Announcements
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.150 Friday, 5 December 2025
From: Meriem Pages <
Date: December 4 at 9:34 PM EST
Subject: CFP: 46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum
46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum:
The Body in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Keene State College
Keene, NH, USA
Friday and Saturday April 10-11, 2026
Call for Papers and Sessions
We are delighted to announce that the 46th Medieval and Renaissance Forum will take place in person on Friday, April 10 and Saturday April 11, 2026 at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. This year’s conference considers “the body” in the broadest way possible. As always, we also welcome papers on any and every topic related to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance as well as papers on medievalism. We plan to hold the 46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum in person with a limited number of virtual presentations.
We welcome abstracts (one page or less) from faculty, students, and independent scholars. If you are an undergraduate student, we ask that you obtain a faculty member’s approval and sponsorship.
Graduate students are eligible for consideration for the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award upon submission of their essays by March 1, 2026. The winner of the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award will win $100 to be used for registration and/or travel expenses to the 47th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum (travel expenses including but not limited to transportation to and from the conference and accommodations while in Keene). The winner of the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award will be announced at the Medieval Feast on Friday, April 10, 2026.
Please submit abstracts and full contact information on the google form available at:
This year’s keynote speaker is Colby Gordon, Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College who will speak on “Margaret Cavendish’s Trans Kabbalah”:
Is gender identity a secularized version of the Christian soul? And if so, where does that leave the body? This talk considers the religious prehistories of the apparently secular clinical apparatus that, today, manages trans life, linking Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 utopian fiction The Blazing World with the later sexological fascination with the transmigration of souls as an explanation for sexual inversion.
Colby Gordon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College. With Simone Chess and Will Fisher, he edited a special issue of The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies on early modern trans studies, the first published collection to bring the conceptual vocabulary of trans studies into the analysis of gender in early modern literature and culture. In 2022, the Shakespeare Association of America named his essay “A Woman’s Prick” the winner of its Innovative Article Award. His first book, Glorious Bodies: Trans Theology and Renaissance Literature, is from the University of Chicago Press (2024). He is currently at work on a second monograph entitled The Trans Debate and the Jewish Question.
Abstract deadline: January 15, 2026
Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2026
As always, we look forward to greeting returning and first-time participants to Keene!
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.149 Friday, 5 December 2025
From: Tom Bishop <
Date: December 4 at 12:29 PM EST
Subject: Death of Graham Bradshaw
Dear SHAKSPER colleagues,
Alongside the SHAKSPER community’s losses of Andrew Jarvis and Meghan Andrews, recently noted here, I am sad to report the death last month of Graham Bradshaw, author of “Shakespeare’s Skepticism” and “Misrepresentations”, co-author of “Shakespeare in Japan” and co-editor the “Shakespearean International Yearbook”. Graham taught at Cambridge, at St Andrews, and at Kyoto University, and was ten years retired from Chuo University (Tokyo) and living in Bali at the time of his death. Those who knew him will recall, among other traits, his witty and sharp conversation, his love of music and revelry, and his gleeful anecdotes of eccentric adventure. He was a passionate and skilled reader of Shakespeare, a gifted and pithy writer, and a forthright controversialist, in person and in print. May his memory be a blessing.
Tom
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.148 Thursday, 4 December 2025
From: Hannibal Hamlin <
Date: December 3 at 2:35 PM EST
Subject: Support for Posthumous Publication by Meghan Andrews
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I forward this on behalf of my colleagues, Sarah Neville, Alan Farmer, and Elizabeth Kolkovich. But really this is all in behalf of celebrating and memorializing Meghan Andrews, whom some of you may have known. Meghan was a promising young scholar, a graduate of Brown and the University of Texas, Austin, and a tenured Associate Professor at Lycoming College. Her scholarship was published in Shakespeare Quarterly, SEL, Renaissance Drama, and other journals. Tragically, Meghan died in 2023 from colon cancer, at the age of only 36.
In honor of Meghan as well as with a sense of the potential value of her work, my colleagues have worked to complete her monograph, Shakespeare and Authorial Networks in Early Modern Drama. The book will be published in the Revels Plays Companion Library by Manchester University Press, but a gofundme page has been set up to raise money to make the volume open-access.
Please consider donating, in memory of Meghan Andrews, a valued scholar gone too soon, and to make her work as widely available as possible, even posthumously.
Yours sincerely,
Hannibal
Fundraiser for Cathy Andrews by Sarah Neville : Help Publish Meghan's Shakespeare Monograph
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.147 Wednesday, 3 December 2025
From: W. Reginald Rampone <
Date: November 30 at 3:42 PM EST
Subject: CFP: Papers on Shakespeare’s Sonnets
The Aesthetics of Shakespeare’s Sonnets
This call for papers focuses on the aesthetics of Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are celebrated not only for the profundity of their emotional and psychological insight into the lover’s mind in the sonnet sequence, but also for the sheer beauty of their language. Shakespeare’s use of imagery, rhyme and rhythm, assonance and alliteration, and a plenitude of other literary devices all work together in order to create a sonnet sequence of virtuosic poetic achievement. This collection seeks to determine not only which sonnets are the most beloved but also why have they have achieved this status. In the interest of discussing as many different sonnets as possible, essays are limited to no more than five, single-spaced, typed—written pages in Times New Roman 12 point, inclusive of all reference matter. All sonnets should be aligned to the third Arden edition. Please email us as to which sonnet you wish to write before submitting your abstract. This is to avoid submitting an abstract on a sonnet on which another scholar has already chosen to write. If this happens, the potential contributor will be asked to submit an abstract on another sonnet. Please submit a 250-300 abstract on your favorite sonnet by May 1, 2026 to
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.146 Sunday, 30 November 2025
From: Don Weingust <
Date: November 30 at 1:34 PM EST
Subject: Re: Andrew Jarvis
Thanks to John Drakakis for his lovely words about Andrew Jarvis. Andrew’s agency, Jo Hole Associates, is offering to forward messages on to his widow, Gillian. An address for same may be found at the agency’s page for Andrew:
https://www.joholeassociates.com/actors/andrew-jarvis/
Don Weingust
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.143 Saturday, 29 November 2025
From: John Drakakis <
Date: November 25 at 5:05 PM EST
Subject: Andrew Jarvis
It is with considerable sadness that I write to record the death of Andrew Jarvis.
