49th Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. Appropriating Shakespearean Romance in Indian Cinema
Thea Buckley (Queen’s University Belfast)
Rosa Maria Garcia-Periago (Queen’s University Belfast)
This seminar examines the manifold representations of Shakespearean love in Indian screen adaptations, for TV or Bollywood, regional, parallel or diaspora cinemas. It welcomes a variety of approaches and papers that examine how local cultures or patriarchally arranged marriages affect India’s global representations of Shakespearean love. Ultimately, the seminar aims to decenter the current shorthand of Shakespearean love as Anglocentric romance, by presenting perspectives from the Global South.
02. Asexual Reading
Simone Chess (Wayne State University)
Catherine R. Clifford (Graceland University)
This seminar invites work on “asexual reading,” theorizing or modeling interpretive practices informed by the methods of asexuality studies. What does it mean to read asexually, and what might an asexual methodology look like in early modern literary studies? Topics might include chastity and celibacy as limit cases for asexuality studies; asexual readings of characters; performative asexualities; aversion/repulsion; aromanticism; constructions and maintenences of allosexuality.
03. Boundaries of Violence
Matthew C. Carter (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Samantha D. Dressel (Chapman University)
What boundaries are placed on violence, and when does violence reign unchecked? This seminar will interrogate the boundaries of violence articulated and violated on both stage and page in the Renaissance. We consider violence broadly, looking at enacted, threatened, imagined, and stifled violence. Papers may interrogate all the ways violence can have boundaries placed on it, removed from it, or otherwise transgressed or enforced. This seminar encourages participants to bring a range of criticism.
04. Child’s Play
Gemma A. Miller (King’s College London)
Bethany M. Packard (Transylvania University)
In early modern England “play” encompassed recreations ranging from children’s games, to sports, to drama. In light of play’s myriad forms, what can approaching children as players reveal about how period drama depicted, questioned, and constructed childhood as a social role? Inviting essays on intersections of child studies and play from perspectives including game and play theory, material culture, historicism, Shakespearean child characters, children’s companies, and performance studies.
05. Class and Identity in Shakespeare
Ronda Arab (Simon Fraser University)
Laurie Ellinghausen (University of Missouri, Kansas City)
This seminar explores class as intersectional identity, welcoming work on dramatic and non-dramatic genres, as well as performance contexts. How did other social categories such race, religion, gender, geography, age, or cultural capital complicate, challenge, or bolster conventional ideologies of blood, wealth, and occupation? How did other social categories impact class tensions and class mobility? How might feminist or queer methodologies help us understand intersectionalities of class?
06. Early Modern English Women Writers and the Arts of Language: Thinking Rhetorically with Shakespeare
Elizabeth Ann Mackay (University of Dayton)
This seminar considers early modern women’s relationships to rhetoric, formal rhetorical training, and rhetorical culture. Papers produced for this seminar will investigate women’s training in and employment of rhetorics as fundamental to their engagements in England’s vernacular rhetorical culture. In thinking about women’s writing as rhetorical, what historical possibilities, influences, interventions, and implications were particular to both canonical and non-canonical women writers?
07. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Critical Race Studies
Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University)
Michelle M. Dowd (University of Alabama)
This seminar examines early modern women’s writing through the lenses of Black feminism and critical race studies. Papers should explore works by early modern women as they engage with discourses of race. How has the critical history of the field been shaped by white feminism? How might the field be transformed by intersectional feminism? How can the archive of women’s writing open up new perspectives on gender, race, and the intersection of the two?
08. Eco-Migration: Shakespeare and the Contemporary Novel
Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama)
Eco-migration is disruptive, dangerous. Novelists are using Shakespeare to confront its meaning, among them Mark Haddon (The Porpoise), Ali Smith (Spring), Preti Taneja (We That Are Young), Margaret Atwood (Hagseed), and Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven). What does Shakespeare offer the novelists? What do the novelists offer us? I invite papers on any of these works that engage migration’s relationship to economic and environmental stress, either today or in-period.
09. Editing Early-Modern Women’s Writing: Approaches, Challenges, and Responsibilities
Claire Bowditch (Loughborough University)
Elaine Hobby (Loughborough University)
This seminar examines the cultures and fascinations of scholarly editing of early-modern women’s writing across English, Drama, and Digital and Medical Humanities. It provides an opportunity to consider the peculiar challenges faced by modern editors of early-women’s work. Participants will include but not be limited to: current and recent editors of early women’s writing, and those planning such an undertaking, with the aim of developing new interpretations through sharing approaches.
