Monthly Archives: December 2017

Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Graduate Conference – Call for Papers

Vulnerability: 10th Annual Medievalists @ Penn Graduate Conference

 
Deadline for submissions: 
January 15, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
Medievalists @ Penn
 
Contact email: 
pennmedieval@gmail.com
 
Keynote Speaker: Masha Raskolnikov, Cornell University

Conference date: Saturday, March 17th 2018, University of Pennsylvania

This conference aims to think of vulnerability as a state of being that precedes but does not necessarily entail violence, a condition that is temporalized, oriented toward a future that is potentially hazardous. To be vulnerable is to be under threat. What are the methods by which the Middle Ages constructed and maintained states of vulnerability? As a corollary, if we think of vulnerability as entailing threat, what are the methods by which people or things are constructed as threats? What did it mean for medieval people to be living under threat?

We invite 15-20 minute papers from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, including History, Art History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • The construction of race and alterity
  • Gendered vulnerability and issues of care or protection
  • Ecological threat and disaster
  • Class, resource scarcity, and economic precarity
  • (Dis)Ability and illness
  • Trials, court cases, and legal actions
  • War and political conflict
  • Heresy and threats posed by religious orthodoxy
  • Vulnerable and damaged material texts or objects
  • The positions of medievalists in modern society

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words as attachments to pennmedieval@gmail.com by January 15, 2018. Submissions should include your name, paper title, email, and institutional and departmental affiliation. Papers will be due March 10, 2018 for distribution to faculty respondents.

The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period – Call for Papers

The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period
 

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
Medieval and Renaissance Center (NYU)
 
Contact email: 
marc.center@nyu.edu
 
The Annual Conference at the Medieval and Renaissance Center will be held on April 13th and 14th. This year’s theme will be “The Worlds That Plague Made: Cultures of Disease in the Medieval and Early Modern Period.” Keynote speakers will be Ann Carmichael, Indiana University, and Susan Jones, University of Minnesota.

We invite submissions from any discipline in Medieval and Renaissance Studies on any aspect of the history of plague and disease.

Submissions will be accepted on a rolling basis until January 15th 2018. Please submit a 250 word abstract and a brief CV to marc.center@nyu.edu (put “Conference Submission” in the subject line).

http://as.nyu.edu/marc/conference/conferencespring2018.html
 
 

Special Issue: “New Feminist Voices in the Heroic Age” – Call for Papers

Special Issue: “New Feminist Voices in the Heroic Age”

 
Deadline for submissions: March 30, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe
 
Contact email: 
MElmes@lindenwood.edu
 
CFP: The Heroic Age special issue (2018): “New Feminist Voices in the Heroic Age”

Guest Editors: Melissa Ridley Elmes (Lindenwood University) and Mary Kate Hurley (Ohio University)

The Heroic Age, a digital peer-reviewed scholarly journal, seeks submissions for a special issue on “New Feminist Voices in the Heroic Age” which will run from 1 January 2018 through 31 December 2018.

We are interested in submissions from graduate students, postdoctoral, and junior or early-stage scholars (pre-tenure or equivalent NTT faculty experience) working in any discipline with a focus on Northwestern Europe in the period covered by the journal, c. 300-1200 CE.; we are also eager to consider comparative approaches that examine a Northwestern European topic in context with another geographical area. We welcome articles of 7,000 words (inclusive of bibliography and endnotes) and essays of 3,000 words. Submissions do not necessarily have to focus on feminist issues, although they should demonstrate a feminist approach (women’s studies, gender/ queer studies, & etc.) to the question(s) being addressed.

Submission guidelines and style requirements for The Heroic Age can be found here: http://www.heroicage.org/authors.php

The Heroic Age operates on a rolling submissions basis, and we are now accepting submissions for this special issue. Queries are welcome if you are unsure as to whether your project is suitable for this issue, and queries, article, and essay submissions should be sent to the guest editors: MElmes@lindenwood.edu and hurleym1@ohio.edu

Articles on the Monstrous/Uncanny – Call for Papers

Articles on the Monstrous/Uncanny

 
Deadline for submissions: February 28, 2017
 
Full name / name of organization: 
MEARCSTAPA
 
Contact email: 
tmtomaini@gmail.com
 
MEARCSTAPA

Call for Papers

MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application) invites papers on any topic of Monsters/Monster theory, or the Supernatural/Uncanny for a special issue of the journal Preternature (PSU Press). The special issue will celebrate MEARCSTAPA’s tenth anniversary as an academic society dedicated to the study of the monstrous.

Papers are welcome from anywhere on the globe, in any discipline of the Humanities, can reflect any genre, and can include any historical or literary period. Papers must be in English, and must conform to the Preternature submission guidelines. Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.psupress.org/Journals/jnls_Preternature.html

Please send full papers of 8,000-12,000 words by Feb 28, 2018 to Melissa Ridley Elmes at madamemedievalist@gmail.com and Thea Tomaini at tmtomaini@gmail.com. Papers will undergo a double-blind review by at least two reviewers.

