Seminar and Workshop Abstracts
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52nd Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. Ambivalence
Frances E. Dolan (University of California, Davis) and Valerie Traub (University of Michigan)
As a theme, ambivalence has been central to Shakespeare studies, where it has largely been conceptualized as pertaining to individual psychic conflicts. Over the past twenty years, however, ambivalence has begun to be invoked by queers and feminists to describe an affirmative capacity, a political emotion, and structural condition of life under neo-liberalism. This seminar offers an opportunity to engage with the concept of ambivalence through this broader, more political lens.
02. Anglo-Hispanisms
Eric J. Griffin (Millsaps College), José A. Pérez Díez (University of Leeds), and Alexander Samson (University College London)
Nation-centered literary histories have been complicated by transnational approaches viewing our canons as rooted in communities whose national languages and cultures were merely emergent. Taking the Anglo-Hispanic relationship as a nexus of intersection, this seminar welcomes papers examining the ways “Anglo-Hispanisms” figure in early modern drama and all related genres. Approaches might include questions of influence, representation, ideology, otherness, performance, and theatrical practice.
03. Asian Shakespeares: Translation, Adaptation, Interpretation
Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University Belfast) and Jessica K. Chiba (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
Sparked by scholarship, festivals, anime/manga films, translation projects and digital resources, this seminar explores trends in “Asian Shakespeares.” Understanding Asia as polyvocal and transnational, we reflect on the field via three overlapping areas: translation, adaptation and interpretation. This allows us to consider the play/adaptation relationship, intersections with gender studies/critical race studies, and the local/global interpretive role Shakespeare plays in Asian contexts.
04. Costume, Scenography, and the Role of the Designer in Performance
Ella Kirsty Hawkins (University of Birmingham)
This seminar considers how visual production elements shape the meanings of early modern plays in performance. How do costumes, scenery, props, and lighting enable a particular interpretation of the text? To what extent can design make early modern plays speak to contemporary issues? Welcoming papers concerned with any aspect of design for early modern drama—historical or contemporary, stage or screen—this seminar seeks to recenter the work of the designer in discussions of performance.
05. Criminal Shakespeares
John S. Garrison (Grinnell College), Kyle A. Pivetti (Norwich University), and Vanessa L. Rapatz (Ball State University)
This seminar invites explorations of both Renaissance criminality and modern crime and noir fiction depictions, incl. film, novels, period pamphlets, or personal journals. How is Shakespeare deployed as a figure of class or morality? How is crime defined through sexuality, gender, or body? And how does Shakespeare generate a vocabulary for criminals to reveal the systems against which they transgress?
06. Cutting and Pasting in Renaissance England: Gender, Authorship, and the Use of Others’ Words
Julie Ann Eckerle (University of Minnesota, Morris) and Erin A. McCarthy (University of Galway)
This seminar will consider the recursive relationship between early modern women’s reading and writing. At a time when print and manuscript publishing informed one another, women were also creating their own texts, often by drawing creatively upon published works by other writers. Essays may focus on single or multiple authors to consider the full range of writers’ uses of others’ texts, including but not limited to copying, cutting, appropriating, and compiling in any form, language, or medium.
07. Damaged, Decayed, Destroyed, Disappeared
Anna Reynolds (University of Sheffield) and Misha Teramura (University of Toronto)
This seminar invites papers that explore decaying, damaged, and lost objects, whether textual, theatrical, archival, or imagined. How did the early modern world understand such objects, and how do they shape our understanding of the early modern past? Essays might consider fragments, ruins, vandalism, theatrical properties, missing or destroyed documents, archival silences, waste, recycling, retrieval, or restoration.
08. Dance on and Beyond the Early Modern Stage
Seth S. Williams (Barnard College of Columbia University)
How does dancing—or any motion that we might view as a kind of choreography—reconfigure social relations, construct identities kinetically, or throw systems of knowledge off balance? This seminar welcomes scholars who are curious about but not expert in dance studies, and who wish to discuss plays or any literature that stages scenes of aestheticized, politicized motion, whether solo or corporate, designed or improvised. Paired with an optional practicum, “Trampling the Archive.”
09. Dis/ability and Racial Capitalism in Shakespeare and Beyond
Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College) and Penelope H. Geng (Macalester College)
This seminar welcomes work on the intersection(s) of race, class, and dis/ability in Shakespeare and related texts. Such work could include efforts to theorize and historicize the interplay of dis/ability, race, and class in drama, the linking of citizenship to whiteness and able-bodiedness, or the disabling consequences of racial capitalism. How might a study of the interlocking histories of dis/ability, race, and class in Shakespeare inspire and complicate our work as scholar-teachers?
10. Drama and the Public Sphere
Stephen Wittek (Carnegie Mellon University)
This seminar will consider the relation between early modern drama and an incipient public sphere—or what some critics refer to as the “proto-public sphere.” Projects that consider drama outside of the Shakespearean canon are particularly welcome. Potential areas of focus include: drama and topical representation, the discursive affordances of theatrical space, publics and public-making, theatrical counter-publics, cultures of spectatorship, drama and news, textual publics, and dramatic representation of public activity.
11. Early Modern Book History: The State of the Field
Heidi Craig (University of Toronto) and Georgina Wilson (Jesus College, University of Cambridge)
What are the defining features of book history today, and where do we want it to go tomorrow? We invite participants to reflect on book history’s recent shifts towards heterogeneous, global, local, democratic, and subjective areas of study. One goal is to determine how to identify and communicate methods in all their complexity and eclecticism. What is at stake in the future of the field, and what can we learn about our political and aesthetic priorities in the way we do book history now?
12. Early Modern Geographies of Race
Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College) and Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut)
This seminar invites scholars working at the intersections of premodern critical race studies, geography, postcolonial theory, critical indigenous studies, ecocriticism, and related fields to examine the rich and complex network of relations of race, identity, and place in early modern discourse. How were discourses of geography and place as location and social position instrumental to race-making in early modern England?
13. Early Modern Horror
Sheila Coursey (Saint Louis University) and Hannah Korell (University of Wisconsin, Platteville)
This seminar invites participants to theorize “horror” as a pre-gothic genre and aesthetic in early modern literature and culture. We welcome papers that explore topics related to monsters/monstrosity, witchcraft, diabolism, true crime, public executions, or body horror. Papers might consider questions about horror and its relationship to empire and colonialism, affect or embodiment, the construction of social identity, sexuality, or shifting audience preferences within popular entertainment.
14. Energy Transitions in Long Modernity
Todd A. Borlik (University of Huddersfield) and Tiffany J. Werth (University of California, Davis)
This seminar asks participants to examine and theorize representations (or misrepresentations) of energy use and energy crisis in the long history of modernity, and to assess the role of literary texts in documenting, resisting, or imagining what we are calling “energy transitions.” We especially welcome papers that promote conversations across disciplinary and period boundaries to better gauge the longterm impacts of different energy regimes, revealing the ways in which they drive new forms of cultural expression and political organization.
15. “I am not what I am”: Shakespeare and Artificial Intelligence
Don Rodrigues (Old Dominion University)
This seminar asks what AI can do for the study and teaching of Shakespeare and, conversely, what Shakespeare can do for our understanding of AI. Papers might focus on how “Shakespeare” has been and might be rerendered through techniques in machine learning, natural language processing, neural networks, and robotics, or examine how one might conceive of AI in an early modern context by way of the nonhuman agents and rational networks that appear in early modern texts.
16. John Lyly, Influencer
Lara Bovilsky (University of Oregon)
Lyly is having a moment. Recent scholarship argues he created dramatic conventions (glam boy actors, reversible metamorphoses, classical settings), models of polymorphous, trans, and contemplative erotics, stylized characterization, and a market for published plays. This seminar builds on this work and invites more. How is Lyly’s stylistic, dramaturgic, thematic, or political promise most taken up or neglected by later writers/readers? What is unique in his depictions of power in/out of court, children, labor, art, and traffic among gods, humans and those in-between? How do Lyly’s plays change our sense of early modern taste and thought?
17. Land, Liberty, Community and the Law
Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw (Arizona State University)
As recorded in many land cases, like Shelley’s Case (1581) and Lord Cheyney’s Case (1591), liberty and the law are terms constantly contested across colonized communities. What role does land play in freedom narratives during the early modern period? How might those early models, whether play-texts or legal texts, evolve as instructive in this contemporary moment? What happens when we consider these models across cultures and communities? How might we find solutions to our current causes for concern in pre-modern spaces?
18. Marlowe and Shakespeare
Rory Loughnane (University of Kent) and Catherine Richardson (University of Kent)
Marlowe and Shakespeare, born only months apart in early 1564, both began to write plays for London’s commercial theatre industry in the late 1580s. Over the next six to seven years, the duration of Marlowe’s writing career before his untimely death in 1593, their lives appear to have overlapped in significant ways to lasting effect. Papers are invited for this seminar that consider issues such as company involvement, status, community, location, co-authorship, influence, and reputation.
19. The Matter of Witchcraft in Early Modern Drama
Molly Hand (Florida State University) and Andrew Loeb (Trent University)
Over 25 years ago, Stuart Clark showed us early moderns were “thinking with demons.” Can a focus on the materiality of witchcraft invigorate how we think with and about demons now? What matter was witchcraft made of? Domestic and occult practices, animal and plant material, the stuff of stage and page—matter is crucial to thinking and performing witchcraft. Does early modern witchcraft matter now? Join our coven as we think all things contrary to the custom of men: backward, to the left hand.
20. Measure for Measure and Its Cultural Currency
William R. Rampone, Jr. (South Carolina State University)
Perhaps one of the most relevant of all Shakespeare’s plays at this historical moment is the problem play, Measure for Measure. Most recently, this play has gained notoriety because of issues involving sexual harassment, abuse of power in the work place, and the treatment of prisoners. The theoretical lens of performance theory, disability studies, Critical Race theory, ecocriticism, posthumanist studies, and trans and gender theory are encouraged in this timely exploration of Measure for Measure.
21. New Objects in Critical Race Studies
Miles P. Grier (Queens College, CUNY)
This seminar invites papers that start from theorists, maxims, sites, rituals, or perspectives that have not been as prominent in recent work on race in Early Modern English Studies. Some points of departure might include: Europeans as objects and not subjects of racialization, transracial adoption, and the making of pan-African or pan-Indigenous affiliations. The seminar aims to uncover both uncommon starting points for early modern race studies and unexpected destinations.
22. The Poetics of the Obvious
Chris Barrett (Louisiana State University)
This seminar invites papers exploring literary obviousness in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. While often dismissed or deprecated, the obvious pervades daily life, but has been under-studied as an aesthetic and rhetorical category. What does it mean to talk about obviousness in early modern drama, prose, and poetry? How might obviousness be theorized as an interpretive or expressive mode? What adjacencies does obviousness have to secrecy, mystery, evidence, facticity, authority, and other terms of knowledge and epistemology?
23. Premodern Disability and Performance
Julie Paulson (San Francisco State University)
This seminar invites papers that consider performance as a paradigm for considering medieval and early modern conceptualizations of disability. Papers might ask: How do we understand disability as performed in premodern texts? How might examining disability through the lens of performance help us to see how disability is communally constructed? What insights into premodern conceptualizations of physical and mental difference can looking across the medieval and early modern drama provide?
24. Protest and Resistance in the (Early) Modern Era
Scott Oldenburg (Tulane University) and Dyani J. Taff (Colby College)
What counts as protest in the early modern period and today? Participants in this seminar will think through and broaden our sense of protest and resistance. Can protest be unintended or untheorized? What does it mean for nonhuman agents to be resistant? We are open to responses that explore multiple forms of early modern protest, that examine contemporary appropriations/adaptations that aim to resist or protest, and that reflect on resistance in the classroom or profession.
25. Racialized Womanhood on Page, on Screen, and in Performance
Nora Galland (Université Côte d’Azur) and Iman Sheeha (Brunel University London)
The seminar investigates early modern representations of racialized female characters on page, on screen, and in performance. We are interested in the embodiment of gendered racial difference, the intersection between race, gender, religion, and queerness in the construction of womanhood and girlhood, and the relationship between unruly femininity, patriarchy, whiteness, and racialized womanhood.
26. Reading for the Plantationocene in Early Modern Literary Cultures
Ashley Sarpong (California State University, Stanislaus)
How does the “plantation”—a site of labor, extractive land use, and capital accumulation—situate early modern texts and cultural production within new considerations about the climate emergency? In what ways can we analyze how cultural objects depict ecologies of extraction, capitalism, colonialism, and racialization? Papers may consider broader inquiries about the relationships between eco-critical studies and studies of race, empire, or capital in the pre-/early modern world.
27. Reconsidering Stage Properties
Douglas Clark (Université de Neuchâtel)
This seminar invites participants to reconsider the significance that stage properties take in shaping early modern plays and theatrical entertainments, beyond the famous crowns, skulls, rings, and letters that have most frequently drawn the attention of scholars. What more can the creation, use, and destruction of moveable objects on the stage tell us about early modern theatricality?
28. Renaissance Dick Jokes
Jessie Hock (Vanderbilt University)
Shakespeare’s sonnets exploit the many senses of his given name, Will(iam), dwelling with particular relish on its sexual meanings: penis and/or vagina. This seminar invites papers on sexual humor, especially involving name puns, in early modern literature. Papers welcome on sonnets, prose, plays, conventions of seriousness—and prudishness—in literary scholarship, intellectual traditions that inflect early modern literary sexuality (spiritualizing Neoplatonism, sensualizing materialism), interventions and new approaches in gender and sexuality studies.
29. (Re)Turning to the Spatial Turn in Early Modern Literature
Gavin Hollis (Hunter College, CUNY) and Laura Williamson (Saint Mary’s College)
The spatial turn has been with us for many decades. Has it become so enmeshed in scholarship that we now take it for granted? Can we return to the spatial? How might spatiality reinvigorate subfields which haven’t foregrounded space and place and return us to questions of, for example, conversion, race, embodiment, or translation? How does the spatial animate global and borderland Shakespeares, blue humanities, or digital humanities, even challenging our narratives of early modern spatiality?
30. The Sensorium of Early Modern Science
Whitney Sperrazza (Rochester Institute of Technology)
The five senses were significant epistemological tools in early modern England, from the hands-on work of midwifery to the “sound-houses” of Bacon’s New Atlantis to the burgeoning popularity of the curiosity cabinet, a sensory-rich colonial tool. This seminar invites us to center the sensorium in our studies of premodern science. Papers might examine the senses as conceptual fields, prosthetic sensory tools of early science, or sense-thinking at the intersections of literature and science.
31. Sex, Race, and the Premodern in Popular Culture
Rebecca L. Fall (Newberry Library) and Yasmine Hachimi (Newberry Library)
From TV hits like The Serpent Queen to Beyoncé’s masterful remixes of Renaissance artwork, premodernity inspires—and premodernity sells. This seminar explores how 21st-century pop culture reimagines, adapts, and appropriates premodernity to make sense of—or control—sex and race today. How do such reimaginings reflect modern concerns about race, sexual expression, and gender identity? We envision a vibrant conversation engaging TV, film, music, video games, and other expressions of pop culture.
32. Shakespeare and Ecological Crisis
Carolyn Sale (University of Alberta)
In the face of an ecological crisis of such magnitude that it is driving the extinction of non-human species and risks making Earth uninhabitable for humanity, how should we read, teach, and perform Shakespeare across the next decade? How might Shakespeare help us speak to the causes of planetary emergency, imagine a new geo-politics, and contribute to forms of action that might curtail catastrophe? How might we mobilize Shakespeare in an insurgent poetics that helps to protect life on Earth?
33. Shakespeare and Italy: Influence, Reception, and Adaptation
John H. Cameron (St. Mary’s University)
This seminar looks at the relationship between Shakespeare and Italy, investigating what is new in this field. Participants may address representations of Italy and of Italians, Italian sources, Shakespeare’s reception in Italy, translations of Shakespeare into Italian, or significant Italian productions of Shakespeare’s plays.
34. Shakespeare and Scale
Caro Pirri (University of Pittsburgh) and Jennifer Waldron (University of Pittsburgh)
When the Chorus of Shakespeare’s Henry V describes actors as “ciphers” and “crooked figures” in the great “account” of history, he positions theaters as laboratories for the exploration of scale. We invite papers taking any critical approach to early modern “figures” of scale, from the theatrical and aesthetic to the epistemological and the technical. We also welcome those considering scale from methodological perspectives, such as distant/close reading or race and periodization.
35. Shakespeare and Science Fiction
Jim Casey (Tyler, TX) and Brandon Christopher (University of Winnipeg)
This seminar explores the intersection of Shakespeare and science fiction—from Asimov’s “The Immortal Bard,” to Forbidden Planet, to Star Trek, to Dr. Who, to The Expanse and beyond. We welcome essays that engage with Shakespeare in SF film, television, books, and comics; SF Shakespeare and adaptation; Shakespearean allusion in SF; Shakespeare, SF, and high/low culture; Shakespeare and SF genres; Shakespeare and theoretical approaches to SF; Shakespeare and SF gaming; or any related topic.
36. Shakespeare and Sedition
Joseph Mansky (University of Oklahoma)
Sedition. Slander. Libel. Treason. This seminar asks: how did these and other crimes against the state shape the composition, production, and creative imagination of early modern literature? How did violence, persecution, censorship, conspiracy, xenophobia, populism, demagoguery, and other such forces interface with the literary sphere? Papers on all genres—drama, verse, prose—and from a variety of approaches (historical, theoretical, legal, political, formalist, presentist) are welcome.
37. Shakespeare and Textual Failure
Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University)
This seminar invites papers on any aspect of textual failure vis-à-vis Shakespeare and early modern texts, including but not limited to: mistakes and errors; loss and destruction; misreadings; digital glitches; forgotten cues/lines in performance; flaws in editorial design; unsolvable textual cruxes; un- or underfunded editorial projects; texts contingent on the personal/financial/professional precarity of their makers; inscrutable marginalia; textual rejection (in critical circles, by the mainstream, etc.)
38. Shakespeare and Voice
Katie Adkison (Bates College) and Kent Lehnhof (Chapman University)
This seminar focuses on the role and operation of the voice in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We invite participants to examine what voices do, who gets to use them, and what they make (im)possible. We are especially interested in papers that focus on the voice as a sensuous, embodied, material, and acoustic phenomenon, and not just as a vehicle for the expression of semantic content. Collectively, we seek new ways of listening to and for the vocality of Shakespeare’s world.
39. Shakespeare, Power and Consent
Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto) and Kirsten N. Mendoza (University of Dayton)
This seminar explores the meanings of consent in Shakespeare’s works alongside three key terms: power, complicity and collectives. It interrogates how consent operates not only in individual, clearly delineated relationships but towards structural ends. As we engage with and move beyond scholarly examinations of legal and sexual consent, we welcome papers informed by a range of methodologies including critical race, indigenous, queer, trans, ecocritical, disability, and/or performance studies.
41. Shakespearean Natures
Gretchen E. Minton (Montana State University) and Peter C. Remien (Lewis-Clark State College)
To what extent is Shakespeare (in Johnson’s formulation) a poet of nature? Sponsored by the Oecologies Research Cluster, this seminar welcomes papers of a variety of approaches and critical orientations centered on Shakespearean nature. Construing nature as both concept and material entity, constitutive of theology and science, and subject to myriad cultural and historical permutations, the seminar seeks to revitalize a longstanding line of inquiry through emergent questions and methodologies.
42. Shakespeare’s Poems in Context(s)
Stephen Guy-Bray (University of BriAsh Columbia)
Participants are invited to discuss Shakespeare in the context of his poetry and to set his poems in dialogue with other poems, whether by his predecessors or by his contemporaries or by later writers. Participants may also wish to discuss Shakespeare’s status as a poet in critical discourse and in the teaching of poetry. All approaches are welcome.
43. “Shakespheres”: Cross-Media and Non-Anglophone Shakespeare in Contemporary Times
Ivy Hao Liu (Tsinghua University) and Cun Xie (Beijing Foreign Studies University)
Now more than ever, Shakespeare is both globally mobile and locally inflected. A diversity of cultural and political contexts have reshaped our understanding of the Bard. This seminar welcomes non-Anglophone and cross-media perspectives on Shakespeare’s works as well as reflections on the uses of “Shakespeare” as a global icon of cultural and literary value. We will delve into the intricate ways in which the local contexts and indigenous traditions are reshaping our understanding of the Shakespeare canon, and explore the protean meanings of “Shakespeare” in our increasingly interconnected, digital, and multimedia age.
44. Theatre History Now—Sites and Insights
Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland) and Siobhan C. Keenan (De Montfort University)
This seminar invites reflection on the sites of 21st-century theatre history, both in terms of the places we study and the places in which (and the positions from which) we study. What new insights can theatre history offer into the physical spaces, proximities, distances, and sites of early theatre? How might new developments in theatre history inform new methodologies covering the role, use and accessibility of archival materials and archaeological sites?
46. Trans/Philologies
Joseph Gamble (University of Toledo)
This seminar aims to bring together the questions and concerns of philology and trans studies, both defined in their broadest terms. Questions to be considered include: how might philological methods give us purchase on the epistemological contours of gender nonconformity in early modernity? What might the materiality of texts have to teach us about the materiality of bodies? How might intersectional approaches to gender, race, sexuality, disability, and class revivify philological methods?
47. Travel and Rhetoric in Early Modern Literature
Natalya Din-Kariuki (University of Warwick)
This seminar will reflect on the connections between travel and rhetoric in any aspect of early modern literature. Papers could consider the uses of rhetoric in travel writing or the entanglement of travel and rhetoric in any other context, such as voyage drama. They might deal with questions of race, gender, sexuality, and disability; the archive; material culture, and more, and take stock of the interpretation of travel and rhetoric in existing scholarship while developing new approaches.
48. Vigilance and Epistemological Uncertainty in Early Modern Drama
Cord-Christian Casper (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), Nikolina Hatton (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München), and Claudia Olk (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
What is unknown on the early modern stage? This seminar explores unknowingness as a constitutive dimension of dramatic texts and theatrical practice. What kinds of vigilance are required once a form of knowing becomes suspect? How does theater thrust the audience into states of discrepant awareness that demand vigilance? Participants will explore how drama probes cultural practices of vigilance in the face of doubt, skepticism, and reasoned mistrust.
49. Whither Memorial Reconstruction?
Alan B. Farmer (Ohio State University) and Sarah Neville (Ohio State University)
This seminar reconsiders the theory of memorial reconstruction. Although it is usually invoked to explain “corrupt” textual evidence, recent quantitative and qualitative methods of studying authorship, book history, and dramaturgy offer alternative explanations. How might new methods support or argue against the possibility of MR? Papers on textual transmission, the history and practice of scholarly editing, and the connections between bibliography and performance are particularly welcome.
50. Women Playmakers
Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich (Ohio State University)
What does it mean to “make” a play, and who does so? How have women helped produce early modern drama? This seminar invites a wide range of approaches to these questions, along with many definitions of “women,” “maker,” and “play.” Research on individual playwrights, translators, performers, patrons, printers, publishers, scribes, directors, and other devisers is welcome, as are considerations of gender in theatrical production at any historical moment, papers on modern adaptations of early modern drama, and transhistorical studies.
51. Writing Like Shakespeare: Invention, Appropriation, and Pastiche from the 1590s to the 2020s
Nick Moschovakis (Bethesda, MD) and Jennifer L. Wood (Folger Shakespeare Library)
This seminar will convene scholars and eminent creative practitioners to consider the past and present of Shakespearean mimicries and mashups. How have writings succeeded, or failed, at recreating textual and theatrical features deemed typically Shakespearean? Topics may include plays in pointedly Shakespearean idioms; parody and bricolage, whether serious or burlesque (or both); and simulations of Shakespearean writing generated by artificial intelligence using language models (e.g., ChatGPT).
WORKSHOP
52. Practical Pedagogy for Early Modern Literature
Jess Hamlet (Alvernia University), Courtney A. Parker (University of Alabama), and Eileen Sperry (Skidmore College)
This pedagogy workshop aims to generate a wealth of classroom materials for teaching early modern drama and literature, including lesson plans, activities, discussion questions, secondary reading lists, and essay 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.
53. Shakespeare Superpowers: Renaissance Scholars as Transformative 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 academic leadership. How does the field’s consideration of Renaissance leadership make us uniquely qualified for this work? How do we use our specific perspectives to advocate for the humanities? How do we build skills in areas required for leadership that are not part of our scholarly training? Participants will engage with common readings, reflective writings, and preparatory brainstorming prior to the SAA 2024 conference.
54. Using Shakespeare in a Time of Political Backlash
Jennifer A. Low (Florida Atlantic University), Ian F. Moulton (Arizona State University), and Gary L. Taylor (Florida State University)
Responding to political backlash against an inclusive curriculum, we will develop strategies to create and expand spaces for teaching socially active curricula, and strengthen the right to faculty governance. Grounding our discussion in concrete knowledge of recent legislation, we will cultivate our expertise in rhetorical techniques, including invoking the aura of Shakespeare, to reframe and challenge conservative positions. We’ll also develop vocabularies that comply with legislation while enabling us to continue our work with students.
51st Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. Seminar: The 1623 First Folio
Gabriel Egan (De Montfort University) and Miranda Fay Thomas (Trinity College Dublin)
Participants are invited to take stock of our knowledge of this book on its 400th anniversary and to share new work that sheds light on its creation, reception, significance, and history. How has our understanding of this book changed since the last centennial, when the New Bibliography had begun to dominate the study of early Shakespeare texts? All approaches—bibliographical, theatrical, editorial, critical, economic, linguistic, political, historical, theoretical, statistical—are welcome.
02. Seminar: Abject Science
Pavneet Aulakh (Vanderbilt University) and Jean Feerick John (Carroll University)
Seventeenth-century natural philosophers maligned romance as fictive. But they continually returned to its motifs, suggesting its enduring philosophical value. With romance as but one example of “abject science,” we invite papers that ask: How do literary forms (dramatic, narrative, poetic), stylistic strategies, or tropes model ways of knowledge-making alternative or instrumental to natural philosophy? How might the history of science look if we foregrounded such non-normative practices?
03. Seminar: Adaptation Strategies and Resilience in Early Modern England
Rebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University) and Mary Trull (St. Olaf College)
Early moderns had a broad and regularly performed range of strategies for adapting to crisis. Early modern drama places these strategies on display, as characters from distinct perspectival vantage points navigate the same crisis terrain—some in the service of communal resilience and others in service of themselves. This seminar invites papers that identify performed strategies of adaptation to crisis and the corresponding community resilience bolstered or thwarted by them.
04. Seminar: Beyond “Formal Limits”: New Frontiers in Theater History
Christopher Matusiak (Ithaca College) and Kara Northway (Kansas State University)
On the centenary of E. K. Chambers’ The Elizabethan Stage and its institution of the “formal limits” of modern theater history, this seminar will integrate twenty-first-century conversations that interrogate or challenge the discipline’s boundaries, borders, and barriers. We welcome papers on race, gender, ability, and other inclusive topics in early theater; previously overlooked archives; innovative digital projects; and other research that charts meaningful new directions in theater history.
05. Seminar: Comic Epistemologies
Laura Kolb (Baruch College, CUNY) and Jessica Rosenberg (University of Miami)
This seminar invites papers that explore Shakespearean comedy as a site at which knowledge is made, tested, circulated, and used. What kinds of knowledge did comedy—with its reliance on confusion and misrecognition, trial and error, tricks and devices—make possible? What understandings of matter, environment, bodies? How did stage comedy engage non-dramatic genres of practical knowledge? What overlooked epistemic settings and subjects does an attention to early modern comic practices reveal?
06. Seminar: Contemporary Poets and Early Modernity
Hannah Crawforth (King’s College London), Amrita Dhar (Ohio State University), and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (King’s College London)
This session asks how contemporary poets writing today have responded to early modern texts, images and ideas. We will discuss what it means to write with—and against—a historical period that enshrines ideas about politics, class, race, ability, gender and sexuality that have led to the structural inequalities of today. We will pay particular attention to form: what does it mean to use the forms of early modernity in order to question the presumptions and hierarchies of that historical moment and its often damaging legacies for today?
07. Seminar: Counting (in) Early Modern Drama
Rob Carson (Hobart and William Smith Colleges) and Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
Quantificational arguments turn up everywhere in early modern studies from Book History to Theater History, from formalist criticism to authorship studies, from distant reading to the Digital Humanities. And early modern texts themselves are often deeply invested in numerical matters. In this seminar, we hope to forge unexpected connections by focusing on the role that counting plays in our critical practices. What roles (for better and for worse) do numbers play in our criticism?
08. Seminar: Cunning
Suparna Roychoudhury (Mount Holyoke College) and Katherine Walker (University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
We invite explorations of cunning in Shakespeare’s works and time. How do cunning figures wield their knowledge in different social or epistemic registers? Given the interpretative and performative possibilities of cunning, we encourage explorations of how the term and its values are culturally constructed on the Renaissance stage. We welcome investigations that intersect with questions of religion, race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, disability, or histories of magic, philosophy, and science.
09. Seminar: Dissolving Worlds in Early Modern Literature
Marshelle Woodward (University of Toronto, Mississauga)
This seminar seeks papers exploring global dissolution in early modern texts of all genres. Essays might consider Christian apocalypticism, contemptus or senectus mundi topoi, epicureanism, colonial violence, chymical eschatology, pastoral hellscapes, etc. How might the presence of such dissolving worlds lead us to reassess the optimism around poesis in the early modern worldmaking tradition? To what extent ought the world(s) we have inherited—not golden, but riven, collapsing—prompt the same?
10. Seminar: Early Modern Carceral Studies
Matthew Ritger (Dartmouth College)
This seminar seeks papers that explore connections between early modern literature and drama and pre-modern carceral studies. As contemporary politics and scholarship change our understanding of the history of punishment, prisons, and unfree labor in the early modern period, literary and dramatic texts continue to offer important insights. Topics might include: the prison in or on the stage; prison writing; penal ideology in ballads and broadsides; perspectives from critical prison studies.
11. Seminar: Early Modern Data
John Ladd (Denison University)
This seminar invites papers on early modern data: the early modern obsession with information collected and arranged for later presentation or study. We will examine data as a historical concept alongside today’s data analysis techniques. Topics may include data analysis of literature, explorations of the use of data in the early modern period, the place of data within performance, and the intersection of historical data with conceptions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability.
12. Seminar: Early Modern London Historiography and Drama
Janelle Jenstad (University of Victoria) and Mark Kaethler (Medicine Hat College)
London’s historiography and drama meet in civic pageantry, mayoral shows, chronicle comedies, and urban surveys. While much has been said on the power dynamics and forms of nationhood or civic identity, it is time to return to these texts and their politics. Seminar leaders particularly encourage papers on Premodern Critical Race Studies and Premodern Critical Indigenous Studies as well as their intersections with gender, sexuality, and ecocriticism.
13. Seminar: Echoes of Violence
Matt Carter (Clayton State University) and Samantha Dressel (Chapman University)
How do Renaissance plays create echoes of violence? How do modern echoes of that violence distort or add meaning to the original context? This seminar considers the way violence resounds across the Renaissance and into our world. We consider violence broadly, looking at enacted, threatened, imagined, and stifled violence, as that violence appears textually, in performance, and inter- and meta-textually. The seminar encourages a range of critical perspectives.
14. Seminar: Forsaken Plays
Erin E. Kelly (University of Victoria)
This seminar invites participants to introduce to a captive audience the overlooked, neglected, or weird play they think deserves more scholarly attention. (Advocacy for a play that lacks a modern edition is especially welcome.) How would our understanding of literary history, early modern English drama, or Shakespeare be transformed if we focused on such plays? Along the way, expect to wrestle with questions about what qualities might lead a play to have been treated as insignificant or bad.
15. Seminar: Henry VIII: New Directions
Meghan C. Andrews (Lycoming College) and Edward Gieskes (University of South Carolina)
This seminar invites new perspectives on Henry VIII, asking what fresh inquiries we should be making of the play today. How might new approaches to Henry VIII—including but not limited to studies of collaboration, trauma, race, performance and theater history, or formalist, feminist, queer, book historical, or pedagogical approaches—reinvigorate its study? Contributions from all theoretical and disciplinary approaches are welcome, as is work that is new, still in progress, or speculative.
16. Seminar: Imagining Antiquity
Daniel Blank (Durham University) and Heather James (University of Southern California)
This seminar explores the early modern stage’s fascination with the ancient world, from the use of classical texts to the depiction of characters from classical antiquity. We invite papers which seek to broaden traditional ideas of early modern dramatists’ debt to the past. Possible topics include the influence of individual source texts; the relationship between classical texts and early modern representations of identity; legacies of ancient figures both within and beyond early modern drama.
17. Seminar: Intersectional Animality
Holly Dugan (George Washington University) and Karen Raber (University of Mississippi)
Critical animal studies seeks to divest definitions of the human from arguments for ethical, legal, and political rights and protections, yet it remains problematic to connect the place of animals with the treatment of people, especially since metaphors of animality have been weaponized against so many. While acknowledging this tension, this seminar explores how critical animal studies can engage productively with premodern critical race studies, disability studies, early modern trans studies, and more.
18. Seminar: Love’s Labour’s Won: Reimagining Shakespeare Studies
Scott Maisano (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
As we celebrate the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, let’s remember Love’s Labour’s Won. Any Complete Works of Shakespeare that does not contain LLW is incomplete. What might a lost, ecstatic, utopian text make possible for Shakespeare studies? What opportunities does this canonical gap open for queer of color performance, ecofeminism, or postcritique? Could it make comedy, pedagogy, or research more inclusive? What’s in a title? Can imagination play a bigger role in Shakespeare studies?
19. Seminar: Marlowe and Jonson
Judith Haber (Tufts University)
We will consider two of the greatest poet-playwrights of the period. Papers may focus on one text or many, on either author alone or on both together, or on comparisons with Shakespeare and others. Any type of approach Is welcome. Questions to be considered may include the following: What is distinctive about the texts of each writer? How do they influence and interact with each other or with Shakespeare? How do newer critical and theoretical approaches alter our view of their texts?
20. Seminar: Metatheater as Rivalry and Dialogue
Daniel Moss (Southern Methodist University)
With Shakespeare’s traditional priority as metatheatrical mastermind beginning to give way to a healthier, dialogic account of metatheatricality, it is time for a revaluation of practices by other playwrights and companies. This seminar explores alternative metatheatrical modes—whether in relation to Shakespeare’s work or independent of it—and seeks to identify new points of contact with recent scholarship on race, gender, queer expression, class, and other key aspects of Early Modern drama.
21. Seminar: Natural History Now
Joseph Campana (Rice University)
Recent attention to creatures relies on a “Renaissance” of natural history in early modern Europe. What is natural is history now? Iconic works or new ones? Relative to poetry, theater, other arts? What models for creaturely stories? Natural history relative to genre? Form? Audience? Media? Global traffic and the Columbian exchange? When does natural history “naturalize” (sex, gender, sexuality, race) or confound? What is an author, what is humanism from this vantage?
22. Seminar: New Approaches to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania)
This seminar will focus on how the interpretation and performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream have evolved in the past few decades, in particular as reflected through the lenses of gender, sexuality, race, post-colonialism, and the environment. Papers are invited that represent many different perspectives and approaches, including performance history, global translations and adaptations, and critical history, as well as interpretations of different aspects and themes of the play.
23. Seminar: Pedagogies of Premodern Disability
Genevieve Love (Colorado College) and Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto)
What are the stakes of attending to critical disability studies in teaching Shakespeare and early modern drama? How do we move from classroom practice to disability justice? This seminar considers the pedagogical methods and practices that illuminate disability representations, disabling conditions, and disability gain in early modern texts. We welcome position papers that pair key theoretical and primary text(s) as well as experimental and reflective forms of writing on disability pedagogies.
24. Seminar: Performance Cultures in and around the Inns of Court
Emma Rhatigan (University of Sheffield), Michelle O’Callaghan (University of Reading), and Jackie Watson (Oxford, UK)
Performance cultures at the Inns of Court took a variety of forms, from Christmas revels and masques to mooting and sermons. The four Inns of Court were not homogenous or discrete spaces but open and traversed. This workshop will explore performance cultures at the Inns and how they move across and intersect with other playing spaces in London and cross borders to engage with European festive cultures and the wider world, via the movement of people, texts, performances, and objects.
25. Seminar: The Queen’s Gambit
Sarah Crover (University of Vancouver Island) and Elizabeth Hodgson (University of British Columbia)
Queens in early modern English literatures, both as authors and as characters, often embody particular nexes of cultural identity, gender, and racialization, filtered through their distinctively constrained privilege. As monarchs with limits, and as particularly embodied agents of nationalism, queens both historical and imagined mark English and other cultural identities in specifically complex terms. This seminar will examine how queens act out race, gender, and nationalist power in divergent and emergent forms.
26. Seminar: Reassessing Lady Mary Wroth’s Poetry: New Approaches and Future Directions
Paul Salzman (La Trobe University) and Rosalind Smith (Australian National University)
This seminar invites its participants to reassess the poetry of Lady Mary Wroth in the light of new theoretical developments in early modern studies, including critical race theory (with the pioneering work of Kim F. Hall on Wroth still needing to be addressed in detail); queer theory; new formalism; emotions scholarship; and expanded material histories which have taken into account transmission, reception, annotation, and collecting.
27. Seminar: Reconsidering Science and Religion
Aaron Kitch (Bowdoin College)
This seminar invites explorations of early modern science and religion, broadly conceived. How did early modern accounts of anatomy, astronomy, botany, natural history, or medicine, for example, both draw on and reshape theology? How did new empirical efforts to observe nature challenge or reinforce religious ideas and practices? How do we locate Shakespeare’s works in relation to such contexts? Literary, historical, archival, and theoretical approaches equally welcome.
28. Seminar: The Renaissance Project
Tessie Prakas (Scripps College) and Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld (Pomona College)
“Renaissance” is largely taken to identify periods of radical innovation in arts and letters. The chronological borders of those periods shift from region to region (e.g. Italian, English, Ottoman) but it is generally a given that any period the term designates is now closed. But what if “Renaissance” is best conceived not as a closed historical period but as an open historical project? What if our task is to participate or intervene in these historical projects variously called “Renaissance”?
29. Seminar: Scarcity in a Time of Plenty: Early Modern English Writers on Hunger
Andy Crow (Boston College) and Lauren Shook (Texas Lutheran University)
Hunger gripped early modern England. Writers from preachers to playwrights had something to say about it. How was form used to ameliorate systemic hunger in England? How did writers experience food insecurity? How does their literary work relate to this experience? How do race, class, gender, and religion factor into written responses to hunger? How can we leverage the innovations of English writers to think through productive responses to 21st century food insecurity?
30. Seminar: Screen Shakespeares: Form and Technology
Greg Semenza (University of Connecticut) and Garrett Sullivan (Pennsylvania State University)
This seminar focuses on how the formal and technological elements of film, video and television construct interpretations of Shakespeare. Participants are encouraged to think about “screen” Shakespeares broadly—in movies, TV programs, video games, etc.—while prioritizing lighting, framing, sound design, and tracking, as well as other non-traditional production elements that fuse together filmic and non-filmic Shakespeares (CGI and other animation techniques, and computer programming).
31. Seminar: Shakespeare and Early Modern Misogyny
Brian Chalk (Manhattan College), Shannon Kelley (Fairfield University), and Patricia Wareh (Union College)
This seminar explores how early modern authors represent misogyny in their works. Do the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries reinforce or undermine the patriarchal worlds that the plays and poems create? How is early modern patriarchy’s goal of maintaining order by devaluing women connected to its implicit belief that whiteness is superior? This seminar also invites work that investigates overlaps between misogyny and de/post/colonial studies, queer theory, disability studies, trans studies, and other intersectional possibilities.
32. Seminar: Shakespeare and Race in Popular Culture
Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University) and L. Monique Pittman (Andrews University)
This seminar takes seriously pop culture as an archive for expanding the study of Shakespeare and race. Deploying rigorous theoretical and methodological approaches can assist in illuminating more precisely how pop culture uses Shakespeare to uphold, contest, and [re-]shape existing racial imaginaries. We thus invite papers taking a wide range of disciplined approaches to consider the social and ideological implications of the triangulation between Shakespeare, pop culture, and race.
33. Seminar: Shakespeare and the Public Good
Peter Kuling (University of Guelph) and Wes Pearce (University of Regina)
This seminar explores the public good emerging from Shakespeare beyond the experience of studying the plays or seeing live performances. We seek papers and presentations investigating concepts of the “public good” as it relates to our own scholarship. Does Shakespeare enable us to generate new outcomes for various publics? This seminar aims to collectively debate and define concepts of the “public good” while also identifying the impact of Shakespeare’s contributions to our contemporary world.
34. Seminar: Shakespeare and Writing Instruction
Adhaar Noor Desai (Bard College)
What were the methods and assumptions of poetic writing in early modern England? How might the study of them allow us to critically engage—and potentially reform—the methods of writing instruction practiced in modern literature classrooms? This seminar hopes to fortify a reciprocal relationship between scholarship on early modern poetic practices and the ways literary criticism is practiced and taught in contemporary higher education.
35. Seminar: Shakespeare between Ancient and Modern Thought
Benjamin Parris (University of Pittsburgh) and Steven Swarbrick (Baruch College, CUNY)
How might attention to Shakespeare’s reactivation and transformation of ancient philosophy simultaneously illuminate, clarify, or modify our understanding of his work in relation to modern modes of philosophical inquiry? How might we read Shakespeare between Marx and Aristotle, for example, or between Wynter and Ptolemy? Papers whose triangulation of Shakespeare takes up emergent and timely areas of theoretical concern such as trans studies, critical race, ethnic, and indigenous studies, or ecocriticism are especially encouraged.
36. Seminar: Shakespeare, Bob Dylan, and the Bardic Tradition
Mark Bayer (University of Texas, San Antonio) and Robert Sawyer (East Tennessee State University)
A native of Minnesota, Bob Dylan’s writings are saturated with allusions to Shakespeare. But the similarities between the two writers go beyond simple influence or appropriation. Both are cultural icons whose works transcend popular culture and permeate literary, academic, and political discussions, and who are often seen as secular prophets. This seminar invites papers that consider the multiple lines of intersection between Shakespeare, Dylan, and the bardic tradition they represent.
37. Seminar: Shakespeare on Broadway
Louise Geddes (Adelphi University) and Nora J. Williams (University of Essex)
Broadway and Shakespeare operate as discrete neoliberal cultural ecologies and this seminar will bring them together to consider Broadway as both an historical locale and a big-budget production genre. What is Shakespeare’s relationship to musical theatre? How do the spaces and traditions of Broadway shape Shakespeare? What is the place of Broadway Shakespeare in the larger networks of Shakespearean consumption? This seminar welcomes papers that engage with theatre history, adaptation or performance theory, music theory, or cultural studies.
38. Seminar: Shakespeare, Sex, and Space
Justine DeCamillis (University of Maryland)
How does the sociosexual energy of Shakespeare’s plays shift between places and spaces? Antony’s sexual proclivities are blamed on feminized Egypt, beyond Rome’s sphere of masculine civilization. Iago describes Desdemona as the “supersubtle Venetian,” a sexual identity tied to a particular city. We invite papers that explore these shifts in Shakespeare and his contemporaries’ dramatic works and welcome a diverse array of critical approaches to this topic.
39. Seminar: Shakespeare’s Propositional Third Spaces: Thinking beyond the Binary
Christian Billing (University of Hull) and Susanne Wofford (New York University)
Recent trends in critical theory have pointed to the ways in which normative cultures of oppression frequently use taxonomies and hierarchies based on binary oppositions in order to control and dominate particular groups and/or individuals. This seminar considers how we, as activist scholars, teachers, and artists, can work critically with Shakespeare’s binary-probing imagination in order to provide less-limiting visions of what is ontologically, socially and culturally possible.
40. Seminar: Transitions: Ecologies of Economic Life
Derrick Higginbotham (University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa)
Income inequality, global trade conflicts, booms in ecological extraction and consumerism, increased dispossession: economic forces intimately shape lives, individually and collectively, in both the past and present. How do early modern cultures process and understand economic transformations? Can the insights of queer theory, trans studies, ecocriticism, and critical race studies—especially when these methods overlap—reframe our conceptualization of early modern economic changes?
41. Seminar: The Two Noble Kinsmen: State of the Play
David L. Orvis (Appalachian State University)
The aim of this seminar is twofold: to take stock of previous scholarship on The Two Noble Kinsmen, and to chart new trajectories for future work on this play. Especially welcome are papers that help us see the play afresh through hitherto neglected theoretical perspectives such as critical race theory, affect theory, ecocriticism, posthumanism, disability studies, and performance studies. Papers that shift focus to less-studied characters, tropes, and passages are also encouraged.
