Category Archives: Conference

Call for Papers: Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700

Call for Papers: Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700
National Library of Australia, August 7-8 2025

Early modern women marked their books in myriad ways, and their marginalia provide evidence of their book ownership, their reading, writing and drawing practices, their acquisition of literacy, and the interrelation of body, book, and material world. This symposium invites papers and panels interpreting this exciting new textual corpus and discussing the theoretical and methodological challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing marginalia by early modern women, elite and non-elite, known and unknown. What can marginalia tell us about women’s textual agency, education and literacy, their use of books, their lived experience of household economics, organization and technologies, and their interpersonal, affective and social relationships? What evidence does marginalia provide for women’s engagement with orality, performance, print, and scribal cultures? How can marginalia help us position women as humanist, political and religious agents and understand their worlds of work and leisure? And how can such new analyses of early modern women’s marginalia reshape early modern marginalia studies more broadly?

20 minute papers and panels are invited on any aspect of early modern women’s marginalia, but might consider the following topics:

  • Marginalia, book ownership, book collecting, and provenance
  • Marginalia as evidence of early modern women’s reading
  • Marginalia as evidence of early modern women’s writing
  • Visual and material cultures in early modern women’s marginalia
  • Authorship, attribution and agency
  • Form and genre
  • Marginalia and sociability
  • Marginalia, politics and power
  • Marginalia and race
  • Non-elite women’s marginalia
  • Marginalia, education and literacy
  • Marginalia, emotion and affect
  • Marginalia and haptics
  • Marginalia and heuristics

Invited speakers include Professor Micheline White (Carleton University), Professor Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo), Professor Paul Salzman (La Trobe University), Professor Sarah Ross (Victoria University of Wellington), and Dr Hannah August (Massey University)

The symposium will also launch the database Early Modern Women’s Marginalia: The Library of Libraries, with over 3000 examples of early modern women’s marginalia from 100 archives worldwide, hosted by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the Australian National University. Please send a 200 word abstract (or panel proposal) plus a short biography to admin.cems@anu.edu.au by 31 March 2025.

CFP: Early Modern Global Separation Conference

The research project Moved Apart is pleased to announce that its second conference
Early Modern Global Separation will take place at Lund University on 20-22 August 2025.

This conference seeks proposals that contribute to further our knowledge of how separation was communicated in different parts of the world (Africa, America, Asia, Europe) in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The deadline for submitting a proposal is 3 March 2025 and you will be notified of the results by the end of March 2025.

Note that there may be opportunities for financial support for early career scholars. Please flag this in your proposal.

See the below flyer for further details.

Conference of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group

Registration is now open for the Myths, Legends, and Fairy Tales conference hosted by Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group on the weekend of 16–17 November this year in hybrid form at The University of Western Australia and online.

Further details can be found at https://www.pmrg.org.au/2024-conference-myths-legends-and-fairy-tales.

CFP: Fourth Triennial Australian Literary Studies Convention

July 2-5, 2024
Western Sydney University, Parramatta South Campus
www.australianliteraryconvention.com

Chaos and Order

This triennial event brings together major associations for the study of literature in Australia and welcomes scholars and postgraduate students working on any aspect or field of literary studies. We seek papers on the theme of ‘Chaos and Order’. Literary scholarship and literary practice can both be understood as ordering processes: a work of creative writing is an attempt to build meaning by drawing on, and framing, the chaos of experience. So too, whether the research be qualitative or quantitative in method, literary scholarship considers how meaning might traced and interpreted within literary works, forms, periods and literary fields, applying modes of order to them through this critical reception.

While literary study involves the broad expanses of time and space that comprise the histories of oral and written literature, such works are studied now because they continue to speak to us, in what is a challenging present moment. Order might be applied to make sense of chaos, but equally too much order, or newly applied kinds of
order have the potential to create chaos. Just as ‘order’ might be understood in positive or negative terms, ‘chaos’ does not have to be understood in solely negative terms: it might be understood, rather, as that which allows the potential for new kinds of creation.

We are open to all interpretations of ‘Chaos and Order’ and all methodologies applied to the study or practice of literature.

We invite papers and panels, including but not limited to the following topics:

  • How literature (from any period or tradition) helps us understand chaos and order.
  • What literature can do (be it political, ideological, affective, existential, ethical, imaginative, social, personal) in relation to the chaos and orders of the present.
  • How literature is imbricated in, produces, or resists systems of order or power (reproduces or contests dominant ideologies; literature and Empire; literature and propaganda; literature and social change/transformation for example)
  • How the opportunity to write and/or publish has been and is now determined by systems of order (gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, markets).
  • How book history and print culture has responded to (or influenced) periods of chaos.
  • How particular methodologies might offer new ways of seeing old problems.
  • How particular methods might collaborate or generate chaos through conflict.
  • How pedagogical systems might solve or cause problems (both within universities and between primary, secondary and tertiary forms of education).

Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2024.

Please send an abstract of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to Anthony Uhlmann a.uhlmann@westernsydney.edu.au

Jointly held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association, the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australian University Heads of English, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, The Australasian Children’s Literature Association, The Australasian Modernist Studies Network