Monthly Archives: August 2016

University of Oxford (All Souls College): Five-Year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships – Call For Applications

University of Oxford: All Souls College
Five-Year Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships

Location: Oxford
Salary: £41,101 to £42,845 (including housing allowance of £9,272 if eligible)
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary

All Souls College invites applications for up to five Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships in the following subjects: Life Sciences; Theoretical Physical Sciences (broadly defined); Classical Studies; Modern Languages; Literature in English; and Philosophy. Those elected will be expected to take up their Fellowships on 1 October, 2017 or such other date as may be agreed in advance with the College. The Fellowship are for five years, fixed-term, and non-renewable.

The Fellowships are intended to offer opportunities for outstanding early career researchers to establish a record of independent research. But, while the primary duty of a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow is the completion of a significant body of independent research for publication, they are also encouraged to undertake appropriate teaching and supervision of research in the University, develop their curriculum vitae, and improve their prospects of obtaining a permanent academic position by the end of the Fellowship.

Applicants must have been awarded their doctorates after 1 August, 2014 or expect to have been awarded their doctorate by 1 October, 2017. (The successful candidates must have completed their doctorates by the time they take up their Fellowships.) Candidates must be able to demonstrate both through their thesis and other work published or submitted for publication, their capacity to undertake original publishable academic research in their chosen field. Where they have been working as part of a team, the College will wish to understand the significance of the candidate’s particular contribution to jointly authored papers.

For further particulars and to complete the on-line application, see the Appointments section of the College’s website: http://www.all-souls.ox.ac.uk.

Closing dates and times for:

  • Applications: 4 pm (UK time), Friday, 9 September 2016
  • References: 4 pm (UK time), Friday, 16 September 2016

Interviews: Friday, 13 January and Saturday, 14 January, 2017

Elections to the Fellowships: Saturday, 21 January, 2017.

The College is committed to promoting diversity and applications are particularly welcome from women and black and minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts in Oxford.

CROMOHS 21 (2016): From Comparative to Global History: Assessing Relational Approaches to the Past (1400-1900) – Call For Papes

CROMOHS 21 (2016) – CAll for papers http://www.fupress.net/index.php/cromohs/index

From Comparative to Global History: Assessing Relational Approaches to the Past (1400-1900)

In 1928, Marc Bloch made what proved to be an influential statement when he said that the practice of comparing societies distant in space and time, described rather disparagingly as “comparative method in the grand manner”, may serve some ends but is too imprecise to be of any great use “from the scientific point of view”. Decades later William H. Sewell, Jr. objected that “mere temporal and spatial proximity does not assure similarity, and some societies which are very remote from one another are surely more alike, at least in ways that are crucial for some explanatory problems, than some neighboring societies”.

Themes such as “global history,” “Transfergeschichte”, “circulation,” and “connection” all hold an undoubted appeal and draw in the present age. It has been pointed out though that all too often the history of the world, especially when it is based to a large degree on (mostly English) secondary literature, has ended up being fashioned into a flat narrative of “the rise of the West and the Westernization of the rest.” For Sanjay Subrahmanyam, an alternative to the “grand narrative of modernization” would be for historians not simply to adopt a different scale, but to take a step sideways, finding a different vantage point and employing a decentring technique to identify previously hidden or unseen connections among places and cultures.

More recent comparative endeavours have seen scholars engaging more and more with what Serge Gruzinski has described as the “alchemy of hybridization,” and the “intensity of circulation … that reveals mixed landscapes”. Entangled histories (Espagne, Kocka, Werner, Zimmermann) have explored “mutual influencing,” “reciprocal or asymmetric perceptions,” and the intertwined “processes of constituting one another.” Further efforts to restore cultural comparison to the centre of scholarship have included the “cognitive science of religion”, “World Literature” and “World Philology”. Finally, but no less important, historians of emotions have begun to investigate and to problematize the transcultural translatability of emotions.

The next issue of CROMOHS (21/2016) will offer a critical historiographical survey and discussion, accompanied by exemplary case studies, of the various approaches to comparative early modern history that have been theorized and practiced in the last two decades. These range from transcultural and translation studies to global and connected histories. The aim is to unravel, review, and compare the possibilities and limitations of this plurality of relational approaches and methods. Has a change of scale been taking place, or a shift in perspective instead? What are the consequences of adopting a practice of synchronic or diachronic comparison? How can researchers working with languages, concepts and categories that are not part of their sphere of socialization deal with the inescapable challenges of reflexivity that these pose?

