'Love & the Word' – AULLA Conference 2016

Hosted by Victoria University, the Australasian Universities Languages & Literature Association Conference will be held in Melbourne, Australia from 7th-9th December 2016.

The conference theme draws on AULLA’s origins as an association of scholars working in fields of philology. Thus we examine both philos (love) and logos (word). How does affection affect words? What do people mean by ‘love’ and its counterparts in the world’s languages? Or perhaps: how does it ‘do’ those meanings?

We encourage papers with a focus on engaged studies and discussions of teaching practice and of critical/exegetical responses to creative practice. Papers that respond to ‘love and the word’ in the fields of languages, the literary study of other languages, and philosophical approaches to cultural expression are expressly welcome. We also expressly welcome interdisciplinary angles on the theme, such as Cultural Studies, Indigenous Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and comparative approaches.

The organisers welcome submissions for individual presentations of 20 minutes and panel sessions of 90 minutes. Please note, submissions are due by Monday the 29 February, 2016. Submissions should include: name/s of author/s (including affiliations), title of presentation, an abstract of up to 200 words, and a biographical note of up to 50 words per author. Panel proposals should include the above for each presentation as well as a title and abstract for the session as a whole. If you would like to nominate a chair for your panel session, that would also be welcome. To submit a proposal, please visit: Call for Papers


CALL FOR PAPERS: Cultures of Mortality: Death on the Shakespearean Stage

1-3 December 2016
Shakespeare’s Globe

2016 sees the 400th anniversary of the deaths of Shakespeare, Francis Beaumont, the theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe and the Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes. Globe Education is marking this memorable year with an international conference that explores death, rituals of dying and the experience of loss on the early modern stage.

This conference invites papers that explores these themes and more. It is particularly interested in:
rituals of death; artistic representation; shifting practices from Medieval to Renaissance/early modern; loss and bereavement; performativity of death- performing death on the early modern stage; commemoration: textual, artistic and dramatic; philosophical, religious and social attitudes to death and dying; wills and legacies.

Please submit a 150 word abstract/proposal tofarah.k@shakespearesglobe.com by 1st of March 2016

Farah Karim-Cooper
Head of Higher Education & Research
Globe Education
020 7902 1439

COMMITTEE POSITION: Post-Graduate Position on the BSA History of Science Steering Committee

The History of Science Section of the British Science Association is looking to recruit a current UK-based postgraduate student from the history or philosophy of science to join its steering committee. In addition to advising the BSA on issues related to the history of science, the section organises a minimum of two events at the British Science Festival, held annually in September by the BSA.

This is a volunteer role and the postgraduate representative chosen will be expected to attend between 2-3 Section meetings per year and the festival itself (travel expenses covered). The postgraduate representative will work with the rest of the Section committee to source, develop, plan and deliver exciting lectures, debates and other science communication activities. The role is open to any UK-based current postgraduate student, who is studying any aspect of the history or philosophy of science, and is a great opportunity for anyone interested in public engagement and science communication to get hands on experience and develop new skills.

For more information on the BSA's Scientific Sections, please go to: http://www.britishscienceassociation.org/scientific-sections

If you are interested in putting your name forward, please send an up to date CV, along with a short paragraph or two explaining why you're interested in the role to Dr Alexander Hall. Expressions of interest must be received by Friday 9th December.

Alexander Hall
(BSA History of Science Section Recorder)

Associate Director | The Centre for Science, Knowledge and Belief in Society | Newman University, Birmingham
Research Fellow | Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum
Follow the project on Twitter @SciRelSpec


CALL FOR PAPERS: Authority Revisited: Towards Thomas More and Erasmus in 1516

Lectio International Conference 30th November - 3rd December 2016, University of Leuven, Belgium

In the year 1516, two crucial texts for the cultural history of the West saw the light: Thomas More’s Utopia and Desiderius Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum. Both of these works dealt freely with authoritative sources of western civilization and opened new pathways of thought on the eve of invasive religious and political changes.

Lectio and the University of Leuven, in collaboration with its RefoRC-partners the Johannes a Lasco Library Emden and the Europäische Melanchthon Akademie Bretten as well as other partners, will mark the 500th birthday of both foundational texts by organizing a conference, from November 30 through December 2, 2016. The university city of Leuven is a most appropriate place to have this conference organized, since it was intimately involved in the genesis and the history of both works.

The conference will be devoted to studying not only the reception and influence of Utopia and the Novum Instrumentum in (early) modern times, but also their precursors in classical antiquity, the patristic period, and the middle ages. The conference will thus lead to a better understanding of how More and Erasmus used their sources, and it will address the more encompassing question of how these two authors, through their own ideas and their use of authoritative texts, have contributed to the rise of modern western thought.

The conference also explicitly aims at enhancing our understanding of iconographic, book-, and art-historical aspects of the transmission of the texts under consideration, both before and after the publication of the two works.

This multidisciplinary Lectio conference wants to bring together international scholars working in the field of theology, art history, philosophy, history of science and historical linguistics.


Thomas More: Utopia Revisited

More’s colorful description of the allegedly recently discovered island of Utopia was so influential as to lend its name to a literary genre. At the same time, although the name Utopia is a neologism invented in More's circle , the utopian tradition reaches back to antiquity.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

The best known examples from classical antiquity are Plato’s descriptions of the ideal state. Yet there are other instances, such as the myth of the golden age, elaborated in many different ways by numerous ancient writers. In addition, More had a thorough knowledge of the works by Greek and Roman thinkers such as Plutarch, Lucian, Cicero, and Seneca. The conference aims to map these ancient representations of the ideal state and to study the way in which More was influenced by them.

Equally influential is the Christian tradition, most prominently laid down in Augustine’s City of God, a text of central importance that marks the transition from antiquity to the middle ages. Augustine’s eschatological view of the perfect City may, for example, be the subject of contributions to the conference. By extension, the various forms of the mythical account of Cockaigne enter the picture as possible topics.

Also of direct impact on Utopia were reports about the New World (for example in the letters of Amerigo Vespucci, Christopher Columbus, or Peter Martyr of Anghiera) and the images of the New World in Europe. It would be an interesting contribution to the conference to study in which ways the discovery and description of an “unspoiled” world and its inhabitants inspired More’s views.

Renaissance humanists also influenced More’s Utopia. The most renowned example is, of course, Erasmus. But the views of other humanists, like Pico della Mirandola, also shaped More’s thought. Similarly, the scholastic tradition deserves to be studied in at this juncture. Renaissance humanism and scholasticism were difficult to reconcile, according to More, and on more than one occasion he sets one over against the other.

The conference shall also pay due attention to the reception of Utopia in early modern times, both in the vernacular and in Latin. Authors such as Tommaso Campanella, Vasco de Quiroga, Francis Bacon, Johann Eberlin, Kaspar Stiblin, and Johann Valentin Andreae may be investigated in this regard, as well as the genre of the picaresque novel.

Of particular interest are iconographic, book-, and art-historical aspects of the transmission of Utopia as well as the works of More’s predecessors.

Erasmus: The New Testament Revisited 

Erasmus’s revision of the New Testament text was groundbreaking. Obviously, however, Erasmus’s foundational work cannot be properly understood apart from his predecessors’ endeavors to translate the Bible and to comment on it, or to deal with the Bible from a text-critical perspective.

Papers are invited on the following topics:

Papers studying biblical exegesis in Christian antiquity and its reception in the works by Erasmus. More in particular, paper topics may include Jerome’s Vulgata, Origen’s Hexapla, and relevant commentaries on Scripture, such as those of Chrysostom and others. Erasmus’s recourse to classical language and culture in the Annotationes to his New Testament may also be the subject of paper proposals.

Medieval biblical exegesis: Even though self-declared pioneers like Erasmus and the Renaissance humanists were not keen to be associated with medieval biblical exegesis, this aspect of possible influences and sources cannot be neglected. The conference invites contributions on the biblical Renaissance of the twelfth century and later (among others, the Glossa ordinaria, Hugh of St. Victor and the Parisian Victorines, Peter Comestor, Peter Cantor and Stephen Langton, Hugh of St. Cher and Nicholas of Lyra). In sum, the conference aims to explore the extent to which Erasmus and his fellow humanists integrated the progress made by medieval biblical exegesis.

The link between Erasmus and Renaissance humanism, both in northern Europe (Agricola, Cornelius Gerardi Aurelius) and in Italy (Lorenzo Valla, Gianozzo Manetti). The main question is here how Erasmus’s Christian humanism did relate to the broader cultural historical current of renewed textual criticism.

