With generous support from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the RSA invites applications for the position of Public Engagement Fellow for the academic year 2026–27. This is an exciting opportunity for a US graduate student to gain experience with public engagement, cultivate their leadership potential, and make a meaningful contribution to the RSA.

The fellow will participate in four areas of activity at the RSA and receive compensation up to $20,000. The RSA will also reimburse travel and accommodation expenses for the fellow to attend the RSA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia in March 2027.

If you would like to champion the RSA's mission while gaining professional skills that connect theory to real-world practice, we highly encourage you to apply. Please view the fellowship details and note that the deadline for applications is Monday, August 17, 2026.

The RSA’s William Nelson Prize for the best article published in Renaissance Quarterly during 2025 has been awarded to Mackenzie Cooley for her article “A Patchwork Columbian Exchange: Ecological Imperialism, Animals, and the Relaciones Geográficas of New Spain” (78.4, Winter 2025). Please view our 2025 honorable mentions and more details about the Nelson Prize on this webpage.

As of 2026, the RSA is awarding a new Renaissance Studies Article Prize to one or more authors whose recently published journal articles demonstrate the relevance of Renaissance studies (1300-1700) to our contemporary world. Winning articles display excellence in research and relation to the yearly theme. The theme for the 2025 Renaissance Studies Article Prize is “Renaissance Ecologies.” This inaugural prize goes to Marcy Norton and John Kuhn for their article “Towards a History of the Hammock: An Indigenous Technology in the Atlantic World” (postmedieval, Vol. 16, Nos. 2–3, 2025). More information about the Renaissance Studies Article Prize, additional winners, and honorable mentions can be found on this webpage.

Please join us in congratulating our newest prize recipients!

The submission portal for the RSA Philadelphia 2027 Annual Meeting is now open!

Log in to the submission portal here

(Current RSA Membership required to log in)

Browse currently open Calls for Papers on the RSA Philadelphia 2027 CfP Index Page. New CfPs may be posted until July 15.

Submissions may come in the form of organized panels or individual paper proposals. For more information, see the Submission Guidelines page.

Deadline for All Finalized Submissions: August 15, 2026

Notification Date: November 2, 2026

Conference registration and hotel reservations in the RSA block are also available now.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Explore the numerous possibilities that arise when we rethink the future of scholarly work. Join us online for a new two-day symposium, Public-Making Spaces, Then and Now: Reimagining Early Modern Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century and expand your horizons for engagement both within and beyond the academy. This two-day symposium will be held on Thursday, January 28, and Friday, January 29, 2027.

Co-sponsored by the Renaissance Society of America and the Sixteenth Century Society, we will explore this theme within the context of “precarity as possibility” and examine how, in this era of institutional shifts and professional uncertainty, to best transform “precarity” into a site of generative potential.

We invite participants from various disciplinary backgrounds to think about what public life meant between 1300 and 1750 and how an understanding of those histories can inspire more diverse and flexible engagement with the world today. Abstracts of 250 words are due by Friday, August 7, 2026. Please visit this webpage for more details.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

We will hold our Annual Member Meeting via Zoom on Thursday, June 18, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. (EDT). Easily convert the time zone.

Please click this link to register for the Annual Member Meeting.

Voting is now open. Cast your ballot by June 18 at 8:00 a.m. (EDT).

All RSA members, regardless of their ability to attend the meeting, are invited to vote for nominees and candidates to fill vacancies on the RSA Nominating Committee and Board of Directors.

We recommend voting ahead of time because the ballot is long. Although voting will close at 8:00 a.m. (EDT) on the 18th, we will reopen the ballot during the Meeting so members can ask questions before casting their votes.

Members attending the meeting will receive the agenda via email the day before the meeting.

We look forward to seeing you on June 18.

Please join the Renaissance Society of America’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee on Thursday, June 4, 2026, for “Fragments.” Participants from across disciplinary backgrounds will explore this theme as both a material condition and analytical framework. This half-day event will begin at 10:00 a.m. EDT.  Easily convert the time zone. Our Graduate Student Lightning Talks are open to all. Please register here.

