SEMA 2016: Place and Power – Call For Papers

SEMA 2016: Place and Power
Knoxville, Tennessee
October 6-8, 2016

The Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) invites proposals for papers on the theme of “Place and Power” for its 55th meeting, October 6-8, 2016. The meeting is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and University of Tennessee Knoxville and will take place at the Downtown Hilton, Knoxville, Tennessee.

We invite individual submissions and panels from all disciplines exploring any aspect of medieval places and medieval powers as they were conceptualized, experienced, imagined, and embodied. We welcome papers considering, but not limited to:

  • Places as spaces, territories, and/or boundaries
  • Sacred and profane spaces
  • Practices of power
  • Geopolitics and the environment
  • Gendered and sexualized power

As the conference date coincides with the 950th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, we also seek sessions and papers pertaining to the Norman Conquest. We desire a variety of methodological approaches to the theme, including eco-criticism, landscape studies, gender studies, and environmental perspectives. Proposals on other medieval topics or relating “Place and Power” to teaching are also welcome. Several sessions will be devoted to undergraduate research so we encourage submissions from undergraduate students.

Please submit proposals for sessions and for individual papers at http://goo.gl/forms/Xi6JTYSnjk no later than June 1, 2016.

World Shakespeare Conference 2016 – Registration Closes on 1 May

There are now less than two weeks until Congress registration closes on Sunday 1 May 2016. If you, your friends or colleagues are planning to attend and have not yet registered, we would encourage you to do so as soon as possible.

After Sunday 1 May 2016, it will not be possible to register for the Congress.

Congress registration includes:

  • Attendance to both of the Congress Welcome Receptions
  • Entry to Plenary Sessions in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London
  • Entry to Panel Sessions in both Stratford-upon-Avon and London
  • Participation in one seminar in either Stratford-upon-Avon or London (registration required)
  • Participation in workshops (subject to registration, spaces are limited)

Plus:

  • A WSC 2016 welcome pack
  • A space on a coach for travel from Stratford-upon-Avon to London on Thursday 4 August 2016

For further information and to register, please visit: www.wsc2016.info

Please note: delegates are not able to participate in any part of the Congress without registering for the full event.

Perth Symphonic Chorus: Shakespeare 400th Commemoration

Shakespeare 400th Commemoration
Perth Symphonic Chorus

Date: 24 April, 2016
Time: 3:00pm-5:00pm
Venue: Government House Ballroom, 25 St Georges Terrace, Perth, WA
Tickets: Tickets from $63 from www.ticketek.com.au (13 28 49)

Honour Shakespeare in this weekend of the 400th commemoration of his death day, April 23rd 1616, in a concert of beautiful selections of famous Shakespearean readings and choral and orchestral settings of his texts.

From Rutter’s colourful cantata When Icicles Hang through the lush settings of Vaughan Williams’ In Windsor Forest for choir and orchestra as well as his exquisitely ethereal Lark Ascending with soloist Paul Wright, the concert encompasses old texts in a variety of delightful musical forms.

Guest soprano Katja Webb from the W.A. Opera Company further enhances the concert with well-known Shakespeare songs such as Where The Bee Sucks There Suck I and Who Is Sylvia?.

With costumed actors reading excerpts relevant to the music from Shakespeare sonnet collection and famous plays such as Twelfth Night, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, Taming of the Shrew etc. this will be a once in a lifetime experience for us all on this most auspicious weekend.

Download the programme/flyer.

Shakespeare on Screen – Film Festival @ GOMA Brisbane

Shakespeare on Screen
22 Apr 2016 – 25 May 2016 | GOMA | Cinema A
Free

‘Shakespeare on Screen’ celebrates the timeless power of William Shakespeare, the most frequently adapted author in cinema history. Commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Bard’s death, this program is a taste of the breadth and dynamism with which filmmakers have transmuted his plays from stage to screen. It brings together a mixture of traditional adaptations and creative reinventions, along with films that look at both the performance and the performers of the texts themselves. From The Tempest in outer space (Forbidden Planet 1956) to Othello in a London jazz club (All Night Long 1962), Shakespeare’s work onscreen is restricted by neither genre nor setting — only the ingenuity of the adaptation.