The reception of Erasmus’s text-critical and exegetical work in the early modern era will be explored through the establishment of (new) authoritative version(s) of the New Testament and the debates that accompanied the process (Novum Instrumentum, Vulgata, Textus Receptus) as well as the elaboration of humanist, Protestant, and Catholic exegesis, from Luther and Melanchthon through Beza, from Dorpius, Franciscus Lucas Brugensis and Jansenius Gandavensis, via Estienne, Arias Montanus, through Maldonatus, etc. We further look forward to receiving papers on how Erasmus’ New Testament was used in the development of early modern vernacular versions, on all sides of the confessional spectrum.

Of particular interest are iconographic, book-, and art-historical aspects of the transmission of the texts, both of Erasmus’s predecessors and of Erasmus’s Novum Instrumentum.

Papers may be given in English or French and the presentation should take 20 minutes.
To submit a proposal, please send an abstract of approximately 300 words (along with your name, academic affiliation and contact information) to lectio@kuleuven.be by January 15, 2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by the end of March 2016.

The publication of selected papers is planned in a volume to be included in the peer-reviewed LECTIO Series (Brepols Publishers).

Invited speakers:Gillian Clark (University of Bristol)
Henk Jan De Jonge (Leiden University) 
Günter Frank (Europäische Melanchthon Akademie)
Brad Gregory (University of Notre Dame)
Quentin Skinner (Queen Mary University of London)

Venue: The Leuven Institute for Ireland in Europe, Janseniusstraat 1, 3000 Leuven

Organising Committee:
Erik De Bom, Anthony Dupont, Wim François, Jan Papy, Marleen Reynders, Andrea Robiglio, Violet Soen, Gerd Van Riel 

Scientific Committee:
Rita Beyers (U Antwerpen), Erik De Bom (KU Leuven), Anthony Dupont (KU Leuven), Wim François (KU Leuven), Günter Frank (Europäische Melanchthon Akademie, Bretten), Jan Papy (KU Leuven), Andrea Robiglio (KU Leuven), Herman Selderhuis (Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek, Emden), Violet Soen (KU Leuven), Gerd Van Riel (KU Leuven), Wim Verbaal (U Gent)

Contact:
Lectio KU Leuven
Faculties of Arts, Law, Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Blijde Inkomststraat 5
3000 Leuven
BELGIUM
+32 16 328778
lectio@kuleuven.be
www.ghum.kuleuven.be/lectio



CALL FOR PAPERS: Shakespeare and European Theatrical Cultures: AnAtomizing Text and Stage


27 – 30 July 2017 University of Gdańsk and The Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre, Poland http://esra2017.eu 


This conference will convene Shakespeare scholars at a theatre that proudly stands in the place where English players regularly performed 400 years ago. This makes us ponder with renewed interest the relation between theatre and Shakespeare. The urge to do so may sound like a commonplace, but it comes to us enhanced by the fact that in the popular and learned imagination alike Shakespeare is inseparable from theatre while the theatre, for four centuries now, first in England, then on the continent (Europe) and eventually in the world, has been more and more strongly defined and shaped by Shakespeare. Shakespeare has become the theatrical icon, a constant point of reference, the litmus paper for the formal, technological and ideological development of the theatre, and for the impact of adaptation and appropriation on theatrical cultures. Shakespeare has served as one of the major sources for the development of European culture, both high and low. His presence permeates the fine shades and fissures of a multifarious European identity. His work has informed educational traditions, and, through forms of textual transmit such as translation and appropriation, has actively contributed to the process of building national distinctiveness. Shakespeare has been one of the master keys and, at the same time, a picklock granting easier access to the complex and challenging space of European and universal values. 

Please send your abstracts and biographies to seminar organisers (and cc conference organisers at gdansk@esra2017.eu) not later than 31 January 2017. 

Organising committee, ESRA 2017: 
Prof. Jerzy Limon, convenor | University of Gdańsk and the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre 
Prof. Jacek Fabiszak, co-convenor | Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań and the Polish Shakespeare Society 
Prof. Olga Kubińska | University of Gdańsk and the Polish Shakespeare Society 
Dr. Aleksandra Sakowska | The Shakespeare Institute (UK) 

Marta Nowicka | Conference Coordinator for the University of Gdansk 

Anna Ratkiewicz-Syrek | Conference Coordinator for the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre 

You are now invited to submit papers for the following seminars: 

SEMINARS LIST 

1. Avant-Garde Shakespeares/Shakespeare in the Avant-Garde Conveners: Aleksandra Sakowska, The Shakespeare Institute (UK), Lucian Ghita, Clemson University (USA) 

2. “The accent of his tongue affecteth him:” “Accentism” and/in Shakespeare Conveners: Carla Della Gatta (University of Southern California, USA), Adele Lee (University of Greenwich, UK) 

3. “There are more things in heaven and earth”: Shakespeare’s philosophy, philosophy’s Shakespeare revisited Conveners: Katarzyna Burzyńska (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Annie Martirosyan (Independent scholar, Armenia) 

4. “You must needs be strangers”: Shakespeare and the Scenography of Mobility Conveners: Miguel Ramalhete Gomes (University of Porto, Portugal), Remedios Perni (University of Murcia, Spain), Christian Smith (University of Warwick, UK) 

5. Shakespeare and Translation for the Stage Conveners: Madalina Nicolaescu (University of Bucharest), Marta Gibinska (Jagiellonian University) 

6. ‘The strangers’ case’ and the ‘tracks’ of performance Conveners: Boika Sokolova (University of Notre Dame – USA / London Global Gateway), Janice Valls-Russell (Research Institute for the Renaissance, the Neo-Classical Era and the Enlightenment (IRCL), University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France) 

7. Anatomizing Shakespearean Myth-making: Game of Thrones Conveners: Thea Buckley (The Shakespeare Institute and the RSC, UK), Paul Hamilton, Independent scholar (USA), Timo Uotinen (Royal Holloway, UK) 

8. Shakespeare and European Writers: Inspiration, Resistance, Authority Conveners: Juan F. Cerdá (University of Murcia), Ángel-Luis Pujante (University of Murcia), Rui Carvalho Homem (University of Porto) 

9. Staged on the Page: Transmedial Shakespeare in Theatre and Visual Arts Conveners: Anna Wołosz-Sosnowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland), Megan Holman (Northumbria University, United Kingdom) 

10. Race in European Theatrical Cultures: Border Crossings and Hybrid Identities Conveners: Christy Desmet and Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia (USA), Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney, University of Łódź (Poland) 

11. The name of action: actors of Shakespeare and Shakespearean actors Convener: Miranda F Thomas (Shakespeare’s Globe and University of Greenwich) 

12. Shakespeare and Music Conveners: Michelle Assay (Université de Paris Sorbonne, France/Canada/Iran), David Fanning (University of Manchester, UK), Christopher Wilson (University of Hull, UK) 

13. Shakespearean Drama and the Early Modern European Stage Conveners: Lukas Erne (University of Geneva), Ton Hoenselaars (Utrecht University) 
 
14. He do Shakespeare in Different Voices: The use of Regional Accents and Dialects Conveners: Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam University), Domenico Lovascio (University of Genoa) 

15. Magic through ritual objects and stage props: Early Modern practices and Modern adaptations Conveners: Pierre Kapitaniak (University of Montpellier), Natalia Brzozowska (Kujawy and Pomorze University in Bydgoszcz) 

16. Shakespeare and the Politics of Location Conveners: Magdalena Cieślak (University of Łódź), Francesca Rayner (Universidade do Minho) 

17. The influence of Shakespeare’s tragic dramatic approach on European thought on justice Conveners: Reina Brouwer (University of Leiden, Campus The Hague, The Netherlands), Zsuzsánna Kiss (Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church Budapest) 

18. Staging Utopias: Shakespeare in Print and Performance Conveners: Delilah Bermudez Brataas (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik (Wyższa Szkoła Europejska, Kraków, Poland) 

19. Shakespeare in performance in digital media Conveners: Urszula Kizelbach (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań), Imke Lichterfeld (University of Bonn) 

Download seminars list here to find out more! http://esra2017.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/ESRA_-_SEMINARS.pdf 

Confirmed PLENARY LECTURES: 
Professor Małgorzata Grzegorzewska, University of Warsaw Professor 
Diana Henderson, MIT Professor Peter Holland, University of Notre Dame Luc Perceval, the Hamburg Thalia Theatre 

Confirmed PANELS and roundtables: http://esra2017.eu/general-information/panels/ 

The conference takes place during the 21st International Shakespeare Festival http://festiwalszekspirowski.pl/en/home-2/festival/ at the Gdansk Shakespeare Theatre http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-29201993

Ben Jonson’s Workes and their contexts: 400 years on


12 November 2016, 10am-4.30pm
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

This day conference, hosted by the Sheffield Centre for Early Modern Studies, celebrates the 400th anniversary of Ben Jonson’s folio Workes. Its publication was a landmark in English literary history, grouping together Jonson’s work in multiple genres, implicitly aligning him with the classic authors of the past, and embodying his writing in a monumental, thousand-page object.

