Monthly Archives: November 2015

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Study Day: The Heart – Call For Papers

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Study Day: ‘The Heart’

Date: 11 March, 2016
Venue: The University of Melbourne
Contact: Convenors Katie Barclay (katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au) or Bronwyn Reddan (b.reddan@student.unimelb.edu.au)

The significance of the heart across time in Western culture is hard to underestimate. It is a beating heart that haunts Edgar Allan Poe’s murderous narrator; his guilt embodied as another’s heart. The relationship between conscience and the heart is encapsulated in the expression ‘black-hearted’ – disposed to evil; a metaphor that the contemporary author, Frank Peretti, captured in his horror fiction, where sin manifested as an oozing wound over the heart. Similarly, early modern Christians often imagined religious conversion as a change of heart, the physical embodiment of spiritual transformation. Here the heart was a space of conscience, cognition, morality; for others, it was closely tied to constructions of self. The practice of ‘heart burial’ across medieval and early modern world operated in part due to the association of the heart with the soul; the heart became a key organ that signified the person and enabled it to stand in place of them.

St Teresa of Avila’s heart became a reliquary, perhaps in part due to her famous and agonising visions of being stabbed in the heart, only to be left with an overwhelming love of God; whilst four hundred years later, the French Republican Leon Gambetta’s heart was used as a secular reliquary that encouraged patriotism amongst his followers. Here the heart signified the qualities of the deceased that enabled it to inspire devotion amongst worshippers.

Perhaps most famously, the heart has been associated with emotion. ‘Sweetheart’, ‘Dearhart’ were the most popular affectionate nicknames amongst seventeenth-century Scottish lovers, and hearts remain a key symbol of romantic love, found on Valentine Day’s cards and in numerous songs. Christ should be loved with your ‘whole heart’, the gospel of Mark reminds readers. Conversely, sorrow is often signified as an attack on the heart. The Virgin Mary, in the Marian play The Betrayal, felt her ‘hert hard as ston’ on hearing of Christ’s death. Richard the Lionheart reminds us that hearts were associated with courage, whilst Snow White’s evil stepmother had an ‘envious heart’ that led her to seek the murder of her stepdaughter. The heart then is a site of emotional experience, of conscience, character, self and soul – a physical organ that does considerable symbolic work, and an organ that in turn has been understood through metaphor, with heart disease and broken-heartedness, as illnesses, closely tied to emotional wellbeing and health.

This CHE study day seeks presentations that explore ‘The heart’ across time and place. Our aim is to facilitate an interdisciplinary conversation about the association between the heart and emotion. Papers might consider, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • how the heart is represented in art and culture;
  • how ideas of the heart effect experience and feeling;
  • the heart as a site of feeling, cognition, and being, and how such dimensions interact;
  • the relationship between the heart as a physical organ and its metaphorical dimensions;
  • the heart in interaction with other organs (the liver, the brain);
  • the religious or spiritual heart; the loving heart; or the heart as soul.

Presenters will be asked to give a short paper of 10-15 minutes, and then lead a discussion based on pre-circulated material such as the texts, images, or other media that their presentation draws on. It is intended that the papers presented at this study day will be published as a special edition of a journal.

Abstracts of no more than 200 words, and a short bio, should be emailed to both Katie Barclay, (katie.barclay@adelaide.edu.au) and Bronwyn Reddan (b.reddan@student.unimelb.edu.au) by 30 November, 2015. Questions or queries can also be addressed to the above.

Lancaster University: Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature – Call For Applications

Lancaster University – English and Creative Writing
Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature

Location: Lancaster
Salary: £33,242 to £45,954 pay award pending
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Permanent
Job Ref: A1392

The Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster is a world-class department currently ranked 11th in the UK, with 40% of our research rated as 4* in REF 2014. We seek to appoint a full time permanent Lecturer in English Literature with a specialism in Medieval/Early Modern and an ability to teach in both periods. You will be able to demonstrate excellent teaching abilities at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, be willing to give lectures, design specialist courses and have the potential to supervise postgraduate students. You should have a strong research profile with the potential for publication in top journals and the making of successful grant applications. Your research should also be able to contribute to larger impact within society and culture. We welcome applicants from a range of backgrounds.

