CALL FOR PAPERS: The Common Denominator 2014

Focusing on the wider British context, the aim of this three-day interdisciplinary conference (20-22 March 2014) is to bring together researchers from diverse academic and professional disciplines. By establishing mathematics as the common denominator between the individual panels, the links between mathematics and Cultural Studies are brought into focus. The conference will explore the reception and representation of mathematical concepts in Britain and the Commonwealth across such diverse fields as popular culture, literature and linguistics.

We invite proposals of 250-300 words for papers of 20 minutes length from postgraduate students and established scholars. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to the following fields:

• Philosophy: mathematics in history, philosophy and religion, e.g. John Dee
• Politics: mathematics and gender, the British Empire, and Bletchley Park
• Popular Culture: mathematics and their influence on everyday life, recreational mathematics
• The Arts: representations of mathematics in film, the Fine Arts, music, architecture, the aesthetics of mathematical symbols
• Literature: representations of mathematics and mathematicians in literature, mathematical imagery

Proposals should include up to four keywords and indicate a critical approach or theoretical framework. Owing to the international character, the conference language is English. Please e-mail your submissions either as a word document or PDF by 15 July 2013 to the following address:

denominator@uni-leipzig.de

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organisers, Felicitas Hanke, Franziska Kohlt, Rita Singer, and Kati Voigt.

History of the Book Seminar: Paper, Pen and Ink: Manuscript Cultures in Early Modern England

Carlo Bajetta will be talking about the editing of early modern manuscripts at the next seminar in this year's Open University Book History Research Group series. The seminar will take place on Monday 17 March at Senate House in London, at 5.30pm. There is no need to book in advance, and everyone is welcome. More details below.

The topic for the series as a whole, which is organised in association with the Institute of English Studies, is Paper, Pen and Ink: Manuscript Cultures in Early Modern England. The complete programme can be downloaded at http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/book-history/sites/www.open.ac.uk.arts.research.book-history/files/files/ecms/arts-bh-pr/web-content/paper-pen-ink.pdf

For further information, please contact the series organiser, Jonathan Gibson

Monday 17 March 2014: University of London, Senate House, Room 234 (2nd floor), 5.30-7.00pm

Carlo Bajetta (Università della Valle d’Aosta)
‘Making Sense of Chaos: Analysing Early Modern Manuscripts’

This talk will reconsider analytical and editorial methodology in early modern manuscript studies. After a look at the age-old, but still crucial, problem of how best to deal with the patent mistakes many early modern manuscript texts present (or seem to present), it will suggest a variety of ways in which a modern researcher can get the best out of the analysis of handwritten texts. By means of an examination of specific cases, including some of Elizabeth I’s Italian letters, I will illustrate the advantages of a case-to-case, evidence-based, approach to both editorial emendation and to the analysis of the material features of manuscript volumes.

Professor Carlo M. Bajetta is Professor of English at Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italy. His books include Sir Walter Ralegh (1998), Whole Volumes in Folio (2000), Some Notes on Printing and Publishing in Renaissance Venice (2000), and, with Luisa Camaiora, Shakespearean Readings: Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley (2004). He has edited R.B. McKerrow’s 1928 Sandars Lectures on authors’ manuscripts (Studies in Bibliography, 2000), Wordsworth’s, Shelley’s and Reynold’s 1819 Peter Bell poems (2005) and, in a bilingual edition, Thomas More’s English Poems. He has also published research on the fiction, literary criticism and letters of C.S. Lewis and is currently engaged on an edition of the Italian letters of Elizabeth I.

Popular Culture

An Early Modern Studies in Scotland Seminar hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies, Aberdeen

A cross-disciplinary event examining the meanings of popular culture in the early modern period featuring scholars from Literature, History, Visual Culture, and Renaissance Animal Studies.

Friday 14th March 2014,
Meeting Room 1, Sir Duncan Rice Library (7th floor), University of Aberdeen. 12.30-5 pm.

Programme
12.30 - 1: Tea & Coffee

1-2.30 Session 1
Prof. Andrew Hadfield (Sussex): 'A Red Herring: Fishing, God and Polemic in Elizabethan England'
This talk will explore the significance of a strange herring caught off the coast of Norway in 1587, the pamphlets that the fish inspired and the ways in which the discovery contributed to late Elizabethan popular culture. I will also talk about the English fishing industry and its significance in the period, and the representation of herring in Nashe's Lenten Stuffe (1599).

Prof. Beat Kümin (Warwick): ‘The Return of the Elites? Observations on Recent Trends in Historical Research’
The early modern period is often associated with a growing divergence between the "little" and "great tradition". Some recent historical work, however, points to continued if not increasing interaction between "popular" and "elite" culture. This paper will reassess the issue with reference to case studies from the religious, political and convivial spheres.

2.30-3 pm. Refreshments

3-4.30 Session 2
Prof. Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) ‘Farmyard Choreographies in Early Modern England: Or, Dances with Invisible Cows in Popular Culture’
This paper will focus on the difficulties in tracking one of the most important and prosaic interactions in early modern England: that of people with their livestock. Dance manuals, ballads, and legal documents will help to address the nature of, and absence from the record of these relationships, and will raise questions about what we can say about early modern households and their ubiquitous, invisible, animals.

