Day 1, February 24, 2022:

Day 2, February 25, 2022

___________________________

Conference Schedule:

*The conference is virtual (via Zoom), and all times listed below are PST*

THURSDAY, February 24^th

11:30-11:35 Welcome: Nicole Stark, Graduate Fellow, Early Modern Center

11:35-12:50 Panel 1: Female Spaces and the “Space” for Women

Moderator: Reem Taha

Şebnem Düzgün (Ankara Science University), “Creation of a Female Space in Sarah Scott’s Millenium Hall”

Amelia Mills (University of Loughborough), “Reclaiming the ‘Carte de Tendre’: Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Tallemant, and Aphra Behn”

Kimberly Glassman (University of London), “Treading Between Linnaean Botany and Female Propriety in Colonial Canada: An analysis of the scientific writings of Maria Jacson and Harriet Sheppard.”

12:50-1:15 25 min. break

1:15-2:30 Panel 2: ‘Woman’ in Drama & Popular Print

Moderator: Shaun Nowicki

Alice Fulmer (University of California, Santa Barbara), “The Forum of Hic Mulier: Body Economics in The Roaring Girl”

Chrissie Maroulli (University of Cyprus), “Murky Milks: Outsourcing Breastmilk and Maternal Failure in the Early Modern Ballad ‘Lamkin’”

Beatrice Righetti (University of Padua), “The ‘female advocate’: Defences and Mock Trials in Early Modern Women’s Pamphlets”

2:30-3:00 30 min. break

3:00-4:30 Keynote Presentation: Simone Chess (Wayne State University), “The Warrior Women Project, Trans Ballads, and Intergenerational Queer Studies.”

            Introduction: Bernadette Andrea, Former Director of the Early Modern Center & Professor of English (UCSB)

Abstract:

In 1983, ballad scholar Dianne Dugaw compiled a type-written catalogue of 113 “warrior women” ballads—ballads in which female characters decide to become male soldiers and sailors—as part of her dissertation. Almost 40 years later, in 2020, the catalogue was digitally published for the first time as part of “The Warrior Women Project,” a collaboration between the UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive and a team at Wayne State University in Detroit. This talk will explore the histories and futures of this collection of “warrior women” ballads and the parallel histories and futures of feminist and queer scholarship they generate, with a special focus on the possibilities now available through trans studies approaches. While the talk will offer some specifics about my own work—both in planning the Warrior Women Project and in reading trans pregnancy in warrior women ballads—most fundamentally it will be about the challenges, possibilities, and urgencies inherent to intergenerational collaborations in queer and feminist early modern studies. In this way, the talk takes up the conference theme of Voicing ‘Women’ not only through the characters in and content of the ballads, but also through the stances of and conversations between the scholars responsible for interpreting whatever it is the ballads voice.

FRIDAY, February 25^th:

10:00-11:30 Panel 3: Writing ‘Woman’ and Women Writers

Moderator: Olivia Bievenue

Marlin E. Blaine (California State University, Fullerton), “‘Juno Thunders with the Tongue’: John Dryden, the Woman’s Voice, and an Eighteenth-Century Misogynistic Topos”

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Remediating Philomela”

Xinyuan Qiu (Binghamton University), “‘So – so strangely!’: Disciplinary Gaze and Female Equivocal Voice as a Device to Gain Agency in Evelina”

Olivia Henderson (University of California, Santa Barbara), “‘Told still shee was mad, and threatned to bee used accordingly’: The Social Model of Madness in Mary Wroth’s Urania”

11:30-11:45 15 min. break

11:45-1:15 Panel 4: ‘Woman’ Across Media: Depictions, Connections, Translations, & Adaptations

Moderator: Olivia Henderson

Madison Connaughton (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Queen Elizabeth Tudor I: Monarch, Writer, & Consequent Shapeshifter”

Raja Althobaiti (University of Washington), “Genre, Narrative Closure and Shahrazad’s Motherhood in Antoine Galland’s Translation of the Arabian Nights”

Sofie Schneibel (University of California, Santa Barbara), “’A guiltless death I die’: What Shakespeare’s Othello Illustrates about Language and
Violence against Women in Light of the Isla Vista Shooting”

Waed Hasan (University of Guelph), “The Power of Tongues: Shakespeare’s Women in Julie Taymor’s Titus“

1:15-2:00 Lunch

2:00-3:30 Keynote Presentation: James McNamara (University of California, Santa Barbara), “‘Witch’, ‘Prophetess’, ‘Queen’”: Foregrounding Queen Margaret’s Political Power via Serialized Television Adaptation in The Hollow Crown (BBC, 2012, 2016)”

