2025 Meeting Program and Schedule
19 March ➤
20 March ➤
21 March ➤
22 March ➤
19 March ➤
4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Registration
Advanced Onsite Registration
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
5:00 to 6:00 p.m.
Town Hall Business Meeting
📌 Sheraton
Open to all registrants.
6:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Cash Bar
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Open to all registrants and their registered guests.
20 March ➤
8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Registration
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Book Exhibits
📌 TBA
8:00 to 9:00 a.m.
Professionalization
Meet-and-Greet with Journal Editors
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER: Jeremy Lopez, Shakespeare Quarterly
Sponsored by Shakespeare Quarterly
Light refreshments served.
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.
8:00 to 9:30 a.m.
Professionalization
Breakfast with the New Variorum Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
Sponsored by New Variorum Shakespeare
Light refreshments served.
Join the NVS for a drop-in, catered breakfast and a chance to hear about one of the oldest editorial projects in Shakespearean studies, now in a digital format. Free and open to all; no registration required. All are encouraged to attend.
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Seminar
After King Lear
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Jessica Rosenberg, Cornell University and Laurie Shannon, Northwestern University
This seminar invites new approaches to King Lear from a range of perspectives: textual, theatrical, philosophical, ecological, political. How might Shakespeare’s markedly ancient play be understood from our own moment of convergent crises and waning institutional authority?
Seminar
Artifacts of Capitalism in Early Modern Drama
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Eric Dunnum, Campbell University
How did early moderns respond to early forms of capitalism and what artifacts did they leave behind that captured their responses? How can these artifacts (sermons, account books, husbandry manuals, etc.) help us understand the way that Shakespeare represents economic activity? Too often we fail to clearly define early or proto or emerging capitalism. This seminar will attempt to find and apply early capitalist artifacts to better understand how Shakespeare is thinking about and representing his own economic system.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
As You Like It, As You Like It
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Tom Bishop, University of Auckland and William N. West, Northwestern University
If you like As You Like It, what do you like about it? This seminar invites papers on new ways of thinking about As You Like It. How does this evergreen play in any of its versions explore gender/sexuality; literary genres or performance histories; structures of feeling; kinds of community, environment, humanity, animality, vegetality? We seek many ways of seeing, and we encourage participants to explore both new ways into the play and how it entertains such a variety of ways into the Forest.
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Book Proposal Lab
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Karen Raber, University of Mississippi and Rebecca Totaro, Florida Gulf Coast University
In this workshop, participants will become familiar with the required components of a scholarly book proposal, develop a draft of their own proposal, and give and receive feedback on those drafts, specifically with the field of early modern literary and cultural studies in mind. By the end of the workshop, members will have produced a working draft of a scholarly book proposal and a list of presses to which they can send it.
Seminar
Displacement in Renaissance Drama
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Alexander Thom, University of Leeds
Throughout Shakespeare’s drama, as James Joyce once wrote, “the note of banishment, banishment from the heart, banishment from home, sounds uninterruptedly.” Explorations of how Shakespeare handles the theme of displacement are welcome. This seminar will also encourage participants to think comparatively between Shakespeare’s dramatic strategies and those of other Renaissance dramatists.
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Seminar
Drama and Conversion
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Stephen Wittek, Carnegie Mellon University
This seminar will consider the relation between early modern drama and the fuzzy, slippery phenomenon of conversion, in all of its many colors and flavors. Projects that consider drama outside of the Shakespearean canon are particularly welcome. Potential areas of focus include political conversions, conversion and race, conversion and colonialism, conversion and performance, spaces of conversion, conversion and nationhood, the texts of conversion, and the dramatic representation of conversional activity.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Early Modern Foodways: New Perspectives
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: David B. Goldstein, York University and
Victoria Yeoman, Seneca Polytechnic
This seminar asks what the study of foodways teaches us about early modernity. Food—as symbol, metaphor, event, object, or relationship—demarcates tensions that lie at the core of Shakespeare’s theatrical and poetic concerns. Papers are invited on any aspect of foodways, including race and cross-cultural encounter, hospitality and otherness, sex and gender, recipes as communicative forms, ecology and animal studies, social and religious politics, and the development of science and medicine.
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Seminar
The Early Modern Undead: Zombies, Monsters, and Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Ambereen Dadabhoy, Harvey Mudd College and Carol Mejia LaPerle, Wright State University
What is the afterlife of an undead author? How is the Shakespearean corpus a monstrous text? What do monsters reveal about the culture that produces them? How do early modern anxieties about decay, horror, and loss of self-sovereignty anticipate the figure of the zombie? This seminar exhumes the early modern undead to consider how it informs Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ concerns with collapsing civilizations, the biopolitics of survival, and the affects of fear, desperation, and disgust.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Ecofeminist Approaches to Shakespeare and His Contemporaries
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Aurélie Griffin, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle and Claire Hansen, Australian National University
How might we advance our understanding of the early modern relationship between gender and the natural world? Acknowledging developments in ecofeminist criticism, this seminar invites papers on ecofeminist approaches to Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Drawing on movements across ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, participants are invited to consider the intersections of gender, feminisms and materialism with the environment, place, the more-than-human and ecological systems.
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Seminar
Future Fletchers
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Clare McManus, Northumbria University, José A. Pérez Díez, University of Leeds, and Michael M. Wagoner, United States Naval Academy
Four hundred years after the death of John Fletcher, how have developments in our field altered our reception and interpretation of the playwright who was in many ways the heir to William Shakespeare? How has the study of Fletcher historically intertwined with or diverged from the study of Shakespeare? Finally and most importantly, how does Fletcher’s global, feminocentric, queer, and trans drama offer an alternative sense of the early modern, and what does that alternative promise for future directions in early modern scholarship, editing, pedagogy and performance practice?
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Seminar
The Gender of Paratexts
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Heidi Craig, University of Toronto and Andie Silva, York College, CUNY
How does gender influence the form and content of early modern paratexts? How might their liminal status and framing functions help us complicate and expand notions of gender? We invite papers or DH projects that explore the historical, political, or rhetorical roles of gender for authors, translators, and stationers; as well as the gendering of readers, dedicatees, book buyers, or even books, themselves. Work that subverts gender binaries and gendered reading practices is especially welcome.
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Seminar
Global Performance and Adaptations of Richard III
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Juan F. Cerdá, Universidad de Murcia, Paul Prescott, University of Warwick, and Jennifer Ruiz-Morgan, University of Extremadura
Sponsored by the European Shakespeare Research Association
We invite contributions that chart Richard III‘s non-anglophone reception from the sixteenth century to the present in any media or format: stage, operatic, cinematic/televisual/digital performance, translations, adaptations, appropriations, rewritings. We particularly welcome papers that relocate the play’s ideological and identity boundaries within specific historical and theoretical contexts, while also connecting local interventions to broader regional, national or transnational concerns.
