Monthly Archives: November 2016

The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland – Call For Papers

The Clergy in Early Modern Scotland
New College, Edinburgh
12 May, 2017

Parish clergy in early modern Scotland were central figures in communicating religious practice and understanding to their parishioners. As the early modern period progressed, priests and, later, ministers had to respond to a variety of changes in theology, socioeconomic circumstances, and political processes. As early modern studies has embraced a range of different models of religious, social, and political change-from top-down to bottom-up-the role of the minister remains ripe for further investigation.

This one day conference organised by the University of Edinburgh and Newman University, Birmingham, seeks to explore these issues through a range of papers and workshops covering the period from the early sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. The organisers invite proposals for papers (twenty minutes) or panels of three papers on the following themes:

  • Clerical negotiation of key theological and political changes
  • Ministers as agents of reform within the parish
  • Clerical education and teachings
  • Ministerial self-identification
  • Clerical piety
  • Preaching and its impact
  • Pastoral care
  • Ministers and charity
  • Inter- and intra-parish relationships (dissent, concord, indifference)
  • Clerical families

Other topics relevant to the theme of the conference will also be considered.

The conference seeks to attract a range of established and early career scholars as well as doctoral students. The organisers hope to be able to offer postgraduate and unwaged speakers small bursaries to contribute towards travel and conference expenses.

Please send proposals of no more than 250 words to clergy2017@gmail.com by 28 February, 2017. Submissions should include the name of the presenter, their institution and a short profile.

Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age Exhibition @ Art Gallery of New South Wales

Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: Masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum
Art Gallery of New South Wales
11 November 2017 – 18 February 2018

More info: https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/rembrandt/

This is a rare opportunity for Sydney audiences to experience outstanding works of art by Rembrandt, Vermeer, Ruisdael, Hals, Steen, Dou, Lievens and Leyster – each masters of their respective genres – drawn from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the great national collection of the Netherlands.

Rembrandt and the Dutch golden age presents a richly unfolding panorama of Dutch society in an era of unparalleled wealth, maritime power and cultural confidence. Vivid and compelling, the paintings encompass the tranquil Dutch landscape, the colourful life of the cities, Dutch society and morality, ships on the high seas and the characterful people who made the Dutch Republic such a success.

Cerae (Vol. 4): Influence and Appropriation – Call For Papers Due 18 November

Influence and Appropriation

CERAE: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies is seeking contributions for its upcoming volume on the theme of “Influence and Appropriation”, to be published in 2017. We are, additionally, delighted to announce a prize of $200 for the best article published in this volume by a graduate student or early career researcher (details below).

Both individuals and entire cultural groups are influenced consciously and subconsciously as part of a receptive process, but they may actively respond to such influences by appropriating them for new purposes. Perhaps human beings cannot escape their influences, but think in terms of them regardless of whether they are taken as right or wrong, useful or otherwise. Such influences may have enduring effects on the lives of people and ideas, and may be co-opted for new social contexts to fit new purposes.
Contributors to this issue may consider some of the following areas:

  • How writers adapt received ideas and novel conceptual frameworks or adapt to them
  • How entire cultural groupings (national, vocational, socio-economic, religious, and so on) may be influenced by contact and exchange
  • The mentorship and authority of ideas and people
  • The use and abuse of old concepts for new polemics
  • The shifting influence of canonical texts across time
  • The way received ideas influence behaviours in specific situations
  • How medieval and early modern ideas are reshaped for use in modern situations

These topics are intended as guides. Any potential contributors who are unsure about the suitability of their idea are encouraged to contact the journal’s editor (Keagan Brewer) at editorcerae@gmail.com.

The deadline for themed submissions is Friday 18 November, 2016. In addition to themed articles, however, we also welcome non-themed submissions, which can be made at any point throughout the year.

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Articles should be approximately 5000-7000 words. Further details regarding submission, including author guidelines and the journal’s style sheet, can be found online at http://openjournals.arts.uwa.edu.au/index.php/cerae/about/submissions.

