2023 Meeting Program and Schedule

8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Registration

Registration Office

Book Exhibits

TBA

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8:00 to 9:00 a.m.

Professionalization

Meet-and-Greet with Journal Editors
TBA

Join the editors of several peer-reviewed journals for coffee and informal conversation about submitting work for publication: what to submit, where to submit, and what to expect after you’ve submitted it. All are welcome, and early-career scholars are particularly encouraged to attend.

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10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

Seminar

Abject Science
TBA

LEADERS: 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?

Workshop

Applied Shakespeare: Renaissance Leadership for Transformative Higher Education
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Beyond “Formal Limits”: New Frontiers in Theater History
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Comic Epistemologies, Part One
TBA

LEADERS: 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?

Seminar

Contemporary Poets and Early Modernity
TBA

LEADERS: 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?

Seminar

Cunning
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Early Modern Data
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Imagining Antiquity, Part One
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Intersectional Animality, Part One
TBA

LEADERS: Holly Dugan, George Washington University and Karen Raber, University of Mississippi

Critical animal studies seek 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

The World Must be Peopled: Biopolitics and Early Modern Sexuality, Labor, and Race
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Digital Exhibit

Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts
TBA

Heidi Craig, Texas A&M University
Sonia Massai, King’s College London

Early Modern Dramatic Paratexts (EMDP, paratexts.folger.edu) is an open-access database of all dramatic paratexts printed to 1660. EMDP digitizes and expands Paratexts in English Printed Drama to 1642 (CUP, 2014) edited by Thomas L. Berger and Massai, and was created with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Texas A&M’s Center for Digital Humanities Research (CoDHR).

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

First Folio Celebration: An Immersive Experience
TBA

Gabriel Egan, De Montfort University
Tam McDonald, Cradle of English Limited

Cradle of English is a London-based start-up company inspired by the links between new technologies and evolving culture, from the 16th century printing presses to today’s immersive technologies. It is creating a multimedia, digital content platform⁠—called an “immerzeo”⁠—to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio and as a new way of presenting history.

Visit Project Website

View Introductory Video

Digital Exhibit

The Marlowe Census
TBA

Rob Carson, Hobart and William Smith Colleges

Borrowing its design from the Shakespeare Census conducted by Adam Hooks and Zachary Lesser, the Marlowe Census attempts to locate and describe all surviving copies of Marlowe’s works printed before 1700. We are also developing an open-source template for scholars who are interested in conducting censuses of their own for the surviving corpora of other early modern writers.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

REED and Taxonomies: Toward a Classification of the Early Modern Everything
TBA

Tanya Hagen, University of Toronto

This session showcases REED Online, the web-based, open access resource launched in 2016 by the Records of Early English Drama project as a successor to our print-based series. Producing REED in an electronic environment involves a large-scale rethinking of how we name and classify the myriad entities that a collection comprehends, particularly as we think toward broad interoperability with other digital humanities resources.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

Rethinking the Canon: Integrating Corpus Linguistics into Traditional Literary Analysis
TBA

Lily Freeman-Jones, Queen Mary University of London

This project presents a doctoral thesis as an example of how corpus linguistics might be incorporated by a wider range of literary scholars, without digital humanities expertise. It also evaluates computer-generated and traditional manual methods to create a lexical field. In doing so, it ultimately aims to foster discussion about how and why we work the way we do today.

Digital Exhibit

Sources of Early Modern Emotion in English, 1500-1700
TBA

Bradley J. Irish, Arizona State University

Sources of Early Modern Emotion in English, 1500-1700 (SEMEE) is a collaborative website that hosts freely-editable bibliographies of primary and secondary sources related to the study of early modern emotion in England.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

Unfortunate Creatures: Pre-modern Natural Disaster Narratives
TBA

Ian F. MacInnes, Albion College

Unfortunate Creatures invites participants to collaborate on a peer-reviewed crowd-sourced project devoted to making available TEI-encoded primary sources reacting to natural disasters in the pre-modern period combined with numerical data gleaned from those sources. The project is particularly interested in promoting mentored undergraduate research.

