Lecture and Silent Film Screening: “Shakespeare’s Romans”
Professor Alastair Blanshard (University of Queensland) and Dr Shushma Malik (University of Queensland)

Date: Sunday, 5 June 2016
Time: 2:00pm-4:00pm
Venue: Room E109, Forgan Smith Building (Building 1), UQ St Lucia
RSVP: Free, RSVP essential: HERE

Julius Caesar, Marc Antony, Cleopatra: all owe their undying fame in no small part to the plays of William Shakespeare. In this public lecture, Professor Alastair Blanshard and Dr Shushma Malik explore this legacy through a discussion of the plays and their sources, as well as analysis of the influence of Shakespeare on cinema and drama. A highlight of the event will be the screening of a couple of silent films based on Shakespeare’s Roman plays, with live musical accompaniment.

Alastair Blanshard is Paul Eliadis Chair of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Queensland. He writes on the social and cultural history of ancient Athens, on Greek gender and sexuality, on epigraphy, and on the classical tradition more generally. His books include: Hercules: A Heroic Life (Granta, 2005); Sex: Vice and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Blackwell, 2010); and, with Kim Shahabudin, Classics on Screen: Ancient Greece and Rome in Film (Bloomsbury, 2011).

Dr Shushma Malik is a historian who works on the reception of the Roman Emperor Nero. She is currently completing a book on the figure of Nero as Anti-Christ, as well as researching the impact of Roman imperial figures on nineteenth-century decadent literature.

“The Arrival, Form and Meaning of the Early Modern Grotesque in England,” Professor Liam Semler

Date: When Tuesday 24 May
Time: 5:00pm-6:30pm
Venue: Cinema 327, Robert Webster Building, UNSW Kensington.
Full info: https://sam.arts.unsw.edu.au/events/sam-seminar-early-modern-grotesque-in-england

This seminar is based on Professor Semler’s introduction to his book manuscript, The Early Modern Grotesque: English Sources and Documents, 1500-1700—a collection of 287 sources and documents from English Renaissance texts that discuss or refer to the grotesque.

The sourcebook is arranged chronologically and the sources are extensively annotated and cross-referenced. This dataset gives an expansive insight into the discourse of the grotesque from 1500-1700 in England. An aim of the collection is to help widen the scholarly discussion of the early modern English grotesque beyond the usual parameters which tend to prioritise the theories of Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin.

The primary terms for the grotesque that are traced through two centuries of English writing are ‘grottesco/grotesque/grotesque-work’ and ‘antic/antique/antique-work.’ These are explored in relation to other key terms and English visual imagery. It is hoped that a richer sense of the specifically English grotesque from 1500-1700 will emerge from this analysis of the textual archive.

Liam Semler is Professor of Early Modern Literature at the University of Sydney.

His main research interests are: Shakespeare, literary studies and modern pedagogical systems; early modern literature and the visual arts; the classical inheritance in the Renaissance; and women’s writing from 1500-1700. His current active research projects are on: the construction of the neoliberal student; Margaret Cavendish’s early philosophical works; and the terminology of the ‘grotesque’ in England from 1500-1700.

He is author of The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (1998) and Teaching Shakespeare and Marlowe: Learning versus the System (2013); editor of the early modern puritan text, Eliza’s Babes; or the Virgin’s Offering (1652) (2001); and co-editor of Storytelling: Critical and Creative Approaches (2013), Teaching Shakespeare beyond the Centre: Australasian Perspectives (2013), What is the Human? Australian Voices from the Humanities (2012), and Word and Self Estranged in English Texts from 1550-1660 (2010).

“Idolaters, Warriors and Lovers: Muslims in Medieval Swedish and Danish Texts,” Dr Jonathan Adams

Date: Thursday 19 May 2016
Time: 1:00-2:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Enquiries: craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au

Between the Viking Age and the Middle Ages, there was a noticeable change in relations between Scandinavia and the Islamic world – the sources point to a shift from travel and trade to hostility and war. Muslims did not settle in the North until the eighteenth century, and during the Middle Ages there was little contact between Scandinavians and ‘real’ Muslims. So how did Danes and Swedes imagine and describe this Other? Is there anything unusual or unexpected about the portrayal of Muslims? How does this image compare to that of the other great religious opponent, the Jew? By investigating East Norse devotional texts, travel literature, saints’ lives, romances and accounts of Ottoman warfare, this paper aims to draw out some of the major themes in medieval Scandinavian descriptions of Muslims and Islam.

Jonathan Adams is docent and research fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in the Department of Scandinavian Languages, Uppsala University, Sweden

PMRG/CMEMS Public Lecture: “‘Ponder whether it be not changed for the better’: Erasmus’ Revolutionary New Testament at 500”, by Kirk Essary (UWA)

Date: Wednesday 18 May, 2016
Time: 6:30pm-7:30pm
Venue: Arts Lecture Room 6, G.62, ground floor, Arts Building), UWA
RSVP: This is a free event. RSVPs aren’t required – just come along!

