The University of Sydney Postgraduate Conference invite honours, postgraduate research students, and recently graduated scholars from the humanities and adjacent disciplines to come together to share their work, socialise and, in a world where the humanities appear to be increasingly under threat, to acknowledge the inherent value of their research.
The conference will take place on the 6th and 7th December; abstracts are due in by 6th October. Please see below flyer for further details.
Member Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński has recently published an edited collection in the Brepols series ‘East Central Europe’: The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386–1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy. https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503598970-1
The volume offers a re-examination of the rise of the Jagiellon dynasty in medieval and early modern Central Europe. Originating in Lithuania and extending its dominion to Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia, the Jagiellon dynasty has left an enduring legacy in European history. This collection of studies presents the Jagiellons as rulers with dynamic and negotiated authority. It begins with the dynasty’s origins and its dynastic union with Poland, milestones that have shaped the political and cultural trajectory of the dynasty’s reign. The volume places significant emphasis on the role of royal consorts, thereby broadening traditional gender-focused perspectives. Far from being mere accessories, queens had a considerable influence on governance, economic matters, and diplomacy. The cultural impact of Jagiellon rule is analysed through interactions with humanists and the intellectual milieu of the court. The performative aspects of Jagiellon power, including the use of words, gestures, and even intentional silences, are examined as powerful tools of articulation. Emotional factors that influence governance and intricate dynastic relationships are explored, revealing how political decisions, especially constitutional reforms, are made more rapidly when faced with perceived dynastic vulnerabilities. In Poland, the rise of parliamentary institutions under the earlier Jagiellon monarchs epitomises the concept of negotiated authority, underscoring the growing political role of the nobility. This volume thus provides a multi-faceted and nuanced understanding of the Jagiellon dynasty’s legacy in political, cultural, and gender-related spheres, enhancing understanding of European history.
The Center for Italian Studies at the University of Notre Dame have opened applications for a funded opportunity for enrolled PhD students to attend the 2025 Rome Archive Seminar.
The seminar is designed to introduce Ph.D. 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 the Middle Ages to the present. 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.
The dates for the 2025 Seminar are June 2 to June 27 2025.
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.
Previous seminar participants include students of art history, history, literature, political science, medieval studies, film studies, and musicology. Their areas of intellectual interest ranged from Byzantine art, papal humanism, hospitals, charity and pilgrimage, Persian embassies and the Chinese missions to art and science, fascist textile production, the history of sexuality, and politics and church in the postwar era. They have taken up primary sources like Anglo-Latin manuscripts, a Hebrew Arthurian legend, socioeconomic records of daily life, institutional records of church and state, art and material culture, films, and twentieth-century letters. Participants have come from Brown, Catholic University, Emory, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, Stanford, Syracuse, University of Chicago, University of Melbourne, University of Minnesota, University of Notre Dame, University of Texas Austin, University of Toronto, and others.
The professors in charge of the seminar this year are Paula Findlen (Stanford) and Heather Minor (Notre Dame). Please direct any questions about the seminar to Prof. Minor at hhydemin@nd.edu.
This seminar is made possible by generous support from Stanford University, the Princeton University Humanities Council, and from Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, and the Center for Italian Studies.
We welcome applications from students from any discipline at any stage in their graduate education who have not done extensive research in Rome prior to the seminar. To be eligible to apply, you must be enrolled full-time in a Ph.D. 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. Each successful applicant will receive a stipend of up to $4,000 to defray travel costs, housing, and meals in Rome
Please send through Interfolio – http://apply.interfolio.com/152258 – the following documents: a CV, a statement of interest, the name of one referee and the email address of the referee. Please confirm with your referee directly that an Interfolio link arrives to upload your letter of reference.
The application deadline is October 31 2024. Review of applications will take place quickly after the deadline and applicants will be notified of the outcome no later than January.
For questions about the seminar, please contact Prof. Heather Minor at: hhydemin@nd.edu.
The next session of the 2024 ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate reading group is scheduled for Tuesday, September 24. This will be a session on AI and history. See schedule below.
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/1Qi0W8i-38w0Dgwia9jJ0aDCh5OEQjpRF?usp=sharing
Please contact the convenors with any queries: Alexandra Forsyth (University of Auckland), afor784@aucklanduni.ac.nz, and Emily Chambers (Murdoch University), emily.chambers@murdoch.edu.au.
Member Anna Dorofeeva has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘Reading Nature in the Early Middle Ages: Writing, Language, and Creation in the Latin Physiologus, ca. 700–1000’.
As the recipient of the 2021 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Anna’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/85029
This book is a new cultural and intellectual history of the natural world in the early medieval Latin West. It examines the complex relationships between language, texts, and the physical world they describe, focusing on the manuscripts of the Physiologus—the foundation of the medieval bestiary. The Physiologus helped to shape the post-Roman worldview about the role and place of human beings in Creation. This process drew on classical ideas, but in its emphasis on allegory, etymology, and a plurality of readings, it was original and distinctive. This study demonstrates precisely how the early medieval re-contextualization of existing knowledge, together with a substantial amount of new writing, set the course of ideas about faith and nature for centuries to come. In doing so, it establishes the importance of multi-text miscellanies for early medieval written culture.
Member Georgina Pitt has recently published a monograph with Arc Humanities Press entitled ‘The Persuasive Agency of Objects and Practices in Alfred the Great’s Reform Program’.
As the recipient of the 2022 ANZAMEMS–ARC Humanities Award for Original Research, Georgina’s book has been made available as open access: https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/92882
Alfred the Great’s early English kingdom was the only one to resist Viking conquest. His reform program strengthened the kingdom and enabled it to hold fast against the Vikings. But texts are largely silent on the process of reform. There has been a tendency to assume that these reforms would obviously be beneficial, but Alfred’s elites were not to know that in advance. What motivated them to do as their king bid them? This book analyzes how objects and behaviours shaped aristocratic response to the reform program, using assemblage theory and social practice theory. The Alfred Jewel (as shown on the cover) exercised a powerful persuasive agency in Alfredian reform. Broadening the frame of inquiry beyond textual evidence, giving objects and behaviours their due, permits a richer and more nuanced understanding.
Registration is now open for the Myths, Legends, and Fairy Tales conference hosted by Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group on the weekend of 16–17 November this year in hybrid form at The University of Western Australia and online.
Further details can be found at https://www.pmrg.org.au/2024-conference-myths-legends-and-fairy-tales.