New Perspectives on Women in Medieval Romance Literature:

From ecocriticism to the global Middle Ages, queer theory to the medical humanities, contemporary fields of scholarly interest provide a plethora of ways through which to reinterpret women in medieval romance literature. With this series of panel sessions proposed for Leeds International Medieval Congress, we seek to examine women in romance afresh, considering the new themes and issues brought into view by contemporary methodologies.

The panel title is deliberately broad and we are open to a variety of approaches. Themes you may wish to consider include, but are not limited to: 

• Non-white and/or non-Christian women’s roles in romance
• Ecocritical and ecofeminist approaches to women in romance
• Queer approaches to women in romance
• Virginity, sex, and sexuality 
• Same-sex desire 
• Women and healing 
• Women and trauma
• Sexual violence and rape in romance literature
• Women’s political roles in medieval romance
• Women and disability 
• Motherhood and family relations 
• Remembering and/or forgetting women in romance literature
• Women’s memories in romance literature
• Minor and/or non-aristocratic women in romance
• Groups of women in medieval romance 
• Women as patrons and readers of romance
• The material culture and objects of women in romance 
• Women in early modern romance
• Medieval romance and medievalis

We particularly welcome papers given by scholars from under-represented backgrounds, as well as papers by PhD students and early career researchers. Papers taking a feminist approach, and those which interrogate questions of race and diversity, are particularly sought.

Papers should be 15-20 minutes long. Please send abstracts of 100 words, along with a short biography, to hannah.e.piercy@durham.ac.uk by Friday 8th September 2017. Any queries are also welcome, please send these to the same address.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Call for Papers:

The Royal Studies Network and Royal Studies Journal invite proposals for two sessions on Plural/Corporate Monarchy in Theory and Practice for the 2018 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. These panels welcome multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches and seek to move our understanding of monarchy beyond the concept of the great man. We welcome proposals about monarchies in any region of the world.

Please send a one-page abstract and a completed participant information form to Kristen Geaman at kristen.geaman@utoledo.edu by September 15. The participant information form can be found here: http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions.

Call for papers

(deadline: September 15)

“Citing Authorities in the Middle Ages” at the 53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 10-13, 2018), organized by Elizabeth C. Teviotdale and sponsored by the Medieval Institute, Western Michigan University

Medieval Christian authors and scribes cited the sources for information and ideas, often the Bible and works of the patristic fathers, in a variety of ways. Famously, the Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus named his patristic sources in the prologue to his treatise on the Eucharist, and for much of the manuscript tradition, some (but curiously not all) of those authors were identified as sources of particular ideas by shortened names (AM, HIL, etc.) in the margins of the treatise. Authorities for ideas in medieval texts were often identified not by name at all but by sobriquet, as was the case for Averroes, so often referred to simply as “the commentator. ” This session seeks to bring together papers exploring aspects of attribution in medieval texts and manuscripts.

submissions to: e.teviotdale@att.net

Call for Papers – Leeds International Medieval Congress 2018
2-5 July, Leeds, UK
Sponsor: MEARCSTAPA

Monstrous Medievalism: Toxic Appropriations of the Middle Ages in Modern Popular Culture and Thought

MEARCSTAPA seeks papers to compose a session of 3 or 4 papers to the 2018 International Medieval Congress at Leeds. The Congress theme is “Memory.” Our hope is that this session will run as a twin-session to our proposed panel for Kalamazoo 2018 on Monstrous Medievalisms.

The medieval period continues to be misidentified both as a primitive and savage ‘dark ages’ and as an idealized utopian golden age of racial and religious homogeny. In both cases, aspects of medieval culture—stories, motifs, and themes—are appropriated and reimagined (that is, remembered and reconstructed) in ways that celebrate and promote the othering of certain racial and ethnic groups or cultures. Medievalists should be made uncomfortable by the realization that we share some interests with white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and other groups dedicated to the oppression, segregation, and even elimination of racial and ethnic groups or cultures. Medievalists should feel even more uncomfortable when this othering—intentional or otherwise—becomes common in the presentation of the Middle Ages in various popular cultural media.

