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RCSC Fall 2020 Newsletter

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27 September 2020

Dear Renaissance Conference of Southern California Members and Friends,

I write to update you on our preparations for the 2021 RCSC Conference. Included in this newsletter is information on the important recent work some of our community of scholars has produced over the last couple of years. 

We all looked forward to our 2020 RCSC Conference that would have been a fascinating day to explore the important scholarship put together in eleven various panels, but Covid-19 forced us to cancel this conference. We want to thank Heather Graham, 2019-2020 RCSC President, for her thoughtful and insightful leadership in creating the 2020 Conference. We wish that we all could have experienced the joyful intellectual community that she had forged during this year. 

We are  pleased, however, to announce that the presenters for our 2020 Roundtable on Interdisciplinary Approaches have agreed to join us next March for this important discussion. We remain grateful to: Amy Buono (Art History, Chapman University), Katherine Powers (Music, California State University, Fullerton), and Martine van Elk (English, California State University, Long Beach) for again offering to share their insights of working across disciplines in producing scholarship. 

Along with our Round Table presenters, we welcome those scholars previously scheduled to participate last year to please re-submit your paper and panel proposals for the 65th Renaissance Conference of Southern California Annual Conference Meeting, scheduled for Saturday, March 20, 2021. This meeting will be our first webinar conference. We anticipate the conference will continue to attract art history, literature, musicology, and history scholars from California as well as  national and international scholars who have traditionally enjoyed spending the day together at the Huntington, experiencing provocative and influential scholarship, forming bonds with one another, and creating a very special sense of a scholarly community. Our 65th conference will again prove to be a genuine experience of such a community. As we prepare for our coming webinar, we will keep our members informed on all necessary details. 

We do hope each of you will consider submitting a proposal to the 65th annual Renaissance Conference of Southern California meeting. The CFP deadline is 9 November 2020. 

RCSC Donors (2020)

We could not create this important scholarly community without the support of generous donors, such as:

Yvonne Elet

Robert G. Frank Jr.

Maryanne Cline Horowitz

Klena Kazakova

Sheryl Reiss

Linda Wolk-Simon

In addition to the support of donors, we are also dependent on our collective membership. Please consider becoming a member.

Membership not only helps to ensure the fiscal health of the RCSC, enabling us to continue to host the Annual Conference at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens while keeping registration fees affordable for all, it also comes with added benefits.

Members are able to:

  • Submit short texts for publication in our twice-yearly Newsletter
  • Participate in the Annual Conference as session Chairs and/or Respondents
  • Propose panels for RCSC Sponsorship at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Meeting
  • Participate in Members Only events

Membership is a minimal fee, 15$ (Regular) 10$ (Student), and rolls over on January 1st each year. Please consider supporting our scholarly community by joining today!

RCSC Member Publications and Conferences

For our Fall 2020 RCSC Newsletter, we are launching a list of recent and forthcoming publications and conferences from our members. Please peruse the following for inspiring and stimulating scholarship:

Julia Lupton (UC Irvine) was happy to serve as dramaturg for New Swan Shakespeare’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Zoom” (August 2020). The production and talkbacks are available on YouTube. The theatrical experience is readily available in Julia and her team’s video essays on performing on Zoom, diversity in casting, and the production itself.

RCSC Member Publications

Asaro, Brittany. Gallery Talk, “Living and Dying Lords: Sacred and Profane Love in Italian Renaissance Poetry.” November 2019 at the exhibit Christ: Life, Death, and Resurrection, curated by Hugo Chapman and Sarah Vowles (The British Museum) in the Hoehn Family Galleries at the University of San Diego.

Blessing, Carol.“‘It shall teach all Ladies the right path to rectify their issue’: Bastardy Law in John Webster’s The Devil’s Law-Case.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews (2018): 31.3, pp. 161-167.

_____. Paper Presentation, “W.D. Snodgrass as the Wise Fool.” November 2019 at the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association Conference in San Diego.

Dr. Blessing,  please accept the heartfelt congratulations from RCSC Membership on your recent retirement from Point Loma Nazarene University after 27 years of teaching, some of it also serving as department Chair! You are an inspiring intellectual force. 

Ardolino, Frank. Spenser, Kyd, and the Authorship of The Spanish Tragedy. New York, Peter Lang, 2019. 

