Call for proposals, for a new series from Medieval Institute Publications – Late Tudor and Stuart Drama: Gender, Performance, and Material Culture

Series Editors: Cristina León Alfar, Hunter College, CUNY, and Helen Ostovich, McMaster University

This series provides a forum for monographs and essay collections that investigate the material culture, broadly conceived, of theatre and performance in England from the late Tudor to the pre-Restoration Stuart periods (c. 1550–1650). The editors invite proposals for book-length studies engaging in the material vitality of the dramatic text, political culture, theatre and performance history, theatrical design, performance spaces, gendering court entertainments, child- and adult-actors, music, dance, and audiences in London and on tour. We are also interested in the discursive production of gender, sex, and race in early modern England in relation to material historical, social, cultural, and political structures; changes to and effects of law; monarchy and the republic in dramatic texts; theatre and performance, including performance spaces that are not in theatres. Further topics might include the production and consumption of things and ideas; costumes, props, theatre records and accounts, gendering of spaces and geographies (court, tavern, street, and household, rural or urban), cross-dressing, military or naval excursions, gendered pastimes, games, behaviours, rituals, fashions, and encounters with the exotic, the non-European, the disabled, and the demonic and their reflection in text and performance.

To submit a proposal, please contact Erika Gaffney, Senior Acquisitions Editor, at Erika.Gaffney@arc-humanities.org.

Emotions: History, Culture, Society (EHCS) Journal

The Society for the History of Emotions, a project of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 1100-1800, is pleased to announce its new journal Emotions: History, Culture, Society (EHCS). We anticipate that the first issue of the journal will be launched in 2017. The journal, in the first instance, will be published by the Centre for the History of Emotions.

EHCS is a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary journal dedicated to understanding emotions as historically and culturally-situated phenomena and to exploring the role of emotion in shaping human experience, societies, cultures and environments. The editors are now accepting submissions.

EHCS welcomes theoretically-informed work from a range of historical, cultural and social domains. We aim to illuminate (1) the ways emotion is conceptualised and understood in different temporal or cultural settings, from antiquity to the present, and across the globe; (2) the impact of emotion on human action and in processes of change; and (3) the influence of emotional legacies from the past on current social, cultural and political practices. We are interested in multidisciplinary approaches (qualitative and quantitative) from history, art, literature, languages, music, politics, sociology, cognitive sciences, cultural studies, environmental humanities, religious studies, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and related disciplines.

We also invite papers that interrogate the methodological and critical problems of exploring emotions in historical, cultural and social contexts; and the relation between past and present in the study of feelings, passions, sentiments, emotions and affects. EHCS also accepts reflective scholarship that explores how scholars access, uncover, construct and engage with emotions in their own scholarly practice.

For more details or to submit a contribution, please email: editemotions@gmail.com

Editors

• Katie Barclay, The University of Adelaide
• Andrew Lynch, The University of Western Australia

Special Issue of Adaptation: Adaptation and Perception
Guest editors: Sibylle Baumbach, Dan Hassler-Forest, and Pascal Nicklas

Submission deadline: 1 October, 2016

Adaptation is a key concept in the context of media convergence, cross-platform storyworlds, and transmedia storytelling (Ryan and Thon 2014). While more traditional approaches in adaptation studies focused primarily on film adaptations and the relationship between book and film, recent approaches in the field address a broader range of aspects, including recent developments in convergence and participatory culture (Nicklas and Voigts 2013). In this context, the notion of the passive consumer has been replaced by the “produser” or “prosumer” respectively, which point to the intersection of producers and consumers first registered in Henry Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture (Jenkins 2006).

Technological changes have not only facilitated media convergence: they also changed the role activities such as reading, watching, and listening played and continue to play in processes of adaptation. The facility to adapt a text, a film, or a piece of music by means of digital devices, for instance, blurs the line between purely receptive and purely productive modes of interaction and enables new modes of participatory adaptation. Furthermore, the increasingly decentered modes of reception, distribution, and production through social media provide a fertile ground for the dissemination of creative readings and writings (Hassler-Forest and Nicklas 2015).

Within this new media matrix, content seems to flow more easily across multiple channels connecting multiple technological platforms. Replacing the traditional interfaces of page and screen, laptop computers, tablets, and smartphones enable innovative forms of participation and creativity by opening up new avenues for recording and producing media. All of these developments have had a profound impact on our everyday use of technological devices and on our patterns of behaviour and perception. The cardinal role of perception in processes of adaptation, however, remains largely unexplored. This is all the more surprising as the appreciation of an aesthetics of adaptation, which is intimately connected to media convergence, would help reveal the underlying conditions of perception that have shaped and continue to shape adaptations in contemporary convergence culture.

