48th Ohio Valley Shakespeare Conference
“Shakespeare for our Time”
Owens Community College: Toledo Campus
October 16-18, 2025
The OVSC welcomes abstracts for papers, panels, workshops, and roundtables that focus on Shakespeare’s importance in our present times, which can include recent theatrical and film representations, other literary creations, current critical and theoretical approaches, new ways of teaching his works, and collaborations with other fields. Proposals can address, among other related issues, themes such as the “common good,” or conversely, “enemies within,” with the former taking up all forms of “commons,” collaborations, and positive social concerns about shared space, social conditions, justice, and other aspects of the plays, and the latter addressing explicitly political concerns such as the plenitude of duplicitous, self-serving characters in general as well as “states of emergency,” sovereign decisions, and resistances to those judgments and decisions We seek to emphasize applications of Early Modern literature to today’s issues. How do Shakespeare’s plays represent the possibilities of solving problems and overcoming contention? What can they tell us about our current historical moment? How do they connect to social and political questions we face now? In other words, how can we look to Shakespeare to inspire hope, parse our social challenges, or understand the traumas and dramas of our contemporary moment?
The conference invites scholars of all ranks, including theater practitioners and teachers, to take part in its scholarly community. We welcome graduate students for regular sessions and undergraduate students for roundtable seminars. Undergraduate presenters are encouraged to submit papers for the M. Rick Smith Memorial Prize competition. Graduate student presenters are encouraged to submit papers for the Julia Reinhard Lupton Prize.