Blaine, Marlin E. “The Erotic Wit of Herrick’s ‘The Parcæ’: Mythic Revision and a Metaleptic 

______. Pun on ‘Die.’ ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 2020.  DOI: 10.1080/0895769X.2020.1817725 

_____“Lust, Spirit, and the Vice List in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129 and Galatians 5.”  The Ben Jonson Journal 27.2 (2020), 234-46.  (Based on a paper presented at the 2019 RCSC.)

_____“Sallustian Views of Nature and Ethics in Paradise Lost, Book 8.”  Notes & Queries. 

Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1093/notesj/gjaa095. Forthcoming in print, September 2020.

_____“Cremation and the Author Cult in Richard Lovelace’s Posthume Poems and Robert Herrick’s Hesperides.” Afterlives: Reinvention, Reception, and Reproduction. Sponsored CSU Long Beach Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Forest Lawn Museum, Glendale, CA. 9 Nov, 2019.

_____“The Living Bust in Seventeenth-Century Author Portraits: Disability and Transcendence.” Sixteenth Century Society and Conference. St. Louis, MO. 17 Oct. 2019.

Buono, Amy and Sven Dupré, eds. A Cultural History of Color in the Renaissance. A Cultural History of Color Series, Vol. 3. General Eds. Carole P. Bigga and Kirsten Wolf. London: Bloomsbury Academic, (forthcoming, Dec 2020). ISBN: 9781474273732

Crawford, JE and Nathaniel Crawford. Chronicles of Pythia: The Last Trojan Princess. Kindle Edition. Illustrations. Sai Yogetsh Kindle [email protected], 2019.

Dadabhoy, Ambereen. “Skin in the Game: Teaching Race in Early Modern Literature.” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART) 27.2 (Fall 2020).

____. “The unbearable whiteness of being (in) Shakespeare.” Postmedieval: a Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies. V. 11, 2-3, 228-235. www.palgrave.com/journals. 2020. 

Fumerton, Patricia. The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press, Oct 2020).

Graham, Heather. “Guido Mazzoni and Renaissance Emotions.”  https://smarthistory.org/mazzoni-renaissance-emotions/

_____. “Introduction to Gender in Renaissance Italy.” https://smarthistory.org/gender-renaissance-italy/

Graham, Heather and Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank. “Mannerism, An Introduction.” https://smarthistory.org/europe-1300-1800/italy-16th-century/mannerism-introduction/

Griffin, Andrew. Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. (https://utorontopress.com/ca/untimely-death-in-renaissance-drama-2#).    

Horowitz, Maryanne Cline and Louise Arizzoli, eds. Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personification of the Continents. Intersections Series, Vol. 73 (forthcoming, Brill Publishers, November 2020). ISBN: 978-90-04-43803-3

Kilroy-Ewbank, Lauren and Heather Graham. “Types of Renaissance Patronage.” https://smarthistory.org/a-level-types-of-renaissance-patronage/

Lehnhof, Kent. “Sweet Fooling: Ethical Humor in Lear and Levinas,” forthcoming in SQ 71 (2021).

_____. “Twinship and Marriage in The Comedy of Errors.” Studies in English Language 60 (2020): pp. 277–98.

McCabe, Sophia Quach. “Intermediaries and the Market: Hans Rottenhammer’s Use of Networks in the Copper Painting Market.” In Art Markets and Digital Histories. Eds. Claartje Rasterhoff and Sandra van Ginhoven. Basel: MDPI, 2020. https://doi.org/10.3390/books978-3-03921-971-1   

Moffatt, Constance and Sara Taglialagamba, eds. Leonardo da Vinci—Nature and Architecture. Leonardo Studies, Vol. 2. Leiden: Bril, 2019.

Van Elk, Martine. “Female Glass Engravers in the Early Modern Dutch Republic.”  Renaissance Quarterly 73.1 (Spring 2020): pp. 165-211.

_____. “‘Famed as far as one finds books’: Women Publishers in the Dutch Republic and England.” In Women’s Labour and the History of the Book in Early Modern England. Ed. by Valerie Wayne. London: Bloomsbury/Arden, 2020. pp. 115–42.

_____.“Women Writers and the Dutch Stage: Public Femininity in the Plays of Verwers and      Questiers.” In Women and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries, 1500–1750. Eds. Amanda Pipkin and Sarah Joan Moran. Leiden: Brill, 2019, pp. 167–91.

