Girton College, Cambridge: Research Fellowship in the Arts – Call For Applications

Girton College, Cambridge: Research Fellowship in the Arts

Applications are invited for a Research Fellowship for the academic year 2016-2017 and tenable for three years. This year’s competition is in archaeology, classics, history, and biological and social anthropology. The Fellowship is open to graduates of any university and of any age, but it is intended to support those at an early stage of their academic career. Candidates will have normally completed their doctoral thesis prior to and no more than five years before the start of the Fellowship (excluding career breaks).

Potential applicants should note that the standard needed to progress to the later stages of the competition is extremely high. The competition involves the assessment of candidates’ submitted work and an interview.

Candidates will be asked to provide a 600-word summary of current and future research. Long-listed candidates will be invited to submit two pieces of written work, each of no more than 10,000 words, accompanied by a short note explaining how each fits in to their overall research programme. Candidates travelling overseas should note that, should they be invited to interview, the College cannot pay for international travel. We shall, however, cover the costs of travel within the UK and offer overnight accommodation at Girton. Overseas candidates may be interviewed via Skype.

The emoluments of the Fellowship are reviewed annually. The present scale (from 1 August 2015) will rise by two annual increments from £19,083 to £21,391 p.a. for Research Fellows who have not yet completed their PhD and from £20,198 to £22,685 p.a. for post-doctoral Research Fellows. The Fellowship is pensionable under the U.S.S. and emoluments are paid monthly in arrears by bank transfer. The post-holder is required to provide four hours of paid supervision teaching per week during the twenty weeks of the teaching year; in some circumstances, this requirement may be reduced in the first year of Fellowship. Research Fellows may claim research expenses up to a total of £2,500 over the three years.

The closing date for the applications is noon on 29 February, 2016.

Long-listed candidates will be invited to submit work by 21 March, 2016 and interviews for short-listed candidates will be held on 5 May 2016.

Further details of the appointment and the online application process are available from the College website at: www.girton.cam.ac.uk/vacancies/research.

Please note that the College has a responsibility to ensure that all employees are eligible to live and work in the UK.

Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll: A Graduate Workshop with Beinecke MSS 410 and Osborn a14 – Call For Applications

Digital Editing and the Medieval Manuscript Roll:
A Graduate Workshop with Beinecke MSS 410 and Osborn a14
Yale University
11-12 March, 2016

This graduate training workshop will cover topics in:

  • Medieval Manuscript Rolls: Paleography, Cataloging and Preservation
  • Manuscript Transcription and Scholarly Editing
  • Introduction to the Digital Edition: Challenges and Best Practices
  • Collaborative Editing
  • XML, Text Encoding Fundamentals and the TEI Schema

No prior paleography or encoding experience is required.

Participants will learn the fundamentals of digital editing while tackling the unique codicological challenges posed by manuscript rolls. Practical sessions will inform collective editorial decision-making: participants will undertake the work of transcription and commentary, and tag (according to TEI 5 protocols) the text and images of two medieval manuscript rolls. The workshop will result in collaborative editions of the two rolls.

The workshop will run 11-12 March, 2016 (Friday-Saturday) 9.30am-4.30pm.

The workshop is free of charge, and lunches will be provided for participants. A limited number of need-based travel bursaries are available for participants traveling to New Haven, and it may be possible also to arrange graduate student hosts to provide accommodation for the duration of the workshop.

This workshop will be limited to 12 places – preference will be given to graduate students with demonstrated need for training in manuscript study and text encoding.

An information booklet and syllabus can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bxq8XHYjZ_NENDFBZmlFOGlyWTA/view?usp=sharing and on the project website – please read this document before applying.

Please apply online by 26 January, 2016. Applicants will be notified on 1 February, 2016 whether they can be offered a place.

