Seminar and Workshop Abstracts

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.

2023

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.

2022

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

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)

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.

2021

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

Part One
Part Two

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

Part One

Part Two

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?

2020

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?

2019

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

Part One: Historical, Textual, and Thematic Approaches

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.

2018

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 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 21^st 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.

2017

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.

2016

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

Part 1

Part 2

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