Informal enquiries may be made to Sally Bushell, Head of Department: s.bushell@lancs.ac.uk

For further information and to apply, please visit: http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AMF455/lecturer-in-medieval-and-early-modern-literature

Applications close: 20 November, 2015.

Witchcraft and Emotions: Media and Cultural Meanings – Draft Programme Online, Registration Now Open

Witchcraft and Emotions: Media and Cultural Meanings
Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, Carlton, The University of Melbourne
25-27 November, 2015

Registration now open: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/witchcraft-and-emotions/

Download the draft programme HERE.

Witchcraft is an intensely emotional crime. The crime of witchcraft fundamentally concerns the impact of emotional states on physical ones. Anger, envy or hate of one person towards another could manifest itself in a variety of physical ailments and even death. In early modern Europe, women’s passions and lusts were sometimes said to make them more prone to witchcraft than their male counterparts. It was not just the witch who was intensely emotional: the Devil could also play the role of jealous lover or violent master. So too the families, relations, friends, and sometimes the community as a whole, would be drawn into the complex web of emotional claim and counter claim from which developed accusations and condemnations of witchcraft.

Yet despite the path-breaking work of Lyndal Roper and Diane Purkiss on the emotional self-representation and imagination of accused witches and their accusers, an emotional history of witchcraft remains relatively unexplored. This conference seeks to bring together scholars from a number of different fields, including history, art history and anthropology, to probe further into the relationship between witchcraft and emotions through an inter-disciplinary perspective.

Confirmed speakers include: Victoria Burbank (Anthropology, University of Western Australia), Johannes Dillinger (History, Oxford Brookes), Iris Gareis (Anthropology, Goethe University Frankfurt), Malcolm Gaskill (History, University of East Anglia), Eliza Kent (University of New England), Isak Niehaus (Anthropology, Brunel University), Abaigéal Warfield, (History, University of Adelaide), Jan Machielsen (History, University of Oxford), Patricia Simons (Art History, University of Michigan), Julian Goodare (History, University of Edinburgh), Sarah Ferber (Anthropology, La Trobe University), Deborah Van Heekeren (Anthropology, Macquarie University), Charlotte-Rose Millar (History, University of Melbourne), Laura Kounine (History, Max Planck Institute Berlin), Jacqueline van Gent (History, University of Western Australia), Charles Zika (History, University of Melbourne) and Sarah Ferber (History, University of Wollongong).

The symposium will run from Wednesday 25th – Friday 27th November and will be held at Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, Carlton. The conference dinner at Il Vicolo Carlton will be at 7pm on Wednesday the 25th and there will be a free, public film screening of the 1922 film ‘Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages’ at 7.30pm on Thursday the 26th in the Singapore Theatre (B120), The School of Melbourne Design, the University of Melbourne.

This symposium is the first of two, the second of which will be held in Berlin in June 2016.

Heckman Research Stipends at St. John’s University (MN) – Call For Applications

Heckman Stipends, made possible by the A.A. Heckman Endowed Fund, are awarded semi-annually. Up to 10 stipends in amounts up to $2,000 are available each year. Funds may be applied toward travel to and from Collegeville, housing and meals at Saint John’s University, and costs related to duplication of HMML’s microfilm or digital resources. The Stipend may be supplemented by other sources of funding but may not be held simultaneously with another HMML Stipend or Fellowship. Holders of the Stipend must wait at least two years before applying again.

The program is specifically intended to help scholars who have not yet established themselves professionally and whose research cannot progress satisfactorily without consulting materials to be found in the collections of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library.

Applications:
Applications must be submitted by April 15 for residencies between July and December of the same year, or by November 15 for residencies between January and June of the following year.

