Posterity in France, 1650-­1800
University of Cambridge
Thursday 19 March, 2015

‘La postérité pour le philosophe, c’est l’autre monde de l’homme religieux.’

So writes Diderot to the sculptor Etienne Falconet in early 1766. Their long correspondence on
the subject of posterity is just one response to a topic that pervades cultural production in
eighteenth‐century France: from the Encyclopédie’s aim to convey to the future not only human knowledge but also the names of its creators, through Rousseau’s desire to control his posthumous image in his Confessions, to the celebration of the first literary centenaries, which gave contemporary writers cause to think on their own legacies. The desire to be remembered was nothing new in the period: as far back as Horace’s claim in 23BC that ‘I shall not wholly die’, writers and artists had been imagining the afterlife that would be available to them through their works.

This one‐day conference, though, sets out to investigate the specificity of the idea of future glory for French cultural producers in the period 1650­‐1800, when there seems to be a suggestive confluence of social and intellectual changes: the growth of the public sphere, a new concept of an exemplary ‘grand homme’ focusing on moral and intellectual achievement rather than high birth or military might, a context of declining patronage and de‐institutionalisation, and an increasing secularism, with the attendant questions about the afterlife of the soul.

Topics to be addressed could include:

• The specific features of the concept of posterity developed in the period.
• How a consciousness of posterity affects how and what people write – both as individuals and in terms
• of broader cultural trends.
• How the lure of posterity relates to an individual’s social self-­‐positioning in life.
• Whether writers and artists hold a particularly privileged position in the quest to be remembered.
• The extent to which new cultures of mourning and commemoration influence or are influenced by contemporary writings on posterity.
• The relationship between posterity and the religious afterlife in the thought of the period.

Papers may be given in English or French, and should last 20 minutes.
Abstracts of 200-­300 words should be sent to earlymodernposterity@gmail.com by Monday 6 October 2014. Questions may also be addressed to the organisers at this address.

Contributions from early-­career scholars and postgraduates are particularly welcome.

Happiness, Joy and Pleasure Conference
The University of Sydney
27-28 November 2014

We call for papers that interrogate the meaning of happiness, pleasure, and joy from interdisciplinary perspectives including but not limited to gender studies, literature, film, media, history, philosophy, health, economics, law, education, science and psychology.

Keynote speakers:

• Dr. Chris Bishop (Australian National University)
• Associate Professor Louise D’Arcens (University of Wollongong)

Some questions papers could address include:

• What is happiness (or joy or pleasure) and what does it mean for different people?
• How is happiness constructed, experienced, performed, and represented through different histories, cultures, identities, and genders?
• How do we experience happiness through our sexualities, masculinities, femininities, and / or trans-identities?
• Do we have a ‘right to happiness’ as enshrined, for example, in the American Constitution?
• Is the restriction of happiness or pleasure a violation of human rights?
• Can and should the law legislate for happiness?
• What are the tyrannies of discourses of happiness?
• Is happiness a chimera?
• How is happiness represented in popular culture?
• Who has the power to define happiness and who does not?
• What are the links between gender, happiness, health and well-being?

Email an abstract (of 500 words or fewer) outlining your paper, a brief bio and your affiliation to: Chenoa.Hunter@sydney.edu.au

Abstracts due 5pm Friday 19 September.

Masculinities in the British Landscape Conference
Harlaxton Manor, Lincolnshire
14-17 May 2015

Conference Website

The Masculinities in the British Landscape Conference will be held at Harlaxton Manor, University of Evansville, outside of Grantham, Lincolnshire, from 14-17 May 2015.

Keynote speaker: Professor Howard Williams on ‘From Stonehenge to the National Memorial Arboretum: Megaliths and Martial Masculinity in the British Landscape.’ Find out more about Prof. Williams here.

The gendered landscape is a topic ready for exploration. This conference seeks to explore current and historical concepts of masculinities in the British landscapes, geographically and historically broadly conceived. From depictions of masculine control to landscapes of masculine employment, the conference wishes to explore the various ways masculinity can and has been marked on the landscape and expressed itself in landscape terms. As such, this conference seeks a wide range of papers covering the topic. Proposals will be accepted from all eras from the prehistoric to the contemporary. The geographic area covered will be not only the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but also the historic scope of ‘Britishness,’ including former British Empire states in their colonial and post-colonial periods.

Proposals are encouraged from any disciplinary field, including (but not limited to) archaeology, art history, criminology, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and theology. Topics might include:

• The naval seascape
• Sculpted and symbolic landscapes
• Agricultural landscapes
• Ritualized landscapes
• Gender, crime and urban topography
• Employment and land
• Geographic concepts of masculinity
• Masculinity, empire and the landscape
• Religious masculinity and the monastic landscape
• Landscapes of masculinity through war, rebellion and protest
• Textual depictions of masculinities and landscapes

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or 3-paper panels exploring any aspect of masculinities in the British landscape. Please email proposals of approximately 200 words (or for panels, 500 words including paper abstracts) to masclandscapes2015@gmail.com by 1 December 2015. Informal queries can be made to Dr Edward Bujak at ebujak@harlaxton.ac.uk or Dr Katherine Weikert at katherine.weikert@winchester.ac.uk. View the Call for Papers online here. Registration will open in late 2014.

