Monthly Archives: January 2015

Scholarship, Print, and Polemics in Seventeenth-Century Germany – Call For Papers

Scholarship, Print, and Polemics in Seventeenth-Century Germany

Call for Abstracts

This is a call for abstracts or extracts of book chapters that explore scholarly practice in the Holy Roman German Empire of the seventeenth century. The proposed volume is specifically interested in exploring the interactions between scholarly practice, print technology, and the polemics associated with confessionalisation and the rise of the early modern nation state. Potential contributors are encouraged to consider these interactions in the context of early modern interdisciplinarity and the correspondence networks that underpinned the Gelehrtenrepublik.

A rising interest in the early modern republic of letters is apparent in historical scholarship of the last three decades, and the last ten years in particular have seen a surge in this field. Initiatives such as the Cultures of Knowledge project at Oxford, and new journals such as Republics of Letters, sponsored by Stanford University, focus specifically on this unique world and the correspondence networks and scholarly rituals that were so crucial to its success. Nevertheless, scholarly interest in the German context, at least among Anglophone scholars, has been somewhat sporadic. English-language scholarship (particularly monographs) on the early modern republic of letters has tended towards the English and French contexts, with a gap in our understanding of how these experiences translated to and from the German lands. Alternately, one often finds the literature examining the topic with intellectual icons from the Low Countries at the centre and scholars from Germany and elsewhere cast almost at the periphery.

This volume will add to a growing body of work in the German context with contributions that explore scholarship, print, and polemics in the seventeenth-century German lands with a specific focus on the interdisciplinary practices and correspondence networks that supported them. In so doing, it is anticipated that this volume will not only add to our existing understanding of early modern scholarly practice, but will also offer different perspectives on interactions between German scholars and their international counterparts. In this light, contributions that compare and contrast the German experience with the broader seventeenth-century republic of letters, and/or which contextualise their analyses in this context, are strongly encouraged.

Abstracts may be up to one page in length, and final chapters should be between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes.

Please submit abstracts, extracts, or drafts to the editor, Christian Thorsten Callisen, via email (christian@callisen.net.au) by 31 March 2015. Successful submissions will inform a book proposal for consideration in Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History. It is anticipated that completed drafts of chapters will be required by the end of February 2016, with revisions to be completed thereafter, though final deadlines will be confirmed.

Christian Thorsten Callisen is based in Brisbane, Australia. His research focuses on interdisciplinary scholarship and the dissemination of ideas in early modern Europe. His work has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas and he is editor of Reading and Writing History from Bruni to Windschuttle: Essays in Honour of Gary Ianziti (Ashgate, 2014).

Uni of Melbourne: Early Modern Circle 2015 – Call For Papers

Dear Friends, as 2015 gets underway, we are calling for papers for this year’s Early Modern Circle, to be held at 6.15 pm on the third Monday of most months. If you would like to offer a paper (alone or with others), or lead a discussion session, please send suggestions to all three of us at the emails below.

Papers can be offered in a variety of formats: single papers of 30-35 minutes, shorter papers of 15 minutes with two speakers per session, or thematic discussion sessions with associated reading proposed and lead by someone with a special interest in that material. We encourage people to propose a shorter paper jointly with someone working on a similar theme, to encourage cohesiveness. If you propose a short paper on your own, we can also try to pair you with another speaker. And, of course, we welcome collaborative papers if people are working on shared projects.

All formats allow ample room for questions and discussion, which are an integral part of the sessions, and we aim to conclude each session by 7.30 pm. We usually go for drinks or dinner after the seminar – all welcome. Information about last year’s program can be found at:

http://www.amems.unimelb.edu.au/seminars/earlymoderncircle.html

The dates for the Early Modern Circle in 2015 will be:

  • Monday 16th March
  • Monday 20th April
  • Monday 18th May
  • Monday 15th June – Session has been taken
  • Monday 27th July – Session has been taken
  • Monday 17th August
  • Monday 21st September
  • Monday 19th October
  • Monday 16th November

Please email all three of us a proposal that includes a provisional title and your preferred date (with at least one back-up option) by the 22nd February 2015. We will be in touch as soon as possible after that date. We hope to accommodate as many offered papers as possible, depending on scheduling restrictions, and look forward to hearing from many of you.