PRIZES:

Cerae is delighted to announce a prize of $200 for the best article to be published in Volume 4 by a graduate student or early career researcher (defined as five years out from PhD completion). Cerae is able to offer this prize thanks to the generosity of our sponsors. For a full list of organizations which have supported us in the past, see our sponsorship page. The journal reserves the right not to award a prize in any given year if no articles of sufficiently high standard are submitted.

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present – Call For Papers

Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations, 1776 to the Present
Special Issue of The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture 11.2 (June 2018)
Guest Editors: Li-hsin Hsu and Andrew Taylor

This special issue The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture seeks essays of 6,000 to 10,000 words engaged in debate around historical, cultural, and literary issues in the Atlantic World. Whilst national narratives have often sought to assert the truth of universal values, a more self-conscious focus upon the methodological framework of the transnational Atlantic world concerns itself explicitly with ways in which diverse and competing local or national paradigms might contest the kinds of ideological assumptions that underwrite narratives of progress, civilisation and modernity. The editors are keen to receive submissions that explore what happens when the assumptions of a nationalistic model of doing literary and cultural criticism, in which geography is allegorised as the autonomous locus of all possible meaning, are challenged by forms of encounter and contagion that disrupt and expand our frames of interpretation. How might the Atlantic space map a series of textual disruptions and contagions during the period? In what ways does transatlanticism open up possibilities for thinking about literary comparison as a critical practice? How do the crossings of people, objects and ideas complicate our sense of literary and intellectual inheritance? What kinds of relationship does the Atlantic world have with other spatial paradigms—the Pacific, the Orient, Australasia? The essays in this special issue seek to explore the meshed networks of interaction—aesthetic, ideological, material—that constitute the space of Atlantic exchange. This, we hope, will result in a wide-ranging, geographically diverse collection that displays much of the best research being undertaken in this exciting and vibrant field.

Possible areas of interest may include, but are not limited to:

  • ecology and landscape
  • migration and travel
  • nature and nation
  • Asia/Orientalism and transatlanticism
  • social reform
  • class and conflict
  • gender and sexuality
  • art and aesthetics
  • slavery and empire
  • science and technology
  • nationalism and cosmopolitanism

The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture (www.wreview.org) is a Scopus-indexed journal of interdisciplinary nature based in the Department of English, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. Please follow the submission guidelines to submit articles online by 30 June, 2017.

Li-hsin Hsu is Assistant Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan. She holds a PhD in Transatlantic Romanticism from the University of Edinburgh and specialises in transatlantic studies, ecocriticism, and Orientalism. She received the 2014 Emily Dickinson International Society (EDIS) Scholar in Amherst Award and has published in journals such as Symbiosis: A Transatlantic Journal and The Emily Dickinson Journal.

Andrew Taylor is Senior Lecturer and Head of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in 19th- and 20th-century North American literature and intellectual history and has an interest in the intersection of historiography and contemporary American fiction. He’s the author of Henry James and the Father Question (Cambridge UP, 2002), Thinking America: New England Intellectuals and the Varieties of American Experience (U of New Hampshire P, 2010), and co-author of Thomas Pynchon (Manchester UP, 2013). He’s the co-editor of several books including Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader (Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), Stanley Cavell: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (Manchester UP, 2012), and Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America (Routledge, 2013). An awardee of the Leverhulme Trust Project Grant, Dr Taylor is a series editor of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Atlantic Literatures and Cultures, published by Edinburgh UP.

Selected Ashgate History Research Titles – Free-to-View Online in November 2016

We are delighted to welcome Ashgate to the Taylor and Francis Group.

With nearly 50 years of distinguished publishing in the Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities, Ashgate compliments Routledge’s commitment to support academic research and scholarly publishing. Ashgate is a leading research publisher in Art History, Music, History, Social Work, Politics, Literary Studies, and many other disciplines and we are delighted to now offer these titles through the Taylor and Francis Group.

To highlight the breadth and depth of the newly acquired titles we are pleased to launch this special free to view promotion across Humanities and Social Sciences, allowing you to view selected monographs online in their entirety for one month.

