Monthly Archives: June 2016

Sanders Prize in the History of Early Modern Philosophy – Call For Applications

The Sanders Prize in the History of Early Modern Philosophy is administered by Donald Rutherford, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and co-editor of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

The Sanders Prize in the History of Early Modern Philosophy is a biennial essay competition open to scholars who are within fifteen (15) years of receiving a Ph.D. or students who are currently enrolled in a graduate program. Independent scholars may also be eligible, and should direct inquiries to Donald Rutherford, co-editor of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy at drutherford@ucsd.edu.

The award for the prizewinning essay is $10,000. Winning essays will be published in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

Submitted essays must present original research in the history of early modern philosophy, interpreted broadly as the period that begins roughly with Descartes and his contemporaries and ends with Kant. The core of the subject matter is philosophy and its history, though philosophy in this period was much broader than today and included a great deal of what currently belongs to the natural sciences, theology, and politics. Essays should be between 7,500 and 15,000 words. Since winning essays will appear in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, submissions must not be under review elsewhere. To be eligible for this year’s prize, submissions must be received, electronically, by October 1, 2016. Refereeing will be blind; authors should omit remarks and references that might disclose their identities. Receipt of submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail. The winner will be determined by a committee appointed by Donald Rutherford and Daniel Garber, the co-editors of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy and will be announced by the end of November. (The editors reserve the right to extend the deadline, if no essay is chosen.) At the author’s request, the editors will simultaneously consider entries in the prize competition as submissions for publication in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy independently of the prize.

Submissions and inquiries should be directed to Donald Rutherford, co-editor of Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy at drutherford@ucsd.edu.

University of Oxford, Postdoctoral Researcher (2 Positions): Music and Late Medieval Court European Cultures – Call For Applications

University of Oxford – Faculty of Music
Postdoctoral Researcher – Music and Late Medieval Court European Cultures

Location: Oxford
Salary: £30,738 to £33,574 Grade 7 p.a.
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary

The Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, proposes to appoint two postdoctoral researchers for a period of 4 years, starting 1 September 2016, to work on a new ERC funded Advanced grant, Music and Late Medieval European Court Cultures (MALMECC). The posts will be on a Grade 7 (salary in the range £30,738 – £33,574 p.a.) and will be based in the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities office (TORCH), Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, Woodstock Road, Oxford.

Reporting to the project’s Principal Investigator (PI), Karl Kügle, the postdoctoral researchers will pursue an individual research project within their specific selected sub-project, in collaboration with the project team. They will be expected to collaborate with all members of the team and participate in the preparation of relevant research publications, as well as representing the project at internal and external meetings, contributing ideas and engaging in dissemination. The project seeks to develop a new, post-national and trans-disciplinary method of studying pre-modern cultures; specifically, the focus will be on European courts of the ‘long’ fourteenth century, defined as 1250 – 1450. The project will consist of systematic collaboration of a team of scholars drawn from relevant disciplines (including but not limited to history, art history, architectural history, modern and classical languages, music) under the leadership of the PI.

Applications are welcome from candidates with a PhD or equivalent and research experience in a relevant discipline for the period 1250 – 1450. In addition, ability and willingness to collaborate across the disciplines of musicology and medieval studies will be essential, along with high level competencies in at least one other relevant language.

Candidates may apply for any one of the following sub-projects: (1) the effects of gender and lineage on patronage in Northwestern Europe; (2) the courts of ecclesiastic princes in France and Southern Europe; (3) the artistic patronage of the Luxembourgs in Germany and the Czech lands; (4) the politics of prince-bishop Pilgrim II of Salzburg and the songs of the ‘Monk of Salzburg’.

The closing date for applications is 12.00 noon on Wednesday 6 July, 2016.

For full information and to apply, please visit: https://www.recruit.ox.ac.uk/pls/hrisliverecruit/erq_jobspec_version_4.jobspec?p_id=123798.