The conference brings together specialists from a range of disciplines both to explore the text of the Workes and to consider Jonson in relation to the wider social and cultural forms of his day. These include music, the visual arts, clothing, and drinking, as well as the multimedia performance that was his 1618 walk to Scotland.

Speakers:
  • Martin Butler (Leeds)
  • John Cunningham (Bangor)
  • Anna Groundwater (Edinburgh), James Loxley (Edinburgh) and Julie Sanders (Newcastle), representing ‘Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland’
  • Tamsin Lewis (Passamezzo)
  • Eleanor Lowe (Oxford Brookes)
  • Jane Rickard (Leeds)
  • Matthew Steggle (Sheffield Hallam)
  • Crosby Stevens (Sheffield)
  • Phil Withington (Sheffield), representing ‘Intoxicants and Early Modernity’

Registration opens soon; for more details, see here.

Dr Tom Rutter 
Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama Co-convenor, 
MA English Studies Online School of English University of Sheffield 
Jessop West 1 
Upper Hanover Street 
Sheffield 
S3 7RA 


Colouring & Making in Alchemy and Chemistry

The final programme and abstracts of the papers to be presented at the 7th SHAC Postgraduate Workshop are now available and attached to this email.

The workshop will take place on Wednesday 26 October 2016 at Utrecht University, hosted by the ARTECHNE research group. The theme for 2016, ‘Colouring and Making in Alchemy and Chemistry’, seeks to highlight colour­ing and making as twin aspects throughout the history of alchemy and chemistry. During the workshop, we will explore how these activities relate to one another in a variety of ways throughout the ages. Keynote speakers are Ernst Homburg (Maastricht) and Tara Nummedal (Brown).

This workshop, including lunch and refreshments, is free, but the number of participants is limited. Please register until 15 October by emailing Thijs Hagendijk (Utrecht), t.hagendijk@uu.nl.

Sent on behalf of the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry by Dr Anna Simmons, Acting Honorary Secretary and Membership Secretary

7th SHAC Postgraduate Workshop

Wednesday, 26 October 2016, 9:45–18:15 | Utrecht University, Sweelinckzaal, Drift 21, 3512 BR Utrecht at Maastricht University, having previously researched doctorates in chemistry and the history of science. His research focuses on the boundary between science and technology as well as interactions between industry and university. Alongside various editorial activities, he served on the Council of SHAC between 1996 and 2016.

http://www.histech.nl/www/nl/about/bijzondere-leerstoel 

Alchemy Keynote

Prof. Tara Nummedal (Brown)
Early-Modern Alchemy as the Art of Colour

Tara Nummedal teaches early-modern history at Brown University. Having explored alchemical contracts and accusations of fraud in Alchemy and Authority in the Holy Roman Empire (2007), she is currently preparing a study on the sixteenth-century alchemist Anna Maria Zieglerin (ca. 1550–75) and previously edited a special issue of Ambix on ‘Alchemy and Religion in Christian Europe’.

https://vivo.brown.edu/display/tnummeda

For more information, please visit www.ambix.org or contact Mike A. Zuber (Amsterdam), studentrep@ambix.org.

Please register as a participant until 15 October by emailing Thijs Hagendijk (Utrecht), t.hagendijk@uu.nl.


Chemistry Panel 

Amélie Bonney (Oxford)
Creating Toxic Colours: Explosions, Poisoning and Occupational Hazards in the French and British Colour Industry, 1800–1914 

Industrialized Britain and France made use of a variety of by-products from the mining industry to create an alternative source of wealth: a range of new dyes and pigments. Colours made with arsenic, zinc or aniline were each marketed as a safer variety than their counterparts, causing specific chemical elements to become fashionable or, on the contrary, undesirable. For example, aniline dyes and pigments were initially marketed as being a safe alternative to colours made with arsenic, but they were later found to be dangerous both for the workers and for the environment.

This paper will investigate why this discourse on the toxicity or the benefits of colours changed throughout the nineteenth century, and argues that this was caused by a combination of the volatility of popular conceptions of toxicity, economic interests and the development of scientific and toxicological knowledge. An investigation of the narratives of workers, scientists and occupational health physicians reveals that the harmful side-effects were often well-known in the working environment long before regulation was implemented. Often these risks were minimised by companies and government authorities in order to make a colour more marketable until a new alternative was found. The effects for workers ranged from skin lesions to acute poisoning, while on an entirely different level there were cases of industrial explosions and large-scale pollution. This paper thus provides a new context in which to discuss the development of aniline dyes as well as pigments and further develops our understanding of risk management during the production of dyes and pigments in the colour industry.

Victor de Seauve (Paris, MNHN)
Edmond Becquerel’s First Colour Photographs Monitoring the Evolution of Colours

In 1848 Edmond Becquerel developed the very first colour-photographic process and was able to record the solar spectrum with its own colours, basing himself on Seebeck’s work on silver chloride. A few prints representing still-lifes, obtained with the same process, are still conserved in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris. The support is a silver plate similar to those used for daguerreotypes that underwent a sensitization step and the positive colour image is directly formed onto the sensitized plate. The exposure times were quite long, and the resulting photochromatic images could not be fixed which is why this invention was not widely used.

If this process was the first response to the problem of colour in photography, the origin of colours motivated a debate between scientists in the nineteenth century, an issue that remains unresolved in the twenty-first century. In order to gain insights on the colours of the photochromatic images, we try to relate the sub-microstructure to the optical properties of the images.

In this talk we will focus on the steps of the Becquerel’s process we reproduced according to his writings. The light exposure step of the process is studied with spectrocolorimetry and the resulting images with visible reflectance spectrometry. We will attempt to define the spectral sensitivity of the process and to describe the critical parameters to obtain the most beautiful colours.

Alchemy Panel 

Vincenzo Carlotta (Berlin, HU)
Chromatic References in the Making of the Transmutation Agent as Presented in the Dialogue of the Philosophers and Cleopatra

In the context offered by the Greco-Egyptian alchemical tradition, the Dialogue of the Philosophers and Cleopatra touches on distinctive topics, the importance of which has been progressively highlighted by recent scholarship. Nevertheless, the discussion about the sources of these features – and their possible influence on other works – is still open to debate.

The present paper aims at analyzing two closely related subjects: first, the relationship between the body, spirit and soul of the metallic substances, as presented by Cleopatra and her fellows; second, the role performed in this three-way relationship by the doxa of metals. This Greek word is not immediately intelligible, except through a careful analysis of its occurrences in context, and the present paper will point out how this word involves a direct reference to the outer appearance of metallic bodies – specifically, it refers to their ‘brightness’ as opposed to their ‘darkness’. Moreover, this aspect reveals the probable Christian influence on the alchemical text falsely attributed to Cleopatra vii so as to lead up to the more general, and still debated, study of the relationship between Greco-Egyptian alchemy and Christian thought. Finally, this particular case study proves to be especially fruitful since it involves both theoretical and practical issues of the discussion on metallic transmutation throughout the late classical and Byzantine eras.

Kathryn Kremnitzer & Siddhartha V. Shah (Columbia)
Making Emerald Imitation as Working Method

A recipe for making esmeraulde (emerald) appears as an illustrated marginal note under the heading Pierrerie (gemstones) in Ms. Fr. 640 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris), followed by instructions for making other coloured stones, including ruby, hyacinth and topaz. These recipes confirm the larger scope of the author-practitioner’s wide-ranging ambition to reproduce the colour and refractive effects of precious materials, suggesting that imitation is both an artistic aim and a working method to replicate natural processes in form and character.

This paper explores the strong link between coloring and making at the intersection of craft and science, in the production of jewels, bringing together the long-documented history of imitation gemstone production with the findings of our own historical reconstruction. It further reconsiders unstable conceptions of real vs. fake and authentic vs. inauthentic in the early modern period and today, to question how the economic, artistic, and use value of these craft objects was and is determined.

Thijs Hagendijk (Utrecht)
Alchemy, Art and Antwerp Peeter Coudenberghe's Colour Recipes

From antiquity up to the early modern period, it is hard to tell where alchemical practices ended and artisanal practices began. One of the places where the hybridity between alchemy and art can clearly be seen at work is in artisanal recipe books that usually covered a wide array of different practices, ranging from colour-making to metallurgy.

