Paper and poster submissions are invited for the Gender and Medieval Studies 2019 conference, to be held at Durham University, 7-10 January 2019. The conference theme is ‘Gender and Aliens’.

In recent years discourse around ‘aliens’, as migrants living in modern nation-states, has been highly polarised, and the status of people who are technically termed legal or illegal aliens by the governments of those states has often been hotly contested. It is evident from studies of the past, however, that the movement of people is not a recent phenomenon: in the medieval west, one of the Latin terms applied to such people was alieni (‘foreigners’, or ‘strangers’), and it is clear from the surviving evidence that there were many people in the Middle Ages who could be, and indeed were, identified as aliens. This conference aims to stimulate debate about the ways in which gender intersected with and related to the idea of such aliens – and, more broadly, alienation – in the whole medieval world from c. 400 to c. 1500. The organisers welcome proposals for papers on any topic related to gender and aliens or alienation, broadly construed, and encourage submissions relating to the world beyond Europe. Papers might consider topics such as:

• refugees, immigrants, emigrants
• inclusion and exclusion
• alterity and difference
• outlaws, the law, legality
• marginalised or disenfranchised groups
• non-normative bodies, illness, disability
• acculturation
• imagined geographies
• borders and frontiers
• ethnicity and identity
• slavery and slaves

In addition to sessions of papers, the conference will also include a poster session. Proposals for a 20-minute paper or for a poster can be submitted at https://tinyurl.com/gms2019submit by September 30th 2018.

The conference organisers are also happy to consider proposals for other kinds of presentation. Please contact the organisers at gmsconference2019@gmail.com to discuss these.

Some travel bursaries will be available for students and unwaged delegates to attend this conference. Please see http://medievalgender.co.uk/ for details.

Abstracts are invited for a panel on Vices and Virtues: Gender, Subversion, and Moralizing Discourses at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS) Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, Michigan, 9-12 May, 2019.

Organizers: Jacob Doss, University of Texas at Austin; and Matthew Vanderpoel, University of Chicago

Significant watersheds in medieval Christianity have often entailed the reconceptualization of notions of vice and virtue and of gender. From the twelfth-century “renaissance” and “reformation,” amid the thirteenth-century “pastoral revolution,” and after the rediscovery of Aristotle, these two conceptual categories formed a mutually influential discourse. However, much of the scholarship on the development of discourses of vice and virtue has not incorporated gender as a central category of analysis, outside of specific case studies, if at all. Where gender has been addressed it has often been treated primarily as an egalitarian, gender-neutral discourse. Certainly, on one level, one’s susceptibility to vice or the development of virtue was not the domain of one or another gender, but this did not stop medieval people from creatively deploying them in gendered terms. Despite this seemingly ambivalent relationship to gender, medieval Christians wielded virtue and vice to organize social hierarchies, construct theoretical and practical anthropologies, and, as in telling cases such as Prudentius’ Psychomachia, to subvert gender binaries.

This panel will aim both to interrogate and theorize, broadly, the extent to which moralizing discourses concerning the vices and virtues incorporated notions of gender and vice versa. How does the gendering of specific personifications of vices and virtues reinforce and subvert medieval discourses about gender? How do normative commitments to gender roles and performances structure programmatic and didactic accounts of vice and virtue? To what extent does the intersection of vice and virtue with gendered language change between different religious or non-religious contexts, for example between monasteries, the universities, and popularizing works for the laity, or in the politics of the nobility? How may recent gender- and queer- theoretical thought equip us to interpret medieval writings on vice and virtue? Given these variegated questions, we seek an interdisciplinary panel and welcome proposals from scholars of religion, philosophy, literature, art history, and history.

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words including your name title, and affiliation along with a completed Participant Information Form (available on the ICMS conference website) to the session organizers, Jacob Doss (jacobwdoss@utexas.edu ) or Matthew Vanderpoel (vanderpoelensis@uchicago.edu) by 15 September, 2018.

Abstracts not accepted will be forwarded to the Congress Committee to be considered for general sessions.