Monthly Archives: January 2016

Pilgrimage, Shrines and Healing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe – Call For Papers

Pilgrimage, Shrines and Healing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The University of Chester, hosted in collaboration with Plymouth University
24 June, 2016

Plenary Speakers: Anthony Bale (Birkbeck) & Elizabeth Tingle (Plymouth)

Pilgrimage is a spiritual undertaking with a long history. Taken up by Christians as early as the second century, pilgrims journeyed to holy sites to enhance their faith with prayers and also for the expiation of sin in the performance of public penance. The association with early Christian shrines as spaces for healing replaced earlier pagan traditions and, in turn, generated a thriving medieval material culture of pilgrimage inextricably connected to the cult of saints. Pilgrimage has also long been more broadly symbolic of devotional life. Spiritual doubt and temptation, conversion, and the pursuit of salvation have historically been represented using the language and vocabulary of the spiritual journey.

If the Reformation brought this tradition of Christian pilgrimage into question via its attack on indulgences, it nonetheless proved resilient. Recent histories have begun to trace the enduring nature of pilgrimage as a devotional practice in early modern Catholic Europe, as pilgrims continued to flock to shrines to venerate relics and sacred sites, in return for indulgences, healing and spiritual comfort. As a number of scholars have recently observed, the celebration of sacred landscapes through the promotion and veneration of local and regional shrines was particularly characteristic of post-Tridentine Catholicism. For the literate elite, mental pilgrimage was also advocated as a meditative technique to facilitate interior journeys to more distant holy sites.

The aim of this one-day colloquium is to explore continuity and change in material and spiritual pilgrimage across the late medieval and early modern period. We are seeking contributions from scholars whose research speaks to these themes in the pre- and post-Reformation eras.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on themes that might include (but are not restricted to):

  • Pilgrimage: local, regional, international
  • Sacred landscapes and architecture of pilgrimage
  • Pardons and indulgences
  • Shrines and the cult of saints
  • Healing and miracles
  • Relics, paintings, ex-votos and the material culture of pilgrimage
  • Confraternities and collective pilgrimage
  • Pilgrims and their representation
  • Mental pilgrimage and meditation
  • Spiritual journeys

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to Jennifer Hillman at j.hillman@chester.ac.uk by Friday 11 March, 2016.

Early Modern Black Studies: A Critical Anthology – Call For Papers

Seeking submissions for a collection of essays tentatively titled Early Modern Black Studies: A Critical Anthology. Inspired by and modeled after interdisciplinary studies such as Black Queer Studies and Shakesqueer: A Companion to the Works of Shakespeare, this edited volume stages a conversation between two fields—Early Modern Studies and Black Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. This disconnect is the product of current scholarly assumptions about a lack of archival evidence that limits what we can say about those of African descent in earlier historical periods. This proposed volume posits that the limitations are not in the archives but in the methods we have constructed for locating and examining those archives. Our collection, then, seeks to establish productive and provocative conversations about these two seemingly disparate fields. Our goal is to enlist the strategies, methodologies, and insights of Black Studies into the service of Early Modern Studies and vice versa. Ultimately, the overarching scholarly contribution of this critical anthology is to revise current understandings about racial discourse and the cultural contributions of black Africans in early modernity across the globe.

The editors of Early Modern Black Studies seek essays that offer new critical approaches to representations of black Africans and the conceptualization of Blackness in early modern literary works, historical documents, and/or material and visual cultures. We also seek articles that, on the one hand, mobilize corrective interventions to commonly held notions in each of the aforementioned fields and, on the other hand, theorize a synthetic methodology for the Early Modern/Black Studies discursive divide.

Possible paper topics include but are not limited to:

  • Black Studies as method and inquiry
  • The racial contours of early modern studies methods
  • Comparative analysis of Black Studies and Early Modern Studies archives
  • Methodologies of Black Africans and Exploration of the Americas
  • Imperialism and Colonization
  • African slavery across the Sahara and Ocean Studies (Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific)
  • Re-conceptualizations of Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic in the 21st century
  • Black Lives Matter in contemporary and historical contexts
  • Medieval understandings of human difference
  • Representations of Africa as a geopolitical and imaginary space, past and present
  • Gender and Sexuality; Black Feminists Studies and Early Modernity; the figure of the mulatta
  • Queer Studies; the queering of Black Studies and Early Modern Studies
  • Critical Race Studies and Early Modernity; Animal Studies and Biopolitics vis-à-vis representations of Blackness

Please send queries and/or an abstract (250-500 words) to clsmith17@ua.edu, miles.grier@qc.cuny.edu, and nick.jones@bucknell.edu by January 31, 2016. The deadline for 5000-7000 word essays from accepted abstracts will be August 15, 2016.

Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures – Call For Applications

The Governing Body of The Queen’s College invites applications from graduates of any university for election to a three-year post-doctoral position as a Junior Research Fellow in Manuscript and Text Cultures, with a research specialism in knowledge-production and text-transmission in pre-modern literate societies.

Fellowships are intended to support those at an early stage of their academic careers, and will normally be awarded to those who have recently completed their doctoral research, or are very close to completion. Candidates must not have accumulated more than seven years in full-time postgraduate study of research, nor have already held a post-doctoral research fellowship elsewhere.

The basic stipend of the Fellowship, which is pensionable under the Universities Superannuation Scheme, is £22,000 subject to adjustment in the light of any other emoluments enjoyed by the Fellow or in the light of any general alteration to University stipends. The Fellow will be entitled to free rooms in College, or to an allowance of £6,000 in lieu, and to free meals in College.

For full application details, please visit: http://www.queens.ox.ac.uk/about-queens/vacancies.

Applications should be submitted, preferably by e-mail to joyce.millar@queens.ox.ac.uk the Academic Administrator, by noon on Monday 15 February, 2016.

The Making of the Humanities V – Call For Papers

The Making of the Humanities V
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA)
5-7 October, 2016

The Making of Humanities conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, musicology, philology, and media studies, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day. We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilizations.

Please note that the Making of the Humanities conferences are not concerned with the history of art, the history of music or the history of literature, etc., but instead with the history of art history, the history of musicology, the history of literary studies, etc.

Keynote speakers:

  1. Karine Chemla (ERC project SAW, SPHERE, CNRS & U. Paris Diderot): “Writing the history of ancient mathematics in China and beyond in the 19th century: who? for whom?, and how?”
  2. Anthony Grafton (Princeton U.): “Christianity and Philology: Blood Wedding?”; Sarah Kay (New York U.): “Inhuman Humanities and the Artes that Make up Medieval Song”

MoH-V will feature three days of panel and paper sessions, next to three keynote speakers and a closing panel on the Status of the Humanities. A reception will take place on the first day in the magnificent Peabody Library, and a banquet on the second day. An overview of the previous conferences and resulting publications is on the Society’s homepage.

Abstracts of single papers (25 minutes including discussion) should be in Word format and contain the name of the speaker, full contact address (including email address), the title and a summary of the paper of maximally 250 words. Abstracts should be sent (in Word) to historyhumanities@gmail.com. Deadline for abstracts: 30 April, 2016. Notification of acceptance: End of June 2016.

Panels last 1.5 hours and can consist of 3-4 papers including discussion and possibly a commentary. Panel proposals should be in Word format and contain respectively the name of the chair, the names of the speakers and commentator, full contact addresses (including email addresses), the title of the panel, a short (150 words) description of the panel’s content and for each paper an abstract of maximally 250 words. Panel proposals should be sent (in Word) to historyhumanities@gmail.com. Deadline for panel proposals: 30 April, 2016. Notification of acceptance: End of June 2016.

For full information about the conference, please visit: http://www.historyofhumanities.org/2015/10/29/call-for-papers-and-panels-the-making-of-humanities-v.

Girton College, Cambridge: Research Fellowship in the Arts – Call For Applications

Girton College, Cambridge: Research Fellowship in the Arts

Applications are invited for a Research Fellowship for the academic year 2016-2017 and tenable for three years. This year’s competition is in archaeology, classics, history, and biological and social anthropology. The Fellowship is open to graduates of any university and of any age, but it is intended to support those at an early stage of their academic career. Candidates will have normally completed their doctoral thesis prior to and no more than five years before the start of the Fellowship (excluding career breaks).

Potential applicants should note that the standard needed to progress to the later stages of the competition is extremely high. The competition involves the assessment of candidates’ submitted work and an interview.

Candidates will be asked to provide a 600-word summary of current and future research. Long-listed candidates will be invited to submit two pieces of written work, each of no more than 10,000 words, accompanied by a short note explaining how each fits in to their overall research programme. Candidates travelling overseas should note that, should they be invited to interview, the College cannot pay for international travel. We shall, however, cover the costs of travel within the UK and offer overnight accommodation at Girton. Overseas candidates may be interviewed via Skype.

