Papers on any aspect of spectatorship will be welcome in this member-organized session for Congress 2013 in Victoria. For example, spectatorship might include visual art in which the activity of watching is represented; it might include reports of early modern wedding festivities or funerals; it might include the public display of early modern executions, sometimes of famous offenders (Sir Thomas More), sometimes of marginal outcasts (Elizabeth Sawyer); it might include overtly theatrical events, such as the performance of plays and masques; it might include scientific observation, as practiced by Galileo and endorsed by Bacon. The goal here is to explore what it meant to be a spectator in early modern culture, with no particular limit on the strategies deployed in such explorations.
Please send your proposal (of not more than 500 words) to the organizer of this session, Ronald Huebert, Department of English, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS B3H 4R2 (rhuebert@dal.ca) before December 15, 2012.