Resilience, Persistence, and Agency
The American University of Paris, Paris, France
On-site and online
5th – 7th January 2022
Resilience in the face of adversity for marginalized individuals, persistence in the face of obstacles created by hegemonic power structures, and creative or subversive forms of agency were as often exerted by feminine and queer actors in the Middle Ages as they are in the twenty-first century. Contemporary medieval scholarship is inflected by intersectional feminist frameworks that explore how individuals can understand and subvert power structures in the face of multiple oppressions, postcolonial studies that broadens our understanding of what constitutes a “Middle Ages,” and critical race theory that invites medievalists to interrogate the history of their discipline and the pernicious ends to which “medievalism” has been put in contemporary white supremacist discourses.
This edition of the Gender and Medieval Studies Conference invites papers that examine how resilience, persistence, and agency were deployed by actors during the global Middle Ages and how medieval studies can play an activist role in deconstructing the misperceptions of the period that buttress oppressive politics.
The organizers welcome proposals on any aspect of resilience, persistence, and agency as it relates to medieval genders and sexualities from scholars at any stage of study or career. Proposals for papers may include, but are not limited to:
Subversive discourses in the Middle Ages/covert agency/unrecognized resilience/transgressive behaviors/persistence and resistance/anachronism and activism/postcolonial medieval studies/recovering trans and queer narratives/antiracist medieval scholarship/non-European Middle Ages.
We anticipate contributors giving papers of 10-15 minutes. Proposals for panels of 3-4 papers are also warmly welcomed, as are proposals for roundtables (90 minutes) of 3-5 participants.
The conference aims to be as inclusive as possible and encourages participation from around the globe. As such the sessions and activities will be a mixture of on-site events in Paris with remote and/or asynchronous participation welcome. The conference will be broadcast via Zoom on Paris time.
Please submit proposed titles and abstracts of 300 words, with a short biography to Elizabeth Kinne (gmsconference2022@gmail.com) by September 15, 2021. See the conference website for further details.
Visit the Gender and Medieval Studies website and find us on Twitter @medievalgender.
Monthly Archives: August 2021
PhD and MPhil Applications: Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the Australian Catholic University
The Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Program of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry (IRCI) welcomes applications from highly motivated students to study toward a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) or Doctor of Philosophy (PhD). We seek applicants who wish to develop research projects in medieval and early modern history in areas such as social, cultural, religious, and gender history.
We are particularly interested in hearing from prospective PhD students interested in developing projects aligned with our large-scale collaborative project, ‘Religious Mobilities: Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World’. Multiple research scholarships are available to support PhD students in this project.
The IRCI’s MEMS program is the largest medieval and modern program in Australia, and a dynamic, supportive, internationally-engaged research community. Students are supported by reading groups, seminars, professional development opportunities, events across ACU’s cognate faculties and institutes, and international networking opportunities.
For further information, please contact the MEMS Program Director, Professor Megan Cassidy-Welch.
Call for contributions: Daphnis, German culture of the early modern period
Coffee and Tobacco – ignitors of sociability?
The last Daphnis issue focuses on the sociability discourse in early modern Leipzig. This includes social practices like singing student and drinking songs like the ‘Dunkelmännerlied’ or eating goose at Martin’s Eve. This issue clearly makes an important contribution to the cultural history of the early modern period and is hence worth reading.
For further information please see: Formen der Geselligkeit und ihr historischer Wandel als Herausforderung der frühneuzeitlichen Kulturgeschichte.
