Project Funding and School Prize of the German Shakespeare Society
The German Shakespeare Society funds outstanding projects, initiatives, and teaching formats that convey Shakespeare’s works, person, and era in innovative ways. The call for proposals should motivate learners and teachers to explore creative and contemporary approaches to engaging with Shakespeare’s texts, themes, and characters.
Applications are welcome from student teams, teachers with their classes, subject departments, or project groups (e.g., literature or theatre clubs, interdisciplinary teams) from all school types and grade levels. Each year, up to three projects will be funded, with 500 euros for each project.
Find further information here.
Call for Papers
Shakespeare Jahrbuch 163 (2027)
“Shakespeare and Truth: Practices and Performances”
The truth debates that have occupied political, cultural, and philosophical discourses in recent years primarily focused on subjective-relativist notions and concepts, as well as the contested status of truth. Terms such as “fake news,” “post-factual,” “post-truth,” and “alternative facts” testify to this. While these approaches can certainly be productively mobilized in Shakespearean scholarship, Volume 163 of the Shakespeare Yearbook (2027), Shakespeare and Truth: Practices and Performances, focuses on the historical dimensions of truth and on how Shakespeare’s works, on the one hand, participate in practices, semantical and poetic strategies involved in the production, assertion, and negotiation of truth claims, and, on the other hand, reflect on these negotiation processes on a meta-level. The editors therefore welcome contributions that approach the practices, performances, and poetics of truth in Shakespeare’s works from diverse perspectives.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- historical discourses and practices of knowledge and truth production (philosophy, theology, law, historiography, astronomy, new science)
- truth and falsehood in political and historiographical discourses (Machiavelli, Bacon, Tacitus, Polydore Vergil, Thomas More)
- literature and truth: early modern poetics and poetic truth (Sidney)
- truth and religion: religious conversion and “equivocation” in post-Reformation England; the Bible as a source of truth; the role of Bible translations; religious prophecies
- truth and the material world: objects and their functions in the dramatic world (as pieces of evidence, distraction from truth, affective mobilisation) as well as in the theatre (production of authenticity, control of attention, judgments)
- praxeological perspectives: involvement of practices, agents, objects, arrangements of practices and materials, and artefacts in the production, enforcement, and questioning of truth claims; participation of objects and their enabling of the making or undermining of truth assertions (ring, necklace, money, handkerchief, headdress, bracelet, etc.)
- semantics of truth: competing meanings of “true” and “truth” (“legitimate, loyal, reliable, practical, constant, good, useful, probable, correct, exact, genuine”; see e.g. “true prince,” “true friend,” “true lovers,” “true servant,” “true numbers,” “true qualities”)
- truth and non-literal speech; use of tropes (metaphors, comparisons, wordplay, irony, etc.), e.g., through fools, in riddles, prophecies, dreams, visions
- law, judgment, and justice on stage; evidence- and knowledge-production; evidencing
- Shakespeare’s theatre as a place of truth- and knowledge-production; as experiment, laboratory (Bacon), anatomical theatre
- genre-specific perspectives: how generic conventions theatrically (re)present truth claims
- historical performance contexts: how performance conditions (theatre forms, stages, dramaturgy, audience behaviour, theatre companies, actors, acting styles, etc.) affect the theatrical engagement with truth claims
Please send an electronic version (Word file) of your article to the editor of the Shakespeare Yearbook, Prof. Dr. Isabel Karremann (email: karremann@es.uzh.ch) and the guest editor of the volume, Prof. Dr. Roland Weidle (email: roland.weidle@rub.de). Submission deadline for all contributions in English or German, c. 6.000 words, as well as an abstract of about 200 words is 31 May 2026. Please follow the Style Sheet, which can be downloaded here. The selection of articles is conducted through a double blind peer review system.
Martin Lehnert Prize (15 December of each year)
The Martin Lehnert Prize, donated by the former president of the German Shakespeare Society, is intended to honour students or young academics who have made outstanding contributions to the work and impact of William Shakespeare, his contemporaries or the culture of Shakespeare’s time, its reception and/or communication.
The prize is awarded annually for an outstanding final thesis (Magister, Master’s, Staatsexamen), a dissertation or a documented student project (theatre production, exhibition, etc.). The prize money is €2,000 for a dissertation, €500 for a thesis and €500 for a student project. The prize is aimed in particular at the departments of English, German and Theatre Studies.
Nominations can be made for German or English-language papers written or submitted at universities in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. Work produced at universities in non-German-speaking countries by young academics from Germany, Austria or Switzerland can generally also be nominated. The academic supervisors of the respective work are authorised to make nominations.
Die Verleihung des Martin-Lehnert-Preises findet jeweils im Rahmen der Frühjahrstagung der Deutschen Shakespeare-Gesellschaft im April statt.
The Martin Lehnert Prize is awarded at the spring conference of the German Shakespeare Society in April.
Proposed works (from the current year or the two previous years) can be submitted to the German Shakespeare Society in two copies and accompanied by an expert opinion by 15 December.
Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft e.V.
Windischenstraße 4-6
99423 Weimar
office@shakespeare-gesellschaft.de
The Martin Lehnert Prize is awarded by a jury consisting of the following members:
Prof. Felix Sprang, Siegen (Vorsitzender)
Dr. Bettina Boecker, München
Prof. Peter Marx, Köln
Dr. Vanessa Schormann, Neuss
Scholarship programme of the German Shakespeare Foundation in cooperation with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar (graduate scholarship)
The application deadline is 31 January.
The scholarships are aimed at doctoral candidates with an excellent university degree who can demonstrate a conceptual connection between the research project to be realised in Weimar and their dissertation. The newly established graduate scholarships focus on the early modern period in the broader sense, including the Baroque period and the processes of its reception and transformation up to the present day. Interdisciplinary and comparative projects on theatre, Shakespeare and his contemporaries as well as on the transmission and reception of the early modern period in Germany and especially in Weimar Classicism are also particularly welcome. Funding is available for ambitious projects for the realisation of which the collections of the Klassik Stiftung are essential.
More about the Shakespeare Scholarship
Julia Jennifer Beine is the first scholarship holder, April-June 2024.