Daily Archives: 28 October 2016

Professor Carolyne Larrington, Public Lecture @ The University of Adelaide

“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Tuesday 8 November, 2016
Time: 6:15pm–7:15pm
Venue: Napier Lecture Theatre 102, The University of Adelaide
Enquiries: Jacquie Bennett (jacquie.bennett@adelaide.edu.au)
Registration: Online here.

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.

Offensive Shakespeare Conference – Call For Papers

Offensive Shakespeare Conference
Northumbria University
24 May, 2017

Sponsored by The British Shakespeare Association

Keynote Speakers:

  • Professor Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire)
  • Dr Peter Kirwan (Nottingham University)


Outrage as BBC bosses “use Shakespeare to push pro-immigration agenda”

This was a headline in The Daily Express on 25 April 2016, after the BBC included what has become known as the ‘Immigration Speech’ from Sir Thomas More in a programme celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. From Thomas and Henrietta Bowdler expurgating ‘inappropriate’ passages from their Family Shakespeare, through Jewish campaigns in the early 20th Century to remove The Merchant of Venice from American classrooms, to the recent ‘outrage’, people have been offended by what Shakespeare wrote or by the uses to which others have put him. But what is it that offends us and how do we deal with it? What makes Shakespeare and his appropriations such a sensitive issue?

This conference seeks to answer these questions by examining the following and related areas:

  • Case studies of individuals or groups taking offence at Shakespeare’s texts.
  • Examples of Shakespearean rewritings aimed to address ‘offensive’ issues.
  • Shakespearean plays or performances which have been banned, censored, or campaigned against.
  • Debates around including or removing Shakespeare from educational curricula, and/or making the study of his work mandatory.
  • Appropriations of Shakespeare by anti-democratic, repressive movements (e.g. ‘Nazi Shakespeare’, ‘racist Shakespeare’).
  • Iconoclastic uses of Shakespeare, going against established orthodoxies.
  • Adaptations of Shakespeare into popular genres or idioms (charges of ‘dumbing down’).
  • The ways to tackle plays which include passages offensive to current moral, ethical, or political sensibilities (e.g. The Taming of the Shrew, Othello, The Merchant of Venice).
  • Issues surrounding studying and teaching Shakespeare without giving offence in the era of ‘trigger warnings’.
  • Uses of Shakespeare in propaganda, inflammatory speeches and/or heated political debates.
  • Authorship controversies.

Online Booking is now available: https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/onlinepayments/fadsscnf20/?view=page3

  • Full Delegate Fee: £30
  • Postgraduate Student and Unwaged Fee: £15

Thanks to a generous grant from the British Shakespeare Association, we are able to offer two bursaries of £75 each to assist postgraduate students with the costs of attending the conference. Please, email the organisers if you would like to apply for one of these.

If you would like to present a paper, please send a 200-word abstract to Monika Smialkowska (monika.smialkowska@northumbria.ac.uk) or Edmund King (edmund.king@open.ac.uk) by 15 February, 2017.