In this paper I investigate a late sixteenth-century Antwerp manuscript that contains recipes for the making of different paints, inks and the production of stained glass. Although the manuscript has drawn the attention of several art historians and conservators, little attention has been given to the alchemical notions and recipes that can be found throughout the manuscript. For instance, the manuscript counts eight recipes for the making of the blue pigment azure. While six of these recipes describe historically accurate procedures, two recipes call for quicksilver and sulphur. Such ingredients would never yield a blue pigment, but instead seem to allude to alchemical transmutation as the underlying process of azure-making.

To better understand the interplay between alchemy and art in this manuscript, I will take a closer look at its author – recently identified as Peeter Coudenberghe (1517–99), an apothecary who lived and worked in Antwerp at a time during which the city flourished as an important international market for artists’ materials.

Acknowledgements

Selection Committee
Prof. Hasok Chang (Cambridge)
Dr. Peter Forshaw (Amsterdam)
Prof. Ernst Homburg (Maastricht)
Prof. Tara Nummedal (Brown)

Financial Support In addition to the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, the following institutions have generously made this workshop possible:

University of Amsterdam – ASH: Amsterdam School of Historical Studies – HHP: History of Hermetic Philosophy and Related Currents

Utrecht University – ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts, 1500–1950 (European Research Council, grant agreement nr. 648718)

SOCIETY for the HISTORY of ALCHEMY and CHEMISTRY
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Shakespeare, The Earls of Derby & the North West

An International Symposium with leading scholars of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre culture, marking the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, Knowsley Hall. 

19th October, 2016



To purchase tickets, visit Shakespeare Symposium or call 0151 489 4827

This symposium is being held at Knowsley Hall, tickets are £75 and include; refreshments throughout the day and a 2 course hot and cold buffet lunch. Places for this event are limited and can be booked online by clicking here.





PROGRAMME

9.00am - Registration 9.20am - The Earl of Derby: Welcome

9.25am - Dr Stephen Lloyd (Curator of the Derby Collection and Chair of the morning Session)


SESSION 1: SHAKESPEARE

9.30am - Professor Richard Wilson (Sir Peter Hall Professor of Shakespeare Studies, Kingston University and the Rose Theatre): The Only Shake Scene in a Country: William the Conqueror

10.00am - Dr David George (Emeritus Professor of English, Urbana University, Ohio) The youthful Shakespeare: out of the shadows

10:30am - Anthony Holden (Writer and Biographer) The 1590s: Shakespeare’s formative years

11.00am - Coffee Break


SESSION 2: THE DERBY COMPANIES

11.30am - Professor Lawrence Manley (William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Yale University, New Haven) Magical Plays of the Derby Companies

12.00pm - Dr Edel Lamb (Lecturer in Renaissance Literature, School of Arts English and Languages, Queen’s University, Belfast) Patronage and Plays: The Revival of the Children of Paul’s in 1599

12.30pm - Professor Sally-Beth MacLean (Professor Emerita of English and Director of REED, University of Toronto) The 6th Earl of Derby and his touring Players: an illustrated overview

1.00pm - Lunch

Chair for afternoon sessions: Professor Elspeth Graham (Professor of Early-Modern Literature, Liverpool John Moores University)

SESSION 3: LITERATURE, MASQUE & PERFORMANCE

2.00pm - Dr Vanessa Wilkie (William A. Moffett Curator of Medieval and British Historical Manuscripts, The Huntington Library, California) ‘To the Right Honorable...’: The Literary Patronage and Masque Culture of the Stanley Women

2.30pm - Dr Rebecca Bailey (Lecturer in English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Liverpool John Moores University) ‘Your name shall live / In the new yeare: as in the age of gold’: The Staging of Sir Thomas Salusbury’s Twelfth Night Masque, performed for the Stanley Household at Knowsley Hall in 1640/1, and its contexts

3.00pm - ‘Discoveries in Practice’: a short discussion with actors and director Professor Kathy Dacre on the first performance of the Knowsley Masque since 1641; part of the ‘Voicing Shakespeare’ research project at Rose Bruford College of Theatre and Performance

3.15pm - Tea

SESSION 4: SHAKESPEARE NOW IN THE NORTH WEST

3.30pm - Julian Bowsher (Senior Archaeologist, Museum of London Archaeology) The Playhouse in Prescot as seen from the London Theatreland

4.00pm - Patrick Spottiswoode (Director, Globe Education, Shakespeare’s Globe) Education and Shakespeare’s Globe

4.30pm - Dr Nicholas Helm (Helm Architecture, London) Shakespeare and Architecture: What sort of a Replica?: The Playhouse in Prescot

5.00pm - Discussion 5.30pm - Closing Remarks


Liverpool John Moores University



British Milton Seminar, 15 October 2016: Programme

BMS 54, Saturday 15 October 2016

Venue: The Birmingham and Midland Institute. There will be two sessions, from 11.00 am to 12.30 pm and from 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm

11.00-12.30

Esther van Ramsdonk (Exeter): ‘Milton, Marvell and Anglo-Dutch Relations in the early 1650s’

Philippa Earle (Exeter): ‘True Fictions of Cosmology in Kepler and Milton’

2.00-4.00

Sarah Knight (Leicester): ‘The prosody of a verse among the rudiments of grammar? Milton and Ideas about Metre at Early Modern Cambridge’

Cedric Brown (Reading): ‘Milton’s Discriminatory Greek Test’

The Birmingham and Midland Institute (BMI) was founded by Act of Parliament in 1854, for ‘the Diffusion and Advancement of Science, Literature and Art amongst all Classes of Persons resident in Birmingham and the Midland Counties,’ and continues to pursue these aims. The BMI is located in the heart of Birmingham’s city centre, just a few minutes’ walk from Birmingham New Street, Snow Hill and Moor Street railway stations:

Birmingham and Midland Institute
Margaret Street
Birmingham B3 3BS

Please follow this link for a map of the BMI’s location, and for further information about the BMI and its Library:http://bmi.org.uk/location.html

For further information about the British Milton Seminar, please contact either:

Professor Sarah Knight (sk218@leicester.ac.uk), or Dr Hugh Adlington (h.c.adlington@bham.ac.uk).

Hugh Adlington and Sarah M. Knight (Co-convenors)

Kingston Shakespeare Seminar: Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory

Our first KiSS session on Thursday October 6 features Dr Neema Parvini discussing his book Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory, published by Bloomsbury in Arden Shakespeare’s Shakespeare and Theory series, coming out in January 2017. In our new format, the session will be an informal roundtable discussion with the author, chaired by Richard Wilson. We will convene at 6.30 pm at the Gallery of the Rose Theatre, Kingston. These sessions are free and open to everyone. See also the event page!

About Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory (from the publisher’s website):

Over the past three decades, no critical movement has been more prominent in Shakespeare Studies than new historicism. And yet, it remains notoriously difficult to pin down, define and explain, let alone analyze. Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory provides a comprehensive scholarly analysis of new historicism as a development in Shakespeare studies while asking fundamental questions about its status as literary theory and its continued usefulness as a method of approaching Shakespeare’s plays.

Dr Neema Parvini is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Surrey. He is the author of three books alongside the aforementioned Shakespeare and New Historicist Theory: Shakespeare’s History Plays: Rethinking Historicism (Edinburgh University Press, 2012), Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory: New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (Bloomsbury, 2012), and Shakespeare and Cognition: Thinking Fast and Slow Through Character (Palgrave, 2015). Moreover, check out his fantastic podcast series on Shakespeare and Contemporary Theory. 
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'Shakespeare and Italy' Seminars at the Victoria and Albert Museum

11 October to 22 November from 14:00-16.30.
The Lydia & Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre, Victoria and Albert Museum.

An inter-disciplinary course that brings together leading scholars from English Literature, Italian Studies, Translation Studies and Comparative Literature, to offer an in-depth view of the fascinating dynamics between Shakespeare and Italian literary culture from the Elizabethan era to the present day.

Arranged chronologically, the sessions address the wide range of plays which Shakespeare situates in Italy, including Much Ado about Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Othello. Besides providing close textual analyses of the individual plays, the course considers how Italian authors, actors, and composers repurposed a selection of Shakespearean characters for contemporary audiences, including the troupes of the Commedia dell’arte, Giuseppe Verdi, the first Sicilian dialect theatre company, and the recent ‘Shylock Project’. 

The course thus combines the study of a variety of disciplines with more practical-based sessions — including a Commedia dell’arte mask workshop — to explain and explore the vibrant and shifting currents of transnational exchange between Shakespeare and Italy.

