Daily Archives: 12 November 2019

CFP Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum

41st Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum:
Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Keene State College
Keene, NH, USA
Friday and Saturday April 17-18, 2020

Call for Papers and Sessions
We are delighted to announce that the 41st Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will take place on Friday, April 17 and Saturday April 18, 2020 at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. 

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss smell and fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Papers and sessions, however, need not be confined to this theme but may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history, and music.

This year’s keynote speaker is Deirdre Larkin, Managing Horticulturist at The Cloisters Museum and Gardens from 2007 to 2013, who will speak on “Every Fragrant Herb: The Medieval Garden and the Gardens of The Cloisters.”

Deirdre Larkin is a horticulturist and historian of plants and gardens. She holds an MA in the history of religions from Princeton University and received her horticultural training at the New York Botanical Garden. She was associated with the Gardens of The Cloisters for more than twenty years and was responsible for all aspects of their development, design, and interpretation. Ms. Larkin was the originator of and principal contributor to the Medieval Garden Enclosed blog, published on the MMA website from 2008 through 2013. Ms. Larkin lectures frequently for museums, historical societies, and horticultural organizations. In 2017, she was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, where she researched the fortunes and reputations of medieval European plants now naturalized in North America. Her gardens in upstate New York serve as a laboratory for further investigations in the field.

Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. Please indicate your status (undergraduate, graduate, or faculty), affiliation (if relevant), and full contact information (including email address) on your proposal.

We welcome undergraduate sessions, but ask that students obtain a faculty member’s approval and sponsorship.  

Please submit abstracts, audio/visual needs, and full contact information to Dr. Robert G. Sullivan, Assistant Forum Director at sullivan@german.umass.edu.

Abstract deadline: January 15, 2020

Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2020

As always, we look forward to greeting returning and first-time participants to Keene in April!

Western Civilisation in the Twenty-First Century

Registration is now open for ‘Western Civilisation in the Twenty-First Century’, to be held on 20-21 February 2020 at the University of Adelaide.

This symposium provides a moment to reflect on the concept of Western Civilisation today, not just as a topic of historical interest but an idea that continues to hold a significant political function. What role do the histories that we write and teach play in the production of discourses of ‘western civilisation’ or resistance to it? What role do historians have in shaping ideas about the past in the present? And what responsibility do we have towards ‘western civilisation’ as a discourse? What is the future of ‘Western Civilisation’, both as taught in universities and in the public sphere?

This event is being supported by ANZAMEMS. Registration is free and ANZAMEMS is funding travel bursaries to facilitate attendance for postgraduates, early career scholars and those without institutional support.

To register, please follow the registration link from the conference homepage: https://westernciv2020.wordpress.com/

For further information on bursaries and to apply, see https://westernciv2020.wordpress.com/bursaries/

For information on the conference venue and nearby accommodation, see https://westernciv2020.wordpress.com/location/

CFP Viator: Looking Ahead: Global Encounters in the North Atlantic, ca. 350–1300

A special dossier in Viator

Co-edited by Nahir Otaño Gracia, Nicole Lopez-Jantzen, and Erica Weaver

In the last few years, several urgent interventions have begun to reshape medieval studies as a more capacious and inclusive field. Scholars such as Geraldine Heng, Monica Green, and Michael Gomez have expanded our understanding of the multifaceted interactions between and among Africa, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, while Adam Miyashiro and Mary Rambaran-Olm have urged us to reassess the North Atlantic in particular. Traditionally, scholars have tended to work within national borders or to focus on how North Atlantic cultures changed the rest of the globe rather than how they were themselves changed by global interactions, with drastic consequences for our field––especially for our earliest periods.

In order to continue these important conversations and to expand what our scholarship can look like going forward, this special essay cluster seeks to provide a platform for early-career scholars to propose new critical directions for the study of the early medieval North Atlantic, broadly encompassing ca. 350–1300. We thus invite short, rigorous interventions (2000–3500 words each), in the model of the popular conference genre of “lightning talks.” In particular, we seek imaginative new work that expands the contours of early medieval studies and challenges, or transgresses, its standard disciplinary, temporal, and linguistic boundaries. Following the example set by the IONA: Islands of the North Atlantic conferences, we reject the unproductive disciplinary divides that have separated the study of England, Wales, Ireland, Francia, Scandinavia, the Iberian Peninsula, Africa, and even the Mediterranean both from each other and from points further afield along the Atlantic rim and beyond. We also aim to break down the divisions that have artificially separated Late Antiquity and the early and high Middle Ages. We are intentionally leaving this call for papers very broad, because we come from the perspective that the global does not exclude the local, and vice-versa. Moreover, the insular can be archipelagic. We welcome essays that bring together North Atlantic and Mediterranean Studies, or that read what has been seen as national literature from a transnational perspective.

In the spirit of emerging from our own linguistic silos and in Viator’s usual practice, we thus welcome work from scholars writing in English, Spanish, and French. Additionally, we particularly invite work from graduate students, postdocs, independent scholars, and members of the precariat as well as contributions that are explicitly feminist, queer, anti-racist, and decolonial. We would like to be as inclusive as possible, so please contact us if you have any questions.

Short abstracts of around 200 words are due by December 2 to ViatorIssue@gmail.com, with essays to be submitted by January 15.

Folger Institute Research Fellowships 2020-21

www.folger.edu/institute/fellowships

The Folger Shakespeare Library is embarking on a major renovation project to commence in early 2020. While this work is underway, the Folger Institute is committed to continuing its support of collections-based research, and to providing scholars with the resources they need to pursue and advance their work. The renovation offers the Institute the opportunity to create new kinds of awards, to make fellowships more adaptable, and to forge new relationships with archives, collections, libraries, and museums around the world.

Fellowship awards will be $3,500 to support four continuous weeks of work. The deadline for applications is January 1, 2020. Fellowships may be undertaken between July 2020 and May 2021.

Applicants should make a strong case for their proposed topic’s importance, its relevance to a field of study broadly supported by the Folger Library’s collections and programs, and the originality and sophistication of its approach. They should also describe the proposed location(s) of their work, with a justification of why and how this agenda will advance their project. Here are some scenarios an applicant might propose:

• A researcher is planning a trip to multiple archives in order to consult a range of rare materials, all in one trip.
• A researcher requests access to select electronic resources while writing from home.
• A researcher needs the dedicated time to work with a local collection.
• A researcher wishes to conduct research at a repository which is non-traditional, under-funded, or under-utilized.

The Folger has also arranged for a select number of archives, collections, libraries, and museums, without research fellowship endowments of their own, to host Folger fellows at their institutions. Each of these awards comes with an assurance of availability of collections items, space to work, and a contact person for reference consultations. Learn more about hosting partnerships at Jamestown Rediscovery, The John Rylands Research Institute, the Kislak Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Shakespeare’s Globe, and the Wellcome Collection.

Apply now online. Deadline for research fellowships is January 1, 2020.