Being Non/Human
Queen Mary, University of London
17 June, 2015

Being Non/Human is organising a conference for 2015 on the topic of ‘bodily borders’ and we invite any postgraduate or early career researcher interested in this theme to submit an abstract or propose a panel. Being Non/Human is an interdisciplinary group that engages with research on interactions between the human and nonhuman, providing a forum for graduate students and early career researchers to present current research. We hope this conference will offer a similar opportunity.

Transforming human skin into fur or scale; combining living tissue with metal; breaking through membrane into disembodied existence. Factual and fictional narratives of bodily metamorphosis are common. But what does it mean to exist in the middle – in the moment between pre- and post-transformation? What does it entail when we speak of change, adaptation and mutation? We are looking for papers and panels which explore this suspension between the non/human and open it up to analyse the borderlands of non/humanity, examining how such borders are defined, transgressed or denied altogether.

This is an interdisciplinary conference and as such we welcome papers and panels from a range of backgrounds. We are looking for examinations of bodily borders within literature and popular culture, the limits of the human in medicine, the impact of technological developments on how we define the borders of the ‘human’, the place of the non/human in ethics, anthropological approaches to how the human body may have changed over time, the concept of liminal embodiment in theology, discussions of the boundary between human and animal, and so forth.

How human is the cyborg’s touch? What does it mean to cross species’ boundaries or create chimeras? What is the experience of shifting beyond an animal body into vegetal or ecological vibrancy – to become cold as ice, turn into stone, be reduced to ash or mud? Is the transformation between the non/human merely physical?
Possible focuses might include:

• Posthuman embodiment
• The hybrid, mutated or mutilated form
• The animalistic or inorganic body
• Subhuman, superhuman or sublime existence
• The lifeless body
• The disembodied

Please send abstracts (250 words) for twenty minute papers or panel proposals to: being.non.human@gmail.com. The deadline for abstracts is Monday 2 February, 2015.

Kingston Shakespeare Seminar
Jan Kott Our Contemporary: Contexts, Legacies, New Perspectives
An international one-day conference, Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames
19 February, 2015

On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, and fifty years to the day after the English publication of Jan Kott’s Shakespeare Our Contemporary, this conference will bring together scholars, students, practitioners, reviewers, and members of the general public, to discuss the role of the Polish critic Jan Kott in Shakespeare and Theatre Studies, as well as his contribution to the intellectual life of the twentieth century. The event is part of a centenary celebration that includes evening performances of Songs of Lear, an acclaimed production by the Polish Song of the Goat Theatre, at the Battersea Arts Centre, London.

Proposals are invited for 20-min seminar papers. Possible topics include:

• Jan Kott as academic critic. How has Shakespeare Our Contemporary shaped the development of Shakespeare criticism and Theatre Studies?
• Kott and the art of the essay. What made Kott’s essays influential; and do we still need them?
• Kott and ancient Greek drama. How has the critic influenced Classical Studies?
• Kott and Existentialism. What was the importance of Kott’s work as a translator of Sartre?
• Kott and the theatre of the absurd: the critic’s response to Beckett, Ionesco and Gombrowicz.
• Kott and global theatre. What was the importance of the critic’s interest in Kabuki and Noh?
• Kott’s and the anthropology of theatre. What was the extent of Kott’s interaction with Jerzy Grotowski, Tadeusz Kantor, and Peter Brook?
• Kott and Modernism. Can the critic be read as a Modernist writer?
• Kott and religion. What were the critic’s views on Catholic doctrine on morality and sexuality, particularly in light of his writings on androgyny in Renaissance art and literature?
• Kott’s politics. What were the critic’s reactions to Marxist and Post-Marxist political theory, and to their impact on Polish and international theatre and theatre theory?
• Kott and Jewish ethnicity. What is the impact of the Shoah on Polish and world theatre?
• Kott, Polish emigration, and émigré culture. How do exiled artists and intellectuals like the critic shape the societies in which they work?

