Enrollment for the seminars will open on 25 May 2025 and close on 15 September 2025

S01.
Anthropocene Shakespeare:
Research, Practice, Transformations

Organisers: Sophie Chiari, Randall Martin

Description: This seminar invites scholars and practitioners: to examine how Anthropocene conditions can make fresh sense of Shakespeare’s plays; to explore how today’s earth-system and environmental crises are reshaping Shakespeare criticism and performance; and to discuss how environmentally impacted and adapted Shakespeare can productively suggest post-Anthropocene futures. The use of non-Western forms of knowledge to reincorporate ecological values into Shakespeare, the institutional and transcultural mediation of eco-Shakespeare in performance, the environmental footprints of theatre production — these are just some of the many issues worth investigating in today’s contexts of rethinking and staging Shakespeare on a precarious planet. How does Shakespeare’s attention to the non-human resonate with today’s Anthropocene crises? How does eco-dramaturgy imagine alternatives of environmental preservation, equity, and coping mechanisms? And how can it encourage best practices and post-growth sponsorship and investment?   

S02.
Antony and Cleopatra as Cosmos

Organises: Eric S. Mallin, Paromita Chakravarti, W. Reginald Rampone, Jr. 

Description: Nearly every expression of theme, affect, or selfhood in Antony and Cleopatra partakes of the transcendent. From assertions of racial identity to articulations of conquest, empire, desire, and grief, the play repeatedly argues for human participation in and encounter with the infinites the supralunary real. How best can we understand characters who think themselves virtually divine, planetary objects? What are the significances for our reading of the sexualities, politics, and ecologies implied in discourse about the heavenly spheres? This seminar will consider the play’s challenge to Eurocentric habits of thought through its obsessions with universality and global scale.

S03.
Blue Shakespeares  

Organisers: Steve Mentz, Shaul Bassi, Dyani Johns Taff   

Description: Shakespeare’s planetary vision often focuses on the sea and other bodies of water. From the ‘boundless’ seas of love that animate Romeo and Juliet to Macbeth’s ‘multitudinous seas’ and Hamlet’s ‘sea of troubles’, the World Ocean operates throughout Shakespeare’s plays and poems as both metaphor and fundamental physical reality. This seminar invites papers that expand Shakespeare’s watery visions beyond the poetics of oceans into fresh waters, ice, clouds and fog, and other watery forms. We aim to engage with recent scholarship in the blue humanities, ecocriticism, and different kinds of planetarity and globalization.  

S04.
Caliban and the (Inter-)Planetary:
The In, the Out and the Beyond

Organisers: Michela Compagnoni, Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik 

Description: By offering insights into the development of the troubling discourses of race, and by coupling these discourses to the conflicts between bodies and identities, contemporary rewritings of Caliban as a character speak powerfully to our own world of religious, ethnic, and national antagonism that can be translated into transnational, global, post-Earth, and even inter-planetary scenarios. The seminar invites submissions that explore the (inter)planetary afterlives of Shakespeare’s Caliban in the literary, performative, and digital forms of expression in the twenty-first century and that allow us to imagine alternatives to this increasingly fractured world and its unjust power relations.

S05.
Contemporary Shakespeare Fiction

Organisers: Koel Chatterjee, Kinga Földváry

Description: This seminar would like to explore novelisations of Shakespeare with particular focus given to contemporary novels from the perspective of minor characters from the plays, non-caucasian characters, non-traditional settings or genres, and novels and prose translations written in languages other than English. Topics of interest for this seminar might address, but are not limited to, the following broad areas: the relevance of Shakespeare fiction and the context of telling the story in a different time, place, or setting, particularly in the present day; the use of Shakespeare to address anxieties about environmental concerns; Shakespeare’s fictionality or Shakespearean challenges to modern fiction; individual responses to Shakespeare through writing, editing, or interpreting the plays, for example fanfiction; experimentation with genre and form; Shakespeare fiction adapted to unusual genres, from YA to undead horror; the proliferation of Shakespeare biofiction.

