Monthly Archives: August 2012

Gender in Material Culture: Annual Gender and Medieval Studies Conference – Call For Papers

Gender in Material Culture
Annual Gender and Medieval Studies Conference
Corsham Court, Bath Spa University
4th-6th January, 2013

Conference Website

Keynote Speakers:

  • Prof. Catherine Karkov, University of Leeds
  • Dr Simon Yarrow, University of Birmingham

From saintly relics to grave goods, and from domestic furnishings to the built environment, medieval people inhabited a material world saturated with symbolism. Gender had a profound influence on production and consumption in this material culture. Birth charms and objects of Marian devotion were crafted most often with women in mind, whilst gender shaped the internal spaces of male and female religious houses. The material environment could evoke intense emotions from onlookers, whether fostering reverence in religious rituals, or inspiring awe during royal processions. How did gender influence encounters with these objects and the built environment? Seldom purely functional, these items could incorporate complex meanings, enabling acts of display at every level of society, in fashionable circles at European courts or amongst civic guilds sponsoring lavish pageants. Did gender influence aesthetic choices, and how did status shape the way that people engaged with their physical surroundings? In literary texts and in art, the depiction of clothing and objects can be used to negotiate symbolic space as well as class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Texts and images also circulated as material objects themselves, with patterns of transmission across the British Isles, the Anglo-Norman world, and between East and West. The exchange of such objects both accompanied and enacted cross-fertilisation in linguistic, political and cultural spheres.

The Conference will consider the gendered nature of social, religious and economic uses of ‘things’, exploring the way that objects and material culture were produced, consumed and displayed. Papers will address questions of gender from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, embracing literature, history, art history, and archaeology.

Themes will include:

  • adornment, clothing and self-fashioning
  • the material culture of devotion
  • objects and materialism
  • the material culture of children, adolescents and life cycle
  • emotion, intimacy and love-gifts
  • entertainment and games
  • memory and commemoration
  • pleasure, pain, and bodily discipline
  • production and consumption
  • monastic material culture
  • material culture in literary texts

Please e-mail proposals of approximately 300 words for 20 minute papers to the GMS Committee by 14 September 2012. Please also include your name, research area, institution and level of study in your abstract. The Kate Westoby Travel Fund provides limited financial support for postgraduates and independent researchers who wish to attend the meeting.

Tales After Tolkien – Panel at International Medieval Congress 2013 – Call For Papers

“Tales After Tolkien: Medievalism and Twenty-First Century Fantasy Literature”
Panel at the International Medieval Congress, Kalamazoo
May 9-12, 2013

Congress Website

Organizer: Helen Young
Moderator: Carol L. Robinson

For a work of contemporary fantasy literature to be compared with those of J. R. R. Tolkien can be either compliment or condemnation; the juxtaposition might suggest a major, original contribution to the genre or imply a work is merely derivative. Yet if Tolkien had one of the first words on fantasy and medievalism he did not have the last. Author Steven Erikson recently described himself and other writers of epic fantasy as “post-Tolkien” in The New York Review of Science Fiction and lamented the tendency of some scholars to not realise that “we’ve moved on.” This panel seeks papers which explore the ways in which twenty-first century fantasy literature deploys ‘the medieval’ with all its relics, forms and incarnations. Papers may or may not directly contrast and compare with Tolkien’s practice. The panel asks, for example, how contemporary trends in technology, society, politics, and culture intersect with and influence contemporary writers, readers, and critics in their re-imaginings of medieval material. Are there shifts in the genre as a whole? Tolkien drew largely on the European Middle Ages as do his imitators; is this changing as Eurocentric views become increasingly problematic and the world is ever more globalised? How do technological developments and the explosion of multi-media fantasy products including film, television and video-gaming engage with literature? How do representations of race, gender, and class intersect with medievalism in contemporary fantasy? Is the idea of an ‘authentic’ Middle Ages important? How do writers research the past and approach their sources? Papers which address these or any other topic related to the theme of the panel are invited. They might address short stories, novels, comics and graphic novels, series, authors and/or their oeuvres, or the genre as a whole, as well as adaptations for or from film, tv, gaming, and fandoms including fan-fiction.

Please send a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper, a brief biography, and a conference Participant Information Form (http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html) to the organizer, Dr Helen Young by Monday 10th September 2012. Abstracts etc. are best emailed to: Helen.young@sydney.edu.au.