For bookings, please see here.

Shakespeare and Italy: From the Early Modern Period to Today.  Tuesdays 14:00-16:30

11 October – Dr Chris Stamatakis
Shakespeare’s Italy: An Introduction
Much Ado about Nothing

18 October – Olly Crick
Shakespeare and the Commedia dell’arte

1 November – Dr Eric Langley
Shakespeare and Venice
The Merchant of Venice

8 November – Professor Helen Hackett
Shakespeare and Amore
Romeo and Juliet

15 November – Professor Rene Weis
Shakespeare and Italian Opera
Verdi’s Macbeth and Othello

22 November – Professor Loredana Polezzi and Dr Enza De Francisci
Translating Shakespeare in Modern Italy

UCL Renaissance Latin Reading Group

Timothy Demetris (UCL Italian) will be running the UCL Renaissance Latin Reading Group again this coming term (Term One of the new academic year).

The UCL Renaissance Latin Reading Group is a reading group focused on Latin texts from the Renaissance period for those wishing to improve their Latin through the reading and translation of historical texts. Each week a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century text will be introduced and a passage from it handed out to be translated as 'homework'. The following week translations will be compared and corrected and the text itself discussed.

Latin texts will include Enea Silvio Piccolomini's Epistolae, Pope Pius II's Commentarii, Cardinal Bessarion's Epistolae, Bartolomeo Platina's Liber de vita Christi ac omnium pontificum, the Contract for Ten Frescoes for the Sistine Chapel from the Vatican Secret Archives, Leonardo Bruni's Historiae Florentini populi, Pietro Bembo's Historiae Venetae libri XII, Jacopo Gherardi's Diario romano, Johann Burchard's Liber notarum and Sigismondo dei Conti's Historiae suorum temporum.

A previous acquaintance with the Latin language is required to engage with the Latin texts.

The reading group meets on Tuesdays at 6.00 p.m. in the Italian Seminar Room, Room 351, Third Floor, Foster Court, Malet Place.  Wine will be provided.

For further information, please see the UCL Renaissance Latin Reading Group webpage:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/mars/seminars-lectures/latin-reading

For any questions, please contact Timothy Demetris directly.

The first session of the reading group will take place on Tuesday 4 October. I looking forward to seeing some of you there.

Timothy Demetris
PhD candidate
Department of Italian
SELCS
University College London

Institute of Historical Research: Society, Culture and Belief Seminar Season 2016-17

Seminars will take place in the John S. Cohen Room (203, second floor) at the Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London, WC1, on the following Thursdays at 5.30 p.m. All are welcome!

13 October
Chris Kissane (London School of Economics)
The Eaters: Deciphering Early Modern Food Cultures

 Long overlooked by historians, food has in recent decades become a prominent subject in historical study. Food cultures and 'foodways' have emerged as a growing focus of early modern cultural history. The study of food, however, often remains diffuse in its methodologies, and its relationship to wider cultural history is unclear. Examining fast-breaking events in Reformation Zürich, this paper asks how we can more rigorously approach and 'decipher' early modern food cultures.

10 November
Tawny Paul (University of Exeter)
Work culture, occupation and masculine identity in eighteenth-century Britain

It is well known that people in early modern Britain undertook multiple jobs in order to make a living. The occupational titles that men claimed in legal and institutional settings did not necessarily reflect the work that they undertook. While this relationship between title and work poses challenges for understanding men’s productive activities, it also opens up a number of questions related to identity. Work is often given a central place in accounts of masculine status. What happened, however, when men undertook multiple jobs? How did men account for their worth and status against plural employments? This paper draws on the diaries of three male artisans in the pre-industrial eighteenth century to investigate how men “accounted” for their work in social and cultural terms. It challenges some of the prevailing associations between occupation and masculinity, and investigates the interrelationship between labour, leisure, skill, income and status.

8 December
Jennifer Spinks (University of Manchester)
Magic, Emotions and the Global Supernatural in Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe

 16th-century European Christians collected and circulated many reports of magical rites, figures and objects from beyond Europe’s borders. Chronologically, these coincided with an increasing fear of the Devil and of witchcraft within Europe. This paper draws upon a range of printed travelogues, wonder books and demonological treatises to explore the powerful emotions depicted in and roused by reports of non-European diabolical magic. It asks why this material gained so much polemical traction within northern European print culture, and examines what it can tell us about domestic European anxieties during an era transformed by religious conflicts and global encounters.

19 January
James Fisher (King’s College London)
The Creation of “Book-Farming”: Appropriating and Codifying Agricultural Knowledge in 17th & 18th-Century England

The growth of agricultural books in the early modern period is usually interpreted in terms of how they facilitated the spread of knowledge and contributed to innovations in the practice of farming. However, this focus on the relation between books and technological changes ignores their role in relation to social and institutional changes. This paper argues that agricultural books facilitated a redistribution of knowledge within rural society, by appropriating and codifying the knowledge possessed by common husbandmen in the interests of gentlemen landowners and large tenant farmers. It aims to highlight the hidden struggles around “book-farming”.

16 February
Richard Thomas Bell (Stanford University)
The Company of Inmates: Collective Identity and Self-government in the Seventeenth-century London Prison

This paper will analyse the collectives and customs through which inmates managed life in prison in seventeenth-century London, from the formal and officially sanctioned to the informal and subversive, uncovering their potential to ease hardships and provide solidarity, as well as exposing risks of inefficiency, constraint and corruption. It will discuss how and why prisoners laid claim to certain models of authority and communal identity—especially office-holding and the notion of prisons as ‘little commonwealths’—and the implicit claim to a place within wider civil society and politics that this entailed.

16 March
Jennifer Bishop (Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge)
Making a Record of the Self: Individual Stories and Collective Histories in the Archives of the London Livery Companies, c.1540-1660

11 May
Tim Wales and James Brown (University of East Anglia)
'Shamefully Disordered with Excessive Drinking': Clerical Intoxication in Early Modern England

Allegations of drunkenness in a range of social spaces loomed large in the trials of many clergymen prosecuted for misbehaviour in early modern England's ecclesiastical courts. However, the issue of clerical intoxication has received little sustained attention, either from church historians or within the burgeoning field of alcohol and drug history. Drawing on fresh archival research undertaken by the ESRC/AHRC research project 'Intoxicants and Early Modernity: England, 1580-1740' (https://www.intoxicantsproject.org), this paper uses systematic analysis of over fifty trials from the well-documented dioceses of Norwich and Chester to explore the practices, representations, and legal uses of the drunk vicar in the long 17th century.


Katharine Hodgkin
Professor of Cultural History
Director, Raphael Samuel Research Centre
School of Arts and Digital Industries
University of East London
Docklands Campus, University Way
London E16 2RD
020 8223 2934

www.raphael-samuel.org

CALL FOR PAPERS: 11th International Conference on the History of Chemistry (11ichc)

The programme committee especially encourages the submission of panel/session proposals, but also welcomes the submission of stand-alone papers. Session organizers and contributors are free to send their proposals on any topic on the history of chemistry, broadly construed as the cluster of molecular sciences, industry, technology and engineering. A non-exhaustive list of possible sessions could include historical papers on the development of all aspects of the material and life sciences, such as:
  • Chemistry, professors, textbooks and classrooms
  • Teaching and didactics of history of chemistry
  • Chemistry and law: controversies, expertise, counter-expertise, fraud and activism
  • Toxics regulation, risk assessment and public health
  • Environmental chemistry, energy and regulation
  • Chemistry, industry, and economy
  • Spaces and sites of chemistry
  • Instruments, collections and material culture
  • Biographies and prosopographies, and databases
  • Chemistry, war and exile
  • Representation of chemistry, and visual cultures
  • Alchemy, Chymistry and Early Modern Science and Medicine
  • Gender and chemistry
  • Proposal Guidelines

All proposals must be in English, the language of the conference. Submitted abstracts and session proposals will be subject to review by an advisory committee. Although the conference is open to individual paper submissions, preference will be given to organised sessions with three or more papers. All paper proposals must use the template provided below, and must include (1) an abstract of the session topic (up to 150 words), the name(s) of the organiser(s), and the proposed papers; (2) abstracts for each paper (up to 200 words); (3) a short CV of the organiser(s).
Template

Please use the following template for panels and individual papers: template

Submission
All proposals should be submitted by email to: 11.ichc.trondheim@gmail.com
Important Dates

Deadline for submitting proposals (both panels and individual papers): 31 January, 2017
Notification of acceptance: 31 March, 2017
Early Registration: 31 May, 2017
Conference dates: 29 August – 2 September 2017

Object Lessons and Nature Tables: Research Collaborations Between Historians of Science and University Museums

University of Reading, 23 September 2016, 9:45 to 17:00

Venue: Special Collections and Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading, Redlands Road, Reading, Berkshire, RG1 5EX, UK

Website, Programme and Registration at: http://objectlessonsandnaturetables.info/

With the ‘material turn’ in the humanities, historians of science are paying greater and greater attention to collections of all kinds, and to their complex structures and histories. University museum collections in the UK and across Europe form a singular meeting point in humanities discourses for which history of science is highly significant – such as environmental history, histories of colonialism, and information histories.

