This seminar invites papers on the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies. How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?

Explorations of Cultural Trauma from the Early Modern Stage to Today

Devori Kimbro (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)

This seminar will explore the role of cultural trauma in the legacy of the early modern stage. How did early modern playwrights respond to cultural traumas of the day with their productions, and how are modern theatrical companies and directors still drawn to these early modern stories to explore modern cultural trauma, and do such productions result in catharsis or agitation? Participants may explore either original or modern stagings of these texts mounted in response to cultural traumas.

New Tales of Winter

Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham)

From tyrannical rulers rejecting truth, to asylum seekers fleeing persecution across borders, to the public trying of a woman’s virtue, to the (mis)fortunes of the itinerant, the stories of The Winter’s Tale have reverberated with unexpected resonance in recent years. This seminar invites participants to contribute new work on race, migration, gender, ecology, childhood, performance, trauma and more, telling new tales of The Winter’s Tale and its resurrections.

Performance during Pandemic: Shakespeare and Covid

Douglas M. Lanier (University of New Hampshire)

Though the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 was devastating for conventional stage productions, practitioners were ingenious in crafting new ways of performing Shakespeare amidst severe restrictions. This seminar will explore Shakespearean performance during the pandemic: what new formats of performance emerged? What economic, sociopolitical, ethical and ideological issues do these formats and particular productions raise? Case studies and accounts by practitioners are especially welcome.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)

This seminar will explore current thinking about Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Contributions from all disciplinary and theoretical perspectives are welcome: work that is new, still-in-process, unresolved, speculative or even risky is particularly encouraged. Papers are welcome that consider Pericles in relation to its original historical moment, to our 2020s, to periods in between – or that rethink ideas of contextual frames entirely. What questions are we not yet asking about this play?

Twelfth Night

Emma Smith (Hertford College, University of Oxford)

Twelfth Night has been a key text for understanding Shakespeare’s “bittersweet,” “cross-dressing” and “festive” comedy: these critical cliches need rebooting. This seminar invites work on the play that engages with new approaches: performance and theatre history; gender, queer, and trans studies; historical investigations of social rank and status; editing and book history; and critical race studies and the occluded orientalism of its Illyrian setting.

2022 In-Person Annual Meeting Program (7-9 April 2022)

In-Person Panels and Roundtables

Plenary Panel: Fifty Years of Early Modern Critical Race Studies

Panel Organizer Ian Smith (Lafayette College), with Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw (Arizona State University) and Ruben Espinosa (University of Texas, El Paso)

Shakespeare Futures Roundtable: Shakespeare and Inclusive Pedagogy

Roundtable Organizers Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College) and Nedda Mehdizadeh (University of California, Los Angeles), with Colby Gordon (Bryn Mawr College), Lisa Jennings (Texas A&M University, San Antonio), and Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto)

Asexual Renaissance Resonances

Roundtable Organizer Liza Blake (University of Toronto), with Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), Rachel Chung (University of Edinburgh), Catherine R. Clifford (Graceland University), and Ashley O’Mara (Syracuse University)

“Decolonizing” Early Modern Literary Studies?: Critical Indigenous Interventions

Panel Organizer L. Lehua Yim (San Francisco, CA) and Chair Scott M. Stevens (Syracuse University), with Mariam Galarrita (University of California, Riverside) and Noelani M. Arista (University of Hawaiʻi, Mānoa)

Feminist Debates and Early Modern Studies

Roundtable Organizer Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University), with Cristina León Alfar (Hunter College, CUNY), Valerie Billing (Central College), Vanessa M. Braganza (Harvard University), Kimberly Anne Coles (University of Maryland), Jean Elizabeth Howard (Columbia University), and Niamh J. O’Leary (Xavier University)

Indian Shakespeares/Regional Interventions

Panel Organizer Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast), with Taarini Mookherjee (SUNY New Paltz) and Poonam Trivedi (University of Delhi)

Nature, Art and Ethics in The Winter’s Tale

Panel Organizer Paul A. Kottman (New School for Social Research), with Sarah Beckwith (Duke University) and Daniella Jancsó (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Prose by Any Other Name

