4th Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group
Off the Books: Making, Breaking, Binding, Burning, Leaving, Gathering
University of Toronto, Canada
9-11 October 2015

We are calling upon individuals and groups interested in proposing sessions for our 2015 biennial meeting that would explore various histories of the book and bookmaking, as well as consider what it means to go “off the books”: how ideas and various cultural and historical forms leap off from and out of books; how we ourselves are “off of” books and “over” books; what it means to go “off the books” or “off the record”: to go astray, between and off the lines, underground, and illegal, and to be unaccounted for.

As with all BABEL endeavors, we invite and welcome provocations that address and confront and work through questions, issues, and subject areas we have not yet anticipated. Further, we invite creative proposals for sessions from all academic fields and sites of para-academic work. Most importantly, this year we launch a new conference (or un-conference) structure: instead of determining in advance that sessions will be 90 minutes each, or 60 minutes each (as we have done in the past), we want YOU to propose the session you want to imagine, at the speed you want to run it: for example, a “speed-dating” or “dork short” session, with 20+ people circulating and doing 1-minute introductions of their research to one another over the course of an hour or more; a seminar that meets for an hour a day each of the 3 days; a 90-minute panel with three traditional papers; an hour-long roundtable discussion with 5 or more persons presenting research/ideas/writing relative to a specific topic or question; a session that would take place over a brunch or lunch or during the cocktail hour; seminar-workshops of 10 or more persons who have circulated work and/or readings in advance; “flash-paper” sessions where presenters have been given prompts in advance that they then “respond” to in short (3-5-minute) performances; a session that extends over the entire 3 days with some sort of performance or exhibit; a “linked” session, spanning 2 hours with a break in-between, with presentations in first half and “breakout” group discussions in the second half; a “slow reading” session where 6+ people bring a passage, an image, a text, an object, etc. which is then “chewed over/ruminated” slowly with audience; a creatively designed “poster/object” session; an anti-plenary plenary session; a “maker/making/unmaking” workshop/lab; a session delivered entirely with emoticons; an intellectual “dim sum” sessions that takes place over real “dim sum”; a session where people give away work they will never be able to finish; etc., etc.

Think about sessions, too, in the form of: working group, demonstration, performance, collision course, dramatic reading, thought-experiment, dialogue, debate, seminar (with papers circulated in advance), drinking game, diatribe, testimony, flash mob (or other type of flash-event), roundtable discussion, complaint, drawing-room comedy, speculation, gymnasium, protest, clinical trial, séance, laboratory, masque, exhibition, recording session, screening, potlatch, cabinet, slam, etc. In addition to calling for sessions that address books and being “on” or “off” the books, we also invite sessions that are themselves “off the books”—that is, off the record, secretive, hidden, not conducted according to the usual protocols, or not institutional or official in any way imaginable. We have set aside the following spaces: 2 rooms that can hold 50 people each; 1 room that can hold about 80; 1 seminar room that can hold 6-10; a hallway that can hold an exhibit, or posters, or a small performance, or a very friendly flash mob; etc. If you propose a session, and a time (preferably in half-hour increments), we will work to make a schedule that will accommodate a lively, rowdy multiplicity of sessions.

For the full CFP, please visit: http://babel-meeting.org/2015-meeting

Send session proposals of approx. 350-500 words (which can be completely open to potential participants and/or already include some or all committed participants), to include full contact information for organizer(s) and any committed participants, NO LATER THAN February 1, 2015, to: babel.conference@gmail.com

Beyond Leeches and Lepers: Medieval and Early Modern Medicine Conference
Anatomy Lecture Theatre, The University of Edinburgh
Saturday 2nd May, 2015

This is a one-day public engagement conference for postgraduate students and early career researchers. We are excited to announce that Dr. Irina Metzler has been confirmed as the keynote speaker.

There are many misconceptions about the quality of health care in the medieval and early-modern periods. Even Blackadder II, set in the sixteenth century, popularises the idea that early-modern medical practices were both limited and ineffective:

Edmund: I’ve never had anything you doctors didn’t try to cure with leeches. A leech on my ear for ear ache, a leech on my bottom for constipation.
Doctor: They’re marvellous, aren’t they?
Edmund: Well, the bottom one wasn’t. I just sat there and squashed it.

“Beyond Leeches and Lepers” refers to the intention of this conference to look beyond a simplistic coverage of these subjects that are commonly associated with medieval and early-modern medicine, and to explore this area of history more broadly and in greater detail. As a public engagement conference, this is an opportunity for postgraduate students and early career researchers to develop their ability to communicate their research and ideas to the public. This will allow scholars to impart our current understanding of medieval and early-modern medicine, and the public to engage with this subject and address their preconceptions. The conference is to be held in the historic Anatomy Lecture Theatre in the Old Medical Building at the University of Edinburgh. This historically notable space will help to emphasise the seminal importance of medicine in the medieval and early-modern periods inside the long history of medicine.

Possible topics for exploration include: anatomy and dissection; plagues, pandemics and diseases; disability and impairment; hospitals and healthcare; surgery, physicians and medical manuscripts; bloodletting, and the bodily humors. Papers should be prepared with a non-expert audience in mind.