If you are interested in participating in ‘Jan Kott Our Contemporary’, please send a 200-word abstract with a 50-word cv. by December 1 2014 to Aneta Mancewicz and Richard Wilson: kott.london2015@gmail.com.

Alternatively you may use this postal address:

Aneta Mancewicz and Richard Wilson
Kingston University
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Penrhyn Road
Kingston upon Thames
Surrey KT1 2EE

Speakers will be notified of acceptance by 8 December 2014.

There is no registration fee for ‘Jan Kott Our Contemporary’. The conference will be free and open to the general public. Tickets for the Song of the Goat Theatre production of Songs of Lear at the Battersea Arts Centre on 20 and 21 February, 2015 will be on sale at a special rate.

Organisers: John Elsom (Kingston Shakespeare Seminar), Anna Godlewska (Polish Cultural Institute), Anna Gruszka (Polish Cultural Institute), Aneta Mancewicz (Kingston University), Aleksandra Sakowska (British Friends of the Gdansk Theatre Trust), Richard Wilson (Kingston University);

John Fletcher: A Critical Reappraisal
Christ Church University, Canterbury
26-27 June, 2015

Conference Website

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Gordon McMullan (King’s College London)
• Dr Lucy Munro (King’s College London)
• Professor Sandra Clark (Professor Emerita, Institute of English Studies, University of London)
• Professor Clare McManus (University of Roehampton)

It is fair to say that John Fletcher remains an understudied and under-appreciated writer in recent early modern scholarship. Even the very recent success of non-Shakespearean drama in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, and the Swan Theatre’s commitment to staging Shakespeare’s contemporaries, has proved fruitless so far in introducing Fletcher to a new generation of academics and theatre-goers. In the near 390 years since his death, it is now time for a complete re-evaluation of the work of a man who made a considerable impact on Jacobean theatre and society by producing a vast corpus of about 53 plays that challenged, commented on, and critiqued Renaissance England. By investigating Fletcher’s ideas and ideals, apparent in his work, we can gain a significant understanding of Jacobean theatre practices and politics: his career virtually encompassed the entirety of the reign of James I, under whose patronage he worked as Shakespeare’s successor as the resident dramatist of the King’s Men. In short, to study Fletcher is to study the soul of the age.

The conference seeks to bring together leading experts, early career researchers, and postgraduate students working on John Fletcher to reassess his engagement with the ideas, culture, politics, and society of Renaissance England.

This call for papers asks for contributions considering:

• Any aspect of Fletcher’s involvement with the theatre of Jacobean England;
• His use of European literary sources, particularly those of Spanish origin;
• The textual and performance history of his plays;
• His status as a collaborative writer and his working relationship with his more frequent writing partners (Beaumont, Field, Massinger);
• His influences and ideas on politics, gender, and culture;
• The Fletcher ‘canon’ of plays;
• Fletcher’s collaborative plays with Shakespeare;
• Fletcher’s influence on Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s influence on Fletcher;
• The trials and tribulations of editing or staging them in our modern world;
• New approaches to analysing his work as a dramatist.

This is by no means an exhaustive or constrictive list, and we invite contributions for papers that critically re-evaluate and extend our knowledge of a writer whose plays helped shape and redefine the place and importance of the theatre in Renaissance London.

After the sessions in Canterbury, the conference will reconvene for a one day event at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, where the Shakespeare Institute Players will perform an unabridged script-in-hand production of one of Fletcher’s plays. The performance will take place on Saturday 25th July 2015. A conference website will be set up in the next few weeks where delegates and members of the public will be able to vote, from a list of 5 Fletcher plays, for which one they would like to see staged. The play with the most votes will be performed by the Players! We invite people to use the Twitter hashtag #TeamJohnFletcher or to get in touch with us at the email address below to cast a vote. One vote per Twitter account or email address, please!

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words for papers lasting 20 minutes in length to Dr Steve Orman (Canterbury Christ Church University) and José A. Pérez Díez (Shakespeare Institute), conference conveners, at the following email address: johnfletcherconference@gmail.com

The deadline for sending proposals is Friday 9th January 2015.

