Below are the descriptions of the seminars that will take place at the SRS Biennial Conference from 2-5 July 2025 in Bristol. In signing up to participate in a seminar, you are agreeing to pre-circulate a short paper to other participants. Auditors will have access to abstracts of the papers only.
Please note that signing up for a seminar does not guarantee participation in it. For further details about seminars, please see the Guidelines for Seminars. It is not possible to participate in a seminar if you are already presenting on a panel, though other speakers are welcome to audit seminars. The deadline for expressing interest in participating in a seminar is 22 January 2025.
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1. Mechanick Exercises in the History of the Book: Practice Based and Collaborative Research into Early Modern Print Cultures
Seminar Leaders: John McTague (Bristol); Rhiannon Daniels (Bristol)
This seminar is in effect a workshop exploring practice-based and collaborative research into early modern print cultures, involving practical demonstrations using the historical equipment of Bristol Common Press. The seminar leaders are co-founders of this working historical print shop, and are involved in research projects which featurehands-on letterpress work, using historical equipment and materials to expand, revise, or problematise the research questions and answers of desk-based research in the fields of bibliography and the history of the book. These projects look not only at books, but the interconnected materials, processes and people that made them; by actually /making/ books, or parts thereof, they put investigators in new positions and open up new perspectives. Like early modern print shops themselves, these projects are highly collaborative: one of them aims to investigate (by reconstructing) the practice of ‘shared printing’, where the printing of single books is distributed across a number of printers for speed; another brings practical knowledge of early print shop practice to bear on a digital humanities project seeking to investigate the geometry of the page in early Italian printed books. With a mixture of brief presentation, practical demonstration, examination of printed outputs and other materials (i.e. sheets printed on replica wooden hand presses; locked up formes of moveable type), we hope to introduce participants to the interim findings of these projects, explore and demonstrate our working methods and the facilities of Bristol Common Press, and discuss together the challenges and benefits of conducting practice-based and collaborative research into early modern print cultures.
2. Renaissance Interconnections: World-Making and Environmental Pedagogies
Seminar Leaders: Kristen Abbott Bennett (Framingham State University); Joseph Campana (Rice University)
This seminar invites participants to explore multidisciplinary approaches to teaching environmental humanities in Renaissance literature, history, culture, and the arts. Papers should respond to questions including: How might issues now recognized as urgent (biodiversity, scale, waste, population, coastal erosion, sea-levels, watershed pollution, rivers, oceans, and watersheds, superstorms, heat, and others) benefit from earlier points of view? How can early modernists be a central part of environmental teaching in twenty-first century universities with strong presentist tendencies? How can we emphasize the role of Renaissance ecologies in shaping a more equitable future amidst environmental degradation and climate instability? Discussions will emphasize how earlier eras do not simply present a genealogy of present environmental horrors. They also offer conversational traces and material artifacts that can vitalize one’s capacity to imagine future worlds of greater equity, worlds that also thrive in the face of intensifying environmental degradation and an increasingly unstable climate. We aim to create a space for innovative thinking that balances creative and critical approaches to developing assignments and syllabi, one that centres Renaissance ecologies for a wide range of audiences in a variety of teaching contexts. Participants are encouraged to explore how to leverage environmental humanities and arts approaches across fields including science and technology studies, digital humanities, and in classrooms that include students majoring outside the humanities who are unsure about what we do and why the histories we care about matter. Conventional seminar papers are welcome, and participants also are encouraged to submit syllabi and assignments to workshop with the group. Overall, this seminar seeks to illuminate the interconnections between environmental humanities, Renaissance studies, contemporary ecological challenges, and twenty-first century pedagogies.
3. Renaissance Islands and Colonial Thinking
Seminar Leaders: Matthew Dimmock (Sussex); Andrew Hadfield (Sussex)
New geographical and hydrographical thinking in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries began to envisage the world as made up of islands. This vision entailed, according to the navigator John Davis, a recognition that the world’s landmasses were in fact ‘many ylands’ wholly ‘invironed with the seas’. To see a world of islands was to see the world differently; to participate in the perspectival shift that generated early modern European expansionism and to think in new commercial and colonial ways, privileging oceanic superhighways over the ‘impediment’ of land.
Islands had long occupied an important position in the Western cultural imaginary, but Davis’s work reflected a new centrality that emerged from such varied sources as More’s celebrated Utopia and the Venetian isolarii genre, which including Benedetto Bordone’s Isolario (or Book of Islands) of 1528, a cartographic study of all the islands of the world that extended to the ‘New Worlds’ of the West, and later studies that developed the genre further, including islands both real and imagined, in the work of Tomasso Poracchi, Giovanni Francesco Camocio and Donato Bertelli. Islands might become experimental spaces for plantation-style colonialism and the staging of its resistance; spaces for cultural and commercial interaction; or places in which grander competing colonial claims could be contested; but in fiction they could also enable imagined, syncretic, idealised cultures. Often all these different elements were in play, as for instance in Shakespeare’s celebrated island drama, The Tempest. Understanding the world as a sequence of bounded island spaces had profound implications for conceptions of race and indigeneity, of the nation state, and of colonial strategy, all issues that are prominent in that play.
