ANZAMEMS Reading Group: Semester 2 2023

The ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate Reading Group discusses the latest research in medieval and early modern studies, with the aim of promoting engagement with emerging and established fields of inquiry in MEMS research.

Virtual sessions of the reading group will take place via Zoom monthly between June and October/November 2023. 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 (whose own research is ideally in the vicinity of their chosen session theme), followed by questions-led discussion.

The reading group will be co-convened by Emma Rayner (PhD candidate, ANU) and Emily Chambers (PhD candidate, University of Nottingham).

We hope to foster a convivial and intellectually productive online space—think advanced graduate seminar!—where we can come together to talk all things MEMS research in a fairly informal manner, while expanding our networks or strengthening existing connections. Everyone is welcome, including more senior members of ANZAMEMS.

ANZAMEMS members who are interested in leading a session based around one of the below themes or a topic of your own selection, AND/OR who are interested in providing a short write-up of a session for a planned ANZAMEMS postgrad blog, please email Emma.Rayner@anu.edu.au / Emily.Chambers@nottingham.ac.uk no later than June 16, 2023.

A finalized schedule and Zoom link will be circulated ahead of our first meeting for the semester on June 27.

Possible session themes include:

  • Periodization
  • Affect / emotion studies
  • Critical race studies
  • Cultures of materiality
  • Ecocriticism
  • Comparative / transnational studies
  • Travel and cultural encounter
  • Visual culture
  • Religion, religious culture
  • Borders, borderlands
  • Language and translation
  • Genealogies
  • Geography, cartography
  • Rhetoric
  • Poetics
  • Epistemologies
  • Historiography
  • Time and temporality
  • Performance studies
  • Knowledge production
  • Humanism
  • Virtue, vertu
  • Cultures of collecting
  • Book history
  • Afterlives, reception studies
  • Adaptation
  • Digital Humanities
  • Manuscript studies
  • Incunabula
  • Intellectual networks
  • Devotional communities
  • Reading, coteries
  • Marginalia
  • Disability studies
  • Canonicity
  • Gender studies
  • Class studies
  • Archives
  • Methodologies
  • Pedagogy