Launched in September 2022, the SHAPE Futures is an early- and mid-career network for the disciplines of the humanities, creative arts and social sciences. Our purpose is to ensure the humanities, arts and social sciences thrive and excel in Australia, by fostering an inclusive and diverse community that supports, empowers and promotes Australian early and mid-career researchers, within and beyond academia.
We would like to encourage those who might consider themselves to be early or mid-career researchers (typically up to 15 years post-PhD, excluding career interruptions) to join the Network; there is no cost to join. Our website provides information on ways that the network can support EMCRs, including advocacy, networking opportunities, and increased visibility of opportunities, resources, and avenues of support. A crucial part of our work is our EMCR cohort survey, which will help build our understanding of the needs of this diverse group, informing our strategies for representation, advocacy, opportunities and network-building. The survey closes in mid-March.
If you would like further information on SHAPE Futures, please contact us on info@shapefutures.com.
Monthly Archives: February 2023
CFP Royal Spectacle and Court Performance: Medieval and Early Modern Perspectives
Royalty has often been accompanied by spectacle, ritual, and excess. Monarchs have exploited public space to exert authority, express anger or encourage love, deploying high-profile and fantastic rituals or displays to communicate with their publics. Clothing, accessories, gifts, food, and other materials have been used to build friendships, negotiate social hierarchies, or to convey displeasure. Art, statuary, monuments and buildings, as well as the more ephemeral prints, ribbons, or household goods, have been used as propaganda and to further a performance of power. Art and material goods were often part of elaborate performances at court, on stage, in the press, or on the street, where spectacle was embodied and communicated as identity, power and privilege. Such activities were replete with emotion, as courtiers sought to build or
negotiate relationships, encourage awe or affection, and promote appreciation of systems of monarchical power and divine right. This workshop explores royal spectacles and court performances in the medieval and early modern world and now calls for papers that speak to this theme.
Topics can include but are not limited to:
Displays of monarchical power or identity
Court performances and interactions
Fashion diplomacy and dress
Gift-giving, hospitality and generosity
Abundance and excess
Ephemeral displays
Print power and the monarch in the public sphere
The audiences for monarchical displays and court performances
Displays of emotion and the capacity of performance to promote feeling
Drama, theatre, and literary court performances
Medieval and Early Modern spectacles in the modern era
Gender, race, class as spectacle
Deadline for proposals 30 April 2023.
Please email proposals to courtlyperformances@gmail.com
Macquarie University Research (postdoctoral) Fellowship scheme opening soon
Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia) will soon be offering up to 10 full-time Research Fellowship positions commencing in 2024. Fellowships will be awarded on a competitive basis and will be fixed-term for three years. Applicants must have been awarded their PhD on or after 1 March 2020 or submit their thesis on or before 16 August 2023 (or make a convincing case for early career researcher status).
MQRF24 applicants must either reside in Australia and have appropriate work rights (either be an Australian Permanent Resident or Citizen) OR if they are applying from overseas, they must have appropriate work rights for Australia already (returning Australian Permanent Resident/Citizen) and be able to get themselves back to Australia to commence no later than 30 June 2024 or they forfeit their MQRF
The Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language, and Literature (MCCALL) is interested in the following research areas:
· Media and Communications: screen practice; social media and digital culture; media history; journalism and non-fiction writing; communications; cultural studies.
· Creative Arts: music and related technologies; music production; the singing voice; popular music; ethnomusicology; creative processes; sound; improvisation; performance; dance; circus, industry practices.
· Languages and Cultures: global literatures and cultures; language studies and applied linguistics; the role of languages in cultural identities, and their impact on linguistic and literary products in social life.
· Literature: medievalism; medieval and early modern literature; modernism; historical fiction; popular fiction; literary approaches to film and television; postcolonialism; Australian fiction.
If you have an interest in applying for a Fellowship in the 2024 round through MCCALL, please send the following to Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley and Associate Professor Paul Sheehan [b.foley@mq.edu.au and paul.sheehan@mq.edu.au] the following by 5pm AEDT Wednesday 29 March:
1. Provisional project title and a brief (400-word) project description
2. Name of potential sponsor in MCCALL. This can be discussed with Bridget and Paul.
3. Your PhD conferral date (or thesis submission date if the PhD is not yet awarded).
4. A copy of your CV as an attachment including a list of publications. Publications should be listed under the headings: books, book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles and other (including creative works and non-traditional research outputs). Your CV should also briefly detail any career interruptions since the award of your PhD.
If MCCALL is able to sponsor your application, you will be notified by Tuesday, 11 April. You will then also be required to supply a copy of your Australian residency document – passport or visa. Sponsored applicants will be invited to work with their sponsors to develop their formal Expressions of Interest which must be submitted to Research Services by Wednesday, 26 April.
Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Gender & History: Gendered Segregation and Gendering Segregation
Gender & History is an international journal for research and writing on the history of gender and gender relations, including (but not limited to) masculinity and femininity.
This Special Issue will examine segregation, broadly understood, exploring how segregation has reflected and constructed gender across time and space. This Special Issue welcomes submissions from scholars studying any country or region, and any historical period, including the classical, medieval, early modern, and the modern.
Segregation is the physical, cultural, or legal separation of groups on the basis of self- or external demarcations of difference and can be observed in many different, but by no means all, human societies of the past. Gendering segregation is a fruitful lens to interrogate relations of power and to do so in spatial settings such as homes, communes, schools, religious institutions, workhouses, prisons, leisure facilities, or others. Additionally, analysing the gendering of segregation—within premodern and modern societies and throughout the world—opens routes towards more capacious understandings of important themes of inquiry such as histories of sexuality, labour, science and technology, politics, feminism, and social identities.
This issue examines how and why segregation has been used as a tool for constructing and policing gender boundaries, at the intersection with race, age, status, class, functionality, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nationality or other historical ideas of human identity and categorization. We particularly welcome studies on transgender and/or non-binary aspects of the presence – or absence – of segregation in past societies. This issue understands segregation as both a framework of control through imposing binarity and as an individual strategy. We also welcome investigations of how and why gender segregation has been used as a coping mechanism and a strategy of subversion. We also seek to critically engage with scholarly narratives such as the ‘separate spheres’ paradigm.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
• Segregation through and of labour
• Segregation and race
• Scientific and legal logics of segregation
• Segregation in the home
• Segregation in education
• Segregation in sports
• Segregation over the life course
• Segregation as a political strategy
• Self-imposed segregation
• Segregation as a religious practice
• Segregation and urbanism
• Segregation and colonialism
Interested colleagues are asked to submit a 500-word abstract and a brief biography (250 words) by email no later than 31 May 2023 for consideration. Please submit materials to genderandhistory@sheffield.ac.uk.
Abstracts will be reviewed by the Special Issue editors and successful authors will submit full drafts (6,000- 8,000 words) ahead of participation in a hybrid colloquium, which will be held in Bonn, Germany, in partnership with Research Area E (Gender and Intersectionality) of the Bonn Center for Slavery and Dependency Studies. We hope to be able to fund travel and accommodation for all participants. After the colloquium, the editors will select contributions to proceed through the journal’s peer review system. As with any submission, there is no guarantee of publication.
The Special Issue will be edited by Drs. Daniel Grey, Lisa Hellman, Julia Hillner, and Rachel Jean-Baptiste.
Special Issue Timeline
Abstract Proposals to SI editors: 31 May 2023.
Decisions communicated: 1 July 2023.
Draft papers submitted for circulation: 15 March 2024.
Colloquium: 25-27 April 2024.
Full submissions submitted for peer review: 1 September 2024.
Contributions in progress to G&H Editors: 1 March 2025.
Edited MS, illustrations and permissions: 31 May 2025.
Publication: October 2025.
Further information on Gender & History can be found here.
ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group:
ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group: Semester 1, 2023
| Tuesday 28 February 1pm Perth 4pm Melbourne 6pm New Zealand Blogging: Emma Rayner (ANU) and Emily Chambers (Nottingham) | 1. Compassion Session leaders: Emma Rayner (ANU) and Emily Chambers (Nottingham) Recommended reading: Diana G. Barnes, ‘Cultures of Compassion in English, French, and Italian Literature and Music, 1300-1700’, Parergon, 39/2 (2022), pp. 1-13 Optional: Katherine Ibbett, ‘The Compassion Machine: Theories of Fellow-Feeling, 1570-1692,’ in Compassion’s Edge: Fellow-Feeling and Its Limits in Early Modern France (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), pp. 29-59 ———————————————————— |
| Tuesday 21 March 11am Perth 2pm Melbourne 4pm New Zealand Blogging: Katrina Cutcliffe (University of Southern Queensland) | 2. Household accounts as primary sources Session leader: Emily Chambers (Nottingham) Recommended reading: Taverner, C., & Flavin, S., ‘Food and Power in Sixteenth-Century Ireland: Studying Household Accounts from Dublin Castle’, The Historical Journal, 66/1 (2023), pp. 1-26 ———————————————————— |
| Tuesday 11 April 10am Perth 12pm Melbourne 2pm New Zealand | 3. Representations of Crisis and Catastrophe Session leader: Emma Rayner (ANU) |
| Blogging: Anna- Rose Shack (University of Amsterdam) | Recommended reading: Shannon Gayk and Evelyn Reynolds, ‘Forms of Catastrophe’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 1-16 Plus one of the following (optional): Ryan Netzley, ‘Managed Catastrophe: Problem-Solving and Rhyming Couplets in the Seventeenth-Century Country House Poem’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 147-73 Evelyn Reynolds, ‘“They Saw Mute Creation Trembling”: Forms of Catastrophe in the Old English Christ III,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 52/1 (2022), pp. 41- 67 ———————————————————— |
| Tuesday 2 May Hour TBC Blogging: Jenny Smith (Monash University) | 4. TBC Session leader: Katrina Cutcliffe (University of Southern Queensland) Readings TBC ———————————————————— |
| Tuesday 23 May 2pm Perth 4pm Melbourne 6pm New Zealand Blogging: TBC | 5. Language and Translation Session leaders: Sophie Patrick (UNE) and Gideon Brough (OU Wales) Readings TBC |
Info:
Each session will take one or two recent articles or chapters related to a certain topic/methodological approach/trend in MEMS scholarship, and feature a short presentation from an ANZAMEMS member followed by group discussion.
