46th Annual Meeting
01. Alternative Times and Possible Futures
J. K. Barret (University of Texas) and Katherine Eggert (University of Colorado)
This seminar invites papers on how early modern writers project alternative temporalities and on the resources (philosophical, theological, technological, historical, magical, linguistic, literary), aims, and effects of doing so. Possible topics: potential/possibility; emotions or relations invested in the future; certainty/uncertainty (contingency, fortune, luck opportunity, probability, inevitability, etc.); technologies—including literary techniques—for crafting future or alternative time.
02. Continental Shakespeare
Karen Newman (Brown University)
Before the First Folio saw print in 1623, it was advertised in an English reprint of the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue (1622). English players visited Paris, the Low Countries, Germany, Vienna, Prague, and Gdansk; Germans adapted English drama (Titus and Hamlet). The First Folio was in libraries of major continental humanists, of recusant colleges, and of the French finance minister Fouquet and his king, Louis XIV. This seminar invites work on English drama on the continent, 1580 to Voltaire.
03. Early Modern Cultures of Taste
Matthew Hunter (Texas Tech University) and Sam Fallon (SUNY New Paltz)
This seminar invites papers that examine the role of taste in early modern literature and culture: how “taste” emerges as a form of cultural distinction and aesthetic judgment in the early modern period; how gustatory taste relates to cultural taste; how affects like pleasure and disgust arise from and invite such judgments. Especially welcome are new connections between performance studies and material culture, aesthetics and studies of the senses, affect theory and the sociology of culture.
04. First-Generation Shakespeare
Rebecca Olson (Oregon State University)
Many first-generation students are drawn to Shakespeare’s perceived cultural capital; this seminar brainstorms about the ways our courses and scholarship can effectively support underprepared students and promote more inclusive academic communities. Papers might address best practices for helping academically trailblazing students become more confident readers; Shakespeare’s own status as a working-class poet; or the particular challenges and rewards of being a first-generation early modernist.
05. Foucault beyond New Historicism
Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University)
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
06. Intermedia Approaches to Early Modern Song
Katherine R. Larson (University of Toronto) and Sarah F. Williams (University of South Carolina)
How might intermedia tools animate song’s least tangible, yet essential, facets: its generic multidimensionality; its ability to register multiple meanings and permeate boundaries in unexpected ways; and its rootedness in the air? This seminar welcomes contributions that explore intermedia resources for the study and performance of song, engage directly with specific formats for presenting song, or consider the usefulness of digital initiatives for capturing music from a historical perspective.
07. Jonson and Shakespeare
Lynn Meskill (Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Cité)
This seminar seeks to rectify Jonson’s role as either prologue or foil in Shakespeare criticism; it aims to make a breach in the wall separating these two giants of the early modern stage. Participants are invited to compare works rather than biographies and to move beyond traditional labels to explore, for instance, Every Man in His Humour as a predecessor of Othello, the roles for criminals in each author’s plays, or the influence of Jonson’s masques on plays other than The Tempest.
08. The Languages of Tudor Englishness
Alan Stewart (Columbia University)
This seminar invites literary and historical papers on the shifting grounds of “Englishness”: terms for English (natural, true, native) and non-English (stranger, alien, refugiate, savage); the making of “new” Englishness (denization, naturalization); new origin stories for Englishness (chronicles, chorographies). Papers might address language acquisition or refusal, property regulation, marriage and inheritance strategies, writings of exile and displacement, discourses of race and nativism.
09. Locating and (Dis)locating Voices in Shakespeare
Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California)
This seminar focuses on the positioning of voices in space and time as they appear in Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and life-documents. Core readings to be considered are from Barthes, Fernyhough, and Keywords in Sound. Paper topics might include voices in the air, in the head, in the chest, in the ears, on the platform, in vacancy, on the page, in echo-effects, in ventriloquism, in recordings, in the ether.
10. Macbeth: New Directions
Part One: Historical, Textual, and Thematic Approaches
Part Two: Performance and Adaptation
Deborah Willis (University of California, Riverside)
This seminar invites new work on Macbeth from any angle. Can recent studies of early modern emotions and affect, sensations and strangeness, the occult and the demonic, queer time and queer space (among other topics) open up the possibility of fresh insights into this play? What do contemporary productions on stage, film, or in new media tell us about Macbeth’s continuing power and significance? Papers on adaptations of Macbethin any period or in other arts are also welcome.
