Academic Meetings and Opportunities Fall 2003

Upcoming Academic Meetings and Opportunities

CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline: December 31, 2003

SITM (SociŽtŽ Internationale pour l'Žtude du thŽ‰tre mŽdiŽval)
Colloquium

The next SITM colloquium will be held during the week of 9 to 14 August, 2004, in the Valencian city of Elx (Elche), where the Mystery Play of the Assumption is performed annually on August 15th. The performance dates back in an unbroken tradition to the late Middle Ages, possibly earlier.

Colloquium sessions will be organized around the following topics:

- The "Misteri d'Elx" and other Marian Plays
- Medieval Theatre in the Mediterranean Area
- Christmas Plays
- Audiences and Reception

Send half-page proposals for papers or sessions to Josep Llu“s Sirera, director of the Colloquium (Josep.Sirera@uv.es) by December 31, 2003. A provisional program with further information will then be issued. The deadline for the complete versions of the papers will be March 1, 2004. All papers will be published on the web by May 2004. As usual, at the conference, speakers should limit themselves to a 10-minute presentation of the main discussion points contained in their papers. All papers are given in plenary sessions with ample time for discussion. Membership in SITM is required of all presenters.

Colloquium web page: http://parnaseo.uv.es/Ars/webelx/elx.htm
SITM web page: http://burgundy.byu.edu/sitm/

CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline: January 1, 2004

International Society of Phenomenology, Aesthetics and the Fine Arts
(An affiliate of the World Phenomenology Institute)

Ninth Annual Conference
May 14-15, 2004
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge MA USA

Human Creation Between Reality and Illusion: art, dance, digital art, film, light, music, theatre.

All the arts challenge percipients to resolve the dialectical tension between reality and illusion. This conference is dedicated to those processes that play on self-referential illusion in the work of art. Topics might include: illusions of expansion and diminution in time and space; perspective; truth in digital art, photography and film; illusions and emotion; illusion and neurology; the awakenings of illusion; staged illusion of reality of life in theatre; the "true lie"; echoes; conventions in opera; belief suspended in disbelief. We would appreciate contributions from the points of view of creators and percipients alike.

Abstracts due January 1, 2004; full papers due March 1, 2004

Send abstracts and papers to:

Patricia Trutty-Coohill
ISPAFA Secretary-General
Department of Creative Arts
Siena College
515 Loudon Road
Loudonville NY 12211-1462

ptrutty@siena.edu
http://www.phenomenology.org/

UPCOMING SEMINAR
Center for Research in Festive Culture

Seminar 1, Friday, January 23, 2004, 2:00-5:00 p.m.
Newberry Library, Chicago, Illinois

The Politics of Festival: Renaissance Florence and Elizabethan England

Graduate Students, Faculty, and the General Public are Cordially Invited to Attend

At the first session of the spring 2004 Research Seminar in Festive Culture the following two papers will be discussed. The papers are available by email to correspondents of the Center.

Martin Walsh, Professor of Drama, University of Michigan, discusses an incident in the war of Lucca against Florence in the 1320s. Castruccio Castracani, the brutal military leader of Lucca (cf. Machiavelli's Life of Castracani), having captured in battle a number of prominent and less prominent Florentines, offered them a Martinmas banquet at the expense of his city, and then paraded them through the streets to his dungeons. What was the politico-cultural strategy behind this ritual humiliation? What were the particular dramatic modes and metaphors that it used, insofar as we can deduce them? What antecedents and parallels to the staging can be suggested? These are the questions and issues explored in this paper.

Paulette Marty, Adjunct Professor of English, Millikan University, Decatur, Illinois, probes the meaning of an event occurring during Queen Elizabeth I's visit to the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle in 1575. Her host provided many entertainments, including a "brideale," a traditional celebration which honored newlyweds. An eyewitness account suggests that the event was a representation for the form rather than the genuine marriage celebration. Professor Marty concludes that Leicester staged the brideale to suit his ambitions, political and personal. In that case, how did the representation appear to its spectators, including the queen-as a cruel satire? A festive play? A touristic novelty?