In 1516, Erasmus published the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament, along with a fresh Latin translation of it on facing pages. Controversy arose immediately, for the very existence of Erasmus’ project called into question the long-standing legitimacy of the Vulgate Latin Bible. For the next twenty years, Erasmus would revise and republish his version, along with an increasingly lengthy set of ‘annotationes’, which consisted of philological and theological comments in defence of his choices as a text-critic and translator. While Erasmus’ Bible was rejected by the Catholic Church, its legacy was secured in the fact that Protestants would very soon come to use it extensively, along with his notes, both for the composition of their own commentaries and as a basis for vernacular translations. This paper is meant to celebrate the quincentenary of Erasmus’ New Testament by considering the significance and method of its production as a Renaissance text, and also the role it played in the religious revolutions of the sixteenth century.

Kirk Essary is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Meanings Program of the Centre at The University of Western Australia under the direction of Yasmin Haskell. He holds an MA in Classics (Texas Tech University, 2008) an MA in Religions of Western Antiquity (Florida State University, 2010), and a PhD in the History of Religions (Florida State University, 2014). His publications have considered Erasmus’ and Calvin’s reception of New Testament texts: on the problem of Christian eloquence in 1 Corinthians; on the radical humility and self-emptying of Christ in Philippians 2; on the problem of Christ’s fear in the Garden of Gethsemane. He has also published on the Calvinist underpinnings of the ‘silence of God’ trope in the novels of Cormac McCarthy.

Professional Development Seminar: “Not Only Musical in Himself…”

Presented by the UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Europe 1100-1800).

Date: Monday, June 13, 2016
Time: 4:30pm, with afternoon tea from 4:00pm
Venue: Room 275, Global Change Institute (Building 20), University of Queensland, St Lucia
Cost: Free event but RSVP essential, uqche@uq.edu.au

Keynote speaker: Professor Tom Bishop (University of Auckland)

Shakespeare used music extensively and expertly to enrich the texture and resonance of his plays. But his work also served as a prompt to later musicians and writers interested in music, not only in the great tradition of Shakespearean operas, but, even more intriguingly, as an impetus for other original developments and departures. In this talk, we will begin with Shakespeare’s own practice, but then explore some of these subsequent responses in the work of later composers such as Haydn, Berlioz, Mendelssohn and poets such as Tennyson and Auden.

This seminar is open to all, and will count towards Continuing Professional Development targets for secondary school teachers of English, Music, and Drama.

Tom Bishop is Professor of English at the University of Auckland, where he teaches literature and drama. He is the author of Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder (Cambridge University Press, 1996); the translator of Ovid’s Amores (Carcanet, 2003); and a general editor of The Shakespearean International Yearbook (Ashgate Press). He is currently working on a book entitled Shakespeare’s Theatre Games.

“Marco Polo’s Tomatoes, or on Cross-Cultural Exchange in Early European Art”, Professor Anne Dunlop

Date: Wednesday, 4 May, 2016
Time: 6:45–7:45pm
Venue: Old Arts Public Lecture Theatre, The University of Melbourne (map)
RSVP: Free event, registration required. Register here.

In the last decades, the question of cross-cultural contact and exchange has emerged as a major field of research in Art History and the humanities in general. This work is driven by the need to understand the early history of our own global moment, but it is also part of a larger and more ambitious project: the attempt to write a global history of art, one that does not privilege Western production at the expense of other cultures. The importance of the project is clear, but there are many competing, and conflicting, ideas about how such a history should be written.

To explore the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches, this lecture will focus on a limit-case: the possibility that renewed contact between Italy and Eurasia after the rise of the Mongol Empire had an impact on European art. On the one hand, it is clear that this was a moment of renewed and intense contact and exchange: Marco Polo travelling to China is only one famous example of a much larger phenomenon. Artists, materials, technologies, and objects travelled across Europe, Africa, and Asia as they had not done in a thousand years. It is also clear that there were fundamental changes in Italian art in the years around 1300. Yet how can we determine cause and effect, given the limited historical evidence that survives? The challenge is to avoid anachronistic interpretation, what will be discussed here as the danger of Marco Polo’s tomatoes.

Anne Dunlop was appointed to the Herald Chair of Fine Arts in the School of Culture and Communication in 2015. Her research and teaching focus on the art of Italy and Europe between about 1300 and 1550, including the role of materials and technology in the making of art, and the relations of Italy and Eurasian in the years after the Mongol Conquests.

“A state of excitement? WA’s heritage of European emotions”, (Professor Susan Broomhall, UWA)

Date: Tuesday 10 May, 2016
Time: 5:45pm – 7:00pm
Venue: The University of Western Australia, Hackett Drive, Crawley, 6009 WA
Booking: Free event. RSVP online here, 08 6488 3858, emotions@uwa.edu.au

Professor Susan Broomhall, from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, examines the long history of emotional contact between our continent’s western edge and Europe, stretching back well before British settlement in 1829. From medieval maps to early exploration, these lands and their peoples have been the subject of curiosity and wonder, greed and envy, fear and anger: a site of European competition far away that has shaped the borders of our state and of profound, sometimes difficult, interactions with local peoples. The heritage of these emotions has continuing impact on the state today, from geographic markers, the location of towns and cities to our cultural institutions and social orientations.

