Epistolary Cultures, London in Love, and Other CFPs | The Scrivener

Welcome to The Scrivener! It’s Lindsay here this week with the latest news in early modern scholarship. This week, we have several calls for papers, a few calls for manuscripts, a note about Women’s History Month, and news of an early modern job opportunity.

Calls for Papers

From the place of Cicero’s intimate letters in the development of Renaissance humanism, to the knowledge networks of merchants, collectors and scientists, to the role of women in the republic of letters, recent years have seen a flowering of studies on the practice of letter-writing in Early Modern Europe, as well as major editing projects of early modern letters. The University of York has announced that it will be hosting a two-day conference entitled ‘Epistolary Cultures – Letters and Letter-writing in Early Modern Europe’. This event is scheduled to take place from 18-19 March 2016. You can find the call here, and abstracts are due by 27 April 2015.

From 22–24 July 2015, the Institute of English Studies, University of London will host the Literary London Society’s annual conference. This year’s theme is ‘London in Love’. Proposals are invited for papers, comprised panels, and roundtable sessions, which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city’s roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. The full call can be found here, and the deadline for submissions has recently been extended until 31 March 2015.

A conference to be held from 12-14 November 2015 at the University of Georgia in Athens will look at ‘Appropriation in the Age of Global Shakespeare’. Abstracts for papers that broadly address the conference topic are due no later than 10 April 2015, and you’ll find the full call here.

By the early sixteenth century, European encounters with faraway cultures had led to a new awareness of the cultural ‘other’ and of non-European musical cultures, which found its expression in the writings of travelers and scholars, in the imagination of visual artists, and in the rendering of ‘exotic’ features in musical compositions. Some of the images associated with this emerging awareness, may have been the result of firsthand experiences or eyewitness participation. Others, by contrast, represented mostly secondhand impressions, which despite pretensions of authenticity, partook in visual or auditory imaginary journeys whose details in many cases could have been triggered by learned traditions of literary culture. 30 April 2015 is the deadline to submit an abstract for ‘Travellers to Faraway Countries and the Musical Imagination on the Move, 1500–1900’. This conference will take place at the Università del Salento in Lecce, Italy on 28–29 September 2015. You will find the full call here.

A two-day workshop taking place at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK from  2-3 July 2015 will consider the legacy of Patrick Collinson’s seminal article of 1985, ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation’. Proposals for papers are due by 17 April 2015. Rather than standard research presentations, the organisers are asking for short papers that reflect explicitly on Collinson’s article and how it relates to/has influenced/is challenged by their own work. More information can be found here.

A two-day international conference on ‘Compassion in Early Modern Culture 1550-1700’ aims to bring together literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, and cultural historians to explore thinking about the experience as well as the social and political impact of compassion in early modern European culture. This conference is set to take place at VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, from 18-19 September 2015, and abstracts are due by 1 May 2015. You can find full details here.

A conference entitled ‘“The Company of Wolves”: Sociality, Animality, and Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Narratives—Werewolves, Shapeshifters, and Feral Humans’ will be held at the University of Hertfordshire, UK from 3-5 September 2015. It will explore human social existence and its animal substrate, and the intersection between the human and the wolfishly bestial as expressed in narrative media from a variety of epochs and cultures. Abstracts are due by 31 March 2015, and more details are available here.

Scholars are invited to propose papers for two panels sponsored by the Medieval and Early Modern Folklore section of the American Folklore Society, to be presented at the Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California from 14-17 October 2015. The Society is organizing: 1) ‘Making Merry in the Medieval and Early Modern Period’; and 2) ‘Encountering the Early Masters’. 25 March 2015 is the deadline to submit an abstract, and you can find more details online here.

The Sixteenth Century Society and Conference (SCSC) is now accepting proposals for individual presentation proposals and complete panels for its next annual conference, to be held 22-25 October 2015 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The full call is here, and the deadline for proposals is 15 April 2015.

Now in its fifth year, the Tudor and Stuart Ireland Interdisciplinary Conference will be held at Maynooth University in Ireland on 28-29 August 2015. Proposals are welcomed for papers on any aspect of Ireland or the Irish abroad during the Tudor and Stuart periods. You can find the full call here, and proposals are due by 20 April 2015.

17 April 2015 is the deadline for graduate/postgraduate students to submit an abstract for ‘New Perspectives on Jacobean Scotland’. This conference will be held at the University of Glasgow on 31 July 2015. Contributions on any aspect of Scottish history during the life of James VI (1566-1625) are welcomed.

Calls for Manuscripts

Shakespeare continues to feature in the construction and refashioning of national cultures and identities in a variety of original forms. Recent discussions about originality, now and then, have forced us to re-assess what we mean by Shakespeare, for originality not only travels backwards in time to a (perhaps mythologized) point of an ‘origin’ but also refers to the ‘original’ interpretation of Shakespeare today. A future volume of Multicultural Shakespeare will explore literary and cultural origins as well as new original ways of appropriating, interpreting and re/producing Shakespeare today in different cultures, contexts and media. Article submissions are due by 30 April 2015, and more information can be found here.

Chapter proposals are invited for an edited volume on ecofeminist literary criticism, Literature and Ecofeminism. Contributions covering a range of literary forms from diverse cultures and national traditions are welcome. Interested authors should submit an abstract and writing sample by 1 April 2015. Full details can be found here.

‘Radical archives’ and ‘radical archiving’ are concepts that continue to gain currency among archivists, artists and cultural theorists alike, but to date, discussions of ‘radical archives’ and ‘radical archiving’ often appear to rest on an assumed rather than articulated understanding of what these concepts mean. 15 April 2015 is the deadline to submit materials for a special issue of Archive Journal on the theme of ‘Radical Archives’. Essays, reviews, and/or interviews (text, image, audio and video formats welcome) are welcomed, and you can find more information here.

Women’s History Month

Did you know that March is Women’s History Month? In celebration of this fact, Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present, published online by Cambridge University Press at orlando.cambridge.org/ is now freely available to access for March 2015. The user id is womenshistory2015, and the password is orlando2015.

Job Opportunity

A full-time project manager is currently being sought for ‘Cultures of Knowledge’, one of Oxford University’s most exciting digital humanities projects. This post is currently tenable for two years from April 2015, and the successful candidate will oversee the development of the project’s flagship union catalogue (Early Modern Letters Online), liaise with our technical and editorial teams, and help to coordinate our expanding community of contributors. More details can be found here, and applications are due by 8 April 2015.