Jane Chick and Michael Paraskos

Introduction

Jane Chick and Michael Paraskos

OTHELLO’S ISLAND IS a conference focusing on the medieval and early modern periods, held annually on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. It was started in 2013 by Professor James Fitzmaurice of the University of Sheffield and Northern Arizona University, Ben Read of the University of Leeds and Dr Michael Paraskos of Imperial College London, and as is so often the case with events like this, it was the product of our personal friendship as much as a recognition that there is a wealth of history and culture relating to Cyprus and the mediaeval and early modern periods that often goes overlooked. This frequent neglect includes not only the extraordinary wealth of Byzantine art on the island, such as the painted churches of the Troodhos mountains, but also the non-Byzantine medieval and early modern artefacts, including the dramatic gothic cathedrals of Nicosia and Famagusta and the Ottoman hans (inns) of Nicosia and Paphos. Then there is the impact of Cyprus on western culture through the island’s surprisingly frequent appearances in the works of writers ranging from Geoffrey Chaucer to Cervantes, and William Shakespeare to Mary Wroth. It all suggested, to us at least as we sat enjoying a beer and an ouzini cocktail in a Larnaca bar, that there was room for an annual multi-disciplinary conference for people with open minds and broad-ranging interests. For the first two years of its existence Othello’s Island was hosted by the Cornaro Institute in the city of Larnaca, but in 2015 the conference moved to the Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR) in Nicosia, which has been its home ever since. With that move we developed the conference to include new people on the organisational side, and new strands into the conference itself. This included a number

of academics from universities outside Cyprus, including Dr Jane Chick of the University of East Anglia, Professor Lisa Hopkins of Sheffield Hallam University, Dr Sarah James of the University of Kent, Dr Richard Maguire of the University of East Anglia, Dr Laurence Publicover of the University of Bristol and Professor David Rollo of the University of Southern California. This additional expertise has strengthened the conference so that it has become a genuinely diverse gathering, with papers looking at aspects of the medieval and early modern periods with or without a Cyprus connection. A key example of this is the involvement in Othello’s Island of the Department of English Studies at the University of Cyprus, and in particular Dr Stella Achilleos, whose work with James Fitzmaurice has helped turn our event into one of the ‘go to’ annual international gatherings for academics interested in early modern women writers. Working with Dr Henry Bell of the University of Sheffield, Stella Achilleos and James Fitzmaurice have also encouraged the staging of historical plays at the conference, opening up the event to a wider public. Henry Bell has also worked with Stella Achilleos at taking research into local schools in Cyprus, introducing children from diverse communities on the island to new ways at looking at Shakespeare. Although there was a desire to publish the proceedings of the conference right from the start, it has been a long-delayed project. A number of papers presented at the earlier conferences have already been published in a special volume of The Journal of Mediterranean Studies (vol. 25, no.1, 2016), edited by Lisa Hopkins, but those were papers which fitted in with the parameters of the journal, and several Othello’s Island conferences have taken place since then. Plans for a more catholic volume of proceedings were further delayed by the death in 2016 of Benedict Read, who we had hoped would edit the volumes. Not all papers have been submitted for publication, and so those included here are only an incomplete snapshot of the diversity of themes covered at Othello’s Island, and we still have a backlog of

further papers for publication in future volumes. However, this is a start, which we hope will be a useful and permanent record of our meetings. The papers in this volume do not come from a single staging of Othello’s Island, but are drawn from across first seven years of the event. This principle will be true also of subsequent published volumes. Our approach to editing the papers has been primarily to edit for consistency in formatting, but with minimal interventions in the papers’ texts. For us, this light touch approach seems appropriate due to the diversity of topics reflecting the diversity of nationalities who attend Othello’s Island. In presenting these papers as proceedings the aim is to reflect the papers as presented rather than imposing explicitly western notions as to what constitutes ‘correct’ academic style on researchers from other parts of the world. We make no apologies for this approach, although we acknowledge it can result in some papers having nonstandard English phrasing, syntax and grammar. Our special thanks go to Dr Rita Severis, the extraordinary founder and Director of CVAR, whose help in staging Othello’s Island is invaluable. We also thank all the speakers who have submitted papers for inclusion in this volume and those that will follow it, and to our original hosts at the Cornaro Institute (then part of the Cyprus College of Art) for giving us the original space in Larnaca in which to start this annual event. As well as our academic organising committee, thanks are also due to our academic board, which includes our academic organising committee plus Dr Nicholas Coureas (Cyprus Research Centre, Cyprus), Dr Rita Severis (CVAR, Cyprus), Professor Astrid Swenson (Bath Spa University, UK) and, Dr Violetta Trofimova (St Petersburg University, Russia). And last, but not least, thanks to our helpers each year, including Lara Benjamin, Rosamund Fitzmaurice, Alexander Head, Edward Head and Angela Witney.

Dr Jane Chick, University of East Anglia and Dr Michael Paraskos, Imperial College London

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