11. Margaret Cavendish Now
Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University)
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
This seminar invites papers on any aspect of Cavendish’s drama, poetry, natural philosophy, fiction; and / or the relations among them. Also welcome are polemical or programmatic answers to the questions: Why Margaret Cavendish now? What does it mean to read Cavendish in the twenty-first century? Which critical traditions are most useful for her: autobiography, feminism, political philosophy, others? How has her new prominence transformed our understanding of early modern literature and culture?
12. Media, Interface, and Cognition
Paul Budra (Simon Fraser University) and Clifford Werier (Mount Royal University)
This seminar investigates links between media properties and the interfaces which structure a play in consciousness. Such interfaces include historically mediated design features of books, evolving theatrical technologies, cinematic, digital, and virtual reality platforms, and other delivery mechanisms. Historical phenomenology, reading theory, media, and cognitive ecologies and interface design theory may be applied to questions related to the medium of the play and its interface with the mind.
13. Microhistory and the Literary Imagination
Richelle Munkhoff (University of Colorado)
This seminar seeks to explain why microhistorical method has proved so attractive to historians and literary scholars of the late medieval and early modern periods; to elaborate on the relationship between various national schools of microhistory; to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of an approach to historical study by narrowing the scale of observation to the most minute of cultural contexts; and to consider the insertion of the voice of the investigator into the narrative.
14. Mobs, Protests, and Street Fights in Shakespeare
David George (Urbana University)
Papers for this seminar cover riots outside the theatre (the 1849 Astor Place riots) and on stage (in Sir Thomas More, 2 Henry VI, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus). The impetus for these on-stage riots include the successful challenging of political power and consequent anti-absolutism; individual, moral protest (Doll Williamson); the dramatic potential of riots in Early Modern theatre; and the shifting of imagery to depict commoners as unruly or sympathetic. In Coriolanus they are early on framed as noxious animals. Sources for the inspiration behind these scenes may be the spectacular public anatomical theatre (cutting and dissecting); violence in the climax of Mark’s Gospel; and parallels in the sources Shakespeare used.
15. The New Changeling
Gordon McMullan (King’s College London) and Kelly J. Stage (University of Nebraska)
This seminar invites papers addressing The Changeling and its afterlife from any angle: canons, authorship, genres, histories, spaces, sexualities, performances, editions. What difference does it make, ten years after the Oxford Middleton, to read a play often examined in isolation in the context of all the texts created by Middleton and his collaborators? What are the impacts of editing and criticism on performance, and vice versa? What futures might we imagine for Changeling criticism?
16. Object Lessons in Renaissance Personhood
Kevin Curran (Université de Lausanne)
What can we learn about Renaissance notions of personhood by working from the outside in rather than the inside out? This seminar takes personhood as not just a legal expression of agency and sentience, but also a legal fiction designed to curate interactions among people, property, and institutions. How do things like liberty, responsibility, and consent manifest themselves at the level of substance, form, and environment? Papers might address props, animals, tools, furniture, food, plants, more.
17. Old and New Materialisms
Liza Blake (University of Toronto) and Jacques Lezra (University of California, Riverside)
How “new” are the new materialisms? This seminar welcomes essays that bring classical and early modern texts (philosophy, poetry, drama) into conversation with contemporary materialisms. Topics might include: the reception of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura; philosophies of matter in Shakespeare’s plays; plasticity (Catherine Malabou); seventeenth-century matter and atom poems; aleatory materialism; philosophies of chance; vitalisms; ideas of “objects” before Harman and object-oriented ontology.
18. Performing the Humoral Body
Amy Kenny (University of California, Riverside)
This seminar considers how the humoral body was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the early modern stage by exploring the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. How were the humors represented on stage? What was the relationship between the body of the actor and humoral discourse? How did actors theatricalize an inner state for an audience? Papers are welcome on performing interiority, historical phenomenology of the humors, or the semiotics of humoral discourse on stage.
