Inviting papers on bodies, objects, and circulation in seventeenth- and/or eighteenth-century literature for a panel at the meeting of the Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies (GEMCS) 2009. Topics may include blood and medical circulation; contamination and disease; sexual circulation: libertinism and prostitution; trade and the nation. Abstracts of 250 words should be sent to Marisa Huerta (marisa.huerta at utsa.edu) by 13 May 2009.
See here for GEMCS info: http://www.english.fsu.edu/gemcs/
Early Modern England was a benchmark for literary and political activity by women, from Anne Askew’s Examinations in the first half of the sixteenth century to Anna Trapnel’s political prophecies in the final decades of the seventeenth. While the lengthy reign and potency of Elizabeth I 1558-1603 certainly set a precedent for early modern women’s writing, texts by women played a significant political role well before and after her rule, and arguably found their apogee in the ideological fervor that surrounded the reigns of her Stuart successors. More importantly, women authors actively participated in the early modern public sphere at a time when magistrates and divines were striving to situate women within the realm of the household.
This panel seeks papers that explore women’s engagement in early-modern political life, and especially the ways in which gender politics overlap with the state and other “conventionally” political realms, whether discursively or through direct social action.
Please send a brief abstract max. 250 words, specification of audio-visual requirements, and contact data email and academic addresses as well as a short CV, to the organizers, Rachel Greenberg greenber@canisius.edu and Maya Mathur mmathur@umw.edu with the subject line “Venice RSA” by Friday, May 15, 2009.
Though revenge tragedies preoccupied Elizabethan and Jacobean spectators, these plays received little to no critical recognition. Even today, revenge tragedies comprise a seemingly marginalized sector of Renaissance drama. Observing their current status, Stevie Simkin quips in Revenge Tragedy: “Consequently, they are (with some reluctance) permitted to join the established canon of classical works, occasionally dragged out like exotic creatures for a season to be observed by curious audiences and often patronizing theatre critics, and then locked securely away for another ten years” (4). Furthermore, these works – as a genre – have garnered a remarkably small amount of scholarly attention, particularly in the past ten years.
Part of this panel, then, aims to address this gap in the critical discourse. Genre-wide considerations are not the only way to approach this topic; individual plays may be considered as well. Areas of particular interest include but are not limited to:
-Senecan, Italian, and French influences – how does English revenge tragedy differ from its influences? From a historical perspective, what factors may account for this difference?
-Genre specifications – what constitutes revenge tragedy?
-Contemporaneous legal and/or ecclesiastical responses to English revenge tragedies
-Relation between the scaffold and the stage – does the ubiquitous violence of English revenge tragedies trouble the boundaries between theatrical and “real” violence, particularly with regard to regicide?
-Ethics and revenge tragedies – how would contemporary theoretical discussions of ethics (Badiou, Zupančič, Lacan, and more) intersect with aspects of this genre?
Please send abstracts (150 word maximum) for a 20-min paper, a short CV, and contact information (current institutional affiliation, e-mail address) to Emily.King@tufts.edu by May 15, 2009.
Women Readers/Educational Texts 1500-1800
A three-day international conference at the University of Liverpool
April 14th-16th 2010
The recent upsurge in interest in the history of reading has opened numerous new interpretative avenues for scholars. Women’s reading has attracted particular attention, in specific regions and time periods. Much of this critical interest has focussed on the idea of leisure reading, however, with the reading of literary texts an especially common theme. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to explore the range of representations and reading practices contained within and encouraged by works which had a solely or largely pedagogical purpose. What vision of female nature did they propose? How were their textual and editorial strategies specifically adapted to fulfil the perceived needs of the female reading public? How did individual female readers respond to these representations and proposed practices? And how did reading advice and practices change over time?
Points of departure include but are not limited to:
• textual and editorial strategies for advising women
• moral aphorisms for women
• the interplay between educational and leisure reading
• the role of reading in developing women’s civic and domestic duties
• reading as a means to women’s moral and social advancement
• specific reading practices proposed by educational texts or adopted by individual readers
• the ‘feminisation’ of traditionally ‘masculine’ reading practices, including commonplace books, books of extracts etc.