The emoluments of the Fellowship are reviewed annually. The present scale (from 1 August 2015) will rise by two annual increments from £19,083 to £21,391 p.a. for Research Fellows who have not yet completed their PhD and from £20,198 to £22,685 p.a. for post-doctoral Research Fellows. The Fellowship is pensionable under the U.S.S. and emoluments are paid monthly in arrears by bank transfer. The post-holder is required to provide four hours of paid supervision teaching per week during the twenty weeks of the teaching year; in some circumstances, this requirement may be reduced in the first year of Fellowship. Research Fellows may claim research expenses up to a total of £2,500 over the three years.

The closing date for the applications is noon on 29 February, 2016.

Long-listed candidates will be invited to submit work by 21 March, 2016 and interviews for short-listed candidates will be held on 5 May 2016.

Further details of the appointment and the online application process are available from the College website at: www.girton.cam.ac.uk/vacancies/research.

Please note that the College has a responsibility to ensure that all employees are eligible to live and work in the UK.

Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll: A Graduate Workshop with Beinecke MSS 410 and Osborn a14 – Call For Applications

Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll:
A Graduate Workshop with Beinecke MSS 410 and Osborn a14
Yale University
11-12 March, 2016

This graduate training workshop will cover topics in:

  • Medieval Manuscript Rolls: Paleography, Cataloging and Preservation
  • Manuscript Transcription and Scholarly Editing
  • Introduction to the Digital Edition: Challenges and Best Practices
  • Collaborative Editing
  • XML, Text Encoding Fundamentals and the TEI Schema

No prior paleography or encoding experience is required.

Participants will learn the fundamentals of digital editing while tackling the unique codicological challenges posed by manuscript rolls. Practical sessions will inform collective editorial decision-making: participants will undertake the work of transcription and commentary, and tag (according to TEI 5 protocols) the text and images of two medieval manuscript rolls. The workshop will result in collaborative editions of the two rolls.

The workshop will run 11-12 March, 2016 (Friday-Saturday) 9.30am-4.30pm.

The workshop is free of charge, and lunches will be provided for participants. A limited number of need-based travel bursaries are available for participants traveling to New Haven, and it may be possible also to arrange graduate student hosts to provide accommodation for the duration of the workshop.

This workshop will be limited to 12 places – preference will be given to graduate students with demonstrated need for training in manuscript study and text encoding.

An information booklet and syllabus can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxq8XHYjZ_NENDFBZmlFOGlyWTA/view?usp=sharing and on the project website – please read this document before applying.

Please apply online by 26 January, 2016. Applicants will be notified on 1 February, 2016 whether they can be offered a place.

To apply, follow the application link on the project website: http://digitalrollsandfragments.com/calls-for-workshop-participants

For more information, please email organizer Anya Adair at:
digitalmanuscriptrolls@gmail.com

Ain’t Love Grand – Call For Papers

Ain’t Love Grand
Romance Writers’ of Australia & Flinders University
Love and Romance Conference
Stamford Grand Hotel, Adelaide, South Australia
August 18-21, 2016

Flinders University is partnering with the Romance Writers of Australia to deliver two peer-reviewed academic streams at the Romance Writers of Australia national conference in August 2016. One stream will be focussed on Historical Representations of Love; the second will be for Popular Romance Studies. The Love Research Cluster for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Studies are partners for these streams and we aim to bring together a diverse and dynamic community of researchers on love and romance.

Love is central in the personal, social, and political construction of how we understand, organise, categorise, and measure our relationships. For historians, cultural theorists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and literary scholars it is not possible to understand our areas without some understanding of the role of love. For Romance writers, it is the centre of their narratives. This is an increasingly reciprocal relationship. Writers use the work of scholars to give their work immediacy and accuracy, while scholars use popular depictions to explain cultural difference or illustrate cultural paradigms both in their work and their teaching. This conference aims to bring together those who create representations of love, sex, and romance with those who study them through its transdisciplinary academic stream, ‘Historical Representations of Love’ and its popular romance specific stream ‘Popular Romance Studies’.

