Monthly Archives: October 2015

ANZAMEMS Member News: Charlotte Rose Millar, Thoughts on the 10th ANZAMEMS Conference @ UQ, July 2015

Charlotte Rose Millar, Early Career Researcher, The University of Melbourne

I always look forward to ANZAMEMS. This year’s Brisbane offering provided the same wonderful mix of amazing papers, friendly people and intellectual debate that I have come to associate with any ANZAMEMS conference. Thanks to the generous support of the ANZAMEMS committee, I was able to attend the conference for the full five days. As much as I was looking forward to the conference, I did not expect to experience the profound sense of belonging and purpose that I came away with. Perhaps I should provide some context. Almost a year ago, I submitted my PhD and I graduated in March this year. With the exception of RSA in March this year, which I attended in somewhat of a post-PhD haze, ANZAMEMS was the first conference I attended as an early career researcher. As many reading will know, this post-PhD period is a difficult time, financially, emotionally and academically. Like many recent graduates, I experienced a strange sense of loss after submitting my thesis and found it difficult to focus on the next project. ANZAMEMS reinvigorated me. Although I already had an idea of what direction I wanted my research to take, talking to ANZAMEMS delegates allowed me to shape my ideas into a much fuller form. It reminded me of my love of academia and academic research and gave me the energy and focus I needed to get working on my book proposal. In the two months since ANZAMEMS I have regained my sense of focus, my engagement with my sources, and my drive to pursue my research and am now completely re-immersed in academic life.

This would not have happened at any conference. ANZAMEMS reminds us of the wonderful scholarly community that we have in Australia. Although small, it is this smallness that makes it so valuable. ANZAMEMS delegates were intellectually rigorous, always encouraging, constructively critical, and, perhaps most importantly, genuinely interested in advancing the careers and research of early career researchers. This was particularly notable in Brisbane with the launch of the Maddern-Crawford Network for advancing female academics, a development that was met with overwhelming support. This network formalises what many ANZAMEMS members already do and could only have come out of a scholarly community that is genuinely committed to helping each other. I would like to thank the ANZAMEMS conference committee for their fantastic work in bringing the conference together and to all the delegates who made it such a wonderful experience. Here’s to another fabulous event in Wellington 2017.

ANZAMEMS PATS 2015: Medieval and Early Modern Digital Humanities

Medieval and Early Modern Digital Humanities: Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar | University of Canterbury

Date: Wednesday 18 November, 2015
Time: 9am–5pm
Venue: The Undercroft, University of Canterbury
More information: Dr. Francis Yapp

Does your research involve digital methodologies? Or are you interested in learning how digital tools can help us answer new and existing questions in Medieval and Early Modern Studies?
This Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar (PATS) at the University of Canterbury will bring students together with established scholars to discuss digital research in Medieval and Early Modern Studies.

The PATS will consist of two keynote presentations, an interactive session, and a panel discussion. The two keynotes will focus on using digitised sources in researching the medieval and early modern periods, and on the key issues and digital archival work on the digital English Broadside Ballad Archive respectively. The panel discussion will focus on digital humanities project management, and students will have the opportunity to discuss their own research and gain hands-on experience of digital tools in the interactive session.

Cost
There is no cost for postgraduate students attending this PATS. However, places are limited to ensure the day is focused. Lunch and refreshments will be provided; please advise of any dietary requirements when applying.

Travel Grants
Travel grants are available for students from outside the Christchurch area. Ten travel grants are available for New Zealand students, and two grants are available for Australian students. If you are intending to apply for a travel grant, please submit an application form plus a short academic reference before 26 October 2015. Applicants will hear back shortly after 26 October.

Application forms for the PATS at the University of Canterbury can be downloaded HERE.

CANCELLED EVENT: Professor Michael Schoenfeldt, Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (UWA Node) Free Public Lecture

Unfortunately Professor Michael Schoenfeldt has had to cancel his trip to Australia at short notice.  Regretfully therefore the following  event has been cancelled.  Apologies for any inconvenience.

CHE Public Lecture with:

Professor Michael Schoenfeldt (John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan)

Date: Wednesday 21 October, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre, Geography and Geology Building, The University of Western Australia

Professor Michael Schoenfeldt, Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (UWA Node) Free Public Lecture

EDIT: Unfortunately Professor Michael Schoenfeldt has had to cancel his trip to Australia at short notice.  Regretfully therefore the following event has been cancelled.  Apologies for any inconvenience.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions UWA node, Free Public Lecture:

“Places of Pleasure and Pain: Environment and Embodiment in Spenser and Milton”, Professor Michael Schoenfeldt (John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan)

Date: Wednesday 21 October, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre, Geography and Geology Building, The University of Western Australia

