Program of the 54th Annual Meeting

Seminars: 

01. The Adaptability of Adaptation

Rebecca Hixon, Lourdes University

Does adaptation operate differently in different contexts, spaces, genres, geographies, etc.? Does it change shape when paired with other modes of reading, performing, or thinking Shakespeare? This seminar invites participants to think about adaptation capaciously—at both the level of theory and practice. Papers that pair an exploration of adaptation with other methodologies such as critical race theory or performance studies are especially welcome.

02. Audio Shakespeare Around the World: Radio, Recordings, Internet

Michael P. Jensen Shakespeare Newsletter

Global audio Shakespeare is the most neglected area of Shakespeare performance studies. This seminar is open to all radio, recorded, and internet audio performances. Papers may include any country and language, studies of specific audio performances, audio series, or performances by themes such as navigating race, gender, period, culture, and other issues that inform audio performances. The field is wide open. Let’s fill it.

03A. Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet at Thirty

Gemma Kate Allred, Université de Neuchâtel
Benjamin Broadribb, London, UK
Edel Semple, University College Cork

This seminar explores the legacy of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) across Shakespearean culture and global popular culture. We invite papers considering Romeo +Juliet’s legacy across cultures and media, exploring how Luhrmann’s film has influenced the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare; where, how, and why echoes and aftershocks of Romeo + Juliet can be found in cultural objects from the past three decades; and the evolution of the film’s reception and status over time.

03B. Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet at Thirty (Virtual Session 🌐)  

Gemma Kate Allred, Université de Neuchâtel
Benjamin Broadribb, London, UK
Edel Semple, University College Cork

This seminar explores the legacy of Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) across Shakespearean culture and global popular culture. We invite papers considering Romeo +Juliet’s legacy across cultures and media, exploring how Luhrmann’s film has influenced the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare; where, how, and why echoes and aftershocks of Romeo + Juliet can be found in cultural objects from the past three decades; and the evolution of the film’s reception and status over time.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

04. Child Performance

Scott A. Trudell, University of Maryland

This seminar invites new directions in child performance studies as they intersect with early modern trans studies, theater history, sexuality studies, histories of race, civic pageantry, and transnational performance. How was childhood redefined in early modern theater and performance cultures, and why did versatile and charismatic child performers hold such magnetic appeal during the period?

05. Community and the Scapegoat

Craig Dionne, Eastern Michigan University
Sharon O’Dair, University of Alabama

Shakespeare’s plays are community-building machines often requiring exclusion, a scapegoat. Critical theory argues these resolutions are ideological, weighted with the bias of prejudice. Yet, as skeptical as historical-political criticism has been of these restored communities, are we persuaded that Shakespeare is critical in writing them? Are we persuaded that Shakespeare—or Shakespeareans—can help create and maintain community today, without being exclusionary?

06. Comparative Sexualities: Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Hybrid Session 🌐)

Goran Stanivukovic, Saint Mary’s University

When compared with the works of some of his contemporaries, sexual discourses in Shakespeare’s writing often appear somewhat restrained. This seminar sets out to compare non-Shakespearean texts to Shakespeare, and to interpret Shakespeare in relation to his Continental contemporaries. The aim of this seminar is to show what new discourses, narratives, rhetoric, and representations of sexuality emerge from this critical engagement with other dramatists and poets.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

07. Contemporary Pedagogies of Reading Early Modern Literature

Catherine R. Clifford, Hastings College
Jess Hamlet, Alvernia University

This hybrid workshop-seminar welcomes classroom activities or assignments, pedagogical essays informed by theory, and/or reflective essays on success and failures. We welcome materials on class and the study of humanities disciplines; the “value” of reading; common student resistances to Shakespeare; reading early modern literature within the context ofl arger political attacks on higher education and the humanities; comprehension; methodologies; assessment; and making reading practices visible.

08. Creative-Critical Engagements with the Renaissance

Kate Bolton Bonnici, Pepperdine University
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld, Pomona College

This seminar considers practices that blur the boundaries between research and art, practices that affirm creative writing as a valid mode of scholarly inquiry. How might we—as critics—write about early modern literatures using methods that are themselves literary? That is, how might we write critically about the Renaissance without being limited by the (current) scholarly essay or article form? In this seminar, we will explore critical-creative engagements with the subjects of early modernity, occupying the hyphenated, expansive, and varied spaces of scholar-artists.

