10th Biennial Conference Programme

Lauren Working and Sarah Howe

Curatorial/exhibition talk before moving to the World Museum to see ‘I too am a survivor’, an immersive immersive audio-visual display in the World Cultures gallery. This display explores the imagined lives of seven Chinese ceramic objects, through the words of TS Eliot Prize-winning poet Sarah Howe.

Moves to World Museum

Hybrid Panel organised by Laurie Johnson

Chair: Jane Grogan (UCD)

Bill Angus (Massey), Catholic Monsters and the Crossroads [Online]

Eric Dunnum (Campbell), The Economic Difficulties of Travelling

Sharon Emmerichs (Alaska, Anchorage), The Making of Monsters: Woman and Roads in Shakespeare’s Plays

Laurie Johnson (Southern Queensland), From Itineraries to Circuits to Staying Put, or Reasons to Change Habits

Chair: Helen Wilcox (Bangor)

Harry Spillane (Cambridge), Curating History: Matthew Parker's Library Bequests [online]

Alison Searle (Leeds), Organisations, Archives, and Entangled Afterlives

Angela Andreani (Università degli Studi di Milano), ‘Endevoring to be reconcyled’: Faith and loyalty in recusant manuscripts

Jane Lawson (Emory & Sheffield), Tracking the New Year's Gift Rolls: From Jewel House to Archives

Roundtable organised by Fabrizio Nevola

Chair: Fabrizio Nevola (Exeter)

David Rosenthal (Exeter), Mobile storytelling, material culture and urban space in early modern Europe: the Hidden Cities apps

Tarnya Cooper (National Trust), Public history, national identity, and the visual culture of the English Renaissance

Louis Morris (Uncomfortable Cities), Medieval and Early Modern History and Technology: lessons for public engagement

Hybrid Panel

Chair: Douglas Clark (Neuchâtel)

Catherine Evans (Manchester), Pollution in the Pulpit

Tamsin Badcoe (Bristol), ‘Hardned to the Sea’: The Strange and True Relations of Enslavement in the Galleys

Emily Naish (Sheffield), Human Avarice and Unruly Nymphs: Historicising Exploitation and Excess along the River

Christina F. Kolias (Claremont), ‘Mother of science’: Eve, Plants, and Ecofeminism [Online]

Online Panel organised by Eleanor Chan

Chair: Tim Sheppard (Sheffield)

Jason Rosenholtz-Witt (Western Kentucky), Music, Art, and Religious Politics: Marian Intertextuality in Santa Maria Maggiore, Bergamo 

Linda Austern (Northwestern), 'With Sooden Sight’: Gentlemen’s Musical Sociability, Visual Culture, and William Byrd’s The Greedy Hawk

Frima Fox-Hofrichter (Pratt Institute), Instruments Which go Unplayed

Panel organised by Kevin Killeen

Chair: Katherine Hunt (UEA)

Namratha Rao (York), Green Conceits: Poetic Thinking

Kevin Killeen (York), ‘Metaphors aenigmaticall, and Covert words’: the Poetry of Natural Philosophy

Ivana Bičak (Durham), Orbis in Domo: Natural-Philosophical Collections in Seventeenth-Century Poetry

Seminar Leaders: Kate Chedgzoy (Newcastle) & Kit Heyam (QMUL)

Please note: the deadline for registering interest in participating in this seminar has now passed.

What questions are researchers asking now about queer and trans lives and representations in the Renaissance? What approaches, methods and materials are they using to seek answers to those questions? And what are the political stakes in our own moment of doing this work?

Established for several decades, the study of gender and sexuality in the Renaissance has been reinvigorated recently for a number of reasons, not the least being that trans studies has opened up new ways of thinking about the relations between those concepts in the past. We want to take stock of where early modern scholarship has got to across all disciplines that have engaged with queer and trans material and perspectives; gain a richer sense of the specificity and diversity of this research; reflect on shared concerns; explore potential answers to shared questions; and map pathways forward. And we want to build connections and community with and for students and colleagues doing work that can expose us to hostility within and beyond academia. This is particularly important if we want as a field to think about how our research can most effectively and appropriately have a wider impact, by demonstrating that thinking in serious, ethical, and intellectually nuanced ways about difficult pasts can help us with some of the difficult aspects of our present moment for queer and trans people.

We hope that seminar discussion will both illuminate discipline-specific questions of methodology and enrich methodological and political reflection by creating a space for sharing ideas across and between disciplines. Papers that consider the methodological and political dimensions of researching and/or teaching the queer and trans in early modern culture, or from LGBTQ+ perspectives, will be welcome.

Panel organised by Freyja Cox Jensen

Chair: David Rundle (Kent)

Fred Schurink (Manchester), From Intermediary Translations to Transnational Literatures: Towards a Multiscalar Approach to the Reception of Plutarch in Europe, 1470-1650

Edward Paleit (City), Illustrating Caesar: History, ‘Art’, and National Identity in Sixteenth-Century Translations of the Commentarii

Noreen Humble (Calgary), Augmenting Ancient Histories: a Little Imitation, a Little Emulation, a Lot of Variation

Freyja Cox Jensen (Exeter), History, literature, and the question of genre

Respondent: Tiago Sousa Garcia (Newcastle)

Chair: Elisabetta Toreno (OU)

Helen Newsome (UCD), The Queens' Post: Performing Power in Early Tudor Queens' Correspondence

Mel Evans (Leeds) and Helen Newsome (UCD), Dearest Brother etc: Doing Epistolary Power and Kingship in Scotland and England (1513-1542)

Roundtable organised by Mary Ann Lund

Chair: Mary Ann Lund (Leicester)

Mary Morrissey (Reading)

Erica Longfellow (New College, Oxford)

Emma Rhatigan (Sheffield)