42. Seminar: Winter’s Tales: The Imagined North in Early Modern English Literature
Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (ENS, Université de Lyon)
What did the North mean to Shakespeare’s contemporaries? How did the depiction of northern places, phenomena and identities on the English stage create a geographical but also climatic imaginary? Representations of Northern local or global locations engaged with political and geographical discourses, but on a more intimate level, they also redefined coldness as a symbol of northerliness. Approaches focusing on material history, sensory geography, empire, geohumouralism and ecocriticism are welcome.
43. Seminar: Women and Complaint, from Medieval to Early Modern
Holly A. Crocker (University of South Carolina) and Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University)
This seminar asks, what happens to women’s complaint across the conventional divide between medieval and early modern periods? From ballads and lyrics, to epyllia and drama: we invite analyses of complaints that are institutional and ephemeral, formal and fleeting. By taking a long view of complaining women, we hope to begin a conversation among medievalists and early modernists working to dislodge normative trajectories of gender, sexuality, embodiment, and temporality.
44. Seminar: The World Must be Peopled: Biopolitics and Early Modern Sexuality, Labor, and Race
Ari Friedlander (University of Mississippi)
In an age of pandemics and renewed focus on public health, it is time to think about biopolitics. How did the state come to exercise power through the management of biological life? What social, political, and religious factors combined to reconceive nations as populations rather than territories? How did this shift alter ideas about sexuality, disability, race, class, and literature? Papers may examine literary and non-literary texts on poor relief, life under plague, management of laborers, and colonial projects in Europe and around the world.
WORKSHOPS
45. Workshop: Applied Shakespeare: Renaissance Leadership for Transformative Higher Education
Ariane Balizet (Texas Christian University), Natalie K. Eschenbaum (University of Washington, Tacoma), and Marcela Kostihova (Hamline University)
This workshop is designed for Renaissance scholars interested in leadership positions in the academy. How does the field’s frequent consideration of leadership in Renaissance texts make us uniquely qualified for this work? How do Renaissance scholar administrators use their critical/historical perspectives to advocate for the humanities? How do we build skills in areas required for leadership that are not part of our scholarly training? Common readings and reflective writing will be completed in advance.
46. Workshop: Artifact as Text: Object-Based Learning in the Shakespeare Classroom
Jess Hamlet (Alvernia University) and Molly Beth Seremet (Mary Baldwin University)
This interactive pedagogy workshop will give participants new tools to engage their students in close-reading practices. This two-part session will both model best practices for educators using objects as a close-reading exercise as well as give participants the opportunity to share, workshop, and refine their own pedagogical practices, taking skills and methods learned from/during the pandemic and incorporating them into regular teaching practices in person, online, or in a hybrid format.
47. Workshop: The Bard in the Borderlands: Pedagogical, Artistic, and Scholarly Approaches to Shakespeare en La Frontera
Katherine Gillen (Texas A&M University, San Antonio), Adrianna M. Santos (Texas A&M University, San Antonio), and Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University)
This workshop will facilitate pedagogical, artistic, and scholarly engagement with a set of previously unpublished plays compiled in the forthcoming openaccess anthology, The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriation en La Frontera (ACMRS Press, 2023). Participants will receive advanced access to these plays and will be invited to create a project (pedagogical material, an essay, or a creative piece) related to the growing subfield of Borderlands Shakespeare.
48. Workshop: Engaging Students and Empowering Research with the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS)
Laura Mandell (Texas A&M University) and Katayoun Torabi (Texas A&M University)
This workshop will introduce participants to the Digital New Variorum Shakespeare (NVS), an open-access, interactive web application that presents the history of Shakespearean editorial scholarship for selected plays through an interface that is intuitive and comprehensive. Participants will learn how the Digital NVS can be used as an effective resource for research and teaching through a series of exercises we created for college courses.
50th Annual Meeting
VIRTUAL SEMINARS
A. Early Modern Ecocriticism and Critical Race Studies
Hillary Eklund (Loyola University New Orleans)
Jennifer Park (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut, Avery Point)
Ayanna Thompson (Arizona State University)
This seminar invites papers on the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies. How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?
B. Explorations of Cultural Trauma from the Early Modern Stage to Today
Devori Kimbro (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
This seminar will explore the role of cultural trauma in the legacy of the early modern stage. How did early modern playwrights respond to cultural traumas of the day with their productions, and how are modern theatrical companies and directors still drawn to these early modern stories to explore modern cultural trauma, and do such productions result in catharsis or agitation? Participants may explore either original or modern stagings of these texts mounted in response to cultural traumas.
C. New Tales of Winter
Peter Kirwan (University of Nottingham)
From tyrannical rulers rejecting truth, to asylum seekers fleeing persecution across borders, to the public trying of a woman’s virtue, to the (mis)fortunes of the itinerant, the stories of The Winter’s Tale have reverberated with unexpected resonance in recent years. This seminar invites participants to contribute new work on race, migration, gender, ecology, childhood, performance, trauma and more, telling new tales of The Winter’s Tale and its resurrections.
D. Performance during Pandemic: Shakespeare and Covid
Douglas M. Lanier (University of New Hampshire)
Though the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 was devastating for conventional stage productions, practitioners were ingenious in crafting new ways of performing Shakespeare amidst severe restrictions. This seminar will explore Shakespearean performance during the pandemic: what new formats of performance emerged? What economic, sociopolitical, ethical and ideological issues do these formats and particular productions raise? Case studies and accounts by practitioners are especially welcome.
E. Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Adam Smyth (Balliol College, Oxford University)
This seminar will explore current thinking about Pericles, Prince of Tyre. Contributions from all disciplinary and theoretical perspectives are welcome: work that is new, still-in-process, unresolved, speculative or even risky is particularly encouraged. Papers are welcome that consider Pericles in relation to its original historical moment, to our 2020s, to periods in between – or that rethink ideas of contextual frames entirely. What questions are we not yet asking about this play?
F. Twelfth Night
Emma Smith (Hertford College, University of Oxford)
Twelfth Night has been a key text for understanding Shakespeare’s “bittersweet,” “cross-dressing” and “festive” comedy: these critical cliches need rebooting. This seminar invites work on the play that engages with new approaches: performance and theatre history; gender, queer, and trans studies; historical investigations of social rank and status; editing and book history; and critical race studies and the occluded orientalism of its Illyrian setting.
IN-PERSON SEMINARS
01. Archival Violence and Early Modern Research: Building Inclusive Practice
Erin Julian (University of Roehampton)Clare M. McManus (University of Roehampton)
How can intersections between the early modern archives and queer theory, critical race studies, feminism and disability studies generate inclusive methodologies for archival research, mitigating the violence of selection, access and terminology? We seek contributions connecting archives to PaR, theatre history, historiography and textual studies; on curatorial practice, digital collections and open access; and speculation on new archives for cultural institutions and marginalized communities.
02. Archives and Sustainability: Pasts and Futures (Cancelled)
Megan Heffernan (DePaul University)
Jane Raisch (York University)
This seminar explores questions of sustainability and conservation in early modern archives, physical and digital. Construing sustainability broadly, we consider how histories of literature, materiality, and performance might be brought into the present responsibly. How can public engagement keep historical knowledge relevant? Can environmental stewardship function as historical curation? How might archives on the peripheries reshape our understanding of Shakespeare and early modern literature?
03. Building New Characters: Casting on Shakespeare’s Stages Today
Amy Cook (Stony Brook University)
This seminar will ask participants to think about how casting choices shape the stories plays tell us about who we are, about who belongs to what group, and who doesn’t—with particular attention to questions of race, gender, and physical difference. Participants will view scenes and productions of recently-produced Shakespeare plays to develop a common vocabulary and set of reference points. We will then explore together how casting “works” or doesn’t in these selections, addressing what it means to make such a judgment and what the stakes are in doing so.
04. Cervantes’s English Transformations
José A. Pérez Díez (University of Leeds)
Michael M. Wagoner (United States Naval Academy)
This seminar sets out to re-evaluate the pervading influence of the works of Miguel de Cervantes on the intellectual, cultural, and political life of Jacobean and Caroline England. We welcome papers exploring the reception of Cervantes’s fiction among early English readers, examining the work of translators, essayists, poets, and polemicists, and tracing his impact on commercial plays written by dramatists such as Fletcher, Massinger, Beaumont, Field, Middleton, and Shakespeare.
05. Classicizing Race in Early Modern England
Joseph M. Ortiz (University of Texas, El Paso)
This seminar seeks papers that explore the influence of classical texts on emerging notions of race in early modern England. How were gens and barbarus and other classical markers of difference appropriated by early modern writers to create racial distinctions? How were humanist approaches to classical texts re-deployed to racialize contemporary peoples in the Old or New Worlds? How was racism in antiquity detected, amplified, or overlooked by early modern readers?
06. Disney+ Shakespeare
Amy Scott-Douglass (Lorain County Community College)
Disney+ and other streaming services have affected our lives, from the way we teach Shakespeare’s plays to the way we survive quarantine. This seminar is devoted to intersections of streaming, subscriptions, and Shakespeare—including the place of Shakespeare in youth and family entertainment and edification, popular culture and Shakespeare, Shakespeare spinoffs, and Shakespeare in the virtual classroom in the age of Covid. Papers might focus on Shakespeare borrowings or offerings in the Disney+, Netflix, or Prime catalogs; subscription Shakespeare, binging, access, economics; Shakespeare and Gen Z; pandemic-era Shakespeare performances and pedagogies. Papers on any early modern playwright are welcome; not limited to Shakespeare.
07. Divided Shakespeare
Darlene Farabee (University of South Dakota)
Travis D. Williams (University of Rhode Island)
This seminar seeks diverse treatments of “division,” including concepts of separation, fragmentation, rupture, and opposition, in early modern drama: authorship disintegration; textual division; break-up and separation in identities, couples, families, politics, nations, and cultures; unity in division; mathematics, economics, law, rigor and equity. We welcome experimental, exploratory, and emergent work, hoping to emphasize development of ideas and methods over polite commentary on polished writing.
08. Early Modern Affective Ecologies
Piers Brown (Kenyon College)
Allison Deutermann (Baruch College, CUNY)
In the early modern period, the passions were often compared to–and understood as influenced by–the natural world. This seminar asks how work on affect, audience, and ecology can speak to and complement each other. How do we conceptualize the relationship between theatrical atmospheres and the weather? What does an ecological understanding of emotion reveal about how people feel together? How might such questions be reshaped by attention to the early modern anthropocene?
09. Early Modern Architectural Spaces: From Hovels to Palaces
Kaitlyn Culliton (Texas A&M International University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)
This seminar examines the buildings in Shakespeare’s drama, from houses, theatres, churches, and prisons to castles and palaces. We investigate the relationship between the complex architecture implied in the play-texts and its constrained representation in both historical and contemporary stage adaptations. We invite papers that consider various functions of architectural spaces in the plays, both as physical representations on stage and as metaphors within the texts.
10. Early Modern City Comedies
Lilly Berberyan (Northwestern State University of Louisiana)
This seminar invites papers that focus on city comedies and encourages explorations of ideas, concepts, and characters that are under-represented in Shakespearean drama. With a wider range of characters and figures, city comedies capture a unique version of early modern society and culture, granting more nuanced understandings of the period. Various perspectives and methodologies (gender, critical race, queer, materialist, postcolonial, performance, or pedagogical approaches) are encouraged.
11. Early Modern Ecocriticism and Critical Race Studies
Hillary Eklund (Loyola University New Orleans)
Jennifer Park (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut, Avery Point)
Ayanna Thompson (Arizona State University)
This seminar invites papers on the intersection of early modern ecocriticism and premodern critical race studies. How might studies of early modern literature attend to our presentist concerns? How can research on environmental catastrophes, refugia, or natural resources expand studies of colonization and empire? How might studies of race and gender foster an intersectional ecofeminism? How might we better explore the entanglements of racial, social, and environmental injustice?
12. Early Modern Erogenous Zones
Devin Byker (College of Charleston)
Jennifer Holl (Rhode Island College)
Erogenous: libidinally charged, erotically sensitive. Zone: a field of contact or arousal. This seminar explores erogenous zones in and with early modernity, positioning erogeneity as a mode of sensation, desire, or contact that extends beyond the genital to the human and nonhuman erotic interactions and yearnings that occur through surfaces, spaces, and media. We welcome papers on nongenital bodily erogenous zones as well as erogenous objects, surfaces, texts, and performance spaces.
13. Early Modern Fan Culture
Kavita Mudan Finn (Manchester, NH)
Emily Griffiths Jones (University of South Florida)
Jessica McCall (Delaware Valley University)
This seminar will explore the intersection between early modern literary culture and contemporary transformative fandom. We welcome papers that consider proto-fan culture in the early modern period, twentieth- and twenty-first-century fan transformations of early modern works, and appropriations of early modern texts in intermediate periods that might be seen as fannish (e.g. Romantic and Victorian revivals).
14. Early Modern Theatre Studies and Podcasting
Sheila Coursey (Saint Louis University)
Jess Hamlet (Alvernia University)
How has the podcast changed early modern theatre studies? As a mode of public-facing scholarship, a teaching tool, an alternative space of scholarly discourse, and an aural medium, the podcast serves as a site for conversations about access, performance, pedagogy, and contingent labor, particularly in the Covid era. We invite papers and/or hybrid projects that explore how podcasts are created, consumed, or taught, as well as potential parallels between podcasting and early modern theatre itself.
15. Earworms
Sharon J. Harris (Brigham Young University)
Thomas Ward (United States Naval Academy)
This seminar invites papers that explore early modern earworms, broadly defined as repeating songs or musical fragments, ranging from the catchy and appealing to the persistent and unwelcome. Papers may focus on literary representations of involuntary musical repetition, the viral recirculation of songs and ballads on the early modern stage and elsewhere, cognitive or phenomenological aspects of musical repetition, earworms’ relationship to trauma, or other non-musical kinds of aurivermiculation.
16. EEBO Finds, Failures, and Futures
Jonathan P. Lamb (University of Kansas)
This seminar focuses on the use of Early English Books Online for scholarship and teaching. What scholarly narratives does EEBO permit, constrain, prevent? What questions of access, method, or interface does it raise? What can/can’t we find on EEBO? We’ll showcase how scholars use EEBO, discuss the stakes, and imagine EEBO’s futures. All are welcome: critiques, defenses, research projects, editorial, philological, or computational studies, and beyond! EEBO access not required to participate.
17. Exciting Explorations in Love’s Labor’s Lost
William R. Rampone, Jr. (South Carolina State University)
Love’s Labor’s Lost has been associated with the aesthetics of language and the topicality of historical allusions. Because of the increasing need to see the applicability of Love’s Labor’s Lost and its relevance to the 21st century and its concerns regarding racial, gender, environmental issues, a plethora of theoretical paradigms has emerged to address some of these issues. Consequently, this seminar invites a diversity of theoretical approaches that explore the play’s relationship to ecocriticism, critical race theory, feminism, the denouement’s indeterminacy, recent adaptations and appropriations of the play on stage, film, video, and this play’s interplay with other early modern texts.
18. Explorations of Cultural Trauma from the Early Modern Stage to Today
Devori Kimbro (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
This seminar will explore the role of cultural trauma in the legacy of the early modern stage. How did early modern playwrights respond to cultural traumas of the day with their productions; how are modern theatrical companies and directors still drawn to these early modern stories to explore modern cultural trauma, and do such productions result in catharsis or agitation? Participants may explore either original or modern stagings of these texts mounted in response to cultural traumas.
19. Gender and Science
Jennifer Munroe (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Mary Trull (St. Olaf College)
This workshop explores the relationship between gender, nature, and knowledge-making in early modern England, interpreting “science” widely to include all theories of natural knowledge as well as practices like experimentalism and household medicine. We invite participants to consider how gender shaped early modern scientific accounts of the world; to disturb the boundaries between science and the literary; to highlight the work of women writers; and to explore intersectional approaches.
20. Hiding in Plain Sight: Archival Discoveries in Early Modern Theater History and Biography
Alan H. Nelson (University of California, Berkeley)
Documentary evidence concerning Early Modern playhouses, playing companies, performances, publications, manuscripts, and theatrical personnel, is increasingly available as access to archives and libraries is enhanced by updated catalogues, digitization, and indexes. This seminar invites papers on entirely new archival discoveries, as well as papers on historical or more recent discoveries which might have received less publicity and recognition. Papers in the latter category should link such discoveries to further advances in scholarly understanding.
21. “I engraft you new”
Paul Edmondson (Shakespeare Birthplace Trust)
Robert Stagg (Shakespeare Institute / University of Oxford)
We seek to engraft Shakespeare’s sonnets anew. Recent work encourages us to think differently about (for example) their sexuality and their order of composition, and we have hopefully left behind tired, eighteenth-century narrative paradigms. What happens when we read the sonnets in the light of global contexts, critical race theory, ecocriticism, and trans sexualities? What was their place and purpose in Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical culture, and in our own, and in social media?
22. (In)Significant Shakespeare
Coen Heijes (University of Groningen)
David Ruiter (University of California, San Diego)
Within a growing effort to connect Shakespeare with broader discourses on today’s challenges, such as the pandemic, racism, sexual abuse, populism, and sustainability, we call on papers by academics, teachers and practitioners that: highlight success stories in achieving positive change; illustrate the difficulties and failures on this road to significance; and/or question the very notion of Significant Shakespeare and argue that this is or is not what we should engage in at all.
23. Invention
Wendy Beth Hyman (Oberlin College)
This seminar invites work on early modern “inventions”—invented languages, instruments, engines, techniques, paradigms, poetic forms, thought processes, worlds—and papers theorizing the nature of invention itself. Is invention “nature’s child,” or the product of ingenious contrivance? What is its proximity to other modes of making or knowing? Papers may range from poetics to natural philosophy, stagecraft to intellectual history, curious gizmos to elaborate schemes.
24. Margaret Cavendish: Gender and Genre
Shawn W. Moore (Florida Southwestern State College)
Vanessa L. Rapatz (Ball State University)
This seminar will investigate Margaret Cavendish’s development and use of varied genres as dialogic philosophical, political, and romantic narratives. We especially welcome papers that take up the intersection of gender and genre including, the social impact of generic conventions, the use of philosophical dialogues as a meta-narrative for world building, and how catalogues of history and time are gendered.
25. Mothering in Early Modern Culture
Elizabeth Steinway (Colorado State University)
Amanda Zoch (Mellon/ACLS)
This seminar invites participants to examine the act of mothering in early modern culture. All genres are welcome, and we are especially interested in queer, monstrous, or marginalized examples of mothering. Participants might consider how mothering is defined; if that definition is stable; mothering’s relationship to reproductive knowledge; how mothering intersects with race, class, gender, or region; Shakespeare’s “bad” mothers; or if one can mother from beyond the grave.
26. Performance during Pandemic: Shakespeare and Covid
Douglas M. Lanier (University of New Hampshire)
Though the Covid pandemic of 2020 and 2021 was devastating for conventional stage productions, practitioners were ingenious in crafting new ways of performing Shakespeare amidst severe restrictions. This seminar will explore Shakespearean performance during the pandemic: what new formats of performance emerged? What economic, sociopolitical, ethical and ideological issues do these formats and particular productions raise? Case studies and accounts by practitioners are especially welcome.
27. “Poison in Jest”: Racist Laughter Across Genres and Nations
Pamela A. Brown (University of Connecticut)
Robert Hornback (Oglethorpe University)
How did racist laughter work to promote and spread race-belief in early modern drama and culture? How did racial humor serve as a discursive practice as part of race formation? How did laughter work to produce whiteness (or sometimes mock it)? We invite multiple approaches to such questions; papers might address jests and insults, but can also treat motifs, roles, and plots in any genre or historical period, in plays by Shakespeare or others. Particularly welcome are critical race theory, transnational, performance theory, and pedagogical approaches.
28. Queering Death
Lauren Shohet (Villanova University)
Christine Varnado (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
This seminar explores death as materially, cosmologically, and aesthetically complicated. What becomes visible through attention to practices, plays, experiences, objects, and belief systems that highlight death’s immanent ambiguities? Possible topics: resurrection, revenants, apparitions, theatrical death, faked death, coma, delirium, abortive reproduction and the unborn, afterlives, remains, morbid eroticism, kinship and inheritance, archival resurrection, failed apocalypse, messianic time, and the lifespans of variously mediated and temporized forms of self.
29. Rendering The Roaring Girl (Cancelled)
Justine DeCamillis (University of Maryland)
Catherine Elliott Tisdale (Boston, MA)
Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl is one of the most written about early modern plays. The resonances between Moll’s character and Shakespeare’s Portia, Rosalind, and Viola invite scholars to consider a history of characters that interrogate identity formation and social representation on the stage. This seminar invites diverse critical approaches that may ask: Are there identifiable patterns between this and other plays? What markers of identity (or lack thereof) elicit such vigorous debate?
30. Rethinking Civility
Emily King (Louisiana State University)
Although civility is cast as a virtuous reprieve from discourtesy, it often suppresses conflict and conceals violence. This seminar explores how civility—that is, civil behaviors, discourse, and expectations for—intersects with early modern structures of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, nationalism, and indigeneity. On what grounds is civility extended? By what modes is it inculcated or weaponized? To what extent does the Shakespearean world recognize civility’s wounding power?
31. Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbean
Steve Mentz (St. John’s University)
Being in Florida and near the Caribbean can reframe ideas about English identities, race, literary culture, ecological change, and global ventures. Placing the region, which was shaped by encounters among Indigenous, African, and European groups, at the center of analysis, we invite papers on Caribbean connections with Shakespeare and early modern English literature. We welcome approaches that engage critical theorizations of the region’s encounters before, during, and after Shakespeare’s time.
32. Shakespeare and Empathy
Katherine Attié (Towson University)
This seminar welcomes papers about empathy in – or as response to – Shakespeare’s works. How does Shakespeare represent empathy (or a lack thereof) in and between characters on stage? How do characters arouse empathy in an audience? Some possible thematic and critical contexts for a discussion of empathy include justice and mercy, theology and religion, diversity and difference, the non-human, Aristotelian dramatic theory, perception and cognition, affect theory, and reception theory.
33. Shakespeare and France
John Cameron (Saint Mary’s University)
This seminar looks at the relationship between Shakespeare and the French. It prompts participants to explore this from a variety of angles, such as the representation of France and of French characters, the attitudes of the English characters to France, and French sources Shakespeare made use of in his drama, Shakespeare’s reception in France, translations of Shakespeare into French, and important French productions of Shakespeare’s plays. Open to a variety of different perspectives, approaches, and methodologies, this seminar hopes to address the various ways that one could tackle this myriad subject and see where the discussion might go from here.
34. Shakespeare and Health
Roberta Barker (Dalhousie University)
Claire Hansen (James Cook University)
Bríd Phillips (University of Western Australia)
The connection between Shakespeare and health is of longstanding interest within Shakespearean scholarship. This seminar invites renewed consideration of the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries can inform our understandings of health and wellbeing in research, practice, and individual experience. Embracing an inclusive conception of the emergent field of health humanities, we are open to a range of projects connecting Shakespeare Studies and human health.
35. Shakespeare and the Staging of Exile
Stephanie Chamberlain (Southeast Missouri State University)
Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University)
James M. Sutton (Florida International University)
Our seminar explores exile—estrangement from one’s homeland—broadly conceived in Shakespeare: the forced immigrant, the banished refugee, the person politically, religiously, or culturally othered. Essays might analyze exile within plays; early modern exilic practices; Shakespeare’s contact with exiles; the author’s proximity to exilic ontologies; stage histories treating exile; studies of exile in performance or film; and how global Shakespearean production today might refigure localized exile.
36. Shakespeare and Wisdom Literature
Sean Keilen (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Julia R. Lupton (University of California, Irvine)
Wisdom literature transmits philosophical, pragmatic, poetic, and theological aspirations through myth and maxim as well as epistle and essay. Egyptian, Buddhist, and Arabic wisdom literature mixed with Greek and Jewish traditions to contribute to a common thought world taken up by both Christianity and Islam. How does friendship model the reception of pagan wisdom in Shakespeare? How do the mixed sources of wisdom transcend confessionalism? What does wisdom offer the humanities today?
37. Shakespeare between Past and Present
Patrick Gray (Durham University)
What is the relation between Shakespeare’s past and our present? How can we best situate Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to intellectual history or, as it was once known, the history of ideas? This seminar welcomes case studies in genealogies of influence and analogies between ideas, as well as conceptual reflections on competing methods of historicizing patterns of belief, with reference to literature, theory, politics, philosophy, and/or theology, as well as performance.
38. Shakespeare in Quarto and Folio
Joshua R. Held (Trinity International University)
Paul Werstine (Western University)
In anticipation of the 2023 quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s First Folio, this seminar invites engagement with this highly significant, even fetishized, volume alongside other printed texts, including quartos, later folios, and (not to forget) octavos. How have these texts—and increasingly open methods of access to them—influenced the editing, acting, and teaching of Shakespeare? We welcome diverse approaches, including speculation about the origins and effects of variant texts.
39. Shakespeare in situ (Cancelled)
Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland)
Heather Knight (Museum of London Archaeology)
Elizabeth E. Tavares (University of Alabama)
More than three decades since the discovery of the Globe and Rose foundations, the role of archaeological investigation in early modern theatre history, and vice versa, remains underdeveloped. This seminar aims to facilitate conversation about how archaeological discoveries inform study of the early modern theatre, from rethinking the evolution of the playhouses to reimagining the relationship between playhouse design, performance, and playwriting.
40. Shakespeare’s Editors
Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University)
Molly G. Yarn (Athens, GA)
Textual editing is no longer understood to be a neutral practice, as editors are increasingly elevated as agents of textual meaning. We invite papers that explore the lives and labors of those who have edited the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries from the 16th century to the present. We also welcome papers that consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of reading editions biographically and of producing editions from the position of self-aware subjectivity.
41. Shakespeare’s Madnesses
Leslie C. Dunn (Vassar College)
Avi Mendelson (London, UK)
This seminar explores madness’ interdiscursivity in the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Some topics: madness vs. mental illness; feigned madness; madness and race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability; supernatural madness: witches, demonic possession, and lycanthropy; pathological madness: melancholy, syphilis, and rabies; Bethlem Hospital (“Bedlam”); phenomena linked to madness: dreams, confusion, error, desire, and ecstasy. Papers on teaching madness in drama are welcome.
42. Shakespeare’s “Other Disability Plays”: Continued
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (Luther College)
Lenora Bellee Jones-Pierce (Centenary College of Louisiana)
Building on the strengths of last year’s seminar, this iteration continues to explore ideologies of dis/ability at work in plays not explicitly “about” disability. We invite participants to consider how dis/ability was shaped by representations of able-bodiedness, including dis/ability motifs and metaphors, disabled poetics, and disabled aesthetics. Possible topics may include: health, beauty, youth, sanity, fertility, wit, strength, skill, productivity, virtuosity, and wholeness.
43. Staging Poetics
Matthew Harrison (West Texas A&M University)
Paul Hecht (Purdue University Northwest)
This seminar invites approaches to poetry and performance, including class, racial, sexual, gendered, and ability-focused dimensions of poetic performance in plays, as well as performances of amateurism or mastery, or considerations of poetic matter and poem as text or poem as spoken word. How does theater change how poems move through literary history? What kinds of spaces does drama open or establish to hear poetry? And what disciplinary spaces can poetry open for scholars of drama?
44. Text in/as Performance
Denise A. Walen (Vassar College)
Evidence of both deletions and additions exist among the early printed versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The scripts are still regularly cut for performance, and some cuts have become almost standard practice. This seminar will investigate the way theatre practitioners have cut and shaped Shakespeare’s scripts for performance, from the sixteenth century through current productions. Papers are welcome on specific productions, the history of cuts for a particular play, or any aspect of the textual choices made by theatre artists for production.
45. The Theatre of Cruelty in Performance (Cancelled)
Amanda Di Ponio (Huron University College)
This seminar invites papers exploring performances of early modern drama aligned with Antonin Artaud’s vision for a Theatre of Cruelty, in any variety of theatrical forms. The goal of Theatre of Cruelty productions is to stimulate the audience via the senses, resulting in not necessarily a pleasurable, but momentous response. Participants may wish to investigate intersections between early modern drama and historical and/or contemporary avant-garde movements or other non-realist traditions.
46. Witches in Space
Sarah O’Malley (London, UK)
Meg Pearson (University of West Georgia)
The spatial turn in humanities caused a reconsideration of how physical spaces shape, and are shaped by, the cultures they form part of. This seminar asks how space shaped understandings of early modern witches/witchcraft. Participants might consider: how representations of witches varied in different regions; how the spatialization of witchcraft added to understandings of gender, racial, and sexual identity; how contemporary adaptations of witch-texts draw on and challenge this spatial legacy.
IN-PERSON WORKSHOPS
47. The Beginning at the End
Wesley Broulik (Central Connecticut State University / Time’s Fool Company)
Christie Maturo (Central Connecticut State University / Time’s Fool Company)
When one looks at many of Shakespeare’s plays the endings presented in different versions can vary wildly ranging from Folio, to Quarto, to specific choices made by editors. In this workshop we will look closely, through staging on our feet with workshop participants, at the endings of a few selections of Shakespeare’s texts and examine the differences between the choices that have been made. Together we will interrogate how these choices can impact the entirety of a play and what the audience is left with and also why these editors made their choices.
48. Creating a Digital Humanities (DH) Project: A Workshop for All Levels of Experience and Research Contexts (Cancelled)
Kurt Daw (San Francisco State University)
Elizabeth Hunter (San Francisco State University)
In the last decade, DH work has grown in sophistication and pervasiveness, and emergent technologies have expanded the possibilities for humanistic inquiry with computers. Despite these changes, practical questions about DH persist. This workshop will facilitate and demystify the process of designing, funding, and building a DH project. Prior to the conference, participants will submit a description of a potential or actual DH project. Conference time will be spent workshopping these projects. Non-coders welcome.
49. Digital Performance Scholarship: Multimedia Critical Editions of Gender and Shakespeare in Asian Theatre (Cancelled)
Dympna Callaghan (Syracuse University)
Yong Li Lan (National University of Singapore)
This interactive workshop aims to enable participants to incorporate global theatre performance into their teaching and research. Our objective is to enable a more inclusive research and pedagogy and to create dialog about Anglophone discourses especially about gender in relation to Shakespeare performances in Asia.
50. SAA-SHARP: New Directions in the Study of Early Modern Female Book Ownership
Sarah Lindenbaum (Bloomington, IL)
Tara Lyons (Illinois State University)
Martine Van Elk (California State University, Long Beach)
What can we extrapolate from the ever-growing evidence of women owning books? This workshop examines strategies for uncovering evidence of female book ownership, from marginalia to wills, portraits, catalogues, bindings, and bookplates. In addition to exploring research materials, participants will consider issues of methodology in assessing evidence of “owned” texts. What new directions in book history can emerge from these discoveries, their accumulation, and their concomitant gaps?
51. Shakespeare and the Anti-Racist Classroom
Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College)
Nedda Mehdizadeh (University of California, Los Angeles)
This workshop answers the urgent call to cultivate an anti-racist pedagogy in our classrooms. Participants will discuss and develop methods of engaging in meaningful, ongoing discussions with students about race (and its intersections) through guided activities that will result in course materials educators can use toward an anti-racist pedagogy. Participants of all career and experience levels are invited to participate, and will leave with revised syllabi, assignments, and teaching strategies.
52. Shakespeare and Women’s Leadership
Natalie Eschenbaum (St. Catherine University)
This workshop is designed for Shakespeare instructors and those who serve in leadership roles at their institutions (e.g., directors, chairs, deans). We will read scenes from Shakespeare alongside some contemporary leadership theory to consider what Shakespeare teaches us about women’s and feminist leadership, in particular. Participants will use Shakespeare’s teachings about women and leadership to develop a lesson plan, a “key results” plan for change, a mission/vision statement, or similar.
53. Shakespeare in the General Education Classroom
Jennifer Black (Boise State University)
Laura Turchi (University of Houston)
This workshop explores the affordances of teaching “general” Shakespeare to a broad range of students with different educational goals, including non-majors and pre-service teachers. We welcome explorations of effective tools and resources, questions about the costs and benefits of making Shakespeare relevant to 21st century life, arguments about the need to “market” Shakespeare to students and administration, and discussions of how Shakespeare relates to the goals of a liberal arts education.
49th Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. Appropriating Shakespearean Romance in Indian Cinema
Thea Buckley (Queen’s University Belfast)
Rosa Maria Garcia-Periago (Queen’s University Belfast)
This seminar examines the manifold representations of Shakespearean love in Indian screen adaptations, for TV or Bollywood, regional, parallel or diaspora cinemas. It welcomes a variety of approaches and papers that examine how local cultures or patriarchally arranged marriages affect India’s global representations of Shakespearean love. Ultimately, the seminar aims to decenter the current shorthand of Shakespearean love as Anglocentric romance, by presenting perspectives from the Global South.
02. Asexual Reading
Simone Chess (Wayne State University)
Catherine R. Clifford (Graceland University)
This seminar invites work on “asexual reading,” theorizing or modeling interpretive practices informed by the methods of asexuality studies. What does it mean to read asexually, and what might an asexual methodology look like in early modern literary studies? Topics might include chastity and celibacy as limit cases for asexuality studies; asexual readings of characters; performative asexualities; aversion/repulsion; aromanticism; constructions and maintenences of allosexuality.
03. Boundaries of Violence
Matthew C. Carter (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Samantha D. Dressel (Chapman University)
What boundaries are placed on violence, and when does violence reign unchecked? This seminar will interrogate the boundaries of violence articulated and violated on both stage and page in the Renaissance. We consider violence broadly, looking at enacted, threatened, imagined, and stifled violence. Papers may interrogate all the ways violence can have boundaries placed on it, removed from it, or otherwise transgressed or enforced. This seminar encourages participants to bring a range of criticism.
04. Child’s Play
Gemma A. Miller (King’s College London)
Bethany M. Packard (Transylvania University)
In early modern England “play” encompassed recreations ranging from children’s games, to sports, to drama. In light of play’s myriad forms, what can approaching children as players reveal about how period drama depicted, questioned, and constructed childhood as a social role? Inviting essays on intersections of child studies and play from perspectives including game and play theory, material culture, historicism, Shakespearean child characters, children’s companies, and performance studies.
05. Class and Identity in Shakespeare
Ronda Arab (Simon Fraser University)
Laurie Ellinghausen (University of Missouri, Kansas City)
This seminar explores class as intersectional identity, welcoming work on dramatic and non-dramatic genres, as well as performance contexts. How did other social categories such race, religion, gender, geography, age, or cultural capital complicate, challenge, or bolster conventional ideologies of blood, wealth, and occupation? How did other social categories impact class tensions and class mobility? How might feminist or queer methodologies help us understand intersectionalities of class?
06. Early Modern English Women Writers and the Arts of Language: Thinking Rhetorically with Shakespeare
Elizabeth Ann Mackay (University of Dayton)
This seminar considers early modern women’s relationships to rhetoric, formal rhetorical training, and rhetorical culture. Papers produced for this seminar will investigate women’s training in and employment of rhetorics as fundamental to their engagements in England’s vernacular rhetorical culture. In thinking about women’s writing as rhetorical, what historical possibilities, influences, interventions, and implications were particular to both canonical and non-canonical women writers?
07. Early Modern Women’s Writing and Critical Race Studies
Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University)
Michelle M. Dowd (University of Alabama)
This seminar examines early modern women’s writing through the lenses of Black feminism and critical race studies. Papers should explore works by early modern women as they engage with discourses of race. How has the critical history of the field been shaped by white feminism? How might the field be transformed by intersectional feminism? How can the archive of women’s writing open up new perspectives on gender, race, and the intersection of the two?
08. Eco-Migration: Shakespeare and the Contemporary Novel
Sharon O’Dair (University of Alabama)
Eco-migration is disruptive, dangerous. Novelists are using Shakespeare to confront its meaning, among them Mark Haddon (The Porpoise), Ali Smith (Spring), Preti Taneja (We That Are Young), Margaret Atwood (Hagseed), and Emily St. John Mandel (Station Eleven). What does Shakespeare offer the novelists? What do the novelists offer us? I invite papers on any of these works that engage migration’s relationship to economic and environmental stress, either today or in-period.
09. Editing Early-Modern Women’s Writing: Approaches, Challenges, and Responsibilities
Claire Bowditch (Loughborough University)
Elaine Hobby (Loughborough University)
This seminar examines the cultures and fascinations of scholarly editing of early-modern women’s writing across English, Drama, and Digital and Medical Humanities. It provides an opportunity to consider the peculiar challenges faced by modern editors of early-women’s work. Participants will include but not be limited to: current and recent editors of early women’s writing, and those planning such an undertaking, with the aim of developing new interpretations through sharing approaches.
10. Embodying Differences in Global Shakespearean Performance
Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
Elizabeth Pentland (York University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)
The ethics of embodied difference intersect with global frames for filming and performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability put pressure on artists’ and audiences’ claims about ethical and political gains of global Shakespeare? This seminar invites contributions that examine identity politics in the production and global reception of adaptations.
11. English Drama and the Early Modern Atlantic
Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College)
How does drama register the emergence of new contact zones and colonial sites across the early modern Atlantic? This seminar welcomes papers that offer fresh perspectives on this question, including efforts to situate drama within the intersecting histories of racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism, to trace drama’s engagement with the ecological or embodied consequences of contact, to foreground Indigenous perspectives and experience, or to consider noncanonical or lost plays.
12. Entertainers and Institutions
Peter H. Greenfield (University of Houston-Downtown)
Paul Whitfield White (Purdue University)
This seminar aims to explore instances of reciprocity between the makers of theater and related forms of entertainment with the institutions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. Papers may investigate how entertainers negotiated those relationships, how institutions might support the entertainers’ activities, how institutions could restrict those activities, and to what extent the theater itself became an institution that shaped entertainers’ lives and activities.
13. Fields, Spaces, Parks and Gardens: Shakespearean Drama and Entertainment Outdoors
Eva Griffith (London, UK)
The original Globe and its reconstruction; Central and Regent’s Park—entertainment both in Shakespeare’s day and ours has existed in open spaces. Will Kemp’s jig to Norwich was ambitiously outdoors, and other early modern pastimes connected to playing, such as bowling, wrestling, fencing and fireworks showed the will to enjoy the outside. What does the open air donate to entertainment, and what are the pleasures and concerns involving it, both in Shakespeare’s day and our own?
14. “Foreign” Places in Familiar Spaces
Maria Shmygol (University of Leeds)
This seminar invites reflection on how “foreign” settings functioned on the stage, in civic pageantry, and in court masques. What types of material and cognitive strategies were used to “set the scene” and stage geographic difference? How do early modern theories of racial difference relate to geographic “foreignness”? How were “familiar” sites of performance and local knowledge invoked self-consciously to mediate geographical alterity in drama from the 1570s to the Restoration?
15. The Friend Comes of Age
Will Tosh (Shakespeare’s Globe)
2021 sees the eighteenth anniversary of the posthumous publication of The Friend, and twenty years since the death of its author, Alan Bray. This seminar asks us to think about the impact of Bray’s contribution to queer Shakespeare scholarship. Papers might re-investigate the intersection of same-sex friendship, eroticism and sexuality in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and I encourage contributors to address some of the acknowledged lacunae in his Bray’s influential framework.
16. Global Shakespeare, Performance as Research, and the Labor of Decolonization
Susan Bennett (University of Calgary)
Kim Solga (University of Western Ontario)
In her study of Shakespeare in the Global South, Sandra Young aims “to test some of the vocabulary with which Shakespeare scholars have sought to engage a diverse and unequal world […] through the concepts of the creolization, indigenization, localization and Africanization of Shakespeare” (2). Our seminar asks what Performance as Research (PaR) methodologies can bring to this project and how PaR might better represent and/or challenge Shakespeare in contemporary political contexts?
17. Histories of the Early Modern Digital/Material Book
Erin A. McCarthy (University of Newcastle)
This seminar considers how digital technology, broadly defined, mediates our understanding of early modern printed books, manuscripts, and objects. How can technology increase access to early modern artifacts? What shortcomings and risks does it pose? What materials are not available digitally and why? How does digitization inform what is studied, taught, and performed? Theoretical perspectives and case studies are welcome, as are papers reflecting on gaps, omissions, and distortions.
18. Inclusive Shakespeare
Sheila T. Cavanagh (Emory University)
Sonya Freeman Loftis (Morehouse College)
What does it mean to make the use and expression of Shakespeare inclusive of diverse communities and minority identities? This seminar considers inclusive Shakespeares, broadly construed: inclusion for people with disabilities; inclusion for first-generation students; pedagogy that uses universal design; performances that engage minority communities. Papers will focus on the discoveries that are made when scholars, teachers, and directors work to create inclusive texts, classrooms, and theaters.
19. Inessential Shakespeare
Sarah Neville (Ohio State University)
Selections from Collected Works editions of Shakespeare are often marketed in limited form as “essential,” “compact,” or “necessary” volumes. This seminar considers the what we lose by indirectly categorizing some plays as “unnecessary.” Papers may explore theoretical issues in cultural hierarchies, Shakespeare’s literary and theatrical development, canonical clashes between high and low culture, genre snobbery, and/or the influence of critical reception on pedagogy.
20. The Kinky Renaissance
Joseph Gamble (University of Toledo)
Gillian Knoll (Western Kentucky University)
Were there kinky early moderns? This seminar aims to leverage the sexual nuances of contemporary kink culture to shift the ground of early modern queer studies. Questions participants might pursue include: how might contemporary kink and BDSM practices, such as cuckoldry, “race play,” name calling, “play partners,” edging, and scene setting, offer new insights into early modern drama? Do contemporary kink identities—e.g. brat, spanko, switch, daddy, furry—have early modern parallels?
21. Marvel-ous Shakespeares
Jessica McCall (Delaware Valley University)
Marvel-ous Shakespeares will consider the intersections of Shakespeare and modern superhero media. Participants might consider: representations of power in the Early Modern period that overlap, mirror, echo or in some way speak to the issues of power present in superhero culture; new or revised pedagogies of Shakespeare using superheroes as a key component; the ways Shakespearean actors and directors intentionally bring Shakespeare into superheroes and how that might drive critical conversation.
22. Medieval and Early Modern Digital Humanities: Premodern Critical Race and Methodology
Dorothy K. Kim (Brandeis University)
This seminar resituates critical digital humanities (i.e. see American Quarterly) in discussion with premodern critical race studies discussed in Margo Hendrick’s Race Before Race talk. This seminar considers the black feminist work from the archive of slavery—Saidiya Hartman, Marisa Fuentes, Jennifer Morgan, Jessica Marie Johnson—to address the issues of methodology in relation to “Mark Up Bodies.” What are the methodological issues in marking race in medieval/early modern critical DH projects.
23. New Approaches to Henry V
Emma K. Atwood (University of Montevallo)
Jennifer Feather (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
This seminar invites papers that consider new approaches to Shakespeare’s Henry V. The play has seen popular resurgence, from The King (2019) and the RSC touring simulcast (2015) to recent books on nationalism. Why Henry V? Why now? Possible themes may include (but are not limited to) nation, race, language, leadership, historiography, masculinity, class, affect, performance, pedagogy. Papers that address Henry V in light of current cultural and political conversations are particularly welcome.
24. New Directions for Shakespeare and Psychoanalytic Studies
James T. Newlin (Case Western Reserve University)
James W. Stone (American University)
This seminar invites papers that will inaugurate a renewed dialogue between Shakespeare studies and psychoanalysis. We welcome projects that draw upon any variant of psychoanalytic theory to examine a variety of approaches and topics, including adaptation, performance, formal analysis, pedagogy, and treatments of racial, gender, and sexual identity. Papers may rethink familiar texts by Freud and other major psychoanalytic theorists, or they may consider the work of underexamined thinkers.
25. Playing Shakespeare
Vernon G. Dickson (Florida International University)
Michael Lutz (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
This seminar explores play, games, and gaming related to Shakespeare. By joining Shakespeare and game studies, we aim to investigate dramatic and literary notions of play, while also examining early modern material used in the (re)production of games and play, including where and how games appear in Shakespeare’s plays and poetry; what games were known in his period and what significance they held; or what Shakespearean concerns appear in today’s ludic array of analog and digital games.
26. The Politics of Bibliography, Textual Editing, and Book History
Brandi K. Adams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)
While textual editing, bibliography, and book history are sometimes seen as technical or “objective,” they are in fact rife with politics. How do these fields intersect with early modern and/or modern structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationalism and colonialism, indigeneity, or other political arenas? We invite papers on all aspects of the politics of editing, glossing, bibliographic analysis, librarianship, bookselling and collecting, and the materiality of the text.
27. Queer/Race/Global: Early Modern Crossings
Bernadette Andrea (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Abdulhamit Arvas (University of Pennsylvania)
This seminar aims to bring together scholars of race, sexuality, and transcultural studies to explore early modern intersections of sexuality, gender, and race from a global critical lens. We welcome diverse methodologies and approaches that deploy “race” and “queer” as analytical tools, that advance comparative or contrapuntal perspectives, and that engage noneurocentric texts and contexts to complicate gender binaries, racialized hierarchies, and sexualized identities on the stage and page.
