2015 – Call for Papers

The Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference

Call for Papers

“Negotiating Shakespeare: History, Culture, and Context”
October 8-10, 2015
Bowling Green State University
Bowling Green State, Ohio

Plenary Speaker:
Ian Smith, Professor of English at Lafayette College

Please join us October 8-10, 2015 in Bowling Green, Ohio for the annual Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference.

Our plenary speaker will be Ian Smith, professor of English at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania and author of Race and Rhetoric in the Renaissance: Barbarian Errors (Palgrave, 2009).

The conference will also feature the Akron based, Rubber City Shakespeare Company, who will perform Macbeth on Friday evening.

This year, the OVSC is especially interested in papers and panels on the topic of negotiating Shakespeare through history, culture, and context. We welcome a variety of approaches to this topic. Essays might consider, for instance, how we negotiate Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do adaptations of Shakespeare’s work negotiate the gulf of over 400 years that stands between early modern texts and us? Which theories of time and/or history are the most fruitful in negotiating our relationship to the early modern era and its texts? How do we negotiate the use of such “old” texts, like Shakespeare’s, in the contemporary classroom? Alternately, essays could inquire about Shakespeare’s negotiation of his culture, in relation, for instance, to governmental censorship or playhouse politics. Or, papers might examine negotiations within Shakespeare’s plays, including characters’ negotiations of identity as it relates to gender, class, race, sexuality, and/or religion. Discussions of bad faith negotiations, such as Aaron’s false promise of freedom for Martius and Quintus in exchange for one of the Andronici’s hands, are also encouraged as are those that examine characters’ negotiations of language and social systems found within the plays.

Proposals for papers of 20 minutes, roundtable topics, or panels of three or four members on Shakespeare’s work and that of his contemporaries are welcome. Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to stephsg@bgsu.edu by August 1, 2015.

The OVSC publishes a volume of selected papers each year and conferees are welcome to submit revised versions of their papers for consideration. Students who present are eligible to compete for the M. Rick Smith Memorial Prize. More information is available at http://blogs.uakron.edu/ovsconf/.

This year’s conference is sponsored by Bowling Green State University, Lourdes University, Owens Community College, and the University of Toledo.