***

The 65th Renaissance Conference of Southern California, 2021, will be my last official event with the RCSC. I am sincerely grateful for my tenure on the Board of Directors for the past four years in which I have enjoyed continuing to work with talented mentors and communicating with so many special and generous scholars who have kindly shared their meaningful ideas on their important work that always stimulates and inspires me. 

We will be seeking a fourth member after my tenure concludes this Spring. I highly encourage all our members to consider and to apply for the Board of Directors to have the pleasant duty of organizing this conference.

The information to submit is below:

Opportunity to Serve: RCSC Officer Needed

Please consider serving as an Officer and Executive Committee member of the RCSC. Members of the RCSC Executive Committee serve for four years, rotating through the various offices from Treasurer to President.

All officers are responsible for the following:

  • Meeting (online or in-person) at least twice a year
  • Reading and voting on all submissions for the annual conference
  • Helping to form cohesive panels for the annual conference
  • Attending the annual conference and chairing panels as needed

For additional information on officer duties, please see our website. 

If you would like to be considered as an RCSC officer, term beginning Spring 2021-Spring 2025, please submit a short statement of interest and a current CV to the in-coming 2021-2022 RCSC President, Sophia McCabe by April 30, 2021 at: [email protected]      

Many thanks for your years of support. We look forward to seeing all our members at our 2021 RCSC Annual Meeting. 

Stay Safe!

Kind Regards, 

M. Barbara Mello, President

Sophia McCabe, Vice-President 

Marlin Blaine, Secretary

Brittany Asaro, Treasurer

 rcsconline.org

Newsletter

March 2020 Newsletter

Dear colleagues,

I write to share news and updates about the Renaissance Conference of Southern California. During my tenure as an Officer and RCSC Executive Committee member for the past four years, I have seen the RCSC develop in new and exciting ways. We have reinvigorated our Membership program with new opportunities and events, sponsored stimulating interdisciplinary conferences, addressed important topics including pedagogy, race, and interdisciplinary study through our Plenary Roundtables, and revived our relationship with the Renaissance Society of America. I look forward to seeing the RCSC continue to grow and serve as a valuable scholarly association for Southern California scholars and beyond. This is my final year with the RCSC, and we are actively seeking a new board member. I encourage you to consider serving as an RCSC officer (see below).

64th Annual RCSC Conference: March 21, 2020
We hope that you will be able to join us at our 64th Annual Conference at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, CA on March 21, 2020. The program includes eleven fascinating panels, a presentation by Steve Hindle (W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library), as well as a Plenary Roundtable: “Interdisciplinary Research and the Renaissance: How to Do It.” Our roundtable participants include leading local early modern scholars, Amy Buono (Art History, Chapman University) and Martine van Elk (English, CSU, Long Beach). Registration for the event may be found on our website, or you may register here.

RCSC Sponsored Panels at RSA 2020
The RCSC is proud to be sponsoring a five-panel series, “Reconsidering Raphael,” at the upcoming Renaissance Society of America Conference in Philadelphia during April 2-4, 2020. April 6, 2020 will mark the quincentenary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520), one of the most brilliant and consequential artists in the western tradition. Praised during his lifetime as “Prince of Painters (pictorum princeps),” a description rendered indelible by Giorgio Vasari, this characterization has long served to obscure Raphael’s artistic achievements in other modes. He was in reality an impresario in many media: revered in his own day as Rome’s chief architect, Raphael was also an urbanist and a designer of sculpture, silver, prints, tapestries, and landscapes. These sessions dedicated to Raphael bring together established and emerging scholars to assess current approaches to his astonishingly innovative and influential works, to present new research, and to chart directions for further study.

The RCSC welcomes our members to propose panels for sponsorship at the 2021 RSA conference, to be held in Dublin, Ireland 7-10 April, 2021. Our call will go out in late May with a deadline of July 1, 2020.

Member Events
On February 7, 2020 RCSC Members enjoyed a Special Collections Curatorial Tour and discussion of print history, art history, and the strengths of the Getty Research Institute’s Prints and Drawings Collection led by curator, Naoko Takahatake.

Membership
Membership not only helps to ensure the fiscal health of the RCSC, enabling us to continue to host the Annual Conference at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens while keeping registration fees affordable for all, it also comes with added benefits.

Members are able to:

  • Submit short texts for publication in our twice-yearly Newsletter
  • Participate in the Annual Conference as session Chairs and/or respondents
  • Propose panels for RCSC Sponsorship at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Conference
  • Participate in Members Only events

Membership is just a minimal fee, 15$ (Regular) 10$ (Student), and rolls over on January 1st each year. Please consider supporting our scholarly community by joining today! 