‘Namque ego suetus eram hos libros legisse frequenter’:
Early Medieval Practices of Reading and Writing
Den Haag, The Netherlands
3-5 June, 2015

This is a call for papers for a conference on the subject of books, practices of writing, reading, copying and studying in the early middle ages. It is organized by the research project ‘Marginal Scholarship: The Practice of Learning in the Early Middle Ages (c. 800 – c. 1000)’, which seeks to map the phenomenon of writing in the blank space of manuscripts (in the margin, in between the lines, on fly-leaves or inserted leaves) in the early middle ages, in order to gain a better understanding of the way in which books and texts were used in that period. In essence, we aim to understand the intellectual practices of the period as reflected by the manuscripts and to re-evaluate both how traditional the period was, and how innovative. Furthermore, we hope to explore how the developments of the culture of writing in this period led to developments in later periods, and also how they compare to those in other cultures, such as the Byzantine world or the world of Late Antiquity. Confirmed speakers include David Ganz and John Contreni.

The following questions and themes will be addressed in the sessions:

1. Practices of annotating

Who were allowed to make annotations in manuscripts? What can we learn about the hierarchical organization of the writing process in monastic or cathedral environments, and are there ways to say something about the status of scribes and/or scholars working in manuscript margins?

Annotating practices reflect many different functionalities of the appropriation of text: they can, for example, reflect a process of text comparison and textual criticism; they can have the aim to gather information in order to facilitate the composition of a new text; they can offer guidance to the reader, either in the sense of offering explanation or interpretation, or in the sense of warning the reader and delivering criticism; they can engage in a discussion with the author of the text, or with another annotator, or create stepping stones from one text to others, in order to broaden the reading of the text by offering new and different opinions. We would like to discuss these and other functionalities, and replace the mono-dimensional ‘annotated book = school book’ with a richer and more accurate model of interpretation.

2. The profile of annotating practices

Can we see patterns in the relationship between textual genres and the kind of marginal activity encountered in the margin? Were certain textual genres treated differently than others? For example, do theological texts invite other types of critical reflection than scientific texts or historical texts? Are there genres with ‘empty’ margins, and what would be the reason for that?

Can we distinguish sets of annotating practices which are specific to certain intellectual centres or groups of scholars? Can we distinguish individual practices even, which allow us to identify the scholar who worked in the manuscript? It has been argued, for example, that the group around Florus of Lyon had a very particular set of signs to mark patristic texts, in order to prepare florilegia of patristic quotations on certain subjects. Are there other examples of such private practices, and what happened to them after the death of the scholar(s) at their centre?

Some annotating practices are particular to a certain period in history. Tironian notes, for example, seem to have been used in a specific time and space for marginal comments, and are rarely found outside that period. The Nota sign gets company in the shape of a pointing hand at a certain moment in time, is perhaps even replaced by it. Could we mark annotation practices on a chronological scale, just as we can with letter shapes or other physical features of manuscripts?

3. Cultures of writing

Manuscripts, scholars and books traveled, and thus the culture of writing is a dynamic and ever evolving field. Can we map the circles of influence from one scholar, or one school to the next through the eyes of manuscripts? Can we trace specific practices of annotating or writing in general through history, and follow their historical development? And do these practices offer us insight into the intellectual networks of the time? What would be good strategies to map the dynamics of the lives of manuscripts, both in the sense of their actual travels, and in the sense of their changing contents?

A selection of the papers from the conference will be collected in an edited volume, to be published in 2016.

If you are interested in participating in this conference, please send us a title and abstract (ca 400-500 words), your contact information and affiliation to MarginalScholarship@gmail.com. The deadline for sending in abstracts is 15 January 2015. You will hear back from us before 15 February 2015 whether your proposal has been accepted.

The organizers offer to cover your expenses of accommodation. No fee will be asked, lunches will be provided, as well as the conference dinner. For your travel expenses we kindly ask you to rely on the budget of your own university or other academic sponsor. If this is a problem, please indicate this in your correspondence with us.