For more information, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/history/collections/10586

HARTS & Minds (Vol.3, Issue 2): Embodied Masculinities – Call For Papers

HARTS & Minds
Vol.3, Issue 2: Embodied Masculinities

It has become a truism to state that masculinity is always in crisis, and a common reaction to reiterate that gendered identities are always constructed, always imminent: more the product of, rather than material for, either artistic or literary representation, or even empirical study. Such debates are often mapped onto the body, which becomes visible only insofar as it emblematizes the gendered constructions already available for interpreting the body and lending it meaning at any given historical moment.

In this issue of HARTS & Minds, we invite submissions exploring the range of discourses and representational practices that have helped to frame/construct the male body as an object freighted with ideological and social significance. How do we represent male bodies as male, and what opportunities and limitations does that create? What managing of masculinity does it allow, construct and promote?

This issue seeks to reflect the representation of physical masculinity as widely as possible, from Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers offering a diverse range of gendered, racial and cultural perspectives. To this end, interdisciplinary approaches are actively encouraged. Whilst all submissions will be blind peer-reviewed and selected on merit, we would also especially encourage contributions from scholars who are people of colour, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, non-UK or non-Western.

Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Medical humanities
  • The male body as spectacle
  • The body of the actor
  • The body in physical culture/sport
  • The Body as a facet of celebrity – as ‘star text’
  • Literary representations of physical attributes
  • (Pseudo-)scientific pathologies of masculine ‘types’
  • The male body in art
  • The male body in politics, propaganda or activism
  • The representation of the adolescent or child body
  • Liminal or monstrous bodies
  • Injured or disabled bodies
  • Bodily Ideals
  • Sexualised bodies

Submissions should adhere to the guidelines and use the article template available on our website www.harts-minds.co.uk

We accept submissions of:

ARTICLES: Abstract of 300 words. Accepted abstracts will need to produce articles of no longer than 6,000 words.

BOOK REVIEWS: Approx. 1,000 words covering any academic text relevant to the theme. Interdisciplinary text preferred, but reviews of subject-specific texts will be considered.

EXHIBITION REVIEWS: Approx. 1,000 words on any event along the lines of an art exhibition, museum collection, academic event or conference review that deals with the theme in some respect.

CREATIVE WRITING PIECES: e.g. original poetry (up to 3 short or 1 long) short stories or creative essays of up to 4,000 words related to the theme.

All submissions should be sent to Guest Editors Dewi Evans and Het Phillips at editors@harts-minds.co.uk by the following dates:

  • 300 word abstracts (for 6,000 word articles): by 9 February, 2017
  • Accepted articles – 6,000 words by 20 March, 2017
  • Creative writing and Reviews: by 1 June, 2017

Please keep in mind that HARTS & Minds is intended as a truly inter-disciplinary journal, and esoteric topics will therefore need to be written with a general academic readership in mind.

Spiros Zournazis Memorial Fellowship – Call For Applications

The Spiros Zournazis Memorial Fellowship supports research into the Australian War Memorial’s extensive art collection by early career scholars. The Fellowship is open to honours or postgraduate students undertaking a thesis as part of their degree, or those who have completed a PhD, MA or Mphil since January 2014. Fellows are free to determine their own course of research provided it focuses primarily on the Memorial’s art collection. Scholars working in the fields of art history, cultural studies, museology, sociology and related disciplines may apply. Research projects that demonstrate methodological innovation will be considered favourably.

The Fellowship is four weeks in duration and the recipient will be awarded return airfares to Canberra (from within Australia), accommodation in a studio apartment at the Gorman Arts Centre and a stipend of $2000 to cover other expenses. The Fellowship also includes a study space with desk, phone and computer facilities within the Memorial’s Art department and full access to the art collection and archive. Fellows will be supported by Memorial curators and the Head of Art, and will have the opportunity to consult with Dr Mary Zournazi, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of NSW, filmmaker and a specialist in global war and peace studies, during the Fellowship period.

