julie Sanders (Nottingham), Professor Tiffany Stern (Oxford)

This one-day academic conference aims to bring together scholars working on all aspects of performance in the early modern period (taken broadly to include the fifteenth to the early eighteenth centuries). We intend to interrogate what performance and its related terminologies and practices might have meant to early modern readers, playgoers, and congregations; how performance shaped and/or undermined distinctions between private/public bodies and selves. Although drama is an essential point of reference for this discussion, we encourage that “historicizing performance” be taken as broadly as possible. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

- Plays and play-going
- Music and singing
- Public spectacles, ceremonies and architecture
- Ritual, devotional expression, spirituality / the sermon as performance
- Autobiography and Performative Texts
- Performing gender/ sexuality/ the domestic
- Performance and the performative in theory

Please email abstracts (400 words max.) for a 20 minute paper to Michael Durrant and
Naya Tsentourou at: Historicizing.Performance@manchester.ac.uk
Deadline for abstracts: September 23th, 2011
Notifications of acceptance to be sent out by October 14th, 2011

Imaginative Geographies: Travels of the Mind in Early Modern Europe

2011-09-15T13:55:00.000+01:00

28th September 2011 at the University of Bristol

While Renaissance and Early Modern Studies are focused on the two and a half centuries between 1500 and 1750, the areas of research that the period encompasses are
multi-disciplinary and wide-ranging. A common thread is the spatial or
geographical dimension. This conference aims to attract a wide audience,
to explore correspondences between geography, literary and historical
fields of research, to enable varied and cross-disciplinary discourses
between scholars and students of the arts and sciences, and to enrich
renaissance and early modern research with methodological and thematic
diversity.

There will be panels on: 'Spiritual Geographies',
'Cartographic Spaces', 'Mapping the Other', 'Mapping the Familiar'.
Please download the application form from the conference website if you
are interested in attending:
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/arts/gradschool/community/conferences/imaginative-geographies.html.

Please note, there is a delegate's fee of £10 for applications received
before 14 September 2011, rising to £12 for applications received after
that date. There is an additional £5 charge for those delegates wishing
to attend the conference reception, at which early modern-inspired
refreshments will be served. This conference is organised by
postgraduate REMS researchers at the University of Bristol and supported
by The Bristol Institute for Research in the Humanities and Arts.

Collaboration, Authorship and the Renaissance: Early Modern and

2011-09-15T13:53:00.000+01:00

Queen's University, Belfast, January 13-14 2012

Plenary Speakers: Professor Gary Taylor (Florida State University),
Professor Grace Iopollo (University of Reading) and Dr. Deborah Cartmell
(De Montfort University)

Over the past three decades, the increasing attention paid to the
collaborative practices of the early modern theatre has generated new
opportunities for critical enquiry. In particular, it has been possible
to explore more deeply the role of the author and his/her implication in
networks of performance and textual polyphony. In tandem with these
developments, criticism has addressed the multiple ways in which
Shakespearean and other early modern texts have been reconceptualised
and rewritten in modern and postmodern digital technologies-in film,
television and the expanding creative environments of Web 2.0-and how
such appropriations affect received notions of authorship, authenticity
and originality. This conference seeks to initiate a dialogue between
these two crucial schools of thought. It will investigate potential
cross-fertilizations between early modern constructions of authors and
collaborators and postmodern paradigms of auteurs and 'digital
Shakespeares'; in so doing, further areas of interest will be
illuminated, and fresh understandings of texts and their producers will
be facilitated.