19. The Problem of Life
Christine Varnado (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
How do things—organisms, substances, materials, bodies—make more of themselves? How does matter become alive, and propagate itself, in the material universes figured by and in Shakespeare’s plays and other early modern texts? Taking reproduction as a problem—that is, something not “natural,” essential, or inevitable but instead deeply strange—this seminar welcomes work analyzing the mechanisms and models of reproduction in early modern literature from diverse theoretical perspectives.
20. Publicity and the Early Modern Stage
Allison K. Deutermann (Baruch College, CUNY)
Before mass media, who was famous, how did they get that way, and what did fame entail? This seminar examines theater’s role in the cultivation and consumption of publicity. The aim is to investigate the cultural uses to which famous individuals were put, as well as the networks of communication and modes of representation through which fame developed. With well-known performers, celebrity characters, and notorious playgoers (i.e., Mary Frith), what does a taxonomy of early modern publicity look like?
21. Queer Affects
Mario DiGangi (Graduate Center, CUNY)
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed defines “queer orientations” as those that “don’t line up” with conventional heterosexual norms. What might queer orientations look like in early modern England, before a regime of sexual orientations? How do queer affects—“slantwise” or “misaligned” relations of touch, proximity, or sensation—manifest in early modern texts, and with what effects? How might an attention to such relations contribute to new strands of thought in Shakespeare studies?
22. Recuperating Laughter in Early Modern Comedy
Andrew McConnell Stott (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
What did we lose when we began taking comedy seriously—that is, as a window onto social norms, ideological pressures, political expression? How do we recover comedy’s humor, and what obstacles must we overcome to read comedy on its own terms? Papers might treat archaic wordplay, obscure references, reconstructed comic experience, the archaeology of early modern laughter, the ephemerality of performance, audience incomprehension, laughter’s absence in critical responses, comedy in the classroom.
23. Remediations of Early Modern Drama
Sally Barnden (King’s College London) and Nora J. Williams (University of Exeter)
How is our engagement with early modern drama conditioned by the media landscapes we inhabit? How have the technological innovations of the last two hundred years affected interpretation, adaptation, and archiving? Addressing the need for interdisciplinary scholarship that moves beyond “fidelity debates,” this seminar welcomes papers on topics across the range of media that adapt, appropriate, and interpolate these plays, including film, television, digital and social media, and visual cultures.
24. Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England
Sara Luttfring (Pennsylvania State University, Behrend)
This seminar investigates reproductive knowledge on the early modern page and stage. Papers might consider reproduction’s role in perpetuating familial lines, social hierarchies, and public institutions; the opacity of biological processes; how epistemological authority was negotiated on the basis of gender, class, religion, and political allegiance; medical treatises; pamphlets didactic and obscene; the subjects of impotence, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, parturition, lactation.
25. Rethinking the Global in Global Shakespeare
Susan Bennett (University of Calgary) and Sonia Massai (King’s College London)
The wealth of performances and events around the world in 2016 provided overwhelming evidence of Shakespeare’s impact. This seminar addresses not specific performances or events but the kinds of discourses they generate. What ideas constructed the field of global Shakespeare and what ideas are extending or revising work in this area? Are there theoretical approaches in other disciplines that productively engage the complexity of Shakespeare today? Is the term “global” still fit for purpose?
26. Revisiting Genre Theory
Edward Gieskes (University of South Carolina)
This seminar explores genres as dynamic and contradictory spaces whose internal structures and external boundaries are constantly in flux. Rosalie Colie described them as “tiny subcultures with their own habits, habitats, and structures of ideas as well as their own forms.” How do generic categories operate in relationship to shifting “habitats” for early moderns? How do such social changes get refracted into generic changes? How might we account for the period’s productivity in generic innovation?
27. The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us
Steve Mentz (Saint John’s University) and Carla Della Gatta (University of Southern California)
It is a good time to be Shakespeare—but not necessarily a good time to be us. What does it mean to be a Shakespearean or SAA member facing diminished professional prospects? What utopian or dystopian futures can we envision for our profession and the SAA? This seminar invites critique and communication around systemic conditions, institutional reform, political climate, and structural change. What steps can we take to make our dreams a reality and avoid our worst nightmares?
