51st Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. Seminar: The 1623 First Folio
Gabriel Egan (De Montfort University) and Miranda Fay Thomas (Trinity College Dublin)
Participants are invited to take stock of our knowledge of this book on its 400th anniversary and to share new work that sheds light on its creation, reception, significance, and history. How has our understanding of this book changed since the last centennial, when the New Bibliography had begun to dominate the study of early Shakespeare texts? All approaches—bibliographical, theatrical, editorial, critical, economic, linguistic, political, historical, theoretical, statistical—are welcome.
02. Seminar: Abject Science
Pavneet Aulakh (Vanderbilt University) and Jean Feerick John (Carroll University)
Seventeenth-century natural philosophers maligned romance as fictive. But they continually returned to its motifs, suggesting its enduring philosophical value. With romance as but one example of “abject science,” we invite papers that ask: How do literary forms (dramatic, narrative, poetic), stylistic strategies, or tropes model ways of knowledge-making alternative or instrumental to natural philosophy? How might the history of science look if we foregrounded such non-normative practices?
03. Seminar: Adaptation Strategies and Resilience in Early Modern England
Rebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University) and Mary Trull (St. Olaf College)
Early moderns had a broad and regularly performed range of strategies for adapting to crisis. Early modern drama places these strategies on display, as characters from distinct perspectival vantage points navigate the same crisis terrain—some in the service of communal resilience and others in service of themselves. This seminar invites papers that identify performed strategies of adaptation to crisis and the corresponding community resilience bolstered or thwarted by them.
04. Seminar: Beyond “Formal Limits”: New Frontiers in Theater History
Christopher Matusiak (Ithaca College) and Kara Northway (Kansas State University)
On the centenary of E. K. Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage and its institution of the “formal limits” of modern theater history, this seminar will integrate twenty-first-century conversations that interrogate or challenge the discipline’s boundaries, borders, and barriers. We welcome papers on race, gender, ability, and other inclusive topics in early theater; previously overlooked archives; innovative digital projects; and other research that charts meaningful new directions in theater history.
05. Seminar: Comic Epistemologies
Laura Kolb (Baruch College, CUNY) and Jessica Rosenberg (University of Miami)
This seminar invites papers that explore Shakespearean comedy as a site at which knowledge is made, tested, circulated, and used. What kinds of knowledge did comedy—with its reliance on confusion and misrecognition, trial and error, tricks and devices—make possible? What understandings of matter, environment, bodies? How did stage comedy engage non-dramatic genres of practical knowledge? What overlooked epistemic settings and subjects does an attention to early modern comic practices reveal?
06. Seminar: Contemporary Poets and Early Modernity
Hannah Crawforth (King’s College London), Amrita Dhar (Ohio State University), and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (King’s College London)
This session asks how contemporary poets writing today have responded to early modern texts, images and ideas. We will discuss what it means to write with—and against—a historical period that enshrines ideas about politics, class, race, ability, gender and sexuality that have led to the structural inequalities of today. We will pay particular attention to form: what does it mean to use the forms of early modernity in order to question the presumptions and hierarchies of that historical moment and its often damaging legacies for today?
07. Seminar: Counting (in) Early Modern Drama
Rob Carson (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
Quantificational arguments turn up everywhere in early modern studies from Book History to Theater History, from formalist criticism to authorship studies, from distant reading to the Digital Humanities. And early modern texts themselves are often deeply invested in numerical matters. In this seminar, we hope to forge unexpected connections by focusing on the role that counting plays in our critical practices. What roles (for better and for worse) do numbers play in our criticism?
08. Seminar: Cunning
Suparna Roychoudhury (Mount Holyoke College) and Katherine Walker (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
We invite explorations of cunning in Shakespeare’s works and time. How do cunning figures wield their knowledge in different social or epistemic registers? Given the interpretative and performative possibilities of cunning, we encourage explorations of how the term and its values are culturally constructed on the Renaissance stage. We welcome investigations that intersect with questions of religion, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, disability, or histories of magic, philosophy, and science.