The conference invites abstracts on topics which may include, but are
not limited to, the following:

* Authorship in early modern manuscript, material and print culture
* Authorship, collaboration and revision in Shakespearean and
non-Shakespearean playtexts; collaborative practices in early modern
theatres, and wider literary and textual culture
* Shakespeare and auteur theory; Shakespearean texts in
Anglo-American and world cinema
* The 'author' and contemporary theories of textuality, materiality,
gender and intentionality; authorial identity and its 'recovery' via the
early modern and postmodern text
* Shakespeare and the Renaissance in post-modern digital
technologies; videogames, video and sound technology, the Web and
user-generated content
* New and renewed editorial strategies in postmodernity; authorship
and collaboration in the age of hypertextuality

Submit abstracts (250 words) to: collaboration2012@qub.ac.uk

Extended deadline: 27th September 2011

(note: a small registration fee may be required)

http://www.collaboration2012.tumblr.com
twitter @collab2012qub

Dr. Faustus ...

2011-09-12T18:06:00.001+01:00

There will be another Marlowe Society lecture at the Rose theatre on Saturday 17th September. Dr. Andy Kesson of Kent University will speak on

'Every merry word a very witchcraft: Dr. Faustus and the supernatural in the early commercial theatres.'

The talk will place the Globe and Rose Theatre stagings of this play in context.

As usual the charge for students will be reduced to £5, the full charge being £10, and coffee and tea will be available at the Rose Theatre from about 10.30, with the lecture commencing at 11 a.m.

Full details are available on the Society website www.marlowe-society.org and while payment can be made on the day, it is helpful to have advance notice of attendees, so please notify Events secretary, Barbara Wooding - contact details on the website.

Call for Papers: Journal of the Northern Renaissance Issue 4: The Legacy of the Will

2011-09-12T17:56:00.002+01:00

Submission deadline: March 2012. Expected date of publication October 2012

This special issue of JNR will seek to explore the slippery notion of the ‘will’ and its various semantic permutations in the context of such issues as subjectivity, power, logic, desire, freedom, volition, wit, wisdom, theology and metaphysics. One of its main purposes is to investigate what power and signifying force ‘the will’ possesses, as well as its limitations, and to locate this concept within the aesthetic, political, theological, philosophical and ideological traditions that informed early modern literature and culture.

The issue builds on a symposium held at the University of Strathclyde, and will be guest-edited by Alison Thorne; however, for this issue JNR also welcomes further submissions around this theme.

The semantic slipperiness of will fascinated the Renaissance: in all manner of texts of the period we find ‘Will too boote, and Will in over-plus’. The structural conceit of the opening lines of John Donne’s poem, ‘The Will’, exemplifies a key thematic construct to be found in much early modern literature and a prevalent intellectual thread in the culture from which this literature emerges: ‘Before I sigh my last gasp, let me breath / Great Love, some legacies’. This poem – this willed enactment of the speaker’s last will and testament to the world he will shortly leave behind – encapsulates the polyvocal qualities of the human ‘will’ and all that it signifies. The rich intellectual legacy of the European Renaissance that we, as critics and researchers, struggle to understand is constructed from the physical and literary legacies that writers such as Donne, Erasmus, Calvin, Elizabeth I, Marlowe, Middleton and others have bequeathed us. It is from these legacies of authorial ‘will’ that our very idea of what represents or constitutes the early modern period is shaped

We would welcome papers of up to 8,000 words on the ‘will’ in the northern Renaissance. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

*
Will as desire or volition: willfulness; will as voluntas; will as membrum pudendum, male or female; possession of one’s will; excessive willing, transgressive will.
*
Theological and philosophical wills: freedom of the will; the negation or undoing of the will; will as futurity; theological debates on the relationship between ‘will’ and ‘fate’.
*
Literary and legal wills: the exercise or abdication of authorial will or intentionality; will as testament; framing legal wills; the interplay between ‘wit’ and ‘will’; Will as a proper name and authoritative mark.

