Monthly Archives: October 2019

CFP Medieval English Theatre Conference

Consumption, Performance, and Early Theatre, University of Wolverhampton・Saturday, 4 April 2020

Consumption involves the using up of a resource, whether through acts of imbibing or intake and acts of expenditure or through decaying or wasting away. Early performance relies on consumption, whether this takes the form of Eucharistic consumption accompanying liturgy; Eve’s sinful act of consumption that provided pretext and plot for urban biblical pageants; the use of performance to sell goods and medicines; the material goods required to create dramatic spectacle; the consumption of drink, ideas and time by spectators and performers; or the Tudor feasts that produced space for dramatic interludes. The Records of Early English Drama, with their lists of goods, payments and services, provide an archive of evidence for consumption practice. Yet acts of consumption in early drama are often fraught. Consumption is as often used to articulate doubt or mark characters and performance makers as morally dubious as it is to ensnare the senses of audiences. In a climate both preoccupied with material consumption at a global level and in which we, as researchers, theatre practitioners and teachers are frequently reminded that our labour is also consumer material, this conference seeks to examine how consumption is manifested, managed and questioned in early performance. Topics might include but are not limited to:

• The consumption of raw materials and/ or material culture in the production and performance of early drama
• Food or fasting in early performance; the morality, ethics and/or theology of consumption
• Economies of consumption in early performance
• Ritual performance and faith; inclusion and community
• Subversive consumption, over-consumption and/or consumption as a source of ‘othering’
• Consumption, spectacle and the senses
• The consumption of play manuscripts and texts
• Critical reflections on the role of consumption within modern performances and broadcasts of early drama
• Critical reflections on the role of consumption in early drama pedagogy and/or research

We invite 300-word proposals from scholars at any stage of study or career, for 20 minute papers or roundtable sessions; please submit your proposals by 1 December 2019 to Daisy Black d.black3@wlv.ac.uk

On the day before the conference (Friday, 3 April 2020) there will be a Postgraduate and Early Career Symposium organised with the Early English Drama & Performance Network; more information about this will be posted soon.

Further details and registration information will be posted soon at Medieval English Theatre.

Bloomsbury Medieval Studies

Bloomsbury has recently launched a new interdisciplinary digital resource, Bloomsbury Medieval Studies. It brings together high-quality secondary content with visual primary sources, an exclusive new reference work and object images into one cross-searchable platform, to open up the medieval world for students and scholars across this rich field of study.

This unprecedented platform comprises content from Bloomsbury and other leading publishers in the field, including I.B. Tauris, Amsterdam University Press and Arc Humanities Press – as well as medieval maps from the British Library and newly digitized incunabula from Senate House Library.

Users will benefit from instant, searchable access to a new and exclusively commissioned reference work, the Encyclopedia of the Global Middle Ages. Written by an international group of scholars, it offers a non-Eurocentric approach with articles including:

– Thematic overviews of intellectual discourse, migration and trade systems
– Primary source analyses of Maya Civilization, Japan and Korean Kingdom of Silla
– Core Case Studies of queens and powerful women of the Middle Ages.

The platform also provides full digital access to over 150 eBooks– ranging from primary texts to research monographs, companions, primary source readers and more.

Interested in finding out more?
Bloomsbury Medieval Studies will be available for 30-day free trials and can be purchased on a perpetual access basis. If you would like to register interest in a trial, or have any questions about the product please contact Katie.Dean@bloomsbury.com.

The full press release including further details of resources available can be downloaded here.

Download (DOCX, 529KB)

PARTHENOS Digital Humanities Training

The EU-funded PARTHENOS project has released an online teaching module, Digital Humanities and Heritage Science Research Infrastructures: New Approaches to the Study of Pre-Modern Manuscripts, which seeks to bring together knowledge and resources from Research Infrastructures and Humanities projects. The module will be of interest to scholars looking to apply Digital Humanities and/or Heritage Science methods to medieval and early modern manuscript studies. It was produced in collaboration with teams working at Nottingham Trent University (UK) and the University of Canterbury (NZ).

The module is part of the PARTHENOS Training Suite, which provides reusable training materials that can be accessed for free by students, lecturers, and anyone interested in issues and skills related to e-Heritage and Digital Humanities. More information about the PARTHENOS Project can be found here.