09. Seminar: Dissolving Worlds in Early Modern Literature
Marshelle Woodward (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
This seminar seeks papers exploring global dissolution in early modern texts of all genres. Essays might consider Christian apocalypticism, contemptus or senectus mundi topoi, epicureanism, colonial violence, chymical eschatology, pastoral hellscapes, etc. How might the presence of such dissolving worlds lead us to reassess the optimism around poesis in the early modern worldmaking tradition? To what extent ought the world(s) we have inherited—not golden, but riven, collapsing—prompt the same?
10. Seminar: Early Modern Carceral Studies
Matthew Ritger (Dartmouth College)
This seminar seeks papers that explore connections between early modern literature and drama and pre-modern carceral studies. As contemporary politics and scholarship change our understanding of the history of punishment, prisons, and unfree labor in the early modern period, literary and dramatic texts continue to offer important insights. Topics might include: the prison in or on the stage; prison writing; penal ideology in ballads and broadsides; perspectives from critical prison studies.
11. Seminar: Early Modern Data
John Ladd (Denison University)
This seminar invites papers on early modern data: the early modern obsession with information collected and arranged for later presentation or study. We will examine data as a historical concept alongside today’s data analysis techniques. Topics may include data analysis of literature, explorations of the use of data in the early modern period, the place of data within performance, and the intersection of historical data with conceptions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
12. Seminar: Early Modern London Historiography and Drama
Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria) and Mark Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)
London’s historiography and drama meet in civic pageantry, mayoral shows, chronicle comedies, and urban surveys. While much has been said on the power dynamics and forms of nationhood or civic identity, it is time to return to these texts and their politics. Seminar leaders particularly encourage papers on Premodern Critical Race Studies and Premodern Critical Indigenous Studies as well as their intersections with gender, sexuality, and ecocriticism.
13. Seminar: Echoes of Violence
Matt Carter (Clayton State University) and Samantha Dressel (Chapman University)
How do Renaissance plays create echoes of violence? How do modern echoes of that violence distort or add meaning to the original context? This seminar considers the way violence resounds across the Renaissance and into our world. We consider violence broadly, looking at enacted, threatened, imagined, and stifled violence, as that violence appears textually, in performance, and inter- and meta-textually. The seminar encourages a range of critical perspectives.
14. Seminar: Forsaken Plays
Erin E. Kelly (University of Victoria)
This seminar invites participants to introduce to a captive audience the overlooked, neglected, or weird play they think deserves more scholarly attention. (Advocacy for a play that lacks a modern edition is especially welcome.) How would our understanding of literary history, early modern English drama, or Shakespeare be transformed if we focused on such plays? Along the way, expect to wrestle with questions about what qualities might lead a play to have been treated as insignificant or bad.
15. Seminar: Henry VIII: New Directions
Meghan C. Andrews (Lycoming College) and Edward Gieskes (University of South Carolina)
This seminar invites new perspectives on Henry VIII, asking what fresh inquiries we should be making of the play today. How might new approaches to Henry VIII—including but not limited to studies of collaboration, trauma, race, performance and theater history, or formalist, feminist, queer, book historical, or pedagogical approaches—reinvigorate its study? Contributions from all theoretical and disciplinary approaches are welcome, as is work that is new, still in progress, or speculative.
16. Seminar: Imagining Antiquity
Daniel Blank (Durham University) and Heather James (University of Southern California)
This seminar explores the early modern stage’s fascination with the ancient world, from the use of classical texts to the depiction of characters from classical antiquity. We invite papers which seek to broaden traditional ideas of early modern dramatists’ debt to the past. Possible topics include the influence of individual source texts; the relationship between classical texts and early modern representations of identity; legacies of ancient figures both within and beyond early modern drama.