S06.
Crisis and Resilience in the Roman Plays

Organisers: Pascale Aebischer, Lubaaba Al-Azami, Courtney Lehmann, Hassana Moosa 

Description: This seminar explores how Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and the Roman plays address resilience in the face of catastrophe to confront planetary permacrises wherein environmental, health, migratory, military, and sociopolitical violences intersect. Through the lens of Marcus’ nihilistic plea for planetary destruction, participants are invited to reflect on individual and communal coping mechanisms that reimagine Shakespeare’s stoicism as a mode of creative improvisation, fostering kinship and emergent forms of collective resistance among diverse communities. The seminar also encourages considerations of how productions and editions of these plays engage with themes of empire, neo-fascisms, racisms, statelessness, sexual violence, and (dis)ability.

S07.
Dramaturgies of Disruption: Shakespeare in the Age of Algorithmic Alienation

Organisers: Tai-Won Kim, Lingui Yang, Huimin Wang, Roberta Zanoni

Description: Shakespeare’s enduring dramaturgy—juxtaposing genres, layering mises en scène, and confronting religious strife, gender inequity, and social unrest—remains startlingly relevant. In an era of digital saturation and algorithmic alienation, how do his structural innovations (soliloquies as viral monologues, metatheatricality as hyper-awareness) resonate? This seminar interrogates contemporary stagings that weaponize his humanism: post-human adaptations, VR-driven audience immersion, or tradaptations exposing cultural fault lines. Can his dramaturgical boldness—subversive doubling, fluid temporality—inspire new forms of resistance amid modern censorship? We seek analyses of productions, films, or transcultural reinventions that harness Shakespeare’s craft to mirror today’s fractures, proving drama’s power to interrogate, not just entertain.

S08.
The End(s) of Global Shakespeare 

Organisers: Alexa Alice Joubin, Dennis Kennedy

Description: How might we bring new critical tools to scrutinize the politics and usefulness of the concept of global Shakespeare? Do the failures of globalism as an economic and social project require us to rethink what international Shakespeare was, is, or should be? The wave of change in Shakespeare studies in the past thirty years—in print, on stage, and on film—has flooded out the Anglo-centred approach, but we have not fully understood what the wave indicates or what forces drive it. The seminar proposes an international exploration that reconsiders the significance of global Shakespeare and its usefulness as a concept. Participants are invited to offer specific examples that broaden or redefine global Shakespeare.

S09.
Geopolitical Dynamics in Shakespeare Adaptations:
Perspectives on the New Cold War

Organisers: Dong-ha Seo, Hisao Oshima, Ananya Dutta Gupta

Description: This seminar explores literary and theatrical responses to contemporary geopolitical tensions, particularly the ‘New Cold War’ in an increasingly multipolar world. Examining Shakespeare’s works, it compares adaptations from the Cold War to reinterpretations in the new millennium, analyzing how they address ideological, geopolitical, and military conflicts. It considers broader cultural and historical contexts shaping collective memory, focusing on the resonance of Shakespeare’s works in Europe, East Asia, and other nations. Themes include the siege as a metaphor for geopolitical conflicts and the impact of adaptations on audience perceptions, highlighting Shakespeare’s enduring role in reflecting twenty-first century global shifts. 

S10.
International Shakespeares:
Soft Power and National Cultural Identities 

Organisers: Helen A. Hopkins, L. Monique Pittman 

Description: Many nations have used Shakespeare’s life, works, and iconicity for soft power purposes: to create or assert an appealing national cultural identity that increases their influence on the world stage. This seminar asks: how is Shakespeare used to shape national identities? How do adaptations and appropriations recirculate Shakespeare as soft power? How is Shakespearean power consolidated through the provenance and exhibition of material artifacts? What are the implications of this appropriation of power? This seminar welcomes papers exploring forms of Shakespearean soft power that manifest through global networking, negotiations, and performances in varied locales and through a range of artifacts.

S11.
Lunar Intersections

Organisers: William C. Carroll, Pascale C. Drouet

Description: We invite papers on representations, invocations, and speculations on lunar topics, from early modern imaginings and scientific investigations to contemporary deployments in performance, queer genre and eco-theory. Suggested topics and questions can include visual representations of the moon, the moon’s long association with diseases and madness, the Man in the Moon (sources, circulation, intertextuality), the moon and the cult of Elizabeth I, the cultural circulation and aftermath of Copernicus and Galileo’s discoveries, voyages to the moon as a utopia. Authors considered may range from Lyly, Shakespeare and Jonson, to John Wilkins, Aphra Behn, and modern and contemporary writers. 