28. Race-ing and Queering Queens
Mira Assaf Kafantaris (Ohio State University)
This seminar invites scholars of race, gender, sexuality, and geopolitics to investigate early modern “Queens.” By putting early modern representations of “race,” “queer,” and “queen” in conversation with one another, we believe that these concepts will not only exert productive pressure on each other, but create new meanings, intersections, and frameworks. We welcome diverse methodologies and approaches that complicate power dynamics, racialized hierarchies, and sexualized identities.
29. Reading Lists
Heidi Craig (Texas A&M University)
Adam G. Hooks (University of Iowa)
Book history embraces the list as object of study and scholarly practice. As a genre it provides the foundation for critical and historicist scholarship; as a literary form, lists disrupt, defer, and delight in plentitude. This seminar considers lists within or about early modern texts, both pragmatic and poetical. Participants are invited to consider how the creation, function, and interpretation of lists allows us to see the complementary uses of the form within book history and poetics.
30. Religion, Race and Bad Humour in Early Modern Drama
Kimberly A. Coles (University of Maryland)
This seminar explores how religion might be a product of humoral composition. Moralists and physicians from mid-sixteenth century resorted to Galen as a model for understanding the body as a contact point between the immaterial soul and the physical world. How might humoral theory align with early modern theories of race and religion? How does religious difference manifest as physical difference? How do representations of race on the English stage score this interaction of body and soul?
31. Revisiting Orientalism
Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College)
Nedda Mehdizadeh (University of California, Los Angeles)
For this seminar, we argue that Edward Said’s Orientalism continues to be relevant to early modern transnational studies, especially in our current political moment. We seek papers offering a nuanced and capacious formulation of cultural contact within a dialogic context, and welcome critical studies that trouble the east/west binary, examine English and global texts, interrogate representations of race, ethnicity, and religion, or provide theoretically informed pedagogical interventions.
32. Satire/Satyre
Kristen A. Bennett (Framingham State University)
Earliest English uses of “satire” simultaneously invoke Juvenalian-style censorship and the half-human satyr, a paradox of Dionysian decadence, bestiality, and sagacity. This seminar embraces satire’s hybrid forms across classical, medieval, and early modern English contexts, inviting essays and/or digital research approaches/projects that put pressure on prevailing paradigms of class, race, gender, and globalism. How does satire “work” as a mode of social and political reform–or not?
33. Science without Shakespeare
Liza Blake (University of Toronto)
Whitney Sperrazza (Rochester Institute of Technology)
What does it mean to think about science without Shakespeare? We invite papers that explore early modern literature and science, with particular attention to women’s writing, critical race studies, and global literatures. How do such frameworks expand our archive for what “counts” as the history of science? What new early modern modes of knowing does this expanded archive reveal? We also welcome participants to think critically about Shakespeare’s influence on the field and its long-term effects.
34. Shakespeare and Comics
Jim Casey (Arcadia University)
Brandon Christopher (University of Winnipeg)
This seminar welcomes papers that explore the intersection of Shakespeare and comics, from Classics Illustrated to Kill Shakespeare and beyond. We welcome essays on Shakespeare and comics, graphic novels, Manga, comic strips, co-mix theory, adaptation, allusion, authority, intermediality, pedagogy, high/low culture, or any other related topic.
35. Shakespeare and immersion
Erin Sullivan (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)
This seminar invites papers exploring what it means to be immersed in Shakespeare. From immersive theater practice, to VR and mixed reality technologies, to the rise of fan and gaming communities, to practice-based research and pedagogy, to the revival of deep, close reading, what kinds of attention are involved in enveloping oneself in Shakespeare, and what are their benefits and limitations? Critiques of immersion as a concept, as well as work on Shakespeare’s contemporaries, are also welcome.
36. Shakespeare and Intersectionality in Performance and Adaptation
Ariane M. Balizet (Texas Christian University)
Is an intersectional Shakespeare possible in the public sphere? Shakespeare’s most public forms too often reiterate oppressive narratives of gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class privilege and ableist discourses of the body politic presented as “universal” values. This seminar imagines the role Shakespeare might play in illuminating structures of inequality in pedagogy and performance and considers the degree to which Shakespeare is fundamental to those oppressive structures.
37. Shakespeare and the Canon: New Directions
Faith D. Acker (Kennedyville, MD)
Douglas I. Clark (University of Manchester)
Shakespeare’s work has indelibly shaped what we research and how research is performed in early modern literary studies, but what archives, critical approaches, and literary genres have been occluded by Shakespeare’s centrality in the canon? This seminar invites discussion about the future of the discipline and the role that the study of Shakespeare should play in it, inviting theoretical essays, practical applications, and pedagogical approaches that address these issues.
38. Shakespeare and the Director
Stuart Hampton-Reeves (University of Warwick)
This seminar aims to explore the role of the director in shaping and defining modern Shakespearean performance. We will put critical pressure on both the concept and the practice of directing, drawing inspiration from experimental and non-Western theatre as well as revisiting the work of major directors. We will consider performance practices which disrupt or even dispense with the director and discuss the future of the director.
39. Shakespeare and the Elements
Katherine B. Attie (Towson University)
This seminar considers the four elements–fire, air, water, and earth–in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers might discuss a single element or a combination thereof; they might offer focused close readings or explore broader connections such as the four elements in relation to the four humors. The seminar welcomes a range of interests and critical perspectives, including the history of scientific thought, old and new materialisms, feminism and gender, and ecocriticism.
40. Shakespeare and Translation beyond the Global
Leticia C. García (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University)
This seminar explores new approaches to the processes and politics of translation in relation to Shakespeare. Who translates Shakespeare? For whom, how, and to what ends? We invite papers that theorize the embodied, performative, intersemiotic, and multimodal nature of translation in ways that go beyond the macroscopic idea of the “global” and are rooted in particular methodologies of translation studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies.
41. Shakespeare in the “Post”Colonies: What’s Shakespeare to Them, or They to Shakespeare
Amrita Dhar (Ohio State University)
Amrita Sen (University of Calcutta)
This seminar explores the stakes of performing, teaching and reading Shakespeare in erstwhile colonial spaces. Given recent critical work on the internal colonies of “post”colonial geographies, how does Shakespeare remain relevant in engaging questions of race, caste, gender, indigeneity and multilingualism? What are the affordances of studying Shakespeare in neocolonial contexts? How can Shakespeare help articulate positions of resistance or justice against new mechanisms of disenfranchisement?
42. Shakespeare(s) in the Public Market
Timothy Francisco (Youngstown State University)
A crucial future for Shakespeare studies is public Shakespeare(s), defined as accessible criticism, pedagogies of social justice, or community work. This turn occurs as our relationship to capital has never been more stark: Precarity, public skepticism, and Neoliberalism have shaped the role, politics, and methods of literary study, and this seminar explores public work in the context of the market that has shaped it, to position such work within and beyond the academy.
43. Shakespeare, Archives and Performing Memory
Sally Barnden (King’s College London)
How does memory intersect with archival material in writing about Shakespeare performance? This seminar considers the impacts of race, gender, sexuality and class on performance archives. It asks what is remembered and forgotten by performance archives, and how those memories and omissions carry into future performances. It also welcomes responses to digitisation of performances and archives, and reflections on what our relationship to past performance might look like in the future.
44. Shakespeare’s “Other Disability Plays”
Lenora Bellee Jones-Pierce (Middle Tennessee State University)
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (Luther College)
This seminar will expand discussions of dis/ability beyond a small recurring group of plays and explore ideologies of dis/ability at work in drama not explicitly “about” disability. We invite analysis of how dis/ability was shaped by representations of able-bodiedness, including dis/ability motifs and metaphors, disabled poetics, and disabled aesthetics. Possible topics include: health, beauty, youth, sanity, fertility, wit, and wholeness, as well as performance choices about dis/ability.
45. Shakespearean Biofiction on the Stage and Screen
Ronan Hatfull (University of Warwick)
Edel Semple (University College Cork)
This seminar invites papers on Shakespearean biofiction on the stage and screen in any period, with a focus on adaptations and appropriations which critique and satirise his work and legacy. Topics may include Shakespearean biofiction and: stage versus screen media; contemporary adaptation; its historical origins; its social, cultural, or political uses; his characters, family, and associates; gender and sexuality; discourses of nationality; cultural capital; iconography; the literary biopic.
46. The Spanish Tragedy and Its Afterlives
Timothy A. Turner (University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee)
The Spanish Tragedy—frequently revived, often imitated, occasionally mocked, eventually expanded—is nearly unrivaled in its hold on Shakespeare and his peers. This seminar invites papers from diverse critical approaches on all aspects of the play and its long influence. What new connections are to be found among Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others? What light has work in attribution studies shed on the importance of the play? What direction will editorial work on it take in the coming decades?
47. Teaching Shakespeare in the Age of Mass Incarceration
Liz Fox (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
This seminar examines the deployment of Shakespeare in prison classrooms and programs to envision best practices for premodern pedagogy in a space of incarceration. Participants might: investigate the motivations and ambitions of bringing Shakespeare into prison; consider shifts in investments and approaches across men’s and women’s facilities; identify how political and institutional (educational and correctional) demands and limitations shape how and why we teach Shakespeare in prisons.
48. Women’s Marginalia in English Books, 1500-1800
Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo)
Rosalind L. Smith (University of Newcastle)
Early modern womenʼs marginalia form an exciting new, and growing, corpus of women’s writing. What do they tell us about the functions of books, writing, and reading for women in early modern society? Are class and whiteness inevitably a hard boundary in our study of marginalia, especially by women? Is marginalia a genre or form? In what sense are feminist theories of use in relation to this material? What is the impact of digital archiving on our understanding of the field?
49. Wonder Books
Rob Conkie (La Trobe University)
Jennifer A. Low (Florida Atlantic University)
This seminar focuses on the material and visual properties of books and their power to inspire wonder. Wonder books might include artists’ books, moveable books, and fabulously illuminated books. We invite discussion, theorization, comparison, and ekphrasis of these and other wondrous (Shakespeare-related, however distantly) books. Participants may pursue interests in aesthetics, cognition, pedagogies, or other approaches. We also invite the creation of wonder books, or fragments thereof.
WORKSHOPS
50. The Activist Shakespearean on the University Campus
Andrea M. Crow (Boston College)
This workshop brings together college instructors who want to expand their capacities to pursue their activist commitments at their workplaces. Participants will compose and exchange case studies, sharing strategies for making institutions of higher education more just for workers, students, and the communities surrounding them. The range of topics will vary, but questions to consider might include: How does being tasked with teaching Shakespeare and/or perceived as a Shakespearean create challenges or opportunities when it comes to intervening in discriminatory policies and practices on campus and in the wider community? How might teaching Shakespeare help you advocate for the rights of students, faculty, and other university workers in the face of institutionalized colonialism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, classism, and other forms of minoritization and exclusion?
51. The Community-Engaged Premodern Classroom
Kathleen T. Leuschen (Emory University)
Lauren Shook (Texas Lutheran University)
Community-engaged pedagogies have flourished in writing and literary studies. Yet premodern studies have primarily focused on service-learning via Shakespeare. How can we build a more capacious understanding of how premodern texts open themselves up to community engagement? Participants of all career and experience levels are invited to produce a pool of pedagogical resources for the community-engaged premodern classroom that is intersectional and social-justice minded.
52. Considering the HOW of Teaching Shakespeare
Peggy O’Brien (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Corinee Viglietta (Folger Shakespeare Library)
In response to growing requests from our colleagues on college campuses, Folger Education offers a hands-on workshop that will immerse participants in our active, language-based methodology for teaching Shakespeare. The Folger Method is a set of principles and practices that work together to get every single reader questioning, interpreting, embracing, and resisting Shakespeare’s language. Participants will experience firsthand a radically equitable way of teaching and learning that complements the inclusive, progressive scholarship that is the hallmark of SAA.
53. Intersectionality and Inclusion in the Early Modern Classroom
Maya Mathur (University of Mary Washington)
Elisa Oh (Howard University)
This workshop draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to examine how the overlapping axes of our identities and those of our students shape our pedagogy. Participants are invited to develop a teaching philosophy and lesson plan that focus on early modern women writers, writers of color, and non-Western texts; the historical and contemporary contexts of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality; or critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and Marxist analyses of early modern texts.
54. Pushing Boundaries in the Study of Early Modern Poetry
Joanne Diaz (Illinois Wesleyan University)
How can we push on traditional boundaries—of canon, of form, of performance, of structure, of philology, of the divide between creative and scholarly work—to offer students a new way of understanding early modern poetry and poetics? To answer this question, we will read brief articles on innovative close reading practices and share our own pedagogical theories and approaches. By the end of the workshop session, participants will be able to return to their home institutions with a broad range of activities and approaches to share with their students.
55. Teaching with Special Collections
Sarah Werner (Washington, DC)
Do you want to teach with rare materials but feel unsure if your library has suitable texts? Are you scared of bibliography but want to be able to encourage students to think about the materiality of texts? By doing advance readings and exercises and then sharing assignments with the workshop, participants will develop approaches to teaching with special collections and tools to do so confidently, whether or not they are based at institutions with loads of early books.
56. Writing for Popular Media
Daniel Pollack-Pelzner (Linfield College)
Elizabeth E. Tavares (University of Alabama)
This practical workshop will explore concrete strategies for publishing in popular media, based on participants’ work-in-progress. How do you find a timely hook for your research? Who is the right editor for the right pitch? How do you craft an argument for a general audience? What are strategies to #CiteScholarsOfColor in popular venues? How do you get institutional credit for your work? How can we all give credit to the academic labor that produces our insights? And what about trolls?
48th Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
Atrocity and Early Modern Drama
Sarah Elizabeth Johnson (Royal Military College of Canada)
Georgina M. Lucas (Queen’s University Belfast)
This seminar invites papers that consider how early modern drama handles, and is used to handle, atrocities. What constitutes an atrocity? How might atrocities be staged? Are there distinctions within this category, dependent on actor, time, or victim? Who decides? Who leverages early modern drama and dramatists in post-atrocity societies? The seminar welcomes a variety of approaches to these questions, including text, television, film, performance history, and cultural studies.
Bad Philology
Jenny C. Mann (Cornell University)
Brian Pietras (Princeton University)
Early moderns could be very bad philologists, mis-translating classical works, creating false etymologies, and constructing improbable cultural histories. This seminar explores “bad philology” as an object of study and a fruitful methodology for early modern studies now. How might bad philology spur us to be more global in our scholarship and foster more imaginative connections among the classical, medieval, and modern? Can bad philology explode dominant paradigms of race, class, and gender?
Breathing in/with Shakespeare
Kathryn Prince (University of Western Australia)
Naya Tsentourou (University of Exeter)
“How can we start to think about something we cannot see?” (Quinlivan 2014, 1). This seminar focuses on the circulation of breath in Shakespeare’s texts and their performance. How does breath open up physical, spiritual, and emotional worlds? How is breath work part of the Shakespearean actor’s training and practice? Can spectatorial breathing offer insights into emotional communities and emotional contagion? The seminar offers the first sustained engagement with Shakespeare’s pneumatic economy.
“But is it any good?”: Evaluating Shakespeare Adaptation
Douglas M. Lanier (University of New Hampshire)
Scholarly study of Shakespeare adaptation has largely neglected the question of principles by which we assign value to Shakespeare adaptations, in themselves and relative to one other. How to evaluate adaptation–for its fidelity to or deviation from Shakespeare, its political or ethical orientation, its aesthetics, its novelty, its capacity to please or shock, its popularity or relevance, the different audiences it serves, or other principles? Or should we suspend the question of value?
Chaucerian Resonances in Tudor and Stuart Performance Contexts
Lindsay Ann Reid (National University of Ireland, Galway)
This seminar considers Chaucer’s reception in Tudor and Stuart performance contexts. New readings of Shakespeare’s most overtly Chaucerian plays (The Two Noble Kinsmen, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida) are welcome, as are analyses of previously unidentified/understudied Chaucerian resonances within and beyond the Shakespeare canon. Papers might treat balladry, masques, entertainments, or stage plays such as Women Pleased, Four Plays in One, Patient Grissil, or Sir Giles Goosecap.
Conspiracy
Lisa M. Barksdale-Shaw (Michigan State University)
As evidenced in the trials of Nicholas Throckmorton or Walter Raleigh, fears about conspiracy abound in Shakespeare’s world. How does the representation of criminal collaboration differ from one trial to another and one literary text to another? Might disparate judgments occur if we control for race, gender, class, or nationality? What happens when we consider the results of such judgments alongside dramatic depictions of trials? How might the requirement for proofs and judgment provide insights into the presentation of conspiracy?
Critical Methodologies in Early Modern Studies, Post-Historicism
Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania)
Alice A. Dailey (Villanova University)
This seminar explores the methodological possibilities emerging in historicism’s wake. Aiming to move beyond presentism and periodization, we investigate new methods for approaching early modern literature, including modes of inquiry adapted from other disciplines and those some see as anachronistic, such as methods that engage with media and technology. The seminar invites literary analysis papers that experiment with method as well as metacritical reflections and methodological manifestos.
Digital Approaches to Book History
Andie Silva (York College, CUNY)
Whitney Trettien (University of Pennsylvania)
Digital platforms expand opportunities for scholars to study rare books; to trace early modern textual production and circulation; and to remediate texts using OCR, 3D modelling, multispectral imaging, text encoding, and social network analysis. We invite papers that engage with or produce new resources, including upcoming or in-progress tools, electronic editions, digitization, digital bibliography. We especially encourage papers working at the intersection of digital pedagogy and book history.
Disability in the Global Renaissance
Elizabeth B. Bearden (University of Wisconsin)
Katherine Schaap Williams (University of Toronto)
How might attention to concepts of early modern disability productively “crip” critical constructions of the global Renaissance? In Crip Times, Robert McRuer suggests that to crip scholarly discourse is to recenter disabled bodies and minds and expose how demands for ability become naturalized within cultural norms. This seminar invites papers that consider the forms of physical and intellectual difference that Renaissance texts engage as they take stock of an emerging global imagination.
Dramatic Verse
Andrew Mattison (University of Toledo)
Why did dramatic verse continue to exist once plays in prose were common and blank verse made line breaks harder to hear? In other words, what difference do the distinctions between verse and prose make? This seminar will explore treatments of verse by playwrights, scribes, compositors, readers, and actors to explore the importance of verse to genre and theater. Both small- and largescale approaches are welcome, from analyses of individual passages to treatments of historical trends in dramatic writing.
Early Drama and Performance: Contexts and Challenges
Thomas Betteridge (Brunel University London)
Eleanor Rycroft (University of Bristol)
Greg Walker (University of Edinburgh)
This seminar will focus on the secular and religious drama of the early sixteenth century. It invites papers that explore or exemplify approaches informed by practice-based research, exploration of space through performance, and/or historical contextualisation. It will examine the challenges of using practice to illuminate often partial traces of ephemeral performances, and how they might be addressed, and/or the benefits of exploring later playhouse drama in the context of earlier traditions.
Early Mod Cons
Rob Carson (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
Eric Francis Langley (University College London)
This seminar invites papers about topics beginning with the prefix “con-” and its variant forms—and thus topics such as conspiracy, contagion, conscience, consent, commodity, constancy, commonwealth, correspondence, collaboration, confession, and conversion—in order to open up a conversation about early modern collectivity. How did shared experience shape early modern conceptions of community and of the self? Approaches via queer philology and historical phenomenology are particularly welcome.
Early Modern Women’s Anger
Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University)
Laura E. Kolb (Baruch College, CUNY)
The Renaissance inherited a strong tradition of delegitimizing women’s anger. Yet early modern women and female characters experienced and expressed anger: in letters and diaries, plays and poems, prose and verse. This seminar explores representations of women’s anger alongside the structures that both motivated and suppressed it. Collectively, we will consider anger’s sources, its forms, and the kinds of knowledge and action it makes possible.
Ecologies and/of Resistance
Jennifer A. Munroe (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Amy L. Tigner (University of Texas, Arlington)
“Ecologies and/of Resistance” aims to consider questions of the “ecological” with those related to gender, race, and/or class both to identify alternative modes of resistance in the early modern period and to rectify what are and will continue to be their complex intersections. We look to foster conversation about how the various strands within early modern ecostudies might redress these crises by accounting for both for “nature” and “culture” as we posit alternative pathways of resistance.
Edition/Copy: New Approaches to Reading and Editing Early Modern Books
Sponsored by SHARP, the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
Claire M. L. Bourne (Pennsylvania State University)
Andrew S. Keener (Santa Clara University)
This seminar invites participants to reflect on the treatment of early modern printed texts as exceptional (i.e., as unique copies) rather than exemplary (i.e., as representatives of larger editions) in the way we have come to practice book history, theater and performance studies, and textual editing. We welcome papers that explore the history, historiography, uses, methods, readings, and dramaturgical implications of “edition vs. copy,” in addition to any potential pitfalls of either approach.
Experiential/Experimental Knowledge in Shakespeare
Pavneet Singh Aulakh (Vanderbilt University)
James Kearney (University of California, Santa Barbara)
This seminar invites papers that reflect on experiential or experimental knowledge in early modern drama. We encourage contributors to cast a wide net in exploring how new or old forms of knowing intersect with the art of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers might address these issues from historical, phenomenological, political, or ethical perspectives or in terms of cognitive studies, histories of science, histories of the emotions, or discourses of the body.
The Favorite
Julie A. Crawford (Columbia University)
The favorite benefited from some of the privileges enjoyed by the friend, but also much of the opprobrium heaped on the flatterer. This seminar is interested in the philosophies that subtended the favorite’s position and ethics; the categories of social difference that rendered them legible; their key postures and other bodily practices; the challenges they pose for editors; and their renascence in current popular takes on the Renaissance.
Global Performance and Adaptations of Macbeth
Sponsored by the European Shakespeare Research Association
Juan F. Cerdá (Universidad de Murcia)
Paul Prescott (University of Warwick)
We invite papers that chart Macbeth’s non-Anglophone reception from the seventeenth century to the present in any media or form; we particularly welcome papers that address the relocation of the play’s ideological or identity boundaries within specific historical and theoretical contexts, connecting local interventions and reception to the play’s history and their role in broader regional, national, or transnational contexts.
Good Governance
Mark Netzloff (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee)
This seminar examines early modern governance and the relation of literary production to practices of political life. It also explores literary, historical, and theoretical models of good governance: civic virtue; advice and counsel; diplomacy and other forms of governmental service; the political and/as the happy or good life. Papers dealing with non-Shakespearean literary texts, political writings, historical case-studies, and theoretical or transhistorical approaches are encouraged.
Keeping Care in Early Modern England
Rebecca Totaro (Florida Gulf Coast University)
This seminar will examine “keeping care” for others in post-Reformation England, especially as represented by Spenser, Shakespeare, and women writers. Natural disasters and the halt of Catholic relief efforts renewed questions of who needed, provided, and paid for this care. Papers might consider caregiving and characters (e.g., Spenser’s Belphoebe, Shakespeare’s Ariel, Wroth’s Denia) and/or in A View; associated affective dimensions; care networks; archival finds; and/or uncompensated labor.
Locating Lucrece in the Twenty-First Century
Miriam E. Jacobson (University of Georgia)
Shakespeare’s second narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, was hugely popular in its time, enjoying multiple publications, citations, and even a poetic sequel by Middleton. What accounted for this popularity then, and how can we read Shakespeare’s Lucrece (the character, the poem) today, in light of current cultural and political conversations? This seminar invites papers that examine Lucrece from multiple perspectives.
London’s Indoor Playhouses
Christopher Highley (Ohio State University)
This seminar invites participants to explore the identities of, and relationships among, London’s indoor playhouses in the early modern period. Why did these “private” houses open when and where they did? Were they in a competitive or codependent relationship with each other and with the public ampitheaters? Did each indoor venue develop a distinct house style and repertory and were these different repertories in conversation with one another? And what do we know about actual playgoers?
Marlowe and Early Shakespeare
Sarah Dustagheer (University of Kent)
Andrew J. Power (University of Sharjah)
What does it mean to say a work is early? This seminar invites papers on Marlowe and Shakespeare that address “earliness” in relation to the length of both authors’ careers, to the arc of their lives, to the educational and developmental factors that influenced their work, or to other literary and theatrical aspects of authorship, performance, and criticism. Papers that address new discoveries and new developments that contextualize Marlowe and Shakespeare scholarship and/or early modern theater are particularly welcome.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: New Perspectives
Sarah Lewis (King’s College London)
Gillian Woods (Birkbeck University of London)
This seminar invites fresh investigations of all aspects of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Possible themes include: New Formalist explorations of its linguistic, spatial and ideological structures; eco-critical and animal studies approaches to its climatic concerns and metamorphic action; analysis of desire through queer theory; work on embodiment, phenomenology and the senses; investigations of the comedy’s music and dance; and studies of its global performance history and multi-media adaptations.
Money and Magic on the Renaissance Stage
David Hawkes (Arizona State University)
In early modern England, the legitimization of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce, while the fetishistic adoration of liturgical icons gave rise to Reformation iconoclasm, and widespread anxiety about the magical deployment of performative symbols produced the pan-European witch-hunts. The theater provided an apt medium in which such developments could be debated and displayed. This seminar will study treatments of performative representation on the early modern English stage.
Multiple Worlds: Early Modern Theater and Reformation Cosmology
James A. Knapp (Loyola University Chicago)
The early modern period witnessed important debates over the existence and nature of multiple worlds. This seminar invites papers that explore the intersections of these debates and the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. All approaches are welcome. Topics may include: analogies between actual and imagined worlds, world making, Leibnitzian compossibility, the Americas as a “new world,” human and non-human worlds, among other cosmological subjects.
New Philologies
Marjorie Rubright (University of Massachusetts)
Stephen Spiess (Babson College)
This seminar will examine the (re)turn to philology and explore new avenues for thinking philologically in our early modern engagements. We invite methodologically self-conscious papers that address the recent scholarship of new, queer, feminist, trans*, transnational, race, and/or eco- philologies. Participants might: introduce a new method for reading early modern words; explore the benefits and limitations of related hermeneutics; and/or attend to broader aspects of English lexical culture.
“New Worlds,” New Approaches
Olga L. Valbuena (Wake Forest University)
Who noticed “the augmentation of the Indies”? This seminar addresses England’s global aspirations and permeable borders in light of colonial bodies, territory, objects, and privateering in Mexico and the Indies. Did the theater naturalize, commoditize, or further estrange new “wonders”? Did audiences gain perspectives different from official state discourses? Topics might include religion, trade, invasion, and trans/nationalism in plays, polemic, and narrative in well- and lesser-known texts.
Performing Digital Shakespeare
Aneta Mancewicz (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Recent applications of motion capture and virtual reality in Shakespeare productions (e.g. the RSC’s The Tempest, 2016) suggest that as digital tools are becoming more interactive and immersive, they offer new opportunities for performing Shakespeare. The seminar proposes to evaluate digital productions in a global context, examine how Shakespeare’s plays lend themselves to such practice, and explore the cultural implications of digital Shakespeare performance on stage, film, online, and beyond.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland)
Deanne Williams (York University)
Review and discussion of recent approaches and new concerns in the evaluation of Pericles, Prince of Tyre. One of the most popular Globe hits, the play later fell into contempt and obscurity. In the midtwentieth century, it was an object of more favorable critical scrutiny, and has recently had widespread and repeated success in performance, and been a key work in arguments about attribution. What ways of thinking through this history and its implications are of current critical interest?
Playing in Rep
Laurie Johnson (University of Southern Queensland)
Elizabeth E. Tavares (Pacific University)
Early English professional players relied on the repertory system—performing a different play every day of the week rather than runs of a single play—for financial success. This seminar invites archival, practitioner, and theoretical explorations of the ways in which performing “in rep” conditioned the early modern performance event. How did the rep system influence enskillment in players? The playgoer experience? What is its role in Shakespeare festivals today? Or in video-on-demand services?
Public Shakespeares and New Media: Critical Approaches
Devori Kimbro (University of Tennessee, Chattanooga)
Michael Noschka (Paradise Valley Community College)
Geoffrey Way (Arizona State University)
This seminar explores how new media foster engagement between Shakespeareans, institutions, and public audiences through evolving frameworks and methodologies. What are the benefits and pitfalls of such new media engagement? How can fostering such engagement offer new ways of reaching the public with our work in Shakespeare and humanities education in general? We encourage critical and creative work around inventive approaches of all types that connect public audiences with Shakespeare.
Reviving Phillip Massinger
Gina M. Di Salvo (University of Tennessee)
John M. Kuhn (SUNY, Binghamton)
This seminar invites papers that address any aspect of the work of the Caroline playwright Philip Massinger (1583-1640). Papers might address Massinger’s work in relation to: religion, meta-theater and ritual, history, geography, questions of genre, economic ideas, or representations of gender, race, or nation. Papers are also welcome on Massinger as a theater professional, his lost plays, his biography, his poetry, his place in the canon, his afterlives, or his work as a collaborator.
Shakespeare after Queer Theory
Anthony Guy Patricia (Concord University)
This seminar invites papers that engage with queer theory and the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Topics participants may explore include: critiques of extant queer readings; the crafting of new queer interpretations; the role of queer theory in textual editing; the possibilities for queer theory in performance studies and histories; the queer pleasure(s) the study of early modern literature engenders; and the debate between historicism and unhistoricism.
Shakespeare and Civil Conflict
Mark Bayer (University of Texas, San Antonio)
Joseph Navitsky (West Chester University)
What happens when both parties to a dispute enlist Shakespeare to support their cause? We welcome papers that examine any aspect of how Shakespeare has been implicated in civil conflict, rivalry, resistance, competition, or polemic. Participants might examine how Shakespeare has been appropriated in armed conflicts like the English Civil War or the American Civil War, but also in less familiar civil contests, or even the wars of words that abound during these critical historical junctures.
Shakespeare and Class
Chris Fitter (Rutgers University, Camden)
The New Social History has revealed not only plebeian anger and resistance to elite rule, but Shakespeare’s familiarity with underclass protest. We ask: Can we speak of class-consciousness in Shakespeare’s England? Should we reassess class conflict in Shakespeare’s, or others’, plays? Are they consistent towards poverty? What reflections are there of social policy (bastardy, drunkenness, vagrancy, curfew, dancing, Poor Law)? Did performances manipulate class divisions within the theaters?
Shakespeare and Linguistic Creativity
Daniel Allen Shore (Georgetown University)
How should we theorize the linguistic creativity of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? Can we extract the concept of creativity from the ideological matrix of bourgeois individualism? How might we move beyond debates over whether Shakespeare possessed or coined the most words? This seminar welcomes papers that draw on recent developments in linguistics, quantitative and qualitative corpus methods, and advances in Natural Language Processing, as well as those that practice close reading.
Shakespeare and Sanctuary
Urvashi Chakravarty (George Mason University)
Ross Knecht (Emory University)
This seminar explores the relationship between early modern literature and legal and social concepts of sanctuary. In light of the current sanctuary city movement, papers might attend to representations of official and informal sanctuary in Shakespeare’s plays and contemporary texts; the role of immigrants and “strangers”; sanctuary as a “state of exception”; and the stage as a space of refuge. We welcome work which intersects with race and diaspora studies and with queer and disability studies.
Shakespeare and the Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Affect
Bradley J. Irish (Arizona State University)
What does it mean to think about Shakespeare and his contemporaries in terms of the “mind”? This seminar will consider early modern literature through all manners of psychology, both historical and modern. Approaches might include cognition, emotion, affect, theory of mind, historical psychology, Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, etc.
Shakespeare and Virtual Reality
David McInnis (University of Melbourne)
Stephen Wittek (Carnegie Mellon University)
This seminar will consider representations of Shakespearean drama in virtual reality and speculate as to how the medium might impact the production, teaching, and meaning of Shakespeare in years to come. Projects that intersect with performance studies, film studies, and media studies are particularly welcome. Potential areas of focus include: soliloquies and interiority; documentation of theatrical experience; pedagogy; spatiality; embodiment; production; affect; interactivity; and adaptation.
Shakespeare and Virtue
Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine)
Donovan H. Sherman (Seton Hall University)
In antiquity, virtue was in no way simply synonymous with morality or a code of behavior but instead concerned the powers, capacities, and ends of human and nonhuman actors. Shakespeare’s plays stage both virtue (the capacity of ensouled beings for action) and virtues (the palette of attributes and skills that shape conduct in the world). We invite approaches to the virtues that cut across philosophy, performance and pedagogy and contribute to environmental and medical humanities.
Shakespeare in/on the Borderlands
Elizabeth V. Acosta (El Paso Community College)
Victoria Muñoz (Hostos Community College, CUNY)
In light of the current political climate around immigration and borders, this seminar considers the teaching of Shakespeare and/on the borderlands. We are especially interested in papers from scholars living in borderland communities. How does teaching on the borderlands shape your pedagogy or scholarship? How does Shakespeare factor into the everyday lives of those living on the border? We also welcome papers that consider how a methodological focus on the borderland contributes to teaching about power, identity, struggle, and agency, and related issues in Shakespeare.
Shakespeare Studies and the Idea of the Interface
Lauren Shohet (Villanova University)
What Shakespeare scholarship might emerge from considering the “interface”: the liminal space where deeply different entities must somehow be functionally mediated? How could ideas of interface help us think about intersections of past and present, actor and character, stage and page, figurative and real? How might the simultaneous transparency and undeniable fictiveness of computer interfaces like “windows” and “desktops” and “trashcans” illuminate parallel problems in Shakespeare studies?
Shakespeare, Music, and Dance
Lynsey McCulloch (Coventry University)
Amy Rodgers (Mount Holyoke College)
This seminar brings together specialists in literature, music, and dance to discuss Shakespeare’s use of sound and movement as features of his staged output. Shakespeare’s employment, and enjoyment, of music and dance has since been matched by the frequent adaptation of his works by composers and choreographers. But, despite the co-dependant nature of music and dance, Shakespeareans have been slow to examine this intermedial relationship. This seminar will provide a forum for such discussion.
The Shakespearean Death Arts
William E. Engel (Sewanee: The University of the South)
Grant Williams (Carleton University)
This seminar invites a range of historical and comparative investigations of how Shakespeare and his contemporaries mobilized the death arts—the period’s plurality of memento mori allusions and artifacts, meditative exercises, commemorative practices, and funereal rituals. Which plays from the period engage most pointedly and extensively with these arts; what about the theatrical, philosophical, and sociological rationale behind staging them; how did these plays differ in their staging?
Shakespeare’s “Other Race Plays”
David Sterling Brown (SUNY Binghamton)
What are Shakespeare’s “other race plays?” Why have they been marginalized in critical race discourse? How can reading those 33 plays through a racial lens enhance our scholarship? This seminar moves the issue of Shakespeare and Race forward by sidelining the five “race plays” and asserting that Shakespearean dramas containing all-white characters also permit generative discussions about race. We invite both play-centric and theoretically-oriented papers that mine these alternative literary sites in search of new racial knowledge.
Shakespeare’s Divination
Aaron Wells Kitch (Bowdoin College)
Peter Struck defines divination as an “ontology of universalist materialism” that uncovers secret bonds between things in the cosmos. This seminar considers divination in its broadest sense as any conjunction of human and divine forces, including modes of belief and practice that resist both Protestant and Catholic orthodoxies. Participants may wish to explore augury, oracles, miracles, or prophecies in Shakespeare’s works. Classical, philosophical, and non-Western approaches are also welcome.
Shakespeare’s Shameful Histories
John S. Garrison (Grinnell College)
Kyle A. Pivetti (Norwich University)
Across Shakespeare’s work, the word “shame” appears with striking frequency in the history plays, behind only The Rape of Lucrece. What in this genre inspires consideration of shame? How is shame contained in the past or shared with present audiences and readers? The seminar encourages essays that combine various theories—queer theory, affect studies, or memory studies—with a number of potential sources, such as diaries, conduct manuals, or sermons.
Short Scenes in Shakespeare
William Germano (Cooper Union)
Do not blink or you may miss them: this seminar invites work on the shortest scenes in Shakespeare’s plays. Why are they there? What thematic, psychological, or dramatic function can such brief scenes provide? Our purpose will be to examine the theatrical function of “unnecessary” scenes in Shakespeare, not only to consider their thematic and dramatic purpose within the playtext as a literary construct but to encourage fresh directorial perspectives on the plays in performance.
The Short Script: Forms of and Formulas for Action
Jacqueline Wernimont (Dartmouth College)
Seth S. Williams (Barnard College)
This seminar explores relationships between literature and the wide range of “short scripts,” or formulae, that structured everyday embodied actions: receipts, mnemonics, music and dance notations, books on prayer or penmanship, and more. We welcome submissions involving both recognizable and unexpected kinds of formulaic doing. How do short scripts render daily life performative, or turn making into a form of knowing? Explorations of form, relationality, materiality, and more are encouraged.
The Supernatural and Transcendent in Shakespeare on Screen
Melissa Croteau (California Baptist University)
Lisa S. Starks (University of South Florida, St. Petersburg)
Shakespeare’s plays are replete with supernatural and transcendent moments; however, when his plays are adapted for the screen, the spiritual material poses particular problems for artists. This seminar invites essays from various critical perspectives that explore supernatural and transcendent elements in Shakespearean audio-visual media (adaptations and offshoots) in relation to technological, cultural, historical, political, and theoretical contexts.
Teaching Identity, Inclusion, and Exclusion through Early Modern Drama
Brinda Charry (Keene State College)
Matteo Pangallo (Virginia Commonwealth University)
This seminar invites papers on teaching Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists through explorations of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, or socioeconomic status. Contributions might focus on pedagogical theory, class activities, course design, resources, assignments, or similar topics. The seminar’s goal is to share effective methodologies for helping students connect the study of Shakespeare and early modern drama with the pursuit of equity, inclusion, and social justice.
“Tread the Ooze”: Early Modern Slime
Brent Dawson (University of Oregon)
Lynn M. Maxwell (Spelman College)
This seminar is interested in how Shakespeare and his contemporaries use slime, muck, and other viscous materials. How do early modern authors figure differently “the common muck of the world”? What is the value of these less than savory materials and how are they used to explore issues of gender, procreation, and otherness? To what extent does their status as semisolids matter, and what is their relation to other semi-solids like clay and wax that are attached to more positive possibilities?
Villains and Villainy in Renaissance Drama
David Hershinow (Baruch College, CUNY)
The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed a change in dramatic tastes from the allegorical Vice of an earlier era to a new breed of cunning, psychologically complex stage villain. This seminar invites papers that reflect on the period’s appetite for new kinds of villains and new forms of villainy. Papers across a range of approaches are welcome, including those that focus on gender and sexuality, critical race studies, theodicy, political theory, performance studies, and the new economic criticism.
Watery Thinking: Cognitive and Ecocritical Perspectives on Water in Early Modern Literature
Nicholas Ryan Helms (University of Alabama)
Steve Mentz (St. John’s University)
This seminar will blend cognitive and ecocritical approaches to early modern literature, questioning what role the watery environment plays in how authors think, and how they think about thinking. In particular, we’re interested in how water, as metaphor and feature of the environment, creates affordances and constraints for early modern thought. We would like the seminar to explore how both early modern ecocriticism and contemporary cognitive sciences draw upon water and watery environs.
Women Writers and Political Frameworks
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender
Mihoko Suzuki (University of Miami)
Joanne Wright (University of New Brunswick)
This seminar explores how early modern women writers challenged, subverted, or revised prevailing political frameworks, and attendant philosophical, scientific, and economic categories. Topics can include the disruption of the division between royalist/parliamentarian; understandings of citizenship, family, the church and the rise of capitalism; the hierarchy between human/non-human; literary-historical periodization; and, in light of #MeToo, women’s experiences of violence and abuse.
Young Adult Shakespeare
Jennifer Flaherty (Georgia College)
Deborah Uman (St. John Fisher College)
Starting as early as Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, the impulse to make Shakespeare accessible to young people has inspired adaptations across all forms of media. For this seminar we will consider a range of contributions to YA and children’s Shakespeare, including novels, films, comic books, plays, music, television, games, and web series. We will encourage a variety of approaches, considering the implications of this pop culture phenomenon for our students, our classrooms, and our scholarship.
WORKSHOPS
#MeToo: Staging Sexual Violence in Early Modern Drama
Online Platform: https://metooshakespeare.hcommons.org/
Erin Julian (University of Western Ontario)
Nora J. Williams (Independent Scholar)
The acute visibility of the #MeToo movement has spurred reflection about how we “do” early modern plays in ways that are ethical and intersectional, while acknowledging them as culturally valuable texts. This workshop will explore the limits of current approaches and of what a scholar/practitioner can or should represent, as well as models of successful praxis. We encourage work on dramatists beyond Shakespeare, and we particularly welcome participants identifying as LGBTQI, disabled, and POC.
On Difficulty
Eric S. Mallin (University of Texas, Austin)
This workshop is about interpretation and diplomacy, which is to say, pedagogical problems. Specifically: how can we cope with verbal and ideological difficulty in the classroom? As teachers, how much attention should we pay to the wholly unattractive or utterly obscure moments in Shakespeare plays? We will try to frame some practical solutions for defining and confronting “difficulty”—verbal and cultural entanglement that has become opaque to modern sensibilities—without erasing it.
Shakespeare and Graduate Education
Michelle M. Dowd (University of Alabama)
What is the place of Shakespeare studies in graduate education today? This workshop seeks to foster discussion of curricular structures, practical considerations, and scholarly developments relevant to graduate study and training. Materials produced for the session may include assignments, program requirements, best practices, exam reading lists, analyses of historical trends, or ideas for future directions. Participants at all levels, including current graduate students, are welcome.
Writing “Shakespearean” Fiction
Andrew James Hartley (University of North Carolina, Charlotte)
Many Shakespearean academics are—or aspire to be—literary artists, whether they think of themselves as novelists, short story writers, playwrights or screenwriters. How does our status as professors of the world’s most renowned writer affect the stories we write? What might we pursue in our own literary craft which is in some way “Shakespearean” in scope, genre, political representation etc., and how do such things make our fiction similar to or different from our research and teaching?
47th Annual Meeting
SEMINARS
01. 5PP: Players, Playwrights, Playhouses, Plays, and Parishes
Alan H. Nelson (University of California, Berkeley)
Early Modern playhouses were built in parishes; playhouse owners, players, and playwrights often served as parish officers. Printers resided in parishes, usually in or near their shops. Records of Early English Drama (REED) has shown that parishes produced, consumed, and opposed plays and players. This seminar invites papers on parishes as sites of theatrical activity. Especially welcome will be papers citing parish documents: registers, churchwarden’s accounts, vestry books, etc.
02. Approaches to Aphra Behn’s The Rover: Text, Teaching, and Performance
Elaine Hobby (Loughborough University) and Claire Bowditch (Loughborough University)
This seminar aims to examine Aphra Behn’s best-known play, The Rover, from a range of perspectives, so as to develop new interpretations through the cross-fertilization of methods and contexts. We welcome diverse approaches, from book historians, theatre historians, theater directors, those teaching Behn on undergraduate survey courses, literary historians, and those wishing to relate The Rover to other works by Behn. How might we best approach The Rover in 2019?
03. Art-Religion in Shakespeare
John L. Parker (University of Virginia)
Is there a meaningful difference in Shakespeare between religious devotion and aesthetic appreciation? Iconoclasts at the time argued that the difference, whatever it was supposed to have been, had for centuries been all but lost and that many of their contemporaries mistook the traditional, material props of Christian worship for the object of worship itself; or worse, gave to secular, aesthetic experience their fullest veneration. How does this easy slippage play out in Shakespearean drama?
04. As You Like It: Motley Approaches
Rob Wakeman (Mount Saint Mary College)
Inviting a wide range of critical approaches to As You Like It, this seminar will explore the crosstalk among residents of Arden, female and male, high and low, human and nonhuman. What do the incongruous representations of the forest landscape tell us about the instability of erotic desire? How does the portrayal of human-animal relations inform the play’s take on class consciousness? Does unified nature continuously recede past the horizon, or can we conjure a wholeness from Arden’s disjointed motley?
05. Class as Intersectional Phenomenon in Shakespeare
Laurie Ellinghausen (University of Missouri, Kansas City)
This seminar aims to explore class as an intersectional phenomenon in the texts of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers treating dramatic and non-dramatic genres, as well performance contexts, are welcome. How do imaginative texts use other social categories—such race, religion, or gender—to complicate conventional ideologies of blood, wealth, and occupation? How do non-English settings, within or outside the British Isles, place particular pressure on English class hierarchies?
06. Collecting Shakespeare
Aaron T. Pratt (University of Texas, Austin)
1619 saw the publication of a group of nine playbooks (ten plays) either by or attributed to William Shakespeare. These, the so-called Pavier Quartos, represent the book trade’s first major attempt to position Shakespeare as an author to be collected. This seminar takes their 400th anniversary as an opportunity to consider ways individuals and institutions have collected Shakespeare and other early modern texts in commercial editions and custom assemblages, in excerpts and complete works, and in manuscript, print, and digital forms.