These medievalisms use the Middle Ages—our Middle Ages—to advance their racist agendas, which have frequently resulted in malicious acts against individuals and groups. In short, the Middle Ages are often put to monstrous work in modern popular thought and culture, frequently used by one community to attack another. The Middle Ages thus become othered and estranged from the scholars who study and teach from positions of acceptance and inclusion. These monstrous medievalisms use the period to foster some of the most pernicious ideologies of the present day and distort our understanding of the past. We ask, whose Middle Ages are they? And in so doing, we seek to confront these monstrous medievalisms, to unravel and make sense of them in order to dismantle the negative work they do.

Papers for this panel might address topics such as:
Appropriations of the medieval image and narrative in Nazi propaganda
Contemporary White Pride/White Nationalist appropriations of the medieval symbols and signs (tattoos, banners, album covers, banners)
Racist responses to inclusion in “Medieval” film
The medieval fantasies of white identity in the Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm of the founding fathers
Racialized Monsters in the contemporary medieval fantasy
Race War as trope in Ancient and Medieval period films, video games, and/or books
“Unintentional” rehearsals of racist ideologies in popular media

We invite papers from all disciplines and national traditions. Additionally, MEARCSTAPA will provide an award of $500 to the best graduate student submission to this or any of its sessions to help offset the costs of travel and lodging for the IMC.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a brief bio to session organizer Renée Ward (rward@lincoln.ac.uk) by 10 September 2017. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts will be vetted by the MEARCSTAPA board and the full session will be submitted to the Congress mid-September 2017.

Think Globally, Love Locally?
Seventh International Conference on Popular Romance Studies
Sydney, Australia
27-29 June, 2018

Keynote speakers:

• Lisa Fletcher, University of Tasmania
• Beth Driscoll, University of Melbourne
• Kim Wilkins, University of Queensland

Space, place, and romantic love are intimately entwined. Popular culture depicts particular locations and environments as “romantic”; romantic fantasies can be “escapist” or involve the “boy/girl/beloved next door”; and romantic relationships play out in a complex mix of physical and virtual settings. The romance industry may be globalized, but popular romance culture is always situated: produced and circulated in distinctive localities and spaces, online and offline. Love plays out in real-world contexts of migration and dislocation; love figures in representations of assimilation and cultural resistance; in different times and places, radically disparate political movements—revolutionary, reactionary, and everything in between—have all deployed the rhetoric and imagery of love.

For its seventh international conference on Popular Romance Studies, the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance calls for papers on romantic love and popular culture, now and in the past, from anywhere in the world. We are particularly interested, this year, on papers that address the relationship between love and locality in popular culture: not just in fictional modes (novels, films, TV shows, comics, song lyrics, fan fiction, etc.), but also in didactic genres (advice columns, dating manuals, journalism), in advertising, and in both digital and material culture (wedding dresses, courtship rituals, etc.).

The conference will be held at Macquarie University’s city campus, 123 Pit Street, Sydney. The venue is in the heart of Sydney’s CBD shopping and dining precinct, a 15-minute walk away from the Sydney Opera House, Harbour Bridge, and historic Rocks area. Travel support for graduate students, independent scholars, and nontenured faculty may be applied for, if your proposal is accepted.

Topics of interest might include:

• Geographies of love and sexuality
• Love’s Settings: e.g., the imagined Outback of Rural Romances; the Scottish Highlands; romantic cities; small-town and island romances; the communal space of “Romancelandia”
• Romantic Chronotopes: times and places when love is imagined to be “truer” or “deeper” than the here-and-now (e.g., Regency or Victorian England; medieval Provence; Tang Dynasty China; the Joseon settings of Korean TV-drama, etc.)
• Honeymoon travel (past and present) and romantic tourism, including fan pilgrimages for romantic texts and films, destination weddings, and the like
• Locality and LGBTQIA romance culture
• Courtship in public and semi-private spaces: e.g., paying visits, dating, office romance, romance and car culture
• Love’s Architectures: Hotels, Fantasy Suites, Clubs and Restaurants, Domestic Spaces (kitchens, bedrooms, Red Rooms of Pain, etc.)
• Local, National, and Transnational Book Industries
• Local Romance Writer Groups, Reader Groups, or Media Fan Groups / Events
  Romance and the (Local) Library or Bookshop
• Local Love on Television (e.g., Farmer Wants a Wife) and online (Tinder, etc.)
• “Escapist” reading and the places / practices of romance consumption
• Place and Race in Popular Romance
• The “Phone-World” and other Virtual Spaces for Love
• Off the Map: Emerging and Under-Studied Settings and Romance Cultures
  • Material locations and imaginary spaces for love, and the combination of the two in Edward Soja’s concept of “thirdspace”
  • Migration and love: migration for love, love hampered by distance, love in migrant and refugee communities
  • Non-geographic love (e.g., love experienced entirely online) and the intersections of technology with long-distance love, now and in the past
  • Lieux de memoire in the context of romantic love (as opposed to national identity)
  • Love and nationalism, love and regionalism, love and (local) political struggle

