I’ve just got home from California after a couple of fascinating days at the Early Modern Literary Geographies conference. This was held in the Huntington Library in San Marino, a superb venue set in glorious grounds. The conference was very useful for me, both in terms of comments and questions on the paper I gave – “Denmark, Norway, Poland: Regional Geopolitics in Hamlet” – and for the ideas and reading suggestions I got from the other papers. There were some other papers on Shakespeare, but also other writers from the period, as well as work informed by history and archaeology. It was a really interdisciplinary mix of people, and fully justified the disruption of trying to do a west-coast conference in term-time. My thanks to Garrett Sullivan and Julie Sanders for organising the conference, and Steve Hindle and Juan Gomez at the Huntington for the logistics and hosting. On the Sunday I met with Efraín Kristal for lunch and a brief tour of the wonderful Norton Simon Museum. Efraín was one of the contributors to the Sloterdijk Now book I edited a few years ago, although we’d not actually met in person.

I understand the conference was filmed and will be made available, but in the meantime the audio recording of my talk is available here.

[Update: the audio recordings of all papers are available on Soundcloud and iTunes. There is a short discussion of the rationale for the conference here.]