renaissance

Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory (KiSSiT), part of the London Graduate School, is a forum for research by postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and early career scholars with an interest in Shakespeare, philosophy and theory. The program is committed to thinking through Shakespeare about urgent contemporary issues in dialogue with the work of past and present philosophers—from Aristotle to Žižek.

Following the success of its conference on 'Shakespeare and Waste', Kingston Shakespeare Seminar in Theory seeks participants for a one-day conference on 'Shakespeare and the State of Exception' to be held on Saturday 19 December, 2015 at the Rose Theatre, Kingston-upon-Thames.

CONCEPT NOTE:

Near the end of the Middle English romance Robert of Cisyle, the eponymous king—who has been punished for his pride by being made to serve as his own court's fool—acknowledges the error of his former ways: "For he ys a fole [. . .] / That turneth hys wytt unto folye" (CUL Ff. 2. 38, ll. 398–9). Such condemnations of fools and folly—in Robert of Cisyle, underwritten by the pope and an angel—in no way served to stem the tide of medieval and early modern interest in fools and folly. Literary evidence shows that many premodern writers and their audiences "turn[ed their] wytt vn to folye": fools filled the stage and page, pervading multiple literary genres.

Deadline for special session proposals/abstracts has been extended to Nov. 1st.

We invite 300-word abstracts/proposals treating of any aspect of medieval and renaissance culture or thought. Equally welcome are proposals/abstracts on music, art, history, architecture, literature, linguistics, religion, philosophy, theater, and dance.

The conference will be held on the beautiful campus of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, April 7-9, 2016.

Come and join this exciting gathering of scholars celebrating all things medieval and renaissance!

Cheers!
Dr. Darci Hill

Send all inquiries and proposals to:
dr.darci.hill@gmail.com

"The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and reimagines the world." — Malcolm Gladwell

"It's a very salutary thing to realize that the rather dull universe in which most of us spend most of our time is not the only universe there is." — Aldous Huxley

Philosophers, poets, and artists in every era have revisioned and reimagined the world in ways that have inspired historical transformations. Visionary texts – whether they reach proleptically into an imagined future, analeptically reconsider the past, or urgently re-envision the present – have offered us alternative possibilities of understanding who and where we are.