Andrew Jarvis’s skill and expertise embraces the entire range of activities associated with the Shakespeare. He has been associated with many of the major acting companies in the UK, from the time of his brilliant performance as Richard III in Michael Bogdanov’s highly innovative English Shakespeare Company’s production of The Wars of the Roses, through to his recently acclaimed understudying of both roles played by Sir Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the National Theatre production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land.
Andrew Jarvis’s theatrical range is formidable and he has been associated with a large number of Shakespearean plays since his association from the early 1980s with the English Shakespeare Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has worked for the RSC, and he has appeared in Shakespeare productions at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield. He has also been a fine teacher of Shakespearean verse-speaking, and has run workshops for the British Shakespeare Association. He has held the post of trustee there, and also he has chaired the BSA Honorary Fellowships committee. He was, at the time of his death, busy planning an event in Kings Lynn, and he has already organised a very successful conference there on Shakespeare. His funeral will be on 10 December.
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.141 Monday, 24 November 2025
From: W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. <
Date: November 23 at 5:29 PM EST
Subject: CFP: Explorations in Love’s Labour’s Lost
CALL FOR PAPERS
Explorations in Love’s Labour’s Lost
This collection of essays seeks to explore the many new and cutting-edge directions surrounding the scholarship of Love’s Labour’s Lost, especially related to global approaches. Love’s Labour’s Lost has always been perceived as a peculiar comedy with its indeterminate ending. In what way is this ending more in the way of a post-modern text? In what way does the homosociality of the young nobles instantiate adolescent or young male same-sex attraction and desire? In what ways is the test to which the young women subject their male lovers indicative of the questioning or skeptical nature of the young women regarding the nature of romantic love? This collection looks to explore how we interpret Love’s Labour’s Lost in the present day, inclusive of appropriations and adaptations. Approaches that might be particularly appropriate include:
- national, regional, and local identity
- ethnicity and race
- sexuality and gender in homosocial friendships
- metadramatic use of language
- marriage or its lack thereof at the conclusion of the play
- performance, national and multimedia adaptation or appropriation of text across countries, cultures, and societies.
- pedagogical approaches to Love’s Labour’s Lost in secondary, collegiate, and post-graduate education.
- the Green World and eco-criticism
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract by March 1, 2026 to W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. at
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.140 Sunday, 23 November 2025
From: Evelyn Gajowski <
Date: November 23 at 4:16 PM EST
Subject: Announcement of Publication
“Congratulations!” to Genevieve Love on Bloomsbury’s publication of her book, Shakespeare & Disability Theory, in the Arden Shakespeare & Theory Series.
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/shakespeare-and-disability-theory-9781350424371/
All the best,
Lynn
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.139 Sunday, 23 November 2025
From: Robert Stagg <
Date: November 23 at 12:56 AM EST
Subject: NVS Seminar
The final New Variorum Shakespeare Seminar of the semester will take place on Thursday 4 December at 2:30pm (CT) at Texas A&M University LAAH 453, where it will also be streamed live on Zoom. The seminar will feature a conversation between Prof. Steven Urkowitz (CUNY) and Prof. Eric Rasmussen (Nevada) about the textual status of King Lear. In addition, we will be making a special announcement about the NVS edition of King Lear.
Further details and a Zoom link can be found on our website: https://newvariorumshakespeare.org/news/
Please contact NVS Director Dr. Robert Stagg (
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.136 Wednesday, 19 November 2025
From: Robert Brink <
Date: November 19 at 4:58 AM EST
Subject: Invitation to Nov 22 memorial
Dear friends, colleagues, and students of Dr. Jean R. Brink,
We are writing to invite you to a memorial gathering in honor of Jeanie’s life, work, and friendship.
Date: Saturday, November 22
Time: 10:00 AM MST (Mountain Standard Time) / 5:00 PM GMT
Location: Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Arizona State University - directions
The gathering will include brief remembrances, readings, and time to share stories together.
If you would like to participate in the Zoom, please reply and we’ll send you the link.
If you plan to attend in person, it would help us with planning if you would reply to this email to let us know that as we are providing some refreshments.
We are grateful for the many ways Jeanie’s scholarship, teaching, and friendship touched so many. We hope you will join us in remembering her.
With thanks,
The Brink Family
on behalf of the friends and colleagues of
Dr. Jeanie Renee Brink
The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 36.130 Wednesday, 5 November 2025
From: Randall Martin <
Date: November 4 at 9:09 PM EST
Subject: New publication discount and sample
Good news. OUP academic is temporarily offering a 30% discount on hardback copies of my new book, Shakespeare, St Paul, and Dramatic Emancipation: disability, gender, race, ecology:
Please go to the order page
and use the promotion code AUFLY30
Alternatively, the Canadian bookseller Indigo is offering a Kobo ebook version of the book at the discounted price of $C79.99:
Finally, OUP is also making a free sample chapter (my Introduction) available during November:
https://academic.oup.com/book/60795/chapter-abstract/528756597
If you have any problems accessing these links, please let me know at
Randall