Events
2025 ICCEMS Events
21 March 2025, Boston: ICCEMS Early Career Members Drinks Reception and Launch of the ICCEMS Higher Degree and Early Career Researcher Program
ICCEMS will host a networking cash-bar event for Higher Degree and Early Career Research members of ICCEMS at RSA Boston. This will launch the ICCEMS Higher Degree and Early Career Researcher Program, which is designed to use the collective strength and scale of our centres to benefit ICCEMS’ higher degree and early career members. Click here for details about the networking drinks.
4 April 2025, Paris and Online: “Mary, Queen of Scots in the Querelle about women’s education” with Armel Dubois-Nayt
PEMS will host the next ICCEMS online seminar with Armel Dubois-Nayt from Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, who works on early modern women’s writing in Scotland and the Querelle des femmes. Read more.
23 April, 2025, Online: “More of a Comment than a Question: Q&As and How to Handle Them,” an ICCEMS Tacit Knowledge Workshop for higher degree and early career researchers
ICCEMS is proud to present the first in a new online workshop series, Tacit Knowledge for higher degree and early career researchers. This session is titled “More of a Comment than a Question: Q&As and How to Handle Them,” and will be hosted by Associate Professor Kathryn Murphy and Professor Joe Moshenska on behalf of the Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford. Click here for details.
7 August, 2025, Canberra and Online: Micheline White, “☛ Gorgeous Books and Royal Annotations: What Katherine Parr and Henry VIII Wrote in their Books ☚”
Henry VIII and Katherine Parr owned hundreds of deluxe books. They sometimes read with pen in hand and left fascinating markings in the margins and on the title pages of their volumes, markings that include charming inscriptions, little hands (manicules), trefoils, and notes to themselves. At first glance, these markings appear to be highly personal and private, but a king and queen were never alone, and their reading and writing were carefully scrutinized by the courtiers who surrounded them. By closely examining some of the marginalia produced by Katherine and Henry, we’ll see how they used handwritten markings to create ideal representations of themselves as self-reflective, learned, pious, prudent, and charitable. For Katherine, the stakes of her self-representation were very high, and we’ll discuss how she used books and marginalia as part of a broader strategy to “survive” her marriage to Henry. Read more and register.
8 August 2025, Canberra: Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700
Early modern women marked their books in myriad ways, and their marginalia provide evidence of their book ownership, their reading, writing and drawing practices, their acquisition of literacy, and the interrelation of body, book, and material world. This symposium interprets this exciting new textual corpus and discusses the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing marginalia by early modern women, elite and non-elite, known and unknown. Read more and register.
11 September 2025, Online: “Secret Editors’ Business: What No One Tells You About Getting an Article Published,” an ICCEMS Tacit Knowledge Workshop for higher degree and early career researchers
ICCEMS is proud to present the second online workshop of our series Tacit Knowledge for Higher Degree and Early Career Researchers. This session, “Secret Editors’ Business: What No One Tells You About Getting an Article Published” will be hosted by Prof Rosalind Smith (ANU) and Prof Emma Smith (Hertford College, Oxford). Read more and register.
2 October 2025, Online: Early Modern Puppet ‘Literature’: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Milton Puppet Plays with Professor Tiffany Stern
ANU CEMS will host the next ICCEMS online seminar with Professor Tiffany Stern who will speak about three early modern puppet-shows, Hamlet, Doctor Faustus, and The Creation of the World. Read more and register.
2026 Events
6 February 2026, Paris: Christine Sukič, Ineffable Bodies
Christine Sukič, professor of early modern English literature and culture at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and current president of the French Shakespeare Society (Société Française Shakespeare) presents work from her recent monograph Ineffable Bodies: Heroism on the Early Modern Stage. Details coming soon.
14 April 2026, Online: “Working with digital collections: does seeing the actual thing matter?” An ICCEMS Tacit Knowledge Workshop for higher degree and early career researchers
PEMS will host the first ICCEMS Tacit Knowledge Workshop for 2026 with Guillaume Coatalen (Université Versailles Saint-Quentin) and Blandine Demotz (Cergy Université). Read more.
Past Events
30 January 2024, Oxford: ICCEMS website soft launch at “Unfinished Conversations: Still Kissing the Rod #3”
Hosted and organised by Professor Lorna Hutson, Director of CEMS Oxford, Unfinished Conversations: Still Kissing the Rod #3 reassesses the state of the field of early modern women’s writing. Speakers include the presenters Rosalind Smith, Sarah C. E. Ross, Danielle Clarke and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann, with interlocutors Virginia Cox, Diane Purkiss and Ros Ballaster. They will discuss two landmark publications in the field: Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women’s Writing in English.
Details: https://iccems.org/event-report-on-unfinished-conversations-still-kissing-the-rod-3/
21-23 March 2024, Chicago: ICCEMS Drinks Reception at RSA Chicago 2024
ICCEMS hosted drinks at RSA Chicago to invite new partners to join ICCEMS.
Details: https://iccems.org/iccems-at-rsa-chicago-2024/
16 May, Paris: PEMS Hosts ICCEMS Zoom Seminar “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain”
The Paris Early Modern Seminar (PEMS) hosted the first ICCEMS seminar, introducing Brepols series “Polyglot Encounters in Early Modern Britain“.
Details: https://iccems.org/polyglot-encounters-in-early-modern-britain-iccems-hybrid-seminar-16-may-2024/
7 June 2024, London: LRS One-Day Conference, “Learning from Early Modern Books”
The London Renaissance Seminar hosted this one-day event at Birkbeck, University of London.
Details: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/events/event/42050/learning-from-early-modern-books
14 June 2024, London: LRS One-Day Conference: “London Locations: Urban Geography, Creative Opportunities and Literary Representations”
This one-day conference hosted by the London Renaissance Seminar and the Paris Early Modern Seminar took place at Birkbeck on Friday 14 June.
Details: https://pems.hypotheses.org/1158
2 July 2024, Canberra: ANU CEMS Hosts ICCEMS Hybrid Seminar with Nicholas Terpstra, “Moving Targets: Finding Young People in the Early Modern World”
ANU CEMS welcomed Professor Nicholas Terpstra for this hybrid lecture at the National Library of Australia.
Details: https://iccems.org/nicholas-terpstra-moving-targets/
3 September 2024, Canberra: ANU CEMS Hosts Hybrid Seminar with Michelle O’Callaghan, “Making Poetry Collections by Hand and Productive Leisure”
Professor Michelle O’Callaghan (University of Reading) visited ANU CEMS thanks to funding from the ANU Research School of Humanities and the Arts.
Details: https://iccems.org/anu-cems-seminar-with-michelle-ocallaghan-on-3-september-2024/