We invite ground-breaking research articles that either critically address the history of relational approaches to historical and cultural studies, or apply a possible variant of such perspectives (comparative, connected, global history, etc.) to a research theme (political, intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and so on), combined with a reflection on its theoretical implications. Any geographic area may be considered, while the time span covered by the issue will be from 1400 to 1900. The opening historiographical essay will be by Prof. Dr. Margrit Pernau, Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Center for the History of Emotions), Berlin.

Submissions must be sent no later than January 14, 2017 to: giovanni.tarantino@uwa.edu.au and/or g.marcocci@unitus.it.

Articles should be no more than 7,000 words in length, notes included. Proposals should include a c.500 word abstract and a short biography of the author. Please prepare your essays using the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/), using footnotes rather than endnotes. Authors will be informed as to whether or not their articles have been accepted for publication within two months, following evaluation by two internationally renowned referees. The issue will be published online by April 2017.

Special Issue of Etudes Epistémè: Profane Shakespeare – Call For Papers

Profane Shakespeare: Perfection, Pollution, and the Truth of Performance

For its 33rd issue (Spring 2018), the online peer-reviewed journal Etudes Epistémè (www.episteme.revues.org). seeks articles examining Shakespeare’s treatment of the notions of perfection (or “purity”) and pollution (or “impurity”), understood not only along traditional moral and religious lines, but also, more “profanely”, in aesthetic and hermeneutic terms.

In recent years, much attention has been devoted to the question of Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, leading to a polarization of opinions. Though Shakespeare belonged to a deeply Christian culture and though his language is in part shaped by all-pervasive Christian texts, evidence of Shakespeare’s “true faith” remains necessarily inconclusive. The playwright and poet situates his own truth elsewhere, in his art of poetry and drama, and in the time and act of performance, rather than in any sort of religious canon or eschatological horizon, implying the notions of completion and perfection. If Shakespeare so broadly and keenly “speaks to us” to this day, it is perhaps because of how profane his art is.

This does not mean that Shakespeare does not engage in an (implicit) debate with the religious imagination of his time. His contemporary world and contemporary language are still too intrinsically imbued with the religious for him to step into the neutral ground of the “secular”. He cannot draw the contours of a profane world without using the language of religion and deflecting it to a new purpose. His poetry and his theatre can be read as specifically literary responses, addressing, and, more importantly, displacing, or even “polluting” (in the etymological sense of “desecrating”) the contemporary ethical and religious debate over purity, especially purity of heart – a burning issue at the time – to turn it into an aesthetic, hermeneutic, and possibly anthropological question.

We welcome papers focusing on the different ways in which Shakespeare recounts and stages the failure of purity (or perfection), embracing the impure (or the polluted) as a lively, creative material. This special Shakespeare issue of Etudes Epistémè is open to essays adopting a variety of methodological approaches, whether more materially- or philosophically-oriented. In all cases the issue especially invites proposals that attempt to “re-textualize” Shakespeare by favoring close examination of the text over religious or biographical speculation, to bring out the complex interplay between the notions of perfection, pollution and performance. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Shakespeare’s treatment of spots and stains
  • Shakespeare’s representations of purity and impurity of heart
  • moral and poetic forms of pollution
  • hypocrisy and performance
  • sexuality and performance
  • Shakespeare’s criticism of religious, moral, or political rigorism
  • the moral, ontological and metaphysical implications of performance
  • uses, misuses and abuses of religious or theological language in Shakespeare
  • acts of profanation
  • histrionic displacements of the religious
  • spaces of mixture and contamination
  • parallelisms and oppositions between the stage and the temple
  • Shakespeare and hermeneutic or exegetical traditions
  • early practices of censorship of the Shakespearean text, especially those revealing any “profane” quality of the Shakespearean corpus
  • Christian readings / misreadings of Shakespeare

Detailed abstracts of 600 to 1000 words of proposed articles are to be sent to the editors of the issue, Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise, Karen Britland and Line Cottegnies by December 15th, 2016: anne-marie.miller-blaise@univ-paris3.fr, britland@startmail.com and line.cottegnies@univ-paris3.fr . Notifications of acceptance: March 31, 2017. Full articles due September 1st, 2017. The articles will then be peer-reviewed before publication in the Spring of 2018.

Close Reading Live Cinema Productions of Henry V Masterclass @ The University of Queensland

“Look Ye How They Change”: Close Reading Live Cinema Productions of Henry V, A Masterclass by John Wyver (Illuminations/RSC/University of Westminster)

Date: Wednesday 7 September, 2016
Time: 10:30am-12:30pm (Morning tea served from 10am)
Venue: Room 471, Global Change Institute (Building 20), The University of Queensland, St Lucia
RSVP: Email uqche@uq.edu.au by Friday 2 September, 2016

All welcome, but spaces are limited.

