Othello’s Island 2016
The 4th Annual Multidisciplinary Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Art, Literature, History, Culture and Society
CVAR, Nicosia, Cyprus
17-20 March, 2016

Conference Website

A collaborative event organised by academics from Sheffield Hallam University, the SOAS University of London University of Kent, University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds

Convenors:

• Professor James Fitzmaurice, University of Sheffield
• Professor Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University
• Dr Sarah James, University of Kent
• Dr Michael Paraskos, SOAS University of London
• ​Benedict Read FSA, University of Leeds

About the Conference:

Othello’s Island is an annual conference, now in its fourth year, examining the history, culture, art and literature of the medieval and renaissance periods from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Located at the Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR) in Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, the conference attracts academics and researchers from all over the world in a co-operative and constructive environment that has rapidly developed the reputation as one of the friendliest academic conferences in town. It is also seen as encouraging a genuine interdisciplinary approach as there is no streaming of different subjects and at recent events this has led to some astonishing connections between different subject areas.

We welcome researchers into art, literature, cultural, political and social history, and other topics to submit proposals for papers, which should be delivered in English and be twenty minutes in length. As we are located in Cyprus many papers make connections with Cyprus, the Levant or the wider Mediterranean, but we are interested in all aspects of the medieval and renaissance world and so this is not a requirement.

That said, researchers into all aspects of the medieval and renaissance periods will find Cyprus a fascinating place to visit, with some of the best surviving gothic churches and cathedrals in the eastern Mediterranean, and a contemporary culture that is still imbued with the cultures of the past. This is particularly apparent in the location of the conference in the centre of the Venetian old town are of Nicosia. We will also be organising a coach trip to see some of the stunning UNESCO-listed medieval painted churches of the Troodhos Mountains.

​Call For Papers:

Full Papers (20 minutes talk plus questions)

If you are interested in giving a talk at the conference please submit a proposal for a paper. Standard papers are 20 minutes long, followed by 5 or 10 minutes for questions.

We are very open minded on the topic of papers, so if you have an idea for a presentation that is not covered by the suggestions given above please feel free to submit a proposal, or contact us first to discuss the idea.

Proposals for papers should comprise a cover sheet showing:

1. Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name
2. Your institutional affiliation (if any)
3. Your postal address, e’mail address and telephone number
4. The title of your proposed paper

​With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 300 words and a copy of your CV/resume to mparaskos@mac.com with the subject line OTHELLO 2016.

All papers must be delivered in English.

The deadline for submissions of proposals is 4 January 2016. Early submission is strongly advised. We aim to have a decision on the acceptance of papers within four weeks of submission.

Guided Poster Sessions (10 minutes talk plus “poster” display)

As an alternative to full papers, a new development for 2016 is an event called Guided Poster Sessions. Guided Poster Sessions are short presentations that are delivered in a far more informal and sociable way than full conference papers, and we are thinking of doing these at an evening event (to be confirmed).

What we ask presenters at the Guided Poster Sessions to do is provide an A2 size poster comprising at least one illustration and a body of text in English explaining some of the key points of their research.

The posters should be kept as simple as possible and not attempt to be a written paper or essay. Bullet points and headlines with very short explanatory texts are preferable.

Those showing the posters will then have ten minutes to present their key ideas to the other delegates (called “talking to the poster”) and also answer questions on them.

As stated, the aim is to be very informal with the Guided Poster Sessions, so these are particularly good for researchers who want to present provisional findings or speculative ideas for informal discussion, rather than more complete academic papers. Ideas could even be highly speculative or controversial and designed simply to provoke discussion.

Poster sessions might also be useful for younger or less experienced researchers who are not used to the formality of full conference delivery. However younger and less experienced researchers are very welcome to apply to give full papers as Othello’s Island and should not assume they can only give Guided Poster Session papers. Equally we welcome Guided Poster Session Papers from more experience researchers and even professors.

