MRDS Business Fall 2005

MRDS Business

ELECTION OF OFFICERS

Nominations have been made for the following positions. Please return your ballot with your dues by March 1, 2006. (Ballots will be sent by postal mail)

Nominees for Council (vote for two)

Vicki Hamblin is Professor of French Language and Literature at Western Washington University. She teaches courses at all levels in an undergraduate curriculum. In that capacity, she also serves as study-abroad advisor and as faculty mentor for the Mu Pi chapter of Pi Delta Phi. Her research focus is French theater of the fifteenth-century, and especially non-biblical mystery plays. She has published a critical edition of the Mistere du siege d'Orleans (Droz 2002) in addition to numerous articles in professional publications in the U.S., Europe and Australia. She is currently on professional leave to produce a book entitled Saints at Play: The Performance Features of French Hagiographic Mystery Plays. In this comparative analysis of some 35 plays, textual remnants of performance will be analyzed as a study-set for reconstructing the staging features of mystery plays at the height of their popularity in France.

Gordon Kipling is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes on civic and courtly spectacle in the late Middle Ages and the early Modern Period. His most recent book, Enter the King: Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph won the first annual David Bevington Prize as well as the Otto Grundler prize. He is presently working on three books: one on the Early Modern civic triumph, another (with Meg Twycross) on the theatrical illustrations of the entry of Princess Joanna into Brussels (1496), and another on modern conceptions of the medieval theatre.

Eckehard Simon has taught at Harvard University's German Department since 1964 where he is currently serving as Victor S. Thomas Professor. His college course on The Medieval Stage reconstructs performances of major plays from France and England in their historical context. The "Swabian Christmas Play" (Constance, 1417), which he discovered in Houghton Library in 1975, expanded the repertory of early German Christmas plays from six to seven. In 1991 Cambridge University Press published The Theater of Medieval Europe, essays from a Harvard conference on theater scholarship. His 2003 history of non-religious German theater (1370-1530) is based on newly harvested performance records and won the 2005 Bevington Prize for the Best New Book in Early Drama. The last two articles he has written deal with German Mary Assumption plays and the Strasbourg Mary Portal (European Medieval Drama, 9) and with staging the Reformation in the Nuremberg Carnival (to appear in Transatlantic German Studies). He is currently writing a history of medieval and early modern German theater for colleagues in the field.

Jenna Soleo-Shanks is a Ph.D. candidate in the Theatre Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her dissertation, on which she is currently at work, examines the political function of performance in the city-state republic of Siena, Italy. For the upcoming 41st International Congress on Medieval Studies, she has organized the MRDS session on "What Theater Studies Brings to Medieval Studies." Her most recent conference papers have focused on the semiotics of performance space in the Sienese Republic, and her presentation "'Teatro' in Piazza: Siena's Piazza del Campo as a Performance Space," delivered at SITM in Elx in 2004, won the Alexandra F. Johnston Prize in 2005. Her article on the Assumption drama of Elx, its performance tradition, and its the elaborate aerial machinery (dating from the 16th century) was recently published in Western European Stages (Winter 2005). She has received grant money for dissertation research from the Program for Cultural Cooperation, and has taught theatre, speech, and humanities classes at Hunter, Baruch, and Marymount Manhattan colleges as well as at St. John's University in New York.

CONSTITUTIONAL AMMENDMENT

The vote on this ammendment will take place at the 2006 MRDS Business Meeting. Proposed changes to the MRDS Constitution appear below. It is proposed that [text in bold and bracketed be deleted] and text underlined, italicized, and in bold be added.

1. There shall be a non-profit educational society called the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society. Its purposes shall be to effect annual meetings of scholars and other persons interested in medieval and Renaissance drama, to sponsor long-range projects of interest to such persons, and to support the publication of [publish] material of interest to the Society, including the Early European Drama in Translation (EEDT) Series and Research Opportunities in Medieval and Renaissance Drama [and its Medieval Supplement].