The Materiality of Mourning: A 2-Day Interdisciplinary Workshop
The University of Warwick
19-20 May, 2016

Funded by the Wellcome Trust

Organiser: Dr Zahra Newby, Dept of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick, UK.

Papers are invited for this interdisciplinary workshop, which aims to bring together scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines for a two-day workshop exploring the roles and uses of images and objects in contexts of grief and mourning. Speakers’ UK travel and accommodation expenses will be met by funding provided by the Wellcome Trust.

Grief and bereavement are human constants, affecting all of us, across time, religions and cultures. Yet our responses to them are both emotionally and culturally conditioned, and can take a variety of forms. For historians, the remnants of past grief are often revealed to us through physical memorials: a tombstone, a carved epitaph, or a cherished possession which passes into the ownership of the bereaved. The physical object stands as a tangible remnant of embedded sets of relationships, emotions and desires which it is the job of the he historian to unpick.

This workshop sets out to explore the role of material objects and images in the processes of grief, mourning and commemoration, across a range of time periods and cultures. The aim is to open up awareness of the different ways of studying this material, allowing for cross-disciplinary insights which will deepen our understanding of both present and past societies, while allowing for the recognition of social and cultural differences. Papers are invited from both academic researchers and practitioners involved in supporting the bereaved, or the terminally ill and their families.

There are two main themes:

1: Objects and images in grief, mourning and remembrance.

This session will explore the use of material objects in contexts of grief, mourning and memory in both contemporary society and the past, from a number of different perspectives: how are tangible objects, mementoes and memorials seen as beneficial aids to the process of mourning? What roles can they play in the different rituals around death? Papers may include examinations of group responses to death, as well as those of individuals and families. Discussions of the ways material objects are presented in the contexts of grief in literature and thought are also welcome.

2: Embodied Emotion: accessing historic grief and mourning through material remains?

This session will ask how far we can gain access to the lived experience of grief and mourning through the material remains of the past. Archaeologists, historians and art historians often seek to understand past societies and cultures through the physical remains they have left behind; yet cultural values and practices around death and mourning can vary widely from one society to another, and issues such as changing rates of mortality can affect the ways in which societies approach death and bereavement. Papers will address the question of how much we can glean about past emotions through the physical monuments which remain, and the representation of such objects in literature or philosophy, as well as the question of agency and responsibility: whose grief is expressed; to what extent is it ‘real’, or the reflection of societal expectations, and which agents are involved in the creation of the tomb and its imagery?

Confirmed Speakers:

• Sarah Tarlow, Professor of Archaeology, University of Leicester: ‘Body, Thing, Memory’
• Michael Brennan, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Liverpool Hope University. ‘Why materiality matters’
• Douglas Davies, (Professor of the Study of Religion, Durham): ‘Grave and hopeful emotions’
• Lucy Noakes (History, Brighton): Memorials and grief in WWII Britain
• Su Chard (independent funerary celebrant) ‘When the mantelpiece spoke.’
• Dawn Nevin, Director of Counselling and Family Support at Myton Hospices, Warwickshire.
• Pam Foley, Sculptor ‘Routes of Sorrow: grieving without finality’

Academics and practitioners across all disciplines are warmly invited to offer papers exploring the research questions outlined above. PhD candidates and Early Career Researchers are particularly welcome. Disciplines may include, but are not limited to: Psychology, Sociology, History, Medical Education, Philosophy, Bereavement Counselling, Religious studies, History of Art and Architecture, Classics and Ancient History, Literary studies, Politics and Public policy. Please send a title and brief abstract (up to 200 words) to Zahra.newby@warwick.ac.uk by 29 February, 2016.

Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages
University of St Andrews
April 26-28, 2016

Conference Website

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages 2015, an interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies (SAIMS). Entering into its seventh year, this conference welcomes participation from postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers interested in one or both of our focal themes of gender studies or more general ideas of transgression in the mediaeval period.

This year’s conference will have a keynote presentation by Dr Rob Meens of the Utrecht Universiteit. Other speakers include Dr Liana Saif (University of Oxford), Dr Megan Cavell (Durham University) and Dr Zubin Mistry (Queen Mary University of London).

