Thursday, February 17, 2011

CFP: Southeastern Renaissance Conference 6/1/11; 10/20-21/11

Papers are invited on any aspect of Renaissance literature and culture for presentation at the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, October 20-21, 2011, at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC.

Please submit your full essay (20 minute reading time) by email attachment to Dr. Robert L. Reid, President of the Southeastern Renaissance Conference, rlreid@ehc.edu by June 1, 2011.

Submission of your work to the Conference is also an automatic submission to Renaissance Papers, the journal of the Conference. Even those articles not accepted for delivery at the meeting will be considered for publication in the journal.

[UPDATE] CFP- Shakespeare and the Material World (March 2, 2011)

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/

PAMLA 2011 Special Session - The Dialogues of Love: An Early Modern Best-Seller

Papers on any aspect of the life and work of Leone Ebreo (Yehudah Abravanel), author of The Dialogues of Love. Penned by a Spanish Sephardic exile and published in Rome in 1535, The Dialogues is one of the most eclectic and influential vernacular philosophical works of sixteenth century.
The 109th Annual PAMLA Conference will be held at Scripps College in Claremont, California, on November 5 and 6, 2011.
A paper title, an approximately 500-word proposal, and an approximately 40-word abstract should be submitted online at: http://www.pamla.org/2011/proposals by March 25, 2011.

New Directions in Earlier Tudor Drama (MLA 2012)

We welcome proposals for innovative papers on all aspects of and approaches to Tudor drama before Shakespeare. Please send 300-word abstracts by 18 March 2011.

CFP: Shakespeare and Film (Abstracts: 30 April 2011; Conference: 13-15 October 2011; Jaipur, India)

Increasingly Shakespeare studies have included in their ambit performance both on stage and screen, and some of the most interesting recent critical studies have been in this area. We are no longer caught between the virtuality of the playscript and the ephemerality of the performance. Cinematic texts have a life all their own, dealing as they do with the international marketplace of culture and communication. In this seminar, while the paramount focus will be on Shakespeare in Indian cinema, be it successful Hindi films like Gulzar’s Angoor or Vishal Bhardwaj’s Maqbool and Omkara, attention will be paid to Shakespeare performed in regional language cinema—classics like the Bengali Bhranti Bilash or the Malaylam Kaliyattam. In addition, we hope to have papers on Shakespeare as interpreted in the British film industry (the films of Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh, for example,) in Hollywood (the work of Orson Welles and Baz Luhrman to name a few) and by renowned international directors like Grigori Kozintsev of the USSR, Akira Kurosawa of Japan and Franco Zeffirelli of Italy. Modern cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare plays, such as Gil Yunger’s Ten Things I Hate About You, Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet 2000 and Julie Taymor’s recent Tempest (2010) will also be included.
Please send a 500-word abstract with a title by 30 April 2011 to nitakr@gmail.com (Secretary, SSI). You will hear back from us by 30 May 2011.
If the Seminar Committee approves your abstract, you will be expected to submit the full paper, approximately 5000 words including notes and in MLA 7th edition format, by September 30, 2011.

REMINDER: UW-Madison PRINT CULTURE COLLOQUIUM with Michael Witmore: "Data-Mining Early English Dramatic Texts from the Text Creation Partnership"

Michael Witmore, Professor, Department of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Thursday, February 17, 2011, 12:00 Noon-1:00 p.m.
SLIS Commons
4207 Helen C. White Hall
600 North Park Street
University of Wisconsin-Madison
In this talk, Professor Witmore will discuss his work on digitized versions of early modern printed texts using multivariate statistics and a text-analysis tool called Docuscope. His presentation will focus on the following question: what can we learn from data-mining large numbers of early modern texts that we couldn’t learn by simply reading a representative sample of them? Witmore is organizer of the Working Group for Digital Inquiry, a research collective that is mapping the prose genres of Early English Books online using techniques from bioinformatics and corpus linguistics.

Christine Pawley, Director
Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America
University of Wisconsin-Madison
School of Library and Information Studies
Room 4234 Helen C. White Hall
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 263-2945 or (608) 263-2900
Fax: (608) 263-4849

Email: printculture@slis.wisc.edu
Visit the website at http://slisweb.lis.wisc.edu/~printcul/index.html

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

CFP: Early Modern Devotional Writing

The Renaissance English Text Society invites abstracts for sessions on Early Modern Devotional Writing at the following conferences:

* Renaissance Society of America, 24-26 March 2012 in Washington, D.C.
* International Congress on Medieval Studies, 10-13 May 2012 in Kalamazoo, Michigan
* Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 25-28 October 2012 in Cincinnati, OH

Please send abstracts to Margaret Hannay (hannay@siena.edu) and Susan Felch at (felch@calvin.edu) by 1 May 2011 for RSA and Kalamazoo; by 1 February 2012 for SCSC.