All theoretical and empirical approaches are welcome, including discussions of pedagogy.

Submit 250-300 word proposals for individual papers, full panels, roundtables, interviews, or innovative presentations to conferences@iaspr.org by 15 September, 2017. All proposals will be peer reviewed.

Cambridge: College, Church and City
British Archaeological Association Annual Conference 2018
Cambridge, UK
1-5 September, 2018

The Association holds an annual conference at a centre of established importance in the medieval period, usually in the British Isles and occasionally in mainland Europe.

The annual conferences focus on the medieval art, architecture and archaeology of one location, and visit all the city’s or areas most important medieval sites, including some not usually accessible to the public.

All our conferences welcome professional scholars and amateur enthusiasts alike who are members of the association.

More information: http://thebaa.org/meetings-events/conferences/annual-conferences.

Abstracts Due: 1 February, 2018

Shakespeare and Science Fiction
The Anglia Ruskin Centre for Science Fiction and Fantasy (CSFF)
Anglia Ruskin University
28 April, 2018

Despite science fiction’s associations with modernity and popular culture, it seems haunted by the literary canon. Shakespeare, in particular, has had a significant influence on the genre. Many texts and films rework or allude to Shakespeare’s plays. A well known example is Forbidden Planet (1956) which reimagines The Tempest in space. More recently, Iain Pears wove plot strands from As You Like It into the complex triple narrative of his novel Arcadia (2015).

Shakespeare has appeared as a character in many science fiction texts. Often in these he becomes a kind of touchstone for humanity – In the Doctor Who episode ‘The Shakespeare Code’ (2007) the Doctor refers to him as ‘the most human human there’s ever been.’ His plays sometimes have the power to prove that the earth should be spared from alien wrath – at other times they represent a consolation for the scattered remnants of humanity after a terrible catastrophe.

Over the decades writers have repeatedly been drawn to encounters between Shakespeare and non-humans – robots, aliens, post-humans – imagining their possible responses to his work. Science fiction has also had an impact on the way Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted and performed. In his 2016 BBC production of the play, Russell T. Davies transplanted A Midsummer Night’s Dream from ancient Athens to a dystopian future.

Papers are invited for a one-day conference on all aspects of the intersection between Shakespeare and science fiction. Proposals are welcomed from researchers at all stages of their career, including postgraduate students, independent scholars and creative writers.

Please send a 300 word abstract and a CV to sarah.brown@anglia.ac.uk by Friday 6 October 2017.

A Gender and Medieval Studies Group and Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Joint Conference
Corpus Christi College, University of Oxford
8-10 January, 2018

The glittering beauty of the Alfred Jewel, the rich illustration of the Lindisfarne Gospels, the dominating Great West Window of York Minster, the intricate embroidery of the Bayeux Tapestry, the luminous Maestà of Duccio, the opulent Oseberg ship burial, and the sophisticated imagery of the Ruthwell cross are all testament to the centrality of the visual to our understanding of a range of medieval cultures.

Constructed at and across the intersections of race, disability, sexual orientation, religion, national identity, age, social class, and economic status, gendered medieval identities are multiple, mobile, and multivalent. Iconography – both religious and secular – plays a key role in the representation of such multifaceted identities. But visual symbols do not merely represent personhood. Across the range of medieval media, visual symbolism is used actively to produce, inscribe, and express the gendered identities of both individuals and groups.

The 2018 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference welcomes papers on all aspects of gender, identity and iconography from those working on medieval subjects in any discipline.

