renaissance

Call for Papers

Shakespeare in Pop Culture

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

48th Annual Conference, February 17-20, 2027

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

https://swpaca.org

Submissions open: September 1, 2026

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2026

20032. The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction "The Picaro and Picaresque Fiction" examines variations on theme of the picaro from its sixteenth-century Spanish origins to the present day. What does this recurring impish rapscallion have to offer readers in different political and historical contexts?

Decadence: Rhetoric and Aesthetics of Decline from Ancient Empire to the Age of Polycrisis

Conference open to scholars of all stages

Venue: British School at Rome, Rome

Dates:21-22nd January 2027

Following a successful symposium in 2025 on the subject of civilisational origins, we are delighted to announce our next event, Decadence, a conference about what happens to civilisations, societies, and cultural movements when they reach and then exceed their peak.

62nd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 13 - 15, 2027)

Kalamazoo, MI, USA

In-Person Session

In her 1991 article “Scolding Brides and Bridling Scolds: Taming the Woman's Unruly Member,” Lynda Boose describes Kate’s final speech in The Taming of the Shrew as “a textual moment in which, in Althusserian terms, the play quite overtly ‘interpellates,’ or hails, its women viewers to an imaginary relationship with the ideology of the discourse being played out on stage.” This panel builds on Boose’s reading by examining texts that both assume an audience of women and interpellate the reader in a meaningful way. During a period when relatively few women were literate, texts that hail women had to find a way to reach their audience. Boose’s stage example is one way to attract women’s attention.

Inspired by Ronald Hutton’s work in “The Making of the Early Modern British Fairy Tradition” (2014), this panel explores gendered figures in early modern folklore texts. The study of early modern folklore features significant crossover: fairies may also be familiars, witches can be wise women, and fairyland could be, as Hutton explains, the “embodiment of hedonism, summed up in its characteristic activity of song and dance.” Panelists are invited to explore texts and records that capture folk traditions in early modern literature and culture. Papers are welcome to explore a wide variety of topics with questions of gender at their heart. 

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

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?