Louise D’Arcens: Public Lecture – University of Western Australia

For those in Perth in the next week:

University of Western Australia CMEMS/PMRG Public Lecture:

“Reception, Recovery, Re-creation: The Singular Story of the Middle Ages in Australia” – Associate Professor Louise D’Arcens, The University of Wollongong
Date: Thursday 16 August
Time: 6.00 PM 
Venue: Gentilli Lecture Theatre (Geography 1.31), University of Western Australia

A public lecture will precede the annual PMRG/CMEMS conference (see http://www.pmrg.arts.uwa.edu.au/2012_conference for details) on the evening of Thursday 16th August. This is a free public lecture – the more the merrier!

—-

Louise D’Arcens is the author of Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian literature 1840–1910, which was published in 2011. For more information, see: http://uwap.uwa.edu.au/books-and-authors/book/old-songs-in-the-timeless-land.

Yale University – Assistant Professor-Early Modern Intellectual History – Call For Applications

Yale University, Department of History
Assistant Professor – Early Modern Intellectual History

The Yale University Department of History and Humanities Program intend to make a tenure-track assistant professor appointment, to begin July 1, 2013, focusing on early modern intellectual history. We invite applications from candidates specializing in any region of the world. The successful candidate will be expected to teach two sections each year in the Directed Studies Program on the European intellectual tradition and two courses to be cross-listed in the History Department and the Humanities Program.

Applications are invited from historians and other historically-oriented scholars with strong potential for achievement in scholarship, undergraduate and graduate teaching, and intellectual leadership. Yale University is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Yale values diversity among its students, staff, and faculty and strongly welcomes applications from women and under-represented minorities. Ph.D. expected. Application, C.V., statement of research and teaching interests, a chapter-length writing sample, and three letters of reference should be submitted at http://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/1657. The review of applications will begin September 15, 2012.

Further Info:
http://www.yale.edu/history
Liza Joyner (liza.joyner@yale.edu)
Department of History
Yale University
P.O. Box 208324
New Haven, CT 06520-8324

View this job listing on-line: http://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/1657

Sins, Vices and Virtues: At The Interface of Morality – Call For Papers

At The Interface Project – Second Global Conference
Sins, Vices and Virtues: At The Interface of Morality
Wednesday 13th March – Friday 15th March 2013
Lisbon, Portugal

Conference Website

This interdisciplinary conference seeks a new, provocative, intercultural perspective on some enduring truths concerning virtues and vices, sins and transgressions. Do we need a new list of moral commandments in the globalised, multicultural 21st century? Should they be religious or secular in nature? Who are these aimed at? And, finally, is it possible, reaching back to the origins of humanity, to find common denominators between religious/spiritual definitions of vices and virtues of all belief systems? Can discussions of ‘sin’ not introduce theology and religion into the contemporary discussion?

We are inviting scholars, theologians, anthropologists, artists, teachers, psychologists, therapists, philosophers, teachers of ethics, etc. to present papers, reports, works of art, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels on issues related but not limited to the following themes:

  • The genealogy of the idea of sin or religious transgression around the world
  • Anthropology of transgression
  • Sinful/Transgressive actions, evil thoughts, religious taboos in Christian and non-Christian cultures
  • What are the pre-Islam Arabic ideas of sin? How do these influence Islamic thought and how do they shape or not shape fundamentalist Islamic political thought?
  • Lexicon of sinfulness/transgression and virtuousness in Christian and non-Christian cultures
  • Social functions of sins and virtues
  • Modern sins and vices: Individual and social; religious and secular; intercultural
  • Social ‘sins’: ‘Institutional’ and ‘structural’; their social ramifications
  • ‘-isms’ in religious and spiritual discourse
  • Communal versus individual sins/transgressions: Do societies sin? How are societies
  • policing them?
  • The concept of sin or spiritual transgression/deviation and philosophy
  • The notions of ‘sins’, vices and virtues on the political arena (secular morality or no morality)
  • Psychology of sin (‘sinful’ or ‘abnormal’?; the concept of sin after Darwin, Nietzsche and Freud)
  • Emotions and moral decision-making
  • How to represent evil and morality in art: Representation of sins and sinners, vices, transgressions and virtues in art, literature, movies in Christian and non-Christian cultures
  • Genderisation of sins, vices and virtues in Christian and non-Christian cultures
  • Ideology of sin/religious transgression and technological progress: G/god or the Machine; ‘sins’ of productive necessity
  • Theologies and Nature: Environmental studies and the notions of ‘sin’, transgression and virtue
  • Sins/Vices and/in the Media (ie adveritising)
  • Medieval crusades and modern (holy) wars
  • Sinless, non-transgressive life in 21st century: Possibility or wishful thinking?
  • Fear of the confessional or ‘McDonald-isation’ of spiritual life; is confession needed at all?
  • Public and penitential practices across the ages and cultures
  • Punishment for sin/transgression and rewarding virtue across the ages and cultures: individual and collective
  • Visions of Hell, Paradise and other afterlife Realms across cultures
  • Virtues in the modern times; virtues in a modern man