07. Desire and the Nonhuman
Jean E. Feerick (John Carroll University) and Shannon Elizabeth Kelley (Fairfield University)
This seminar addresses wonder, desire, and love for nonhuman life across plant, animal, and mineral kingdoms. How did humans express desire for creatures, plants, or landscapes? And how did nonhuman life express melancholia, joy, or eros? What cognitive and passionate exchanges rippled across species “divisions,” and how does such evidence recalibrate narratives of the early modern period? Possible critical approaches include psychoanalysis, queer theory, disability studies, and ecocriticism.
08. Disability and Its Intersections
Allison P. Hobgood (Willamette University) and Jonathan Hsy (George Washington University)
How does premodern disability studies intersect with critical race studies, queer theory, and other minoritarian modes of analysis? This seminar invites “crosstalk” among premodernists working on disability and identitarian intersections. It brings together medievalists and early modernists across discipline and periodization schemes to examine how disability interacts with race and other identities, and it centers intersectional approaches that transform our understandings of the past.
09. Early Modern Disability Methodologies
Genevieve Love (Colorado College) and Katherine Schaap Williams (New York University, Abu Dhabi)
This seminar encourages participants to push early modern disability studies beyond Richard III, and beyond Shakespeare, to consider disability representations and methodologies that exceed the indexing of subjective or historical experience. We invite papers that theorize the future of early modern disability studies, thinking about disability in relation to, for example, form, theatricality, temporality, affect, poetics, textual studies, periodization, and aesthetics.
10. Early Modern Sexual Knowledge
James Bromley (Miami University)
This seminar focuses on the construction and obstruction of early modern sexual knowledge. How does sexual knowledge circulate in/through early modern literature and culture? How do absences and asymmetries of knowledge shape representations and interpretations of early modern sex? Papers might consider early modern representations of the nexus of sex and knowledge and/or examine the present-day conditions that foster and frustrate efforts to produce knowledge about early modern sex.
11. Ecomaterialism and Performance
Todd Andrew Borlik (University of Huddersfield) and Randall Martin (University of New Brunswick)
This seminar invites papers that traverse the crossroads of ecocriticism and performance studies. Contributors will be encouraged to explore the confluence of place, matter, and motion in theatrical performance to consider how the Shakespearean stage can enact a new environmental ethics. We especially solicit papers that approach Shakespearean drama as encompassing more-than-human assemblages or ensembles that blur the distinctions between person, place, and thing.
12. Environments of Justice
Chris Barrett (Louisiana State University) and Sarah Higinbotham (Emory University)
This seminar invites work on the intersections of environment and justice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature and its contexts. How do the representations of place, nature, animals, and ecology intertwine with law and legal discourse? Topics might include the administration of justice in green spaces; the laws of the forest; litigation and public discourse of pollution, deforestation, or other landscape interventions; animal trials and animal justice; and more.
13. Fellowship in Shakespeares Time
Nathan Szymanski (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) and Stephen Guy-Bray (University of British Columbia)
This seminar aims to recover early modern ideas of fellowship as they overlap with or are distinguished from ideas of friendship, alliance, competition, and rivalry in the period. We welcome diverse approaches to the above topic, from queer and philological to affective and historical. How might early modern ideas of fellowship (and cognate terms and ideas, including “fellowships” between women) animate or challenge broader theories of same-sex relations in the period?
14. First-Personal Shakespeare
Sara Coodin (University of Oklahoma) and Ambereen Dadabhoy (Harvey Mudd College)
From Montaigne’s remarks on selfhood in “Of Friendship” to Othello’s plea to “speak of me as I am,” the first-personal has both underwritten claims to knowledge and been seen as a source of limitation. In what ways are claims to authority and moral insight grounded in or troubled by the first-personal in the work of Shakespeare and his critical interpreters? How has the first-personal been viewed as a locus for bias or ethnic difference? Papers are welcome on both early modern and modern contexts.
15. Iberian Romance and Its English Afterlives
Joyce Boro (Université de Montréal) and Louise Wilson (Liverpool Hope University)
This seminar examines the impact of Iberian romance on the literary culture of early modern England with a particular focus on the interconnections between the romances, their translations, and the drama of Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, and others. The aim is to open up transnational approaches to early modern drama and popular reading. Potential topics include: the romances as dramatic intertexts; publication and reading; translation and transmission; transnationalism and national identity.
16. Invisible Presences: Detecting the Unseen in Renaissance Drama
Jonathan A. Walker (Portland State University) and Andrew Sofer (Boston College)
Invisible and unseen phenomena in drama create perceptual, affective, and epistemological tensions with the ocular proofs of the stage. This seminar probes the relationship between onstage and offstage action and spaces; between dramatic and narrative forms, time, and ways of knowing; and between materially absent but dramatically essential events and what playgoers see and hear. Participants may consider how unseen events make their way to the stage and into the consciousness of playgoers.
17. Jacobean Hispanophilia and English Drama
Eric John Griffin (Millsaps College) and Alexander Samson (University College London)
This seminar seeks papers that explore what the drama of the Jacobean period reveals about 17th century England’s fascination with things Spanish, whether in the literary sphere or in other cultural fields. We are particularly interested in papers that work comparatively, between English dramas and their Spanish sources, or between Jacobean views of Spain and earlier Elizabethan constructions of Spain by Shakespeare and other playwriting contemporaries.
18. The King’s Men and Their Playwrights
James J. Marino (Cleveland State University) and Meghan C. Andrews (Lycoming College)
This seminar examines drama written for the King’s/Lord Chamberlain’s playing company by playwrights other than Shakespeare. Papers are invited on non-Shakespearean plays in light of a range of topics, such as the company’s repertory, membership, status, and resources. Contributors may also consider Shakespeare’s plays in dialogue with the rest of this company’s repertory and corporate history.
19. Law, Literature, and Constitutional Authority
Stephanie Elsky (Rhodes College) and Rayna Kalas (Cornell University)
This seminar will explore literature’s involvement in constitutional principles, crises, and debates. What is the constitution’s life beyond political institutions? Is there a connection between premodern and modern constitutionalism? Possible topics: common law and the “ancient constitution”; rights and liberties; collective authority and consent; race and nation; rhetorics of “native” and “foreign”; literary form in relation to law and/or governance; constitutions and periodization.
20. London as a Theatrical Space
Tracey Hill (Bath Spa University) and Andrew Gordon (University of Aberdeen)
Theater history is a field that is generating much fresh knowledge and interpretation. It thus seems timely to explore the reciprocity of theater/performance and London space. This seminar seeks to go beyond the citation of topographical references in stage plays to consider theatrical and spectacular uses of space more directly. We are interested in work that reflects on the nature of urban performance and how that impacts on our understanding of early modern theatricality.
21. London Incorporated: Theater and Institutional Life
Christi Spain-Savage (Siena College) and Jordan Windholz (Shippensburg University)
This seminar invites papers on the material or discursive exchanges between the theater and London civic or economic institutions. Essays might trace the material relationships between London playhouses and the prisons, hospitals, halls, or churches of their respective neighborhoods. Also welcome are papers that address this topic more broadly: how were discourses within institutions shared, absorbed, or transformed by other institutions and what was the theater’s role in this process?
22. Manuscripts and Early Modern Drama
Ivan Lupić (Stanford University) and Misha Teramura (University of Toronto)
What can manuscripts say about the production, performance, transmission, and reception of early modern drama? Possible topics include: playhouse documents and manuscript plays; authorship and anonymity; scribes, censors, patrons, collectors, playgoers; manuscripts and the dramatic canon; the editing of manuscript drama; excerpts and marginalia; forgeries. What are the challenges of producing scholarship based on manuscript sources? What role does technology play in manuscript studies? Can dramatic manuscripts be studied in transnational contexts?
23. Minor Affects and Feelings in Early Modern Environs
Tripthi Pillai (Coastal Carolina University)
This seminar focuses on minor feelings and affective hinterlands in early modern environs. How are minor feelings like boredom, irritation, unhappiness, playfulness, and willfulness connected to affective experiences of temporal and spatial belonging and unbelonging? How do minor affects inform broader notions of objecthood and personhood? Participants are encouraged to adopt and/or combine diverse theoretical, historical, and aesthetic approaches to explore any variety of minor affects or feelings.
24. Modern Scholarly Editions: Challenges and Opportunities
Martin Butler (University of Leeds) and Jennifer Richards (Newcastle University)
This seminar invites papers on how the idea of the “complete works” has changed for Shakespeare and other writers. What opportunities, obstacles and pressures are now encountered by collected editions? What are the consequences of the need to make authors look new? How has digital or multiple-platform editing changed the landscape? Can the ethos of single-author editions survive new thinking about collaboration, revision and production? What might be the future shape of a collected works?
25. Navigating Early Modern Interfaces
Meaghan J. Brown (Folger Shakespeare Library)
This seminar invites participants to think about the history of information organization in the early modern period and how early modern books and other informational objects are being remediated and reused in digital environments. Beyond transcribed texts, how do users encounter maps, volvelles, wax tablets, and tally-sticks online? How can the functional affordances of a range of early modern media inform new digital interfaces for exploring and understanding early modern cultures online?
26. Occult Agents in Shakespeare
Mary Floyd-Wilson (University of North Carolina)
Early modern texts often attribute effects, behaviors, and actions to a host of subtle influences, such as stars, planets, demons, spirits, air, and poison. This seminar examines the role of invisible forces in early modern literature. How might the presence of secret sympathies, hidden devils, or “auspicious stars” shape our understanding of personhood, gender, or emotion? How does drama represent the unseen? Theological, scientific, environmental, political, & theatrical approaches welcome.
27. #OpenSecrets
Marjorie Rubright (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Kathryn Vomero Santos (Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi)
What constitutes the “open secret” in Shakespeare? In the wake of the #MeToo movement this seminar calls for rigorous reevaluation of what Shakespeare’s works offer to feminist critics. What might it mean to read for “movements” rather than “moments” of sexual empowerment? As feminism becomes more intersectional and amplifies a wider range of voices, we seek fresh methodological approaches to guide future directions of feminist Shakespearean scholarship, teaching, and community engagement.
28. Performing Women/Performing Gender in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond
Melinda Gough (McMaster University)
What new questions are generated about gender in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries once we take seriously the documentary evidence now available concerning early modern women’s performance history? How can knowledge of women’s performance in Italy, Spain, France, and northern Europe, and of encounters between continental mixed-gender and all-male English companies through travel or contact at court, change how we approach these plays as students and teachers, literary critics, editors, and/or theater practitioners?
29. Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser
Leah J. Whittington (Harvard University) and Joe Moshenska (University of Oxford)
Scholars of literature have recently sought alternatives to hermeneutic suspicion, arguing that criticism can be characterized by openness, receptivity, and pleasure. This seminar turns to Shakespeare and Spenser—a pairing that seems both inescapable and elusive—and asks how their works shed light on the risks and pleasures of interpretation. We seek methodologically self-conscious papers that address these two authors, emphasizing the role of affect, emotion, pleasure, and sensation.
30. Populist Shakespeare Today
Wes D. Pearce (University of Regina) and Peter Kuling (University of Ottawa)
At this moment of resurgent populist politics around the English-speaking world, different social groups are re-casting Shakespeare as a populist (as opposed to popular) playwright. These efforts reconceive the plays of Shakespeare as populist plays for everyone and not the singular domain of the elite, yet in doing so they query the denotation of politically charged terms such as “elite” and “popular.” We welcome all papers on the implications of Shakespeare understood as “the people’s playwright.”
31. Print, Conservation, and Waste
Sarah Wall-Randell (Wellesley College) and Lina Perkins Wilder (Connecticut College)
This seminar examines waste, re-use, conservation, and loss in print culture. Papers may consider conservation in the literal sense of the re-use of old material, as when “waste” paper like medieval manuscript leaves turns up used as paste-downs or spine-liners in printed books, for example, or when old rags are re-used to make paper; or engage with the more metaphorical re-use of content, as when writers re-tell old fictions, and when books are reprinted in new editions and different formats.
32. Provincial Shakespeare
Katherine A. Gillen (Texas A&M University, San Antonio) and Marissa Greenberg (University of New Mexico)
This seminar reclaims the provincial as a theoretical framework. Rather than seeing Shakespeare as cosmopolitan, we begin with the provincial—defined variously as regional, microcultural, and borderland. Using a transhistorical approach, we examine the provincial in Shakespeare’s period and our own. We invite position papers that provoke new ways of thinking provincially about Shakespeare and locality, identity, performance, adaptation, pedagogy, social difference, and political activism.
33. Race and/as Affect in Early Modern Literature
Carol Mejia LaPerle, (Wright State University)
What is the affective experience of processes of racialization in early modern literature? The seminar invites papers exploring the affective economies that contribute to depictions of race, constructions of difference, performances of foreignness, emotions in global engagements, and sensations that attend early modern racial ideologies. In our research and teaching, how does feeling race and racializing emotions inform and intersect with religion, gender, class, sexuality, and (dis)abilities?
34. Race: Comparative and Transnational Approaches
Noémie N’Diaye (Carnegie Mellon University) and Emily Weissbourd (Lehigh University)
This seminar examines race and ethnicity in early modern English culture from comparative and transnational perspectives. Papers might address the difference and resemblance between English and continental racial cultures; the circulation, (mis)translation, and repurposing of racial tropes across cultures; and the role of visual, musical, and performance cultures in fostering a transnational dissemination of racial ideas and representations. Co-authored and interdisciplinary papers are welcome.
35. Refuge in Shakespeare’s Europe
Stephen O’Neill (National University of Ireland, Maynooth)
This seminar invites papers exploring the intersection of Shakespeare and Europe’s refugee crisis. Participants might consider how we can ethically apply Shakespeare to humanitarian crisis. Is there a principle of refuge and empathy for the displaced in Shakespeare? What European values, histories and futures are modeled there? Historical and theoretical contributions are welcome, as are those that address a range of media and practices that forge direct engagements with stories of refuge.
36. Shakespeare and Cultural Appropriation
Vanessa I. Corredera (Andrews University) and Geoffrey Way (Washburn University)
This seminar considers varied forms of cultural appropriation, or misappropriation, within and of Shakespeare. What cultures does Shakespeare use or mis-use? Where can we locate cultural appropriation in modern re-tellings of Shakespeare? What cultures appropriate Shakespeare and why? What can these cultural appropriations tell us about the commodity of Shakespeare to particular cultures, or the commodity of particular cultures to Shakespeare? We invite wide-ranging methods and approaches.
37. Shakespeare and “Minor” Dramatists
Tom Rutter (University of Sheffield) and David McInnis (University of Melbourne)
This seminar considers the relationship between Shakespeare and “minor” dramatists of the early modern period (including “anon”). This may take the form of influence, collaboration, company affiliation, critical reception, etc.; papers may also challenge the categories of “major” and “minor,” address processes shaping canon-formation, or contest the marginalization of specific dramatists. The convenors are willing to consider proposals on minor dramatists that do not relate them to Shakespeare.
38. Shakespeare and the District
Richard Finkelstein (University of Mary Washington) and Maya Mathur (University of Mary Washington)
The seminar addresses the influence of Shakespeare’s legacy on Washington’s institutions; and how race and class have shaped Shakespeare’s legacy in the capital, both in productions of his works and perceptions of his cultural status. We invite papers on Shakespeare and the presidency; Shakespeare and government institutions; Shakespeare in Washington’s schools; appropriations set in Washington; the repertory and funding of the city’s theaters; and segregation and Shakespeare.
39. Shakespeare and Visual Cultures, Old and New
Howard Marchitello (Rutgers University, Camden) and Stephen Orgel (Stanford University)
This seminar examines visual Shakespeare across historical periods and forms—painting, portraiture, sculpture, photography, film, digital media, graphic novels—and their venues: the museum, the book, the Internet. Diverse theoretical approaches are encouraged—iconology, phenomenology, aesthetics, systems theory. Essay topics may include image-specific studies, as well as studies meant to embrace or to contest theoretical understandings of visual cultures and their strategies and goals.
40. Shakespeare at Scale
Brett D. Greatley-Hirsch (University of Leeds) and Anupam Basu (Washington University in St. Louis)
We invite theoretical papers on, and case studies of, the quantitative study of Shakespeare, his works, and/or those of his contemporaries at scale (macro, meso, micro). Topics other than authorship attribution are welcome, including (but not limited to) numerical studies of language, form, genre, and style, computational analysis of literary and theatrical networks, and quantitative histories of editing, publishing, curriculum, criticism, and performance.
41. Shakespeare in Central and Eastern Europe (cancelled)
William Ingram (University of Michigan) and Halyna Olexiyivna Pastushuk (Ukranian Catholic University)
In Central and Eastern Europe, Shakespeare’s plays, while used for political ends, have a life beyond politics. We ask scholars of (and from) these countries to reflect upon current Shakespearean scholarship in the region. Papers on issues of translation are welcome, as are approaches embracing literary and historical criticism, including early-modern relations between English drama and the places where it penetrated in print and performance, as occurred throughout the region.
42. Shakespeare in Film History
Gregory M. Colón Semenza (University of Connecticut, Storrs)
In spite of increased sensitivity within Adaptation Studies to the importance of history for adaptation and appropriation, the literary text too often continues to dominate the conception and structure of most studies of literature on film. This seminar seeks to redress this imbalance by exploring how Shakespeare films have functioned and evolved in the context of the film industry. Papers are welcome on the cultural and political forces at work in various eras of film history from 1895-2018.
43. Shakespeare on the Contemporary Regional Stage
Niamh J. O’Leary (Xavier University) and Jayme M. Yeo (Belmont University)
This seminar focuses on Shakespeare as produced on the local stage; the impact of performance in the regional community; and the interaction of actors, academics, and audiences at the local level. How might we understand these productions’ impact on our evolving sense of Shakespeare’s work? What theories or vocabularies best contextualize regional productions? Topics may include reconsidering “the local,” embedded scholarship, digital mediations, specific productions, or pedagogical engagements.
44. Shakespeare, Race, and the Practical Humanities
Ian Smith (Lafayette College)
How practical are the humanities? The seminar engages an ongoing broad cultural conversation about the practicality of the humanities by focusing on race—stubbornly real and consequential in defining identities, relationships, and our politics in today’s increasingly demographically plural society. The seminar asks specifically: What role might the intersection of Shakespeare and race play while sharpening the conversation about the future and social relevance of the humanities?
45. Shakespeare the Documentary
Mark Thornton Burnett (Queen’s University, Belfast)
The documentary is a genre and mode tied closely to Shakespeare. A cinematic method, documentaries offer spaces for rehabilitative projects, intercultural collaboration and theatrical experiment. How does the Shakespearean documentary address questions of politics and censorship? Are there distinct traditions? What connections are there in terms of race, gender and class? This seminar will explore relevant examples, approaches and themes, making visible an area accorded little attention.
46. Shakespearean Revulsions
Claire McEachern (University of California, Los Angeles)
Many descriptions of our relations to literary characters rely on a vocabulary of affiliation and connection: identification, empathy, exemplarity, compassion, emulation and so on. Yet the coarser feelings also play a part in the kinds of connections we make (or do not make) to Shakespeare’s characters. Envy, disgust, horror and resentment (for instance) also come into play. How might we theorize the role of such antipathies in our relation to literary character?
47. Shakespearean Skies: Weather and Climate
Sophie Chiari (Université Clermont Auvergne) and Sophie Lemercier-Goddard (ENS Université de Lyon)
To Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the sky was both a spiritual entity and a daily object of study. This seminar will favor an eco-critical perspective, exploring representations of the sky in popular wisdom, its nature, habitat, atmosphere, its materiality for geographers, cosmographers, country people or city-dwellers, as well as the “heavens” of the playhouse. Did perceptions change over the 16th and 17th centuries, and if they did, could this suggest the advent of an epistemological change?
48. Shakespeare’s Enemies
Paul D. Menzer (Mary Baldwin University) and Jeremy Lopez (University of Toronto)
This seminar invites proposals from scholars who wish to explore the labile properties of Shakespearean animus. We welcome essays on a particular writer’s agonistic engagement with Shakespeare, historical treatments of his aesthetic offenses, or presentist critiques of his cultural dominance. Ultimately, the seminar convenes a conversation about what it has meant – at various times and places – to hold in distaste or even disdain the individual at the heart of our profession.
49. Shakespeare’s Forms
Emily Shortslef (University of Kentucky) and Erin K. Kelly (California State University, Chico)
Drawing on the expansive notion of form outlined in Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015), this seminar invites papers examining patterns, shapes, and configurations of any sort (words, things, people, time, physical space) in and across Shakespeare’s works. What affordances and constraints do these forms offer? How do they shape theatrical performance? What social relations do they model? Papers on the implications of form for historicist, theoretical, and performance-based approaches are welcome.
50. Shakespeare’s Greek
Andrew J. Fleck (University of Texas, El Paso) and John Garrison (Grinnell College)
How is Shakespeare in dialogue with Greek authors and ideas? Papers might discuss his reception of ancient Greek theatrical practices, thinking about the genres, formal elements of poetics, or sexual norms, as well as address questions about history and periodization. We invite a range of interpretative approaches, including gender and sexuality studies; genre studies; literary history; performance theory; philology; and theater history.
51. Shakespeare’s Language: Changing Methods
Alysia Kolentsis (St. Jerome’s University) and Lynne Magnusson (University of Toronto)
With socio-historical linguistics sketching out micro-histories of language change, with ambitious digital projects re-imagining the scale of rhetorical and stylistic analysis, with renewed interest in linguistic form deriving both from cognitive science and early modern “grammatical culture,” new avenues are opening for the study of literary and dramatic language. This seminar invites papers about the language of Shakespeare and his contemporaries that engage with evolving methodologies.
52. Signs of the Sexed Body in Early Modern Drama
Kimberly A. Coles (University of Maryland)
This seminar invites essays on the forms and signs of the sexed body in early modern drama. How should we reassess the gap between embodiment and representation at a time when political discourse repeatedly breaches the distance between sign and signified (a pussyhat as a political symbol, for example)? What is the state interest in the essential body, when the body itself is contingent in its terms? How does drama reinforce or reproduce political power upon the sexed body? And how does the archive help us explore the production, uses, and limits of the category of “woman”?
53. Staging Muslims and Jews in Early Modern England
Lindsay Kaplan (Georgetown University)
The scholarship on representations of Muslims or Jews in early modern culture tends to view each group in isolation. However, early modern dramatic portrayals of Muslims often include Jews. How does our understanding of representations of religious alterity in early modern culture change if we consider Muslims and Jews in relation to each other? How do questions of gender/sexuality, race/religion and periodization inflect these representations?
54. Theatrical Skepticism
Anita Gilman Sherman (American University) and Lauren Robertson (Columbia University)
How did skepticism manifest itself in early modern playhouses? What theatrical moves incited uncertainty in audiences? This seminar investigates theatrical practices and embodied behaviors that inspired skeptical questioning. Do modes like the creative inversion of rituals, the foregrounding of gaps and silences, spectacles of wonder and specters of dissent comprise a skeptical repertoire? If so, what ethical work is this repertoire doing when it invites suspended judgment or skeptical doubt?
55. Tudor Performance: Contexts, Traditions, Afterlives
Jessica L. Winston (Idaho State University)
Performance-oriented criticism is not yet a routine part of Tudor studies. How might such work transform the field? This seminar invites exploration of a wide range of performance-oriented approaches to Tudor drama—that is, Tudor plays from before the rise of the commercial theatres. Topics include original techniques and contexts of production, traditions of Tudor playing, and post-Renaissance afterlives in performance, for instance in readings, stagings, adaptations, and teaching.
56. The Unthinkable Renaissance
Erica Fudge (University of Strathclyde)
This seminar will explore the limits of our engagement with the Renaissance by considering ideas, actions, and things from the period that are unthinkable to us: moments that mark the boundary between past and present cultures. What might thinking about and with what is impossible for us to comprehend from the past allow us to see about Shakespeare and the period that produced him? Is the Renaissance unthinkable really unthinkable?
57. Virtual Shakespeare
Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania)
This seminar explores how the intersection of digital technology and enactment can affect our thinking about Shakespeare and theater overall. It will welcome papers about Shakespeare played digitally, including videogames, virtual performance, and cybernarrative, but also ones on general or theoretical issues concerning theater and virtuality: for example, performance through avatars, live-action roleplay, and live-streaming gameplay, or modes of experimenting with narrative and interactivity.
58. “Washed in Lethe”: Renaissance Cultures of Remembering and Forgetting
Jonathan Baldo (Eastman School of Music) and Isabel C. Karremann (Universität Würzburg)
This seminar invites contributions on the workings of cultural memory in early modern England, with a particular focus on the role that acts of remembering and forgetting play in the formation and transformation of culture. Papers for this seminar will be asked to explore ways in which a medieval and Renaissance culture of memory met resistance and challenges from the spread of print culture, the growth of nationalism, and the English Reformation.
59. Webster’s The White Devil: New Directions
Lara Bovilsky (University of Oregon)
The White Devil‘s fascination with intersecting questions of gender, sexuality, race, nation, law, equity, religion, and the fruits of economic desperation makes it timely, as recent productions attest. This seminar invites new takes on these and other questions, such as: modern/early modern productions; ghost characters; Webster’s use of sources; the play’s adaptation across time/media; relation to other works; or indulgence of theatricality, in dumbshow, sorcery, supernatural, trial, or ceremony.
60. Women and Public Worship, 1500-1660
Micheline White (Carleton University) and Jaime Goodrich (Wayne State University)
This seminar invites papers that address any aspect of women’s participation in public or communal worship, whether found in literary, textual, or material sources. This includes discussions of: literary works that depict women participating in public rituals (baptisms, Churching, Processions, funerals, the Mass/ Supper); nuns or laywomen who performed in public rituals; women who wrote or sponsored liturgical or para-liturgical texts; and women who designed tombs or liturgical objects.
61. World, Globe, Planet: Macrocosmic Thinking in the Age of Shakespeare
Joseph Campana (Rice University) and Ayesha Ramachandran (Yale University)
This seminar takes up the problems of scale posed by the return of macrocosmic theoretical categories—world, globe, planet—in the age of Shakespeare. How did Shakespeare and his contemporaries conceive of these terms? What forms of political, social, epistemic and imaginative power are invested in these categories and what might they reveal about early forms of globalization, universal aspiration and ecological awareness?
WORKSHOPS
62. Editing Editing
Leah Knight (Brock University)
How can we edit differently, now, with authorship decentered and new media expanding representational modes? We will explore the variant potential of different editions; edit texts in contrastive ways; and stage a scene of editing a “test text” in competing forms. At issue: how can editing enhance understanding? How do materials and media demand different responses? When is editing interpreting, an edition an adaptation, an editor an author? How can editing be expressive, creative, and queer?
63. Publishing Your Book: Proposals, Presses, and the Process
Henry S. Turner (Rutgers University) and Jane Hwang Degenhardt (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
A workshop on book publication, focused on monographs and with some discussion of edited collections: conceptualizing and planning the manuscript; techniques for writing a successful proposal; presses, editors, and series editors; readers and reports; contracts; challenges faced by scholars working on race, sexuality, and other topics that are underrepresented among academic presses. Participants will workshop drafts of proposals and accompanying materials.
64. Shakespeare on Our Hands
Jill Bradbury (Gallaudet University), Crom Saunders (Columbia College Chicago), Ethan Sinnott (Gallaudet University) and Lindsey Snyder (Silver Spring, MD)
This workshop will introduce non-signers to the history of Shakespeare in sign language and Deaf performance, basic poetic techniques of sign languages, and visual gestural communication. Activities will engage participants in experiencing how visual-gestural approaches can enhance our understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Participants will be given scenes from the plays to stage through body movement and gesture, applying the techniques learned in the workshop.
65. Teaching the Premodern in a Time of White Supremacy
Dorothy Kim (Brandeis University), Reginald Alfred Wilburn (University of New Hampshire) and Holly E. Dugan (George Washington University)
This workshop will consider both theories and praxis in how to teach the premodern and especially Shakespeare Studies during a period of overt white supremacy in our national and international politics. In light of the recent petitions from alums and undergraduates at the University of Cambridge and also Yale University, we will consider the ethics of the curriculum in light of calls to decolonize the English curriculum.
66. Teaching Shakespeare Online
Loreen L. Giese (Ohio University)
Colleges and universities offer more and more online classes. While some provide IT and design help, many do not offer pedagogical support. This workshop aims to do just that by focusing on teaching Shakespeare online. Papers are welcome on all topics whether they be best practices or cautionary tales. Possible topics include: close reading, building connections, student engagement, assignments, grading, class discussions, and challenges. Participants at all levels of experience are welcome.
67. Writing about Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama for a Broader Public
Daniel Thomas Swift (New College of the Humanities)
How might scholars translate their work on Shakespeare and early modern drama into material for a broader public? This workshop will consider the distinction made between academic and popular writing on theatre history of early modern England. Participants will discuss differences of style and content between popular and academic studies, as well as the kinds of stories scholars tell; and how, why, and whether these differ from those told and demanded by a general reading public.
46th Annual Meeting
01. Alternative Times and Possible Futures
J. K. Barret (University of Texas) and Katherine Eggert (University of Colorado)
This seminar invites papers on how early modern writers project alternative temporalities and on the resources (philosophical, theological, technological, historical, magical, linguistic, literary), aims, and effects of doing so. Possible topics: potential/possibility; emotions or relations invested in the future; certainty/uncertainty (contingency, fortune, luck opportunity, probability, inevitability, etc.); technologies—including literary techniques—for crafting future or alternative time.
02. Continental Shakespeare
Karen Newman (Brown University)
Before the First Folio saw print in 1623, it was advertised in an English reprint of the Frankfurt Book Fair catalogue (1622). English players visited Paris, the Low Countries, Germany, Vienna, Prague, and Gdansk; Germans adapted English drama (Titus and Hamlet). The First Folio was in libraries of major continental humanists, of recusant colleges, and of the French finance minister Fouquet and his king, Louis XIV. This seminar invites work on English drama on the continent, 1580 to Voltaire.
03. Early Modern Cultures of Taste
Matthew Hunter (Texas Tech University) and Sam Fallon (SUNY New Paltz)
This seminar invites papers that examine the role of taste in early modern literature and culture: how “taste” emerges as a form of cultural distinction and aesthetic judgment in the early modern period; how gustatory taste relates to cultural taste; how affects like pleasure and disgust arise from and invite such judgments. Especially welcome are new connections between performance studies and material culture, aesthetics and studies of the senses, affect theory and the sociology of culture.
04. First-Generation Shakespeare
Rebecca Olson (Oregon State University)
Many first-generation students are drawn to Shakespeare’s perceived cultural capital; this seminar brainstorms about the ways our courses and scholarship can effectively support underprepared students and promote more inclusive academic communities. Papers might address best practices for helping academically trailblazing students become more confident readers; Shakespeare’s own status as a working-class poet; or the particular challenges and rewards of being a first-generation early modernist.
05. Foucault beyond New Historicism
Jennifer R. Rust (Saint Louis University)
This seminar invites papers that put Foucault’s College de France lectures of the late 1970s into dialogue with early modern literary works. How does late Foucault intersect with recent research on law, political theology, biopolitics, religion? Topics might include: governmentality, pastoral power, counter-conduct, parrhesia, biopower, analytics of “race struggle,” prehistories of liberalism or neoliberalism, or assessments of Foucault’s engagement with figures such as Machiavelli or Hobbes.
06. Intermedia Approaches to Early Modern Song
Katherine R. Larson (University of Toronto) and Sarah F. Williams (University of South Carolina)
How might intermedia tools animate song’s least tangible, yet essential, facets: its generic multidimensionality; its ability to register multiple meanings and permeate boundaries in unexpected ways; and its rootedness in the air? This seminar welcomes contributions that explore intermedia resources for the study and performance of song, engage directly with specific formats for presenting song, or consider the usefulness of digital initiatives for capturing music from a historical perspective.
07. Jonson and Shakespeare
Lynn Meskill (Université Paris Diderot, Sorbonne Cité)
This seminar seeks to rectify Jonson’s role as either prologue or foil in Shakespeare criticism; it aims to make a breach in the wall separating these two giants of the early modern stage. Participants are invited to compare works rather than biographies and to move beyond traditional labels to explore, for instance, Every Man in His Humour as a predecessor of Othello, the roles for criminals in each author’s plays, or the influence of Jonson’s masques on plays other than The Tempest.
08. The Languages of Tudor Englishness
Alan Stewart (Columbia University)
This seminar invites literary and historical papers on the shifting grounds of “Englishness”: terms for English (natural, true, native) and non-English (stranger, alien, refugiate, savage); the making of “new” Englishness (denization, naturalization); new origin stories for Englishness (chronicles, chorographies). Papers might address language acquisition or refusal, property regulation, marriage and inheritance strategies, writings of exile and displacement, discourses of race and nativism.
09. Locating and (Dis)locating Voices in Shakespeare
Bruce R. Smith (University of Southern California)
This seminar focuses on the positioning of voices in space and time as they appear in Shakespeare’s plays, poems, and life-documents. Core readings to be considered are from Barthes, Fernyhough, and Keywords in Sound. Paper topics might include voices in the air, in the head, in the chest, in the ears, on the platform, in vacancy, on the page, in echo-effects, in ventriloquism, in recordings, in the ether.
10. Macbeth: New Directions
Part One: Historical, Textual, and Thematic Approaches
Part Two: Performance and Adaptation
Deborah Willis (University of California, Riverside)
This seminar invites new work on Macbeth from any angle. Can recent studies of early modern emotions and affect, sensations and strangeness, the occult and the demonic, queer time and queer space (among other topics) open up the possibility of fresh insights into this play? What do contemporary productions on stage, film, or in new media tell us about Macbeth’s continuing power and significance? Papers on adaptations of Macbethin any period or in other arts are also welcome.
11. Margaret Cavendish Now
Lara Dodds (Mississippi State University)
Sponsored by the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women
This seminar invites papers on any aspect of Cavendish’s drama, poetry, natural philosophy, fiction; and / or the relations among them. Also welcome are polemical or programmatic answers to the questions: Why Margaret Cavendish now? What does it mean to read Cavendish in the twenty-first century? Which critical traditions are most useful for her: autobiography, feminism, political philosophy, others? How has her new prominence transformed our understanding of early modern literature and culture?
12. Media, Interface, and Cognition
Paul Budra (Simon Fraser University) and Clifford Werier (Mount Royal University)
This seminar investigates links between media properties and the interfaces which structure a play in consciousness. Such interfaces include historically mediated design features of books, evolving theatrical technologies, cinematic, digital, and virtual reality platforms, and other delivery mechanisms. Historical phenomenology, reading theory, media, and cognitive ecologies and interface design theory may be applied to questions related to the medium of the play and its interface with the mind.
13. Microhistory and the Literary Imagination
Richelle Munkhoff (University of Colorado)
This seminar seeks to explain why microhistorical method has proved so attractive to historians and literary scholars of the late medieval and early modern periods; to elaborate on the relationship between various national schools of microhistory; to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of an approach to historical study by narrowing the scale of observation to the most minute of cultural contexts; and to consider the insertion of the voice of the investigator into the narrative.
14. Mobs, Protests, and Street Fights in Shakespeare
David George (Urbana University)
Papers for this seminar cover riots outside the theatre (the 1849 Astor Place riots) and on stage (in Sir Thomas More, 2 Henry VI, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, and Coriolanus). The impetus for these on-stage riots include the successful challenging of political power and consequent anti-absolutism; individual, moral protest (Doll Williamson); the dramatic potential of riots in Early Modern theatre; and the shifting of imagery to depict commoners as unruly or sympathetic. In Coriolanus they are early on framed as noxious animals. Sources for the inspiration behind these scenes may be the spectacular public anatomical theatre (cutting and dissecting); violence in the climax of Mark’s Gospel; and parallels in the sources Shakespeare used.
15. The New Changeling
Gordon McMullan (King’s College London) and Kelly J. Stage (University of Nebraska)
This seminar invites papers addressing The Changeling and its afterlife from any angle: canons, authorship, genres, histories, spaces, sexualities, performances, editions. What difference does it make, ten years after the Oxford Middleton, to read a play often examined in isolation in the context of all the texts created by Middleton and his collaborators? What are the impacts of editing and criticism on performance, and vice versa? What futures might we imagine for Changeling criticism?
16. Object Lessons in Renaissance Personhood
Kevin Curran (Université de Lausanne)
What can we learn about Renaissance notions of personhood by working from the outside in rather than the inside out? This seminar takes personhood as not just a legal expression of agency and sentience, but also a legal fiction designed to curate interactions among people, property, and institutions. How do things like liberty, responsibility, and consent manifest themselves at the level of substance, form, and environment? Papers might address props, animals, tools, furniture, food, plants, more.
17. Old and New Materialisms
Liza Blake (University of Toronto) and Jacques Lezra (University of California, Riverside)
How “new” are the new materialisms? This seminar welcomes essays that bring classical and early modern texts (philosophy, poetry, drama) into conversation with contemporary materialisms. Topics might include: the reception of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura; philosophies of matter in Shakespeare’s plays; plasticity (Catherine Malabou); seventeenth-century matter and atom poems; aleatory materialism; philosophies of chance; vitalisms; ideas of “objects” before Harman and object-oriented ontology.
18. Performing the Humoral Body
Amy Kenny (University of California, Riverside)
This seminar considers how the humoral body was evoked, enacted, and embodied on the early modern stage by exploring the intersection of performance studies and humoral theory. How were the humors represented on stage? What was the relationship between the body of the actor and humoral discourse? How did actors theatricalize an inner state for an audience? Papers are welcome on performing interiority, historical phenomenology of the humors, or the semiotics of humoral discourse on stage.
19. The Problem of Life
Christine Varnado (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
How do things—organisms, substances, materials, bodies—make more of themselves? How does matter become alive, and propagate itself, in the material universes figured by and in Shakespeare’s plays and other early modern texts? Taking reproduction as a problem—that is, something not “natural,” essential, or inevitable but instead deeply strange—this seminar welcomes work analyzing the mechanisms and models of reproduction in early modern literature from diverse theoretical perspectives.
20. Publicity and the Early Modern Stage
Allison K. Deutermann (Baruch College, CUNY)
Before mass media, who was famous, how did they get that way, and what did fame entail? This seminar examines theater’s role in the cultivation and consumption of publicity. The aim is to investigate the cultural uses to which famous individuals were put, as well as the networks of communication and modes of representation through which fame developed. With well-known performers, celebrity characters, and notorious playgoers (i.e., Mary Frith), what does a taxonomy of early modern publicity look like?
21. Queer Affects
Mario DiGangi (Graduate Center, CUNY)
In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed defines “queer orientations” as those that “don’t line up” with conventional heterosexual norms. What might queer orientations look like in early modern England, before a regime of sexual orientations? How do queer affects—“slantwise” or “misaligned” relations of touch, proximity, or sensation—manifest in early modern texts, and with what effects? How might an attention to such relations contribute to new strands of thought in Shakespeare studies?
22. Recuperating Laughter in Early Modern Comedy
Andrew McConnell Stott (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
What did we lose when we began taking comedy seriously—that is, as a window onto social norms, ideological pressures, political expression? How do we recover comedy’s humor, and what obstacles must we overcome to read comedy on its own terms? Papers might treat archaic wordplay, obscure references, reconstructed comic experience, the archaeology of early modern laughter, the ephemerality of performance, audience incomprehension, laughter’s absence in critical responses, comedy in the classroom.
23. Remediations of Early Modern Drama
Sally Barnden (King’s College London) and Nora J. Williams (University of Exeter)
How is our engagement with early modern drama conditioned by the media landscapes we inhabit? How have the technological innovations of the last two hundred years affected interpretation, adaptation, and archiving? Addressing the need for interdisciplinary scholarship that moves beyond “fidelity debates,” this seminar welcomes papers on topics across the range of media that adapt, appropriate, and interpolate these plays, including film, television, digital and social media, and visual cultures.
24. Reproductive Knowledge in Early Modern England
Sara Luttfring (Pennsylvania State University, Behrend)
This seminar investigates reproductive knowledge on the early modern page and stage. Papers might consider reproduction’s role in perpetuating familial lines, social hierarchies, and public institutions; the opacity of biological processes; how epistemological authority was negotiated on the basis of gender, class, religion, and political allegiance; medical treatises; pamphlets didactic and obscene; the subjects of impotence, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, parturition, lactation.
25. Rethinking the Global in Global Shakespeare
Susan Bennett (University of Calgary) and Sonia Massai (King’s College London)
The wealth of performances and events around the world in 2016 provided overwhelming evidence of Shakespeare’s impact. This seminar addresses not specific performances or events but the kinds of discourses they generate. What ideas constructed the field of global Shakespeare and what ideas are extending or revising work in this area? Are there theoretical approaches in other disciplines that productively engage the complexity of Shakespeare today? Is the term “global” still fit for purpose?
26. Revisiting Genre Theory
Edward Gieskes (University of South Carolina)
This seminar explores genres as dynamic and contradictory spaces whose internal structures and external boundaries are constantly in flux. Rosalie Colie described them as “tiny subcultures with their own habits, habitats, and structures of ideas as well as their own forms.” How do generic categories operate in relationship to shifting “habitats” for early moderns? How do such social changes get refracted into generic changes? How might we account for the period’s productivity in generic innovation?
27. The SAA, Shakespeare, and Us
Steve Mentz (Saint John’s University) and Carla Della Gatta (University of Southern California)
It is a good time to be Shakespeare—but not necessarily a good time to be us. What does it mean to be a Shakespearean or SAA member facing diminished professional prospects? What utopian or dystopian futures can we envision for our profession and the SAA? This seminar invites critique and communication around systemic conditions, institutional reform, political climate, and structural change. What steps can we take to make our dreams a reality and avoid our worst nightmares?
28. Scholar-Practitioner Shakespeare
Chad Allen Thomas (University of Alabama, Huntsville) and Amy Rodgers (Mount Holyoke College)
This seminar brings together scholar-performers—academics who perform in, direct, or are otherwise involved in Shakespeare performance—to ask how we might overcome traditional barriers fortified by specialized epistemologies and lexicons. How do book work, blocking, and rehearsal exercises challenge scholars’ understandings? How might scholarly work inform performance outside of historical consultation? How does performing Shakespeare provide new perspectives on “the archive” and “evidence”?
29. Scrapbook Shakespeare
Rob Conkie (La Trobe University) and Paul Salzman (La Trobe University)
What does the scrapbooking of Shakespeare reveal about the uses to which he is put across time and place? Work might feature patchwork play scripts (described by Tiffany Stern), cut-and-paste editing (practiced by Halliwell-Phillips), theatrical archives (such as the Folger), radical dramaturgies (like that of Marowitz), social media (including Pinterest and Instagram). Scrapbooking might also be used to explore performance, pedagogy, editing, biography, and authorship in Shakespeare studies.
30. Shakespeare across the Mediterranean
Sabine Schülting (Freie Universität Berlin)
Sponsored by the European Shakespeare Research Association
For centuries, the Mediterranean has constituted both a dynamic cultural contact zone and a divide between Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. The seminar is concerned with the ocean, sea journeys and shipwrecks in Shakespearean drama as well as with the “Mediterranean” travels of the plays in translation and adaptation. Focusing on the figure of the stranger or refugee, we will also discuss Shakespeare’s plays in the light of Mediterranean migration in the 21st century.
31. Shakespeare and Donne
Elizabeth D. Harvey (University of Toronto) and Timothy M. Harrison (University of Chicago)
This seminar invites papers that probe the relationship between Donne and Shakespeare with particular attention to language, rhetoric, and poetics. How do they employ theatricality, poetic forms, and modes? How do they treat shared sources (Ovid, Petrarch, Montaigne)? How do they represent the inhabitation of other forms of being? In what ways do they examine love, infidelity, jealousy, erotic desire, gender impersonation? What epistemological frameworks do they bring to bear on their works?
32. Shakespeare and Gesture
Miranda Fay Thomas (Shakespeare’s Globe) and Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago)
This seminar considers the use of gesture in early modern drama: in performance, in its reception, or on film. In what ways is gesture used to communicate emotion, opinion, intent, ceremony, or even disrespect on the Renaissance stage? How does Shakespeare’s work engage with us beyond words, using the language of the body? Participants might engage with the seminar from the approach of historicism, performance studies, cognition, psycholinguistics, or as practitioners.
34. Shakespeare and Peace
Lawrence Manley (Yale University) and Maggie Vinter (Case Western Reserve University)
This seminar invites work on Shakespeare and peace, including concepts and definitions of peace; peace as personal or interpersonal felicity and as moral, religious, social, legal, or political ideal. Possible topics include the invocation of peace in praise, prayer, and greeting; peace and peacefulness in character, form, and genre; dramaturgical aspects of peace on stage; early modern geopolitics, sources, and motives of early modern pacifism, Shakespeare in the history of pacifism and peacemaking.
