Call for Papers
After a hiatus of some years, the British and Irish Spenser seminar will be reconvening in-person, at University College, Oxford on Friday 11th November 2022. We seek to provide a convivial meeting place for conversation amongst Spenserians, and especially to offer support to early career academics and graduate students who are developing projects involving Spenser. We are looking forward to renewing old conversations and starting new ones, as we return tentatively but excitedly to in-person gatherings that we hope will complement and build upon the Spenserian communities that have flourished online in the past three years.
The format for the seminar will include a keynote lecture from a distinguished Spenserian, and panels featuring new work from those earlier in their career. The November keynote will be delivered by Susanne Wofford (NYU), who was recently the recipient of the Colin Clout Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Spenser Society.
We welcome proposals of up to 250 words from PhD students, early career researchers and those in fixed-term roles for talks of no more than 20 minutes in length. The sessions are open-topic, and simply seek to showcase the most exciting new work on Spenser.
Please submit abstracts to Hannah.crawforth@kcl.ac.uk and Joseph.moshenska@ell.ox.ac.uk by 1st October. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions, or to make contact if you’re interested in attending. A full programme and will be shared in advance of the seminar, but the talks will be in the afternoon/early evening to allow people to travel to Oxford that day.
We will be able to offer small travel grants to contribute towards the cost of some participants’ travel to Oxford. If you would like to be considered for one of these grants, please include a statement with your abstract of no more than 150 words briefly explaining your circumstances and likely travel costs.
Future sessions will be held (we hope) annually and will circulate amongst different institutions in Britain and Ireland, who will take a turn to host. Please contact us if you might be interested in hosting a future session.