10. Embodying Differences in Global Shakespearean Performance
Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
Elizabeth Pentland (York University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)
The ethics of embodied difference intersect with global frames for filming and performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability put pressure on artists’ and audiences’ claims about ethical and political gains of global Shakespeare? This seminar invites contributions that examine identity politics in the production and global reception of adaptations.
11. English Drama and the Early Modern Atlantic
Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College)
How does drama register the emergence of new contact zones and colonial sites across the early modern Atlantic? This seminar welcomes papers that offer fresh perspectives on this question, including efforts to situate drama within the intersecting histories of racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism, to trace drama’s engagement with the ecological or embodied consequences of contact, to foreground Indigenous perspectives and experience, or to consider noncanonical or lost plays.
12. Entertainers and Institutions
Peter H. Greenfield (University of Houston-Downtown)
Paul Whitfield White (Purdue University)
This seminar aims to explore instances of reciprocity between the makers of theater and related forms of entertainment with the institutions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. Papers may investigate how entertainers negotiated those relationships, how institutions might support the entertainers’ activities, how institutions could restrict those activities, and to what extent the theater itself became an institution that shaped entertainers’ lives and activities.
13. Fields, Spaces, Parks and Gardens: Shakespearean Drama and Entertainment Outdoors
Eva Griffith (London, UK)
The original Globe and its reconstruction; Central and Regent’s Park—entertainment both in Shakespeare’s day and ours has existed in open spaces. Will Kemp’s jig to Norwich was ambitiously outdoors, and other early modern pastimes connected to playing, such as bowling, wrestling, fencing and fireworks showed the will to enjoy the outside. What does the open air donate to entertainment, and what are the pleasures and concerns involving it, both in Shakespeare’s day and our own?
14. “Foreign” Places in Familiar Spaces
Maria Shmygol (University of Leeds)
This seminar invites reflection on how “foreign” settings functioned on the stage, in civic pageantry, and in court masques. What types of material and cognitive strategies were used to “set the scene” and stage geographic difference? How do early modern theories of racial difference relate to geographic “foreignness”? How were “familiar” sites of performance and local knowledge invoked self-consciously to mediate geographical alterity in drama from the 1570s to the Restoration?
15. The Friend Comes of Age
Will Tosh (Shakespeare’s Globe)
2021 sees the eighteenth anniversary of the posthumous publication of The Friend, and twenty years since the death of its author, Alan Bray. This seminar asks us to think about the impact of Bray’s contribution to queer Shakespeare scholarship. Papers might re-investigate the intersection of same-sex friendship, eroticism and sexuality in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and I encourage contributors to address some of the acknowledged lacunae in his Bray’s influential framework.
16. Global Shakespeare, Performance as Research, and the Labor of Decolonization
Susan Bennett (University of Calgary)
Kim Solga (University of Western Ontario)
In her study of Shakespeare in the Global South, Sandra Young aims “to test some of the vocabulary with which Shakespeare scholars have sought to engage a diverse and unequal world […] through the concepts of the creolization, indigenization, localization and Africanization of Shakespeare” (2). Our seminar asks what Performance as Research (PaR) methodologies can bring to this project and how PaR might better represent and/or challenge Shakespeare in contemporary political contexts?
17. Histories of the Early Modern Digital/Material Book
Erin A. McCarthy (University of Newcastle)
This seminar considers how digital technology, broadly defined, mediates our understanding of early modern printed books, manuscripts, and objects. How can technology increase access to early modern artifacts? What shortcomings and risks does it pose? What materials are not available digitally and why? How does digitization inform what is studied, taught, and performed? Theoretical perspectives and case studies are welcome, as are papers reflecting on gaps, omissions, and distortions.
18. Inclusive Shakespeare
Sheila T. Cavanagh (Emory University)
Sonya Freeman Loftis (Morehouse College)
What does it mean to make the use and expression of Shakespeare inclusive of diverse communities and minority identities? This seminar considers inclusive Shakespeares, broadly construed: inclusion for people with disabilities; inclusion for first-generation students; pedagogy that uses universal design; performances that engage minority communities. Papers will focus on the discoveries that are made when scholars, teachers, and directors work to create inclusive texts, classrooms, and theaters.
