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: Shakespeare and Cervantes: 1616 - 2016

2016 marks the fourth centennial of the death of the greatest Renaissance writers: William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. Potential contributors are invited to celebrate their global cultural legacy. Submissions might address any related issues including, but certainly not limited to, the following:

• The myth of authorship: Cervantes’s fictitious authorship (Mata, 2008) and the Shakespeare authorship question (Bradbeer and Casson, 2015)
• Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s role in the genealogy of such modern ideas as love and friendship (Donskis, 2008) as well as in the humanist educational revolution;
• The two writers’ concerns overlapping with our understanding of Green politics (Egan, 2006);
• Imitating and imitated: Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the dynamics of literary influence;
• Servants’ resistance (Shin, 2010) in Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ works as a literary solution to the narrative and ideological problem of ineffectual or tyrannical authority;
• Popular historical and political appropriations of Shakespeare and Cervantes as part of a wider popular culture interest and investment in the Renaissance (Semenza, 2010);
• Shakespeare, Cervantes, and the problem of adaptation: the wide variety of guises under which their work circulates;
• Shakespeare’s wife (Greer, 2008), Cervantes’s daughter, and the ‘problematic’ woman (Gay, 1994) in their life and works;
• The roots of political theory and the discourse of politics in the writings of Shakespeare and Cervantes (Cascardi, 2012).

Deadline for article submission: 1 June 2016. We welcome papers in English, Spanish, French, German, and Romanian. Please send the abstracts (ca 200 words), the full paper (up to 7000 words), as well as a brief biographical note (ca 400 words) to the following addresses: lumi_t@yahoo.com, corneliamacsiniuc@yahoo.com

For details regarding style, please visit the following page:http://meridiancritic.usv.ro/index.php?page=instructions-to-authors 

We also welcome book-length studies in the field of literature and linguistics, published in 2015, to be reviewed in our journal. Please send the books to the following address: Meridian critic, Facultatea de Litere şi Ştiinţe ale Comunicării, Universitatea „Ştefan cel Mare” Suceava, Str. Universităţii nr. 13, 720229 Suceava, Romania