While we in the twenty-first century rightly worry about the ways humans contaminate their environment, early modern writers were far more concerned about how the environment contaminates human. Renaissance medicine and ethics conspired to produce a porous sense of self, always in danger of pernicious environmental influences. I would like in this session to explore the ways that England’s two greatest epic poets, Edmund Spenser and John Milton, investigate the relationship between environment and embodiment. Lacking a full vocabulary of inner pleasure, both Spenser and Milton keep projecting pleasure outward into space, into gardens of illicit temptation or divinely sanctioned gratification. Milton learns from Spenser the ability to create landscapes that put immense ethical pressure on his subjects For Milton, though, pleasure has a different ethical valence; his Garden of Eden is a Bower of licit bliss. The Fall of humanity, moreover, entails the primal act of environmental contamination, as the effects of human sinfulness are felt throughout creation. For Milton, finally, Hell is less a physical place than a state of internal agony, and so cannot be escaped. But Paradise becomes as well an internal state, which ameliorates the agony of our exile from the original garden of fulsome pleasure.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010); and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context for Cambridge, writing a book for Blackwell’s entitled Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry, and researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Crusading Masculinities: International Workshop – Call For Papers

Crusading Masculinities: International Workshop
University of Zürich, Switzerland
30 March – 1 April 2016

Conference Organisers: Matthew Mesley (University of Zürich), Natasha Hodgson (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Katherine J. Lewis (University of Huddersfield, UK). The workshop has been generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge support for postgraduate attendance provided by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East.

In the last decade significant research on the role and representation of women in the crusades has been produced, yet the rich varieties of ideas about medieval manhood prevalent throughout crusade sources remain largely untapped. Gendered comparisons were often used to draw distinctions between the men who took the cross and their enemies, and authors of crusade narratives regularly commented on the manliness of different individuals and groups during crusade expeditions. Masculinity was also a feature of preaching: gendered language was central to the communication of the crusade message and to its enduring popularity. Medieval men existed in a hierarchical world, but even during the short time at which crusading was at its height, social constructs such as masculinity were subject to change. Crusaders were not just a hybrid of secular and ecclesiastical ideals: they represented a spectrum of masculinities from a cross-section of medieval society: rich and poor, laymen and clergy, traders and settlers, fighters and pilgrims. They encountered and reflected on the masculine ideals of different religions, sects and cultures: Christian, Jewish and Muslim. The development of military orders in the early to mid-twelfth century represented another significant shift in elite male identity. The enormous popularity of crusading and the military orders is a testament to their central place in the developing debate over ideal manhood in medieval society.
This workshop’s aim is to bring together scholars from the fields of gender history and crusader studies, in order to examine and highlight the variety of masculinities which were represented in the context of the crusades.

Confirmed speakers include: Anthony Bale (Birbeck, University of London); Niall Christie (Langara College, Vancouver); Paul M. Cobb (University of Pennsylvania); Susan Edgington (Queen Mary University, London); Yvonne Friedman (Bar-llan University, Ramat-Gan); Natasha Hodgson (Nottingham Trent University); Linda G. Jones (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona); Ruth Mazo Karras (University of Minnesota); Katherine J. Lewis (University of Huddersfield); Christoph Maier (University of Zürich); Matthew M. Mesley (University of Zürich); Alan V. Murray (University of Leeds); Helen Nicholson (Cardiff University); Dion C. Smythe (Queen’s University Belfast).

We would like to invite offers of twenty-minute papers relating to the crusades on the following themes:

  • Competing masculinities/men and social status
  • Masculinities and public display/rituals
  • Clerical and/or lay masculinities
  • Gender and Late Medieval Crusading Ideals
  • Masculinities and violence/non-violence
  • Masculinities and the family
  • Female masculinities
  • Women as audience/women in relation to masculinities
  • Representations of masculinities in art/material culture/music
  • Individual exemplars of masculinities and leadership roles
  • Military Orders and masculinities
  • Crusading Memory and Masculinities
  • Cross-cultural encounters: gendering the ‘enemy’
  • Muslim and Byzantine perspectives
  • Spanish and Eastern-European perspectives
  • Crusading Medievalism and Masculinity

Papers can be in relation to any historical forum where crusading formed a relevant ideological component, and we also welcome papers from scholars who explore non-textual sources. We are happy to accept submissions over a broad chronological timescale, in relation to crusading activity or representation across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East – from a range of disciplinary perspectives. We are particularly keen to encourage postgraduates to offer papers and hope to be able to provide postgraduate speakers with financial support towards travel costs, accommodation, and registration. There is space for up to thirty participants.

If interested please send an abstract of not more than 300 words to matthew.mesley@uzh.ch, by November 15, 2015.