35. Shakespeare and Service Courses
Kelly Neil (Spartanburg Methodist College)
This seminar reconsiders a task—teaching Shakespeare in introductions to literature and surveys—that is often seen as ancillary to research and upper-level teaching. Papers might explore approaches or challenges to teaching Shakespeare to freshmen, sophomores, non-majors, and non-traditional students in such courses, as well as to the institutional cultures of community colleges, junior colleges, and baccalaureate colleges. Reports of classroom experience should be informed by critical analysis.
36. Shakespeare and the Global South
Sandra Young (University of Cape Town) and Pompa Banerjee (University of Colorado, Denver)
The resonances of contemporary global Shakespeares point to the solidarity that exists across vast differences, as theater makers around the world probe the subversive in Shakespeare. This seminar invites papers that consider how nontraditional Shakespeares open up new avenues of thought and social critique. Can cultural theory learn from the way Shakespeare has been reimagined for a new moment, as we reckon with global cultural politics and disturbing new appeals to ethnicity to police borders?
37. Shakespeare and the Modern Novel
Douglas Trevor (University of Michigan)
How might we assess the impact of Shakespeare’s writings on the modern novel? Are there dominant modes (thematic or characterological) and forms (realistic, genre, or experimental fiction) by which this influence has been most felt? What is the Shakespearean effect on these reimaginings (in terms of style, for example)? Participants are invited to consider novels in the Hogarth Shakespeare series (Tyler, Atwood) or other modern novels that engage with the Shakespearean corpus (McEwan’s Nutshell).
38. Shakespeare and Twenty-First-Century Poetics
Linda Gregerson (University of Michigan)
How can we map Shakespeare’s continuing force field in the realm of contemporary poetics? By “Shakespeare,” we mean not only the plays, poems, and ongoing legacy of theatrical production, but also: scholarly contestation, textual analysis, popular appropriation, material artifacts, biographical obsession. This seminar welcomes the widest range of contributions: explications of individual poets or poetic devices, theoretical analyses of method, creative experiments on Shakespearean themes.
39. Shakespeare, Marx, Our Moment
Hugh Grady (Arcadia University) and Jean E. Howard (Columbia University)
On the two-hundredth anniversary of Marx’s birth, this seminar explores how his ideas have influenced the field’s understanding of Shakespeare’s works and can continue to inform the engaged criticism urgently needed now. Topics might include Marx’s critical legacy in Shakespeare studies; Marxism’s relationship to feminism, cultural materialism, presentism, ecocriticism, early modern race studies, the new economic criticism; and its usefulness for critical projects that speak to the present.
40. The Shakespearean Everyday
Jessica Rosenberg (University of Miami)
This seminar addresses the status of everyday life as a sphere of experience and expertise, taking a special interest in temporalities of habit and repetition that do not normally register on historical timescales (including the diurnal, hourly, weekly, and seasonal). What is at stake in exploring the formal and political composition of ordinary life today? In what new ways might we understand the performative or creative work done by everyday practices? The seminar welcomes papers that take as their object Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean drama, poetry, and prose, as well as material and popular culture.
41. Shakespearean Negativity
Andrew Griffin (University of California, Santa Barbara) and James Kearney (University of California, Santa Barbara)
This seminar asks questions about affect and knowledge in Shakespeare’s plays by exploring his representations of negativity. Here, negativity is understood to be a feeling, an ethical position, a way of understanding humanity: the misanthrope, the pessimist, and the cynic feel bad about the world, think poorly of humanity, and mistrust the future. How do Shakespeare’s plays deal with such negativity? What is the relationship between pessimism and politics? Is there hope for the misanthrope?
42. Sites of Resistance in the Early Modern Theater
Robin E. Bates (Lynchburg College)
What kinds of resistance are represented in early modern plays? How does the repeated performance of a moment of opposition create meaning for the location being represented, or how might it implicate the site of performance as itself a location of resistance? What do early modern performances of oppression, encroachment, and invasion suggest about how resistance succeeds or fails? This seminar welcomes geocritical, ecocritical, performance theory, political, cultural studies approaches—and more.
43. Speculative Shakespeare
Louise Geddes (Adelphi University) and Valerie Fazel (Arizona State University)
This seminar explores the impact that speculative realism has on the Shakespearean aesthetic. Due to its pluralized identity across media, Shakespeare acquires an agency that is well-suited to posthumanist speculative criticism. Creative and critical work for the seminar might use performance, appropriations, networks, and gaming to explore non-causal networks that emerge within and across the works, the text as actant, or Shakespeare as an active agent in twenty-first-century thought.
44. The Subject of Elizabeth(s)
Kaara Peterson (Miami University of Ohio)
This seminar invites new work on Shakespeare in the age of Elizabeth I—and Elizabeth II. How did the Virgin Queen’s forty-five-year reign create distinct pictures of virginity, Amazons, Tudors, female rule? How was her court influenced by the popular culture of the stage, as political actors or private individuals? How have Elizabeth II’s six decades on the throne shaped Shakespearean theater? What new trends inform the Elizabethan stage since 1952? Papers may explore either Elizabethan era.
45. Taking Notes in/on Shakespeare
Scott Schofield (Huron University College)
Sponsored by the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing
This inaugural SHARP/SAA seminar offers an intensive investigation of notetaking by encouraging discussion between scholars of text, performance, editing, and the various makers of Shakespeare on paper and screen. Papers might consider the notes of individual annotators, the scholarship of early modern reading practices (such as interleaving and commonplacing), and how it might inform notetaking in the classroom, multimodal notetaking, or the future of commentary in online social settings.
46. The Taming of the Shrew and Its Afterlife
Coppélia Kahn (Brown University) and Linda Woodbridge (Pennsylvania State University)
Shakespeare’s most controversial play poses stubborn questions about gender roles, the extent of patriarchal power, the use of metadrama to stage taming as illusion or pretense. Starting with Garrick’s Catherine and Petruchio, adaptations have registered social changes that drive continued controversy. Papers are invited on the play and its rewritings in film, ballet, opera, drama, narrative, satire, parody. New perspectives on race, gender, and specific political issues are especially welcome.
47. Teaching Shakespeare at the Performance
Jessica Winston (Idaho State University)
In the pedagogical criticism, little attention has been paid to the teaching of live stage productions of early modern drama, whether as a tool for teaching the text or as an art form to be analyzed in its own right. How do we help students or the public to “read” live performance? What approaches do teachers and theater educational staff use? What are the merits of teaching with live theater versus digital relays or film? How do we address challenges of access (logistics, finances, disability)?
48. Technology, Philosophy, Performance
Lisa S. Starks (University of South Florida, Saint Petersburg)
What are the interactions between philosophy and technology in Shakespearean performance? How do performances mediate inquiry through technologies of acting, writing, design? How are structures derived from modern philosophy applied to understanding performance? How might they be rethought to engage the theater’s means of materialized inquiry? Essays should engage an intersection of philosophy and performance, focusing on theoretical or material aspects of theater practice and technology.
49. Theatrical Families, 1560-1660
Eva Griffith (London, UK) and David Kathman (Chicago, IL)
To what extent did families contribute to the economics and development of early theater? How should evidence of their contributions be found and presented? This seminar invited papers exploring theatre-connected families active between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, including but not limited to families of actors, playhouse owners, stationers, tire makers, livery company members, inn holders, and patrons. The results are varied and revealing.
50. Time and Emotion
Sarah Lewis (King’s College London), Kristine Johanson (Universiteit van Amsterdam), and Thomas J. Moretti (Iona College)
From the momentary “hap” of happiness, to the idea that old age engendered melancholy, to the sense of temporal distance inherent in nostalgia, emotions in early modern literature were significantly and variously temporal. Papers might explore intersections of the temporal and the emotional in late Elizabethan and early Stuart literature within such contexts as early modern physiology, religion, medicine, textual production, performance, literary form, age, race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
51. Thinking Theology with Shakespeare
Jay Zysk (University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth)
In Reformation England, theology is as much about issues of hermeneutics as it is about doctrine and belief. This seminar asks how Shakespeare draws on theology not only as a set of doctrinal positions but also as a theoretical resource that frames questions about time, history, humanity, and dramatic representation. Papers are welcome on the interplay between literature and theology, theology’s reach beyond religion, and theology in its theoretical, historical, and epistemological permutations.
52. Warring Grecians Turks Afric Moors and Others
Lisa Barksdale-Shaw (Saginaw Valley State University)
From Shakespeare’s Goths in Titus to Marlowe’s Scythians in Tamburlaine, the early modern stage offers characters who are both “others” and warriors. How does analyzing both conditions offer another lens to read the Blackamoor? Papers might consider race, gender, culture, and nationality. How did drama imitate or deviate from earlier depictions of militant men and women? What methodologies—psychological, scientific, legal, or political—might apply? How do other texts depict the warring others?
53. Where Is Myth?
Wendy Hyman (Oberlin College)
Revising the question, “if the Mona Lisa is in the Louvre in Paris, where is Hamlet?” this seminar asks “where is myth?” What sort of thing is a myth on Shakespeare’s stage? How do we understand the relationship between ostensibly “real” and “fictional” beings? What need we know of genre, stagecraft, and textual transmission? Papers may deploy Other Worlds theory, actor-network theory, and theories of mimesis and figuration to explore the epistemological and metaphysical ruptures of mythology.
54. Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance
Sarah C. E. Ross (Victoria University of Wellington) and Rosalind Smith (University of Newcastle)
Complaint is a powerful and ubiquitous Renaissance rhetorical mode, expressing erotic, religious, and political protest and loss. It often foregrounds the voice and body of a lamenting woman, but “female complaint” has largely been understood as male literary ventriloquy. This seminar focuses on women writers and the gendered politics of complaint, exploring how the voices of the disenfranchised, railing against their circumstances, helped to shape Renaissance literary and social cultures.
55. Women Gender and Book History
Valerie Wayne (University of Hawai’i)
This seminar brings work on women’s participation in book production and questions of gender into conversation with recent scholarship on the early modern book trade concerning Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Research on women as printers, publishers, booksellers, stationers, patrons, and readers is especially welcome, along with discussions of gender in relation to book history. We will also share information on databases and websites that are particularly helpful for doing this work.
56. Connecting Faculty, Schools, and Communities through Shakespeare
Ann C. Christensen (University of Houston) and Laura Turchi (University of Houston)
This workshop offers a framework for professional and personal interest in pedagogy, social activism, youth culture and the arts, as well as a practicum to develop collaborative programming around Shakespeare in participants’ own institutional and local contexts. Advance work includes readings in key texts; Internet searches for local Shakespeare curricula, funding sources, and publication venues; strategies for identifying potential collaborators; and ways of reporting on findings and goals.
57. Resurrecting Shakespeare (and His Sisters)
Emma Whipday (University College London)
This hands-on workshop explores how archival research and contemporary creative practice can “resurrect” vanished or overlooked aspects of Shakespeare’s theatrical world, from neglected performance contexts to the work and experiences of women. Approaching conduct literature, masques, broadsides, wills, diaries, and court records through performance practice and creative play, participants will collaborate in creating a new form of “verbatim theater” that resurrects Shakespeare’s world (and that of his sisters).
58. Shakespeare Improv
Tom Bishop (University of Auckland) and Stephen Purcell (University of Warwick)
Shakespeare and his contemporaries inherited a late-medieval tradition of dramatic performance in which drama and game were cognate activities, and traces of this heritage may be found in the theatrical culture of the early modern period. This workshop proposes that there is much to be learned from “reverse engineering” early modern drama, approaching it as a form of improvisatory game. It combines archival and performance-based approaches to explore the forms and pressures of Shakespearean improv.
59. Shakespeare in the Health Humanities
Cora Fox (Arizona State University)
Our workshop is collaborating to generate two working documents that will become resources for faculty, administrators, students, and members of the community, including 1)those interested in documenting or expanding the practical/applied uses of Shakespeare in Health Humanities contexts; and 2)those considering the social, professional, ethical or disciplinary challenges and discoveries that can result from interdisciplinary projects involving Shakespeare and questions of health and medicine. We aim to capture the vitality and promise of approaching health through Shakespeare study and/or performance, while at the same time addressing the limitations and cautions that can or should place restraints on such programs. Our ultimate goal is to create an archive of best practices for the integration of Shakespeare’s works or scholarship on Shakespeare into programs studying or promoting health.
60. “Third Wave” Interdisciplinarity in Shakespeare and Biblical Studies
Lori Anne Ferrell (Claremont Graduate University) and Tammi J. Schneider (Claremont Graduate University)
This workshop offers scholars of Shakespeare and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament a rare chance to work closely with and learn from each other, comparing hermeneutical methods and theories of interpretation in genuinely cross-disciplinary conversation. Navigating the philological and historical issues raised in both current Biblical and current Shakespeare textual studies, participants will work on issues of shared longstanding interest: monarchy, monogamy, and monotheism.
61. Transcribing and Interpreting Digital Recipe Manuscripts
Amy L. Tigner (University of Texas, Arlington) and Hillary M. Nunn (University of Akron)
For this workshop, participants will transcribe a Folger recipe manuscript with the aims of increasing their paleographic skills, learning the Folger transcription platform Dromio, and generating research projects: blog posts, syllabi, contextual essays, video demonstrations, digital humanities applications. What challenges are associated with physical objects encountered in digital form, documents without known authors, texts created by underrepresented populations, manuscripts in the classroom?
62. Writing, Shaping, and Publishing the Scholarly Book
William Germano (Cooper Union)
Led by the author of Getting It Published and From Dissertation to Book, this workshop focuses on moving from research to manuscript to book. Participants should be at work on a book-length research project. Each will provide a publication proposal (description, table of contents, market analysis). The workshop leader will provide written feedback on the proposal’s voice, presentation, argumentation, and evidence. Participants will also read and review work by fellow workshop members.
45th Annual Meeting
1. Accident and the Archives
How do archival accidents influence our textual and literary histories? Can we read meaning in the received arrangement of pre-modern compilations, commonplace books, and finding aids? What chance encounters (and new points of friction) are effected by warped scans on EEBO and erasures of blank pages from digital facsimiles? Papers might focus on confrontations between bibliography and material texts, technological glitches and oddities, or the conflicted temporalities of objects assembled over time.
2. Afterlives of Medieval Drama
This seminar invites papers on any aspect of the afterlives of medieval English drama: props, staging, notions of time and action, structures of feeling, the strategic uses of medieval drama to make political statements. Extreme violence and the complex interplay of comic and tragic were staples of medieval biblical drama, not classical sources. Where do we draw the line between medieval and Renaissance/early modern drama, and why? What are the advantages and disadvantages of periodization itself?
3. All’s Well That Ends Well: New Approaches
Recent debate about the authorship of All’s Well That Ends Well has brought renewed attention to the complexities of the play, from its undated inception to its performance possibilities. The play’s generic assignment, its attitude toward gender and sexuality, its theological orientation, its textual cruxes, its uncertain attribution, and its striking variations in popularity and performance are all ripe for reconsideration. This seminar invites new thoughts on the play from any perspective.
4. Asia in the Making of Europe
Over fifty years after Donald Lach’s monumental Asia in the Making of Europe, this seminar seeks to reassess how Europe’s encounters with the East influenced Western culture. Papers might consider works featuring Asian characters and settings; European or Asian representations of the encounter; intra- European rivalries; the appropriation of Asian knowledges into European cultures or vice versa; tactics of accommodation or adaptation; cross-cultural exchanges and networks; shared histories and mythologies.
5. Beyond Shakespeare’s Genres
This seminar invites participants whose interest in dramatic genre challenges or ranges beyond the classic tripartite division of the First Folio. Studies might attend to the defining influence on Shakespeare of early modern genres unnamed there; social and political conditions that made some genres popular; genres devised by later editors and critics; the models Shakespeare’s canon provided the novel and its subgenres; more radical reimaginings of Shakespearean genres in new media, film, and fan fiction.
6. Bloody Talk, Talking Blood
This seminar focuses on blood on the early modern stage. Studying “bloody talk” or “talking blood,” papers might analyze the words, gestures, and other non-verbal cues used to express and inflict bodily violence, notably gendered bodily violence, and how this violence was performed and conceptualized in past centuries. Also welcome are presentist approaches about staging such plays now: what is acceptable to show on stage, what is not, how lines are drawn, and what happens when they are transgressed.
7. Cognition in the Early Modern Period, Part One
Cognition in the Early Modern Period, Part Two
What are the concepts and terms with which Shakespeare and his contemporaries spoke about and understood mental life? How do early modern ideas about cognition relate to classical or medieval ones? How does Shakespeare handle these in his depictions of perceiving, thinking, and feeling? What does the medium of theater add to such depictions? Papers might engage topics such as memory or madness, or else explore notions such as intuition or skill, giving attention to history, philosophy, or form.
8. Commonplacing Shakespeare, Past and Present
This seminar invites contributions on the way Shakespeare’s work emerges out of a culture of commonplacing and is in turn taken up and distributed as quotation. Possible topics include the early modern commonplace; how plays became a resource for sententious (and parodic) quotation, especially through print; the vexed relationship between quotation and literary value; the influence of technologies of communication on the circulation of commonplaces; viral Shakespeare on contemporary social networks.
9. Cosmological Bodies
The relationships between and among cosmological bodies—atomic, biological, meteorological, planetary—were sources of awe and debate in early modern texts. This seminar invites thematic, theoretical, or speculative treatments of literal or metaphoric cosmological bodies in motion; of the influence of these bodies upon each other by way of sympathies and contagion; of wonders and marvels; of Shakespeare’s appropriation of Aristotelian, Lucretian, and other paradigms; of emerging cosmologies in the period.
10. Disability and Subjectivity in Shakespeare
This seminar pursues ways Disability Studies can help us explore new understandings of Shakespearean subjectivity. What do Shakespeare’s representations of affliction, disability, or dependence tell us about the nature of human experience? How do engagements with Shakespeare’s work by readers with disabilities, and theatrical productions which feature disability, speak back to his representations of personhood? How might non-disabled scholars incorporate these insights into their work?
11. Diversifying the Field of Shakespeare Performance
Our diverse histories of engaging with Shakespeare call for reconsideration of the means by which we read cultures, identity, and types of performance. This seminar invites papers that attend to a specific production, festival, genre, or style of performance, from amateur to celebrity, whether multilingual or in translation, musical adaptations as well as original practices. Especially welcome is work on “diversity” more broadly. What methodologies hold the most promise to diversify Shakespeare studies today?
12. Early Modern Performance beyond Drama
This seminar aims to recover traces of performance practices in early modern texts, from festival books to medical treatises. Diverse approaches are welcome, from aesthetics and semiotics to cognition and cultural studies. How can textual study account for performances outside the theater—the countless embodied, everyday acts that transmit social knowledge? Does the early modern era offer a distinct set of practices that might challenge or invigorate broader theories of performance?
13. Early Modern Technologies of Space and Place
How did literary, cartographic, and mechanical technologies alter the means by which landscapes and seascapes, roads and rivers, counties and colonies were measured, codified, crossed, “practiced” (de Certeau), and “produced” (Lefebvre) in early modern England? This seminar welcomes work on transportation, surveying manuals, estate plans, maps, globes, portolans, astrolabes, chronometers, sextants, and almanac calendars, as well as on theatrical devices and machinery and the use of stage space.
14. Early Modern Trans*Historicity
This seminar explores the intersections between trans* studies and early modern studies, with special attention to trans*historicity and trans*temporality. Papers might analyze representations of gender-variant bodies, characters, cultural types, or historical figures; address the use of contemporary terms and concepts for early modern phenomena; or attend to the methodological and theoretical alliances and/or tensions between early modern feminist, queer, and trans* studies.
15. Finding Fletcher
This seminar invites papers exploring the drama of John Fletcher. Participants might consider: particularly Fletcherian themes or concerns; collaborations with Beaumont, Massinger, Shakespeare, others; Fletcher’s role in the emergence of tragicomedy; his position succeeding Shakespeare as King’s Men’s playwright; Fletcher’s dramatic responses to plays of his contemporaries; his influence on his contemporaries or on the drama of the next several decades; performing, editing, or teaching Fletcher.
16. Forgotten Histories
This seminar examines early modern history plays not widely considered in the critical conversation, including those authored by lesser-known talents and written or performed after the genre’s vogue had passed. What do they reveal about the literary or political landscape, the material culture of theater, the printing house? How do they illuminate our sense of the genre? What possibilities do they present for performance or teaching? Papers with new insights on more prominent history plays are also welcome.
17. Global Othello
This seminar addresses productions of Othello created outside Anglophonia: stage, operatic, cinematic, and televisual performance; translations, adaptations, and appropriations; Othello’s reception in non-Anglophone contexts; international theatrical tours and intercultural performances; Othello in global digital culture. How do local interventions contribute to Othello’s privileged place in the “global Shakespeare” canon? What continuities and contrasts can be found? What national and transnational concerns?
18. Hamlet: Shifting Perspectives
The complex history of the reception of Hamlet on stage and on the page, and across different cultures and art forms, shows the extent to which engagement with this play has shaped Shakespeare studies and its neighboring disciplines. This seminar therefore invites contributions from across different fields of enquiry— text, performance, critical and historicist approaches, other media—with a specific focus on how current work on Hamlet is changing established critical and creative paradigms.
19. Home Ecologies
What happens when we reorient our study of “ecologies” from sweeping landscapes (terrestrial or oceanic) to the more localized material environment of the home? This seminar maintains an ecological emphasis on material bodies and objects but includes how physical environments, living and non-living, inform our understanding of exchange in and around the home in early modern texts. Papers are welcome on symbolic or material forms of exchange and diverse definitions of the “home” or “household.”
20. Law and Poetics in Shakespeare
This seminar explores connections between early modern law and poetics in Shakespeare. How do the aesthetic experiences of literature relate to law? Papers might examine how the arrangement of a line, the shape of a scene, or the structure of an act stage legal practices (pleading, judgment), concepts (equity, citizenship, sovereignty), and feelings (guilt, shame, pity). Papers that theorize the relationship between historicism and formalism, book history, rhetoric, and performance are welcome.
21. Lost Plays and Their Contexts
This seminar aims to develop models and techniques for thinking about lost plays and other lost early modern works. Papers might consider texts from the Lost Plays Database and lost pamphlets from the Stationers’ Register; changing ideas of how playscripts relate to plays; the place of lost texts in genealogies and corpora of surviving texts; applications of our understanding of plays as collaborative and provisional to non- dramatic works; the role of digital and non-digital resources.
22. Lyric Reading
This seminar juxtaposes Renaissance scenes of lyric reading with theories of reading that might help us interpret them. What do early modern poems expect of their readers, and what do those readers expect of their poems? How might these scenes of reading help us reconsider the changing status of reading and readers in contemporary criticism? What room is there in our theories for readerly misprision? Discussion will begin with a bibliography of case studies and theoretical models.
23. John Marston: New Directions
Marston is one of the most problematic and neglected of Shakespeare’s contemporaries; even the boundaries of his canon are uncertain. This seminar invites papers on any aspect of his works: the attribution and authorship of his plays; the collaborative writing; the plays in performance, especially with the boys’ troupes; his relations with other writers, especially Shakespeare; intellectual influences and friendship groups; his significance for the modern reader and playgoer.
24. Material Texts and Digital Interfaces
This seminar considers the relationship between materiality and digital presence. What can a material approach to digital tools teach us? What can be gained by exploring the physical attributes of a textual object through a digital interface? What happens when we think of digital facsimiles as objects in their own right, rather than as providers of transparent access to texts? How do the material conditions of creating a digital project shape its use?
25. Meta-Shakespeare
This seminar focuses on “meta-ness” in the poetry and drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. How and why did early modern authors consistently, even compulsively, introduce elements of self-reflexivity into their works? Possible topics include poems about poetry; plays within plays; prologues and epilogues; depictions of poets, playwrights, actors, and/or audiences; references to the playing space; invocations of manuscript and/or print culture; paratextuality; staging the book.
26. Metropolitan Shakespeare
This seminar invites participants to explore the urban engagements of plays and performances with the aim of rethinking the “theater of a city” with Shakespeare at the center. How might Shakespeare’s plays and performances have given meaning to the expanding metropolis? Or have provided a self-reflexive medium through which city residents participated in new modes of urban experience and belonging? Theoretical, historical, text-based, and performance-based approaches are welcome.
27. Mystery in Early Modern Drama
Shakespeare’s plays explore, test, and modify ideas about mystery, from practical craft mystery, through the arcana imperii, to the unknowable mysteries of the divine. This seminar invites contributions that evaluate early modern dramatists’ engagement with mystery, including invisibility, secrecy, stage effects, magic, the supernatural, craft knowledge, religion. How do dramatists create mystery? Are certain literary forms particularly amenable to the mysterious? When is mystery subjected to satire?
28. Negative Affects in Shakespeare
Many of the most characteristic Shakespearean affects are negative in valence: hatred, despair, aversion, jealousy, envy, grief, and heartbreak. But what characterizes them as negative? Their outcome? Their objects? These content questions lead to critical questions. Must we repair such negativity? Can we attend to negativity as negativity and allow it to remain useless or harmful? Or must critical attention necessarily transvalue and redeem its objects? How might genre modulate negativity?
29. New Directions for Historicism
How might post-new-historicist scholarship differentiate itself from early “pre-theory” empiricist versions of history? How can we bring contemporary modes of theoretical inquiry to bear on the archival turn? How might materialist and textualist histories be productively entangled? Should we distinguish between history and literature? How do object-criticism, the new economic criticism, and ecocriticism complicate those distinctions? This seminar engages future directions for historicist theory and practice.
30. New Shakespearean Economies
Notions of “the economic” appeared in political theory, husbandry manuals, Utopian literature, account books, religious tracts. This seminar invites papers on overlooked aspects of period economic discourse: how were buying, selling, borrowing, lending, and negotiating conceptualized, lived, and represented on the Renaissance stage? Especially welcome are readings of plays that are not typically associated with money, and work that applies later economic theory to early modern texts in fresh ways.
31. Performance and the Paper Stage, 1640-1695
This seminar explores restrictions on and innovations in dramatic production and publication, 1640-1695. With drama banned (1642-1660) and only two London playhouses licensed (1660-1700), performance continued at fairs, inns, and homes, and print publication exploded. Work is welcome on alternative stages and illegal theaters; drolls, ballads, civic pageantry, court performances; touring companies; censorship; performance enacted on the page through paratext, typography, layout; theatrical annotation.
32. Queer Meter
This seminar welcomes papers about the period’s queer ways of “measuring” language. What non-normative dimensions of language do meter and versification invite and uncover? How might queer theory and gender studies allow us to return afresh to “feminine” rhyme, Sapphic verse, the Marlovian line, and other of the period’s metrical kinks? How might book history and media studies allow us to reimagine what counts as verse in the first place, and how is it queered through editing and adaptation?
33. Queer Theology in Shakespeare Studies
This seminar examines the intersection of sexuality and theology in Shakespeare’s work. Beyond prohibition and repression, how can religious language and logic challenge normative views of love, gender, marriage, friendship, homoeroticism, and subjectivity? How do Shakespeare’s plays illuminate the contradictions and perversities of religious ideals and institutions? What can Shakespearean texts tell us about the erotic dimension of confessional identity, faith, grace, and spiritual obligation?
34. Race and the Materiality of Early Modern Performance
The early modern production of races has been located in the historical contexts of the Atlantic slave trade, racial capitalism, legal racism, and the Linnaean revolution in natural science. This seminar asks whether these supposedly nonperformative realms share materials and practices with text, theater, and other forms of culture. Papers are welcome on how attention to early modern performance—in its broadest sense— shifts the geography, temporality, and social history of race.
35. Regulating Early Modern Womens Bodies
This seminar investigates the ways that early modern English texts and culture imagine regulating feminine bodies through virtuous exempla, cautionary tales, education and conduct books, medical diagnosis and advice, literary plots or tropes, fashion, or physical disciplines such as needlework, dance, or music lessons. How are prescriptive limitations and rebellious evasions mutually constitutive? How can we understand failed self-regulation? Diverse methodologies, theories, and texts are welcome.
36. Renaissance Afterlives Revisited
Fictional and scholarly representations of the Renaissance respond and contribute to contemporary political and aesthetic debates, raising crucial questions about how the past has been fashioned and how it is appropriated. This seminar invites papers that examine modern representations of or allusions to the Renaissance, its works, or its people. Especially welcome is work on productions that produce the Renaissance in untraditional ways and on the academic and cultural significance of such re- imaginings.
37. Shakespeare and Black America
This seminar seeks to shed light on the vital role of Shakespeare in Black America. It aims to recover the understudied history of performance beyond the professional stage in racially marked spaces such as homes, colleges, schools, libraries, reading clubs, churches, concert halls, and amateur theaters. It also welcomes inquiries into the present moment, the transnational reach of Shakespeare and Black politics, and the significance of digital technologies and pedagogies for Black communities.
38. Shakespeare and Counterfeiting
This seminar examines the role of forged and spurious forms, both literal and metaphorical, in early modern literature, considering counterfeiting as cultural practice, literary motif, and theoretical framework. Papers are welcome on positive and negative concepts of counterfeiting in the time and afterlives of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, including artistic creation or imitation; value and authenticity; theatrical practice; pirated editions; authorship and canon formation; scholarly fabrication.
39. Shakespeare and Film Form
Shakespearean film scholarship tends to privilege “literary” interpretation over technical attention to the medium. This seminar, inspired by Eisenstein’s Film Form, invites participants to engage directly with cinematographic language. Papers might explore the tensions between the autonomy of the aesthetic prevalent in the new formalism and the more progressive methodology known as “activist formalism.” What new directions for Shakespearean film scholarship might be prompted by a return to form?
40. Shakespeare and Geek Culture
As a first step into the new field of Shakespeare geek studies, this seminar accommodates a broad range of critical approaches. Papers might consider such topics as the apparent geekiness of academia; Shakespeare’s links to other areas of geek culture (in fantasy and sci-fi fandom, for instance); the historical roots of geek culture; and the possibility that Shakespeare has, in some ways, always been associated with elements we might see as geeky: the arcane, the fantastic, or the marginal.
41. Shakespeare and Medical Humanities
Amid renewed interest in incorporating the humanities into medical education and practice, Shakespeare is a source for what it means to be “fully human.” How can medical or bioethical issues in Shakespeare open up these issues for contemporary practitioners? How does work in medical humanities help us understand and explore early modern texts? This seminar welcomes work on scholarship, pedagogy, curriculum, institutional connections, community engagement, the role of scholarship in public humanities.
42. Shakespeare and Middleton
This seminar considers Middleton and Shakespeare as collaborators on Timon of Athens; Shakespeare’s influence on Middleton in terms of plot, characterization, and theme; Middleton’s influence on Shakespeare before and after Timon; and Middleton as possible adapter of Macbeth and Measure for Measure (and, perhaps, other plays). Papers are welcome on the present state of (and debates about) studies in attribution, the Shakespeare and Middleton canons, and new directions for future research.
43. Shakespeare and the Creaturely World
This seminar invites participants to write about nonhuman creatures and creaturely interactions in Shakespeare’s texts and Shakespeare’s time. Contributions are welcome on a world that saw both humans and animals as creatures; particular creatures; the theological dimension of the creaturely; material objects made from and by creatures; the natural world from a creaturely perspective; classifications of creatures; interactions between and among human and nonhuman creatures in texts.
44. Shakespeare in the Anthropocene
The 1610 “Orbis Spike,” a dip in global carbon dioxide coinciding with the commingling of Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, locates Shakespeare in an epoch of human influence upon geology. What does it mean to experience Shakespeare in this context? How do his genres express themes associated with anthropocenic existence? How do his plays shape or enable a post-human awareness of this interconnection? How do his eco-aesthetics react to and potentially alter our uncertain geopolitical scene?
45. Shakespeare, Memory, and Performance
What is the status of memory as a way of understanding the performance of Shakespeare? What is the relationship between performance studies, trauma studies, and cognitive studies? How does technology—from crowdsourcing to distance collaboration to online videos— shape our relationship to performance and its records? This seminar welcomes papers on material culture, theater archives, digital humanities, Shakespeare festivals, anniversary commemorations, reconstructed theaters, original performance practices.
46. Shakespeare, the Book, and the Longue Durée
With the diminished sway of New Historicism, scholars have increasingly turned from a synchronic idea of “context” to the broader, stranger chronologies in which literary works take shape. This seminar considers the particular relationship of book history to diachrony, polychronicity, deep time, and anachronism in literary study. What are the implications for our theoretical, literary- critical, periodizing, and digital practices of thinking about books as multi- or trans- historical objects?
47. Shakespearean Distortions of Early Modern Drama
This seminar invites papers that examine how overreliance on Shakespeare distorts understanding of early modern drama: how truisms from the Shakespeare industry shape received wisdom; how Shakespeare’s stature structures thinking about periodization, audience, print and the author function, and relationships between drama and culture; aspects of drama that have been obscured by focus on Shakespeare. Also welcome are reconsiderations of Shakespeare’s work from the perspective of a broader theater culture.
48. Shakespearean Migrants, Immigrants, Exiles, and Refugees
This seminar considers early modern texts in relation to both early modern and present-day migrations: the impact of Protestant refugees and provincial migrants arriving in Renaissance London; historical contexts for the Syrian refugee crisis and Mexican / U.S. border crossings; the cultural, economic, or environmental impacts of human migrations; onstage use of foreign languages; how recent performances and translations provide new contexts for thinking about Shakespeare, migration, and exile.
49. The Soundscapes of Renaissance Prose
This seminar examines cross-fertilizations between sixteenth-century drama and prose in the work of Baldwin, Nashe, Lyly, Greene, others. The aim is to enrich our understanding of the soundscapes of Renaissance literary culture. Potential topics include friendship and collaboration; allusion and adaptation; borrowing; literary quarrels on and off the stage; satire and pastiche; marketing; print and performance. Also welcome are contributions that open up any aspect of the orality and literacy debate.
50. Terrestrial Shakespeare
How did Shakespeare represent the earth? This seminar encourages dialogue between approaches to the early modern globe that have focused on geography, race, empire, and economy, and those that have adopted an ecological and materialist attention to the earth and oceans. What kinds of histories are stored in land, rock, and water? What epistemic possibilities circulate in drama’s terrestrial lexicon? How might a focus on the earth transform a “global” understanding of the Renaissance?
51. Testing Knowledge on Shakespeare’s Stage
This seminar welcomes papers that challenge or deepen the commonplace that Shakespeare’s plays explore an epistemological skepticism. Do neo- Aristotelian, Thomistic, or emerging scientific epistemologies illuminate the plays? Do the Academic skeptics or early modern philosophers (Bacon, Descartes) add to our understanding of Shakespeare? Is drama particularly suited to skepticism or liable to be misinterpreted as skeptical? What new approaches can be brought to bear on Shakespeare and Montaigne/Pyrrhonism?
52. Theatrical Historiography
This seminar focuses on Shakespeare performance between the Restoration and the twentieth century, with contributions welcome from scholars (Shakespeareans, theater historians, musicologists) and practitioners (directors, actors, musicians, dancers). Papers might problematize binary reductions of Shakespeare to an artist either remotely past or perpetually present; engage directly with performance; or reflect upon research-led creative practice by means of multimedia documentation or performances.
53. Time Reckoning in Early Modern England
How can knowledge of the material practices of time-reckoning in the early modern period illuminate the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? Topics might include studies of clocks, hourglasses, almanacs, sundials, and astrolabes; the time-reckoning attributes of the church, court, or theater; cultural beliefs and controversies—medical, scientific, political—that informed the calendar; or the time-measuring functions of English textual forms, such as diaries, metrical poetry, or plays.
54. Traces of Reading in Shakespeare’s Britain
The field of early modern reading history has expanded rapidly in its texts, methods, and technologies. This seminar welcomes both traditional work on print or manuscript marginalia and new digital approaches to reading history. Papers might address reading histories and the reception of Shakespeare; representations of reading; methodological studies of marginalia as digital objects and the copy census as methodology; the future of access to commonplace books, miscellanies, and annotated book-copies.
55. Typography and the Material Text
This seminar invites papers considering the silent commotion of typography as it generates the early modern Shakespearean playtext. What does a close looking practice, uniting bibliography with close reading, look like? Topics might include orthography; punctuation; white space; non-alphabetic and decorative features; metrical line printing; relationships between various forms of print and manuscript, ink and paper; new technologies for reading; contemporary editions and media; textual variants; cruxes.
56. Women, Performance, and the Dramatic Canon
What are the consequences of early modern women’s theatricality for the dramatic canon, early modern dramaturgy or performance practices, present-day Shakespearean performance, or theater history? Papers might explore the evidence base for female performance; theoretical or methodological approaches to performance, transnationality, feminism, and gender; connections to Continental practice. Fresh interpretations of Shakespeare plays in light of women’s theatricality (broadly defined) are also welcome.
57. Adapting Shakespeare: Contemporary Theory and Practice
This workshop seeks to attract practitioners, scholars, dramaturgs, playwrights (or any combination of those identities) for a collaborative exploration of the theory and practice of adapting Shakespeare for live performance in the twenty-first century. Participants will consider the ways in which “adaptive traits”—microscopic, medium-sized, and radical interventions—may allow a Shakespearean text to flourish in new habitats, vis-à-vis particular audiences, locations, and/or historical moments.
58. Alternatives to the Term Paper
This pedagogically oriented workshop focuses on three types of classroom assignment that reflect methodologies central to the study of early modern drama: editing, performance, and contextualization through hypertext. Emphasizing the contingency and instability of drama, these approaches encourage students to engage with Shakespeare actively and with authority. Participants will build a website to develop a practical and theoretical bibliography, share successful assignments, and develop new ones.
59. Audience Engagement on the Shakespearean Stage
Audience interplay is a key element of Shakespearean performance today and a growing historical and theoretical topic for scholars. This hands-on workshop examines the nature and effects of such interplay, articulating and testing assumptions about early modern stages and audiences that inform such practices. Participants will explore possibilities for audience address in particular scenes, learn about varieties of engagement, and consider their significance for early modern actors and audiences.
60. A Digital Textbook for DH Shakespeare
Participants in this workshop will collaborate on a free, online, open-access textbook for use by those looking to make digital methods a central focus of Shakespeare and early modern literature courses. Work might include reviewing related textbooks; brainstorming about the structure, content, and aesthetic features of this textbook; drafting content for chapters; developing reading and writing assignments. The workshop welcomes those who are comfortable with digital tools and those who are new to DH.
61. Playwrights in Parts
This workshop extends research into actors’ parts in Shakespeare’s plays to the rest of early modern drama. Were playwrights with acting experience better able to manipulate parts and cues? Are there qualities of parts playing that Shakespeare did not use? Or that belong to particular playwrights or companies? Participants will be encouraged to re- divide extant plays into their parts and to test out their findings in workshop rehearsals, generating and reflecting on discoveries through practice.
62. Shakespeare by the Numbers
This workshop introduces scholars to a range of Shakespearean datasets, to techniques and best practices for interpreting data, and to digital tools to facilitate interpretation. Participants will evaluate these datasets’ suitability for answering particular kinds of research questions and write brief position papers on future research possibilities, what kinds of data ought to be collected, and ideal visualization tools. Also welcome are scholars with existing projects and datasets.
44th Annual Meeting
1. Absence and Omission in Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays are often complicated by what they lack. Key characters go suddenly missing from scenes, absent characters exert influence over present ones, plots turn because of mislaid or immaterial objects, and cuts to scripts help shape contemporary performances. This seminar invites papers that examine how absences—of characters, objects, text, etc.—enrich, extend, or undercut the effects of what is present. Participants might explore questions related to early modern dramaturgy, contemporary representation and reception, text and genre, agency and materiality, and more.
2. Ambassador Shakespeare
While Shakespeare has often been used to support particular political or cultural beliefs, his plays have also been used as a means of bridging cultural divides. This seminar invites scholars to examine those moments in which Shakespeare becomes an ambassador. Possibilities include looking at intercultural performances that bring together actors from more than one nation, examining the use of Shakespearean texts or performances to bridge cultural divides in the multicultural classroom, or exploring other moments in which Shakespearean diplomacy decreases the distance between cultures.
3. Approaching Dance in Shakespeare: Text, Context, and Performance
This interactive workshop explores the significance of dance in Shakespeare’s plays from three perspectives, beginning with pre-conference reading on dance in early modern English culture and its significance in the text of one or two exemplary plays. With both teaching and research in mind, participants are invited to suggest clips of dance scenes in notable modern productions for review prior to and discussion during the workshop. Finally, participants will learn some Renaissance dance steps under the tutelage of Dibble and Winerock.
4. Arden of Faversham: Performance, Authorship, Gender, and History
Arden has exploded into prominence as a result of new claims that Shakespeare wrote part of it—or did not. England’s first (and best?) domestic tragedy, and the first English play dominated by a woman character, has seen recent modern-dress productions in Stratford, Washington D.C., and Indianapolis. How does performance illuminate it? Is the play misogynist? How does it relate to the 1580s? To Holinshed? The evolution of history plays? Domestic violence? Unemployed military veterans? The rise of Protestant capitalism? Black comedy? Who wrote it?
5. Artful Shakespeares
This seminar explores the intersection of native English and continental visual arts traditions and Shakespearean-era drama. How are features or techniques of the visual arts—natural landscapes, por- traiture, chiaroscuro/sfumato, perspec- tive, decorative/material objects, other depicted elements, etc.—embedded or “painted” into early modern playtexts or stagecraft? Alternatively, how do Renais- sance artworks represent the world of the theater, perhaps in actors’ or individuals’ portraits or other illustrations? Rather than focusing on later periods’ representations of Shakespearean subjects, this seminar considers the contemporary interrela- tionship between Renaissance art and drama.
6. Before Shakespeare: The Drama of the 1580s
Since the 1980s, scholars have recognized that the final decades of London commercial theater are poorly understood. The first decades of the playhouses, however, have not received similarly comprehensive revision: it is not only Shakespeare for whom the 1580s are lost years. This seminar explores the place of the early playhouses in London’s wider literary, cultural, and commercial landscape, seeking to connect theater history to other disciplinary forms, such as performance studies, book history, and the fields of poetry and prose fiction.
7. Ben Jonson in Space
Four hundred years after the publication of Jonson’s monumental first folio, this seminar explores the Jonsonian use of, and engagement with, spatiality. Contributions may focus on any relevant aspect of the topic, including the spaces of the theater, the printed page, or manuscript. Jonson’s interest in architecture, emblems, and site-specific or itinerant performance, as well as his handling of social or symbolic space, might also feature in participants’ work. Is there a spatial practice distinctive to Jonsonian writing that helps to make it precisely Jonsonian?
8. “Both in Reputation & Profit”: Kinds of Capital in the Early Theatre
The commercial enterprises of performing plays and running early modern playhouses were hedged around by negotiations with the Master of Revels, civic authorities, and patrons. Within the theatrical profession, obligations and fellowship colored contractual relationships. That players’ activities were preparatory “to do his majesty service in their quality” was not just a convenient fiction. This seminar’s central question asks how service, quality, profit, and reputation fed one another.
9. Caroline Shakespeare
How was Shakespeare imagined in the Caroline period? What were the responses to his work? Who were the readers of his posthumous printed editions, and how did they interpret him? How did Shakespeare influence Caroline theatrical practice and, conversely, how did Caroline theater, and the attacks against it, affect his reputation? Most broadly, how did Shakespeare influence writing of all kinds from 1625 to 1649? This seminar invites participants in and dialogue between the fields of book history, theater history, genre studies, and reception history.
10. Cavell on Shakespeare
The goal of this seminar is to help its participants (and potentially others) reckon with the contribution of Stanley Cavell to Shakespeare studies. The aim is not praise but understanding and assessment. Papers can be appreciative as well as critical so long as they are analytical. They can consider readings of or particular claims about individual plays, or his methodology, or the ways in which his work on Shakespeare is affected by his other work: his “straight” philosophical work; his work on film; etc.
11. Close Reading
Seminar papers can be either close readings of individual plays or theoretical arguments about the methodologies of close reading, the reasons close readings have fallen out of favor, and/or arguments for their continuing value.
12. Commemorating Shakespeare: Conflict, Co-operation, Capital
In 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death will be celebrated worldwide. This global commemorative enthusiasm leads us to interrogate the phenomenon of “commemorative Shakespeare” and its socio-political ramifications. This seminar invites examinations of Shakespearean festivities from Garrick’s Jubilee to the present, reflecting on motivations for commemorating Shakespeare. How do commemorative events enable social groups to construct collective identities in opposition to or in collaboration with other groups? How does commemoration generate cultural, social, or monetary capital? What makes Shakespeare a privileged site of commemorative activity?