From your 2015 Early Modern Circle convenors:

Art of the Crusades: A Re-Evaluation – Call For Applications

SOAS University of London with funding from the Getty Foundation is launching a new research programme lasting two years that might be of interest to you entitled The Art of the Crusades: A Re-Evaluation.

Led by Professor Scott Redford of SOAS University of London, The Art of the Crusades: A Re-Evaluation is aimed at early career academics and higher level research students interested in exploring the possibilities of a new kind of integrationist approach to the art and archaeology of the mediaeval period in the eastern Mediterranean and Levant.

This approach will involve interrogating the material culture of the mediaeval period using diverse academic approaches, and seek to show the connections between the art and other material culture of the different peoples and religious groups of this region at the time.

We are looking for candidates from a wide variety of academic fields. This includes researchers into Crusader art, architecture and archaeology, but also Byzantinists, and researchers into the art and architecture of Islamic, Jewish and other religious and ethnic groups in the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant region during the Middle Ages.

Those taking part will be asked to attend four fully-funded research field trips, two in 2015 and two in 2016, each lasting nine days. These research trips will be to Greece, Israel, Jordan and Turkey and on them participants will attend lectures by international and local experts, visit historical sites of interest and engage in seminars aimed at formulating a new way of looking at this kind of material from an integrationist perspective.

We are particularly keen to encourage researchers based in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, or with strong connections to it, to apply.

All air fares, accommodation and meals on the research trips will be paid for, and we welcome applications now for the first of these trips, to Turkey, in November 2015.

Further information and an application form can be found on the SOAS website at:

Further Information: www.soas.ac.uk/artofthecrusades

Application Form: http://www.jotformeu.com/form/50121286584352

Deadline for Applications: 15 March 2015. Spaces are limited and so early application is strongly advised.

Postdoctoral Fellowship in Women’s and Gender History – Call For Applications

The Journal of Women’s History and Binghamton University are excited to welcome applications for a new postdoctoral fellowship exploring the intersections of gender and global history. Beginning in the fall of 2015, this one-year in residence appointment carries a stipend of $45,000, plus benefits. The successful applicant much teach one course per semester and present one university-wide public lecture; all remaining time will be devoted to scholarly research and writing. Candidates must complete all requirements for the PhD by 1 July 2015, or have received the PhD no earlier than the fall semester of 2011.

The search committee encourages candidates whose research explores the embodied histories of the global past, considering women as historical subjects as well as gender and sexuality as historical systems. We are especially interested in scholars whose spatial framework transcends national borders to focus on the movement of gendered bodies in transnational arenas, whether through migration, trafficking, travel, imperial politics, slavery, or other processes of exchange. Please note that Binghamton is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer committed to diversity. Women, minorities, and members of underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply.

The postdoctoral fellow will join a vibrant community of scholars working on women, gender, and sexuality at Binghamton University, which has a long tradition of supporting scholarship in this field. In 1974, Binghamton’s history faculty created one of the first PhD programs in women’s history in the United States. Binghamton also houses the Center for the Historical Study of Women and Gender and in 2010, became the editorial home of the award-winning Journal of Women’s History, the first journal devoted exclusively to the international field of women’s history. The JWH promotes comparative and transnational approaches to the history of gender, sexuality, and women’s experiences.

Application requirements

Applicants must submit:

  1. A CV
  2. A 2,000-word statement detailing the significance of the research project to be developed during the fellowship tenure
  3. Three letters of recommendation
  4. A list of possible course offerings

Materials must be submitted at http://binghamton.interviewexchange.com.

Application Deadline: 28 February 2015.

Please direct all questions to jwh@binghamton.edu.

For more information about the Journal of Women’s History, please visit http://journalofwomenshistory.org.