17. Seminar: Intersectional Animality
Holly Dugan (George Washington University) and Karen Raber (University of Mississippi)
Critical animal studies seeks to divest definitions of the human from arguments for ethical, legal, and political rights and protections, yet it remains problematic to connect the place of animals with the treatment of people, especially since metaphors of animality have been weaponized against so many. While acknowledging this tension, this seminar explores how critical animal studies can engage productively with premodern critical race studies, disability studies, early modern trans studies, and more.
18. Seminar: Love’s Labour’s Won: Reimagining Shakespeare Studies
Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, let’s remember Love’s Labour’s Won. Any Complete Works of Shakespeare that does not contain LLW is incomplete. What might a lost, ecstatic, utopian text make possible for Shakespeare studies? What opportunities does this canonical gap open for queer of color performance, ecofeminism, or postcritique? Could it make comedy, pedagogy, or research more inclusive? What’s in a title? Can imagination play a bigger role in Shakespeare studies?
19. Seminar: Marlowe and Jonson
Judith Haber (Tufts University)
We will consider two of the greatest poet-playwrights of the period. Papers may focus on one text or many, on either author alone or on both together, or on comparisons with Shakespeare and others. Any type of approach Is welcome. Questions to be considered may include the following: What is distinctive about the texts of each writer? How do they influence and interact with each other or with Shakespeare? How do newer critical and theoretical approaches alter our view of their texts?
20. Seminar: Metatheater as Rivalry and Dialogue
Daniel Moss (Southern Methodist University)
With Shakespeare’s traditional priority as metatheatrical mastermind beginning to give way to a healthier, dialogic account of metatheatricality, it is time for a revaluation of practices by other playwrights and companies. This seminar explores alternative metatheatrical modes—whether in relation to Shakespeare’s work or independent of it—and seeks to identify new points of contact with recent scholarship on race, gender, queer expression, class, and other key aspects of Early Modern drama.
21. Seminar: Natural History Now
Joseph Campana (Rice University)
Recent attention to creatures relies on a “Renaissance” of natural history in early modern Europe. What is natural is history now? Iconic works or new ones? Relative to poetry, theater, other arts? What models for creaturely stories? Natural history relative to genre? Form? Audience? Media? Global traffic and the Columbian exchange? When does natural history “naturalize” (sex, gender, sexuality, race) or confound? What is an author, what is humanism from this vantage?
22. Seminar: New Approaches to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania)
This seminar will focus on how the interpretation and performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have evolved in the past few decades, in particular as reflected through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, post-colonialism, and the environment. Papers are invited that represent many different perspectives and approaches, including performance history, global translations and adaptations, and critical history, as well as interpretations of different aspects and themes of the play.
23. Seminar: Pedagogies of Premodern Disability
Genevieve Love (Colorado College) and Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto)
What are the stakes of attending to critical disability studies in teaching Shakespeare and early modern drama? How do we move from classroom practice to disability justice? This seminar considers the pedagogical methods and practices that illuminate disability representations, disabling conditions, and disability gain in early modern texts. We welcome position papers that pair key theoretical and primary text(s) as well as experimental and reflective forms of writing on disability pedagogies.
24. Seminar: Performance Cultures in and around the Inns of Court
Emma Rhatigan (University of Sheffield), Michelle O’Callaghan (University of Reading), and Jackie Watson (Oxford, UK)
Performance cultures at the Inns of Court took a variety of forms, from Christmas revels and masques to mooting and sermons. The four Inns of Court were not homogenous or discrete spaces but open and traversed. This workshop will explore performance cultures at the Inns and how they move across and intersect with other playing spaces in London and cross borders to engage with European festive cultures and the wider world, via the movement of people, texts, performances, and objects.
25. Seminar: The Queen’s Gambit
Sarah Crover (University of Vancouver Island) and Elizabeth Hodgson (University of British Columbia)
Queens in early modern English literatures, both as authors and as characters, often embody particular nexes of cultural identity, gender, and racialization, filtered through their distinctively constrained privilege. As monarchs with limits, and as particularly embodied agents of nationalism, queens both historical and imagined mark English and other cultural identities in specifically complex terms. This seminar will examine how queens act out race, gender, and nationalist power in divergent and emergent forms.
