International Shakespeare: Translation, Adaptation, and Performance 
University of Massachusetts Amherst
March 8-9, 2014

Conference Website

The Translation Center in partnership with The Massachusetts Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, co-sponsored by the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, invite scholars to its first annual conference, “International Shakespeare: Translation, Adaptation, and Performance,” on March 8-9, 2014.

Paper proposals are welcome on a number of topics: case studies of translation, production, imitation or reception of Shakespeare worldwide, as well as on the impact of these phenomena on the interpretation of Shakespeare’s texts. The conference can integrate theories of identity, political perspectives, translation, readership, reception and censorship. Please submit 250-500 word abstracts to Marie Roche (rochemarie23@gmail.com) and/or Edwin Gentzler (gentzler@complit.umass.edu) by Jan. 15, 2014.

The Afterlives of Pastoral
The University of Queensland
7-8 July, 2014

Since William Empson published his landmark Some Versions of Pastoral in 1935, the ancient mode that is pastoral has been re-visioned and re-analysed, and a range of scholarly readings has confirmed there is no easy or comfortable way of pinning down just how pastoral operates either in Virgil’s Eclogues or in the literature the poem has inspired since the Renaissance. Annabel Patterson in her Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (1987) focused on why Virgilian pastoral has echoed and continues to echo through western literary history, arguing “it is not what pastoral is that should matter to us”; what is far more useful is to consider “how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions have used pastoral for a range of functions and intentions that the Eclogues first articulated” (7; emphasis in original). In 1996, pastoral scholar Paul Alpers referred to “a happy confusion of definitions,” and with a linguistic nod to Empson, confirmed “there are as many versions of pastoral as there are critics and scholars who write about it” and that “‘pastoral’ can still be a word to conjure with” (What Is Pastoral? 8).

Over the last twenty-five years, there has been a resurgence of interest not only in the theory and criticism of pastoral but in literature that in various ways is in dialogue with the mode. For instance, Seamus Heaney self-consciously writes back to Virgil, and Stanley Fish has noted telling elements of pastoral in Suzanne Collins’s blockbuster trilogy The Hunger Games (2008–2010). Environmental criticism, too, has found a dialogue with this tradition to be a productive way of thinking about the human/nature relationships in which so many current environmental issues are embedded.

This symposium invites a dialogue on the afterlives of pastoral. It is inspired by the recent pastoral turn, by the questioning title of Alpers’s book, and by Patterson’s focus on the pastoral as literature in action. As Alpers reminds us, the pleasures of nymphs and shepherds and their herds are only ever the vehicle for a quite different, darker discourse: “the very notion of pastoral . . . represents a fantasy that is dissipated by the recognition of political and social realities” (24).

In this spirit, the organisers seek participants from a wide range of fields, including literature, the performing arts, music and other forms of cultural discourse that engage with the core of this ancient tradition.

Papers and panels might consider:

• Historiography of pastoral; how we might read the arguments of theorists of pastoral, including Paul Alpers, William Empson, Terry Gifford, Peter Marinelli, Leo Marx, Annabel Patterson, Philip Tew, and Raymond Williams
• Pastoral as a way of exploring melancholy, mourning, longing and love
• The pastoral mode as intertext; pastoral parodies; pastoral and metafiction
• Pastoral and ecocriticism; guardianship/custodianship, anti-pastoral; counter-pastoral
• Pastoral and the negotiation of concepts of ‘civilization’ and ‘nature’, the city and the country
• Pastoral concepts of dispossession and exile
• Pastoral and the concept of the active versus the contemplative life; pastoral and reverie
• Pastoral and its relationship to myth
• Pastoral and the aesthetic: landscape, the sublime, the picturesque; pastoral and the garden
• Pastoral and gender
• Pastoral and anti-war literature
• Pastoral and time
• Responses to the mode by specific painters, composers, sculptors, dramatists, poets, and novelists whose work takes up and produces versions of pastoral. Some possibilities are Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” Milton’s “Lycidas,” Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego, Watteau’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, Streeton’s Australia Felix, Coetzee’s Disgrace, Stoppard’s Arcadia, Roth’s American Pastoral, Lohrey’s Vertigo, Heaney’s Electric Light; Kinsella’s Jam Tree Gully.

Please submit a 250-word proposal together with a 100-word biographical note to the conference organisers at pastoralafterlives@gmail.com. Proposals for panels are welcome.

Keynote speakers: tba

Deadline for proposals: Friday, 10 January 2014

Please direct inquiries to Dr Judith Seaboyer j.seaboyer@uq.edu.au or Dr Victoria Bladen v.bladen@uq.edu.au

Composition: Making Meaning Through Design
An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Material Texts
University of California, Santa Barbara
15-16 May 2014

“Composition” can refer to the content of a text, piece of music, or work of art, to its visual and material manifestations, as well as to the act of production. As form relates to function, so each sense of composition influences the other. From inscriptions and scrolls, to broadsheets and serials, to graphic novels and e-books, design elements inform reading practices and structure meaning. Composition: making meaning through design is an interdisciplinary symposium that asks how design features (such as format, material, type font/ script, and imagery, to name but a few) can alter, enhance, or otherwise affect the transmission of meaning and shape a text’s use. This symposium aims to bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives in order to promote engaging new dialogues in book history. We warmly invite submissions for papers that may consider a broad scope of topics including, but not limited to:

• the relationship of materiality and content
• how a text’s format or design shapes reading practices
• the interplay of text and image
• how the author-reader relationship is mediated through design
• design interventions by readers
• changes in form or design over time
• how a text’s format expresses space, time, sound
• how media borrow and adapt formal or design elements from one another
• how archival practices affect or interact with design

Proposals of approximately 300 words (for 20-minute paper presentations) should be submitted along with a CV to materialtexts@gmail.com by January 15, 2014.