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Seminar
Mourning, Memorializing, and Grieving in Shakespeare’s World
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Lesel Dawson, University of Bristol and Kaara Peterson, Miami University of Ohio
Our seminar asks what constitutes the relationship of the living to the dead. How are mourning, memorializing, and grieving represented in Shakespeare’s works and across early modern culture? Do novel therapeutic and philosophical models of adaptive grieving shed light on early modern bereavement—or discover important disjunctions? Participants may explore grief and memorializing in Shakespearean texts and in dialogue with other literature, art, effigies/material objects, cultural practices, and/or as construed across disciplines.
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Seminar
Novelizing Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Katharine Cleland, Virginia Tech and Paul J. Zajac, McDaniel College
This seminar invites papers that examine the novelization of Shakespeare‘s work and life to any extent. We will explore how novelists appropriate Shakespeare‘s themes, plots, and characters, while also asking what happens when his plays get adapted specifically as novels. What is the purpose or appeal of novelistic adaptations? How do changes in genre relate to changes in cultural context? How might novelistic adaptations contribute to our reconsideration of Shakespeare’s relevance in 2025?
📁 View Abstracts
Open Workshop
Shakespeare in Performance
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Shakespeare in Performance Actors from The London Stage
The five actors of the AFTLS Spring 2025 Tour of Hamlet lead an interactive workshop demonstrating performance-based teaching techniques for the college classroom. Attendees will discover the power of embodied learning/engagement when approaching Shakespeare’s plays. Open to all conference registrants and registered guests.
Workshop
Testing Throughlines: The Present Moment, Premodern Critical Race Scholarship, and Teaching
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw, Arizona State University and Laura Turchi, Arizona State University
This workshop invites faculty to experiment with new Throughlines content and aims to build shared confidence for integrating discussions of race in literature classrooms. Throughlines is an online compendium of premodern critical race scholarship built by RaceB4Race. Designed as a multi-media home for pedagogical and scholarly resources, Throughlines supports teaching the historical arcs of race and race-making in a holistic and intersectional way—pointing students toward more inclusive futures.
Seminar
Women Writing Transatlantic Slavery
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Kimberly Anne Coles, University of Maryland
Scholarship on early modern women’s writing has not always made their complicity in the English colonial project fully visible. This seminar will confront that complicity. We need to recognize women among the chief authors of the rhetoric and cultural codes that rewrote Black people as chattel and consumable goods. Emphasis will be placed on plays and masque performances written by women—or performances where women controlled the representation. Work responding to women writers is also welcome.
1:30 to 3:00 p.m.
Shakespeare Futures Roundtable
Theatrical Labor and the Audience
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER: Nora J. Williams, BIMM University
CHAIR: Margaret Jane Kidnie, University of Western Ontario
Nora J. Williams, BIMM University
Ophelia’s Laborious Afterlives
Peter Kirwan, Mary Baldwin University
Playing the Work
Margaret Jane Kidnie, University of Western Ontario
Creative Collaborations
John R. Proctor III, Tulane University
Audiences Reading Race, Gender, and Authority in the Shakespearean Stage Picture
Roundtable
Performance as Research: Scholar/Theatermaker Collaborations at the Red Bull
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Jean Elizabeth Howard, Columbia University
Jesse Berger, Red Bull Theater
The Scholars’ Role in Creating Effective Performances at Red Bull Theater
Barbara Fuchs, University of California, Los Angeles
Diversifying the Classics and Red Bull
Musa Gurnis, Baruch College/Red Bull Theater
The Early Modern Scene Work Collaborative
Noémie Ndiaye, University of Chicago
Difficult Conversations
Tanya Pollard, Brooklyn College, CUNY
Staging Women
3:30 to 5:30 p.m.
Seminar
Antony and Cleopatra
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Heather James, University of Southern California and John M. Kuhn, SUNY Binghamton
We invite papers relating to any aspect of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, its sources, its contexts, and its varied afterlives in print and performance. Revisiting the play—which has not been the sole subject of an SAA seminar for decades—seems to us to be particularly timely in our present moment, given its engagement with issues of sex and gender; empire and colonialism; and race and ethnicity. We welcome papers that touch on these or any other topic relating to the play.
📂 View Abstracts
Seminar
Early Modern Cosmologies, Part One
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Jane Hwang Degenhardt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University
This seminar reads Renaissance plays and poems for their engagements with early modern cosmology, or accounts of what constitutes a “world” at the turn of the 17th century. Looking past the early modern as the origin point for globalization or a source for humanist worldviews, the seminar invites papers that explore the more radical cosmologies of the 16th and 17th centuries to twist the epistemological and ontological settlements of modernity and seed ideas for our own speculative world-making.
📂 View Abstracts
Seminar
Early Modern Horror
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Claire M. Falck, Rowan University
This seminar invites papers that explore horror as an early modern literary genre. Topics may include how to define early modern horror; horror as a hybrid generic mode; how horror interacts with different literary forms; and readings of early modern horror texts from a range of critical perspectives.
📂 View Abstracts
Seminar
Early Modern Underworlds
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Joel E. Slotkin, Towson University
What does it mean to posit a world beneath this one, and what calls us down into it when we are supposed to look up to higher things? We will investigate various underworlds in the early modern imagination, including subterranean afterlives as well as criminal underworlds. Early modern writers also sometimes called our own world an underworld. What cultural work do these underworlds perform? How might one type relate to another? Why are these spaces so fascinating?
📂 View Abstracts
Open Workshop
From Bard to Beat: Teaching Shakespeare Through Hip-Hop and Poetry
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Devon Glover, The Sonnet Man and Katherine Steele Brokaw, University of California, Merced
Join Devon Glover the Sonnet Man, a rapper/poet, teacher, playwright, director and actor, to explore new avenues into Shakespeare. Come see how hip hop and creative writing can unlock your students’ interest and understanding of The Bard.
Workshop
Going Beyond Reading Aloud: Performance Pedagogy in the Classroom
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Jennifer Birkett, University of Notre Dame
Shakespeare’s plays were written for players on the stage, and yet most students only ever grapple with them cerebrally on the page. Looking beyond merely assigning students to read aloud, or memorize monologues, this pedagogy workshop seeks to present and distribute pedagogical techniques and materials for teaching early modern literature (not just Shakespeare’s plays) through performance. Specifically, we will focus on lesson plans, in-class activities, assignments, discussion questions, midterm exams, and group work. The workshop intends to bring junior scholars, contingent faculty, non-tenure track faculty, and faculty at teaching-focused institutions together to share experiences and resources. Be prepared to get out of your chairs and up on your feet!
