International Workshop: Tragedy and Resistance
16-17 April, 2026
Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus, Berlin
Keynote Speakers
- Professor Caroline Levine (Cornell University), author of The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis
- Dr Marco Checchi (Northumbria University), author of The Primacy of Resistance: Power, Opposition and Becoming
Many contemporary challenges in our divided, unjust, and unequal world – ecocide, authoritarianism, populism, militarism, neo-imperialism, and nationalism – have their roots in the early modern European era. Early modern European drama – especially tragedy – represents and critiques that era, and tells us a lot about how we got here, and where we might go next.
This matters because our contemporary challenges necessitate an active and resistant response. Dominant approaches to literary analysis have often focused on ‘unsettling’ discourses that stimulate critical thinking, but with an open-ended, ‘anti-instrumentalist’ approach, and without necessarily connecting this to substantial social action.
In contrast, this event takes a transdisciplinary, transnational, and transhistorical approach to a specific historical genre – early modern tragedy – to foster an ‘activist humanism’ by offering an experimental space for contemporary social engagement and resistance, and by engaging literary scholars in dialogue with and to the benefit of activists, educators, and theatre makers. Interpreting early modern plays is therefore not an end in itself but a means to stimulate criticality framing and informing action and resistance.
During this workshop we will reflect on the following questions:
- What do early modern tragedies say about activism and resistance, and how can activist and resistant readings and practices alter the uses of early modern tragedies, on stage, on the page, and in the classroom?
© Annagraphics. Foto: Judith Buss - How might tragedies of the past inform readings of and resistances to tragic conditions in the present?
- How can we theorize, historicize, share, and perform resistance?
See the full programme here
To participate in this workshop please register here before 1 April 2026
Organisation by Adam Hansen (Northumbria University) & Cornelis van der Haven (Ghent University)