2016 American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Meeting
Minneapolis, Minnesota
28 April-1 May, 2016

The American Association for the History of Medicine (AAHM) invites abstracts for papers in any area of medical history for its 89th annual meeting, to be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, 28 April to 1 May 2016. The AAHM welcomes papers on the history of health and healing; the history of medical ideas, practices, and institutions; and the history of illness, disease, or public health. Submissions pertaining to all eras and regions of the world are welcome. Papers and panels that expand the horizons of medical history and engage related fields are particularly encouraged.

In addition to single-paper proposals, the Program Committee, led by Co-Chairs Sarah Tracy <swtracy@ou.edu> and Scott Podolsky <scott_podolsky@hms.harvard.edu >, encourages proposals for creatively structured panels and for luncheon workshops. Please contact one or both of the Program Committee Co-chairs if you are planning a panel or workshop. The Program Committee will judge individual papers in each of these venues on their own merits.

Presentations are limited to no more than 20 minutes. Papers must represent original work not already published or in press. Speakers are encouraged to make their manuscripts available to the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, the official journal of the AAHM.

This year, for the first time, the Program Committee also invites a limited number of poster presentations. Poster proposals likewise will be considered individually.

The AAHM uses an online abstract submissions system, accessible through the organization website at: http://www.histmed.org/cfp2016. Guidelines for writing a successful abstract may also be found through this link. Abstracts must be submitted by 28 September 2015.

Making Early Middle English Conference
University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
23-25 September, 2016

Past scholarly evaluations of the Early Middle English period (roughly ca. 1100-1350) have not been positive. In the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (1999), Thomas Hahn summarized the history of scholarship as a struggle with “one of the dullest and least accessible intervals in standard literary history, an incoherent, intractable, impenetrable dark age scarcely redeemed by a handful of highlights.” J.A. Bennett and G.V. Smithers found little to challenge “the traditional view that the reigns of William [the Conqueror] and his sons mark an hiatus in our literature” (Early Middle English Verse and Prose, 1968). Even when scholars depart from these paradigms, there is a tendency, as Christopher Cannon has observed, to view Early Middle English in terms of “profound isolation from immediate vernacular models and examples, from any local precedent for the business of writing English” (The Grounds of English Literature, 2004). For Hahn, the period has a reputation for “aridity and remoteness,” and for Cannon, the consequence is “literary history’s general sense that there is nothing there.” A reassessment remains necessary, especially to de-isolate English texts and genres of this period and (re)place them in their wider textual, linguistic, and cultural contexts. The Early Middle English period was in fact a time of intense change, experimentation, and production. Early Middle English literature juggles regional specificities, genres in process, and multilingual and multicultural interactions with verve.

This conference will explore Early Middle English, it historical and scholarly “making,” and its contexts. It takes as its topic the widest possible conception of the field: bracketed by the Norman Conquest and the decline of the English populace as a result of the Plague. This period was characterized by its multilingualism and interaction between four main literary languages (Latin, French, English, Welsh), as well as users of Greek, Hebrew, Irish, Old Norse, Arabic, and Dutch. It was a time that witnessed crusaders’ establishment and loss of the Holy Land and the presence of an active Jewish community in England (before their expulsion in 1290). The literary climate was rich in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural dialogue. New scholarship is revealing a diverse, and intellectually and aesthetically experimental, textual and literary landscape, and digital humanists and editors are presently working to meet the special challenges of access that have always existed for the period.

The organizers welcome papers that engage how Early Middle English as a field, as manuscripts, as texts, and as a multilingual phenomenon has been shaped and made, handled and mishandled. We are interested in talks that consider the historical, global, and multilingual situation of English literature and English manuscript production between 1100-1350, and we encourage ideas of Early Middle English as a network of experimental clusters. We are also interested in how the period has been fashioned in its post-medieval histories, from sixteenth-century antiquarian descriptions, to twentieth-century scholarly views of its “aridity and remoteness” (to quote Thomas Hahn in the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature), to its current new “making” in digital archives. Scholars from a range of disciplines, working on a range of genres and languages related to the production of English literature and “Englishness” in the period 1100-1350, should feel free to submit proposals for sessions or papers.

Topics to consider include but are not limited to:

• the multicultural and international contexts of Early Middle English
• the multilingual contexts of Early Middle English (including Englishes, Latin, French/Anglo-Norman, Hebrew, Welsh, etc.)
• the history of the field and boundary problems (e.g., between Old English and Early Middle English, between England and France, between disciplines, etc.)
• manuscript studies
• access to and creation of resources (digital resources, editions)
• pedagogical challenges around Early Middle English
• concepts of nativeness in Early Middle English and related literature
• the role of women and gender in Early Middle English (as a field or a corpus)

The conference will take place at the University of Victoria, located on southern Vancouver Island in beautiful British Columbia, Canada. University of Victoria boasts world-class Digital Humanities programs, a thriving undergraduate major and honours program in Medieval Studies, and a fine teaching collection of medieval manuscripts and documents. The conference will include presentation of Special Collections materials, workshops on the challenges of creating digital resources for Early Middle English, a presentation by the directors of the NEH-funded Archive of Early Middle English project, and keynote addresses by scholars working on the multilingual situation of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. Dependent on grant funding, some subsidies may become available for those who would otherwise find it difficult to attend.

