| Fall 2008 Schedule |
| Sept 16 |
MOLLY MURRAY (Columbia)
"Toward a Poetics of the Early Modern Prison"
|
UPCOMING SPEAKERS --
details of their papers will be posted nearer the time of their talks
|
| Oct 14 |
CATHERINE BATE (Warwick)
|
| Oct 28 |
BROOKE CONTI (SUNY, Brockport)
|
Nov 13
Thursday
|
DREW DANIEL (Johns Hopkins)
|
| Dec 2 |
RICHARD McCOY (CUNY, Queens)
|
| |
| Spring 2008 Schedule |
| Jan 29 |
ELLIOTT VISCONSI (Yale)
"Matthew Hale and the Invention of Criminal Blasphemy"
Elliott Visconsi specializes in the literature, law, and political thought of seventeenth- century England, with special emphasis on the Restoration period. He is concerned broadly with the nexus of literary and legal thinking, including the manner in which literary texts work as constitutional commentary and public political education in early modern England and the Americas. His first book, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Cornell University Press, forthcoming) describes the later seventeenth-century literary transformation of equity from a principle of legal interpretation into an ethos of deliberative citizenship, in works by Hobbes, Milton, Dryden, Neville, Behn, and Defoe.
Currently Elliott is working on a second book?"The Invention of Civil Religion: The Literature of Church and State in Postrevolutionary England and America"?which describes the intellectual and cultural history of the principle of separation of church and state between 1649 and 1791. This study suggests that literary culture plays a deeply influential role in the development of a constitutional sensibility in which the robust separation of church and state is understood to be best for government and for religion. Moreover, the project argues that it is in the domains of the literary that the concept of "civil religion" emerges.
|
| Feb 12 |
ANN BAYNES COIRO (Rutgers)
"Milton's Actresses"
Ann Baynes Coiro specializes in Milton, and seventeenth-century poetry and drama, including women writers. She is the author of Robert Herrick's "Hesperides" and the Epigram Book Tradition (Johns Hopkins UP, 1988), and the forthcoming "Dramatic Milton."
|
| Feb 26 |
HENRY TURNER (Columbia)
"The Corporate Commonwealth: Artificial Persons and Political Bodies in Early Modern England and Beyond"
Henry Turner is the author of The English Renaissance Stage: Geometry, Poetics, and the Practical Spatial Arts, 1580-1630 (Oxford, 2006), and the editor of The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2002). He has recently completed Shakespeare's Double Helix, a contribution to the Shakespeare Now series published by Continuum Press forthcoming 2008).
|
Mar 27
Thursday |
The Columbia Early Modern Seminar has postponed meeting, but encourages attendance at a public lecture presented by The Rutgers Seminar in the History of the Book, in
The Program in Early Modern Studies at Rutgers
ZACH LESSER
(University of Pennsylvania)
"Literary Drama:
William Shakespeare vs. The Anonymous Thomas Tomkis"
5:00 pm Alexander Library, Pane Room
Rutgers University
Over the past two decades, the question of the "literary" status of
drama has remained a central preoccupation of book-historical work in
early modern studies. Were the plays of William Shakespeare, Ben
Jonson, and their contemporaries considered merely subliterary "riff-
raff" as Thomas Bodley termed them in a letter advising his librarian
to exclude playbooks from the nascent Bodleian Library? Or did these
"plays" become "works" over the course of the early modern period? If
so, how was this transformation effected? In seeking to answer these
questions, we have left largely unexamined a logically prior
question: What exactly do we mean by "literary" drama, and how does
what we mean by that term relate to what early modern meant by it? To
begin to answer this question, this paper tells the story of two very different publishers, Simon Waterson and his son John, who ran a shop
at the sign of the Crown in Paul's Churchyard for nearly seventy
years; and of two very different plays, Thomas Tomkis's Lingua (1607)
and Shakespeare and John Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen (1634),
that issued from the Crown bookshop. Examining the careers of these
two stationers, their playbooks, and especially the collapse of the
Waterson shop following the death of the father and the accession of
the son, will help to illuminate the fractured and often self-
contradictory nature of "the literary" in seventeenth-century England.
|
Apr 15
|
HEATHER HIRSCHELD (Tennessee-Knoxville)
"Hell and the Problem of Satisfaction in the English Renaissance"
Professor Hirschfeld's first book, Joint Enterprises, studies the phenomenon of the shared writing of playscripts by early modern English dramatists such as Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Middleton. Her current research project concerns the theological grounds and investments of English Renaissance revenge tragedy.