Opportunity to Serve: RCSC Officer Needed
Please consider serving as an Officer and Executive Committee member of the RCSC. Members of the RCSC Executive Committee serve for four years, rotating through the various offices from Treasurer to President.

All officers are responsible for the following:

  • Meeting (online or in-person) at least twice a year
  • Reading and voting on all submissions for the annual conference
  • Helping to form cohesive panels for the annual conference
  • Attending the annual conference and chairing panels as needed

For additional information on officer duties, please see our website.

If you would like to be considered as an RCSC officer, term beginning Spring 2020-Spring 2024, please submit the following to the in-coming 2020-2021 RCSC President, Barbara Mello, by April 30, 2020 at: [email protected]:

  • Short Statement of Interest
  • Current CV

Many thanks,
Heather Graham
RCSC President, 2019-2020

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Membership

Membership helps to ensure the fiscal health of the RCSC, enabling us to continue to host the Annual Conference at the exceptional Huntington Library while keeping registration fees affordable for all. More importantly, Membership contributes to the continued growth of our shared scholarly community.

Members are able to:

  • Submit short texts for publication in our twice-yearly Newsletter
  • Participate in the Annual Conference as session Chairs and/or respondents
  • Propose panels for RCSC Sponsorship at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Conference
  • Participate in Members Only events

Please join today!

Newsletter

September 2019 Newsletter

Dear colleagues,

The RCSC is entering our 64th year, making us one of the longest running academic conferences in the Southern California region. We owe the continuing success of our Annual Conference to the many scholars who have generously given their time, energy, and expertise throughout the years. We thank you for your commitment to our community and to furthering the study of the early modern world.

I write to share news about our recent activities and exciting new developments underway in 2019–2020. The 2019 conference, held March 9 at the Huntington Library in Pasadena, included twenty-five scholarly papers covering a breadth of topics as well as a rich array of additional programming. Vanessa Wilkie, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts and British History at the Huntington, gave a highly informative presentation on the Huntington’s vast Renaissance holdings, including an overview of new directions in collecting and digital endeavors currently underway. Dr. Wilkie’s presentation was followed by a Workshop on Digital Humanities led by Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank and Sophia McCabe. Attendees were introduced to Digital Humanities practices and were able to engage in an interactive dialogue about DH and its many possibilities for early modern scholarship. The day concluded with a Plenary Roundtable, Teaching Race and the Renaissance. A lively discussion was held between leading Southern California scholars: Ambereen Dadabhoy (Literature, Harvey Mudd College), Danielle Terrazas Williams (History, Huntington Fellow (2018–19) and Oberlin College), and Liesder Mayea (Spanish, University of Redlands). We are grateful to these wonderful scholars for their constructive dialogue and guidance in developing innovative pedagogy. Special thanks is also owed to our out-going President, Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank (Pepperdine University), for her tireless efforts in making the 2019 conference a success.

We have recently announced our Call for Papers for the 2020 Annual Conference, to be held March 21, once again at the Huntington Library. The call for participants closes on November 1, 2019; please see our website for details if you would like to submit a paper. The highlights of that event will include the Plenary Roundtable: Interdisciplinarity and the Renaissance: How to do It. We are excited to have Amy Buono (Art History, Chapman University), Katherine Powers (Music, California State University, Fullerton), Martine van Elk (English, California State University, Long Beach) as participants in what promises to be a wonderful discussion.

New to the RCSC President’s Newsletter is the inclusion of RCSC Member contributions. We want to build upon the constructive and open dialogue we enjoy at our yearly conference by inviting scholars to share short contributions on their recent research and activities. We are thrilled to have two wonderful contributions to share with you: Bruce Smith (English, USC) writing on his recent work exploring Renaissance color and Danielle Terrazas Williams (History, Oberlin College) sharing her insightful afterthoughts on the 2019 RCSC Conference and Plenary Roundtable. Please follow the links above to access these contributions.

Lastly, I wish to remind you all of the benefits of RCSC Membership. Membership helps to ensure the fiscal health of the RCSC, enabling us to continue to host the Annual Conference at the exceptional Huntington Library while keeping registration fees affordable for all. More importantly, Membership contributes to the continued growth of our shared scholarly community.