CFP International Society for Intellectual History

‘Change and Exchange’: The 2020 Conference of the International Society for Intellectual History, 27 – 29 May 2020, European University Institute

The suddenness of many recent changes has led to a widespread feeling of bewilderment and led many to retreat into what are seen as safe places and idealised pasts, rejection of difference and increasingly violent and intolerant social exchange. At the same time, the evidence of climate change is making people increasingly aware of the need to rethink our way of life. It therefore seems an appropriate moment to look at how change has been understood and conceptualised in the past, how changes in ways of thinking, concepts and paradigms have come about, the strength of resistance to change, and the role of exchange – intellectual and material – in this process. Change and Exchange proposes to explore historical, philosophical, cultural, material, social, environmental and scientific change, the varieties of social, intellectual, material, economic, etc. exchange and the interactions between the two. It will also look at change and exchange in the field of Intellectual History itself.

The International Society for Intellectual History (ISIH) invites proposals for papers and panels. Papers (20 mins, followed by 10 mins of discussion), relating to the theme of change and exchange in intellectual history at large, can concentrate on any period, region, tradition or discipline, including the arts, humanities and sciences, 1450 to present. As well as individual papers, we welcome proposals for panels of up to three papers and a commentator. The range of subjects of investigation is extremely broad, and may include, but is not limited to:

• thinking about change in intellectual history: epistemological breaks, paradigm change and intellectual traditions;
• interdisciplinarity in intellectual history
• debates on social, political, economic, scientific, technological, climate, etc. change;
• writing the history of change; changes of scale in historical understanding
• interactions between political, social, economic, technological, scientific and intellectual change;
• promoting and resisting change;
• informal and institutional exchanges between cultures and their role in bringing about change;
• sociability and intellectual, scientific, commercial, institutional etc. networks;
• the theory, practice, history and role of translation.

Proposals for papers and panels are due by 15 November 2019 and must be submitted through the Conference Submission Form.
Sponsor: Department of History and Civilisation, European University Institute.

For general inquiries, please email Francesca.Parenti@eui.eu.
Conference Committee: Ann Thomson, Thomas Ashby, Elisavet Papalexopoulou, Francesca Parenti.

The details of the conference can also be found on the ISIH website.

CFP Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies

SEDERI welcomes ARTICLES, NOTES and REVIEWS for its next issue (nº 30) to be published in Autumn 2020. SEDERI, Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies, is an annual publication devoted to current criticism and scholarship on Early Modern English Studies. It is peer-reviewed by external readers, following a double-blind policy. It is published in paper and online, in open-access.

QUALITY ASSESSMENT AND INDEXING
SEDERI is included in the Web of Science, the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, the MLA International Bibliography, Scopus, EBSCO Host, ProQuest, ERIH+, Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (ABELL), Dialnet plus, The Spanish Repository for Science and Technology (RECYT), CIRC, CARHUS+, DICE (CSIC-CINDOC-Aneca), Latindex, and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory. SEDERI’s scientific and editorial excellence has been accredited continually by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) since 2009. It meets 100% of the scientific requirements established by Latindex and DICE-CINDOC. The Italian National Agency for the Assessment of Research (ANVUR) has ranked SEDERI Yearbook as an «A» journal.

AREAS OF INTEREST
Early Modern English Literature
Early Modern English History and Culture
Early Modern English Language
Restoration English Studies
Early Modern Anglo-Spanish and cross-cultural studies
Early Modern Anglo-Portuguese cross-cultural studies

EDITORIAL PROCESS
Submissions will be sent to two readers for review, following a double blind, peer-review policy. In case of disagreement, a third report will be decisive. If the paper is accepted for publication, the authors may be asked to consider the readers’ suggestions and to bring it into line with our style sheet. The contributions, in their final form, will go through copyediting, layout, and proofreading. Once published, the authors will receive a copy of the issue in which their work is included.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION
Time from submission to decision: 3-4 months
From decision to publication: 6-9 months
Number of readers prior to decision: 2-3
Articles/notes submitted per year: 20-25
Articles/notes published per year: 6-12
Information updated on July 2019

Submissions should be sent through the SEDERI online submission platform (https://recyt.fecyt.es/index.php/SEDY/about/submissions). If you are not a user of the SEDERI platform yet, you will need to register as a new user before logging in. All submissions should be in Word/RTF format. Please omit any personal information in the file of your paper and make sure the file properties do not show your name.