26. Seminar: Reassessing Lady Mary Wroth’s Poetry: New Approaches and Future Directions
Paul Salzman (La Trobe University) and Rosalind Smith (Australian National University)
This seminar invites its participants to reassess the poetry of Lady Mary Wroth in the light of new theoretical developments in early modern studies, including critical race theory (with the pioneering work of Kim F. Hall on Wroth still needing to be addressed in detail); queer theory; new formalism; emotions scholarship; and expanded material histories which have taken into account transmission, reception, annotation, and collecting.
27. Seminar: Reconsidering Science and Religion
Aaron Kitch (Bowdoin College)
This seminar invites explorations of early modern science and religion, broadly conceived. How did early modern accounts of anatomy, astronomy, botany, natural history, or medicine, for example, both draw on and reshape theology? How did new empirical efforts to observe nature challenge or reinforce religious ideas and practices? How do we locate Shakespeare’s works in relation to such contexts? Literary, historical, archival, and theoretical approaches equally welcome.
28. Seminar: The Renaissance Project
Tessie Prakas (Scripps College) and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld (Pomona College)
“Renaissance” is largely taken to identify periods of radical innovation in arts and letters. The chronological borders of those periods shift from region to region (e.g. Italian, English, Ottoman) but it is generally a given that any period the term designates is now closed. But what if “Renaissance” is best conceived not as a closed historical period but as an open historical project? What if our task is to participate or intervene in these historical projects variously called “Renaissance”?
29. Seminar: Scarcity in a Time of Plenty: Early Modern English Writers on Hunger
Andy Crow (Boston College) and Lauren Shook (Texas Lutheran University)
Hunger gripped early modern England. Writers from preachers to playwrights had something to say about it. How was form used to ameliorate systemic hunger in England? How did writers experience food insecurity? How does their literary work relate to this experience? How do race, class, gender, and religion factor into written responses to hunger? How can we leverage the innovations of English writers to think through productive responses to 21st century food insecurity?
30. Seminar: Screen Shakespeares: Form and Technology
Greg Semenza (University of Connecticut) and Garrett Sullivan (Pennsylvania State University)
This seminar focuses on how the formal and technological elements of film, video and television construct interpretations of Shakespeare. Participants are encouraged to think about “screen” Shakespeares broadly—in movies, TV programs, video games, etc.—while prioritizing lighting, framing, sound design, and tracking, as well as other non-traditional production elements that fuse together filmic and non-filmic Shakespeares (CGI and other animation techniques, and computer programming).
31. Seminar: Shakespeare and Early Modern Misogyny
Brian Chalk (Manhattan College), Shannon Kelley (Fairfield University), and Patricia Wareh (Union College)
This seminar explores how early modern authors represent misogyny in their works. Do the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries reinforce or undermine the patriarchal worlds that the plays and poems create? How is early modern patriarchy’s goal of maintaining order by devaluing women connected to its implicit belief that whiteness is superior? This seminar also invites work that investigates overlaps between misogyny and de/post/colonial studies, queer theory, disability studies, trans studies, and other intersectional possibilities.
32. Seminar: Shakespeare and Race in Popular Culture
Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University) and L. Monique Pittman (Andrews University)
This seminar takes seriously pop culture as an archive for expanding the study of Shakespeare and race. Deploying rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can assist in illuminating more precisely how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest, and [re-]shape existing racial imaginaries. We thus invite papers taking a wide range of disciplined approaches to consider the social and ideological implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture, and race.
33. Seminar: Shakespeare and the Public Good
Peter Kuling (University of Guelph) and Wes Pearce (University of Regina)
This seminar explores the public good emerging from Shakespeare beyond the experience of studying the plays or seeing live performances. We seek papers and presentations investigating concepts of the “public good” as it relates to our own scholarship. Does Shakespeare enable us to generate new outcomes for various publics? This seminar aims to collectively debate and define concepts of the “public good” while also identifying the impact of Shakespeare’s contributions to our contemporary world.