For a full list of films and screening dates/times, please visit: https://www.qagoma.qld.gov.au/whats-on/cinema/programs/shakespeare-on-screen

Special Issue of Literature Film Quarterly on Audiences and Adaptation – Call For Papers

In his essay “Adaptation and New Media,” Michael Ryan Moore reflects on the status of adaptation studies in the digital age, stating that with new media “adaptation becomes a strategy of participation. Rather than develop wholly new works, audiences take ownership over existing media, adapting the stories, shows, and films that they most identify with.” In this special issue of Literature Film Quarterly, we seek to explore the role of audiences in adaptation and the manner in which adaptation is a participatory process. How do audiences make meaning out of adapted properties? What is the role of memory or nostalgia in adaptation? How might transmedia storytelling ask audiences to interact with texts in new and exciting ways? How does fan culture complicate existing models of author/encoder and spectator/decoder?

Adaptation studies have long asked useful and engaging questions concerning the textual and authorial dimensions of adaptation processes, but has not as readily addressed the role of audiences in this equation. Nor has the field engaged fully with the rich and innovative work done in reception studies. For this issue of LFQ, we seek to put adaptation studies and reception studies in conversation.

We welcome work that explores the complex relationship between adaptation and audiences from a variety of disciplinary, critical, and historical perspectives. Possible areas of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

  • Amateur, unauthorized, “sweded,” or fan–produced adaptations
  • Cosplay, role-playing, and –Con festivals
  • Fan love and cinephilia for adapted properties
  • Fan hatred or rejection of adapted properties
  • Franchises, multi-platform, and transmedia storytelling
  • Scholar-fandom and autoethnography
  • Adaptation as a mode of reception/fandom
  • Remaking, rebooting, and the “reclaimed” text
  • Stardom and adaptation
  • Adaptation to/from video games and other participatory formats
  • Oppositional reading or queering adaptation
  • Fan or slash fiction; exploration or extension of storyworlds
  • Adaptation and affect, emotion, or sensation
  • Adaptation and nostalgia/memory
  • Paratexts and/as adaptations
  • Merchandising and collecting
  • Advertising and marketing of adaptations
  • Censorship, rating systems, test audiences, and boycotts
  • Kickstarter and crowd-sourced film adaptations
  • Exhibition practices and distribution of adaptations

Please submit a 500-800 word abstract in MLA style to litfilmquart@salisbury.edu by May 1, 2016. Your abstract should outline your working thesis and briefly sketch the theoretical framework(s) within which your essay will be situated. If accepted, full articles of 5,000 to 6,500 words must be submitted by October 3, 2016. The Special Issue will run in October 2017 as part of LFQ’s new online open access format.

Please email LFQ Assistant Editor Andrew Scahill at adscahill@salisbury.edu with any questions.

ANZAMEMS Member News: Chantelle Saville – PATS (2016) Report

Chantelle Saville, Doctoral Candidate, University of Auckland

In the words of Prof. Rodney Thomson: “The more you know about manuscripts before you start looking at them, the more you’ll find.” The Manuscript Book Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar was the perfect opportunity to gain some valuable palaeographical skills, fast. The course covered two intensive days during which Prof. Thomson introduced us to the history and technology of early book production. We learnt how to differentiate between Carolingian Minuscule, Gothic and Cursive hands, as well as important codicological information such as folio numbering systems and the forms of scribal abbreviation.

One of the privileges enjoyed on the course was the chance to examine and handle the manuscripts held at the Fisher Library (University of Sydney), including the glorious Spanish Historical Music Manuscripts. Prof. Margaret Manion provided us with a wonderful discussion of the decoration and illuminations in the collection, bringing the manuscripts to our desks and explaining features in detail. Because part of my doctoral dissertation involves collating and transcribing from four fourteenth-century manuscripts, the instruction provided during the course was hugely useful to me. Most exciting, however, was the opportunity to ask Prof. Thomson for advice regarding a couple of difficulties I had had when dealing with my own primary sources. He was able to answer my questions on the spot!