Proposals for Poster Session Papers should comprise a cover sheet showing:

1. Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name
2. Your institutional affiliation (if any)
3. Your postal address, e’mail address and telephone number
4. The title of your proposed poster and short presentation

​With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 150 words and a copy of your CV/resume to mparaskos@mac.com with the subject line OTHELLO POSTER 2016.

All posters and papers must be delivered in English.

The deadline for submissions of proposals is 4 January 2016. Early submission is strongly advised. We aim to have a decision on the acceptance of papers within four weeks of submission.

Please refer to the website before submitting for further information: www.othellosisland.org

Dynasty and Dynasticism, 1400-1700
Somerville College, University of Oxford
March 16-18, 2016

Keynotes:

• Professor János M. Bak (Central European University)
• Professor Craig Clunas (Oxford)
• Professor Jeroen Duindam (Leiden)
• Professor Paula Sutter Fichtner (CUNY /Brooklyn College)
• Professor John Morrill (Cambridge)

Abstract submissions are invited for a major international conference on Dynasty and Dynasticism, 1400-1700, in Europe and beyond.

Boyd Tonkin has written that credence in the power of dynastic blood is the ‘residue of a magical world view’, yet in this period dynasty co-existed with new kinds of national and imperial state. Cliff Davies has questioned whether a dynasty such as the Tudors existed at all in the minds of contemporaries, suggesting they might have been ‘invented’ retrospectively.

This conference aims to ask afresh what royal dynasty was in the late medieval and early modern periods: what beliefs underpinned it, whence its power and mystique derived, and who or what ruling dynasties believed themselves to be. In recent decades, the ‘new political history’ has reanimated the study of monarchy, courts, parliaments and royal image-making, using a range of interdisciplinary techniques, in the process enriching our grasp of political culture in the late medieval and early modern periods. This conference now seeks to put dynasty under the spotlight, as a category of analysis in its own right, and as a major organising political principle in the pre-modern world.

The questions which the conference wishes to address include:

• How was the identity of a dynasty constructed and expressed?
• Did a heightened dynastic consciousness emerge in Europe or elsewhere in the 15th,16th and 17th centuries?
• How should we understand the relationship between dynasty and monarchy (hereditary, elective or imperial)?
• What role did dynasties play in discourses about national identity and foreignness?
• What light do gender studies, anthropology, history of the body or history of emotions shed on the nature and functioning of dynasty?
• How did mono-territorial dynasties differ in strategy and self-understanding from international dynasties which ruled multiple lands?
• How different were royal dynasties from other forms of elite family network: e.g. aristocratic, banking or merchant houses?
• How have royal dynasties been constructed in subsequent cultural memory and scholarship?

The Jagiellonians Project

The conference is being organised by the Oxford-based, ERC-funded project Jagiellonians: Dynasty, Memory and Identity in Central Europe (www.jagiellonians.com), led by Dr. Natalia Nowakowska. The project takes as its focus the supra-national Jagiellonian dynasty, who ruled multiple European polities in the period 1386 to 1572 – the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the kingdoms of Poland, Hungary and Bohemia – and married extensively into the ruling houses of the Holy Roman Empire and Scandinavia. Well known in the individual national historiographies of northern and Central Europe, the Jagiellonians have rarely been studied as an international political phenomenon, and they remain little known outside the regions which they once ruled.

The project seeks to explore Jagiellonian dynasty and dynasticism within a much broader context: located in Central Europe, the Jagiellonians looked westwards, but also south and east towards the Orthodox world, the Tartars and the Ottomans. We welcome proposals for papers addressing these and related questions, from scholars working on the Jagiellonians and other ruling dynasties of Latin Christendom, Eastern Christendom, the Americas and Asia in these centuries.

Submission of Abstracts

Abstracts for proposed papers (max. 500 words) should be sent to dynasty@history.ox.ac.uk by 1 August, 2015 .

Authors will be notified regarding acceptance of their contribution by 1 October, 2015 at the latest, after all submissions have been reviewed.

Applicants are expected to arrange for their own funding for conference participation. However, the project is able to subsidise a certain number of speakers who would not otherwise be able to attend. Please indicate when submitting the abstract if you would like to be considered for a subsidized place.

