Thursday, January 27, 2011

Transformation and Innovation in the British Military from 1642 to 1945

Transformation and Innovation in the British Military from 1642 to 1945

13 April 2011

This symposium, organised by the Centres for First and Second World War Studies at the University of Birmingham, intends to give postgraduate and early career historians the opportunity to examine the process of transformation and innovation in the British military as recent literature on the subject has highlighted a need to evaluate the process from 1642 to the present day. The symposium will be held at the Edgbaston campus of the University of Birmingham.
The symposium will also give delegates the opportunity to present aspects of their research to a wider audience and engage with the academic community in military history. The symposium programme is attached; it includes eighteen papers on aspects of transformation and innovation in the British military from the early modern period to the early twentieth century and from a range of perspectives. Professor John Buckley, Chair of Military History at the University of Wolverhampton, will deliver the keynote lecture. Professor Gary Sheffield, Chair of War Studies at the University of Birmingham, will deliver the symposium’s closing address.
The symposium fee, which includes tea & coffee and lunch on the day, is £10 for postgraduate students and Friends/Members of the Centres for First and Second World War Studies and £20 for other interested parties. Please see the website for the booking form and further details.


Ross Mahoney
C/O School of History and Cultures
College of Arts and Law
University of Birmingham
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
Email:
birminghamwarstudies@gmail.com
Visit the website at http://warstudies.wordpress.com/symposium/

Friday, January 21, 2011

Midwest Conference on British Studies 57th Annual Meeting

CALL FOR PAPERS
Midwest Conference on British Studies 57th Annual Meeting
November 4-6, 2011, Terre Haute, IN

  The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its fifty-seventh annual meeting will be hosted by Indiana State University in Terre Haute, IN.

The MWCBS seeks papers from scholars in all fields of British Studies, broadly defined to include those who study England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and Britain's empire. We welcome scholars from the broad spectrum of disciplines, including but not limited to history, literature, political science, gender studies and art history. Proposals for complete sessions are preferred, although proposals for individual papers will be considered. Especially welcome are roundtables and panels that:

--offer cross-disciplinary perspectives on topics in British Studies

--discuss collaborative or innovative learning techniques in the British Studies classroom

--situate the arts, letters, and sciences in a British cultural context

--examine representations of British and imperial/Commonwealth national identities

--consider Anglo-American relations, past and present

--examine new trends in British Studies

--assess a major work or body of work by a scholar

The MWCBS welcomes papers presented by advanced graduate students and will award the Walter L. Arnstein Prize at its plenary luncheon for the best graduate student paper(s) given at the conference.

Proposals should include a 200-word abstract for each paper and a brief, 1-page c.v. for each participant, including chairs and commentators. For full panels, please include a brief 200-word preview of the panel as a whole. Please place the panel proposal, and its accompanying paper proposals and vitas in one file. Please make certain that all contact information, particularly email addresses are correct and current. All proposals should be submitted online by April 15, 2011, to the Program Committee Chair, Lia Paradis at lia.paradis@sru.edu.
Visit the MWCBS website at http://mwcbs.edublogs.org/.

MWCBS Program Committee:  Lia Paradis, Chair, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania; Gene Beiriger, DePaul University; Lori Campbell, University of Pittsburgh; Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame; Chris Otter, Ohio State University; Anne Rodrick, Wofford College.  

Friday, January 7, 2011

special journal issue on Milton's "Paradise Regained"

Of the two Miltonic epics, Paradise Regained has been under-served by criticism while its longer counterpart has perhaps been over-served. The Huntington Library Quarterly now seeks proposals for essays to be included in a special issue devoted to Paradise Regained.
To propose an essay, submit a 500-word abstract and a cv. We will review proposals received by June 30, 2011. We will then invite submissions of full manuscripts (of 7,000 to 15,000 words), to be completed by December 31, 2011. These will be circulated to referees, with publication planned before the end of 2012.
Please send your proposal by e-mail with the subject line “Milton HLQ submission” to Susan Green at sgreen@huntington.org.
For more information, visit http://www.ucpressjournals.com/journal.asp?j=hlq&jDetail=submit.

Ancient Rome and Early Modern England: History, Politics, and Political Thought

Ancient Rome was a source of endless fascination to the early moderns. Historians, politicians, divines, and imaginative writers looked to the Roman example for models and inspiration. This international conference reassesses the place of ancient Rome in the political culture of late Tudor and early Stuart England. What was the impact of the Roman precedent on attitudes towards constitutional change, the rights and wrongs of empire, and the law? How did it influence ecclesiastical policy and, more generally, the views of the relationship between church and state? In what ways did Roman historiography, political writings, and rhetoric shape the language and substance of public argument? How did the Roman legacy compare with that of ancient Greece?