09. Early Modern Eco-Memory

Daniel Normandin, Marshall University

This seminar welcomes papers that consider how Shakespeare and other early moderns imagined the links between memory and the environment. How did they read their pasts—whether private or public, personal or historical—in their landscapes and cityscapes? Possible topics include: the environment as mnemonic device (or as a device for forgetting); religious memory during and after the “Reformation of the landscape”; archaeological tropes; the memory of past ecological disruption; and urban ecology.

10. Essaying Shakespeare (Hybrid Session 🌐)

Huw Griffiths, University of Sydney
Jennifer E. Nicholson, University of Sydney

Is it time to re-assess the relationship between Shakespeare studies and the form of the “essay”? Can Shakespeare studies enliven its investment in the “essay” as a productively ephemeral form? Topics could include: Essays as idiosyncratic and ephemeral forms of knowledge production; The form of the essay in the wake of generative AI; Early modern essay writers; The historical emergence of Shakespeare studies through the form of the essay; Contemporary forms of essayistic thinking: from the podcast to the student essay.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

11. Ethical Plurality on the Early Modern Stage

Christopher Crosbie, North Carolina State University
Anita Gilman Sherman, American University

This seminar considers how the early modern stage made use of, mediated between, and reconceptualized different, even rival, ethical and religious traditions. How did multiple ways of knowing or believing find expression in the theater and to what end? What methodologies help us trace variant lineages of thought shaping early modern plays? How did playwrights negotiate the erudite and vernacular, parochial and syncretic, or partisan and ecumenical in their representations of ethical reasoning?

12. Faculty/Student Collaboration in the Undergraduate Shakespeare Classroom

Lucie Alden, Georgetown University
Mardy Philippian, Lewis University

Higher education in the US faces declining trust, shrinking humanities enrollment, and faculty burnout. Rethinking how we teach Shakespeare—especially through faculty-student collaboration—could reengage undergraduates, particularly at non-elite institutions. This seminar explores barriers to such collaboration and considers questions about inclusivity, public value, and the future of Shakespeare Studies in shaping student outcomes and supporting broader academic goals.

13. From Commonplaces to Databases: The Social Memory of Proverbs (Virtual Session 🌐)  

Laura Estill, St. Francis Xavier University
Richard J. Meek, University of Hull

Proverbs offer fertile ways of thinking about questions of shared history and cross-cultural understanding; the relationship between classical and popular culture; rhetoric and pedagogy; authorship, style, and creativity; and adaptation, appropriation, and afterlives. We welcome papers that consider proverbs, sayings, and/or commonplaces in works by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, their nature and transmission, and how to undertake effective research on early modern proverbs today.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

14. The Future of Renaissance (Non-Human) Animal Studies

Rebecca Ann Bach, University of Alabama, Birmingham

This seminar invites papers on particular nonhuman animals, metaphorical usages of nonhuman animals, legends about nonhuman animals, human usages of nonhuman animal parts, and any other nonhuman animal references in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. It also invites meta-treatments of Animal Studies: discussions of the field’s dimensions, its problems, its terminology, its future, including continuation of the work begun in the previous seminar on Intersectional Animalities.

15. Generation Shakespeare: YA Adaptations

Brian Harries, Concordia University
Ann M. Martinez, Kent State University at Stark
Gaywyn Moore, Santa Clara University

This seminar seeks to examine the popularity of recycling Shakespeare for a YA audience. What insights do these adaptations afford us? How does YA pedagogy deal with Shakespeare’s difficult topics? Does a general collective cultural memory resonate in these reimaginings? How do these works engage younger readers? Seminar participants are welcome to focus on any media and are welcome to consider adaptation theory, YA literary theory, and cultural resonance to aid in our seminar’s discussion

16. How to Use King Lear

Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire

This seminar aims at creating a “User Guide” for King Lear: we invite papers concerned with ways the play has been, can be, and even should be used in productions on stage or on screens, and in classrooms. How can we move away from familiar touchstones of mainstream theatre work in the US and UK towards areas where King Lear functions differently, outside conventional theatre repertories and classrooms and into spaces that enable us to rethink the purposes of engaging with it?

