BSA 2023 Conference: ‘Re-locating Shakespeare’

University of Liverpool

Tuesday 25th – Friday 28th July 2023

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This year’s BSA conference will take place at the University of Liverpool, organised by Dr Esme Miskimmin (University of Liverpool), Dr Katie Knowles (University of Liverpool) and Professor Emerita Elspeth Graham (Liverpool John Moores University), supported by the BSA’s Conference Team.

In Shakespeare’s lifetime, and in the four hundred years since the relocation of his plays from stage to page in the First Folio, his work has had a sustained and varied life in multiple geographical and theoretical locations through print, performance, research and education. More importantly, perhaps, there has been a concomitant narrative of ‘relocation’ associated with Shakespeare. The physical journeys of his works and their performers, including the visits of Lord Strange’s Men to the Northwest in the late sixteenth-century, performers who used the plays for colonialist and imperialist purposes overseas, or the arrival of Ira Aldridge, the ‘Black Roscius’ at the Liverpool docks in 1824, attest to a constant geographical relocation of Shakespeare and his performers. There have also always been sustained theoretical re-locations of Shakespeare in relation to changing contexts and prevailing critical, socio-historical and theatrical perspectives. Most recently, the opening of the Shakespeare North Playhouse in Knowsley has relocated performances and narratives of Shakespeare in the Northwest of England.

This conference will seek to explore the geographical, temporal and semantic ‘Re-locations’ of Shakespeare, looking again at the place(s) of his works and reassessing them through the wider contexts of performance, print, translation, teaching and research, including (but not limited to):

• Notions of location, locating and re-locating within Shakespeare, including explorations of travel, exile, pilgrimage and direction.
• Claiming and ‘owning’ locations, including colonial and postcolonial re/appropriations.
• The cartographies of Shakespeare – the mapping / remapping, navigation and ‘discovery’ of locations.
• Re-locating through the imagination and / or the virtual:  the movement from the ‘wooden O’ to the ‘vasty fields of France’ or the virtual Dover cliff; online performances.
• Re-locating through translation and adaptation, including dramatic, musical, operatic and fictional adaptations.
• Location / Re-location in the teaching of Shakespeare – where and how pupils and students experience Shakespeare.
• Voluntary and / or forced relocations – in Shakespeare’s texts, or for pedagogical or political uses.
• Re-locating perspectives (critical, pedagogical or performative) in relation to cultural and social changes, disability and LGBTQ+
• Relocating in times of pandemic (from the touring circuit outside of London during the plagues and beyond, to the internet during covid).
• ‘What do they in the North?’ (RIII 4.4.398): Implications / connotations arising from a specifically ‘northern’ Shakespeare.
• Re-locating Shakespeare’s work in understandings of literary / theatrical / critical canons, in the light of any of the above (or any other types of ‘re-locations’).

The BSA are delighted to have three plenary lectures by:

Professor Poonam Trivedi (formerly University of Delhi)
Dr Eleanor Rycroft (University of Bristol)
Ben Crystal (author, actor, producer)

and a plenary roundtable led by:

Dr Peter Kirwan (Mary Baldwin University).

Conference Registration Fee Information

Registration will open in the spring; the provisional conference fees are:

• Full fee: £190 (for salaried members, including academic and teaching staff)
• Discounted fee: £120 (for students, OAPs, trainee teachers, teaching assistants, precariously-employed scholars, and scholars without institutional support).

Day rates will also be available. The provisional day rates are:

• £50 per day for ‘Full’ category delegates
• £35 per day for ‘Discounted’ category delegates

Read more about the seminars and workshops on their website.