Live cinema broadcasts and recordings released on DVD and online are significantly enhancing the availability of a range of productions of most of Shakespeare’s plays. But the critical discussion of the form to date has been undertaken largely in conceptual and contextual terms. My interest in this class is to develop close readings of a short passage from Henry V in the 2015 RSC and 2012 Shakespeare’s Globe ‘live’ productions, and to compare the treatment in these with the same passage in British television productions of the play from 1957, 1979 and The Hollow Crown series in 2012, as well as the well- known films directed by Laurence Olivier in 1944 and Kenneth Branagh in 1989. In doing so, I hope to start developing an understanding of the specific screen languages and poetics of live cinema productions.

John Wyver is a writer and producer with Illuminations, a Media Associate with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Westminster. He has produced and directed numerous performance lms and documentaries about the arts, and his work has been honoured with a BAFTA, an International Emmy and a Peabody Award. He has produced three performance films for television with the RSC: Macbeth (2000), with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter; Hamlet (2009), with David Tennant; and Julius Caesar (2012). He also produced Gloriana, a Film (1999), directed by Phyllida Lloyd, and Macbeth (2010), directed by Rupert Goold. In 2013, he produced the RSC’s first live-to-cinema broadcast, Richard II: Live from Stratford-upon-Avon, and is currently advising the RSC on its broadcasting strategy. He has written extensively on the history of documentary film, early television and digital culture, and at the University of Westminster is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded research project ‘Screen Plays: Theatre Plays on British Television’. He is the author of Vision On: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (2007). He blogs regularly at the Illuminations website, and tweets as @Illuminations.

It is recommended that participants attend the 2016 Lloyd Davis Memorial Public Lecture, “Being There: Shakespeare, Theatre Television, and Live Cinema”, which John Wyver will deliver on Tuesday 6 September, 6pm, in the Terrace Room of the Sir Llew Edwards Building, UQ St Lucia. To RSVP for the lecture, please email by Friday 2 September.

Pre-Modernisms – Call For Papers

Pre-Modernisms
12th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Friday, October 28th, 2016

As the famous sayings go, everything old is new again, and history repeats itself. How many times have we heard someone described as a Renaissance man or woman, or something that seems old-fashioned called “medieval?” Scholars of these periods often find, of course, that such evaluations are, at best, inaccurate. However, trans-temporal approaches to study and even historical anachronisms can produce fruitful new inquiries into our fields, from contemporary children’s literature that engages in medievalisms to produce new fantasy worlds to queer and transgender studies that attempt to see the past from non-normative perspectives. This conference aims to bring together a wide variety of scholars of different disciplines and especially different time periods to pair what we know about the classical, medieval, and early modern periods with what later times perceive about these periods and how they manipulate the past for present agendas. As such, this conference is aimed not only at pre-modern scholars, but also at scholars of later and contemporary periods whose work engages in envisioning the past.

Please submit a 300-word abstract no later than September 15 at 5 PM. E-mail: medieval.study@gmail.com

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Arthurian Tradition
  • Early Book Collections
  • Architectural Styles
  • Medieval TV and Film
  • Children’s and Young Adult Literature
  • Historical Fiction
  • J.R.R. Tolkien
  • Historically Based Political Rhetoric
  • History of Marginal Perspectives
  • Law and the Legal Tradition
  • Renaissance Humanism
  • Philosophical Traditions
  • Renaissance Faires and Period Dress
  • Medieval and Early Modern Adaptations of Classical Texts
  • Premodern Recipes and Remedies
  • Contemporary Classroom Approaches
  • Linguistic Developments
  • Premodern Historiography (including history plays)

Medieval Association of the Pacific 2017 Conference – Call For Papers

Medieval Association of the Pacific 2017 Conference
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, California
16–18 March 2017

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Medieval Association of the Pacific will be held 16–18 March 2017, at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, located near the Pacific Ocean, just minutes from Los Angeles International Airport, and ranked among the most beautiful college campuses in the country. The conference will conclude with an exciting evening program at the J. Paul Getty Museum, renowned for its collections of antiquities, medieval manuscripts, European paintings, and photography.

Presentations on all aspects of medieval studies are welcomed, but the program committee particularly invites abstracts for papers on the theme “Preserving and Presenting the Medieval.” Possible topics could include the multiple uses of the medieval past in contemporary media and culture; the modern politics surrounding the conservation of medieval artifacts and sites; advances and challenges in curatorial science and methodology; medieval reflections on and practices toward ruins, renovation, and material heritage; the transmission, editing, translation, and dissemination of medieval texts; and debates over the meaning of the term “medieval,” its perpetuation, and its relevance. In keeping with MAP’s mission to bring together scholars from around the Pacific Rim, the program committee also encourages proposals treating cultures and societies of the Pacific world between ca. 500 and 1500, as well as submissions from medievalists based in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, and Oceania.