For further information please email dynasty@history.ox.uk

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America
Boston
31 March–2 April 2016

Trilingualizing Iberian Epic: Intersections and Interactions between Latin and the Vernacular in Early Modern Iberian Epic Poetry: The First of a Two-Part Session Sponsored by the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry

The epic of early modern Iberia and Iberoamerica has enjoyed a welcome rehabilitation over the past two decades, with increasingly enthusiastic uptake in recent years. The linguistic profile of this tradition, as it has been presented so far, is essentially always bilingual: Spanish and Portuguese. Now that Iberian epic studies have gained a secure foothold and established themselves as a vital new area of study, however, the time is ripe to add a third element to the picture: Latin. By this we do not, on this occasion, mean the Latin of the Greco-Roman epic tradition—a tradition which is of course central to the study of early modern Iberian epic in its own right—but rather the Latin-language (‘Neo-Latin’) epic production of the early modern period itself. The linguistic and literary landscape then was different from our own, and countless early modern epicists writing in, or about, the Iberian world chose to do so in Latin instead of (or as well as) the vernacular. To speak of early modern Iberian epic without ever mentioning the word “Latin” is thus to tell only part of the story. This is particularly so as the Latin-language material is just as committed to exploring the contemporary Iberian world, American questions, Atlantic concerns—precisely the same themes, in other words, as we identify in all the vernacular material. Submissions are sought from those working at the intersection—however defined—between Latin and the vernacular in early modern Iberian (or Iberian-themed) epic. How does adding Latin to the picture complement—and complicate—our existing view of the early modern Iberian epic scene? What new topoi and traditions can be seen to crystallize if we consider the material cross-linguistically in this way? And what does this signal to us about possible new directions for the study of early modern Iberian epic in the future?

Papers will be read in English or Spanish. Please send abstract of 250 words and a brief, standard format CV to Maya Feile Tomes (mcf37@cam.ac.uk) and Elizabeth B. Davis (davis.823@osu.edu). Graduate students submitting an abstract should indicate the title of their dissertation, if available. Proposals must be received by May 25, 2015.

Heroes of Epic Proportions: Examining the Figure of the Explorer–Discoverer in Early Modern Iberian Epic Poetry: The Second of a Two-Part Session Sponsored by the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry

It can be argued that the two best-known examples of early modern Iberian epic—Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana and Luis de Camões’ Os Lusíadas—center around particular heroes whose trajectories the epics are dedicated to exploring, and who have, in turn, been the subject of extensive exploration in the literature on these poems. But what about all the other heroes—and all the other epics? Many are the Iberian and Iberoamerican epic poems that take the figure of the explorer–discoverer–seafarer and place him at the heart of the work, giving rise to poems dedicated to such figures as Columbus, Cortés and Magellan, to name only the most obvious. Allied to this is an intense preoccupation with issues and themes of discovery, navigation and exploration and with how the heroes respond to classical, medieval and contemporary idea(l)s of heroism, nautical prowess and expeditionary success. These heroes all vie with their literary forebears—and with each other. This session examines such heroic figures in their spaces and places, which raises inevitable, important questions about colonialism, centers and peripheries. How do the heroes situate themselves in—or in relation to—the landscapes they traverse? How should the hero behave when he is ‘abroad’? What happens when the critic de-centers—or re-centers—a hero? How does the epic ‘anti-hero’—the pirates, marauders and other countercultural figures—fit within this framework? How are their activities to be construed? Do they destabilize or reinforce, those of the principal epic heroes? From an examination of these and other questions, we hope to develop a better understanding of the role of the hero at the heart of the early modern Iberoamerican epics of exploration and discovery.

Papers will be read in English or Spanish. Please send an abstract of 250 words and a brief, standard format CV to Elizabeth Davis (davis.823@osu.edu) and Maya Feile Tomes (mcf37@cam.ac.uk). Graduate students submitting an abstract should indicate the title of their dissertation, if available. Proposals must be received by May 25, 2015.