29th SEDERI International Conference – Call for Papers

29th International SEDERI Conference

Changing states: ideas of metamorphosis in early modern England University of Alcalá, Guadalajara Campus 9-11 May 2018

We are pleased to announce that the 29th International Conference of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (Sederi) will be held at the University of Alcalá’s campus in Guadalajara (Spain) on 9-11 May 2018. As the English translation (“river of stones”) of our host city’s originally Arabic name (“wād al-ḥaŷarah”) reminds us, linguistic and cultural transfer often entails metamorphosis. In this case, the figuratively dead name regains metaphorical life around its own metamorphic fusion of liquid and solid states. This conference takes as its theme the notion of changing states and the cognate trope of metamorphosis in early modern England. In a period of great political, social, scientific and cultural transformation, a reality in flux was challenging models of stability and permanence, while identity in all ambits of individual and collective life was up for grabs. The conference therefore calls for papers and round tables on ideas of metamorphosis in early modern England and welcomes contributions on the following and other related subjects and issues:

  • Tropes of metamorphosis in scientific, political and literary discourse
  • Comic and tragic transformations  
  • Metamorphic subjectivities: sexual, national, racial and ethnic, cultural or religious
  • Transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
  • Transplanted selfhood: exiled and colonial identities, cultural mimesis and co-adaptation
  • Stability and permanence, innovation and revolution, mutability and decline
  • Natural transformations, monsters and prodigies
  • Translation, adaptation and transfiguration within and across genres and art forms
  • “Transport”, ecstasy, transmigration, metempsychosis and out-of-body experiences
  • Early modern Epicureanism
  • English transformed: language change in the early modern period
  • Rhetoric of change: metaphor, allegory, symbol  

The following guest lecturers have already confirmed their participation:

Clark Hulse (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University)

Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe)

Papers will last 20 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Proposals must include the following information:

  • The full title of your paper.
  • A 200-word abstract.
  • Any technical requirements for the presentation.
  • Your name, postal address and e-mail address.
  • Your institutional affiliation
  • Your SEDERI membership status (member, non-member, application submitted). 

Please submit your proposal as an e-mail attachment (preferably .doc or .docx) to organisation sederi29@uah.es before 11 February 2018. For more details about the conference, you are invited to visit the conference website at https://sederi29.wixsite.com/sederi2018.