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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 15.1919  Thursday, 21 October 2004

From:           Gary Taylor <gltaylor@bama.ua.edu>
Date:           Wednesday, October 20, 2004 11:21 AM
Subject:        Enfants Terribles Symposium Jan. 8-9

The envelope please...

Our search for "the six most brilliant Renaissance scholars in the world
under 40" has been exhilarating, humbling, and excruciating. I will
publish in a subsequent email a list of all the scholars nominated
(including many who turned out to be over 40). Every nominated scholar
deserves recognition, and any six of them would have produced a splendid
symposium.

Different judges would, no doubt, have chosen differently. I and my
colleague Professor Sharon O'Dair ruled out of consideration our own
younger colleague and our own former students because, however deserving
they might be, our choice of them would have been dismissed as
favoritism. (The many of you who nominated colleagues or former students
will appreciate how difficult and in some ways unfair that self-imposed
restriction was.) We have not chosen candidates on the basis of how many
nominations they received: this is not a popularity contest-and in any
case it was obvious that some people actively solicited nominations. We
have not chosen candidates on the basis of the sheer number of their
publications, but on what we regard as the quality and significance of
their work. (Nevertheless, in practice it has proven difficult to assess
the work of really young scholars, and the youngest of our chosen
"enfants" is 33.) We have not chosen people because we agree with them:
we would want to quarrel with aspects of the work of every one of the
winners. But an "enfant terrible", by definition, should be infuriating
as well as exciting: someone who challenges the paradigms of the older
generation, including the judges. We were not looking for people who do
superlatively well what their teachers taught them to do, but for people
who push the boundaries of the discipline in new directions. I encourage
any scholar who didn't get chosen to seize this opportunity to prove us
wrong, so that ten or twenty years from now we will be deeply
embarrassed to have overlooked such a colossal talent. Personally, I
have always found rejection the most powerful stimulus to aggressive
reinvestment.

We were so inundated by compelling nominations that we decided to hold
two symposia. The first, featuring six young scholars who work primarily
on drama, will take place at the University of Alabama on January 8 and
9, 2005. The second, featuring six young scholars who work primarily on
poetry and prose, will take place later in 2005; I will announce details
of that symposium within the next month or so. I list below, in
alphabetical order, the six speakers at the Enfants Terribles
(dramatiques) symposium, along with references to two representative
short samples of their work, chosen by themselves.

KAREN BRITLAND (33, Keele University) for feminist and archival work on
the drama of the 1630s
---'"All emulation cease, and jars": political possibilities in
_Chloridia_, Queen Henrietta Maria's masque of 1631', _The Ben Jonson
Journal_ 9 (2002),87-108
---'An under-stated mother-in-law: Marie de Médicis and the last
Caroline court masque', _Women and Culture in the Courts of the  Stuart
Queens_, ed. Clare McManus (Palgrave: 2003), 204-23

LUKAS ERNE (36, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland) for work on
Shakespeare as a "literary dramatist"
---'Shakespeare and the Publication of His Plays', in his _Shakespeare
as Literary Dramatist_ (Cambridge UP, 2003), 78-100
---'_Don Horatio_ and _The First Part of Hieronimo_, in his_Beyond *The
Spanish Tragedy*: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd_ (Manchester UP,
2001), 14-46

EWAN FERNIE (33, Royal Holloway University of London) for work on
"presentist" criticism and the power of Shakespeare now
---"Introduction," _Shame in Shakespeare_(Routledge, 2002), 1-23
---"Shakespeare and the Prospect of Presentism", forthcoming in
_Shakespeare Survey_58 (2005)

CARLA MAZZIO (38, University of Chicago) for work on quantification,
sensation and affect in drama
---"The Three Dimensional Self: Geometry, Melancholy, Drama," in _Arts
of Calculation: Numerical Thought in Early Modern Europe_, ed. David
Glimp and Michelle R. Warren (Palgrave, 2004), 39-65
---"Acting with Tact: Touch and Theater in the English Renaissance," in
_Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture_, ed. Elizabeth Harvey
(University of Pennsylvania, 2003),  159-186

BRYAN REYNOLDS (39, University of California, Irvine) for work on
"transversal poetics"
---"State Power, Cultural Dissidence, Transversal Power," in his book
_Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in
Early Modern England_ (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
---"Transversal Performance: Shakespace, the September 11 Attacks, and
the Critical Future," in his book _Performing Transversally: Reimagining
Shakespeare and the Critical Future_ (Palgrave, 2003).

TIFFANY STERN (36, Oxford Brookes University) for archival and
theoretical work on early performance
---"A small-beer health to his second day": Playwrights, Prologues, and
first Performances in the Early Modern Theater," _Studies in Philology_
(2004), 172-199
---'Prologues, Songs, and Actors' Parts' in her book _Making
Shakespeare_ (Routledge, 2004), 113-36

The January 8-9 symposium will start an extraordinary semester for the
Strode Program, which will also include the third "Signs of Race"
symposium, co-directed by our Strode colleague Celia R. Daileader: for
more information on "Women and Others: Racial and Gender Difference in
Anglo-American Literary Culture," see the website at
http://www.as.ua.edu/english/symposium/series.htm#d The first two books
in the "Signs of Race" series (_Writing Race across the Atlantic World,
Medieval to Modern_, edited by Philip Beidler and myself, and my own
book _Buying Whiteness: Race, Culture, and Identity from Columbus to Hip
Hop_) will be published by Palgrave in January; both focus on the early
modern period, and you can see advance copies at the MLA convention.
Celia Daileader's own new book, _Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth:
Interracial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee_ (Cambridge UP) will
be published later in the year.

Thank you for your nominations: over the last six months I have been
introduced to an extraordinary range of exciting new work. I hope to
announce the line-up for the poetry and prose symposium soon.

Gary Taylor
Hudson Strode Professor of English
Director, Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies
http://www.as.ua.edu/english/strode/index.htm
General Editor, The Oxford Middleton
http://www.as.ua.edu/english/strode/middleton/intro1.htm

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