CALL FOR PAPERS: British Society of Science, Postgraduate Conference

The British Society for the History of Science is holding its post-graduate conference at the University of Leeds on 8-10 January 2014.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is 5pm on Friday 8th of November.

For further details and the CFP please visit http://www.bshs.org.uk/conferences/postgraduate-conference/2014-postgraduate-conference-leeds and do not hesitate to contact the Organising Committee should you have any questions.




Inaugural F T Prince Memorial Lecture: Sir Christopher Ricks - 'Blaspheming Tongues'

The inaugural lecture at the University of Southampton will be given by Sir Christopher Ricks, 'Blaspheming Tongues' 6pm, Tuesday 15 October 2013.  Chaired by Dr Will May, Senior Lecturer in English

F.T. Prince's poems - as well as his literary criticism, literary history, and editorial work - learn from and teach us about Milton. Blasphemy is one of the enduring human concerns central to Milton's art and to Milton's heirs, Prince among them. Christopher Ricks is Warren Professor of the Humanities and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute at Boston University. He taught previously at Oxford, Bristol, and Cambridge, and was Professor of Poetry at Oxford 2004-2009. With Jim McCue he is completing a two-volume critical edition of the poems of T.S. Eliot, to be published by Faber & Faber in 2014. His first book was Milton's Grand Style (1963).

This is the inaugural F.T. Prince Memorial Lecture. These lectures will be given every year in honour of the poet and scholar F.T. Prince, who was one of Southampton's first English professors.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Classical Philosophers in Seventeenth Century English Thought

28 May 2014, CREMS, University of York

A day symposium – Keynote speakers: Prof Jessica Wolfe (North Carolina) and Prof Sarah Hutton (Aberystwyth)

This one day symposium will look at the reception of classical philosophers in seventeenth century English thought and culture, in philosophy, religion, natural philosophy, poetry and literature, the university, or other areas of early modern intellectual life. The focus will be on England, but not on English, and we encourage papers on the Latin reception of classical philosophy.

We will take the term ‘classical philosophy’ broadly speaking, and with a generic latitude, so that Homer or Hesiod might be considered, as they certainly were in the early modern period, as contributors to the philosophical outlook of the ancients, and so that while Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus, Seneca or Cicero are central and protean in their seventeenth century reception, so too Virgil, Ovid and Lucretius were seen as containing an important philosophical core. Of interest also might be the collations and compendia of classical thought that served as a digest of ancient ideas, whether those of the ancients themselves, such as Diogenes Laertius, or of the early modern writers, such as Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy. How did early modern writers accommodate, transpose or circumvent the pagan elements in ancient philosophy? How concerned were early modern thinkers with the systematic and with completeness in their use of classical philosophers? How was the pagan religion transposed to a Christian era?

Abstracts by 15th December (c. 250 words)

Contact: Kevin Killeen, kevin.killeen@york.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS: Shakespeare Seminar at the Shakespeare-Tage 2014

Strike up, pipers.
Shakespeare’s Festivities

As we celebrate Shakespeare’s 450th birthday we turn to merriment and commemoration in Shakespeare’s plays. There is reason to believe that Shakespeare, if he were still alive today, would shun the festivities in his honour. Shakespeare, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, never contributed to the royal entries or city pageants in his lifetime. We also know that Shakespeare’s festive comedies cast a shadow of doubt about what is being celebrated and by whom. Equally, it is often the wreath of victory or the lascivious pleasing of a lute that foreshadows a crisis. Without ignoring that there is a place for merriment and festivity in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, we would like to investigate why and how celebration turns awry in so many of his plays. That investigation allows for revisiting, among other issues, notions of genre, the place of rhetoric as well as constraints of production. Are Shakespeare’s feasts tapered by the amalgamation of religious, political and economic constraints? And in how far does the historical context influence our reading of these feasts? Is the “feast of Crispian” a feast? Can it survive as a legacy stripped from the commemoration of Marian martyrs and resonances with the nursery rhyme “Remember, remember, the fifth of November”? Identifying merriment and commemoration as ritual, and addressing the cultural and textual forces at play, this workshop aims at getting closer to understanding why Shakespeare arguably sympathised with Mistress Page in preferring to “go home, and laugh this sport o’er by a country fire”.

Our seminar plans to address these and related questions with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage (24-27 April 2014 in Weimar, Germany). As critical input for the discussion and provocation for debate, panellists are invited to give short statements on the basis of pre-circulated papers presenting concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic. Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) and all further questions by 15 November 2013 to the seminar convenors:

Felix Sprang, University of Hamburg: felix.sprang@uni-hamburg.de
Christina Wald, Humboldt University of Berlin: christina.wald@hu-berlin.de

See also: http://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/publikationen/seminar.html