Members are able to:

  • Submit short texts for publication in our twice-yearly Newsletter
  • Participate in the Annual Conference as session Chairs and/or respondents
  • Propose panels for RCSC Sponsorship at the Renaissance Society of America’s Annual Conference
  • Participate in Members Only events

We hope that you join the RCSC as an official member, information on how to do so is available on our website. We look forward to seeing you at the 2020 conference, and as always, welcome your ideas and suggestions for how to keep the RCSC moving continuously forward.

Thank you,

Heather Graham, President

The RCSC Executive Committee

 

Newsletter

June 2018 Newsletter

Dear colleagues,

I write to share some exciting developments of the Renaissance Conference of Southern California. The RCSC executive committee has been creating new types of programming, considering new ways to grow our membership, and working to strengthen our ties to local and national organizations.

During my tenure on the executive committee (2015–present), we have held stimulating interdisciplinary conferences at the Huntington Museum and Library. Our distinguished keynote speakers, including Teófilo Ruiz (History, UCLA), Carolyn Dean (Art History, UCSC), and Bruce Smith (English, USC), have presented fascinating new directions in their respective fields of specialization. Each of these talks has sparked lively and thought-provoking interchanges among our conference attendees. Moreover, the consistently high caliber papers delivered at the annual conference speak to the diverse manner in which scholars and students continue to push our understanding of what constitutes “The Renaissance.” Papers on topics as broad-ranging as phenomenological approaches to English literature and European exchanges with Islam to GIS mapping of Italian Inquisition cases and the visual culture of the Spanish Americas point to the diverse array of topics, as well as theories and methods, that have energized the field of Renaissance studies.

At our 2018 conference we held a pedagogy roundtable (with Bronwen Wilson, UCLA; Jonathan Burton, Whittier College; Julia Lupton, UC Irvine; and Clorinda Donato, CSULB) on teaching the Renaissance, which was met with great excitement among conference attendees. For our 2019 conference, we will have a plenary roundtable on the subject of Race and the Renaissance, and are planning to offer a workshop on some aspect of the Digital Humanities that we believe will interest those of us focused on the early modern world. Our hope is to continue to offer a space that supports energetic dialogue about the Renaissance world, broadly conceived, between 1300–1700.

We are also making a few changes to our organization’s setup. To begin, we have decided that it is important to reinstate membership dues as a way to grow and maintain the RCSC as well as to provide better programming and services to RCSC members. Membership dues will allow us to

  • create an official listserv for members to use,
  • permit members to celebrate their achievements and share important news in a biannual newsletter,
  • and apply for sponsored panels at the RSA conference.

In recent years, our official affiliation with the Renaissance Society of America had lapsed. We have decided to rejoin the RSA as an Associate Organization. Each year we are now able to sponsor up to four panels at the annual RSA conference (Toronto, 17–19 March 2019). Details about how to apply follow this email. There will be two membership categories for the RCSC, regular ($15) and student ($10). You can become a member by visiting this link or by visiting out website (rcsconline.org).

In the coming weeks, we will be sending out a short survey to gather information from you about the types of programming you feel would benefit members (beyond what has been described here) and your thoughts on what role the RCSC could play as a local organization. We hope you will join the RCSC as an official member and work with us to grow the organization in exciting new directions. Should you have any suggestions for the conference or other types of programming, please don’t hesitate to contact us

 

Many thanks,

 

Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank, President

&

The RCSC Executive Committee

 

 

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As an Associate Organization of the Renaissance Society of America, will be sponsoring up to four panels at next year’s RSA conference in Toronto (17–19 March 2019). We seek proposals for complete panels on any subject of the Renaissance world. Please see the details below about what is expected to propose a panel or consult the RSA website. Per RSA rules, graduate students are permitted on panels, but they must be within 1-2 years of defending their dissertations (see here for more information from RSA). The deadline for consideration is August 1, 2018. Please send your submission (the panel proposal and the information about each paper presenter) to the current RCSC president ([email protected]).

 

For a Panel proposal, you will need:

  • panel title (15-word maximum)
  • panel keywords
  • a/v requests
  • panel chair
  • respondent (optional)
  • general discipline area (History, Art History, Literature, or other)

Each paper presenter must provide:

  • paper title (15-word maximum)
  • abstract (150-word maximum)
  • curriculum vitae (.pdf or .doc upload)
  • PhD completion date (past or expected)
  • full name, current affiliation, and email address