Panel Organizers Sarah Neville (Ohio State University) and Eric Rasmussen (University of Nevada), with Anupam Basu (Washington University in Saint Louis), Douglas Bruster (University of Texas at Austin), and Matthew Hunter (Texas Tech University)

The Shakespeare Editor: Lives & Labor

Panel Organizer Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University) and Molly G. Yarn (Athens, GA), with Margaret Jane Kidnie (University of Western Ontario), Anandi Rao (New York University, Shanghai), and Misha Teramura (University of Toronto)

Toward a Critical Audience Studies

Roundtable Organizers Sawyer K. Kemp (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) and Geoffrey Way (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies), with Emily Lathrop (George Washington University), Erika T. Lin (Graduate Center, CUNY), Madeline Sayet (Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program), Kirsty Sedgman (University of Bristol), and Lindsey D. Snyder (Silver Spring, MD)

In-Person Seminars

Archival Violence and Early Modern Research: Building Inclusive Practice

Erin Julian (University of Roehampton)
Clare M. McManus (University of Roehampton)

How can intersections between the early modern archives and queer theory, critical race studies, feminism and disability studies generate inclusive methodologies for archival research, mitigating the violence of selection, access and terminology? We seek contributions connecting archives to PaR, theatre history, historiography and textual studies; on curatorial practice, digital collections and open access; and speculation on new archives for cultural institutions and marginalized communities.

Building New Characters: Casting on Shakespeare’s Stages Today

Amy Cook (Stony Brook University)

This seminar will ask participants to think about how casting choices shape the stories plays tell us about who we are, about who belongs to what group, and who doesn’t—with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and physical difference. Participants will view scenes and productions of recently-produced Shakespeare plays to develop a common vocabulary and set of reference points. We will then explore together how casting “works” or doesn’t in these selections, addressing what it means to make such a judgment and what the stakes are in doing so.

Cervantes’s English Transformations

José A. Pérez Díez (University of Leeds)
Michael M. Wagoner (United States Naval Academy)

This seminar sets out to re-evaluate the pervading influence of the works of Miguel de Cervantes on the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Jacobean and Caroline England. We welcome papers exploring the reception of Cervantes’s fiction among early English readers, examining the work of translators, essayists, poets, and polemicists, and tracing his impact on commercial plays written by dramatists such as Fletcher, Massinger, Beaumont, Field, Middleton, and Shakespeare.

Classicizing Race in Early Modern England

Joseph M. Ortiz (University of Texas, El Paso)

This seminar seeks papers that explore the influence of classical texts on emerging notions of race in early modern England. How were gens and barbarus and other classical markers of difference appropriated by early modern writers to create racial distinctions? How were humanist approaches to classical texts re-deployed to racialize contemporary peoples in the Old or New Worlds? How was racism in antiquity detected, amplified, or overlooked by early modern readers?

Disney+ Shakespeare

Amy Scott-Douglass (Marymount University)

Disney+ and other streaming services have affected our lives, from the way we teach Shakespeare’s plays to the way we survive quarantine. This seminar is devoted to intersections of streaming, subscriptions, and Shakespeare—including the place of Shakespeare in youth and family entertainment and edification, popular culture and Shakespeare, Shakespeare spinoffs, and Shakespeare in the virtual classroom in the age of Covid. Papers might focus on Shakespeare borrowings or offerings in the Disney+, Netflix, or Prime catalogs; subscription Shakespeare, binging, access, economics; Shakespeare and Gen Z; pandemic-era Shakespeare performances and pedagogies. Papers on any early modern playwright are welcome; not limited to Shakespeare.

Divided Shakespeare

Darlene Farabee (University of South Dakota)
Travis D. Williams (University of Rhode Island)

This seminar seeks diverse treatments of “division,” including concepts of separation, fragmentation, rupture, and opposition, in early modern drama: authorship disintegration; textual division; break-up and separation in identities, couples, families, politics, nations, and cultures; unity in division; mathematics, economics, law, rigor and equity. We welcome experimental, exploratory, and emergent work, hoping to emphasize development of ideas and methods over polite commentary on polished writing.