EVENT PROGRAM

10:00-10:10 a.m. EDT: Introduction by Shanti Giovannetti-Singh

Picking Up the Pieces: Fragments of the Renaissance (10:10 -11:00 a.m. EDT)


●     Jennifer M Meissner (University of California, Santa Barbara) The Intimate Lives of Huguenot Guys: Reconstructing a History of French-Calvinist Youth Intimacy in Seventeenth-Century France 

●     Fabiola Corte (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Strategically Fabulated Anachronisms: A Fragmentary Revival of the Spanish Renaissance

●     Beatrice Mundo (Graduate Center of CUNY) Fragmented Italy: Canards and the Italian Imaginary in Early Modern France

●     Ronny Azuaje (Texas Tech University) Fragments of Service: Reconstructing African-Descended Military Lives in Colonial Spanish America

BREAK – 10 MINUTES

Traces of Bodies, Traces of Earth: Natural Science and Ethnography  (11:10-11:50 a.m. EDT)

●     Rae Tunstall (University of Winchester) The Fragmentary Archive of a Medieval Birth Girdle

●      Valentina Majolo (University of York) Pieces of the Lost World: Early Modern Reconstructions of Antediluvian Nature through Geological Fragments

●     Abigail Beckett (McGill University) Fragmented Bodies: The medicinal use of mummy in seventeenth-century England and France

●     Niyanta Sangal (University of Maryland) Negotiating Transness: Fragmentary Histories in Mughal archives and Early Modern English Travelogues

BREAK – 10 MINUTES

Textual Fragments/Fragmenting the Text (Noon-12:40 p.m. EDT)

●     Liora Ortega (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Nodes of Erasure: Mapping Inquisitorial Cues in Cervantes' Theatrical Manuscripts

●      Kenzo Pecchia (McGill University) Christopher Marlowe's Finished Fragment: The (Un)Endings of Hero and Leander

●     Nicole Baiguera (Graduate Center of CUNY) Layers of Fragmentation: Rhetoric in Petrarch's "Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta"

●     Olivia Barry (University of Massachusetts Amherst)  Fragmented Grammar and the “Mute Letter” in Ben Jonson’s Epicoene

BREAK – 10 MINUTES

Art History: Fragmenting the Frame  (12:50-1:30 p.m. EDT)

●     Ari Lipkis (Temple University) Recombinant Antiquity: Capriccio and Generative Imagination in Early Modern Italy

●     Chrisallo Borg (University of Malta) An Altarpiece in Pieces: Temporal and Material Fragmentation in Early Modern Malta

●     Tatyana Knight (Tufts University) Embers of the Fire: The Head Studies for Van Dyck's Aldermen of Brussels Group Portrait

●     Michael James Chappell (Warburg Institute)  Altered reception: a fragmentary late medieval altarpiece at the Honolulu Museum of Art

Closing Remarks:  1:30-1:40 p.m. EDT

We look forward to seeing you on June 4!

The Graduate Student Advisory Committee

Shanti Giovannetti-Singh

Lottie Page

Serena Strecker

Camille Uglow

Yixin Alfred Wang

We are pleased to announce that the Committee on Renaissance Studies for High School Students is once again calling for proposals for innovative teaching projects in Renaissance studies by RSA members who are high school teachers. Submissions are now open for this year’s grants which cover eligible expenses up to $3,000. Please click on this link to access the application and view additional information. Submissions are due Tuesday, June 30, 2026, and the winners will be announced this summer. As always, please email us with any questions.

We are delighted to announce that the RSA Philadelphia 2027 Call for Papers submission form is now open. RSA members are invited to submit Calls for Papers to organize sessions for our 73rd Annual Meeting, taking place March 11-13, 2027, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Once approved, CfPs will appear in the RSA Philadelphia 2027 Public Index of Calls for Papers. The submission deadline for proposals of complete sessions and individual papers is August 15, 2026. Notifications will be sent in November.

Organizers preparing session proposals should note the following key dates:

• July 31, 2026— Confirm with interested members whether they will be included in your final session proposal
• August 15, 2026— Submit complete session proposals through the RSA Philadelphia 2027 submissions portal (opens June 2026)

Our conference hotel will be the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, which is ideally located for exploring the city's cultural and historic sites and venues. 

We look forward to receiving your proposals and seeing you next March in Philadelphia. Please contact the RSA office with any questions.

The Renaissance Society of America’s Graduate Student Advisory Committee is delighted to announce our upcoming series of Online Graduate Student Lightning Talks, to be held on June 4, 2026. This year, we invite student participants to explore the theme of “Fragments.”

