CALL FOR PAPERS

Call for Papers – Medievalism, Public History, and Academia: the Re-creation of Early Medieval Europe, c. 400–1000

Conference Date: 26-28 September 2018
Malmö University, Sweden
The deadline for paper proposals is 15 December 2017.
Proposals with an abstract of maximum 100 words to Sara Ellis Nilsson.

https://www.mah.se/Nyheter/Kalender/Conference-Call-for-Papers–Medievalism-Public-History-and-Academia-the-Re-creation-of-Early-Medieval-Europe-c-400-1000/

Call for Papers

Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference

23 – 26th August 2018

We are pleased to announce that the 24th biennial conference of SASMARS will be held at Mont Fleur in Stellenbosch, South Africa from Thursday the 23rd to Sunday the 26th of August 2018.

“Ancestry and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds”

Keynote Speaker: Professor Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge

Medieval and early modern societies weathered various socio-cultural changes, including religious, economic, and political transformations, across a range of different geographies and in both urban and rural spaces. We seek papers from any applicable discipline that explore ancestry and memory within a variety of geographic locales in the medieval and/or early modern eras. We shall welcome broad and imaginative interpretations of “ancestry” and “memory”.

Deadline: Please send a conference proposal and a short biography to Retha Knoetze: knoetr@unisa.ac.za by 18 February 2018. Any inquiries can be directed to the same email address.

Sensory Cultures and the Communication of Belief

Religious History Association, Canberra, 3 July 2018 (in association with the Australian Historical Association Conference 2-6 July 2018)

The Religious History Association invites presentations that explore the material and sensory dimensions of the communication of belief.

Our knowledge of devotional practices and rituals, and of beliefs and attitudes, can be enriched by exploring the material and sensory heritage through which religions are interpreted, expressed and understood. We are especially interested in how the material aspects of religion, such as music, movement, architecture, objects, foodways, and clothing, as well as sensory responses to these material forms, express and translate religious commitment.

We welcome papers that look particularly at how material and sensory practices shape and express the dynamics of religious belief across geographical areas, eras of history or between distinct communities; that explore cross-cultural and interfaith exchanges, including the re-interpretation of religious texts, art or artefact in missionary encounters; and in diverse social and cultural contexts. Papers may also examine how objects or devotional practices are the products of encounter between diverse religious cultures and exchanges.

Proposals for 20 minute individual papers, panels (3 x 15 minute papers with chair and respondent), and roundtables (90 minute conversation by several scholars on an issue, book or object) are welcome.

Proposals should be submitted through the Australian Historical Association conference site: aha2018.anu.edu.au, indicating RHA Stream.

CFP Deadline: 28 February 2018 Participants will be invited to submit papers to the Journal of Religious History.

Calls for Papers
ISSM 2018 Boundary Crossings
October 12-13, 2018
Brock University, St. Catharines, ON, Canada

St Catharines, Ontario, Canada, the location of Brock University, is just 19 kilometres from the Niagara River, the boundary between Canada and the United States of America. In this location, then, it seems appropriate to think about medievalism and boundary crossing. Plenary sessions will cross disciplinary boundaries by investigating similarities in concerns, methods, and themes between the fields of (neo)medievalism(s) and the Neo-Victorian. For regular conference sessions, proposals are invited on the conference theme. Papers might address the ways in which medievalism crosses the boundaries of, or is used to interrogate the boundaries of

• genres/subgenres
• national designations
• temporal periods
• academic disciplines
• the academic and the popular
• gender
• sexuality
• class
• race
• human / non-human

Please send one-page proposals to Dr. Ann F. Howey, Associate Professor at Brock University (ahowey@brocku.ca), by March 26, 2018.

St Catharines, in the Niagara Peninsula, is located midway between Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and Buffalo, New York, USA; both cities have international airports, and airport shuttles service the Niagara region from both airports. St Catharines is located in the heart of Niagara’s wine producing region and is also close to tourist attractions such as Niagara Falls and Niagara-on-the-Lake, with its famous Shaw Festival theatre productions.

Traces Arborescentes – Call for Papers

Sacred Science: Learning from the Tree

European Society for the History of Science

Biennial Conference 2018 September, 14-17

We are pleased to announce that Trames Arborescentes is preparing a symposium for the European Society for the History of Science’s conference (http:// www.eshs.org/?lang=en) that will take place in London on September 2018.

«Unity and Disunity» has been chosen as the main theme for the aforementioned meeting. Within this framework, Trames Arborescentes has decided to participate by proposing a commented panel that will gather four speakers around the subject «Sacred Science: Learning from the Tree».

Proposals containing personal information (including academic affiliation), an abstract, and a short bio are welcome for this panel. The document may be submitted to our email address tramesarborescentes@gmail.com before December 12.