We invite proposals for papers of approximately 20 minutes that engage with the themes of gender and/or transgression from various disciplinary standpoints, such as historical, linguistic, literary, archaeological, art historical, or others. Possible topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• Depictions of violence: visual and literary images of violence, verbal and non-verbal violence, gendered violence
• Legal Studies: women in the courtroom, gendered crimes, law breaking and law making
• Penance: men, women and penance, penance as punishment, rituals of penance, penitential discourses and ideals, penance and power
• Orthodoxy and Heresy: transgressing orthodox thought, portrayals of religious ‘outsiders’, monasticism, lay religion, mysticism
• Moral transgression
• Homosexuality and sexual deviancy
• Masculinity and/or femininity in the Middle Ages: ideas of gender norms and their application within current historiography

There will be four set strands of Medieval Law and Literature, Transgression in the Medieval East (with Liana Saif), Bodies and Violence (with Megan Cavell), and Crimes of
Sex (with Zubin Mistry). There will be several other sessions within the broader conference theme.

Those wishing to participate should please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words to genderandtransgression@st-andrews.ac.uk by 13 February, 2015. Please attach your abstract to your email as a Microsoft Word or PDF file and include your name, home institution and stage of your postgraduate or postdoctoral career.

Registration for the conference will be £15. This will cover tea, coffee, lunch and two wine receptions. All delegates are also warmly invited to the conference meal on Friday 8 May. Further details can be found at our website, http://www.standrews.ac.uk/saims/gender/index.html as they become available. Please also follow us on Twitter @standgt and find us on Facebook!

Beyond Borders: Mutual Imaginings of Europe and the Middle East (800-1700)
Barnard College’s 25th Biannual Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference
December 3, 2016

Recent scholarship is challenging the stark border between Europe and the Middle East during the long period between 800-1700. Rather than thinking of these areas in isolation, scholars are revealing the depth of their mutual influence. Trade, war, migration, and scholarly exchange connected Europe and the Middle East in ways both cooperative and adversarial. The distant world was not only an object of aggression, but also, inextricably, of fantasy and longing. Jewish, Muslim, and Christian thinkers looked to each other to understand their own cultural histories and to imagine their futures. Bringing together art historians, literary scholars, historians, scholars of the history of science, and scholars of religious thought, this interdisciplinary conference will explore the real and imaginary cultural interchanges between Europe and the Middle East during their formative periods. The conference will feature plenary lectures by Professors Nancy Bisaha of Vassar College, and Nabil Matar of the University of Minnesota.

This conference is being organized by Professors Rachel Eisendrath, Najam Haider, and Laurie Postlewate of Barnard College.

Please send an abstract (with title) of approximately 200 words and CV to lpostlew@barnard.edu. Presentations should be 20 minutes.

Deadline: April 10, 2016.

Myth and Emotion in Early Modern Europe
Upper East Room, University House, Professors Walk, The University of Melbourne
10 March, 2016

Symposium Website

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Greek and Roman classics became increasingly central to the European literary imagination, being referenced, translated, adopted and reshaped by a huge range of authors. In turn, current criticism of early modern literature is ever more concerned with the period’s reception and appropriation of the classical past. Greek and Roman myths held a two­fold appeal for authors: they were ‘known’ stories, culturally iconic and comfortingly familiar to the educated reader, but readerly knowledge could also be manipulated, and the myths reshaped in emotionally provocative and iconoclastic ways. This one day symposium at the University of Melbourne will be an investigation into early modern use of classical myths, asking how myth was used both ‘privately’, to excite emotional effect, and ‘publically’, to respond to political, religious, or social events. This symposium will focus on how and why myth was used specifically to excite and manipulate emotional responses in early modern readers and audiences: responses that might run counter to the original, classical focus of such stories.

Papers may consider, but are not limited to, the following questions:

• Which classical myths were most popular, among authors seeking emotional effect?
• How were myths rewritten to alter or increase the emotional impact? Could comic myths become tragic, or was it more likely for tragic myths to become comic?
• How did authors working with the burgeoning genre of tragicomedy, a form that by its very nature demands a bifurcated emotional response from the auditor, adapt classical myth?
• Why did authors choose to rewrite known stories in this way? How does an iconic reshaping of a classical story’s emotional impact (such as Shakespeare’s rewriting of Pyramus and Thisbe into a comic interlude) affect our perception of the original myth, or hypotext?
• How has our emotional response to myth and its rewriting altered, from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first? Do we laugh at Pyramus and Thisbe, or Venus and Adonis, in the same way that Shakespeare’s readers and audiences might have done? Is the rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus less disturbing, if we are less familiar with Ovid’s underlying tale of Procne and Philomela? Do modern adapters of myth, such as Ted Hughes and Carol Anne Duffy, handle its emotive potential in the same way as their early modern forebears?
• What might the ‘emotionalising’ of a particular myth (for example by giving the reader access to a character’s previously unspoken thoughts or feelings) have to tell us about the cultural or literary context in which it was written? (for example, what might it suggest about attitudes to women; to the foreign; to the relationship between reader and audience).

