20th Annual ACMRS Conference
Catastrophes and the Apocalyptic in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Embassy Suites Scottsdale Hotel, Scottsdale, Arizona.
February 6-8, 2014

Conference Website

Keynote speaker: Professor Jaime Lara, Research Professor, ACMRS and the Hispanic Research Center (HRC), Arizona State University; previously Chair, Program in Religion and the Arts, Yale University.

We welcome papers that explore any topic related to the study and teaching of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and especially those that focus on this year’s theme of catastrophe and the apocalyptic.

Selected papers related to the conference theme will be considered for publication in the conference volume of the Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance series, published by Brepols Publishers (Belgium).

Before the conference, ACMRS will host a workshop on manuscript studies to be led by Timothy Graham, Director of the Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of New Mexico. The workshop will be Thursday afternoon, February 6, and participation will be limited to 25 participants, who will be determined by the order in which registrations are received. The cost of the workshop is $30 and is in addition to the regular conference registration fee.

Please submit an abstract of 250 words and a brief CV to ACMRSconference@asu.edu. The deadline for proposals/abstracts is midnight, MST on 6 December 2013. Proposals must include audio/visual requirements and any other special requests.

If you have any questions, please contact the conference coordinator at acmrs@acmrs.org or 480-965-5900.

Second Annual Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium Conference
The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages
University of Notre Dame, Indiana
28 Feb-1 Mar, 2014

Conference Website

Keynote Speaker: Professor Geraldine Heng, Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

The transnational turn in the humanities over the last two decades has put increasing pressure on our ideas of nationhood and has provided us with a liberating awareness of the constructedness of the spaces we study. New methodologies have developed in response to this pressure as scholars turn to comparative approaches, borderland studies, histoire croisée, studies of empire, and oceanic models in order to accommodate the ambiguities of nationhood and of conceptions of space. Suggested by seminal transnational studies, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, many critics now study “the flows of people, capital, profits and information.” Recently, David Wallace’s ambitious literary history of Europe has adopted a similarly fluid approach to culture, avoiding a study of “national blocks” of literature, organizing itself instead along transnational itineraries that stretch beyond the European sphere. The Middle Ages offer a particularly broad and rich era in which to encounter fluid notions of space, as any glance at a medieval map such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi invitingly suggests. We invite presentations from all fields to explore any aspect of the medieval “geographic imagination,” of conceptions of space, place, and nation: ideas of geography, cartography, transnational identities and networks, intercultural encounters, mercantile routes, travelogues, rural and urban spaces, religious places, and concepts of locality and local identities.

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by 15 December 2013 on the conference website, www.nd.edu/imgc2014. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests.

This conference is generously sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. The Nanovic Institute is committed to enriching the intellectual culture of Notre Dame by creating an integrated, interdisciplinary home for students and faculty to explore the evolving ideas, cultures, beliefs, and institutions that shape Europe today.