This will be a session of the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference in Pittsburgh, PA. March 5-8, 2026.

https://www.nemla.org/convention.html | https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21790

Modality: Hybrid: The session will be held in-person but a few remote presentations may be included.

Theater was an integral part of life in early modern Europe. From the 15th to the 18th centuries, across Europe, drama responded to the massive shifts during this period such as religious reformations, tumultuous politics, nascent capitalism, and global expansion. Early modern play texts demonstrate how playwrights wrestled with changes to their culture and the widening of their world. Beyond its literary value, early modern drama was a living, breathing, visceral entity that players and audiences inhabited bodily and affectively. This session invites participants to re-examine dramatic literature from the early modern period, looking beyond the text itself to consider the emotional, embodied, physical, and material aspects of playing, playgoing, and playwriting. In what ways was the viscerality of early modern theater (re)generative? How did certain plays and theatrical traditions (re)generate emotions in audiences? How do playhouse structures, stages, props, costumes, voices, and bodies in motion complement or complicate the (re)generative nature of early modern drama?

Papers might consider themes of (re)generation relating to topics in:

- English Tudor drama, Shakespeare and contemporaries, Jacobean, Caroline, and Restoration drama
- Continental drama of the 15th-18th centuries
- Intercultural dramatic exchange
- Dramatic composition
- Accounts of playgoing; pro- and anti-theatricalism
- Stagecraft, props, costumes, soundscapes, scenery
- Acting, delivery, movement
- Labor and theatrical practice
- Embodied and affective regenerations in the forms of adaptations and revivals of early modern drama

Please send abstracts (in English) of 200-300 words along with the title of your paper, your email, your institutional affiliation, and a brief bio.