“Common Time: Enclosure and the Renaissance”
October 10-12, 2025 at Williams College
Marx’s elaboration of a theory of “primitive accumulation” as the constitutive separation of producers from the means of production has been much debated, and much criticized. Within the field of English literature, there have been a couple of landmark studies (Richard Halpern’s monograph The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital [1991] and Richard Burt and John Michael Archer’s collection Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England [1994]), but the dominance of historicism as opposed to historical materialism, which began in the 1980’s and is only now beginning to wane, as well as the longer history of explicit and implicit anti-communism in the Anglo-American academy, has prevented a more thorough engagement with the aspect of Marxist thought most directly germane to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century imaginative production.
Our symposium aims to undertake such an engagement. We are particularly interested in the affordances of thinking about time alongside space as a medium for collective thought and action, and as a medium where the logic of enclosure continues apace. To these ends, the symposium will bring together speakers who showcase the current vitality of historical materialist thinking, a poet who considers the translation of empire to the American West, and scholars of the “Renaissance” as period and temporal enclosure. We hope to devote at least one session to undertaking some writing in common, making the most of the time and space in which we will be together and preparing the ground for collaborations that can continue after the symposium has ended.
All who are interested in attending the symposium are welcome. Details about travel, accommodation, costs, and other logistical matters will be forthcoming. Those who are interested in writing new work for the symposium, consider responding to the following Call for Papers.
Call for Papers:
“Common Time: Enclosure and the Renaissance,” a symposium organized by The Renaissance Project, invites papers that undertake a re-opening of the “Renaissance”–which has conventionally been understood as a closed historical period–by engaging with literary examinations of enclosure. Papers may draw on Marxist critiques of capitalism, trans studies, indigenous studies, and other methods. The symposium will be held at Williams College, October 10-12, 2025.
In previous symposia, The Renaissance Project has been guided by questions such as: what kind of transhistorical work, or attention to questions of temporality and periodization, illuminate our relationship to this shifting thing called the Renaissance? How can aesthetics expand our sense of the political? This upcoming symposium will address these questions by expansively thinking about the common and the collective, whether with reference to space, time, or practice. After a collective turn away from new historicism, a new generation’s interest in social justice and lived material realities invites a reconsideration of Marxist thought’s relationship to imaginative production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and beyond.
We invite papers that explore the current vitality of historical materialist thinking, especially as it pertains to cross-temporal aesthetics, commons, and spatialization; the influence of landmark studies in early modern Marxist thought; the relationship among property, fiction, and embodied time; and mobility across the boundary of theory and practice. Papers will be pre-circulated before the conference and discussed in seminar format.
Confirmed speakers include Toby Altman, JK Barret, Jeff Dolven, Colby Gordon, Rayna Kalas, Ryan Netzley, and the poet Paisley Rekdal.
Please submit proposals of 150 words by January 15, 2025 to renaissanceprojectcollective@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent out in mid-February. Papers will be due for pre-circulation on September 15.