The seminar will devote 90-minute round-table discussions to each of these papers, with a brief coffee break between them. The papers will be briefly introduced, not read, by Professors Walsh and Marty.

Please send your request for a copy of the papers to

Erin Lucido, secretary of the seminar, at the Newberry Library
(lucidoe@newberry.org).

Requested papers will be sent to your email address. If you do not have an email address, send your mailing address to

Erin Lucido
Newberry Library
60 West Walton Street
Chicago, IL 60610-7324,

or to

Samuel Kinser
History Department
Northern Illinois University
DeKalb, IL 60115
( sakinser@aol.com).

Please call Lorraine Scurti, Secretary, History Department, Northern Illinois University, for further information (815-753-6820).

CALL FOR ESSAYS
Deadline: March 8, 2004

Text and Performance Quarterly
Special Issue: Religion as Performance

Frederick C. Corey and Thomas K. Nakayama, guest editors of Text and Performance Quarterly, invite scholarship on the intersections of religion, performance, and power. Of particular interest are manuscripts that explore confounding borders of hegemony, politics, race, ethnicity, (post)colonialism, sexuality, patriotism, theaters of war, and nationalism. Topics may range from the everyday practice of religion to missionaries, religious "stars," the ideology of "the separation of church and state," religious conflict, religion and capitalism/imperialism, ubiquitous enactments of fundamentalism or Puritanism, and triptychs of religion/sex/politics. Manuscripts from a wide range of perspectives, including rhetorical, feminist, ethnographic, political, psychoanalytic, and aesthetic are welcome. The possibility of photographs is open, subject to editorial review and budgetary constraints.

All submissions should observe the following guidelines:
Manuscripts submitted for this special issue should not be under consideration elsewhere. Because TPQ follows a policy of blind, peer review, no material identifying the author(s) should appear anywhere other than the title page. Double-space the entire manuscript, including notes and block quotes. Include an abstract of not more than 150 words and a list of 5 suggested keywords. Indicate the history of the manuscript, noting whether it is part of a thesis or dissertation and, if so, the director's name, and/or whether any portion of the essay has been presented at a colloquy, conference, or convention. Manuscripts must conform to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, edited by Joseph Gibaldi (6th edition).

Please email manuscripts (no hard copies please) in MS Word or WordPerfect to Frederick.corey@asu.edu by March 8, 2004.

Text and Performance Quarterly is a peer-reviewed journal of the National Communication Association published by Routledge Journals, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Ltd.

CALL FOR ESSAYS
Deadline: June 1, 2004

Contributions are sought for a collection of essays addressing connections between oral traditions-including folktales and folklore-and gender in early modern literature. Send completed papers (no more than 5,000 words)or abstracts by June 1, 2004 to both Karen Bamford kbamford@mta.ca and Mary Ellen Lamb marylamb@siu.edu.

CALL FOR ESSAYS
European Medieval Drama

European Medieval Drama volume 7, which is the first volume of this periodical to be published as a result of the new association between the publishers Brepols and the SITM, is about to go to press. It will probably be published before the end of December 2003.

Colleagues are invited to submit, in English or in French, original articles on any aspect of medieval drama for publication in EMD 8 (2004) and EMD 9 (2005). Articles should be submitted in the form of a PC file, either in RTF or Word for Windows format.

EMD is also prepared occasionally to publish translations into English of medieval plays in other languages.

With regard to book reviews, EMD does not set out to review all books published in our field, but we are eager to review major works on any aspect of our discipline. I would therefore be grateful if colleagues would let me know if there are any books on medieval drama which they think merit a review in EMD.

Please send questions and submissions to

Graham A. Runnalls
85A Colinton Road
Edinburgh, EH10 5DF, UK

gandarunnalls@btinternet.com