CFP: International Congress on Medieval Studies “Kalamazoo” 2018 – Medieval Settlement and Landscape: the medieval in the modern May 10-13 2018

“Medieval Settlement and Landscape” builds on the success of the three sessions organized on this theme during the previous two ICMS. The positive levels of engagement stemming from these sessions have duly encouraged us to commence working towards an edited volume that will highlight the major findings presented at ICMS. This publication will reflect the intellectually stimulating conversations provoked by the combined sessions.

The session for ICMS 2018 will engage with the dynamic interdisciplinary sub-field of medieval settlement studies. Medieval settlement and landscape studies, more generally, have combined theories and techniques from a variety of disciplines, most overtly those of history, archaeology and geography. Interdisciplinarity has to some extent become something of a buzzword in medieval studies, but it is an integral aspect of any successful academic study into settlements and landscapes. The ICMS session will bring together colleagues from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to strengthen collaborative efforts and assist in answering common research questions. We particularly encourage the inclusion of young scholars with innovative work in our panel.

We encourage the exploration of technology to understand the place of medieval settlements and landscapes in the modern world. These multidisciplinary approaches include digital humanities and computer applications, such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Lidar, and 3D printing, but also scientific contributions. Our session further engages with textual research. In particular, manuscript materials in archives still remain underutilized by practitioners. Digital scholarship will alleviate many of these logistical problems. The session will provide methodological examples of best practice for scholars with interests in applying medieval evidence sources from outside their field of study.

We aim to incorporate perspectives from across Europe, especially when considering the modern heritage issues presented by these medieval settlements and landscapes. This is an issue of serious scholarly and public concern. Today, with far-reaching economic limitations, heritage preservation is a worrying issue for all practitioners. It is beneficial for the disciplines as a whole to contemplate the efforts made by scholars from a variety of multidisciplinary fields and geographic regions in addressing these concerns. We must also remember that a further benefit of working with physical places and spaces is providing a means of engaging with the public. Presenters will be urged to consider this positioning of the medieval within the modern and to highlight the innovative contributions their research can make to this common experience.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words together with a short bio and a completed Participant Information Form to session organizers Vicky McAlister vmcalister@semo.edu or Jennifer Immich immichjl@gmail.com by September 15. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself. All abstracts not accepted for the session will be forwarded to Congress administrators for consideration in general sessions, as per Congress regulations.

CfP: The Old and the Young: Medieval Bodies Ignored

Institute for Medieval Studies, University of Leeds 
Sponsored Sessions at Kalamazoo, May 10-13 2018

These sessions will concentrate upon the experiences and bodies of the old and the young. Recognising that the medieval normative body (male, middle aged and white) has influenced the way we look at the MA, the intention of these sessions is to highlight the experiences of children and the elderly which are outside the boundaries of said norm. Furthermore, we wish to gain a greater understanding of how other factors (gender, race, ability, wealth, bodily status, power) intersect with and impact upon the experiences of elderly and young people. While medieval childhood studies is by no means a neglected field, historiography has recently turned away from a ‘panhistorical and essentialist’ child-centric model. This allows us to examine the experiences of a child within culturally specific contexts in which it might be neglected, abandoned or dismissed. Meanwhile, the old are often marginalised in scholarship, within the medieval discourse and in our lived reality. The hope is that by examining their experiences in concert with one another, we will be able to build up a clearer understanding of the lived experience of the old and the young in the Middle Ages.

Intersectional, interdisciplinary abstracts would be particularly welcomed.

Possible Topics Include:

Specific historical experiences of being young and old
Body as physical entity and as a site of rhetoric
Dual nature of body: site of discourse and identity
Descriptions of old and young bodies

Please submit a 250-word proposal for a 15- to 20-minute paper as well as a Participant Information Form to medievalbodiesignored@gmail.com by September 15, 2017.

Call for papers: MNEMONICS IN WORD AND IMAGE  (Leeds IMC, 2-5 July 2018).
Session sponsored by Huygens ING, De Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen

Medieval manuscripts are replete with mnemonic devices. Chronologies, scientific speculations, schoolroom commonplaces from grammatical and rhetorical books, and even material for prayers and sermons were visually and verbally arranged to facilitate ease of recollection. Historians have drawn attention to the range of devices used by medieval scholars, but have tended to treat graphical and discursive models separately. These sessions aim to bridge the divide, reconnecting the two fields of mnemonics in order to better understand how form related to function. As ancient techniques were inventively reinterpreted under the influence of new or rediscovered texts, varied practices of memorization made fresh contributions to medieval intellectual life.

We invite 20-minute papers for two sessions on the production or use of mnemonic devices – verbal, visual, or both – in any medieval culture.

Please contact Seb Falk (sldf2@cam.ac.uk) with your proposed title and a brief summary of your paper.

Deadline: 15th September.

Session organisers:
Seb Falk, University of Cambridge
Amanda Gerber, UCLA
Irene O’Daly, Huygens ING

New Perspectives on Women in Medieval Romance Literature:

From ecocriticism to the global Middle Ages, queer theory to the medical humanities, contemporary fields of scholarly interest provide a plethora of ways through which to reinterpret women in medieval romance literature. With this series of panel sessions proposed for Leeds International Medieval Congress, we seek to examine women in romance afresh, considering the new themes and issues brought into view by contemporary methodologies.

The panel title is deliberately broad and we are open to a variety of approaches. Themes you may wish to consider include, but are not limited to: 

• Non-white and/or non-Christian women’s roles in romance
• Ecocritical and ecofeminist approaches to women in romance
• Queer approaches to women in romance
• Virginity, sex, and sexuality 
• Same-sex desire 
• Women and healing 
• Women and trauma
• Sexual violence and rape in romance literature
• Women’s political roles in medieval romance
• Women and disability 
• Motherhood and family relations 
• Remembering and/or forgetting women in romance literature
• Women’s memories in romance literature
• Minor and/or non-aristocratic women in romance
• Groups of women in medieval romance 
• Women as patrons and readers of romance
• The material culture and objects of women in romance 
• Women in early modern romance
• Medieval romance and medievalis

We particularly welcome papers given by scholars from under-represented backgrounds, as well as papers by PhD students and early career researchers. Papers taking a feminist approach, and those which interrogate questions of race and diversity, are particularly sought.

Papers should be 15-20 minutes long. Please send abstracts of 100 words, along with a short biography, to hannah.e.piercy@durham.ac.uk by Friday 8th September 2017. Any queries are also welcome, please send these to the same address.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Call for Papers:

The Royal Studies Network and Royal Studies Journal invite proposals for two sessions on Plural/Corporate Monarchy in Theory and Practice for the 2018 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. These panels welcome multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches and seek to move our understanding of monarchy beyond the concept of the great man. We welcome proposals about monarchies in any region of the world.

Please send a one-page abstract and a completed participant information form to Kristen Geaman at kristen.geaman@utoledo.edu by September 15. The participant information form can be found here: http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions.