De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History is seeking proposals for five sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2019 (Western Michigan University, 9-12 May 2019).

De Re Militari is interested in papers on all aspects of warfare, broadly defined. Papers from the Kalamazoo sessions may be considered for publication in the Journal of Medieval Military History https://boydellandbrewer.com/series/journal-of-medieval-military-history.html

The five sessions are:

1. Annual Journal of Medieval Military History Lecture
2. War and Chivalry
3. Early and High Medieval Military History
4. Late Medieval Military History
5. Medieval Military Technology

Proposal deadline is 15 September 2018. Proposals should be sent to Dr Valerie Eads, Department of Humanities and Sciences, School of Visual Arts, New York: veads@sva.edu

The Material Collective is sponsoring a roundtable at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo 2019 (Western Michigan University, 9-12 May 2019) on The Middle Ages: What Does it Have to Do with Me?

What does medieval art, culture, and history have to do with my life; what is the point of knowing this stuff? Immersed in the study of the Middle Ages as we are, we may lose sight of the fact that for many people the material to which we are passionately devoted holds little to no interest. It is our hope that this roundtable discussion can produce some strategies for countering this disengagement.

As we consider how to expand access to and engagement with the field, we invite consideration of the roles identity can play in both academic and popular engagement with Medieval Studies. From its antiquarian origins to today, the field has been shaped by nationalist identities, impulses, and agendas. In more recent decades, scholarly attention to gender, racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual identities has expanded and re-shaped the field and created opportunities for multiple identifications with the past. We also wish to question this paradigm: must engagement be structured by identity?

We welcome contributions treating all aspects of fostering access to and engagement with Medieval Studies both in the classroom and beyond. This includes consideration of the way we as scholars talk about Medieval Studies—where our voices are heard and what we can be heard to say. With humanities fields under constant threat, we may also wish to consider the various publics with whom we might profitably engage. Beyond undergraduate students are the parents, administrators, and legislators whose voices sway what does and does not get taught at colleges and universities; there are also the primary and secondary school students who may enter our classrooms someday in the future.

A discussion of public engagement is also an opportunity to reconsider the way we conceive of our field. Ongoing efforts to decolonize Medieval Studies are essential to the mission of making the field accessible to a more diverse public. This includes engaging colleagues to recognize the need for change as well as the need to support medievalists marginalized by race, LGBTQ identity, or employment status.

Topics for consideration may include but not be limited to:

• Engaging students
• Engaging the public beyond the classroom
• Medieval Studies and modern identities
• Medieval Studies in the neoliberal academy
• Promoting access to Medieval Studies
• Role of public scholarship within the academy

Please submit abstracts of 300 words by 15 September 2018 to Rachel Dressler (dressler@albany.edu) and Maeve Doyle (DOYLEMAE@EASTERNCT.EDU).

The University of Sydney Postgraduate History Conference will be held on 28 and 29 November 2018. We warmly invite postgraduate students to submit an abstract for this two-day interdisciplinary conference on the theme of Connected Histories.

Ideas. Culture. Family. Environment. Media. War. Trade. Language. Food. Histories are connected in more ways than we can imagine. At the 2018 University of Sydney Postgraduate History Conference we invite you to share your research and the historical connections you’ve uncovered. We take a broad understanding of this theme and invite you to submit an abstract based on our suggestions below or one of your own choosing:

• Global, international, and transnational connections
• Interdisciplinary connections
• Histories of empire and colonialism
• Connections of past and present: how understandings of the past impact us today
• Intellectual histories of connected ideas and concepts
• Chance encounters: unexpected connections?

We welcome abstracts from postgraduate students across disciplines and encourage anyone with a historical aspect to their work to apply.

If you wish to present, please submit an abstract of no more than 200 words for a twenty minute presentation, as well as a short bio, here.

Please note, abstracts are due by 3^rd August 2018.

To register to attend, whether presenting or not, click here.

The conference announced on the call for papers below was originally designed for Europeanists, but was opened up to all world areas following multiple requests by non-Europeanists to participate. The CFP has therefore been revised and the deadline extended to 15 August, 2018. Applications from anthropologists, legal scholars and political scientists are especially welcome. Please note that all proposals previously submitted remain valid.