University of East Anglia: Senior Research Associate in Early Modern History – Call For Applications

University of East Anglia – School of History
Senior Research Associate in Early Modern History

Location: Norwich
Salary: £31,656 per annum
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary. Two-year full-time position from October 2016

Inner Lives: Emotion, Identity and the Supernatural, 1300-1900: www.innerlivesblog.com

This post is a two-year full-time postdoctoral research associateship to participate in a major research project (2015-18) funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The principal investigator is Professor Malcolm Gaskill; the co-investigators are Dr Sophie Page (UCL), covering the medieval period, and Professor Owen Davies (Hertfordshire), covering the modern.

The successful applicant would be based in the School of History at the University of East Anglia. He/she would assist Prof. Gaskill with his work on witchcraft in the Anglo-American world and the history of emotions, while also furthering his/her own research and publication plans. A doctorate in early modern history is an essential requirement, as is proficiency in using sixteenth- and seventeenth-century manuscripts and printed sources. Expertise in the history of emotions and/or the history of witchcraft would be especially welcome.

The research associate would also be expected to help with the project more widely, including overseeing the website and social media, writing and commissioning blog posts, drawing together ‘inner lives’ methodologies to write an article for publication, helping with a planned exhibition, and organising an international conference in 2018.

The research associate will be entitled to funds from the project research budget to cover expenses related to the project and to his/her own work.

Closing date: 12 noon on 28 June, 2016.

For full details and to apply, please visit: http://www.uea.ac.uk/hr/vacancies/research/-/asset_publisher/62h7ppZT4QgW/content/senior-research-associate-in-early-modern-history

RSAA Postgraduate and Early Career Workshop – Call For Applications

RSAA Postgraduate and Early Career Workshop
Wellington NZ
15 February, 2017

Postgraduate and early career researchers are invited to join us for a stimulating pre-conference workshop at the National Library of New Zealand on 15 February, 2017, as part of the RSAA 2017 conference.

The workshop will be a chance to connect with fellow researchers and to learn about research and opportunities in our field.

This event is free. Please note that places will be strictly limited. All participants must be members of RSAA. To apply for the workshop, please email Nikki Hessell (nikki.hessell@vuw.ac.nz) by 20 August, 2016.

For full details about the workshop, as well as about the 2017 RSAA conference, please visit: https://rsaa2017.wordpress.com/postgraduate-and-early-career-workshop

Professor Robert Shoemaker, CMEMS/History Public Lecture @ University of Western Australia

CMEMS/History Public Lecture: “The Evolution of Record-Keeping as a Means of Understanding Criminality, 1780–1860”, by Professor Robert Shoemaker (The University of Sheffield)

Date: Tuesday 28 June, 2016
Time: 6:00pm-7:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre (Geography & Geology Building), University of Western Australia

All Welcome – you don’t need to RSVP. For other enquiries, contact joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au.

This paper seeks to understand why detailed personal information about accused criminals, the data which makes the Digital Panopticon project (http://www.digitalpanopticon.org/) possible, started to be collected from the late eighteenth century. Whereas little information beyond the name of most criminals was kept at the start of this period, by 1860 information about their personal and criminal histories and physical descriptions was routinely recorded. The initiative to start keeping such records came from both new official requirements and personal and local initiatives. Records were often compiled to meet functional requirements to assist with the prosecution of crime and punishment of criminals, but this explanation does not explain why information was kept about so many personal characteristics, in such detail, and often long before it was officially required. This paper argues that such record-keeping was often driven by local initiatives and imperatives, and that this reveals the development of a grass-roots information-gathering culture. Ultimately, the substantial amount of information generated reveals a strong and widely held desire to understand crime, long before the self-conscious enterprise of ‘criminology’ was invented.

Bob Shoemaker is Professor of Eighteenth-Century British History at the University of Sheffield and Co-Investigator on the Digital Panopticon project. For more information, see: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/history/staff/robert-shoemaker.