S12.
‘More … than fancy’s images’:
Shakespearean Characters in Their Context

Organisers: Sandra Pietrini, Svenn-Arve Myklebost, Rachele S. Bassan

Description: We invite contributions investigating the relationship between character and environment in graphic, visual and intermedial representations and adaptations of Shakespeare. Potential discussion topics include, but are not limited to: diachronic and synchronic iconographies of space/environment and Shakespearean characters; graphic, visual, intermedial adaptations of Shakespeare; the production of social and cultural meaning in graphic/visual Shakespeare; the relationship between descriptions of space and environment visuality in Shakespeare and the graphic/visual representation thereof; setting in graphic/visual Shakespeare; the relationship between text and image in illustrated editions, graphic novels, theatrical posters, book covers, and similar media; social commentary through space/environment in graphic/visual representations or adaptations of Shakespeare; influences of the production environment on graphic/visual Shakespeare.  

S13.
The Natures of Shakespeare, Ecological Shakespeare, 
or Environmental Shakespeare 

Organisers: Melissa Croteau, Stephen O’Neill,  Victoria Bladen 

Description:  In the context of current planetary crises, applying an eco-lens to our contemporary critical and creative thinking in Shakespeare studies becomes ever more pressing. Shakespeare consistently engaged with ideas of green space as well as the relationship between humans and their environments, encompassing natural spaces, where green or blue worlds may threaten, offer pastoral escape, or constitute agents of metamorphosis and renewal. These also include mythic and metaphorical uses of green space, natural elements, and animal imagery to articulate ideas from the political to the personal. This seminar explores these various facets, including consideration of how green space and/or blue space has been represented, created, and recreated in adaptation and performance across various media.  

S14.
New Worlds of Words:
Shakespeare’s Language, Near and Far

Organisers: Emily Louisa Smith, Carla Mazzio

Description: The ambitions of this seminar are threefold. Its first aim is to reconsider the dominant paradigm of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading—principally applied only to digital analyses— and thereby foreground the continuities between analogue and digital approaches to reading. Its second goal is to encourage attendees to critically reflect upon the affordances and limitations of their preferred analytical method. Its third and final goal is, relatedly, to encourage thinking about ways in which these diverse analyses can prove mutually informative.

S15.
Perfect Bodies, Perfect Worlds:
Proto-Eugenics and Fantasies of the Human in Early Modern Utopias

Organisors: Lindsey Row-Heyveld, Hanh Bui

Desription: Our seminar will examine the importance of early modern utopian narratives to the development of proto-eugenic thought and practice, highlighting how notions of ideal bodies helped to define European identity categories, especially whiteness and able-bodiedness, against which ‘otherness’ was measured. From explicitly utopian texts to genres including drama, non-fiction and lyric poetry, fantasies of ideal societies endorse the types of bodies they imagine would inhabit them. By defining the boundaries of ‘perfect’ or normative minds, bodies and populations, early modern utopias lay foundations for later theories of biopolitical control while exposing the deep entanglements of race, disability, gender and age.

S16.
The Planetary and the Sacred in Asian Shakespeares

Organisers: Ted Motohashi, Yong Li Lan

Description: In this seminar we propose to place the planetary, as a critique and / or ‘completion’ of globalism, alongside the force of Asian faiths and belief systems for sacralizing the earth. While current conceptualizations of the planetary—as an emergent world-view—are fundamentally secular in ethics and artistic values (Elias and Moraru 2015), adaptations of Shakespeare in diverse Asian theatre cultures are profoundly shaped by ancient cosmological systems that are spiritual in their practices and philosophies of place and nature (Duara 2018). 

S17.
Planetary Plenitude:
Nature and Multiplicity in Shakespeare

Organisers: Rocco Coronato, Andrew Hadfield

Description: The seminar invites papers that explore the themes of abundance and diversity in Shakespeare’s works. It highlights how Shakespeare engages with nature to create a sense of planetary plenitude, characterised by a rich interplay of beings and environments. Scholars are encouraged to examine how this concept relates to various genres, genders, and race, considering whether plenitude can have both positive and negative connotations. The seminar also addresses the impact of emerging technologies like digital humanities on the analysis of Shakespearean texts, fostering dialogue on the intersection of nature, multiplicity, and plenitude.  