Dr Angela McShane (Royal College of Art/Victoria & Albert Museum) 'Wooden Idols: Viewing the Monarchy from the Street?'
This paper offers a riposte to long-held scholarly misconceptions of illustrated ballad woodcuts as ‘useless’, ‘irrelevant’, ‘merely generic’ or even ‘preposterous’. Instead, it applies what Baxendall has called a ‘period eye’ to the ‘bastard art’ of the woodcut (as James Knapp has phrased it), and locates the illustrated ballad in a contemporary cultural context. Adopting this more historically situated stance, it explores how the interactive images and texts of political ballads envisioned and imagined the governors and governed of seventeenth century England, and how ballad woodcuts, especially (though not exclusively) those of the Stuart monarchy, could serve both textually transformative and politically performative functions.

Orientation and Practical Information:

There are a limited number of postgraduate travel bursaries available. To apply for one, please contact the organiser.

Travel information, including campus maps, are available at: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/maps/travel.php
For more information please contact the organiser Andrew Gordon

Dr Andrew Gordon
Co-Director, Centre for Early Modern Studies
English Department,
School of Language & Literature
Taylor Building
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3UB

Vacancy: Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature

UCL Dept     English Language & Literature, Ref:1404596
Grade            7
Hours            Full Time
Salary           (inclusive of London allowance)
                     £36,424 - £39,523 per annum

Duties and Responsibilities

The person appointed will be expected to teach on courses covering the Renaissance English period at undergraduate level, including the compulsory Shakespeare course and the Renaissance option course, and to contribute to the MA Shakespeare in History and the Early Modern Studies MA. In addition, the successful candidate will give one-to-one tutorials to undergraduate students and undertake the normal duties of teaching administration. It is expected that the successful candidate will make a full contribution to maintaining and enhancing the Department's research profile through publication at international standard and through the supervision of research degree students.

Key Requirements

Candidates must have a PhD. A proven research record in Renaissance literature or Shakespeare is essential, as is a proven teaching record in the period at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. An ability to teach selectively outside the period is also required. Candidates must also demonstrate research achievement at a high level appropriate to their stage of career.

Further Details

A job description and person specification can be accessed at the bottom of this page.

If you have any enquiries regarding the vacancy or the application process, please contact the Departmental Administrator, Mr. Stephen Cadywold, s.cadywold@ucl.ac.uk.

Further information about the Department is available on www.ucl.ac.uk/english.
UCL Taking Action for Equality

Closing Date         24 Mar 2014, 12 pm.
Interview date       Week commencing 28 April 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shadows of the Mind: Discourses of Superstition and Nature in the Early Modern World

Special Issue of Preternature

Extended Deadline: 1 March 2014

The advent of novel approaches in early modernity to understanding and mastering nature—from natural magic, to natural history, to natural philosophy—motivated discourse about how best to distill true knowledge (vera scientia) from an increasing body of claims about the natural world. The need to develop a language with which to frame this discourse naturally led magicians, alchemists, historians, and philosophers to turn to that facet of society which already possessed the terminology necessary to deal with epistemological deviation; namely, the Christian religion. The adoption of traditionally religious terms such as “idol,” “vanity,” and “superstition” by investigators of nature afforded the opportunity to differentiate claims to true knowledge, at the same time as it facilitated virulent attacks between rival cultures of knowledge. Beyond the merely rhetorical, though, this process of adoption began to shift the established semantic landscape of early modernity. The very act of employing such religious terms within the context of the inquiry into nature infused them with new meanings; meanings which contributed, in turn, to the myriad new ways in which Europeans began to view both themselves and the world around them. Of particular importance was the notion of “superstition” (superstitio). More than many other terms, the meaning of superstition began an extensive transformation from its traditional sense of incorrect beliefs within the sphere of religion to incorrect beliefs within the sphere of nature. Discourses of superstition entered into numerous debates about the study of nature: they contributed to the development of definable relationships between the natural and the preternatural, for instance; helped to map new models of the mind and legitimize the practitioners of new, naturalistic vocations; and underwrote emergent ideas of “progress,” “advancement,” and “enlightenment” in tandem with beliefs about the nature of the (preter)natural.

This special issue of Preternature seeks papers which address shifting conceptualizations of “superstition” as it relates to both the natural and preternatural in the early modern period. Papers should examine the ways in which various discourses of superstition contributed to the emergence of new cultures of natural and preternatural knowledge, thereby helping to shape the early modern world.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• The various ways in which the study of nature came to be conceived as a remedy for the apparent spread of superstition in the post-Reformation period.
• How the concept of superstition was altered by emerging definitions of “true” and “false” knowledge with regards to the natural world.
• How the idea of superstition contributed to the creation of a definable relationship between the natural world and the preternatural.
• Whether new ways of thinking about nature ultimately led to the trivialization of superstition and superstitions.
• The use of discourses of superstition in defense of natural magic, demonology, witchcraft, and the occult, etc.
• The relationship between ideas of “progress,” “advancement,” “enlightenment” and superstition in early modern cultures of knowledge.

Final papers will be due 1 March 2014. Submissions should be made through the journal's online submission module at: www.preternature.org.

Contributions should usually be 8,000 - 12,000 words, including all documentation and critical apparatus. However, exceptions can be made in certain circumstances. If accepted for publication, manuscripts will be required to adhere to the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition (style 1, employing footnotes).

For more information, please contact James A.T. Lancaster (james.lancaster@postgrad.sas.ac.uk).

James A.T. Lancaster
H.B.A. (Toronto), M.A. (Toronto), PhD Candidate (Warburg)
The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Studies
University of London
james.lancaster@postgrad.sas.ac.uk