19. Inessential Shakespeare
Sarah Neville (Ohio State University)
Selections from Collected Works editions of Shakespeare are often marketed in limited form as “essential,” “compact,” or “necessary” volumes. This seminar considers the what we lose by indirectly categorizing some plays as “unnecessary.” Papers may explore theoretical issues in cultural hierarchies, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical development, canonical clashes between high and low culture, genre snobbery, and/or the influence of critical reception on pedagogy.
20. The Kinky Renaissance
Joseph Gamble (University of Toledo)
Gillian Knoll (Western Kentucky University)
Were there kinky early moderns? This seminar aims to leverage the sexual nuances of contemporary kink culture to shift the ground of early modern queer studies. Questions participants might pursue include: how might contemporary kink and BDSM practices, such as cuckoldry, “race play,” name calling, “play partners,” edging, and scene setting, offer new insights into early modern drama? Do contemporary kink identities—e.g. brat, spanko, switch, daddy, furry—have early modern parallels?
21. Marvel-ous Shakespeares
Jessica McCall (Delaware Valley University)
Marvel-ous Shakespeares will consider the intersections of Shakespeare and modern superhero media. Participants might consider: representations of power in the Early Modern period that overlap, mirror, echo or in some way speak to the issues of power present in superhero culture; new or revised pedagogies of Shakespeare using superheroes as a key component; the ways Shakespearean actors and directors intentionally bring Shakespeare into superheroes and how that might drive critical conversation.
22. Medieval and Early Modern Digital Humanities: Premodern Critical Race and Methodology
Dorothy K. Kim (Brandeis University)
This seminar resituates critical digital humanities (i.e. see American Quarterly) in discussion with premodern critical race studies discussed in Margo Hendrick’s Race Before Race talk. This seminar considers the black feminist work from the archive of slavery—Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, Jessica Marie Johnson—to address the issues of methodology in relation to “Mark Up Bodies.” What are the methodological issues in marking race in medieval/early modern critical DH projects.
23. New Approaches to Henry V
Emma K. Atwood (University of Montevallo)
Jennifer Feather (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
This seminar invites papers that consider new approaches to Shakespeare’s Henry V. The play has seen popular resurgence, from The King (2019) and the RSC touring simulcast (2015) to recent books on nationalism. Why Henry V? Why now? Possible themes may include (but are not limited to) nation, race, language, leadership, historiography, masculinity, class, affect, performance, pedagogy. Papers that address Henry V in light of current cultural and political conversations are particularly welcome.
24. New Directions for Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Studies
James T. Newlin (Case Western Reserve University)
James W. Stone (American University)
This seminar invites papers that will inaugurate a renewed dialogue between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis. We welcome projects that draw upon any variant of psychoanalytic theory to examine a variety of approaches and topics, including adaptation, performance, formal analysis, pedagogy, and treatments of racial, gender, and sexual identity. Papers may rethink familiar texts by Freud and other major psychoanalytic theorists, or they may consider the work of underexamined thinkers.
25. Playing Shakespeare
Vernon G. Dickson (Florida International University)
Michael Lutz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
This seminar explores play, games, and gaming related to Shakespeare. By joining Shakespeare and game studies, we aim to investigate dramatic and literary notions of play, while also examining early modern material used in the (re)production of games and play, including where and how games appear in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry; what games were known in his period and what significance they held; or what Shakespearean concerns appear in today’s ludic array of analog and digital games.
26. The Politics of Bibliography, Textual Editing, and Book History
Brandi K. Adams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
While textual editing, bibliography, and book history are sometimes seen as technical or “objective,” they are in fact rife with politics. How do these fields intersect with early modern and/or modern structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationalism and colonialism, indigeneity, or other political arenas? We invite papers on all aspects of the politics of editing, glossing, bibliographic analysis, librarianship, bookselling and collecting, and the materiality of the text.
27. Queer/Race/Global: Early Modern Crossings
Bernadette Andrea (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania)
This seminar aims to bring together scholars of race, sexuality, and transcultural studies to explore early modern intersections of sexuality, gender, and race from a global critical lens. We welcome diverse methodologies and approaches that deploy “race” and “queer” as analytical tools, that advance comparative or contrapuntal perspectives, and that engage noneurocentric texts and contexts to complicate gender binaries, racialized hierarchies, and sexualized identities on the stage and page.
28. Race-ing and Queering Queens
Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Ohio State University)
This seminar invites scholars of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics to investigate early modern “Queens.” By putting early modern representations of “race,” “queer,” and “queen” in conversation with one another, we believe that these concepts will not only exert productive pressure on each other, but create new meanings, intersections, and frameworks. We welcome diverse methodologies and approaches that complicate power dynamics, racialized hierarchies, and sexualized identities.