17. Interlocking Letters

Kerry N. Cooke, Mary Baldwin University

The term letterlocking refers to methods of folding, tucking, and sealing early modern letters. Letterlocking was ubiquitous among letter writers: people, regardless of race, gender, class used locking mechanisms to secure the content of their messages. But, what of their race, gender, class, as well as their sexuality and ability, did they lock into their letters? This seminar invites inquiries into the ways letters “interlocked” identities. Indeed, it will borrow this essential term from bell hooks to ask questions like: how did writers script, fold, and seal their “interlocking” identities into their letters? How did the genre or form facilitate the expression of interlocking identities? How did the form or genre disallow interlocking forms of expression? 

18. Labor and Early Modern Literature

Megan Heffernan, DePaul University
Julia Schleck, Colorado State University

This seminar invites papers that explore the relationship between literary and non-literary labor historically and/or today. Papers can focus on the material history of literary production, whether on the stage or in the printing house, or the depiction of such relationships within literary works. We welcome papers that draw early modern labor into productive dialogue with contemporary labor conditions within and beyond the academy.

19. Manuscript Cultures/Theatrical Cultures

Alan Stewart, Columbia University

This seminar aims to explore the many and various ways in which the manuscript cultures of early modern England are implicated in the theatrical cultures of the period, and vice versa. Papers might address play-texts, plats, and parts that survive in manuscript form; manuscript marginalia on printed plays; manuscript archives relating to the theatre; and the representation of manuscript culture (writing and writers, papers and paperwork) on the early modern stage.

20. The Many Lives of The Shrew

James J. Marino, Cleveland State University
Elizabeth E. Tavares, University of Alabama

Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew has always been entangled with other versions of its narrative. In many ways, the history of The Shrew is the history of its intertexts. This seminar invites papers on The Taming of the Shrew and its many forerunners, sequels, adaptations, and spinoffs. A range of approaches are welcome, from critical theoretical vantages of trans, gender, and sexuality studies, to affect, translation, and media theory or book, theatre, performance, and film history.

21. New Directions in Shakespeare and the Bible

Gabriel Bloomfield, Bates College

Recent work on Shakespeare and the Bible has revealed the vast extent of his debt to scriptural texts and their interpretation in early modernity, but has remained mostly separate from the study of race, gender, sexuality, and ecology in early modern England. By exploring how the Bible’s ever-contentious texts helped to construct these categories in early modern thought, we will seek to enrich the field’s understanding of how writers reproduced and contested biblical constructions of difference.

22. New World Theatricality

Andrew Bozio, Skidmore College
Caro Pirri, University of Pittsburgh

This seminar explores the formal imprint of conquest on early modern theatricality. How does theatricality, not simply as a medium but as a mode, give us new interpretive rubrics for reading the histories and legacies of conquest history? Papers might explore this question not simply in Shakespeare’s dramas or on the English stage, but across the early modern media landscape—from entertainments, masques, and emblems to representations of Indigenous performance and ritual.

23. On Glossing

Stephen Spiess, Babson College

What is a textual gloss? What does/should it do? This seminar invites papers “on glossing” from a range of perspectives: editorial, political, historical, theatrical, pedagogical. Participants might anatomize a specific textual gloss; examine the histories, politics, or ethics of glossing (gender, sexuality, race, etc.); assess how digital technologies inform contemporary glossing practices; consider instances of glossing in early modern texts; explore how glosses get used by theater practitioners; and/or introduce strategies for teaching with glosses.

24. Overwhelmed

Gerard Passannante, University of Maryland, College Park
Susanne L. Wofford, New York University

How does Shakespeare dramatize—in different genres, in plays or lyric poetry—being overwhelmed by nature, by politics, by disaster or by thoughts—floods, fires, shipwrecks, wars, all overwhelm, but so do obsessions, fears, or passions. We will look at political and ecological overwhelm and at the boundary between external and psychic experience. We will ask if and when these experiences illuminate the ties for the characters, players or audience between the self and the political order.

25. Performing Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare: Theory and Praxis

Chad Allen Thomas, University of Alabama in Huntsville

This seminar bridges the gap between scholarly analysis and theatrical practice, challenging the divide between historicist and performance methodologies. Focusing on gender and sexuality in Shakespearean productions, we examine how cross-gender casting, gender-fluid performance, queer reinterpretation, and insights from trans studies shape meaning. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, we explore how performance reflects and reshapes cultural understandings, expanding Shakespearean interpretation beyond the text.

