Calls for Papers
15 April 2014 is the deadline to submit a proposal for a fantastic sounding conference called ‘Dramatizing Penshurst: Site, Script, Sidneys’. The conference will explore how Penshurst Place operates as a repository of memories and tradition and simultaneously as a place of literary innovation (in sonnet sequences, lyrics, female-authored drama and pastoral romance). Scheduled for 8-9 June 2014, this event will be held on-site at Penshurst Place and will also feature a Globe Education ‘Read not Dead’ staged reading of Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory. You can read all about it here.
Yawn. 31 March 2014 is, coincidentally, the deadline to submit abstracts for two different dream-related conferences. The first of these is called ‘”Perchance to Dream”: Sleep and Related Phenomena in English Literature’, which will be held at the University of Bristol on 7 May 2014. The second, called ‘The Night of the Senses : Dreams and Sensory Illusion in Early-Modern England and France’, will be hosted by Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris from 19-20 September 2014. You can read about these two conferences here and here.
The University of Łódź in Poland aims to bring together experts in medieval and early modern literature, folklore, and contemporary fantasy literature for a conference entitled ‘Supernatural Creatures: from Elf-Shot to Shrek’ to be held from 22-24 September 2014. Proposals are sought which address the relationship between supernatural creatures and humankind. Submit your abstract by 28 February 2014, and read more details here.
Proposals are invited for a conference on ‘Ages of London’ to be hosted at the Institute of English Studies, University of London from 23–25 July 2014. Papers, panels, and roundtable sessions may 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 deadline for proposal submissions is 1 March 2014, and you can find further information here.
Papers and panel proposals are sought from graduate/postgraduate students for the 2014 Graduate English Conference at Southern Connecticut State University. The deadline to submit a proposal is 1 March 2014. This year’s theme is ‘The Text and Time: Past, Present, Future’, and you can read the call here.
An interdisciplinary material culture workshop for graduate/postgraduate students called ‘Thinking with Things, 1500-1940’ is planned for 25 April 2014 at the University of Cambridge. More information is available here, and proposals should be submitted by 3 March 2014.
In a unique collaboration with with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, Xavier University in Ohio will be holding a symposium on The Two Noble Kinsmen from 2-4 May 2014. Participants–who will attend a performance of the play and enjoy a private, post-performance Q & A with the actors–are invited to consider any facet of the play, including pedagogical concerns, adaptation and performance, sources and textual history, gender and genre. You can read more about this really interesting sounding event here. Paper abstracts and proposals for roundtable discussions should be submitted no later than 10 March 2014.
The New Researchers’ Network of the Society for Theatre Research will be holding a symposium on the theme of ‘Emergence’ in London on 20 May 2014. New scholars, postgraduate/gradate students, and early career researchers are invited to submit abstracts on any aspect of this theme, broadly interpreted, by 21 February 2014. Read the full call here.
A conference called ‘Ars Effectiva et Methodus: The Body in Early Modern Science and Thought’ will be held at the German Herzog August Bibliothek from 30 June-1 July 2014. Proposals for papers addressing the themes of the conference (i.e. bodies physical and metaphysical; knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge; teaching the body; heavenly bodies from astronomy to astrology and alchemy; the ‘body politic’ as an epistemological resource; the ‘Body of Proof’ in medicine, method and humanist discourses) are due by 7 March 2014. More details can be found here.
Here’s one for the undergraduates! Worcester State University in Massachusetts will host the Undergraduate Shakespeare Conference Consortium’s 13th annual conference on 26 April 2014. This year’s theme is ‘Shakespeare Noir: Destabilization, Corruption, Irruption, Illumination, Liberation’. Find more information here, and send your proposal by 14 March 2014.
The Department of English at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus will host a conference on 23-24 May 2014. Proposals are sought that address ‘rhetoric and war’ as represented in literary texts or that use techniques of literary interpretation to analyse ‘rhetoric and war’ in other kinds of texts. Read more about this conference here, and submit your proposal no later than 15 March 2014.
The English Department of the University of Bucharest in Romania invites proposals for a conference on ‘Transnational Dimensions of Literature and the Arts’, which is scheduled for 5-7 June 2014. Proposals are due by 15 March 2014, and more information can be found here.
From 23-24 October 2014, a conference will be held at the University of Zurich in Switzerland on ‘The Relationship of Exterior and Interior: Descriptions of Architecture and Interiors in Literature of Early Modern Times to the Present’. Abstracts are due no later than 28 February 2014, and you can read more details here.
3 March 2014 is the deadline to submit a proposal for a conference on ‘Medieval and Renaissance Lost Libraries’ to be held at Senate House in London on 12 July 2014. Papers are welcome on such topics as libraries that have been destroyed either deliberately or accidentally, stolen books and libraries, fractured collections and losses due to weeding policy. You can read more specifics here.
MLA 2015
If you’re interested in putting together a call for papers for the 2015 MLA Convention (scheduled for 8–11 January in Vancouver), do so here by 21 February 2014.