Preternature provides an interdisciplinary, inclusive forum for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable. The journal embraces a broad and dynamic definition of the preternatural that encompasses the weird and uncanny—magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, esotericism, demonology, monstrophy, and more, recognizing that the areas of magic, religion, and science are fluid and that their intersections should continue to be explored, contextualized, and challenged.

 

Omission – University of Oxford English Faculty Graduate Conference 2018 – Call for Papers

Call for Papers
Omission

University of Oxford English Faculty Graduate Conference 2018

Friday, June 1, 2018

How should we engage with omissions? Some gaps, it seems, demand to be filled, while others remain obstinately empty. Omissions can be productive, playful, and deliberate, but they can also impede and obscure. From lost or damaged Medieval manuscripts to censored modernist texts, omissions have marked and shaped our critical practices. This is true not only of textual omissions: feminist, gender, and queer theorists have addressed silences in a heterosexist canon and postcolonial theorists have raised issues of exclusion and marginalisation.

Sins of omission occur in every period and genre. From the unspoken truths in Kazuo
Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day to the concealed trauma in Toni Morrison’s Beloved,
narrative details are withheld from readers. The theatrical power of the empty stage is attested by the jarring disappearance of Lear’s Fool and by Godot’s failure to materialise. Poems reach us through processes of omission: Emily Dickinson’s poetry was edited posthumously, while Marianne Moore notoriously revised her own work. For Moore, ‘Omissions are not accidents.’

These questions of omission are open for debate, and we look forward to discussing them further. This conference welcomes papers crossing all periods, genres, and disciplines, on themes including but certainly not limited to:

• Silence and empty spaces
• Lost texts, textual gaps and lacunae
• Palimpsests and erasure
• Annotation and filling in the blanks
• Editing, deletions, and revisions
• Censorship and self-censorship
• Memory and forgetting
• Falsehoods and lies of omission
• Unreliable narrators
• Anonymity
• Things lost in translation
• Use of and deviation from sources
• Works omitted from the canon
• Citizenship and statelessness
• Marginalised voices.

We welcome individual proposals for twenty-minute papers (250 words). Three-person panel proposals (500 words) are also strongly encouraged. Please send all submissions
to omission.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk by Friday 16 February 2018. For more information, visit oxgradconf2018.wordpress.com or follow us at @OmissionConf18.

Angelical Conjunctions: Crossroads of Medicine and Religion, 1200-1800 – Call for Papers

Angelical Conjunctions: Crossroads of Medicine and Religion, 1200-1800 – Call for Papers

McGill University on April 13-15, 2019

“Angelical Conjunction” was the term coined by the seventeenth-century New England Puritan Cotton Mather to denote the mutual affinity of medicine and religion. Indeed, medical and spiritual practices have a long history of coexistence in many religious traditions. This connection took many forms, from the pious provision of health care (in person or through endowed charity), to the archetypal figure of the healing prophet. Yet despite decades of specialized research, a coherent and analytical history of the “angelical conjunction” itself remains elusive.   This conference therefore aims to explore the connection between medicine and religion across the time-span of the late medieval and early modern eras, and  from an intercultural perspective. Taking as our focus the Mediterranean, the Islamic World and Europe, and the various Christianities, Islams and Judaisms that flourished there, we aim to develop methodological and theoretical perspectives on the “angelical conjunction(s)” of these two spheres. How did the entanglement of religion and medicine shape epistemologies in both of these spheres? What are the conceptions of the body and its relationship to the soul that these entanglements assumed or envisioned? What were the limits to coexistence? How did the “conjunction” change over time?

We invite papers on a range of themes that include, but are not limited to:

–         The relationship between spiritual charisma and medical practice
–         The involvement of medical practitioners in theological debates
–         Medicine and “fringe” religious traditions (e.g. Hermetic, heretical, “occult”…)
–         Representations of the healer-prophet or healer-saint in art
–         Debates on body and soul informed by medical and theological knowledge
–         Spiritualization of physical illness
–         Devotion as therapy, and (the provision of) therapy as devotion

Accommodation and meals will be provided. We are seeking grant support to subsidize travel.

Please submit an abstract of 300 words and a CV to Dr. Aslıhan Gürbüzel at angelicalconjunctions@gmail.com by January 10, 2018.

https://dishist.hypotheses.org/508

Cities of Strangeness 1350-1700: strangers, estrangement, becoming-strange – Call for Papers

Cities of Strangeness 1350-1700: strangers, estrangement, becoming-strange
 

Deadline for submissions: January 19, 2018
 
Full name / name of organization: 
University of Manchester
 
Contact email: 
citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com
 
The Northern Premodern Seminar Cities of Strangeness, 1350-1700
strangers / estrangement / becoming-strange