S18.
Planetary Poets 

Organisers: Paul Edmondson, Claudia Olk

Description: How and why do countries align poets from their own cultures with Shakespeare?  ‘National’ poets who have been aligned with Shakespeare and Stratford-upon-Avon include: Goethe and Schiller (Germany), Cervantes (Spain), Jan Kochanowski (Poland), Iqbal (Pakistan), Tagore (India), and Tang Xianzu (China). How, if at all, do the celebrations of other national poets include, appropriate, or refer to Shakespeare, and why? How does Shakespeare, as an emerging poetic presence, work with or against other traditions? How, if at all, is Shakespeare’s birthdate celebrated around the world? How does Shakespeare become part of the processes of cultural contact and transfer?  

S19.
The Rhetoric of Ecology and Racial Difference
on Page & in Performance

Organisers: Nora Galland, Anita Raychawdhuri

Description: This seminar looks to explore the relationship between race and ecology in Shakespeare, broadly conceived. We invite participants to consider the Shakespearean text and its early modern contexts and/or adaptations and appropriations across the globe that centre race and ecology in the performance/text’s approach to Shakespeare. We are particularly interested in rhetorical use of ecology to describe race and vice versa. Through critical attention to the dynamic between representation and interpretation of race and the environment, this seminar aims to foreground how exploring, mapping, and shaping the world were also about race.   

S20.
Shakespeare and the Luso-Hispanic Planet

Organisers: John Stone, Deanne Williams

Description: This seminar welcomes work exploring all aspects of Shakespeare and the Luso-Hispanic world, including a) the reading and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in Spain, Portugal, and the Luso-Hispanic world, b) Spanish, Portuguese, and Luso-Hispanic influences on the work and performance of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, c) other forms of dialogue about Shakespeare and the performance of Shakespeare on the Iberian peninsula and in the broader Luso-Hispanic world, from the early modern period to the present day, d) Shakespeare’s role in the dialogue between English-speaking diasporas and Hispanic and Lusophone cultures in the territories where they settled.

S21.
Shakespeare and the Musical Planet

Organisers: Alina Bottez, Michelle Assay, David Fanning 

Description: ‘Shakespeare and the Musical Planet’ considers the multi-faceted field of ‘Shakespeare and Music’ in tandem with such polarities as ‘global vs local’ and ‘art vs popular’. Employing a cross-cultural range of inter- and cross-disciplinary approaches, this seminar examines both Shakespeare’s use of music and later musical responses to Shakespeare (Music in Shakespeare and Shakespeare in Music), probing along the way such notions as the ‘universality’ of Shakespeare as well as pluralist universes of Shakespeare as reflected in music.

S22.
Shakespeare and the New Psychoanalysis

Organisers: Catherine Bates, James W. Stone

Description: Recent publications on Shakespeare manifest a renewed interest in psychoanalysis after many years of silence. This seminar invites dialogue with all forms of psychoanalysis and its critics in order to interrogate Shakespeare’s treatment of sex and gender, race, social customs, history, trauma, and the construction and dissolution of the self. Ecocriticism, adaptation studies and presentism (including fans on social networks), and colonizations and their aftermath will be on the analytical table. Historicism and cognitive psychology mounted opposition to psychoanalysis over the decades, and global contexts and planetary networks may contest its provincialism and Eurocentrism. How are psychoanalytic Shakespeareans responding? 

S23.
Shakespeare in the Cloud(s)  

Organisers: Maria Elisa Montironi, Reto Winckler

Description: Shakespeare in the cloud(s) interrogates categories of temporality and spatiality in relation to digital Shakespeares in the form of performances, editing practices, adaptations, appropriations, community building, AI-revivifications, memes and more and explores their aesthetic and political implications. Challenging definitions of locality and globality and attendant notions of universality in the face of digital imperialism and ecological crises, the seminar invites contributors to wrestle with the difficult questions raised by the apparent time- and placelessness of Shakespeare in the digital sphere.

