Monthly Archives: October 2014

50th Anniversary of the New Fortune (UWA) – Free Lecture-Performance by Aarne Neeme

The 50th Anniversary New Fortune Lecture-Performance: ‘Fortune Tellers: Shakespeare and Dorothy Hewett’

As part of ongoing celebrations for the 50 year anniversary of the Arts Faculty Building and the New Fortune Theatre at The University of Western Australia, a free special lecture-performance by acclaimed director Aarne Neeme will be held at UWA in November.

Aarne will share some of his thoughts and conclusions regarding the use of the Fortune as a playing area, and illustrate them with selections entitled Fortune Tellers: Shakespeare and Dorothy Hewett, performed by actors from various works.

Date: Friday 14 November 2014
Time: 6:00-7:30pm
Venue: New Fortune Theatre, Arts Building, The University of Western Australia (In case of inclement weather, Social Sciences Lecture Theatre)
Cost: Free event supported by ARC Centre for History of Emotions, The UWA Faculty of Arts, and The UWA Cultural Precinct
RSVP: Jenny Pynes by 7 November 2014

In the summer of 1967/8, Rex Cramphorn and Aarne Neeme accompanied Phillip Parsons as assistants on his Festival production of Richard III in the New Fortune Theatre. It was Neeme’s first journey to Perth, and he was absolutely smitten by the Fortune’s vast open playing area and its stadium-like actor-audience relationship.

Shakespeare, like any competent playwright, was fully conversant with the staging possibilities and conventions of his time, and this venue was like a palette to an artist for Elizabethan stagecraft. Neeme was excited about gaining insights into the structure and intended visual effects of his plays and how the use of this space would illuminate Shakespeare’s intentions.

During this initial visit, he also had the good ‘fortune’ to meet Dorothy Hewett, and to strike up a rapport with her. She had an office in the English Department overlooking the New Fortune and was likewise fascinated by its possibilities. In the course of time, he had the honour of directing four of her plays there, most notably The Chapel Perilous (1971).

While he has staged only two other Shakespearean plays in the New Fortune – Antony and Cleopatra (1974), with Robin Nevin and Arthur Dignam, and The Taming of the Shrew (1986), with John Bell and Anna Volska – the unique stage has fully informed the production of 10 other plays he has directed, tackling them in a variety of other venues.

Aarne Neeme started his professional career in 1962 as a dancer in a pantomime at Melbourne’s Tivoli Theatre. He then joined Wal Cherry’s Emerald Hill Theatre, where he learned the ropes of acting.

In an attempt to postpone conscription, he attended Australia’s first School of Drama at UNSW and, as a consequence of his undergraduate productions, was appointed Resident Director of the then newly built Octagon Theatre, 1969-71.

Later work in Perth included being Artistic Director of the National Theatre at the Playhouse, 1973-7; Head of the Theatre Department at WAAPA, 1985-9; and Artistic Director at the Hole-in-the-Wall, 1990-1. He has directed some 300 plays, covering both the classical and contemporary repertoire, and specialising in new writing; he has worked for most major theatre companies across Australia, and in New Zealand and Singapore. He has also taught in vocational and academic institutes; and since 2001, he has been involved in directing television drama, including Blue Heelers, All Saints, MDA, Neighbours and Home and Away.

In 2013, Neeme was conferred an Order of Australia for his contribution as a director and teacher in theatre and television.

University of Cambridge: Junior Research Fellowships 2015

Junior Research Fellowships 2015
University of Cambridge – Clare College, Cambridge

Applications are invited for two Junior Research Fellowships in The Arts, tenable for three years.

These Fellowships, which will start on 1 October 2015, are intended for researchers who are in the early stages of their careers.

The successful candidates will have excellent academic records and the potential to continue their research at the highest level. It is expected that the candidates will be either graduate students, in the latter stages of their research leading to a PhD, or post-doctoral researchers who have been awarded their PhD within the last year.

Candidates who have undertaken more than four years full-time research in The Arts will have the opportunity to present their case during the application process. The College is prepared to consider exceptions.

Remuneration for Research Fellows is set by reference to the Cambridge University general stipend and salary scale with a starting point of spine point 39 (£28,695).

It is anticipated that the successful candidate will carry out full-time research for 37.5 per week.

Research Fellows may be invited to undertake a small amount of undergraduate teaching during term. They will not be permitted to undertake other paid work or to hold other offices and awards except by permission of the College Council.

The competition closes at 5pm GMT on Monday 8 December. For more information and to apply go to http://jrf.clare.cam.ac.uk/rf_2015.

