‘War and Peace in Early Modern Literature and Culture’
Queen’s University Belfast
26–28 November, 2015

War and Peace in Early Modern Literature and Culture is a three-day conference to be held on the 26th – 28th November 2015 in association with the School of English at Queen’s University Belfast, exploring ‘war and peace’ in early modern Europe across literary and historical perspectives. Our aim is to engage with contemporary literary texts, historical analysis and more recent representations and appropriations of the period’s numerous conflicts.

From the Spanish Armada to the Battle of the Boyne, this was a century dominated by war. But the period also witnessed the first ever European-wide peace agreement with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, while in earlier years figures such as James I strove to unite the continent’s warring fractions. This range of treaties and conflicts provided the period’s literature with some of its most controversial and radical subject matter. The interrelation of war and peace is fundamental to the work of writers as diverse as William Shakespeare, John Milton, Luis de Góngora, John Dryden and Joost van den Vondel. Yet, despite widespread critical interest in the representation of violence and power within early modern culture, the subject of war itself has received relatively little attention.

The aim of our conference is to explore these different elements of war and peace in early modern Europe from 1588-1690. Plenary speakers will include Dr. Jerome De Groot of Manchester University, Professor Andrew Hadfield of Sussex University and Dr. Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez of the University of Amsterdam. We invite early modern academics and PhD candidates of all levels to submit abstracts. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

• The Thirty Years War
• Conflict and Ireland in the seventeenth century
• The Second Northern War
• The legacy of the Armada and the ‘Black Legend’
• Class struggle in the English Civil War
• Militant Protestantism and early modern politics
• James I as peacemaker
• The staging and performance of war
• News distribution through newspapers, pamphlets and newsplays
• The writer as soldier from Philip Sidney to Lope de Vega
• Early modern war as twentieth century propaganda
• Censorship of literary works concerning war and peace
• The justification of war in early modern literature
• Reimaging early modern war on screen

The deadline for submission of abstracts (300 words maximum for twenty minute presentations) is 1st of June 2015. Submissions for panels are also invited. A small registration fee of £20 is requested, which covers lunch and refreshments for duration of the conference. Some funding for PG bursaries will be available. Please email submissions to: wandpconference@qub.ac.uk

Please direct any other queries to:
Sonja Kleij: skleij01@qub.ac.uk
Romano Mullin: rmullin02@qub.ac.uk
Matthew Williamson: mwilliamson11@qub.ac.uk

“The Charm of the Unfamiliar”: Myth and Alterity in Early Modern Literature
Postgraduate Conference of the Department of English Studies, University of Durham
St Mary’s College, Durham
Friday June 19, 2015

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor Michael Pincombe (Newcastle)

A hint of the far reaching and rich symbolic potential of the word “exotic” resides in one twentieth-century dictionary’s definition of the term as “the charm of the unfamiliar”. Haunted as it is by the spectre of nineteenth-century Orientalism, this potential has been largely left untapped by twenty first-century scholarship. Yet the word “exotic” was current as early as 1600, and bears significantly upon the genre, or genres, of early modern mythic literature. Returning to this period, this one day postgraduate conference aims to interrogate the importance of literary exoticism in its loose, “unfamiliar” sense, with a view to rehabilitate the term in light of a modern historical consciousness and ethics.

The focus of this endeavour will be the study of myth through alterity, a term that gestures towards the broader identity politics inseparable from modern ideas of the exotic. Alterity proves fundamental to an era where a humanist renaissance of classical myths, often appropriated by political or “national” narratives, coincided with the philosophical and geographical necessity of negotiating new and old worlds. If for psychologist Jacob Arlow myth “is a particular kind of communal experience…it serves to bring the individual into relationship with members of his cultural group on the basis of certain common needs”, theorists since Levi-Strauss have shown that this fostering of communality is underpinned by a structure or metaphysics of myth that is primarily oppositional. Inclusion depends on exclusion, self upon other. Such “otherness” takes many forms, and for the purposes of this conference questions of sexual, religious or animal alterity, for example, are of no less importance than those of race or nationality.

Proposals for papers of 20 minutes on any aspect of myth and alterity in the early modern period (c.1500-1700) are warmly invited, to be sent to myth.alterity.durham@gmail.com by 5pm, Friday 1st May. We recognise and wish to foster the interdisciplinary nature of this topic and welcome contributions from areas of philosophy, politics, anthropology and translation as well as English studies. Abstracts should be 300 words and may treat, but are not limited to:

Travel writing and colonial encounters; hermeneutics and mythic exegesis; classics and the bible; ecology and the natural world; gender and hybridity; myth and memory; humanism and science; metaphysical debate; the supernatural; magic and the occult; animality; national borders and transgressions; migration and translation; language and metamorphosis; monstrosity; folklores and fables; intertextuality; culture and history; creation narratives and founding myths; subject and state

All contributors will be invited to submit their paper to be considered for publication in Postgraduate English, an online, peer-reviewed journal sponsored by the English department at the University of Durham.