29. Reading Lists
Heidi Craig (Texas A&M University)
Adam G. Hooks (University of Iowa)
Book history embraces the list as object of study and scholarly practice. As a genre it provides the foundation for critical and historicist scholarship; as a literary form, lists disrupt, defer, and delight in plentitude. This seminar considers lists within or about early modern texts, both pragmatic and poetical. Participants are invited to consider how the creation, function, and interpretation of lists allows us to see the complementary uses of the form within book history and poetics.
30. Religion, Race and Bad Humour in Early Modern Drama
Kimberly A. Coles (University of Maryland)
This seminar explores how religion might be a product of humoral composition. Moralists and physicians from mid-sixteenth century resorted to Galen as a model for understanding the body as a contact point between the immaterial soul and the physical world. How might humoral theory align with early modern theories of race and religion? How does religious difference manifest as physical difference? How do representations of race on the English stage score this interaction of body and soul?
31. Revisiting Orientalism
Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College)
Nedda Mehdizadeh (University of California, Los Angeles)
For this seminar, we argue that Edward Said’s Orientalism continues to be relevant to early modern transnational studies, especially in our current political moment. We seek papers offering a nuanced and capacious formulation of cultural contact within a dialogic context, and welcome critical studies that trouble the east/west binary, examine English and global texts, interrogate representations of race, ethnicity, and religion, or provide theoretically informed pedagogical interventions.
32. Satire/Satyre
Kristen A. Bennett (Framingham State University)
Earliest English uses of “satire” simultaneously invoke Juvenalian-style censorship and the half-human satyr, a paradox of Dionysian decadence, bestiality, and sagacity. This seminar embraces satire’s hybrid forms across classical, medieval, and early modern English contexts, inviting essays and/or digital research approaches/projects that put pressure on prevailing paradigms of class, race, gender, and globalism. How does satire “work” as a mode of social and political reform–or not?
33. Science without Shakespeare
Liza Blake (University of Toronto)
Whitney Sperrazza (Rochester Institute of Technology)
What does it mean to think about science without Shakespeare? We invite papers that explore early modern literature and science, with particular attention to women’s writing, critical race studies, and global literatures. How do such frameworks expand our archive for what “counts” as the history of science? What new early modern modes of knowing does this expanded archive reveal? We also welcome participants to think critically about Shakespeare’s influence on the field and its long-term effects.
34. Shakespeare and Comics
Jim Casey (Arcadia University)
Brandon Christopher (University of Winnipeg)
This seminar welcomes papers that explore the intersection of Shakespeare and comics, from Classics Illustrated to Kill Shakespeare and beyond. We welcome essays on Shakespeare and comics, graphic novels, Manga, comic strips, co-mix theory, adaptation, allusion, authority, intermediality, pedagogy, high/low culture, or any other related topic.
35. Shakespeare and immersion
Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
This seminar invites papers exploring what it means to be immersed in Shakespeare. From immersive theater practice, to VR and mixed reality technologies, to the rise of fan and gaming communities, to practice-based research and pedagogy, to the revival of deep, close reading, what kinds of attention are involved in enveloping oneself in Shakespeare, and what are their benefits and limitations? Critiques of immersion as a concept, as well as work on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, are also welcome.
36. Shakespeare and Intersectionality in Performance and Adaptation
Ariane M. Balizet (Texas Christian University)
Is an intersectional Shakespeare possible in the public sphere? Shakespeare’s most public forms too often reiterate oppressive narratives of gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class privilege and ableist discourses of the body politic presented as “universal” values. This seminar imagines the role Shakespeare might play in illuminating structures of inequality in pedagogy and performance and considers the degree to which Shakespeare is fundamental to those oppressive structures.
37. Shakespeare and the Canon: New Directions
Faith D. Acker (Kennedyville, MD)
Douglas I. Clark (University of Manchester)
Shakespeare’s work has indelibly shaped what we research and how research is performed in early modern literary studies, but what archives, critical approaches, and literary genres have been occluded by Shakespeare’s centrality in the canon? This seminar invites discussion about the future of the discipline and the role that the study of Shakespeare should play in it, inviting theoretical essays, practical applications, and pedagogical approaches that address these issues.
38. Shakespeare and the Director
Stuart Hampton-Reeves (University of Warwick)
This seminar aims to explore the role of the director in shaping and defining modern Shakespearean performance. We will put critical pressure on both the concept and the practice of directing, drawing inspiration from experimental and non-Western theatre as well as revisiting the work of major directors. We will consider performance practices which disrupt or even dispense with the director and discuss the future of the director.