Monarchy and Modernity since 1500, University of Cambridge, 8-9 January 2019.

Europe’s past is overwhelmingly monarchical, yet the monarchies that remain in place today hardly resemble those that governed Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. Modernity has transformed monarchy from a matter of unquestioned and often sacred fact to a matter of largely secular and usually democratic choice. If the words remain the same – along with many of the families, their titles, properties and places of residence – their meaning has changed profoundly over time and across countries, so much so that, along the centuries, the working mechanisms, functions and powers of European monarchy have been transformed. The academic literature, however, seldom measures this distance between monarchy’s various historical meanings and its surprisingly frequent manifestations today.

In theoretical and speculative disciplines, the lack of inquiry into monarchy’s significance is due partly to disciplinary divisions. Political theorists, intellectual historians, experts in jurisprudence and art and literary critics rarely delve into the subject of monarchy, while historians of monarchy tend to focus on chronology rather than concepts. Monarchy’s own nature has helped determine these divisions.With its providentialist, semi-magic and mysterious foundations in the divine right of kings, monarchism is a double paradox, a form of political theory that is at once anti-political and anti-theoretical. Innovatively, this conference seeks to break disciplinary barriers by combining the outlooks of monarchical specialists on the one hand, and of social, cultural, literary and political theorists on theother.

Proceeding from the premise that the nature of things is best known, and their development mostdetermined, during critical times, this conference centers on three (long) key moments in the history ofmodern European monarchy: the English Revolution, the French Revolution, and the mainstreamingof republicanism during the first half of the twentieth century. These moments, however, are onlyreferential, and presentations studying the reinvention, representation and conceptualisation ofmonarchy during other modern periods, from 1500 to the present, are also welcome, with Renaissancesubjects possibly serving as introits and contemporary ones as epilogues to the conference.

The main lines of inquiry are twofold, one directed at monarchy’s political-legal significance, and theother at its socio-cultural, psychological, religious, literary and spiritual roles. The political-legal lineof inquiry can include – without being limited to – European monarchy’s historical relationship tolegislation and the administration of justice, as well as democratic, republican, and aristocratictraditions. The theological/sociological/anthropological perspective is instead concerned withmonarchy as a series of rituals, processions, celebrations and formal procedures that representsovereignty, organise time and relationships, lend nations a sense of identity, and connect individualsemotionally with sacred spaces and powers.

Studies of non-European monarchical traditions are likewise accepted, preferably with reference to European ones.

Contributions may address one or more of the following themes but are not limited to them:

1. Monarchy in political thought
2. Monarchy and constitutionalism
3. Monarchy in its relation with religion, theology and spirituality
4. The relationship between spiritual and temporal powers
5. Royalism vs. monarchism
6. National and sovereign representation
7. The royal imaginary, including literary representations of monarchy
8. Monarchy and property
9. Monarchy and material culture: art, fashion and the built environment
10. Royal feasts, rituals, processions and celebrations
11. Women and monarchy
12. Non-European monarchical traditions, preferably with reference to European ones.

We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations, which will be revised subsequently for publication ina peer-reviewed collective volume. Graduate students are welcome to participate, and papers in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are accepted, although English isencouraged to facilitate communication. The conference will be held at the University of Cambridge on 8-9 January 2019.

Please email a 200-word abstract and one-page CV to Carolina Armenteros(cra22@cam.ac.uk) by 15 August 2018.

The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS) is (co-)sponsoring six panels at the 2019 International Congress on  Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Details of individual panels and organisers follow.

1. Complicit: White Women and the Project of Empire

Women in medieval texts are often read as oppressed, powerless, and without agency. This panel asks how our readings of women, such as Constance in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale or the Princess of Tars from The King of Tars, change when we view these women as not simply acted upon, but as complicit in the scenes of conversion and imperial power that dominate these narratives. This panel seeks papers that move beyond reading women in narratives of imperial dominance as solely victims of patriarchal structures of power, and asks what it means to recognize complicity with the project of empire alongside patriarchal oppression. The goal of this panel is to offer intersectional analyses of the project of patriarchy alongside the project of empire through a reexamination of how we define and understand women’s agency.

Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to Shyama Rajendran (shyama.rajendran@gmail.com).

2. Dysphoric Pedagogies: Teaching About Transgender and Intersex in the Middle Ages (co-sponsored by The Teaching Association for Medieval Studies (TEAMS))

Students have long seemed curious about the non-binary and non-cisgender lives that appear in courses on pre-modern periods. This panel will offer a range of pedagogy techniques, lesson plans, assignments, reading lists, and anecdotes for those interested in enhancing how they teach about transgender and intersex in the Middle Ages. The concept of “Dysphoric Pedagogies” is drawn from the DSM-5 diagnostic language that describes the experience where one’s identified or expressed gender conflicts with the gender assigned by society. Scholars will share their experiences teaching dysphoria within the art, history, and literature in an era before the DSM-5 and its various diagnoses, or the coinage of the words “transgender” or “intersex.”  How have these moments of gender diversity and conflict provoked conversations about self and society, expression and audience, nature and nurture, gender norms and non-conformity, past and present?

Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski (Gabrielle.Bychowski@case.edu)

3. Critical Approaches to Medieval Men and Masculinities

In recent decades, there has been increasing engagement in medieval studies with questions of gender, space and identity as they relate to medieval men and masculinities. From the hypermasculine heroes of romance to Abelard’s eunuch body, performative medieval masculinities both uphold and challenge the structural frameworks that define medieval culture and society. As such, an understanding of medieval masculinities and their role in shaping culture and society is vital to a full reading of masculinities in the twenty-first century. This panel invites papers which contribute to and extend scholarship on medieval men and masculinities, particularly those which explore queer and intersectional masculinities.

Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to Amy Burge (dramyburge@gmail.com).

4. Girls to Women, Boys to Men: Gender in Medieval Education and Socialization

Regardless of access to formal education, children learned how to become adults in medieval society from a variety of sources. Ruth Mazo Karras’s From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Late Medieval Europe traces some of the influences and ideologies surrounding the ways medieval boys were socialized to become men, contributing to critical masculinity studies by examining the formation in addition to the manifestation of masculinity. The manifestation of medieval concepts of femininity has been extensively studied, but more attention needs to be paid to the ways in which girls were socialized to become women. This panel will expand discussions about children and childhood, gender, and education. Questions that might be raised include: How were girls trained to become women? How were girls taught to view themselves? How were they taught to view men? How were men taught to view women? What ideologies and structures played a role in the ways girls were trained or taught? How do texts reinforce or defy the dominant models of feminine training and socialization?

Organizer: Dainy Bernstein. Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to dainybernstein@gmail.com.

5. #MEditerraneanTOO (co-sponsored by the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies)

Neither rape culture nor women’s collective activism against sexual harassment and gender-based violence are 21^st century phenomena, nor are they exclusive to the US. As a collaboration between the Association of Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies and the Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship, this panel seeks papers that examine these topics transregionally, specifically around the multi-religious environment of the medieval Mediterranean. A range of methodologies is welcome – literary assessments of the querelle des femmes, court cases on the definition of rape, archival work on sex workers and violence, laws on forced concubinage between religious traditions, analysis of hagiographic tropes of forced marriage, etc.

Organizer: Jessica Boon. Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to jboon@email.unc.edu.

6. Nasty Women: Villains, Witches, Rebels in the Middle Ages (co-sponsored by the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages (SSHMA))

Recent debates in modern discourse have centered around appropriate boundaries of feminine behavior. “Nastiness” has become a by-word for a specific type of womanhood, one that pushes the boundaries of acceptable sexual agency, political power, and social hierarchies. This panel will explore the various ways in “nastiness” existed in the Middle Ages, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. How did contemporary authors, philosophers, or courts depict or deal with subversive women? How did women conceive of their own power in terms of sexual acts, gender expression, and other forms of socially-rebellious behavior? The papers in this session will address these issues through several lenses, providing new insight in the critical discourses of queer and feminist medieval scholarship.

Send abstracts, Participant Information Form, and other inquiries to Graham Drake (drake@geneseo.edu).