Full details including registration and the preliminary schedule of the four-day event – scheduled for September 26 to 29 at Denver’s Hyatt Centric Hotel — can be found in the Conference section of the SOF website.
Livestream registration for the four days is scheduled to begin July 15th and will be made available through the same Conference section page.
Some two dozen papers will be presented during the conference by leading scholars from across the US and Canada. Among them will be major papers by Bonner Cutting on Ben Jonson and the First Folio, Roger Stritmatter introducing a new SOF volume on Jonson as well as a separate paper about his work on de Vere annotations that he has found at Audley End, and Robert Prechter speaking about possible Oxford connections to the Marlowe canon.
Other papers will be given by Michael Dudley on a meta-understanding of the authorship debate, by Katherine Chiljan on Oxford’s religious portraits, by former New York Times writer William Niederkorn on The Tempest, by Earl Showerman on Hamlet, and by Dorothea Dickerman on Oxford’s wife, Elizabeth Trentham.
Australian researcher Matt Hutchinson will be presenting a video paper on Penelope Rich as Elizabethan Muse in the Sonnets with scholar Lisa Quattrocki Knight proposing a “Theory of Mind” approach to understanding the Sonnets.
Other speakers include Shakespeare Illuminated host Michael Delahoyde, Cheryl Eagan-Donovan, Rima Greenhill, Sky Gilbert, Jonathan S. Jackson, Ralph McDonald, Daniel Cowan, Christopher Carolan, David W. Richardson, Ron Roffel and Shelly Maycock. Tom Townsend will be presenting this year’s Oxford 101 paper as the conference’s opening talk.
One of the many highlights of the conference will be a panel discussion with Chris Coleman, artistic director of the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, about directing Hamlet, a production that will be on during the conference. Coleman is a signatory to the Shakespeare
Authorship Coalition’s Declaration of Reasonable Doubt (doubtaboutwill.org) and the SOF has reserved a block of tickets for the Friday night performance of the show which will go on sale to conference registrants on or about July 15th. The discussion is part of a panel on the production chaired by theatre scholar Don Rubin featuring dramaturg Leann Torske and one of the actors (tba).
And just in case all this seems a bit too intellectually heavy, SOF’s long-time Newsletter editor Alex McNeil is hosting an “Oxfordian Jeopardy” session on the Friday, a session open to everyone in attendance.
As usual, Oxfordian authors are encouraged to have books available in Denver for sale but do not send them to the hotel ahead of time. Hyatt will not accept them – contact Tom Woosnam at tomwoosnam.sof@gmail.com for mailing instructions if you are not bringing the books with you.
The full preliminary schedule can be found on the 2024 conference webpage.
