Newberry Library
9:30-4:30
In 2018, “Attending” asked how Early Modern women’s action and agency shaped their lives and world. In 2022, we will turn to performance, asking how women’s performances of power, gender, and art before 1800 provide powerful paths towards understanding their lives and our own today. The conference will ask such questions as: How do medieval, early modern, and Indigenous women draw on various forms of power, from the racial to the religious, to perform different roles? How was the category of “woman” itself contested, reinforced, and complicated through the performance of gender? What did women choose to perform through music, dance, and visual art? Lastly, what responsibilities and possibilities do we have as scholars who teach and share our work with the public?
The conference will retain its innovative format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote dialogue, augmented by a keynote lecture and a plenary panel on each of the four conference topics: power, gender, art, and public humanities/pedagogy.
Organized by the Center for Renaissance Studies and the Attending 2022 organizing committee: Elizabeth Gerlach (University of Chicago), Julie Campbell (Illinois State University), Daisy Delogu (University of Chicago), Theresa Gross-Diaz (Loyola University), Carole Levin (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), Silvia Mitchell (Purdue University), Caterina Mongiat Farina (DePaul University), Diana Robin (Newberry Library), and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).
Call For Proposals
We welcome proposals for workshop sessions on the following themes: Women Performing Power, Women Performing Gender, Women Performing Art, and Public Humanities and Pedagogy.
Workshops are 90-minute sessions organized by a group of two to four leaders who circulate readings, questions, and other materials in advance through the conference website. Please note that we cannot accept full proposals from individual organizers. The best workshops are often comparative and interdisciplinary, and all allow participants to share information, pass on knowledge, ask advice, and learn something new.
For more information about submitting a workshop proposal, see the full call here. To submit a proposal, please use this online submission module. The submission deadline is Tuesday, March 15, 2022.