Keynote Speakers:

  • Zrinka Stahuljak, Professor, French and Francophone Studies, UCLA “The Medieval Potential”
  • Nancy Turner, Conservator, Department of Paper Conservation, The Getty Museum “Observation and Image-Making: Medieval Illuminations and the View from L.A.”

Submissions:

For the 2017 MAP meeting, participants may submit a proposal for either a 20-minute paper or an 8- minute presentation as part of a roundtable session. Proposals must be submitted either as MS Word documents or as PDF files. Please send proposals to aperron@lmu.edu, laskaya@uoregon.edu, and map2017lmu@gmail.com. Keep in mind that the deadline of October 31, 2016, is firm and that proposals received after this date cannot be accepted.

Paper Proposals

Proposals need to include the following for each speaker: name, discipline, institution (if applicable), email address, and an abstract of up to 250 words. Papers normally will be 20 minutes in length (8–10 pages).

A small number of papers closely addressing the theme of the conference will be selected for inclusion in a plenary panel to open MAP 2017.

Roundtable Presentation Proposals

The program committee also invites participants for a small number of roundtable sessions focusing on specific aspects of the conference theme. These include:

  • Medievalism, the media, and popular culture
  • Preservation of medieval sites
  • Manuscript transmission and conservation
  • Medieval attitudes toward and practices concerning renovation and material heritage
  • Rethinking the “Middle Ages” as a period

Those interested in participating in roundtable discussions should plan to speak for no more than 8 minutes and should send in their name, discipline, institution (if applicable), email address, and an abstract of no more than 100 words. The program committee will form the roundtables and put participants in contact with one another. To facilitate scholarly interchange, roundtable participants will be expected to pre-circulate their proposed comments among the group prior to the conference.

Conference Information & MAP Membership

The conference website, which will include further details about MAP 2017, is currently under construction and will be available in the fall. In the meantime, please direct any questions to Anthony Perron, History Department, Loyola Marymount University (aperron@lmu.edu). Participants in the conference must be current members of MAP. To join or renew your MAP membership, please go to www.medievalpacific.org.

Encounters and Reimaginings: Medieval Scandinavia and the World – Call For Papers

Encounters and Reimaginings: Medieval Scandinavia and the World
2017 Berkeley Graduate Student Symposium
University of California, Berkeley
March 3-4, 2017

ScandGrads, the graduate organization affiliated with Department of Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley, is proud to announce the interdisciplinary Graduate Student Symposium in Berkeley, California to be held March 3-4, 2017.

From the shores of Vínland to the halls of Byzantium, the Norse traveled widely and encountered many cultures—which in turn influenced Norse society at home. Traces of these journeys can be found in the archaeological record, saga narratives, and modern interpretations thereof. Moreover, continental ideas and literary forms—from romances to saints’ lives—informed Scandinavian intellectual and everyday life. The organizing committee welcomes papers exploring encounters and reimaginings across the Old Norse world, as well as echoes and influences of medieval Scandinavia in modern contexts.

We are happy to announce our two plenary speakers for the conference:

  • Professor Marianne Kalinke (Emerita, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  • Professor Jonas Wellendorf (University of California, Berkeley)

Both Professor Kalinke and Professor Wellendorf have written extensively on cultural and literary interactions between the Old Norse-Icelandic sphere and continental medieval Europe. We are very excited to welcome both of them in March!

Any student or early career researcher is welcome to submit a proposal related to the conference theme in areas of study including but not limited to: literary studies, material culture, migration, law, politics, religious studies, reception studies, linguistics, and textual studies.

All interested applicants are encouraged to submit an abstract of 200 words to the organizing committee at scandgrads@gmail.com by August 31, 2016.

New Norcia Library Lecture 2016

New Norcia Library Lecture

Date: Friday, 14 October, 2016
Venue: New Norcia Library, New Norcia Benedictine Community, WA
Cost: Costs; $80 per librarian and $40 per student, The day includes a cemetery tour, lunch, morning and afternoon tea and the sessions. Tickets numbers are limited to 100.
Tickets: http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/products/group/events-and-special-items/26

Dr Toby Burrows, Manager of the eResearch Support Unit in Information Services, University of Western Australia, will be introducing us to events and places into which manuscripts survive. He worked for two years in the U.K. with manuscripts and their stories from the dispersed collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps.