Transporting Romanticism – Call For Papers

Transporting Romanticism
RSAA Biennial Conference
Wellington, NZ
16-18 February, 2017

Conference Website

In the last decades of Humanities scholarship, mobility and mediation have become increasingly central, as scholars emphasise boundary-crossing rather than differentiation, movement rather than stasis, and such ideas as the porosity of individuals and communities, and a world connected in unforeseen and complex ways by the circulation of global traffic. Movements of people, objects, information, genres, and feelings, both within intimate spaces and over vast distances, have come to seem increasingly important, becoming central to work of scholars such as Celeste Langan, Alan Bewell, Mary Favret, Adela Pinch, Miranda Burgess and many others. The Romantic era provides a particularly apt site for these critical discussions because it marks the period in which a shift occurred toward thinking in terms of mobility that would become associated with modernity. Mediation contributes to the idea of mobility by suggesting liminal states, border-crossings, and negotiations, but has also been used in the work of Kevis Goodman and others to suggest the way in which Romantic literature is shaped both by the medium in which it is consumed, and by the tangential texts, disciplines, and discourses which it rubs up against. This conference aims to move between mediation and mobility, to suggest the ways in which “transport” might be understood as a range of places, motions, emotions, experiences, and reconfigurations.

We welcome proposals from scholars across the Humanities that address ideas related to mediation and mobility in Romantic contexts.

Possible topics might include:

  • movement and being moved
  • mobile texts, objects and bodies
  • mobile emotions/ mediated emotions
  • mobile genres/mobile readers
  • global mobilities
  • gendered mobilities/mobile genders
  • Transpacific mobilities
  • travelling natures
  • transported readers/transported writers
  • emotional transport (especially the history of the emotions: please see the Postgraduate Bursaries that are attached to this theme)
  • mediating beyond the centre and the periphery
  • translation as mediation
  • mediated reading
  • mediating and remediating Romanticism
  • mass mobilization in the Romantic era
  • mobilization of Romantic texts
  • mobile methods

Please submit abstracts of 250 words, and a 100-word bio note, to rsaa2017submissions@gmail.com. We will be making decisions on a rolling basis.

Call for Papers closes: 20 August, 2016

Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space – Call For Papers

Understanding Material Loss Across Time and Space
University of Birmingham
17–18 February 2017

Understanding Material Loss across Time and Space is an innovative conference that will take place in 2017 at the University of Birmingham. Kate Smith, who works as Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History, is organizing the conference to complement her current research on loss, lost property, and the making of modern Britain. Rather than focus solely on modern Britain, however, the conference seeks to consider the methodological and historical insights that might be revealed by utilizing loss as significant analytical framework across time and space, particularly when examining the material world.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, philosophers, literary scholars, sociologists and historians have increasingly come to understand the material world as an active and shaping force. Nevertheless, while significant, such studies have consistently privileged material presence as the basis for understanding how and why the material world has played an increasingly important role in the lives of humans. In contrast, Understanding Material Loss suggests that instances of absence, as much as presence, provide important means of understanding how and why the material world has shaped human life and historical processes.

Speculative and exploratory in nature, Understanding Material Loss asserts that in a period marked by ecological destruction, but also economic austerity, large scale migration, and increasing resource scarcity, it is important that historians work to better understand the ways in which humans have responded to material loss in the past and how such responses have shaped change. Understanding Material Loss asks: how have humans historically responded to material loss and how has this shaped historical processes? The conference will bring together a range of scholars in an effort more to begin to explore and frame a problem, than provide definitive answers.