Conveners: Abigail Richards (Durham) and Sherihan Al-Akhras (Durham): myth.alterity.durham@gmail.com

“Women In The Global Eighteenth Century”
The Aphra Behn Society Conference 2015
Seton Hall University, South Orange, N.J.
November 5-6, 2015

Conference Website

Plenary lecture by Dr. Lynn Festa, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University

In The Global Eighteenth Century, Felicity Nussbaum and her contributors urged scholars to see the eighteenth century as “wide”: a period with a geographical as well as temporal sweep. Such a perspective, Nussbaum contended, would require different, more complex narratives of the people, events, systems, and discourses of the age. In the spirit of our namesake Aphra Behn, whose poetry, drama, plays, and translations reflect a complex awareness of a widening world, The Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830 takes up the challenge posed by The Global Eighteenth Century to invite papers exploring any aspect of women and the arts in this “global eighteenth century.” How does a wider, potentially global, lens change the view of people, places, and things both familiar and strange, domestic and imperial, Us and Other? How does gender affect those views?

The Aphra Behn Society for Women and the Arts invites papers addressing the intersection of gender and the global eighteenth century from a wide variety of disciplines, including but not limited to Literature, History, Art History, Music History, Modern Languages, Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. We welcome papers on this topic from all sub-fields of these disciplines.

Papers might address the following topics:

• Investigations or representations of “difference” in literature and the sister arts
• Representations of social and political authority
• The arts, women, and empire
• Women and the construction of literary, artistic, domestic, public, national, imperial, and colonial spaces
• Women and travel writing
• Women and diaspora
• Women and the metropole
• Women and indigenous knowledge
• Women, genre (textual, visual, musical, etc.), and space/place
• Notions of performance and gender
• Notions of gender and race, class, religion, or other markers, perhaps under pressure in a widening context
• Gender and encountering the Other
• Women, modernity, and post-colonial situations
• Women and the colonial or post-colonial Enlightenment

As always, we also welcome abstracts for papers not related to the conference theme.

Send 1-2 page abstracts or panels to aphrabehn2015@gmail.com by May 15, 2015. Please specify in the abstract if you will require audio/visual equipment.

The conference will include a plenary lecture by Dr. Lynn Festa of Rutgers University, a luncheon, a concluding banquet, and exciting papers delivered by scholars from the United States and abroad. The Aphra Behn Society sponsors a graduate student travel award ($150) and a graduate student essay prize ($150 and the possibility of publication in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640-1830). For more information, please contact the conference organizers, Dr. Kirsten Schultz at Kirsten.schultz@shu.edu or Dr. Karen Gevirtz at Karen.gevirtz@shu.edu.

Sponsored by the Aphra Behn Society for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Women and Gender Studies Program at Seton Hall University.

Music and Literature: Critical Polyphonies
Durham Castle
2 July, 2015

Submissions are open for this one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference, which seeks to explore the myriad ways in which literature and music interact to construct meaning. The conference will run on 2nd July, at Durham Castle; keynote speaker will be Dr Ian Biddle.

Music means exactly the way everything else does and at the same time may not mean at all and at the same time means in ways that nothing else can. (Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music, 2011)

This one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference seeks to explore the myriad ways in which literature and music interact to construct meaning. In recent years, musicology has embraced new critical approaches, not least from literary theory and criticism, in order to understand music as constitutive of identity – gender, sexuality, nationality, race – and suggest radical ways in which music signifies through language and metaphor. These developments suggest that literary studies can continue to inform analysis of music in productive ways, while approaches from musicology can also stimulate fresh perspectives on literary works by prompting a reassessment of the way in which music functions in relation to the literary text.