The Little Free Library movement is making tracks in W.A. Soraya Majidi of Albany Public Library and Laura Parker of Gingin will offer insights into a library service that fulfils a niche. Their consequential experiences alert us to potential dynamics and social benefits another means of outreach may bring to our communities.

Former, long term New Norcia Librarian, Sue Johnson will be your guide for this year’s opportunity to learn about a different aspect of New Norcia’s history — an after lunch tour of the New Norcia cemetery.

Clare Menck, author of Mundaring Weir forestry settlement, 1923-2011, will also take us into the labyrinth of social outcomes — the challenges of producing “readable” reports that seek to avoid being mere “dust collectors”. The report that Clare will use to illustrate her ideas is now available as an e-book, via the State Library of Western Australia catalogue: http://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b4505139_1

State Library of NSW: Australian Religious History Fellowship

Australian Religious History Fellowship
Annual. Award of $20,000
Applications will open 22 August and close 19 September, 2016

The specific focus of the Australian History Religious Fellowship is for the study and research of any aspect of Australian religious history of any faith. The successful Fellow will be based at the State Library of NSW, although it is understood that it may be necessary to also work within other institutions and archives, and use resources outside the Library.

The Australian Religious History Fellowship was established in 2010 with a generous endowment from an anonymous benefactor.

For more info: http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/fellowships/australian-religious-history-fellowship

‘More than meets the page’: Printing Text and Images in Italy, 1570s-1700s – Call For Papers

‘More than meets the page’: Printing Text and Images in Italy, 1570s-1700s
University of Warwick
4 March, 2017

Keynote Speakers:

  • Dr Marika Keblusek (Leiden University)
  • Dr Angela McShane (RCA/V&A)

For Italy, the ‘long seventeenth century’ was a period of considerable financial challenges. This was especially evident on the book market. Nevertheless, thanks to new techniques and formats which mutually related text and images within the same publication, innovative genres were born that were marketed towards both ends of the audience spectrum, from the learned to the illiterate.

‘More than meets the page: Printing Text and Images in Italy, 1570s-1700s’ aims to investigate the ways in which the consolidation of the book and print trade influenced the development of such new book genres from the late sixteenth to the early eighteenth century. The products emerging in the wake of these processes reached consumers throughout distant countries, between Italy and the rest of Europe. Moreover, various professionals and skilled workers earned their living thanks to the print market, from the production to the distribution of printed items. For instance, workshops of woodcutters specialized exclusively in book illustrations, such as for scientific treatises, and publishers regularly sent participants to fairs throughout Europe. The new commercial items, moreover, contributed to the spread of cultural phenomena, for instance the Grand Tour through its souvenir prints that were sometimes incorporated in atlases.

This one-day interdisciplinary conference seeks to examine these matters by focusing on the products, audiences and professionals involved. By doing so, it sets out to lay the foundations for a shared history of printed products and markets in the early modern period. The conference promotes a multidisciplinary perspective, bridging the gaps between art history, history of the book and other disciplines such as intellectual history and communication studies.

We invite papers addressing, although by no means limited to, questions such as:

  • Who were the publishers that specialized in the new genres, both in earnest or merely to face the financial challenges they encountered from the late sixteenth century onwards?
  • Can specific socio-­‐geographical patterns be discerned (through either individual case studies or larger scale data analysis)?
  • In what ways was the book trade on a whole influenced by booksellers’ increasing reliance on book fairs and news correspondents, and by the emergence of bookselling as a separate profession? And what was the relevance of supplementary trades, such as paper production?
  • To what extent did the production methods and channels of distribution used in the book‐ and print trade overlap during this period?
  • What was the impact of collecting on the physical appearance of print products, such atlases and albums, and on the demand for already circulating books?
  • Were certain of the new genres specifically targeted towards particular audiences? Can cheap print in its various shapes, such as news printing, be considered as reaching a shared audience between different social classes?
  • In what ways did figures active within cities or in areas between city and countryside, like street singers, performers, public news readers, and pedlars, contribute to the book ‐ and print trade?
  • How can the status of Italy, which despite its waning glory was still able to remain one of the leading players on the book -­ and print market, in all this be understood?

We invite papers from both established and emerging scholars in universities, museums, galleries, and other related institutions.

Accepted speakers will be expected to pay the conference fee and fund their own travel; bursaries for postgraduate students might be offered to help with travel expenses, however this is not guaranteed. All accepted speakers are encouraged to apply to their institutions for subsidies to attend the conference.

Abstracts for 20-­‐minute papers, not exceeding 300 words, accompanied by a brief academic CV (100 words), should be sent by 31 August, 2016 to: meetsthepage@gmail.com.