Shortlisted candidates will be notified by 23 January 2015 and asked to submit copies of their written works.

Domestic Drama and Political Culture – Call For Papers

In the early modern period, the household was commonly perceived as analogical to the state, the head of the household, a king, the servants, his subjects: “An houshold,” John Dod and Robert Cleaver wrote in 1598, “is as it were a little Commonwealth.” Towards the end of the sixteenth-century, the domestic received particular attention from political theorists, moralists and writers of household guides alike. Running alongside this extensive public interest in the household, writers for the theatre produced a series of plays that took the domestic, the private and non-elite household as its subject matter. Given the commonplace household/state analogy, the political could be read into many situations and scenarios depicted in many of these plays. Invited to see a play that apparently deals with households like their own, early modern audiences were offered more than a domestic situation to look at, examine, criticize and think about—they were offered scenarios that invited them to think beyond the micropolitics of daily existence to the macropolitics of kingly governance. Domestic plays deal with a range of vital political questions: gender relations, resistance theory, active citizenry, and good governance. Calling for papers to be edited into a collection provisionally titled Domestic Drama and Political Culture, we invite contributions that will investigate the place of domestic drama in the political culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What, we want to know, can drama tell us about domestic politics? What can domestic politics tell us about drama?

We are inviting contributions that will look at a wide body of dramatic material. While critics have marked out a handful of plays such as Arden of Faversham and A Woman Killed with Kindness as, generically, ‘domestic tragedies’, we understand that domestic politics, widely conceived, is the ‘matter’ handled in a number of plays not conventionally thought of as ‘domestic’ comedies or tragedies, written by a range of different authors, across a number of dramatic genres. In this call for papers, we invite original scholarly work from researchers in the field of early modern culture and literature. Initially, we ask for abstracts of around 500 words, together with a CV, to be sent to Eoin Price (e.p.price@bham.ac.uk) and Iman Sheeha (iman.sheeha@warwick.ac.uk) by 1 November 2014.

Questions explored may include (but are not limited to):

  • How did the household/state analogy work, or fail to work, in the drama and culture of early modern England?
  • How did the analogy between citizen and household servant work in drama?
  • How do domestic plays deal with gender relations? How did an Elizabethan England, headed by a female monarch, readjust commonplace parallels between household and state?
  • In what ways do these plays relate politics to their audiences? Do they allow for new ways of thinking about political issues?
  • What cultural work did domestic plays perform in their time? Can they be said to have unanimously encouraged or deterred resistance, or questioned contemporary political theorization?
  • Do different genres, e.g. comedy, history, tragedy, tragicomedy, tell us different things about drama and domestic politics?
  • What constitutes ‘the domestic’? What can be said about different kinds of domestic settings, e.g. court, city, and country?
  • What can be said about the politics of domestic performance?
  • What insights into domestic politics can be gained by thinking about these plays in performance?
  • What role do domestic plays have in the modern repertory? What might plays such as Arden of Faversham and The Witch of Edmonton, performed at the RSC in 2014, suggest about domesticity and politics?

Assistant Professor Danijela Kambaskovic, Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery Free Public Lecture

“To be, or not to be, forever?”, Assistant Professor Danijela Kambaskovic (University of Western Australia)

Date: Friday, 5 December 2014
Time: 1:00-2:00 PM
Venue: Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery
RSVP: Via EventBrite

Assistant Professor Danijela Kambaskovic is Research Associate with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion 1100-1800, where she is currently working on a book project concerned with cultural history of love and literary genres (The New Life: Love Written in the First Person and the European Renaissance).

She states ‘Remembering the transience of life was (and is) a practice with a fundamentally uplifting purpose. Its messages are simple: right your wrongs. Love deeply. Be good at what you do. Die and be remembered.

Classical, Medieval and Renaissance thinkers felt that being forgotten or overlooked was a fate much worse than dying, and— in their different ways, and using different genres and media— identified procreation, creation and salvation as three ways of living after death.’

Her presentation in relation to the Memento Mori exhibition, To be, or not to be, forever? will investigate the questions: ‘Can we learn from people who have managed not to be forgotten? How are their ideas relevant to our lives?’