S24.
Shakespeare in the Global Musical Opera:
From Stage to Sound 

Organisers: Elena Biggi Parodi, Adriana De Feo, Elena Abbado

Description: This seminar will explore the pivotal role of Shakespeare in shaping global opera traditions, focusing on how his works have inspired composers, librettists, and performers across different cultures and historical periods. Participants will investigate a wide range of musical adaptations, from operas to ballets and contemporary compositions, examining how Shakespeare’s themes and characters resonate in diverse musical languages. The seminar aims to foster interdisciplinary dialogue among scholars, musicians, and artists, encouraging new insights into the enduring influence of Shakespeare on world music and its role in the ongoing reinterpretation of his legacy.

S25.
Shakespeare, Spirituality, and Universal Spaces for Encounter

Organisers: Marta Cerezo, Marguerite Tassi

Description: This seminar will reflect on unexplored religious and spiritual readings of Shakespeare which address the following issues: (1) Shakespeare’s texts as ‘universal’ in the sense that they hold space for many different voices, and evoke communion and social cohesion, rather than supremacy; (2) ‘spaces of encounter’ taking shape in Shakespeare’s texts themselves, but also outside them, such as religious, civic, cultural, natural and even digital locations where Shakespeare takes centre stage as evocation of a spirituality and ethics whose main values point to social reconciliation and fight against polarization and division. The seminar is open to all religious and spiritualities. 

S26.
Shakespeare’s Sonic Galaxies and Constellations
of Emotional Response

Organisers: Jennifer Linhart Wood, Maddalena Pennacchia

Description: This seminar is interested in the wide range of sounds in, and prompted by, the Shakespearean multiverse: music, sound-effects, soundscapes, and later musical adaptations such as operatic works, songs, and popular music. Taking a wide range of sonic phenomena as its starting point, this seminar will investigate the myriad ways in which sound was employed in Shakespeare’s theater and what affective or emotional responses it may have generated in its audiences—including the effects it can produce on contemporary audiences, especially younger ones.

S27.
Shakespeare’s Tragedies and their Twenty-First-Century Reverberations

Organisers: Gemma Kate Allred, Benjamin Broadribb, Edel Semple

Description: This seminar explores reverberations of Shakespeare’s tragedies across a range of twenty-first-century media. Venturing beyond the safely-charted territory of traditional stage and screen performances, the seminar considers how Shakespeare’s tragic protagonists, narratives, themes, and tropes haunt, echo in, or inspire contemporary cultural objects. Papers may address tragic echoes and textual hauntings in drama, film, TV, prose, advertising, and other media. Key questions include: why do twenty-first-century artists look to Shakespeare’s tragedies; how can these echoes and hauntings illuminate Shakespeare’s tragedies; and how might reverberations galvanise shifts away from imbalanced power structures, and towards greater empathy and equality for historically marginalised communities?  

S28.
The Skirts of the Forest:
Re-placing Arden

Organisers: Tom Bishop, Sophie Lemercier-Goddard, William N. West 

Description: The Forest of Arden is probably Shakespeare’s most famous location. This seminar invites participants to look again at the sort of space Arden is (including what happens there), and to extrapolate from there to discuss the sorts of places –literal and figurative, real and fictional, staged, filmed, otherwise imagined– that it has become since As You Like It took us into it. Are they all “pastoral”? Are they geographical? virtual? educational? ecological? fantastical? Do they do the same work that Arden did, or afford the same respite? Can one still seek Arden, or has it become an impossible destination? 

S29.
Sport on Stage:
Playing across Difference

Organisers: Jade Standing, Jonathan Koch 

Description: This seminar asks how differences in identity are dressed, addressed, and redressed in sports played on and beyond the early modern stage. Participants will explore how sports—athletic games (e.g., football, tennis, fencing), physical pursuits (archery, dancing, ropewalking), organised and non-organised competitions (chess, hunting, playwright collaborations, intercompany rivalries)—created and tested communities of diverse players and playgoers. Approaching the concept of ‘sport’ capaciously, we invite papers that consider the players, venues, occasions, rules, and audiences of early modern sports; the relationship of sports to drama, intellectual history, colonialism, theology, etc.; or historical examples of moments when sport has metamorphised difference. 

