The Past is Back on Stage – Medieval and Early Modern England on the Contemporary Stage
EMMA, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France
19-20 May 2017

Keynote speaker: David Edgar, playwright.

From the 1960s when Robert Bolt wrote A Man for All Seasons first for BBC radio, then for television and finally for the stage, to the 2010s when Hilary Mantel’s successful novel Wolf Hall was adapted to the stage and then for television, the past several decades have witnessed a renewed interest in medieval and early modern England among contemporary writers and audiences.

The extended period from the Protestant Reformation to the Glorious Revolution provides novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters with material through which to engage pressing current issues, and the success of their works among diverse socio-economic, ethnic, and generational groups indicates a popular phenomenon that reaches beyond academic and artistic communities.

This international conference, organized by EMMA at University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France, aims to understand why contemporary playwrights find this particular past appealing. More precisely, it aims to shed light on the political and cultural significance of medieval and early modern England for twentieth- and twenty-first century writers and audiences.

Centring on contemporary theatre in the English-speaking world, it invites scholars of medieval, early modern, and contemporary drama, performance, and culture to submit papers on any of the following topics:

• History Plays: what do playwrights deem useful about the past in the creation of politically-committed theatre? Could such a distant period be considered as a valid mirror image of our contemporary world? How are the uses of the past today comparable to the way it was used by medieval and early modern dramatic writers?
• Medieval Exceptionality: why is this particular period of English history seen as a cultural reference which is understood and appropriated world-wide?
• The Place of Diversity: how do women, racial and ethnic minorities, writers from nations and national traditions outside England, respond to and use the medieval English past?
• Rewriting History: what is the cultural, historical and political bias of contemporary writers and audiences?
• Recreation and Entertainment: the choice of certain historical figures as new heroes may be discussed, as well as the way those historical figures may be depicted as endearing champions of the Good, or loathsome villains, for the entertainment of audiences today.
• Canonicity and Beyond: to what extent and in what ways do contemporary playwrights allude to, adapt, endorse, expand on and/or critique the canon?
• Adapting Elizabethan Theatre: how do contemporary playwrights, stage-directors or theatre companies rewrite and renew Elizabethan plays for contemporary audiences? How can they use the assets of site-specific performance?

Our plenary speaker will be British playwright and writer David Edgar, who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world. Edgar has repeatedly looked to other periods and other writers to engage the stage and screen as media for political activism. Most recently, in Written on the Heart, which was produced in 2011 by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Edgar exposed the historical situatedness and composite composition of this “authoritative” text of scripture.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English and a brief CV indicating your institutional affiliation to Marianne Drugeon (marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr) by January 31, 2017. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 15, 2017.

The Modern Invention of Dynasty: A Global Intellectual History, 1500-2000
University of Birmingham
21-23 September, 2017

What is dynasty? Historians rarely ask this question. It is automatically assumed that the word corresponds to some real institution(s) that played an extremely important role in pre-modern politics. At this conference, we intend to overturn this uncritical assumption, and, instead, interrogate ‘dynasty’ as a modern conceptual construct, which has been projected onto both the past and the present.

The conference is inspired by the publications of late Cliff Davies, the ongoing work on the Jagiellonians Project at Oxford, as well as the ‘Nationising the Dynasty’ project at Heidelberg. These researches have shown that the Latin word dynastia was rarely used in the Middle Ages and was infrequently deployed even in sixteenth century Europe, while, in many other regions of the world too, including in South Asia, the construction of the concept of ‘dynasty’ was, in part, the result of modern interventions. Terms which were used to articulate genealogical and familial identity in premodern societies often do not necessarily map well on to the modern historiographical concept of ‘dynasty’. Collective ‘dynastic’ names, such as ‘the Tudors’, ‘the Plantagenets’ or ‘the Jagiellonians’ were late or retrospective inventions, rarely, if at all, mentioned in contemporary sources. If ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic’ identity are so difficult to locate in medieval and early modern sources, this begs a question: how has ‘dynasty’ become one of the key concepts for narrating and explaining pre-modern political history, as well as for defining modern monarchical regimes?