What exactly does this new landscape of university researchers and their science collections look like now? How do we approach the material culture of science? What are the research projects taking place in this arena, and what is its future potential? How do collaborations between curators and historians of science function – especially inside university contexts? What are the examples of innovative research conjoining university collections and historians of science? When do teaching and research in history of science come together in collections contexts? What public histories of science are being co-produced in university- based science museums? These epistemological and practice-based questions will be the focus of this one-day conference co-sponsored by the Centre for Collections Based Research and the Department of History of the University of Reading, and supported by the British Society for the History of Science.

The morning sessions of the conference are devoted to ‘object animations’, where actual collections objects and their research potential will be explored by speakers who will also be demonstrating their methods and techniques. We have an expert panel with Professor Simon Schaffer and Professor David Gaimster, who will be sharing collaborative research methodologies. The afternoon sessions of 20 minute papers will further deepen our understanding of how to work across collecting institutions and the academy by exploring institutional initiatives, museums as catalysts for sustained interdisciplinarity, and epistemic techniques. Registration open now !


Dr Rohan Deb Roy
Lecturer in South Asian History
Department of History
University of Reading,
United Kingdom
&
Book Reviews Editor,
South Asian History and Culture (Routledge)

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/journal.asp?issn=1947-2498&linktype=145

CALL FOR PAPERS: Utopia for 500 Years

A Conference on Thomas More’s Utopia to be held at St. Thomas More College, University Of Saskatchewan

22-24 September 2016, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the work’s publication

In the five hundred years since Thomas More published his Utopia, the work has had a profound influence on political and philosophical thought. But it has likewise held an important place in modern aesthetic and cultural developments—in literature, in art, in architecture and design—and has inspired political change, social experiments, and radical countercultural movements. This conference seeks to address the varieties of utopia and utopianism that More’s work and those influenced by it have dared imagine. Does the utopian impulse mark a practical response to political, ecological or social crisis? Does utopia reflect a nostalgia for some lost golden age or optimism for a better—if perhaps impossible—future? Do utopian fictions allow us to explore previously unseen possibilities or confine us to the realm of mere imagination? What about dystopias? How are imagined dystopias informed by the tradition begun by More? Are they a straightforward antithesis of the utopian impulse, or could it be that dystopia is somehow a product of utopianism? Finally, what is the place of Utopia and utopias in historical change? Can we identify historical or modern social, economic or ecological experiments that display some utopian vision? In short, how has utopia been used as a tool to think with and how have people translated that thought into action.

We invite proposals on a range of topics that address More’s Utopia, its context, reception and influence, but also those that more broadly address the idea of utopias and utopianism in other political, philosophical, literary, social and historical contexts. We hope this conference will bring together a range of scholars working on Utopia and utopias from diverse disciplinary perspectives. Dr. Anne Prescott, Emerita Helen Goodhart Altschul Professor of English at Barnard College, will deliver a keynote address.

St. Thomas More College is a Catholic liberal arts college that is federated with the University of Saskatchewan. The College’s Shannon Library holds one of six extant copies of the 1518 second edition of More’s Utopia. Together with the Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Program and the Department of History at the University of Saskatchewan, St. Thomas More College invites proposals for individual papers or complete panels that address the conference theme. Applications for funding to cover travel costs will be made available to those whose papers are accepted. Please send proposed titles and abstracts (no longer than 300 words) by email to utopia2016@stmcollege.ca by 8 January 2016.

For conference updates, follow the blog of the Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies program at the University of Saskatchewan.

On Twitter @CMRSatUSask #Utopia2016

Dr. Brent Nelson, Professor
Director, Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance Studies
Department of English
9 Campus Dr.
University of Saskatchewan
Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A5
ph.: (306) 966-1820
fax.: (306) 966-5951


CALL FOR PAPERS: The Afterlives of Eve

9-11 September 2016 at Newcastle University and Durham University

Keynotes: Sandra M. Gilbert (UC Davis), Wendy Furman-Adams (Whittier), John Bothwell (Durham) 

From Genesis to mitochondrial Eve, the idea of a single common foremother has occupied a crucial space in the Western cultural imaginary. Eve, whether as bringer of sin, as life-giver, as burden, curse or saviour, functions as a commentary on maternity, sexuality, creativity and power. This cross-period and interdisciplinary conference will be an opportunity to explore the impact of her varied representations through the centuries and across different genres and media. 

How has this archetypal figure been revised and revisited by conservative and radical thought? 
What personal, polemical and/or creative uses have been made of the figure of Eve?
What persists and what changes in her depictions across time and geographical space?
How have women and men negotiated their shared and different relationships to Eve?
How has Eve been appropriated, neglected or rejected as a foremother?
How does she speak to fantasies of masculine or feminine self-sufficiency?
What cultural, political, literary and/or theological spaces does she occupy now? 

Topics might include, but need not be limited to: 
  • Origins of/Sources for Eve 
  • Other Eves 
  • The absence of Eve 
  • Representations and Transformations of Eve 
  • Eve as Over-reacher 

We welcome papers from all disciplines in arts, humanities and sciences and covering any historical period. We also welcome panel proposals including PGR panel proposals. Titles and abstracts of no more than 250 words per speaker should be sent to Ruth Connolly (ruth.connolly@ncl.ac.uk) and Mandy Green (mandy.green@durham.ac.uk) by 12 March 2016. 

Panel proposals should also include a title for the panel's programme. Speakers will be notified by March 21st. We gratefully acknowledge support from MEMS at Newcastle, IMEMS Durham and Newcastle University's Academic Conference Fund. A limited number of PGR bursaries may be available. Please indicate when sending your abstract whether you would like to be considered for a bursary.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shakespearean Transformations: Death, Life, and Afterlives

7th Biennial British Shakespeare Association Conference

University of Hull, 8-11 September 2016
www.hull.ac.uk/bsa2016

Keynote speakers:
Susan Bassnett (University of Warwick)
Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex)
Michael Neill (University of Auckland)
Claudia Olk (Free University of Berlin)
Barrie Rutter (Northern Broadsides)
Tiffany Stern (University of Oxford)
Richard Wilson (Kingston University)

‘Remember me!’ commands the ghost of Hamlet’s father at a moment in English history when the very purpose of remembrance of the dead was being transformed. How does the past haunt the present in Shakespeare? What do Shakespeare’s works reveal about the processes of mourning and remembrance? Shakespeare breathed new life into ‘old tales’: how do his acts of literary resuscitation transform the material he revived and what it signifies? This major international conference will investigate the ways in which Shakespeare remembered the past and we remember Shakespeare.

The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death offers us a timely opportunity to reflect upon the continuation of his life and art diachronically, spatially from the Globe across the globe, and materially on stage, page, canvas, music score, and screen. How does Shakespeare continue to haunt us? The second strand of the conference focuses on Shakespeare’s literary, dramatic, and transcultural afterlives. The conference thus also seeks to explore the various ways in which Shakespeare’s ghost has been invoked, summoned up, or warded off over the past four centuries.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:
  • Shakespearean transformations: borrowing/adaptation/appropriation/intertextuality
  • Shakespeare and death
  • Speaking to/of and impersonating the dead in Shakespeare
  • Shakespeare, religion, and reformations of ritual
  • Shakespeare and memory/remembrance
  • Shakespeare and time: temporality/anachronism/archaism
  • Shakespeare and early modern conceptions of ‘life’
  • Emotion and embodiment in Shakespeare
  • Performing Shakespeare: now and then
  • Transcultural Shakespeare
  • Critical and theoretical conceptions of/engagements through Shakespeare
  • Textual resurrections: editing Shakespeare
  • Rethinking Shakespearean biography
  • Enlivening Shakespeare teaching
  • Shakespeare in a digital age

The conference will be held in the official run-up to Hull’s year as the UK’s City of Culture in 2017. The programme will include plenary lectures, papers, seminars, workshops, and performances at Hull Truck and the Gulbenkian Centre. There will also be special workshops and sessions directed towards pedagogy.