What to Send

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 12 October 2013. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper of no more than 3000 words should be submitted by Friday 18th January 2013.

Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract
E-mails should be entitled: Sins and Virtues 2 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

Katarzyna Bronk: bbronkk@gmail.com
Rob Fisher: sins2@inter-disciplinary.net

The conference is part of the At the Interface series of research projects. The aim of the conference is to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference are eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into a themed ISBN hard copy volume.

Themed issues of Parergon (2014 and 2015) – Call For Proposals

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Call for proposals for a themed issue of Parergon
http://www.parergon.arts.uwa.edu.au/

The journal Parergon, in print since 1971, regularly produces one open issue and one themed issue annually.

The most recent themed issues have been:

  • 2011, 28.2 Reason of State, Natural Law and Early Modern Statecraft guest-edited by David Martin Jones and Cathy Curtis
  • 2012, Early Modern Women and the Apparatus of Authorship, guest-edited by Sarah C.E. Ross, Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (in press)
  • 2013, Thinking About Magic in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, to be guest-edited by Tracy Adams (forthcoming)

We now call for proposals for future themed issues, most immediately for 2014 (31.2) and 2015 (32.2).

Parergon publishes articles on all aspects of medieval and early modern studies, from early medieval through to the eighteenth century, and including the reception and influence of medieval and early modern culture in the modern world. We are particularly interested in research which takes new approaches and crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Proposals which deal with medieval material, in part or exclusively, will be particularly welcomed in this next round. Themed issues contain up to ten essays, plus the usual reviews section. The guest editor is responsible for setting the theme and drawing up the criteria for the essays.

Proposals should contain the following:

  1. A draft title for the issue.
  2. A statement outlining the rationale for the issue.
  3. Titles and abstracts of all the essays.
  4. A short biographical paragraph for the guest editor(s) and for each contributor.
  5. An example of a completed essay if available. (This is not essential).

The editorial process:

Once a proposal has been accepted:

  1. The guest editor will commission and pre-select the essays before submitting them to the Parergon editor by the agreed date.
  2. The Parergon editor will arrange for independent and anonymous peer-review in accordance with the journal’s established criteria.
  3. Once the essays have been peer-reviewed, the Parergon editor will communicate the feedback to the guest editor.
  4. The guest editor will then be asked to work with the authors to bring the submissions to the required standard where necessary.
  5. Occasionally a commissioned essay will be judged not suitable for publication in Parergon. This decision will be taken by the Parergon editor, based on the anonymous expert reviews.
  6. Essays which have already been published or accepted for publication elsewhere are not eligible for inclusion in the journal.

Time line:

Proposals for the 2014 issue (31.2) are required by 30 January 2013, and completed essays by 30 January 2014 for publication in late 2014.

Proposals for the 2015 issue (32.2) are required by 30 January 2014, and completed essays by 30 January 2015 for publication in late 2015.

Preliminary expressions of interest are welcome at any time.

Proposals will be considered by a selection panel drawn from members of the Parergon Editorial Board who will be asked to assess and rank the proposals according to the following criteria:

  1. Suitability for the journal
  2. Originality of contribution to the chosen field
  3. Significance/importance of the proposed theme
  4. Potential for advancing scholarship in a new and exciting way
  5. Range and quality of authors

Parergon, is available in electronic form as part of Project Muse (from 2005), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Wilson’s Humanities Full Text (from 2008); it is included in the Thomson Scientific Master Journal List of refereed journals and in the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), and is indexed for nine major database services, including ABELL, IMB and Scopus.

Please correspond with Anne M. Scott, Editor Parergon (The University of Western Australia): anne.scott@uwa.edu.au.