In existing scholarship on intellectual history, particularly those emanating from Anglophone and German scholarly worlds, concepts such as ‘kingship’ or ‘sovereignty’ have received detailed attention, but not the related notion of ‘dynasty’. We hope to address this scholarly gap, while also engaging with the newly emergent field of global intellectual history. We believe that the modern construction of ‘dynasty’ as an encompassing concept can be understood only in resolutely transborder, transcontinental, or even global terms. It was the result of reflections by actors not only about polities in one’s own region, but also about other polities, including spatially or temporally distant ones. The increasing interconnectedness of the early modern and modern world resulted in growing European awareness about political regimes in other societies, while extra-European actors often hybridized (and thereby radically transformed) their regional political categories by bringing them into dialogue with European political vocabulary. Imperial encounters often lay at the heart of such ‘transcultural’ exchanges, leading ultimately, by the nineteenth century, to the crystallization of ‘dynasty’ as a globalized category of historical narration.

The conference invites paper proposals from prospective speakers who bring specific case studies from around the world (focusing on the period of ca. 1500-2000) into dialogue with these broader theoretical questions. In line with recent discussions about global intellectual history, we welcome papers that explore issues of multi-scalarity, bringing regional scales of transformation into conversation with translocal shifts in regimes of power. We are especially looking for papers that use intellectual history as a vantage point to tackle broader questions of material and ideological power and see transformations in concepts as not just rarefied academic shifts, but as the result of changes in political economies (including relating to colonialism), arrangements in gender relations, religious and cultural formations, and in the (often, revolutionary) reorganization of political/state power. The conference seeks to understand how the globalized construction of the concept of ‘dynasty’ was ultimately a matter of importance not just for scholars, or even for ruling elites, but for wider publics as well, including for various subaltern actors and groups: issues of class, gender, or race which structured conceptual formations lie at the heart of our investigation.

We are delighted to announce that keynote lectures at the conference will be delivered by Julia Adams (Yale), Pamela Crossley (Dartmouth College), Faisal Devji (Oxford), and Richard Wortman (Columbia).

Prospective speakers are invited to submit abstracts of approximately 300 words. Submissions should include name, affiliation, and contact details. The deadline for submissions is Monday, 30 January, 2017. For more information about the conference, or to submit an abstract, please email the organising committee at I.Afanasyev@bham.ac.uk and milindabanerjee1@gmail.com.

Tangible Cities: Materiality and Identity in Southern Italy (1100 – 1800)
Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Rome, Italy
6-7 July, 2017

A two-day workshop organized by: Stefano D’Ovidio, Joris van Gastel, and Tanja Michalsky

“Materiality conveys meaning. It provides the means by which social relations are visualized, for it is through materiality that we articulate meaning and thus it is the frame through which people communicate identities.” (Sofaer, Material Identities, 2007) Whereas in recent research in art and architectural history, materials have gained currency, the significance of the specific materiality of the world we inhabit still remains largely uncharted territory. Yet, a focus on materials may draw attention to unexpected continuities and discontinuities between different art forms, epochs, and geographical areas. Moreover, as Georges Didi-Huberman (1998) has shown, such a focus is pertinent to historiography as well, revealing the implicit hang-ups and taboos of our discipline.

Taking its key from these recent debates, this workshop seeks to explore the ways in which, between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity, different artistic materials create meanings and identities in the context of the Southern Italian city. In doing so, it hopes to draw attention to the role materials might have played in creating the specific narrative of Southern Italy in art history and to how, conversely, a focus on materiality might lead to a different story. To what extent did materials carry associations of a local geological and natural context? How do they relate to the city’s past? And how do these contribute to the creation of local identities? Here one can think of particular local materials, such as the versatile pietra leccese in Lecce or the colored marbles of Sicily, spolia that make materially present a city’s Greek or Roman past, but also materials that travelled from afar and carried traces of their far-away origins, such as the costly lapis lazuli. Along with the connections between materiality and identity, the workshop aims to lay bare the reception of specific materials in various textual sources, including art literature, contracts, travel guides, but also scientific treatises.

We invite proposals for both case studies and more theoretically informed papers. Possible perspectives include (but are not confined to):

• The use of spolia and the role of a Greco-Roman past in local identities;
• The relationship between materials and discourses of center and periphery;
• Marginalized local traditions related to a specific material;
• The reception of materials in art literature and whether or not art criticism has favored or prevented the use of specific materials;
• The relationship between materials and colonial issues;
• The manner in which the availability of specific materials has favored the development of local artistic traditions and debates.

Please send an abstract (300 words max.), a paper title, and a short CV to Stefano D’Ovidio (dovidio@biblhertz.it) and Joris van Gastel (gastel@biblhertz.it). The deadline for submissions is 29 January, 2017. Travel and accommodation will be covered by the Bibliotheca Hertziana in accordance with the provisions of the German Travel Expenses Act (Bundesreisekostengesetz).