28. Scholar-Practitioner Shakespeare
Chad Allen Thomas (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and Amy Rodgers (Mount Holyoke College)
This seminar brings together scholar-performers—academics who perform in, direct, or are otherwise involved in Shakespeare performance—to ask how we might overcome traditional barriers fortified by specialized epistemologies and lexicons. How do book work, blocking, and rehearsal exercises challenge scholars’ understandings? How might scholarly work inform performance outside of historical consultation? How does performing Shakespeare provide new perspectives on “the archive” and “evidence”?
29. Scrapbook Shakespeare
Rob Conkie (La Trobe University) and Paul Salzman (La Trobe University)
What does the scrapbooking of Shakespeare reveal about the uses to which he is put across time and place? Work might feature patchwork play scripts (described by Tiffany Stern), cut-and-paste editing (practiced by Halliwell-Phillips), theatrical archives (such as the Folger), radical dramaturgies (like that of Marowitz), social media (including Pinterest and Instagram). Scrapbooking might also be used to explore performance, pedagogy, editing, biography, and authorship in Shakespeare studies.
30. Shakespeare across the Mediterranean
Sabine Schülting (Freie Universität Berlin)
Sponsored by the European Shakespeare Research Association
For centuries, the Mediterranean has constituted both a dynamic cultural contact zone and a divide between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The seminar is concerned with the ocean, sea journeys and shipwrecks in Shakespearean drama as well as with the “Mediterranean” travels of the plays in translation and adaptation. Focusing on the figure of the stranger or refugee, we will also discuss Shakespeare’s plays in the light of Mediterranean migration in the 21st century.
31. Shakespeare and Donne
Elizabeth D. Harvey (University of Toronto) and Timothy M. Harrison (University of Chicago)
This seminar invites papers that probe the relationship between Donne and Shakespeare with particular attention to language, rhetoric, and poetics. How do they employ theatricality, poetic forms, and modes? How do they treat shared sources (Ovid, Petrarch, Montaigne)? How do they represent the inhabitation of other forms of being? In what ways do they examine love, infidelity, jealousy, erotic desire, gender impersonation? What epistemological frameworks do they bring to bear on their works?
32. Shakespeare and Gesture
Miranda Fay Thomas (Shakespeare’s Globe) and Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago)
This seminar considers the use of gesture in early modern drama: in performance, in its reception, or on film. In what ways is gesture used to communicate emotion, opinion, intent, ceremony, or even disrespect on the Renaissance stage? How does Shakespeare’s work engage with us beyond words, using the language of the body? Participants might engage with the seminar from the approach of historicism, performance studies, cognition, psycholinguistics, or as practitioners.
34. Shakespeare and Peace
Lawrence Manley (Yale University) and Maggie Vinter (Case Western Reserve University)
This seminar invites work on Shakespeare and peace, including concepts and definitions of peace; peace as personal or interpersonal felicity and as moral, religious, social, legal, or political ideal. Possible topics include the invocation of peace in praise, prayer, and greeting; peace and peacefulness in character, form, and genre; dramaturgical aspects of peace on stage; early modern geopolitics, sources, and motives of early modern pacifism, Shakespeare in the history of pacifism and peacemaking.
35. Shakespeare and Service Courses
Kelly Neil (Spartanburg Methodist College)
This seminar reconsiders a task—teaching Shakespeare in introductions to literature and surveys—that is often seen as ancillary to research and upper-level teaching. Papers might explore approaches or challenges to teaching Shakespeare to freshmen, sophomores, non-majors, and non-traditional students in such courses, as well as to the institutional cultures of community colleges, junior colleges, and baccalaureate colleges. Reports of classroom experience should be informed by critical analysis.
36. Shakespeare and the Global South
Sandra Young (University of Cape Town) and Pompa Banerjee (University of Colorado, Denver)
The resonances of contemporary global Shakespeares point to the solidarity that exists across vast differences, as theater makers around the world probe the subversive in Shakespeare. This seminar invites papers that consider how nontraditional Shakespeares open up new avenues of thought and social critique. Can cultural theory learn from the way Shakespeare has been reimagined for a new moment, as we reckon with global cultural politics and disturbing new appeals to ethnicity to police borders?
