“Common Time: Enclosure and the Renaissance,” a symposium organized by The Renaissance Project, invites papers that undertake a re-opening of the “Renaissance”–which has conventionally been understood as a closed historical period–by engaging with literary examinations of enclosure. Papers may draw on Marxist critiques of capitalism, trans studies, indigenous studies, and other methods. The symposium will be held at Williams College, October 10-12, 2025.

In previous symposia, The Renaissance Project has been guided by questions such as: what kind of transhistorical work, or attention to questions of temporality and periodization, illuminate our relationship to this shifting thing called the Renaissance? How can aesthetics expand our sense of the political? This upcoming symposium will address these questions by expansively thinking about the common and the collective, whether with reference to space, time, or practice. After a collective turn away from new historicism, a new generation’s interest in social justice and lived material realities invites a reconsideration of Marxist thought’s relationship to imaginative production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond.

We invite papers that explore the current vitality of historical materialist thinking, especially as it pertains to cross-temporal aesthetics, commons, and spatialization; the influence of landmark studies in early modern Marxist thought; the relationship among property, fiction, and embodied time; and mobility across the boundary of theory and practice. Papers will be pre-circulated before the conference and discussed in seminar format. 

Please submit proposals of 150 words by January 15, 2025 to renaissanceprojectcollective@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent out in mid-February. Papers will be due for pre-circulation on September 15.

All other questions about the symposium should be directed to Emily Vasiliauskas at ev2@williams.edu.