The Tragical History of Margaret of Anjou: A Dramatised Reading @ The University of Western Australia

The Tragical History of Margaret of Anjou: A Dramatised Reading

Date: Thursday 18 February, 2016
Time: 1–2pm
Venue: Callaway Music Auditorium, The University of Western Australia
Contact: Bob White (bob.white@uwa.edu.au)

Free and open to the public. No ticket required

To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, performance historian Liz Schafer and dramaturg Philippa Kelly will oversee the Australian premiere performance of Margaret of Anjou by William Shakespeare.

After lying undiscovered for over four centuries, Shakespeare’s most feminist play, Margaret of Anjou, will receive a public, dramatised reading at UWA’s Callaway Music Auditorium. As Margaret matures from feisty princess to scheming queen, from cold-blooded killer to grief-stricken mother, from shameless adulteress to cursing crone, the hapless men who surround her are unable to withstand the fury of her ‘tiger’s heart, wrapped in a woman’s hide’.

Historian Susan Broomhall will speak briefly about the historical figure of Margaret, and the performance will be followed by audience discussion.

This is a reading of the ‘bad’ (short) quarto of Margaret of Anjou.

The Idea of a Life, 1500-1700 – Call For Papers

The Idea of a Life, 1500-1700
Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University
MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College
Friday 17 June, 2016

‘I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am’
— Othello, Act 5, Scene 2

What was a life in early modern England and Europe? What patterns and templates were used to sort, sift, organise and represent experience? How were models for a life produced and reworked? How was a life evaluated, in terms of various sorts of good — moral, spiritual, civic, familial, economic? What were the moments, and what were the processes, by which a representation of a life was circulated? Are Burckhardtian models of the birth of Renaissance individuality and depth still useful to describe early modern culture, or do we need new paradigms? If much recent early modern work has been organised around ideas of networks, coteries and communities, how has the idea of a life been revised?

If autobiography is often seen as a nineteenth-century form, what kind of pre-history does it experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How has the turn to the archive reformed our sense of early modern lives? For scholars today, what is the status of biography as a way of organising analysis of the period?

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University invites proposals for 20-minute papers on topics that engage with the idea of a life, 1500-1700, from any disciplinary perspective. Papers are welcome on English or European materials, and from all disciplinary perspectives.

Papers might include (but are not limited to) topics such as:

  • Life and the archive: inclusions, exclusions, mediations
  • Memorialization: modes of remembering a life
  • Recording lives: note-taking, diary keeping, commonplace books, information management
  • Classical models of a life
  • Saints lives and martyrologies
  • Public and private lives: honour, service, love, family
  • Typology and reiterated lives
  • Interiority and inwardness
  • Experimental predestinarianism, and the search for signs of grace
  • Conduct books
  • Fulfilment, contentment, happiness
  • Posthumous lives, reputation, honour, influence
  • Forms of autobiography and experiments in life-writing
  • Lives of artists
  • Exemplary lives
  • The good life
  • The role of biography in early modern studies
  • Editing lives and letters
  • The stages of life: youth and age.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a brief (one-page) CV to Dr Adam Smyth
(adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 25 April, 2016.

Translators and Printers in Renaissance Europe: Framing Identity and Agency – Call For Papers

Translators and Printers in Renaissance Europe: Framing Identity and Agency
IMLR, University of London
29–30 September, 2016

The European Renaissance witnessed a new significance accorded to the tasks of textual translation, and the printing and dissemination of the resultant works—whether religious tracts, literary or historical works, or popular manuals of instruction. As a consequence, the same period saw a dramatic increase in the importance, even prestige claimed by translators, both women and men, for their skills.

Translators and printers made these claims in frontispieces, prefaces, letters of dedication, and the like. In their direct appeal to the reader, such framing devices yield rich information about the material culture of sixteenth-century books, and the scope of translators’ endeavours.

This international conference explores the self-presentational strategies of sixteenth-century European translators and printers, and the tensions and ambiguities therein. Through analysis of paratextual material, this two-day event aims to illuminate the self-views of sixteenth-century translators, and their own accounts of their role as authoritative agents of cultural exchange, national and transnational acculturation.

