Time and again, Shakespeare demonstrates the frailty and contingency of the many historical and “imagined” communities (Anderson) that feature in his works. Many of his plays revolve around the conflict between individuals and society, depicting the bonds between friends, lovers, family members or even whole nations being put to the test by desire, jealousy, and ambition. If Shakespeare’s communities are unstable to begin with, then discussions of diversity bring to light that very instability even further. His works have been both hailed for showcasing the universality of human nature and critiqued for implicitly reinforcing a Western, Eurocentric world view. Shakespearean drama walks a fine line between incorporating diverse facets of early modern life – including gender and sexuality, race, and religion – and perpetuating insidious mechanisms of marginalisation and othering, as the fates of some of the figureheads of Shakespearean diversity, such as Shylock, Othello and Caliban, show. On Shakespeare’s stage, community and diversity are intimately but uneasily paired and expose the various ways in which “difference”, as Goran Stanivukovic writes in Queer Shakespeare: Desire and Sexuality (2017), is “based on suppression, occlusion and semantic difference of allied vocabulary” (24). Shakespeare thus makes us ponder the question “who’s in, who’s out” (King Lear 5.3.16) both in early modern times and in ours. While the dramatic representations of these conflicts are inevitably bound to the historical contexts that helped produce them, the theatre itself always had and still has the potential to renegotiate them and to newly create communities, just as it is capable of diversifying Shakespeare, and making his works more inclusive for 21st century audiences.
Sunday, November 5, 2023
Call for Abstracts: “WHO’S IN, WHO’S OUT”: #COMMUNITY AND #DIVERSITY IN #SHAKESPEARE- Annual #Conference #German #Shakespeare Society 2024
CFA: Travel and Research Grants from the Central European History Society
The Central European History Society (CEHS) seeks applications from North American doctoral candidates (ABD) and recent PhDs (up to three years after completion of degree) in Central European history for travel and research grants up to $4,000. To be eligible, research projects must demonstrate a clear and significant connection to Central Europe and involve travel outside North America. For the purposes of this grant, “Central Europe” includes the region’s historically German-speaking lands as well as the Habsburg Empire and its successor states. All grant-related travel must be planned to take place between April 1 and December 31, 2024.
Applicants need to be members of the Central European History Society at the time of application. (Membership also includes an individual subscription to the journal Central European History: $27/print edition and $17/digital edition annually for graduate students; $42/print and $32/digital for others.) To become a member, visit https://www.cambridge.org/core/membership/cehs.
Application Procedure:
The following materials are required, and should be combined into one PDF and e-mailed to CEHSGrants@gmail.com:
- Statement of Purpose (1000-word limit), including a project title, a succinct summary of the project and its scholarly contributions, as well as a cogent explanation of how the research to be funded by the grant fits into the larger research project. If the application is a resubmission, the narrative should indicate in which ways the project has advanced since the previous application.
- Curriculum Vitae (with a clear indication of the applicant’s preferred mail and email addresses)
- Budget Statement, totaling no more than $4,000, which should estimate and itemize costs for all planned expenditures (broken out into categories, e.g. foreign transportation, local transportation, lodging, copying, etc.), in keeping with the planned itinerary.
The application and one (1) letter of reference (which the recommender should e-mail directly to CEHSGrants@gmail.com) must be received by 15 January 2024. Applicants are advised to give their recommender several weeks’ notice of their need for a letter.
For further information or inquiries about the grants (but not to submit applications), please contact the Executive Director of CEHS, Anthony Steinhoff, at cehsexecutivedirector@gmail.com.