Questions and queries about the conference programme or the call for papers can also be directed to the email above.

Professor Peter Robinson, University of Sydney Special Seminar

“Is Digital Editing really Editing? The Canterbury Tales Project and other adventures” Professor Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room N397, John Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Registration: For further information please contact mark.byron@sydney.edu.au

Please join us for a discussion by Peter Robinson, centred on a demonstration of the new system for collaborative online editing: textual communities (http://textualcommunities.usask.ca/). This project, developed out of the University of Saskatchewan, establishes a new model of partnership between scholars and readers everywhere in exploring texts. Increasingly, the base materials for research into texts are available on the internet: especially, as images of manuscripts, books and other documents. The huge volume of material now available, even for just one work (such as the 84 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales) requires many people to research them to identify the documents, to make copies of them, to annotate them, to make transcripts of them, to compare and analyze them. This project provides an infrastructure and tools to allow anyone, anywhere interested in a text to contribute to its study, as part of a community working together.

Peter draws on decades of experience in developing digital tools for scholarly editing and has produced a number of landmark digital scholarly editions, including the Canterbury Tales Project.

Peter Robinson is Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed several computer-based tools for the preparation and publication of scholarly editions, and is active in the development of standards for digital resources. He has published and lectured on matters relating to computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, and electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. As well as his own editions of Old Norse and Middle English texts, he has collaborated with other scholars on the publication of editions of collections of historical documents, Armenian texts, the Greek New Testament and Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia. His current major interest is in the creation of online “textual communities.”

Dr Corioli Souter, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Free Public Lecture

“Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties”, Dr Corioli Souter (Adjunct Lecturer in Archaeology, UWA, and Curator, Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum)

Date: 4 November, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Theatre Auditorium, University Club, University of Western Australia
Register: Free, but RSVP essential. For full information and to register, please visit: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/bennett

Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties is an Australia Research Council (ARC) funded project that is making a significant contribution to our understanding of Europeans active in the Indian Ocean and our region during the 17th and 18th centuries through the unique window into the past provided by these maritime archaeological sites. The project is led by UWA’s Associate Professor of Archaeology Alistair Paterson in partnership with researchers from the Western Australia Museum and other national and international partners.

The project builds on the early work by the Western Australian Museum which pioneered underwater archaeological excavations centred on shipwrecked Dutch United East India (Vereenigde Oostindishe Compagnie or VOC) vessels that passed through the Indian Ocean.

This early work set the international benchmark for excavation and management of post-medieval and early modern wreck sites. These historic events placed Australia at the forefront of maritime archaeology globally, and led to Western Australia enacting the world’s first underwater heritage legislation, followed by the Commonwealth, in 1976. Forty years on, the shipwrecks, associated terrestrial sites and artefact collections continue to be examined using new methodologies and technologies.

This lecture is an overview of the archaeological discoveries with a special focus on the 2015 excavations of the Batavia related sites.

Corioli Souter’s current research interests include remote sensing survey techniques for the discovery and mapping of shipwreck and terrestrial sites and the archaeology of contact between Aboriginal Australians and visitors along the Western seaboard. She has also established collaborations with terrestrial archaeologists for the investigation of shipwreck survivor camps and other maritime terrestrial sites such as those found in the Abrolhos, the Dampier Archipelago, as well as the South west and Kimberley coasts. Over the last few years, Corioli has developed and provided content for exhibition projects including Immerse: Exploring the Deep (2011), Lustre: Pearling & Australia (2015) and Indian Ocean Stories (2016), a collaboration with the British Museum.

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner, Massey University (Wellington Campus) Free Public Lecture

“Do the arts and the humanities still have a place in the contemporary university system, and do they still matter?” Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner (University of Queensland)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 5:30-6:30pm
Venue: The Pit, Te Ara Hihiko, Massey University (Wellington Campus), Entrance E, Tasman St, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Contact: Elspeth Tilley
Register: Free public event, all welcome. More info here.

As universities the world over corporatise and commercialise, and as the university increasingly defines itself as a location for training, on the one hand, and scientific research, on the other, the connection between the university and a liberal education is starting to attenuate. A key location where the pressure of such an evolution is being felt is in the disciplines within the humanities and creative arts sector.

Join Professor Graeme Turner as he draws upon a major study of the condition of the humanities, arts and social sciences in Australia, and addresses the placement of these disciplines in a context where the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are sucking up most of the oxygen.