Early Modern Affective Ecologies

Piers Brown (Kenyon College)
Allison Deutermann (Baruch College, CUNY)

In the early modern period, the passions were often compared to–and understood as influenced by–the natural world. This seminar asks how work on affect, audience, and ecology can speak to and complement each other. How do we conceptualize the relationship between theatrical atmospheres and the weather? What does an ecological understanding of emotion reveal about how people feel together? How might such questions be reshaped by attention to the early modern anthropocene?

Early Modern Architectural Spaces: From Hovels to Palaces

Kaitlyn Culliton (Texas A&M International University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

This seminar examines the buildings in Shakespeare’s drama, from houses, theatres, churches, and prisons to castles and palaces. We investigate the relationship between the complex architecture implied in the play-texts and its constrained representation in both historical and contemporary stage adaptations. We invite papers that consider various functions of architectural spaces in the plays, both as physical representations on stage and as metaphors within the texts.

Early Modern City Comedies

Lilly Berberyan (Northwestern State University of Louisiana)

This seminar invites papers that focus on city comedies and encourages explorations of ideas, concepts, and characters that are under-represented in Shakespearean drama. With a wider range of characters and figures, city comedies capture a unique version of early modern society and culture, granting more nuanced understandings of the period. Various perspectives and methodologies (gender, critical race, queer, materialist, postcolonial, performance, or pedagogical approaches) are encouraged.

Early Modern Ecocriticism and Critical Race Studies

Hillary Eklund (Loyola University New Orleans)
Jennifer Park (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut, Avery Point)
Ayanna Thompson (Arizona State University)

This seminar invites papers on the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies. How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?

Early Modern Erogenous Zones

Devin Byker (College of Charleston)
Jennifer Holl (Rhode Island College)

Erogenous: libidinally charged, erotically sensitive. Zone: a field of contact or arousal. This seminar explores erogenous zones in and with early modernity, positioning erogeneity as a mode of sensation, desire, or contact that extends beyond the genital to the human and nonhuman erotic interactions and yearnings that occur through surfaces, spaces, and media. We welcome papers on nongenital bodily erogenous zones as well as erogenous objects, surfaces, texts, and performance spaces.

Early Modern Fan Culture

Kavita Mudan Finn (Manchester, NH)
Emily Griffiths Jones (University of South Florida)
Jessica McCall (Delaware Valley University)

This seminar will explore the intersection between early modern literary culture and contemporary transformative fandom. We welcome papers that consider proto-fan culture in the early modern period, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fan transformations of early modern works, and appropriations of early modern texts in intermediate periods that might be seen as fannish (e.g. Romantic and Victorian revivals).

Early Modern Theatre Studies and Podcasting

Sheila Coursey (Saint Louis University)
Jess Hamlet (Alvernia University)

How has the podcast changed early modern theatre studies? As a mode of public-facing scholarship, a teaching tool, an alternative space of scholarly discourse, and an aural medium, the podcast serves as a site for conversations about access, performance, pedagogy, and contingent labor, particularly in the Covid era. We invite papers and/or hybrid projects that explore how podcasts are created, consumed, or taught, as well as potential parallels between podcasting and early modern theatre itself.

Earworms

Sharon J. Harris (Brigham Young University)
Thomas Ward (United States Naval Academy)

This seminar invites papers that explore early modern earworms, broadly defined as repeating songs or musical fragments, ranging from the catchy and appealing to the persistent and unwelcome. Papers may focus on literary representations of involuntary musical repetition, the viral recirculation of songs and ballads on the early modern stage and elsewhere, cognitive or phenomenological aspects of musical repetition, earworms’ relationship to trauma, or other non-musical kinds of aurivermiculation.

EEBO Finds, Failures, and Futures

Jonathan P. Lamb (University of Kansas)

This seminar focuses on the use of Early English Books Online for scholarship and teaching. What scholarly narratives does EEBO permit, constrain, prevent? What questions of access, method, or interface does it raise? What can/can’t we find on EEBO? We’ll showcase how scholars use EEBO, discuss the stakes, and imagine EEBO’s futures. All are welcome: critiques, defenses, research projects, editorial, philological, or computational studies, and beyond! EEBO access not required to participate.

Exciting Explorations in Love’s Labor’s Lost

William R. Rampone, Jr. (South Carolina State University)

Love’s Labor’s Lost has been associated with the aesthetics of language and the topicality of historical allusions. Because of the increasing need to see the applicability of Love’s Labor’s Lost and its relevance to the 21st century and its concerns regarding racial, gender, environmental issues, a plethora of theoretical paradigms has emerged to address some of these issues. Consequently, this seminar invites a diversity of theoretical approaches that explore the play’s relationship to ecocriticism, critical race theory, feminism, the denouement’s indeterminacy, recent adaptations and appropriations of the play on stage, film, video, and this play’s interplay with other early modern texts.

Explorations of Cultural Trauma from the Early Modern Stage to Today

Devori Kimbro (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)

This seminar will explore the role of cultural trauma in the legacy of the early modern stage. How did early modern playwrights respond to cultural traumas of the day with their productions; how are modern theatrical companies and directors still drawn to these early modern stories to explore modern cultural trauma, and do such productions result in catharsis or agitation? Participants may explore either original or modern stagings of these texts mounted in response to cultural traumas.

Gender and Science

Jennifer Munroe (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Mary Trull (St. Olaf College)

This workshop explores the relationship between gender, nature, and knowledge-making in early modern England, interpreting “science” widely to include all theories of natural knowledge as well as practices like experimentalism and household medicine. We invite participants to consider how gender shaped early modern scientific accounts of the world; to disturb the boundaries between science and the literary; to highlight the work of women writers; and to explore intersectional approaches.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Archival Discoveries in Early Modern Theater History and Biography

Alan H. Nelson (University of California, Berkeley)

Documentary evidence concerning Early Modern playhouses, playing companies, performances, publications, manuscripts, and theatrical personnel, is increasingly available as access to archives and libraries is enhanced by updated catalogues, digitization, and indexes. This seminar invites papers on entirely new archival discoveries, as well as papers on historical or more recent discoveries which might have received less publicity and recognition. Papers in the latter category should link such discoveries to further advances in scholarly understanding.

“I engraft you new”

Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)
Robert Stagg (Shakespeare Institute / University of Oxford)

We seek to engraft Shakespeare’s sonnets anew. Recent work encourages us to think differently about (for example) their sexuality and their order of composition, and we have hopefully left behind tired, eighteenth-century narrative paradigms. What happens when we read the sonnets in the light of global contexts, critical race theory, ecocriticism, and trans sexualities? What was their place and purpose in Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical culture, and in our own, and in social media?

(In)Significant Shakespeare

Coen Heijes (University of Groningen)
David Ruiter (University of California, San Diego)

Within a growing effort to connect Shakespeare with broader discourses on today’s challenges, such as the pandemic, racism, sexual abuse, populism, and sustainability, we call on papers by academics, teachers and practitioners that: highlight success stories in achieving positive change; illustrate the difficulties and failures on this road to significance; and/or question the very notion of Significant Shakespeare and argue that this is or is not what we should engage in at all.

Invention

Wendy Beth Hyman (Oberlin College)

This seminar invites work on early modern “inventions”—invented languages, instruments, engines, techniques, paradigms, poetic forms, thought processes, worlds—and papers theorizing the nature of invention itself. Is invention “nature’s child,” or the product of ingenious contrivance? What is its proximity to other modes of making or knowing? Papers may range from poetics to natural philosophy, stagecraft to intellectual history, curious gizmos to elaborate schemes.

Margaret Cavendish: Gender and Genre

Shawn W. Moore (Florida Southwestern State College)
Vanessa L. Rapatz (Ball State University)

This seminar will investigate Margaret Cavendish’s development and use of varied genres as dialogic philosophical, political, and romantic narratives. We especially welcome papers that take up the intersection of gender and genre including, the social impact of generic conventions, the use of philosophical dialogues as a meta-narrative for world building, and how catalogues of history and time are gendered.

Mothering in Early Modern Culture

Elizabeth Steinway (Colorado State University)
Amanda Zoch (Mellon/ACLS)

This seminar invites participants to examine the act of mothering in early modern culture. All genres are welcome, and we are especially interested in queer, monstrous, or marginalized examples of mothering. Participants might consider how mothering is defined; if that definition is stable; mothering’s relationship to reproductive knowledge; how mothering intersects with race, class, gender, or region; Shakespeare’s “bad” mothers; or if one can mother from beyond the grave.