13. Early Modern Sensory Interactions
This seminar asks how the senses interacted with one another in early modern performance, literature, and culture. How might attention to more than one sense at a time yield new insights into early modern subjects as readers, playgoers, performers, or writers? Papers may explore subjects’ multi-sensory responses to literature or performance; how literary and other writings convey entangled or overlapping sensory experiences; the playhouse environment; material text approaches to the experience of books and manuscripts; and synesthesia in early modern texts, performances, and contexts.
14. Early Modern Women and Travel
This seminar invites papers that engage the topic of early modern women and travel from theoretical, critical, archival, and pedagogical perspectives. How do scholars understand “travel writing” in terms of early modern women’s movements locally and globally? How do the imaginative works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries promote and undermine women’s travel? What possibilities for teaching early modern women’s travels emerge from an assessment of documentary, literary, and other sources? What sorts of critical editions, anthologies, or electronic databases can emerge out of these discussions?
15. Ecological Resilience
This seminar explores the intimate and local moments after environmental crisis. Participants are encouraged to look past vulnerability and consider individual and communal resilience in the aftermath of the storms, plagues, blights, fires, droughts, floods, and wars that affected early modern populations. In considering how these populations moved on in the wake of devastation, the seminar asks participants to think about the ways humans persist and how the human and nonhuman environment is indelibly marked by the experience of ecological calamity.
16. Editing for Performance: An Interactive Workshop for Practitioners and Editors
Over the last decade, an editorial/ commentary practice to facilitate performance and experiential exploration (rather than silent study) of Shakespeare’s texts has been increasingly theorized, but as yet there has been little practical application. This hands-on workshop, designed for both actors and editors, introduces and explores emerging proposals about editing for practitioners. Prior to the conference, participants will edit and/ or annotate one Shakespearean scene, modeling possible formats, types of annotation, or editorial principles. Conference time is given over to on-our- feet readings of resultant scripts.
17. Imagining Scientific Form
This seminar aims to place form at the center of discussions of early modern literature and science. How do writers deploy scientific notions of form in imaginative works? How do literary forms—from the macro-level of genres to the micro-level of figures of speech—shape practices in natural philosophy? Papers might focus on: reflections on form in Shakespeare and his contemporaries; explorations of the concept of form in natural philosophy; and interactions of “new formalism” with science studies, object criticism, and forms of “new materialisms.”
18. Intention in Early Modern Literature
How can scholars talk rigorously and precisely about intention in early modern literature? How do they detect an author’s purpose? What critical commitments subtend such an approach? Do playwrights have a relationship to intention different from poets or prose writers? What of non-authorial agents (compositors, copyists, performers)? Do “things” have intentions? Do genres, forms, and even texts? How were notions of deliberation and purposiveness understood by early modern writers themselves?
19. Masculinity and the Body in Contemporary Shakespearean Film and Performance
This seminar investigates the performative male body as a source of meaning and an adaptive site in its own right. In what ways do celebrity, queer, sexualized, wounded, militarized, aging males signify? How does race or nationality cut across the politics of bodily branding? When does a concentration on male body plays affect conceptions of the canon? Where does a focus on masculinity leave women? Papers on male bodies, dead or alive, are invited.
20. More or Less than Kind: Claiming Kinship in Early Modern Literature
When is a bastard kin and when not? Servants? Poor cousins? Such figures on the fringe of family structures are a key locus for analyzing the working of contested definitions of family in early modern culture and literature. This seminar invites papers (drawing on plays, poetry, conduct manuals, pamphlets, sermons, and more) investigating how fringe members of families position themselves to exploit family ties, how strategies differ between different kinds—servants and tutors, widows and stepmothers—of kin, and how affective dynamics inflect those negotiations.
21. New Perspectives on The Merchant of Venice: Text, Performance, Adaptation
Merchant of Venice scholarship addresses a wide range of topics: religion, antisemitism, homosociality, race, usury, law, and animals. In addition to the stage, it has been adapted in film, as an opera, and in graphic novels. 2016 marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the establishment of the Venetian ghetto. This seminar invites participants to consider broadly new perspectives from which
to view the text, performances, and adaptations of the play.
22. Novel/Travelling Objects
This seminar considers two kinds of objects: novel or new objects, and objects that travel or are mobile. Both kinds invite speculation about foreignness, familiarity, desire, and transformation. Questions for exploration include: What networks are formed or destroyed by objects as they move through time and space? How do objects deteriorate, become fixed, lost, recovered, refurbished, and what does that tell us about the objects (and, perhaps, the hands through which they have passed)? What is the relationship between current and early modern object theories?
23. Part-time Shakespeare
Most specialists in Shakespeare teach at small liberal arts colleges, regional comprehensive universities, community colleges, or off the tenure track entirely. This seminar considers the place of these Shakespeare scholars working outside of the major research university environment. Papers might consider how institutional structures inform pedagogical decisions, how Shakespeare fits into the general education curriculum, the way teaching generalist courses affects a Shakespeare/early modernist research agenda, or what “part-time” Shakespeareans contribute to our understanding of Shakespeare.
24. Performance Studies and Shakespeare: A Dialogue
This seminar considers the ways that performance studies scholarship might open up new questions and methodologies for the analysis of Shakespearean performance. Participants will read short excerpts from key performance studies theorists on issues currently being debated in the field, such as liveness, ephemerality, reenactment, and site-specificity (among other things) and use these ideas to frame their exploration of particular plays; issues in theater history; or theatrical and/or extra- or para-theatrical performances, including dance, hospitality, festivity, juggling, habits of everyday life, etc.
25. Performing Disability in Early Modern England
This seminar examines how disability intersected with performance in early modern England. How were bodily and cognitive disabilities performed in the early modern English theater? How was disability enacted and embodied in other performance venues—by fools and dwarfs at court, in displays of “deformity” at fairs, in ballads about “monsters,” and in poems about the madness of love? How can the work of disabled actors in recent performances of early modern drama inform scholarship?
26. Performing Knowledge on Shakespeare’s Stage
This seminar explores the strategies used by early modern drama to negotiate the theatrical challenges of representing forms and processes of knowing. How are specific theatrical devices, properties, scenic structures, and spaces deployed to probe the affective, cognitive, and ethical aspects of knowledge? How do dramatic texts forge a theatrical “language” for giving such elusive and mobile functions a theatrical habitation and a name? Reflections on epistemic dialogues with non-dramatic modes, and how the global Shakespearean stage translates culturally specific knowledge transactions, are also welcome.
27. Political Aesthetics
How is the aesthetic dimension related to an expanded conception of political subjectivities and communities during the early modern moment? To a revised understanding of affect and the human sensorium? How is the artwork related to issues of autonomy and origination and thus to the problem of political foundations? What is the relation between the aesthetic and history or historicization? The seminar explores literary and visual material by way of Renaissance conceptions of the work as well as through current aesthetic theory.
28. Queering Childhood
This seminar aims to bring together queer theory with childhood studies. To what extent might the early modern child be seen as queer, and what role did drama play in creating “the child” as a social category that intersects with constructions of gender, sexuality, race, and class? When do children reinforce early modern notions of such differences, and when do they collapse them? Potential topics include children and queer temporalities, transgender theory and boy actresses, children as genderqueer, and the homoerotics of early modern childhood.
29. Race and …
The “race and…” mode of inquiry—race and gender, race and religion, race and geography, for example—suggests that scholars primarily understand early modern racial formation as intersecting with other factors that help define kinship and community. This seminar asks participants to consider new or underexplored intersections for studying race in the early modern period or to introduce new models for thinking about often-considered intersections. Participants might also consider places of non-intersection where race seems to resist being put in conversation with other factors.
30. Re-appraising the Admiral’s Men
This seminar aims to synthesize the latest advances in literary criticism and theater history, including digital resources, to re-evaluate the plays and practices of the Admiral’s Men and their successor companies, the Prince’s and Palsgrave’s Men. To what extent did this playing company have a distinctive repertory, audience, and corporate identity? What methodologies and resources are most productive when approaching its plays? How is its relationship to Shakespeare’s company best understood, and how can a study of the Admiral’s Men illuminate our understanding of Shakespeare?
31. Re-Authoring Shakespeare in Contemporary Performance, Translation, and Adaptation
This seminar examines contemporary productions, translations, and theatrical adaptations of Shakespeare and assertions of authorship made by or about them. Contributors may wish to explore: productions in which the authorial status of either Shakespeare or the theater-makers involved has been significantly contested; claims to authorship made either implicitly or explicitly by methodologies for the direction, translation, or adaptation of plays; emerging debates over the authorial status of theater-makers such as directors, designers, and actors; and performances which seek to share authorship with their audiences.
32. Reality Shakespeare
Reality Shakespeare is aesthetically and generically diverse. It lays claim to a discourse of “the real” about content, makers and audiences, and/ or processes. In broadcast television and radio, it includes the game show, game-doc, docu-soap, pop-doc, make-over, and social experiment, e.g. with teachers and actors. Elsewhere, it encompasses “grassroots” audio-visual content, films, biographies, newspaper articles, academic writing, and hip hop. Seminarians may explore reality Shakespeare’s reception globally by critics and Shakespeareans; how it may be understand through work on quotation, appropriation, authenticity, and evidence; or related topics.
33. Re-evaluating Earlier Generations of Shakespeare Films
This seminar seeks new approaches to earlier generations of Shakespeare films (pre-Branagh), which may include perspectives on the silent era/early talkies, advantages of black and white or color storytelling, film marketing, Shakespeare as Auteur subject, studio shorts and screen tests, script revisions, and supplementations and corrections to extant film scholarship. Comparisons of pre-1989 and recent films might consider casting, play choice, screenplay text analysis, restricted and permissive use of nudity, violence, and language. Other new approaches are most welcome.
34. Religion and / as Language
This seminar studies the role language plays in religious experience in Shakespeare and post-Reformation culture and reflects on the methodological questions germane to such study. How does religious language mean, and what does it do? What are its forms? What skills do scholars need to read religious language? How can theology, grammar, rhetoric, and logic help us? Which later theories of language seem most relevant? Both focused readings and broad considerations of these questions are welcome.
35. Representing Ovid on the Early Modern Stage
This seminar invites participants to continue in the path of recent scholarship on Ovid in the Renaissance but to branch out into new territory by exploring representations of Ovid’s poetry on the early modern stage. Papers may address the ways in which early modern playwrights and companies appropriated Ovidian subject matters, perspectives, genres, or poetic methods in their dramaturgy, modes of representation, or theatrical practices; the role of English translations in staging Ovid; or the affective impact of Ovidian-inspired plays on early modern audiences and/or culture.
36. Reprints and Revivals
Scholarship on early modern drama privileges first performances and publications, but this seminar explores the ways in which playwrights, acting companies, and stationers renewed plays in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, inviting papers on reprints, revivals, and/or the relationship between them. How do scholars know when a play is revived? How do printed and theatrical paratexts represent new publications and performances? Do some reprints and revivals coincide? How do revivals complicate ideas of repertory? How might the cultural and social climate of later performances/ publications have affected audiences/ readers?
37. Rethinking the “Minor” Epic
Can scholarship expand upon recent attempts to read epyllia by Shakespeare and others in light of shifting definitions of masculinity, nationhood, and the nature of social distinction? What do these not-so-minor poems reveal about the institutions of rhetorical training— grammar schools, universities, Inns of Court—that made them possible? What kinds of cultural and poetic critique emerge if they are studied as a poetic conversation? As engagements with the commercial stage, the law, or new forms of trade? Theoretical, archival, and interpretive approaches are welcome.
38. Ritual Shakespeare
This seminar invites papers on all forms of ritual in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Topics may include religious ceremonies, spectacles of punishment, banquets, royal progresses, carnivals, and commemorations. How is ritual represented in serious and parodic registers? Do ritual practices differ according to sacred and secular uses? How does ritual connect religious practice to language and literary form? In what ways do rituals “do things with words”? And how has Shakespeare himself become the subject of ritual practice since the seventeenth century?
39. Scenographic Shakespeares: Site, Space, Performance
What do site, space, and design bring to Shakespeare? How does Shakespeare offer extended possibilities in scenography and mise-en-scène? This seminar is for scholars and practitioners whose interests lie in Shakespeare and the visual, in performance practice and theory, and in the interface between textual and performance analysis. Participants may consider various performance sites and scenic environments in which Shakespeare has been staged, explore theoretical models for understanding such spaces, and share accounts of the relationships between particular settings and the Shakespeare texts they host.
40. Sexuality from Below
Are there differences between elite and low sexualities? Where have scholars looked for them, and where should they look? Could renewed focus on sexuality from below change our understanding of categories like elite/base, homo/hetero, and licit/illicit? Prompted by these questions, papers might examine the sexualization of specific figures (vagrants, prostitutes, gypsies, disabled persons); paranoid visions of low sexuality (sodomy, bastardy, promiscuity, incest, sexual violence); low sexuality in non-literary artifacts (crime narratives, legal records, illustrations); and elite invocations of low sexuality (disguise, mimicry, appropriation).
41. Shakespeare and Cognition
This seminar explores ways that cognitive methodologies can illuminate the language and performance of Shakespeare. Cognitive linguistics imagines language as creative and embodied, while current research in the cognitive sciences demonstrates the deeply embedded and distributed nature of cognition. More than just located in a body, thinking is distributed across and interacts with an environment. This seminar focuses on the processes and products of engaging with a Shakespearean environment on page and in performance, using cognitive approaches to theorize how Shakespeare moves an audience.
42. Shakespeare and His Contemporaries in the 18th and 19th Centuries
Does the reception of Shakespeare in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries still shape our understanding of his dramatic and non-dramatic contemporaries? How were his contemporaries read, reimagined, and received, in various media and in various contexts, across the two centuries? What have scholars gained or lost in their perception of early modern writing by approaching it through Shakespeare? Both theoretical and historical contributions as well as different national and transnational perspectives are welcome.
43. Shakespeare and Montaigne
The collected works of Shakespeare and Montaigne serve perhaps better than any other body of writing to illustrate what could be thought, imagined, and felt in early modern Europe. How is our study of Shakespeare enhanced by familiarity with Montaigne—or vice versa? How and why might scholars teach or write about these authors in close juxtaposition? Jointly considered, how can their works deepen our understanding of the cultural worlds these men inhabited and the verbal worlds they have left us?
44. Shakespeare and Narrative (Theory)
This seminar invites essays that consider storytelling as intrinsic to the commercial, critical, and cultural success of Shakespeare’s plays as well as the long-term polity of his art. Papers might focus on stories produced and circulated within the plays or their various re-appropriations; or they might rethink theoretical accounts merging theater, narration, and cultural production in an effort to reappraise Shakespeare’s growing iconicity throughout early modernity and beyond. Participants are also invited to consider stories of and about Shakespeare produced through critical engagements with the man and his work.
45. Shakespeare and Riot
From the depiction of angry mobs (e.g., in Coriolanus) to the provocation of theatrical unrest (e.g., the 1849 Astor Place Riot), this seminar explores the multiple connections between Shakespeare and riot across time and space. Papers might consider how early modern dramatists staged riot, instances of social unrest in response to performances of Shakespeare, and how Shakespeare and his works function as sites of disorder in the theater and the media. Our aim is to develop critical methodologies for the study of theatrical disorder.
46. Shakespeare and the Dictionary
Our growing sense of the early modern as a noisy polyglot space encourages us to think about dictionaries, not only as Shakespeare might have used them but as foundational texts we would later come to call “reference works.” This seminar invites papers on dictionary making, dictionary reading, the question of Shakespeare’s “vocabulary,” and related subjects. Participants are encouraged to look beyond a reading of a particular word to think more broadly about the role of dictionaries in bridging the gap between Shakespeare’s world and ours.
47. Shakespeare and the Histories of Sustainability
What might Shakespeare and his contemporaries contribute to multi- disciplinary conversations about sustainability? Do English Renaissance texts and institutions model “sustainable practices”? Do they resist such practices, imagine them differently, or figure their failure? Papers are welcome on such topics as catastrophe, climate change, debt and gift economies, excess and festival, husbandry, resource depletion and extraction, resilience, risk management, scarcity, sufficiency, and yields.
48. Shakespeare Documents
Digitization projects have made the documentary evidence that witnesses Shakespeare’s life widely available, but it now circulates free of its archival contexts. Pre-conference readings will allow participants to understand the early modern administrative processes that led to the rich collection of “Shakespeare documents.” Convened by archival specialists, this workshop models how an understanding of Renaissance bureaucratic structures can help corroborate known sources and lead to new ones. Ultimately, participants can build upon the contextual understanding developed in the workshop to consider what more these documents might reveal.
49. Shakespeare in the American South
The Southern U.S. has a historically strong connection to Shakespeare and Shakespeare scholarship, having played a role in the founding of the SAA itself. It also figures in current productions and appropriations. The SAA asked us to lead a seminar on this topic in New Orleans over a decade ago; ten years later, our seminar revisits Shakespeare’s artistic and cultural function in the region broadly defined. Papers are welcome on a wide range of topics, especially on Shakespeare’s historical, critical, institutional, and performative role.
50. Shakespeare, Materialism, and Religion
The “religious turn” and the “new materialism” have emerged at roughly the same time, both with a decidedly philosophical focus. This seminar seeks papers that put these two critical strands in dialogue. How do religious debates complicate claims that materialist thought dominated pre-Cartesian understanding? How are philosophical accounts of materiality and immateriality implicated in the religious rhetoric of the period? How else might scholars connect Shakespeare, religion, and philosophy?
51. Shakespeare, Race, and Pedagogical Practice
Recent scholarship has shown the complexity of race in the early modern period, but what are the best ways to teach this complexity and deepen students’ responses to black lives in the Shakespearean text? What strategies can help students understand the past and recognize privilege, injustice, inequality, and racism in the present? Before the workshop, participants are asked to share essays, lesson plans, digital modules, assignments, lecture outlines, slides, or other pedagogical materials offering local and global perspectives on teaching Shakespeare and race.
52. Shared Practices and Shakespearean Communities
This seminar asks how different communities create different ways of knowing in and around Shakespeare. How do shared practices, including the crafts of acting, writing, and teaching, foster communal identities and create particular kinds of knowledge? Papers are welcome that explore a variety of communities, practices, and users, from a theater company to a ship’s crew, an artisanal guild, or a professional society (like the SAA). What benefits and dangers attend the communal generation of bodies of knowledge and the communal validation of associated practices?
53. Sleeping through the Renaissance
This seminar investigates early modern understandings of consciousness, asking how states like swooning, sleeping, wakefulness, and others were depicted in a range of texts. Could these states be conceptualized within a spectrum? How do liminal states of consciousness (half-asleep, sleep-talking, waking dreams, sleep- walking, drug-induced states) become conceptualized, and what might this imply about the relationship between consciousness and embodied personhood? Participants are invited to attend particularly to how these states trouble a variety of written discourses, especially in the act of fiction-making.
54. Space, Memory, and Transformation in Early Modern Literature
This seminar explores how spaces, both terrestrial and maritime, were remembered, reworked, and reimagined on and off the stage or page. Papers that consider how early modern inhabitants, writers, or performers transformed past places and practices through their labor are welcome. How might personal or collective memories alter spaces? How might built or natural spaces transform memories? Subjects of inquiry could include: site specific performance; memory and cognition; sensory geographies; material histories; or built or natural environments, such as cities, households, waterways, coastlines, forests, and ruins.
55. Teaching Textual Studies in/through Shakespeare
After the “textual” and “material” turns, textual studies and bibliography remain perceived as marginal, if not subservient, to literary criticism as practiced by most Shakespeare scholars. And yet close reading, arguably the principal tool of the literary critic, is also at the heart of editorial practice and teaching. This seminar welcomes papers investigating the role of pedagogy in bridging the gap between Shakespearean textual studies, bibliography, and literary criticism, from case studies
and histories to explorations of wider theoretical, institutional, and disciplinary concerns.
56. The Face-to-Face in Shakespearean Drama
This seminar focuses on face-to-face encounters in Shakespearean drama and its cultural contexts. Participants are encouraged to consider moments of intimacy, exchange, interpersonal religion, hospitality, dining, conversation, collective storytelling, touching, dance, and confession as activities distinct from transcendence, publicness, and institutions. While forms of interaction may differ, the central concerns of the seminar unite around the question of how interpersonal intimacy, as performative and theatrical, critiques or reinforces histories of secularism and transcendence. How does the face-to-face perform a phenomenology of the human?
57. The Forgotten Archives of Early Modern English Culture
In recent years, some archival genres–letters, commonplace books, miscellanies, receipt books, diaries– have enjoyed analysis by literary scholars. But other archives have been neglected–wills, leases, bonds, accounts, inventories, maps, Exchequer records, guild papers, almanacs, etc. This seminar invites work that illuminates these forgotten archives. What can literary analysis tell us about an archival genre’s formal qualities, rhetorics, and social functions? How might interpretations of literary works change when considered alongside these forgotten archives as part an early modern textual world?
58. The Shakespearean Text and Contemporary Performance
Have postmodern perspectives compelled scholars to abandon the idea of an authoritative text that encodes a meaning that performance reproduces? Is there any objective way to gauge the legitimacy of a production’s inventions, its degree of Shakespearean-ness? On what basis do scholars separate the valid from the fraudulent? Is it ever appropriate to asperse a production for enacting a “misreading”? Papers are welcome from anyone currently wrestling with these questions, whether in the form of theoretical disquisitions performances histories, or reviews and analyses.
59. Titus Andronicus: The State of Play
The surge in recent performances of Titus Andronicus suggests it is popular with current audiences. But is it still dismissed as an immature, gratuitously violent work by Shakespeare and his collaborator George Peele? This seminar is interested in papers that consider why Titus continues to appeal to audiences. What new light can be shed upon its disturbing cruelty? How has our critical vocabulary developed, particularly in light of theater history and contemporary performance? A range of approaches to Titus is welcome.
60. Towards Ecocriticism in Performance
This seminar explores ways in which Shakespeare in performance can foster ecological consciousness and change. Papers are invited from conceptual, historical, and practical perspectives. They might address questions such as: What theories of performance enable ecocritical productions? How have (or could) Shakespearean tropes of degradation and sustainability been adapted in performance to address today’s environmental problems and solutions? How do different performance genres or media shape ecologically oriented representations and responses? What role can Shakespearean performance play in producing an environmental politics and posthuman ethics?
61. Vision and Emotion in Early Modern Literature and Culture
How do theories of sight shape psychology in early modern literature and culture? What role does vision
play in fear, jealousy, lovesickness, joy, aesthetic pleasure, and trauma, and how do competing theories of vision relate to early modern ideas of contagion, sympathy, and theater- going? This seminar aims to reopen discussions about vision in light of recent approaches to cognition, embodiment, and affect.
62. What to Do with a Discovery in the Archive: Hester Pulter’s Manuscript and Other Found Objects
How may the unknown be framed, interpreted, and shared? Workshop participants use hands-on techniques to explore how to “frame” texts, objects, or images, including variant ways of editing, digitizing, anthologizing, contextualizing, and curating sources. Beginning with
the test case of Hester Pulter’s newly discovered manuscript, participants may then introduce their own archival “finds.” The aim is to experiment with how new material invites us to rethink assumptions about reading practices, editorial theory, authorship, women’s writing, canonization, digital tools, intellectual paradigms, genre, and/or manuscript studies.
63. Working Class Shakespeares: Shakespeare in Class and Class in Shakespeare
This workshop explores Shakespeare, upward mobility, and the (re)production
of social class, especially as related to college access and success. Through shared readings, participants will engage Working-Class Shakespeares from critical, pedagogical, and even biographical perspectives. They will also query, among other questions, the responsibility in teaching working-class students; the relationship between Shakespeare and cultural capital; the ways class and status in the academy influence criticism and pedagogy; and what Shakespeare’s plays reveal about education’s role in the formation of class, status, and mobility.
43rd Annual Meeting
1. Animal Encounters
This seminar welcomes a wide variety of approaches to studying animals in the past. The collective goal is to examine the role of historical change in scholarship about animal lives, particularly in Shakespeare studies. How might the diverse range of methodological approaches that now define Shakespeare studies enrich animal culture studies? What narratives emerge from our collective encounters with animals in Shakespearean archives, broadly defined? What might the role of Shakespeare studies be within the broader field of critical animal studies?
2. Animal Materialisms
This seminar invites essays on animals’ material presences in early modern environments—as objects, food, clothing, furniture; in menageries; as the objects of scientific experiments; as property, elements of landscapes, or the vehicles or objects of trade—to raise questions about the nature of embodiment, the fashioning of “culture,” animal agency and/or the definition of the human, or any other categories, histories, identities, or readings of texts that might be created or disrupted by attending to the matter of animals.
3. Apocalypse and Form
Is the apocalypse a form or the end of forms? Is form always a mediating screen ultimately annihilated by the face-to-face immediacy of revelation? This seminar invites papers that explore Shakespeare’s lyric, narrative, and dramatic depictions of apocalyptic or messianic events and his use of formal innovation (masque elements in the romances or alterations to the sonnet sequence, for example) to connote revelatory change. In sum, it asks whether and how Shakespeare imagines apocalyptic or messianic change as a present possibility inside of literary forms.
4. Appropriation, Adaptation, or What You Will
This seminar aims to establish a set of working methodologies for scholars writ- ing about Shakespearean appropriation so that they can develop a shared, even if contested, discourse. Papers might consider Shakespearean appropriations within contemporary cultural contexts: in current copyright law, in the so-called creative commons, in academic labor, in classroom and performance spaces. Participants may also consider to what extent it is worth distinguishing among adaptive media in terms of technical specifications and how or whether per- formance can be considered a kind of embodied appropriation.
5. Broadcast Your Shakespeare
This seminar proposes to explore Shakespeare in and as broadcasting. Participants might undertake a historically comparative approach exploring the relation of “new” media Shakespeares to “older” broadcast media. They might take a medium- specific approach, and address what qualities newer broadcasting forms (e.g., a YouTube vlog or Tumblr page) bring to Shakespeare studies. Papers also might address media change and its ideological consequences: do newer forms realize a heterogeneous, culturally diverse Bard? Or, do we need to queer the “new” in Shakespeare and new media?
6. Disgusting Shakespeare
The word “disgust” enters the English language around 1600. Yet, Shakespeare frequently makes use of this aversive affect, and contemporary studies of disgust turn to him for examples of disgusting behaviors and disgusted reactions. This seminar invites papers on any aspect of disgust in Shakespeare’s works. The papers might be informed by topical and analytic studies, those more deeply invested in questions of history and philosophy, theoretical studies focused on the political ramifications of disgust, or those that represent theory’s current “turn to affect.”
7. Early Modern Aesthetics
This seminar explores the aesthetic principles, practices, and problems that mattered to early modern authors. How do Shakespeare and his contemporaries set or upset the aesthetic standards of the age, and what might have been at stake — culturally, religiously, politically, economically, or philosophically — for early modern writers employing or discussing those standards? Papers might consider how particular literary texts represent beauty (or ugliness), how aesthetic making and aesthetic judgment are thematized in poetry and drama, or how they are schematized in critical prose.
8. Early Modern Food Systems
While food studies have afforded ways of comprehending early modern habits of preparing, consuming, and regulating food for particular eaters, this seminar invites papers that configure the field more broadly. Focusing on food systems—the interactions of constituents involved in food production, processing, transportation, exchange, distribution, consumption, and disposal—papers may attend to the operations and coordinates of edible things beyond the context of eating and digestion, such as the role of food in community formation, customs, hospitality, justice, land use, labor, travel, and trade.
9. Early Modern Prose
This seminar invites papers on works of nonfictional prose that broaden our ideas about the production, circulation, or consumption of the literary in Shakespeare’s England. How and by whom was nonfictional prose read, and how did early moderns categorize these works? What do we learn from taking a careful look at form, style, and format, as well as contemporary reception? How are form and history, aesthetics and materialism mutually informing? A variety of theoretical and methodological approaches are welcome.
10. Early Modern Race / Ethnic / Diaspora Studies
What are the institutional, professional, and research challenges of working both in early modern studies and also in such areas as Critical Ethnic Studies, African Diaspora Studies, and Native American / Indigenous Studies? The governing assumptions for each field can be at odds, but this seminar asks whether the space between the presentism of race studies and the push against anachronism in Shakespeare studies can be energizing and productive. Papers are welcome on how the disciplines can learn from each other for scholarship and teaching.
11. Entertainments and Early Modern Plays
Popular entertainments (such as bear baitings, jigs, musicians) were frequently offered with plays in the early modern playhouses, yet scholarship has tended to keep drama partitioned off from peripheral entertainments. How might we re-imagine early modern plays as being shaped in anticipation of entertainments or as incorporating them in plays themselves? How did drama engage with mayoral pageants and royal progresses as part of the political and cultural landscape? Where might we blur the boundary between drama and paradramatic entertainments on the early modern stage?
12. Error in Early Modern Studies
This seminar examines negative knowledge and semantic lack in primarily (though not exclusively) Shakespearean contexts, considering its place in play-text and poetry as well as in performance, scholarship, pedagogy, and historical process. Participants should be willing to think creatively across topics including (for example) character miscalculations, representations or enactments of social or cognitive miscues, failures of knowledge, narrative contradictions, the matter of satire, mathematical mistakes, material for jesting culture, publishers’ misprints, errata slips, digital glitches, and our own engagements with error as scholars and teachers.
13. Fiction in Shakespeare
Papers might address any aspect of the fictional in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What do we gain by letting fictions into our lives? What can we learn by studying them? Do fictional creatures inhabit this world, a different world, or do they leave unfilled holes in the world? How does fiction relate to history, philosophy, law, imitation, ekphrasis, fantasy, dream, play, artifice, or falsehood? Is theater fictional? Is poetry nonfictional? What about literary criticism? How would early moderns have thought about fiction?
14. Form and Deformity in Early Modern Literature
This seminar explores deformity as a foundational concept and animating force for early modern performance and poetics. To declare a line, a character, a text, a shape, a figure, or a play “deformed” is to assert a judgment— aesthetic, moral, social—that appeals to a shared sense of form, but deformation may also mark literature’s capacity to introduce new forms into the world. Papers on deformity—with topics ranging from dramatic phenomenology to literary formalism, from embodiment and prosthetics to rhetoric and style— are welcome.
15. Form, Complexity, and Computation
This seminar explores ways in which the complexity of literary texts can be expressed in computational terms. How can we represent verbal ambiguity, nuances of theme and structure, and intertextuality within quantitative frameworks? Papers may reflect on the processes of quantification or grapple with the computational difficulty presented by the inescapable ambiguity of literary data. Particularly welcome are those that engage contemporary statistical and information theoretic approaches to complexity and ambiguity in data — including probability, bias, entropy, information gain.
16. Gender, Sexuality, and Militarism
Bringing together deep archival work and broader theoretical conversations, this seminar crosses genres, periods, and methodologies to consider the nexus of gender, sexuality, and militarism in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, including the civil wars and their immediate aftermath, debates about military theory and practice leading up to the wars, and representations of conflicts from the century’s second half. Possible topics include military subjectivity, the erotics of battle, just-war theory, rape and “civility,” sieges and the “domestic,” torture, states of exception, war martyrs, citizenship.
17. Landscape, Space, and Place in Early Modern Literature
This seminar welcomes papers exploring any form of early modern writing that engages with space, place, landscape, and environment. Subjects of inquiry might include historical phenomenology and sensory geographies; body and environment; mobility studies; histories of travel or perambulation; regional and provincial literatures; urban studies, including buildings, neighborhoods, or habitats; performance environments; sites of performance, memory, and cognition; cartography or chorography; ecocriticism; oceanic or new blue studies; trans-disciplinary engagements with cognate disciplines.
18. Literary Romance
Do Shakespeare’s later plays seem especially literary? Are there unique literary effects when romance mediates between stage and page, belief and disbelief, national and international identities? If the romance mode imagines gender, sexuality, race, nation, and religion as labile, how effective are their onstage embodiments? Seminar contributors may address plays by Shakespeare, his collaborators, and his competitors; romance elements or inter texts of any early modern play; romance’s involvement with classical and early modern national literatures; romance in contemporary fiction, drama, film, criticism, or translation.
19. Marxist Shakespeares / Shakespearean Marx
This seminar engages both classical Marxist analyses of Shakespearean plays and Shakespearean analyses of Marxist theory—that is, papers that discuss Shakespeare from a Marxist perspective and ones that discuss how Shakespeare’s plays influenced Marxism. Participants may use Marxism’s basic critiques to renew critical and cultural theory within Shakespeare studies, to re-invigorate current critical practices, to challenge the current hegemony of finance capital. Also welcome are papers that seek the roots of Marxist theory and practice in the imagery, poetics, and form of Shakespeare’s plays.
20. Memory and Musical Performance
Music and memory intersected in numerous ways in early modern drama; even a brief textual reference would have prompted audiences to remember a ballad’s tune and full text. More recent presentations of early modern drama in multiple media also explore relationships between memory and musical performance. This seminar invites scholars from varied disciplinary perspectives to consider how music, performance, and memory weave together in dramas by Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as in more recent theatrical, cinematic, and televised adaptations of early modern plays.
21. Non-Shakespearean Ontologies
What modes of being can we access in literature by Shakespeare’s contemporaries? This seminar invites papers that historicize early modern ontology in works by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as well as papers that bring non-Shakespearean literary texts into dialogue with theoretical approaches to ontology. How might these texts revise our histories of early modern ontology? How might these ontologies be activated for present purposes? Papers might also address how literature by Shakespeare’s contemporaries can revise our understanding of the modes of being available in Shakespeare’s work.
22. Ovid in Early Modern Culture
“Ovid in Early Modern Culture” invites participants to discuss Ovid’s multiple presences and functions in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers on Ovid as source, the development of his genres, his narrative styles, Ovidian history, erotics and bodies, and Ovidianism in non-elite settings are all welcome, as are discussions of how Ovid modeled authorship, informed pedagogy, crossed generic borders, and re-narrated history. While papers on aspects of the Metamorphoses are welcome, the seminar also encourages papers turning on Shakespeare’s (and others’) uses of other Ovidian texts.
23. Performing Guilt and Reputation in Renaissance Drama
Signs of honesty or criminality in Tudor/ Stuart English culture demanded forms of testing defined in and by the theater. Religious, medical, and juridical authorities frequently imagine the performativity of guilt or innocence and position themselves as theatrical audiences, and the act of watching was itself a site of social judgment. Spiritual fact was thus known to be in part a spectacle, a social form of seeing and being seen. This seminar investigates how plays and related genres imagine, taxonomize, and generate these theatricalized reputations.
24. Play Openings
This seminar explores Renaissance drama’s conventional and unconventional methods with openings—techniques of exposition, strategies for audience engagement, and prefatory devices such as prologues and inductions—in terms of the challenges playwrights faced, charged with constructing plots, and the challenges members of the companies faced, charged with staging them. Participants may employ internal evidence from Shakespeare and English and Continental contemporaries or external evidence from Renaissance theater records and rhetorical handbooks. Also relevant are case studies of openings for twenty- first-century audiences at “original practices” productions.
25. Playhouses and Other Early Modern Playing Venues
The past generation has seen a transformation in our knowledge of early modern playing places. In addition to new archival discoveries, archeological digs have provided invaluable information about the shape, size, and other physical characteristics of several outdoor playhouses. Reconstructions— Shakespeare’s Globe and the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in London, the Blackfriars playhouse in Staunton, Virginia—have provided insights into how these playing spaces affected performance. This seminar invites papers that explore these or any other aspects of early modern playhouses and other performance spaces.
26. Popularity in Early Modern England
“Popularity” identified strategies for eliciting the people’s love; it was also a byword for “democracy” and popular politics. What did early moderns gain or lose in courting popular favor? How did “the people”—as political subjects, parishioners, audiences, etc.—assert or define themselves through what they made popular? What constituted popularity in early modern politics, religion, theater, print, genre, style? What can “popularity” teach us about individual and collective identities, publics and public relations, elite or popular politics, puritan preaching, authorship, celebrity, or mass entertainment?
27. Positive Affect in Renaissance Literature
Scholars have only begun to explore the range of positive emotions that were understood, valued, and represented in Renaissance England. This seminar invites literary work on positive affect, happiness, and well-being informed by such fields as the history of medicine, psychology, cognition, the body, philosophy. Can we identify ideologies or institutions that encourage or pervert certain positive affects in Renaissance cultural products? Does early modern happiness bear resemblances to modern or postmodern (or posthuman) happiness that go beyond bodily or evolutionary similarities in human experience?
28. The Post-Shakespearean Seventeenth Century
This seminar invites papers that explore questions of belatedness in early modern drama. Did dramatists writing after 1616 see themselves as inhabiting a “post-Shakespearean” moment? Is the best term for late-Jacobean and Caroline drama “derivative,” and if so can we understand “derivative” as a creative category? Topics for papers and discussion might include: how Elizabethan or “Shakespearean” drama was imagined, as a period or an aesthetic, by later dramatists; the critical and canonical identity of post-Shakespearean dramatists; Shakespeare as an imitative or derivative dramatist.
29. Queer Shakespeare
This seminar re-opens debates about queer Shakespeare by addressing questions of language, grammar, style, sources, and analogues. How does the question of queer style intersect with acts, figures, and objects of desire? What is queer about Shakespeare’s way of crafting ideas? What roles do Shakespeare’s sources play in the queer temporalities of intertextuality? How does queerness function as a mode of stylistic mediation among texts? When does Shakespeare’s style become a refuge from identity and an alternative to politics? Where is queer Shakespeare headed?
30. Reading Essex
With persistent periodicity, the second Earl of Essex re-asserts his historical, literary, cultural, and theoretical significance for the modern era; the past three years alone have seen three scholarly books and four novels on Essex. But are we in danger of losing Essex to the historians? Undoubtedly, Essex is ripe for re-evaluation by the Shakespeare community. This seminar aims to balance the recent burst of Essexian political history with new approaches to reading Essex’s life and legend within the worlds of literary production and consumption.
31. Reappraising The Revenger’s Tragedy
This seminar invites contributions— whether theoretical, performative, historical, material, or textual—on Revenger’s Tragedy. Where does it belong in conversations about Middleton’s work, the King’s Men repertory, the medieval morality tradition? How might recent reappraisals of the play affect our reading of the genre of revenge tragedy in particular and Jacobean drama in general? What can we say now about the role of parody, the theme of socio-economic injustice, the supposed absence of interiority in its characters, the place of memory in revenge, the grotesque?
32. Re-Mediating Shakespeare
“Re-Mediating Shakespeare” invites scholars interested in a range of methodological and bibliographical approaches to investigate the varied media forms in which “Shakespeare” is made manifest. Putting pressure on the lexicons of descriptive bibliography and media studies, on points of congruence and incongruence, and on the usefulness of each, this seminar explores established and emergent media forms designed to remake and remedy “Shakespeare” (and Renaissance literature). Focused studies as well as broader questions about past and future methodologies, textual forms, and modes of inquiry are welcome.
33. Rome Revisited
This seminar aims to stimulate and interrogate new perspectives on Shakespeare’s Roman imagination across his plays and poems. It looks afresh at the work Rome did for Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and his audiences, and the work it has continued to do across their theatrical and critical reception. Participants may review the reinventions of Shakespeare’s Rome in criticism, editions, and performance; rethink changing ideologies of Romanness with respect to recent research on colonialism, sexuality, and rhetoric; consider whether the category of “Roman play” is still useful.
34. Shakespeare and Advertising
This seminar reflects on Shakespeare’s role within the wide world of advertising, from the earliest uses of Shakespeare’s name to sell a product to the present day. Papers are welcome on all aspects of Shakespeare and advertising: Shakespeare’s own acknowledgments of the opportunism of markets, the use of his name in early printed editions or to elevate an author, literary work, form of entertainment, or advertising campaign; the selling of Shakespeare through film press books, posters, film shorts, and trailers; Shakespeare and tourism; Shakespeare souvenirs.
35. Shakespeare and Ballads
This seminar seeks to address the interactive, performative power of ballads and plays. At the same time, it extends our understanding of ballads beyond the oral to consider their multiple performative character as text, image, song, and dance. How do plays reflect upon, deploy, or redeploy such a complex “media ecology” of broadside ballads—and vice versa? How do both genres capitalize on their audiences within an early modern market of mass consumerism? The seminar seeks to pursue these and other related questions that arise.
36. Shakespeare and Book Design
This seminar invites papers that examine any aspect of book design— including but not limited to bindings, illustrations, typefaces/hands, ornaments, symbols, divisions, and mise-en-page—as it relates to the evolving practices of reading and performing early modern drama: dramatic manuscripts, promptbooks and playbooks, commonplace books, collections and anthologies, collector’s and vanity editions, scrapbooks, editions for teaching and private reading, editions of early modern plays in a global context, digital and alternate-media editions. Also welcome are papers that consider the designs of non-dramatic and multi-generic texts.
37. Shakespeare and Contagion
In the absence of germ theory, what constituted contagion on the Shakespearean stage? This seminar invites papers that consider how the language of contagion shapes dramatic narratives, contemporary understandings of theater-going, the history of emotion, and the perception of natural and preternatural phenomena. What might be transmitted by air, words, images, behavior, astral influence, the passions, the senses, or action at a distance? What is the relationship between different concepts of the body (Galenic, Fracastorian, Paracelsian, Lucretian, “hysterical”) and Shakespeare’s representation of early modern biopolitics?
38. Shakespeare and Early Modern Historiographies
What are the ethics of historical narrative? Which artifacts should be used as source material? Who is authorized to write history, and who may read it? This seminar examines the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries acknowledge, appropriate from, and contribute to the culture of history writing in Britain. Papers are welcome on early modern archaeology, the artes historiae tradition, temporality in rural and urban spaces, the historian’s cultural status, Baconian “mechanical history,” literary appropriations of chronicles and life- writing, history plays, and related topics.
39. Shakespeare and Film Form
This seminar invites formal analyses of Shakespeare film adaptations, and especially those that invoke and reassess the “filmic mode,” a useful but elusive term for cinematic equivalents to poetic techniques. The filmic mode is how cinema most insistently claims a distinctive role in Shakespeare adaptation. Interrogating its operation and effects is a means to make “Shakespeare on film” studies more cogent. How do cinematic elements—camera work, soundtrack, editing—compete with, complement, or supplement Shakespeare’s language in ways that disrupt, enact, or remake Shakespearean meanings?
40. Shakespeare and / in Canada
What do stage productions, translations, and adaptations of Shakespeare reveal about Canadian national, regional, or provincial identities? Seminar papers might address English Canadian, French Canadian, First Nations, multicultural, or intercultural responses to Shakespeare; regional approaches from the Atlantic provinces through the Prairies, Rockies, West Coast, or the North; specific productions, translations, or adaptations; allusions to Canada in global Shakespeares or reception on the global stage; or similarities and differences between Canadian and other national Shakespeares. How does Shakespeare articulate the imagined community that is “Canada”?
41. Shakespeare and the Matter of Wit
How is Shakespeare witty? What kind of social and cultural exchanges exist between Shakespeare and other writers around the “matter of wit”—meaning not only the subject of wit but also the context, contest, problem, and perhaps the physical substance of wit? This seminar welcomes essays on any combination of these issues, focusing on Shakespeare and/or his contemporaries, as part of an effort to survey the early modern “matter of wit.” Although the focus is thus historicist, theoretical approaches to wit are also very welcome.
42. Shakespeare and the Novel
This seminar asks how Shakespeare has been novelized and the novel as a genre “Shakespearized.” How have novelists appropriated Shakespeare’s works and cultural authority? What happens stylistically when drama becomes narration? Have novelistic criteria shaped Shakespeare’s reception? Have Shakespearean invocations helped to canonize the novel? How do different historical periods and national literatures configure this relationship? The goal is to discover what Shakespeare criticism can add to the history and theory of the novel, and what novel studies can contribute to Shakespeare scholarship.
43. Shakespeare and the Philosophy of Action
What is the difference between an event and an action? At what point does the sphere of action (Hamlet kills Polonius) yield to the sphere of event (Ophelia’s death)? This seminar invites papers that explore Shakespeare’s fictions through distinctions (often blurry) between intention and accident, freedom and causation, reasons and reflex, human and natural, and so on. Seminar participants might engage classic and recent philosophical problems in describing human behavior: akrasia, moral luck, free agency, self-deception, ethical character, belief and deliberation, pretending, and more.
44. Shakespeare and the Seasons
What do the seasons mean, physically and metaphorically, in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? How were seasons imagined in herbals, culinary and medicinal receipt books, diaries and journals, almanacs, and husbandry and garden manuals, and how were they both represented and referred to in literary texts? How did they influence life cycles and food sources? Whether concentrating on physical or metaphorical aspects of the seasons (or both), participants are invited to explore how seasonal time transforms the ecocriticism in the early modern period.
45. Shakespeare and Transcendence
This seminar explores Shakespeare’s creative and speculative engagements with forms of transcendence. How do they gesture beyond predefined religious doctrines and systems of dogma, and in what ways might Shakespeare explore new kinds of religious life? Conversely, how might these engagements represent inventive deployments of earlier religious forms? Can such moments help us reflect anew on concerns in religion and theology, both in Shakespeare’s time and in our own? In what ways do they invite or challenge concepts of materialism, modernity, or secularity?