Keynotes:

  • Guyda Armstrong (University of Manchester): Materiality, agency, and the book-object in early modern printed translations
  • Douglas Biow (University of Texas at Austin): Vasari’s Professions
  • A. E. B. Coldiron (Florida State University): Presenting the Translator: Visibility and the author-function(s) in early modern translators’ portraits

You are invited to submit a paper title, an abstract of 150 words, 3 keywords, and a 300 word curriculum vitae directly to translatorsrenaissance@gmail.com before the 31 March, 2016. The outcome of the submission will be communicated before the 15 April, 2016 and the conference programme will be announced shortly afterwards. Please note that papers should not be longer than 20 minutes.

Registration

More details on the conference and on how to register will soon be posted on: http://events.sas.ac.uk/imlr/events/view/19987/Translators+and+Printers+in+Renaissance+Europe.+Framing+Identity+and+Agency.

Please note that registration will be £25 (regular) or £15 (students).

Pop-up Globe – Opening February 2016 in Auckland

Pop-up Globe, a full-scale temporary working replica of the second Globe Theatre, will be appearing in Auckland in February 2016:

” In 2016, the world marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. To mark this important anniversary we’re building Pop-up Globe, a full-scale temporary working replica of the second Globe Theatre, and filling it with a season of some of his best known plays. Pop-up Globe will literally ‘pop up’ in a central Auckland location, be amazing, then disappear.”

For full details, please visit: http://www.popupglobe.co.nz

University of Roehampton: Research Fellow, English & Creative Writing – Call For Applications

University of Roehampton: Research Fellow, English & Creative Writing

Location: London
Salary: £34,172 to £37,008 inclusive of London Weighting Allowance, Pro Rata
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary
Closes: 22nd February 2016
Job Ref: RU00348

We are looking for a Research Fellow in English & Creative Writing to undertake a significant piece of research during the tenure of an award in collaboration with the lead researcher. “Before Shakespeare: The Beginning of London Commercial Theatre” is a two-year research project funded by the AHRC on the first thirty years of the Elizabethan playhouses (c 1565-95). There will be significant archival work, aiming to produce a census of what we know about this period of theatre history and how we know it. There will also be administrative support relating to a number of practice and performance based experiments with Dolphin’s Back and Shakespeare’s Globe. A successful collaboration will result in named co-authorship of an article, essay collection and monograph.

We are looking for applications from candidates with a complementary academic background. Candidates should be highly motivated and willing and able to engage with this collaboration.

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AMW957/research-fellow-english-and-creative-writing.

The closing date for completed applications is: 22 February, 2016.

ANZAMEMS Conference Panel: Mobility and Exchange in Medieval and Early Modern Afterlives – Call For Papers

A multicultural and global world has triggered a widespread and increasing fascination with all aspects and processes related to mobility and exchange in the humanities and social sciences. Like many disciplines in the humanities, medieval and early modern studies is often challenged about its relevance in the contemporary world. One way to respond to these concerns is to engage not just with the historic medieval and early modern past but also with the various medievalisms and early modernisms in contemporary popular culture.

Proposals are invited for papers for a panel engaging with ideas of mobility and exchange in medieval and early modern afterlives in television and cinema, children’s and young adult literature, comic books and graphic novels, computer gaming, new media and fandom, and other popular contemporary appropriations and re-imaginings.

The panel will convene at the ANZAMEMS Eleventh Biennial Conference at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, on the 7-10 February, 2017.

Potential topics for papers include but are not limited to:

  • Cross-Cultural and/or Inter-Cultural Mobilities and Exchange
  • Transnational Mobilities: Migration, Diaspora, Exile, and Homecomings
  • Uses of Media and Digital Technology
  • Exchange/Mobility and the Body
  • Mobility and Place: Situatedness, Belonging, and Home
  • Gender-, Race- and Class-Inflected Mobilities and Exchange
  • Issues of Translation and Adaptation: Semiotic Mobility and Exchange
  • Exchange/Mobility and Performance
  • Resistance to Exchange/Mobility

If you would like to contribute a paper to this panel, please send the following to marina.gerzic@uwa.edu.au by 5 August, 2016 with ‘MedEM Afterlives’ in the subject line:

  1. Paper title
  2. Abstract (up to 150 words)
  3. Your name, affiliation, and email address
  4. An indication of AV requirements

Romantic Climates Symposium – Call For Papers

Romantic Climates Symposium
Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
10 March, 2016

Keynote speaker: Nikki Hessell, Victoria University of Wellington.

The bicentenary of the ‘Year without a Summer’ is our vantage point from which to reconsider both how the people we call the Romantics responded to the climates of their day – whether political or meteorological – and what the climate for Romantic studies might look like in 2016 and beyond.

This one-day symposium will feature short papers on such topics as:

  • scientific and/or poetic responses to weather
  • Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy
  • climate change and apocalyptic thinking
  • Imperial and/or exotic climates
  • political weather
  • artistic and poetic responses to the climate of 1816

Ideally this will be an occasion for discussion as well as hearing new research. If you’d like to give a paper, please send a title by 20 February, 2016 to Olivia Murphy: olivia.murphy@sydney.edu.au

Shakespeare Documented – Now Online

Shakespeare Documented is the largest and most authoritative collection of primary-source materials documenting the life of William Shakespeare (1564-1616), bringing together all known manuscript and print references to Shakespeare, his works, and additional references to his family, in his lifetime and shortly thereafter. Nearly 500 references, found in roughly 400 print and manuscript documents, provide a rich portrait of Shakespeare as a professional playwright, actor, poet, business man, and family man who lived in both London and Stratford-upon-Avon. These documents trace Shakespeare’s path to becoming a household name, from the earliest reference to his father in Stratford-upon-Avon, a bustling market town in Warwickshire, in 1552, to the publication of his collected plays, now known as the “First Folio,” in 1623, to the earliest gossipy references to Shakespeare in the following decades.

On this site you will find images, descriptions, and transcriptions of:

  • 103 manuscripts that refer to William Shakespeare by name in his lifetime (spelled in many different ways, which was typical of the period), including four manuscripts signed by him, and one letter addressed to him
  • 89 printed books and manuscripts from Shakespeare’s lifetime that mention or quote his plays or poems, or that refer to him directly or indirectly as a writer
  • 34 Stationers’ Register entries for Shakespeare’s plays and poems, up to and including the First Folio (1623), five of which name him as author
  • 84 printed editions of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, up to and including the First Folio (1623), 62 of which include his name on the title-page or dedicatory leaf
  • More than 100 documents that refer to other members of Shakespeare’s family, including references to Shakespeare’s coat of arms

The Shakespeare Documented website can be found at: http://www.shakespearedocumented.org.

“Mobility and Exchange”: ANZAMEMS 11th Biennial Conference @ Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 7-10 February 2017

We invite delegates from around the world to join us for the 11th biennial ANZAMEMS conference at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, 7-10 February 2017.

The conference theme is “Mobility and Exchange” and we invite papers that engage with this theme from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines. For full details including the Call for Papers, please visit the conference website: https://anzamems2017.wordpress.com.

For social media users, the conference hashtag will be #ANZ17.

The Beginning of the Book – Call For Papers

The Beginning of the Book
University of Bristol
18 March, 2016

The books cluster is pleased to announce a call for papers for a one-day conference at the University of Bristol on 18 March. After the success of ‘Judging Books by their Covers‘ we will be thinking about what happens when we open the cover and contemplate ‘The Beginning of the Book‘.

When we open a book it is likely that we will have to leaf through several pages before arriving at the authorial text – what we are conditioned to think of as the ‘text proper’. How often do we stop to read and reflect on the preliminary matter which occupies the space between the cover and the text we have opened the book to read? What kind of material is included in the frontmatter, and what purpose does it serve? How does the inclusion of paratextual support matter reflect developments in the evolution of the codex and how much does it lead developments in book design and our conception of literary history?

This one-day conference aims to bring together scholars working within different historical periods (from the beginnings of the codex to the present) and with different languages and genres in order to explore continuities and variance in the development of the codex, focusing on the preliminary pages which make up a book object. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • the ordering and placement of preliminary paratexts
  • the authorship of prefatory paratexts
  • the contribution made by book design to distinctions between prefatory paratext and the main body of the text
  • the role and function of prefatory paratexts in the sequence of a book’s manufacture
  • the relationship between frontmatter and backmatter
  • the conceptual significance of beginnings, openings, introductions etc.
  • the relationship between editorial design and reading practice

Please send proposals for 20-minute papers of no more than 300 words to Rhiannon Daniels (r.j.daniels@bristol.ac.uk) and Jennifer Batt (jennifer.batt@bristol.ac.uk) by Monday 15 February.