We invite submissions on any period or any literature in English or other modern languages, and from those using methodologies drawing on literary criticism and musical analysis. Theoretical contributions and submissions incorporating elements of musical performance are also welcome.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Music and literary form (e.g. leitmotif, serialism, minimalism).
• Musicians in literature (e.g. George du Maurier’s Trilby, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu).
• Poetry set to music (e.g. the Medieval Lyric, Goethe, Stéphane Mallarmé, A.E. Housman).
• Lyrics as literature (e.g. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen).
• The libretto as work of literature (e.g. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W.S. Gilbert, W.H. Auden).
• Musical performances in literature (e.g. the piano in Jane Austen, opera in E.M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst).
• Music and song in dramatic performance (e.g. lyric and aurality in Medieval and Renaissance drama and masque).
• Musical adaptation of literary works (e.g. operas on Medieval Romance, Shakespeare or Pushkin, symphonic poems on Shakespeare or Dante).
• Allusions to musical works in literature (e.g. T.S. Eliot and Wagner, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, folksong in Lorca).
• Musical notation or illustrations incorporated within literary texts (e.g. Medieval manuscripts, Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina).
• The relationship between ‘New Musicology’ and contemporary literary theory.

Abstracts of up to 300 words for papers of 20 minutes should be sent to musicandlit2015@gmail.com by 5pm on 8 May 2015. Please also include full contact details and a brief biographical note, and specify any audiovisual equipment you will require.

Contributors to the conference will be invited to submit their work to an upcoming volume of Postgraduate English, a peer-reviewed online journal based at the Department of English Studies, Durham University.

Organisers: Fraser Riddell, James Beckett (Durham), Tom Smith (University College London)

Play of Emotions: Meanings Collaboratory
The University of Western Australia
19-20 November, 2015

This will be a free event but for catering purposes a registration page will be posted before the end of March 2015.

Confirmed Speakers:

• Professor Ros King, University of Southampton
• Professor Jennifer Radden, University of Massachusetts, Boston

‘Go, play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I Play too…’ (The Winter’s Tale)

Leontes’ words, spoken by a ‘player’ in a ‘play’, open up multiple and complex ideas about the various senses in which ‘play’ may ‘play’ many parts in emotional lives, from early childhood into maturity and old age. We aim to open up as many of these meanings as possible, considered in the context of the history of emotions from 1100-1800 and across disciplines.

The word ‘play’, as both noun and verb, has many meanings, some obsolete or now rare in occurrence, which can give glimpses of the past, and others sometimes intriguingly contradictory in their senses. Although the root meaning of the word refers to some kind of aimless physical activity which involves moving about swiftly in a lively manner and sometimes clapping the hands, yet invariably we find through context, the word indicates an emotional driving force or impetus. The question is, then, ‘why do we play?’; ‘what emotional needs does play satisfy or respond to?’. At the ‘innocent’ end of a spectrum, play is an expression of joy and merriment, which was once associated with the souls of the blessed in heaven. Huizinga in 3 generalised that play has a ‘civilizing function’, and yet also underlies war and any form of ritualized violence. Children’s play is considered the most quintessentially innocent diversion, as is playing a musical instrument, while parents might regard play variously as a waste of time or as an affectively bonding experience. As adults we play as an alternative to work, a recreation, a therapy for damaged minds; however, some play as a job – actors, musicians and professional sportspeople. Like Shakespeare’s Venus, Milton’s Adam proposes sexual intercourse as a form of play: ‘Now let us play … For never did thy Beautie … so enflame my sense / With ardor to enjoy thee’, a meaning which has led to the promiscuity of ‘playing the field’, ‘playing around’, ‘playing false’ and even committing adultery, as extensions of sexual dalliance. We might play a game like dice or cards, and the implicit level of counterfeiting can shade into more general forms of pretence or representing fictional personages in drama and films that lead to accusations of deviousness or cheating, or the ambiguity with which players in the theatre have historically been regarded. Play can be considered a dangerously undermining activity – in 2014 the Chinese State Broadcasting Authority banned wordplay in the media as likely to damage culture and linguistic heritage values. A word associated primarily with innocent activity is surprisingly charged with many differing emotions when context reveals the emotional motivations behind play. Our symposium will open discussion on a range of historical factors in considering the emotional meanings of ‘play’.

Some possible areas for questions and discussion:

• Meanings of Play
• Historical and semantic dimensions
• Survivals of older meanings into the modern world
• Huizinga Revisited
• Imaginative play in its creative forms
• Gender and play
• Portmanteau phrases (play off, play on, play out, play at …)
• Theatre – playmaking and playgoing
• Music – playful; musical jokes (e.g. Mozart?)
• Children’s Play – can it be historicised?
• “War games”: the play of weapons, bringing military forces into play
• Theoretical approaches: Locke, Rousseau, Huizinga etc.
• Sexuality and play – foreplay
• Wordplay, jokes, tricks
• Animals and playing
• Play in art

Proposals Due: 30 July, 2015 to ciara.rawnsley@uwa.edu.au

For further information please contact: bobwhite@uwa.edu.au and pam.bond@uwa.edu.au