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner is the founding Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (2000-2012), and one of the leading figures in cultural and media studies in Australia and internationally. His research has covered a wide range of forms and media – literature, film, television, radio, new media, journalism, and popular culture. He has published 23 books with national and international academic presses; the most recent is (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (Routledge, 2013). A past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2004-2007), an ARC Federation Fellow (2006-2011) and Convenor of the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network (2006-2010), he has had considerable engagement with federal research and higher education policy. He is only the second humanities scholar to serve on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. In collaboration with Dr Kylie Brass, Professor Turner is the author of a major research monograph prepared for the Department of Industry and the Academies of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia (2014), and he has been appointed as the chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel for ERA 2015. His current research projects include an ARC funded international comparative study of the social function of television in the post-broadcast digital environment in collaboration with Dr Anna Cristina Pertierra, a collection of essays on Asian television histories, co-edited with Dr Jinna Tay, to be published by Routledge in 2015, and the completion of his book, Reinventing the Media, also to be published by Routledge in 2015. In 2015 he will be the Bonnier Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Stockholm University.

ANZAMEMS Member News: Chantelle Saville, Thoughts on the 10th ANZAMEMS Conference @ UQ, July 2015

Chantelle Saville, Doctoral Candidate, University of Auckland

ANZAMEMS Report 2015 – Reflections on an inspiring week.

When you find your flight home preoccupied by a swarm of ‘highly important ideas’ that you really must jot down on paper, you know for sure that you have attended a splendid conference. That is exactly what the experience of the ANZAMEMS Conference 2015 was like for me.

There was a real global atmosphere to the conference this year, with presenters attending from Scotland, Russia, Israel and the South Pacific. The theme of the first Round Table session was, in fact, ‘The Global Medieval’, discussing the prospects for future research aimed at bridging the gaps between continents and outlooks during the medieval and Early Modern period. With a number of conference panel presentations focused outside of Medieval Europe – such as “Japanese Political Thought in the 17th and 18th Centuries” – I would say that we are already on our way to achieving some great research with a ‘global’ perspective.

It was a pleasure to finally meet Samuel Baudinette (Monash University), and Prof. Yossef Shwartz (Tel Aviv University), both of whom spoke on the same panel as myself. Academics with an intellectual commitment to medieval philosophy and Dominican theology are few and far between in the South Pacific, so the opportunity to engage with a network of scholars outside the University of Auckland who share an interest in this area was greatly welcomed. I found that the discussion during and after, my panel session was very insightful, especially the challenging questions put to me following my presentation. Further, I found that listening to and observing how others presented their papers got me thinking hard about how I might present my own research more effectively, giving me models for future conference presentations.

Other papers that caught my interest included Prof. Andrew Lynch’s presentation “Reading ‘Violence’ in Later Medieval Narrative”, in which he interrogated the meaning of ‘violence’ as a medieval concept, arguing that ‘violence’ was understood more as an ’emotional force’ than a ‘physical force’. I also enjoyed Dr Diana Jefferies paper “Making Meaning of Mental Illness”, which presented a brilliant interdisciplinary approach to making meaning of mental illness in The Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint. Drawing upon her skills and expertise in the field of contemporary nursing, she emphasised the need to try to understand how the authors of the Middle English texts conceptualised and thought about the conditions they were suffering, rather than giving them a ‘post-diagnosis in hindsight’. Especially interesting was Diana’s descriptions of the kind of ‘care’ Margery and Thomas received, and the kind of ‘care’ that an individual suffering from mental illness might expect to receive today.

It is worth noting that I am a doctoral candidate in the late stages of thesis completion, so my decision to attend the ANZAMEMS conference this year was not automatic and I was not completely at ease in my environment due to the constant anxiety of finishing my work. However, the members of the ANZAMEMS community whom I talked with during lunch and tea breaks were entirely supportive and empathetic towards my position, offering advice on how to cope and manage the pressure of completing a large research project. This, I feel, is one of the very valuable aspects of the ANZAMEMS organization. As the generational spectrum of members stretches from MPhils to senior research academics, there is great opportunity for those with advanced experience to offer their personal insights to the members of the community on the first rungs of the academic ladder.

On behalf of the graduates who received travel bursaries this year I would like to thank those who enabled us to attend the conference. It was a truly rich and productive collaborative experience.

Uni of Otago: Marsden-funded MA Early Modern Theatre and Skill – Call For Applications

Applications are now being accepted for a Marsden-funded MA scholarship on the topic of Early Modern Theatre and Skill. Candidates will write a thesis under the supervision of Professor Evelyn Tribble at the University of Otago. Scholarships are for one year, include full fees for domestic students (New Zealand and Australian) and carry a stipend of NZ$13,000.

Interested students should write to Professor Tribble: evelyn.tribble@otago.ac.nz with a brief introduction and a possible topic.

See more about Professor Tribble’s research on her staff webpage and on her academia.edu webpage.

Further information about the Otago Research Master’s is available on the University’s Research Master’s webpage and the Department of English & Linguistics’ postgraduate pages.