The Fellowship is funded through a generous bequest to the Australian War Memorial by Spiros Zournazis.

More information, including details of how to apply: https://www.awm.gov.au/research/grants/spiros_fellowship

Applications close 5:00pm, 11 December, 2016.

ANZAMEMS: Diversity and Equity Statement

Dear ANZAMEMS Members,

At the 2016 ANZAMEMS AGM, Professor Stephanie Trigg drew the Association’s attention to recent discussion in social media concerning some disturbing anti-feminist material circulating on the website of a prominent medievalist. She highlighted that further reports had been circulated of sexual harassment, plagiarism, and sexist behaviour from a range of institutions and conferences of medieval and early modern studies worldwide. Following discussion, it was determined that, in line with a number of medieval societies, the Association would formulate a statement of principle about behaviour at conferences, and the conduct of academic business.

An ad hoc committee on Equity and Diversity, chaired by the Secretary, has recently completed work on a general statement of ethical principles that pertains to equity and diversity in our Association. We are extremely pleased to be able to circulate this statement to the membership. As part of this process, the General Committee will be appointing Diversity Officers from the existing ad hoc committee to assist any members if there is an issue they wish to raise. At the next AGM, the General Committee we will propose the permanent establishment of a committee on Equity and Diversity.

We hope you will agree that this is a positive and meaningful step forward for the Association. We have always been a friendly organisation that is respectful of the rights, views and orientations of others and this statement is intended to affirm and entrench those values.

A copy of the Association’s Diversity and Equity Statement can be downloaded at the ANZAMEMS website: http://anzamems.org/?page_id=12

Clare Monagle, Secretary
Chris Jones, President

Technologies of the Book – Call For Papers

Technologies of the Book
25th Annual Conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP)
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
9-12 June, 2017

There will be an optional excursion to Vancouver, BC, on Tuesday June 13th. SHARP 2017 will take place in conjunction with the annual Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI; dhsi.org), which runs from June 5-9 and June 12-16, 2017.

Technologies of the book have been shifting, multiplying, and evolving for centuries. In Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450–1830, David McKitterick wrote: “each new technology does not replace the previous one. Rather, it augments it, and offers alternatives” (2003, 20). Media theorist Lisa Gitelman reminds us in Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents that “The meanings of media are not prescribed, we know, but rather evolve amid the conditions of use” (2014, 137). In Reading, Writing, Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound (2014), Lori Emerson characterizes this process as “readingwriting” when the conditions of use are digital—that is, one simultaneously inscribes and creates while navigating online or electronic media environments: writing while reading, and vice versa. The SHARP 2017 theme, “Technologies of the Book,” aims to encapsulate the long history of technological transformations of authoring, reading, and publishing, as well as the book’s longstanding role as a technology, and the evolving ways that individuals interact with medias. How can we examine the book’s past, present, and future through the conceptual framework of technologies?

The conference theme, “Technologies of the Book,” may be approached from several angles, including, but not limited to:

  1. The history of the book as a technology, across the centuries: Historical formats and functions; The role of the book in society and the social history of print; The mechanisms of knowledge production and dissemination; Print cultures and networks; The codex as a technology
  2. The role of the reader: Annotation; Conservation and preservation; Interaction, exploration, and readingwriting
  3. The digital book: E-books, online journals, digital editions; Fan fiction, self-publishing, and social media; Copyright and ownership of digital books; Materiality
  4. Digital-specific technologies: Remediation, digitization, and standards development; Tools for authoring, reading, and publishing; Digital projects that focus on historical books, manuscripts, and other textual artefacts
  5. Futures of the book: The role and technologies of institutions (public vs. private) in curating/preserving book culture’s pasts and futures; Possible directions for design and interaction; Potential forms and formats; Shifts in ideas of authorship and publishing; Technological failures of the book

This list of topics is not, by any means, exhaustive, and participants are encouraged to think creatively about the technologies of the book, including regarding form, format, support, material, and production. The conference also welcomes proposals for papers and panels on any topic related to the history of the book and print culture, but preference may be given to those that engage in some way with the conference theme.