Rethinking Shakespeare and Italy – Call For Papers

Rethinking Shakespeare and Italy: Cultural Exchanges from the Early Modern Period to the Present, ed. by Enza De Francisci and Chris Stamatakis (Routledge: Studies in Shakespeare Series)

This volume brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, drama, and linguistics, as well as actors and playwrights, and offers new perspectives on the vibrant relationships that can be traced between Shakespeare and Italy from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Besides offering a selection of individual examples of exchanges from Shakespeare’s own time to the present, this volume also ventures more theoretical paradigms to explain the fascinating dynamics by which exchange between Shakespeare and Italy is a two-way process. It is not simply that the literary, dramatic, and linguistic culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, but rather that, as this book shows by tracing his literary afterlife, Shakespeare’s plays helped shape Italian artistic culture in the ensuing centuries, in the realms of drama, opera, novels, and film. Unifying the chapters in this book is an interest in how Shakespeare’s drama represents, enacts, and becomes the subject of exchanges across the national, political, and cultural boundaries separating England and Italy.

Abstracts of approximately 250 words are sought for essays that address any period and any aspect of exchange between Shakespeare and Italian culture. Essays can be either empirical or more theoretical in nature, and can explore any mode of cultural interchange – from theatrical influences in either direction, to the cross-border travel of actors and acting troupes, to the artistic and political afterlife of Shakespeare’s plays in Italy, to the polyglot, linguistic exchanges that take place through translation, to name a few. The deadline for submissions is 12 December, 2014. Abstracts should be sent to e.francisci@ucl.ac.uk, and will be subjected to peer review. First drafts of chapters (c. 6,000 words) should then be submitted to the editors ideally by March 2015.

So far, the volume includes chapters and case studies on the following areas:
– Shakespeare’s representation of travel in Italy – Shakespeare and Florio – Shakespeare’s relationship with the commedia dell’arte – Shakespeare’s early reception in Italy – Verdi’s operatic adaptations of Shakespeare – Performances of Shakespeare by the Italian grandi attori – Early Hebrew translations of Shakespeare’s plays set in Italy – Adaptations of Shakespeare in Fascist Italy – Strehler’s staging of Shakespeare’s histories – Recent stage and screen adaptations of Shakespeare by Italian translators and playwrights.

For any questions or further information, please do not hesitate to contact e.francisci@ucl.ac.uk or c.stamatakis@ucl.ac.uk.

Stories and Storytelling in the Medieval World – Call For Papers

Stories and Storytelling in the Medieval World: an Interdisciplinary Conference
Institute of Archaeology, UCL
11-12 April, 2015

þo scal við saugu súpa. en ǽi ofmikit drecka sœmð.
er saugu at segia ef hæyrenðr til lyða. en tapat starfi at hafna at hæyra.

One is to drink when stories are told, but not too much:
it is an honour to tell a story if people listen, but it is a wasted effort if nobody listens.

EMICS, the Early Medieval Interdisciplinary Conference Series is pleased to invite proposals for papers on ‘Stories and Storytelling in the Medieval World’. This interdisciplinary event intends to explore how stories were used, told, and received in different Early Medieval contexts. Discussion of the stories we tell and the use of stories in teaching about the period is also welcomed. As with previous EMICS events, a selection of papers will be put forward for publication.

The shaping and sharing of narrative has always been key in the negotiation and recreation of reality for individuals and cultural groups. Some stories, indeed, seem to possess a life of their own: claiming a peculiar agency and taking on distinct voices which speak across time and space. How, for example, do objects, manuscripts and other artefacts communicate alternative or complementary narratives that transcend textual and linguistic boundaries? As well as the stories themselves, scholarship is increasingly interested in how stories were told and received, from communal dramatic recreations to records produced for private meditation.

EMICS aims to bring a range of disciplines, including manuscript and literary studies, art history, archaeology and history, together. Consideration will be given to how stories can be created, reshaped, and re-experienced; to how the experience of narratives creates meaning; and to how the meaning of stories shifts across different contexts and media. Case studies from different disciplines will provoke a conversation between fields of study about the making and decoding of stories in Early Medieval worlds.

Proposals are invited for 20 minute papers on any aspect of storytelling, from researchers in any discipline, and considering any medieval culture. Papers from PhD students and early career researchers are particularly welcomed. Topics could include, but are not limited to:

  • stories re-used in different ways across a culture or period;
  • storification of cultural challenges, such as the creation of monsters or myths;
  • the construction of spaces and objects for storytelling or in response to stories;
  • how stories were told or received in particular contexts or formats;
  • how materials negotiate different modes of speaking and storytelling;
  • the use of stories and storytelling in teaching and exploring Early Medieval worlds.

Abstracts of 300-500 words are invited for submission by 30 January 2015. Please email abstracts to the conference committee at EMICSstorytelling@gmail.com.

Further details at emicsblog.wordpress.com and emicsstorytelling.wordpress.com.

Call for proposals for a themed issue of Parergon (2016)

We now call for proposals for future themed issues, most immediately for 2016 (33.2).

Parergon publishes articles on all aspects of medieval and early modern studies, from early medieval through to the eighteenth century, and including the reception and influence of medieval and early modern culture in the modern world. We are particularly interested in research which takes new approaches and crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Themed issues contain up to ten essays, plus the usual reviews section. The guest editor is responsible for setting the theme and drawing up the criteria for the essays.

Proposals should contain the following:

  1. A draft title for the issue.
  2. A statement outlining the rationale for the issue.
  3. Titles and abstracts of all the essays.
  4. A short biographical paragraph for the guest editor(s) and for each contributor.
  5. An example of a completed essay if available. (This is not essential).

Time line
Proposals for the 2016 issue (33.2) are required by 30 January 2015, and completed essays by 30 January 2016 for publication in late 2016.

Preliminary expressions of interest are welcome at any time.

For full details, please see the CFP below

[gview file=”http://anzamems.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/CFProposals-for-Parergon-themed-issues-2016.pdf”]

Professor Piroska Nagy, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Public Lecture

“Birth of emotional communities, or the power of emotional communion in the medieval West”, Professor Piroska Nagy (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Date: Monday 27 October, 2014
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: The University of Western Australia, Arts Lecture Room 10 (Arts 1.62)
Further information: Pam Bond (pam.bond@uwa.edu.au)

Barbara Rosenwein elaborated the notion of emotional communities as a way of explaining the affective dimension of social and cultural groups. In this talk, Professor Nagy will reflect on the way one can bring change in the perspective of reasoning with emotional communities. After a few theoretical and methodological considerations, exploring a famous case from medieval religious history, she would like to test the hypothesis according to which shared emotional events or processes can induce the formation of an emotional or affective community. One of the best known episodes in the life of saint Francis of Assisi is his celebration of Christmas in 1223 in the little town of Greccio. The episode is told in detail by Thomas of Celano in his first biography written in 1228-29. Later sources on Francis report the episode differently, according to their particular agenda ; it is also included in the iconographic cycles that depict Francis’s life. Professor Nagy’s aim in this paper is firstly, to analyse the work of emotions in the creation of communal feeling, through the careful observation of what happened in Greccio according to the first sources, and how they can be understood within the context of Franciscan history ; secondly, to show how the transformation of the episode in later sources reveals what can be called a Franciscan politics of emotion. Finally, using also other cases, she would like to distinguish emotional and affective communities.

Piroska Nagy is a professor of medieval history at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). From 2014 to 2017 she is also an International Partner Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. Professor Nagy has previously taught at the Université Paris I, the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, Université de Rouen and the Central European University. She is author of Le don des larmes au Moyen Age. Un instrument spirituel en quête d’institution, Ve-XIIIe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000) and co-author, with Damien Boquet, of Sensible Moyen Age. Une histoire culturelle des émotions et de la vie affective dans l’Occident médiéval, (Paris: Seuil, forthcoming in 2015). With Damien Boquet in 2006, Nagy launched the first French research project on the history of emotions, EMMA, EMotions in the Middle Ages: and coedited with D. Boquet Émotions médiévales (2007); Le sujet des émotions au Moyen Âge (2009); Politiques des émotions au Moyen Âge (2010); La chair des émotions au Moyen Âge (2011).

Her current research centres on the relation between collective religious emotions in the medieval West and historical change.

Medieval London & the World – Call For Papers

Medieval London & the World
The London Medieval Society: 70th Anniversary International Conference
London
1-4 May, 2015

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Julia Boffey, Prof. David Carpenter, Prof. Matthew Davies, Prof. Vanessa Harding, and Prof. Sheila Lindenbaum

We welcome proposals for papers, sessions, roundtables, and workshops. Topics may include:

  • Politics & Diplomacy between London and Europe, Asia, Africa, or the Americas
  • International Trade Networks
  • Travel and Pilgrimage to/from London
  • Cultural Interactions
  • Textual Culture & Literature
  • Playwrights & Theatre
  • Medieval Urban Life, Space and Place
  • London & the Papacy
  • Mapping & Geography

Contributions involving artefacts or manuscripts held in London collections are also sought after as the conference will include visits to London museums, libraries, and historic sites.
Funding will be available for speakers.

A volume with conference proceedings is anticipated.

Please send outlines, proposals, and expressions of interest by 31 October 2014 to: Londonmedievalsoc2015@gmail.com

More information to follow soon. Please contact us with any further questions. Visit the London Medieval Society at: http://www.the-lms.org