To apply, follow the application link on the project website: http://digitalrollsandfragments.com/calls-for-workshop-participants

For more information, please email organizer Anya Adair at:
digitalmanuscriptrolls@gmail.com

Ain’t Love Grand – Call For Papers

Ain’t Love Grand
Romance Writers’ of Australia & Flinders University
Love and Romance Conference
Stamford Grand Hotel, Adelaide, South Australia
August 18-21, 2016

Flinders University is partnering with the Romance Writers of Australia to deliver two peer-reviewed academic streams at the Romance Writers of Australia national conference in August 2016. One stream will be focussed on Historical Representations of Love; the second will be for Popular Romance Studies. The Love Research Cluster for the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance Studies are partners for these streams and we aim to bring together a diverse and dynamic community of researchers on love and romance.

Love is central in the personal, social, and political construction of how we understand, organise, categorise, and measure our relationships. For historians, cultural theorists, sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and literary scholars it is not possible to understand our areas without some understanding of the role of love. For Romance writers, it is the centre of their narratives. This is an increasingly reciprocal relationship. Writers use the work of scholars to give their work immediacy and accuracy, while scholars use popular depictions to explain cultural difference or illustrate cultural paradigms both in their work and their teaching. This conference aims to bring together those who create representations of love, sex, and romance with those who study them through its transdisciplinary academic stream, ‘Historical Representations of Love’ and its popular romance specific stream ‘Popular Romance Studies’.

Keynote Speakers at the conference will be:

  • Professor Catherine Roach (New College, University of Alabama)
  • Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne)
  • Dr Danijela Kambaskovic (University of Western Australia)

The call for papers is welcome on but not limited to the following:

  • Affect
  • Representations of women and sexuality
  • Historical representations of love, romance, and lust
  • The history of emotions
  • The philosophy of love, romance, lust
  • Constructions and/or representations of marriage
  • Gender and power dynamics
  • Men and masculinity and love, romance, lust
  • LGBTQI and love, romance, lust
  • Gender fluidity and love, romance, lust
  • The psychology of love, romance, lust
  • History and philosophy of legal perspectives on rape and/or marriage
  • Medievalism and emotion
  • The reception of depictions of love and/or lust in Pre-Modern texts

Deadline for Submission of Papers is Monday 29 February, 2016. Send to: amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au

For further information please contact: Dr Amy Matthews (amy.t.matthews@flinders.edu.au) and Dr Erin Sebo (erin.sebo@flinders.edu.au)

Adam Matthew Medieval and Early Modern Collections – Free Four-Week Trial

Adam Matthew publishes unique primary source collections from archives around the world The collections span the social sciences and humanities and cover a multitude of topics ranging from Medieval family life and Victorian medicine to 1960s pop culture and global politics.

Free, four-week trials are available on all Adam Matthew collections simply by completing the trial request form. A member of the Adam Matthew team will contact you with confirmation of your trial details on submission of the form.

  1. Select the collection you would like to trial from the select collections list.
  2. Complete your details in the form below, ensuring you have provided your email address.
  3. Click send.

These trials are open to teachers, faculty and librarians of universities, colleges, and academic institutions (private and public).

New Book Series: Perspectives on Emotions History – Call For Proposals

Perspectives on Emotions History encourages proposals for monographs, essay collections, reference works and editions of texts. Inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary projects are welcome, as are theoretical studies. The focus is primarily European, but includes cross-cultural encounters, influences and legacies.

Editorial Board

  • Robert E. Bjork, Director, ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies)
  • Andrew Lynch, Director, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800
  • Joel Gereboff, Arizona State University
  • Peter Holbrook, The University of Queensland
  • Susan Karant-Nunn, The University of Arizona
  • Juanita Ruys, The University of Sydney

Please send any queries or proposals to either of the series General Editors: Andrew Lynch (andrew.lynch@uwa.edu.au); Robert Bjork (robert.bjork@asu.edu).

Perspectives on Emotions History is jointly sponsored by the ACMRS (Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800, and will be published within ACMRS’s “Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies” series.