“The Eye Sees Not Itself: Shakespeare and Aristotle on Friendship”, Dr Patrick Gray (Durham University)

Date: Wednesday 11 May, 2016
Time: 4:30–5:30PM
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building, University of Melbourne (map)
More info: sarah.balkin@unimelb.edu.au and (03) 9035 8617

In a conversation in Troilus and Cressida between Ulysses and Achilles, Shakespeare presents a remarkably sophisticated account of the relationship between the self and the other, adumbrating the concept of intersubjective “recognition” (Anerkennung) more commonly associated with Hegel, as well as other, later Continental philosophers such as Sartre, Ricoeur, and Levinas.

The idea that the other, especially, the friend or lover, is a mirror or “glass,” enabling and mediating self-definition, reappears in Julius Caesar, as well as Antony and Cleopatra; even as early as King John. Shakespeare anticipates Hegel here not only because he himself influences Hegel’s thought, but also because both he and Hegel are drawing on a common source, Aristotle’s account of the role of friendship in his moral philosophy.

More specifically, the image of the friend as mirror can be traced to a treatise attributed to Aristotle, the Magna Moralia, now considered of doubtful authenticity, as mediated through influential commentaries on Aristotle’s ethics by Shakespeare’s English contemporary, John Case: the Speculum Moralium Quaestionum (1585) and the Reflexus Speculi Moralis (1596). Case further complicates Aristotle’s original metaphor by emphasizing the eye of the other as providing the most revealing reflection of the self, drawing upon related conceits in Plato’s First Alcibiades and Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations.

Patrick Gray is Lecturer in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. He is the co-editor with John D. Cox of Shakespeare and Renaissance Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2014) and guest editor of a forthcoming special issue of Critical Survey on Shakespeare and war. His essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Critical Survey, Comparative Drama, and Cahiers Shakespeare en devenir. He is currently working on a monograph on shame and guilt in Shakespeare, as well as co-editing a collection of essays on Shakespeare and Montaigne. In April and May 2016, Patrick Gray is Early Career International Research Fellow at the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100-1800.

Lecture and Panel Discussion: “Shakespeare & Co: The Bard and His Peers in the Digital Age”, Professor Hugh Craig (University of Newcastle), with Dr Jennifer Clement (University of Queensland) and Professor Peter Holbrook (University of Queensland)

Date: Wednesday, 11 May 2016
Time: 5:30pm (for a 6pm start)
Venue: F.W. Robinson Reading Room, Fryer Library, Level 4 Duhig Building, University of Queensland (St Lucia campus)
Register: Free. RSVP here

Professor Hugh Craig is Deputy Head of the Faculty of Education and Arts at the University of Newcastle and Director of the University’s new Centre for Twenty-First Century Humanities. His work is based largely on frequency data and has led to several breakthrough findings in regard to Shakespearean works. Using computational techniques he found that Shakespeare was the likely author of a number of passages from The Spanish Tragedy that had previously been attributed to the playwright Ben Jonson. The results are presented in his co-edited book Shakespeare, Computers and the Mystery of Authorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Following a lecture about his work in the digital humanities, Professor Craig will be joined in conversation by Peter Holbrook, Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland, and Dr Jennifer Clement, who teaches the undergraduate course “Introduction to Shakespeare” at UQ.

This event, part of the Friends of the Library program, coincides with the establishment in 2016 of UQ’s Centre for Digital Scholarship, located above the Fryer Library.

Presented by the Fryer Library, University of Queensland.

“The Limits of Tolerance: Arguments For and Against Religious Violence in the High Middle Ages”, Dr Michael Barbezat (UWA)

Date: 11 May, 2016
Time: 6:00-7:00pm
Venue: Fox Lecture Theatre (G.59, Ground Floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia
Register: This is a free event, but registration is required. To register: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/barbezat

Killing your religious opponents in the Middle Ages was neither an easy choice nor unquestioned. Leading intellectuals condemned executions for heresy when they began in Western Europe during the eleventh century, reminding Christians of their duty to reserve such judgment to God. This response, however, did not remain dominant in following centuries, as persecution, sometimes deadly, continued to increase. Contemporaries described this escalation not as the growth of hatred, but rather as the realisation of the very virtues that constituted the basis of Western Christian civilization. In this presentation, Michael Barbezat will argue that medieval calls for divinely sanctioned murder relied heavily upon a discourse of love. He will follow the use of the parable of the wheat and the tares in discussions of the use of deadly force as a response to Christian heresy. At its point of origin, the parable seems like a call to religious tolerance, but this interpretation does not remain stable. As he moves through examples from the third to thirteenth centuries, the role and necessity of violence will expand, until the parable’s earlier interpretation has been turned on its head. Instead of a call to toleration, the parable by the thirteenth century was, in the eyes of some of the most learned commentators, a call to deadly violence. This presentation will conclude with an example from the infamous Albigensian Crusade that illustrates these principles in action, portraying the massacre of hundreds as a necessary, divinely sanctioned act of love.