All readings and any updates to the schedule will be shared through the reading group’s Google Drive folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qi0W8i38w0Dgwia9jJ0aDCh5OEQjpRF?usp=sharing.
Blogs: we invite blogwriters to write up a brief post (minimum 200w) for submission no later than one week after their assigned session, which will be posted on the ANZAMEMS blog and circulated in the newsletter.
Please contact the convenors with any queries and for Zoom links: Emma Rayner (ANU), emma.rayner@anu.edu.au, and Emily Chambers (University of Nottingham), emily.chambers@nottingham.ac.uk.
All ANZAMEMS members are welcome, especially postgraduates and ECRs. We look forward to discussing all things MEMS with you this semester!
Australian Academy of the Humanities Grants and Awards Open
Applications and nominations are now open for two of our most prestigious awards: the John Mulvaney Fellowship and the Max Crawford Medal.
About the John Mulvaney Fellowship:
Supporting Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander ECRs
We’re looking for exceptional Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander early career researchers and PhD students working in any area of the humanities!
- applications must be lodged electronically by 5pm AEST Friday 28 April 2023
- self-nominations are accepted
- selection criteria are based on: rigour of the research, likely impact, potential to engage/benefit the community.
For Further information on the John Mulvaney Fellowship please see this website.
About the Max Crawford Medal:
Recognising ECRs for achievement & promise in the humanities
Do you know a humanities early-career scholar whose work is helping the general public better understand their discipline? Nominate them now!
- nominations must be lodged electronically by 5pm AEST Friday 28 April 2023
- self-nominations are not accepted
- selection criteria are based on: quality and impact, enrichment of cultural life, media/genre and goal focussed.
For further information on the Max Crawford Medal please see this website.
CEMS Seminar: Friday 24th February 12pm, Shakespeare & the Settlement of the North American West
Please join us for the inaugural CEMS Seminar for 2023 at 12 pm on the 24th of February in Lecture Room 1 of the RSSS Building at ANU.
CEMS is very excited to be hosting Professor Gretchen Minton for her excellent talk on “Shakespeare and the Settlement of the North American West”.
“Shakespeare and the Settlement of the North American West” focuses upon the role that Shakespeare as a cultural icon played in the nineteenth-century settlement of the North American frontier, providing a thorough picture of how the earliest white men who migrated across the continent used, understood and interacted with Shakespeare’s works. Re-examining narratives about white settler encounters with Shakespeare reveals several recurring themes, including the importance of books, hybrid identities, a return to Europe and the fashioning of Western personae. In the narratives about such encounters, the voices of the Indigenous people are consistently silenced, but important perspectives arise when we analyse the nature of such marginalisation. The article thus ultimately demonstrates that attitudes toward Shakespeare are symptomatic of attitudes toward settlement in the Rocky Mountain region, and thus invariably symptomatic of how this region’s Indigenous peoples were treated.
Gretchen has edited several early modern plays, including Timon of Athens, Twelfth Night, and The Revenger’s Tragedy. She is the co-founder of Montana InSite Theatre, which is dedicated to site-specific performances that use classical texts to address environmental issues. Projects for this company include Timon of Anaconda, Shakespeare’s Walking Story, and Walking the Water Way. Minton also serves as dramaturg and script adaptor for Montana Shakespeare in the Parks, which participated in the 2021-22 international project called “Cymbeline in the Anthropocene.” In 2023 she will be a Fulbright Scholar at James Cook University in Townsville, Queensland.
For further information and to register, please see this website.
