Paper Groups

Judgment and Religion
Devin Byker
Stephanie Bahr
Marcia Eppich-Harris

Judgment and Theater
Heather Hirschfeld
David Currell
Harry Keyishian
Gretchen Minton

Judgment, Ethics, Sociality
Robert B. Pierce
Katherine B. Attie
Cordelia Zuckerman
Olga Valbuena

Seminar Deadlines

December 15: Email me your paper title, an abstract (300 words max.), and a brief bio (300 words max.).  Shortly after I’ve received this information, I’ll circulate it to the group as a whole.

Early to mid-January: I’ll organize you into themed groups—four groups of four—based on your abstracts.

February 10: PAPERS DUE, 8-12 pp. max. Please don’t send anything longer than 8-12 pp.—with a full seminar, no one will have time to read your paper if it’s over 12 pages. Also, please note that this is an absolute deadline. As you may know, the SAA requires seminar leaders to confirm that all participants have completed their written work in order for them to be included on the SAA program. It is thus vital that you meet this deadline to be included in the seminar. Please email you papers to all seminarians.

March 3: Responses due. You will write a short response (1 page max.) to each of the other three people in your group. Please email responses to all members of your group and cc me.

Late March or early April: I’ll email you a handful of broad discussion questions that I see emerging from the papers and responses. I don’t want to micromanage our conversation, but I do think it would be useful for all of us to arrive in St. Louis with a similar sense of the directions the seminar might take.

April 10-12: See you in St. Louis!

Renaissance Judgment: Key Readings

Hello, everyone. If you encounter readings, primary or critical, that address Renaissance judgment in interesting ways, feel free to post them here so we all have the opportunity to take a look (just click the pencil icon below to edit post). I'll start with two recent pieces by our Respondent, Richard Strier.

“Against Morality: from Richard III to Antony and Cleopatra ,” in Richard Strier, The Unrepentant Renaissance: from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 98-149.

Richard Strier, “Shakespeare and Legal Systems: The Better the Worse (but Not Vice Versa),” in Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum and Richard Strier, eds., Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 174-200.

Seminar Description

Judgment is both a concept and a practice. It is fundamental to law as well as religion, and it is a key term in the development of aesthetics and the discourse of sociality. As such, judgment has a remarkably vibrant intellectual history. The basic premise of this seminar is that the theater of Shakespeare and his contemporaries occupies an important position within that intellectual history, that early modern plays and the institution of theater have compelling things to tell us about judgment, and that, conversely, judgment offers an illuminating framework for thinking about a variety of early modern plays. The audience for this seminar is broad since judgment stands at the intersection of several different strands of early modern intellectual culture, including law, religion, ethics, literary criticism, and rhetoric. It will also appeal to philosophically and theoretically inclined scholars, especially those interested in Hannah Arendt. Arendt explored the topic of judgment in various ways throughout her career and lectured on Kant’s Critique of Judgment at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research. The aim of the seminar will be to map out the relationship between early modern theater and the intellectual history of judgment through a variety of case studies. Papers are invited on a range of topics. These might include: courtroom scenes; judges and judge-figures; justices of peace and juries; judgment and theatrical spectatorship; theater and the development of literary criticism; judgment and the prehistory of taste; the legal history of judgment; divine judgment; skepticism and other intellectual contexts; judgment and evidence; theological considerations; judgment and sociality; modern philosophical perspectives; medieval inheritances; the rhetoric of judgment.