Speakers include: Annabel Brett, Anthony Grafton, Paulina Kewes, Eric Nelson, Markku Peltonen, Malcolm Smuts, Freyja Cox Jensen, Patricia Osmond, Nick Popper, and Arthur Williamson.

Venue: The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
Dates: 21-22 January 2011

Best & Worst Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama Productions 2000-2010

SHAKESPEARE BULLETIN, a peer reviewed academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press, is seeking short theatre reviews for one or more issues in the 2012 volume.
We solicit accounts & reviews of the BEST and/or WORST productions of Shakespeare and other early modern dramatists of the past decade.
Our goal is to run a great many of these reviews, and to encourage formally and stylistically innovative & adventurous writing about performance. Therefore, reviews should be a MAXIMUM of 500 words.
Submissions will be accepted from now through September 30, 2011.
To submit reviews or to request further information, submission and editorial guidelines, etc., please contact Shakespeare Bulletin's theatre review editor Jeremy Lopez:
jeremy.lopez@utoronto.ca

Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature 4/8 - 4/9 2011

On April 8-9 of 2011, the Northern Plains Conference on Early British Literature (NPCEBL) will hold its nineteenth annual conference, hosted by Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, nestled in the bluffs along the Mississippi river in Winona, MN. The conference attracts advanced scholars, graduate students, and select undergraduates from the upper Midwest (and farther) to discuss literary-critical, theoretical, and pedagogical issues concerning the early literatures of the British isles (medieval through long 18th century). The keynote speaker this year will be Dolores Frese of the University of Notre Dame.
ABSTRACTS are being accepted in any related area until February 14. Please send abstracts, panel proposals, and any inquiries to jkerr@smumn.edu. Selected papers will be published in the annual proceedings.
We will have 30 rooms available at the conference center for $55 per night, available in order of abstract submission/registration. (These are essentially small motel rooms with double bed, television, and internet service). There will also be traditional motel rooms available at a discounted rate. The conference fee will be $65.

The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment

The dating of Beowulf is one of the most controversial and pressing issues in Anglo-Saxon studies. It has animated and continues to animate a great deal of scholarship on Beowulf, often with ramifications for the study of Anglo-Saxon literature and culture as a whole. Scholars had once agreed with near unanimity that Beowulf was one of the earliest extant Old English poems, yet the University of Toronto’s 1980 conference on the dating of Beowulf – presenting arguments for ninth, tenth, and early eleventh century composition – threw open the question again. Despite the uncertainty ushered in by the conference and the subsequent collection of essays, many scholars have made important contributions to our efforts to date Beowulf over the last thirty years, and strong arguments have emerged on paleographical, linguistic, metrical, cultural, and historical grounds, among others.
Harvard University’s English Department, with support from the Morton Bloomfield Trust and the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, will be hosting a conference entitled “The Dating of Beowulf: A Reassessment” on September 23 – 24, 2011. We are pleased to announce that R.D. Fulk, Class of 1964 Chancellor’s Professor of English at Indiana University, will be giving the conference’s plenary address.
We invite scholars to supplement, evaluate, or interrogate the scholarship on the dating of Beowulf that has emerged over the last three decades. We welcome both highly specific investigations as well as holistic attempts to integrate the findings of various approaches.
Presentations should be no longer than twenty minutes. There will be a short discussion period after each paper. Potential presenters should send an abstract of approximately 250 words by e-mail to HarvardBeowulf@gmail.com. Abstracts are due by March 31, 2011.

CFP: Book Design from the Middle Ages to the Future. Traditions and Evolutions

The objective of this international congress is to explore traditions and innovations in book design and typography from the manuscript era to the age of the electronic book. The following questions will be addressed: How did the design of books evolve during the Middle Ages, the early modern period and beyond? Which traditions survived the successive transitions from manuscripts to hand press books in the early modern period, at the end of the eighteenth century (the period of mechanization and automatisation), and at the end of the twentieth century from the paper book to the electronic book? How did the changing conditions of production and use affect the appearance and content of books? Which elements endured and which ones were altered or disappeared? How is the design of books embedded in culture and how do the arts interact where the presentation of texts is concerned? Twenty-minute papers are invited addressing different aspects of book design, typography and book layout from a comparative or long-term perspective. They may deal with single aspects, such as title pages, type and illustrations, or with strategies for the articulation of texts, such as rubrication, colour, typographical white, ornaments and initials. Contributions should focus on traditions and the long-term evolution of book design, or explore the interaction of different cultures that have influenced the typography of books in neighbouring regions.

Keynote speaker: Prof David McKitterick (Cambridge University) Confirmed speakers include Dr Erik Kwakkel (Leiden University) & Prof Gerard Unger (Leiden University)

The congress will be preceded by a Miræus Lecture in the Nottebohm Hall of the Antwerp Erfgoedbibliotheek Hendrik Conscience, and will be followed by a guided tour of the Museum Plantin Moretus in Antwerp on Saturday 1 October.

