Ars Longa is a new, independent online journal and blog dedicated to Early Modern art and visual/material culture. Our aim is to create an open-access, creative platform where early career scholars and advanced graduate students can share their research and current projects. We present work that challenges conventional forms and categories, that is often open-ended and exploratory—but always based on a foundation of rigorous scholarship. We publish journal-quality work without the strictures of academic writing.
Our scope is global and we encourage a diversity of formats and methodologies. We welcome a variety of subject matter and interdisciplinary approaches, as long as they are in some way related to the visual art of the Early Modern, which we roughly define as the period from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ca. 1400-1800.
For more information, including submission details for the journal or blog, see here.
CFP AskHistorians Digital Conference
2021 ASKHISTORIANS DIGITAL CONFERENCE: “[DELETED] & MISSING HISTORY: RECONSTRUCTING THE PAST, CONFRONTING DISTORTIONS”
19–21 October 2021
AskHistorians Public History Forum
Whether it’s swords and sandals, corsets and wigs, or statues still standing, the past and its possible meanings resonate with twenty-first century audiences. Historical television series, public history projects, and books of popular history might claim to depict the past “as it really was,” but nevertheless illuminate the ways in which we as a society continue to bring the past into dialogue with contemporary popular culture. In so doing, these narratives often reveal more about what we think about the past—and ourselves—than about the past itself. Today, shifting interpretations of the past reveal a growing interest in the inclusion of marginalized voices as well as in questions about the human condition, the relationship between race and national identity, and issues relating to the
construction of sexuality, gender, and equality. Indeed, representations of the historical past have been used as lenses through which contemporary society has grappled with very modern examples of brutality, oppression, and the general uncertainty of life.
We therefore welcome proposals from individuals whose research explores representations of the past in any form. As the scope and influence of our topic is broad and far-reaching, we encourage proposals from a wide range of scholarly disciplines on the themes of gender, identity (both personal and national), propaganda, culture, society, accuracy, and authenticity (among others) as these pertain to the ways in which historical narratives have been constructed, represented, or misrepresented.
Applicants are asked to please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biography of no more than 100 words to conference@askhistorians.com by 11:59 PM EDT on 1 June 2021.
For more information, including suggested topics and a guide for submissions, see the attached document.
CFP MEMS Festival, University of Kent
Join us online for the University of Kent’s seventh annual MEMS Summer Festival. This two-day event celebrates Medieval and Early Modern history, 400 – 1800, and encourages a wide range of interdisciplinary topics, including but not limited to politics, religion, economics, art, drama, literature, and domestic culture. MEMS Fest aims to be an informal space in which postgraduate students, early career researchers, and academics can share ideas and foster conversations, whilst building a greater sense of community. Undergraduate students in their final year of study are also welcome at the conference.
We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for individual research papers of 20 minutes in length on ANY subject relating to the Medieval and Early Modern periods. The research can be in its earliest stages or a more developed piece.
We also encourage 700-word abstracts proposing a three-person panel, presenting on a specific subject or theme in Medieval or Early Modern studies. If you have an idea and would like us to advertise for it, please contact us at memsfestival@gmail.com.
Deadline for all Paper and Panel Proposals is Friday 30th April 2021. All applications must be sent to memsfestival@gmail.com with ‘MEMS Fest 2021 Abstract’ as the subject of the email.
New member publication: Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War: Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
Congratulations to ANZAMEMS members Claire McIlroy and Anne M. Scott on the publication of their new edited collection, Literature, Emotions, and Pre-Modern War: Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Arc Humanities Press, 2021).
This collection assembles work by some of the foremost English-speaking scholars of pre-modern thought and culture and is the fruit of the Australian Research Council’s ground-breaking Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion. The impact of war, a human activity that is both public and politically charged, is examined as it affects private human lives caught up in public and political situations. The essays, many of them influenced by the burgeoning field of study in the history of emotions, examine the often unconsidered effects of war—on the individual and on the commune—as revealed in the study of well-known texts such as Beowulf, Piers Plowman, Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, as well as other lesser-known works that mirror the concerns of the society in which they were conceived. These latter range from the twelfth-century chansons of the Crusades, through the fifteenth-century French and English political works of Alain Chartier, to the twentieth-century anti-war satirical films of Mario Monicelli.
Please find attached below a promotional flyer for 50% off the purchase price for ANZAMEMS members.
ANZAMEMS members wishing to promote their research through the ANZAMEMS newsletter are invited to email the editor, Lisa Rolston.
ACU MPhil and PhD Opportunities
Fully-funded PhD and MPhil in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Australian Catholic University.
The Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) Program of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at ACU in Melbourne invites applications for six competitive PhD scholarships in connection with its new research project ‘Religious Mobilities: Medieval and Early Modern Europe and the World.’ A major new international research collaboration with partners in Leuven, London, Princeton, Stanford, and Toronto, ‘Religious Mobilities’ seeks to investigate the multiple and intersecting roles that religion has played in relation to mobility in this critical period for the formation of a globalised world. Applicants are encouraged to contact the MEMS director, Prof. Christopher Ocker, to discuss their application and proposed projects in connection to the key aims of the ‘Religious Mobilities’ project.
