Since the times of Ancient Greece, when “society” and “the State” were subsumed into and joined in the term, “polis,” Theater and Law/Ethics have interacted and relied on each other. 

 In Greece, drama tended to serve socio-political, cultural,religious, and other functions. It was a device for presenting and addressing serious and important public ethical, religious, and political issues, thereby building citizenship and engagement of the artists with public leaders and members of the public, in works by Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. 

45th Annual Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture Since 1900
23–25 February 2017

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.

— T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (1920)

The International Lawrence Durrell Society invites proposals for papers exploring the broad theme of “Indebtedness & Influence” in literature and culture since 1900.

Possible starting points for this topic include:

Feminist Connections: Rhetorical Strategies from the Suffragists to the Cyberfeminists

Since Thomas Hoccleve chose to set his “Compleinte,” the opening salvo of his five-poem Series, in the “broun sesoun of Mihelmesse” (an intentional inversion of Chaucer’s springtime “Aprill shoures”), critics of his poetry have been immersed in the depressive and disconsolate overtones of much of his verse. Hoccleve makes this easy—he dwells on his misspent youth and the infirmities of old age, bodily and financial.  Malcolm Richardson’s decades-old evaluation of Hoccleve as an “unfortunate poet,” a “slacker” and “failed bureaucrat” remains alive in much current scholarship which scours Hoccleve’s self-admitted defeats and disappointments for evidence of his commentary on fifteenth-century English politics and identity-politics.

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 10th August 2016

Dreaming Asleep, Dreaming Awake International Conference aims to spark new conversations about dreams and and their role(s) in cultural, social and personal contexts.

         Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

Our panel in 2017 will consider Elizabeth and her ruling strategies in relation to the material culture of early modern England. How did Elizabeth participate in production and consumption of material culture? How did material culture of early modern England reflect, shape, or ignore Elizabeth's taste, needs, and preferences? What household practices were modeled on those of the royal household? How did the city of London, the royal palaces, and places Elizabeth visited during her progresses accommodate the queen's needs? How were the material aspects of trade, gift-giving, cooking, writing, theater, etc. affected by Elizabeth's prominent position as a ruler?

CFP: Reconsidering The Second Nun’s Tale
International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 11-14, 2017) in Kalamazoo, MI