For further information & questions, please contact Dr Goran Proot, University of Antwerp, Grote Kauwenberg 18, room d218, b-2000 Antwerp, Belgium.
Please send twenty-line abstracts by 28 February 2011 to goran.proot@gmail.com.

Early English Studies Journal CFP

Early English Studies Journal is an online journal under the auspices of the University of Texas, Arlington English Department and is devoted to literary and cultural topics of study in the medieval and early modern periods. EES is published annually, peer-reviewed, and open to general submission.

Early English Studies Journal is now accepting submission for our next issue, which will be titled, Shakespeare and the Material World. We welcome submissions that deal with any aspect of Shakespeare and material culture. We are interested, for example, in the ways in which materiality informs theatrical practices and is reflected in the plays. How do objects or the idea of an object construct identity and gender or create a sense of space, time, or location? What is the meaning of materiality in the early modern world and the world of Shakespeare’s plays? Submissions (7000-9000 words including notes) are due on March 2, 2011.

Please include a brief bio and 200-word abstract with your electronic submission, all in Word documents. Please visit the website at http://www.uta.edu/english/ees/ for more specific submission guidelines and to read past issues.

In Volume 4, we will also have a new section of book reviews. If you would like to have your book, which has been published in the last two years and concerns medieval or early modern literary and or cultural studies, considered for review, please send an email to Sarah Farrell, Review Editor, sarah.farrell@mavs.uta.edu.

Deadline for Paper: March 2, 2011

Send submissions to: Amy L. Tigner, earlyenglishstudies@gmail.com

Call for Papers website: http://www.uta.edu/english/ees/

Early Modern Architecture Website

There is a new website devoted to the architecture of Europe and its colonies, 1400-1800 at: http://earlymodernarchitecture.com. The website aims to: 1) highlight new research trends (through announcements of CFPs, recently published volumes, and upcoming conferences as well as exhibitions), 2) provide basic information on the field (from images to fellowship and job announcements), and 3) offer the opportunity for discussion and photo exchange.

Monday, January 3, 2011

RMMRA Conference 2011: Faith and Doubt in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association
Faith and Doubt in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
April 7-9, 2011
Salt Lake City, Utah
The Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association invites panel and paper proposals on the conference theme, “Faith and Doubt in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”
The Conference will be held at the Crystal Inn in downtown Salt Lake City, just ten minutes from the Salt Lake City International Airport. Our keynote speaker will be Raymond Waddington, Professor of English at the University of California at Davis. He is the author of numerous articles, essays, and books including Aretino's Satyr, 2004; The Expulsion of the Jews (co-editor), 1994; The Age of Milton (co-editor), 1980; The Mind's Empire, 1974; and The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry (co-editor), 1974. He also serves as Senior Editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal.
The RMMRA seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of European medieval and Renaissance studies. We welcome abstracts addressing, among other topics, the literary, historical, scientific, religious and cultural representations of faith and doubt and their various permutations in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. However, as in previous years, abstracts, papers, and sessions on all aspects of the study of the European Middle Ages and Renaissance are also welcome.
Please note that we will be hosting a special panel on academic publishing, featuring Professor Waddington, which will be of great use to advanced graduate students and junior faculty.
Proposals for panels or abstracts for individual papers should be directed to one of the conference’s co-organizers: Kimberly Johnson (kimberly_johnson@byu.edu), Ginger Smoak (ginger.smoak@utah.edu), and Michael Walton (waltonmar@aol.com). Abstracts are due January 31, 2011.

California State University Shakespeare Symposium (Update)

Call for Papers
for the Nineteenth Annual
California State University Shakespeare Symposium
May 5-6, 2011
California State University, Stanislaus
Keynote Speaker: Professor Frances Dolan, University of California, Davis
Proposal submission deadline extended to: January 20th, 2011
Conference hotel: Candlewood Suites
1000 Powers Court
Turlock, CA 95380
Phone: (209) 250-1501
Email: http://www.candlewoodsuites.com/
The symposium committee invites proposals for papers and presentations on any aspect of the works of William Shakespeare. We are currently accepting submissions on a wide range of topics, discipline-specific or interdisciplinary, authored by graduate students or professors. General topics may include, but are not limited to, Shakespeare and early modern culture; Shakespeare’s influence on or appropriation by contemporary culture; Shakespeare on film or television; digital Shakespeare; Shakespearean sources or adaptations; aesthetic approaches to Shakespeare’s work; the Shakespearean stage; Shakespeare in performance; teaching Shakespeare; Shakespeare in the high school classroom. A selection of papers presented at the conference will be published in a special fall edition of The San Joaquin Valley Journal, a refereed online journal published by graduate students and professors in CSU Stanislaus’ English Department (http://sjvjcsustan.com/).
The symposium will be held on the campus of California State University, Stanislaus, on Thursday, May 5th and Friday, May 6th. The beautiful 228-acre campus is situated in the heart of California’s great Central Valley—a short distance from the San Francisco Bay Area, Monterey, and Sacramento. The conference will coincide with the University Theater Department’s production of Romeo and Juliet, which will be performed in the evening in an outdoor amphitheatre. Conference attendees are invited to performances of the play at no additional cost. Additionally, guest director Daniel Gately will address the conference at a reception preceding the Thursday night performance.
If you are interested in presenting at this year’s symposium, please send a 250-word abstract and a brief (one-page) CV to shakespeare@csustan.edu. Finished papers should have a presentation time of no more than twenty minutes. Though the conference welcomes all graduate students and college educators, submissions are particularly encouraged from current and former faculty, instructors, and students of any California State University campus. The deadline for submissions will be January 20th, 2011. If you want to chair a special session, please submit your session title, a brief description and justification for the session, and three abstracts (including CVs) from session participants.

Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Nov 4-5, 2011) Deadline extended to Feb 20

The Fifth International Conference of the Taiwan Association of Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies Ludi Civitatis: the Church, the Court, and the Citizens
‘Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play’ (Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens). In civic entertainment, ‘play’ constitutes the primary formative element in human culture that affords and sustains common interest and amusement. Texts produced in the classical, medieval and the Renaissance periods document how the Church, the Court, and the citizens devise their ‘play’ in triumphal entries, court entertainment, civic festivals, religious rituals, processions, drama, music and dance.
But why does culture endlessly produce and consume entertainment? What are the motives that prompt people to create civic entertainment? How did civic entertainment and its effects resonate through manuscripts, print, economics, politics and the arts from the classical period to the Renaissance?
This year’s conference explores complex manifestations of ‘play’, aiming to look into ‘makers’ and consumers of civic entertainment in the city, the ‘common’ stage for cultural productions across the classical, medieval and Renaissance periods. TACMRS now invites proposals for papers on one of the following themes:
 The Church and religious ‘play’ in the city
 Court entertainment and the city
 Popular festivals in the civic space
 Playwrights and their ‘play’
 Artists and the performing arts
TACMRS provides an interdisciplinary forum for discussions and debates on the motives, performances, and effects of civic entertainment, and seeks to create dialogue between and across disciplines and periods. We would particularly encourage submissions with cross-cultural approaches, and on this premise welcome papers that reach beyond the traditional chronological and disciplinary borders of classical, medieval and Renaissance studies. Please send the paper proposals to TACMRS.NSYSU@gmail.com by Feb 20, 2011.

Sixteenth Century Society Conference 2011

The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) is now accepting proposals for individual papers and complete sessions for its annual conference, to be held at the Renaissance Worthington Hotel, Fort Worth, Texas, Oct 27-30, 2011. This hotel (awarded four diamonds by AAA) is in the center of Fort Worth on historic Sundance Square, and is moments away from the museum district, which includes the Kimall Art Museum, the Museum of American Art, and the Modern Art Museum of Forth Worth.

The SCSC, founded to promote scholarship on the early modern era (ca. 1450 – ca. 1660), actively encourages the participation of international scholars as well as the integration of younger colleagues into the academic community. We also welcome proposals for roundtables sponsored by scholarly societies that are affiliated with the SCSC.

Abstracts (up to 250 words in length) for papers and sessions may be submitted online at: http://www.sixteenthcentury.org/conf_proposals.shtml

If you experience any difficulty with our online submission process or have questions about how to submit a proposal please send an email message to: conference@sixteenthcentury.org

The deadline for submissions is 1 April 2011. Within four weeks after the deadline, the Program Committee will notify all those who submitted proposals.

The SCSC, a not-for-profit scholarly organization, receives no governmental or institutional funding. In order to participate in this conference, delegates or their sponsoring institution/organization will need to fund their own travel and lodging expenses in addition to a $155 per delegate registration fee ($93 student fee). The registration fee is used to pay for conference facilities and general events. By paying the fee, delegates become members in the SCSC.

Prof. Randall Zachman
Notre Dame University
235 Malloy Hall
South Bend, IN 46556

Email: rzachman@nd.edu
Visit the website at http://sixteenthcentury.org/

The Power of Print: The Marprelate Tracts

Printed on a secret press transported at night, the Marprelate Tracts were one of the most dramatic political and literary events in late sixteenth century England. This is a one-day conference designed to celebrate the first new edition of the Marprelate Tracts and provoke new research on these fierce, witty and subversive works.

Cathryn Enis
Department of History
University of Reading
Whiteknights Campus
Reading
United Kingdom
Email: c.e.enis@reading.ac.uk
Visit the website at http://www.reading.ac.uk/emrc