📂 View Abstracts
Seminar
Habit—Inhabit—Habitation—Habitat
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Joseph Campana, Rice University
An ecology of cognates derived from habeo: to have, hold, keep, possess, cherish, occupy, enclose, contain, inhere, dwell. Take any of these four terms individually or create networks. What logics and erotics govern indwelling dispositions? How to understand dwelling and dwellings, human or not? Does “habit” inform “inhabit”? Does the early modernity of habit and inhabit prepare for later terms—habitat or environment? Augustine’s consuetudo? Nests or houses? Bourdieu’s habitus? Other cognates?
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Seminar
How Not to Be a Misogynist
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Lilly Berberyan, Northwestern State University of Louisiana
How might scholars of the early modern period inadvertently engage in “reading as a misogynist” by reinscribing narratives of oppression, patriarchy, and of course, misogyny? How do such narratives create a false sense of historical transformation that comforts us about the present, while undermining our ability to read beyond or against the “discovery” of men’s anxiety and women’s disempowerment? What social and political ends are served by this subtle misogyny and how can less biased reading advance different interests and agendas?
📂 View Abstracts
Seminar
Magic, Science, Knowledge, and Popular Belief, Part One
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania
In early modern Europe new philosophical trends and novel technologies increasingly influenced people’s understanding and uses of the natural world. However, magic still flourished, undergirded by everyday beliefs about that world. This seminar invites papers that address magical beliefs and practices (elite and common), technology, and new modes of inquiry, with their implications for understanding the natural world we inhabit.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Matter in Time: New Theater Histories
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Nicole Sheriko, Yale University and Emma M. Solberg, Bowdoin College
Theaters are full of things: ruffs, rats, swords, snacks, papers, players, weather, wood. Performance culture is sustained by the inter-theatrical recycling of objects, bodies, and spaces. This seminar invites critical approaches to the temporality of theatricality materiality, considering forms of reuse and repurposing, of remembering and forgetting, of rebirth and haunting in order to open up new directions for studying theater’s material history across the medieval/early modern divide and beyond.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Mind(ing) the Stage
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Heather A. Hirschfeld, University of Tennessee and Nathalie E. Rivere De Carles, Université de Toulouse Jean Jaures
This seminar considers how the Shakespearean stage (re)presented the nature of the mind, its cognitive/emotional capacities, and its relation to the body and world. We invite essays on early modern theatrical “minding” from multiple perspectives, including the staged mind in its spatial environments; the mind as a locus of intention and personhood; the centrality of mind games to plot and character; the use of dramatic conventions to affect the cognitive experiences of actors and audience.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Performing Bodies in Early Modern Drama, Part One
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Eleanor K. Rycroft, Bristol University
Bodies multiply in early modern drama. This seminar will examine the staging of bodies in historical and contemporary performance, questioning the singularity of “the body” on a stage which bodied forth, and resisted, dominant ideas and assumptions. Participants may wish to consider bodies in plural or in part/s; bodies stilled or in motion; racialized/classed/disabled/gendered/animal bodies; the material cultures of bodies; and bodies at different points of the lifecycle, including corpses.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Re-weirding and/as Re-wilding in Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Darryl Chalk, University of Southern Queensland and Laurie Johnson, University of Southern Queensland
How do early modern plays invoke weirdness in the encounter with the wilderness? Do weird phenomena speak to an uncanny overlap between the natural, supernatural, and preternatural dimensions of life and world? We ask if some modes of literary ecology have made us too familiar with the natural world in the plays, losing sight of the strangeness of this world and the stage’s engagement with it. Can “re-weirding” in criticism or performance thus be used to recapture early modern senses of the demonic, fated, magical, spiritual, and just plain “wild” forces beyond human control?
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Shakespeare and Blended Learning
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Rachael Deagman Simonetta, University of Colorado, Boulder and Jay Zysk, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
Blended pedagogy thoughtfully combines in-person and online learning modalities. What happens when blended learning meets the Bard? This workshop explores practical strategies for teaching Shakespeare that fully integrate in-person classroom activities with digital resources and tools used synchronously and asynchronously online. We will consider how blended Shakespeare pedagogy can stimulate student engagement through active learning and create a more inclusive and accessible classroom for all.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare and Islam
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: David Currell, American University of Beirut and Islam Issa, Birmingham City University
How do we read Shakespeare with Islam? This seminar will foster explorations of a topic at the intersection of global Shakespeares and studies of race and religion. We invite papers on Shakespearean representations of Islamicate worlds; dialogues between Shakespeare and Islamic traditions; Islamic receptions and Muslim reader responses; Islam in Shakespeare pedagogy; orientalism and Islamophobia in critical or performance history; and comparative studies of race, Islam, and early modern culture.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shared Forms
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Adhaar Noor Desai, Bard College and
Dianne Mitchell, University of Colorado, Boulder
How might critical and pedagogical methods respond to form’s sharedness across time and space? How do memes, meter or tune repurposing, or the authorial identity “anon” rupture monovocality? How might the flexibility of form afford us more flexible conceptions of authorship, periodization, or literariness? Papers might study specific instances of a borrowed literary device, imitation, parody, or repurposing, or they might broadly theorize early modern views of genre, convention, or commonality.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
A Troilus for Our Time
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Jyotsna G. Singh, Michigan State University and Michael Ullyot, University of Calgary
How do recent performances and scholarship contend with Troilus and Cressida as a play for our times? Do its morally flawed characters, its politics, its warfare and myth-making, its appetites, and its rhetoric deserve revaluation through a presentist lens? And why has it remained on the margins of the Shakespeare canon? Participants are invited to interpret the play as a complex, anti-heroic text whose language can be strained and opaque.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Who Cares? Care, Caring and Disability in Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Susan L. Anderson, Staunton, VA
This seminar invites participants to examine care from a disability studies perspective, asking who cares for whom, in what ways, and with what implications for social justice, identity, and power. How is care inflected by intersections with age, gender, race and class? How does care or its lack show up in performance, text and criticism? Where does it (dis)appear within Shakespeare studies itself? And how do burdens of care sit unevenly within the community of scholars who study this field?
📁 View Abstracts
5:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Book Launch
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Celebrate books published this year.
Graduate Student Coffee Hour
📌 Sheraton
8:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Annual Reception
📌 Sheraton
Hors d-oeuvres and cash bar.
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-Third 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.
21 March ➤
7:30 to 8:30 a.m.
Yoga
Shakespeare Yoga
📌 Sheraton
Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting and registered guests.
8:00 to 9:00 a.m.
Breakfast
Graduate Student Breakfast
📌 Sheraton
Hosted by the Trustees of the Association.
*Please note that this event is exclusively for SAA graduate students.
8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Registration
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Book Exhibits
📌 TBA
9:00 to 10:30 a.m.
