Daily Archives: 11 February 2014

Survey on Medievalism

Dear members, Dr Helen Young (DECRA Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English University of Sydney), is conducting a survey about teaching and researching in medievalism, and is in search of volunteers. Please see the details below.

I write to ask for your participation in a short survey exploring medievalism in Australian and New Zealand universities. If you currently either teach or research medievalism, have done in the past, or plan to do so in the future, I would be very grateful for 10-15 minutes of your time to answer some questions online.

For the purposes of the survey I have defined medievalism as any research or teaching which examines a post-medieval work – literature, artwork, film, tv, architecture etc – which engages with the Middle Ages as long as the research and/or teaching is focused in some way on that engagement. For example, The Lord of the Rings – novels or films – could be considered a medievalist work, and is relevant to this survey if that medievalism is a topic for discussion in the course, but not if the focus is on, say, the films as adaptations of the novels.

I aim to gain some insights into how, where and why medievalism is researched and taught: in which disciplines, what kinds of courses, at what levels? My hope is to form a broad overview of the field as it exists at present, with an eye to where it may head in future. I will be talking about the results in a roundtable – ‘Medievalism and the Academy Today’ – sponsored by the International Society for the Study of Medievalism at the Kalamazoo ICMS in 2014, and also hope to write an article exploring current and possible future trends.

You can find the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TeachingMedievalism If the link doesn’t work, please copy and paste into the address bar on your browser window. You can give as much or as little information as you choose. If you don’t have time to complete the survey but would like to contribute to the research, you could email me any relevant course outlines on Helen.young@sydney.edu.au. If you do so, please let me know if you are happy to be identified by name, institution, or both, or if you would prefer to remain anonymous when the results of the study are made public.

Many thanks,
Helen

Adapating Australia – Call For Papers

‘Adapting Australia’
Special Issue of Adaptation, Oxford University Press

We encourage submission of articles for a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Adaptation (Oxford University Press), jointly edited by Ken Gelder (University of Melbourne) and Imelda Whelehan (University of Tasmania.

While adaptation studies has recently reflected on its own theoretical gaps and silences, little work has been produced on national literatures and cultures in adaptation beyond an Anglo-American framework. The purpose of this special issue is to gather perspectives on this topic: what happens when a nation reflects on its past through the adaptation of core narratives (novels, poems, memoirs, plays, films, myths, historical events, folktales, political and social movements, graphic narrative, etc)? Can changing notions of Australianness be charted through the process of adaptation; do they change a nation’s consciousness or do they more readily shore up the illusion of shared identity? What do Australian adaptations tell Australians about themselves, and who are excluded? What institutions act as gatekeepers for Australian adaptations and to what effect? What do Australian adaptations suggest to the world at large? The special issue title, ‘Adapting Australia’, invites creative interpretation. Adaptation was an important part of New Australian Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s, as was explored in the 1993 Special Issue of Literature/Film Quarterly, edited by Brian McFarlane, and it is hoped that this volume will extend that early exploration of culture and identity in adaptation, to show how much adaptation studies has diversified and broadened over the past twenty years.

We invite proposals on any aspect of contemporary Australian adaptations, but suggestions include:

  • (mis)appropriating the canon
  • adaptation and Indigenous culture
  • Screens and sounds: adaptation, audiobooks and music
  • Post-literary adaptation: cartoons, games, oral narratives
  • Horror adaptations
  • Gendering adaptation
  • Remakes/rewriting/rethinking Australia
  • Crossmedia/transmedia storytelling
  • Culture and adaptation industries: agents, institutions, copyright and funding
  • Adaptation and fandom
  • Costume and location
  • Authorial/star discourse
  • Screenwriting and script adaptation
  • Theatrical adaptations

Please submit completed papers (up to 5000 words accompanied by a 150-word abstract) directly to the Adaptation website (Flagging submissions as intended for the special issue), and following the advice on online submission: http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/adaptation/for_authors/ Manuscripts must be submitted online in an anonymous form and will be sent to at least two external reviewers. The deadline is 1 July 2014.