Conference

October 12-14, 2023

Yale University, New Haven, CT

This conference aims to bring together scholars from art history, history, European literary and language studies, theater, and other fields to formally establish early European puppetry studies as a cross-disciplinary field and scholarly community. To that end, sessions will provide an opportunity for collecting and sharing resources as well as sites for setting the terms and questions that structure early European puppetry studies. We intend to build on the conference’s presentations to produce the first edited volume in early European puppetry studies in the following year.

We invite work on all manner of performing objects that can usefully be examined or theorized in terms of puppetry. We welcome proposals from scholars already working explicitly on puppetry as well as those newly imagining their work in relation to puppetry. In particular, we are interested in papers that resist dominant cultural discourses that limit puppetry to “popular” or “folkloric” spaces, seeking instead to locate fruitful avenues for using puppetry as a framework to analyze art, literature, culture, and performance traditions in medieval and early modern Europe. In other words, we hope to expand the field of inquiry from puppetry as metaphor to puppetry as praxis.

The conference will take place from October 12-14 at Yale University. This conference has been made possible by the generous support of the Whitney Humanities Center, the Elizabethan Club, Yale University’s Department of English, Yale University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and the MacMillan Center.

Schedule of Events

All conference sessions will be held in person in Room 276 in the Humanities Quadrangle of Yale University, 320 York St, New Haven. Unfortunately we are unable to offer remote access.

Thanks to the generous support of the Yale English Department, there are no registration fees for this event.

Thursday, October 12

Opening reception for speakers, 5-7pm.

Friday, October 13

9:00-9:30: Conference opening remarks by Michelle Oing (Stanford) & Nicole Sheriko (Yale)

9:30-10:30: Puppetry and Children

• Scott Trudell (University of Maryland), “Artificial Life in English Civic Pageantry”

• Isabel Dollar (St Andrews), “Bypassing the Interpreter: Child Actors, Ben Jonson’s Epicene, and the Power of Puppets”

10:30-11:30: Puppetry and Dolls

• Markus Rath (Universität Trier), “On the gender of the jointed doll”

• Michelle Moseley (Virginia Tech), “‘Beautiful and Extraordinary!’: Intersections of Puppetry, Performing Objects, and the Early Modern Dutch Dollhouse as Staged Spectacle”

11:30-12:30: Articulated Christ Sculptures as Puppetry

• Una D’Elia (Queen’s University), “The Dead Weight of Christ and the Mechanics of Performance”

• Ariella Algaze (Johns Hopkins), “Vernacular Puppetry and the Crucifix-as-Actor in Italian Confraternal Drama”

12:30-1:30pm: Lunch break (catered lunch for speakers)

1:30-3:00: Puppet Bodies and Materiality

• Manuel Schaub (Universität Konstanz), “Hidden in Plain Sight. The Cleverly Concealed Puppeteer in Wolfgang von Kempelen’s Chess Automaton”

• Jodie Coates (Cambridge), “Moveables of the Middle Ages as Paper-Engineered Puppetry”

• Laura Weigert (Rutgers), “Wax, Skin, and Paint: Vibrant Bodies in Fifteenth-Century Performance”

3:00-3:30: Coffee break

3:30-5:30: Puppet Death and Violence

• Beth Clancy (Durham University), “‘Better play| then playe either at ches or tables’: Chess, Death and Puppetry in the Book of the Duchess”

• Ayesha Verma (Columbia), “‘Dressed in Tiers to Bear a Part’: The Manipulation of Female Corpses in Early Modern English Tragedy”

• Alexa Sand (Utah State), “Dismembered Memories: Puppets, Bodies, Laughter, and Violence in the Late Middle Ages”

7:00: Sponsored speaker dinner.

Saturday, October 14

9:00-9:30: Coffee/tea and light breakfast

9:30-10:30: Records and Reconstructing Puppetry I

• Alissa Mello (University of Exeter), “Charlotte Charke, Mother of Punch”

• Tracy Davis (Northwestern), “By George! How to Perform a Dragon”

10:30-11:30: Records and Reconstructing Puppetry II

• Leanne Groeneveld (University of Regina), “‘then and ther a handlinge’: The case of William Appowell, Puppet Spectator and Player”

• Richard Preiss (University of Utah), “Ventriloquizing Early English Puppet Theater”

11:30-12:30: Puppetry in the Mediterranean

• Clio Takas (Harvard), “Disjointed Articulations: Shadow Players from Ibn Dāniyāl to Spatharis”

• Christopher Swift (CUNY City Tech), “New Directions for Research on Puppetry in Al-Andalus”

12:30-1:30: Lunch break (catered lunch for speakers)

1:30-3:00: Puppetry and Transgression

• Patrick Kozey (Austin College), “Puppetry in a Medieval Iberian Performance Hierarchy”

• Phoenix Gonzalez (Northwestern), “The Catalonian Caganer: Making and Managing Waste in Late Medieval Performance”

• John Bell (UConn), “Puppets and Passion Plays: Bread and Puppet Theater’s 21st-Century Cycle Dramas”

3:00-3:30pm: Coffee break

3:30-5:30: Roundtable discussion with all participants, moderated by Nicole Sheriko & Michelle Oing

7:00: Casual gathering at BAR Pizza, 254 Crown St. 

• If you are staying in New Haven, please join us at BAR Pizza for some post- conference conversation and celebration. 

Please contact us at earlyeuropeanpuppetrystudies@gmail.com with any questions.

About the COnvenors