We welcome proposals for papers (20 minutes), panels (90 minutes), or seminars/workshops (90 minutes) on any aspect of the conference theme, broadly interpreted. Abstracts (no more than 200 words) should be sent to bsa2016@hull.ac.uk by 15 December 2015.

Participants must be members of the British Shakespeare Association at the time of the conference. Details of how to join can be found here: www.britishshakespeare.ws

The Great Fire of London, Reconsidered





















Sat 3 September 2016 – Wren Suite, St Paul’s Cathedral

The Great Fire of London has long been held as a pivotal moment in London’s history. Over the course of four days in September 1666, an infernal blaze claimed over 13,000 houses, 87 churches and 52 livery halls, and rendered an estimated 70,000 people homeless. Yet while cellars still burned there were whispers at court that the conflagration might actually be ‘the greatest blessing that God ever conferred’ upon King Charles II because it had crippled the ‘rebellious’ City of London; forever opening its gates to royal power.

Three hundred and fifty years on, The Great Fire: Reconsidered aims to re-examine the impact of the Great Fire of London and explore its wide-ranging legacy.

Programme

9:00 – 9:30 Registration & Welcome

9:30 – 10:30 Keynote lecture

Michael Hebbert (UCL), FVMANTIBUS IAM TVM RVINIS – Reconstruction Reconsidered

10:30 – 11:45 Panel One, ‘London mourning in ashes’

Hazel Forsyth (Museum of London), Butcher, Baker, Candlestick maker: Surviving the Great Fire of London

Una McIlvenna (University of Kent), Ballads about the Great Fire of London

Elaine Tierney (V&A), ‘Miserable Huts and Hovels’: Temporary Shelter after the Great Fire of London

11:45 – 12:30 Lunch

12:30 – 13:45 Panel Two, Religion and Conspiracy

Jewell Johnson (University of Sydney), The Present Future Past: Prophecies and Conspiratorial Fascinations

Lara Thorpe (Royal Holloway, University of London), A designed buisines’: post-Fire Anti-Catholic Hysteria according to Ejected Puritan Minister John Allin

Alan Marshall (Bath Spa University), The Great Fire, 1666, and the conspiracy mentalitiè in Restoration England.

13:45 – 14:15 Coffee break

14:45 – 16:00 Panel Three, ‘A More Beautiful City’

Marit Leenstra (MOLA), The archaeology of the Great Fire of London

Mark Kirby (University of York), The City churches and “The Glory of all Christendom”

16:00 – 16:10 Final Remarks

Clare Jackson (Trinity Hall, Cambridge) offers final thoughts on the day’s proceedings.

16:15 Wine Reception

Refreshments and lunch are provided and delegates will receive a complimentary visitor ticket to St Paul’s Cathedral that day (open until 9pm), which can be used following the event.

Registration: Please click on the link to register for the conference: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-great-fire-reconsidered-tickets-26002821138

Beyond the PhD: Post-Doctoral Opportunities and Early Career Development for Neo-Latinists

The Society for Neo-Latin Studies is organising a FREE EVENT aimed at researchers with interests in Neo-Latin at the postdoctoral and early-career level, to be held on the 9th September 2016 at King’s College London (Strand Campus). A full schedule for the event is given below, and will include a sponsored lunch and coffee breaks. Each session will include brief presentations on the schemes and opportunities under discussion, with particular consideration of the perspective of neo-Latin researchers. All presenters will have personal experience either of successful applications for, or of assessment of applications for the schemes or positions under discussion.

To sign up for the event please fill in the questionnaire at the following link by the 15th August 2016.

https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/CKXCLC3

The event is open to all who are interested, but should it be over-subscribed, priority will be given to those working wholly or partly on or with neo-Latin material, and who are either PhD students in the final 18 months of their program or post-doctoral researchers within three years of completing their PhD.

Program
10am – Arrival
10.30-11.30 – Introduction and presentation of Junior Research Fellowships and European opportunities. (Victoria Moul and William Barton)
11.30-12.00 – Coffee

12.00-1.00 – Presentation of Leverhulme and British Academy post-docs; and of post-docs attached to specific projects. (Lucy Jackson, Elizabeth Sandis and David McOmish)

1.00-2.00 – Lunch

2.-3.00 - Teaching fellowships, temporary and permanent lectureships, and careers in school-teaching.  (Bobby Xinyue, Ingrid De Smet, John Roberts)

3.00-3.30 – Tea

3.30-5.00pm - Strategies for career development: balancing teaching and research; where and when to publish; REF/TEF; preparing a book proposal; other career options etc. (Victoria Moul, William Barton, Gesine Manuwald)

5.00 onwards - Drinks/dinner at a local venue on a voluntary basis


For any queries not covered by the on-line survey, please contact the organisers at victoria.moul@kcl.ac.uk or william.barton@neolatin.lbg.ac.at.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Cultural Influence of Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford

“Life of the Muses’ day, their morning star!”
The Cultural Influence of Lucy Harington Russell, Countess of Bedford

11–12 August 2016, Lincoln College, Oxford

Paper proposals are invited for a conference dedicated to the cultural influence of Lucy Harington Russell (1580–1627), Countess of Bedford. Lady Bedford was the pre-eminent woman patron of early seventeenth-century England, and a key figure behind the artistic achievements of such luminaries as John Donne, John Dowland, Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton, Samuel Daniel, and Aemilia Lanyer. She commissioned John Florio to make the first English translation of Montaigne’s Essais, and herself wrote poetry praised by Donne. Grand full-length portraits and exquisite miniatures testify to her patronage of artists including Nicholas Hilliard, and she worked with architects and landscape designers to produce pioneering estate designs. She participated in the most sumptuous court masques of the Jacobean era, managed her husband’s estates, intervened in politically sensitive marriages, and served as Queen Anna’s most trusted confidant. In an age when women’s voices were suppressed in politics and culture Lady Bedford exerted considerable influence in both arenas. Yet she is almost always discussed in relation to the men whom she enabled and inspired. This conference seeks to place her at the centre of critical enquiry, asking questions about power, politics, patronage, culture, literature, performance, art, architecture, religion, and the body.

Keynotes:
Professor Linda Levy Peck (George Washington University)
Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin–Madison)

Confirmed speakers include:
Julie Crawford (Columbia); Ariel Franklin-Hudson (Columbia); Karen Hearn (UCL); Erica Longfellow (New College, Oxford); Margaret Maurer (Colgate); Michelle O’Callaghan (Reading); Marion O’Connor (Kent); Barbara Ravelhofer (Durham); Chris Stamatakis (UCL); Jane Stevenson (Aberdeen); Sebastiaan Verweij (Bristol).

The conference organisers are Dr Daniel Starza Smith (Lincoln College, Oxford) and Dr Nadine Akkerman (Leiden/Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study). Please send expressions of interest to daniel.smith@ell.ox.ac.uk by Wednesday, 9 March. Graduate bursaries are available, thanks to generous support from the Society for Renaissance Studies, the Royal Historical Society, and the Royal Musical Association. Please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered for one of these.

The Sharing of Medical Ideas and Information Among Early-Modern Practitioners

A Project Meeting to be held at the Edward Worth Library (1733), in association with UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland

Tuesday 2 August 2016, 2 p.m.-5.30 p. m.

Free Admission – Booking Essential
Venue: The Boardroom, Dr Steevens’ Hospital, Dublin 8

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ole Peter Grell, MA, Ph.D., FRHS

Programme:

Tuesday 2 August 2016

1.00pm: Registration

1.45pm: Official Opening

2.00pm: Dr Jason Harris (Centre for Neo-Latin Studies, University College Cork)
“The Latinity of Renaissance Physicians”

2.30pm: Dr Benjamin Hazard (School of History, University College Dublin)
“Medical Recipes for Military Chaplains in Spanish Flanders.”

3.30pm: Dr Elizabethanne Boran (Librarian, The Edward Worth Library)
“Buying and Selling Medical Books in Early Modern Ireland”

4.00pm: Keynote Chaired by: Dr Catherine Cox (Director, UCD Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland):

Professor Ole Peter Grell MA PhD FRHistS (Professor in Early Modern History, The Open University)
“The Importance of the Republic of Letters for the Exchange of Medical Knowledge and Ideas in the Early Seventeenth Century: The Physician Ole Worm (1588-1654) and his Correspondents”

3.00pm: Coffee Break

5.00pm: Closing Remarks

For bookings, contact: Ben Hazard

John Lyly’s Galatea at the Jerwood Space, London

We invite scholars to participate in exploring John Lyly’s Galatea at the Jerwood Space this August. The award-winning theatre maker Emma Frankland and Andy Kesson will be working with a company of performers, exploring the play’s representations of non-normative sexuality and its concluding investment in transgender identity. We are grateful to Shakespeare Bulletin, the University of Roehampton and the Before Shakespeare project for funding and supporting this work.