26. Performing Repetition

Allison K. Deutermann, Baruch College, CUNY
Lauren Robertson, Columbia University

Repetition has been called “a God term” in performance studies. If repetition is key to the making of dramatic meaning, it has signal importance to early modern drama, which developed alongside a poetics that prized poesis and within a theatrical culture of recycling and reuse. We ask, what is it that repetition makes? We welcome papers taking up repetitionat various scales—from the word or line to formal conventions or the meme-like circulation of devices, props, and characters.

27. Play On: Shakespeare and Video Games

Lowell Duckert, University of Delaware
Christine Hoffmann, West Virginia University

The RSC just announced its first video game, Lili. Reflecting upon a decades-long history of Shakespeare in/as video games, this seminar asks: what does the study of early modernity bring to the discourse of video game studies, and what does the discourse of video game studies bring to the study of early modernity? What can/should this intersectional work look like? We welcome players interested in pedagogy; adaptation, appropriation, and translation; interactivity, reception, and spectatorship.

28. The Poetics of the Page

Jessica C. Beckman, Dartmouth College

When does early modern poetics encompass the material text? How can we theorize the relationship between early modern literary experimentation and its material forms? Submissions to this seminar might include essays on poetics and rhetoric, poetry or drama, the history of the book and reading, material culture, aesthetic theory, theories of gender, race, and sexuality, ecocriticism, textual editing, digital editions, and writers beyond Shakespeare.

29. Postcolonial Shakespeares (Hybrid Session 🌐)

Amrita Dhar, University of California, San Diego

This seminar explores postcolonial Shakespeares—adaptation, community work, pedagogy—from around the world. How do the conditions of post-coloniality (the temporal after of empire) and the critical stance of postcoloniality (the resistance to empire) inform engagements with Shakespeare? How do postcolonials write Shakespeare—in films, plays, novels, lesson plans—and why? How do postcolonial and post-colonial identities get raced, gendered, and abled/disabled in engagements with Shakespeare?

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

30. Power Dressing

Katharine E. Landers, Illinois State University

This seminar explores the early modern nexus of dress, politics, and women’s writing. Why and how do women writers turn to dress and material identity-making to do political work in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How does gender inform the challenges and possibilities offered by dress? Papers might consider varied forms of “dressing” or explore how the politics of dress intersects with identity-formation in women’s writing via gender, sexuality, race, religion, and more.

31. Preternatural Shakespeare

Mary Floyd-Wilson, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Phebe Jensen, Utah State University
Katherine Walker, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

This seminar invites papers on early modern English drama’s staging of the preternatural. As a liminal category between the natural and the supernatural, how might the concept of preternature inform transformations in humans, plants, animals, or minerals? Papers might consider the hidden but material effects of planets, stars, contagion, spirits, or the environment, as they manifest in the bodies and emotions of characters, actors, and spectators in the early modern theater.

32. Race and Anglo-Iberian Literary Exchanges

Zainab Cheema, Florida Gulf Coast University
Victoria M. Muñoz, Adelphi University

While Anglo-Iberian studies has uncovered Shakespeare and his peers’ rich connections to Iberia, the scholarship’s racial stakes remain underexplored. This seminar engages with England’s literary relations with Spain and Portugal via Premodern Critical Race Studies. Papers may address contexts in Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa, the Middle East through transoceanic networks, religious conflicts, indigeneity, colonial exchanges, enslavement, racial polemics, gender, disability, and ecopoetics.

33. REED at 50: Prospects and Retrospects

Peter Greenfield, University of Puget Sound
Alan H. Nelson, University of California, Berkeley

In 1976 Records of Early English Drama (REED), of the University of Toronto, received its first funding from the Canada Council. Since 1979 REED has published a total of 27 collections in 36 print volumes, and 7 collections in “born-digital” format. Papers are invited which emulate, reflect upon, profit from, or supplement REED publications. Any research in “Theater History” will be welcome, but authors will be invited to connect their arguments at some point to the REED enterprise.

34. Representation, Politics, and Performance

Andrew S. Brown, Dalhousie University

How did the early modern development of representative ideas and institutions transform the English stage—and vice versa? This seminar invites papers on theatrical representation and political representation, with each of these representative forms inviting a range of approaches and definitions. Potential areas of focus include sovereignty; mimesis; individual and collective personhood; domestic and international law; and constructions of race, gender, national identity, and/or social status.

