Shahidha Bari is joined by Stephen Shapiro and guests to read volume 4 of Foucault's History of Sexuality, which has been translated into English for the first time.

The Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, encourages outstanding postdoctoral scholars to apply to The Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowships scheme, for Fellowships starting in the 2021/22 academic year.

We are proud to announce that Marta Meazza (BA English Literature with Intercalated Year) is the winner of the Literature category at this year's Global Undergraduate Awards for her essay "Toxic Waste, Toxic Masculinity: Femicide, Ecocide and the Slow Violence of Globalization in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666". Marta's work was selected out of an international field of student research for this prestigious recognition, and is now invited to collect her prize at the UA Global Summit in Dublin in November.

English and Comparative Literary Studies department, have again been placed in the top 20 English departments in the world by the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

The following is an obituary written by Dr Margaret Shewring (Theatre & Performance and Cultural & Media Policy Studies). We note his considerable contribution to the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, where Ronnie taught for many years, particularly on Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, and on poetry. Ronnie also worked alongside Jack (later Lord) Butterworth to protect the Faculty of Arts against cuts by the University Grants Council in the 1980s. The funeral will take place on Monday 25 February 2019 at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon at 12.00 noon. His wife, Eithne, welcomes all friends and colleagues.

Dr Shewring writes:

It is with great sadness that we write to let you know that J.R. (Ronnie) Mulryne died on Monday 28 January. He had become increasingly unwell in the past two months and, although he remained mentally alert, his body had become very frail as the cancer had spread and the treatments became more difficult to cope with. He died at home during in his sleep.

Throughout his career Ronnie has been a tireless and distinguished contributor to academic teaching, research and publication. He has inspired generations of students and scholars, developing resources and a scholarly framework for the interdisciplinary study of European Renaissance Culture and of Early Modern Performance.

Ronnie joined the Department of English at the University of Warwick in 1977. Among his many University roles he was Director of the Centre for the Study of the Renaissance from the 1980s to 2003, a role that reflected his determination that postgraduate students would benefit from being a part of an interdisciplinary grouping for teaching and research at MA and doctoral level. With colleagues associated with the Centre he convened numerous interdisciplinary conferences at Warwick, Warwick in Venice, Columbia University New York, Bergamo and the Warburg Institute (University of London) as well as two EURESCO-funded conferences in Lucca, Tuscany. Ronnie actively promoted international partnerships with the University of Venice, Ca’ Foscari, the University of Paris-Sorbonne and the University of Tours. Under his directorship, the Centre developed European academic exchange programmes (ERASMUS and SOCRATES) with colleagues and postgraduate students in Venice and Paris. Ronnie’s own frequent contributions to conferences of the Société Internationale de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur la Renaissance (S.I.R.I.R) at Paris-Sorbonne, and his subsequent publications on aspects of Renaissance literature and performance, were recognised by the French Ministry of Education and Culture in 1992 when he was made a Chevalier of l’Ordres des Palmes Académiques.

In the late 1990s Ronnie led Warwick’s successful application for funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Board for Warwick’s Centre for the Study of the Renaissance to host the AHRB Centre for the Study of Renaissance Elites and Court Cultures, chairing this Centre for three years and leading one of its interdisciplinary research programmes with a focus on court and civic festivals of the European Renaissance, a project that resulted in a 2-volume, large-format publication making available to readers the texts of court and civic festivals, transcribed, translated and annotated with scholarly introductions. He also led the creation of a website, in collaboration with the British Library, to make more than two hundred and fifty festival books from the Library’s collection available in searchable, digital format.

On his retirement from Warwick in 2004 Ronnie was made Professor Emeritus. He continued to be an active scholar, editor, conference convenor and participant. As a co-founder of the Society for European Festivals Research he continued to collaborate in conferences in Warwick, Venice, London, Bergamo, Mons and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He particularly enjoyed our collaboration with the European Science Foundation’s PALATIUM research network. As a general editor of the European Festival Studies, 1450–1700 series of books he encouraged interdisciplinary research in an increasingly international context for students, doctoral and early career researchers and more senior scholars, collaborating in research networks with curators, archivists and performance practitioners.

