Monthly Archives: March 2019

2020 National Library of Australia Fellowships

Applications are now open for the 2020 National Library of Australia Fellowships, which support in-depth collection research across a broad range of disciplines. These prestigious funded Fellowships are available to scholars from Australia and overseas undertaking advanced research projects. They will enjoy 12 weeks of intensive research using the National Library of Australia’s extraordinary 10 million item collection.

Applications close 30 April 2019 and will be assessed on merit. Some Honorary Fellowships may also be awarded.

Benefits include an honorarium of AUD$1,000 per week for 12 weeks, contribution towards travel and accommodation, privileged access to the Library’s collections, staff and resources, and uninterrupted time for research.

Fellowship categories

National Library Fellowships may be awarded to researchers working in any field or discipline. The intensive research enabled by the Fellowships can focus on Australian or international collections, with a view to creating publications or other public outputs, including curatorial projects or other research outcomes.

The research can be at any stage of development, or form part of a larger project. However, applicants must outline in their application their anticipated progress during the Fellowship residency, as well as how relevant collections will underpin or advance their research toward publication or other research outcomes.

The period of Fellowship research may lead to longer-term outcomes, rather than immediate publication or public outcomes. The Library does not expect Fellows to complete a body of work during the residency.

For further information and to apply, see the National Library of Australia website.

Notice of ANZAMEMS AGM

The Annual General Meeting of ANZAMEMS Inc. will be held on Monday 1 April 2019 at 10:00am-12:00pm (WST).

The meeting is hosted by The University of Western Australia and will be held via the video conferencing software Zoom. 

Local times (for your convenience):
WA: 10:00am-12:00pm
QLD: 12:00pm-2:00pm
SA: 12:30pm-2:30pm
VIC/NSW/TAS/ACT: 1:00pm-3:00pm
New Zealand: 3:00pm-5:00pm

Current members should have received by email details of matters to be voted on at the upcoming AGM, along with a Proxy Voting Form for those members who are unable to attend the meeting in person, and details for joining the meeting by Zoom video conferencing. If you are a current financial member and have not received this information, please contact the ANZAMEMS Executive Administrator Marina Gerzic.

You must be a financial member of ANZAMEMS for 2019 in order for your vote to be considered valid. To renew your membership for 2019, or to join ANZAMEMS, please visit: https://anzamems.org/?page_id=75

New member publication: Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries

Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries cover imageCongratulations to ANZAMEMS members Helen Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine on the publication of their co-edited collection Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries (Manchester University Press, 2018). It is doubly pleasing that the book is a festschrift for long-time ANZAMEMS member and past president Stephanie Trigg, who has contributed so much to the Association and to the wider field of medieval and early modern studies. Below, the editors reflect on what inspired their book and the diverse approaches contributors take to its unifying themes.

“We were delighted to take up the opportunity to celebrate Stephanie Trigg’s academic achievements as well as her tireless fostering of scholarly communities throughout her career. Our intention was to create a vibrant collection that attests to her achievements and her generosity as a researcher. We felt that within Stephanie’s wide-ranging interests, Geoffrey Chaucer was central to the progression of her own ideas and her sphere of influence. For over 700 years, many readers have claimed powerful personal connections not only with Chaucer’s writing, but with the author himself. Stephanie’s Congenial Souls (2001) delved deeply into the desires that Chaucer’s literary output has both created and fed throughout those seven centuries. This mode of inquiry, which she describes as a symptomatic long history, makes explicit the stakes and the manoeuvres that give shape to the experience of communing with the Chaucerian text, its author, and the age in which he lived, claims that are at times proprietorial and exclusive, and at others challenging and resistant. Stephanie has since employed this methodology to interrogate hierarchised distinctions between scholarly and creative responses to medieval culture, the latter often known as medievalism. Congenial Souls therefore offers an important contribution to Chaucer scholarship, but further lays down groundwork for researchers of medieval culture to reflect on the broader significance of their own practices.

Two decades after the publication of Congenial Souls, we felt it was timely to review current debates surrounding the traditions, emotions and intellectual underpinnings of Chaucer scholarship, and the implications of this work for researching the Middle Ages more generally. Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries showcases the contributions of fourteen outstanding thinkers in the field who explore both Chaucer’s writing and the longue durée of its reception. The diversity of topics and approaches evinces the dynamic and innovative research that Chaucer’s writing continues to inspire, as well as the resonance of Stephanie’s insights within contemporary Chaucer research.

Each essay stands alone as a significant contribution to Chaucer scholarship, in some cases drawing attention to features of Chaucer’s poetic techniques and intertextual allusions that have gone unnoticed, despite extensive poring over Chaucer’s oeuvre. Some are inspired by or engage directly with Stephanie’s work on authorship, emotions and medievalism to produce fresh insights into the faces, bodies and environments found within Chaucer’s narratives; others consider emotions and connection with Chaucer himself in critical analyses as well as in creative forms such as cinema and stand-up comedy.

The historical development of Chaucer’s legacy is represented in a variety of contexts, from scribal activity and early print culture through to contests over national identity in the nineteenth century. Several essays address how critical trends and challenges both shape and are impacted by Chaucer’s canonical status, and many individual essays attend to combinations of these themes. Together, they create a dialogue about what the past means in our own present moment, and why Chaucer continues to be such a source of fascination and reward. These essays confirm that we are never truly “done” with the past; we continue to return with new questions to Chaucer’s writing and the astonishing experience of immediacy that it produces in readers even as temporal distance increases. The changing present compels us to reconsider, re-evaluate, and reappraise the connections between literary traditions and contemporary scholarship, and past and present more broadly.

Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries is also inflected by the diversity of our own research interests. Melissa is currently working on children’s voices in both medieval literature and contemporary Australian culture. In both contexts, she explores how historically specific ideas about childhood, especially the relationships of children with adults, shape the communication of actual and imagined children, including some created by Chaucer. Anne is at the proofing stage of her first monograph, Medieval Crime Fiction: A Critical Overview, which will be published by McFarland in April and offers the first sustained analysis of this neglected but extremely popular example of contemporary medievalism. She is also finalising an article for Exemplaria that considers Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale through Georges Bataille’s theory of an economics of waste. Helen is currently working on feet in medieval and early modern poetics and art, and on ideas of beauty and aesthetics in medieval European poetry. She is completing a chapter on Thomas Hoccleve’s poetics through theories of embodiment.

Helen M. Hickey, Anne McKendry and Melissa Raine are Research Associates at the University of Melbourne’s School of Culture and Communication. A substantial preview of Contemporary Chaucer across the Centuries can be downloaded for free from the publisher’s website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526129154/

ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Amanda McVitty. We particularly welcome approaches from early career scholars.

 

Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship

The Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience and the John Carter Brown Library invite applications for the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellowship, a unique research and writing fellowship.

The Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Library Fellowship supports work by academics, independent scholars and writers working on significant projects relating to the literature, history, culture, or art of the Americas before 1830. Candidates with a U.S. history topic are strongly encouraged to concentrate on the period prior to 1801. The fellowship is also open to filmmakers, novelists, creative and performing artists, and others working on projects that draw on this period of history. Candidates are encouraged to consult the John Carter Brown Library’s collections online prior to submitting an application.

The 2018-2019 fellowship award supports two months of research and two months of writing. The stipend is $5,000 per month for a total of $20,000, plus housing and university privileges.

The research is conducted at the John Carter Brown Library on the campus of Brown University in Providence, R.I., which has one of the world’s richest collections of books, maps and documents related to North and South America and the Caribbean between 1492 and 1830. The research must be completed within the academic year (September to May). Housing will be provided convenient to the library.

The writing period of the fellowship will be at the Starr Center at Washington College in Chestertown, MD. The Starr Center is dedicated to innovative approaches to the nation’s past and present, and to fostering outstanding writing on American history and culture. The two-month writing term will be during the summer following the research term (June- August). The Hodson Trust – John Carter Brown Library Fellow will be provided with an office in the Starr Center’s c. 1745 waterfront Custom House, as well as exclusive use of its Fellows’ Residence in Chestertown’s historic district. (The house is large enough to accommodate a family.)

Applications should include the following:

1. A cover letter.

2. The applicant’s curriculum vitae, including a list of past publications or other relevant projects, as well as the names and telephone numbers of at least three references.

3. At least one substantial sample of the candidate’s writing (published or unpublished) or other past work.

4. A brief narrative description of the work-in-progress, its potential contributions to history, literature, the arts, or our understanding of the present, and the candidate’s plan for his or her fellowship terms in Providence and Chestertown.

Candidates are encouraged to consult the John Carter Brown Library’s collections online prior to submitting an application. Special consideration will be given to proposals discussing specific resources at the JCB that will be useful to the project.

For further information and to apply see https://www.brown.edu/academics/libraries/john-carter-brown/fellowships/description-fellowship-program

Deadline: 15 March, 2019.

CFP Romantic Studies Association of Australiasia 2019 Conference

Proposals are invited for the the fifth biennial RSAA conference in Canberra, Australia, 21-23 November 2019. The conference theme is ‘Embodying Romanticism’.

Although the body has preoccupied literary scholarship for some time, there has been a renewed attention in Romantic studies to the complex ways in which literature encodes and reproduces our awareness of embodied experience. Challenging views of Romanticism as bounded by visionary and idealist expression, such work reflects a reorientation of criticism around the materiality of Romantic culture, whether configured as part of the age of sensibility or in relation to the era’s natural and social sciences. The Romantic period was, moreover, a time when control of the body emerged as a key political issue in workshops, homes, battlefields and colonies, when bodies were subject to rapidly evolving ideas of gender, class and race, while new bodies of knowledge and corporate political bodies emerged to regulate the affairs of nations and empires. This was a period when bodies were subject to ever more intensive modes of analysis and management, at the same time that bodies imposed their transgressive physicality through new understandings of environments, vitalism, trauma, slavery, disease and taste. Attentive to such developments, Romantic studies in turn dovetails with a broader materialist emphasis that explores how bodies are shaped in relation to affect, biopolitics, speculative realism, post-humanism and eco-criticism. Alain Badiou has recently proposed that our modern, liberal ideology can today only perceive two objects: bodies and language. Aligning itself at the conjuncture of these two terms, this conference invites papers that broadly consider how embodiment was evoked, challenged and understood in Romantic cultural life.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspects of Romanticism and embodiment. Proposals may be for individual papers or for panels of 3-4 papers.

Abstracts of approximately 250 words are due by 30 June 2019. Please send abstracts to the conference convenor, Neil Ramsey, at n.ramsey@unsw.edu.au

Postgraduate bursaries are available. See the conference website for details: https://www.unsw.adfa.edu.au/conferences/rsaa/postgraduate-bursaries

S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship

Applications are now open for the S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship, an outstanding international opportunity for early career scholars. The Fellowship is open to young scholars under 45 years of age. Applicants must demonstrate an outstanding record of scholarship and outline a program of study that will lead to a book relating to English literature of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.

The Fellowship is worth approximately $35,000, and is available for Australian scholars (not students) intending to study outside of Australia, leading to publishing a book relating to dramatic or non-dramatic English literature of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries.

Applications close 29 April 2019.

For further information and to apply, see https://scholarships.unimelb.edu.au/awards/s.-ernest-sprott-fellowship