39. Shakespeare and the Elements
Katherine B. Attie (Towson University)
This seminar considers the four elements–fire, air, water, and earth–in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers might discuss a single element or a combination thereof; they might offer focused close readings or explore broader connections such as the four elements in relation to the four humors. The seminar welcomes a range of interests and critical perspectives, including the history of scientific thought, old and new materialisms, feminism and gender, and ecocriticism.
40. Shakespeare and Translation beyond the Global
Leticia C. García (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University)
This seminar explores new approaches to the processes and politics of translation in relation to Shakespeare. Who translates Shakespeare? For whom, how, and to what ends? We invite papers that theorize the embodied, performative, intersemiotic, and multimodal nature of translation in ways that go beyond the macroscopic idea of the “global” and are rooted in particular methodologies of translation studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
41. Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies: What’s Shakespeare to Them, or They to Shakespeare
Amrita Dhar (Ohio State University)
Amrita Sen (University of Calcutta)
This seminar explores the stakes of performing, teaching and reading Shakespeare in erstwhile colonial spaces. Given recent critical work on the internal colonies of “post”colonial geographies, how does Shakespeare remain relevant in engaging questions of race, caste, gender, indigeneity and multilingualism? What are the affordances of studying Shakespeare in neocolonial contexts? How can Shakespeare help articulate positions of resistance or justice against new mechanisms of disenfranchisement?
42. Shakespeare(s) in the Public Market
Timothy Francisco (Youngstown State University)
A crucial future for Shakespeare studies is public Shakespeare(s), defined as accessible criticism, pedagogies of social justice, or community work. This turn occurs as our relationship to capital has never been more stark: Precarity, public skepticism, and Neoliberalism have shaped the role, politics, and methods of literary study, and this seminar explores public work in the context of the market that has shaped it, to position such work within and beyond the academy.
43. Shakespeare, Archives and Performing Memory
Sally Barnden (King’s College London)
How does memory intersect with archival material in writing about Shakespeare performance? This seminar considers the impacts of race, gender, sexuality and class on performance archives. It asks what is remembered and forgotten by performance archives, and how those memories and omissions carry into future performances. It also welcomes responses to digitisation of performances and archives, and reflections on what our relationship to past performance might look like in the future.
44. Shakespeare’s “Other Disability Plays”
Lenora Bellee Jones-Pierce (Middle Tennessee State University)
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (Luther College)
This seminar will expand discussions of dis/ability beyond a small recurring group of plays and explore ideologies of dis/ability at work in drama not explicitly “about” disability. We invite analysis of how dis/ability was shaped by representations of able-bodiedness, including dis/ability motifs and metaphors, disabled poetics, and disabled aesthetics. Possible topics include: health, beauty, youth, sanity, fertility, wit, and wholeness, as well as performance choices about dis/ability.
45. Shakespearean Biofiction on the Stage and Screen
Ronan Hatfull (University of Warwick)
Edel Semple (University College Cork)
This seminar invites papers on Shakespearean biofiction on the stage and screen in any period, with a focus on adaptations and appropriations which critique and satirise his work and legacy. Topics may include Shakespearean biofiction and: stage versus screen media; contemporary adaptation; its historical origins; its social, cultural, or political uses; his characters, family, and associates; gender and sexuality; discourses of nationality; cultural capital; iconography; the literary biopic.
46. The Spanish Tragedy and Its Afterlives
Timothy A. Turner (University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee)
The Spanish Tragedy—frequently revived, often imitated, occasionally mocked, eventually expanded—is nearly unrivaled in its hold on Shakespeare and his peers. This seminar invites papers from diverse critical approaches on all aspects of the play and its long influence. What new connections are to be found among Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others? What light has work in attribution studies shed on the importance of the play? What direction will editorial work on it take in the coming decades?
47. Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Liz Fox (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
This seminar examines the deployment of Shakespeare in prison classrooms and programs to envision best practices for premodern pedagogy in a space of incarceration. Participants might: investigate the motivations and ambitions of bringing Shakespeare into prison; consider shifts in investments and approaches across men’s and women’s facilities; identify how political and institutional (educational and correctional) demands and limitations shape how and why we teach Shakespeare in prisons.