46. The Shakespeare Audience
Shakespeare’s audiences are now constituted through digital, virtual, live-screened, filmed, and tweeted performance events. These take place in outdoor theaters, indoors, black boxes, reconstructions; they are on campuses, at festivals, on tour. Vox pops, comment sites, blogs, and social media make more data available but also make audiences differently responsible and responsive. If the audience is the co-producer of the performance event, how can researchers best account for the practice and significance of spectatorship? This seminar invites old and new methods for studying audience response.
47. Shakespearean Horizons
This seminar explores instances of transformation effected by the figuration of horizons. In theatrical terms, this may involve thresholds—entrances, windows, vanishing points—by means of which embodied experiences are intensified by efforts to orient them. Papers may also consider movement, wandering, experimentation, and improvisation when in dialogue with mechanisms that classify, manage, and fix bodies and temporal processes (borders, boundaries). Also relevant are investigations of cultural forms (maps, inventories) or natural formations (skylines, coastal rims, forest verges) that constitute, or dismantle, horizons and expectations.
48. Shakespearean Parentage
This seminar explores the cultural and dramatic importance of the concept of parentage. The familial topic unites several social concerns, including lineage, influence, right conduct, and surrogacy. In its extended senses “parentage” also encompasses distinctly literary, political, and scientific matters: conceptions of the family were tied to understandings of authorship, the monarchy, and human anatomy. Seminar participants will attend to parentage in its social, linguistic, and figurative manifestations, and they will examine the capacity of parentage
to challenge or confirm notions of authenticity or kinship.
49. Shakespeare’s Foreign Policy
This seminar invites papers exploring concepts of foreign policy in early modern drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Papers might examine the varied ways that early modern authors engage the ethical, domestic, national, or European considerations of foreign affairs, including but not limited to military conflict. Welcoming a wide-range of approaches to the question of how playwrights represent foreign affairs, the seminar is interested in how our understanding of early modern political theories of sovereignty might generate new understandings of the representation of foreign policy.
50. Shakespeare’s Sonnets Now
As we approach the quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death, this seminar considers the sonnets’ preoccupation with time, memory, and commemoration. How do the poems theorize—or historicize—the practice of making monuments? Work is welcome on questions of sequence, series, and narrative; on issues of psychology and affect; on the belatedness of Shakespeare’s sonnet writing; on stylistic borrowings and challenges to Sidney, Spenser, and perhaps Wroth; on the idea of play in Shakespeare’s language and in critical, pedagogical, and poetic responses to the sonnets today.
51. Staging Poïesis
This seminar invites papers that examine the role of poïesis in Shakespeare studies. What happens when poetry is improvised, remediated, and remade in performance? How are varying forms of Renaissance “poesie,” from sonneteering to painting to playwriting, categorized and redefined in the theater? How were they theorized in the period and now? Attending to the messy “stuff” of literary production as it is worked out onstage, seminar members will think collectively about how musical, gestural, verbal, and other types of making are represented onstage.
52. Tudor Shakespeare
This seminar explores Shakespeare’s relationship to drama from the reigns of the early Tudors until the establishment of the playhouses in London in 1576. Papers may discuss models of continuity and change in sixteenth-century theater; issues in the development of genres (e.g., tragedy, comedy, satire, history); boy players and theatrical professionalization; the vice, fool, and clown figures or other character types; Shakespeare’s sense of the past; the contexts of humanism; and revised narratives of the long reformation(s) and secularization in the theater.
53. The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Often popular in performance, Two Gentlemen has traditionally been less successful with critics, though recent work suggests productive new directions. This seminar invites new looks at the play’s master-servant relations, boy actors, women and civility, same-sex love and friendship, Ovidianism, pastoral, com media dell’arte, animals, rape cultures, comic form, intertextuality, or other topics. How has the play been reimagined interculturally? How has the play’s prominence in Shakespeare’s body of work varied, and what accounts for its frequent critical dismissal? A wide variety of approaches is welcome.
54. Uncharacteristic Shakespeare
This seminar invites consideration of the un-Shakespearean within Shakespeare. Shakespeare evokes lingering associations with rich characterization, naturalism, depth psychology, and “timeless,” “universal” sentiments. But there are also unfamiliar Shakespeares to (re) capture, depictions that grate against Shakespearean conventions, startling, boring, alienating, and eluding notice. Papers might investigate: flat, crude, or inconstant speaking parts; stylized emotions; textual chimeras; Shakespeare imitating Marlowe or Jonson; distortion effects in reception or editorial history; attribution controversies; or Shakespeare rewritten by Cibber, Tate, and others.
55. Women Making Texts in Early Modern England
This seminar on early modern women and their interventions in material textual production invites papers on women printers, publishers, binders, booksellers, scribes, scriveners, artists, calligraphers, readers, editors, collectors, patrons, or other roles in which women (individually, in networks, or in collaboration with men) shaped texts as material objects. Also welcome are theoretical discussions of feminist approaches to bibliography, manuscript studies, and book history. How has the archive obscured the material practices of women in textual creation? What methodologies or resources can make them more visible?
56. Women’s Alliances
This seminar seeks to complicate understandings of the familial, political, religious, and literary networks of early modern women. This topic highlights challenges for women whose gestures of autonomy flaunted prescriptions about gender roles. Papers may address real or fictional women and explore questions such as: does viewing women as collaborators neglect individual accomplishments? How do discourses of community exclude women? Could alliances stifle creativity or enforce conformity? The goal is to look broadly at how women respond to the support and constraints offered by alliances.
57. Writing New Histories of Embodiment
Has the “turn to the body” finally produced “body fatigue,” or are there new kinds of bodily histories to be written? Will scientific discoveries in cognition, neuroscience, and molecular biology create fresh, interdisciplinary ways of conceiving early modern selfhood and its cognitive and biological environments? Can we locate bodily representations in genres other than drama, emotion scripts in playwrights other than Shakespeare, new descriptions of the embodied mind at work? This seminar invites speculative papers on new directions for early modern embodiments and cognitive ecologies.
58. Reading the First Folio Then and Now
Taking as its starting point Meisei University’s First Folio MR774, whose seventeenth-century marginalia covering all thirty-six plays are fully transcribed and freely available online, this workshop invites participants to share their experience of working with annotated Shakespearean early editions and digitized collections. The aim is to investigate the reading practices of Shakespeare’s first readers and to relate them to our own reading practices. Short scholarly papers, as well as specific examples of teaching involving First Folio digital archives, are welcome.
59. New Models for Mobilizing Undergraduate Research
With the massive increase of online tools, archives, and digital library collections, undergraduates now have the resources to do original research. How can Shakespeareans and early modernists make space for that to happen in the classroom? The Map of Early Modern London’s pedagogical partnerships provide instructors with materials, students with real-world publication opportunities, and burgeoning digital projects with scholarly content. In this workshop, participants will develop ways of incorporating Research-Based Learning approaches into their teaching and discover new models for engaging students in research.
60. Shakespearean Scene-Writing
Are there limits — and alternatives — to what criticism and analysis can teach us and our students about Shakespeare? What if knowing why Shakespeare produced language, characters, dialogue, pacing, plots, adaptations, allusions, entrances, exits, even aporias and cruces as he did depended on learning how (or at least trying) to do it ourselves? Drawing on humanist methods of imitate and early modern “maker’s knowledge traditions,” this workshop aims to create new “Shakespearean” scenes with period-specific diction, grammar, iambic pentameter. Responses may include scholarly notes, readings, performances.
61. Using Data in Shakespeare Studies
How do people engage with Shakespeare’s works on web sites, in publication databases, and through theater attendance and book sales? In this hands-on workshop, participants will be introduced to five large Shakespeare-related data collections. Collectively mining and exploring the datasets, they will analyze reader interactions with digital texts, identify ways in which data can function in research and teaching, and develop practical pathways toward increased use of quantitative analysis among scholars and students. Prior experience with this kind of analysis is helpful but not required.
42nd Annual Meeting
1. Accidental Shakespeare
This seminar approaches Shakespeare’s afterlife by asking not “Is this Shakespeare?” or “How much of this is Shakespeare?” but “When and how does (not) Shakespeare become Shakespeare, and vice versa?” The title plays with the etymology of “accidental” as that which either is not essential or occurs by chance. Papers might address how afterlives and artifacts of all kinds can retrospectively become “Shakespeare” or, alternatively, lose their affiliation with Shakespeare; investigate theoretically what “inessential” qualities can produce “Shakespeare”; or consider otherwise the is/is not paradox.
2. Alter Egos and Second Selves
This seminar welcomes papers on the alter ego in Renaissance culture. Papers might focus on such figures as the ambassador, avatar, impersonator, surrogate, sidekick, second, foil, rival, friend, soulmate, twin, spouse, or child. Papers might also treat the topic more abstractly, in terms of one’s reputation, credit, image, office, or persona. The objective is to examine what it means to imagine the other as an extension of the self and how the alter ego may raise, answer, or unsettle questions of identity, epistemology, and ethics.
3. Ben Jonson Now
This seminar assesses the current state of Jonson studies with respect to textual editing, dramatic production, and literary interpretation. Papers are invited on any aspect of Jonson’s work and from all theoretical perspectives: reinterpretations of major or neglected plays; Jonson’s role as a multi-media pioneer and theorist of media (in New Inn especially); his literary networks; Jonson editions (including the new Cambridge complete works), the chronology of composition and distinctions of genre; Jonson and disability studies, gender studies, and cultural studies; Jonson in classroom instruction.
4. The Blind Spots of Knowledge in Shakespeare and his World
This seminar examines forms and processes of knowledge that elude familiar categories and paradigms, but which Shakespeare and his contempo- raries explore: knowing and knowing- ness, doubt and unknowing, epistemic resistance, contingent knowledge, apprehension rather than cool reason’s comprehension. What theatrical and rhetorical devices are used to intervene in the wider conversation about knowl- edge and the means and ends (in both senses) of knowing? Do threshold states (dreaming, awakening, lucid confusion, or uncanny intimations) speak to inter- disciplinary thresholds that are yet to be systematically researched?
5. Brothers and Others: New Directions
This seminar seeks alternatives to traditional binary models of “othering” in English prose and dramatic texts: spectrums of difference and similitude, cosmopolitanism, mimicry and hybridity, nomadism, disability theory, fluidity, conversion, transformation. Papers may also engage the role of the hermeneutics of suspicion as a reading practice and the un/desirability of presentism. Work on any geographic location is welcome, provided that it lends itself to discussions of the usefulness of alternative modes of analysis for early modern representation of continental European and non- European characters and cultures.
6. Contending with Shakespeare through Adaptation
This seminar examines adaptations of Shakespeare as registers of alienation from the very figure they celebrate. What differentiates adaptations from other forms of alteration and appropriation? What has worked on stage, what has not? How have playwrights, directors, and performers articulated the need for, or defended, their specific endeavors? What tensions emerge as adaptations shift from performances to printed texts? How can we incorporate the rich history of adaptations into graduate and undergraduate classrooms? Papers are welcome on adaptations from the Restoration to the present.
7. Conversions / Conversations: The Language of Religious and Cultural Encounter
This seminar takes the language of conversion as central not only to the rhetorical and linguistic but also to the conceptual and material structures of the Renaissance. How are the terms of conversion developed, re-articulated, and expressed across a variety of literary forms (drama, travel narratives, sermons, lyric verse, household books)? Themes include: conversion as material change, the fine discriminations and wider cultural import of the language of religious alteration, the deliberate sidestepping of religious terminology in key accounts, the importance of the dialogue form.
8. Coriolanus
With the release of the Arden III edition and Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation, this seminar seeks to push scholarship on Coriolanus forward in new directions. Participants may explore pedagogical, textual, or performance questions. Possible topics include the place of women and children in a society defined by war and aggressive masculinity, new approaches for bottom-up readings of agrarian issues and peasant revolts, the depiction of the body politic (or political bodies) and how these resonate with classical and Renaissance texts as well as readers today.
9. Creative / Critical Approaches to Shakespeare
The range of creative responses to Shakespeare has expanded recently to include critical writing that is evocative, affective, and performative. This seminar invites papers—on any Shakespeare-related topic—that integrate creative and critical modes of writing. The aim is to examine how creative modes of writing might facilitate new or different types of critical engagement with Shakespeare. What kinds of critical insights are made possible only or especially via creative strategies? And, indeed, how do critical perspectives impel creative (re) engagement with Shakespeare?
10. Disenchantments / Re-enchantments
Weber’s treatment of the world’s progressive disenchantment (Entzauberung) as an intrinsic, inescapable aspect of its turning modern has been seriously questioned. This seminar reconsiders dealings with the wondrous, magical, holy, sacred, sainted, numinous, auratic, and uncanny in early modern drama. Does dramatic representation of magic “de-magic” or does it instate magic’s uncanniness? Potential concerns include “moldy tales” and the imaginative empowerment of culturally dépassé narrative material, dealings with the classical divine, an optically reconfigured supernatural, represented magic and the other worlds of travel and romance.
11. Elemental Shakespeare
Reading Shakespeare as an elemental ecotheorist, this seminar asks several questions: how do the elements challenge human/inhuman divides, separations between nature and culture, and bounded notions of the “human”? How do the elements disturb ways of knowing, disrupt systems of order, and even expand definitions of “life”? How can Shakespeare’s ele-mentalities help us listen to the silenced in/humans of the world and, in response, usher in new worlds? Especially welcome are engagements with new critical modes such as vital materialism, object-oriented ontology, and actor-network theory.
12. The Erotics of Memory in Shakespeare’s England
This seminar explores the early modern contexts that drive the studies of memory and sexuality together: in the acts of memory deemed erotic and the acts of eroticism deemed memorial. Are sexual experiences heightened or deflated by memory? Can erotic acts be commemorative? Can an act of memory be eroticized? How do forms of romantic desire underwrite forms of memory? Various critical approaches are welcome, as is work on elegies, epitaphs, dedications, and life writing as well as plays by Shakespeare and other early moderns.
13. The Erotics of Shakespeare’s Poetry
This seminar invites papers on any aspect of the eroticism of Shakespeare’s poetry, including queer erotics, anti- eroticism, issues of sexual aggression and violence, friendship, lovesickness, and the relation between sexuality and affection, as well as between the erotic and the spiritual. Papers may focus on the narrative poems and sonnets or on the theatrical representation of poems or poetry in Shakespeare’s plays. Papers addressing the textual transmission of Shakespeare’s poems and the erotics of poetic exchange are also welcome.
14. Evidence in Early Modern Drama Studies
What counts as evidence in early modern drama studies? How do we select, reject, categorize, grade, emphasize, suppress, create, and ignore the evidence for our claims? What are the buried assumptions of our engagements with evidence? What do we gain or lose by unearthing them? This seminar welcomes
essays of three kinds: theoretical discussions of these topics, reflections on evidence within and as critical arguments about plays, and meta-arguments that correlate manifestations of evidence within plays with the evidence pursued in the criticism of plays.
15. Exhibiting the Early Modern: Gesture, Memory, Space
How are theatrical meaning, memory, and history connected to properties, gestures, bodies, and spaces? How are the physical dynamics of early modern drama transposed into present-day performances, spaces, objects, and media? This seminar invites papers that explore stage directions and blocking challenges, physical aspects of performance, actor training, and rehearsal in any era. Particularly welcome are papers that consider innovative uses of space, early modern objects and object theories, exhibitions, installations, and museology, as well as studies of particular objects or gestures in theater history.
16. Forms of Time
This seminar explores the commerce between operations of time and operations of form. What understandings of pastness, presentness, sequentiality, temporality, or polychronicity sponsor particular literary, rhetorical, theatrical, political, or hermeneutic forms? Possible topics include time in history, comedy, tragedy; temporality and lyric form; expectation, delay, repetition in prosody or rhyme; temporality in musical, visual, architectural, botanical, or animal forms; archetypal, historical, or Messianic time; repertory, repetition, and memory; pastness, presence, and futurity in theoretical models from Frye to Agamben and concerning character, adaptation, or archive.
17. The Global Shakespeare Festival: Shakespearean Diplomacy
The Globe to Globe Festival, which featured all thirty-seven plays in thirty-seven different languages, is just one example of the way international festivals can provide a platform for national traditions of Shakespeare in performance. This seminar debates how watching the plays together in an international performance context can develop international dialogues about “nation,” “language,” “identity,” and “gender,” and also about religious intolerance, racism, and sexism. The seminar is designed to consider the Shakespeare festival, the Shakespeare academic audience, and their combined political potential.
18. The Icon
This seminar explores early modern attitudes to visual culture by focusing on the icon. How do visual and material icons instantiate stories and ideas? Who uses, interprets, and circulates icons? What does iconic function tell us about the nature of early modern knowledge and its transmission? Papers may consider icons in the theater: where icons are found on stage, how they are represented, what role they play in dramatic action. Material discussed may also include other iconographic matter: sculpture, painting, printed illustration, embroidery, graffiti.
19. Intercultural Shakespeare: Theory and Methodology
Much scholarship on intercultural Shakespeare employs a “show and tell” mode, providing cultural background and visual aids while comparing a production to its source. This seminar invites alternative modes. How can we theorize diverse theatrical practices without generalizing and oversimplifying? Can the theory accommodate “non- festival” interculturalism, such as Asian Shakespeare in Western dress and in English? How can we bypass the authenticity test and focus on the core issues exposed by each production? Studies beyond performance, such as film adaptation and cultural translation, are welcome.
20. Intrusions by Others in Shakespeare’s Writings
Shakespeare closely adapted or quoted outright other poets and songwriters in his own poems and plays. This seminar seeks to identify as fully as possible his immediate indebtedness to other writers; to determine where Shakespeare might have obtained this material, especially verse and song that had not been printed at the time and therefore bears witness to his access to oral and scribal culture; and to consider why he sometimes relied on the works of others rather than draw on his own substantial poetic talent.
21. Inn-wards: Literary-Legal Culture of the Inns of Court
This seminar explores whether the Inns were a distinct literary environment. How did law and legal education influence literary reception and output at the Inns? What educational, social, or other traditions, discourses, and experiences influenced writers associated with the Inns? Did the Inns’ real or imagined distinctiveness manifest itself in particular modes (Senecan drama, satire, epyllia, masques)? Did practices of adaptation evidence an Inns ethos? Do Shakespeare’s engagements with law and genre differ in works associated with the Inns (Errors, Love’s Labor’s, Troilus, Twelfth Night)?
22. Julius Caesar
Though scholars describe Julius Caesar as one of Shakespeare’s least problematic texts, difficulties remain: the two reports of Portia’s death; Brutus’s culpability; Antony’s deception of the mob; Caesar’s “just cause” line ridiculed by Jonson; puzzling phrases such as “objects, rots, and imitations.” Is the study of such issues still worthwhile? Which trends currently inform the study of the play? What keeps Caesar so conducive a vehicle for engaging local politics? This seminar welcomes essays that address questions regarding textual and interpretive criticism, performance, and pedagogy.
23. New and Revised Narratives of the Theater
It may be time for the current generation of theater historians to reassess the narratives on which their work relies. Were plays with legendary popularity as popular as has been assumed? Are there notations in Henslowe’s diary where guesswork has hardened into fact? Are we trying to understand play-company histories with too little evidence? How do recent paratextual studies reflect on accepted storylines? This seminar invites papers that question agreed-upon narratives and/ or offer new information. Especially welcome are papers on little-known archival materials.
24. New Approaches to Visualizing Shakespeare
How do digital visualization tools augment research and teaching? What are their limitations? This seminar welcomes work with 3D renderings of theater spaces, immersive character and scene simulations, geospatial information systems, video games, and timeline tracking software. It promotes dialogue among scholars interested in the visual representation of Shakespeare’s works and encourages reflection upon emerging digital tools. Those who are familiar with the visual aspects of the Digital Humanities are welcome, as are those who are new to them.
25. New Generations in “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text”
This seminar revisits the four post- Enlightenment categories queried in de Grazia and Stallybrass’s seminal essay: work, word, character, and author. Twenty years on, how has the study of material texts illuminated the print cultures of early modern Europe and colonial America? What opportunities has the “textual turn” opened for critical discourses— postcolonial, feminist, queer, performance, and others? How has it influenced the editing of modern printed editions, the burgeoning production of digital texts? What new forms of textual materiality can be found in archival research?
26. Object-Oriented Environs
This seminar stages a confluence of two important trends in critical theory: the environmental turn and object- oriented ontology (vibrant materialism, new materialism, speculative realism). These modes of inquiry move beyond anthropocentrism to examine nonhumans at every scale, their relations to each other, and the ethics of human enmeshment with a material world that possesses its own agency. How does our apprehension of the inhuman change when texts become laboratories for probing the liveliness, mystery, and autonomy of objects, in their alliances and in performance?
27. Performance, Print, and Politics in 1621 and Beyond
The year of The Witch of Edmonton, Fletcher’s The Island Princess, Jonson’s Gypsies Metamorphosed, and Middleton’s The Sun in Aries, 1621 has long been viewed as a pivotal moment in late-Jacobean culture and politics. This seminar invites participants to take 1621 as their starting-point for a close examination of dramatic production in the Jacobean fin de siècle. Topics might include: new works and revivals, drama in print, drama and political/ news culture, interactions between plays and works such as The Anatomy of Melancholy and Urania.
28. Putting Gender to Work
Are early modern dramatic depictions of labor inflected by contemporary notions of sex and gender? How are gender categories and relations delineated by commercial and economic exchanges in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? This seminar focuses on representations of production, consumption, service, and trade in early modern drama, particularly in relation to early modern concepts of sex and gender. It welcomes papers exploring how trades and occupations, including the tools, products, bodies, and practices associated with those vocations, were freighted with gendered significance.
29. Queer Heterosexualities
Queer heterosexualities complicate definitions of normative and non- normative sexual fantasy and practice by resituating sex acts and desires as queer regardless of the anatomies involved. Where do we find—and what do we do with—early modern texts, moments, and subjects that resist both queer and straight categorization? How does performance enact social ideals, like monogamy, alongside affective possibilities, like sympathy with polyamory? Topics might include gender play, BDSM, technologies of sex and the body, fantasy, sexuality in print culture, love and intimacy, and more.
30. Reimagining Topicality
This seminar invites readings of Shakespeare and contemporaries that offer new ways to construe the relations between broad historical shifts or movements (secularization, the growth of print, emerging capitalism, state formation, global expansion, etc.) and more targeted moments or particular events, scandals, institutions, or cultural practices. How do we navigate between larger scale histories and specific regional, cultural, or textual locales? How might we organize such projects? When is close-reading the ideal strategy for making these moves? What are its drawbacks?
31. Rules of Playing and Theatrical Culture in Early Modern England
This seminar examines the codes of signification through which early modern drama was produced, interpreted, and made meaningful. The goal is twofold: to examine how specific poetic and performance practices function (e.g., generic conventions, soliloquies, jigs), and to ask how these shaped the theater as an institution. How did intertheatrical references foster cultural competencies, or entrain audiences to particular modes of reception? How did repertoires and performance styles inform companies’ identities? How did revision of familiar conventions occasion reflection on what theater is and does?
32. Shakespeare and Dance
Despite academic interest in movement, materiality, and the body—and the growth of dance studies as a disciplinary field— Shakespearean dance in all its variety remains understudied. This seminar invites papers on early modern choreography, Shakespeare’s dance sequences, dance as metaphor, comic resolution and post-performance jigs, dance etiquette and pedagogy, dance and sexual innuendo, ekphrasis, dance and affect, Morris dance and masques. Work is also welcome on dance adaptations of Shakespeare, dance and visual culture, movement direction in Shakespearean performance, notation and choreographic language.
33. Shakespeare and Language: Close and Distant Reading
This seminar invites papers on Shakespeare’s language from a variety of perspectives: digital text analytics, linguistic theories (then and now), language economies, language philosophies, the phenomenology of language, the history of rhetoric, performance and performativity, translation and adaptation, silence, noise. A principal objective is to promote informed discussion of a question exercising scholars in the digital humanities as well as literature departments: how to negotiate distant and close reading as this bears on Shakespeare.
34. Shakespeare and Pedagogy
What do Shakespeare’s habits of writing reveal about the discursive and disciplinary practices of Tudor pedagogy? What kinds of emotion scripts do school texts and plays provide, what affective responses do they solicit? Does an institutional perspective change our understanding of early modern “classicism,” masculinity, bodies? How might feminist, queer, materialist, or rhetorical theory be brought to bear on pedagogy and its effects? Papers may be archival, interpretive, or theoretical; reactions from Shakespeare’s contemporaries or comparisons to other educational institutions welcome.
35. Shakespeare and the Book Trade, 1642-1737
This seminar explores a neglected area of Shakespeare’s print history, from the 1642 closure of the theaters to the 1737 Licensing Act. Participants might examine Shakespeare’s changing cultural presence and the development of the book trade by considering the form and contents of Shakespeare editions (folios, drolls, “players’ quartos,” Rowe, Johnson, Pope, Theobald), owners of books
by Shakespeare, how individual book trade agents shaped Shakespeare’s textual afterlife, links between the theater and print industries, and the print history of Shakespeare’s contemporaries (Beaumont and Fletcher, Jonson).
36. Shakespeare and the Liberal Arts Curriculum
Shakespeare’s role in the “new” liberal arts curriculum continues to evolve. More than ever, he is the site of curricular and pedagogical negotiations over the materials and methods presumed vital for the production of well-rounded, responsible citizens. Despite this element of change, “liberal educators” remain united by a range of unique challenges and opportunities. This seminar invites papers that explore the status and meaning of Shakespeare for a style of education that, even as it changes with the times, seeks somehow to remain the same.
37. Shakespeare and the Limits of Cognitive Theory
This seminar invites papers that examine the limits of cognitive approaches to Shakespeare. What of those Shakespearean principals whose unpredictable and irreducible actions seem to belie the presuppositions of neurocriticism? To what extent does Shakespearean skepticism elude some of the newly enshrined canons of cognitive science? Can a cognitive approach to Shakespeare be aligned with an ideological approach? Does/can cognitive theory offer a robust theory of character that is not overly naturalistic, and that accounts for the influence of genre on Shakespearean character construction?
38. Shakespeare and Theories of Spectatorship
This seminar explores theories of spectatorship that influenced Shakespeare and his contemporaries and that inform modern actors’ and directors’ expectations and practices. How did Renaissance playwrights conceive of the imaginative processes that theater generated, even mobilized? How did early modern theater practitioners refashion theories of perspective, optics, reading, affect? In what ways are modern Shakespearean practitioners working on stage and screen indebted to pre-modern spectatorial theories, and how have modern technologies of production and communication influenced their ideas about audiences, performance, even Shakespeare’s works themselves?
39. Shakespeare Beyond Words
Early modern playgoers more often spoke of “seeing” than “hearing” a play, suggesting that what is often dismissed as “unrecoverable” may have constituted the most powerful part of their experience. As a playwright/actor in a theater where there was no director to orchestrate effects, Shakespeare had a practical interest in controlling the staging and performance of his plays. This seminar invites attention to non-verbal techniques (primarily visual, but including silence and pausing) by which Shakespeare and others sought to shape the presentation of their work.
40. The Shakespeare Documentary
Many who have never read a Shakespeare play have seen a Shakespeare documentary. This seminar considers the hundreds of programs produced for radio, film, and television that have served educational, marketing, and propaganda purposes. Possible avenues include: documentaries about a single play or Shakespeare’s life, film-strips, DVD extras, audio/visual classroom materials, the personalities or corporations behind documentaries, changes in documentary treatments of Shakespeare over time and across media, how and why documentaries matter. Those who have produced or participated in Shakespeare documentaries are most welcome.
41. Shakespeare in Contemporary Fiction
Whether finding new ways to retell Shakespearean stories, rethinking Shakespeare himself, pursuing his lost plays, or populating his world with new characters, many contemporary fiction writers are preoccupied with Shakespeare. What versions of Shakespeare are in play in these novels? What might they tell us about his status in popular culture? What brands of authorship, of art, and of history do such tales manifest? In what ways do they enact a ghosting of the plays’ cultural traces for a readership increasingly distanced from the originals?
42. Shakespeare in Motion
Looking backward and forward, this seminar examines the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in relation to the early modern reconsideration of motion. How did literature engage the legacy of Aristotelian thought, and in particular its broad sense of motion as encompassing all forms of change? What relationships subtended both scientific thought and literary production in the period? How did the re-thinking of physics enter Shakespeare’s oeuvre? The topic may be approached from science studies, vitalism, humoral physiology, the emotions, the dynamics of stagecraft, more.
43. Shakespeare, Performance, and the Senses
How does the sensual body figure into performance and the interpersonal exchange between performer and auditor/spectator? In what ways was/ is the theatrical experience contingent upon the multi-sensory effects produced by performance? This seminar invites work on reception and phenomenology; music, sound effects, and voice; audience sounds; costume as haptic or spectacle; movement and proprioception; architecture and the senses; tactile theater (props, instruments); spectacle; olfactory effects; taste. Also welcome are papers exploring strategies for representing the senses through the media of text and image.
44. Shakespeare without Africans: Staging Blackness in the Early Modern English Theater
Without Africans to play certain roles, how was blackness staged in the early modern English theater? While interest in race in the Renaissance has produced substantial scholarly inquiry, the practical question pertaining to performance history—white actors or characters imitating Moors using cosmetics, ointments, and prostheses— has been mostly left unattended. The seminar invites papers that investigate the phenomenon of early modern blackface and the specific materials of racial impersonation in relation to ideas of race, subjectivity, language, audience reception, particular players, playhouses, and companies.
45. Shakespeare without Print
Everything we know about Shakespeare is preconceived by print, although print may obscure rather than clarify our thinking about a wide variety of early modern cultural products and productions. “Shakespeare without Print” invites papers from a range of material and conceptual perspectives, from those that focus on the handwritten, to those that examine manuscript culture, to those that consider the metaphorical and material ways in which print has shaped our understanding of early modern writing, performance, life, and thought.
46. Slavery, Captivity, and Piracy in Early Modern Writing
This seminar focuses on texts representing the circulation of bodies in a violent maritime marketplace. How did these commercial practices replicate or trouble social hierarchy? How did writers indicate or blur the difference between a legitimate and a criminalized commerce? What kind of gender work did these representations perform? How did emerging practices of slavetrading draw upon traditions of Mediterranean captivity? What was at stake in early modern representations of pirates, slaves, or captives? Participants may refer to legal, political, commercial, literary, or other discourses.
47. “A Smack of All Neighboring Languages”
This seminar welcomes papers that engage the cohabitation of languages and dialects in Shakespeare, his fellow dramatists, and early modern London. It takes “language” as a ductile term that can be applied to genres of media, cultural norms, and ways of reading, and it makes room for considerations of Shakespeare performances in an ever-increasing array of linguistic, epistemological, and cultural modes. With reference to Derrida, Bakhtin, Venuti, and Spivak, the seminar will also address the semiotics and problematics of translation in multiple traditions and genres.
48. Theater and Neighborhood in Early Modern London
While the names of early modern London’s theatrical neighborhoods are well known (Bankside, Clerkenwell, etc.), surprisingly little has been written about the neighborhoods themselves and even less about the relationship between playhouses and their local communities. Papers are welcome that examine all aspects of the impact of playhouses upon their neighborhoods and vice versa. Participants might focus on questions of evidence and methodology or on the details of a particular playhouse neighborhood, taking account of local governance, residents, social and religious institutions, and businesses.
49. Theater and Judgment in Early Modern England
Both a concept and a practice, judgment is fundamental to law and religion and is a key term for aesthetics and the discourse of sociality. Early modern plays have compelling things to tell us about the place of judgment in intellectual history, and judgment offers an illuminating framework for engaging early modern plays. Topics might include: courtroom scenes, judges and judge-figures, judgment and spectatorship, the prehistory of taste, legal-historical contexts, divine judgment, medieval inheritances, the rhetoric of judgment, modern philosophical and theoretical perspectives (including Arendt).
50. Theorizing the Digital Archive
This seminar speculates that the digital Shakespearean archive exists in alternative cultural forms to traditional embodiments of textual studies and therefore calls for innovative theoretical approaches. Digital textuality de- centers the text as the object of study, instead making the platform the artifact. As a result, the question arises whether authority resides in the text or its use. This seminar seeks not only to examine specific examples of digital publication but also to theorize how we might talk about Shakespeare online.
51. Words and Things
Early modern performance, writing, and visual art frequently test the limits of signification not only through the plasticity of language and the materiality of the text but also through the interplay of words, things, and ideas. This seminar engages the super-linguistic power of words and things in early modern culture, history, and theory: words that animate and perform functions and metamorphoses on stage and in material texts, things that operate linguistically, and words and sounds that deliberately resist signification in one or more registers.
52. Curating the Digital Folio of Renaissance Drama for the 21st Century
This workshop welcomes Shakespeareans interested in joining the Folger Digital Folio of Renaissance Drama for the 21st Century. Participants may work solo or collaboratively to develop research projects based in 400+ dramatic texts that comprise this state-of-the-art digital corpus of Renaissance English drama, supporting machine-assisted critical studies. Participants are encouraged to design, implement, and assess lightweight, generative digital curation assignments for small teams of undergraduate curators. What social and intellectual factors must we take into account for this type of collaborative work to succeed?
53. Digital Resources for the Early Modern Book Trade
This workshop considers the digital resources available for studying the early modern English book trade (EEBO, ESTC, USTC, EEB, DEEP, etc.). Based on the structure of current databases, talking points may include metadata, variant spellings, searchability, and integration with other resources. The workshop will also assess three electronic book- trade projects in development, and will imagine what new resources might be desirable in coming years. Those engaged in digital projects or who use digital tools in their teaching or research are encouraged to participate.
54. Finding the Signals for Performance in a Shakespeare Text
What are the pointers for actors in an early modern cue script? What information does the text provide about status, tone, movement, and person? The workshop’s premise is that limited time for rehearsal required early modern actors to rely on their parts for clues to performance signaled by such markers as metrics, rhetorical figures, embedded stage directions, and terms of address. The workshop leader will guide participants interested in stage or classroom performance in reading these signals for acting choices as they explore selected passages.
55. Playing the Thing: Practice-as- Research in Shakespeare Studies
This workshop aims to bring together theorists and practitioners to investigate theater practice as a research methodology, from the “original practices” experiments of Shakespeare’s Globe and the American Shakespeare Center to explorations in modern performance practice. Participants are asked to contribute position papers for advance circulation, as for a seminar. The session itself will follow a workshop format, with short performances, video screenings, practical exercises, and demonstrations of the advantages and problems of practice-as-research. Both skeptical and enthusiastic voices are welcome.
56. Transnational Theatergrams in Shakespeare and Early Modern Performance
This performance-centered workshop invites a composite of performers and scholars to materialize and theorize early-modern “theatergrams”— moveable units of action, dialogue, character, physical routine, and socio- spatial configuration—that might have passed from Italy to England (perhaps via France), between English actors traveling on the continent and German- or Dutch-speaking actors, or through other international means. Participants presenting performance demonstrations will be asked also to write short papers regarding their presentations. Other participants may present longer papers (without also performing) that address transnational units of performance.
41st Annual Meeting
1. Anti-Social Shakespeare/Early Modern Anti-Social
The anti-social is the object of the most fundamental taboo there is, and the obligation to be social the most fundamental obligation. But what might there be beyond the social? Is it possible to be both human and anti-social? This seminar invites work that puts pressure on the felt inevitability of the social. Topics might include: skepticism; misanthropy; anti-natalism; asceticism; incest, virginity, masturbation; radical thing-orientation. All work exploring the early modern anti-social, however understood, in Shakespeare or elsewhere, is welcome.
2. Aristotle, Jonson, Shakespeare
What new perspectives on Jonson or Shakespeare arise from recent work on Aristotle’s Poetics (including translations by Halliwell, Heath, Janko, Sachs, or Whalley)? Do reconstructions of Aristotle on comedy apply to these playwrights? Is Shakespeare’s concern for “some necessary question” allied with Jonson’s that “necessity ask a conclusion” in his plays, and does either take his bearings from Aristotle’s seminal thinking on the role of probability and necessity? The seminar welcomes reassessments of the practicing dramatists and the arch theorist.
3. Class and Emotion in Shakespeare
This seminar explores whether emotion is colored in Shakespeare’s plays and poems by social difference. Why does Ophelia suffer from love melancholy whereas the jailer’s daughter suffers from mopishness? Do kings and commoners feel love, anger, joy and shame in the same ways? Are faith and doubt determined by class allegiance? How did people of different social origins encounter Shakespeare’s works? Papers will consider, from a variety of perspectives, how the habitus of class shapes cognitive and somatic experience.
4. Collaborative Shakespeare
This seminar welcomes papers that address the status of collaborative writing in Shakespeare’s time and its relation to contemporary concepts of authorship; historical attitudes to collaborative Shakespeare; the instruments developed to establish Shakespeare’s collaborative practice; the consequences of collaborative writing for editorial practice and the presentation of texts; the perception of Shakespeare as a collaborative writer in fictional texts about the author’s life; and the stage history of Shakespearean collaborative plays.
5. Contemporary Actors as Evidence
This seminar invites papers that use new or preexisting actors’ interviews, memoirs, and essays, not as sources of interpretive insight into the roles and plays, but as evidence of contemporary histrionic aesthetics and attitudes about character and dramatic action. What assumptions about character and action prevail even as scholars are problematizing character? What mainstream assumptions do actors bring to their work outside of the mainstream, whether post-modern or “Original Practices?”
6. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam and Early Modern Drama
Criticism on Mariam has moved from a focus on biography, gender and voice to an engage- ment with geography, race and intertextuality. To mark the 400th anniversary of the play’s publication, this seminar welcomes fresh perspectives on Cary’s drama. How does the play connect with work by other dramatists? In what ways might it be read inside theories of manuscript circulation and book production? Do recent performances allow for a re-evaluation of the text? Does Mariam remain important for feminist critics?
7. Future Directions in Performance Studies
The past decade has positioned Shake- speare within the theoretically heterodox discourse of performance studies. Critics have explored Shakespearean performance as cultural practice and intercultural exchange; approached productions through the lenses of post-colonial, gender, and queer theory; and assessed how new technologies have revolutionized the way we view performance. Where will the next decade take us? What areas should be explored? What new questions should be asked? Papers on any topic related to future directions in Shakespearean performance studies are welcome.
8. Gender and Sexuality in Adaptations of Shakespeare
This seminar places Shakespearean adaptation in dialogue with critical and theoretical discussions of gender and sexuality. Using a broad, multi-media definition of adaptation, we shall discuss how the process of adaptation represents, engages with, and critiques historical and/or contemporary constructions of gender and sexuality. Possible topics include: film and theatrical adaptation; online and Web 2.0 Shakespeares; feminist, queer and transgendered Shakespeares; fiction, fanfiction and the graphic novel; visual arts; Shakespeare for girls, boys and the classroom; Shakespeare in critical theory.
9. Geography and Literature
Early modern geography had many different modes, from atlases to mathematical handbooks to travellers’ narratives and beyond. What can these materials and their concerns do for us as literary scholars? This seminar invites work that considers the intersections of early modern literature and geography: applications of literary analysis to geographical texts; reflections on methodology, strategies, and outcomes; or considerations of how geography—as a body of knowledge, a practice, a set of questions—may afford useful perspectives on literary texts.
10. Greek Texts and the Early Modern Stage
This seminar will explore the impact of Greek texts on Shakespeare and contemporary dramatists. Greek texts began to circulate in this period in translations, adaptations, and original versions. Connected with Protestantism, heretical philosophy, and the origins of literary forms, they sparked fascination and controversy, yet their resonances remain largely unexcavated. Papers might explore Shakespeare’s Plutarch, Galen’s humors, antitheatricalists’ Plato, Aristotle’s Poetics and genre theory, Jonson’s Aristophanes, Chapman’s Homer, staging Heliodoran romance, and English translations, printings, and performances of Greek plays.
11. Health, Well-Being, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body
This seminar investigates health and happiness in Shakespeare through the complex relations among bodies and systems, rhetoric and objects, and character and genre. Participants might discuss health in Shakespeare’s plays and poems alongside measures of “well-being” such as prosperity, employment, youthfulness, strength, peace of mind, friendships, or physical comfort; the role of imagination in Shakespearean health; and the effects on health of reading, watching, or viewing Shakespeare, both in its own right or as a proxy for the humanities.
12. Historical Perspectives on Shakespeare and Education
Shakespeare has long been a mainstay in high schools, colleges, and universities. But the ways he has been taught have changed dramatically. Or have they? How might research on Shakespeare in education, on influential figures, texts, course records, and other hard evidence complicate standard professional narratives? This seminar is not interested in current approaches to Shakespeare in classrooms. Instead, it welcomes papers that examine any aspect of the history of Shakespeare and education and the development of institutional Shakespeare studies.
13. Knowing Language in Shakespeare’s Poems
This seminar on experimental language in Shakespeare’s sonnets and other poems considers the relation between poetic speech and the codes or systems that enter the poetry from various practices and disciplines (economics, grammar, horticulture, law, medicine, natural science, rhetoric, theology, etc). How do different languages compete for space in these texts? What interpretive opportunities does technical language make available? How do practices like commonplacing or imitation influence the poems? How are Shakespeare’s lyrics in conversation with the work of drama?
14. Literature as Protest
This seminar posits protest as a subject of literary representation. When does Shakespeare in either poetry or drama employ literary expression to represent protest or give contour to social unrest? Does Shakespearean drama or poetry engage itself in protest? How has early modern literature been deployed over time, for or against social protest? Also, how might the tension of plot or of the poetic turn, through figure, inform our cultural relationship to protest? Theoretical approaches and non-dramatic attentions are welcome.
15. Lost Plays in Early Modern England
There are at least 550 early modern plays for which there survives some evidence, but not a full playscript. Papers in this seminar might attend to specific lost plays, considering repertory practices, playhouses and playing companies, audiences and playwrights. Alternatively, participants may engage with issues pertaining to “clumping” vs. “splitting” of titles; what it means to speculate “responsibly” about lost plays; the nature of scholarly collaboration in researching lost plays; the role of digital resources in theater history.
16. Lucretian Pleasure and Shakespearean Study
Pleasure and poetry, inextricably linked in the early modern period, become increasingly associated with Lucretius’s De rerun natura. How does Lucretian influence, direct or transversal, transform depictions of desire, sexuality, poetics, and the passions in Shakespeare and other writers? The seminar invites papers that interrogate figurations of pleasure in Shakespearean texts and contexts. It aims to open a dialogue between models of pleasure derived from psychoanalysis, feminism, and post-structuralism, and the ancient defense and critique of pleasure in Lucretius’s poem.
17. Managing Shakespeare and the Early Modern Theater Business
Early modern theatrical performances began with someone organizing players, properties, and space. Narratives of theater history often contain assumptions about management that deserve closer examination, including how and when the “manager” emerged as a recognizable professional category. This seminar invites participants to reevaluate the lives of acting company leaders and playhouse owners, the organization of courtly and civic production, the cultivation of patrons and social networks, patent and contract economics, repertorial competition, audience manipulation, or any other aspect of management.
18. Nomadic Subjects and Objects
Taking as its point of departure contemporary theories of “the nomadic subject,” this seminar invites papers that explore subjects and objects (including commodities, texts, language, scientific ideas, and social practices) that circulated between early modern England and other parts of the globe. The seminar encourages a variety of critical approaches, from historical accounts of individual travelers, to studies of mercantile theory and practice, to book historical analysis or translation studies of specific texts such as foreign language ethnographies or memoirs.
19. On Beyond Rabbits and Ducks: Re-engaging Henry V
This seminar invites re-evaluations of Henry V, including the polarizing tendencies in the criticism: Christian rabbit or Machiavellian duck? How are we reading this play today? What new directions are we pursuing in our critical and theoretical attempts to understand this play and its relation to nation? to political violence? and to topicality? How do we understand the nature of the divergent Q and F texts? And what place does Henry V hold in our understanding of Shakespeare’s dramatic career.
20. Patrons, Professional Drama, and Print Culture
This seminar builds on studies of patronage in early modern theater by focusing on connections between theater patrons, the patronage system, and the early modern print industry. Suggested topics include: direct interventions by theater patrons in publishing play texts; investigations into patron-publisher networks; representations of patrons in plays, epistles, etc.; views expressed by patrons toward printers and print culture; post-Renaissance depictions of the intersection between patrons and print.
21. Pedagogy and the Performance of Learning in Shakespeare’s England
This seminar focuses on the use, staging, and performance of pedagogy in the dramas of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. What is the relationship amongst literary and non-literary texts and the representation of teaching, learning, and literacy on the early modern stage? How is the gendered and classed aspect of learning either affirmed or challenged? In particular, participants are invited to consider learning in light of the technologies of reading and writing, including the use of material objects as theatrical props.