Applicants are asked to provide:

  1. a letter of application with current contact information, the title of the project, length of the proposed residency at HMML and its projected dates, and the amount requested (up to $2,000)
  2. a description of the project to be pursued, with an explanation of how HMML’s resources are essential to its successful completion of the project; applicants are advised to be as specific as possible about which resources will be needed (maximum length: 1,000 words)
  3. an updated curriculum vitae
  4. a confidential letter of recommendation to be sent directly to HMML by an advisor, thesis director, mentor, or, in the case of postdoctoral candidates, a colleague who is a good judge of the applicant’s work

Please send all materials as email attachments to: fellowships@hmml.org, with “Heckman Stipend” in the subject line. Questions about the Stipends may be sent to the same address.

Research Associate @ Leverhulme Project: Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity, and the Supernatural, 1300-1900 – Call For Applications

Inner Lives: Emotions, Identity, and the Supernatural, 1300-1900 is a three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project will explore personal and collective identities in western Europe and America, focusing on patterns of continuity and discontinuity over six centuries. The PI Malcom Gaskill (UEA) will work on the period 1500-1700, with CIs Sophie Page (UCL) focusing on 1300-1500 and Owen Davies (University of Hertfordshire) on 1700-1900.

This RA post will work with Dr Sophie Page and be based at UCL. The RA will visit archives and libraries in France, Italy and Germany, finding information that Page will use for her monograph, ‘Cosmology, Magic and Inner Lives’. This will primarily relate to the fields of late medieval cosmology, demonology, magic and medicine. The successful candidate will engage in original research related to the project and publish the results of his/her work through papers at scholarly conferences and in an academic journal.

The Research Associate will be based in London but will travel to Europe to work in archives; and deliver papers at academic conferences both in the UK and abroad.

This post is funded for 18 months in the first instance.

Applications close: 13 November, 2015

For full information, and to apply, please visit: https://atsv7.wcn.co.uk/search_engine/jobs.cgi?SID=amNvZGU9MTUwNTYwMyZ2dF90ZW1wbGF0ZT05NjUmb3duZXI9NTA0MTE3OCZvd25lcnR5cGU9ZmFpciZicmFuZF9pZD0wJmpvYl9yZWZfY29kZT0xNTA1NjAzJnBvc3RpbmdfY29kZT0yMjQmcmVxc2lnPTE0NDY0MjkxMzktNjE3MGNmZDEzM2VjMTJmZjZiNjI3ZjgxNTM1YWI0YmIxYWMxNGE2OA==

Gender Worlds, 500-1800: New Perspectives – Call For Papers

Gender Worlds, 500-1800: New Perspectives
The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies & Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group XXII Annual Conference
The University Club, The University of Western Australia
8 October, 2016

Keynote Speaker: Professor Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee).

Gender is a powerful and flexible analytical tool that has profoundly influenced scholarship over the past few decades. It is widely recognised as a necessary category of analysis; and exciting opportunities to integrate it more fully into scholarly practice continue to emerge. This conference applies gender theories, concepts and methodologies to uncover and explore dynamic, new perspectives on the medieval and early modern. Possible themes include (but are not limited to):

  • Masculinities, femininities, sexualities
  • Ideologies, mentalities, thought worlds
  • Performances and practices
  • Local, global and transnational connections
  • Identities, communities, historical memory
  • Gender and emotions/gendered emotions
  • Textualities, language, rhetoric
  • Spatial and material cultures
  • Feminisms and gender historiography
  • Binaries, crossings, intersections, transgressions

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers exploring any of the above themes. Submissions should include a paper title, a c.250-word abstract, presenter’s name, affiliation (if any), email address, and audio/visual requirements.

Please email submissions to Dr Joanne McEwan at: joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au.

Deadline for proposals: 1 May, 2016.