Keynote Speakers at the conference will be:

  • Professor Catherine Roach (New College, University of Alabama)
  • Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)
  • Dr Danijela Kambaskovic (University of Western Australia)

The call for papers is welcome on but not limited to the following:

  • Affect
  • Representations of women and sexuality
  • Historical representations of love, romance, and lust
  • The history of emotions
  • The philosophy of love, romance, lust
  • Constructions and/or representations of marriage
  • Gender and power dynamics
  • Men and masculinity and love, romance, lust
  • LGBTQI and love, romance, lust
  • Gender fluidity and love, romance, lust
  • The psychology of love, romance, lust
  • History and philosophy of legal perspectives on rape and/or marriage
  • Medievalism and emotion
  • The reception of depictions of love and/or lust in Pre-Modern texts

Deadline for Submission of Papers is Monday 29 February, 2016. Send to: amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au

For further information please contact: Dr Amy Matthews (amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au) and Dr Erin Sebo (erin.sebo@flinders.edu.au)

Adam Matthew Medieval and Early Modern Collections – Free Four-Week Trial

Adam Matthew publishes unique primary source collections from archives around the world The collections span the social sciences and humanities and cover a multitude of topics ranging from Medieval family life and Victorian medicine to 1960s pop culture and global politics.

Free, four-week trials are available on all Adam Matthew collections simply by completing the trial request form. A member of the Adam Matthew team will contact you with confirmation of your trial details on submission of the form.

  1. Select the collection you would like to trial from the select collections list.
  2. Complete your details in the form below, ensuring you have provided your email address.
  3. Click send.

These trials are open to teachers, faculty and librarians of universities, colleges, and academic institutions (private and public).

New Book Series: Perspectives on Emotions History – Call For Proposals

Perspectives on Emotions History encourages proposals for monographs, essay collections, reference works and editions of texts. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary projects are welcome, as are theoretical studies. The focus is primarily European, but includes cross-cultural encounters, influences and legacies.

Editorial Board

  • Robert E. Bjork, Director, ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)
  • Andrew Lynch, Director, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800
  • Joel Gereboff, Arizona State University
  • Peter Holbrook, The University of Queensland
  • Susan Karant-Nunn, The University of Arizona
  • Juanita Ruys, The University of Sydney

Please send any queries or proposals to either of the series General Editors: Andrew Lynch (andrew.lynch@uwa.edu.au); Robert Bjork (robert.bjork@asu.edu).

Perspectives on Emotions History is jointly sponsored by the ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800, and will be published within ACMRS’s “Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies” series.

Historical Memory and the Preservation of the Past in the Early Modern Period – Call For Papers

Historical Memory and the Preservation of the Past in the Early Modern Period
The Pennsylvania State University Committee for Early Modern Studies 2016 Symposium
State College, Pennsylvania, USA
28-29 October, 2016

In August of 2015 a video was anonymously released that showed the fiery demolition of Palmyra’s 2nd-century CE Temple of Baalshamin. This shocking act, which purportedly occurred weeks before the world became aware, was the latest targeted attack on historically significant sites scattered throughout Iraq and Syria. For scholars of the early modern period (and beyond), this scene was sadly familiar. The demolition of Palmyra’s temple was simply the most recent chapter of a tradition that stretches back centuries: intentional destruction as a political or religious statement.

Penn State’s Committee for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) is organizing a symposium, “In the Face of Destruction,” with the aim of inspiring discussion about the historical roots of cultural devastation. We seek papers that take on the themes of destruction and subsequent preservation, writ larger than the iconoclastic acts that immediately come to mind. Defining the early modern period broadly in temporal terms (1300—1800) and geographic expanse, this symposium seeks to unite a number of topics related to destruction and preservation including iconoclasm, collecting practices, censorship, the Inquisition, warfare, extirpation campaigns, disease, historical suppression/erasure, martyrologies, natural disasters, commerce, and their related ethical dimensions. We hope to expand this theme to form a broader conceptual framework that includes “non-western” traditions, frontier regions, and colonial contexts. The natural corollary to destruction and its consequences for peoples and nations – human agency and initiative amid crises – are also of analytical interest.

Keynote and Plenary speakers will include:

  • Dr. Brian Rose (Professor of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania)
  • Dr. Alisha Rankin (Associate Professor of History, Tufts University)
  • Dr. Barbara Mundy (Professor of Art History, Fordham University)

Paper presentations will be no longer than 20 minutes in length. Selected papers will provide a basis for an edited volume that prioritizes inter-disciplinary methodologies. To apply, please email a 200 word abstract (with paper title) and a current CV to FoDSymposium@gmail.com by March 1, 2016 as a single PDF document. Please include a subject heading of “CEMS Symposium Proposal” in the email.