Sixth Blackfriars Conference, Staunton, VA (October 25-30, 2011)

In 2011, the American Shakespeare Center’s Education and Research Department will once again host Shakespeareans, scholars and practitioners alike, to explore Shakespeare in the study and Shakespeare on the stage and to find ways that these two worlds – sometime in collision – can collaborate. Past conferences have included such notable scholars as Andrew Gurr, the “godfatASC actor and 2009 Blackfriars Conference presenter: James Keegan as Falstaff in 1H4.her” of the Blackfriars Playhouse, Tiffany Stern, Russ McDonald, Gary Taylor, Stephen Greenblatt, Roz Knutson, Tina Packer, and many more in five days full of activities.
Except for banquets, all events – papers, plays, workshops, – take place in the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre, the Blackfriars Playhouse. This conference distinguishes itself from saner conferences in a variety of other ways. First, to model the kind of collaboration we think possible we encourage presenters to feature actors as partners in the demonstration of their theses. For instance, in 2009, Gary Taylor’s keynote presentation “Lyrical Middleton” featured ASC actors singing and dancing to the songs in Middleton’s plays. Second, we limit each paper session to six short papers (10 minutes for solo presentations, 13 minutes for presentations with actors). Third, we enforce this rule by ursine fiat – a bear chases from the stage those speakers who go over their allotted time. Delegates also attend all of the plays in the ASC fall season – Hamlet, Henry V, The Tempest, by Shakespeare, Tamburlaine by Christopher Marlowe, and The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde – and, for the past several conferences, bonus plays written by their colleagues and performed by actors in the Mary Baldwin College MFA in Shakespeare in Performance program. The spirit of fun that imbues the conference manifests itself in the annual Truancy Award, for the sensible conferee who – visiting the Shenandoah Valley at the height of Fall – has the good sense to miss the most sessions.
The 2011 gathering will include a returning keynote speaker, Shakespearean scholar Tiffany Stern, author of essential performance studies such as Making Shakespeare, Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, and Documents of Performance. Professor Stern’s work has played an influential role in the development of the American Shakespeare Center’s Actors’ Renaissance Season, and her presentations continue to inspire the further exploration of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the ASC’s educational and artistic programming. Additionally, George T. Wright, author of Shakespeare’s Metrical Art, will present. Professor Wright’s text on prosody illuminates Shakespeare’s use of meter for actors and scholars. We will invite our other speakers with an eye to other aspects of Shakespeare’s plays in performance such as playing the possibilities of rhetoric, playing in early modern theatres, early modern play audiences (then and now), metrical analysis, early modern rehearsal practice, early modern visual design, pedagogy (early modern and current practice and its influence on performance).
Since each conference expands on the activities of the preceding conferences, the 2011 incarnation will include thematic panels following each keynote address. The work of the conference always echoes in the work on stage at the Blackfriars Playhouse and in the American Shakespeare Center’s Research and Scholarship department, and it has provided the material for two books devoted specifically to essays from the conference (Inside Shakespeare, edited by Paul Menzer, and Thunder in the Playhouse, edited by Matt Kosusko and Peter Kanelos). Plans are already afoot to include papers from the upcoming conference in a third book.
ASC Education and Research extends this call for papers on any matters to do with the performance of early modern drama (historical, architectural, political, dramatical, sartorial, medical, linguistical, comical, pastoral) to all interested parties for our bi-annual conference to be held at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, 25-30 October 2011. The deadline to submit your abstract is 31 May 2011.
Link to Abstract Submission Form: http://www.formstack.com/forms/?1007217-Fa8fydC0oQ

Early Modern Possible Worlds (MLA 2012, Abstract Deadline 3/1/2011)

This is a proposed special session for the 2012 MLA convention. Sixteenth and seventeenth-century works, from Utopia to The Blazing World, engaged in acts of worldmaking by speculating on or inventing "possible worlds.” This panel will examine the scope and limitations of these early modern possible worlds, and more generally, the condition of the “possible,” which authors variously define through the terms “what may be,” “what should be,” or even “what if.”
We will ask: What distinct epistemological claims are enabled through these acts of worldmaking? How does the concept and example of the possible world become a vehicle through which one examines contemporary social, political and epistemological issues? How do possible worlds enable us to think of the relation between reality and imagination, between truth and fiction? What is the relationship between utopia and possible worlds? How does the notion of possibility vary across genres? And finally, how does the idea of the “possible,” as an unactualized or counterfactual epistemological framework, shape our own disciplinary and critical practices? Interdisciplinary approaches particularly welcome.
Please send a 300-word abstract by 1 March 2011 to Debapriya Sarkar at dsarkar@eden.rutgers.edu.