37. Shakespeare and the Modern Novel
Douglas Trevor (University of Michigan)
How might we assess the impact of Shakespeare’s writings on the modern novel? Are there dominant modes (thematic or characterological) and forms (realistic, genre, or experimental fiction) by which this influence has been most felt? What is the Shakespearean effect on these reimaginings (in terms of style, for example)? Participants are invited to consider novels in the Hogarth Shakespeare series (Tyler, Atwood) or other modern novels that engage with the Shakespearean corpus (McEwan’s Nutshell).
38. Shakespeare and Twenty-First-Century Poetics
Linda Gregerson (University of Michigan)
How can we map Shakespeare’s continuing force field in the realm of contemporary poetics? By “Shakespeare,” we mean not only the plays, poems, and ongoing legacy of theatrical production, but also: scholarly contestation, textual analysis, popular appropriation, material artifacts, biographical obsession. This seminar welcomes the widest range of contributions: explications of individual poets or poetic devices, theoretical analyses of method, creative experiments on Shakespearean themes.
39. Shakespeare, Marx, Our Moment
Hugh Grady (Arcadia University) and Jean E. Howard (Columbia University)
On the two-hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth, this seminar explores how his ideas have influenced the field’s understanding of Shakespeare’s works and can continue to inform the engaged criticism urgently needed now. Topics might include Marx’s critical legacy in Shakespeare studies; Marxism’s relationship to feminism, cultural materialism, presentism, ecocriticism, early modern race studies, the new economic criticism; and its usefulness for critical projects that speak to the present.
40. The Shakespearean Everyday
Jessica Rosenberg (University of Miami)
This seminar addresses the status of everyday life as a sphere of experience and expertise, taking a special interest in temporalities of habit and repetition that do not normally register on historical timescales (including the diurnal, hourly, weekly, and seasonal). What is at stake in exploring the formal and political composition of ordinary life today? In what new ways might we understand the performative or creative work done by everyday practices? The seminar welcomes papers that take as their object Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, poetry, and prose, as well as material and popular culture.
41. Shakespearean Negativity
Andrew Griffin (University of California, Santa Barbara) and James Kearney (University of California, Santa Barbara)
This seminar asks questions about affect and knowledge in Shakespeare’s plays by exploring his representations of negativity. Here, negativity is understood to be a feeling, an ethical position, a way of understanding humanity: the misanthrope, the pessimist, and the cynic feel bad about the world, think poorly of humanity, and mistrust the future. How do Shakespeare’s plays deal with such negativity? What is the relationship between pessimism and politics? Is there hope for the misanthrope?
42. Sites of Resistance in the Early Modern Theater
Robin E. Bates (Lynchburg College)
What kinds of resistance are represented in early modern plays? How does the repeated performance of a moment of opposition create meaning for the location being represented, or how might it implicate the site of performance as itself a location of resistance? What do early modern performances of oppression, encroachment, and invasion suggest about how resistance succeeds or fails? This seminar welcomes geocritical, ecocritical, performance theory, political, cultural studies approaches—and more.
43. Speculative Shakespeare
Louise Geddes (Adelphi University) and Valerie Fazel (Arizona State University)
This seminar explores the impact that speculative realism has on the Shakespearean aesthetic. Due to its pluralized identity across media, Shakespeare acquires an agency that is well-suited to posthumanist speculative criticism. Creative and critical work for the seminar might use performance, appropriations, networks, and gaming to explore non-causal networks that emerge within and across the works, the text as actant, or Shakespeare as an active agent in twenty-first-century thought.
44. The Subject of Elizabeth(s)
Kaara Peterson (Miami University of Ohio)
This seminar invites new work on Shakespeare in the age of Elizabeth I—and Elizabeth II. How did the Virgin Queen’s forty-five-year reign create distinct pictures of virginity, Amazons, Tudors, female rule? How was her court influenced by the popular culture of the stage, as political actors or private individuals? How have Elizabeth II’s six decades on the throne shaped Shakespearean theater? What new trends inform the Elizabethan stage since 1952? Papers may explore either Elizabethan era.
45. Taking Notes in/on Shakespeare
Scott Schofield (Huron University College)
Sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
This inaugural SHARP/SAA seminar offers an intensive investigation of notetaking by encouraging discussion between scholars of text, performance, editing, and the various makers of Shakespeare on paper and screen. Papers might consider the notes of individual annotators, the scholarship of early modern reading practices (such as interleaving and commonplacing), and how it might inform notetaking in the classroom, multimodal notetaking, or the future of commentary in online social settings.
