Bodies in Flux: Rewriting the Body in Medieval Literature, Art and Culture 1000-1450
University of Warwick
Saturday 20 May, 2017

Keynote Speakers:

• Dr Miranda Griffin (St Catharine’s College, Cambridge)
• Dr Robert Mills (UCL)
• Dr Debra Strickland (University of Glasgow)

What is it to have a body? And to experience change and transformation through that body?

A focus on the material body in critical theory and philosophy has, in recent decades, produced varied and stimulating challenges to the ways that we think about and engage with bodies, particularly in the fields of gender and sexuality, queer theory, posthumanism, disability studies, and the ‘material turn’. Discussion of how bodies interact with, are situated in, or are delineated from social, political, and cultural phenomena illuminates our understanding of the experience of embodiment, and the representation of this experience. Similar debates, discussions, and anxieties were expressed in the Middle Ages.

This interdisciplinary conference asks what the transformation of the body means for the conception of bodies of different kinds: human, nonhuman, animal, material, divine, and how the representation of these changes in different media reflects on and inflects the boundaries conventionally associated with the body. We welcome abstracts from scholars working in any area of medieval studies, including literature, art history, history of medicine, and history of religion; we encourage proposals that engage with critical theory or challenge disciplinary boundaries, as well as those approaching the topic in more historical ways.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• metamorphosis
• boundaries between species
• boundaries between materials
• volatile matter
• changing forms
• spiritual bodies
• transubstantiation
• transforming saints
• vulnerable bodies
• death, illness, injury
• medical transformations
• bodily miracles
• translating bodies
• bodies in text and image
• allegory and symbolism
• transforming meaning

Please submit abstracts of 250 words to warwickbodiesinflux@gmail.com by 15 December, 2016.

Contact details

Organisers: Liam Lewis Jane Sinnett-Smith (Email: warwickbodiesinflux@gmail.com)

Royal Studies Network

Call for Papers: 52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo MI
May 11-14, 2017

The fifty-second International Congress on Medieval Studies will take place in Kalamazoo MI, from May 11-14, 2017. As in previous years, the 2017 Congress will offer almost 580
sessions in various formats, two plenary addresses, receptions, luncheons, business meetings, and mentoring opportunities.

The Royal Studies Network seeks papers for two sessions it will sponsor for ICMS 2017. We invite papers from all academic disciplines covering monarchy and royal studies during the
long Middle Ages and across diverse geographical and ethno-religious regions. The unifying theme underpinning our two ICMS sessions is “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence”,
which forms part of an ambitious History of Monarchy project currently being developed by the Royal Studies Network. With theme of “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence”,
the Network seeks to re-calibrate the ways in which scholars perceive the exercise of authority and influence across a range of disciplines, time periods and multiple geographies.
Our sponsored sessions for ICMS 2017 are specifically designed to be points of departure intended to generate broader multi-disciplinary reflections on ideas such as self-fashioning
and identity, reputation, gender, agency, influence, power and authority.

The sessions are:

• Session 1: (A Paper Session)
  “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence I: ‘Seulete suy et seulete vueil estre’ (Alone am
  I, and alone I wish to remain): The Perils and Promise of Medieval Widowhood”
• Session 2: (A Paper Session)
  “Exercising Authority and Exerting Influence II: Unleashing the Power Within: Reassessing
  Royal and Elite Domestic Spaces”

Proposals should include a title, and abstract of c. 250 words, institutional affiliation, and a short CV (a maximum of two pages). All papers should be in English, and be 20 minutes long.
Please submit your paper proposals to the session organizers, Zita Rohr and Ellie Woodacre at zita.rohr@sydney.edu.au or to Ellie.Woodacre@winchester.ac.uk no later than September 8, 2016.

Royal Studies Network

Call for Papers: Leeds International Medieval Congress 2017
Leeds, UK
July 3-6, 2017

‘Otherness’

The twenty-third International Medieval Congress will take place in Leeds, from July 3-6, 2017. The IMC seeks to provide an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of Medieval Studies. Every year, the IMC chooses a special thematic strand which – for 2017 – is ‘Otherness’. ‘Others’ can be found everywhere: outside one’s own community (from foreigners to non-human monsters) and inside it (for example, religious and social minorities, or individual newcomers in towns, villages, or at court). Forms and concepts of the ‘Other’, and attitudes towards ‘Others’, imply and reveal concepts of ‘Self’, self-awareness and identity, whether expressed explicitly or implicitly. There is no ‘Other’ without ‘Self’.

The Royal Studies Network seeks papers for two sessions it hopes to sponsor for Leeds 2017. We invite papers from all academic disciplines covering monarchy and royal studies in the medieval and early modern periods and across diverse geographical regions.