Papers may address, but are not limited to:

• Sight and Blindness
• Visible and Invisible Identities
• Visual Languages
• Colour and Shade
• Icons and Iconoclasm
• Light and Darkness
• Collective and Individual Identities
• Orthodox and Heretical imagery
• Aesthetics
• Subject and Motif
• Convention and Innovation

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers. Please email proposals of approx. 200 words to gmsconference2018@gmail.com by Monday 4 September 2017. We will also consider proposals for alternative kinds of presentation, including full panel proposals, performance and art; please contact the organisers to discuss.

A conference for everyone

Corpus Christi College’s auditorium is fully wheelchair accessible, has accessible toilets, and features a hearing loop for those using hearing aids. Please contact us if you have specific accessibility needs you would like to discuss. We plan to provide a private lactation space.

It is hoped that the Kate Westoby Fund will be able to offer a modest contribution towards (but not the full costs of) as many postgraduate student travel expenses as possible. We are exploring other avenues to make the conference financially feasible for postgraduates and early career scholars to attend.

Pacific Partnership in Late Antiquity 

University of Auckland, New Zealand 

July 11-13 2018

The Pacific Partnership in Late Antiquity would like to invite proposals for papers at a conference to be held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, July 11-13 2018.

Proposals can be for papers in any area of late antique, early medieval, or Byzantine studies, and the conference is intended to provide a venue for scholars in these fields around the Pacific Rim.

Abstracts for 20 min papers should be 250-300 words in length and submitted to Lisa Bailey (lk.bailey@auckland.ac.nz) by 1 October 2017.

Registration for the conference will be $65 for academic staff, but will be free for graduate students thanks to a generous subsidy from the Australasian Society for Classical Studies. Details on registration will follow at a later point.

Please contact Lisa if you would like to be added to the mailing list for the Pacific Partnership in Late Antiquity. 

Shakespeare and his Contemporaries
The IASEMS Graduate Conference at the British Institute of Florence

Conversions In Early Modern British Literature and Culture
Florence,
20 April, 2018

The 2018 IASEMS Graduate Conference at The British Institute in Florence is a one-day interdisciplinary and bilingual English-Italian forum open to PhD students and researchers who have obtained their doctorates within the past 5 years. This year’s conference will focus on the theme of conversion, a fascinating phenomenon, a promise of newness that blends elements of individual experience with larger problems of historical change.

The ideological and spiritual life of early modern Britain finds a special interpretative key in the notion of conversion, whether perceived as an individual response to a religious and political challenge, a community reaction to political upheaval, or a social change brought about by the innovations of modernity.

The goal of this Conference is to develop an understanding of conversion that will address epistemological, psychological, political, spiritual and technological kinds of transformation, perceived both as subjective and collective change. Therefore conversion is to be understood in its broadest possible sense, and nor merely as a religious phenomenon.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:

forms of conversion, sacred and secular, i.e., awakening to a new faith, an intensification of existing beliefs, an embracing of a (radical) political movement, etc.

• conversional thinking and practice
• early modern textual ‘conversions’, i.e., from manuscript to print, from one format to another, from one genre to another
• relationships among transformation, freedom and power
• forms of religious dissent in early modern British culture
• religious change and gender
• how early modern English theatre and other theatrical practices represent, adopt, transform, relocate forms of conversion
• conversion narratives
• the phenomenon of forced conversion
• authenticity and pretense in conversion
• religious conversion as catalyst of other transformations (e.g., translation, alchemy, enthusiasm, etc.)
• technologies of transformation

Candidates are invited to send a description of their proposed contribution according to the following guidelines:

• the candidate should provide name, institution, contact info, title and a short abstract of the proposed contribution (300 words for a 20-minute paper), explaining the content and intended structure of the paper, and including a short bibliography;
• abstracts are to be submitted by Sunday 29 October 2017 by email to ilaria.natali@unifi.it;
• all proposals will be blind-vetted. The list of selected papers will be available by the end of November 2017;
• each finished contribution should not exceed 20 minutes and is to be presented in English (an exception will be made for Italian candidates of departments other than English, who can give their papers in Italian);
• Candidates whose first language is not English will need to have their proposals and final papers checked by a mother-tongue speaker
• participants will be asked to present a final draft of the paper ten days before the Conference.
• Selected speakers who are IASEMS members can apply for a small grant
  (http://www.maldura.unipd.it/iasems/iasems_about.html)

For further information please contact Ilaria Natali (ilaria.natali@unifi.it)