Symposium abstract:

Sacred Science: Learning from the Tree

This panel traces the arboreal motif through time, using it as a means to reflect on unity and disunity of interaction between science, art and the sacred. Indeed, the figure of the tree has been used as a visualization tool to structure knowledge since Antiquity. However, it turns out that the tree of the Arts and Sciences is a deciduous tree. Its holy leaves, metaphorical expressions of unseen secrets, have been shed as science gradually broke away from the sacred. The apparent unity of its branches, the Arts and the Sciences, became exposed and fractured. What was the role of the arboreal structure in this process?

Three points will stand in our proposal. Firstly, we will question how the treediagram was used to articulate the conjunction of the Arts, the Sciences and the Sacred. During the Middle Ages, tree diagrams were commonly used in the arts degree as tools to study arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory, grammar, logic and rhetoric. These frameworks of learning in the universities were infused with the sacred, they sprang from the sacred. Gradually though, the Arts and Sciences began to be distinguished, subjects changed categories. But even as Darwin was developing his theory of life, the sacred continued to play a role in scientific discovery and communication. How was this distinction nuanced in every period?

The second point will focus on the loss of the sacred and the sacralization of knowledge. In effect, step by step, the distinction between the arts and sciences gradually became a divide and the concept of sacred changed in this learning context. The sacred was given less space in the hierarchies of knowledge, it no longer penetrated every aspect of learning. At some point knowledge itself became sacred. When and how did this happen? What rapport did the sacred have in this dramatic change in our perception of knowledge? Was this new knowledge disruptive? Did it bring about unity or disunity? Is the current dissociation between the Arts and Sciences a consequence of divorcing knowledge from the sacred?

Thirdly, we will examine arboreal motifs in our contemporary era, when encyclopedic knowledge and three-dimensional mind maps, once again seek to chart the infinite, the unknown, what is not seen by the naked eye. Are these new worlds in new dimensions still shown shaped in a tree-form? If so, what knowledge does the tree convey? Why is the arboreal structure effective? How is the sacred expressed (if at all) in this structure?

The dialectic relationship between unity and disunity seems perfectly tailored to the branching of the tree-diagram, which also allows expression of a hierarchical combination ad infinitum. The centrality and unity – concepts in which the trunk of these diagrams was firmly rooted, has been shifted for new multifocal tree-figures, which grant us plenty of new possibilities that adapt well to current models of information visualization. This panel uses arboreal constructs as a means to look into the sacred/knowledge relationship in order to question the forthcoming cognitive patterns of unity and disunity that will shape our near future.

Channeling Relations in Medieval England and France

Organizers: Stephanie Grace-Petinos (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Deborah McGrady (University of Virginia); Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow); Sara Rychtarik (Graduate Center, CUNY)

Date: May 4, 2018

Location: CUNY Graduate Center

For medievalists, interdisciplinary work has always been a necessity, and our major annual conferences reflect this need to broaden our understanding of the dynamic and widespread time period. While medieval scholars may specialize in one area of medieval studies, they also understand that separating traditions – by culture, language, religion, geographic borders, etc. – can create a limited and narrow understanding of the Middle Ages. This is especially the case for medievalists who study medieval England and France. Although, or perhaps because, they were frequently engaged in war, these two countries had many rich literary and cultural exchanges over the course of the Middle Ages. For Middle English scholars, French literature and music are often valuable resources for the sources of the works of popular authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, and so are often read in medieval English classes. Yet why is Chaucer not routinely read in French departments? Or, on the other side, medieval English texts, law, as well as literature, were often written in French, not English. But British literature survey courses often limit their coverage of the Anglo-French corpus to one or two lais of Marie de France.

This one-day conference offers the opportunity for scholars, whether they usually preserve or cross departmental lines in their own work, to come together with scholars from departments with whom they may not routinely discuss academic work/research/approaches. While this conference focuses on literary and cultural exchanges between England and France, we are not discounting other traditions and welcome submissions for individual papers or full panel proposals that also incorporate other perspectives, particularly non-western. 

Topics to be discussed can include, but are by no means limited to:

–       A text that belongs to both the English and French traditions

–       A text, legend or corpus of characters that exist with variations in each tradition

–       A textual theme shared by both traditions

–       A historical event that occurred in both traditions (i.e. The Hundred Years War)

–       Religious orders or religious figures prominent in both England and France

–       Historical or literary figures that travel throughout England and France

–       French texts that circulate within England; English texts that circulate within France; English and/or French texts that circulate within both England and France

This event is hosted by Pearl Kibre Medieval Study at the CUNY Graduate Center, with contributions by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program.

Please send abstracts of 250 words to pkmsconference@gmail.com by December 31, 2017.