Performance during Pandemic: Shakespeare and Covid

Douglas M. Lanier (University of New Hampshire)

Though the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 was devastating for conventional stage productions, practitioners were ingenious in crafting new ways of performing Shakespeare amidst severe restrictions. This seminar will explore Shakespearean performance during the pandemic: what new formats of performance emerged? What economic, sociopolitical, ethical and ideological issues do these formats and particular productions raise? Case studies and accounts by practitioners are especially welcome.

“Poison in Jest”: Racist Laughter Across Genres and Nations

Pamela A. Brown (University of Connecticut)
Robert Hornback (Oglethorpe University)

How did racist laughter work to promote and spread race-belief in early modern drama and culture? How did racial humor serve as a discursive practice as part of race formation? How did laughter work to produce whiteness (or sometimes mock it)? We invite multiple approaches to such questions; papers might address jests and insults, but can also treat motifs, roles, and plots in any genre or historical period, in plays by Shakespeare or others. Particularly welcome are critical race theory, transnational, performance theory, and pedagogical approaches.

Queering Death

Lauren Shohet (Villanova University)
Christine Varnado (University at Buffalo, SUNY)

This seminar explores death as materially, cosmologically, and aesthetically complicated. What becomes visible through attention to practices, plays, experiences, objects, and belief systems that highlight death’s immanent ambiguities? Possible topics: resurrection, revenants, apparitions, theatrical death, faked death, coma, delirium, abortive reproduction and the unborn, afterlives, remains, morbid eroticism, kinship and inheritance, archival resurrection, failed apocalypse, messianic time, and the lifespans of variously mediated and temporized forms of self.

Rethinking Civility

Emily King (Louisiana State University)

Although civility is cast as a virtuous reprieve from discourtesy, it often suppresses conflict and conceals violence. This seminar explores how civility—that is, civil behaviors, discourse, and expectations for—intersects with early modern structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, nationalism, and indigeneity. On what grounds is civility extended? By what modes is it inculcated or weaponized? To what extent does the Shakespearean world recognize civility’s wounding power?

Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbean

Steve Mentz (St. John’s University)

Being in Florida and near the Caribbean can reframe ideas about English identities, race, literary culture, ecological change, and global ventures. Placing the region, which was shaped by encounters among Indigenous, African, and European groups, at the center of analysis, we invite papers on Caribbean connections with Shakespeare and early modern English literature. We welcome approaches that engage critical theorizations of the region’s encounters before, during, and after Shakespeare’s time.

Shakespeare and Empathy

Katherine Attié (Towson University)

This seminar welcomes papers about empathy in – or as response to – Shakespeare’s works. How does Shakespeare represent empathy (or a lack thereof) in and between characters on stage? How do characters arouse empathy in an audience? Some possible thematic and critical contexts for a discussion of empathy include justice and mercy, theology and religion, diversity and difference, the non-human, Aristotelian dramatic theory, perception and cognition, affect theory, and reception theory.

Shakespeare and France

John Cameron (Saint Mary’s University)

This seminar looks at the relationship between Shakespeare and the French. It prompts participants to explore this from a variety of angles, such as the representation of France and of French characters, the attitudes of the English characters to France, and French sources Shakespeare made use of in his drama, Shakespeare’s reception in France, translations of Shakespeare into French, and important French productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Open to a variety of different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies, this seminar hopes to address the various ways that one could tackle this myriad subject and see where the discussion might go from here.

Shakespeare and Health

Roberta Barker (Dalhousie University)
Claire Hansen (James Cook University)
Bríd Phillips (University of Western Australia)

The connection between Shakespeare and health is of longstanding interest within Shakespearean scholarship. This seminar invites renewed consideration of the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries can inform our understandings of health and wellbeing in research, practice, and individual experience. Embracing an inclusive conception of the emergent field of health humanities, we are open to a range of projects connecting Shakespeare Studies and human health.

Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile

Stephanie Chamberlain (Southeast Missouri State University)
Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University)
James M. Sutton (Florida International University)

Our seminar explores exile—estrangement from one’s homeland—broadly conceived in Shakespeare: the forced immigrant, the banished refugee, the person politically, religiously, or culturally othered. Essays might analyze exile within plays; early modern exilic practices; Shakespeare’s contact with exiles; the author’s proximity to exilic ontologies; stage histories treating exile; studies of exile in performance or film; and how global Shakespearean production today might refigure localized exile.

Shakespeare and Wisdom Literature

Sean Keilen (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Julia R. Lupton (University of California, Irvine)

Wisdom literature transmits philosophical, pragmatic, poetic, and theological aspirations through myth and maxim as well as epistle and essay. Egyptian, Buddhist, and Arabic wisdom literature mixed with Greek and Jewish traditions to contribute to a common thought world taken up by both Christianity and Islam. How does friendship model the reception of pagan wisdom in Shakespeare? How do the mixed sources of wisdom transcend confessionalism? What does wisdom offer the humanities today?

Shakespeare between Past and Present

Patrick Gray (Durham University)

What is the relation between Shakespeare’s past and our present? How can we best situate Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to intellectual history or, as it was once known, the history of ideas? This seminar welcomes case studies in genealogies of influence and analogies between ideas, as well as conceptual reflections on competing methods of historicizing patterns of belief, with reference to literature, theory, politics, philosophy, and/or theology, as well as performance.

Shakespeare in Quarto and Folio

Joshua R. Held (Trinity International University)
Paul Werstine (Western University)

In anticipation of the 2023 quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this seminar invites engagement with this highly significant, even fetishized, volume alongside other printed texts, including quartos, later folios, and (not to forget) octavos. How have these texts—and increasingly open methods of access to them—influenced the editing, acting, and teaching of Shakespeare? We welcome diverse approaches, including speculation about the origins and effects of variant texts.

Shakespeare’s Editors

Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University)
Molly G. Yarn (Athens, GA)

Textual editing is no longer understood to be a neutral practice, as editors are increasingly elevated as agents of textual meaning. We invite papers that explore the lives and labors of those who have edited the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the 16th century to the present. We also welcome papers that consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of reading editions biographically and of producing editions from the position of self-aware subjectivity.

Shakespeare’s Madnesses

Leslie C. Dunn (Vassar College)
Avi Mendelson (London, UK)

This seminar explores madness’ interdiscursivity in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Some topics: madness vs. mental illness; feigned madness; madness and race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability; supernatural madness: witches, demonic possession, and lycanthropy; pathological madness: melancholy, syphilis, and rabies; Bethlem Hospital (“Bedlam”); phenomena linked to madness: dreams, confusion, error, desire, and ecstasy. Papers on teaching madness in drama are welcome.

Shakespeare’s “Other Disability Plays”: Continued

Lenora Bellee Jones-Pierce (Centenary College of Louisiana)
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (Luther College)

Building on the strengths of last year’s seminar, this iteration continues to explore ideologies of dis/ability at work in plays not explicitly “about” disability. We invite participants to consider how dis/ability was shaped by representations of able-bodiedness, including dis/ability motifs and metaphors, disabled poetics, and disabled aesthetics. Possible topics may include: health, beauty, youth, sanity, fertility, wit, strength, skill, productivity, virtuosity, and wholeness.

Staging Poetics

Matthew Harrison (West Texas A&M University)
Paul Hecht (Purdue University Northwest)

This seminar invites approaches to poetry and performance, including class, racial, sexual, gendered, and ability-focused dimensions of poetic performance in plays, as well as performances of amateurism or mastery, or considerations of poetic matter and poem as text or poem as spoken word. How does theater change how poems move through literary history? What kinds of spaces does drama open or establish to hear poetry? And what disciplinary spaces can poetry open for scholars of drama?

Text in/as Performance

Denise A. Walen (Vassar College)

Evidence of both deletions and additions exist among the early printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The scripts are still regularly cut for performance, and some cuts have become almost standard practice. This seminar will investigate the way theatre practitioners have cut and shaped Shakespeare’s scripts for performance, from the sixteenth century through current productions. Papers are welcome on specific productions, the history of cuts for a particular play, or any aspect of the textual choices made by theatre artists for production.

