Shakespeare 450
Société française Shakespeare
Paris
21-27 April 2014

Conference Website

The Société française Shakespeare is organizing in Paris a week-long conference from 21-27 April 2014 to coincide with the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth.

The program will include plenary lectures, roundtables, workshops, seminars, panels, along with performances at various venues, theatres, concert halls, museums, libraries, artists’ studios and bookshops. The conference is backed by a large number of French and international institutions and organizations. The international organizing committee welcomes seminar, workshop or panel proposals on all aspects of Shakespeare’s works, their reflections in painting, sculpture, opera, on radio and screen, as well as issues of performance, critical theory, poetics, commemorations, textual and scenic rewritings, translation, biography.

For 2014, panel proposals will welcome up to four papers per session. Panels may extend for more than one session. Workshop and seminar/roundtable proposals may include more participants; it is up to the organizers to determine their precise form (open discussion, position papers followed by a roundtable discussion, etc.).

Panel, seminar and workshop proposals should include: name and university affiliation of proposed leader(s); title of panel, seminar or workshop; a 500–750 word description stating topic, relevance and approach; a 5-line bio of each seminar leader including their email address(es).

Please send your proposals by 10 December 2012 to: cfp@shakespeareanniversary.org

For more information, see: http://www.shakespeareanniversary.org/?Shakespeare-450-Call-for-Program

Theatrum Mundi: Latin Drama in Renaissance Europe
Magdalen College, University of Oxford
12-14 September 2013

Organized by the Society for Neo-Latin Studies in tandem with the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Oxford, the conference will bring together scholars to discuss early modern Latin drama, a form pivotal to the development of educational practice and literary composition across Europe. Culturally conspicuous, often ideologically engaged, original Latin plays were the pedagogical lifeblood of Renaissance schools, colleges, academies and universities. Scholars of Renaissance drama tend to focus on vernacular plays while overlooking the fact that many dramatists honed their talents at, for instance, institutional theatres constructed at the Elizabethan universities or nurtured at the French Jesuit colleges by the ancien régime. Our conference aims both to remedy such oversight and to stimulate new thought about this pan-European dramatic phenomenon.

Confirmed speakers include Thomas Earle (Oxford), Alison Shell (UCL), and Stefan Tilg (Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, Innsbruck).

Proposals are sought for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of early modern Latin drama, which might discuss but are not limited to the following topics:

• Student life
• Religious conformity and dissent
• Philosophical engagement
• Relationships between Latin and vernacular plays
• Pedagogy and rhetorical training
• Patronage and support

Please send your proposal and any questions about the conference to Sarah Knight, University of Leicester (sk218@le.ac.uk) by December 31 2012. Proposals should include a provisional title, approx. 150-200 words outlining your paper, and contact details

Worldmaking
37th Congress of AULLA (Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association).
University of Queensland, St Lucia.
10-12 July 2013

Conference Website

Keynote speakers: Prof. Simon During (UQ), Prof. Elizabeth Schafer (Royal Holloway UL), and Prof. Anthony J. Cascardi (UC Berkeley).

The theme of the 37th Congress of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) is ‘Worldmaking’.

In 1978 Nelson Goodman explored the relation of ‘worlds’ to language and literature. He asked how a world is made, what it might be made of, and how the process of making a world relates to understanding it. Ways of Worldmaking showed that there was no one language to express and understand the world, but many languages, many ways in which ‘universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built’. Goodman’s pluralistic vision has been taken up in a range of disciplines concerned with issues of globalisation from Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern and the process of ‘worlding’ to Pheng Cheah’s exploration of the value and limits of ‘world literature’.

This Congress will explore how worlds and worldmaking feature in language and literature and in humanities scholarship. It asks what our various disciplines identify as the worlds we make in connection to ‘the world’ at large. How is worldmaking defined and articulated? What is at stake in the process? What does it mean to make, unmake, or remake a world, to experience, feel, or belong to a world? How might we understand – or make bridges between – natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds?

AULLA invites submission of abstracts for papers and panels relating to ‘Worldmaking’. There will be opportunities for delegates to have their papers considered for refereed publication.

Please submit a 200-word abstract for papers and any themed panels online. Abstracts due by 31 January 2013.

Italian Voices: Oral and Written Cultures in Early Modern ItalySchool of Music, University of Leeds
Thursday 5-Friday 6 September, 2013

This conference is being organized as part of the project ‘Oral culture,manuscript and print in early modern Italy, 1450-1700’, funded by the European Research Council. It will investigate how Italian oral culture was related to written culture in this period and how far it was independent of writing. For further information on the project, please visit our website: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italianvoices.