The proposed sessions are:

• Session 1: “Theories and Typologies I: Significant Others: Their Part and Influence in the Shaping of Successful Monarchies”
• Session 2: “Theories and Typologies II: Queering the Pitch: Challenging Accepted Narratives of Pre-Modern Political Theory and Practice”

Intellectual Justification: Recent scholarship has demonstrated that all modern political systems have been produced within an informal political arena alongside government. Domestic or private political spaces were subject to the important influence of others such as women, ethno-religious minorities (residing in strongholds of Christendom), and marginalized and/or difficult to categorize men. Far from being unusual or exceptional, these ‘others’ played vital roles in the shaping and development of successful territorial monarchies, challenging the traditional understanding of what shaped rulers and rulerships and what actually contributed to the success of territorial monarchies, which emerged as geo-political winners in early modern Europe.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract of c. 250 words, institutional affiliation, and a short CV (maximum of two pages). All papers should be given in English and be 20 minutes long. Please submit proposals to the session organizers, Zita Rohr & Ellie Woodacre, at zita.rohr@sydney.edu.au or Ellie.Woodacre@winchester.ac.uk no later than September 15, 2016.

34th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia
5-8 July 2017.

Quotation, Quotation: What Does History Have in Store for Architecture Today?

Recalling Goethe’s theory of ur-phenomenon and considering the Eiffel Tower as a montage of various elements, Walter Benjamin presented quotation as the Geist of a theoretical break with the vulgar historical naturalism, and as a means to grasp the construction of history as such: as meaning in the structure of commentary. Benjamin was not alone in using quotation as a strategy to deconstruct historicism. We are also reminded of Karl Kraus, who used quotation not to preserve, but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy the established totality. Considered as a fragment, quotation can play a critical role in putting together the large construction (historiography) made out of smallest architectonic elements, the detail.

In general we are asking, what do you quote and to what purpose?

Recent historiographies present anachronism as a theoretical paradigm to dispense with the historicist certainties, which most often try to cement the historian’s tendency for period style, solidifying the linear progression of history. Even though quotation seems to be natural to historiography, it’s hard to find a text or manuscript that does not use quotation to re-activate the past, either to confirm a claim, or to expand the scope of the historiographical implications of another claim. In both cases quotation introduces interruption, a pause in the presumed linearity and natural extension of the narrative. But what is it that makes a sentence or an idea quotable? And why is it that throughout history both architects and historians have used citations, if only to save a place in the linear progression of history? The historian’s interest in quotation might be that it says something about an event and/or serves as a reminder of the accuracy of a fact, a recollection. Or else, citation forces the sentence to depart from its subject matter, historical facts and events in order to enter into the realm of what might be called insight, which can also mean in-cite, or in-site. Insightful observations, nevertheless, can become facts in their own right after being quoted and referred to repeatedly. Interestingly enough, Manfredo Tafuri makes a distinction between those who use quotations “to build a new reality” and those who use the same quotations “in order to cover up the disappointments of reality.” In addition to the Benjaminian concept of historiographic montage, what quotation means for architectural historiography is this: that the text, an assembly of facts, processes, events, and insightful observations offers quotable fragments when it inaugurates or establishes a different historical knowledge.

We invite you to consider, among other relevant subjects:

• What use does quotation have for historiography, in general, and architectural history, in particular?
• What role does the historian play in assembling quotations next to verifiable facts and information?
• What is the difference between citation and quotation?
• Quotation and historicism.
• Do quotations from the past “weigh like a nightmare on the brains of living,” as Marx once said?
• Is happiness experienced in quoting something that has not yet become history, as suggested in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History”?
• Postmodernism: tradition quoted or simulated?
• Historical quotations and commentary transplanted/translated out of their historicity.
• Globalization of information and digital collection of data: is it the end of quotation, or a different beginning?
• Contemporary notion of synchronicity and its implications for the discipline of history-writing?

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted via the Online Conference Paper Management website.

To upload your abstract, please create a Login ID and password.

Abstracts will be blind reviewed by at least two members of the Conference Academic Committee. External referees may be called upon to review an abstract if needed. Full papers (4500 words, including notes) will be double blind peer reviewed and those accepted for presentation at the conference will be published on the conference website, with print-on-demand editions of the full conference proceedings available after the conference at additional cost.

SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT via the Online Conference Paper Management website.

For inclusion in the proceedings, a paper needs to be presented at the conference. In exceptional circumstances, (due to health, mobility etc.), a live video presentation by the paper’s author may be accepted. Authors may only present one paper as a sole author, although they may present one additional paper as a co-author. All papers presented are to be accompanied by a unique conference registration – where a sole author of one paper is also the co-author of a second, the other co-author is required to register.

Work submitted for review and for publication in the conference proceedings should be original research that has not previously been published elsewhere, or work that has undergone substantial development from a prior publication.

PLENARY SESSION

The invited panelists are to be confirmed.

TIMELINE

• Abstracts due: 14 October, 2016
• Abstract acceptances sent out: 26 October 2016
• Papers due for refereeing: 14 February 2017
• Final papers due: 1 May 2017
• Conference: 5-8 July 2017

CONFERENCE CONVENORS

Prof. Gevork Hartoonian: gevork.hartoonian@canberra.edu.au
Dr. John Ting: john.ting@canberra.edu.au