CALL FOR PAPERS: Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies: Complaints and Grievances, 1500-1750

Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading

10-11 July 2017

The theme of the 2017 Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies is ‘Complaints and Grievances, 1500-1750’. Proposals for individual papers and panels are invited on research relating to this theme in any area of early modern literature and theatre, history, politics, art, music and culture across Britain, Europe and the wider world. Suggested topics for papers and panels include, although are not confined to:

Literary Complaint:

• Material cultures of complaint: production, transmission, reception
• Erotic complaint: narratives of abandonment, grief and loss
• Early modern women writers and complaint
• Voicing others: complaint as prosopopoeia
• Religious complaint: satire and exhortation

Medical Complaints and Grievances:

• Experiencing or witnessing suffering and pain
• Learning to live with disease and disability
• Painful or pain-relieving medical/surgical treatments
• Sensory aspects of medicine and surgery: sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and tactile sensations
• Complaints about medical practitioners, nurses, or patients

Political and Religious Complaints and Grievances:

• Petitioning and pamphleteering
• From grievances to politics: the personal, the local, and the national
• The popular and elite politics of complaint
• Complaint, crime and the law
• Travellers’ complaints: religion, politics and the lived experience of travel

Each panel proposal (minimum of two and a maximum of four papers) should contain the names of the session chair, the names and affiliations of the speakers and 200 word abstracts of the papers together with email contacts for all participants. A proposal for an individual paper (20 minutes) should consist of a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.

Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email by Friday 16 December 2016, with the subject heading ‘2017 Conference’, to the Conference Committee, emrc@reading.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS: Rowlandson and After: Rethinking Graphic Satire

The Paul Mellon Centre and The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 22 January 2016

Proposals due by 25 September 2015   |   A collaborative study-day organised by Royal Collection Trust and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The prints, drawings and watercolours of Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), which are to be showcased in the forthcoming exhibition High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, have long been recognised as offering a remarkable combination of satirical invention and artistic brilliance.This study-day, which has been co-organised by Royal Collection Trust and The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, uses Rowlandson’s work as the starting-point for a broader art-historical examination of British graphic satire—whether drawn, engraved or painted on paper—between the later years of the 18th century and today.

Rowlandson and After is inspired by the recent upsurge in ambitious scholarship on the pictorial satires of the Georgian and Victorian periods, and by a desire to explore graphic satire’s long-standing identity as a fluid, hybrid form that seems always to straddle different worlds—art, journalism, literature and politics—rather than belonging fully to any one particular cultural sphere. Accordingly, submissions are invited that engage with examples of graphic satire dating from any point across the last 250 years and that address the following questions, among others:

• What can Rowlandson’s work tell us about the broader workings of graphic satire in his period, and how has it helped shape the practice of his successors?
• What have been the distinctive formal, iconographic, technical and textual characteristics of this particular strand of artistic practice at different historical moments, and how and why have they changed?
• What is the relationship between graphic satire and other forms of visual art?
• What kind of artistic persona is associated with this form of practice—how has the figure of the satirist been defined and imagined?
• How has the history of graphic satire been shaped by developments in print technology?
• What is the relationship between graphic satire and journalism; or graphic satire and literature; or graphic satire and political discourse?
• How might histories of graphic satire be related to histories of British humour?
• How does graphic satire operate today—and how might contemporary examples of the genre be compared to the work of artists such as Rowlandson?

The day will be split between The Paul Mellon Centre and The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. Please send proposals (of no more than 250 words) for 20-minute papers to Ella Fleming, Events Manager, events@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk by 5.00pm on 25 September 2015.

High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson
The Queen's Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh, 22 November 2013 — 2 March 2014
The Holburne Museum, Bath, 27 September 2014 — 8 February 2015
The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London, 13 November 2015 — 14 February 2016

Stuart Successions

An Interdisciplinary Colloquium to be held at Jesus College, Oxford, 27-28 September 2013

Moments of royal and protectoral succession in the early-modern period generated huge quantities of writing across a range of forms: from panegyric to polemic, sermon to satire, history to drama. This two-day colloquium, organised as part of the AHRC-funded ‘Stuart Successions Project’, will bring together speakers from Europe and the US to investigate how this body of succession literature reflected on unpredictable transitions of power, discussed the political values of the nation, and shaped contending perceptions of key political personalities in 17th-century Britain.

For further information and registration please visit:http://stuarts.exeter.ac.uk/events/stuart-successions/