Contributions which treat any language area are welcome. Papers which compare and contrast more than one language area are particularly encouraged.
Proposals for 20-minute papers should be sent to Dr Pollie Bromilow (pollie.bromilow@liverpool.ac.uk) and Dr Mark Towsey (m.r.m.towsey@liverpool.ac.uk) by Friday August 28th 2009.
It is envisaged that this conference will form the basis of a co-edited volume.
This conference is jointly organised by the
University of Liverpool History of the Book Research Group and
The Eighteenth-Century Worlds Research Centre: http://www.liv.ac.uk/18cworlds/index.htm
This call for papers can also be viewed on-line at:
http://www.liv.ac.uk/soclas/conferences/WomenReaders/index.htm
via Women Readers/Educational Texts 1500-1800 | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
European Journal of English Studies, Vol. 15
Matter and Material Culture
Deadline for proposals: 13 November 2009
Guest Editors: Maurizio Calbi & Marilena Parlati.
Cultural materialism has been adding much to our knowledge and understanding of the ways in which culture is informed by and conformed to and with matter, and so have the numerous analyses and histories of material culture from fields as varied as sociology, anthropology, museum studies, consumer studies, and so forth.
On a different plane, matter has recently been the focus, among others, of Bill Brown’s ‘thing theory’, according to which ‘things’ come into being when and where ordinary, narrative, or aesthetic objects stop functioning properly and thus become visible and obtrusive. Meanwhile, considerations of material and corporeal remainders of different kinds, from a variety of theoretical perspectives, have also emerged into the cultural landscape of our late modernity.
We encourage contributions from scholars working in this wide arena of cultural, literary and scientific discourses, and who are engaging with, developing, or, at times, challenging a ‘material turn’ or ‘turn to matter’ in their various fields of research. We invite papers that explore the discursive construction of matter, the circulation of objects and the ’social life’ of things (cf. Appadurai), but also, from a different angle, things and the Thing(s) which may help us read matter beyond the paradigms of empiricism. We are interested in re-opening the question of the ‘matter’ of materialism.
The fertile interplay and mutual interpellation between materiality as ineradicable opacity and the ’spectral dimension’ which can be seen (most notably in Derrida) as affecting matter could, in our view, be a fruitful site for a cultural debate open to specialists in the study of Anglophone literature, language, media and culture. Contributions are invited on a range of topics concerning matter and material culture, which might include, but are not restricted to:
• the ‘materiality’ of material culture
• the materialism of consumer culture
• systems, collections, and the display of material culture
• the poetics of the material fragment
• thing theory and its applications/applicability
• transience and durability
• waste/land(s), garbage, residues
• ecocriticism
• ghostly matters/bodies that matter
• objects and abjection
Detailed proposals (500-1,000 words) for articles of c. 5-6,000 words, as well as all inquiries regarding this issue, should be sent to both guest editors: Maurizio Calbi at and Marilena Parlati at .
The deadline for proposals is 13 November 2009, with delivery of completed essays by 31 March 2010. The issue will appear in 2011.
This panel explores the choices early modern women writers made among literary forms. How do women’s artistic choices respond to and seek to change the cultural climate in which they worked? How did the book market and manuscript circulation relate to female artistic output? How did literary contacts and influence affect women’s generic choices? And once women decided to work within specific genres, how did they transform those genres? How does work in literary genres relate to other female artistic output such as painting, embroidery, paper cutting, and glass engraving?
Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches are welcome.
Please e-mail an abstract and a brief CV to Martine van Elk at mvanelk@csulb.edu by May 2, 2009.
Please, note that abstracts of 300 words will be submitted electronically at our website at http://www.imwc2009.org. Deadline for submission of proposals is June 1, 2009.
The IMWC will take place at the Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey between October 13th and 16th, 2009 and the overarching theme for the Congress will be “Change and Empowerment.”
