This panel seeks participants interested in exploring the complex and multi-faceted relationship between Shakespeare and Italy. Key areas of focus will be, among other things, the impact of the Italian Renaissance on England; early modern English translations of Italian works; Shakespeare's use of Italian texts for both direct source and indirect inspiration; Italian settings and characters in Shakespeare's plays; the influence of Italian genres, such as tragicomedy, in Shakespeare's drama; early modern English attitudes towards Italy in general and certain Italians (such as Machiavelli) in particular; and later Italian adaptations of Shakespeare, particularly for the opera and for the cinema.

Location: Vienna University, Vienna
Deadline for Panel, abstracts in English or in French by 31 August 2015

Group Section:
Cultural Anxiety as Creative Potency of Cosmopolitan Perspective in Comparative Literature

Heidelberg, Germany, 14-18 March, 2016

Call for Papers

The thirteenth HCA Spring Academy on American History, Culture, and Politics will be held from March 14-18, 2016. The Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) invites applications for this annual one-week conference that provides twenty international Ph.D. students with the opportunity to present and discuss their Ph.D. projects.

The HCA Spring Academy will also offer participants the chance to work closely with experts in their respective fields of study. For this purpose, workshops held by visiting scholars will take place during this week.

The state of exception, theorized by Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, describes the state's ability to grant exemptions to the normative order of its own law, and in so doing to perform itself as a unified whole. But as this political encounter with the performative suggests, theatre too has a long history of engagement with states of exception, and with a capacity to disrupt and evade normative orders. For theorists and practitioners as wide-ranging as Bertolt Brecht, Harold Pinter, Valie Export, and Peggy Phelan, this rupture is one of performance's most insistent pleasures – and a source of its most trenchant social critique.

In a letter to his friend and fellow jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—son of the original Boston Brahmin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.—congratulated Frederick Pollock on his eightieth birthday saying, "Welcome to old age… So you are a child again in a new zone." In Geriatrics (1914), Ignatz Leo Nascher shared with Holmes the conception of old age as "a distinct period of life…a physiological entity as much so as the period of childhood." Both Holmes and Nascher utilize the comparison to childhood to suggest that by the end of the nineteenth century old age had become understood as a discrete stage of life.

Proposals Due: September 1 to September 23, 2015 through American Comparative Literature Association's web portal.

Link: http://www.acla.org/seminar/vernacular-and-its-politics

Our world is a world of nations. The existence and fundamental importance of nations, national identities, or national boundaries is rarely questioned. Yet, the scholarly literature on nationalism has shown that national communities are socially constructed, that national identities are fluid, and that national boundaries are constantly contested. Clearly, maintaining nations requires a great deal of collective effort. How is it that this effort is rendered invisible? How have nations come to be seen as natural? Why do individuals buy into the idea of national identity?