Aktuelle Konferenzen weltweit
ESRA 2025
Shakespeare and Time: the retrieved pasts, the envisaged futures, 9-12 July, Porto
ESRA 2025 * European Shakespeare Research Association
ESRA 2025 will explore temporality from a variety of angles. Stimulated by Aleida Assman’s description of the “time regime of sustainability”, in which the future “is no longer the opposite of the past but intimately linked to something in the past, which is to be ensured for the future”, this conference will be devoted to discussing that which, though it may please some, tries all, as its personification in The Winter’s Tale announces a little after the middle of the play. Its power “To o’erthrow law”, as well as “To plant and o’erwhelm custom”, makes us ask questions about temporality in Shakespeare: the different times and velocities of the plays and poems, either precisely delineated or vaguely hinted at; the roles, shapes, and valences of the past, between rehearsals of lineage and revivals of Antiquity; time viewed through history and competing historiographies (from chronicle, political history, and antiquarianism to dramatic or poetic histories); time as bringer of ruinous or welcome change, through contingency or necessity, to be resisted in tombs of brass or poetic monuments; and the shaping and political uses also of the future, from prophecy to utopian / dystopian scenarios.
Because this conference is as much about Shakespeare’s Europe as it is about Europe’s Shakespeare(s), it is equally interested in the temporality of afterlives, manifold receptions, and preposterous temporal inversions. Considering the historical engagement with these complex and superimposed temporalities, ESRA 2025 invites investigation into the politics of time, forms of nostalgia and of the regressive imagination, cultures of memory and commemoration, the competing or concerted pulls of historicist and presentist approaches, among other ways of thinking about queer temporalities, natural and human time, anachronism, and even atemporality.
World Shakespeare Congress 2026, Verona
Find the congress’s website here.
Pre-registrations are open NOW until September 15, 2025. Pre-register here.
The 2026 World Shakespeare Congress will mark the International Shakespeare Association’s 50th anniversary. Let us celebrate together in fair Verona, Italy, where, from July 20th to 26th 2026, Shakespeareans will gather in this beautiful and historic city on the Adige River, a vital crossroads of ancient and early modern Europe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the setting for The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. The WSC will address questions related to the role of Shakespeare in connection with contemporary concerns about the destiny of our planet and human beings at a time when humanism has been deeply challenged. The Congress will foster discussion of the many ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived as ‘planetary’, reaching out to resonances with new cultural galaxies of enquiry, debate, and knowledge.
Planetary Shakespeares offers a way to tackle a whole range of issues beyond the present concern with Global Shakespeare and suggesting multifarious ways in which Shakespeare’s infinite variety and complexities can offer an entrance point to the humanities, enabling them to confront planetary crises and reconsider relations among nature, art and technology, as well as the need to reconfigure our sense of reality both socially and epistemologically. Now that we have moved into the digital, the virtual, the cyborg, and the posthuman ages, and the notion itself of reality has been challenged from different angles, including our experience of augmented reality, we have become aware of new turning points in history, and how they affect our perceptionof the contradictions embedded in our sense of the real. Theatre best captures such transformations and possible contradictions. “Planetary Shakespeares” offers convenient gateways into the most varied experiences of ‘the real’ via a plurality of interconnected issues.
Vergangene Konferenzen weltweit
CFP Macbeth in European Culture — Murcia (Spain) 22-24 March, 2022
Die Shakespeare-Übersetzungen von August Wilhelm Schlegel und des Tieck-Kreises. Kontext – Geschichte – Edition:
https://www.uni-bamberg.de/index.php?id=133304
Die als „Schlegel/Tieck“ bekannt gewordene Übersetzung sämtlicher Dramen William Shakespeares – sie wurde 1797 von August Wilhelm Schlegel begonnen und in den 1820er Jahren von Ludwig Tieck, seiner Tochter Dorothea und Wolf Heinrich von Baudissin fortgeführt – ist zu einem klassischen Text der deutschen Literatur geworden. Die Tagung möchte eine Neubewertung dieser Übertragungen vornehmen, indem sie nach ihren Kontexten fragt: nach den Bedingungen, der Theorie und der Praxis des Übersetzens, nach der Bedeutung innerhalb des frühromantischen Programms sowie nach dem Konzept einer „romantisch-poetischen“ Übersetzung. Außerdem werden die Unterschiede in den Verfahren August Wilhelm Schlegels bzw. des Tieck-Kreises, schließlich die intensive Rezeption bis in die Gegenwart vorgestellt und diskutiert; auch soll es um die Frage gehen, wie der „Schlegel/Tieck“ heute am sinnvollsten historisch-kritisch ediert werden kann, welche Anforderungen dabei zu beachten sind und welche digitalen Verfahren bei einer solchen dringend notwendigen Edition zum Einsatz kommen müssen. Ein Tagungsband ist geplant.
All the World’s a Stage conference
17 April 2021
University of Liverpool
All the World’s a Stage conference aims to explore the Theatre, Staging, and Adaptations of the Early Modern.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/all-the-worlds-a-stage-conference-tickets-141001572499
2021 World Shakespeare Congress
CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR THE 11th WORLD SHAKESPEARE CONGRESS, SINGAPORE
19-23 JULY 2021
15.01.2020
Shakespeare and Actors: 2020 Société Française Shakespeare conference Paris, 9-11 January 2020
URL: https://journals.openedition.org/shakespeare/4551
Call for papers
“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” (2.7.139-40), says Jaques in As You Like It, suggesting that playing is inherent to life itself. Throughout their dramatic production, Shakespeare and his contemporaries were keen on showcasing the omnipresence of actors while also stressing the instability of their status. As a theatrical practitioner himself, Shakespeare wrote primarily for his company and his rhythmic language was specifically designed for being projected from a stage. It is thus hardly a surprise to find so many metadramatic and metatheatrical allusions on the early modern stage, from the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to the travelling actors in Hamlet, instances of mise en abymeof the theatrical world abound, emphasising the motif of theatrum mundi. Together, they call for a reflection on the uncertain boundaries between stage and life, and on the material conditions surrounding the acting profession.
17.11.2019
Language and knowledge in Early Modern Britain: Circulating Words, Expanding Lexicons: Paris, 15-16 November 2019
Confirmed keynote speaker: Philip Durkin, Oxford English Dictionary
In the early modern period, the humanist practice of translation of sacred as well as secular texts created new readerships in the vernacular for authoritative texts, religious or classical. While the circulation of vernacular languages within Europe contributed to reshuffle hierarchies between classical languages and vernacular tongues, the role of a unified language to promote unity was highlighted at a national level in manifestos (such as Joachim Du Bellay’s Deffence et Illustration de la Langue Francoyse from 1549, itself adapted from Sperone Speroni’s Italian 1542 Dialogo delle lingue). Transmission via translation was thus not only vertical, but also horizontal, and the contacts between European languages allowed for expanding local lexicons from sources other than Latin or Greek. In England, the controversy about “inkhorn terms” – those foreign borrowings, mainly from Romance languages, which were deemed superfluous by some because Saxon equivalents already existed – is well known.
For more information, see http://tape1617.hypotheses.org