The aim of the Congress is to foster communication and collaboration between academicians and to open up a discussion platform for the analysis, development, and exchange of ideas on the following Women-related main topics:
1. Women in Literature
2. Women in Religion and Philosophy
3. Feminisms
4. Women in Law
5. Women in Statistics
6. Women, Science and Technology
7. Women’s Labour
8. Women and European Union
9. Women and Sexuality
10. Women and Translation
11. Women at Sea
12. Women and Language
13. Women and Education
14. Women and Migration
15. Women and Culture
16. Women and Health
17. Women and Politics
18. Women and History
The official languages of the congress are Turkish, English and German.
Congress Coordinator
Fusun Coban Doskaya
via International Multidisciplinary Women’s Congress (October 13-16, 2009) | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
The Medieval and Renaissance Teaching Conference invites you to attend its inaugural meeting at the Carson Springs Convention Center in Newport, Tennessee on October 29- 31, 2009. Come join us in the beautiful Smoky Mountains, in the midst of the beautiful Fall color season!
Submissions of abstracts are welcome in any discipline involved in the teaching of the Middle Ages or Renaissance. We are especially interested in papers
dealing with the teaching of the macabre, monsters, heretics, the occult, torture, anything appropriate for presentation over the Halloween weekend! Papers should be limited to no more than 20 minutes (roughly eight double-spaced pages).
Papers of authors in absentia will not be read.
SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS
Anyone interested in reading an original paper or proposing an organized panel should submit a one-page abstract for consideration. All abstracts will be submitted electronically. Email your abstract as a MS Word attachment to Mary Baldridge (mbaldridge@cn.edu) or Kip Wheeler (kwheeler@cn.edu). The deadline for submission of abstracts is May 30, 2009.
via “The Monstrous Middle Ages and the Wretched Renaissance” OCTOBER 29-31, 2009 | cfp.english.upenn.edu.
The Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies is pleased to announce its first annual Symposium. Scholars whose research concerns any aspect of the Symposium topic are invited to send proposals to the Directors of the Institute. (Applicants should feel free to interpret both “literature” and “religious conflict” in broad terms.)
TILTS Fellows receive an honorarium of $1,200, and expenses for travel as well as for food and lodging during the four-day event (air travel and lodging to be booked by the Institute). Fellows are expected to produce substantial scholarly essays which, together with other texts and materials, will be the focus of presentations and discussions at the Symposium. Texas Studies in Literature and Language will publish a special issue of selected essays from the Symposium.
Application deadline: October 1, 2009. Applicants must hold the Ph.D. and should submit the following, in a single pdf file: (1) a current CV, (2) a 200-word abstract, and (3) a three-to-four page, single-spaced project description. Successful applicants will be notified after November 15, 2009, and will then be asked to develop their proposals into essays of 25-30 pages, which must be submitted to the Directors by March 1, 2010 for advance circulation among the participants in the Symposium.
Address applications to Wayne A. Rebhorn and Frank Whigham, Directors of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, at TILTS.renaissance@austin.utexas.edu.
full name / name of organization:
Joseph Sterrett, Cardiff University
contact email:
sterrettjw@cardiff.ac.uk
cfp categories:
religion
renaissance
This panel seeks to explore aspects of prayer in European culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. How was prayer represented in literature, plays or works of art? How did communities utilize prayer as a distinguishing feature for their religious identity, and how were these forms of prayer policed? More importantly, in what ways does the representation or prayer in literature and drama intersect with its importance as a means of defining religious loyalties and identities? Papers are invited from those who work on prayer during this period to share their research, whether it be an examination of the architecture created to facilitate prayer, or the texts created to preserve, stimulate, guide or police prayer (poetry, hymns, sermons, or polemic). Prayers in Shakespeare, Marlowe and Middleton, for example, each register quite different responses to the controversies and debates about what constituted true or effective prayer.
Please submit proposals of 150 words by April 25. Queries welcome.