34. Seminar: Shakespeare and Writing Instruction
Adhaar Noor Desai (Bard College)
What were the methods and assumptions of poetic writing in early modern England? How might the study of them allow us to critically engage—and potentially reform—the methods of writing instruction practiced in modern literature classrooms? This seminar hopes to fortify a reciprocal relationship between scholarship on early modern poetic practices and the ways literary criticism is practiced and taught in contemporary higher education.
35. Seminar: Shakespeare between Ancient and Modern Thought
Benjamin Parris (University of Pittsburgh) and Steven Swarbrick (Baruch College, CUNY)
How might attention to Shakespeare’s reactivation and transformation of ancient philosophy simultaneously illuminate, clarify, or modify our understanding of his work in relation to modern modes of philosophical inquiry? How might we read Shakespeare between Marx and Aristotle, for example, or between Wynter and Ptolemy? Papers whose triangulation of Shakespeare takes up emergent and timely areas of theoretical concern such as trans studies, critical race, ethnic, and indigenous studies, or ecocriticism are especially encouraged.
36. Seminar: Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition
Mark Bayer (University of Texas, San Antonio) and Robert Sawyer (East Tennessee State University)
A native of Minnesota, Bob Dylan’s writings are saturated with allusions to Shakespeare. But the similarities between the two writers go beyond simple influence or appropriation. Both are cultural icons whose works transcend popular culture and permeate literary, academic, and political discussions, and who are often seen as secular prophets. This seminar invites papers that consider the multiple lines of intersection between Shakespeare, Dylan, and the bardic tradition they represent.
37. Seminar: Shakespeare on Broadway
Louise Geddes (Adelphi University) and Nora J. Williams (University of Essex)
Broadway and Shakespeare operate as discrete neoliberal cultural ecologies and this seminar will bring them together to consider Broadway as both an historical locale and a big-budget production genre. What is Shakespeare’s relationship to musical theatre? How do the spaces and traditions of Broadway shape Shakespeare? What is the place of Broadway Shakespeare in the larger networks of Shakespearean consumption? This seminar welcomes papers that engage with theatre history, adaptation or performance theory, music theory, or cultural studies.
38. Seminar: Shakespeare, Sex, and Space
Justine DeCamillis (University of Maryland)
How does the sociosexual energy of Shakespeare’s plays shift between places and spaces? Antony’s sexual proclivities are blamed on feminized Egypt, beyond Rome’s sphere of masculine civilization. Iago describes Desdemona as the “supersubtle Venetian,” a sexual identity tied to a particular city. We invite papers that explore these shifts in Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ dramatic works and welcome a diverse array of critical approaches to this topic.
39. Seminar: Shakespeare’s Propositional Third Spaces: Thinking beyond the Binary
Christian Billing (University of Hull) and Susanne Wofford (New York University)
Recent trends in critical theory have pointed to the ways in which normative cultures of oppression frequently use taxonomies and hierarchies based on binary oppositions in order to control and dominate particular groups and/or individuals. This seminar considers how we, as activist scholars, teachers, and artists, can work critically with Shakespeare’s binary-probing imagination in order to provide less-limiting visions of what is ontologically, socially and culturally possible.
40. Seminar: Transitions: Ecologies of Economic Life
Derrick Higginbotham (University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa)
Income inequality, global trade conflicts, booms in ecological extraction and consumerism, increased dispossession: economic forces intimately shape lives, individually and collectively, in both the past and present. How do early modern cultures process and understand economic transformations? Can the insights of queer theory, trans studies, ecocriticism, and critical race studies—especially when these methods overlap—reframe our conceptualization of early modern economic changes?