Panel
Joseph Papp’s Legacy and the Question of American Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Louise Geddes, Adelphi University
Louise Geddes, Adelphi University
Inventing American Shakespeare
Paul D. Menzer, Mary Baldwin University
Public Exposure
De’Aris Rhymes, Arizona State University
Joe Papp’s Untraditional Casting in s Post-2020 America
Roundtable
Reimagining Law and Literature: Critical Approaches to Shakespeare Today
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZERS: Stephanie Elsky, Rhodes College and Penelope H. Geng, Macalester College
CHAIR: Penelope H. Geng, Macalester College
Todd A. Borlik, Purdue University
Shakespeare, Lyly, and Environmental Law: Greening the Archive
Andrew Bozio, Skidmore College
Dramatic Precedents: Racial Slavery and the Early Modern English Stage
Urvashi Chakravarty, University of Toronto
Law, Labour, and White Property in Shakespeare
Stephanie Elsky, Rhodes College
On Not Being Land: Law and Personhood in Early Modern Women’s Writing
Colby Gordon, Bryn Mawr College
Tarry, Jew: Shylock’s Razor Trans Temporality of Criminal Wounding
José Juan Villagrana, Santa Clara University
Reconsidering White Racial Innocence: Spanish Colonial Legal Discourse and Shakespeare
Panel
Shakespearean Infinities
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Benjamin Parris, Rice University
Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine
O Infinite Virtue: Cleopatra as Wisdom Queen
Jenny C. Mann, New York University
Amazement in The Tempest
Benjamin Parris, Rice University
Cosmic Infinity and Natural Goodness in The Winter’s Tale
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Digital Exhibit
Alice Thornton’s Books: Remembrances of a Woman’s Life in the Seventeenth Century
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Cordelia Beattie, University of Edinburgh and Suzanne Trill, University of Edinburgh
The Alice Thornton’s Books project has created a searchable digital edition of her four autobiographical volumes, written c.1659-96. The modernised and semi-diplomatic versions can be read separately or side-by-side. Textual markup enables users to trace people, places and events across the edition and different versions of the same event can be compared on screen.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Macbeth VR Experience
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITOR: Peter Kuling, University of Guelph
Macbeth VR Experience is a 25-minute adaptation directed by Peter Kuling featuring voice work by actors from the Stratford Festival of Canada. Developed in partnership with Simwave VR, solo players take part by becoming one of the three witches and participating in the spectacular magic of Shakespeare’s Macbeth through virtual reality.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Leah Knight Brock University and Wendy Wall Northwestern University
This prize-winning, international collaboration presents the striking political, scientific, and religious verse of Hester Pulter as mobile, variant artifacts. By endorsing equally-authorized versions of an emerging 17th-century female writer, The Pulter Project models a radical editorial practice and new mode of humanist, collective feminist research in the digital age.
Digital Exhibit
Shakespeare in Brazil
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Cristiane Busato Smith, Arizona State University, Belinda Yung, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Mary Erica Zimmer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
<i>Shakespeare in Brazil</i> provides online access to Brazilian performances of Shakespeare, as well as interviews, essays, and metadata by Brazilian scholars and educators. These resources allow users to view and study productions and interviews with Brazilian playwrights, actors, translators, and theater practitioners. We invite further collaborations.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITOR: Rachel J. Willie, Liverpool John Moores University
<i>Sonance: A Journal of Early Modern Sound Studies</i> is a new online peer-reviewed interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary and multimedial Open Access journal published by ACMRS Press that addresses historic sound in all its capacious forms from the period c.1400-c.1800. Our focus is global, ranging across all subjects, theories, and methodologies that attend to sound.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Weather Extremes in England’s Little Ice Age 1500-1700
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITOR: Madeline Bassnett, Western University
This SSHRC-funded ArcGIS database maps English Little Ice Age weather using narrative data from historical chronicles, diaries, and weather pamphlets. It reveals not only severe cold, but also unusual conditions of heat, drought, and damp. Showing us how climate change destabilized historical weather, the site also allows us to connect the past with today’s experience.
🎦 View Introductory Video
10:30 to 11:00 a.m.
Coffee Break
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Professionalization
Meet the Arden Shakespeare Publishers with RaceB4Race
📌 Sheraton
For scholars working on Premodern Critical Race Studies who would like an informal meeting slot to discuss publishing their research with one of the commissioning editors at The Arden Shakespeare. This can be about a current or future project or just our book publication process more generally.
11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Seminar
Abridging Shakespeare for the British and American Stage
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Ronan James Hatfull, University of Warwick, Rebecca Marie MacMillan, Stroud, UK, and Tom Wilkinson, Oxford, UK
This seminar invites scholarly papers and creative pieces which respond how Shakespeare’s plays have been abridged for the British and American stage, in forms such as clown, drolls, improvisation, parody, and pop music. We seek critical and creative responses which will encompass historical, ethical and political aspects, and address questions regarding the formal properties and theoretical implications of compressed texts to present a rewarding retheorisation of Shakespeare in adaptation.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Early Modern Cosmologies, Part Two
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Jane Hwang Degenhardt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst and Henry S. Turner, Rutgers University
This seminar reads Renaissance plays and poems for their engagements with early modern cosmology, or accounts of what constitutes a “world” at the turn of the 17th century. Looking past the early modern as the origin point for globalization or a source for humanist worldviews, the seminar invites papers that explore the more radical cosmologies of the 16th and 17th centuries to twist the epistemological and ontological settlements of modernity and seed ideas for our own speculative world-making.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Magic, Science, Knowledge, and Popular Belief, Part Two
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Rebecca Bushnell, University of Pennsylvania
In early modern Europe new philosophical trends and novel technologies increasingly influenced people’s understanding and uses of the natural world. However, magic still flourished, undergirded by everyday beliefs about that world. This seminar invites papers that address magical beliefs and practices (elite and common), technology, and new modes of inquiry, with their implications for understanding the natural world we inhabit.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
New Paradigms of Embodiment
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Beatrice Bradley, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
This seminar invites papers that generate new lenses for thinking about the body in early modern studies. Participants might examine anew how contemporary theory can be brought into conversation with premodern texts, and/or they might draw on histories of medicine and the body that have escaped notice from existing humoral-materialist scholarship. Rather than arrive at a definitive paradigm, the seminar will develop a multiplicity of models that reflect the variety of ways in which bodies are conceptualized, defined, and experienced.