Preliminary enquiries are welcome, and should be addressed to northernrenaissance@gmail.com

Temporary Lecturership in Reading

2011-09-10T15:59:00.001+01:00

Department of English Language & Literature, University of Reading
Full time, Fixed term from 1 January 2012 to 30 June 2012
Grade 7 - £33,734 per annum

We are looking for a Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature, for a six-month position starting on 1 January 2011. You will join a flourishing Department with a great and continuing tradition in your field. You will be a committed teacher in Early Modern Literature, with the ability to collaborate with a strong and supportive team of colleagues. You will have some undergraduate teaching experience (possibly postgraduate too), and want to broaden your experience with a full-time post in an established department. Candidates with a particular specialism in Early Modern Drama would be at an advantage.

For informal enquiries please contact the Head of Department, Simon Dentith on +44 (0)118 378 7459 or email s.dentith@reading.ac.uk Alternatively please contact the Professor of Early Modern Literature, Michelle O'Callaghan on +44 (0)118 378 7003 or email m.f.ocallaghan@reading.ac.uk. Application closing date: 30/09/2011

Apply online for this vacancy via the University of Reading website: http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/jobs/

Alternatively, if you wish to apply using a hardcopy form please email recruitment@reading.ac.uk or contact Human Resources, University of Reading, Whiteknights, PO Box 217, Reading RG6 6AH or Telephone +44(0)118 378 6771 (voicemail).

Society, Culture and Belief, 1500-1800

2011-09-10T15:55:00.001+01:00

The programme for the academic year 2011-12 is on the theme of TRUTH AND CREDIT

Convenors: Surekha Davies (Birkbeck), Laura Gowing (King’s College London), Kate Hodgkin (University of East London) and Michael Hunter (Birkbeck).

Seminars will take place in the Athlone Room, Senate House (Room 102), London, WC1, on the following Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. All are welcome!

**NB On November 3rd only the seminar will take place in Senate House room STB7.

TERM 1

20 October 2011 Koji Yamamoto (University of Edinburgh)

Reformation and the distrust of the projector in the Hartlib Circle

3 November 2011 Mark Hailwood (University of Exeter/ IHR)

‘The Honest Tradesman's Honour’: occupational identity and credit relations in 17th-century England

17 November 2011 Florence Grant (King’s College London)

Trading on others’ credit: imitation, copying and plagiarism in the business of 18th-century science

15 December 2011 Miruna Achim (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City)

Debate, public truth and natural knowledge in 18th-century Mexico

TERM 2

26 January 2012 Mark Greengrass (Research Fellow, Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg)

The experiential world of Jean Bodin

23 February 2012 Michael Hunter (Birkbeck)

The accusation of imposture in early modern witchcraft and possession cases

29 March 2012 Tom Betteridge (Oxford Brookes University)

Reformation truth and doubt in the Dialogue Concerning Heresies and Acts and Monuments.

Dr Kate Hodgkin
School of Arts and Digital Industries
University of East London
4-6 University Way
London E16 2RD
tel. 020 8223 3000 (switchboard) 020 8223 2934 (direct line)

Writing the lives of people and things, AD 500-1700: an inter-disciplinary conference

2011-09-10T15:49:00.002+01:00

Chawton House Library, 1st-2nd March 2012

Hosted by the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Culture, University of Southampton

Key-note speaker: Charles Nicholl

[Freelance writer, author of The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street

and The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe]

CALL FOR PAPERS

This conference is intended to push the boundaries of research in biography by bringing together postgraduates and early-career researchers from across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Biography has particular relevance in contemporary scholarship as it encompasses every field of human experience. As a result, scholars are becoming increasingly interested in using the lives of individuals to elucidate the past. In the fields of archaeology and anthropology, too, object biography has been a growing area of theoretical research in the past thirty years. This interest in the stories objects can tell resulted in the British Museum and BBC Radio 4 series A History of the World in 100 Objects, broadcast in 2010.

We welcome abstracts of no more than 200 words for 20 minute papers from postgraduates and early-career researchers of the medieval and renaissance periods with an interest in biography. The conference themes will include (but are not limited to):

· Artefact biography and human interaction with physical objects through time.

· The experience of life in settled spaces.

· Biography through portraiture and clothing.