Confirmed speakers: Peter Burke (Cambridge), Elizabeth Cohen (Toronto), Thomas Cohen (Toronto), Massimo Firpo (Turin), Rob Henke (St Louis), Robert Kendrick (Chicago), Françoise Waquet (Paris).

Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

• Performances of texts in public and private spaces
• Musical settings of texts
• Reading aloud to others
• Improvisation of texts
• Religious and political oratory
• Orality in learned and popular culture
• Linguistic variety and usage in performed texts
• Transcribing performed texts

To propose an individual paper of twenty minutes, in English or in Italian, or a session of three papers, please send a title and 200-word abstract for each paper, and contact information and a brief (one-page) curriculum vitae for each speaker, to italianvoices@leeds.ac.uk. Round-table sessions relating to methodological issues may also be proposed. Any queries should also be addressed to the same address.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: 31 January 2013.

“Lamentations”
Indiana University Medieval Studies Institute Spring Symposium
Indiana University, Bloomington
April 4-6, 2013

Symposium Website

“Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo…” Thus begins the Vulgate rendition of Jeremiah’s Lamentations, a prophetic book in which memorializing lost political and religious wholeness takes the form of a complex temporality in which present lament for the past reaches forward even into the future. Laments—and their liturgical, poetic, and artistic relations—marked particularly crucial moments associated with ends and what’s left after things are over: death and apocalypses, survivors and remnants.

Indiana University Medieval Studies Institute announces its Spring Symposium, to be held April 4-6. On the topic of lamentation, the symposium would like to pose a broad range of possible questions: What social, political, ethical, or aesthetic purposes do laments or their figurations serve? Who—or what, for that matter—is allowed to lament? Where and when is lament appropriate? Who or what is one allowed to lament for? What places or people(s) have laments left out?

Potential paper topics include, but are not limited to:

• Laments over loss of cities, battles, or leaders
• Religious laments and commentaries
• Apocalyptic visions; utopian visions
• The afterlife
• Love complaints and their parodies
• Melancholy; enjoying mourning
• Tragic drama; performing lament; embodied affects
• Illustrations of sorrow in funerary art and manuscript illumination
• Ceremonial observances like funeral orations and eulogies
• Survivor stories; captive narratives
• The process of mourning and grief as understood in the Middle Ages
• Penitence manuals
• Non-human lament or sorrow
• Lament, spatiality, and temporality; spaces reserved for lament, burial, or grief

Abstracts for twenty-minute papers are welcome from scholars across all fields relevant to the study of the Middle Ages, broadly conceived. In keeping with the Medieval Studies Institute’s interdisciplinary mission, we invite submissions in areas including but not limited to art history, history, language, literature, musicology, philosophy, and religious studies.

Please email an abstract of no more than 300 words by December 6, 2012 to: mest@indiana.edu

Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing
University of Reading Early Modern Studies Conference
9-11 July, 2013

We invite papers for the 2013 Reading Early Modern Studies Conference on any aspect of the various material cultures through which early modern women’s writing has been produced, transmitted and received. Criticism of the last decade has increasingly emphasised women’s engagement with diverse generic forms and modes of circulation, expanding the parameters of the field beyond literary interpretation of the texts themselves to a new engagement with their textual histories. This strand of this conference builds upon the increased visibility of form and transmission in the field to focus specifically on early modern women’s engagement with material textual cultures: the material objects they produced, the forms in which they wrote, the ways in which they circulated their work and the ways in which their texts were read by both their contemporary and later audiences.

Questions that might be considered include: How was early modern women’s writing originally packaged and promoted, how did it circulate in its contemporary contexts, and how was it read in its original publication and in later revisions and redactions? How do we configure publication and authorship in relation to early modern women’s writing? What shifts are necessitated by recent theories within history of the book scholarship that view texts as material artefact, textual collage, social network, publication event and collaborative enterprise? What relation do the material cultures of early modern women’s writing have to the material cultures surrounding male-authored writing of the period?

Papers may be on any aspect of the material cultures of early modern women’s writing, including but not limited to the following:

• The material text
• Authorship and early modern women’s writing
• Paratexts
• Marginalia
• Circulation and reception
• Transmission and redaction
• Early modern women and patronage
• Early modern women and editing
• Early modern women and publishing
• Early modern women and print
• Manuscript cultures
• Literary networks and coteries
• Collaborative writing practices

We welcome the submission of individual papers as well as proposals for complete panels, roundtables, and workshops on women’s writing from any nation in the early modern period. Please send proposals (approx. 200 words) to Wendy Alexander (Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au) before December 12, 2012.

The stream will be curated by Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender, coordinators of an Australian Research Council project on the Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2012-2014) and founders of the Early Modern Women’s Research Network (EMWRN) at the University of Newcastle, Australia. For enquiries contact Wendy Alexander, Project Administrator, The Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Wendy.Alexander@newcastle.edu.au