Submissions: Proposals must be submitted electronically via the conference website: http://www.sharpweb.org/ocs/index.php/annual/SHARP2017/schedConf/cfp

SHARP sessions are generally 90 minutes long, composed of three maximum 20-minute papers plus a discussion period.

Proposals for individual papers must include a title, an abstract (max. 400 words), and a short biography of the presenter (max. 100 words). Proposals are also welcomed for full three-paper panels, lightning talks, posters, and digital project demonstrations.

Proposals for full panels must include a title and an abstract (max. 300 words) that outlines the main theme(s) of the panel. In addition, the proposal must include individual titles, abstracts (max. 400 words), and short biographies (max. 100 words) for each participant in the panel. Please use the ‘Add Author’ button to list all the participants. The abstract box should included the abstract for the panel plus the titles and abstracts of the individual presentations. Do not include any speakers’ names in this box. Please indicate if you already have someone to chair the panel; otherwise, a chair will be assigned to you.

Proposals for 5 minute lightning talks, poster presentations and digital project demonstrations must include a title, abstract (max. 400 words), and short biography (max. 100 words) for presenters.

Of note, basic audio-visual technology will be provided for sessions, but digital project presenters are encouraged to bring their own laptop, as this session will take form of a poster session-styled Digital Projects Showcase.

We are pleased to welcome proposals in all languages of our community; note that the chief working language of past gatherings has been English.

Deadline: The deadline for all submissions is November 30, 2016. The program committee will send notifications of its selection in February 2017.

Controlled Submission Vocabulary: For the conference proposal keyword field, please draw on the below suggestions. This vocabulary is meant to be indicative, not prescriptive; if you find that the appropriate terminology is missing from this list, please use the term “Other”.

  • Geographical Focus: Africa; Asia, British Empire; Europe; North America; Roman Empire; Oceania; South America (for further categorization of specific countries, please click here).
  • Historical Period: Pre-Codex; Incunabula; Medieval; 16th Century; 17th Century; 18th Century; 19th Century; 20th Century; 21st Century
  • Topics: Artist’s Books; Authorship; Bibliography; Bindings; Book Arts; Book Trade; Bookbinding; Bookselling; Censorship; Cheap Print; Children’s Literature; Collecting; Colonial; Copyright; Digital Culture; Digital Humanities; Editing; Editors; Ephemera; Illustration; GIS; Graphic Novels; Image and Text; Libraries; Literary Agency/Agents; Literacy; Manuscript; Maps and Cartography; Marginalia; Materiality of Texts; Media Ecology; Music; Newspapers; Papermaking; Paratextual Elements; Periodicals; Postcolonial; Print Culture; Printing; Publishing; Reading; Reception; Scribal Culture; Self-publishing; Serials/Serialization; Technologies of Writing; Technology of Text Production; Theories of the Book; Translation; Typography; Women

Membership: Membership in SHARP is required for all presenters. Membership is not necessary for the submission of a proposal, but those whose proposals are accepted must join SHARP or renew their membership for 2016–17 before registering for the conference. SHARP is able to provide a limited number of travel grants to graduate students and independent scholars. If you wish to be considered for such a grant, please state so when submitting your proposal. There will be reduced registration fees for those attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) and SHARP, and please also note that there are tuition scholarships available to DHSI attendees.

Funding: SHARP is able to provide a limited number of travel grants to graduate students, post-doctoral researchers, and independent scholars; these bursaries can also be used to contribute towards the additional costs of care for any attendee. If you wish to be considered for such a grant, please state this in the Comments for the Conference Director box when submitting your proposal. If you are proposing a panel and one or more members of the panel are seeking support, please give their names in this box. There will be reduced registration fees for those attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) and SHARP, and please also note that there are tuition scholarships available to DHSI attendees.