· The imaginative recreation of individual lives and mentalities through micro-history.

· The relationship of the self to society, i.e. through social cultural or economic interactions.

· The exploration of the self through music.

· New perspectives on the ‘discovery of the individual’ during the medieval period and renaissance.

· The cementing of social and creative networks and affiliations through the ownership of manuscripts and objects.

· Scientific approaches to biographical interpretations of manuscripts, objects, paintings and human remains.

Please send abstracts along with your name, affiliation and email address to:

Gemma Watson at glw1g09@soton.ac.uk and Robert Smith at rfws206@soton.ac.uk

The deadline for abstracts is 31st October 2011.

Shakespeare and the Banquet of the Senses

2011-09-06T11:47:00.000+01:00

October – December 2011, at Shakespeare’s Globe

A season of events consisting of academic conferences, lectures and staged readings around the theme of the senses in early modern culture and performance. Please follow the link to see the brochure and book tickets or to register for the postgraduate forum and/or the international conference at Shakespeare’s Globe: http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/education/events

Speakers throughout the season (lectures and conferences) include: Dr Tarnya Cooper (National Portrait Gallery), Professor Evelyn Welch (QMUL), Dr Francois Quiviger (Warburg), Professor Stanley Wells and Rev. Dr Paul Edmondson (The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford), Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford), Professor Richard Wilson (Cardiff), Dr Margaret Healy (Sussex), Professor Jonathan Hope (Strathclyde), Dr Lucy Munro (Keele), Dr Joan Fitzpatrick (Loughborough), Dr P.A. Skantze (Roehampton), Professor Laura Farina (West Virginia), Professor Ayanna Thompson (ASU), Professor David Lindley (Leeds), Professor William West (Northwestern), Professor Erica Fudge (Strathclyde).

Readings:

George Chapman, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595): Sunday 9 Ocober

Tomas Tomkis, Lingua (1607): Sunday 23 October

We will also feature a reading of The History of Cardenio by William Shakespeare and John Fletcher, recreated by Professor Gary Taylor: Sunday 20 November

For further enquiries, please contact Dr Farah Karim-Cooper farah.k@shakespearesglobe.com

Virgil and Renaissance Culture

2011-09-06T11:44:00.001+01:00

CALL FOR PAPERS

Virgil and Renaissance Culture / Virgilio e la cultura del Rinascimento
[Website:http://virgil2012.wordpress.com/]

A two-day international conference to be held at the Accademia Nazionale
Virgiliana di Scienze Lettere e Arti, Mantua, Italy, 15-16 October 2012

Organisers: Luke Houghton (University of Glasgow), Marco Sgarbi
(University of Verona)

Confirmed keynote speakers: Craig Kallendorf (Texas A&M University) and
Peter Mack (The Warburg Institute)

Et quis, io, iuvenes, tanti miracula lustrans eloquii, non se immensos
terraeque marisque prospectare putet tractus?

(Angelo Poliziano, Manto 351-3)

For scholars and intellectuals of the Renaissance, the poetry of Virgil
was not merely a pervasive presence in their world; it was in many
respects an embodiment of that world. In addition to the traditional
status enjoyed by the Aeneid as a 'mirror for princes', a guide to
virtuous and reprehensible conduct, and a repository of spiritual and
allegorical wisdom, poets and rhetoricians, artists and composers,
philosophers and theologians, political theorists and educators all sought
and found in Virgil's works models of good practice and expert instruction
in their respective fields. The poet's sway over Renaissance thought and
imagination was by no means confined to the library: throughout the
courts, the palaces and the public buildings of Europe, the rich
mythological apparatus of the Aeneid was harnessed to convey imperial and
dynastic claims, to assert proud traditions of civic liberty, and to
associate rulers and their subjects with particular social, moral and
ethical values, as well as to advertise the learning, taste and culture of
individual patrons.