Visit Project Website

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1:30 to 3:00 p.m.

Roundtable

Carceral Shakespeare
TBA

ORGANIZERS: Liz Fox, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Gina Hausknecht, Coe College

CHAIR: Sarah Higinbotham, Emory University, Oxford College

Liz Fox, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Gender Inequities: Shakespeare in Women’s Prisons

Frannie Shepherd-Bates, Detroit, MI
Impacts and Outcomes: Assessing a Shakespeare Prison Arts Program

Kevin J. Windhauser, Columbia University
Misreading or Counter-Reading?: Unstructured Encounters with Shakespearean Texts in Prison Libraries Early Modern Studies

Gina Hausknecht, Coe College
Stealth Abolition: Public Conversations About Carceral Shakespeare

Panel

Race-ing Queens
TBA

ORGANIZER: Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, Butler University

CHAIR: Margo Hendricks, University of California, Santa Cruz

Mira ‘Assaf Kafantaris, Butler University
The Epistemic Promise of Race-ing Queens

Danielle Lee, SUNY College at Old Westbury
Surrender to the Queen: Queen Nzinga, African Female Agency, and Portuguese Submission

Harry R. McCarthy, Jesus College, University of Cambridge
Not He, the Queen: Boyed Blackness and Queer Race in Antony and Cleopatra

Anita Raychawdhuri, University of Houston-Downtown
Queer/Quean: The Tragedy of Mariam, Whiteness, and Queer Chastity

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3:30 to 5:30 p.m.

Seminar

Early Modern London Historiography and Drama
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Echoes of Violence
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Henry VIII: New Directions
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Love’s Labour’s Won: Reimagining Shakespeare Studies
TBA

LEADER: 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?

Seminar

Marlowe and Jonson
TBA

LEADER: 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?

Seminar

Metatheater as Rivalry and Dialogue
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Natural History Now
TBA

LEADER: 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?

Seminar

New Approaches to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Part One
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Pedagogies of Premodern Disability
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Performance Cultures in and around the Inns of Court
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Reconsidering Science and Religion
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

The Renaissance Project
TBA

LEADERS: 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”?

Seminar

Shakespeare and the Public Good
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare’s Propositional Third Spaces: Thinking beyond the Binary
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Book Salon

Spotlight on Early Modern Critical Race Studies
TBA

This event brings together three scholars working in Early Modern Critical Race Studies whose first books appear in print in 2022 and 2023: Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto), Miles Grier (Queens College, CUNY), and Noémie Ndiaye (University of Chicago) will interview and discuss each other’s work, followed by an audience Q&A.

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6:00 to 8:30 p.m.

Annual Reception

TBA

Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting and their guests. Each guest must have an SAA name tag in order to attend; guest tags may be requested and purchased on the conference registration form.

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.

Yoga

Shakespeare Yoga
TBA

Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame

Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting and registered guests.

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8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Registration

Registration Office

Book Exhibits

TBA

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8:00 to 9:00 a.m.

Breakfast

Graduate Student Breakfast
TBA

Hosted by the Trustees of the Association.

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9:00 to 10:30 a.m.

Panel

The Early Modern Multiverse: Worlds beyond Worlds in Shakespeare (and Beyond)
TBA

ORGANIZER: Jane Hwang Degenhardt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

CHAIR: Alice Dailey, Villanova University

Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University
Wild Cosmologies and Multiple Worlds in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries

Wendy Beth Hyman, Oberlin College
Theater as Portal

Jane Hwang Degenhardt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Fiction and World-Making in The Tempest

Helen Smith, University of York
Worlds upon Worlds: Encyclopedic Shakespeare

Panel

Shakespeare en Nuestra América
TBA

ORGANIZER: Carla Della Gatta, Florida State University

CHAIR: Michael Witmore, Folger Shakespeare Library

Alfredo Michel Modenessi, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
“…lo que no es parte de ti”: Bilingual R&J in the USA

Donna Woodford-Gormley, New Mexico Highlands University
Consuming Shakespeare, Incorporating Cuba

Carla Della Gatta, Florida State University
Shakespearean Disidentifications

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11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Seminar

Adaptation Strategies and Resilience in Early Modern England
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Workshop

The Bard in the Borderlands: Pedagogical, Artistic, and Scholarly Approaches to Shakespeare en La Frontera
TBA

LEADERS: 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 open-access 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.