Frances Muecke, University of Sydney Public Lecture

“Montaigne goes to Rome: a sixteenth-century traveller extraordinaire,” Frances Muecke (Australian Academy of the Humanities; University of Sydney)

Date: 7 November, 2015
When: 2:00pm-3:00pm
Where: Nicholson Museum, The Quadrangle, The University of Sydney
Cost: Free
RSVP: Register online here: http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/montaigne-goes-to-rome-a-sixteenth-century-traveller-extraordinaire

On 22 June 1580 Montaigne, then aged 47, set off from his home, the Chateau de Montaigne, thirty miles east of Bordeaux, on a trip to Rome.

Being Montaigne, the most significant French writer of the 16th century, he kept a compellingly interesting journal of his travels. Never intended for publication, the manuscript lay unnoticed in the Chateau until it was discovered in a chest in 1770.

Despite what he calls the feebleness of his age and health, Montaigne was an indefatigable traveller. He ‘lives as the Romans’ do, always ready to comment on regional differences, inns, beds, food and service. He goes out of his way to see sites, and tries to find interesting locals for conversation.

What then does he make of 16th century Rome? There are too many French people there. The appearance of the streets, and their crowds remind him of Paris. It is not safe to go about the streets by night and one should not keep valuables even in the houses – deposit them in a bank. There is nothing special about the beauty of the women, even though Rome has a reputation for this. The churches in Rome are less beautiful than in most of the good towns of Italy, and in general it may be said that the churches, both in Italy and Germany are less beautiful than in France.

And what of his reaction to the ruins of Rome? Montaigne came to some challenging conclusions: the site contains many Romes destroyed and rebuilt. What could be seen in his day was not the great Rome of antiquity – that was buried far below the surface. He said that, ‘one saw nothing of ancient Rome but the sky under which it had stood and the plan of its site.’

Frances Muecke is an Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an Honorary Associate in the Department of Classics and Ancient History. She is also a long-standing Friend of the Nicholson Museum.

John Carter Brown Library: Fellowship Opportunities, 2016-2017

The John Carter Brown Library (JCB), an independently funded institution for advanced research on the campus of Brown University, will award approximately forty residential fellowships for the year July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017. The Library contains one of the world’s premier collections of primary materials related to the discovery, exploration, and settlement of the New World to 1825, including books, maps, newspapers, and other printed objects. JCB Fellowships are open to scholars and writers working on all aspects of the Americas in the early modern period.

Short-term Fellowships are for two to four months with a monthly stipend of $2,100. Open to US and foreign citizens who are engaged in pre- or post-doctoral or independent research. Graduate students must have passed their preliminary or general examinations at the time of application.

Long-Term Fellowships are for five to ten months with a monthly stipend of $4,200. These include two to four NEH Fellowships, for which an applicant must be a US citizen or have lived in the US for the three years preceding the application deadline, and other long-term JCB awards for which all nationalities are eligible. Graduate students are not eligible for long-term JCB Fellowships.

Recipients of all fellowships must relocate to Providence and be in continuous residence at the JCB for the full term of the award. Rooms are available for rent at Fiering House, the JCB’s Fellows’ residence, a beautifully restored 1869 house just four blocks from the Library.

The deadline for short- and long-term fellowships is December 1, 2015.

For more information – including information about Thematic and Cluster Fellowships – and application instructions, visit www.jcbl.org or e-mail jcb-fellowships@brown.edu.

Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies – Call For Applications

The Robert L. Kindrick–CARA Award for Outstanding Service to Medieval Studies recognizes Medieval Academy members who have provided leadership in developing, organizing, promoting, and sponsoring medieval studies through the extensive administrative work that is so crucial to the health of medieval studies but that often goes unrecognized by the profession at large. This award of $1000 is presented at the Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy.

The annual deadline for nominations is 15 November. Three nominators are required, all of whom should have first-hand knowledge of the nominee’s contributions to Medieval Studies.

For more information, please visit: https://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=Kindrick_CARA_Award.