            Introduction: Patrice Petro, Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center

Abstract:

Queen Margaret has a shifting role in screen adaptations and stage productions of William Shakespeare’s First Tetralogy (Henry VI Parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III): pivotal in some, she’s cut from others. Ben Power’s television adaptation of the First Tetralogy for The Hollow Crown: The War of the Roses (BBC, 2016) expressly foregrounds Queen Margaret’s role, emphasizing her political agency and establishing her as the protagonist whose story arc offers a narrative throughline across a serialized second season. To elucidate Power’s adaptive strategy, I will closely read Episode Three: Richard III (the final episode of Season Two) using David Bordwell’s historical poetics to show how Power’s cuts and additions to Shakespeare’s source play establish Queen Margaret as the key causal factor in Richard’s political downfall – the culmination of her foregrounded political role in the preceding two episodes (Henry VI Parts 1, 2, and 3).

My wider claim is that Power uses the defining qualities of his adaptive medium – the complex serialized character arcs of twenty-first-century “prestige television”– to stress the centrality of Shakespeare’s “first tragic heroine”, a role that – as recent queenship studies scholarship has argued – requires serialized adaptation or cyclical performance of the First Tetralogy to fully reveal. This serialized approach (in contradistinction to Season One’s more episodic structure for the Second Tetralogy) offers an important perspective on the historically vexed question of serialization in Shakespeare’s Henriad. More broadly, I maintain that the oft-maligned medium of television should be re-evaluated in light of twenty-first-century advancements and recognized as a vital resource for scholarly understanding of Shakespeare’s plays.

3:30-3:45 15 min. break

3:45-4:45 Roundtable/Lightning Round

Moderator: Andrew Griffin

Yafit Shachar (Tel Aviv University), “Single and Singular: Queen Elizabeth I’s Marriage Speeches”

Lydia Pejovic (Chapman University), “Mary Sidney: Religious Translation and the Role of Women in 16th and 17th Century England”

Anna Caterino (Università degli Studi di Milano), “All’s Well that Ends Well and the Vindication of Female Physicians”

Jennifer Schaupp (Point Park University): “Domesticating & Reclaiming the Whore: How the Visual Representations of Restoration-Era Actresses Manifest in Present Day”

Martina Guzzetti (University of Milan), “Representing Women in Early Examples of British Feminist Writings (1600s-1700s)”

4:45 Closing Remarks: James Kearney, Former Director of the Early Modern Center & Professor of English (UCSB)

Conference CFP

University of California, Santa Barbara

Conference Date: February 24-25, 2022

Abstracts Due: December 31, 2021

The Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara is excited to announce this year’s winter conference, “Voicing ‘Woman’ across Media, 1500-1800,” part of the Center’s theme for the year, ‘Woman,’ 1500-1800. The conference is open globally to faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars, with a special session of distinguished undergraduate students. It will be held virtually (via Zoom) on Thursday, February 24th and Friday, February 25th, 2022. We are also thrilled to announce our two keynote speakers, Dr. Simone Chess (Wayne State University) and Dr. James McNamara (UCSB).

“Voicing ‘Woman’ across Media, 1500-1800” invites presentations that query the early modern concept of ‘woman’ as it is variously constructed or performed by members of all genders in literature, (auto)biography, drama/the stage, music, art, religious texts, film and television, and other media. Instead of focusing broadly on gender, which we recognize has been a key issue of late, we instead want to focus specifically on ‘woman.’ What is ‘woman’? Who is privileged with voicing and defining ‘her’? How have adaptations (both within the early modern period and after the eighteenth century) appropriated and/or interrogated these early modern constructions?

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• writing by and/or about women
• ‘woman’ as dramatic character or caricature
• women’s voices as depicted by male writers
• digitizing ‘woman’ / ‘woman’ in the archive
• the idea of ‘woman’ in relation(s) to race, sexuality, and/or nationality
• transfemininity and transmisogyny in depictions of women
• querying gender in terms of queering ‘woman’ (and vice versa)
• ‘woman’ within and outside the European context
• women as travelers and/or women depicted in travel narrative
• ‘woman’ as icon/iconic
• representations of women in pamphlet gender debates of the early 17th c.
• women as unruly and/or resistant
• ‘warrior’ women
• women and disability
• women in religion
• women’s spaces/the space of (and for) women
• technology and women
• print history and women
• feminist and/or female-centered adaptations of early modern drama

We invite and envision both panel presentations and ten-minute roundtable presentations. Please submit abstracts of 150 to 200 words and a one-page CV to emcfellow@gmail.com by December 31, 2021.