📁 View Abstracts (forthcoming)
Seminar
Performing Bodies in Early Modern Drama, Part Two
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Eleanor K. Rycroft, Bristol University
Bodies multiply in early modern drama. This seminar will examine the staging of bodies in historical and contemporary performance, questioning the singularity of “the body” on a stage which bodied forth, and resisted, dominant ideas and assumptions. Participants may wish to consider bodies in plural or in part/s; bodies stilled or in motion; racialized/classed/disabled/gendered/animal bodies; the material cultures of bodies; and bodies at different points of the lifecycle, including corpses.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
PlayTime: Theatre History and the Question of Staging Time
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Liam Thomas Daley, University of Maryland, College Park and Melanie Rio, University of Maryland
What challenges or opportunities lie in representing time onstage? How did pre-modern playwrights explore questions of temporality? Building on theatre history approaches, this seminar examines time in early modern performance. How were theatrical elements (such as space, props, or costumes) used to convey the passage of time or a sense of historical setting? How might conversations between critical theories of time and theatre history offer new insights? And how does our chronological distance from the archive shape our research?
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Race and Place in Shakespeare and Spenser
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Dennis A. Britton, University of British Columbia and Hillary Eklund, Grinnell College
How might placing Spenser and Shakespeare in conversation extend ongoing conversations in premodern critical race studies, ecocriticism, and social justice? This seminar invites papers that examine how Spenser and/or Shakespeare figure racial and natural hierarchies, and how they use place to sort people based on superficial markings and other real or imagined characteristics. Can putting these poets in dialogue create new avenues for situated knowledge, mutual care, and ethical habitation?
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Reimagining the Female Life Cycle in Shakespeare’s Time
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Anna Susan Graham, Dublin, Ireland and Edel Lamb, Queen’s University Belfast
This seminar explores portrayals of the female life cycle in early modern literature to consider how, when and to what effect women’s roles were defined by age rather than marital status. It invites papers on the importance of women’s life stages, women’s appropriation of models of ageing, sources for re-evaluating life cycles, and how methodologies of transgender studies, critical race theory and disability studies amplify or complicate understandings of gendered ageing in Shakespeare’s time.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Rethinking Fidelity in Adaptations of Shakespeare, Part One
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: James T. Newlin, Case Western Reserve University
This seminar invites papers that rethink what it means to be faithful to Shakespeare. How might even a “slant” or “wild” adaptation of Shakespeare recall the text, performance history, or historical context of Shakespeare’s original? Papers that consider Shakespeare’s engagement with his own sources, as well as the reception and staging of Shakespeare’s works, are both welcome. Approaches might include either individual case studies or broader theorizations of fidelity and difference.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Ruderal Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Nandini Das, University of Oxford
This seminar invites participants to examine and theorize the place of undesired and undesirable vegetal presence in Shakespeare’s texts and within early modern literature and culture in general. Not Ophelia’s posies nor Perdita’s flowers, but weeds and leaf-meal: what can attending to both their persistence and their erasure tell us about both the natural and conceptual worlds of early modernity?
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare among the Poets
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Ted Tregear, University of St. Andrews
For his contemporaries, Shakespeare was as much a poet as a playwright. Still, in placing him among his contemporaries, we tend to think of other dramatists. This seminar invites papers that read Shakespeare alongside the poets he read, imitated, and rejected. It asks how Shakespeare engaged with Spenser, Donne, Daniel, Chapman, and others; how those engagements informed his poetic practice or theory; and how questions of poetic technique might open onto broader issues in early modern studies.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare and Mental Illness
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Leslie C. Dunn, Vassar College and Avi Mendelson, London, UK
This seminar explores depictions of mental illness in early modern drama. Topics might include: intersections of madness with race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability; diagnosis and treatment; early modern doctors. Also welcome are topics examining the interplay between the history of early modern madness and modern conceptions of mental illness, such as: Shakespeare and psychiatry; Shakespeare as dramatherapy; early modern madness re-imagined in modern performances and adaptations.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare Performance Studies Now
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: W. B. Worthen, Barnard College, Columbia University
Is Shakespeare performance distinctive, changing with new modes of theatricality, through refined forms of cultural critique, and in emerging and obsolescing technologies from Original Practices to algorithmic theatre? Papers (10 pp.) should address the theoretical purchase of Shakespeare Performance Studies; exploration of individual productions should precipitate the critical terms helping to locate or orient a wider conception of the field.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
The Soft Power of the Shakespearean Cameo: National Identities and Political Utility
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: L. Monique Pittman, Andrews University
This seminar examines the ideological utility of Shakespearean cameos–citations, slant references, and quotations—within film and television, focusing attention on the ways such Shakespearean cameos define national identities and human belonging. In the charged contexts of New Nationalism’s rise in liberal democracies and a backlash against the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, this seminar situates Shakespearean cameos on film and/or television within these geopolitical power flows.
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Suiting Action to Word: Laban Technique and Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Theo Black, Cornell University
An interactive session in actor-training with Laban Technique, this workshop offers participants a guided opportunity to connect dynamically, accessibly and instantly with Shakespeare’s texts through our bodies and voices. In suiting each Laban action to its specific word in Shakespeare, from close-reading a rich array of contextualized lines we will practice an evolving continuity born of original modes: translating Shakespeare’s language and characters from the page to form vibrantly staged extensions of ourselves. (Laban’s 8 Effort Actions: thrust , float , flick, slash, dab, glide, press, wring)
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Teaching Strategies for Early Modern Literature
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Jess Hamlet, Alvernia University and Molly E. Seremet, Mary Baldwin University
This pedagogy workshop aims to generate a wealth of multimodal classroom materials and strategies for teaching early modern literature, including lesson plans, activities, and assignment prompts. We hope to bring together junior scholars, contingent faculty, non-tenure track faculty, and faculty at teaching-focused institutions to share ideas and resources on a variety of early modern texts.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Theatricality and the Space of Violence
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Emma K. Atwood, University of Montevallo
and Alexander Paulsson Lash, National Taiwan University and Stockholm University
This seminar invites papers on the spaces in which violence was committed, adjudicated, or resisted in early modern England. How did the early modern theater represent and respond to other spaces in which violence transpired, such as the colony, the plantation, the courtroom, the prison, or the bedroom? By considering the space of violence, to what extent does this allow us to explore the theatricality of violence? We welcome perspectives from both established and emerging fields.
📁 View Abstracts
1:30 to 3:00 p.m.
Annual Luncheon
📌 Sheraton
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-Third 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).
*Please note that this event is exclusively for SAA members and their registered guests.
3:30 to 5:00 p.m.
Plenary Panel
Sweet Master Shakespeare: Sugar, Books, and Shakespeare
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Brandi K. Adams, Arizona State University
Brandi K. Adams, Arizona State University
The Sweet Swan of Avon: A Response
Kim F. Hall, Barnard College
Instructive and Pleasant Wonders: Plantation Aesthetics in Early Modern Science
Emma Smith, Hertford College, University of Oxford
Sugared First Folios
5:15 to 6:15 p.m.
