CFP: Drinking (5/12/08; GEMCS 2008)

Inviting papers on drink and drinking in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature, including non-fiction prose, for GEMCS 2008. Topics may include drunkenness and social disorder; drinking and social status;
brewers and brewsters; beer, ale, wine, or spirits; church-ales and other festivities; social histories of brewing and drinking; pubs and alehouses; economics of drink; alcohol and health; temperance. Proposals that emphasize social history or technical and economic approaches are encouraged. Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to David Swain (d.swain at snhu.edu) by 12 May 2008.

See here for GEMCS info: http://www.english.fsu.edu/gemcs/

CFP: Writing About Early Modern Nuns and Writing-Nuns (5/15/08; RSA, 3/19/09-3/21/09)

For the 55th Annual Renaissance Society of America Meeting in Los Angeles, California March 19-21, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza:

This panel seeks to highlight ties between fictional representations of nuns in early modern literature and the actual writing of nuns in early modern Europe and the Americas. Panel participants should examine how
fictional nuns mirror, mesh with, or oppose their real life counterparts in the early modern world. Papers can reflect how authors imagine nuns in their prose, drama, and poetry and how real nuns perform their existence in the textual world through their personal writing. Appropriately complementary examinations of the writing of nuns such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Santa Teresa of Avila, Madre Castillo, Juliana Ernst, and others are welcome. Lastly, panel participants may consider how the querrelle des femmes informs the fictional portrayal of nuns and how its arguments affected the agency and writing of real nuns.

Please e-mail your abstract (150-250 words) and CV as .doc or .rtf attachments to Horacio Sierra at hsierra_at_english.ufl.edu by 15 May 2008.

Panel participants must be members of the Renaissance Society of America and register for the conference sometime before Fall 2008. Details to follow.

CFP: Early Modern Criminality and Sites of Injustice (5/12/08; RSA 09)

CFP: Early Modern Criminality and Sites of Injustice Session for Renaissance Society of America Conference, Los Angeles (March 19-21, 2009)

This session approaches the visual culture of early modern criminality through the framework of injustice, whether imaged, constructed or performed. We encourage papers examining a range of visual material, from architectural sites, decorative programs and locations of crime, to representations of criminals and unjust, ineffectual or otherwise failed rule. Papers might examine ambiguous or invented spaces of criminal acts;
the representation of evaded punishment and unfulfilled justice; unjust actions of the powerful or parodies of justice; or the mapping of injustice through pictorial representation. Who constituted the audience for these kinds of images and spaces, and how did they function to overturn or underscore injustice? For example, depictions of criminal acts and criminal bodies might serve as reminders of the necessity for justice in a given government or, conversely, point to its failings. Shaming ‘portraits’ like pitture infamanti may be understood to make the absent present so as to bring justice to an otherwise absent criminal, or they may rather reinforce absence and hopes for presence. In questioning the sites and representations of injustice in the early modern period, we seek to investigate a “visual culture of criminality” in Europe and explore its multiple functions.

Please email proposals to both Timothy McCall (timothy.mccall_at_villanova.edu) and Allie Terry (alterry_at_bgsu.edu) by Monday, May 12. Please include a 150 word abstract, paper title, and a CV.

CFP: Boredom avant la letter in early modern England (5/15/08; RSA 2009)

Boredom avant la lettre in Early Modern England RSA Los Angeles 2009

The origins of boredom as a category of experience for English men and women have largely been traced to the mid-eighteenth century. However, individuals much earlier expressed their tiredness with the world as is, their dissatisfaction with everyday life. Medieval moralists understood “acedia” as a spiritual state signaling an absence of caring and apathy. The French word “ennui” seemingly crossed the channel with the returning Royalists in 1660. This panel seeks papers that explore early modern English writers or artists concerned with the mundane side of everyday life and/or objects. Potential topics include: melancholy and daily life, material culture and “boredom,” the new philosophy and novel perceptions of disaffected individuality, or distinctly apathetic expressions of political deracination.

Abstracts and brief CV’s attached as Word documents by May 15 to cdaddario_at_towson.edu.

CFP: Form and Reform: Writing New Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (5/5/08; RSA 09)

In many respects the tumult of the seventeenth-century English political landscape can be traced to the failure of conventional political platforms and categories: once-stable institutions had trouble accommodating shifting notions of the English self, prompting reconceptualizations of social identity, responsibility, and action that had viability outside of these failed forms. This panel will consider how
authors make use of literary space to experiment with new relationships to a newly-problematic past and present as they look to rethink the possibilities for their own political status. Proposals might consider
how authors use their work to attempt to strip away institutional markers in response to various pressures, or to reshape notions of history to cope with their unsettling experiences of defeat and disenfranchisement.

Please email abstracts to Nathaniel Stogdill at snathani_at_email.unc.edu by Monday, May 5.