Scholars are invited to participate in this exploration by joining us in the performance space in two- to three-hour slots, available throughout the week (11am-1pm, 2pm-5pm). Scholars are welcome to come as witnesses to the workshop, to document it or to take a more active role and join the performance workshop itself. The workshop is a week-long process of theatrical research and development and is not building towards a final performance at the end of the week.

The workshop will take place 1-5 August. For further information, and to book a slot, please email andy.kesson@roehampton.ac.uk. For anyone interested but unable to attend, we will be documenting the week’s work on the Before Shakespeare website.

CALL FOR PAPERS: “Paratheatrical Entertainments in Shakespeare’s London and London’s Shakespeare” at the World Shakespeare Congress 2016.



Donald Hedrick (Kansas State University) and Edel Semple (University College Cork) Although scholarly interest in available “alternatives” to early modern London theater has recently grown, a focused examination of their relation to Shakespeare has been somewhat absent. Beginning with the position that London’s “entertainment industry” invites a perspective on Shakespeare’s theater which is not dismissive of these entertainments but sees them as integral to and indices of pleasure-production of the time, this seminar aims to redress the existing scholarly gap.

Seminar papers may examine single entertainments (such as bear-baiting, gambling, sports, hearing sermons, drinking, fairs, or other activities), or elements of them in representations or allusions, or they may address the complex theoretical relationship between this culture and Shakespeare’s work. 

Central questions may include these: 
  • What similar or different aesthetics were available in London’s wider entertainment offerings? 
  • In what ways was Shakespeare’s work informed by or even in competition with these entertainments? 
  • What entertainments did Shakespeare depict, how were they inserted, and to what ends? 
  • What was the audience reception of these, either as original recreations or in their secondary representations by Shakespeare? 
  • What is gained or lost in Shakespeare’s “translation” of them? 
  • What sorts of pleasures did they embody for Shakespeare, whether disorderly and “low,” or licit and “higher”? 

Registration for this seminar can be found online at the World Shakespeare Congress 2016 website.

Science Museum Group Journal Prize

The Science Museum Group Journal has now launched a new prize to encourage and reward research articles by talented young scholars. The Journal itself aims to provide open access to peer-reviewed research by international scholars, bringing together ideas across the broad areas of study that inform our work and fascinate our wide readership. This ambition can only be fuelled by the quality and originality of our contributors, now and in the future and the Journal is proud to take a role in encouraging and developing academic excellence.

The SMGJ writing prize of £500 will be awarded annually to the author of the best original research article which addresses research questions around science history, heritage, exhibitions, communications and public engagement.

Submission is open to all researchers in the early stages of their career and it is expected that the winning article will be published in the Journal. We warmly welcome submissions (in English) from international scholars which will deal with previously unpublished research, and the judges (our eminent Editorial Board) will especially look for work which takes advantage of the Journal’s capacity to feature rich imagery and multi-media.

The prize will be launched at the opening of our new Research Centre on 31st March 2016 and the deadline for the inaugural prize is 1st March 2017. For more information, contact the editorial team: richard.nicholls@sciencemuseum.ac.uk. 

The rules are as follows:
  • Articles submitted for the prize must be previously unpublished and it is expected that the winning article will be published in the Journal[1].
  • The prize will be judged by the Journal’s Editorial Board, and the judges will look particularly favourably on articles which make good use of the Journal’s capacity to include images, film and audio as an integral part of the content. The judges’ decision is final and no correspondence will be entered into.
  • Submission is open to all researchers in the early stages of their career. Eligibility will be taken to cease after five years in relevant employment (for example a curatorial or other professional position in a museum) or, where relevant, five years after the completion of a PhD. Allowance can be made for periods devoted to family obligations or extended illness, at the discretion of the board.
  • Authors are invited to nominate their own papers and all articles that meet the criteria will be judged entirely on their own merit. Only one submission per author will be considered each year.
  • Submitted articles should be not less than 3000 words and not more than 10,000 words long.
  • Submissions from authors from all countries are warmly welcomed, though all articles must be written in English.
  • The submission deadline is 1 September of each year and articles submitted for the prize will be accepted at any time in the preceding year. The prize will normally be judged by the end of September and announced in October
  • The competition is closed to all staff and fellows from within the SMG Group. However, Collaborative Doctoral Students are not considered as coming from the group and are eligible to apply for the prize.
[1] Although submissions are accepted on the understanding that the author will publish the paper in the Science Museum Group Journal, this is at the discretion of the Editor. The Editor may also accept other excellent papers submitted for the prize as submissions to the Journal and put them forward for publication with the author’s agreement.

http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/subscribe/

Lisa Jardine Doctoral Studentship

Queen Mary University of London

Qualification type: PhD
Location: London
Funding amount: Not specified
Hours: Full Time

Placed on: 16th June 2016
Closes: 18th July 2016

The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London is seeking applicants for this new PhD studentship, which has been established to recognise the late Professor Lisa Jardine’s many contributions to the university and to disciplinary and inter-disciplinary research.

Applications must be in the area of Early-Modern Studies, and can be held in any one or more (via joint supervision) of the Faculty’s academic Schools. Potential applicants are encouraged to discuss their project with relevant members of academic staff prior to submitting an application.

Applicants should complete a QMUL application form, attaching a 1500 word (max) research proposal, 1 side A4 statement of interest outlining why they wish to pursue their research at Queen Mary, and two academic references. Candidates are advised to discuss their application with their proposed supervisor before submitting their formal application. Application forms, and more details on the application process, can be found at:

http://www.qmul.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/applyresearchdegrees/index.html

Deadline: Monday 18 July

JOBS: Assistant Professor, English Literature and Culture, 15th-18th century

Tenure-track position open in the Department of English Literature, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Area of Specialization: English Literature and Culture, 15th-18th century.

Rank: Assistant Professor.

Job Description

The person who will occupy the position will be called upon to teach courses on various aspects of English Literature and Culture from the late medieval period, through the Renaissance, to the mid-18th century. Although the research interests of the prospective candidates may be concentrated in any area of this chronological spectrum, primary consideration will be given to the one who can evidently cover a wide range of topics/authors in teaching and research. 

Citizens of member states of the European Union outside Greece must provide proof of knowledge of the Greek language at the level of G1. The official declaration of the opening (specifying deadlines and required supporting documents) will be published in the Greek press during the first half of September and will be posted at www.auth.gr. 

Interested individuals may visit the English School’s website www.enl.auth.gr to acquaint themselves with the Department of English Literature. Further enquiries may be addressed to Dr Tina Krontiris at krontir@enl.auth.gr and Dr Katerina Kitsi at katkit@enl.auth.gr.


CALL FOR PAPERS: “New Scholarship in British Art History: Discoveries at the NCMA”

A two-day symposium held at the North Carolina Museum of Art hosted alongside the upcoming exhibition “History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection.”

Date: Friday, January 27th & Saturday, January 28th, 2017.

The question of what makes the British Isles “British” is particularly relevant given recent political events, such as the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union.

Using the North Carolina Museum of Art’s British collections as inspiration, this New Scholars Conference explores the ways in which we can examine “English” and “British” works of art. Particularly, this topic raises questions about the ways Britain can be viewed, either as inward looking and/or in dialogue with the wider world.

We encourage topics ranging from traditional categories of British art, such as portraiture, to new investigations into the mobility of artists and styles, as well as issues of race, class, and gender. The aim of this conference is to explore how innovative scholarship and new narratives can help expand the larger discipline of British studies. This conference is intended for graduate students, recent doctoral graduates, and postdoctoral scholars. We strongly suggest that speakers consider their papers in relation to the British collections at the NCMA, whose works of art range from 1580-1850.

We invite 20-minute papers on topics including (but not limited to) the following:
  • British Notions of Territory
  • Architecture in the English Context
  • Race, Gender, & Class in Art
  • Formation of the British Academy
  • The Immigrant Artist
  • The British Family in Art
  • Foreign Influences in British Art
  • Imagery of Travel and Exchange

Deadline: September 15th 2016 (Speakers will be informed via email by October 1st, 2016)

Please send an abstract (250 words) and a CV to Miranda Elston, with the email heading “NCMA New Scholarship in British Art History” and your Name, Affiliated Institution, and Paper Title in the email.
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Explore our website (New Scholarship in British Art) for more information about the conference, the North Carolina Museum of Art’s British collections, and the upcoming installation of “History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection.”

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