Renaissance Cardinals: Diplomats and Patrons in the Early-Modern World
Saint Mary’s University, Twickenham, London
13-14 March 2015

Saint Mary’s University Twickenham is hosting an international conference on Renaissance cardinals as diplomats and patrons. The conference will mark the 500th anniversary of Thomas Wolsey’s being made a cardinal by Pope Leo X. As ‘Princes of the Church’, cardinals were almost invariably important politicians and international representatives of the Papacy, of princely, national, republican and civic regimes, and of their own families. The conference, organised by the School of Arts and Humanities, will take an innovative, interdisciplinary, approach to cardinals as ‘super-diplomats’, powerful political and cultural brokers, who played a vital role in the transfer and adaptation of ideas and artefacts within and beyond their primary sphere of Western Europe. Proposals on any aspect of the role of cardinals as early-modern papal, princely, civic and dynastic representatives and patrons (rather than as ecclesiastics per se) will be considered. Papers from research students and early-career researchers are especially welcome.

Some suggested areas of enquiry and discussion include:

• Ritual and protocol in diplomatic encounters between cardinals, secular diplomats, and rulers
• The development, training and careers as diplomats of individual cardinals
• The role of Church diplomats in the circulation of texts, literary ideas and artefacts
• The representation of cardinals as diplomats in literary texts and art
• Early modern legal and philosophical attitudes to churchmen/cardinals as diplomats
• The artistic and architectural patronage of cardinals, as diplomats
• The impact of the European Reformation in all its phases on the diplomatic practices and traditions of the Catholic Church
• The part played by cardinals in Western Europe’s encounter with the world beyond.

Enquiries and Proposals for 20 minute papers or panels of 3-4 papers should be sent to Glenn.Richardson@smuc.ac.uk or Eugenia.Russell@smuc.ac.uk by 15 September 2014.

Individual paper proposals should be no more than 300 words. Panel proposals should include abstracts of all papers (max 300 words) and a brief rationale (max 100 words) for the panel. All proposals should be accompanied by a short statement of affiliation and career. Delegates will be notified by 15 October 2014.

“Shakespeare’s Europe – Europe’s Shakespeare(s)”
European Shakespeare Research Association Congress 2015
University of Worcester, UK
29 June-2 July, 2015

Conference Website

The traffic of Shakespeare’s stage invites spectators and readers to travel to different places, imagined and real. Italian and French cities – Verona, Venice, Mantua, Padua, Florence, Milan, Rome, Navarre, Roussillon, Paris, Marseilles – set the scenes of his plays. Rome, Athens, Ephesus and Troy occasion travels in time. On Britain’s map – divided in King Lear – other places are mapped: Scotland, England, Windsor, the Forest of Arden, York. Viola arrives on ‘the shore’ of Illyria while, in The Winter’s Tale, the action shifts between Bohemia and Sicilia. Othello sets up camp in Cyprus and Don Pedro returns, victorious, to Messina. Within the confines of one play, Hamlet, too, maps Europe: from Elsinore, Laertes requests permission to return to France; the Mousetrap is set in Vienna, which will become the setting for Measure for Measure; Hamlet is sent to England, and on his way encounters the Norwegian army marching across Denmark on its way to Poland.

Time and geographical travels map a whole continent and its social, political and cultural exchanges – a feature that Shakespeare’s plays shared with his early modern contemporaries as much as they have with his readers, editors, translators, spectators, film adapters and critical commentators since.

The 2015 ESRA conference continues the long-standing dialogue between Shakespeare’s Europe and Europe’s Shakespeare(s). It asks scholars to take a look at the wider playwriting context of the early modern period and the European reception of Shakespeare as a subject that has been continuously developing, not least due to Europe’s several recent remappings. Twenty-five years since the first events that focused exclusively on European Shakespeares (Antwerp 1990) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (Sofia 1992), ESRA 2015 invites a look back at 425 years of European Shakespeare and towards a vigorous debate on what Shakespeare means for Europe today, as well as on ESRA’s place in Shakespeare Studies, European and beyond.

We welcome proposals for papers in the following seminars (please see the CFP for details of seminars). Please submit an abstract (200-300 words) and a brief biography (150 words) by 1 December 2014 to all conveners of the seminar of your choice. All participants will be notified about the acceptance of their proposals by 1 March 2015. The deadline for submitting the completed seminar papers (3,000 words) is 1 May 2015.

