Alexandra Day, Doctoral Doctoral Candidate, University of Newcastle

ANZAMEMS 2015, hosted by the University of Queensland, was my first conference as a postgrad student. I am very grateful to the Bursaries Committee for their assistance with my airfare, and to the whole ANZAMEMS committee for all their work preparing and running the conference. It was an excellent time, for me, for such intellectual nourishment. Eight months into my research on collaboration and early modern women’s writing in England, I was clear enough about my direction not to be blown off-track, goldfish-like, by the latest and most shiny new thing, but still flexible and open to influence. And I found plenty to be influenced by, both in sessions and in corridor conversations.

As I am learning is normal for most postgrad students, even at the larger universities, my research hours are fairly lonely. Browsing the enormous ANZAMEMS program beforehand opened my eyes to the wealth of research that academics and other postgrad students do all around Australia and New Zealand. During the week I didn’t waste an hour. I attended all the sessions on literature that I could manage, and learned just as much from the questions being asked of medieval texts as I did from early modernists. That said, I was particularly pleased to meet Julie Robarts and Amy Sinclair from Melbourne University, whose work on early modern Italian writers parallels, in some broad senses, my own. Both are further along in their research degrees, and I so admired their poise and confidence in their subjects. At the postgrad drinks on the Wednesday night I was able to meet many more of my cohort. Over deepfried cocktail snacks I learned about the origins of the word jihad, the significance of map making in medieval Italy, discussed the clash of the personal and the professional in PhD life, and most importantly coordinated a plan of action for the Customs House dinner the following night.

Apart from (finally) meeting some other early modern/ medieval students, highlights of the week were the roundtable sessions. I had no idea what the ‘Global Medieval in Antipodes’ meant before I attended this session. Walking away afterwards I still wasn’t entirely sure, but I think the impulse was something I understood: the desire to look from a different perspective; to find new ways to approach subjects which have colonised an intellectual landscape so long, that they have come to seem entrenched, necessary and ‘natural’; to unsettle; to upset; to problematize the idea of period and place as impermeable borders. These questions stayed with me during the week, as I asked myself what this might mean for my own research? Again, no clear and single solution presented itself, but I did find myself wondering, for the first time: what exactly were the ‘business interests’ that John Lumley was engaged in, at least early in his life, and which presumably helped to finance the enormous library which his wife, Jane Lumley, helped to assemble? And if I could trace the family’s lending and borrowing of money across borders, what picture would emerge? How did Lumley’s interest in geography manifest, and what was this family’s attitude towards international exploration? Had I paid enough attention to Arundel’s visit to Italy? What this session stirred up in me then, was a sense of possibility. And a sense that this is the time to make sure that my questions aren’t just new, or worthy, but that they are also politically alive, intriguing, and urgent.