For this seminar we are interested in receiving any submissions that engage with these themes, and in thinking about specific as well as fictional island contexts in this period.
4. Shakespeare from Below
Seminar Leaders: Derek Dunne (Cardiff); Kim Gilchrist (Cardiff)
‘History from below’ has revolutionised the questions we ask and the stories we tell about historical periods from the early modern to our own – instead of grand narratives of sovereigns and state officials, how was historical change experienced and shaped by those further down the social ladder? This seminar borrows this methodology to explore new facets of Shakespeare and early modern drama, by switching focus from well-established cultural institutions – universities, theatres, arts organisations and publications – to more marginalised groups such as:
- the unhoused
- apprentices
- unlicensed players
- prisoners
- refugees and asylum seekers
- the precariat/gig economy workers
- soldiers and veterans
+ those at the intersection of these and other disenfranchised groups
We invite papers both historicist and presentist that grapple with these neglected (in both senses) aspects of Shakespeare studies, and particularly welcome those that reflect on methodological problems and/or their own positionality in telling such stories.
What is known of early modern dramatists and practitioners’ experiences of marginality, especially less documented groups and individuals beyond London’s professional networks? Did the increase in licensed playing companies in the sixteenth century disenfranchise regional or semi-professional practitioners? How have prisoners repurposed Shakespeare for their own ends? Can Lear’s ‘unaccommodated man’ speak to present homelessness crises? In what ways has the cultural power of ‘Shakespeare’ been weaponised against any of these groups? What ethical questions are raised by the strategies of cultural institutions to make Shakespeare ‘accessible’? While there are no doubt positive stories to tell, we must also acknowledge and explore the damage done by ‘Shakespeare’ across time periods and geographies. Our hope is that addressing Shakespeare in this way can contribute to a more inclusive pedagogy and practice.
5. Sound and the Senses
Seminar Leaders: Katie Bank (Birmingham); Rachel Willie (Liverpool John Moores)
In The Acoustic World of Early Modern England (1999), Bruce Smith illustrated the interconnectedness of sound and place through exploring the distinctive sound signatures of the early modern playhouse and other spaces, and how inhabiting such spaces connected to the embodied experiences of hearing, listening and voicing. Twenty-five years after its publication, Smith’s attention to the aural and oral landscapes continues to influence and provoke a range of debate about the early modern soundscape, how we uncover the sounds of the past, and the myriad ways in which sound acts on the senses.
This seminar aims to interrogate the interconnections between sound and the senses and how these interconnections create a sense of connectedness or disconnect. In examining sound as a multisensory experience, it asks 1) how does environment regulate the experience of sound within particular spaces? 2) what forms of knowledge are created and communicated through sound? 3) how does our attention to the historical phenomenology of sound and hearing enrich our understanding of early modern culture and society? 4) How did early modern people understand sound’s function in creating communities of fellow-feeling 5) How does attention to the ecological, temporal and epistemological factors that inform sensory experience feed into our sense of sound and hearing? 6) Can sound ecologies be exclusionary and break connections instead of being generative?
6. “The air choked with fens”[1]: Socio-ecologies of breathing and air in early modern cross-cultural encounters
Seminar Leaders: Semih Çelik (Exeter); Naya Tsentourou (Exeter)
This seminar aims to bring together case studies from the early modern period that open conversations about how the air (whether is it in the form of wind, breath or atmosphere) of a particular place, region, or country may connect or disconnect human and/or animal bodies, their environments, and the literary, historical, theological, and scientific discourses which emerge from these interactions. The seminar invites contributions from scholars working across early modern literary studies, cultural studies, health and environmental humanities, human geography, and political philosophy to study historically specific perceptions of air and breath as constructing and/or marginalising communities in early modern England and/or in transcultural encounters in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, Atlantic worlds, and beyond. Our aim is to ‘inter-connect’ disciplines and sources which respond to the role of air and breath in the formation of “environmental imaginaries” as defined by Diana Davis: “constellation(s) of ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape, usually local or regional, that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state.”[2] We are interested in exploring the ways external and internal air could be seen to function as mechanism for social inclusion and exclusion.
Potential topics include
- Social exclusion and (foul) air in early modern worlds
- Comparative historical socio-ecologies of breathing and air in the early modern world
- Cross-cultural comparisons of perceptions of breathing and air quality
- Entanglements of air, water, land and health in early modern contexts
- Urbanization, environment, and changing airscapes
- Early modern innovations and manipulation of air and breathing
- Environmental crises and anxieties around breathing
[1] Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary written by Fynes Moryson Gent. First in the Latine Tongue, and then translated by him into English. Containing his Ten Yeeres Travell. London, 1617, in Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology, edited by Kenneth Parker, Routledge, 1999, 128-148 (133).
[2] Diana K. Davis, “Introduction: Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East,” in Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, edited by Diana K. Davis and Edmund Burke III, Ohio University Press, 2011, 1-22 (3).