Category Archives: member news

New Unit: Cracking of Christendom, University of Divinity

Study The Cracking of Christendom

Available at the University of Divinity in Semester 2, 2023. Classes commence Wednesday 2 August. Online and in-person options available. 

About the unit

500 years ago, a series of conflicts tore apart the Christian church. In a dry forest of religion and politics, Martin Luther proposed 95 questions for debate, and sparked a wildfire. Western Christianity changed forever. The consequences continue to shape life and worship in contemporary Australia in ways you may not even have imagined.

This unit will be taught collaboratively by academics from diverse traditions, with expertise in both theology and history. Students will benefit from the rich and rounded learning experience made possible by this unparalleled collaboration of five Colleges from within the University of Divinity.

More information and how to enquire

Cracking of Christendom

Introductory video

Monash CMRS symposium

“Materiality and the Senses in the Medieval and Premodern World,” Eighth Annual CMRS Postgraduate (Hybrid) Symposium, 14 April.

We are pleased to announce that registration for the Eighth Annual CMRS Postgraduate Symposium that will take place on 14 April is now open. Our theme this year is “Materiality and the Senses in the Medieval and Premodern World”.

Materials, and the sensory perception of them, were integral to medieval and early modern life. From the mundane to the sacred, “things” were shaped by their creators and users, but, in turn, they also shaped the ways in which creators and users moved through their worlds. In this symposium, our speakers will explore premodern theories of materiality and discuss how the senses acted as mediators of objects, events, and spaces. As outlets for religious experience, medical care, economic prosperity, and self-expression, “things” had significance beyond their shape and size, their colour and feel, their origins and lifespan. They could be dynamic political tools or intimate personal treasures, but it was through sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste that people navigated objects’ physicality and presence.

Our keynote speaker for the event will be Dr Carol J. Williams and we also have a fantastic range of speakers presenting throughout the day. This is a hybrid event and will be occurring on our Clayton Campus as well as on zoom. Free registration can be found here and closes on the 4 April. Virtual registration can still occur after that by emailing the CMRS at cmrs-postgraduatecommittee@monash.edu.


Out Now in Open Access: ‘The Poetic Edda: A Dual-Language Edition’ by Edward Pettit

About the Book
I especially welcome the fact that this prose translation is aimed at understanding the text, rather than preserving a certain style. This is a most valuable contribution to the field and of great value to both students and scholars.

Henrik Williams
Professor of Runology, formerly of Scandinavian Languages, at Uppsala University

This book is an edition and translation of one of the most important and celebrated sources of Old Norse-Icelandic mythology and heroic legend, namely the medieval poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda or Elder Edda.

Included are thirty-six texts, which are mostly preserved in medieval manuscripts, especially the thirteenth-century Icelandic codex traditionally known as the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda. The poems cover diverse subjects, including the creation, destruction and rebirth of the world, the dealings of gods such as Óðinn, Þórr and Loki with giants and each other, and the more intimate, personal tragedies of the hero Sigurðr, his wife Guðrún and the valkyrie Brynhildr.

Each poem is provided with an introduction, synopsis and suggestions for further reading. The Old Norse texts are furnished with a textual apparatus recording the manuscript readings behind this edition’s emendations, as well as select variant readings. The accompanying translations, informed by the latest scholarship, are concisely annotated to make them as accessible as possible.

As the first open-access, single-volume parallel Old Norse edition and English translation of the Poetic Edda, this book will prove a valuable resource for students and scholars of Old Norse literature. It will also interest those researching other fields of medieval literature (especially Old English and Middle High German), and appeal to a wider general audience drawn to the myths and legends of the Viking Age and subsequent centuries.


Access this Title
This book is freely available to read and download in PDF and HTML formats at https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0308. Remember that if you belong to an institution part of our library membership programme, you are entitled to discounts on physical copies and free digital editions.

SHAPE Futures Network Survey

Launched in September 2022, the SHAPE Futures is an early- and mid-career network for the disciplines of the humanities, creative arts and social sciences. Our purpose is to ensure the humanities, arts and social sciences thrive and excel in Australia, by fostering an inclusive and diverse community that supports, empowers and promotes Australian early and mid-career researchers, within and beyond academia.

We would like to encourage those who might consider themselves to be early or mid-career researchers (typically up to 15 years post-PhD, excluding career interruptions) to join the Network; there is no cost to join. Our website provides information on ways that the network can support EMCRs, including advocacy, networking opportunities, and increased visibility of opportunities, resources, and avenues of support. A crucial part of our work is our EMCR cohort survey, which will help build our understanding of the needs of this diverse group, informing our strategies for representation, advocacy, opportunities and network-building. The survey closes in mid-March.

If you would like further information on SHAPE Futures, please contact us on info@shapefutures.com.

Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Gender & History: Gendered Segregation and Gendering Segregation

Gender & History is an international journal for research and writing on the history of gender and gender relations, including (but not limited to) masculinity and femininity.

This Special Issue will examine segregation, broadly understood, exploring how segregation has reflected and constructed gender across time and space. This Special Issue welcomes submissions from scholars studying any country or region, and any historical period, including the classical, medieval, early modern, and the modern.

Segregation is the physical, cultural, or legal separation of groups on the basis of self- or external demarcations of difference and can be observed in many different, but by no means all, human societies of the past. Gendering segregation is a fruitful lens to interrogate relations of power and to do so in spatial settings such as homes, communes, schools, religious institutions, workhouses, prisons, leisure facilities, or others. Additionally, analysing the gendering of segregation—within premodern and modern societies and throughout the world—opens routes towards more capacious understandings of important themes of inquiry such as histories of sexuality, labour, science and technology, politics, feminism, and social identities.

This issue examines how and why segregation has been used as a tool for constructing and policing gender boundaries, at the intersection with race, age, status, class, functionality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nationality or other historical ideas of human identity and categorization. We particularly welcome studies on transgender and/or non-binary aspects of the presence – or absence – of segregation in past societies. This issue understands segregation as both a framework of control through imposing binarity and as an individual strategy. We also welcome investigations of how and why gender segregation has been used as a coping mechanism and a strategy of subversion. We also seek to critically engage with scholarly narratives such as the ‘separate spheres’ paradigm.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Segregation through and of labour
• Segregation and race
• Scientific and legal logics of segregation
• Segregation in the home
• Segregation in education
• Segregation in sports
• Segregation over the life course
• Segregation as a political strategy
• Self-imposed segregation
• Segregation as a religious practice
• Segregation and urbanism
• Segregation and colonialism

Interested colleagues are asked to submit a 500-word abstract and a brief biography (250 words) by email no later than 31 May 2023 for consideration. Please submit materials to genderandhistory@sheffield.ac.uk.

Abstracts will be reviewed by the Special Issue editors and successful authors will submit full drafts (6,000- 8,000 words) ahead of participation in a hybrid colloquium, which will be held in Bonn, Germany, in partnership with Research Area E (Gender and Intersectionality) of the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies. We hope to be able to fund travel and accommodation for all participants. After the colloquium, the editors will select contributions to proceed through the journal’s peer review system. As with any submission, there is no guarantee of publication.

The Special Issue will be edited by Drs. Daniel Grey, Lisa Hellman, Julia Hillner, and Rachel Jean-Baptiste.

Special Issue Timeline
Abstract Proposals to SI editors: 31 May 2023.
Decisions communicated: 1 July 2023.
Draft papers submitted for circulation: 15 March 2024.
Colloquium: 25-27 April 2024.
Full submissions submitted for peer review: 1 September 2024.
Contributions in progress to G&H Editors: 1 March 2025.
Edited MS, illustrations and permissions: 31 May 2025.
Publication: October 2025.
Further information on Gender & History can be found here.

ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group:

ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group: Semester 1, 2023

Tuesday 28 February 1pm Perth 4pm Melbourne 6pm New Zealand  
Blogging: Emma Rayner (ANU) and Emily Chambers (Nottingham)		1. Compassion Session leaders: Emma Rayner (ANU) and Emily Chambers (Nottingham)   Recommended reading: Diana G. Barnes, ‘Cultures of Compassion in English, French, and Italian Literature and Music, 1300-1700’, Parergon, 39/2 (2022), pp. 1-13   Optional: Katherine Ibbett, ‘The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570-1692,’ in Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 29-59   ————————————————————
Tuesday 21 March   11am Perth 2pm Melbourne 4pm New Zealand  
Blogging: Katrina Cutcliffe (University of Southern Queensland)  		  2. Household accounts as primary sources Session leader: Emily Chambers (Nottingham)   Recommended reading: Taverner, C., & Flavin, S., ‘Food and Power in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Studying Household Accounts from Dublin Castle’, The Historical Journal, 66/1 (2023), pp. 1-26     ————————————————————  
Tuesday 11 April 10am Perth 12pm Melbourne 2pm New Zealand  3. Representations of Crisis and Catastrophe Session leader: Emma Rayner (ANU)
Blogging: Anna- Rose Shack (University of Amsterdam)Recommended reading: Shannon Gayk and Evelyn Reynolds, ‘Forms of Catastrophe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 1-16   Plus one of the following (optional): Ryan Netzley, ‘Managed Catastrophe: Problem-Solving and Rhyming Couplets in the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 147-73   Evelyn Reynolds, ‘“They Saw Mute Creation Trembling”: Forms of Catastrophe in the Old English Christ III,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 41- 67 ————————————————————  
Tuesday 2 May Hour TBC      Blogging: Jenny Smith (Monash University)  4. TBC Session leader: Katrina Cutcliffe (University of Southern Queensland)    Readings TBC ————————————————————
  Tuesday 23 May 2pm Perth 4pm Melbourne 6pm New Zealand   Blogging: TBC      5. Language and Translation Session leaders: Sophie Patrick (UNE) and Gideon Brough (OU Wales)   Readings TBC

Info: 

Each session will take one or two recent articles or chapters related to a certain topic/methodological approach/trend in MEMS scholarship, and feature a short presentation from an ANZAMEMS member followed by group discussion.

All readings and any updates to the schedule will be shared through the reading group’s Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qi0W8i38w0Dgwia9jJ0aDCh5OEQjpRF?usp=sharing.

Blogs: we invite blogwriters to write up a brief post (minimum 200w) for submission no later than one week after their assigned session, which will be posted on the ANZAMEMS blog and circulated in the newsletter.

Please contact the convenors with any queries and for Zoom links: Emma Rayner (ANU), emma.rayner@anu.edu.au, and Emily Chambers (University of Nottingham), emily.chambers@nottingham.ac.uk.

All ANZAMEMS members are welcome, especially postgraduates and ECRs. We look forward to discussing all things MEMS with you this semester!

Australian Academy of the Humanities Grants and Awards Open

Applications and nominations are now open for two of our most prestigious awards: the John Mulvaney Fellowship and the Max Crawford Medal.

About the John Mulvaney Fellowship:
Supporting Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander ECRs
We’re looking for exceptional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early career researchers and PhD students working in any area of the humanities!

  • applications must be lodged electronically by 5pm AEST Friday 28 April 2023
  • self-nominations are accepted
  • selection criteria are based on: rigour of the research, likely impact, potential to engage/benefit the community.

For Further information on the John Mulvaney Fellowship please see this website.

About the Max Crawford Medal:
Recognising ECRs for achievement & promise in the humanities
Do you know a humanities early-career scholar whose work is helping the general public better understand their discipline? Nominate them now!

  • nominations must be lodged electronically by 5pm AEST Friday 28 April 2023
  • self-nominations are not accepted
  • selection criteria are based on: quality and impact, enrichment of cultural life, media/genre and goal focussed.

For further information on the Max Crawford Medal please see this website.

CEMS Seminar: Friday 24th February 12pm, Shakespeare & the Settlement of the North American West

Please join us for the inaugural CEMS Seminar for 2023 at 12 pm on the 24th of February in Lecture Room 1 of the RSSS Building at ANU.

CEMS is very excited to be hosting Professor Gretchen Minton for her excellent talk on “Shakespeare and the Settlement of the North American West”.

“Shakespeare and the Settlement of the North American West” focuses upon the role that Shakespeare as a cultural icon played in the nineteenth-century settlement of the North American frontier, providing a thorough picture of how the earliest white men who migrated across the continent used, understood and interacted with Shakespeare’s works. Re-examining narratives about white settler encounters with Shakespeare reveals several recurring themes, including the importance of books, hybrid identities, a return to Europe and the fashioning of Western personae. In the narratives about such encounters, the voices of the Indigenous people are consistently silenced, but important perspectives arise when we analyse the nature of such marginalisation. The article thus ultimately demonstrates that attitudes toward Shakespeare are symptomatic of attitudes toward settlement in the Rocky Mountain region, and thus invariably symptomatic of how this region’s Indigenous peoples were treated.

Gretchen has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address environmental issues. Projects for this company include Timon of Anaconda, Shakespeare’s Walking Story, and Walking the Water Way. Minton also serves as dramaturg and script adaptor for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which participated in the 2021-22 international project called “Cymbeline in the Anthropocene.” In 2023 she will be a Fulbright Scholar at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland.

For further information and to register, please see this website.

ANZAMEMS ECR/POSTGRAD READING GROUP: SEMESTER 1, 2023

ANZAMEMS ECR/POSTGRAD READING GROUP: SEMESTER 1, 2023

The ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group will discuss the latest research in medieval and early modern studies, with the aim of promoting engagement with emerging and established fields of inquiry in MEMS research (see possible session themes below).

Virtual sessions of the reading group will take place via Zoom either monthly or every three weeks in the afternoon/evening between late February and June, 2023. Each session will take one or two recent articles or chapters related to a certain topic/methodological approach/trend in MEMS scholarship, and feature a short presentation from an ANZAMEMS member (whose own research is ideally in the vicinity of their chosen session theme), followed by questions-led discussion.

The reading group will be co-convened by Emma Rayner (PhD candidate, ANU) and Emily Chambers (PhD candidate, University of Nottingham).

We hope to foster a convivial and intellectually productive online space—think advanced graduate seminar!—where we can come together to talk all things MEMS research in a fairly informal manner, while expanding our networks or strengthening existing connections. Everyone is welcome, including more senior members of ANZAMEMS.

ANZAMEMS ECR or postgrad members who are interested in leading a session based around one of the below themes or a topic of your own selection, AND/OR who are interested in providing a short write-up of a session for a planned ANZAMEMS postgrad blog, please email Emma.Rayner@anu.edu.au / Emily.Chambers@nottingham.ac.uk no later than February 8, 2023. A finalized schedule and Zoom link will be circulated later in February.

Possible session themes include:
• Periodization
• Affect / emotion studies
• Critical race studies
• Cultures of materiality
• Ecocriticism
• Comparative / transnational studies
• Travel and cultural encounter
• Visual culture
• Religion, religious culture
• Borders, borderlands
• Language and translation
• Genealogies
• Geography, cartography
• Rhetoric
• Poetics
• Epistemologies
• Historiography
• Time and temporality
• Performance studies
• Knowledge production
• Humanism
• Virtue, vertu
• Cultures of collecting
• Book history
• Afterlives, reception studies
• Adaptation
• Digital Humanities
• Manuscript studies
• Incunabula
• Intellectual networks
• Devotional communities
• Reading, coteries
• Marginalia
• Disability studies
• Canonicity
• Gender studies
• Class studies
• Archives
• Methodologies
• Pedagogy

Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on July 1, 2023

As of July 1, 2023, a paid subscription will no longer be required for access to the Index of Medieval Art database. This transition was made possible by a generous grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the support of the Index’s parent department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University.

Please read more about our momentous shift to open online access in a recent blog post written by director Pamela Patton:

“Access to the Index of Medieval Art Database Will Become Free on July 1, 2023.” The Index of Medieval Art (blog). January 12, 2023. https://ima.princeton.edu/2023/01/12/access-to-the-index-of-medieval-art-database-will-become-free-on-july-1-2023/.

Currently, the Index of Medieval Art database, accessed at this link https://theindex.princeton.edu/, can be browsed through its open access lists, as well as searched with keywords. Researchers can learn more about coverage through the browse function on the database, including over twenty thousand unique terms for iconographic subjects in medieval art, and plan to attend one of their upcoming info sessions this Spring term.

Index staff also remain available for researcher questions via their online form at https://ima.princeton.edu/research-inquiries/.