2023 Meeting Program and Schedule
Wednesday
29 March ➤
4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Registration
Advanced Onsite Registration
Registration Office
5:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Meeting
Town Hall Business Meeting
TBA
Open to all registrants.
6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Cash Bar
TBA
Open to all registrants and their registered guests.
Thursday
30 March ➤
8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Registration
Registration OfficeBook Exhibits
TBA8:00 to 9:00 a.m.

Professionalization
Meet-and-Greet with Journal EditorsTBA
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.
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Seminar
Abject ScienceTBA
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 EducationTBA
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 HistoryTBA
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 OneTBA
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 ModernityTBA
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
CunningTBA
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 DataTBA
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 OneTBA
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 OneTBA
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 TraditionTBA
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 RaceTBA
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 ParatextsTBA
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 ExperienceTBA
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 CensusTBA
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 EverythingTBA
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 AnalysisTBA
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, 1500-1700TBA
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 NarrativesTBA
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
1:30 to 3:00 p.m.
Roundtable
Carceral ShakespeareTBA
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 QueensTBA
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
3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Seminar
Early Modern London Historiography and DramaTBA
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 ViolenceTBA
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 DirectionsTBA
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 StudiesTBA
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 JonsonTBA
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 DialogueTBA
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 NowTBA
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 OneTBA
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 DisabilityTBA
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 CourtTBA
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 ReligionTBA
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 ProjectTBA
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 GoodTBA
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 BinaryTBA
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 StudiesTBA
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.
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.
Friday
31 March ➤
7:30 to 8:30 a.m.
Yoga
Shakespeare YogaTBA
Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting and registered guests.
8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

Registration
Registration OfficeBook Exhibits
TBA8:00 to 9:00 a.m.

Breakfast
Graduate Student BreakfastTBA
Hosted by the Trustees of the Association.
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 AméricaTBA
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
11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Seminar
Adaptation Strategies and Resilience in Early Modern EnglandTBA
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 FronteraTBA
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 EpistemologiesTBA
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 LiteratureTBA
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 StudiesTBA
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 OneTBA
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 TwoTBA
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 TwoTBA
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 TwoTBA
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 GambitTBA
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 HungerTBA
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 TechnologyTBA
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 CultureTBA
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 InstructionTBA
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 ThoughtTBA
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 ManufacturingTBA
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 ArtTBA
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 ProjectTBA
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 SheetsTBA
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 ShakespeareTBA
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 VRTBA
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 LucreceTBA

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.
1:30 to 3:00 p.m.

Annual Luncheon
TBAOpen 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).
3:30 to 5:00 a.m.

Plenary Panel
Constructing the First FolioTBA
*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
5:15 to 7:00 p.m.

Cash Bar
Scholars of Color Social and Cash BarTBA
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!
7:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Interview
A Conversation with Deborah Ann ByrdTBA

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.
Saturday
1 April ➤
7:30 to 8:30 a.m.
Yoga
Shakespeare YogaTBA
Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-First Annual Meeting and registered guests.
8:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon

Registration
Registration OfficeBook Exhibits
TBA9:00 to 10:30 a.m.
Panel
Habeas Corpus: Shakespeare and the Limits of EmbodimentTBA
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’ BookTBA
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 HistoriesTBA
*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
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Plenary Panel
NextGenPlenTBA
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
2:00 to 3:30 p.m.
Roundtable
Anne’s World, 1623/2023: Shakespeare’s Wife and Her Warwickshire LegacyTBA
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 MediascapeeTBA
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 ClassroomTBA
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
4:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Seminar
The 1623 First FolioTBA
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 ClassroomTBA
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 DramaTBA
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)TBA
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 TwoTBA
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 DirectionsTBA
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 MisogynyTBA
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 BroadwayTBA
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 SpaceTBA
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 LifeTBA
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 PlayTBA
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 LiteratureTBA
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 ModernTBA
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.
6:15 to 8:15 p.m.

Cash Bar
ACMRS Press Cash BarTBA
Celebrating authors and contributors to new ACMRS titles. All members are welcome.
7:00 to 9:00 a.m.
Performance
Santiago: A Bilingual Adaptation of Shakespeare’s OthelloTBA

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

Dance
The Malone Society DanceTBA
This year, the dance is free to all registrants and their guests thanks to the generosity of the Malone Society.
Asynchronous Sessions ➤
Practicum
Articles in Progress
Louise Geddes, Adelphi University
The practicum supports first time authors preparing their articles for submission to academic journals. Authors will submit an abstract and brief biography and be paired with a senior scholar with editorial expertise who will read a draft of the article and offer feedback at an informal meeting during the conference.
Exhibitors ➤
Sponsors ➤
Floor Plan ➤
Coming soon.
Participants ➤
Coming soon.