We are able to offer limited funds to offset travel costs for participants. If you wish to be considered for such funding, please indicate this when submitting your proposal.

This symposium is organized by the History of Books and Material Texts Research Focus Group at UCSB, convened by Sophia Rochmes, History of Art and Architecture; Charlotte Becker, English; and James Kearney, English.

Sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School (http://www.rarebookschool.org/fellowships/mellon), with co-sponsorship from UCSB’s History of Books and Material Texts Research Focus Group (http://materialtexts.wordpress.com), Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu), and Department of the History of Art and Architecture (http://www.arthistory.ucsb.edu).

Defending the Faith Conference
15-17 September, 2014

In 1562, John Jewel produced the Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae as the answer of the Reformed Church of England to those who challenged the church’s legitimacy. In 1564 Lady Anne Bacon’s English translation presented the Apology to English readers. In order to mark both the appearance of the Apology and the 450th anniversary of the English translation, we are holding a conference from 15-17 September 2014. It will take place in Salisbury, where Jewel was Bishop, and will feature papers presented by our confirmed keynote speakers: Thomas S. Freeman, Lucy Wooding, and Torrance Kirby.

• We would ask for papers on any of the broad themes outlined below:
• The Elizabethan episcopacy, including John Jewel
• The impact of the Apologia on the late Elizabethan and early Stuart Church
• Catholic responses to the Apologia
• The role of women and women’s writing in the post-reformation church, including Lady Anne Bacon
• Defending the Elizabethan settlement on local and national levels
• The use of the vernacular and/or English history in Reformation polemics and apologetics
• The conference will include a postgraduate workshop and we hope to be able to offer a limited number of postgraduate bursaries. We also hope to publish a volume of essays from the conference papers presented.

We welcome proposals from postgraduate researchers, early career researchers and established scholars. Please send proposals consisting of your name, affiliation and status [e.g. postgraduate/ faculty member] with an abstract of 500 words outlining the theme of your paper to: Angela Ranson ransoang@gmail.com or Sarah Bastow s.l.bastow@hud.ac.uk.

The proposal deadline is 1st March 2014.

Magic | Religion | Science
The 26th Annual Indiana University Medieval Studies Symposium
Indiana University, Bloomington
March 7 & 8, 2014

In his famous work, The Golden Bough, James Frazer proposed that human societies evolved from cultures dependent on magic to ones subject to religion and finally to ones guided by science. Scholarship since Frazer has worked to destabilize and expand upon this tidy theory, pointing out that the distinctions between these three categories of belief are not always clear and that, in fact, all three tend to exist simultaneously within the same societies, schools, and even individuals. Nonetheless, Frazer’s division of belief into magical, religious, and scientific modes of thought provides a useful lens for examining the ways that truth can be legitimated, and offers us a clear heuristic paradigm for exploration into human thought and behavior throughout history. Asking questions about magic, religion, and science offers us avenues into different epistemes and windows into the habitus of a group or society.

It is particularly useful for exploring the Middle Ages, which presents a wealth of examples in which the boundaries between magic, religion, and science are blurred, re-drawn, or entirely confounded. Indeed, the designation “medieval” across cultures often signifies a perceived interim period, between classical and modern thinking, in which multiple paradigms–magic and superstition, the hegemony of religion, and scientific exploration–coexist and compete for dominance. Investigating magic, religion, and science further within the context of the Middle Ages helps us not only to understand medieval thinking and culture more accurately and to see how the boundaries of magic, religion, and science were policed at the time, but to disturb modern assumptions about the operation of knowledge in these time periods.

Questions may include (but are not limited to):

• What role did “magical” items/practices (such as amulets, oaths, and curses) play in medieval life, and on what principles were they thought to operate? How, if at all, were they distinguished from religious or scientific practices?
• How does the examination of epistemology help undermine or reinforce distinctions between elite and popular culture?
• How (and how effectively) did medieval religious authorities police the boundaries of religious thought?
• What pursuits were seen as “science” and what distinguished them from other forms of inquiry?
• How did knowledge, obtained through magic, religion, science, or any combination of the three, affect life in the Middle Ages?
• How is scientia used and defined in the Middle Ages, considering that the modern word “science” in modern parlance often denotes an exit from the medieval world and into the Renaissance?
• How do epistemologies vary between genres? For example, how do the views of a culture’s technical texts vary from its literary texts?

Please submit 300-word abstracts to Diane Fruchtman (dsfrucht@indiana.edu) by 10 January, 2013.