Confirmed keynote speakers include

  • Pamela Smith, History, Columbia
  • Simon Werrett, Science and Technology Studies, UCL
  • Maya Jasanoff, History, Harvard
  • Jonathan Lamb, English, Vanderbilt
  • Anthony Bale, English and Humanities, Birkbeck
  • Astrid Swenson, Politics and History, Brunel

Understanding Material Loss seeks to uncover the multiple practices and institutions that emerged in response to different forms of material loss in the past and asks, how has loss shaped (and been shaped by) processes of acquisition, possession, stability, abundance and permanence? By doing so it seeks to gauge the extent to which ‘loss’ can be used as an organizing framework of study across different disciplines and subfields. Understanding Material Loss seeks papers from across a variety of time periods and geographies. Although open and speculative in nature, this conference will focus on three broad topics within the wider rubric of loss, in order to facilitate meaningful conversations and exchanges.

Using Materials

  • How has the ‘loss’ of particular materials affected scientific practice, manufacturing, architectural design or development in the past?
  • How have humans responded to the partial loss or decay of materials?
  • How have ‘lost’ skills or knowledge affected the use of materials?
  • How have humans re-appropriated or recycled seemingly damaged or obsolete materials?

Possessing Objects

  • How have humans sought to maintain and mark the ownership of objects?
  • How has the loss of possessions and property affected human mobility and constructions of identity?
  • How have communities historically responded to the loss of particular objects? When and why have they sought to stave off the loss of things?
  • Where, when and how have cultures of repair flourished?
  • How has the loss of possessions and property (or the potential for loss) affected processes of production, consumption or financial stability?

Inhabiting Sites and Spaces

  • When and why have particular sites or buildings been understood as destroyed or obsolete?
  • How have past societies responded to the loss of particular sites?
  • When and how have landscapes been actively purged of symbols and sites?
  • How have past societies worked to rebuild or reclaim particular sites?
  • What strategies did past societies develop to ensure the resilience of certain structures?

If you are interested in participating in the conference, please send proposals (250 words max per paper) for papers and panels to conference organizer Kate Smith (k.smith@bham.ac.uk) by Friday 14 October, 2016. Papers should not exceed 20 minutes. Roundtable panels featuring 5–6 papers of 10 minutes each or other innovative formats are encouraged.

Thanks to Past & Present and the University of Birmingham for their generous support for the conference.

92nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America – Call For Papers

92nd Annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America
Toronto, Ontario
6-8 April, 2017

Hosted by the University of Toronto and The Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies

The Organizing Committee invites proposals for papers on all topics and in all disciplines and periods of medieval studies. Any member of the Medieval Academy may submit a paper proposal, excepting those who presented papers at the annual meetings of the Medieval Academy in 2015 or 2016; others may submit proposals as well but must become members in order to present papers at the meeting. Special consideration will be given to individuals whose field would not normally involve membership in the Medieval Academy. The due date for proposals is 15 June, 2016.

Rather than an overarching theme, the 2017 meeting will provide a variety of thematic connections among sessions. The Medieval Academy welcomes innovative sessions that cross traditional disciplinary boundaries or that use various disciplinary approaches to examine an individual topic. To both facilitate and emphasize interdisciplinarity, the Call for Papers is organized in “threads.” Sessions listed under these threads have been proposed to or by the Organizing Committee but the list provided in the Call for Papers is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.

The complete Call for Papers, with proposed threads and sessions as well as instructions for submitting proposals, can be found here (http://medievalacademy.site-ym.com/?page=2017Meeting). Please contact the organizing committee if you have further questions about the meeting, at MAA2017@TheMedievalAcademy.org.

Working History: Professional Historians Association Conference – Registration Now Open

Working History: Professional Historians Association Conference
Graduate House, Carlton, Victoria, Australia
19-20 August, 2016

The conference will explore the following:

History: Now

What’s happening in history practice now? What are some of the tensions, challenges, dilemmas and wisdoms that come with working in history today?

History: How?

How do we communicate history? How does digital history compare to traditional methods? Is there still a role for books, radio and television? How important is technology in history?

History: Whose?

Who are we doing history for? What role does history play in benefiting communities, organisations, individuals? Should historians weigh in on discussions on policy, planning and heritage? What are our responsibilities?

History: Where to?

Our job is discussing the past, but what about the future? What challenges and new practices will we face? Who might we be working for? And what will working in history be like in 20 or 50 years time?

Guest Speakers:

Lisa Murray
Dr Lisa Murray is the City Historian and heads up the history team at the City of Sydney Council. She oversees a diverse History Program at the City that encompasses local and community history, civic and municipal history, and urban history. Lisa is passionate about making history accessible to the public. She is a Councillor with the History Council of NSW and a board member of the Dictionary of Sydney Inc. Lisa is the award-winning author of planning histories and a regular contributor to debates around public history, including being a speaker at TEDxSydney 2013. In her spare time, Lisa is writing a history and field guide to Sydney’s cemeteries, to be published by NewSouth Publishing in late 2016.

Tim Sherratt
Tim Sherratt is a historian and hacker who researches the possibilities and politics of digital cultural collections. Tim has worked across the cultural heritage sector, and has been developing online resources relating to libraries, archives, museums and history since 1993. He’s currently Associate Professor of Digital Heritage at the University of Canberra. You can find him at discontents.com.au and as @wragge on Twitter.

Registration:

  • Members $80 per day
  • Non-members $110 per day
  • Students $65 per day

Registrations are now open! Click here for details.

Contact: workinghistory@phavic.org.au with any enquiries.

Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal – Call For Editor or Editors

ACMRS (the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) at Arizona State University is seeking an editor or editorial team of two to three in related fields to edit Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal for a (renewable) three-year term beginning 1 December 2017. The editor or editors will be responsible for reviewing submissions, choosing outside readers, offering editorial suggestions, assembling and sending suggestions from editors and readers to authors, sending essays to the Editorial Board for votes, inviting some submissions, overseeing the choice of the annual Forum topic as well as undertaking other tasks related to the pre-publication phase of a scholarly journal and sending finished revisions to ACMRS for copy-editing. In consultation with the Director of ACMRS, the editor or editors will also make any necessary changes to the membership of the Editorial and Advisory Boards of the journal and will report (either in person or electronically) to ACMRS at its annual conference. The editor or editors will be made ex officio member(s) of the ACMRS Advisory Board. In addition, the editor or editors will meet annually with the EMWJ Editorial Board and report to the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women (SSEMW) at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference or the Attending to Early Modern Women Symposium.

The editor or editors will be expected to deliver final edited copy of each issue of the bi-annual journal to ACMRS by May 1 and December 1 in time for an October and May publication dates. The editor or editors should expect an average of six or more hours of pro bono work each week year-round, with fluctuations over the course of the year. All managing and editing responsibilities will be handled by ACMRS: subscription records and bookkeeping, logging submissions and reviews, receiving and mailing books for reviews, advertisements, copy-editing, typesetting, final proofreading, printing, etc.

The ideal proposal will come from an editor or team of editors specializing in early modern women or gender studies and having an interest in the global early modern period. Although a small stipend will be provided, the editor or editorial team should have strong support at their home institution.

The new editor or editors would begin the transition into the editorship during the summer and winter of 2017 and would take over formally by 1 December 2017. Some flexibility is possible.
Please send a statement describing your interest and qualifications and the level of institutional support you will have for your editorship to emwjournal@acmrs.org with “EMWJ Editorial Search Committee” in the subject line. Only electronic applications will be accepted.

Applications should include:

  1. Statement of interest, qualifications, and nature of institutional support.
  2. Indication of possible start date, preferably 1 December 2017.
  3. Current CV or CVs.
  4. Three letters of recommendation sent directly to emwjournal@acmrs.org.

Editing experience is desirable. Evidence of successful collaborative work is required as is a commitment both to the field of early modern women and gender studies in a worldwide context and to continuing the EMWJ tradition of excellence that has garnered awards for the journal.

Deadline for application: January 31, 2017.

For more information about the journal please see www.acmrs.org/emwj.