|
Apr 25
Friday |
The Columbia Early Modern Seminar, in collaboration with the Rare Book
and Manuscript Library of Columbia University, is pleased to announce:
FORMS OF EARLY MODERN WRITING
A Conference and Exhibition
Featuring:
Peter Stallybrass, University of Pennsylvania (Keynote)
Amanda Bailey, University of Connecticut, Storrs
Alan Farmer, Ohio State University
Hannibal Hamlin, Ohio State University
Heather James, University of Southern California
Zachary Lesser, University of Pennsylvania
Tanya Pollard, Brooklyn College
Shankar Raman, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
|
| |
ADAM ZUCKER (Columbia)
"Cultural Competency and Comic Form in Early Modern London"
Professor Zucker is currently completing a book *Comedies of Place: Cultural Competence and Comic Form in Early Modern Drama* about the social logic of wit and taste in site-specific plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Shirley, and others. He has published articles in *Renaissance Drama* and *The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies*, and is the co-editor, with Alan B. Farmer, of *Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern English Stage, 1625-1642* (2006).
|
| |
| Fall 2007 Schedule |
| Sept 4 |
JULIE CRAWFORD (Columbia)
"Lady Anne Clifford's Reading List"
|
| Oct 30 |
SUZANNE TRILL (Edinburgh)
"Royalism and Romance: Re-reading the 'lives'
of Anne, Lady Hackett (c. 1621/2 - 99)"
|
| Dec 4 |
WILL FISHER (CUNY-Lehman)
"Stray[ing] lower where the pleasant fountains
lie':
Cunnilingus in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis"
|
| |
| Spring 2007 Schedule |
| Jan 30 |
ACHSAH GUIBBORY (Barnard)
"England's 'Biblical' prophets during the English
Revolution"
|
| Feb 20 |
JOHN KERRIGAN (Cambridge)
"Archipelagic Macbeth"
|
| Mar 6 |
PAMELA BROWN (Connecticut)
"Things to Do with Dwarfs"
|
| Apr 3 |
JOHN STAINES (CUNY-John Jay)
"Radical Pity and Tragic Violence in King
Lear"
|
| |
| Fall 2006 Schedule |
| Sept 5 |
MARIO DIGANGI (CUNY-Lehman
College)
Friction and Friction: Gender, Agency, and Taxonomies
of Female / Female Desire in Early Modern England
|
| Oct 3 |
LUCAS ERNE (Geneva)
Shakespeare for Readers
|
| Oct 24 |
TANYA POLLARD (Montclair
State)
Rethinking Shakespeare's genres and models:
Cymbeline's Ironic Greek Romance
|
| Nov 14 |
ANSTON BOSMAN (Amherst)
Shakespeare in Leather
|
| Dec 12 |
ZACHARY LESSER (Pennsylvania)
Economic Sovereignty and the Form of Tragicomedy
in Fletcher's The Sea Voyage
|
| |
| 2005-2006 Series |
| Oct 20 |
AMANDA BAILEY (University of Connecticut)
The City and the Jew in the Age of Credit
|
| Nov 3 |
No Early Modern Seminar; instead:
STEPHEN GREENBLATT and JONATHAN LEAR (Harvard)
Shame and Necessity
6:15 pm to 9:00 pm
Heyman Center For Humanities, Schapiro CEPSR
|
| Nov 17 |
JAMES KEARNEY (Yale)
Dr. Faustus and the Alien Word
|
| Dec 8 |
ALAN STEWART (Columbia)
Hamlet’s Letters
|
| Feb 23 |
STEVE MENTZ (St.
John's)
Strange Weather in Shakespeare
|
| Mar 9 |
JULIAN YATES (University
of Delaware)
Accidental Shakespeare:
Or, Actor Network Theory meets Renaissance Studies
|
| Apr 6 |
MARY BLY (Fordham)
Playing with Theory:
Using tourism and puns to diagram early modern London
and its playhouses
|
| Apr 20 |
JEFF DOLVEN (Princeton)
The Mirror of Style
|
| May 4 |
HEATHER JAMES (University of Southern California)
Ben Jonson's Purloined Letters: Sources of Slander
in Poetaster
Professor James will speak broadly about her current
research on the political Ovid of the early modern
period and especially the relationship of Ovid's
wanton verse to the political liberty of speech
(parrhesia). The book project, entitled "Taking
liberties: Ovid in renaissance poetry and political
thought", discusses the political significance
of Ovid to Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson,
the Caroline poets, and Milton.
|
| |
| 2005-2006 Series |
| Jan 27 |
Bianca Calabresi (Princeton Society of Fellows)
"you sow, ile read": Etiologies of Literacy
|
| Feb 10 |
William Sherman (Folger Shakespeare Library / University
of York)
Toward a History of the Manicule
|
| Feb 24 |
Rayna Kalas (Cornell University)
Thomas Nashe and the Pages of Misfortune
|
| Mar 10 |
Natasha Korda (Wesleyan University)
A Cry of Players
|
| Mar 24 |
Adam Smyth (Columbia University/ University of Reading)
Almanacs, Annotators and Life-writing in Early Modern
England
|
| May 5 |
Julie Crawford (Columbia University)
How Margaret hoby read her de mornay
|
| |
| |
