The Shakespeare Association of America will hold its 49th Annual Meeting virtually.
The conference dates are March 31-April 3, 2021.

This guide will be updated when the SAA January Bulletin is released.

Panels & Roundtables:

Panels and Roundtables with a stated interest in dis/ability and/or disability studies include:

Shakespeare Futures Roundtable: Accessing Shakespeare

Chair: Eric M. Johnson (Folger Shakespeare Library) 
Organizers: Allison P. Hobgood (Willamette University) and Rebecca Olson (Oregon State University)

Brandi Kristine Adams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Jill Bradbury (Gallaudet University)
Perry D. Guevara (Dominican University of California)
Jennifer Row (University of Minnesota)
Justin P. Shaw (Emory University)

Seminars & Workshops:

Seminars and Workshops with a stated interest in dis/ability and/or disability studies include:

10. Embodying Differences in Global Shakespearean Performance

Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University)
Elizabeth Pentland (York University)
Ema Vyroubalova (Trinity College Dublin)

The ethics of embodied difference intersect with global frames for filming and performing Shakespeare in the twenty-first century. How do categories of race, gender, sexuality, and disability put pressure on artists’ and audiences’ claims about ethical and political gains of global Shakespeare? This seminar invites contributions that examine identity politics in the production and global reception of adaptations.

18. Inclusive Shakespeare

Sheila T. Cavanagh (Emory University)
Sonya Freeman Loftis (Morehouse College)

What does it mean to make the use and expression of Shakespeare inclusive of diverse communities and minority identities? This seminar considers inclusive Shakespeares, broadly construed: inclusion for people with disabilities; inclusion for first-generation students; pedagogy that uses universal design; performances that engage minority communities. Papers will focus on the discoveries that are made when scholars, teachers, and directors work to create inclusive texts, classrooms, and theaters.

26. The Politics of Bibliography, Textual Editing, and Book History

Brandi K. Adams (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
Zachary Lesser (University of Pennsylvania)

While textual editing, bibliography, and book history are sometimes seen as technical or “objective,” they are in fact rife with politics. How do these fields intersect with early modern and/or modern structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, disability, nationalism and colonialism, indigeneity, or other political arenas? We invite papers on all aspects of the politics of editing, glossing, bibliographic analysis, librarianship, bookselling and collecting, and the materiality of the text.

36. Shakespeare and Intersectionality in Performance and Adaptation

Ariane M. Balizet (Texas Christian University)

Is an intersectional Shakespeare possible in the public sphere? Shakespeare’s most public forms too often reiterate oppressive narratives of gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, and class privilege and ableist discourses of the body politic presented as “universal” values. This seminar imagines the role Shakespeare might play in illuminating structures of inequality in pedagogy and performance and considers the degree to which Shakespeare is fundamental to those oppressive structures.

40. Shakespeare and Translation beyond the Global

Leticia C. García (University of California, Santa Barbara)
Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University)

This seminar explores new approaches to the processes and politics of translation in relation to Shakespeare. Who translates Shakespeare? For whom, how, and to what ends? We invite papers that theorize the embodied, performative, intersemiotic, and multimodal nature of translation in ways that go beyond the macroscopic idea of the “global” and are rooted in particular methodologies of translation studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and gender and sexuality studies.

44. Shakespeare’s “Other Disability Plays”

Lenora Bellee Jones-Pierce (Middle Tennessee State University)
Lindsey Row-Heyveld (Luther College)

This seminar will expand discussions of dis/ability beyond a small recurring group of plays and explore ideologies of dis/ability at work in drama not explicitly “about” disability. We invite analysis of how dis/ability was shaped by representations of able-bodiedness, including dis/ability motifs and metaphors, disabled poetics, and disabled aesthetics. Possible topics include: health, beauty, youth, sanity, fertility, wit, and wholeness, as well as performance choices about dis/ability.

50. The Activist Shakespearean on the University Campus

Andrea M. Crow (Boston College)

This workshop brings together college instructors who want to expand their capacities to pursue their activist commitments at their workplaces. Participants will compose and exchange case studies, sharing strategies for making institutions of higher education more just for workers, students, and the communities surrounding them. The range of topics will vary, but questions to consider might include: How does being tasked with teaching Shakespeare and/or perceived as a Shakespearean create challenges or opportunities when it comes to intervening in discriminatory policies and practices on campus and in the wider community? How might teaching Shakespeare help you advocate for the rights of students, faculty, and other university workers in the face of institutionalized colonialism, racism, misogyny, queerphobia, ableism, classism, and other forms of minoritization and exclusion?

53. Intersectionality and Inclusion in the Early Modern Classroom

Maya Mathur (University of Mary Washington)
Elisa Oh (Howard University)

This workshop draws on Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality to examine how the overlapping axes of our identities and those of our students shape our pedagogy. Participants are invited to develop a teaching philosophy and lesson plan that focus on early modern women writers, writers of color, and non-Western texts; the historical and contemporary contexts of race, class, gender, ability, and sexuality; or critical race, postcolonial, feminist, queer, and Marxist analyses of early modern texts.

The seminars and workshops in this guide were included on the basis of the terminology in their descriptions. If you would like your seminar to be included in this guide, please contact us.