Abstracts of no more than 200 words, and a short biography, should be emailed to both Gordon Raeburn (gordon.raeburn@unimelb.edu.au) and Katherine Heavey (katherine.heavey@glasgow.ac.uk) by 12 February, 2016.

Pilgrimage, Shrines and Healing in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe
The University of Chester, hosted in collaboration with Plymouth University
24 June, 2016

Plenary Speakers: Anthony Bale (Birkbeck) & Elizabeth Tingle (Plymouth)

Pilgrimage is a spiritual undertaking with a long history. Taken up by Christians as early as the second century, pilgrims journeyed to holy sites to enhance their faith with prayers and also for the expiation of sin in the performance of public penance. The association with early Christian shrines as spaces for healing replaced earlier pagan traditions and, in turn, generated a thriving medieval material culture of pilgrimage inextricably connected to the cult of saints. Pilgrimage has also long been more broadly symbolic of devotional life. Spiritual doubt and temptation, conversion, and the pursuit of salvation have historically been represented using the language and vocabulary of the spiritual journey.

If the Reformation brought this tradition of Christian pilgrimage into question via its attack on indulgences, it nonetheless proved resilient. Recent histories have begun to trace the enduring nature of pilgrimage as a devotional practice in early modern Catholic Europe, as pilgrims continued to flock to shrines to venerate relics and sacred sites, in return for indulgences, healing and spiritual comfort. As a number of scholars have recently observed, the celebration of sacred landscapes through the promotion and veneration of local and regional shrines was particularly characteristic of post-Tridentine Catholicism. For the literate elite, mental pilgrimage was also advocated as a meditative technique to facilitate interior journeys to more distant holy sites.

The aim of this one-day colloquium is to explore continuity and change in material and spiritual pilgrimage across the late medieval and early modern period. We are seeking contributions from scholars whose research speaks to these themes in the pre- and post-Reformation eras.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on themes that might include (but are not restricted to):

• Pilgrimage: local, regional, international
• Sacred landscapes and architecture of pilgrimage
• Pardons and indulgences
• Shrines and the cult of saints
• Healing and miracles
• Relics, paintings, ex-votos and the material culture of pilgrimage
• Confraternities and collective pilgrimage
• Pilgrims and their representation
• Mental pilgrimage and meditation
• Spiritual journeys

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to Jennifer Hillman at j.hillman@chester.ac.uk by Friday 11 March, 2016.

The Making of the Humanities V
Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore (USA)
5-7 October, 2016

The Making of Humanities conferences are organized by the Society for the History of the Humanities and bring together scholars and historians interested in the history of a wide variety of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, historiography, linguistics, literary studies, musicology, philology, and media studies, tracing these fields from their earliest developments to the modern day. We welcome panels and papers on any period or region. We are especially interested in work that transcends the history of specific humanities disciplines by comparing scholarly practices across disciplines and civilizations.

Please note that the Making of the Humanities conferences are not concerned with the history of art, the history of music or the history of literature, etc., but instead with the history of art history, the history of musicology, the history of literary studies, etc.

Keynote speakers:

1. Karine Chemla (ERC project SAW, SPHERE, CNRS & U. Paris Diderot): “Writing the history of ancient mathematics in China and beyond in the 19th century: who? for whom?, and how?”
2. Anthony Grafton (Princeton U.): “Christianity and Philology: Blood Wedding?”; Sarah Kay (New York U.): “Inhuman Humanities and the Artes that Make up Medieval Song”

MoH-V will feature three days of panel and paper sessions, next to three keynote speakers and a closing panel on the Status of the Humanities. A reception will take place on the first day in the magnificent Peabody Library, and a banquet on the second day. An overview of the previous conferences and resulting publications is on the Society’s homepage.

Abstracts of single papers (25 minutes including discussion) should be in Word format and contain the name of the speaker, full contact address (including email address), the title and a summary of the paper of maximally 250 words. Abstracts should be sent (in Word) to historyhumanities@gmail.com. Deadline for abstracts: 30 April, 2016. Notification of acceptance: End of June 2016.

Panels last 1.5 hours and can consist of 3-4 papers including discussion and possibly a commentary. Panel proposals should be in Word format and contain respectively the name of the chair, the names of the speakers and commentator, full contact addresses (including email addresses), the title of the panel, a short (150 words) description of the panel’s content and for each paper an abstract of maximally 250 words. Panel proposals should be sent (in Word) to historyhumanities@gmail.com. Deadline for panel proposals: 30 April, 2016. Notification of acceptance: End of June 2016.

For full information about the conference, please visit: http://www.historyofhumanities.org/2015/10/29/call-for-papers-and-panels-the-making-of-humanities-v.