To learn more about Binghamton University’s History Department, please visit http://www.binghamton.edu/history.

Othello: The Remix

From February 18 – 22, the Arts Centre Melbourne presents a season of Othello: The Remix, a fresh take on Shakespeare’s tragedy, lyrically rewritten over original hip-hop beats by Chicago Theatre Company’s The Q Brothers.

Originally commissioned for Shakespeare’s Globe London, this story of MC Othello getting out of the ghetto and rising straight to the top won the world over during the international tour that followed. You can watch the trailer here.

Now on sale – get your tickets here.

Thiel Grant for Online Writing – Call For Application

The Thiel Grant for Online Writing supports inventive writing for the internet. Recipients of the $5000 award commit to producing 50 posts on an agreed concept over a 12-month period. Australian online writers of all genres are encouraged to apply.

Criteria for selection:

  • Quality of idea. Unique and original concepts are encouraged. Projects should be sustainable, maintaining interest over 50 posts. (Assessed by 150-word pitch.)
  • Quality of writing. Applicants with strong existing online and social media writing will be favoured, although this need not be extensive. (Assessed by link/s to applicant’s writing available online.)

Applications for the inaugural grant are open until the 28 February, 2015.

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://teacherintherye.wordpress.com/thiel-grant-for-online-writing.

Leverhulme Doctoral Studentship: Women’s Work in Early Modern England – Call For Applications

The College of Humanities at the University of Exeter is delighted to be offering an excellent funding opportunity for exceptional researchers within the area of the History of Women’s Work:

  • One Doctoral Studentship funded by the Leverhulme Trust: all tuition fees paid and an annual maintenance grant for three years. The maintenance grant will be £13,863 per year.

Project Description

The successful applicant will work with Professor Jane Whittle on a Leverhulme Trust funded project on Women’s Work in Rural England 1500-1700 from September 2015.

The PhD project is specifically to examine women’s waged work using household and farm accounts from the counties of Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It will involve the detailed contextual study of at least 15 households and the workers they employed.

In their covering letter, applicants should demonstrate their expertise in early modern social or economic history or a closely related field, including their experience in archival research, and describe their interest in gender history.

The successful applicant will work as part of a team with Professor Whittle (the principal investigator) and Dr Mark Hailwood (research fellow) who will be collecting data on women’s work activities from court documents in a complementary part of the project.

Application deadline: 1 March 2015

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://www.exeter.ac.uk/studying/funding/award/?id=1741

2016 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America – Call For Papers

2016 Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
Boston, MA
February 25-27, 2016

The Program Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal, excepting those who presented papers at the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy in 2014 or 2015; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy.

Location: Boston is home to numerous universities, art museums, and performing arts companies. Hosted by several Boston-area institutions, the meeting will convene at the Hyatt, across the street from the renovated Opera House and in the heart of Boston’s theater district. The final reception will be held at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Theme(s): Rather than an overarching theme, the 2016 meeting will provide a variety of thematic connections among sessions. The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative sessions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. To both facilitate and emphasize interdisciplinarity, the Call for Papers is organized in “threads.” Sessions listed under these threads have been proposed to or by the Program Committee but the list provided below is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.

Proposals: Individuals may propose to offer a paper in one of the sessions below, a full panel of papers and speakers for a listed session, a full panel of papers and speakers for a session they wish to create, or a single paper not designated for a specific session. Sessions usually consist of three 25-minute papers, and proposals should be geared to that length, although the committee is interested in other formats as well (poster sessions, digital experiences, etc). The Program Committee may choose a different format for some sessions after the proposals have been reviewed.

The complete Call for Papers with additional information, submission procedures, selections guidelines, and organizers is available here.

Please contact the Program Committee at MAA2016@TheMedievalAcademy.org with any questions.