In literate society, Virgil was everywhere; but the extent of his
influence reached far beyond the wide circle of his readers, through the
appearance of scenes and motifs from his poems - and sometimes also the
figure of the poet himself - in frescoes, sculpture and woodcuts, and even
on objects for domestic use and display. Contact with Virgil and his texts
took many forms and was shaped by a variety of external factors, in
addition to being filtered through countless previous literary and
artistic adaptations, a long tradition of critical and pedagogical
engagements, and strident expressions of both devotion and censure from
different quarters during the centuries between the poet's own day and the
age of the humanists. Among these successive interventions, a place of
particular honour is occupied by Dante, whose choice of 'the sea of all
knowledge' as his guide and master through the caverns of the Inferno and
along the slopes of Purgatory was to have a lasting impact on perceptions
of Virgil, not only as a literary character and aesthetic model but also
as a poet and historical figure.

Proposals are invited for papers in English or Italian, of no more than 30
minutes' duration, on any aspect of the place of Virgil in Renaissance
culture, in any medium. Abstracts should not be longer than 500 words, and
should include the author's name, institutional affiliation (if
applicable), and current e-mail address.

Proposals should be sent to one of the conference organisers, Marco Sgarbi
(marco.sgarbi@univr.it) or Luke Houghton (luke.houghton@glasgow.ac.uk),
before 31 December 2011. It is hoped that papers from this event will in
due course form a substantial publication.

Three early modern jobs!

2011-09-05T10:01:00.001+01:00

West Virginia University

The Department of English at West Virginia University invites applications for three positions in pre-1800 British literature: (1) Shakespeare, (2) History of the Book, and (3) Poetry and Poetics. Applicants must have a PhD by August, 2012. The successful applicant must demonstrate an active research agenda as evidenced by conference papers and publications and the ability to teach at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. The teaching load for research-active graduate faculty is two courses per semester. The ability to teach the survey of British Literature to 1800 is required for all three positions. The successful applicant will have opportunities to teach a broad range of undergraduate courses and to develop graduate courses and seminars in her/his field. The Department of English has a faculty of 41 in literature, creative writing, socio-linguistics, and composition and rhetoric, and we offer a full range of academic programs (B.A., M.A., M.A. in Professional Writing and Editing, M.F.A., and Ph.D.). WVU is a member of the Folger Consortium, and our department’s faculty benefit from significant ties with the Folger Institute. Our Center for Literary Computing offers opportunities and support for digital humanities projects. West Virginia University is designated a “research-high activity” university with more than 29,000 students. The city of Morgantown, which is often ranked among the best small cities in the United States, is conveniently located within driving distance of Pittsburgh, Columbus, and Washington, D.C.

West Virginia University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity employer and the recipient of an NSF ADVANCE award for gender equity. Especially encouraged to apply are candidates capable of developing or enhancing our commitment to international, interdisciplinary, and/or multicultural studies.

The position begins August 16, 2012. Screening will begin November 1, continuing until the position is filled. Interviews will be conducted at the MLA convention in Seattle. Alternative arrangements will be provided for candidates not attending the convention.

Submit your letter of application and CV to: Search Committee/British Literature, Department of English, West Virginia University, Box 6296, Morgantown, WV 26506-6296. We will request full dossiers and writing samples from selected candidates through November, so please don’t send these materials at this time.

Direct further inquiries to John Ernest: John.Ernest@mail.wvu.edu

The Bible in English from the Early Middle Ages to 1611

2011-08-31T17:02:00.002+01:00

A one-day colloquium to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the
King James Bible
12 November 2011
Canterbury Cathedral Lodge
This colloquium will explore English translations of the Bible from the
Early Middle Ages up to the publication of the King James Version in
1611. The day includes a series of lectures, a private view of the
Cathedral’s exhibition of Bibles in English from Tyndale to King James
Version, and morning and afternoon refreshments. The speakers are Dr
Alixe Bovey, Dr Helen Gittos, Dr Sarah James, Professor John Thompson,
and Dr Ryan Perry, and the day will culminate in Professor Stephen
Prickett’s keynote address on the King James Version.