Please send proposals up to 250 words for 15-20 minutes papers to Helen F. Smith and Jessica Legacy at beyondleechesconference@outlook.com by January 15, 2015.

The Many Forms Of The Decameron: Interpretations, Translations And Adaptations
Johns Hopkins University
24-26 April, 2015

Keynote speakers:

• Victoria Kirkham (University of Pennsylvania)
• Patrick Rumble (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
• Eugenio Refini (Johns Hopkins University)

The conference seeks to explore Boccaccio’s Decameron, its translatability into different media, languages, and historical contexts. The discussion will not be limited to the Decameron and its adaptability, but will also explore the broader concept of translation as well as the relationship between media and authorship, bringing together a network of scholars from various  disciplines. The event will feature standard graduate conference panels and keynote lectures from experts of different media, but will also incorporate film screenings, theatrical performances, and other events. To that end, students and artists with original adaptations of the Decameron (films, paintings, novel, short stories, sculptures, music, comics, scripts, …) are also invited to submit their works that will be included in different ways in the conference. Examples of topics that will be covered include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Translating the Decameron
• Boccaccio in different literary genres and literature (i.e. Chaucer, Shakespeare)
• The Decameron and film: high cinema and sexploitation (from Righelli, to Pasolini, to Lealand).
• The Decameron and theater
• The Decameron and music
• The Decameron and the visual arts
• Translation vs. adaptation
• Re-interpretations vs. misreadings
• The short novel and its adaptability
• The Decameron’s reception and fortune across Europe, USA, and Worldwide
• The Decameron as adaptation: sources, intertextuality and citations
• Remaking the Decameron: medievalism and neomedievalism
• Other adaptations: censorship, editing and the textual tradition of the Decameron

The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2015.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words together with your information (name, title, affiliation, e-mail and telephone number) and audiovisual requests to jhu.boccaccio@gmail.com for a panel presentation. Presentations should be limited to 15-20 minutes and given in Italian or English. To submit any other creative work, contact us at jhu.boccaccio@gmail.com to arrange a suitable exposition of your work.

CONTACTS:
The Italian Graduate Conference Committee – Johns Hopkins University
Email: jhu.boccaccio@gmail.com
Website: http://grll.jhu.edu/2014/11/19/italian-graduate-conference-call-for-papers

Borderlines XIX – Translating the Past: Appropriating the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
Queen’s University, Belfast
10-12 April, 2015

Borderlines XIX – Translating the Past: Appropriating the Medieval and Early Modern Worlds – which will be held in Queen’s University Belfast from 10-12 April 2015. Proposals for both papers and panels are welcomed from postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers in the fields of Medieval and Early Modern studies. Held annually across four universities in Ireland, the Borderlines conferences seek to encourage and demonstrate the exciting interdisciplinary work undertaken by early career researchers both in Ireland and the UK.

The theme for this year’s conference focuses on the ‘translation’ of the past, both in terms of the historical work scholars undertake and representations of the past in the primary materials with which we work. In discussing historiography, Geoffrey Cubitt argues that:

In social and historical discourse (if not strict philosophical necessity), the past is always the past of something – a group, a community, a state, a nation, a race, a society, a civilization … the past in question is our past, the past that … belongs to us as a constitutive element in our common identity. Representations of the collective past hinge, in other words, on backward projections of current perceptions of identity. (2007: 199-200)

As Cubitt suggests, historiographical discourses are not simply re-tellings of the past but are re-imaginings of it, heavily influenced by the perspectives and concerns of those articulating them.

The act of ‘translation’, or ‘appropriation’, as is sometimes the case, is effected in many guises: the literal linguistic and textual translations by ‘medievalists’ such as J.R.R Tolkien; adapting poets such as Seamus Heaney and Simon Armitage; the appropriation of pre-modern socio-political themes and events in historical fiction by the likes of George R. R. Martin and Bruce Holsinger; the historically-influenced costume and set design of popular film and television productions such as Merlin and The Tudors. Such contemporary interest in the Medieval and Early Modern era proliferates and continues to grow.

This conference will engage with the idea of ‘translation’ in multiple senses in an effort to explore and debate new directions in the interdisciplinary fields of literature, language, history, archaeology, music, architecture, visual culture and heritage practice. As such it will provide an outlet for discussion of historiographical issues across disciplines and periods, and invites us as scholars to question our assumptions about both our modern perspectives and those of the ‘pre-modern’ cultures we study.

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

• linguistic or textual translations
• vernacular translation and interpretation
• assimilation or influence of the past in ‘modern’ cultural production
• historical research as creative practice
• translation from page to screen/stage
• translation/interpretation of relics, monuments, artefacts
• interpreting architecture and landscapes of the past
• historical interpretation/representation of historic events
• constructions of the past/periodisation
• museum culture
• limits to translation
• anachronism
• the ‘impact’ of historical documentaries on lay audiences
• transition from manuscript to print
• ‘Medievalism’ and ‘Early Modernism’

Abstracts of 250 words for a 20-minute paper and a short biography are welcomed from postgraduates (MA & PhD students and Postdocs), as are proposals for panels, and should be submitted by Friday 30 January 2015 to borderlinesxix@gmail.com.