Proposed panel on new methods of theorizing and rethinking the complex instances of literary translation, imitation, and confrontation between France and England during the 16th century. 200–400-word abstracts by 12 March 2010
via Re-thinking the Anglo-French Renaissance MLA 2011 special session | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
Twenty-minute papers that address any theme pertaining to Shakespeare. Topics of interest include gender, religious, and race studies in Shakespeare. Submit a 300-500 word abstract to Ruben Espinosa at respinosa2@utep.edu. The deadline for submitting abstracts is March 1, 2010. Notification will be given by March 15.
This panel seeks papers that explore the interplay of text and image in Renaissance works. Topics might include but are not limited to film adaptations or appropriations of Renaissance drama; emblem literature; masques; the visuality of Early Modern theatre performance or contemporary re-stagings; neo-iconoclasm; depictions of women or race or gender; the sermon or religious service as performance; staging power; visual representations ie. paintings, sketches, etc. of Early Modern texts; or book covers, book making, and printing. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to Lynne Simpson at lsimpson@presby.edu by April 23.
via Text and Image in the Renaissance SAMLA 10/10 | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
‘Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britian, 1550-1640’
A Joint Conference organised by the Centre for Humanities, Music and Performing Arts at the University of Plymouth and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen
To be held at the University of Plymouth, 14-16 April 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS
This conference investigates the cultural uses of the letter, and the related practises of correspondence in early modern culture. Concentrating on the years 1550-1640, it examines a crucial period in the development of the English vernacular letter that saw a significant extension of letter-writing skills throughout society and an expansion in the uses to which letters were put. The conference aims to enhance our understanding of epistolary culture and to challenge accepted models of epistolarity through the study of letter-writing practices in all their nuanced complexity, ranging from the textual production of letters, their subsequent delivery and circulation, to the various ways in which letters were read and preserved for posterity. The transmission and reception of correspondence is a major theme for exploration, from the various processes by which letters were delivered in an age before the post office, to their copying and dissemination in manuscript form, and publication in print, as well as the oral divulgation of letters through group and public reading. Study of the early modern letter in its material and cultural forms can reveal the complex interplay of material practices of letter-writing with rhetorical strategies of the letter text. Contemporary literary appropriations of the letter on page and stage demonstrate the cultural significance of the letter and its potential resonances.
Proposals are invited for papers that treat the following key areas:
• The materiality of the letter: the physicality of correspondence (paper, ink, seals, folding) as well as the social context of epistolarity (composition, delivery, reading, archiving)
• Correspondence networks; the circulation of letters; postal systems and modes of delivery
• Letters, news and intelligence
• Authenticity, deception and surveillance: forgeries, secrecy, ciphers and codes
• Women’s letters and the gendered nature of letter-writing
• Epistolary literacies, social hierarchies and the acquisition and diffusion of letter-writing skills
• Manuscript letters and letters in print
• The letter as a cultural genre and the rhetorics of letter-writing
• Humanistic letter-writing practices and the familiar letter; letter-writing manuals and models; education, pedagogy and learning to write letters
• Categories or types of letters: suitors’ letters, letters of petition, love letters, letters of condolence
• Genres of printed letters: prefatory letters, dedicatory letters, address to the readers
• Staging the letter: letters and letter-writing in drama
• Editing and the digitization of correspondence
Proposals for papers, including titles and abstracts (of no more than 300 words) should be sent to James Daybell (james.daybell@plymouth.ac.uk) and Andrew Gordon (a.gordon@abdn.ac.uk) before 1st July 2010.
Confirmed Speakers Include
Alan Stewart (Columbia University)
Lynne Magnusson (University of Toronto)
Gary Schneider (University of Texas, Pan American)
The Organisers
James Daybell is Reader in Early Modern British History at the University of Plymouth. His publications include Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England (Oxford, 2006), three collections of essays, Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450-1700 (Ashgate, 2004), Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450-1700 (Palgrave, 2001) and Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580-1730 (Palgrave, 2010) and more than twenty articles and essays in journals and edited collections. Dr Daybell is currently completing a monograph entitled, The Material Letter: The Practices and Culture of Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England (Palgrave 2011)
Andrew Gordon is Co-Director of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen, and Programme Co-ordinator of the Department of English. He has published articles on various aspects of urban culture in the renaissance from city mapping to the urban signboard, and co-edited (with Bernhard Klein) Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain (Cambridge, 2001) and (with Trevor Stack) a special issue of Citizenship Studies (2007) devoted to early modern concepts of citizenship. A monograph entitled Writing the City is forthcoming. His work on manuscript culture has focused principally on letter-writing and included articles on Francis Bacon, the earl of Essex, John Donne, and early modern libels.