The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the Premodern Era – An Interdisciplinary Conference

The Uses and Abuses of Time: Anachronism/Achronicity in the Premodern Era
An Interdisciplinary Conference
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
March 21-23, 2013

Conference Website

Anachronism is a term that seems to presuppose a fixed and dominant temporal order, a chronological sequence within which each element or event occupies its own proper coordinates within the orderly flow of time. A Greek term, the “anachronistic” has become inseparable from its close Latin counterpart, the “preposterous”—literally, the before-behind. Anachronism has often been seen as a fault; a fault either testifying to a given culture’s lack of historical consciousness and historicist sensibilities, e.g. the Middle Ages’s supposed inability to think in historicist terms, or else as a type of scholarly error. Anachronism is an accusation, an error, a transgression, a stigma. The charge of anachronism seeks to reveal a critical failure to understand the pastness of the past. This perceived failure in turn exposes to ridicule scholars, artists, and entire cultures that are guilty of this charge.

Yet arguably, even the most academically disciplined ways of thinking historically cannot proceed without disavowed acts of anachronism. As scholars of the “medieval” and “early modern” eras, we know that the very names attached to our historical fields of specialty are the product of creative anachronism. The Middle Ages could not become its middling self until the moment of its death, the advent of the Renaissance. What is more anachronistic than the idea of “The Renaissance,” imagined as a phoenix-like return to antiquity that completely circumvents history—the “Middle Ages” itself?
Furthermore, medieval and early modern texts bear evidence of a multiplicity of temporalities that allow for various and varied experiences of time. This heterogeneous premodern notion of time includes Biblical time, historical time, seasonal time, and times for worship. It recognizes diverse practices of typological or allegorical reading that coexist with literal reading, and it suggests a complex understanding of notions such as originality, authenticity, and authority. In the context of this conference, achronicity refers to this productive multiplicity of temporalities.

This conference, organized by the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill in collaboration with the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Early Modern Times at the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the Centre for Late Antique & Medieval Studies at King’s College London, will provide a select group of scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplinary fields in the humanities an opportunity to investigate together the creative potential of anachronism and/or achronicity. It addresses the ways in which temporality was conceptualized, experienced, strategically exploited, aesthetically constructed and ideologically challenged in the medieval and early modern periods. Some of the questions driving this conference are: How can anachronism/achronicity be strategically deployed to highlight problematic aspects of temporality? How can anachronism/achronicity be used to signify competing temporal frames? How does anachronism/achronicity contribute to expressing complex schemes of history, e.g. by linking the eschatological to everyday experience? How does anachronism/achronicity point to the materiality of the historical object itself?

Sponsored by:

Freie Universität Berlin
Zentrum Mittelalter-Renaissance-Früe Neuzeit
(Interdisciplinary Centre: Middle Ages, Renaissance, Early Modern Times)
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Nicole Hochner: Public Lecture – University of Melbourne

For those in Melbourne in the next week, a lecture of interest:

“(E)Motions and Humours or Anxiety about Motion in Late Fifteenth-Century Political Thought” – Nicole Hochner, Head of Cultural Studies, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Date: Wednesday 8 August 2012
Time: 6.15pm
Venue: North Lecture Theatre, Level 2 Old Arts, The University of Melbourne

Many definitions have been given to the word emotion, though its etymology is certain. The word itself is thought not to have existed before the sixteenth century. Dictionaries place its first usage in 1534 in France. It came from the Latin roots: ‘to move out’. It originally referred to the fluctuation of the humours of ancient medical theory.

Humours engaged not only our bodies but also our minds; and therefore blood pressure was not a medical matter alone but an inclination to feelings such as anger, anxiety, or love. But in the sixteenth century ‘emotion’ referred to popular motion in the political sphere, not to a variation of mood or character. It designated popular movement or popular rebellion, rather than its present meaning of feeling or sentiment. It referred to a moving and disturbing humour in the body politic.

The lecture will argue that changes in attitude towards motion in the late fifteenth century support the argument that the word emotion expressed anxiety about political disarray, leading to a new vision of nobility constructed on race and blood.