Reception
Scholars of Color Social
📌 Sheraton
Co-sponsored by the Folger Shakespeare Library
Cash bar and light hors d-oevres.
Open to all registrants and their guests.
6:30 to 8:30 p.m.
Performance
Sonnets and Soliloquies: An Evening with The Sonnet Man
📌 Sheraton
Enjoy an evening with Devon Glover The Sonnet Man—an entertaining night of Shakespeare fused with Hip-Hop music. Dance, sing and celebrate the works of the Bard with as we unlock Shakespeare, one beat at a time.
*Devon will be accompanied by violinist Leoncarlo Canlas.
22 March ➤
7:30 to 8:30 a.m.
Yoga
Shakespeare Yoga
📌 Sheraton
Scott Jackson, RYT-200, University of Notre Dame
Open to all registrants for the Fifty-Third Annual Meeting and registered guests.
8:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Information
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Book Exhibits
📌 TBA
9:00 to 10:30 a.m.
Panel
Playgoing and Privilege
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZERS: Eoin Price, University of Edinburgh and Simon Smith, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
CHAIR: Erika T. Lin, Graduate Center, CUNY
Simon Smith, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham
Experiencing Shakespeare’s Theatres: Playgoing, Pleasure and Judgement in Early Modern England
Eoin Price, University of Edinburgh
(In)Frequent Playgoing, or What the Butler Didn’t See
Lauren Robertson, Columbia University
Framed in Triumph: The Architecture of Roman Worlds in the English Theater
Miles P. Grier, Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY
London Dispersion Forces: White Community from Within and Without
Panel
Private Utterances in Shakespearean Drama
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Connie Scozzaro, Brown University
Coleen R. Rosenfeld, Pomona College
Just One Word
Connie Scozzaro, Brown University
Fixing the Idea in The Winter’s Tale
Steven Swarbrick, Baruch College, CUNY
God in my mouth: The Law of Desire in Measure for Measure
Roundtable
What’s Romance Got to Do with It?
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Margo Hendricks, University of California, Santa Cruz
Jonathan F. Correa Reyes, Clemson University
Yasmine Hachimi, Newberry Library
Margo Hendricks, University of California, Santa Cruz
Brittany N. Williams, New Orleans, LA
9:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Teachers’ Workshop
Teaching Shakespeare with Virtual Reality Gaming Technology
📌 Sheraton
Gina Bloom, University of California, Davis
Open to all registrants as well as area high school teachers, this hands-on workshop shows educators how to teach Shakespeare using a free immersive VR digital Shakespeare game called Play the Knave VR. Players don VR headsets to join together on a virtual stage where their avatars perform scenes from Shakespeare karaoke-style. Bloom will lead participants through a lesson plan from Blood will have Blood, a program she co-developed with a high school teacher in South Africa that uses games and play to prompt students’ critical thinking about violence in Shakespeare and in students’ own communities. This will be followed by a demonstration of how the technology can be adapted for teaching any dramatic texts as well as theatre history.
10:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon
Digital Exhibit
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Alan B. Farmer, Ohilo State University and Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania
DEEP: Database of Early English Playbooks allows scholars and students to investigate the publishing, printing, and marketing of English Renaissance drama in ways not possible using any other print or electronic resource. An easy-to-use and highly customizable search engine of every playbook produced in England, Scotland, and Ireland—or in Europe in the English language—from the beginning of printing through 1660, DEEP provides a wealth of information about the original playbooks, their title-pages, paratextual matter, advertising features, bibliographic details, and theatrical backgrounds.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
The Douai Shakespeare Manuscript Project
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Line Cottegnies, Sorbonne Université and Janelle Auriol Jenstad, University of Victoria
This project provides a semi-diplomatic edition of 6 Shakespeare plays from an 1694 manuscript held at the ‘Bibliothèque municipale’ of Douai, France. This important MS, which might have been used as a promptbook, bears witness to the recreational, perhaps educational, activities among English Catholics in exile in the period, and contains original editorial interventions.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Freedom and the Press before Freedom of the Press: Tools, Data, and Methods for Researching Secret Printing
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITOR: Christopher Warren, Carnegie Mellon University
This project proceeds from the recognition that some of the most fascinating stories of the First Amendment’s prehistory are yet to be told—and that they can only be discovered with tools, data, and methods developed in digital humanities. The most persuasive evidence of clandestine printing often lies below the threshold of human attention—in minute typographical details, recurring pieces of damaged type, similar or divergent paper stocks, or tiny variations in print shop practices, observable only at scale. At the same time, it takes sophisticated information architecture for researchers to move effectively from minute physical details to broader, more consequential patterns. This project aims to ameliorate the persistent challenges of studying clandestine printing with a suite of tools, data, and machine learning methods that can detect, model, and integrate hidden sources of information in letterpress print.
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Shakespeare’s Theatrescapes
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Christopher Highley, Ohio State University, Christopher Matusiak, Ithaca College, and Paul Whitefield White, Purdue University
Shakespeare’s Theatrescape (NEH-funded, 3 years, $250,000) introduces an innovative new scholarly website featuring spatially accurate and topographically detailed ArcGIS models of four London playhouse districts, as well as searchable, relational databases of places, people, and events, freshly edited theatre-related archival records, and new interpretive essays.
🔗 Visit Project Website
🎦 View Introductory Video
Digital Exhibit
Women Writers Project
📌 Sheraton
EXHIBITORS: Sarah Connell, Northeastern University and Julia Flanders, Northeastern University
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women’s writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader.
🎦 View Introductory Video
10:30 to 11:00 a.m.
Coffee Break
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
11:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
Plenary Panel
NextGenPlen
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZERS: Members of the NextGenPlen Committee
CHAIR: Ian Smith, University of Southern California
Margo Kolenda-Mason, University of Central Arkansas
The Queer End(s) of Love’s Labor’s Lost
Patrick Durdel, Université de Lausanne
How to Get Bloody on the Early Modern Stage
Evelyn A. Reidy, University of Roehampton and Shakespeare’s Globe
Very Small Trouble: A Creative-Critical Exploration of Early Modern Women and Festive Performance
Margaret C. Maurer, Dartmouth College
EEBO-TCP, Labor, and the Narratives of Textual Production
2:30 to 4:00 p.m.
Panel
Rethinking Masques
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZERS: Sharon J. Harris, Brigham Young University and Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Ohio State University
CHAIR: Sharon J. Harris, Brigham Young University
Lauren Shohet, Villanova University
Masques and Mediation
Sharon J. Harris, Brigham Young University
Macbeth and the Masque
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, Ohio State University
Shakespeare’s Masques and the Construction of Whiteness
Julie A. Crawford, Columbia University
Masques and the Colonial Imaginary
Panel
Shakespeare and the Ends of Learning
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Adam Zucker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Catherine Nicholson, Yale University
But Spelling
Alan Stewart, Columbia University
The Ends of Shakespeare’s Learned Men
Adam Zucker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
“Stupefied, or Seeming So”: Autocracy and Learning’s Ends
Panel
Shakespearean Fictionality
📌 Sheraton
ORGANIZER and CHAIR: Benedict S. Robinson, Stony Brook University
Lorna M. Hutson, University of Oxford
The Shock of Premodern Fiction
Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University
Are Shakespeare’s Fictional Beings Real?
