2015-2016 Events

Conferences

Annual EMC Conference | The Phenomenology of Playing: 1500-1800 | March 4-5, 2016
The EMC announces its annual winter conference, and the theme for this year is Playing.
Keynote Speakers: Laura Engel (Duquesne University), James A. Knapp (Loyola University Chicago), and Bruce Smith (University of Southern California)
Alumni Hall (Mosher Alumni House) & McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020)

In his Essais, Montaigne suggests that “Childrens playes are not sportes, and should be deemed as their most serious actions” (Florio translation, 1603). Three hundred years later, Sigmund Freud maintains that “it would be wrong to think” that a child at play does not take his imagined “world seriously . . . The opposite of play is not what is serious but what is real” (“Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” 1907). We are seeking papers that take up notions of play (broadly construed) in early modern literature from a phenomenological perspective: how can we understand play as lived experience or lived experience as play in early modern texts? Taking our cue from recent scholarly developments in historical phenomenology and in the study of affect, emotion, cognition, and design, we are looking for papers that attend seriously to play in various early modern manifestations. If play and seriousness are conjoined, as Montaigne and Freud write, what serious work does play perform, and how do play and playfulness reflect, distort, shape or create the realities they resist, enjoy, or inhabit?

Conference Details

“Phenomenology and Play” Call for Papers | “Phenomenology and Play” Website


Events 2015-2016

October 1, 2015 | TALK: Roze Hentschell
“Church, Playhouse, Market, Home: The Cultural Geography of St. Paul’s Precinct, 1561-1625”
Roze Hentschell (Colorado State University)
South Hall 2635, 4:00 PM

Event Flyer | Event Details and Photos

November 13, 2015 | A Playful Conversation with Julie Carlson and Aranye Fradenburg
Julie Carlson (English, UCSB) and Aranye Fradenburg (English, UCSB)
Sankey Room (South Hall 2623), 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Email emcfellow@gmail.com for copies of the readings.

Event FlyerEvent Details and Photos

November 19, 2015 | TALK: Julie Park
“Making Storylines in the Country House Poem: Interiority and the Play of Perspective in Marvell’s Upon Appleton House
Julie Park (Vassar)
South Hall 2635, 5:00 PM

Event Flyer | Event Details

January 28, 2016 | TALK and PERFORMANCE at UCI: Matthew Smith
“Ending with Music: Romeo and Juliet and the Renaissance Jig”
Matthew Smith (Asuza Pacific University)
English Broadside Ballad Archive Performance Group (UC Santa Barbara)
The Little Theater, Humanities Hall Ground Floor, UC Irvine, 6:00 PM

Event Details | Register Here! | Interested in Carpooling from UCSB?

February 5, 2016 | TALK: Christopher Foley
“The Hazardous Proximity of Other Bodies in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610)”
Christopher Foley (UCSB)
South Hall 2635, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Event Details

February 11, 2016 | TALK: Johanne Kristiansen
“Intended for Insertion: Newspaper Editing and Public Debate in England, 1790-1795”
Johanne Kristiansen (Dept. of Language and Literature, Norwegian University of Science and Technology)
South Hall 2635, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM

Event Details

April 7, 2016 | SYMPOSIUM: “Cognition, Phenomenology, Play” with Jaak Panksepp and Kay Young
Jaak Panksepp (Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience, Washington State University)
Kay Young (English, UCSB)
McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), 3:00 PM
Sponsored by the IHC Series The Humanities and the Brain

Event Details | Event Flyer

May 5, 2016 TALK: Pamela Reinagel
“Ballads on the Brain”
Pamela Reinagel (Neuroscience, University of California, San Diego)
Location TBA, 3:30 PM
Cosponsored by Literature and the Mind

Event Details | Event Flyer

May 16, 2016TALK: Liza Blake
“Lucy Hutchinson’s Non-Atomistic Lucretius: How the World Did Not Become Modern”
Liza Blake (English, University of Toronto)
Sankey Room (South Hall 2623), 2:00 PM

Event Details | Event Flyer

May 19, 2016 | Bliss-Zimmerman Memorial Lecture with Gail Kern Paster
“‘After his sour fashion’: The Cognitive Ecology of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.”
Gail Kern Paster (Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly and Director Emerita of the Folger Shakespeare Library)
Henley Board Room (Mosher Alumni House), 4:00 PM

Event Details | Event Flyer