renaissance

 A Series of Panels at the Leeds International Medieval Congress, sponsored by the Long Middle Ages Seminar Series

This interdisciplinary panel aims to explore how women’s work is made manifest in material culture and literary texts. This panel defines “work” broadly. Work might include actions performed, actions in the process of being completed, or the result of labor. Panelists are invited to explore the materials women produced during the early modern period – objects we still have access to and those that would be used or discarded during the period – as well as narratives and depictions of women’s work. Of particular interest are discussions around how and why certain actions or products were gendered in response to religious doctrine or practical divisions of labor. 

Appropriately for a word broadly defined as “having a mixed character,” the idea of “hybridity” has elicited contradictory interpretation since its inception in the Greek word hybris. While the word could mean miscegenation, shame, wantonness, outrage, and even violence, the term carried the alternate but equally valid connotation of thinking and moving beyond human limitations. Despite a shift fromclassical beliefs through Christianity, hybrid figures such as the centaur and satyr continued to proliferate throughout the Renaissance, evoking both wonder and terror. While sometimes considered blasphemous, these classical hybrids were also allegorized to fit into Renaissance ethical and religious frameworks.

We are excited to announce that the Long Middle Ages, a seminar series for postgraduate students and early career researchers working on the Late Antique, Medieval, and Early Modern Periods, will be returning for a second series in Autumn 2026!

We welcome submissions of 30 minute papers from postgraduates and early career researchers working in any discipline and on any topic related to the late antique, medieval and early modern periods. Papers will be followed by time for questions and further discussion.

Seminars will commence in October 2026 and run on a fortnightly basis until mid-December.

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. 

The Winter's Tale: From Page to Stage

 IASEMS Tempera Seminar 2027

 University of Padova, Dipartimento di Studi Linguistici e Letterari

 7-9 June 2027

UVA Wise Medieval-Renaissance Conference XXXIX (9/17-19) deadline for submissions: June 26, 2026 full name / name of organization: University of Virginia-Wise Center for Medieval-Renaissance Studies contact email: kjt9t@uvawise.edu 

This panel considers the often overlooked presence of flora and fauna in early modern print, whether they appear as marginalia, within printers’ ornaments, or as materially integral to books. Animals and plants always carry symbolic value—a single image sometimes carrying diametrically opposed values—and participate in a broader network of signification through emblems, printers’ ornaments, marginalia, and engraven images. Do those values come into tension with each other via the margin, the marginal, and the marginalized? In what ways do peripheral plants and animals comment on questions of identity, like gender, race, or disability?

Call for Papers: Literary Reception and Human Creativity in the Age of AI
Bryn Mawr College, April 16–17, 2027

Co-organizers: Asya Sigelman (Classics) and Margaret Strair (German Studies)

Keynote speaker: Barbara Graziosi (Princeton University)

The rapid integration of generative AI in everyday life brings renewed urgency to fundamental questions about human creativity: what constitutes the human act of writing, and how does human literary production differ from that of large language models (LLMs) — algorithms trained on vast textual corpora to predict and generate language?

CONFERENCE

2026 PAMLA Conference, taking place November 12–15 at the Hyatt Regency Seattle

SESSION/PANEL ABSTRACT

Workshop at the Renaissaince Society of America's annual meeting (Philadelphia. March 11-13, 2027)