This workshop, hosted by the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (ACU), seeks to investigate the ongoing and transforming cultural resonance of the varied New Testament Marys, in global Christian culture from the early Christian era to the present, including their evolving (and sometimes conflated) identities and characteristics, their theological and personal meaning for individuals and societies, and their changing visual forms and material presence. Contributors will demonstrate the Marys’ significance in shaping religio-cultural identities for cohorts ranging from small communities of women to whole nations. This workshop brings together theologians and historians whose different methodologies complement one another in tracing these women’s historic legacies as both exemplars of religious and gendered virtue and as active heavenly protectors.
Please RSVP to susan.broomhall@acu.edu.au to be added to the Zoom meeting, stating which day(s) you will attend and whether you will be joining us in person or online.
The next seminar in ACU’s 2025 series, ‘Premodern Beliefs and their Reception’, will take place at 1pm (AEDT) on Monday 19 May via Teams.
The speaker will be Lindsay Tanner, speaking on the subject ‘Defining boundaries: changing attitudes to animals from the pre-modern to the modern’. See below flyer for further details.
The next seminar in ACU’s 2025 series, ‘Premodern Beliefs and their Reception’, will take place at 1pm (AEDT) on Monday 14 April via Teams.
The speaker will be Professor Yasmin Haskell, speaking on the subject ‘Programming Piety: Poetry, Play and Early Modern Jesuit Pedagogy’. See below flyer for further details.
Dear members, we are pleased to announce the next ANZAMEMS seminar, to be hosted at University of Auckland from 17-18 July.
This two-day workshop will introduce postgraduate and ECRs from across Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia to a range of medieval and early modern sources centred on the female body and female experience. Leading experts will guide participants through unique and challenging genres, from sixth-century Frankish hagiographies and twelfth-century Latin love letters to early modern recipes, architectural drawings and musical manuals. Participants will be encouraged to draw connections between the different genres and consider wider implications for analysing the body, sensory experiences, environmental agencies, and more.
Attendance will be capped at 20-25 participants – see eligibility details below. To apply, send your application to memwomen2025@gmail.com by Friday, 2 May
The first talk in the seminar series Mediterranean Emotions: A Global Research Hotspot is taking place on 6th December at 8pm AEDT. The talk, entitled “Inebriated by a Barbaric Language I need to Possess Immediately: The Emotional Tribulations of a Grammarian Trying to Learn Arabic”, will be given by Prof. José María Pérez Fernández (University of Granada). See below flyer for abstract at speaker profile.
You can join online using this link or in person at the University of Florence (Aula Sapienza, Via San Gallo 10, Florence). You can find more information about MEEM by visiting their webpage.
The Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame have opened applications for a funded opportunity for enrolled PhD students to attend the 2025 Rome Archive Seminar.
The seminar is designed to introduce Ph.D. students from across the humanities to the unique primary sources available in Rome. Working hands-on with materials in the city’s archives and libraries, students will be exposed to the rich potential of a wide range of sources produced from the Middle Ages to the present. Seminar meetings will be held at the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Biblioteca Nazionale, and the Archivio di Stato, and elsewhere. The seminar will also include a series of presentations by senior scholars who will discuss how they have collected and interpreted Roman primary sources in their own research.
The dates for the 2025 Seminar are June 2 to June 27 2025.
There are extraordinary and understudied materials in libraries and archives in the city for archeologists and classicists, art historians and historians, musicologists and students of theater and performance, historians of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the world, specialists in the Near East and East Asia. The holdings of the Vatican Library alone include priceless manuscripts and documents from East Asia, the near East, and North Africa – as well as a vast collection of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in Greek and Latin, a unique resource for the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity from its origins until recent times, of relations between Christians and Jews from antiquity onwards, and other subjects without number.
Previous seminar participants include students of art history, history, literature, political science, medieval studies, film studies, and musicology. Their areas of intellectual interest ranged from Byzantine art, papal humanism, hospitals, charity and pilgrimage, Persian embassies and the Chinese missions to art and science, fascist textile production, the history of sexuality, and politics and church in the postwar era. They have taken up primary sources like Anglo-Latin manuscripts, a Hebrew Arthurian legend, socioeconomic records of daily life, institutional records of church and state, art and material culture, films, and twentieth-century letters. Participants have come from Brown, Catholic University, Emory, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, Syracuse, University of Chicago, University of Melbourne, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, University of Texas Austin, University of Toronto, and others.
The professors in charge of the seminar this year are Paula Findlen (Stanford) and Heather Minor (Notre Dame). Please direct any questions about the seminar to Prof. Minor at hhydemin@nd.edu.
We welcome applications from students from any discipline at any stage in their graduate education who have not done extensive research in Rome prior to the seminar. To be eligible to apply, you must be enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. program. The focus of your research need not be Rome but you should have an interest in developing that research through the use of primary sources located in the city. Each successful applicant will receive a stipend of up to $4,000 to defray travel costs, housing, and meals in Rome
Application Instructions
Please send through Interfolio – http://apply.interfolio.com/152258 – the following documents: a CV, a statement of interest, the name of one referee and the email address of the referee. Please confirm with your referee directly that an Interfolio link arrives to upload your letter of reference.
The application deadline is October 31 2024. Review of applications will take place quickly after the deadline and applicants will be notified of the outcome no later than January.
For questions about the seminar, please contact Prof. Heather Minor at: hhydemin@nd.edu.
Join the Australian National University Centre for Early Modern Studies for a hybrid seminar with Professor Michelle O’Callaghan (University of Reading) on 3 September, 2024.
Making Poetry Collections by Hand and Creative Leisure
What can a focus on the work of the hand bring to the study of making poetry collections in early modern scribal cultures? Compiling poetry collections by hand depended on manual labour that required technical skills, was time-consuming, often intensive, and, in this sense, was work-like. In the case of those manuscripts compiled by the user, it was also work that was undertaken by choice, during leisure time, and, at some level, was satisfying. I am interested in how the category of productive leisure, which turns attention to the pleasurable work of the hand, can help to understand the kinds of making practised in scribal cultures in early modern England. The examples I will discuss were produced by scribes, working outside scriptoria and elite households, for whom penmanship was both work and recreation, and who make literary cultures beyond early modern London and the universities visible.
The MEMS group at The University of Western Australia invites postgraduate students and ECRs to apply to present at an ANZAMEMS Seminar to be held on Tuesday 26 November 2024 (as part of the larger CHASS Congress). The seminar, “Intercultural encounters and materialities in the medieval and early modern period,” will explore the methodological and theoretical challenges in researching inter-cultural encounter histories for MEMS scholars.
Abstracts (ca 150 words) for seminar papers (20 mins duration) are now invited and must be received by 15 September 2024. A limited number of bursaries will be available. For further details, see the ANZAMEMS website.