Seminar

Comic Epistemologies
TBA

LEADERS: 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?

Seminar

Dissolving Worlds in Early Modern Literature
TBA

LEADER: 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?

Seminar

Early Modern Carceral Studies
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Forsaken Plays, Part One
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Imagining Antiquity, Part Two
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Intersectional Animality, Part Two
TBA

LEADERS: Holly Dugan, George Washington University and Karen Raber, University of Mississippi

Critical animal studies seek 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.

Seminar

New Approaches to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Part Two
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

The Queen’s Gambit
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Scarcity in a Time of Plenty: Early Modern English Writers on Hunger
TBA

LEADERS: 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?

Seminar

Screen Shakespeares: Form and Technology
TBA

LEADERS: 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).

Seminar

Shakespeare and Race in Popular Culture
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare and Writing Instruction
TBA

LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare between Ancient and Modern Thought
TBA

LEADERS: 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.

Digital Exhibit

The 3Dhotbed Project: Extending Bibliographical Pedagogy through Additive Manufacturing
TBA

Courtney “Jet” Jacobs, University of California, Los Angeles
Marcia McIntosh, University of North Texas
Kevin M. O’Sullivan, Texas A&M University

An acronym for “3D-Printed History of the Book Education,” 3Dhotbed democratizes access to the resources necessary for hands-on instruction related to book production during the early modern period (and beyond). Among the teaching toolkits it makes freely available are those demonstrating the processes of casting type by hand; xylographic printing; and making paper.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

“Her Melodious [Artificial Intelligence] Lay”: Agency of Ophelia and the Artist in AI Art
TBA

Danielle Byington, University of Jaén

My digital exhibit project utilizes the eighteen lines spoken by Gertrude in Hamlet to abstract Ophelia’s death using AI art. Not unlike scholarship which ponders Ophelia’s degree of agency in her death scene, my digital exhibit content explores the space between artistic genius and who/what creates AI art.

Visit Project Website

View Introductory Video

Digital Exhibit

The Kit Marlowe Project
TBA

Kristen Abbott Bennett, Framingham State University

The Kit Marlowe Project is public-facing, student-generated digital resource dedicated to the study of Christopher Marlowe in the context of early modern English literature and history. Simultaneously it is a site of knowledge-making and experimental digital pedagogy in action. Students contribute original research and DH-driven projects including previously unpublished TEI-encoded, diplomatic editions of early modern works.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

Marlowe in Sheets
TBA

Andreas Patrick Bassett, University of Washington
Sarah Nickel Moore, University of Washington

Marlowe in Sheets is a digital-materiality project that provides access to the works of Christopher Marlowe in their original form: foldable “sheets” of paper. As a tool that connects users to the materiality of Marlowe’s texts, this project offers Marlowe’s corpus in PDFs that can be printed and customized in tandem with robust educational resources and content.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

Nashville’s Shakespeare
TBA

Joel Overall, Belmont University     
Jayme M. Yeo, Belmont University

Nashville’s Shakespeare documents the history of Shakespearean performance in Music City, focusing on civil rights and Southern culture, including gender equality and Black identity. The project highlights Shakespeare’s role in regional America by demonstrating how marginalized artists in Nashville shaped and continue to shape Shakespeare’s work in Music City.

Visit Project Website

Digital Exhibit

Pericles VR
TBA

Emma Harper, Nanyang Technological University
Hans Martin Rall, Nanyang Technological University

Pericles VR is an ongoing collaboration between NTU, Singapore and The Shakespeare Institute, UK, to produce an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Pericles: Prince of Tyre in gamified animated virtual reality. It highlights the potential of immersive media for literary education, and the value of projects which integrate creative design approaches with scholarly research.

Visit Project Website

Performance

The Rape of Lucrece
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Ellena Pellone will present a dramatic performance of Shakespeare’s moving and harrowing poem, The Rape of Lucrece, with musical accompaniment by Katherine Abbott. Pellone’s performance was presented at the 2021 inaugural Verona Shakespeare Fringe Festival and the Shakespeare’s Coming Home! Festival, Stratford-upon-Avon, in 2022. A discussion of the performance and the poem will follow, moderated by event organizer David Schalkwyk.

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1:30 to 3:00 p.m.

Annual Luncheon

TBA

Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting. Additional guest tickets may be purchased in advance. Member tickets are included in registration envelopes (but may not be available to onsite registrants).

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3:30 to 5:00 a.m.

Plenary Panel

Constructing the First Folio
TBA

*See linked seminar: “The 1623 First Folio” on Saturday.

ORGANIZER: Emma Smith, Hertford College, University of Oxford

CHAIR: Bernadette Andrea, University of California, Santa Barbara

Amy E. Lidster, University of Oxford Authorizing the Folio’s “Shakespeare”

Jitka Štollová, University of Cambridge The Tale of Two Folios

Gary L. Taylor, Florida State University One Book to Rule Them All

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5:15 to 7:00 p.m.

Cash Bar

Scholars of Color Social and Cash Bar
TBA

Co-sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Open to all registrants and their guests.

We anticipate a special guest for this event; stay tuned for more!

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7:30 to 8:30 p.m.

Interview

A Conversation with Deborah Ann Byrd
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Classical actress Debra Ann Byrd will discuss and reprise portions of her lauded performance of Becoming Othello. Described as a living memoir, Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey is a multimedia solo theatrical production that debuted in 2020, with lyrical language, soulful songs and the music that shaped the life of a resilient little girl growing up in Spanish Harlem. The choreopoem chronicles Byrd’s life and experiences, including a fateful encounter with a company of Shakespearean actors and her remarkable, gender-flipped journey on the road to becoming Othello.

7:30 to 8:30 a.m.

Yoga

Shakespeare Yoga
TBA

Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame

Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting and registered guests.

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8:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

Registration

Registration Office

Book Exhibits

TBA

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9:00 to 10:30 a.m.

Panel

Habeas Corpus: Shakespeare and the Limits of Embodiment
TBA

ORGANIZER: Christopher L. Pye, Williams College

CHAIR: Heidi Brayman, University of California, Riverside

Ted Tregear, University of St Andrews Shakespeare’s Speculative Bodies: Reflections on “The Phoenix and Turtle”

Christopher L. Pye, Williams College Hurt Feelings: Affect, World and Time in As You Like It

Marjorie Rubright, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Embodiment on the Edge: The Nature of Whiteness in Henry V

Panel

Material Concerns: Shakespeare and the Early Modern in the Artists’ Book
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ORGANIZERS: Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia and Jennifer A. Low, Florida Atlantic University

CHAIR: Vin Nardizzi, University of British Columbia

Jennifer A. Low, Florida Atlantic University
Spatiality without the Playhouse: Manipulable Artists’ Books and the Uses of Shakespeare

Amy L. Tigner, University of Texas, Arlington
The Art and Science of Volvelles and Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia
#BookArtsSoWhite?

Panel

Staging Citizenship: Early Modern Disability Histories
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*See linked seminar: “Pedagogies of Premodern Disability” on Thursday.