It was a real delight to speak to colleagues who share my passion for palaeography, and to hear about their research. Certainly, I have come away from the seminar with many fond memories and new friends. I’d like to thank Dr Nicholas Sparks and ANZAMEMS for enabling me to attend The Manuscript Book PATS by providing a bursary for travel and accommodation. With luck, sometime in the near future I will be able to share findings from my manuscript research with others at an ANZAMEMS conference or event.

Celebrating Shakespeare: In Conversation @ National Library of Australia

Celebrating Shakespeare: In Conversation

Date: 23 April, 2016
Time: 2:00-3:00 pm
Venue: Theatre, Lower Ground 1, National Library of Australia,  Parkes Place, Canberra, ACT
Register: Tickets $15 (refreshments included): https://register.eventarc.com/33425/in-conversation-celebrating-shakespeare

To mark Europe Day and the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, University of Melbourne, and Professor Ian Gadd, Bath Spa University, explore how the playright and poet became a global phenomenon.

Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA

Emeritus Professor Ian Donaldson, FBA FRSE FAHA has had an outstanding academic and professional career and is one of Australia’s most energetic and effective champions of the importance and value of the Humanities.

Currently an Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, he has previously been Fellow and Lecturer of Wadham College, Oxford (1962-9), a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge (1995-2005), and has chaired the English Faculties of both these Universities. He was also Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, Edinburgh University, perhaps the most distinguished and certainly the oldest Chair of English Language and Literature in the world. Resigning his Oxford fellowship to return to Australia in 1969, he was Professor of English at the ANU and also Head of Department (1969-91). In the last three years Professor Donaldson has produced two related publications, the culmination of a life-time of scholarly work: his authoritative biography, Ben Jonson: A Life (Oxford: OUP, 2011), and his General Editorship of the Cambridge Edition of The Works of Ben Jonson (Cambridge: CUP, 2012). The Cambridge Works has been praised in the London Review of Books as ‘[a] formidable enterprise’ while the Times Literary Supplement has described it as an ‘outstanding edition’ and an ‘invaluable scholarly resource’. The biography, Ben Jonson: A Life, has also been published to critical acclaim.

Professor Ian Gadd

Ian Gadd is Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University and President of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), the largest scholarly society in the world devoted to the study of the history of the book. His research focuses on the printing and publishing of books in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was the Charlton Hinman Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, in 2011.

Dr Shane McLeod, “Vikings in England, c. 793-950”, UWA Extension Lecture

“Vikings and Churchmen – Vikings in England, c. 793-950”, by Dr Shane McLeod (UTas)
UWA Extension Lecture

Date: Tuesday 3 May, 2016
Time: 6:30-7:30pm
Venue: The University Club, University of Western Australia
Register: Cost $25. For more info, or to register: https://www.extension.uwa.edu.au/course/CCCA003

This illustrated lecture will examine one of the more popular images of the Vikings, that of stridently pagan thugs deliberately targeting and destroying Christian churches. Following a look at the evidence for paganism and attacks on English churches, the lecture will concentrate on the period when Scandinavians started to settle permanently in eastern and northern England.

This period saw Scandinavian leaders reach accommodations with leading churchmen, including the Archbishop of York, and at least some Scandinavians adopted Christianity.

ANZAMEMS / ASCS Conference Panels: Late-Antiquity – Call For Papers

TWO CONFERENCES, Wellington, NEW ZEALAND, Late January-early February, 2017

Late-Antiquity Panel(s) at:

The 38th Meeting of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (ASCS) Meeting (31 January to 3 February 2017)

AND/OR

The 11th Biennial Australian New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) Conference (7-10 February 2017)

Both to be hosted at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

In early 2017, Victoria University of Wellington will be hosting two separate conferences a few days apart, both of which will be hospitable to late antique and early medieval scholars.