35. Rethinking City Comedy

Bernadette Myers, Washington University in St. Louis
Robert O. Yates, Wagner College

This seminar invites papers exploring the flexible genre of city comedy. What forms of knowledge does the genre produce or obscure? We welcome papers on plays exemplifying the genre’s conventions and those that innovate it. Topics may include understudied character types, unexplored settings, spatial theories beyond De Certeau and Lefebvre, affect, time, historical precedents, nondramatic intertexts, contemporary adaptations, or implications for historiographies of bodies and environments.

36. Rethinking Original Practices (Hybrid Session 🌐)

Benjamin Blyth, University of Calgary
Sarah Dustagheer, Dalhousie University

Original Practices (OP) emerged in the 1990s as an experiment to “discover and recreate Shakespeare’s company’s working practices” (Shakespeare’s Globe). But what constitutes “original” performance? How has this changed over time? And is it possible to uncouple the desire to “discover and recreate” from social, cultural, and psychological structures of colonial power? This seminar reflects on thirty years of OP and asks what role, if any, it might play in future Shakespeare practice and research.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

37. Shakespeare, AI, and Virtuality

Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University

How do Shakespearean “worlds” and soliloquies help us understand generative AI’s realms of virtuality and performativity? Techné governs all synchronous and asynchronous communication. Papers may examine pedagogy, AI’s hallucination, and Shakespeare’s depictions of dreams and neurodiversity; compare the anthropomorphizing of AI to animal symbolism in Shakespeare; or take up other corollaries using ecocritical, trans/queer/feminist, posthumanist, postcolonial, and/or critical race theories.

38. Shakespeare and Belonging

Sara Morrison, William Jewell College
Deborah Uman, Weber State University

Shakespeare’s plays are invested in the dynamics of interpersonal relationships, offering valuable insights into how individuals find their place within communities. We invite papers that consider how the works of Shakespeare can contribute to recent scholarship on belonging, particularly on college campuses. Papers might address questions of belonging in Shakespeare’s plays, ways to deploy Shakespeare as a vehicle to promote belonging, or the dynamics of performance and belonging.

39. Shakespeare and Elite Culture: Performing Whiteness Beyond the Anglophone (Virtual Session 🌐)

Anandi Rao, SOAS, University of London
Francesca Clare Rayner, Universidade do Minho, Portugal

This session takes its cue from the volume, White People in Shakespeare, edited by Arthur Little Jr. While the volume focused primarily on the UK, US and the Anglophone academy, this seminar seeks to move the conversation forward by thinking about Shakespeare, whiteness, and elite culture beyond the Anglophone. We invite participants to think with translations, adaptations and other ways that Shakespeare has circulated globally. We also invite participants to think about questions of pedagogy when teaching, reading, editing, watching Shakespeare in a non-Anglophone context.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

40. Shakespeare and Nonsense

Adam Zucker, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

The experience of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry on the page and in performance often occurs at the very edges of sensible meaning. This may be an intentional aspect of scripted language, an effect of manuscript transmission, or a simple result of the passage of time as language and reference become increasingly obscure to students and audiences; sometimes, however, it is the result of systemically blocked access to language for certain characters, critics, or readers. This seminar provides a forum to consider the many facets and outcomes of Shakespearean nonsense in critical, pedagogical, historical, textual, and theatrical contexts, both as it appears in plays and poems, and as it has emerged in relation to them over time.

41. Shakespeare and Public Libraries

Brandi K. Adams, Arizona State University
Claire M. L. Bourne, Pennsylvania State University

We invite papers about the role of public libraries (local, national and international) in the preservation, circulation, and study of books and other media that transmit works by Shakespeare and early modern writers. How do public collections shape our approaches to early modern textual history? How does the presence early modern books in public collections impact the local communities that these institutions serve? What should scholarly partnerships with public libraries look like?

42. Shakespeare and the Forms of Religion

Trina Hyun, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Amanda K. Ruud, Valparaiso University

Our seminar considers intersections of religion, aesthetics, language, and performance by examining varied forms through which religion emerges in Shakespeare’s corpus (rhetorics of prayer, ritual, lament, etc.). Can attention to religious forms provide new entries for understanding early modern relationships between art and religion? We welcome papers that explore religions beyond Christianity or query notions of the secular.

