Translation is often described with opposed terms like loyalty and betrayal, even though the work of translation defies such a description. New research in translation studies argues for the value of mistranslation and untranslatables, especially in recovering Indigenous knowledge production. This study joins these efforts by documenting how…[Read more]

Shakespeare’s representations of history often have replaced history itself in the popular imagination: Julius Caesar, Margaret of Anjou, Henry V, Richard III — popular recollections of their lives and deaths are intimately linked with Shakespeare’s accounts of their stories, despite the playwright’s deviations from historical facts. In order t…[Read more]

Gendered night, or the nocturnal brightness of the early modern English stage
In French, critics speak of the night using feminine terms, but the term is grammatically neutral in English. Despite this neutrality, night may be gendered. In Romeo and Juliet, virgins hide their shame from their lovers by hiding in the dark. If night is consecrated…[Read more]

For poets like Sir Philip Sidney, the numerous incongruities found in Elizabethan drama fly in the face of Aristotelian theory. London audiences in 1580-1600 would have been hard pressed to recognize the time and place of the action represented on stage from one scene to the next. By comparing Greek theory and Elizabethan practice, this paper…[Read more]

What might strike some as Arden of Faversham’s faulty construction may perhaps be ascribed to the fact that Arden’s murderers, as well as the play’s audience, had to learn how to “temper poison” (i.229). Poison is not simply a means to commit murder, its use also requires great dexterity, one which must be interpreted within a historical and metat…[Read more]

Document written by current and former CLIR postdocs providing insight and advice for applicants to the CLIR postdoctoral fellows program. You can learn more about the program here:

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship Program

Kinds of unity, modes of union—why bother? Does Leibniz ever focus on “union”, anyway? It is not before 1713 that Leibniz gets rid of certain metaphysical concerns which, although secondary for him, were present to his mind since the time of his 1708 answer to Tournemine, who had bespoken a “real union” between the soul and the body (GP VI, 595-9…[Read more]

La Vie Monseigneur Saint Fiacre, one of two medieval French plays featuring the misogynistic horticulturalist, has come down to us in a mildly puzzling form, as a saint play with an interpolated farce. While the text indicates that the farce was intended to be played as an integral part of the performance, it is in fact quite unrelated to the…[Read more]