Dr. Lisa Bailey (Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History and History/University of Auckland/lk.bailey@auckland.ac.nz) and Dr. Mark Masterson (Senior Lecturer of Classics/Victoria University of Wellington/Mark.Masterson@vuw.ac.nz) would like to organize panels on Late Antiquity (broadly construed) at these conferences. We welcome abstracts for either conference or for both, from scholars in Australasia or beyond.

***NOTE: persons not from Australia or New Zealand do NOT have to be members of ASCS or ANZAMEMS to submit an abstract or to give a paper.

We welcome abstracts of 150-250 words on most any aspect of late antiquity which we will group and then put forward to the programme committee.

We would like abstracts by 15 June, 2016.

We welcome inquiries.

Please send questions and abstracts to Mark Masterson (Mark.Masterson@vuw.ac.nz). Please specify which conference (ASCS or ANZAMEMS) your abstract is for.

See below for guidelines.

GUIDELINES FROM ASCS:

There is no particular theme for this conference (therefore Late-Antiquity broadly construed will do).

Offers of papers, posters, panels and archaeological reports should be accompanied by an abstract of 150-250 words.

The abstract should contain the following information:

  • a clear initial statement of purpose;
  • a brief explanation of the abstract’s relationship to the previous literature on the topic, including some brief citations of, or reference to, any important literature;
  • a summary of the argumentation;
  • some examples to be used in the argumentation (this step could be left out if the word limit is affected);
  • reference to works (maximum of 3) which are seminal to the argument. Short citations (author year pp) should be included in the abstract so that readers are clear on how these works have informed your argument. Full bibliographical details (which do not count in the word limit) of the works cited in the abstract should be supplied at the end of the abstract. If you think reference to other authors is not appropriate or necessary, you must add a brief paragraph to inform the committee as to why (e.g. the topic is completely new or it is the report of a season’s excavations).

The abstract should make it clear that the paper is suitable for oral presentation within the time limit (maximum time 20 minutes = less than 3000 words).

GUIDELINES FROM ANZAMEMS:

Our theme for ANZAMEMS 2017 is mobility and exchange. We encourage proposals for papers or panels addressing any aspect of this theme, including (but not limited to):

  • social, cultural, and intellectual exchange
  • the circulation of texts, ideas, and people
  • commercial and mercantile exchange
  • legal interchange
  • transport and transportation
  • rural and urban mobilities
  • pilgrimage, exploration, and migration
  • transglobal and trans-temporal medievalisms and early modernisms

PAPER PROPOSALS SHOULD INCLUDE:

  • Paper title
  • Abstract (up to 150 words)
  • The name, affiliation, and email address of the presenter
  • An indication of AV requirements

Visiting Assistant Professor of English (English Renaissance) @ Saint Joseph’s University – Call For Applications

Visiting Assistant Professor of English (English Renaissance)
Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia, PA
Faculty – Liberal Arts – English and Literature

Application Due: 04/25/2016

Pending budgetary approval, the English department is seeking to fill a one-year term appointment for a visiting professor of English to teach courses in Shakespeare and renaissance literature, introductory literature courses and/or first-year composition. The departmental load for visiting professors is 4/4 and may include a course or courses in the evening program.

Duties and Responsibilities (Essential Duties):
Teaching four courses per semester. Holding regularly scheduled office hours. Attending departmental pedagogy meetings several times yearly.

Minimum Qualifications (Education/Training and Experience Required):
M.A. in English (would hold the title of Visiting Instructor) and an established record of teaching.

Preferred Qualifications:
Ph.D. in English (would hold the title of Visiting Assistant Professor).

Saint Joseph’s University is a private, Catholic, Jesuit institution and expects members of its community to be knowledgeable about its mission and to make a positive contribution to that mission. Saint Joseph’s University is an equal opportunity employer that seeks to recruit, develop and retain a talented and diverse workforce.

For full information and to apply, please visit: https://jobs.sju.edu/postings/13082