Embodiment and New Materialism in Premodern Literature and Culture (1350-1700)
Lancaster University and The Storey
25–26 February, 2017

Conference Website

‘Say I am transform’d, who shall enjoy the Lease?’

New Materialist approaches to premodern literature and culture offer exciting avenues of scholastic engagement through refocussing debates around materiality and exploring what lies beyond the material. By emphasising a departure from conventional textual analysis and searching ‘not for the objectivity of things in themselves but for an objectivity of actualisation and realisation’ (Van der Tuin & Dolphijn, 2010), New Materialism provides a vocabulary and framework for approaching texts which have previously been marginalised. Thomas Tomkis’s comedy Albumazar (c.1615) is such an example of a periphery text, and stages moments where the material self becomes subject to doubt, transformation and ontological uncertainty.

This conference aims to bring together scholars from different disciplines including philosophy, literature, history and cultural studies, and will offer a unique space to explore the potentialities of New Materialist approaches to premodern literature and culture. In addition to a range of papers, the conference will also feature a performance workshop on Albumazar with The Rose Company in Lancaster Castle, and will end with a roundtable to push the boundaries of the conference further. We are also excited to announce that our confirmed plenary speaker is Professor Lisa Hopkins (Sheffield Hallam). The conference is funded through the NWCDTP.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers on a variety of texts and approaches to the premodern period (c. 1350-1700). We particularly welcome papers that begin to engage with New Materialism, and proposals from early-career scholars and current postgraduates. Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

• Juridical and political theory
• The state of the individual
• The body and phenomenology
• Textual (im)materialisms
• Performance as research practice
• Biopolitics and sovereignty
• Spaces and surfaces of the stage
• Object-led ontology and ‘thing theory’
• Transformation, magic and liminality

Please send abstracts of 250 words with a short biography to the conference organisers at: premodernnewmaterialisms@gmail.com.

The closing date for submissions is Friday 18 November, 2016.

Registration is free. Register by 3 February, 2016.

2017 Shakespearean Theatre Conference
“Shakespeare 401: What’s Next?”
University of Waterloo, Stratford
June 22-24, 2017

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, full sessions, and workshops for the second Shakespearean Theatre Conference, to be held June 22-24, 2017. All approaches to Tudor-Stuart drama and its afterlives are welcome. In the wake of the Shakespeare quatercentenary, we especially encourage papers that think broadly and creatively about the future of this drama. How can old plays best speak to the diversity of contemporary identities? What new critical and creative directions seem particularly promising? Which established practices remained indispensable? What — or who — is due for a revival?

Plenary speakers:

• Sarah Beckwith (Duke University)
• Martha Henry (Stratford Festival)
• Peter Holland (University of Notre Dame)
• Julia Reinhard Lupton (University of California, Irvine)

The conference is a joint venture of the University of Waterloo and the Stratford Festival, and will bring together scholars and practitioners to talk about how performance influences scholarship and vice versa. Paper sessions will be held at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford campus, with plays and special events hosted by the Stratford Festival. The 2017 season at Stratford will include productions of Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, The Changeling, Tartuffe, The School for Scandal, and The Bakkhai.

Please send proposals to Shakespeare@uwaterloo.ca by January 31, 2017.

Gender, Places, Spaces, Thresholds
Canterbury Christ Church University
12–15 January, 2017

Keynote Speakers:

• Anthony Bale
• Leonie Hicks
• Sheila Sweetinburgh

This is a Call for Papers for a three-day conference on the theme of ‘Gender and Place, Space, and Liminalities’ hosted by the long-running Gender and Medieval Studies Conference Series. This year our venue is Canterbury Christ Church University which is on the site of St Augustine’s Abbey (founded in 613) close to Canterbury Cathedral.

We are looking for papers that explore the relationships between gender and medieval geographical, cultural, social, spatial, and imagined locations – as well as those which explore aspects of gender and liminalities. In viewing the materiality of place and space through the lens of gender, we wish to encourage both cross- and trans-disciplinary discourses concerning how gender is rendered stable and unstable via networks, objects (relics for example), individuals, communities, and exchanges in the Middle Ages. Proposals are now being accepted for 20 minute papers and 90 minute panel sessions. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

• Gender and the politics of medieval architectural spaces
• Methodologies and meanings of gender and liminalities
• Gendered networks
• Queer spaces
• Thresholds, boundary-breaking and boundary-stepping
• Materiality of sites and gender
• Questioning gender roles in places of production, commerce, shopping, and patronage
• Gendered and transgendered liminal spaces in medieval books as objects and as literature
• The role of space and place in gendered activities and behaviours
• Gendering in medieval performance, music, drama, rituals, pilgrimage, and processions
• Gendered network
• Places of crime and punishment

The conference will employ a range of formats: three keynote lectures, a practitioner-led drama workshop, round-tables, and panel sessions. There will be opportunities to explore Canterbury’s unique standing archaeology and attend Cathedral Evensong (the modern equivalent of the medieval monastic office of Compline).