THREADS:
CAROLINGIAN WORLDS
“Contacts with Islam”
“Frontiers”
“Transformations, 877-987″

THE ELEVENTH CENTURY
“The 1000th Anniversary of Cnut the Great (1016/2016)”
“Art and Architecture in the Eleventh Century: An Age of Experiments”
“Creative Liturgies in the Eleventh Century”

MONASTICISMS
“Monastic Visual Cultures”
“Monastic Identities”
“Ascetic Bodies in the Late Middle Ages”

LYRIC TRANSFORMATIONS
“The ‘Lyric’ Dante”
“Poetic Form”
“Petrarch between the Vernacular and Latin”

GREEN WORLDS/MEDIEVAL ECOLOGIES
“Garden, Park, Wasteland”
“Material Ecologies”
“Medieval Anthropocenes”
“Water Worlds and Seascapes”
“Mediterranean Landscapes”

WORKS: UNFINISHED, TRANSFORMED OR IN RUINS
“Unfinished Books, Incomplete Texts”
“Medieval Art and Architecture as Work(s) in Progress”
“Ruins”

MEDIEVAL STUDIES AND THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES
Papers are invited for a thread devoted to the exciting new ways in which medieval studies and digital humanities intersect. Topics might include (but are not limited to) issues of visualization and the re-presentation of medieval spaces, soundscapes, the implications of digital archives for the editing of medieval texts, the digital (re)construction of medieval collections and libraries, GIS and mapping projects, social network analysis, text encoding, and computational approaches to texts and scribal behaviors.

SESSIONS:
“800th Anniversary of the Dominican Order”
“800th Anniversary of Pope Innocent III’s Death”
“Mortality / Facing Death”
“Margins of War”
“Images of Coercion and Dissent”
“Dangerous, Deviant, and Disobedient Women in the Middle Ages”
“Vernacular Exegesis”
“Drama/Performance”
“Literature of Pastoral Care”
“Boston Area Medieval Manuscripts”

Travel and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern World – Call For Papers

Travel and Conflict in the Medieval and Early Modern World
Institute for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (IMEMS) Aberystwyth-Bangor, Biennial Conference
Bangor University
3-5 September, 2015

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Daniel Carey (National University of Ireland, Galway)

The meeting points between travel, mobility, and conflict are numerous. Travel can be a conflictual experience; in medieval Europe, movement may be perceived as being restricted to travel motivated by the exigencies of piety, pillage, or trade. It would however be too easy to suggest a clear binary between a medieval state of stasis and the more leisurely travel and exploration in the early modern period. Until relatively recently, domestic travel and voyages to the wider world remained dangerous undertakings. Utopian fiction and travel writing are two genres that have been closely aligned by scholars who recognise how these genres reshape medieval discourses on the ideal state for an early modern audience. Weary travellers arrive at geographically unspecified places comprising ideal societies, but these ideal societies occupy a liminal space between fiction and reality: these spaces are ultimately unattainable due to the imprecision and prevarication present in the narrative. This draws to focus tensions within documenting imaginary travel and the material world. Far from being a site of concord, they become spaces of conflict. Travel – whether it is real or imagined, or if it has been implemented for public or private purposes – can be obstructed by conflicts; it remains often restricted and always bitterly debated.

This interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars working in the fields of medieval and early modern studies to interrogate the relationship between travel and conflict. Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Travel in times of war and conflict
  • Restricted travel
  • Forbidden travel
  • Exile and travel
  • Colonial encounters
  • Piracy
  • Travel, subterfuge and deceit
  • Conflict of body and mind in travel
  • Travel, religion and conversion
  • Conflicting readings of travelogues
  • Debates on travel
  • Liminal spaces
  • Utopian/Dystopian travel
  • Travel and synaesthesia
  • Vagrancy
  • Matter, materiality and the unreal
  • Travel as a violent act
  • Remembering and forgetting travel
  • Conflict between topography and spatial movement
  • Conflict between mapped space and inhabited space
  • Language communication and miscommunication
  • Pilgrimage or Crusade
  • Migration and persecution

We invite abstracts of 200-250 words for individual papers of twenty minutes, or of up to 850 words for panels comprising no more than three papers, to be sent to travelandconflict@gmail.com by 25 January 2015. Please send your abstract in the text of your message, and not in an attached file.