2025 - ESRA Oporto

Call for Panel, Roundtable and Seminar Proposals

Shakespeare and Time:

the retrieved pasts, the envisaged futures

9–12 July 2025

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Univ. Porto

 

Confirmed Guest Speakers

Michael Dobson (Shakespeare Institute, U. of Birmingham)


Evelyn Gajowski (U. of Nevada, Las Vegas)


Shaul Bassi (U. Ca’ Foscari Venezia)


Boika Sokolova (U. of Notre Dame, England) and Kirilka Stavreva (Cornell College)

ESRA 2025 will explore temporality from a variety of angles. Stimulated by Aleida Assman’s description of the "time regime of sustainability”, in which the future “is no longer the opposite of the past but intimately linked to something in the past, which is to be ensured for the future”, this conference will be devoted to discussing that which, though it may please some, tries all, as its personification in The Winter’s Tale announces a little after the middle of the play. Its power “To o’erthrow law”, as well as “To plant and o’erwhelm custom”, makes us ask questions about temporality in Shakespeare: the different times and velocities of the plays and poems, either precisely delineated or vaguely hinted at; the roles, shapes, and valences of the past, between rehearsals of lineage and revivals of Antiquity; time viewed through history and competing historiographies (from chronicle, political history, and antiquarianism to dramatic or poetic histories); time as bringer of ruinous or welcome change, through contingency or necessity, to be resisted in tombs of brass or poetic monuments; and the shaping and political uses also of the future, from prophecy to utopian / dystopian scenarios.

Because this conference is as much about Shakespeare’s Europe as it is about Europe’s Shakespeare(s), it is equally interested in the temporality of afterlives, manifold receptions, and preposterous temporal inversions. Considering the historical engagement with these complex and superimposed temporalities, ESRA 2025 invites investigation into the politics of time, forms of nostalgia and of the regressive imagination, cultures of memory and commemoration, the competing or concerted pulls of historicist and presentist approaches, among other ways of thinking about queer temporalities, natural and human time, anachronism, and even atemporality.

The conference will honour ESRA’s foundational engagement with the place held by Shakespeare in European cultures, while also opening itself to a range of other approaches to the topic of ‘Shakespeare and Time’. Potential topics may thus include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Shakespeare, the past and historiography
  • Shakespeare, the past and / as dramatic fiction
  • Shakespeare and the politics of time
  • Shakespeare, nostalgia, and the regressive imagination
  • Shakespeare and the theatrical past
  • Shakespeare, historicisms, and presentism
  • Shakespeare, memory, and trauma
  • Shakespeare, memory, and / or commemoration
  • Shakespeare and visions of the future: utopian / dystopian scenarios
  • Performing the future on the Shakespearian stage
  • Remediating the Shakespearian past: regressiveness on screen
  • Time in / as space: Shakespeare and the geographies of past or future

Members of ESRA are invited to propose a panel or a seminar that they would be interested in convening.

(NB: To become a member of ESRA, you just need to send a message to europeanshakespeare@gmail.com )

Panel proposals of 350-400 words (stating topic, relevance, and approach) should be submitted by a panel convenor with the names of the participants (no more than four speakers).

Seminar proposals of 350-400 words should be submitted by 2 or 3 potential convenors from different countries for each seminar.

To encourage and allow for a broader selection of seminars at the conference, we will accept only one proposal by each ESRA member.

Please send your proposals until 3 June 2024 to the following email address: esra2025@letras.up.pt

The conference organisers and the Board of ESRA will confirm their final choice of panels and seminars by 1 July 2024. All convenors will be personally informed of the choices made and the list of seminars will be made available on the ESRA and the Conference websites.

Should you have any questions, feel free to contact the organising team at the above email address (esra2025@letras.up.pt).

Important dates:

  • Seminar, Panel & Roundtable Proposal deadline: 3 June 2024
  • Proposal acceptance notification: 1 July 2024
  • Call for Papers opening: 8 July 2024
  • Early Bird Registration Opening: 7 October 2024
  • Call for Papers Deadline: 2 December 2024
  • Call for Papers Acceptance Notification: 16 December 2024
  • Early Bird Registration Expires: 31 March 2025

Organising committee:

  • Rui Carvalho Homem and Fátima Vieira (convenors)
  • Miguel Ramalhete Gomes
  • Nuno Ribeiro
  • Jorge Almeida e Pinho
  • Márcia Lemos