22. “Popular” Discourses of Race in Comic Representations
Whereas finding a late emergence of racial distinctions has depended upon elite discourses (e.g., geohumoralism), this seminar invites explorations of “popular” early modern understandings of racial difference in stereotypical comic representations of Moors, Jews, Turks, “Gypsies,” etc. How did laughter at “strangers” address serious concerns, whether about religion, protonation, global exchange, or gender/sex? What notions of difference did the comic promote in such plays as Jew of Malta, Anthony and Cleopatra, Renegado, Island Princess, or English Moor? On what bases?
23. Quoting Shakespeare
What role has quotation played in Shakespeare’s reception? How has selective quotation, from seventeenth-century commonplacing to twenty-first-century advertising, shaped Shakespeare’s image? Is there any connection between Shakespeare’s proverbial borrowings and the fragments admired as his ‘beauties’ or ‘wisdom’? What is it about Shakespeare’s language that invites extraction? Topics might include allusion and intertextuality; creative misquotation in popular culture; critical and pedagogical quotation practices; and digital technology’s potential both for changing, and understanding, the way Shakespeare quotations work in the world.
24. Race/Religion and Gender: Medieval Continuities
In recent debates on the medieval emergence of the concept of race, some argue that Jewish and Muslim identity is constructed in somatic, hierarchical, and hereditary terms. Medieval questions of religious alterity frequently engage gender, also imagined in terms of corporality and subordination. A range of medieval discourses—medical, religious, literary and ethnographic—address these intersections. Participants in this seminar will challenge periodization in considering how medieval discourses help shape representations of religion, race and gender in early modern drama.
25. Representing Women and Politics in Jacobean England
Were women’s political activities in Jacobean England associated with carnivalesque disruptions of social order or simply marginalized? Or, during a time of increasing public discontent with James’s policies, did official images of royal father and husband spawn rival representations of female power? Welcoming a range of approaches to texts from The Winter’s Tale to Arbella Stuart’s letters, this seminar invites papers on representations of women’s actual and/or fictional political engagements in Jacobean works by women and by men.
26. Re-reading Shakespeare, Re-reading in Shakespeare
It is said that one never reads Shakespeare for the first time. Since we approach Shakespeare inevitably through re-reading, this seminar invites considerations of all aspects of re-reading, whether in or of Shakespeare’s (and contemporaries’) texts. Papers might address moments of re-reading in the works, examine Shakespeare’s “re-reading” in his repeated use of the same sources, forge connections between book history and literary criticism, or theorize Shakespearean reading practices, whether material or cognitive, early modern or contemporary, recursive or revisionary.
27. Sexuality and Sovereignty in Early Modern Drama
What light does early modern drama shed on the intersection between sexuality and the “political theology” perspective of Agamben and Schmitt? How do political communities founded on sovereign power call forth, shape, energize or manage sexuality? Does sovereign power itself have a distinctive sexuality? And must we accept political theology as a master theory and simply apply it to sexuality or does a foundational commitment to sexuality require a reworking of the theoretical assumptions of political theology?
28. Shakespeare and Business Culture
This seminar considers Shakespearean intersections with “business” as a subculture with its own ethos and implicit epistemologies. Participants might discuss Shakespeare from perspectives of early modern business culture—e.g., businesses of theater, printing and publishing, trade and colonialism; representations of businesspeople like merchants and artisans; or practices like accounting. Instead, participants might examine Shakespeare within recent business culture—e.g., the business/branding of “Shakespeare” in books, theater, film, etc.; Shakespeare’s role within corporatized universities; Shakespearean insights employed within contemporary business.
29. Shakespeare and Confession
Even after auricular confession was no longer a required sacrament in Protestant England, Shakespeare and his contemporaries continued to represent confessional acts in their drama and poetry. This seminar will investigate the broad range of literary treatments of confession in the early modern period. Paper topics might include: staging confession; gender, sexuality, and confes- sion; the relationship between confession and life writing; the influence of confessional speech on complaint, lamentation, and lyric; and confessional acts and their effects on jurisprudence.
30. Shakespeare and Consciousness
Recognizing that consciousness is of renewed interest in psychology, philosophy, and brain science, this seminar considers what a more nuanced understanding of consciousness might bring to Shakespeare studies. Can a consideration of consciousness, ancient or modern, help us to re-imagine the relationship between the immanence of text and performance and the cognitive assemblage of such stimuli? Papers should investigate connections between states of mind, emotion, and sensation that constitute consciousness and our phenomenological encounters with Shakespeare’s works.
31. Shakespeare and Distributive Justice
According to Aristotle, distributive justice pertains to the fair allocation of a community’s wealth and honors. How did notions of distributive justice inflect Shakespeare’s and other early modern dramatists representations of material inequality? Questions considered might include: the meaning of distributive justice in a late feudal/mercantile economy, the relation between charity and the claims of justice, how distributive justice might challenge or reinforce principles of decorum, the relevance of clowning, and the kinds of plots that speak to distributive justice.
32. Shakespeare and Hospitality
How do routines of greeting, feeding, entertaining, and providing shelter animate the traffic patterns and socio-symbolic worlds of Shakespeare’s plays? How does hospitality contribute to notions of political theology, ethics, and economy? Where are its boundary-lines drawn, especially in terms of gender, community, nationality, and race? What are its environmental resonances? How do productions of the plays, and the playhouses themselves, take up and scenographically engage hospitality? How do Shakespeare’s works make themselves hospitable—or inhospitable—to interpretation and performance?
33. Shakespeare and Memory
How does Shakespeare, and the early modern period more generally, engage with memory? How might Shakespeare’s plays, Renaissance drama, or the memory culture of early modern England encourage us to respond to constructs of memory offered by theorists in the modern period, such as Freud, Bakhtin, Marx, Bergson, Ricoeur, or de Certeau? Through close reading, historicised discussion of the Renaissance debate of memory and exploitation of theoretical materials, this seminar concentrates upon showcasing the multifariousness of memory in Shakespearean texts.
34. Shakespeare and Metamorphosis
Shakespeare and his contemporaries mined Ovid’s Metamorphoses for its stories of transformation. This seminar invites a broad range of questions and explorations concerning the relationship of Shakespeare and his contemporaries to ideas of metamorphosis, figures of transformation, and the slippage between human and nonhuman worlds. How do Ovidian moments work within Shakespeare’s plays and poems? What do transformations out of human form tell us about agency and limitation? Do people really change? And if so, into what?
35. Shakespeare and the Making of Knowledge
How do Shakespeare and early modern theater inhabit and create arenas of knowledge and non-knowledge? Possible issues: (1) Theater or Shakespearean plays or poems as venues for introducing and organizing disciplines of knowledge. (2) How knowledge is affirmed, verified, organized, and transmitted. (3) What constitutes logical proof. (4) Ignorance, stupidity, and obfuscation. (5) Philosophical theories of epistemology: empiricism, skepticism, idealism, etc. (6) Historical epistemology: what Shakespeare’s culture can and cannot know. (7) How Shakespeare displays his own knowledge and ignorance.
36. Shakespeare and the New Source Study
Do new interpretive frameworks and historical information alter how we understand the relationship between Shakespeare and his sources? Do the reframing of a global early modern period, the examination of heterogeneity within European cultures, the turn to religion, historical formalism, intertheatricality, or developments in literary or performance theories, for instance, prompt us to reconsider the politics of terms like source, origin, and adaptation? Is Shakespearean source study a special case? This seminar invites papers that do and/or theorize source study.
37. Shakespeare and/in Manuscript
Where do we find Shakespeare in manuscript? Miscellanies, promptbooks, accounts, marginalia, and other manuscript sources offer evidence of the varied and contingent responses to Shakespeare’s work. How can manuscripts be of use to theater and cultural historians, literary scholars, and textual editors? This seminar encourages participants to consider the wide range of Shakespearean manuscripts, to showcase a variety of critical approaches to these primary texts, and to explore some of the new (and often digital) ways to access these sources.
38. Shakespeare, Phenomenology, and Periodization
This seminar invites phenomenological approaches (broadly defined) to Shakespeare’s contested role as an icon for the emergence of the “early modern” out of the “medieval.” Papers might consider historical phenomenology, embodied cognition, time and anachronism, political theology, or the “theological turn” in phenomenology. How do these diverse modes of phenomenological inquiry inform one another? How might they help us to rethink Shakespeare’s relation to problems of periodization, including his role in secularization narratives and genealogies of modernity?
39. Shakespearean Adaptation and the World’s Religions
This seminar brings together adaptation studies and the religious turn. How have adaptations produced within and for Moslem, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Native American, and indigenous African communities, among others, challenged or transformed Shakespeare’s representations of religion? Possible topics include religion’s relationship to race, gender, nation, or diaspora; transpositions of religious conflict; translations of Shakespeare’s religious language; and secular, “humanist,” and atheistic adaptations. We also invite reflection on concepts (hybridity, universality, pluralization) that might link historical religious and contemporary global Shakespeares.
40. Shakespearean Exceptionalism: The Case of the Sonnets
This seminar explores the relationship of Shakespeare’s sonnets either to other sonnet sequences; other early modern literary or cultural texts; their treatment in relationship to the rest of Shakespeare’s work; or one another—that is, one or more sonnets in relationship to the rest. Are the sonnets more or less peculiar than we’ve been led to believe? How do beliefs about Shakespearean exceptionalism shape the way the sonnets are represented or taught?
41. Shakespeare’s Earth System Science
Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Aiming to expand our understanding of the early modern worldview that charged earthquakes and tempests with preternatural significance, this seminar considers the material composition of the sublunary system and its literary representations. Appropriating terms from NASA, we will attend to “the processes within and interactions among the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, and geosphere”—what comprised early modern physics and meteorology. New historicist, ecocritical, field-specific (anemological to volcanological), and other approaches are welcome.
42. Shakespeare’s Irish Contexts
This seminar seeks to enrich our understanding of Irish contexts for Shakespeare’s works and to construct a new canon of texts that shed light on Anglo-Irish relations in early modern literature more broadly. We invite papers that complement and complicate perspectives offered in Shakespeare and Spenser by addressing a wide range of texts, from proclamations and statutes to diaries and letters, as well as works by later writers such as Jonson and Milton. Papers related to pedagogy are especially welcome.
43. Shakespeare’s Social Networks: Players, Patrons, and Playwrights
Coleridge’s image of Shakespeare seated alone on the summit “of the poetic mountain” has been displaced in recent years by a more contingent historical picture. Scholars now focus on the playwright’s local, practical, places of association and this seminar sets out to explore the literary implications of that approach. Its emphasis is on personal connections. Co-authorship, audience, and individual actors will be important, but the depiction of social networks in Shakespeare’s drama will also be relevant to this debate.
44. Shakespeare’s Theater Games
Shakespeare’s company were “players”, their venue the “playhouse”, “playing” their trade. Can their work be analyzed as “play”? What models of play are relevant? Do the conditions of late medieval and early modern drama support such a picture? Is dramatic play comparable to play in other early modern artists, venues or circumstances? How do early modern plays deploy “play”, games and game-like sequences? How may performance practices— historical, contemporary, reconstructed— respond to a ludic view of early drama?
45. Skill
This seminar asks how skill was inculcated, appraised, displayed, and evaluated in the early modern theater. Topics include methods of training of boy actors; gesture and skill; the terms of art used in describing theatrical skill; inset skill displays such as music, dancing, and fencing; clowning; and verbal dexterity and other means of demonstrating writerly skill. Papers on theories of skill and embodiment are welcome, as are case studies of particular skill sets and inset skill displays.
46. Social Media Shakespeare
The exponential growth of social media platforms has enabled multifaceted engagements with Shakespeare’s texts. They serve as a living archive of materials but also foster vernacular creativity. But to what extent is Shakespeare on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and apps, impacting on the cultural currency of Shakespeare? What kind of Shakespeares are being produced through such intermedial interventions? We invite papers that explore the diverse presence of networked Shakespeare in our mediascape, and reflect on the implications of this “virtual” presence.
47. Staging Allegory
While theories of allegory tend to dwell on modalities of language, accounts of Renaissance theatricality often neglect allegory. This seminar addresses the critical lacuna that results. Topics may include: allegory and anti-theatricality; allegorical dramas; allegorical irruptions in non-allegorical plays; religion and allegory on the post-Reformation stage; character, personification, and the (non)human on the stage; stage properties and allegorical objects; allegory and emblem; tensions between visuality and textuality; economy and allegory; gender, sexuality, and the staging of allegory.
48. The Church
This seminar considers the role of the church in Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Taking up the significance of various holy places—churches, chapels, cathedrals, temples, tombs, sanctuaries—to the literature of the period and to early modern people, papers might consider the following: the church as a structure and the ways the fabric of the church shaped and was shaped by its users; religious activities (quotidian services, baptisms, marriages, coronations, funerals) and/or secular activities (social gatherings, business transactions, misuse).
49. The Singing Body in Shakespeare
Within the predominantly oral but increasingly visual culture of early modern England, songs were inseparable from the sensing bodies of performer, listener, and spectator alike. How does the physiology of the singing body and the acoustic, visual, and affective impact of song performance inform our reading of Shakespeare’s songs and singers? What are the methodological implications of considering Shakespeare’s songs not only as lyric texts and musical settings, but also as instances of embodied and gendered performance?
50. The Tempest
What does The Tempest mean to the 21st century? Shakespeare’s play has become a touchstone for discussing race, gender, power, language, and the New World. In January 2012, as part of a state-wide initiative against ethnic studies, the Tucson school district even banned The Tempest from its curriculum. This seminar invites papers that reframe the play and question such entrenched positions. What brave new worlds can critics explore in these contested times? Interdisciplinary and theoretical approaches particularly welcome.
51. Theater Boundaries
This seminar invites participants to explore the specifics of audience/stage relations in early modern plays (not just Shakespeare): including, but not confined to, characters’ awareness of their genre, language and style (“nay, God be wi’ you an’ you talk in blank verse”: AYLI); theater history (responses of known audience members); literal interpretations (Nashe’s “wise justice” in Pierce Pennilesse); soliloquy; character versus actor; plays based on real events or on other plays; representations of the professions; audience awareness and attitude.
52. Theorizing Repetition: Text, Performance, and Historiography
How does repetition—understood variously as mirroring, duplication, recurrence, renewal, transmission—productively articulate or complicate existing historiographies, epistemologies, and theoretical models? Taking repetition as a site of intersection between text- and performance-based modes of analysis, this seminar invites ambitious, argument-driven case studies and metacritical accounts. Papers might address theatrical imitation, rehearsal, or adaptation; genre formation; literary or discursive citation; recursive temporalities or spatialities; commodity culture; social protocol, religious ritual, or modes of reproduction. All periods, places, and media welcome.
53. Translating Shakespeare beyond Absolutes
The power and contributions of translation have rapidly increased in a world no longer approaching Shakespeare as a source of indisputable truths, but as a dense yet pervious core of matters to converse with in every possible language, culture and medium. This seminar will address the state and impact of Shakespeare translations from as many “post-” perspectives as may be imagined: the post-bardolatrous; the post-national, post-colonial and post-racial; the post-historic and post-human; the post-print and the post-dramatic—even the post-posts.
54. Performing Shakespeare in Europe
The seminar addresses distinctiveness and diversity of staging Shakespeare in Europe. It invites papers on continental, national and local patterns of European Shakespeare production. Are there similarities in translation and staging that define European Shakespeare performance? Can we identify analogies among European nations in the Romantic period? How to describe differences between productions of Shakespeare in Eastern versus Western Europe during the Cold War? And finally, what distinguishes European Shakespeare in an increasingly globalized world?
55. White People in Shakespeare
Including race and postcolonial studies, what are some of the historical, critical, and theoretical methods that can facilitate or advance discussions of whiteness in/and Shakespeare? Is there a relationship in Shakespeare between whiteness as a universal principle and as a site/citation of particularity? Is there a specificity to whiteness that identifies some Shakespearean characters/moments and not others? What are the institutional implications and possibilities for bringing sustained attention to whiteness in/and Shakespeare?
56. Writing Lives in Early Modern England
Early modern England witnessed remarkable innovations in both biography and autobiography. This seminar examines these life-writings through their myriad forms, both generic and material, to explore what the early modern period understood by the concept of a “life”, and what it meant to “write” a life. Participants are encouraged to attend to the remarkable range of genres—from martyrology to spiritual examination—and of physical forms—from printed lives to manuscript account-books, miscellanies, and notebooks—that early modern lives took.
57. Wrong Shakespeare
Is Shakespeare ever not “good for you”? This seminar will focus on contexts in which Shakespeare is or has been used as a force for moral good, such as the curriculum, adaptation and performance studies, and social programs (in prisons and other locales). Who decides the right/wrong way to teach, perform, edit, read, and appropriate Shakespeare? And how are the borders of “wrong” Shakespeare policed? What’s at stake in arguing that Shakespeare is “good” or “not good” for you?
58. Close Reading without Readings
This workshop invites participants (1) to give meticulous attention to the minute particulars of particular passages from Shakespeare; (2) to analyze those passages without insisting on limiting—or even attempting to limit—their range of consideration to elements that might be useful in formulating an interpretation of—a reading of—the play in question; and (3) to consider the possible value of such analysis to an understanding of why the culture values Shakespeare so highly.
59. Dancing in Shakespeare: A Practical Introduction
Shakespeare’s plays contain numerous references to dance, some of which are used to create puns, others to illuminate a particular character or dramatic situation. Through a combination of physical participation, video examples, examination of primary sources, and discussion, this workshop will introduce participants to a number of dances that are mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, including the measures, brawl, coranto, canary, galliard and cinquepace. Participants will also gain first-hand experience in reconstructing a dance from historical sources.
60. Editing Shakespeare for the Web
The purpose of this workshop is to imagine, analyze, and perhaps call for specific developments in the electronic editing of Shakespeare texts. How could and how should the edition of the future look? What kinds of things will we expect it to do? What potential pitfalls should the editor consider? Participants will address these questions both in practice and in discussion.
61. “Performing Archives”: The Stratford Shakespeare Festival
Participants will work with material and documentary remnants of scenes from three Stratford Festival productions: Romeo and Juliet (1968), The Merchant of Venice (1984), and The Tempest (2010). Archival resources for study will include prompt books, design bibles, photographs, blocking diagrams, musical scores, archival videotapes, films, and various written records. Our aim is to study what survives in one major theater archive, discover what we may reconstruct of past productions, and discuss what are the best practices in doing so.
40th Annual Meeting
1. Annotating Shakespeare: Old Words, New Tools
How do digital technologies affect the ways we historicize Shakespeare’s words in annotations? What insights do they afford about the ways Shakespeare’s words made meaning in their own time? What kinds of historical or historicizing arguments can digital annotation make? How does technology challenge scholarly practice? This seminar understands the terms “annotation” and “language” broadly. Approaches to the topic will be informed by participants’ individual interests in, for example, lexis, grammar(s), editing, textual transmission, coding, performance history, historiography, mediatization, pedagogy.
2. Chronologies in Theater History
Chronology is a vexed issue for theater historians, whose field relies on time lines, order, and coincidence. Dates seem set in stone, yet pressure reveals unstable foundations. Papers may assess established chronologies, external vs. internal evidence, recent studies in stylometrics, dates on documents, documents or play texts without dates, the assignment of dates in the absence of evidence, or the significance of chronology generally to the discipline of theater history. Jackhammers, as well as a chisel and mallet, are welcome.
3. Citizenship: From the Outside In
This seminar welcomes historicist research and theoretical speculation on citizen and non-citizen ways of being: citizenship and notions of philosophical subjectivity; freedom and liberty as ethical concepts; sovereign subjects, denizens, aliens, foreigners; women in livery companies, citizen wives, poor working women; aristocrats as freemen; citizens of imagined cities and polities; the political theology of citizenship. The aim is to approach citizenship from its outsides, without reaffirming the citizen as symbolic center. Who or what comes after the citizen in Shakespeare?
4. Drama and the New World: Beyond The Tempest?
This seminar examines the place of the Americas in English drama in the wake of the turn in early modern studies to “the East,” Islam, and “the multicultural Mediterranean.” It welcomes papers that explore the complex representations of New World peoples, places, and commodities in playhouse drama, civic pageants, and/or court masques, as well as papers that situate the Atlantic world in English cultural and imaginative life—in, for example, travel accounts, promotional tracts, religious writing, lyric, epic, balladry, romance.
5. Early modern Institutional Drama
Jaques’ schoolboy might creep “like snail/ Unwillingly to school” but, like many early modern dramatists, Shakespeare was less reluctant to engage with educational institutions. This seminar will explore drama at schools, universities, and Inns of Court. Papers are invited on—but not limited to—institutional performance contexts and playing practice, pedagogy and drama, adolescence, institutional interactions with the court (e.g. on progress visits), amateur (schoolboys) vs. professional (boys’ companies), staging scholarship in private and public theaters (e.g. Greene, Lyly, Marlowe, Shakespeare).
6. Early/Modern Queer Colonial Encounters
How do sexuality, gender, affect, the non-human, disability, and temporal estrangement motivate and transform “encounters” in early modern colonialism? How do Shakespearean adaptations, citations, and translations in postmodern culture carry or efface the traces of coloniality, and how to understand this as a queering (or a straightening of the queer)? What meta-encounters — theoretical, disciplinary, linguistic — shape and are shaped by the materiality of encounter? What can alternative temporalities contribute; what gets foreclosed in assertions of “the future that will be”?
7. Economic Criticisms: Old and New
What does “the new economic criticism” inherit from “old” methods? How might these models inform or enrich one another? This seminar considers relations, agreements, contrasts, and antagonisms between earlier work on literature and culture (R. H. Tawney, L. C. Knights, Louis B. Wright) and newer approaches (postcolonial, ecocritical, transnational). Amid recent trends away from “theory” and towards the re-valorization of “close reading” and “literary” matters, why do economic concerns still matter? Papers might include reviews, appreciations, critical genealogies, acts of economic criticism.
8. Emotion in Shakespeare
This seminar invites various theoretical and critical approaches to the increasingly complex study of emotion in Shakespeare and Renaissance literature. Work is welcome in the history of the passions, the senses, the humoral body, Renaissance rhetorical and theatrical manuals, stoicism and other philosophies of emotion, or theories of subjectivity, the social and the human. Also of particular interest are the intertextual constructions of emotion in Renaissance literature or the emotional scripts that are translated from other contemporary or classical sources.
9. Feeling Medieval: The Affects of the Past in Early Modern England
This seminar invites papers exploring early modern conceptions of medieval feelings. How are passions that were associated with the Middle Ages invested with significance? Do they seem more legitimate as a consequence of historical continuity, or less authoritative because of their cultural belatedness? How does the “affective turn” in queer theory help us think about the social encodings of feelings? Do medieval affects imbue certain genres or traditions? Participants are encouraged to consider how early modern writers imagine “feeling medieval.”
10. Foreign Policy in the Age of Shakespeare
How political is Shakespearean drama, really? This seminar addresses an elusive topic by examining relationships between writing and larger-level events. What new can we learn by refocusing on political history and “foreign affairs” narrowly conceived: consolidating nation-states and violence in Europe, Asian encounters, American resources and European inflation, emergent empire? Studies of less predictable works—such as the comedies—are particularly welcome, as are well-grounded comparative analyses with works by other writers or with political documents such as State Papers.
11. Forms of Service in Early Modern England
This seminar welcomes papers, on Shake- speare and other authors, that address the intersection of literary form with categories of service, broadly understood. What formal innovations did service make available to early modern texts? Can we speak of generic strategies of service? How did print culture interact with service? How did early modern women writers adapt genres associated with service? Did authors’ service roles affect their representations of service? How might servant readers and auditors have understood various textual forms?
12. Is Shakespeare Our Only Contemporary?
Presentism has recently opened up new avenues of inquiry in Shakespeare studies. This seminar explores the promises and limitations of presentism, however, by asking participants to consider its purchase outside Shakespeare studies. Can we imagine Shakespeare’s contemporaries in presentist terms? Does presentism’s currently Shakespeare-centric focus preclude certain questions about temporality, about the relationship between past and present, and about variants of historicism? To what extent is presentism simply a Shakespearean-universalist wolf in sheep’s clothing?
13. Literature and History/Literature as History
The seminar invites papers that address the relationship of literature and history in an effort better to understand the historical turn literary studies have taken (and in places have retreated from) as well as to investigate what kinds of historical claims literary studies are now making. What counts as evidence for historical claims? Do critical arguments and historical ones use evidence the same way? What does literature serve as evidence of? What does it mean to understand a work historically?
14. Literature and Theater as Skeptical Labs
This seminar aims to expand our understanding of the renaissance in skepticism and of the function of the theater as a skeptical lab. Two challenges: first, to situate the skepticism of drama to the equally fervent skepticism of non-dramatic literature and, second, to work out working out the relation of literary skepticism, not only to the epistemological formalities of Cicero and Sextus, but to what might be called “vernacular skepticism,” those idioms of discredit that animate mockery, insult, and polemic.
15. “Love”? Affective Bonding and Kinship in Renaissance Drama
We normally say love differs fundamentally, as a structure of feeling, from use, with its associations of distance and manipulation. Yet Pierre Bourdieu argues that kin relationships are something people make, with which they do something. This seminar invites triangulation among these views and the subject matter of Renaissance drama. How, taken together, do they unpack issues of instrumentalities and ends in early modern family formation: filial/sibling/spousal/same-sex relations, courtship, dowries, cuckoldry, bigamy, legitimacy, inheritance, wardship, service, dynastics?
16. Matter, Perception, and Cognition in the Renaissance
This seminar takes as its point of departure the assumption that early modern matter theory influenced experiences of perception, cognition, and passion. In the most mundane acts—eating, seeing, thinking, and reading—the human body was understood to be involved in the transformation of physical matter. How did such transformations become important to the form and experience of literature? Papers might consider historical phenomenology, Galenism as a materialist psychology, atomism and mechanism, the staging of the body and its senses.
17. The Merry Wives of Windsor
Despite its earlier popularity, The Merry Wives of Windsor now occupies a relatively marginal position in the Shakespearean canon. This seminar is designed both to take a new look at the play and to explore the reasons for its devaluation. Participants may wish to compare the female protagonists in this play with those in Shakespeare’s other comedies, with the female protagonists in plays by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, and/or with accounts of the lives of real women in Shakespeare’s world.
18. Negotiating Confessional Conflict in Early Modern England
This seminar explores ways of discussing confessional conflict in post-Reformation England in terms of negotiation rather than dissent and escalation. Was it possible to sidestep religious controversies in textual and dramatic representations? How can we conceive of literature and drama as possible sites of de-escalation? Does dramatic practice in particular allow for a suspension of faith impossible in theological or polemical discourses? How do textual or dramatic works both reflect on and perform such an erasure, suspension, or displacement of confessional conflict?
19. No Respect: Re-theorizing Comic Theory for Shakespeare
Comedies were prime theatrical commodities, but they remain undervalued and under-theorized compared to tragedy. How did Shakespearean practice differ from the available theories of Aristotle, Horace, Scaliger? What are the uses and limitations of such modern theorists of comedy, laughter, and humor as Bergson, Bakhtin, Cixous? What aspects of Shakespearean comedy practice cry out for, or seem resistant to, new theoretical treatment? Topics might include comic types, generic hybrids, the comic body, magic, gender, the politics of laughter, the accidental.
20. The Nonhuman Renaissance
This seminar considers what lies beyond humanity in the age sometimes credited with “inventing” it for modernity. Instead of assuming Renaissance anthropocentrism, discussion will focus on perspectives from which nonhuman creatures or things (organic and inorganic) interact with humans in a larger ecology of culture, or in which human-ness itself is either decentered or made the object of critique. Participants are invited to explore the various forms of nonhuman being that inhabit the material and imaginary worlds of the Renaissance.
21. Non-Shakespearean Drama and Performance
Shakespeare’s contemporaries have begun to compete with him for dominance in theaters, films, editions, and the study of Renaissance drama. This seminar explores how studying non-Shakespearean productions affects Renaissance performance studies, cultural studies, and editorial practices. What impact do such performances have on our understanding of Renaissance dramaturgies—including Shakespeare’s? Papers are also welcome that consider issues of methodology and terminology that arise in these studies. The aim is to explore new critical directions beyond a focus solely on Shakespeare.
22. Oceanic Shakespeares
This seminar takes Shakespeare offshore, asking participants to stretch familiar scholarly boundaries by exploring the literary meanings of the early modern ocean. A wide variety of literary, historical, and theoretical approaches are welcome. Topics might include Shakespeare’s responses to the “transoceanic turn”; literary depictions of different oceans, especially the Mediterranean and the Atlantic; tropes of shipwreck, piracy, and homecoming; sailing ships as venues for cultural exchange; oceanic narratives and historical progression; and how an oceanic perspective might revise literary history.
23. Othello
With Othello we engage issues of race, ethnicity, nationality, and religion in the Renaissance; women, patriarchalism, and domestic violence; sexual identity, sexual practice, and pornography; social distinction, occupational mobility, and class resentment; state aggression, imperialism, and surveillance. This seminar welcomes papers on the play in its own time and since. Was it racist then? Can it be anything other than racist now? Why are its sexual politics overshadowed by its racial politics? What new questions should be asked of Othello?
24. The Past, Present, and Future of Shakespeare Studies
This seminar considers the past, present, and future of Shakespearean scholarship. Papers might focus on important trends in Shakespearean criticism, groundbreaking scholars or approaches, critical or theoretical genealogies, or underplayed or overplayed interven- tions. How has the field been shaped by close reading, feminism, new historicism, Marxism, postcolonialism, cognitive theory, theater history, performance studies, or cross-textual mediation? Speculation about what’s next or what’s missing is also welcome.
25. Performing Age in Early Modern Drama
Aged figures—children, youths, the elderly—have gained prominence in recent criticism and performance. What does age mean to Shakespeare and his contemporaries? To what extent is it determined by chronology, physi- ology, economics, law, sex, or status? This seminar explores multiple categories of aged identity with a particular focus on theatrical representations. Papers might consider the significance of age in early modern performance cultures; modes of signifying age on stage; the methodological challenges for investigating age in Shakespeare’s theater.
26. Poetics of Possession
Property, crucial to people’s lives in early modern England, is also a battleground of contemporary political and social thought. This seminar asks how Shakespearean norms and narration shape how we understand what property is and why it matters. Papers may explore: legal definitions of “personhood”; citizenship; the relevance of Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and Macpherson; proprietary logics; property rights/human rights; property as contract; liberty and bondage; possession and ownership; labor as property; gender and sexuality as property; global properties.
27. Q1 Hamlet
Given recent developments in book history, theater and performance studies, and editing, how should we now understand Q1 Hamlet? What are the relationships among the Hamlets, the Ur-Hamlet, Der Bestrafte Brudermord? How does Q1 shape narratives about Shakespeare and the Chamberlain’s/King’s Men? What can we learn from the history of scholarly and theatrical approaches to the “problem of Q1”? How can Q1 inform readings of other “bad quartos” and editorial cruces? This seminar welcomes critical readings, cultural histories, technical analyses.
28. Radical Romans and Shakespeare’s Politics
This seminar reconsiders Shakespeare’s Roman plays in light of contemporary political theory, particularly the questions about justice, law, sovereignty, or empire that motivate the concepts of radical democracy initiated by Agamben, Schmitt, Laclau, Mouffe. How did Shakespeare’s Roman imagination re-conceptualize political and theological allegory? Is violence constitutive of the nation-state? Does Shakespeare’s radical Rome shed light on our own concepts of justice, democracy, empire? The seminar also welcomes papers on other playwrights who represent England’s investment in Roman political history.
29. Reading Shakespeare and the Bible
A great deal has been written in recent years on Shakespeare and religion, often in the interest of identifying Shakespeare’s own confessional affiliation. Setting biography aside, and turning to a larger context of belief, this seminar approaches the question of religion in terms of how the plays and poems incorporate biblical and theological language. Participants are invited to explore ways in which Shakespeare’s systems of allusion respond to the methods of biblical reading that emerged from religious controversies and reformations.
30. Reading Shakespeare through Clothes
This seminar welcomes papers on any aspect of Shakespeare and clothing. Participants are encouraged to draw on an infinite variety of sources, reading Shakespeare through clothing that is material and/or metaphorical. Papers may address references to dress and adornment in plots, ideas, language, and images; costume and theoretical issues of gender, identity, age, power, and class; current work in material culture, textual studies, and fashion studies; the important if underexplored role of theater and film costumes in Shakespeare performance history.
31. Rethinking Shakespeare’s Secularity
Secularization has been used to account for transitions from Middle Ages to modern and from medieval cultic mysteries to the London commercial stage—with Shakespeare playing a key role in both. In the face of the present “religious turn” in Shakespeare studies, can his central role be maintained? This seminar invites papers on the secularization thesis (and debate), medieval mystery plays, the Church, sacramental theater, political theology, the Pauline revival, Christian hermeneutics, and Shakespeare’s relation to the worldly and otherworldly.
32. Shakespeare and Hollyworld
This seminar invites consideration of an international range of Shakespearean productions, both cinematic and theatrical. The global film industry, still strongly based in Los Angeles, relies on the construction of sameness; what film and stage productions counter the homogenizing forces of “Hollyworld”? How do contemporary adaptations trouble our understanding of authorship? of reception? our perspectives on the world? Participants are asked to enter into critical dialogue with theatrical and cinematic histories and with legacies of identity, politics, and economics.
33. Shakespeare and Philosophy
The organizing principle of this seminar is that to engage Shakespeare philosophically is to engage the history of Shakespeare interpretation. Rather than “apply” theory to Shakespeare, the seminar aims to leverage Shakespeare’s work to look anew at philosophical modernity. The seminar is keen to ask: How does Shakespeare’s work shed new light on problems such as skepticism, self-consciousness, finitude, secular reason, autonomy, citizenship, biopolitics, terror, rights, or human dignity? How does Shakespeare complicate philosophy by making thought “dramatic”?
34. Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics
This seminar seeks to illuminate the underlying, often conflicting, value-systems that enable and define Shakespearean drama. Papers may examine Shakespeare in light of the Bible, Greek and Roman writers, Patristics, medieval traditions, contemporary homiletics, Catholic and Protestant teaching, legal and political imperatives. Participants may discuss classical and Christian texts and contexts and explore various ethical consonances and dissonances. The seminar stages an inquiry into the nature of virtue and vice on Shakespeare’s stage.
35. Shakespeare and the Modes of Satire
This seminar explores Shakespeare’s relationship to the range of poetic and dramatic satiric modes available to him: was he practitioner, detractor, or passive observer of the period’s formal and ideological experimentation? What was the nature of his engagement with Juvenalian cynicism, Horatian didacticism, allegorical morality tales, Roman New Comedy, Lucianic Menippeanism? Essays addressing the influence and purposes of the conspicuous satirists of the period (Jonson, Nashe, Middleton, Marston, Dekker) are welcome, as are those employing Bakhtinian methodologies.
36. Shakespeare and the Plastic Arts
Rather than focus on film or animation, this seminar invites papers that open new discussion of Shakespearean “afterlives” in the visual arts. Papers may consider any plastic media —paintings, sculpture, installations, mixed-media, prints, photography — that re-imagine Shakespearean themes, characters, visual aesthetics. How do artworks render scenes, characters, objects, tableaux vivants, the unseen, the bard himself? What special reciprocities knit Shakespeare-focused arts and critical scholarship together? What do exhibitions—by galleries, museums, curators — indicate about producers and consumers of Shakespeare-themed art?
37. Shakespeare and the Power of the Face
Inspired by James Elkins’ provocative thesis that a face “is the place where the coherent mind becomes an image,” this seminar focuses on the power of the face in Shakespeare and Shakespeare studies broadly defined. Possible topics may include but are not limited to: the role of the face in the plays and poetry from any theoretical perspective, cultural fascination with the face of the author, the power of the face (and facial expression) in performance.
38. Shakespeare in Place
“Shakespeare in Place” explores Shakespeare’s presence (through performance and as cultural concept) in place making and meaning. The seminar encourages a range of geographically and historically diverse case studies to explore different kinds of place-based relationships. These may include the proliferation of contemporary global circulations and the utility of Shakespeare to emergent cultural economies but, equally, examples from more remote historical periods and less often cited geographies are welcome so as to better chart a trajectory for Shakespeare “in place.”
39. Shakespeare in Public
This seminar aims to resume and reposi- tion suspended conversations about “political Shakespeare.” What ideological functions does Shakespeare retain in the twenty-first century? Has “cultural capital” outlasted its explanatory utility, especially given the dominance of mass culture and newer media platforms? Has mass education made Shakespeare public property? Many approaches and objects are invited: from theatrical performances and institutions to reading and interpretive practices; from older media to new; from the role of culture in the public sphere to “public culture.”
40. Shakespeare on the Campus Stage
What versions of Shakespeare are being performed at our colleges, and where do those productions’ defining impulses originate? What effects have political and economic upheavals had on student identity and priorities as manifested by their theatrical interests? Are campus productions more dramaturgically astute, more intellectually or formally adventurous than those staged by professionals or community players, and if not, why not? What is the place of the Shakespearean scholar in such activities; what might we have to learn from them?
41. Shakespearean Theater as Mass Entertainment
How did a “multitude,” a “throng,” a “swarm” of theatergoers affect the writing, acting, and reception of plays? How did arena theaters compare to other contemporary forms of mass entertainment (for example, preaching or bear-baiting)? If many commercial plays were also staged at court, what difference could mass audiences have made to those plays? Whatwerethetheoriesofmassentertainment then, and how do they relate to theories now? How dissimilar was the Shakespearean theater from modern mass entertainment?
42. Shakespeare’s Errors
A word largely lost from recent textual criticism is “error.” Papers are invited that consider its current application to Shakespeare. They might endorse or challenge the concept of “error” in relation to textual relativism, versions, authorial legitimation, authorial mistakes, transformations in early modern theater, transcription, print culture. They might present new work on textual cruxes, engaging with theoretical as well as practical issues. The seminar will debate what if anything can be characterized as “wrong” in the text of Shakespeare.
43. Shakespeare’s Life Story
Why Shakespeare biography, why now? What continues to impel the surprising revival of the genre? New knowledge or new sources? Newly recognized historical contexts or dynamics? New fictional or biographical models? New ways of imagining the life of the artist? New ways of legitimizing Shakespearean biography as a scholarly enterprise? A new appreciation of critical biography as a genre? A newly felt necessity to “publicize” Shakespeare? New pressures on academic publishing? Papers addressing these or other related questions are welcome.
44. Shakespeare’s Sentences
“The sentence” lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s language. A key feature of his poetry is the deployment of unexpected word orders, and this seminar invites formal linguistic work on Shakespearean and early modern syntax and morphology. The notion of sententiae simultaneously opens the seminar to the topics of rhetoric and formal classical influence. Papers are also welcome on punctuation, textual transmission, and editing—that is, orthographic aspects of the sentence fixed by compositors and scribes rather than by Shakespeare.
45. Shakespeare’s Theories of Translation
Do Shakespeare’s works offer theorized approaches to translation? But also: do our theories of translation derive from his works? Claims to Shakespeare’s “universality” are attached also to claims that his work is untranslatable. Do the works reflect upon the contradiction between universalism and untranslatability? Have theories of translation inherited from them this contradiction? The point is not to apply these theories to Shakespeare’s works, but to ask how translation is conceptualized in the plays and poems, and with what consequences.
46. Sprezzatura
This seminar invites papers investigating the early modern English discourses, practices, and gendering of sprezzatura. Papers may consider the illusion or realization of effortless mastery—written, verbal, or physical—in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Was sprezzatura the sole domain of the (male, noble) courtier or could women, commoners, and racial others achieve its effects? Could subordinate subjects raise their status by performing successful acts of sprezzatura in poetry, music, riding, fencing, athletic contests, dancing, translation, expressive silences?
47. Theater and Geography: Comparative Perspectives
How do the territories and trajectories of early modern English theater compare with those of European vernaculars? What aspects of geography shaped or threatened the places and networks of performance? This seminar explores theater’s intellectual geography by scrutinizing actors, stages, and texts within spatial environments and processes. Participants interested in drama, translation, book history, and mapping are welcome. Topics include cultural mobility; political conflict and diplomacy; ecology, ethnography, and epidemiology; and the recent emergence of the “spatial humanities.”
48. Thomas Heywood and the Theater
Acting, playwriting, translating, collaborating, revising others’ scripts, working with many companies and playhouses, describing social and political effects of theater in his Apology for Actors —Thomas Heywood had a varied and influential career. How did acting inform his drama and his relationships with actors? What do his dedications, prefaces, and prologues suggest about the printing and performance of his plays? What insights into gender and culture do his plays provide? This seminar investigates all aspects of Heywood’s life and afterlife.
49. Tropes of Turning, Conversion, and Translation in Early Modern Drama
This seminar will consider representations of “turnings” in early modern drama—whether religious, political, ethnic, geo-humoral, passional, cognitive, or linguistic. Do the social valences of turning vary according to context and discursive frame? When is “the turn” deplorable, and when laudable? What generic modes enable such tropes, and how do staging practices shape them? How can they enlarge the understanding of early modern conceptions of mind, body, and subjectivity? With what political, economic, and social projects do they intersect?
50. The “University Wits” and the Late-Elizabethan Culture of Writing
The “University Wits” (Lyly, Marlowe, Peele, Greene, Lodge, Nashe) were first assembled by George Saintsbury in 1887 as harbingers of Shakespeare’s genius. This seminar invites work on this energetic group: their role in London’s diverse profession of writing, intersections between their dramatic output and Shakespeare’s, their formal and poetic innovations, their contribution to an emergent canon of vernacular literature at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Particularly welcome are ruminations upon the effects of Saintsbury’s long-lived agglomeration on early modern scholarship.
51. Visual Studies and Early Modern Drama
The field of visual studies analyzes images, image making, perception, and the consequences of vision itself. This seminar invites papers that explore the relationship between the visual and the verbal in early modern drama. How does language enter into the visual, and vice versa? How does the dynamic of visuality and textuality influence the conditions of spectatorship, staging and stage directions, and characterization? How do the workings of dramatic media interact with other art forms (such as dance, emblematics, masques)?
52. Voluntary Sector Shakespeare
This seminar invites papers exploring all aspects of non-professional and semi-professional live Shakespeare across time. Topics might include: the origins, uses, and demographics of amateur and summer-stock Shakespeare in North America; domestic performances of Shakespeare; Shakespeare and military theatricals; Shakespearean pageants; Shakespeare’s own representations of unpaid performance and their significance for real-life amateurs; the relations between voluntary Shakespeare and subsidized Shakespeare as forms of non-commercial theater; kinds of early modern recreational theater and their influence on professional dramatists.
53. Women as Creators and Consumers of Early Modern Plays
An investigation of women’s participation in dramatic and cultural history — as creators (devisors, writers, translators, actors, singers, dancers, and publishers) of plays and as consumers (audience members and also owners, readers, transcribers, and annotators of manuscript and printed copies). Papers may focus on British women such as Mary Sidney, Anne Maxwell, Anne Bracegirdle, or Elizabeth Puckering; on women whose names are presently unknown; and/or on women from the Continent or other parts of the early modern world.
54. iShakespeare: New Media in Research and Pedagogy
This workshop explores the invigorating possibilities and understandable concerns of Shakespearean forays into the digital domains of iPads, Twitter, Dipity, Digital Storytelling, Skype, and Vidyo. The workshop leaders will demonstrate their digital teaching partnership, which links the U.S., the U.K., and India; will offer practical advice on implementation; and will facilitate discussion of the philosophical, social, cognitive, and financial aspects of electronic Shakespearean research and pedagogy. They will welcome reports of other new-media initiatives, including for technologies new to 2012.
55. The Physicality of Shakespeare’s Language
Performing simple acting exercises, participants will examine the physical experience of reverberations and interactions among sound and meaning in speaking, interpreting, and teaching Shakespeare’s plays. Preparation will include readings, memorization of both roles in one brief two-person scene, and one set speech. Book discussion and etymological research will be shared in advance of the session. Open enrollment in the workshop is limited to ten people who have not taken part in workshops conducted by this leader at earlier SAA meetings.
56. Pitiful Goers-Between: Teaching Intertexually
This workshop is devoted to developing and sharing concrete methods for teaching Shakespeare’s work in dialogue with other texts, including but not limited to: sources, analogues, pamphlets, treatises, histories, sermons, theatrical records, paratextual matter , intratextual collaboration, theory , performance, and adaptation. All pairings and approaches are welcome, but each must involve texts that can be assigned to students and discussed in the classroom. Pairings need not be original, but must result in clear insights and be fully articulated for adoption.
57. Sovereignty
This key-word workshop interrogates the question of sovereignty as a fundamental axiom of political thought, referring to the supreme power inside any state and to the “independence” with which states confront one anoth- er outside their borders. Participants will read and discuss classical theories of sovereignty (Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel), as well as Schmitt, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida. The goal is a more rigorous understanding of sovereignty, brought to bear on Shakespeare and on urgent political dilemmas of our own era.