Call for Papers: Shakespeare and the Memory of a Lost Religion

To follow up on the the recent call for papers we posted, a friend recently sent us a second call that may be of interest to some of our readers:

2012 SAMLA CONFERENCE CALLS FOR PAPERS November 9-11, 2012 Research Triangle, North Carolina Special Focus: Text as Memoir: Tales of Travel, Immigration, and Exile.

Panel: Shakespeare and the Memory of a Lost Religion.

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the critical trend of the past dozen years commonly referred to as “the turn to religion in Shakespeare criticism.” An important element of this “turn” has included attempts to uncover the remnants of a forgotten Catholicism in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, e.g., Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet in Purgatory (2001) and Eamon Duffy’s “Bare Ruined Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England” (2003). This panel is not intended as a forum for arguments about Shakespeare’s own personal religious predilections, but instead, papers should address the ways in which the Bard employs Catholic motifs in his writings, effectively creating texts of religious memory, a memory that may be defined as historical, critical, nostalgic, a dramatic tool—the list goes on. Special attention can also be given to the conference themes of travel, immigration, and exile as they lend themselves to Shakespeare’s efforts at remembering a lost English Catholicism. By June 30, 2012, please submit abstracts of 300 words to Paul Stapleton, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, stapleton@unc.edu.