Renaissance Colloquium
The Renaissance Colloquium is committed to providing a forum for graduate students, faculty, and visiting scholars to gather and discuss current topics in early modern studies. We invite speakers from neighboring institutions and further afield to present their research in a collegial setting that encourages questions and discussion. In recent years, we have hosted scholars including Colin Burrow, Richard Halpern, Victoria Kahn, Rhodri Lewis, Molly Murray, and numerous others.
Past Events
Nicolas Boileau is often credited with reintroducing the category of the sublime in 1674, but in fact he writes after nearly 300 years of explicit thought about the sublime in the tradition of Longinus, and still more of its inarticulated practices in performances. Yet despite this long tradition, modern readers of early modern…
This talk will explore two distinctive ways in which lyric poetry can be said to think. First, I will argue that poems think by phenomenalizing concepts, by using mimetic representation to transform abstractions into particulars that appear and, at the same time, reveal how appearance itself is structured. Second, I will argue that poems…
Among his poetic contemporaries, George Herbert stands out as a virtuoso of containers and containment: The Temple’s strong architectural conceit implies a delimited physical structure, within which lyric poems — often featuring boxes, cases, bags, and other vessels — call attention to their own formal limits of line and…
As mainstream theater slowly adopts more transgender-informed casting practices, plays like The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s city comedy featuring the notorious and historical Moll Frith, become attractive vessels for nonbinary and genderqueer character readings and staging. While infusions of contemporary stakes…
Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at Yale University and Author of Uncommon Tongues: Eloquence and Eccentricity in the English Renaissance (Penn Press, 2014).
Assistant Professor of English at Clark University. He specializes in the literature of the 16th and 17th Centuries. He teaches courses on race, disability, and emotions in early modern British literature.
Associate Professor of English at John Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and Author of The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance…
The Stain of Slavery in Early Modern England
Shakespeare in the Trans Archive
On Protean Acting in Shakespeare: Race & Virtuosity
Inglorious, Unemployed: Trans/Crip Conjunctions and the Law of Maims in Samson Agonistes
This event has been canceled.
Milton, Newton, and the Making of a Modern World
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Co-sponsored with the 18th C./Romantic Studies Colloquium.
"Adventures in the Skin Trade: Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko and the Marks of Religion"
Co-sponsored with the University Center for Human Values.
Publishing Workshop with Dr. Jessica Wolfe, Articles Editor for Renaissance Quarterly
" 'Men are lived over again': the Transmigrations of Sir Thomas Browne"
Montaigne the Barbarian
"Failures of Selfhood: Augustine, Hamlet, and the Rise of the Aesthetic"
Reception in the Thorp Library to follow talk.
Playing Songs and Singing Plays: Ballads and Plays in the Early Modern Period
Reception in Thorp Library to follow talk.
The Origins of the Concept of Freedom of the Press
Reception in the Thorp Library, McCosh Hall, to follow talk.