Papers from postgraduate and early career scholars are welcome and reduced conference rates are available. We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology and drama. The conference is supported by a small travel fund, the Kate Westoby Fund. Students and unwaged scholars are invited to apply to the fund up to one month after they have attended the conference. The fund can only pay UK travel expenses. Available funds are limited and divided between all applicants and it is often not possible to pay claims in full. Because of prohibitive bank charges on international payments, claims can only be paid into UK bank accounts. For further inquiries about the fund please contact the treasurer Dr Isabel Davis (i.davis@bbk.ac.uk).

Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Diane Heath at diane.heath@canterbury.ac.uk by 7 September, 2016. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study (if applicable). Further details will be available on the conference website.

Habitual Behaviour in Early Modern Europe
Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield
1–2 June, 2017

Conference Website

‘Habit, n: A settled disposition or tendency to act in a certain way, esp. one acquired by frequent repetition of the same act until it becomes almost or quite involuntary.’
Oxford English Dictionary

‘Habit is Motion made more easy and ready by Custom.’
Thomas Hobbes, 1656, Elements Philos

What habits, practices, or routines, made up day-to-day life in Europe between 1500-1750? At what point was habitual behaviour, such as excessive drinking, considered problematic? And how did ideas about habitual practice fit into early modern concepts of body and self?

This two-day interdisciplinary conference aims to draw together scholars working on material culture, digital humanities, medicine, consumption, daily routine, practice, theory, and more, and invites them to consider their research under the heading of ‘habit’. We welcome papers on habitual behaviour, customs and practices, and daily routines, whether mealtimes or medicine, venery or vinosity.

Keynote speakers: Professor Steven Shapin (Harvard University) and Dr Sasha Handley (University of Manchester), both speaking about their forthcoming publications.

Please submit abstracts of 250 words for 20 minute papers, accompanied by a short speaker biography. We accept proposals for panels of 3 papers, under a session title. Submissions welcome from postgraduate research students as well as established scholars.

Please send abstracts to earlymodernhabits@gmail.com no later than Wednesday 16 November, 2016.

Medical Practice in Early Modern Britain in Comparative Perspective
University of Exeter (UK)
4-6 September, 2017

Papers are invited for an international conference to be held at the University of Exeter (UK) on 4-6 September 2017, funded by the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for the project ‘The Medical World of Early Modern England, Wales and Ireland 1500-1715’ led by Professor Jonathan Barry and Dr Peter Elmer at Exeter (see the project website at http://practitioners.exeter.ac.uk).

This conference will consider the outputs from this project, in particular the database which has been created of more than 30,000 medical practitioners operating in the period, and the opportunities this offers for new research in the field. It will also consider comparative perspectives on early modern Britain, both spatially and temporally, and so welcomes papers from colleagues working on medical practice in other parts of Europe or its colonies, on other cultures (Islamic, Indian, Chinese etc) and also on the periods either side of our 1500-1715 focus, so that we can place the findings of the project in the widest possible context.

Proposals for panels will be welcomed, but so will individual paper proposals, including from research students (for whom bursaries covering the cost of attendance will be available). Those attending will be given exclusive access in advance of the conference to research findings from the project database, which they will be encouraged to consider in their contributions, which we expect to be pre-circulated to encourage the highest level of focused debate during the conference. Senior scholars willing to act as commentators on papers are also encouraged to express an interest in this role, as well as in offering their own papers.

Major themes for consideration include the following:

• Continuity and change in the character and scope of medical practice, including the impact of war and imperial expansion on pre-existing medical culture, the influence of new ideas and/or persistence of established approaches across the period, as well as the significance of attempts at regulation.
• Trends in education, training and career patterns, encompassing hereditary succession, patronage, apprenticeship and university study, and levels of provision in different regions and types of settlement.
• The roles played by women, in popular and domestic medicine and beyond, and by other alternatives to orthodox male practitioners, and by the growth of new methods fro the production and sale of medicines.
• The place of medicine within processes of social and cultural change in the British Isles more generally, and the wider parts played by medical practitioners in scientific, intellectual, political, military, confessional and other spheres.
• The opportunities for comparative research across national boundaries, both in tracing the movement of medical practitioners and in comparing levels and types of medical provision in different cultures.

If you are interested in participating please send an email to Professor Jonathan Barry at J.Barry@exeter.ac.uk, with an abstract of c. 200 words indicating the proposed topic of any paper or panel, preferably by 15 September, 2016.