Witches in Space

Sarah O’Malley (London, UK)
Meg Pearson (University of West Georgia)

The spatial turn in humanities caused a reconsideration of how physical spaces shape, and are shaped by, the cultures they form part of. This seminar asks how space shaped understandings of early modern witches/witchcraft. Participants might consider: how representations of witches varied in different regions; how the spatialization of witchcraft added to understandings of gender, racial, and sexual identity; how contemporary adaptations of witch-texts draw on and challenge this spatial legacy.

In-Person Workshops

The Beginning at the End

Wesley Broulik (Central Connecticut State University / Time’s Fool Company)
Christie Maturo (Central Connecticut State University / Time’s Fool Company)

When one looks at many of Shakespeare’s plays the endings presented in different versions can vary wildly ranging from Folio, to Quarto, to specific choices made by editors. In this workshop we will look closely, through staging on our feet with workshop participants, at the endings of a few selections of Shakespeare’s texts and examine the differences between the choices that have been made. Together we will interrogate how these choices can impact the entirety of a play and what the audience is left with and also why these editors made their choices.

SAA-SHARP: New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Female Book Ownership

Sarah Lindenbaum (Bloomington, IL)
Tara Lyons (Illinois State University)
Martine Van Elk (California State University, Long Beach)

What can we extrapolate from the ever-growing evidence of women owning books? This workshop examines strategies for uncovering evidence of female book ownership, from marginalia to wills, portraits, catalogues, bindings, and bookplates. In addition to exploring research materials, participants will consider issues of methodology in assessing evidence of “owned” texts. What new directions in book history can emerge from these discoveries, their accumulation, and their concomitant gaps?

Shakespeare and the Anti-Racist Classroom

Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College)
Nedda Mehdizadeh (University of California, Los Angeles)

This workshop answers the urgent call to cultivate an anti-racist pedagogy in our classrooms. Participants will discuss and develop methods of engaging in meaningful, ongoing discussions with students about race (and its intersections) through guided activities that will result in course materials educators can use toward an anti-racist pedagogy. Participants of all career and experience levels are invited to participate, and will leave with revised syllabi, assignments, and teaching strategies.

Shakespeare and Women’s Leadership

Natalie Eschenbaum (St. Catherine University)

This workshop is designed for Shakespeare instructors and those who serve in leadership roles at their institutions (e.g., directors, chairs, deans). We will read scenes from Shakespeare alongside some contemporary leadership theory to consider what Shakespeare teaches us about women’s and feminist leadership, in particular. Participants will use Shakespeare’s teachings about women and leadership to develop a lesson plan, a “key results” plan for change, a mission/vision statement, or similar.

Shakespeare in the General Education Classroom

Jennifer Black (Boise State University)
Laura Turchi (University of Houston)

This workshop explores the affordances of teaching “general” Shakespeare to a broad range of students with different educational goals, including non-majors and pre-service teachers. We welcome explorations of effective tools and resources, questions about the costs and benefits of making Shakespeare relevant to 21st century life, arguments about the need to “market” Shakespeare to students and administration, and discussions of how Shakespeare relates to the goals of a liberal arts education.

In-Person Open Session Workshop

Playing Cards in Shakespeare’s England

Cassidy Cash (That Shakespeare Life)

Dive into Shakespeare’s play, Two Gentlemen of Verona, to explore playing cards in Elizabethan England. This session will explore the history of card illustrations for 16th-17th century England, and what we can learn about society from the games they played. Attendees will learn how to play the authentic card game of Noddy.

In-Person Practicum

Articles-in-Progress Workshop

Louise Geddes (Adelphi University)

The Articles-in-Progress Workshop supports first time authors preparing their articles for submission to academic journals. Authors will submit an abstract and brief biography and be paired with a senior scholar with editorial expertise. The editors will read a draft of the article and offer feedback at an informal meeting during the conference. Please note that this workshop is offered in addition to regular seminar participation. Essays must be received by 1 February 2022. Members wishing to join this practicum should email Louise Geddes by 1 September 2021. Members will be admitted on a first-come, first-served basis.