New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies – Call For Papers

New Approaches to Medieval Water Studies

Recent scholarship in water studies has generated several germane streams of new methodological approaches, each relevant to medieval history. This OLH Special Collection will showcase the state of the field for medieval water studies, tease out its salient themes, and demonstrate possible futures for the field. In the last decade, new attention has been paid to the role of water as both a literary metaphor and a cultural reality in the Middle Ages, with exciting results. In The Sea and Medieval Literature (2007), Sebastian Sobecki fruitfully explored how water is used to communicate ‘Englishness’ in various different medieval texts. In environmental history, Ellen Arnold’s Negotiating the Landscape: Environment and Monastic Identity in the Medieval Ardennes (2013) has initiated a new assessment of medieval spiritual relationships with the environment, and has led to a subsequent project on early medieval rivers and waterways. Carole Rawcliffe has shed new light on how urban medieval people conceived of water and dealt with its various challenges in Urban Bodies: Communal Health in Late Medieval English Towns and Cities (2013) and, in a related field, critics like Elizabeth Archibald, Liz Herbert McAvoy and Albrecht Classen have investigated the bathing practices of medieval people, reflecting on how the various customs and associations of medieval bathing manifest themselves in literature of the period, from romances to devotional works.

This work emerges as part of a greater discourse on medieval hygiene and cleanliness, showcased in a forthcoming volume edited by Classen entitled Hygiene, Medicine, and Well-Being in the Middle Ages (2017). This trend is accompanied by a corresponding growth in nuanced studies of Christian baptism, including The Visual Culture of Baptism in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings and Beliefs (2013). Moreover, three thriving areas of medieval studies—namely emotions history, ecocriticism, and the history of travel and cartography—must necessarily encompass water, as an integral part of the medieval landscape and as a conduit for emotion, in the form of tears.

This collection will make an original contribution to a growing debate by: a) setting the scene for new multi- and inter-disciplinary water studies through a speculative survey essay from the editors; b) showcasing perspectives from authors in very different disciplines as a state-of-the field snapshot; c) encouraging the authors to speculate on the methodological challenges of their respective studies; and d) contributing to the understanding of wider environmental humanities themes emerging from the study of water in the Middle Ages. The first criterion will be of great value to those seeking to enter or advance the field, the second will contribute new research to medieval water studies and the wider studies of medieval environment and imagination, the third will provide a new collection of tools, and the fourth will be of value to water historians, water management practitioners, and water governance experts in need of pre-modern context for their work.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • The role of water as a literary metaphor or narrative signpost in medieval literature
  • The role of bathing and cleanliness for medicine or spirituality
  • Liquid landscapes of the Middle Ages – both real and imagined
  • Water within medieval philosophy and cosmology
  • Flood, catastrophe and eschatology
  • Bodily water and its cultural associations or literary representations
  • Water marking boundaries, water disrupting boundaries
  • Water and elemental order and disorder
  • Water through an ecotheoretical / ecomaterialist lens
  • Intersections between different disciplines in studies of water
  • Water as a figure for change, stasis or continuity
  • Artistic representations of water
  • Critical interventions in the treatment of water / the elements by medievalists

Research articles should be approximately 8000 words in length, including references and a short bibliography. Submissions should comprise of:

  1. Abstract (250 words)
  2. Full-length article (8000 words)
  3. Author information (short biographical statement of 200 words)

The deadline for submission is Friday 28 April, 2017.

The special collection, edited by Dr James Smith (University of York) and Dr Hetta Howes (Queen Mary, University of London), is to be published in the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) (ISSN 2056-6700). The OLH is an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded open-access journal with a strong emphasis on quality peer review and a prestigious academic steering board. Unlike some open-access publications, the OLH has no author-facing charges and is instead financially supported by an international consortium of libraries.

Submissions should be made online at: https://submit.openlibhums.org in accordance with the author guidelines and clearly marking the entry as [“NEW APPROACHES TO MEDIEVAL WATER STUDIES”, SPECIAL COLLECTION]. Submissions will then undergo a double-blind peer review process. Authors will be notified of the outcome as soon as reports are received.

To learn more about the Open Library of Humanities please visit: https://www.openlibhums.org