Call for Submissions

12th World Shakespeare Congress

July 20 to 26, 2026

The Twelfth World Shakespeare Congress will be held from July 20th to 26th 2026, in Verona. This will be the first time that the WSC has been held in Italy. The International Shakespeare Association invites submissions of proposals for seminars, workshops, and panels engaging some aspect of the congress theme, ‘Planetary Shakespeares’. The Local Committee is chaired by Silvia Bigliazzi and co-chaired by Emanuel Stelzer.

This is the website of the WSC: https://www.wsc2026.org/. For more information, click here: https://www.wsc2026.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/MORErev.pdf.

The Congress will foster discussion of the many ways in which Shakespeare may be conceived as ‘planetary’, reaching out to resonances with new cultural galaxies of enquiry, debate, and knowledge. It will bridge the Gutenberg print age with the flourishing of humanism and the era of the virtual and the post-human, raising questions about our own understandings of the humanities at a time of manifold crises. In addition, the Congress will provide the occasion for connecting Shakespearean studies and practices to new forms of social awareness and engagement, as well as of innovative takes on our sense of the real. It will offer several areas of debate, emphasising the relation between eco-concerns and the position of the human and post-humanity, in relation to the rise of technology, the digital and the virtual.

Proposals for seminars, workshops and panels must be submitted online via the congress website.

The deadline for all submissions is 15th September 2024.