Paper and poster submissions are invited for the Gender and Medieval Studies 2019 conference, to be held at Durham University, 7-10 January 2019. The conference theme is ‘Gender and Aliens’.

In recent years discourse around ‘aliens’, as migrants living in modern nation-states, has been highly polarised, and the status of people who are technically termed legal or illegal aliens by the governments of those states has often been hotly contested. It is evident from studies of the past, however, that the movement of people is not a recent phenomenon: in the medieval west, one of the Latin terms applied to such people was alieni (‘foreigners’, or ‘strangers’), and it is clear from the surviving evidence that there were many people in the Middle Ages who could be, and indeed were, identified as aliens. This conference aims to stimulate debate about the ways in which gender intersected with and related to the idea of such aliens – and, more broadly, alienation – in the whole medieval world from c. 400 to c. 1500. The organisers welcome proposals for papers on any topic related to gender and aliens or alienation, broadly construed, and encourage submissions relating to the world beyond Europe. Papers might consider topics such as:

• refugees, immigrants, emigrants
• inclusion and exclusion
• alterity and difference
• outlaws, the law, legality
• marginalised or disenfranchised groups
• non-normative bodies, illness, disability
• acculturation
• imagined geographies
• borders and frontiers
• ethnicity and identity
• slavery and slaves

In addition to sessions of papers, the conference will also include a poster session. Proposals for a 20-minute paper or for a poster can be submitted at https://tinyurl.com/gms2019submit by September 30th 2018.

The conference organisers are also happy to consider proposals for other kinds of presentation. Please contact the organisers at gmsconference2019@gmail.com to discuss these.

Some travel bursaries will be available for students and unwaged delegates to attend this conference. Please see http://medievalgender.co.uk/ for details.

Abstracts are invited for a panel on Vices and Virtues: Gender, Subversion, and Moralizing Discourses at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 9-12 May, 2019.

Organizers: Jacob Doss, University of Texas at Austin; and Matthew Vanderpoel, University of Chicago

Significant watersheds in medieval Christianity have often entailed the reconceptualization of notions of vice and virtue and of gender. From the twelfth-century “renaissance” and “reformation,” amid the thirteenth-century “pastoral revolution,” and after the rediscovery of Aristotle, these two conceptual categories formed a mutually influential discourse. However, much of the scholarship on the development of discourses of vice and virtue has not incorporated gender as a central category of analysis, outside of specific case studies, if at all. Where gender has been addressed it has often been treated primarily as an egalitarian, gender-neutral discourse. Certainly, on one level, one’s susceptibility to vice or the development of virtue was not the domain of one or another gender, but this did not stop medieval people from creatively deploying them in gendered terms. Despite this seemingly ambivalent relationship to gender, medieval Christians wielded virtue and vice to organize social hierarchies, construct theoretical and practical anthropologies, and, as in telling cases such as Prudentius’ Psychomachia, to subvert gender binaries.

This panel will aim both to interrogate and theorize, broadly, the extent to which moralizing discourses concerning the vices and virtues incorporated notions of gender and vice versa. How does the gendering of specific personifications of vices and virtues reinforce and subvert medieval discourses about gender? How do normative commitments to gender roles and performances structure programmatic and didactic accounts of vice and virtue? To what extent does the intersection of vice and virtue with gendered language change between different religious or non-religious contexts, for example between monasteries, the universities, and popularizing works for the laity, or in the politics of the nobility? How may recent gender- and queer- theoretical thought equip us to interpret medieval writings on vice and virtue? Given these variegated questions, we seek an interdisciplinary panel and welcome proposals from scholars of religion, philosophy, literature, art history, and history.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words including your name title, and affiliation along with a completed Participant Information Form (available on the ICMS conference website) to the session organizers, Jacob Doss (jacobwdoss@utexas.edu ) or Matthew Vanderpoel (vanderpoelensis@uchicago.edu) by 15 September, 2018.

Abstracts not accepted will be forwarded to the Congress Committee to be considered for general sessions.

The John Gower Society is still seeking submissions for two panels, and for one roundtable (co-sponsored with the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS)), at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) 2019, Kalamazoo, MI.

1) Gower Reads the Classics

2) Revisiting John Gower’s Poetic: Papers in Honor of RF Yeager

3) Practical Approaches to Teaching Gower: A Roundtable

Panel details are provided below. Proposals must be received by 15 September (see guidelines in the ICMS CFP https://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call).

Submit proposals to:

Brian Gastle, Western Carolina University
Dept of English, 305 Coulter Hall, Cullowhee NC 28723
Phone: (828) 227-3922; Fax: (828) 227-7266
Email: bgastle@wcu.edu [Preferred method of submission]

1) Gower Reads the Classics

John Gower’s debts to the Latin classics have been long acknowledged. His intimate familiarity with Ovid’s works has been many times demonstrated. Less well examined are his borrowings from other ancient sources, either in their original form, or received by him through medieval filters: the example of the Ovide Moralisé comes to mind. Gower’s use of the Latin Classics, as Andrew Galloway notes in the recent Routledge Research Companion to John Gower, exemplifies his “participation in a pan-European contemporary fascination with using Antiquity.” This session intends to bring such streams of classical influence into sharper focus by returning attention to Gower’s classical reading: what did he know, where did he find it, how, subsequently, did he turn what he read to use in his work?

