Troubadours and Sonneteers: A Conference on Global Culture, Performance, and the Matter of Display

The continuing presence of lyric in many cultures and media forms proves the endurance of older models of expression and modes of understanding today, with the central feature of the language of lyric poetry, originally and often thereafter as performed song, but also as verse meant for private and silent or collective and shared reading. This conference aims to provide a common and seminal understanding of a global medieval and Renaissance literature, as the model of literary scholarship and pedagogy moves away from the single literary traditions associated with particular (especially European) nation states. In this regard, the project openly and enthusiastically embraces lyric and other relevant cultural forms generated in the ‘global south’ and throughout Africa and Asia as well as Europe.