Benedict S. Robinson, Stony Brook University
Impossible Fictions
4:30 to 6:30 p.m.
Performance
The Honest (Wo)man’s Revenge; or, The Atheist’s Tragedy
📌Sheraton
Co-sponsored by Shakespeare Bulletin
Four electric actors (and four fantastical puppets) take on Cyril Tourneur’s rarely performed revenge story in a queer, highspeed, extreme-doubled production from Streetlight Shakespeare Ensemble. Inspired by comic strips and featuring a set made from paper and markers, this silly, slightly debauched touring show originated in Mary Baldwin University’s MFA program.
Seminar
Imperial Shakespeare
📌Sheraton
LEADER: Philip Goldfarb Styrt, St. Ambrose University
This seminar invites papers that reconsider the relationship between Shakespeare and empire in light of new and emerging ideas about power, race, identity, and dramatic production in the early modern period. Work on non-Shakespearean authors in collaboration with or intertextually linked to Shakespeare is also welcome, as are papers that consider the impact of Shakespeare and his contemporaries on more recent time periods and other nations.
📁 View Abstracts
Undergraduate Seminar
My Shakespeare, Rise
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Brandi K. Adams, Arizona State University and Gillian Knoll, Western Kentucky University
The SAA invites Boston-area faculty members to nominate one or two students to participate in the first-ever undergraduate seminar. Participants will submit a paper about any aspect of Shakespeare studies. They will then
participate in a workshop in which they read and respond to each other’s work. We welcome students from a variety of backgrounds, and are especially keen to welcome first generation university and college students and systemically minoritized groups.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
New Psychoanalytic Methods: Race, Sex, Sexuality
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Christine Varnado, University at Buffalo, SUNY
For anyone interested in using psychoanalytic interpretive frameworks to investigate questions of race, sex, desire, affect, embodiment, gender, and sexuality in early modern literature. Welcome approaches include: reading marginal thinkers/texts; experiments with form, method, and history; paranoid and/or reparative reading practices; the history of criticism; the intersections of psychoanalysis with studies of colonialism and racialization; queer and trans studies; the problem of the human.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Personation
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Emily MacLeod, Penn State Harrisburg and Bailey Sincox, Princeton University
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Public Shakespeare/Public Humanities
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Katherine Steele Brokaw, University of California, Merced and Sean Keilen, University of California, Santa Cruz
What role has and does Shakespeare play in the public humanities, and what role should it play? What kinds of audiences or communities have the most to benefit, or lose, from these projects? And do Public Shakespeare projects take up too much space when it comes to funding, marketing, and prestige, to the determent of more marginalized writers and artists? This panel invites traditional research papers, first-person accounts of public work, proposals for new projects, and thoughts on “best practices.”
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Rethinking Fidelity in Adaptations of Shakespeare, Part Two
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: James T. Newlin, Case Western Reserve University
This seminar invites papers that rethink what it means to be faithful to Shakespeare. How might even a “slant” or “wild” adaptation of Shakespeare recall the text, performance history, or historical context of Shakespeare’s original? Papers that consider Shakespeare’s engagement with his own sources, as well as the reception and staging of Shakespeare’s works, are both welcome. Approaches might include either individual case studies or broader theorizations of fidelity and difference.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare and Ireland in the Cultural Imagination
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Emer McHugh, Queen’s University Belfast
As we gather in the largest Irish American stronghold, this seminar invites new perspectives on Shakespeare and Ireland studies that build upon literary and theatrical representation, inviting dialogue with: transnational Shakespeares and the Irish diaspora; PCRS and whiteness studies; nationalism (both in the Irish and American senses of the word); queer and trans studies; trauma studies; histories of acting; accent/ism and verse-speaking; the transmission and reception of Irishness worldwide.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare and Neurodiversity
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Bradley J. Irish, Arizona State University and Nathan Pensky, University of Pittsburgh
Scholars of early modern disability are starting to consider the topic of neurodiversity: the fact that human minds have different forms of cognitive processing, such as in the mental styles designated by modern labels like autism, ADHD, Tourettes, etc. What does it mean to think about neurodiversity and neurodivergence in the world and works of Shakespeare and contemporaries? All approaches to the topic are welcome, from theoretical speculations to the analysis of particular case studies.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare and Obsession
📌 Sheraton
LEADER: Katherine B. Attié, Towson University
This seminar invites papers that explore representations of obsession in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. How do we know when a character is in the grip of an obsession? How would obsession have been understood by the early moderns? Formalist approaches might anatomize an early modern poetics of obsession as Petrarchan legacy. Alongside discussions of obsession in Shakespeare, the seminar welcomes discussions of obsession with Shakespeare—the man and his works as cultural obsession.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeare as Conversation Partner
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: J. F. Bernard, Montreal, Canada and Paul Yachnin, McGill University
The seminar invites work undertaking the task of talking with Shakespeare. What do we get when we live with Shakespeare? Conversely, what does he get from us? What can Shakespeare offer as a conversation partner in terms of intersectionality, cultural production, or personhood? What is to be gained from approaching complex issues by way of a personal connection? We invite work that, by way of personal conversations with Shakespeare, interrogates, confronts, and contemplates such questions.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Shakespeareans’ Other Selves: Cultivating the Creative Life
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Alice Dailey, Villanova University and Amy L. Tigner, University of Texas, Arlington
This seminar invites participants to share their other selves as creative artists and to reflect on their creative lives beyond their work as early modernists. Seminarians will present their creative projects and observations about creativity. How do our academic and creative selves inform one another? Is our creative work inflected by early modern aesthetics? Projects include but are not limited to creative writing, fine arts, film, digital media, theater, music, and performance art.
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Shakespearesque Leadership: Putting Humanities Skills in Practice
📌 Sheraton
LEADERS: Ariane M. 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 or already serving in leadership positions in higher education. Based on the unshakable assumption that humanities scholars are trained in the core skills necessary for leadership in the turbulent higher education landscape, this workshop will provide opportunities for participants to practice transferring these skills from their scholarship and teaching to administrative actions. Participants will engage in preparatory virtual brainstorming meetings followed by confidential hands-on case-study practice.