2) Revisiting John Gower’s Poetic: Papers in Honor of RF Yeager

Gower studies owes an immense debt to both the scholarship and the leadership of RF Yeager. Having authored, edited, or co-edited over eighteen books and collections, and over three dozen articles and essays, he has mentored countless junior scholars and fostered and shepherded the study of Gower over the past forty years. As President of the International John Gower Society, he has grown membership in the society from the handful that begun the Society over thirty-five years ago to almost 200 members today, and he has organized each of the five Gower Society Congresses which draws scholars from around the world. Simply put, his influence on Gower studies is second to none. Given his 2018 retirement from the University of West Florida, and his transition to Emeritus faculty, the John Gower Society would like to honor Bob Yeager with a session of papers presented in his honor and that reflect his significant influence on the field.

3) Practical Approaches to Teaching Gower: A Roundtable

This roundtable, co-sponsored by the John Gower Society and the Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages (TEAMS), seeks short presentations (5-6 minutes) which focus on practical pedagogical issues and strategies involved in teaching John Gower’s works in classes of all levels (from k-12 to graduate). The panel is particularly interested in practical approaches and welcomes lesson plans, assignment descriptions, examples of student projects, and teaching resources. TEAMS Middle English Text Series (METS) publishes and hosts online Gower’s works (in ME and in translation of the shorter Anglo-French and Latin texts), and it is an apt time for such a panel given that more selections of Gower’s works are appearing in anthologies (in both Modern and Middle English), and the MLA recently published its MLA Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. This panel seeks to provide a venue for sharing approaches to, and materials for, teaching Gower in a variety of classroom settings using these newly established and emerging print and online resources.

The John Gower Society is an open and inclusive organization that seeks to foster collegial, productive, and engaged scholarship and teaching related to Gower and his works; it welcomes submissions from all scholars, regardless of race, religion, ethnicity, national origin, cultural identity, dis/ability, sexual or affectional orientation, or gender identification.

“Fro this day forth I thenke change / And speke of thing is noght so strange, / Which every kinde hath upon honde, / And wherupon the world mot stonde, / And hath don sithen it began, / And schal whil ther is any man; / And that is love, of which I mene.”

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers, full sessions, and workshops for the third Shakespearean Theatre Conference, to be held June 20-22, 2019 in Stratford, Ontario. 

While all approaches to Tudor-Stuart drama are welcome, we especially encourage proposals that respond to our broad theme of “festival and festivity.” How do we understand and perform festive, antic, celebratory, or bacchanal elements in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries? How did these plays draw on and contribute to early modern festive cultures, and how have historical changes to such cultures shifted the meaning of theatrical revelry? To what extent is the festive limited or invigorated by genre and convention? In what ways do cultural and theatrical festivals, including dedicated Shakespeare festivals and Shakespearean playhouses, influence and shape contemporary Shakespearean performance? What do the histories of these festivals have to tell us about changing responses to early modern drama, and what new directions seem promising?  

Plenary Speakers:
Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe)
M. J. Kidnie (Western University)
Paul Prescott (University of Warwick)

The conference is a joint venture of the University of Waterloo and the Stratford Festival, and will bring together scholars and practitioners to talk about how performance influences scholarship and vice versa. Paper sessions will be held at the University of Waterloo’s Stratford campus, with plays and special events hosted by the Stratford Festival.

Please send proposals to shakespeare@uwaterloo.ca by 1 February 1, 2019.

Kenneth Graham – Department of English, University of Waterloo
Alysia Kolentsis – Department of English, St. Jerome’s University
Lois Adamson – Director of Education, Stratford Festival

The Australian Early Medieval Association (AEMA) invites paper proposals for a panel at IMC Leeds 2019:

“Materialities of Antipodal Medievalism: displaced materiality and cultural consumption of the northern Middle Ages for the peripheral medievalist.”

Abstract: Antipodes are periphery to the European core, and recent developments in decolonization and the Global Middle Ages have contributed to understanding the inherent nature ofthe core/periphery dialectic that subsists in medieval studies. Access for antipodal scholars (however defined) to the materialities (the products, the evidence) of medieval cultures of the northern hemisphere is heavily mediated, through hegemonic and competing mechanisms of scholarship (such as the academy) as well as through non-formal means, including popular and social media.

This panel will explore the challenges arising from the study of medieval cultures and societies when the scholar is peripherally located (academically, physically, culturally, theoretically, psychologically), what this might mean for the old hegemonies of medieval studies in Northern Europe and how we even define and do ‘medieval’ into the future. Papers will consider the varied materialities that impinge on antipodal/peripheral scholars, from any relevant discipline, looking at theoretical implications and/or exemplar case studies/analyses of relevant texts/objects/institutions.

Submissions may address one or more of the following sub-themes:

• The nature and impact of skewed or constrained access to the materials of medieval studies due to peripheral/antipodal location.
• Regimes of circulation and consumption and the links, networks, and systems that underpin or undermine material access for the antipodal/peripheral scholar.
• Power, hegemony and post-colonial perspectives on global scholarship.
• The impact of materialities on memory, and how selective, skewed or constrained access to these shape/skew an antipodal/peripheral view of the past.
• The impact of antipodal/peripheral displacement on textual scholarship, considered in itself or in comparison with other types of medieval materialities.

Please send submissions to Roderick McDonald mcdrod@gmail.com by Monday 10 September 2018.