The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period
 

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
Medieval and Renaissance Center (NYU)
 
Contact email: 
marc.center@nyu.edu
 
The Annual Conference at the Medieval and Renaissance Center will be held on April 13th and 14th. This year’s theme will be “The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period.” Keynote speakers will be Ann Carmichael, Indiana University, and Susan Jones, University of Minnesota.

We invite submissions from any discipline in Medieval and Renaissance Studies on any aspect of the history of plague and disease.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until January 15th 2018. Please submit a 250 word abstract and a brief CV to marc.center@nyu.edu (put “Conference Submission” in the subject line).

http://as.nyu.edu/marc/conference/conferencespring2018.html
 
 

Call for Papers
Omission

University of Oxford English Faculty Graduate Conference 2018

Friday, June 1, 2018

How should we engage with omissions? Some gaps, it seems, demand to be filled, while others remain obstinately empty. Omissions can be productive, playful, and deliberate, but they can also impede and obscure. From lost or damaged Medieval manuscripts to censored modernist texts, omissions have marked and shaped our critical practices. This is true not only of textual omissions: feminist, gender, and queer theorists have addressed silences in a heterosexist canon and postcolonial theorists have raised issues of exclusion and marginalisation.

Sins of omission occur in every period and genre. From the unspoken truths in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to the concealed trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
narrative details are withheld from readers. The theatrical power of the empty stage is attested by the jarring disappearance of Lear’s Fool and by Godot’s failure to materialise. Poems reach us through processes of omission: Emily Dickinson’s poetry was edited posthumously, while Marianne Moore notoriously revised her own work. For Moore, ‘Omissions are not accidents.’

These questions of omission are open for debate, and we look forward to discussing them further. This conference welcomes papers crossing all periods, genres, and disciplines, on themes including but certainly not limited to:

• Silence and empty spaces
• Lost texts, textual gaps and lacunae
• Palimpsests and erasure
• Annotation and filling in the blanks
• Editing, deletions, and revisions
• Censorship and self-censorship
• Memory and forgetting
• Falsehoods and lies of omission
• Unreliable narrators
• Anonymity
• Things lost in translation
• Use of and deviation from sources
• Works omitted from the canon
• Citizenship and statelessness
• Marginalised voices.

We welcome individual proposals for twenty-minute papers (250 words). Three-person panel proposals (500 words) are also strongly encouraged. Please send all submissions
to omission.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk by Friday 16 February 2018. For more information, visit oxgradconf2018.wordpress.com or follow us at @OmissionConf18.

Angelical Conjunctions: Crossroads of Medicine and Religion, 1200-1800 – Call for Papers

McGill University on April 13-15, 2019

“Angelical Conjunction” was the term coined by the seventeenth-century New England Puritan Cotton Mather to denote the mutual affinity of medicine and religion. Indeed, medical and spiritual practices have a long history of coexistence in many religious traditions. This connection took many forms, from the pious provision of health care (in person or through endowed charity), to the archetypal figure of the healing prophet. Yet despite decades of specialized research, a coherent and analytical history of the “angelical conjunction” itself remains elusive.   This conference therefore aims to explore the connection between medicine and religion across the time-span of the late medieval and early modern eras, and  from an intercultural perspective. Taking as our focus the Mediterranean, the Islamic World and Europe, and the various Christianities, Islams and Judaisms that flourished there, we aim to develop methodological and theoretical perspectives on the “angelical conjunction(s)” of these two spheres. How did the entanglement of religion and medicine shape epistemologies in both of these spheres? What are the conceptions of the body and its relationship to the soul that these entanglements assumed or envisioned? What were the limits to coexistence? How did the “conjunction” change over time?

We invite papers on a range of themes that include, but are not limited to:

–         The relationship between spiritual charisma and medical practice
–         The involvement of medical practitioners in theological debates
–         Medicine and “fringe” religious traditions (e.g. Hermetic, heretical, “occult”…)
–         Representations of the healer-prophet or healer-saint in art
–         Debates on body and soul informed by medical and theological knowledge
–         Spiritualization of physical illness
–         Devotion as therapy, and (the provision of) therapy as devotion

Accommodation and meals will be provided. We are seeking grant support to subsidize travel.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words and a CV to Dr. Aslıhan Gürbüzel at angelicalconjunctions@gmail.com by January 10, 2018.

https://dishist.hypotheses.org/508

Cities of Strangeness 1350-1700: strangers, estrangement, becoming-strange
 

Deadline for submissions: January 19, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
University of Manchester
 
Contact email: 
citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com
 
The Northern Premodern Seminar Cities of Strangeness, 1350-1700
strangers / estrangement / becoming-strange

Friday 11th May, University of Manchester

Looking one way, you see a beautiful virgin: another way, some deformed monster. Cast an eye upon her profession, she is a well-graced creature: turn it upon her conversation, she is a misshapen stigmatic. View her peace, she is fairer than the daughters of men: view her pride, the children of the Hittites and Amorites are beauteous to her. Think of her good works, then blessed art thou of the Lord; number her sins, then how is that faithful city become an harlot!
Thomas Adams, Eirenopolis: The City of Peace (1622)

The period spanning the years 1350-1700 saw a massive expansion in urban populations, transforming social formations. Changes and developments in medieval and early modern cities were intricately tied up with trade, migration, politics, economics, shifting possibilities for social mobility, and the growth of commodity culture; the relationships of individuals and communities to, and in, the city were frequently characterised by alienation and disorder. The early meanings of ‘strange’ as foreign or alien, and also new, wondrous, and astonishing, point towards premodern cities as sites of danger, possibility, conflict, and discovery.