Right now, a number of panels are forming for the 2015 MLA that may be of interest to Shakespeareans (and early modernists, more generally). These include: ‘Women Appropriate Othello’ due 10 March 2014; ‘Early Modern Food Memories, Memoirs, and Memorials’ due 7 March 2014; ‘Master-Servant Relations, Queer Theory, and Early Modern English Literature’ due 15 March 2014; ‘Poetic Thresholds‘ due 1 March 2014; ‘Reframing Outcomes of Violent Emotions’ due 15 March 2014; ‘Design in Early Modern Anthologies and Miscellanies’ due 10 March 2014; ‘Ability, Disability, and Early Modern Englishness’ due 15 March 2014; ‘Early Modern Matter’ due 15 March 2014; ‘Hacking the Renaissance’ due 15 March 2014; ‘New Media, 1450-1700′ due 15 March 2014; ‘Matter, Method, and Symbolic Capital in Medieval and Early Modern Studies’ due 14 March 2014; ‘Song and/in/as/versus Poetry in Medieval and Early Modern Literatures’ due 21 February 2014; ‘Shakespearean Popular Cultures: Then and Now’ due 15 March 2014; and ‘Playing with Shakespeare’ due 22 March 2014.
Calls for Manuscripts
The London-based literary magazine Litro is currently seeking submissions of short fiction, flash/micro fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and drama for a Shakespeare-themed issue. The deadline to submit your Shakespeare-related creative work is 11 March 2014, and you can find more information here.
20 February 2014 is the deadline to submit a proposal for an edited collection about ‘Prophesy and Eschatology in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500-1800’. You can read more about the collection in the full call here.
Contributions are currently being sought for ‘The King is dead, long live the King?: Royal Loss: Death, Dynasty and Succession’, a collected publication exploring the direct relationship between royal death and succession from the medieval to modern periods. Proposals for chapter/case-study contributions are welcomed from researchers at all stages in their career, from doctoral students to established scholars. More information can be found here, and the deadline is 1 March 2014.
Abstracts are due by 1 March 2014 for an edited collection on the relationship between immanence and literature. You can read the full call here.
Submissions are invited from graduate/postgraduates students or early career researchers an issue of HARTS & Minds, dedicated to ‘Sound and/or Silence’. The deadline for this one is very close: you must submit by 17 February 2014. More details are available here.
The postgraduate/graduate-only, open-access journal, Textual Overtures is currently accepting seeking submissions for an issue on the theme of ‘Bodies’. 28 February 2014 is the deadline to submit your work, and you can read the full call here.
‘What does the future hold for English Studies?’ If you have the answer to this million-dollar question (!), submit it no later than 22 February 2014 to The Journal of South Texas English Studies. In all seriousness, you can read the call here.
Summer School
20 February 2014 is the deadline for graduate/postgraduate students to apply for a (free!) summer programme to be held in Tübingen, Germany from 9-14 June 2014 on the topic of ‘Transcultural Ecologies’. Ten bursaries are available to cover the full costs of summer school tuition, accommodation (on site), and flight/transport for participants. Applicants should ideally already have written an essay or passed another form of assessment in the broad field of ecocriticism, but this condition is not obligatory. Apply by emailing an essay/draft/presentation/chapter to tina-karen.pusse@nuigalway.ie (alternatively, if no such assessment of project exists yet, a motivation letter of 1000 words can be substituted). Priority will be given to postgraduates with existing projects, but the remaining places will go to applicants with the most promising motivation letters.
Heather Wolfe, Curator of Manuscripts at the Folger Shakespeare Library, will provide intensive training in the reading and transcription of early modern English handwriting in a Mellon Summer Institute programme running from 3-26 June 2014. First consideration is given to advanced PhD students and junior faculty at U.S. colleges and universities, but applications will also be accepted from advanced PhD students and junior faculty at Canadian institutions, from professional staff of U.S. and Canadian libraries and museums, and from qualified independent scholars. The deadline for applications is 3 March 2014, and you can find more information here.
Help Fund TSS
If you enjoy reading The Scrivener or any of the other great features here at The Shakespeare Standard, please consider contributing to our current fundraising campaign (even the most modest of sums are greatly appreciated!). As we enter our fifth year of operation, we’re planning to move to the next stage, expanding our reach by developing readership through advanced social and traditional marketing, launching new initiatives like our Local Standard feature, and working with Shakespeare theatre companies to expand their online footprint. Although our editorial team is staffed entirely by volunteers, we’ve incurred some expenses as we’ve built The Shakespeare Standard so far–from web hosting to marketing expenses, from design fees to printing and postage. Our current campaign, Next Stage, seeks to help us cover some of these small expenses so that our planning for the future can continue with full momentum. We appreciate your support!
Library Fellowships
Don’t forget that applications for short-term research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library (which carry a stipend of $2,500 per month for 1-3 months) are due 1 March 2014. Read more about these fellowships and how to apply here.
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That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading! Got a conference, a call for papers, or other scholarship information? Email all of your scholarly news items to scholaship@theshakespearestandard.com.
