Five College Renaissance Seminar
The Five College Renaissance Seminar association presents seminars by Renaissance scholars from around the nation and the world. Four seminars are held each year on a broad range of interdisciplinary topics. Sponsored by Five Colleges, Inc.
Fall 2023
Eyob Derillo, British Library, 'Illuminated Ethiopian manuscripts at the British Library'
Shannon McHugh, UMass Boston, 'Petrarch and the Making of Gender in Renaissance Italy: A Conversation'
Spring 2023
Christopher Nygren, University of Pittsburgh, 'Salt, Water, and Stone: The Ecology of Art in Renaissance Venice'
Will Steffen, American International College, '"The Sweet Marjoram of the Salad": Abortifacient Plants and the Shakespearean Bed Trick'
Fall 2022
Douglas Pfeiffer, Stony Brook University, 'Style as the Lydian Stone: How Early Modern Readers Invented Authors for Their Texts'
Catherine Infante, Amherst College, 'The Arts of Encounter: Christians, Muslims, and the Power of Images in Early Modern Spain'
Adam Zucker, UMass Amherst, 'The Soundscape of The Tempest'
Spring 2022
Mary Crane, Boston College, 'How Did Natural Philosophy Become Natural Science?'
Marco Piana, Smith College, 'Medusa Colonised: Euhemerism, Colonialism, and Proto-Feminism in Lodovico Domenichi’s La nobiltà delle donne'
Fall 2021
Jutta Sperling, Amherst College, 'The Nursing Virgin in Late Medieval and Early Modern Ethiopia'
Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale University, 'Petrarch's Lyric Anthropology'
Spring 2020
Jessica Beckman, Dartmouth College, 'The Borrowed Motions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets'
Fall 2019
Adhaar Noor Desai, Bard College, 'Bodgeries: Tudor Composition Pedagogy, Poetics, and George Gascoigne’s "Patched Coat"'
Noah Tuleja, Mount Holyoke College, '"Thou Art Changed": Using Theatre Practice in the Literature Classroom'
Spring 2019
Lyn Tribble, University of Connecticut, '"A Strange, Hollow, and Confused Noise": Prospero's Start and the Phenomenology of Magic'
Jane Degenhardt, UMass Amherst, 'Fortune’s Early Modern Turn: From Pagan Goddess to Proto-Capitalist Economics'
Fall 2018
Sanam Nader-Esfahani, Amherst College, 'Reflecting and Refracting Reality: Optics and Politics in Early Modern France & Italy'
Spring 2018
Jun Hee Cho, Amherst College, "Of Keepers and Stewards, or the Princely Business of a Northern Renaissance Court"
Marjorie Rubright, University of Massachusetts Amherst, “TRANS * ARCHIPELOGICS”
Fall 2017
Steve Mentz, St. Johns University, "Hostile Environments in Hamlet"
Amanda Henrichs, Amherst College, “Visualizing Absence: Broken (hyper)Links between Mary Wroth and Mary Sidney Herbert”
Spring 2017
Linda McJannet, Bentley University, "Timur's Theatrical Journey: Or, When did Tamburlaine Become Black?"
Travis Williams, University of Rhode Island, "The Spaces of *Hamlet*"
Fall 2016
Jennifer Higginbotham, Ohio State University, "Mary Wroth's Blank Spaces"
Adam Zucker, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "Antihonorificabilitudinitatibus: Love's Labour's Lost and the Pedantic Text"
Spring 2016
Peter Berek, Amherst College, "Defoliating Playbooks and the Reading Public"
Greg Semenza, The University of Connecticut, “Shakespeare and the Auteurs: Rethinking Adaptation through the Director’s Cinema”
Fall 2015
Jutta Sperling, Hampshire College, “The Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture”
Henry Turner, Rutgers University, “Corporate Identity and Early Modern Literary History”
Martin Mueller, Northwestern University, “Digital Humanities and Shakespeare”
Spring 2015
Gerard Passannante, University of Maryland, "Catastrophizing: The Disaster of Renaissance Materialism."
Malcolm Smuts, University of Massachusetts Boston, "How the Elizabethan Monarchical Republic Failed to Build a Republican Monarchy: The Earl of Leicester and the Netherlands"
Fall 2014
Cyrus Mulready, SUNY New Paltz, "#Shakespeare: Following Falstaff in Early Modern England and Beyond"
Christopher Pye, Williams College, "Political Aesthetics in the Time of Shakespeare"
Russ Leo, Princeton University, "Lodovico Castelvetro's Heterodox Poetics: A Protestant Aristotle"
Spring 2014
Suparna Roychoudry, Mt Holyoke College, "Trouble at Sea: The Perturbations of *Pericles*"
Joseph Black, University of Massachusetts Amherst, "The Sidneys and Their Books"
Molly Murray, Columbia University, "From the Closed Cell to the Infinite Universe: Prison Projects and the Ralegh Circle."
Fall 2013
Valerie Foreman, NYU Gallatin, "Transatlantic Developments and Global Consciousness: Politics, Economics, and Aesthetics."
Steven Urkowitz, CUNY City College, "A Clean Smock, or Not--Working the Women between Quartos of Romeo and Juliet"
Spring 2013
Stephanie Elsky, Amherst College, “Sidney's Aporia: Common Law and the Poetics of Doubt in the Old Arcadia”
Amy Rodgers, Mt. Holyoke College, “The Language of Looking: Jonsonian Masque and Conspicuous Consumption”
Erika Lin, City University of New York, “Erotic Horseplay and Demonic Desires: Festive Performance in The Witch of Edmonton"
Steven Mullaney, University of Michigan, “Shakespeare and the Wreckage of History"