Deadline for submission: 31 October 2019

For further details please download the attached CFP and style sheet:

Download (PDF, 159KB)

Download (PDF, 149KB)

Highlights from the Parergon archives: Women and Property

We asked members of Parergon‘s Early Career Committee to tell us about a Parergon article that really stood out for them and why they found it valuable for their research. In this post, Emma Simpson discusses Patricia Crawford’s ‘Women and Property: Women as Property’, Parergon 19.1 (2002), pp. 151-171 (DOI: doi.org/10.1353/pgn.2002.0086)

Those of us interested in early modern women owe a great debt to Patricia Crawford. The ANZAMEMS Crawford-Maddern network speaks to her personal legacy, one that builds on her extensive work in the field encompassing numerous monographs, articles, and edited collections.

Personally, Crawford and Gowing’s Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England was an early introduction to research around early modern women, and I returned to Crawford’s work when beginning my dissertation. Though my focus has since shifted from women writers in a male-dominated genre to representations of women within that genre itself, Crawford’s work still influences the historicist approach I take in my work. Indeed, she remains important across disciplines, and her 2002 Parergon article “Women and Property: Woman as Property” is no exception.

Here, Crawford explores how early modern women functioned as property, what rights they had to property and freedom, and how this affected their ability to act autonomously. She suggests that “three interlocking variables affected a woman’s right to property”: the “status” of women as a category, the “complex system of jurisdictions” which comprised early modern law, and the definition of property itself. But in outlining difficulties for women in the early modern period, Crawford also carefully establishes the ways in which these women could and did “circumvent the restrictions of the common law” (154). She further contextualises her important discussion of gendered restrictions in the period with reference to shifting political and class hierarchies.

Though interested largely in the eighteenth century, “Women and Property: Women as Property” serves as a useful introduction not only to important work on early modern women, but also as an introduction to Crawford and her broader work, as one of Australia’s important voices on women in the early modern period.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit https://parergon.org/.

CFP Medieval Insular Romance Conference

The 17th Biennial Medieval Insular Romance Conference will be hosted at Durham University between 21 and 23 April 2020. Proposals for the 2020 Medieval Insular Romance conference are now warmly encouraged.

The 2020 conference will feature a plenary lecture by Professor Siân Echard (University of British Columbia) on ‘Romancing the Margins: Material Transformations of Medieval Histories’. Papers may address any aspect of romance composed in any of the languages of medieval Britain and Ireland; insular romance’s engagement with continental texts and traditions; or its post- medieval afterlives. (Please note, however, that the focus of this conference series has traditionally been on non-Arthurian, non-Chaucerian romances that have tended to receive less exposure elsewhere.) Papers addressing interactions between languages, and transformations into/away from romance works, are especially welcome, in line with Professor Echard’s plenary focus.

Proposals for 20-minute papers, complete sessions, or roundtables can be sent to Venetia Bridges (venetia.r.bridges@durham.ac.uk). Proposals should include: name, affiliation, email address, title of paper or roundtable, and an abstract of no more than 250 words.

The deadline for submitting proposals is 29 November 2019.
Any general questions regarding the conference can be addressed to Venetia Bridges at venetia.r.bridges@durham.ac.uk.

The web address for the conference is https://medievalinsularromanceconference2020.wordpress.com.

A PDF of the call for papers can be downloaded here.

Download (PDF, 689KB)

CFP Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference

The Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference (APPC) is an annual conference that provides an opportunity for postgraduate philosophy students from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore to present their work, debate their ideas, receive feedback from peers and form collaborations across institutions.

In 2019 APPC will be hosted by Victoria University of Wellington from Friday the 6th of December to Sunday the 8th of December. The conference environment is laid-back and an excellent introduction to conferences for new graduate students.

The call for papers is now open; and will close on 31 October 2019. Please let your students know about this conference and encourage them to come and present their work.