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest attested use of the French loanword fragment in English can be dated to 1531, although the Middle English Dictionary suggests certain uses of the term even earlier. Certainly, fragments pervaded Renaissance texts and studies, not only as nostalgic remnants of rupture, loss, and ephemerality, but also as generative bases of social relations, narrative reconstruction, textual reception, and aesthetic interests. Moreover, in the forms of dispersed materials, damaged archives, and modular compositions, fragments unsettle our inquest for the complete while offering the possibility for new interpretations. The fragmentary, then, is a condition of interpretation shared across the centuries.

Over the course of our Online Graduate Student Lightning Talks, we invite participants from across disciplinary backgrounds to explore “fragments” as both a material condition and analytical framework. Some possible themes that talks may focus on (but are by no means limited to) include the following:

Fragmentary forms in the Renaissance:

○     Paratexts as fragmentary units

○     Print culture and the circulation of textual fragments

○     Ephemera

○     Works from fragments; including collages, mosaics and commonplace-books

Fragmentary evidence and Renaissance reception:

○     Partial consumptions of texts and objects

○     Fragmentary reading practices and object circulation

○     Inherent incompleteness of historical narratives

Fragments in Renaissance networks:

○     Local fragments in the global Renaissance

○     Fragments as nodes in collaborative, patronage, missionary networks, etc

○     Fragments in the division of labor by seniority, gender or social class

Fragments in Renaissance research:

○     The loss or damage of fonts, objects, and sites

○     Challenges of reconstructing the past in its totality

○     Inherent incompleteness of historical narratives

Fragments in Digital Renaissance:

○ Studying textual fragments using digital tools

○ Reconstructing visual and material sources with digital methods

Fragments and the Body:

○ Anatomical dissection and the fragmented body in art and medicine

○ Relics and bodily fragments in devotional and sacred culture

○ Bodily fragmentation in literary and visual representation

○ Gesture and performance as ephemeral fragments of embodied knowledge

Abstracts of 150 words are due by May 1, 2026. Please use this submission form to submit your name, email address, affiliation, proposed title, and short abstract. Participants will be notified by May 15, 2026. The talks will take place on June 4, 2026.

Lightning talks are concise oral presentations of five minutes, which may or may not include visual aids. Presentations could be based on an argument from your current work (BA/MA thesis, PhD dissertation, or article), initial findings from works in progress, field or experience-based observations, or any topic that might stimulate discussion.

We look forward to reading your submissions!

The Graduate Student Advisory Committee

Shanti Giovannetti-Singh

Lottie Page

Serena Strecker

Camille Uglow

Yixin Alfred Wang

*This event is open to all graduate students but preference will be given to RSA graduate student members. Presenters who are not members will be asked to join the RSA.*

The RSA Membership Committee invites you to join the May meeting of our Works-in-Progress seminar via Zoom. The Committee hopes that this seminar will prove a forum for meaningful intellectual community, feedback and support in interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies. To join us, write to the Committee Chair, Vera Keller, at  vkeller@uoregon.edu and she will provide you with a Zoom link and a copy of the pre-circulated paper for discussion a few days in advance of the session. If you would like to submit your work for consideration by the committee, our next deadline is July 1, and you can do so  here. 

May 2026 Works-in-Progress Seminar

Wednesday, May 27, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. EDT

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Presenter: Kyung Cho, Ph.D. Candidate,  Indiana University Bloomington

Chair: Dr. Wayne Tan, Associate Professor of History,  Hope College (RSA Membership Committee member)

Abstract: Shakespeare’s Henry V reveals that a central activity of imperial sovereignty is the production of racialized bodies. I define racialization as a process that situates certain bodies within a legally and politically ambiguous space—neither fully subject nor entirely alien. While the racial exclusivity associated with the king’s second body is famously embodied by Richard II, Henry V mobilizes a rhetoric of shared blood, incorporating bodies that once lay beyond the traditional boundaries of Englishness, expanding and grounding an imagined “fair” fraternity in English soil and lineage. When read alongside England’s contemporary colonization of Ireland, however, Henry V suggests a more ambivalent logic at work. I argue that the play prefigures what would later be called the “British problem,” a problem rooted in the racializing logic of imperial sovereignty that would eventually extend from the Celtic fringe to England’s overseas colonial ventures. What the play dramatizes is a complex racial mechanism—one that defines Englishness not solely through exclusion, but through the regulated incorporation of what is not English in order to constitute what it is. This mechanism operates by strategically drawing and redrawing boundaries as needed, both within and beyond the political body, across internal and external fronts. This literary logic functions simultaneously as a premonition of later legal debates surrounding the post-nati and Sir Edward Coke’s stance toward the Celtic fringe, and as a formative framework that shapes how England comes to structure its legal and imperial relations with racialized bodies through intertwined practices of inclusion and exclusion.

