I’ve been quite busy the first seven weeks of this semester. I tried out a wiki project on my unsuspecting second-year students in a course on early modern literature and cultural history. I think they liked it. The course is almost over now, and I’ll probably be posting an evaluation of my use of a [...]

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) has just published a position paper on the question what universities are for. The LERU is a group of twenty European research universities (see the list; membership is by invitation only) that together seek to influence policy in Europe.
Their paper takes a strong stand against the new discourse [...]

In an earlier post, I noted that Catherine Belsey’s keynote speech at the International Society for Cultural History conference in Ghent this August advocated a renewed attention to literary form and the utopian aspects of fictional worlds. This autumn’s issue of the Shakespeare Quarterly (59:3, Fall 2008) contains an article that thinks along similar lines.
Hugh Grady’s [...]

One of the highlights of the ISCH conference so far, for me, was a paper on cognitive theory and cultural history by Evelyn Tribble and John Sutton. In April, I wrote a post on literature and neuroscience, triggered by Raymond Tallis’ objections to the application of popular neuroscience in the study of literature. He considered it a [...]

The first keynote at the International Society for Cultural History’s inaugural conference yesterday was by Catherine Belsey, who critiqued the new historicism - and especially Stephen Greenblatt - for its monolithic representation of culture - a familiar complaint. Her solution to the problem, however, was not the traditional cultural-materialist answer.
She suggested that attention to literary form [...]

I am off to the new International Society for Cultural History’s inaugural conference in Ghent today. I will be chairing a session on culture and value by the PhD students of the Dutch Huizinga Institute, and presenting a paper called “Living Theory: Shakespeare Biography and Cultural History.” It is a topic rather unrelated to my current [...]

Via Renaissance Lit comes the news of The Shakespeare Post, a new site on Shakespeare. It promises to bring you the latest news on all matters Shakespearean, gathered from the net and based on the editor’s own journalism. In the latter category, the site features a podcast of an interview with archeologist Jo Lyon about [...]