—-

Nicole Hochner is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Head of the Program in Cultural Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research focuses on early modern France, and more specifically on the years 1480-1520. Her publications include Louis XII: Les dérèglements de l’image royale (Seyssel, Paris 2006) and a co-edited volume with Thomas Gaehtgens L’Image du roi de Francois Ier à Louis XIV (Paris, 2006). Her many articles have covered topics such as the emblem of the porcupine, the figuration of the biblical Esther, the notion of propaganda, the display of tears in official pageants, and the political thought of political thinkers such as Guillaume Budé, Pierre Gringore, Claude de Seyssel and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Her current projects include a study of social mobility in early modern France, which emphasizes the ‘birth’ of the word emotion and the importance of the medical gaze; a project on Machiavelli and love; and a political reading of Pierre Gringore’s works which focuses on satire.

Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse

The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, present:

Disaster, Death and the Emotions in the Shadow of the Apocalypse
Saturday and Sunday, 1 – 2 September, 2012
Saturday: 8.30 am – 6.00pm, Sunday: 9.00 am – 6.00 pm
Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, The University of Melbourne

Symposium Website

This symposium will explore the different ways that communities and individuals understood disaster and mass death in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the impact of human emotions in shaping these understandings.

Conference Speakers:

Dagmar Eichberger (Trier), John Gagné (Sydney), Sigrun Haude (Cincinnati), Fredrika Jacobs (Virginia Commonwealth), Erika Kuijpers (Leiden), David Lederer (NUI Maynooth), Dolly MacKinnon (UQ), Louise Marshall (Sydney), Una McIlvenna (Sydney), Gerrit Schenk (Heidelberg & Darmstadt), Peter Sherlock (MCD), Patricia Simons (Michigan – Ann Arbor), Jeffrey Chipps Smith (Texas at Austin), Jenny Spinks (Melbourne), Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne), Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge) and Charles Zika (Melbourne).

Symposium Flyer

Open to the Public – Places Limited

Registration:

  • Single day $50 full, $25 Student/Unwaged
  • Both Days $80 full, $40 Student/Unwaged

Symposium Registration Form and Full Program of Events

NB: For online registration, visit: http://ecommerce.arts.unimelb.edu.au and look under “School of Historical and Philosophical Studies”.

Enquiries: Jessica Scott (jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au)

Scientiae 2013 – Call For Papers

Scientiae 2013
Disciplines of Knowing in the Early Modern World
University of Warwick (UK)
8th-20th April, 2013

Conference Website

Paper and panel proposals are invited for Scientiae 2013: the second annual conference on the emergent knowledge practices of the early-modern period (ca. 1450-1750). The conference will take place on the 18-20th of April 2013 at Warwick University in the UK, building on the success of Scientiae 2012 (Simon Fraser University, Vancouver) which brought together over 100 scholars from around the globe.

The premise of this conference is that knowledge during the period of the Scientific Revolution was inherently interdisciplinary, involving complex mixtures of fields and objects that had not yet been separated into their modern “scientific” hierarchies. As such our approach needs to be equally wide-ranging, involving Biblical exegesis, art theory, logic, and literary humanism; as well as natural philosophy, alchemy, occult practices, and trade knowledge. Scientiae is for scholars working in any area of early-modern intellectual culture, with the emergence of modern natural science serving as a general point of reference. The conference offers a forum both for the sharing of research and the sparking of new investigations, and is open to scholars of all levels.

Topics and questions may include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Theological origins and implications of the new science
  • Nature and scripture: which interprets which?
  • What do images contribute to our understanding of early modern knowledge?
  • Genealogies of “reason”, “utility”, and/or “knowledge”
  • Humanism and the scientific revolution
  • Paracelsianism, Neoplatonism, alchemy: where are we now?
  • What were the relations between the new science and magic and demonology?
  • Health and medicine: separable economies?
  • Morality and the natural world: an on-going relationship?
  • Period conceptions and practices of intellectual property
  • Poetics and science: habits of thought?
  • Renaissance philosophy and the development of a “new” cosmology and anthropology.
  • Information and knowledge: a clear divide?
  • Science and Medicine: Global Knowledges?
  • Early-modern literature and the new knowledge: friends, or foes?
  • Advances or reversals of period logic/dialectic

Abstracts proposing individual papers of 25 minutes should be between 250 and 350 words in length. For panel sessions of one hour and 45 minutes, a list of speakers (with affiliations) and 500-word abstract is required. Roundtable discussions or other formats are acceptable.

The deadline for abstracts is the 20th October 2012.

All submissions should be made at: http://go.warwick.ac.uk/scientiae/submit

If you have any questions please contact the conference convenor David Beck (Scientiae2013@warwick.ac.uk)