46. The Taming of the Shrew and Its Afterlife
Coppélia Kahn (Brown University) and Linda Woodbridge (Pennsylvania State University)
Shakespeare’s most controversial play poses stubborn questions about gender roles, the extent of patriarchal power, the use of metadrama to stage taming as illusion or pretense. Starting with Garrick’s Catherine and Petruchio, adaptations have registered social changes that drive continued controversy. Papers are invited on the play and its rewritings in film, ballet, opera, drama, narrative, satire, parody. New perspectives on race, gender, and specific political issues are especially welcome.
47. Teaching Shakespeare at the Performance
Jessica Winston (Idaho State University)
In the pedagogical criticism, little attention has been paid to the teaching of live stage productions of early modern drama, whether as a tool for teaching the text or as an art form to be analyzed in its own right. How do we help students or the public to “read” live performance? What approaches do teachers and theater educational staff use? What are the merits of teaching with live theater versus digital relays or film? How do we address challenges of access (logistics, finances, disability)?
48. Technology, Philosophy, Performance
Lisa S. Starks (University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg)
What are the interactions between philosophy and technology in Shakespearean performance? How do performances mediate inquiry through technologies of acting, writing, design? How are structures derived from modern philosophy applied to understanding performance? How might they be rethought to engage the theater’s means of materialized inquiry? Essays should engage an intersection of philosophy and performance, focusing on theoretical or material aspects of theater practice and technology.
49. Theatrical Families, 1560-1660
Eva Griffith (London, UK) and David Kathman (Chicago, IL)
To what extent did families contribute to the economics and development of early theater? How should evidence of their contributions be found and presented? This seminar invited papers exploring theatre-connected families active between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, including but not limited to families of actors, playhouse owners, stationers, tire makers, livery company members, inn holders, and patrons. The results are varied and revealing.
50. Time and Emotion
Sarah Lewis (King’s College London), Kristine Johanson (Universiteit van Amsterdam), and Thomas J. Moretti (Iona College)
From the momentary “hap” of happiness, to the idea that old age engendered melancholy, to the sense of temporal distance inherent in nostalgia, emotions in early modern literature were significantly and variously temporal. Papers might explore intersections of the temporal and the emotional in late Elizabethan and early Stuart literature within such contexts as early modern physiology, religion, medicine, textual production, performance, literary form, age, race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
51. Thinking Theology with Shakespeare
Jay Zysk (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)
In Reformation England, theology is as much about issues of hermeneutics as it is about doctrine and belief. This seminar asks how Shakespeare draws on theology not only as a set of doctrinal positions but also as a theoretical resource that frames questions about time, history, humanity, and dramatic representation. Papers are welcome on the interplay between literature and theology, theology’s reach beyond religion, and theology in its theoretical, historical, and epistemological permutations.
52. Warring Grecians Turks Afric Moors and Others
Lisa Barksdale-Shaw (Saginaw Valley State University)
From Shakespeare’s Goths in Titus to Marlowe’s Scythians in Tamburlaine, the early modern stage offers characters who are both “others” and warriors. How does analyzing both conditions offer another lens to read the Blackamoor? Papers might consider race, gender, culture, and nationality. How did drama imitate or deviate from earlier depictions of militant men and women? What methodologies—psychological, scientific, legal, or political—might apply? How do other texts depict the warring others?
53. Where Is Myth?
Wendy Hyman (Oberlin College)
Revising the question, “if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet?” this seminar asks “where is myth?” What sort of thing is a myth on Shakespeare’s stage? How do we understand the relationship between ostensibly “real” and “fictional” beings? What need we know of genre, stagecraft, and textual transmission? Papers may deploy Other Worlds theory, actor-network theory, and theories of mimesis and figuration to explore the epistemological and metaphysical ruptures of mythology.
54. Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance
Sarah C. E. Ross (Victoria University of Wellington) and Rosalind Smith (University of Newcastle)
Complaint is a powerful and ubiquitous Renaissance rhetorical mode, expressing erotic, religious, and political protest and loss. It often foregrounds the voice and body of a lamenting woman, but “female complaint” has largely been understood as male literary ventriloquy. This seminar focuses on women writers and the gendered politics of complaint, exploring how the voices of the disenfranchised, railing against their circumstances, helped to shape Renaissance literary and social cultures.