ORGANIZERS: Penelope H. Geng, Macalester College and Katherine Schaap Williams, University of Toronto

CHAIR: Jennifer Row, University of Minnesota

Penelope H. Geng, Macalester College
Refusing Able-Bodied Citizenship

Genevieve Love, Colorado College
Constructing the Disabled Citizen

Katherine Schaap Williams, University of Toronto
Disabling Citizenship in the History Play

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11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

Plenary Panel

NextGenPlen
TBA

ORGANIZERS: Members of the NextGenPlen Committee

CHAIR: Farah Karim-Cooper, Shakespeare’s Globe

Rebecca Hixon, University of Michigan
“We keep doing this don’t we?”: Disrupting Racial Trauma in Performances of Harlem Duet

Lindsay Adams Kennedy, Belmont Abbey College
A Discursive “She”: The [Mis]Prints and Possibilities of Emilia in Shakespeare’s Othello
Chris Klippenstein, Columbia University
Personating Animals on the Early Modern Stage

Emily MacLeod, Penn State Harrisburg
Discharging Rafe: Protean Performance in The Knight of the Burning Pestle

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2:00 to 3:30 p.m.

Roundtable

Anne’s World, 1623/2023: Shakespeare’s Wife and Her Warwickshire Legacy
TBA

ORGANIZERS: Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Chris Laoutaris, University of Birmingham, and Katherine W. Scheil, University of Minnesota

CHAIR: Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust

Ailsa Grant Ferguson, University of Brighton

Chris Laoutaris, University of Birmingham

Laurie E. Maguire, University of Oxford

Lena C. Orlin, Georgetown University

Panel

Publics–Bodies–Speech: Drama in the Early Modern Mediascapee
TBA

ORGANIZER: Allison K. Deutermann, Baruch College, CUNY

CHAIR: Erika T. Lin, Graduate Center, CUNY

Allison K. Deutermann, Baruch College, CUNY
The Persons of the Play

Scott A. Trudell, University of Maryland
This feather stirs: Cordelia the Cyborg

András Kiséry, City College of New York, CUNY
The Media of the Spoken Word and the Discovery of Embodied Speech

Shakespeare Futures Panel

Zoom-Flight: Neoliberalism and Embodied Learning in the Post-Pandemic Shakespeare Classroom
TBA

ORGANIZER: Eric L. De Barros, American University of Sharjah

CHAIR: Timothy Francisco, Youngstown State University

Marissa Greenberg, University of New Mexico (Re)making Homework for the Online Shakespeare Classroom

Crystal Bartolovich, Syracuse University At the (Seminar) Table: Dialectically Embodied Learning in the Early Modern Studies Classroom

Eric L. De Barros, American University of Sharjah Neoliberal Racism and the (Post-)Pandemic Shakespeare Classroom

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4:00 to 6:00 p.m.

Seminar

The 1623 First Folio
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LEADERS: 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.

Workshop

Artifact as Text: Object-Based Learning in the Shakespeare Classroom
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LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Counting (in) Early Modern Drama
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LEADERS: 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?

Workshop

Engaging Students and Empowering Research with the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS)
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LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Forsaken Plays, Part Two
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LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Reassessing Lady Mary Wroth’s Poetry: New Approaches and Future Directions
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LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare and Early Modern Misogyny
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LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare on Broadway
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LEADERS: 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.

Seminar

Shakespeare, Sex, and Space
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LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Transitions: Ecologies of Economic Life
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LEADER: 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?

Seminar

The Two Noble Kinsmen: State of the Play
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LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Winter’s Tales: The Imagined North in Early Modern English Literature
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LEADER: 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.

Seminar

Women and Complaint, from Medieval to Early Modern
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LEADERS: 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.

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6:15 to 8:15 p.m.

Cash Bar

ACMRS Press Cash Bar
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Celebrating authors and contributors to new ACMRS titles. All members are welcome.

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7:00 to 9:00 a.m.

Performance

Santiago: A Bilingual Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello
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Teatro el Pueblo and the Professional Training Program of the Guthrie Theatre present a reading of Santiago, a bilingual adaptation of Othello developed by Joe Falocco in collaboration with Alfredo Michel Modenessi, and directed by Maija Garcia of the Guthrie Theater.

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10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

Dance

The Malone Society Dance
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This year, the dance is free to all registrants and their guests thanks to the generosity of the Malone Society.