All are welcome. Advance registration is strongly encouraged. £15,
with reduced rates for Friends of the Centre for Medieval and Early
Modern Studies (MEMS); seniors and unwaged (£10); and students (£5).
To register, please contact Claire Taylor at the Centre for Medieval and
Early Modern Studies at the University of Kent: c.l.taylor@kent.ac.uk.
To see the programme and to find out more about becoming a Friend of
MEMS, visit our website: www.kent.ac.uk/mems.

Birkbeck Early Modern Society

2011-08-26T09:57:00.002+01:00

‘Aspirations’ Conference
Saturday 10 September, 2011 Birkbeck Malet Street Building
room tbc

10.00

Registration, coffee

10.30

Birkbeck Early Modern Society AGM

11.00

Conference 'Aspirations'

Opening Remarks: Karen Chester

Session 1: Chair: Timothy Alves

Susan Gane, Birkbeck

The Aspirations of Common Soldiers in the Early Eighteenth Century.

Laura Bolick, Open University

Cherishing Greece: Cardinal Bessarion and the Attempt to Save a Culture.

DISCUSSION

12.45

Lunch Break

Session 2: Chair : Laura Jacobs

Sarah Watkins, Birkbeck

‘The Wonder of all Wonders’ or ‘a mind hardened in sin’? The Aspirations and Motivations of Early Modern Fasting Women and Their Commentators.

Steve Orman, Canterbury Christ Church University

“Nathan Field’s Literary Aspirations in the Early Seventeenth-Century”

Jackie Watson, Birkbeck.

Portrait of Aspiration: Thomas Overbury and Jacobean courtiership

DISCUSSION

3.45

Closing remarks: Karen Chester

3.50

Wine reception

For details of our aims and events please see http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/current-students/societies-student-groups/early-modern-society

Attending to Early Modern Women: Remapping Routes and Spaces

2011-08-24T13:35:00.002+01:00

Call for Proposals
Milwaukee, Wisconsin June 21-June 23, 2012

Attending to Early Modern Women, which has been held seven times at
the University of Maryland since 1990, is moving to the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee, thanks to the generous support of the College of
Letters and Science at UWM. The conference will retain its innovative
format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote
dialogue, augmented by a keynote, and a plenary session on each of the
four conference topics: communities, environments, exchanges, and
pedagogies. It will be held at the UWM School of Continuing Education
Conference Center in the heart of downtown Milwaukee, within easy
walking distance of the lakeshore, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the
Milwaukee Public Museum, and the Amtrak station. Attendees will stay
in the near-by and newly renovated Doubletree Hotel. The conference
will run from Thursday June 21 through Saturday June 23, 2012, and
attendees will also have the opportunity to participate in a special
pre-conference seminar on Wednesday June 20 at the Center for
Renaissance Studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Detailed instructions on submitting workshop proposals may be found
on the conference website:
www.atw2012.uwm.edu

NEW PROPOSAL DEADLINE SEPTEMBER 30.

Attending to Early Modern Women: Remapping Routes and Spaces

How did women situate themselves in the early modern world, and how
did they move through it, in both real and imaginary locations? How
did gender figure in understandings of spatial realms, from the inner
space of the body to the outer spaces of the cosmos? How do new
disciplinary and geographic connections shape the ways in which we
think, write, and teach about the early modern world? Taking as our
inspiration the move of Attending to Early Modern Women from Maryland
to Milwaukee, we will consider these issues in relationship to the
following topics:

Communities
Women’s actions in neighborhoods, villages, cities, states, and
empires; family and kinship networks; establishing and breaching
boundaries in sexual and gender expression; religious communities;
exclusions, exiles, and expulsions.

Environments
Gendered landscapes and soundscapes; the body and its borders; built
and invented realms and frontiers; cartographic spaces; gender and the
new cosmology and anatomy.

