Call for Papers

Shakespeare Jahrbuch 161 (2025)

“Diversity and Community” 

The 2025 volume of Shakespeare Jahrbuch will be a special issue on “Diversity and Community”. Shakespeare’s works have been praised for celebrating the universality of human nature; often misunderstood as a unifying, indeed reifying image of a standardized norm, this universality truly lies in a recognition of diversity and its importance for as well as challenge to community-building. The editorial board invites contributions on the uneasy but foundational relation between diversity and community, individual and society, from a variety of perspectives, in Shakespeare’s plays and/or poetry; productions, adaptations and spin-offs of these works; as well as references to Shakespeare in philosophical, political and cultural debates over equality and inclusion. Contributions with a contemporary or historical perspective are equally welcome.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• representations of diversity within communities, as well as the diversity of communities on the Shakespearean stage
• the relation between individual and society: criteria, mechanisms and legitimization of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and alienation in early modern culture
• the formation of communities and the diversifying impact of difference along lines of religion, social status, nationality, race, ethnicity, sex and gender, sexual desire, (dis)ability
• political and philosophical foundations of community in early modern culture
• language communities and linguistic diversity in Shakespeare
• early modern communities confronted with or shaped by the mobility of people, objects, or ideas; the ethical challenges of diversity and community in issues of displacement/integration, tradition/innovation, hospitality/hostility
• the relations between individuals and communities along different spatial axes: from family and the household to the parish, neighbourhood or the guild, villages, towns and cities, to the more abstract, imagined community of the nation
• embodied difference and early modern explanations for diversity (humoral pathology, climate theory, astrology, supernatural or divine forces)
• strategic, ethical and affective alliances between (individuals from different) communities in early modern culture and the Shakespeare canon
• minority communities and their relation to hegemonic society, then and now
• the role of affect (e.g. love, empathy; hate, disgust) and cognition (memory, judgment, imagination) in forging communities in the playworld and the playhouse
• the audience as community, the diversity of playgoers in early modern England and today
• diversifying the Shakespeare canon through adaptations and rewritings from the perspective of specific communities
• casting as a tool for diversity in performance
• accessible Shakespeare, in theatres, classrooms and academia

Please send an electronic version (as a Word/docx-file) of your article to the general editor of Shakespeare Jahrbuch, Prof. Isabel Karremann (email: karremann@es.uzh.ch). The deadline for submissions (in English or German and of not more than 6,000 words) is 30 April 2024. Please observe the style sheet, which can be downloaded from the website of the German Shakespeare Society (https://shakespeare-gesellschaft.de/shakespeare-jahrbuch/note-on-submission/?lang=en). Articles are selected for publication on the basis of a double-blind peer-review system.