Please email Vera Keller  with any questions. We hope to see you on May 27.

The RSA nominating committee wishes to draw your attention to numerous leadership positions to be filled at the RSA in the coming months, under the terms of our revised bylaws, which expand member involvement in our governance. The opportunities include openings on the board of directors, the new executive council (constituted with standing advisory committee chairs), the nominating committee itself, and our journal, Renaissance Quarterly.

To learn more about the roles to be filled, and to read the bylaws and the charter of our nominating committee, please visit this webpage. There you will also find forms that you can submit to self-nominate for one or more upcoming vacancies. While the nominating committee only accepts self-nominations (so as to gather the necessary information and be sure the scholar is willing to serve), we invite our members to contact colleagues and encourage them to self-nominate as well.

As explained on the nominations webpage, there will be one phase of nominations this spring and another in the summer. The deadline for self-nominations for phase 1 is April 30, 2026.

Later, after the leadership positions are filled, we will issue a call for volunteers for committee service as well. Volunteers are the backbone of nonprofit organizations like the RSA, and we are grateful for your interest.

At its meeting on February 18, 2026, the RSA board of directors approved a three-year plan for sustainability and revised bylaws for the RSA. These documents are the outcome of countless hours of work by our board members, governance consultants, and attorneys over the past two years, and I am very pleased to share the result.

The three-year plan and new bylaws implement changes to our governance structure that will make it possible for the RSA leadership to address concerns about our financial situation, manage our many programs and initiatives with an eye on the evolving state of the field/profession, and involve more members in the operations of the RSA.

You can read the three-year plan for sustainability and revised bylaws here. Next week you will receive the call for self-nominations for positions that need to be filled on July 1, 2026. I urge you to read the position descriptions, volunteer for a role that interests you, and encourage your colleagues to get involved as well.

Sincerely,

Carla Zecher

Executive Director

Registration is open for our new RallyBoard platform that supports the creation of structured peer groups. RSA members have the opportunity to join cohorts with other members who share common interests in their careers and research. We are excited to launch this new platform in April 2026. You can reserve your spot by clicking on the button below or scanning the QR code. The registration deadline is Friday, March 27, 2026.

We look forward to seeing you on Rallyboard!

Linking Cultural Heritage: The Lodovico Media Library 

Wednesday, April 8, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. EDT

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Join us for our final Digital Humanities webinar of the 2025-2026 academic year, as our panelists discuss the structure and functioning of the Lodovico Media Library (LML). Inspired by the intellectual Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), LML brings together heterogeneous materials from different cultural institutions. LML focuses on digitizing the cultural heritage of various institutions in a single repository and adopting a shared metadata structure for ‘objects’ from museums, archives and libraries. Learn more about how LML facilitates the identification of connections, generates new knowledge. and fosters collaborative research between cultural institutions.

Panelists:


• Luca Sandoni, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
• Matteo Al Kalak, Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia
• Allison Levy (moderator), Brown University Digital Publications

Please email us with any questions. We hope to see you on April 8.

Works-in-Progress Seminar

Thursday, March 19, 2026, at 4:00 p.m. EDT

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The RSA Membership Committee invites you to join the inaugural meeting of our Works-in-Progress seminar. Held over Zoom, this seminar will provide a forum for meaningful intellectual community, feedback, and support in interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies.

To join us online March 19, write to the Committee Chair, Vera Keller, at vkeller@uoregon.edu. Vera will provide you with a Zoom link and a copy of the pre-circulated paper for discussion a few days in advance of the session.

Presenter: Virginia M. Burnett Disdier, University of Puerto Rico

Chair: Monica Styles, Howard University

Abstract: The Shakespeare in Paradise Festival, founded in 2009 in The Bahamas, offers a compelling site for examining Shakespeare as a postcolonial cultural practice in the Caribbean. This festival not only stages canonical works by Shakespeare but also reimagines and localizes them through Caribbean aesthetics, performance traditions, and sociopolitical realities. By situating Shakespeare within a Bahamian context, the festival participates in a broader regional project of appropriating, transforming, and sometimes contesting the colonial legacy that Shakespeare represents. This paper argues that Shakespeare in Paradise embodies a postcolonial Shakespeare—one that emerges from a dialogic process of negotiation between inherited texts and contemporary Caribbean identities. Through its adaptations, casting practices, thematic interventions, and incorporation of local languages and performance modes, the festival demonstrates how Shakespeare can serve simultaneously as a tool of cultural critique and a platform for asserting Caribbean agency. Examining this festival contributes to an understanding of how Shakespeare survives and evolves in formerly colonized spaces, revealing the dynamic interplay between global literary heritage and local cultural production.