43. Shakespeare’s Guide to Utopic Futures

Jessica Riddell, Bishop’s University
Jayme M. Yeo, Belmont University

How does Shakespeare’s work envision new futures by imagining the destruction, preservation, or rebuilding of possible worlds? How do these worlds articulate human relationships or political possibility? How can we enliven Shakespearean futurity for students and audiences? How do we move from embodied present to imaginative future? We invite a wide range of theoretical, pedagogical, or creative responses from those engaged in teaching, traditional scholarship, theater practice, or public work.

44. Shakespeare’s Sentences

Shankar Raman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Travis D. Williams, University of Rhode Island

This seminar seeks contributions that explore Shakespeare and other early modern writers at the level of the sentence, including concepts of definition, structure, prose style, relation to poetic form, prescriptive and descriptive grammars, the period, sententiae, and the commonplace. We especially welcome experimental, exploratory, and emergent work, hoping to emphasize collaborative development of ideas and methods.

45. Silence on Stage

Maggie Vinter, Case Western Reserve University

What effects does silence produce in the early modern theater? Papers might consider silence as a dramatic effect in relation to silent characters, dumb shows or extras in historical or contemporary performance; silence as a cultural phenomenon in relation to religious practice, noise and music, political expression and its suppression, and categories of social identity; and/or silence as a reflection of what cannot be said or expressed, the absent, or that which is withheld.

46. The Sonic Laboratory of the Renaissance Theater

Sarah F. Williams, University of South Carolina
Jennifer Linhart Wood, George Mason University

This seminar will explore auditory experiments staged in the sonic laboratory of the early modern theater: noisy audiences, music, sound effects, and even entire soundscapes. Questions for discussion include: What physical effects do theatrical sounds create in listening bodies? What were audiences guided to hear? What did it sound like when things went wrong? How are sounds marshalled in performance(s) of gender, racial, and cultural otherness, and/or other and intersectional forms of identity?

47. Speaking the Speech

Matthew Hunter, Texas Tech University

While Shakespeare’s dramatic language has long been an object of scholarly interest, its status as speech has tended to receive less attention. This is a seminar about the performance, the value, and the ethics of speech in Shakespeare’s plays. It invites scholars from a wide range of intellectual affiliations—from performance history and theory, to poetics and aesthetics, to histories of the book, to disability studies, to ordinary language philosophy and socio8logical and anthropological frameworks—to think anew about what it means to speak in Shakespeare’s plays.

48. Theatrical and Environmental Encounters

Gretchen Minton, Montana State University
Chloe K. Preedy, University of Exeter

Skyscapes, landscapes, flora, birds, and insects can unexpectedly intersect with and participate in theatrical performances. Productions might also involve nonhuman animal performers, use water or fire effects, or feature natural materials and items (e.g. flowers). We invite papers that consider the ecological significance of scripted or unscripted encounters between the more-than-human environment and the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in early modern or modern theatrical contexts.

49. Unearthing

Kristen Abbott Bennett, Framingham State University
Emily Rowe, King’s College London

This seminar explores early modern literature’s engagement with subterranean ecosystems. How do writers imagine unearthing, extraction, and decay in ways that speak to ecological, economic, and socio-political concerns? How do literary texts unearth the entanglements of material wealth and environmental consequence? Our conversations aim to examine imaginative possibilities that materials, objects, plants, and creatures beneath the surface ofthe earth elicit.

50. Variorum Shakespeare

Robert Stagg, Texas A&M University
Dorothy Todd, Texas A&M University

The New Variorum Shakespeare, which began its life in print in the 1870s, is now available in digital form: see https://newvariorumshakespeare.org. Attempts to produce variorum editions of Shakespeare stretch back even further, to the eighteenth century. This seminar invites papers that engage with the NVS and/or the history and method of the variorum and/or digital editing of Shakespeare.

51. Whiteness and the Comic

Sarah Gray Lesley, University of Chicago

What is the relationship between comedy and whiteness in early modern literature? This seminar unpacks how comedy, as a genre and as a mode, colludes with white worldmaking. While Midsummer Night’s Dream and Comedy of Errors have been central to premodern critical race studies, many comic texts and moments remain to be considered. This seminar seeks papers that probe this critical gap, exploring how Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean texts mobilize the comic to develop fictions of whiteness.