55. Women Gender and Book History
Valerie Wayne (University of Hawai’i)
This seminar brings work on women’s participation in book production and questions of gender into conversation with recent scholarship on the early modern book trade concerning Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Research on women as printers, publishers, booksellers, stationers, patrons, and readers is especially welcome, along with discussions of gender in relation to book history. We will also share information on databases and websites that are particularly helpful for doing this work.
56. Connecting Faculty, Schools, and Communities through Shakespeare
Ann C. Christensen (University of Houston) and Laura Turchi (University of Houston)
This workshop offers a framework for professional and personal interest in pedagogy, social activism, youth culture and the arts, as well as a practicum to develop collaborative programming around Shakespeare in participants’ own institutional and local contexts. Advance work includes readings in key texts; Internet searches for local Shakespeare curricula, funding sources, and publication venues; strategies for identifying potential collaborators; and ways of reporting on findings and goals.
57. Resurrecting Shakespeare (and His Sisters)
Emma Whipday (University College London)
This hands-on workshop explores how archival research and contemporary creative practice can “resurrect” vanished or overlooked aspects of Shakespeare’s theatrical world, from neglected performance contexts to the work and experiences of women. Approaching conduct literature, masques, broadsides, wills, diaries, and court records through performance practice and creative play, participants will collaborate in creating a new form of “verbatim theater” that resurrects Shakespeare’s world (and that of his sisters).
58. Shakespeare Improv
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland) and Stephen Purcell (University of Warwick)
Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited a late-medieval tradition of dramatic performance in which drama and game were cognate activities, and traces of this heritage may be found in the theatrical culture of the early modern period. This workshop proposes that there is much to be learned from “reverse engineering” early modern drama, approaching it as a form of improvisatory game. It combines archival and performance-based approaches to explore the forms and pressures of Shakespearean improv.
59. Shakespeare in the Health Humanities
Cora Fox (Arizona State University)
Our workshop is collaborating to generate two working documents that will become resources for faculty, administrators, students, and members of the community, including 1)those interested in documenting or expanding the practical/applied uses of Shakespeare in Health Humanities contexts; and 2)those considering the social, professional, ethical or disciplinary challenges and discoveries that can result from interdisciplinary projects involving Shakespeare and questions of health and medicine. We aim to capture the vitality and promise of approaching health through Shakespeare study and/or performance, while at the same time addressing the limitations and cautions that can or should place restraints on such programs. Our ultimate goal is to create an archive of best practices for the integration of Shakespeare’s works or scholarship on Shakespeare into programs studying or promoting health.
60. “Third Wave” Interdisciplinarity in Shakespeare and Biblical Studies
Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University) and Tammi J. Schneider (Claremont Graduate University)
This workshop offers scholars of Shakespeare and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament a rare chance to work closely with and learn from each other, comparing hermeneutical methods and theories of interpretation in genuinely cross-disciplinary conversation. Navigating the philological and historical issues raised in both current Biblical and current Shakespeare textual studies, participants will work on issues of shared longstanding interest: monarchy, monogamy, and monotheism.
61. Transcribing and Interpreting Digital Recipe Manuscripts
Amy L. Tigner (University of Texas, Arlington) and Hillary M. Nunn (University of Akron)
For this workshop, participants will transcribe a Folger recipe manuscript with the aims of increasing their paleographic skills, learning the Folger transcription platform Dromio, and generating research projects: blog posts, syllabi, contextual essays, video demonstrations, digital humanities applications. What challenges are associated with physical objects encountered in digital form, documents without known authors, texts created by underrepresented populations, manuscripts in the classroom?
62. Writing, Shaping, and Publishing the Scholarly Book
William Germano (Cooper Union)
Led by the author of Getting It Published and From Dissertation to Book, this workshop focuses on moving from research to manuscript to book. Participants should be at work on a book-length research project. Each will provide a publication proposal (description, table of contents, market analysis). The workshop leader will provide written feedback on the proposal’s voice, presentation, argumentation, and evidence. Participants will also read and review work by fellow workshop members.