This panel aims to defamiliarise the spaces of premodern English literature by featuring the work of four early career researchers whose interests and expertise push the study of space in new directions. Working across a range of genres, the presenters reimagine space as ineluctably hybrid—defined by cross-cultural encounters, by ideologies of race and gender, and by the consequences of settler colonialism. In doing so, they offer novel ways of understanding and interpreting the spaces of the literary.

Speakers:

• Andrew Bozio (Skidmore College), Organiser and Chair

• Humma Mouzam (University of Birmingham): Control and Conquer, Mounts and Monsters: Giant Spaces in the Prose Merlin and The Faerie Queene

• Ashley Sarpong (University of California, Davis): Savagery, Courtesy and the Georgic Imaginary in Spenser’s TheFaerie Queene

• Sarah O’Malley (Mahidol University): Colonial Unsettlement and Agrarian Spatial Practice in Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts

• Dyani Taff (Ithaca College): “In mind’s ocean wide”: Naval Wars, Gendered Sovereignty, and Authorship in Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies