The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference

University of Salento (Lecce), 16-17 May 2025
Convenors: Maria Luisa De Rinaldis, Maria Renata Dolce and the IASEMS Executive Board

The Fifteenth IASEMS Conference in Lecce, University of Salento, 16-17 May 2025, will investigate the imaginary of waters in Shakespeare and early modern texts, aiming at the exploration of notions of fluidity and crossing. The conference wishes to investigate what meanings, both personal and collective, circulated around ‘water’ in early modern culture, but also to discuss the water-related relevance and value of the ideas of shapelessness and transformation, mutability and sea change as opposed to fixity, solidity, and normativity.

Relying on and yet not limiting its critical scope to eco-critical, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches (Mentz 2009, 2021, Breyton 2012), the conference will look at how waters and waterscapes were used in terms of power and communication, and how texts encoded water in order to negotiate the cultural paradigms of their times. Moreover, the conference will look at adaptations of staged water, post-textual, and performative remediation, in order to relaunch and rethink the fluidity of Shakespeare’s canon and of early modern texts both across the centuries and in a globalized world (Lanier 1996, 2011).

Suggested topics include but are not limited to:

- the culture of water in early modern England

- fluidity/shapelessness/stagnancy

- liminal geographies between land and sea

- mapping water(s)

- the life and laws of water

- sea mythology and monsters

- boundaries and cross-cultural encounters, voyages and crossings

- water, the body, and emotions

- losses, deaths, and rebirths

- dangerous waters and the environment

- water on stage

- soundscapes of water

- adapting/transforming/remediating 'through' water

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers (maximum). Please send a 500-word abstract and 200-word curriculum vitae by 24 February 2025 to: info@iasems.org

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 10 March 2025.

Selected papers will be included in a volume/journal issue edited by the conference convenors with the support of the IASEMS Executive Board.