University of Münster Postdoctoral Research Associates Wissenschaftliche/r Mitarbeiter/in (salary level TV-L E 13, 100%)
From 1 March 2022. We are offering three fixed-term full-time positions until 31 December 2025 (corresponding to the funding period of the Cluster)
History on Wednesday Seminar series, University of Sydney
“Serendipitous findings: about the unexpected appearance of a daughter of King Arthur in a thirteenth-century piece of Spanish hagiography”
25 August | Hélène Sirantoine
12:10-1:30pm
Scholars finding themselves reading the late thirteenth-century Life of the Blessed Leander and Isidore, archbishops of Seville, Fulgentius, archbishop of Écija, and Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza might be surprised, as was the presenter of this talk, to find in it a puzzling detail. Among the eccentric kinship relations with which the author filled their text, a Visigothic queen, wife of King Reccared (586–601) and mother of King Liuva II (601–603), was made into no less than the “daughter of King Arthur”. But who was really Reccared’s spouse? And how come that, centuries later, some hagiographer imagined making her the offspring of famous, and legendary, King Arthur? Answering these questions led this bemused investigator to examine a wide range of materials, spanning from the sixth to the eighteenth century. This paper traces the steps of this investigation, the longue durée of this medieval legend, and reflects on the role played by serendipitous findings in the making of history.
Hélène Sirantoine is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney. She researches Iberian medieval history with a focus on written culture, especially historiography, hagiography and pragmatic texts as tools of communication and memorialisation. Sirantoine is the author of Imperator Hispaniae: les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León, IXe-XIIe siècles (Madrid, 2012) and she co-edited with Julio Escalona Chartes et cartulaires comme instruments de pouvoir: Péninsule Ibérique et Occident chrétien, VIIIe-XIIe siècles (Toulouse, 2013) and the two first volumes of the series Epistola (Madrid, 2018) dedicated to epistolary practices in medieval Iberia.
You will be able to Join Zoom from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android
Password: History1
For further information on this talk and further talks in this series, please see the website.
CARMEN: The Worldwide Medieval Network – (Virtual) Annual General Meeting 2021
CARMEN: The Worldwide Medieval Network – (Virtual) Annual General Meeting 2021
“The Middle Ages in the Americas”
The annual CARMEN open meeting brings together scholars and professionals from across the world in participatory and interactive formats, including talks by leading scholars, paper sessions, project development workshops, and our annual ‘Forum’ showcasing projects, institutions and research centers. This year’s meeting will take place on 3-5 September 2021, co-sponsored by the Medieval Academy of America and Harvard University’s Committee on Medieval Studies. The theme for this year’s CARMEN meeting, “The Middle Ages in the Americas”, highlights our North American venue, and is meant to encourage scholarly conversation on the rich history of Medieval Studies in the Western hemisphere, as well as the myriad ways in which “the medieval” has been portrayed and appropriated within the art, architecture, literature, and popular culture of the Americas.
Due to the continuing challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, we will not be able to gather in Boston as originally planned. Instead, our meeting will take place virtually, featuring a combination of synchronous lectures, sessions, and workshops that will take place from 1000 to 1500 EDT on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. In addition to keynote talks by Professor Laura Cleaver (School of Advanced Studies, University of London) and Professor Cord Whitaker (Wellesley College) and a series of talks on this year’s theme, the 2021 CARMEN meeting also will feature presentations of new and early-stage project proposals submitted for this year’s CARMEN Project Prize, the winner of which will be announced at the meeting’s conclusion.
For full details about the meeting, including the programme, click here.
“The Middle Ages in the Americas”, the 2021 Annual Meeting of CARMEN, is free and open to the public. To register for the meeting, which will be hosted on the Eventbrite meeting platform from 3 September to 5 September 2021, please click here.
Region and Enmity, A RaceB4Race Symposium
Region and Enmity, A RaceB4Race Symposium
October 19-22, 2021
Co-sponsored by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, the Folger Institute at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Arizona State University.
Enmity is a sustaining force for systemic racism, a fervent antipathy toward a category of people. Enmity exists at the nexus of individual and group identity and produces difference by desiring opposition and supremacy, imagining separation by force, and willing conflict. Enmity unfolds in different ways in different places, according to local logics of territory, population, language, or culture, even as these geographical divisions are subject to constant change.
This interdisciplinary symposium, hosted by Rutgers University, focuses on how early modern racial discourses are tied to cartographical markers and ambitions. The notions of enmity and region provide a dual dynamic lens for tracing the racial repertoires that developed in response to increasingly hostile contention between early modern cultural and political forces. The symposium will invite scholars to take up this intersection between region and enmity, and to examine how belief in difference, or the emergence of polarizing structures and violent practices, configured race thinking and racial practices in ways that are both unique to different territories and that transcend them.
