Transnational Drama within and beyond Europe, 1450-1750

AMSTERDAM AND ONLINE (HYBRID) – 1 AND 2 SEPTEMBER 2022

Keynotes by

Frank Fischer (Freie Universität Berlin), Barbara Fuchs (University of California),

Ioana Galleron (Université Paris 3), Nigel Smith (Princeton University)

Early modern drama research is done on an increasingly large scale. On the one hand, this is the result of the use of computational research methods and the expansion of online resources for the study of drama. On the other hand, the larger scale is the result of scholars making connections between fields that were previously separated. These new approaches increasingly take into account colonial drama and drama written by Jesuit missions, as well as the transnational movements of theatre texts and practices across national, linguistic, and confessional borders. Mobility and circulation can be studied on a small scale, but the accumulative effect of these studies is a view of early modern drama that extends over a large portion of the world map and that begins to create a global picture. What new skills do scholars apply in order to tackle these changing scales of research?

We would like to invite participants to discuss the integration of methods and the synthesis of research results on larger scales in the study of early modern drama. The focus will be methodological, but we encourage participants to approach methodological aspects by way of case studies. Possible focuses include:

- the integration of computational and non-computational methods;
- the connections between different national traditions and languages, including Latin: circulation, mobility, transnationality;
- the connections between the local and the supralocal;
- the integration of large-scale and small-scale research methods;
- the integration of various databases, resources, and data formats;
- the relationship between the different research fields for early modern drama: literature, performance, cultural history, etc.

The conference will take place in hybrid format, on location in Amsterdam with the possibility of following, contributing, and interacting with the other participants online.

We would like to receive your proposal by March 1st 2022.  Please send your proposals for a twenty-minute presentation to dinah.wouters@huygens.knaw.nl. The abstract, as a word file, should be no more than 300 words in length. Please also send a brief curriculum vitae in a separate file. Notification of acceptance will be given by April 1st.

Organising committee: Dinah Wouters, postdoctoral researcher (dinah.wouters@huygens.knaw.nl), Jan Bloemendal, senior researcher and PI TransLatin (jan.bloemendal@huygens.knaw.nl)

About the Project : This conference is organised within the scope of the TransLatin project (translatin.nl) of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands, which forms part of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. The project studies the international network of Netherlandish Neo-Latin playwrights and the vital interaction between Latin theatre and a ‘transnational’ web of plays, through computational analysis and a qualitative investigation of sources.