Daily Archives: 7 November 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