renaissance

Repetition governed the rhythms of early modern life through the practices of liturgy and prayer, the rote drills of grammar-school pedagogy, the iterative logic of print, and the rhetorical schemes (anaphora, epistrophe, ploce, tautology) that early modern writers were trained to use. Repetition could consolidate memory and community, generate affect, structure devotion, or signal decorum. Yet it could also misfire—becoming tedious, compulsive, alienating, or a mark of failure, excess, or exclusion. This panel asks what repetition did in early modern literature and culture, and for whom, treating it simultaneously as a stylistic device and a lived cultural practice.

Due to the rhetorical challenges of sharing the unmentionable, infertility is often underdiscussed in both Early Modern society and today. It has discomforted and continues to discomfort theologians, medical practitioners, politicians, scholars, and everyday people trying to build identities through societies deeply founded on the structure of the family. The very concept of family is built around parents and children–what happens when a couple is childless, what happens when the children aren’t materially seen, only known to the parents that lost them before birth? It has historically forced thinkers to grapple with their understanding of life and death, grace and agency, reality and the supernatural.

Resurgens Theatre Company, along with the Georgia State University Department of English, is pleased to announce our fourth biennial conference on early modern verse drama by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, “Shakespeare’s Apocrypha Now.” We’re calling for papers that examine some aspect of Shakespeare’s non-canonical plays, i.e., those dramatic works that have been or are currently attributed to Shakespeare (as a whole or in part) that have yet to receive widespread scholarly and/or theatrical recognition. We particularly welcome topics on canonicity, collaboration, and performance-oriented concerns regarding Renaissance drama and/or early modern print culture.

This roundtable considers the role of “unfinished” texts—in the broadest possible sense—in early modern English literature and life writing. 

William Shakespeare's plays are replete with themes that resonate with contemporary ecological anxieties. From the imagery of nature in The Tempest to the exploration of human ambition and environmental limits in Macbeth, Shakespeare's works offer a rich terrain for ecocritical analysis. This volume seeks to uncover how Shakespeare's plays can inform our understanding of sustainability and inspire new perspectives on human-nature relationships.

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX
Undergraduate Sessions
The University of Virginia’s College at Wise
September 17-19, 2026

Keynote Address:  
“Arthur's Great Death in Malory and its Afterlives”
Karen Cherewatuk, Saint Olaf College

With that her angels face, vnseene afore,

Like to the ruddie morne appeard in sight,

Deawed with siluer drops, through sweating sore;

But somewhat redder, then beseem'd aright,

Through toylesome heate and labour of her weary fight. 

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, IV.vi.19

Call for Papers

Roundtable: Global Literary and Intellectual History in the Renaissance World

Renaissance Society of America Conference

March 11–13, 2027

Philadelphia

The Southeastern Renaissance Conference (SRC) invites submissions for presentation at our 83rd Annual Meeting, which will be hosted by the University of Tennessee Knoxville and its Marco Institute, to be held from Friday, October 23 to Saturday, October 24, 2026.
The organizers will consider papers on any topic related to the Early Modern / Renaissance period.

CFP: MW/SWCCL, “Taking Care”

Midwest/Southwest Conference on Christianity and Literature

College of the Ozarks
Point Lookout, Missouri
September 25-26, 2026

Keynote Speaker: Jeffrey Bilbro, professor of English at Grove City College and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic

Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by three Gen Z academics — A.J. Scott, Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and Shannen Escote — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends, starting with The Canterbury Tales. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and voices to discuss the Tales and their pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. 

This roundtable invites speakers to address any aspect of the so-called Renaissance self. Borrowing from Jan Goldstein, the cultural historian Elwin Hofman describes the self as “individuated mental stuff.” How might this definition inform our understanding of conceptions of the self that developed during the early modern period? What was the relationship between selfhood, self-consciousness, and identity? What kinds of evidence—artistic, confessional, visual, literary, legal, philosophical, textual, or medical—allow us to approach this question? What methodologies offer the most promise? Given the paradoxical nature of the self, both historically and in our own moment, how might it be treated as a proper object of study?

The Bibliographical Society of America (BSA) will sponsor up to four panels at RSA Philadelphia 2027 and invites proposals for individual papers or pre-formed panels on any topic within the scope of bibliography and book history. Papers and pre-formed panels may address, but are certainly not limited to, the following topics:

RSTEM symposium 05.02.26

Call for PapersRe-Sounding the Early Modern: Art, Power, and the Global Soundscape of the Dutch Masters

The Texas Tech University Vernacular Music Center, in collaboration with the Talkington College of Visual and Performing Arts and the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, invites proposals for a one-day interdisciplinary symposium exploring the cultural, historical, economic, and sonic worlds of the Early Modern.