Friday 11th May, University of Manchester

Looking one way, you see a beautiful virgin: another way, some deformed monster. Cast an eye upon her profession, she is a well-graced creature: turn it upon her conversation, she is a misshapen stigmatic. View her peace, she is fairer than the daughters of men: view her pride, the children of the Hittites and Amorites are beauteous to her. Think of her good works, then blessed art thou of the Lord; number her sins, then how is that faithful city become an harlot!
Thomas Adams, Eirenopolis: The City of Peace (1622)

The period spanning the years 1350-1700 saw a massive expansion in urban populations, transforming social formations. Changes and developments in medieval and early modern cities were intricately tied up with trade, migration, politics, economics, shifting possibilities for social mobility, and the growth of commodity culture; the relationships of individuals and communities to, and in, the city were frequently characterised by alienation and disorder. The early meanings of ‘strange’ as foreign or alien, and also new, wondrous, and astonishing, point towards premodern cities as sites of danger, possibility, conflict, and discovery.

Cities of Strangeness, 1350-1700 is an interdisciplinary one-day conference exploring the centrality of strangeness and estrangement in literary, artistic, and cultural representations of the premodern city. To what extent is the experience of the premodern city characterised by estrangement or alienation? How did the growth and transformation of urban spaces across the late medieval and early modern period alter social identities and formations? What were the relationships between a city and its strangers? How do literature and art respond to cities in strange ways?

We invite proposals for papers that explore any of the following, or related topics, in relation to late medieval and early modern cities:

  • strange bodies, strange creatures
  • the psychoanalysis of estrangement
  • race, immigration, emigration, diaspora
  • alienation and capitalism, class and poverty
  • protests and riots
  • gender, sex and sexuality
  • heterotopias and liminal spaces
  • uncanny, imaginary, mystical or supernatural cities
  • strange languages, strange speech, strange sound

We welcome papers from scholars working in literature, visual cultures, history, religious studies, urbanism, and other related disciplines. We encourage papers that take a cross-period or interdisciplinary approach.

Confirmed plenary speakers: Adam Hansen (University of Northumbria), Anke Bernau (University of Manchester), and Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex).

Please send 250 word abstracts for fifteen-minute papers to Annie Dickinson and Laura Swift at citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com by Friday 19th January, 2018. Please include a brief biography.

The venue is wheelchair accessible, with accessible, gender-neutral toilets and designated parking bays. Information about prayer rooms, dietary requirements, assistance dogs, hearing loops, transport and accommodation can be found on the website (citiesofstrangeness.wordpress.com/accessibility); please contact the organisers if there is anything you would like to discuss in advance.   

Lunch, refreshments, and a wine reception will be provided. Replies to all submissions will be sent in early February 2018, when registration will open.

The conference is kindly sponsored by artsmethods@manchester.                              

citiesofstrangeness.wordpress.com
citiesofstrangeness@gmail.com
@citiesofstrange
 
 

Illuminating the World of the Rothschild Prayer Book: Lecture by Professor Michelle P. Brown

Illuminating the World of the Rothschild Prayer Book: Lecture by Professor Michelle P. Brown

When Tuesday 23 January 2018 06:00PM

Venue State Library Theatre

Details Professor Michelle P. Brown,  Professor Emerita of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the University of London, presents the world of medieval illuminated manuscripts, their makers and readers, in the context of the famous Rothschild Prayer Book.  This beautiful 16th century Renaissance masterpiece is a jewel in The Kerry Stokes Collection in Perth. Images of the Rothschild Prayer Book and Professor Michelle P. Brown are presented in partnership with Kerry Stokes Collection.

https://www.slwa.wa.gov.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/illuminating-world-rothschild-prayer-book-lecture-professor-michelle-p

Forms of Dissent in the Medieval and Early Modern World – Call for Papers

Forms of Dissent in the Medieval and Early Modern World

North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Deadline for submissions: 
Monday, January 22, 2018

18th Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies: Forms of Dissent in the Medieval and Early Modern World March 9-10, 2018, Duke University 

Website: https://sites.duke.edu/nccmems2018/ 

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Sara S. Poor, medieval studies, Princeton University and 2017-18 NHC Fellow; Dr. Roseen Giles, musicology, Duke University 

The Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies invites graduate students to submit proposals for twenty-minute paper presentations to an interdisciplinary audience that consider the forms and functions of dissent (broadly conceived) throughout the medieval and early modern world.

Illuminating the world with the Rothschild Prayer Book Exhibition

Illuminating the world with the Rothschild Prayer Book Exhibition

When from Wednesday 24 January 2018 09:00AM to Sunday 25 February 2018 05:00PM

Venue The Nook, State Library of Western Australia 

Details Discover the secrets of the Rothschild Prayer Book, one of the world’s most important medieval illuminated manuscripts.  The illuminations are presented page by page using the most detailed digital reproduction techniques. Accompanying the interactive digital display will be a showcase of handmade books and printed publications, with several very early printed bibles from the State Library’s collection.

Proudly presented in partnership with the Kerry Stokes Collection.

https://www.slwa.wa.gov.au/whats-on/events-exhibitions/illuminating-world-rothschild-prayer-book