This special issue of Adaptation aims to explore and assess perceptual underpinnings and perceptual changes involved in the reception and/or production of adaptations in media convergence. We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines, including literary, film, and media studies as well as empirical and neuro-aesthetics. We especially welcome interdisciplinary approaches that focus on processes of adaptation and perception. Submissions should be no longer than 5,000 – 6,000 words.

References

• Adaptation: “Adaptation, Transmedia Storytelling and Participatory Culture.” Guest Editors: Pascal Nicklas and Eckart Voigts. Volume 6 Issue 2, August 2013.
• Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas: The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence and Ideology. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
• Henry Jenkins: Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
• Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noel Thon: Storyworlds across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. University of Nebraska Press, 2014.

Call for manuscripts for special issue of postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies on “Prophetic Futures”

Prophetic Futures

Premodern individuals credited the power of prophecy to predict, and even shape, the future. The art or science of prophecy—as it was variously termed and critiqued—subtended larger political and social discourses. Vatic performances informed notions of temporality, nationalism, theology, and gender. Rhetorically, prophetic language ranged from the most equivocal play of syntax to artfully performed literary and figural devices: prolepsis, anachronism, anaphora, doggerel, synecdoche, and metaphor. Prophecy similarly moves beyond categories of historical periodization and regional studies due to its global expanse and transmission across languages, cultures, and timescapes: early modern authors across Europe adapted medieval prophecies, themselves reworkings of oracles from classical and biblical traditions tempered with oral and vernacular cultures. Prophecy sutures both past, present, and futures, but also links geographical expanses in its imagining of alternative and otherwise realities.

This issue of postmedieval aims toward a deep and global history of prophecy with particular attention to modes of temporality and periodization embedded within the texts as well as in critical approaches. The issue thus seeks to reevaluate approaches to prophecy and time, illustrating how different vatic discourses read the future, rewrite the past, and rethink the present moment. As a discursive practice, prophecy eludes, incites, repeats, transforms, and confounds — not only its audiences but also the critical assumptions scholars bring to these unstable texts. As such, we invite essays with fluid critical methodologies, from queer theory to new materialism, and essays from a range of (inter)disciplines, from art history to comparative literature. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):

• The circulation of prophetic texts across Europe in manuscript and print in the Middle Ages and the early modern period.
• The production and circulation of prophecy in the Near and Far East and cross-cultural exchanges with Western traditions.
• Reception of biblical, ancient, medieval and early modern prophecies across historical periods.
• Theoretical reflections on the methodological approach to prophecy and its traditions.
• Conceptualization of time and temporality in prophetic texts.
• The transmission and transformation of ideas concerning gender and sexuality through prophecy.
• Theories of materiality and ontology articulated in prophetic utterances.
• The expression or subversion of religious, national, or imperial identities and communities in prophecy.
• Intersections of prophecy and scientific, philosophical, or political discourses.
• The visual culture(s) of prophetic traditions and the relation between the visual and the textual.

Submissions should be between 8,000–10,000 words (including notes and bibliography) and submitted to the editors, Katherine Walker (walkerkn@email.unc.edu) and Joseph Bowling (jbowling@gradcenter.cuny.edu) by 15 December, 2016. Submissions should follow postmedieval’s house style (the style guide can be found on the journal’s website). postmedieval welcomes articles that are written in lively prose, uses language creatively, avoids jargon, and utilizes historicist, materialist, comparatist, and theoretical methods.

Power of the Bishop’s Second Edited Volume: Call for Papers

Episcopal Personalities

The second volume ‘In the Hands of God’s Servants’: The Power of the Bishop and the Problem of Personality is being prepared, based on the conference Episcopal Personalities held at Cardiff University, 2015. We would like to invite submissions for this volume on the subject of personality and its impact in the formation, enhancement and undermining of the episcopal office across Britain, Europe and Asia Minor during the High Middle Ages. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary applications, and are interpreting the geographical range quite widely.

Submit essays of no more than 7500 words in length including footnotes and bibliography with a 30-40 word author bio to powerofthebishop@gmail.com by 1 October, 2016. Submissions should be in English.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Problems with/Possibilities for interpreting a bishop’s personality from source material, with close readings of manuscripts or other sources (not limited to textual)
• How episcopal personalities were projected/constructed, through art, liturgical music, architecture, material and visual culture
• Discussions of personality traits as tropes – negative and positive/sinful and saintly – in literature, hagiography, chronicles and other source material
• Discussions of visual representations of personality traits in stained glass and other artistic representations of medieval bishops in any visual media
• Case-studies and comparisons of individual bishops, and the impact of their personality upon the formation, projection, enhancement or undermining of their position
• The consequences of contrasting episcopal personalities in the development of monasticism or upon communities of secular canons
• The impact of contrasting episcopal personalities in dealings with secular lords, kinship networks, friendship networks, etc.