52. White Sophistry and Epistemicide in Shakespeare Then and Now

Nora Galland, University of Bretagne Occidentale
Katherine Gillen, Texas A&M University, San Antonio

This seminar explores connections among rhetorical, epistemic, and material white violence inShakespeare. If racial difference is a social construct, it is also a product of white sophistry designed to reinforce whiteness at the expense of other racialized groups. We invite papers on the ways in which the less tangible aspects of whiteness interact with the material violence of racism and genocide. How does Shakespeare foster, reinforce, or disrupt white ways of knowing, speaking, and seeing?

53. “A Whole Theater of Others”: Presenting and Representing the Playgoers in Shakespeare’s Playhouses

Amy Rodgers, Mount Holyoke College
William N. West, Northwestern University

Shakespeare’s plays were present to playgoers in ways that we rarely encounter, and they thickly re-present experiences associated with playgoing. We invite papers on early modern playgoers’ experiences—how they understood themselves, why they went to plays and what they got out of them. We welcome accounts of early performances, experiments with original practices, speculations about perspectives that elude reconstruction—anything that asks “How is it possible then to think of the audience?”

Workshops:

54. Air & Breath in Macbeth: A Scholar-Practitioner Convergence

Theo Black, Cornell University
Christopher Marino, University of North Carolina, Wilmington
Stephanie Shirilan, Syracuse University

This interactive session on Macbeth investigates the shared air/breath of theatrical embodiment, lensing: air’s mercurial materiality, early modern conceits of pneumatics, actor-training work, language as air-borne agents, and ecological reverberations. This workshop offers participants a guided opportunity to connect accessibly and dynamically with Shakespeare’s text to investigate atmospheric studies of air/breath, exploring ways text re-materializes when “envoiced” from page to stage.

55. Book Proposal Lab

Michelle M. Dowd, University of Alabama
Karen Raber, University of Mississippi
Rebecca Totaro, Florida Gulf Coast University

In this workshop, participants will become familiar with the required components of a scholarly book proposal by reviewing proposal guidelines from key presses that support our field. With these guidelines in mind, they will also develop a draft of their own scholarly book proposal and give and receive feedback on those drafts. 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.

56. Rescuing Romance (Virtual Session 🌐)

Katharine A. Craik, Oxford Brookes University
Ewan Fernie, Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham

This workshop ventures into the spaces between critical and creative practice. We will reflect on the established warrants for literary criticism, and when we should question their authority. We propose it is the limits of what Shakespeare himself could write, as much as his achievements, which propel a leap into full imaginative responsibility. Creative dialogue with the action and poetry of Shakespeare’s romances, through “story criticism,” uncovers coherent, significant and playable new stories, allowing characters to find new life in worlds outside those they were born into.

* Preference will be given to international members facing travel restrictions.

57. Shakespeare and Community-Based Practice

Jennifer Feather, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
Lauren Shook, University of North Carolina, Greensboro

This workshop invites participants, at all levels of career and experience, to imagine a range of community-engaged projects that the study of Shakespeare and the early modern affords. How can scholars create mutually beneficial relationships with communities outside of the academy? Participants will share ideas for community-engaged projects and co-create a community of practice whereby workshop members can find mutual support for ongoing projects.

58. Strategic Shakespeares

Nedda Mehdizadeh, University of California, Los Angeles
Nora J. Williams, BIMM University

This workshop considers our distinct responsibilities as early modernists, not to reify Shakespeare as a savior of the Humanities, but to interrogate existing structures. Through pre- and in-workshop exercises, we invite participants to leverage Shakespeare’s cultural capital strategically against outdated academic paradigms. Can tangible outcomes—innovative lesson plans, peer review guidelines, publications models, and scholarly communities–—help revive our academic and humanistic networks?

59. Teaching Early Modern Gender, Sexuality, and Care of the Body

Karen Sawyer Marsalek, St. Olaf College
Nancy L. Simpson-Younger, St. Olaf College

Participants will workshop lesson plans and assignments that cover early modern perspectives on care of the body, gender, and sexuality. Using a set of shared primary texts, including Thomas Cogan’s Haven of Health and recipe collections, we will co-create a range of course modules that integrate early modern literature and therapeutic discourse. We will discuss how to customize these materials for courses at different levels and with different disciplinary focuses.