Exchanges
Travel, migration, and displacement; imagined spatial crossings; new
interdisciplinary connections; the circulation of manuscripts, books,
objects, and ideas; consumerism and material culture; transnational
and transoceanic links.

Pedagogies
Traveling new routes in teaching; the virtual spaces of technology and
teaching; early modern women in the realm of museums and galleries for
adults and children; issues in academic institutions and in publishing.

Detailed instructions on submitting workshop proposals may be found on
the conference website:
www.atw2012.uwm.edu

For further information, please contact:

Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Chair of the Organizing Committee
merrywh@uwm.edu

Eating Words: Text, Image, Food

2011-08-19T17:41:00.002+01:00

A one-day workshop organized by the Cambridge Centre for Material Texts

Some of our most material interactions with texts are
grounded in the very food that we eat. Comestibles are
eloquent objects; they come stamped with words, festooned with
decorative designs, and wrapped in packaging that is at once
visually and verbally loquacious. The kitchen has long been a
textual domain, regulated by cookery books and recipe
collections and noisy with inscriptions on pots, pans, plates
and pastry-moulds. This one-day workshop will explore
numerous aspects of the relationship between writing, eating
and domestic life across a broad swathe of history, in order to
illuminate the unsuspected power of words and pictures in a
paradigmatically practical locale and to shed light on the
textual condition more broadly.

Plenary Speakers: Deborah Krohn (Bard Graduate Centre) & Sara Pennell (Roehampton University)

Gonville and Caius College. Cambridge , 13 September 2O11
For further details please contact Harriet Phillips (hp278 cam.ac.uk)
http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/cmt

Family in the Renaissance

2011-08-15T09:56:00.000+01:00

Wheaton College is excited to host the 2011 New England Renaissance
Conference on "Expanding Relations: Family in the Renaissance" on Saturday,
November 12, 2011. Along with panels, Professor Anthony Grafton of
Princeton University and 2011 President of the American Historical
Association will give the keynote address.

The conference flyer and call for papers is attached. Please send us a
250-word abstract and CV by August 15, 2011.

On-site registration of $15 will include light breakfast, lunch, and a
reception.

Wheaton College is conveniently located between Boston and Providence, at
the intersection of I-95 and I-495. More information, including directions
and lodging, can be found at out website:
http://wheatoncollege.edu/renaissance/. Please feel free to contact us with
any questions.

All are welcomed to attend and we look forward to seeing you in November.

Sincerely,
Touba Ghadessi
ghadessi_touba@wheatonma.edu

Gen Liang
ygliang@wheatonma.edu

Alchemy and Medicine from Antiquity to the Enlightenment

2011-08-08T13:54:00.002+01:00

CRASSH, University of Cambridge
*Registration now open*
22-24 September 2011
Venue: Peterhouse, University of Cambridge

Alchemists pursued many goals, from the transmutation of metals to the
preservation of health and life. These pursuits were continually informed
and modified by medical knowledge, while alchemical debates about nature,
generation, and the achievability of perfection in turn impacted on
medicine and natural philosophy. This three-day international conference
will investigate these interactions, from alchemy's development in late
antiquity to its decline throughout the eighteenth century. It will ask how
alchemical and medical ideas changed over time, how they reflected the
experience of individual readers and practitioners, and the extent to which
they responded to significant currents in intellectual, political,
religious, and social life.

Keynote lecture: *Bruce T. Moran* (University of Nevada at Reno)

Panel themes include: Elixirs and the prolongation of life; Medicine,
alchemy and patronage; The eighteenth-century transmutation of chemical
medicine; Books, recipes and secrets; Medical practitioners as alchemists;
Shared materials, practices and technologies; The transmission of
alchemical and medical knowledge; Histories of alchemy and medicine.