ACU’s MEMS program is a dynamic, supportive, internationally engaged research community based at ACU’s Melbourne Campus, with activities also on ACU’s Rome Campus. MPhil and PhD students in ACU’s MEMS program are fully immersed in the intellectual life of the program, work closely with supervisors, draw extensively on the talents of the MEMS team, participate in the program’s seminars, workshops, and special lectures, contribute to our international collaborations, and pursue research opportunities with our international partners and in relevant archives. Learn more about our research interests, publications and activities online here.
Applicants must meet the eligibility requirements of ACU’s Higher Degree by Research program. The next round of applications for PhD and MPhil courses closes at 11.59pm on Monday 26 April 2021 (AEST). Due to current Australian government restrictions on international student arrivals as part of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, students from countries other than Australia and New Zealand may not be able to commence during 2021.
Symposium for Ian Donaldson at ANU
A LIFE IN LITERATURE: LITERARY EDITING, LITERARY CRITICISM, LITERARY BIOGRAPHY
A Symposium in Honour of Ian Donaldson
Humanities Research Centre, 29-30 March 2021, Sir Roland Wilson Building ANU and Online
This two-day symposium to honour the life and work of the Humanities Research Centre’s first Director, the literary humanist Professor Ian Donaldson (1935-2020), offers a rich array of papers by his friends and colleagues exploring a variety of issues to do with literary editing, literary criticism, and literary biography – like Professor Donaldson’s own work, largely though not exclusively in the area of early modern studies.
Please see the attached full programme of papers.
CFP Old English Poetry and its Legacy
John D. Niles, Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has long been a major voice in Old English studies. This special issue of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Humanities, together with a resultant book, will celebrate his achievements while promoting innovative work in the field.
The collection will focus on the legacy of Old English poetry broadly conceived and will include, for example, studies of particular poems, themes, or verse passages; of the translation or reception history of particular texts; of linguistic features of the poetry and their subsequent influence; of current historical and archaeological studies and how they illuminate the poetry or vice versa; of Old English poetry’s influence on various fields such as music or art; and of how an understanding of Old English prose or medieval Latin literature enriches appreciation of the poetry.
We welcome contributions that address fundamental issues in the Humanities from any meaningful perspective, combining past and present concerns in order to blaze a path toward the future. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. All submissions will be critically reviewed by peers, aiming for the highest possible scholarly level. Being an online journal, the published papers will reach their desired audiences faster, more reliably, and much more easily than traditional print versions, while upholding the same, if not even higher, scholarly standards.
The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2021. For more information see the attached flyer.
CFP Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at MLA
Join the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at the MLA Convention in Washington, DC, January 6-9, 2022 | PROPOSALS DUE March 15, 2021
1. Magic and Gender in Medieval Literature
Magic was omnipresent in the Middle Ages: theorized by natural philosophers, debated by theologians, written about in a wide variety of practical texts and literary genres, and undertaken by a wide range of practitioners, including what Richard Kieckhefer has described as “a clerical underworld.” Unlike the early modern obsession with witches, most medieval magical instruction books limit the knowledge they hold to learned men. Yet in literature, gender seemingly is no barrier for who can cast spells, create potions, or divine the future. While the “authority” of magic is recorded in books understood as the parvenu of men and in particular, of clerics, the practice of magic throughout the medieval period is undertaken by male and female, alike. In fact, more often women, particularly women of the fey and euhemerized goddesses, are wielders of powerful magic. This panel investigates the gendered slipperiness surrounding depictions of magic in medieval literature.
Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio for 15-20-minute papers to Melissa Ridley Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) and Kersti Francis (kersti.francis@gmail.com) by March 15, 2021.
2. Gendered Violence in Old English Literature
The Old English MLA forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship are proposing a jointly-sponsored session on gendered violence in Old English literature. The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in research on the relationship between gender and violence in the Middle Ages, with new studies exploring the construction of gender through violence and women as its victims. Gender theory and feminist studies have done much to refine methodologies used in this research, especially in the late Middle Ages. Still, there is a great deal of work to be done in the area of gendered violence, in particular in the literature of the early English era.
Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio to Melissa Ridley-Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) or David F. Johnson (djohnson@fsu.edu) by March 15, 2021
Panel co-sponsored by the Old English Forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Studies. This panel is not guaranteed.
For more information and suggested topics please see the PDF below.
National Library of Australia Fellowships
The National Library has diverse collections that support, inspire and transform research. Fellowships enable scholars, writers and researchers to conduct intensive research into our collections in a supportive, intellectual and creative environment.
Who should apply?
Fellowships are open to researchers from Australia and overseas undertaking advanced research projects. Seven funded fellowships will be awarded for research areas where the Library’s collections have the depth to support the desired outcomes.
What do Fellows receive?
-an honorarium of AUD1,000 per week for 12 weeks
-travel and accommodation support*
-privileged access to the Library’s collections, staff and resources
-uninterrupted time for research
Additional Honorary Fellowships may be awarded to support research and special access but without financial support.
Applications close 5pm AEST, Monday 26 April, 2021. For guidelines and to apply, see here.
Nottingham Trent University: Jobs in Cultural Heritage
Nottingham Trent University in the UK has a number of positions available in Cultural Heritage. The ISAAC Lab in Heritage Science is seeking tenure-track research fellows and part-time, fixed-term full professors. Applications close on 26 March 2021.