41. Seminar: The Two Noble Kinsmen: State of the Play
David L. Orvis (Appalachian State University)
The aim of this seminar is twofold: to take stock of previous scholarship on The Two Noble Kinsmen, and to chart new trajectories for future work on this play. Especially welcome are papers that help us see the play afresh through hitherto neglected theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory, affect theory, ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies, and performance studies. Papers that shift focus to less-studied characters, tropes, and passages are also encouraged.
42. Seminar: Winter’s Tales: The Imagined North in Early Modern English Literature
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (ENS, Université de Lyon)
What did the North mean to Shakespeare’s contemporaries? How did the depiction of northern places, phenomena and identities on the English stage create a geographical but also climatic imaginary? Representations of Northern local or global locations engaged with political and geographical discourses, but on a more intimate level, they also redefined coldness as a symbol of northerliness. Approaches focusing on material history, sensory geography, empire, geohumouralism and ecocriticism are welcome.
43. Seminar: Women and Complaint, from Medieval to Early Modern
Holly A. Crocker (University of South Carolina) and Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University)
This seminar asks, what happens to women’s complaint across the conventional divide between medieval and early modern periods? From ballads and lyrics, to epyllia and drama: we invite analyses of complaints that are institutional and ephemeral, formal and fleeting. By taking a long view of complaining women, we hope to begin a conversation among medievalists and early modernists working to dislodge normative trajectories of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and temporality.
44. Seminar: The World Must be Peopled: Biopolitics and Early Modern Sexuality, Labor, and Race
Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi)
In an age of pandemics and renewed focus on public health, it is time to think about biopolitics. How did the state come to exercise power through the management of biological life? What social, political, and religious factors combined to reconceive nations as populations rather than territories? How did this shift alter ideas about sexuality, disability, race, class, and literature? Papers may examine literary and non-literary texts on poor relief, life under plague, management of laborers, and colonial projects in Europe and around the world.
WORKSHOPS
45. Workshop: Applied Shakespeare: Renaissance Leadership for Transformative Higher Education
Ariane Balizet (Texas Christian University), Natalie K. Eschenbaum (University of Washington, Tacoma), and Marcela Kostihova (Hamline University)
This workshop is designed for Renaissance scholars interested in leadership positions in the academy. How does the field’s frequent consideration of leadership in Renaissance texts make us uniquely qualified for this work? How do Renaissance scholar administrators use their critical/historical perspectives to advocate for the humanities? How do we build skills in areas required for leadership that are not part of our scholarly training? Common readings and reflective writing will be completed in advance.
46. Workshop: Artifact as Text: Object-Based Learning in the Shakespeare Classroom
Jess Hamlet (Alvernia University) and Molly Beth Seremet (Mary Baldwin University)
This interactive pedagogy workshop will give participants new tools to engage their students in close-reading practices. This two-part session will both model best practices for educators using objects as a close-reading exercise as well as give participants the opportunity to share, workshop, and refine their own pedagogical practices, taking skills and methods learned from/during the pandemic and incorporating them into regular teaching practices in person, online, or in a hybrid format.
47. Workshop: The Bard in the Borderlands: Pedagogical, Artistic, and Scholarly Approaches to Shakespeare en La Frontera
Katherine Gillen (Texas A&M University, San Antonio), Adrianna M. Santos (Texas A&M University, San Antonio), and Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University)
This workshop will facilitate pedagogical, artistic, and scholarly engagement with a set of previously unpublished plays compiled in the forthcoming openaccess anthology, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriation en La Frontera (ACMRS Press, 2023). Participants will receive advanced access to these plays and will be invited to create a project (pedagogical material, an essay, or a creative piece) related to the growing subfield of Borderlands Shakespeare.
48. Workshop: Engaging Students and Empowering Research with the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS)
Laura Mandell (Texas A&M University) and Katayoun Torabi (Texas A&M University)
This workshop will introduce participants to the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS), an open-access, interactive web application that presents the history of Shakespearean editorial scholarship for selected plays through an interface that is intuitive and comprehensive. Participants will learn how the Digital NVS can be used as an effective resource for research and teaching through a series of exercises we created for college courses.