Cities of Strangeness, 1350-1700 is an interdisciplinary one-day conference exploring the centrality of strangeness and estrangement in literary, artistic, and cultural representations of the premodern city. To what extent is the experience of the premodern city characterised by estrangement or alienation? How did the growth and transformation of urban spaces across the late medieval and early modern period alter social identities and formations? What were the relationships between a city and its strangers? How do literature and art respond to cities in strange ways?

We invite proposals for papers that explore any of the following, or related topics, in relation to late medieval and early modern cities:

• strange bodies, strange creatures
• the psychoanalysis of estrangement
• race, immigration, emigration, diaspora
• alienation and capitalism, class and poverty
• protests and riots
• gender, sex and sexuality
• heterotopias and liminal spaces
• uncanny, imaginary, mystical or supernatural cities
• strange languages, strange speech, strange sound

We welcome papers from scholars working in literature, visual cultures, history, religious studies, urbanism, and other related disciplines. We encourage papers that take a cross-period or interdisciplinary approach.

Confirmed plenary speakers: Adam Hansen (University of Northumbria), Anke Bernau (University of Manchester), and Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex).

Please send 250 word abstracts for fifteen-minute papers to Annie Dickinson and Laura Swift at citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com by Friday 19th January, 2018. Please include a brief biography.

The venue is wheelchair accessible, with accessible, gender-neutral toilets and designated parking bays. Information about prayer rooms, dietary requirements, assistance dogs, hearing loops, transport and accommodation can be found on the website (citiesofstrangeness.wordpress.com/accessibility); please contact the organisers if there is anything you would like to discuss in advance.   

Lunch, refreshments, and a wine reception will be provided. Replies to all submissions will be sent in early February 2018, when registration will open.

The conference is kindly sponsored by artsmethods@manchester.                              

citiesofstrangeness.wordpress.com
citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com
@citiesofstrange
 
 

Forms of Dissent in the Medieval and Early Modern World

North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Deadline for submissions: 
Monday, January 22, 2018

18th Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Forms of Dissent in the Medieval and Early Modern World March 9-10, 2018, Duke University 

Website: https://sites.duke.edu/nccmems2018/ 

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Sara S. Poor, medieval studies, Princeton University and 2017-18 NHC Fellow; Dr. Roseen Giles, musicology, Duke University 

The Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals for twenty-minute paper presentations to an interdisciplinary audience that consider the forms and functions of dissent (broadly conceived) throughout the medieval and early modern world.

CALL FOR PAPERS – CHE Conference, Western Australia
2018 CHE Conference ‘The Future of Emotions: Conversations Without Borders’

Conference Date: 14‒15 June 2018
Venue: University Club of Western Australia, The University of Western Australia
Enquiries: Pam Bond, emotions@uwa.edu.au
Call for Papers Deadline: 2 February 2018
Bursary Applications Deadline: 2 March 2018

http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/the-future-of-emotions-conversations-without-borders/?page=2

CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers – Medievalism, Public History, and Academia: the Re-creation of Early Medieval Europe, c. 400–1000

Conference Date: 26-28 September 2018
Malmö University, Sweden
The deadline for paper proposals is 15 December 2017.
Proposals with an abstract of maximum 100 words to Sara Ellis Nilsson.

https://www.mah.se/Nyheter/Kalender/Conference-Call-for-Papers–Medievalism-Public-History-and-Academia-the-Re-creation-of-Early-Medieval-Europe-c-400-1000/

Call for Papers

Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference

23 – 26th August 2018

We are pleased to announce that the 24th biennial conference of SASMARS will be held at Mont Fleur in Stellenbosch, South Africa from Thursday the 23rd to Sunday the 26th of August 2018.

“Ancestry and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds”

Keynote Speaker: Professor Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge

Medieval and early modern societies weathered various socio-cultural changes, including religious, economic, and political transformations, across a range of different geographies and in both urban and rural spaces. We seek papers from any applicable discipline that explore ancestry and memory within a variety of geographic locales in the medieval and/or early modern eras. We shall welcome broad and imaginative interpretations of “ancestry” and “memory”.

Deadline: Please send a conference proposal and a short biography to Retha Knoetze: knoetr@unisa.ac.za by 18 February 2018. Any inquiries can be directed to the same email address.