RaceB4Race is brought to life by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies in partnership with The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Division of Humanities at Arizona State University. RaceB4Race is underwritten by the Hitz Foundation.
Learn more about RaceB4Race here.
This RaceB4Race symposium will be held virtually. Registration opens August 16, 2021 at 9:00 am EDT.
CFP: International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds
International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds: Britain’s Border Geographies
University of Leeds 4-7 July 2022
This series of three panels is sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol, and the Medieval and Early Modern Centre, University of Sydney.
The aim of these panels is to explore aspects of identity formation in the multicultural border zones of medieval Britain, including England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the North Atlantic coast and the English Channel linking Britain to France and the Low Countries. A wide range of critical approaches is encouraged, including, but not limited to, eco-criticism, cultural geography, gender theory, book history, historiography, literary criticism, linguistics, postcolonial theory.
We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers from all disciplines. Proposals from postgraduates and early-career scholars are particularly welcome.
Abstracts of up to 100 words can be sent to: Helen Fulton (helen.fulton@bristol.ac.uk) or Jan Shaw (jan.shaw@sydney.edu.au) by Friday 10 September 2021. Please include your name and full contact details, including institutional address, and any AV equipment you are likely to need.
For more information please see:
ANZAMEMS Development Scheme (ADS)
Dear ANZAMEMS ECRs and HDR Students,
In pre-covid times ANZAMEMS funded PATS (Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminars), which brought HDR students and ECRs together for skills and methods seminars. Since the beginning of the pandemic, it has not been possible to run these workshops for obvious reasons.
So, we’ve decided to try something different. In second semester 2021, beginning in mid to late September, we are going to offer a virtual seminar series, organised by the cohort for the cohort. We will offer seven two-hour sessions, held fortnightly. The program will offer a mix of career development and state of the field/s reflections. We will have three sessions devoted to the job market, offering reflections on how the sector works in different locations focusing on the USA, the UK and the European Union, and Australasia. We will also offer two sessions that focus on timely issues and challenges in the field of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Finally, we will offer two sessions devoted to methodological issues, designed to offer insights into working with particular types of sources, or with relatively new theoretical paradigms.
We have not yet decided on the times and dates for these sessions, as we will seek information from participants about their availability, and work to accommodate as many people as possible.
In the past, we have offered face to face sessions that enabled skill-based training in things like palaeography. The virtual does not lend itself to that sort of training, but we promise we plan to return to face to face training in the future. For now, however, we hope that this new format will provide equally valuable advice and support in different areas of development.
Should you wish to apply to join this seminar series, please email Clare Monagle clare.monagle@mq.edu.au by 22 August to register your interest, supplying the information below. Participation is only open to ANZAMEMS members.
- Name;
- Brief Bio (100 Words);
- Reason for Interest (100 Words);
- Preferred Times and Days of Week for Sessions (please provide as many as possible);
Numbers are not capped, but we ask that participants commit to the entirety of program (pending timing), as we are keen to provide a supportive and open space and offer an opportunity for relationship building as well as career development.
Call for Expressions of Interest: ANZAMEMS 2024 Conference
ANZAMEMS welcomes Expression of Interests for its 2024 Conference.
By convention, the next host would normally be a venue in New Zealand.
Up to $35,000 in conference funding is provided to the successful host institution(s).
The ANZAMEMS Conference Policy can be downloaded on the Conference page of the Association’s website (Version effective July 2021): https://www.anzamems.org/?page_id=7.
A copy of the Association’s Equity and Inclusivity Guidelines for ANZAMEMS Conference and Event Planners can be downloaded from the Diversity and Equity page of the Association’s website. (Version effective 16 February 2018): https://www.anzamems.org/?page_id=9826
For further information, please contact:
Dr Helen Young, President, Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval & Early Modern Studies. Email: president@anzamems.org.