Seminar
Song in Shakespeare
📌Sheraton
LEADER: Nicholas Bellinson, St. John’s College, Annapolis
This seminar welcomes all approaches to songs and singing in Shakespeare but particularly seeks new approaches to the dramatic questions, “What can songs do in Shakespeare?” and “What can singing mean to characters in Shakespeare?” Paper topics might include analysis of the songs in one play or across various plays; songs and sonnets; meter and music; birdsong; singers’’voice changes; non-English songs; missing songs; performance history. Our goal will be to expand our picture of Shakespearean song’s various features and functions.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
The Sports of Nature: Games and the Play of Science in Early Modernity
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Mary T. Crane, Boston College and John Yargo, Boston College
How does the playfulness of the natural world resist or enable scientific apprehension? While research on literature and science has focused on nature and the cosmos in the early modern period, scholars are increasingly attending to how play, playfulness, and games are woven through ideas about the natural world and methods for studying it. Paper topics might include: empirical observation as a form of play; “lusus naturae” or nature’s jokes; wonder cabinets; optical devices; educational games.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Staging Soldiers
📌Sheraton
LEADER: Sarah E. Johnson, Royal Military College of Canada
This seminar invites papers that consider soldierly identity on stage in the 16th and 17th centuries. For what purposes could this identity be appropriated? How flexible was the identity of soldier: did it encompass notions of both Amazonian transgression and Roman virtu? How was soldierly identity imagined in relation to gender, race, disability, and class? Topics might also include: civilians acting like soldiers; conduct literature; reluctant soldiers; veterans; combat as sex; soldier-poets.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Troubling Freedom in Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Thomas Ward, United States Naval Academy and Emily Weissbourd, Lehigh University
This seminar hopes to trouble celebratory readings of freedom in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Topics might include freedom in the context of emergent global slave trade; “free speech” and the right to silence; (mis)appropriations of Shakespeare as a figurehead of freedom in the neoliberal university; and early modern England’s self-definition as a site of freedom in a larger European context. We particularly welcome papers that employ transnational or comparative approaches.
📁 View Abstracts
Workshop
Untitling Shakespeare with Keith Hamilton Cobb
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Emily D. Bryan, Sacred Heart University, Jessica Burr, Blessed Unrest, and Keith Hamilton Cobb
This workshop introduces participants to Untitling Shakespeare with Keith Hamilton Cobb and his collaborators on the <i>Untitled Othello</i> project. 10-12 attendees are invited to join in a slow and methodical reading of the first two scenes of a Shakespeare play (TBD) and 20-30 auditors will be invited to observe and comment throughout the process. In approximately three hours of work, participants will discover how Shakespeare analysis that takes nothing for granted and challenges assumptions can create a model for pedagogy, scholarship, performance, and community building.
Seminar
Violent Women in Early Modern Drama
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Lara Ehrenfried, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Nikolina Hatton, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
How is violence committed by women represented in early modern drama? Under what circumstances is it condoned and how are motivations for violence gender-coded in the period? What roles do genre and performance context play in directing the audience’s reaction to female violence? This seminar explores the framing and reception of violent women and the contours of the woman-as-perpetrator dynamic, with a special focus on lesser-known early modern plays, including closet drama.
📁 View Abstracts
Seminar
Writerly Identity: Race and Women’s Writing
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Lisa Jennings, University of Houston, Downtown and Anita Raychawdhuri, University of Houston, Downtown
This seminar is interested in analyzing women’s writing (all women trans or cis) capaciously to consider how this category is undergirded by race. This seminar welcomes work on early modern women’s writing, women characters who write, or how books are raced and gendered. As the category of womanhood is a de facto racialized one, how is the process and experience of writing racialized for women? When does writing by women writers reaffirm white ideology? When might it offer means of resistance?
📁 View Abstracts
Open Workshop
From the Galliard to Gangnam Style: A Workshop in Staging Historically-Informed Dances for Different-Era Productions
📌Sheraton
LEADERS: Linda McJannet, Bentley University, Nona Monahin, Mount Holyoke College, Meg Pash, Mount Holyoke College, and Emily F. Winerock, Shakespeare and Dance Project/Point Park University
Thirteen Shakespeare plays call for staged dances yet lack choreographic details. This workshop explores challenges and opportunities when staging dances in Shakespeare plays, whether one’s production is set in the 1580s or the 1980s. Participants will first learn some Renaissance dance steps and a simple choreography modified for a dramatic scene. Then participants will create a choreography for the same scene set in a different time or place such as American Appalachia or 1960s Liverpool.
6:15 to 8:15 p.m.
Cash Bar
ACMRS Cash Bar
📌 Grand-Liberty Foyer, Sheraton 2F
Sponsored by ACMRS
Celebrating authors and contributors to new ACMRS titles. All members are welcome.
7:30 to 9:30 p.m.
Performance
Hamlet
📌 Sheraton
Actors From The London Stage
Founded in 1975 at the University of California, Santa Barbara and calling Shakespeare at Notre Dame its home since 2000, Actors From The London Stage celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2025. The company travels to colleges and universities nationwide twice yearly, offering a weeklong residency of workshops and performances. Each member of this self-directed ensemble portrays multiple roles in performance while favoring minimal props and costumes, placing the focus squarely on Shakespeare’s story.
Madness, revenge, and the supernatural: Hamlet remains one of the most well-known of all Shakespeare plays. This powerful tale of vengeance, sanity, and morality continues to resonate with contemporary audiences. Actors From The London Stage celebrates this milestone anniversary with a triumphant return to the Shakespeare Association America’s 2025 Annual Meeting. For more information, visit shakespeare.nd.edu.
10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
Dance
The Malone Society Dance
📌 Grand Ballroom, Sheraton 2F
This year, the dance is free to all registrants and their guests thanks to the generosity of the Malone Society.
The Malone Society invites all registrants of #Shax2025 to join the dance and join its ranks: malonesociety.com. The Malone Society publishes editions of early printed and manuscript texts of plays, plus collections of documentary material relating to the performance and reception of early drama.
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.
The Malone Society invites all registrants of #Shax2025 to join its ranks!
The Malone Society publishes editions of early printed and manuscript texts of plays, plus collections of documentary material relating to the performance and reception of early drama. In addition to the annual volumes distributed to members, we support scholarship through fellowships and research grants, prizes, symposia and a range of bibliographically inspired t-shirts.
New members receive a copy of the current annual volume and a volume from our backlist of their choice, and new student members receive three free volumes from the backlist. Membership is available for purchase in a variety of currencies, and we offer discounted membership rates to students and scholars who are precariously, contingently, or independently employed. Our current annual volume is William Percy’s The Aphrodysial, ed. by Maria Shmygol.
To join the society, please go to our website: malonesociety.com.
Sheraton Boston
Second Floor (Sheraton 2F)
Third Floor (Sheraton 3F)