Please email proposals, as well as queries or expressions of interest, to both organizers by 15 December 2015: Adrienne Boyarin (aboyarin@uvic.ca) and Dorothy Kim (dokim@vassar.edu). Abstracts for 20-minute papers should be no longer than 300 words; session proposals (a session description/rationale and a list of proposed speakers who have confirmed their willingness to attend) should be no longer than 500 words; expressions of interest, queries, and ideas for non-traditional formats are also welcome. Please include your name, research area, and affiliation (if applicable) in all correspondence.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100 – 1800 presents:

CHE Research Cluster on Religion and Emotion
Religious Materiality and Emotion
Hosted by the Centre for the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide, at the Majestic Roof Garden Hotel, Adelaide City.
17-18 February 2016 [commencing with a public lecture on 16 February]

Symposium organisers: Julie Hotchin and Claire Walker

Materiality plays a vital role in cultivating, shaping and directing religious emotions. Pilgrimage and public ritual, private devotional practices, the use of space and settings in which religious activities take place, and bodily posture and movement all arouse, shape and direct religious feelings. The recent critical interest in the role of material culture in religion has been paralleled by the attention in emotions studies to the exploration of affective relationships between beings and things, and the role of the material in eliciting emotional responses. Yet the interplay between materiality and emotions in religion has received less attention, especially within an historical context. This symposium will integrate these strands of research by exploring the ways in which the material – such as objects, space, the body and sensory perception – stimulated, shaped and informed the emotional dimensions of religion.

We invite abstracts for papers (20 minutes in length) that address the relationship between religion, materiality and emotion within a European context between 1200 and the present day. Papers that address the symposium theme from non-Christian traditions would be particularly welcome. Within the broader conference theme potential and welcome areas of inquiry may be, but are not limited to:

• how religious imagery conveyed emotional messages and desired emotional dispositions
• how objects, embodied practices and space were used to convey, amplify, transmit or diminish emotions within religious settings
• the role of the material in generating religious identities and emotional communities
• the dynamics between the material and emotions in encounters between adherents to different religions, religious conflicts or conversion
• exploring relationships between particular objects or practices, and individual and collective religious emotions
• how assumptions of gender inform interactions with religious objects and shape devotional practices and the emotions they arouse
• the interplay between the material and emotions in power relations
• the appropriation of religious imagery or objects by political regimes to mobilise and direct specific emotions
• the role of the senses of cultivating religious feelings. Which senses were privileged and which diminished, and how did this affect the nature of emotional experience?
• the emotions associated with the rejection of the material through renunciation or asceticism.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, and a short biography, should be emailed to both Julie Hotchin, julie.hotchin@anu.edu.au, and Claire Walker, claire.i.walker@adelaide.edu.au by the deadline of the 31 October, 2015. Questions or queries can also be addressed to the above.

Important dates:

• Call for Papers: 31 October 2015
• Notification of Acceptance: 15 November 2015

The symposium will start on the eve of Tuesday 16 February with a Public Lecture, and will run on Wednesday 17 and Thursday 18 February 2016.

Cost information:
A registration fee of A$100 will include a conference pack, lunch, and morning and afternoon tea on 17 and 18 February. Postgraduate students will receive a discounted rate. There will also be a symposium dinner on 17 February. Details of the venue and cost of the dinner will be provided closer to the event.

Memory Day 2015: Memory and Skill Across Time
University of Otago (Margaret Bartley Theatre, Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand)
6-9 December 2015

Memory Day is an annual interdisciplinary showcase of research and scholarship on memory, sponsored by the Department of Cognitive Science and the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders. This year for the first time the University of Otago will be hosting the colloquium, which will be sponsored by The Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund.

This year’s exciting program focuses on memory and skill across time, conceived of as historical time; the experience of time in high-pressure, high-stakes events such as sport and performance; and the developmental life course.

Organising committee: Evelyn Tribble (English, Otago); Amanda Barnier (Cognitive Science, Macquarie; Elaine Reese (Psychology, Otago); Kirk Michaelian (Philosophy, Otago)

• Sunday 6 December: Keynote #1 and opening reception
• Monday 7 December – Wednesday 9 December: Further keynotes, panels, and roundtables

Keynote Addresses by:

• Professor of Cognitive Science David Kirsh, University of California, San Diego http://adrenaline.ucsd.edu/kirsh/
• Developmental psychologist, Professor Qi Wang http://www.human.cornell.edu/bio.cfm?netid=qw23
• Historian and Macarthur Fellow Pamela O. Long http://www.pamelaolong.com
• Dr. Chris Button, School of Physical Education, University of Otago http://physed.otago.ac.nz/staff/cbutton.html

And presentations by: PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, early career researchers and other staff, researchers at the University of Otago, members of the Collective Cognition Team at Macquarie as well as collaborators and colleagues from across and beyond Macquarie and Otago and within and across disciplines.

Call for Papers:

Limited space is available for brief papers on any aspect of the topic. Please email an abstract (200 words) along with a very brief biography to Evelyn Tribble (evelyn.tribble@otago.ac.nz) no later than 31 August. Acceptances will be notified on a rolling basis, so please submit your proposal as soon as possible.