The conference website is https://www.appc2019.com/

Applications open: Rome Seminar, June 10-July 5, 2020

This seminar is designed to introduce graduate students from across the humanities to the unique primary sources available in Rome. Working hands on with materials in the city’s archives and libraries, students will be exposed to the rich potential of a wide range of sources produced from 1100 to 1750. Seminar meetings will be held at the Vatican Apostolic Library, the Biblioteca Nazionale, and the Archivio di Stato, and elsewhere. The seminar will also include a series of presentations by senior scholars who will discuss how they have collected and interpreted Roman primary sources in their own research.

Each successful applicant will receive a stipend of up to $3,500 to defray travel costs, housing, and meals in Rome. We welcome applications from students from any discipline at any stage in their graduate education. To be eligible to apply, you must be enrolled full-time in a graduate program. The focus of your research need not be Rome but you should have an interest in developing that research through the use of primary sources located in the city.

There are extraordinary and understudied materials in libraries and archives in the city for archeologists and classicists, art historians and historians, musicologists and students of theater and performance, historians of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the world, specialists in the Near East and East Asia. The holdings of the Vatican Library alone include priceless manuscripts and documents from East Asia, the near East, and North Africa – as well as a vast collection of ancient, medieval and early modern texts in Greek and Latin, a unique resource for the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome, of Christianity from its origins until recent times, of relations between Christians and Jews from antiquity onwards, and other subjects without number.

For more information, please visit the website: https://rome.nd.edu/research/rome-seminar/

CFP 31st SEDARI Conference: Spanish and Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies

31st SEDERI INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Hells and Heavens of Early Modern England
La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain), 6–8 May, 2020

We are pleased to announce that the 31st SEDERI (Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies) Conference will be held in La Laguna (Tenerife, Spain), on 6-8 May 2020. The Conference theme—Hells and Heavens of Early Modern England—draws on the ambivalent connotations of our venue in Renaissance England: Tenerife, considered the most blessed of the Fortunate Islands, but also the one of the awesome, “heaven-daring” peak. Thus, we expect to re-examine all possible literal and figural representations of hells and heavens, from places to states, including conditions of supreme suffering or bliss. Moreover, the Conference also aims at scrutinising divides and liminal sites in which antithetical agents associated with decadence and innovation emerged, coexisted, collided, overlapped, blended and reshaped transformative factors in early modern English society, its language, literature and culture.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers and round tables (in English) on the following and related topics:

  • Representations of sites, transitions and states of evil, expiation and bliss
  • Textual and graphic depictions of in/visible entities and worlds
  • De-/Regeneration and innovation of language, poetics, and culture
  •  New learning, theologies and alternative beliefs, mythographies, epistemologies, and political doctrines. Bacon’s Novum Organum fourth centenary
  • Shifting ethical values and moral dilemmas. Genesis of and resistance to ambition, disobedience, pride, crime, injustice, betrayal, and violence
  • Bodily adventures. Trans/gendered and transgressive bodies. Encountering otherness, deviancy, abjection, and monstrosity
  • Physical/spiritual medicines, remedies, consolations, and healings
  • Renaissance ecologies and pre-industrial environmental degradation
  • Lights and shadows of diplomacy (esp. Anglo-Iberian relationships)
  • Wheels of wealth and wreck. Economy, business, and trade
  • Un-/Fortunate travellers, displaced, exiles, pilgrims, and intercultural dialogues. The Mayflower fourth-centenary
  • Laughter, subversion and the grotesque
  • Damnation/redemption of words (censorship, lost texts, libraries, archives, dictionaries, anthologies, translations, data-bases, digital resources, intermediality and transmediality, transmission of texts, and editing)

Proposals must be sent as an e-mail attachment (preferably, doc or docx) to sederi31@ull.edu.es before 19 January 2020, and must contain the following information:

• The full title of your paper
• A 200-word abstract
• Any technical requirements for the presentation (Please, save your power point as doc, docx or Mac. If you are using a Mac, please indicate, and bring your own adapter cable)
• Your name and institutional affiliation
• Your postal and e-mail addresses
• Your SEDERI membership status (member, non-member, application submitted)
• A short biographical note (100 words)

Plenary Speakers

  • Louise H. Curth (University of Winchester
  • Nandini Das (University of Oxford)
  • Tanya Pollard (City University of New York, CUNY)

Conference website: http://eventos.ull.es/go/sederi31

SEDERI Website: http://www.sederi.org/