CALL FOR PAPERS: RSA 2020

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown
Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown

2–4 April 2020


Conference hashtag: #RenSA20

Submission deadline: 15 August 2019

The submission website will open later this month (June 2019). The link will be posted in this space. A current RSA membership will be required to enter the submission website.

Conference details:

Conference submission process
Calls for papers
Seminar sessions
Conference hotel
Teaching the conference
Travel, diversity, and on-site care grants
Annual meeting policies
Professional conduct policy

Conference submission process

The submission period for RSA 2020 Philadelphia will open in June 2019 and close in mid-August. Acceptance decisions will be conveyed to submitters in early November 2019.

The RSA Program Committee solicits proposals for both individual papers and organized sessions, which may take the form of a panel, roundtable discussion, or workshop. For more information on the types of proposals accepted, see the Submission guidelines page.


Calls for papers

Calls for papers can be found on the 2020 Philadelphia CfP Blog. Session organizers may post a call for papers by using the "Add New Post" link above the most recent entry (you must be logged in to a current rsa.org membership to create a post).

Seminar sessions

The RSA Program Committee invites proposals for topics for seminar sessions to be held at the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Each seminar session will be moderated by one or two conveners and will feature discussion of a set of papers circulated in advance of the conference. Seminar topics may address any theme of relevance to Renaissance studies (1300–1700). Seminars that encourage dialogue across disciplines and/or open up new fields are especially welcome.

Find more information and the link to the seminar proposal form on the Philadelphia 2020 Seminars page.

Conference hotels

We have booked accommodations and meeting rooms at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown and the nearby Courtyard Philadelphia Downtown, both of them a short walk from the famed Reading Terminal Market and City Hall. The Philadelphia Historic District, which was the first World Heritage city in the US, is also within walking distance or accessible by a short cab, bus, or subway ride. The Library Company of Philadelphia houses collections on American society and culture dating from the seventeenth century. The majestic Philadelphia Museum of Art, originally chartered for the Centennial Exposition in 1876, with its main building on Fairmont Hill completed in 1928, has pay-as-you-wish evening hours on Wednesdays and evening hours on Fridays as well.


Teaching the conference

Attending the conference can be a useful educational tool for undergraduates and beginning graduate students who are interested in learning about Renaissance studies or the academic profession generally. Professor Christopher Carlsmith wrote about his experience bringing undergraduates to the 2016 Annual Meeting in Boston.

Please contact rsa@rsa.org to request more information on bringing students to the Annual Meeting as a pedagogical tool.


Travel, diversity, and on-site care grants

RSA members are invited to apply for travel, diversity, and on-site care grants for the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. Each grant has a separate application with different requirements. The deadline for all grant applications will fall in November 2019 (precise date TBA). For more information on eligibility and the grants application process, see the Conference grants page.

CALL FOR PAPERS: An Anatomy of England: Material culture and early modern character sketches

ONE-DAY CONFERENCE: 8 Nov. 2019

Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines – Paris Saclay, Laboratoire DYPAC (Dynamiques Patrimoniales et Culturelles) EA 2449

The early 17th century vogue for the literary genre of the character sketch reached a height in England after the Protestant humanist Isaac Casaubon published his Latin translation of Theophrastus’s Characters in 1592. Many authors engaged in the challenging formal and stylistic constraints of the character sketch and contributed anatomies of early modern English society. While the golden age glorifying the early Stuarts was celebrated in masques, and the iron age was castigated in pamphlets, character sketches turned out to be precious tools, either to celebrate ideal types and the Christian-Stoic ethos, or to shed light on the alteration process within a changing world, if not a poisoned world, as testified by the sensational Overbury murder case in 1613.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Maternal Influences in the Medieval and Early Modern World


4 November 2019
Queen Mary University of London
maternalinfluences.home.blog

We are seeking participants for a workshop on medieval and early modern motherhood. In recent years, scholarship has sought to illuminate motherhood in the medieval and early modern world as a distinct category of experience in the lives of women. This workshop will consider the various ways in which pre-modern motherhood was medicalised, moralised, theorised and visualised from conception and pregnancy through to childbirth, child-rearing and other ‘alternative’ ways of mothering.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • Rituals of motherhood such as churching or lying-in ceremonies
  • Breastfeeding and infant feeding
  • Midwives and mothers; wet-nurses and mothers
  • Advice to mothers
  • Women’s writings about motherhood
  • Religion and motherhood (including saints and spiritual motherhood)
  • Maternal authority, particularly over children
  • Relationships between mothers and fathers

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be sent to maternalinfluences@gmail.com by 14 June. Please indicate in your email whether you would like to present a traditional 20-minute paper or a 5-10-minute overview of your research. We especially welcome PhD students and ECRs.

If you have any questions, please contact Catherine Maguire or Lauren Cantos.

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: 30th Novembertagung on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics
















31th October - 2nd November 2019, Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée (IRMA), Strasbourg, France

https://novembertagung.wordpress.com

The Novembertagung on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics is an annual international conference aimed at PhD and postdoctoral students (young scholars) in the history and philosophy of mathematics.

In 2019 the Novembertagung will be held in Strasbourg. Lodging will be at the CIARUS from 30/10 to 02/11 and the conferences at the IRMA, from 31/10 to 02/11. The invited speakers are June Barrow-Green (Open University) and Roy Wagner (ETH Zurich).

CALL FOR PAPERS: Medieval and Early Modern Studies Symposium ‘Sex and Gender Politics’

Venue: Northumbria University, Newcastle

Date: 9 October 2019

Keynote speaker: Dr Elena Woodacre (University of Winchester), author of The Queens Regnant of Navarre: succession, politics and partnership, 1274-1512, lead editor of the Routledge History of Monarchy, founder of the Royal Studies Network

This one-day event hosted by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies research group at Northumbria University, Newcastle, brings together academics, early career researchers, and PhD students for an interdisciplinary symposium linking new and more traditional approaches to medieval and early modern gender studies broadly defined.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of approaches to gender studies to include, for example, incorporation of LGBTQ and challenging heteronormativity, history of emotions, and the recognition that to understand gender relations, we must equally study both femininity and masculinity. At the same time, interdisciplinary approaches, from literature, archaeology, music, history, linguistics, art and performance, continue to provide us with new and exciting ways of unlocking experiences of the past as both physical and sexual, as well as structured by gendered social norms.

We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers on the theme of ‘Sex and Gender Politics’ but are also open to other formats (roundtable discussions, shorter work-in-progress papers, performances, reconstructions, posters etc). We hope that the informal atmosphere of a symposium will provide a friendly forum for both developed work as well as work-in-progress and trying out new ideas.

We welcome proposals relating to gender, sex and politics in their broadest senses. Moreover, we understand the term ‘politics’ broadly, as incorporating both governance and power relations between individuals and groups, therefore relating to court and diplomacy, local, family, and religious politics.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Expressions of identity
  • Mistresses and favourites
  • Cross-dressing on stage and beyond
  • Sexual violence and harassment 
  • Representation and iconography
  • Sexuality and eroticism
  • Authority and power
  • History of emotions
  • Consumerism and material culture
  • Work and leisure
  • Boundaries, restrictions, limitations, and resistance

Please email your proposals to Katarzyna Kosior by 8 July 2019.

ALL FOR PAPE