S30.
Storms, Tides, Floods:
Shakespeare and the Power of Climate

Organisers: Susanne Wofford, Christian Billing

Description: This seminar invites participants to explore the many ways extreme climate events in Shakespeare’s works, such as storms, tempests, floods, high winds and tides, can be a catalyst for change on a dramatic, political and personal level, and how climate events can lead to moments of transformation, even if that transformation has tragic effect. Using an eco-critical lens, this seminar will explore the ways in which extreme climate events intersect in Shakespeare’s works with questions of genre; with geography and travel; with island studies; with mythology and Shakespeare’s debt to/inclusion of epic; with representations of environmental forces as figurations of the gods, among other things.

S31.
Theorizing Global Shakespearemes

Organisers: David Nee, Jason Eng Hun Lee

Description: This seminar aims to put pressure on how we define and conceptualize the units or elements of global Shakespeare, or what we are calling “Shakespearemes” (on the model of Lévi-Strauss’s mytheme, or motifeme in folkloristics). How might closer attention to the different kinds of bits and pieces that get remixed in global Shakespeare inform our criticism? We seek a wide range of contributions including but not limited to (1) interventions applying non-Western concepts of the units or elements of art to global Shakespeare; (2) microhistories tracking a specific Shakespearean element (motif, phrase, meme, image, etc.) as it migrates through global adaptation/reception; (3) papers attending to the role of media, remediation, and intermediality in the transmission of Shakespearemes; (4) efforts to re-theorize, in the context of global Shakespeare, key terms like motif, theme, citation, image, gesture, prop, scene. 

S32.
‘There is no world without Verona walls’:
Exile in Shakespeare, Now and Then 

Organisers: James M. Sutton, Stephanie E. Chamberlain, Jane Kingsley-Smith

Description: This seminar will explore the cultural, historical, religious, and racial aspects of exile in Shakespeare’s works, and in the plays and poems of his English and Italian contemporaries. Do early modern works that center exile, and their contemporary global adaptations, prove fertile ground in the search for hospitality offered to the dispossessed? Can Shakespeare speak to the diverse travails of those forced from their native borders? What new revelations about exile can literature, past and present, help us glean? We invite papers that examine early modern representations of exile, as well as adaptations and contemporary performances. 

S33.
Vindicta mihi!
The Performance of Revenge from Classical and Italian Drama to Shakespeare

Organisers: Michele Marrapodi, Graham Holderness

Description: This seminar proposes a critical journey through the idea and performance of revenge, from its origins in classical and Senecan tragedies to the various Italian Renaissance forms until Shakespeare, and extending where appropriate to the modern world, where revenge remains a primary driver of human conflict around the globe. This shift in mentality is reflected in variants in early modern English plays when the revenge myth is used as retribution for political intrigue and societal corruption. Papers are requested to investigate this topic from a moral-historical or presentist viewpoint, examining the contrasts and controversies in early modern English drama before and after Shakespeare. 

S34.
Without Words:
Dance Adaptations of Shakespeare 

Organisers: Lynsey McCulloch, Emily Winerock  

Description: “Shakespeare and Dance” is having a moment. Alan Brissenden’s seminal Shakespeare and the Dance (1981) now sits alongside a plethora of publications on the topic. This seminar invites scholars and practitioners to explore the relationship of dance, language, and meaning in Shakespearean performance, with special attention paid to dance-centred productions and dance adaptations across the globe. From Kathakali to hip hop, tango to ballet, opera to musical theatre, danced Shakespeare asks questions about authorship, authenticity, identity, and the relationship between text and movement. Researchers working in this area alongside “dance curious” theatre practitioners, musicologists, and literary scholars are warmly welcomed. 

S35.
World, Fate, Time, and Space in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 

Organisers: Avraham Oz, Jyotsna G Singh, Camilla Caporicci

Description: The lack of narrative in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, distinguishing it from Shakespeare’s plays, allows for a wider focus of the texts on abstract notions and pointed views of ‘planetary’ and universal themes. Our wide scoped seminar seeks to invite fresh contributions on perspectives the sonnets may throw on themes from space and spatial practices, time, fate and fortune, earth, vegetation, or the elements, to passion, desire, and humanism. Our planet is challenged by crises of practice and thought: fresh readings of the sonnets may involve political, performative, or psychological issues, and range from re-interpreting individual sonnets to relating the sequence to current aesthetic thought or other literary genres or artistic forms.