48. Women’s Marginalia in English Books, 1500-1800
Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo)
Rosalind L. Smith (University of Newcastle)
Early modern womenʼs marginalia form an exciting new, and growing, corpus of women’s writing. What do they tell us about the functions of books, writing, and reading for women in early modern society? Are class and whiteness inevitably a hard boundary in our study of marginalia, especially by women? Is marginalia a genre or form? In what sense are feminist theories of use in relation to this material? What is the impact of digital archiving on our understanding of the field?
49. Wonder Books
Rob Conkie (La Trobe University)
Jennifer A. Low (Florida Atlantic University)
This seminar focuses on the material and visual properties of books and their power to inspire wonder. Wonder books might include artists’ books, moveable books, and fabulously illuminated books. We invite discussion, theorization, comparison, and ekphrasis of these and other wondrous (Shakespeare-related, however distantly) books. Participants may pursue interests in aesthetics, cognition, pedagogies, or other approaches. We also invite the creation of wonder books, or fragments thereof.
WORKSHOPS
50. The Activist Shakespearean on the University Campus
Andrea M. Crow (Boston College)
This workshop brings together college instructors who want to expand their capacities to pursue their activist commitments at their workplaces. Participants will compose and exchange case studies, sharing strategies for making institutions of higher education more just for workers, students, and the communities surrounding them. The range of topics will vary, but questions to consider might include: How does being tasked with teaching Shakespeare and/or perceived as a Shakespearean create challenges or opportunities when it comes to intervening in discriminatory policies and practices on campus and in the wider community? How might teaching Shakespeare help you advocate for the rights of students, faculty, and other university workers in the face of institutionalized colonialism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, classism, and other forms of minoritization and exclusion?
51. The Community-Engaged Premodern Classroom
Kathleen T. Leuschen (Emory University)
Lauren Shook (Texas Lutheran University)
Community-engaged pedagogies have flourished in writing and literary studies. Yet premodern studies have primarily focused on service-learning via Shakespeare. How can we build a more capacious understanding of how premodern texts open themselves up to community engagement? Participants of all career and experience levels are invited to produce a pool of pedagogical resources for the community-engaged premodern classroom that is intersectional and social-justice minded.
52. Considering the HOW of Teaching Shakespeare
Peggy O’Brien (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Corinee Viglietta (Folger Shakespeare Library)
In response to growing requests from our colleagues on college campuses, Folger Education offers a hands-on workshop that will immerse participants in our active, language-based methodology for teaching Shakespeare. The Folger Method is a set of principles and practices that work together to get every single reader questioning, interpreting, embracing, and resisting Shakespeare’s language. Participants will experience firsthand a radically equitable way of teaching and learning that complements the inclusive, progressive scholarship that is the hallmark of SAA.
53. Intersectionality and Inclusion in the Early Modern Classroom
Maya Mathur (University of Mary Washington)
Elisa Oh (Howard University)
This workshop draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to examine how the overlapping axes of our identities and those of our students shape our pedagogy. Participants are invited to develop a teaching philosophy and lesson plan that focus on early modern women writers, writers of color, and non-Western texts; the historical and contemporary contexts of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality; or critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and Marxist analyses of early modern texts.
54. Pushing Boundaries in the Study of Early Modern Poetry
Joanne Diaz (Illinois Wesleyan University)
How can we push on traditional boundaries—of canon, of form, of performance, of structure, of philology, of the divide between creative and scholarly work—to offer students a new way of understanding early modern poetry and poetics? To answer this question, we will read brief articles on innovative close reading practices and share our own pedagogical theories and approaches. By the end of the workshop session, participants will be able to return to their home institutions with a broad range of activities and approaches to share with their students.
55. Teaching with Special Collections
Sarah Werner (Washington, DC)
Do you want to teach with rare materials but feel unsure if your library has suitable texts? Are you scared of bibliography but want to be able to encourage students to think about the materiality of texts? By doing advance readings and exercises and then sharing assignments with the workshop, participants will develop approaches to teaching with special collections and tools to do so confidently, whether or not they are based at institutions with loads of early books.
56. Writing for Popular Media
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (Linfield College)
Elizabeth E. Tavares (University of Alabama)
This practical workshop will explore concrete strategies for publishing in popular media, based on participants’ work-in-progress. How do you find a timely hook for your research? Who is the right editor for the right pitch? How do you craft an argument for a general audience? What are strategies to #CiteScholarsOfColor in popular venues? How do you get institutional credit for your work? How can we all give credit to the academic labor that produces our insights? And what about trolls?