We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, full sessions, and workshops for the third Shakespearean Theatre Conference, to be held June 20-22, 2019 in Stratford, Ontario. 

While all approaches to Tudor-Stuart drama are welcome, we especially encourage proposals that respond to our broad theme of “festival and festivity.” How do we understand and perform festive, antic, celebratory, or bacchanal elements in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? How did these plays draw on and contribute to early modern festive cultures, and how have historical changes to such cultures shifted the meaning of theatrical revelry? To what extent is the festive limited or invigorated by genre and convention? In what ways do cultural and theatrical festivals, including dedicated Shakespeare festivals and Shakespearean playhouses, influence and shape contemporary Shakespearean performance? What do the histories of these festivals have to tell us about changing responses to early modern drama, and what new directions seem promising?  

Plenary Speakers:
Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe)
M. J. Kidnie (Western University)
Paul Prescott (University of Warwick)

The conference is a joint venture of the University of Waterloo and the Stratford Festival, and will bring together scholars and practitioners to talk about how performance influences scholarship and vice versa. Paper sessions will be held at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford campus, with plays and special events hosted by the Stratford Festival.

Please send proposals to shakespeare@uwaterloo.ca by 1 February 1, 2019.

Kenneth Graham – Department of English, University of Waterloo
Alysia Kolentsis – Department of English, St. Jerome’s University
Lois Adamson – Director of Education, Stratford Festival

The Australian Early Medieval Association (AEMA) invites paper proposals for a panel at IMC Leeds 2019:

“Materialities of Antipodal Medievalism: displaced materiality and cultural consumption of the northern Middle Ages for the peripheral medievalist.”

Abstract: Antipodes are periphery to the European core, and recent developments in decolonization and the Global Middle Ages have contributed to understanding the inherent nature ofthe core/periphery dialectic that subsists in medieval studies. Access for antipodal scholars (however defined) to the materialities (the products, the evidence) of medieval cultures of the northern hemisphere is heavily mediated, through hegemonic and competing mechanisms of scholarship (such as the academy) as well as through non-formal means, including popular and social media.

This panel will explore the challenges arising from the study of medieval cultures and societies when the scholar is peripherally located (academically, physically, culturally, theoretically, psychologically), what this might mean for the old hegemonies of medieval studies in Northern Europe and how we even define and do ‘medieval’ into the future. Papers will consider the varied materialities that impinge on antipodal/peripheral scholars, from any relevant discipline, looking at theoretical implications and/or exemplar case studies/analyses of relevant texts/objects/institutions.

Submissions may address one or more of the following sub-themes:

• The nature and impact of skewed or constrained access to the materials of medieval studies due to peripheral/antipodal location.
• Regimes of circulation and consumption and the links, networks, and systems that underpin or undermine material access for the antipodal/peripheral scholar.
• Power, hegemony and post-colonial perspectives on global scholarship.
• The impact of materialities on memory, and how selective, skewed or constrained access to these shape/skew an antipodal/peripheral view of the past.
• The impact of antipodal/peripheral displacement on textual scholarship, considered in itself or in comparison with other types of medieval materialities.

Please send submissions to Roderick McDonald mcdrod@gmail.com by Monday 10 September 2018.