Ad Vivum?
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London
21-22 November, 2014

The term ad vivum and its cognates al vivo, au vif, nach dem Leben and naer het leven have been applied since the thirteenth century to depictions designated as from, to or after (the) life. This one and a half day event will explore the issues raised by this vocabulary in relation to visual materials produced and used in Europe before 1800, including portraiture, botanical, zoological, medical and topographical images, images of novel and newly discovered phenomena, and likenesses created through direct contact with the object being depicted, such as metal casts of animals.

It is has long been recognised that the designation ad vivum was not restricted to depictions made directly after the living model, and that its function was often to advertise the claim of an image to be a faithful likeness or a bearer of reliable information. Viewed as an assertion of accuracy or truth, ad vivum raises a number of fundamental questions about early modern epistemology – questions about the value and prestige of visual and/or physical contiguity between image and original, about the kinds of information which were thought important and dependably transmissible in material form, and about the roles of the artist in this transmission. The recent interest of historians of early modern art in how value and meaning are produced and reproduced by visual materials which do not conform to the definition of art as unique invention, and of historians of science and of art in the visualisation of knowledge, has placed the questions surrounding ad vivum at the centre of their common concerns.

This event will encourage conversation and interchange between different perspectives involving a wide range of participants working in different disciplines, from postgraduate students to established academics. It seeks to encourage dialogue and debate by devoting a portion of its time to sessions comprising short, 10-minute papers, which will allow a variety of ideas and areas of expertise to be drawn into the discussion.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• The role of images, including book illustrations, described as ad vivum in early modern natural history, geography, cosmography, medicine and other investigative disciplines;
• The meanings of ad vivum in relation to sacred images, portraiture, landscape depiction, animal imagery, and other types of subject matter involving a claim to life-likeness;
• The connections between ad vivum and indexical images: death masks; life casts; the moulage; auto-prints made from natural phenomena;
• The connections between concepts of ad vivum and graphic media: the print matrix; imitation and reproduction in print; drawings, diagrams which claim to be ad vivum;
• The concept of ad vivum in cabinets of curiosities, sets and series, other groupings and collections;
• The application of the phrase ad vivum and its cognates to specific images, and usages and discussions of the terminology in early modern texts;
• The use of ad vivum in relation to images of the marvellous and the incredible, including monsters and other prodigies of nature.

The organisers invite proposals for:

• 20-minute papers
• Short, 10-minute (maximum 1,000-word) papers which will address one example or theme, or make one argument persuasively.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, together with a brief CV, by 15 August 2014 to joanna.woodall@courtauld.ac.uk and thomas.balfe@courtauld.ac.uk

‘Sagas and Space’: 16th International Saga Conference
University of Zurich and University of Basel
August 2015

Conference Website

Presentation formats
Participants may propose papers, roundtables, posters, or project presentations. There will also be daily keynotes, given by invited speakers. Descriptions of the presentation formats are available on the website. Please read the descriptions before selecting the format for your presentation.

Themes
The organizers suggest as the main theme of the Sixteenth International Saga Conference ‘Sagas and Space’. A broad and open theme has been selected so that as many participants as possible have the opportunity to present their research in one of the eight strands. These are devoted to the following themes: ‘Constructing Space’, ‘Mediality’, ‘Textuality and Manuscript Transmission’, ‘Reception’, ‘Continental Europe and Medieval Scandinavia’, ‘Literatures of Eastern Scandinavia’, ‘Bodies and Senses in the Scandinavian Middle Ages’, and ‘Open’. The strands are described in more detail on the conference website.

Call For Papers
If you would like to give a paper, roundtable contribution, poster or project presentation at ‘Sagas and Space’ , please submit an abstract (300-­500 words) via email to: sagaconference@unibas.ch by 15 October 2014. Don’t forget to note in the accompanying email:

1. which presentation format you prefer (paper, roundtable, poster, or project)
2. which strand you wish to participate in (Constructing Space; Mediality; Textuality and Manuscript Transmission; Reception; Continental Europe and Medieval Scandinavia; Literatures of Eastern Scandinavia; Bodies and Senses in the Scandinavian Middle Ages; and Open)

We will send all abstracts out for anonymous peer review, and notify of acceptance by email ,
at the latest on 15 January 2015. Abstracts will be published online on the conference website in February, and in a hard copy volume which may be per-­ordered for pickup at registration. As we will be publishing the abstracts, we ask that you use the Stylesheet, downloadable from the conference website, when formatting your abstract.

Practicalities
Please book your accommodation in Zurich soon! As there is no conference block booking, it is
essential to reserve your room early so as not to miss out. Advice and links to booking sites are on the conference website. Details of the conference fee will be published on the website in the autumn. The Swiss National Science Foundation has some funding available to support scholars from Eastern Europe . Applications will need to be made early; let us know as soon as possible if you would like to apply under this programme. It may be possible to organize free childcare
for conference participants. Again, if this would be of interest to you, let us know as soon as you can.

The Third Circular will be sent out in February 2015 and will contain information about the
registration process. Conference registration will be open from February to May 2015.