Harvard English Department Graduate Colloquia

Welcome...

The Renaissance Colloquium is a place for graduate students in Early Modern literary studies at Harvard to connect, to present their work, to hear presentations from scholars in the field, and to receive mentoring from faculty members and visiting speakers.

In the academic year 2025-26, our program will feature a variety of topics, such as performance, race and ethnicity, material culture, global literature, and political aesthetics. We will also host book discussion events and graduate student workshops. If you are interested in joining our mailing list, presenting your work, or posing questions/suggestions, feel free to get in touch!

Fall 2025 Schedule

The Renaissance Colloquium meets twice monthly, generally on Wednesdays.

September 10th

Harvard Early Modern World Fall Aperitivo

In-person Event

Featuring flashtalks by: Janet Gyatso (Harvard Divinity School), Joseph Koerner (History of Art and Architecture), Jinu Choi (Center for History and Economics), Molly Schwartzburg (Houghton).

September 10th | 5pm EST

Location: Department Conference Room, Robinson Hall, Harvard Yard

September 24th

Guest Speaker:

Elisabeth Bronfen

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Elisabeth Bronfen, Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich and Global Distinguished Professor at NYU, for her talk entitled, "Shakespeare's Serial World: Patterns, Obsession, Repititions." This talk is co-sponsored with the Mahindra Humanities Center Shakespearean Studies Seminar.

September 24th | 6pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 133

October 9th

Guest Speaker:

Holly Crocker

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Holly Crocker, Hale Family Director of Women’s and Gender Studies and Professor of English at Boston College, for her talk entitled, "Boundless Subjects and the Literary Downfalls of Eleanor Cobham." This talk is co-hosted with the Medieval Colloquium.

October 9th | 5:15pm EST

Location: Boylston Hall, Room 237

October 21st

Guest Speaker:

Alexander Bevilacqua

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Alexander Bevilacqua, Associate Professor of History at Williams College, for his talk entitled, "The Mask of Battle: Chivalry and the Racial Imagination." This talk is co-sponsored with the Early Modern Workshop in the History Department.

October 21st | 5pm

Location: Basement Seminar Room, Harvard History Department, Robinson Hall, Harvard Yard

November 10th

Guest Speaker:

Stephen Hequembourg

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Dr. Stephen Hequembourg (PhD, Harvard, 2011), Director of the Scholars Program and English Instructor at the Magen David Yeshivah, for his talk entitled "Gravity and the Scientific Epic: Dante, Milton, and Galileo."

November 10th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room TBD

November 21st

Graduate Student Talk:

Clio-Ragna Takas

Zoom and In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Cli0-Ragna Takas, graduate student at the Harvard Comparative Literature Department, for her talk.

November 21st | TBD

Location: TBD

Spring 2025 Schedule (Archive)

The Renaissance Colloquium meets twice monthly, generally on Wednesdays.

February 26th

Guest Speaker:

Shankar Raman

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Shankar Raman, Professor in the Literature Section at MIT, for his talk entitled, "'The Seeds of Time': Infinitesimal Macbeth."

February 26th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

March 5th

Guest Speaker:

Nicole Sheriko

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Nicole Sheriko, Assistant Professor of English at Yale, for her talk entitled, "Puppet Surrogates: Body Doubling on the Early Modern Stage."

March 5th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

March 12th

Graduate Student Talk:

Victoria Pipas

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Victoria Pipas, graduate student at the Harvard English Department, for her talk entitled, "Communing with Antiquity: Incorporation and Literary (Re)production in Montaigne's Essais."

March 12th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

April 30th

Guest Speaker:

Erin Murphy

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Erin Murphy, Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Boston University, for her talk entitled, "Bodies at War: Militarism, Materiality and Gender in the English Civil Wars."

April 30th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 103

Fall 2024 Schedule (archive)

The Renaissance Colloquium meets twice monthly, generally on Wednesdays.

September 18th

Guest Speaker:

Noémie Ndiaye

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Noémie Ndiaye, Associate Professor of Renaissance and Early Modern English Literature at University of Chicago, for her talk entitled, "How to Enslave an Unenslavable Person: Afro-Muslim Dissociations in Early Modern Drama." This talk is co-hosted with the Race and Ethnicity Colloquium and the Theater and Performance Colloquium.

September 18th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

October 2nd

Book Discussion:

England's Insular Imagining

In-person Event

This week we will gather together to discuss Lorna Hutson (Oxford)'s recent monograph, England's Insular Imagining: The Elizabethan Erasure of Scotland (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

October 2nd | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

October 16th

Guest Speaker:

Misha Teramura

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Misha Teramura, Associate Professor of English at University of Toronto, for his talk entitled, "Ink, Paper, Glue, Pins: Making Early Modern Manuscript Playbooks."

October 16th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

November 6th

Graduate Student Talk:

Shaden Heib

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Shaden Heib, graduate student at the Harvard English Department, for her talk entitled, "Shakespearean Allusion(s) in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North."

November 6th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

November 13th

Guest Speaker:

Stephen Guy-Bray

In-person Event

Please join us in welcoming Stephen Guy-Bray, Professor of English at University of British Columbia, for his talk entitled, "The Subject of Lyric Poetry."

November 13th | 5pm EST

Location: Barker Center, Room 316

If you have any questions or want to be added to our mailing list, please reach out.

Student Coordinators for 2025-26

Caroline Engelmayer (cengelmayer@fas.harvard.edu)

Ilya Nemirovsky (ilyanemirovsky@g.harvard.edu)

Faculty Coordinators for 2025-26

Leah Whittington (lwhittington@fas.harvard.edu)

Gordon Teskey (gteskey@fas.harvard.edu)

Stephen Greenblatt (greenbl@fas.harvard.edu)

Mailing Lists and Newsletters

To be added to the Renaissance Colloquium e-mail list, write to the 2025-26 student coordinator Caroline Engelmayer (cengelmayer@fas.harvard.edu).

To receive e-mails about Boston-area events in the History of the Book, write to histbook@fas.harvard.edu.

To receive e-mails about Harvard-based and New-England-area events in Early Modern Studies, write to Program Coordinator at Harvard, Anja-Silvia Goeing (agoeing@fas.harvard.edu).

Subscribe here for events at the Mahindra Humanities Center, including seminars on History of the Book, Renaissance Studies, Shakespearean Studies, and Women, Gender, and Culture in the Early Modern World.

For a partial list of affiliated workshops around the campus, including the History Department's Early Modern Workshop and the History of Science Department's Early Sciences Working Group, see here.

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