If you would like to submit your work for consideration by the Membership Committee, our next seminar deadline is Wednesday, July 1, 2026, and you can do so here. 

We hope to see you on March 19.

Planning Academic Publishing for the Summer

Thursday, April 16, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. EDT

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Plan and prepare your summertime writing, with a special focus on journal articles. This webinar will highlight best practices for planning writing activities and provide foundational strategies for successful article publishing. Our international panelists have diverse experience in academic article publishing and they will address topics such as understanding the fundamentals of peer review in journals, positioning peer-reviewed articles in interdisciplinary venues, and planning for article submission timelines.

Panelists:


• Eelco Nagelsmit, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Giancarlo Casale, European University Institute
• Rachel Miller, Sacramento State
• Aidan Selmer (moderator), Sarah Lawrence College

Please email us with any questions. We hope to see you on April 16.

Digital Scholarly Editing and Visual Storytelling: A Digital Edition of John Derricke’s The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581)

Wednesday, March 11, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. EDT

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Join us for a presentation showcasing Digital Derricke, a work-in-progress digital edition of John Derricke’s rare, polemical 16th-century work The Image of Irelande, with a Discoverie of Woodkarne (1581). The webinar will examine how we treat scholarly editing as a form of community building by connecting its many layers of historic, intertextual, and editorial communities in one digital location. By linking past editorial glosses with new annotations and enhancing the potentials for readerly engagement through annotating the woodcuts with a Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) mark-up, this digital edition aims to create a prismatic space where communities of contemporary readers can engage with past ones to create new insights about this significant work. 

The discussion will consider: What does it mean to read this work now and rediscover it in light of new perspectives on book history and multimodality? How might we place it in conversation with postcolonial studies and English constructions of race? How is the original work promoting (and hindered by) non-linear reading experiences? How can scholarly editing interventions develop visual storytelling practices? And, how can approaching digital editing as community-building impact textual remediation and discovery?  

Panelists:


• Denna Iammarino, Case Western Reserve University
• Andie Silva,York College, CUNY
• Molly Taylor-Poleskey (moderator),Harvard University

Please email us with any questions. We hope to see you on March 11.

Applications for our new Eloise Quiñones Keber Fellowship will close on Sunday, March 1, 2026. The amount of the 2026 award is $2,000 and the fellowship supports research travel for a scholar working in any area of pre-Columbian, early modern, or colonial Latin American art history for the period 1300–1700. The fellowship is intended to allow researchers to visit relevant sites and museums to study works of art in situ for scholarship and teaching.

More information about the fellowship can be found on our webpage. If you have any questions please write to us at rsa@rsa.org; we're happy to help.

We hope you will join us March 16-29, 2026, for our Days of Digital Learning (DDL) series. The sixth annual DDL will be held entirely online over Zoom.

Organized by members of the RSA's Digital and Multimedia Committee, the Days of Digital Learning will feature a varied menu of sessions involving hands-on, participatory work with digital tools and resources. Working under the direction of scholars, librarians, and IT specialists, participants will have a chance to see how their own research and teaching might benefit from digital concepts and tools, and how to develop digital literacies that will help us all understand the new tools of the trade.

Sign-ups for the workshops were emailed to members on Thursday, February 5. Please check your email to secure your spot. Signups are on a first-come, first-served basis. Please email us with questions and we look forward to seeing you online.

Futures of Postdoctoral Funding

Thursday, March 12, 2026, at 12:00 p.m. EDT

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Widen your research and career prospects by learning about funding opportunities, with a special focus on the European academic sphere. Join us online and gain insight into an array of postdoctoral grants and fellowships available in Europe. Our  panelists, whose careers bridge European, US, and UK academes, will discuss topics that include: the MSCA (Marie Curie) EU grant programme, key differences between postdoctoral funding in the US and Europe, and strategies for applying for various grants and fellowships.

Panelists:



• Ragnhild Bø, University of Oslo
• Adam Sammut ,University of York
• Gregor Christopher Meinecke  (moderator), Scuola Normale Superiore and University of Hamburg

Please email us  with any questions. We hope to see you on March 12.