CALL FOR PAPERS: 13th International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference

The Thirteenth International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference 6-9 June 2019, Trondheim, Norway

HOST: Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
THEME: Natures, Pictures: Cavendish and Early Modern Science, Technology, and Creativity

The society welcomes proposals for 20-minute papers on topics related directly or indirectly to the theme, or on any aspects of Cavendish, her work, her family (including William Cavendish, Jane Cavendish, and Elizabeth Cavendish) and her contemporaries, influences, and responses to her work. In particular, we invite panel proposals on the work of Anne Conway and other early modern women scientists and philosophers.

Papers may explore, but are not limited to, the following disciplines:

• art history
• social history
• book history
• digital humanities
• the history of science
• political theory
• literature
• ecocriticism
• gender studies
• philosophy
• translation studies
• pedagogical approaches

The 2019 conference will feature invited speaker Siri Hustvedt, author of The Blazing World (2014):

Siri Hustvedt is the author of a book of poems, four collections of essays, six novels, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Her most recent novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction 2014. Hustvedt has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.


Abstracts of 150 to 200 words should be emailed to Lara Dodds (LDodds@english.mssate.edu) and Lisa Walters (walterl@hope.ac.uk) together with a brief CV by December 1st, 2018.

For more information, or to register for the conference, please visit the website of the Margaret Cavendish Society

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Second Annual Early Modern Women Writers' Colloquium (2018)

At the 6th Annual Othello's Island Conference 2018
Centre for Visual Arts and Research, Nicosia, Cyprus
25 to 27 March 2018

Keynote lecture by: Professor David Norbrook

Full information at www.othellosisland.wixsite.com/emww

Lead Convenors: Dr. Stella Achilleos (University of Cyprus) and Professor James Fitzmaurice (Northern Arizona University)

About the Conference: We are very pleased to announce that our keynote speaker at the Second Annual Early Modern Women Writers' Colloquium in 2018 will be Professor David Norbrook, Emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, who will deliver a lecture titled 'Providence and Displacement: Writing Lucy Hutchinson's Life'.

Dedicated to women writers from the period 1500 to 1700 (approximate dates), the Early Modern Women Writers' Colloquium forms a strand within the annual interdisciplinary "Othello's Island" conference on Byzantine, Medieval, and Renaissance studies. The strand was held informally at the fourth Othello's Island conference in 2015, and became a formal feature in 2016 at the fifth Othello's Island in 2016. This developing tradition continues at the sixth Othello's Island Conference in 2018, where we will again welcome papers on women writers in all languages of the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on the writers Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, Aphra Behn, and their contemporaries. The strand includes papers on women writers themselves, but also associated topics, such as the representation of women and women writers in work by male writers of the period, women publishers, and also the popular round table discussion, held outside under the olive trees, as a true academia, in the courtyard garden at CVAR.

If you would like to submit a paper to the Early Modern Women Writers strand of Othello's Island, please follow the instructions below. If you have any questions, please do contact us. Participants in the Early Modern Women Writers strand can, of course, attend all the other papers and events of the Othello's Island Conference, and we encourage participants to do so. The Early Modern Women Writers strand is held in association with the International Margaret Cavendish Society.

Full Papers (20 minutes plus questions)
If you are interested in giving a talk at the conference please submit a proposal for a paper. Standard papers are 20 minutes long, followed by 5 or 10 minutes for questions. Proposals for papers should comprise a cover sheet showing:

Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name
Your institutional affiliation (if any)
Your postal address, email address and telephone number
The title of your proposed paper

With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 300 words and a copy of your CV/resume to info@othellosisland.org with the subject line EMWW 2018.

All papers must be delivered in English and in person by the author of the paper. We cannot accommodate speakers wishing to present using Skype (or similar), or proxy presentations.

Deadline for submissions: 22 December 2017.

Please visit our website at www.tiny.cc/emww2018 before submitting your proposal.

Cavendish and Hutchinson: Spring 2017 Folger Seminar

In many ways Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) and Lucy Hutchinson (1620-81) make strange bedfellows. One was a royalist and one a republican; one largely indifferent to religion and the other a devoted Calvinist; one an aggressive circulator of her work in print and the other largely committed to scribal publication. Yet they also had a surprising amount in common: both were actively involved in the central political conflicts of their time; both wrote widely printed and widely admired vindicatory accounts of their husbands‚ political and military lives; both lived on large, redoubtable, and profoundly compromised estates in the north; both were actively interested in natural science; both were astonishingly erudite and prolific.

This seminar seeks to examine what they shared as much as what divided them, and takes as its premise that Cavendish and Hutchinson were the complex heirs of what is often called "politically active" humanism. Participants will discuss many aspects of their work, including the books they read as well as the histories and other works they wrote, and the local, as well as national, contexts in which they undertook this work. 

Director: Julie Crawford is Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and Chair of Literature Humanities at Columbia University. She works on topics ranging from the history of sexuality to the history of reading, and is the author of two books, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (2005) and Mediatrix: Women, Politics, and Literary Production in Early Modern England (2014). She is currently completing a book entitled Margaret Cavendish's Political Career. 

Schedule: Friday afternoons, 1:00 - 4:30 p.m., February 3 through April 21, 2017 (10 weeks), excluding March 31 and April 7. 

Apply: September 6, 2016 for admission and grants-in-aid for Folger consortium affiliates; January 17, 2017 for admission only. 

Please visit this link for more information on how to apply:

http://www.folger.edu/2016-2017-institute-scholarly-programs#Cavendish-and-Hutchinson