His energy, his generosity in encouraging others and his love of theatre, music, poetry, architecture and history have been an inspiration to many. He will be greatly missed.

Graeme Macdonald's Petrocultures event at Glasgow University this month was a huge success, reported on in the media, and with a sell-out Town Hall event. Congratulations to Graeme on a fantastic conference.

A foreign state sponsors a political assassination on English soil.

The attempt fails.

In its aftermath, Her Majesty's government asks her expert advisers:

What is the appropriate level of response?

What action can we take against murderous individuals --

and state sponsored terrorism?

Sound familiar?

But this case dates not from 2018 but 1584, when the Spanish Ambassador in London colluded in a plot to assassinate Elizabeth I. The Queen's Privy Council wanted to execute Mendoza. The jurist Alberico Gentili said they couldn't -- because even criminal ambassadors were protected by the right to diplomatic immunity. The following year Gentili published his comprehensive treatise on the role of the ambassador, a book Henry Wotton undoubtedly knew when he arrived in Venice in 1604, instructed by King James to restore diplomatic relations between London and the Republic.

'Hear the Ambassadors: The Performance of Diplomacy in the Age of Shakespeare' is an exhibition that draws together the strands of this history. It thinks about the theory of embassy. It looks at fictions of embassy on Shakespeare's stage. And it displays the practice of Wotton's Venetian embassy. It gathers a rich collection original documents, objects, and early printed books to illustrate the performance of diplomacy. Curated by Warwick's Professor Carol Chillington Rutter in collaboration with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, the exhibition reminds us of the on-going work that ambassadors do to 'represent the person of the Prince' and to 'practice the healing art' of diplomacy.

The exhibition runs from until September 3 2018 in the Treasures Room of the Shakespeare Centre, Stratford upon Avon. It is funded by a grant from the Warwick Impact Fund.

Many congratulations to Laura Shanahan, postgraduate student on the MA in Literary Translation Studies (who had been have been shortlisted for the John Dryden Translation Competition), has been chosen as the prose runner-up for the World Literature Today Translation Prize for her translation from Italian of an excerpt from Anna Maria Ortese's short story 'The Silence of Reason'. Cick here for more information.

Many congratulations to Laura Shanahan, postgraduate student on the MA in Literary Translation Studies, who is one of eight people to have been shortlisted for the John Dryden Translation Competition with her translation from the Italian of Viola di Grado’s La fine delle frasi fatte [The End of the Set Phrases]. The competition received around 100 entries in total. Click here to read more about this achievement.

The poet, Professor David Morley of the University of Warwick Writing Programme, has been elected a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.

The Fellowship is one of the highest honours for a writer. It encompasses the most distinguished authors working in the English language, including J.K. Rowling, Hilary Mantel, Philip Pullman, Richard Dawkins, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Richard Ford, Ian McEwan and Tom Stoppard.

Founded in 1820, The Royal Society of Literature is Britain’s national charity for the advancement of literature. It acts as a voice for the value of literature, encouraging and honouring great writers, and engaging people in appreciating literature.

Election as Fellow of the RSL is a uniquely prestigious honour, awarded by writers to writers.

New Fellows are offered the choice of signing the Society’s Roll Book with the pen of T.S. Eliot, Lord Byron or – new this year - George Eliot. In keeping with the honour being for his poetry, Morley signed with Byron’s.

A National Teaching Fellow, Professor Morley teaches on Warwick’s Writing Programme, and is a recent winner of The Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry for his collection The Invisible Gift, and The Cholmondeley Award for achievement in poetry from The Society of Authors.

On receiving the RSL Fellowship, Professor Morley commented:

‘My election to The Royal Society came out of the blue. It’s a huge honour for my poetry to be recognised by other writers in this way. I’m aware I’ve got a lot of work to do, and Fellowship of the RSL is a great boost. The RSL has an excellent schools outreach programme which I’m looking forward to being involved with. I hope to encourage more students from diverse and less privileged backgrounds to study creative writing at university and become authors themselves’.