CFP: Renaissance Open Topic (5/15/08; SAMLA 11/7-9/08)

Southeastern Renaissance Conference Session, SAMLA, Nov 7-9, 2008, Louisville, KY
In keeping with this year’s special focus on drama, this is an open call for papers on any topic within Renaissance drama. Please send abstracts (250-500 words) by May 15th via email to katiek_at_usca.edu or via post to Dr. Katie Kalpin, Department of English, University of South Carolina, Aiken, 471 University Parkway, Aiken, SC 29801. For further information on the conference, see the conference website:
http://samla.gsu.edu/convention/convention.htm

CFP: New Technologies and Renaissance Studies (5/15/08; RSA 2009)

CFP: New Technologies and Renaissance Studies Renaissance Society of America Annual Conference
Los Angeles, 19-21 March 2009

For the past eight years, the RSA program has featured a number of sessions that document innovative ways in which computing technology is being incorporated into the scholarly activity of our community. At the 2009 RSA meeting, several sessions will continue to follow this interest across several key projects, through a number of thematic touchstones, and in several emerging areas.

For these sessions, we seek proposals in the following general areas, and beyond, at their points of intersection with new technologies:

a) research (individual or group projects)
b) teaching (individual or group projects)
c) publication (e.g. from the vantage point of authors, traditional and
non-traditional publishers)

Proposals for papers, panels, demonstrations, and/or workshop presentations that focus on these issues and others are welcome. Please send proposals before May 15 to siemens_at_uvic.ca.

Ray Siemens
English, CRC Humanities Computing, University of Victoria

and

William R. Bowen
Chair, Department of Humanities, University of Toronto, Scarborough

CFP: Working Shakespeares: 2008 Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference (8/15/08; 10/2-5/08)

CALL FOR PAPERS WORKING SHAKESPEARES
OHIO VALLEY SHAKESPEARE CONFERENCE, OCT 2-5 YOUNGSTOWN STATE UNIVERSITY

The Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference is accepting abstracts for its annual conference to be held October 2-5 at Youngstown State University. The theme for this year’s meeting, Working Shakespeares, is meant to

solicit a broad range of inquiries into issues of labor and market, class and status, civic and public in both the works of Shakespeare and the profession at large. In our current cultural moment, a time in which the gap between rich and poor widens at an alarming pace and universities are facing shifting market demands, how might we rethink Shakespeare studies from perspectives that address these concerns? How might academics sort out issues of culture, capital and cultural capital in the face of changing institutional missions and directives? How do appropriations of Shakespeare in non-academic settings extract use and/or meaning from Shakespeare and how do these appropriations re-invent or displace cultural capital? We welcome submissions that take up such questions as well as materialist and new economic approaches to the works.

Topics might address but are not limited to any of the following:

Civic/Public Shakespeare
The Profession
Shakespeare, Marriage and Money
Shakespeare in the Rust Belt
Town and Gown
Drama and Commerce
Shakespeare in Business
The Business of Playing
Domestic Work
Leisure and Laziness
Enclosure and migrant workers
Theory and The Market
Shakespeare and Working Class Studies
Military Shakespeare
Shakespeare and the Digital Divide
Shakespeare in the classroom
Appropriation and cultural capital
Publishing and book sales
Physical/Intellectual labor

Selected papers will be published in the conference proceedings.

Abstracts should be submitted by August 15 to co-organizers Hillary Nunn, University of Akron nunn_at_akron.edu and Timothy Francisco, Youngstown State University tfrancisco_at_ysu.edu

Please visit the conference website at
http://www.marietta.edu/~webadmin/osc/papers.html

CFP: Anxieties of Succession in England 1595-1605 (4/25/08; MMLA 11/13-16/08)

Papers on both literary and non-literary treatments of popular response to the succession are invited; both Elizabethan anticipation and Jacobean reaction are welcome.

Proposals or abstracts by April 25 to

Dr. Barbara Mather Cobb, Assistant Professor, Department of English and Philosophy, Coordinator, Liberal Arts Major, Murray State University: barbara.cobb_at_murraystate.edu

CFP: Shakespeare’s Mardi Gras Conference (4/11/08; 10/10-11/08)

Announcing the Inaugural Conference of The Louisiana Shakespeare Project, LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY, Baton Rouge, October 10-11, 2008.

Featured Speakers include:
Phebe Jensen, Utah State University, Author, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World.
Christopher Kendrick, Loyola University Chicago, Author, Utopia, Carnival, and Commonwealth in Renaissance England.
Richard Rambuss, Emory University, Author, Closet Devotions.

Proposals for twenty-minute papers on Shakespeare, carnival, and early modern culture are invited. Potential topics might include:
Reconsiderations of the work of Bakhtin, C. L. Barber, and other classic theorists of carnival;
Shakespeare, performance, and carnival;
Shakespeare, film, and carnival;
Ritual, theatre, and carnival;
Gender and festive culture;
Finding carnival in all the wrong places: sermons, religious polemic, murder pamphlets, etc.;
Late medieval carnival and transitions into the Renaissance;
Reformation and carnival (or the Reformation and Lent).

300-word abstracts must be received by April 11. Send to: Alison Graham Bertolini, Department of English, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803, or by e-mail to: abert_at_lsu.edu (Please
include “abstract” in email title).