Call for Article & Essay Submissions
Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ)
The Huntington Library Quarterly (HLQ) is a peer-reviewed journal featuring original research and new perspectives on the early modern period, broadly defined (c. 1400–1800). Its content reflects an early modern world that was connected and cosmopolitan, with diverse communities and cultures increasingly linked by the circulation of people, ideas, social practices, and material objects in ways that transcend disciplinary and geographic boundaries. We invite submissions that draw on the sources, methods, and theoretical frameworks of literature, art, history, science, medicine, material culture, music, performance, and critical cultural studies, with a preference for scholarship that is broadly legible across disciplines.
HLQ’s historical focus on Britain and its American colonies has been dramatically expanded to embrace broader and more diverse fields of inquiry, including scholarship rooted in continental Europe, the African Diaspora, and the Indigenous Americas, as well as their intersections with Mediterranean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean worlds.
HLQ invites article submissions for two featured issues that will mark the journal’s new direction. Submissions received before 15 January 2025 will be evaluated for the first of these issues, to be published in September 2025. Submissions received before 15 March 2025 will be evaluated for the second of these issues, to be published in December 2025.
https://www.pennpress.org/journals/journal/huntington-library-quarterly/
Call for Conference Talks
RSA 2025: Sidney Society
The Sidney Circle
The International Sidney Society welcomes abstracts related to members of the Sidney circle, including Philip Sidney, Mary Sidney, Mary Wroth, Robert Sidney, William Herbert, Fulke Greville, Walter Raleigh, and Penelope Rich.
Women of the Sidney Family
We welcome papers on works especially by Mary Sidney Herbert and Mary Wroth.
Sex and the Sidneys
The Sidney circle engages with sexuality, gender, and desire. Regardless of form or genre, their works show their constant interest in these subjects of central human concern. We invite proposals on any aspect of sex in the Sidney circle and their works. Topics might include, but are not limited to,
- The sexuality of the blazoned body
- Threatening sexual desire
- Allusion, mythology, and sexuality
- Sex, procreation, and creativity
- Pleasure and desire
- Disguised sexualities
- Sex and humor
- Sex and power
- Class and sexuality
- Landscape, the body, and desire
- Desire and morality
- "Passionate sonnets," form, and desire
The Political Sidneys
This topic presents a rich mine of possibilities, as shown by the following events. The Sidney family, from its rise with Sir William Sidney the close friend of King Edward VI to the execution of Algernon Sidney, was rarely non-political. Of its literary members, Sir Philip Sidney was a favoured courtier, involved in settling the New World, Ambassador to the Holy Roman Empire, and the second-in-command of the English forces in the Netherlands; Robert Sidney was a Member of Parliament, Governor of Flushing, and an influential courtier of King James I; Mary Sidney’s first major literary work was Antonius, a translation of Robert Garnier’s highly political play about Antony and Cleopatra; Mary Wroth was a member of Queen Anne’s intimate circle and later helped her lover become Lord Chamberlain; and Algernon was the most political Sidney of them all – soldier, anti-Cromwellian republican, envoy, exile, dissident and perhaps insurrectionist, as well as writing the Discourses Concerning Government and Court Maxims.
Pedagogy: A Workshop
This workshop addresses challenges experienced in teaching Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, the translation of the Psalms by Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney Herbert, Mary Wroth’s poems, or other works by the Sidney family and their circle. We welcome thoughts on digital opportunities, inventive syllabi, and classroom anecdotes. Panelists for this workshop will be chosen from submitted abstracts.
RSA 2025: Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany
We invite proposals for a series of panels that stems from an ongoing AHRC and DFG-funded project, ‘Scientific Poetry and Poetics in Britain and Germany, from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment’ (https://scientificpoetry.org/). The project explores a mass of largely-unknown scientific poetry – and a corresponding poetics of science – that reveals a vibrant facet of Renaissance, Restoration, and Enlightenment culture: the production not only of ideas, but of new, technical vocabularies, all forged in the particular demands of poetic form. The project’s reformulation of the era’s poetic ideas - its cosmopoetics, its theopoetics and its physico-theology - bears on how we understand emergent aesthetics in this most tumultuous period for the vernaculars of both England and Germany. It also reveals the compositional and referential density of both scientific knowledge and poetic forms, writing that came to be valued precisely because of its discursive volatility and its kaleidoscopic capacity. Moreover, we seek to unearth and analyze a body of work by women, much of it in manuscript, that deploys scientific ideas to dazzling effect, as well as neo-Latin verse on topics ranging from blood transfusion to flight theory.
We welcome paper proposals on any aspect of the intersections between poetry, poetics and natural philosophy in early modern vernacular and neo-Latin writings, including (but not limited to) the following:
- early modern poetry/poetics that engages with geology and sea-science, botany and natural history, astronomy and cosmology, atomic thought and a range of emergent sciences,
- relations in scientific-poetic writing between early modern vernaculars and neo-Latin,
- how scientific ideas filter into other frameworks of poetic writing, such as the theological, political and domestic,
- the impact of different poetic forms on the creation and communication of scientific ideas,
- the poetics of scientific practice and theory and the contribution of scientific thought to poetics,
- scientific poetry within the European early Enlightenment.
Please send a 200-300 word abstract of your paper and your contact information (name; affiliation; email address) tocassie.gorman@aru.ac.uk. Your submission should include a paper title (15-word maximum), relevant keywords, and a short CV. The deadline for submissions is 26 July 2024; notification of acceptance will be made by 09 August 2024.
Nature and Science in Premodern Literature at PAMLA in Palm Springs, CA
This panel is open to papers that focus on the relationship between the natural sciences and ancient, medieval, and early modern literature (before roughly 1700 CE) from all parts of the globe. This panel explores the ways in which pre- and early modern literature works with and against contemporary scientific theories, methods, and discourses. Papers may engage any element of the natural sciences, from philosophy, theology, and theory, to inventions and practical technologies. Scientific fields may include astronomy and cosmology, biology and medicine, mathematics, physics and chemistry, and many more.
Deadline: April 30
All abstracts should be submitted via the PAMLA website.
This year's Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association (PAMLA) will be held November 6-10 in Palm Springs, CA. More conference information can be found here.
Please feel free to send any questions to summer.lizer@cgu.edu
Medieval Literature at PAMLA in Palm Springs, CA
Abstract: Medieval Literature will study multiple aspects of medieval literature, with special consideration for work that engages with the conference theme, "Translation in Action." This panel welcomes a broad interpretation of the theme as it relates to Medieval literature as well as the field of medieval studies itself. We also welcome work that considers translation and other similar frameworks.
Description: While Medieval Literature will consider a variety of papers, we welcome proposals that engage with the conference theme, "Translation in Action." This panel welcomes work on any aspect of Medieval literature, but work that considers translation from a broad range of perspectives in terms of the Medieval is particularly welcome. Some questions to ponder include, but are not limited to: what happens when texts move from one space to another? How does the movement between different spaces affect a character? What are the ways in which medievalists can make their work legible and accessible to those outside of the field? In what ways can translation be a metaphor? What is the relationship between an original and a translated copy? What are the limits to translation, and how do we deal with them? What dictates the ability for some things to carry over from one context into another? How might translation forge connections?
Deadline: April 30, 2024.
Please submit paper proposals through PAMLA's online system: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19227