Speakers include:

¢ Chiara Crisciani (Università degli Studi di Pavia)
¢ Andrew Cunningham (University of Cambridge)
¢ Hiro Hirai (Radboud University Nijmegen)
¢ Didier Kahn (CNRS, Paris)
¢ William R. Newman (Indiana University, Bloomington)
¢ Michela Pereira (Università di Siena)
¢ Lawrence M. Principe (Johns Hopkins University)
¢ Nancy Siraisi (City University of New York)
¢ Emma Spary (University of Cambridge)

Programme and online registration at:
http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1408/

Organised by Jennifer Rampling, Peter M. Jones and Lauren Kassell
(Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge). Sponsored by
the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences
(CRASSH), the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry (SHAC), the
Chemical Heritage Foundation, the Wellcome Trust 'Generation to
Reproduction' Strategic Award, and the Society for Renaissance Studies.

For further details, please contact Jennifer Rampling at jmr82@cam.ac.uk

My country Penne would alwaies shun the City

2011-07-20T16:30:00.001+01:00

Regional manuscript transmission, 1500-1700
Society for Renaissance Studies 2012, 9-11th July, University of Manchester.

While the transmission of manuscript texts in early modern England has
been understood as a phenomenon based in metropolitan centres, a number of
recent studies have now shown that hand-copied texts were an important
means of communicating literary culture all over the British Isles. As
suggested by the title’s quotation from Nicholas Oldisworth,
regional manuscripts can show a lively culture of composition and
circulation that operated quite independently of the cities, though
important exchanges were maintained between urban and non-urban
environments.

This panel will present papers that explore any aspect of the role and
significance of manuscript dissemination outside of urban centres in the
early modern British Isles. Topics for proposals may include (but are
certainly not limited to): the accumulation, collection, and anthologising
of hand-copied texts; the importance of social groupings based around
families, friends, and other institutions; the geographical spread of
copied texts; the literary forms of texts available to provincial readers
and copyists; the relationship between writing, place, and dissemination.

Please send short abstracts or informal enquiries to Joel Swann at j.swann
[at] ihum.keele.ac.uk by the 2nd of September 2011 (ahead of the general
SRS deadline). For more information on the 2012 SRS conference, go to
http://www.arts.manchester.ac.uk/srsnc

John Donne Society

2011-07-15T14:46:00.002+01:00

27th Anniversary Conference, Call for Papers

Tuesday, 26 June, to Friday, 29 June, 2012

Scaliger Institute, University of Leiden, Leiden, Netherlands

Individual papers on any aspect of Donne’s life and work are welcome. We also welcome panels of papers addressing specific topics in Donne studies.

COMPLETE PAPERS (1 copy, 8-11 pages maximum, as an email Word attachment; please include your e-mail and mailing addresses in the body of the email submission).

All graduate student essays accepted for presentation will be considered for the John R. Roberts Award for Best Essay by a Graduate Student

All papers must be submitted by August 20, 2011 to
Prof Sean McDowell
Department of English
Seattle University
901 12th Avenue
P.O. Box 222000
Seattle, WA 98122-1090
mcdowell@seattleu.edu

THE BRITISH MILTON SEMINAR

2011-07-12T17:35:00.001+01:00

AUTUMN MEETING, 2011
Saturday 22 October 2011
PRELIMINARY NOTICE / CALL FOR PAPERS

Venue: In the Birmingham and Midland Institute on Saturday 22 October 2011. 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 22 August 2011.

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

Conspiracies

2011-07-11T10:10:00.002+01:00

Registration is now open for this year's York Cultural History Conference, 'Conspiracies Real & Imagined' (6th-8th Sept). Featuring papers on subjects covering all areas of the globe from the 16th to the 21st centuries, from scholars from many disciplines and international affiliations, it is hoped that the conference will go some way to placing conspiracies towards the mainstream of historical concern.

Registration forms and details of the programme can be obtained using the following link:

http://www.york.ac.uk/history/research/conferences/conspiracies/

For any further enquiries, please contact aem502@york.ac.uk