News & Events

After four years of silence, this Epics and Ballads Collection that has been built up in collaboration with several National Cultural Communities of the Philippines and in their home land has been upgraded, emulated in 2023-2024. It has been enriched with many videos and provides complementary documents in PDF contextualizing and analyzing the sonic compositions by the very people involved in this research since 1990.

The Legacy of Luís de Camões: Portugal’s Greatest Poet.

The Hispanic Museum & Library

A symposium taking place on October 1st that aims to show that this famous poet — a symbol of a changing world – spoke to all eras and that his words deserve global recognition. Contextualizing Camões offers an opportunity to delve into the cultural dynamics of the sixteenth century and to highlight the significant contributions of European humanists and artists during this fascinating period.

The invited guests are:

• David Kenneth Jackson, Lecturer in Portuguese at Yale University
• Joaquim Oliveira Caetano, Director of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga (Portuguese Museum of Ancient Art)
• Josiah Blackmore, Chair Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Nancy Clark Smith Professor of the Language and Literature of Portugal
• José Miguel Martínez Torrejón, Distinguished Professor at Queens College
• Isabel Almeida, Associate Professor Faculdade de Letras, Lisbon University
• Henrique Leitão, Provost and Senior Researcher, University of Lisbon
• The symposium will be held on October 1st from 10 am to 5 pm, featuring morning and afternoon sessions that conclude with a lively debate and Q&A

For more information, visit https://hispanicsociety.org/exhibitions/future-exhibitions/the-legacy-of-luis-de-camoes-portugals-greatest-poet/

This conference (in Spanish) on books of chivalry and comedies of the 17th century is part of the Historias Fingidas International Seminar (2022).

It will take place November 10-11, 2022, at the University of Verona, Italy, and can be followed online.

The program and zoom link can be found here.

Renaissance Society of America members can post calls for papers and seek participants for sessions in all disciplines to be held at RSA San Juan (9–11 March 2023). Session proposals are welcome in the following formats: Paper panels; Seminars; Roundtables; Workshops. Papers can be in English or Spanish.

For more information, see the Calls for Proposals: RSA San Juan 2023 and RSA Annual Meeting Submission Guidelines.

Three University of Toronto Scarborough students are reimagining an ancient Tamil epic thanks to an inaugural U of T Scarborough Library Sophia Hilton Storytelling Fellowship.

This year’s fellowship from the Sophia Hilton Foundation focuses on the Tamil epic The Legend of Ponnivala Nadu, translated in Brenda Beck’s forthcoming English edition as The Land of the Golden River.  The students will be creating a series of podcasts. For more information, go to Rebecca Mangra’s January 27, 2022, University of Toronto announcement.

From 2 to 4 November 2022, a symposium will be held in Geneva on the theme of the Epic, focusing more specifically on the role of music in its interpretation. Based on an idea of the Ateliers d’ethnomusicologie (ADEM), in collaboration with the Haute Ecole de Musique de Genève (HEM) and with the contribution of the Séminaire nomade de la Société Française d’Ethnomusicologie (SFE), it will be held within the framework of the festival Les nuits du monde (ADEM), which is based on the same theme. The primary motivation of this vast project is to connect live performance, educational activities, scientific research and publication. A selection of the contributions to the colloquium will subsequently be published as a dossier in the Cahiers d’ethnomusicologie (Vol. 37/2024). Artists, researchers and students of music or (ethno)musicology interested in participating in the colloquium are invited to submit their proposals before 15 January 2022.

For more information, see: https://adem.ch/en/evenements/music-and-epics

The World Epics in Puppet Theater: India, Iran, Japan, Italy project consists of scholarly encounters and puppet theater performances designed to foster intellectual exchange and public awareness about four epic traditions and their continued elaboration in puppetry arts. It also aims to feature contemporary puppeteers who use the dramatic capabilities of theater to present, question, and reinvent epic narratives across languages, cultures, religions, and territories.

The project is part of the Columbia University Humanities War & Peace Initiative, which “fosters the study of war and peace from the perspective of scholars in the Humanities, in conversation with colleagues from around Columbia and the world […] with an ultimate goal of perpetuating a more peaceful world.”

Academic committee: Jo Ann Cavallo (Columbia University), organizer; Olga M. Davidson (Boston University); Claudia Orenstein (Hunter College, CUNY; UNIMA-USA); Elizabeth Oyler (University of Pittsburgh); Paula Richman (Oberlin College); and Poupak Azimpour Tabrizi (University of Tehran, Iran).

Co-sponsors of the mini-symposium: the Humanities War and Peace Initiative, through the Division of Humanities in the Arts & Sciences at Columbia University; the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture, Columbia University; the Museo Internazionale delle Marionette “Antonio Pasqualino” in Palermo, Italy; the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry, University of Connecticut; the Puppet Arts Program, Department of Dramatic Arts, University of Connecticut; the University of Pittsburgh; and UNIMA-USA.

For the latest information about the project (including videos of the mini-symposium, the Q&As with the puppeteers, and select performances) as well as further suggested resources, see the World Epics in Puppet Theater project page.

World Puppetry Day 2021

World Puppetry Day takes place annually on March 21. Click here for this year’s World Puppetry Day events worldwide.