For further details please email: james.daybell@plymouth.ac.uk, or
The Humanities Review, a literary journal published by the St. John’s University English Department in New York, seeks scholarly compositions for the Spring 2010 edition. This issue will focus on the political, social and aesthetic machinery of death in Early Modern literature. Possible topics of interest include:
• The Functions of Textual Death
• Theatrical Death
• Death and the Human Body
• Death and the Supernatural
• Memento mori in period art
• The Plague / Executions
Submissions should be 10 pages single spaced. MLA style only. Endnotes preferred.
Deadline: Saturday, April 10, 2010. Please submit via email to: sjuhumanities@gmail.com or via mail to:
The Humanities Review
St. Augustine Hall 150
8000 Utopia Parkway
Jamaica, NY
11439
Addendum: Call for Cover Art
We also desire cover art for the aforementioned theme. Artistic submissions in painting, photography, CG, & drawing are welcome. Monochrome, or the ability to be printed in black & white, is a must. Please submit via email attachment as a .TIFF file to sjuhumanities@gmail.com.
Deadline: Thursday, April 1, 2010.
John V. Nance and Christianne Cain, Edtors.
via Death in Early Modern Literature | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
“Narrating Lives after Death”
Proposed Special Session for MLA 2011 in Los Angeles
When Katherine Stubbes “bequeaths” their newborn son to Phillip Stubbes, she asks her husband to “bring up this childe in good letters, in learning and discipline, and above all things, see that he be brought up and instructed in the exercise of true religion.” The late sixteenth and early seventeenth century in England saw the print publication of several parental advice manuals. This proposed special session will explore how these advice manuals “narrate the lives” in keeping with the MLA 2011 theme of the children to whom they are left and, by extension, the consumers of the printed objects. I invite proposals for papers that consider the influence of advice manuals in Early Modern England.
Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words in the body of an email to jessica.c.murphy@gmail.com by March 1, 2010. All panel participants must be members of the MLA http://www.mla.org before April 1, 2010.
via CFP: “Narrating Lives after Death” 3/1/10; MLA 2011 | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
It’s up on the CFP list!
Proposed Special Session for MLA 2011 in Los Angeles
I invite papers discussing exile as lived experience and as thematic device in late-17th-century autobiographies. Both theoretical and historical approaches are welcome.
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to sam2142@columbia.edu by March 4th, 2010.
via The Politics of Exile in Restoration Autobiography 3/4/10; MLA 2011 | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
Special Session on teaching early Modern literature, and Shakespeare in particular, from an ecocritical perspective. Submit 250 words abstracts to lbruckner@chatham.edu by March 3, 2010.
via MLA 2011–Pedagogy, Ecocriticism, and Early Modern Texts | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
Midwest Conference on British Studies 56th Annual MeetingOctober 8-10, 2010, Cleveland
The Midwest Conference on British Studies is proud to announce that its fifty-sixth annual meeting will be hosted by Baldwin-Wallace College at the Renaissance Cleveland Hotel.
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. In addition, 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, 2010, to the Program Committee Chair, Rick Incorvati, at rincorvati@wittenberg.edu.
via Midwest Conference on British Studies 56th Annual Meeting | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
Early English Studies Journal is accepting articles that are concerned with any aspect of medieval or early modern green/environmental topics for the 2010 issue, “Green Thoughts in the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds.” We welcome articles between 20 and 30 pages including notes that interrogate ecological or environmental questions that arise in literary and historical texts approximately between the years 1400 and 1700. We are looking for a wide variety of theoretical and historical approaches to the idea of the “green,” which could include but is not limited to investigations of interior and exterior landscapes, the conception of the pastoral, gardens in literature, the effects of pollution, literary celebration of country-house poems, scientific writings and treatises, and journals that record weather or other effects on the land and sea.
Early English Studies EES 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 is open to general submission. Please include a brief bio and 200-word abstract with your electronic submission, all in Word documents .doc not .docx. Please visit the website at http://www.uta.edu/english/ees/ for more specific submission guidelines and to read past issues.
Send submissions to: Amy L. Tigner, earlyenglishstudies@gmail.com
