Shakespeare and the Body Politic Symposium

Research Symposium: “Shakespeare and the Body Politic”
Toowong Rowing Club, 37 Keith St, St Lucia
28 November, 2016 ( 9:00am-5:00pm)

Convened by Dr Karin Sellberg (University of Queensland) and Dr Cathy Curtis (University of Queensland)

Presented by the UQ Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800).

Free event. RSVP here

Bringing together expertise in the fields of the history of political thought, the history of medicine, gender studies, and literary criticism, this cross-disciplinary symposium will reconsider conceptions of the “body politic” in Shakespeare and other early modern authors.


Cathy Curtis is a Honorary Senior Fellow in the UQ School of International Studies and Political Science. She is completing a book entitled Thomas More, Public Offices, and the Ideal Commonwealth, and researches in the areas of early modern political and religious thought, international history, and literature. She has published on Shakespeare, Juan Luis Vives, Thomas More, and Richard Pace, and on methodology and rhetoric.

Karin Sellberg is a Postdoctoral Fellow in UQ’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. She is a literary scholar and cultural theorist, with a specific interest in early modern medicine and discourses of gender and embodiment. She recently published an edited collection entitled Corporeality and Culture: Bodies in Movement (Ashgate, 2015) and has a forthcoming monograph entitled His/Herstories: The Textual Makings of Transgender Bodies (Ashgate, 2016).