Historical Memory and the Preservation of the Past in the Early Modern Period – Call For Papers

Historical Memory and the Preservation of the Past in the Early Modern Period
The Pennsylvania State University Committee for Early Modern Studies 2016 Symposium
State College, Pennsylvania, USA
28-29 October, 2016

In August of 2015 a video was anonymously released that showed the fiery demolition of Palmyra’s 2nd-century CE Temple of Baalshamin. This shocking act, which purportedly occurred weeks before the world became aware, was the latest targeted attack on historically significant sites scattered throughout Iraq and Syria. For scholars of the early modern period (and beyond), this scene was sadly familiar. The demolition of Palmyra’s temple was simply the most recent chapter of a tradition that stretches back centuries: intentional destruction as a political or religious statement.

Penn State’s Committee for Early Modern Studies (CEMS) is organizing a symposium, “In the Face of Destruction,” with the aim of inspiring discussion about the historical roots of cultural devastation. We seek papers that take on the themes of destruction and subsequent preservation, writ larger than the iconoclastic acts that immediately come to mind. Defining the early modern period broadly in temporal terms (1300—1800) and geographic expanse, this symposium seeks to unite a number of topics related to destruction and preservation including iconoclasm, collecting practices, censorship, the Inquisition, warfare, extirpation campaigns, disease, historical suppression/erasure, martyrologies, natural disasters, commerce, and their related ethical dimensions. We hope to expand this theme to form a broader conceptual framework that includes “non-western” traditions, frontier regions, and colonial contexts. The natural corollary to destruction and its consequences for peoples and nations – human agency and initiative amid crises – are also of analytical interest.

Keynote and Plenary speakers will include:

  • Dr. Brian Rose (Professor of Archaeology, University of Pennsylvania)
  • Dr. Alisha Rankin (Associate Professor of History, Tufts University)
  • Dr. Barbara Mundy (Professor of Art History, Fordham University)

Paper presentations will be no longer than 20 minutes in length. Selected papers will provide a basis for an edited volume that prioritizes inter-disciplinary methodologies. To apply, please email a 200 word abstract (with paper title) and a current CV to FoDSymposium@gmail.com by March 1, 2016 as a single PDF document. Please include a subject heading of “CEMS Symposium Proposal” in the email.

Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference – Call For Papers

Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference
University of Sheffield
5–8 July, 2016

We welcome proposals for individual papers of 20 mins, “lightning talks” of 10 mins, round tables, workshops, and posters. We particularly encourage proposals for themed sessions of 3 or 4 papers.

We are delighted to announce that we will have a ‘conference consort’, 4D/O Beta, available for any delegates to use in delivering their papers. The consort will comprise singer-musicologists experienced in reading from period notation. Paper proposers may wish to use the consort simply for live musical examples, or to build their paper around this facility. Please state in your proposal if you wish to include the consort in your presentation.

All proposals should include

  1. Title
  2. Indication of format
  3. Proposer’s name, affiliation, and a short bio.
  4. Contact email
  5. AV requirements

Individual abstracts should be no longer than 200 words. Themed session abstracts should also include an additional description (no longer than 200 words) of the proposed theme.

Please send your abstract to: medren@sheffield.ac.uk.

If intending to use the conference consort, please also email matthew.a.gouldstone@googlemail.com to discuss your requirements.

The deadline for proposals is 9am GMT on Monday 8 February, 2016.

Human Kind: Transforming Identity in British and Australian Portraits, 1700-1914 – Call For Papers

Human Kind: Transforming Identity in British and Australian Portraits, 1700-1914
University of Melbourne and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
September 8-11, 2016

Conference Website

Papers are invited that focus on British or Australian portraits between 1700 and 1914, which can be interpreted as separate fields or as overlapping or comparative studies. The portraits may be in any public or private collection worldwide, but in particular in the National Gallery of Victoria. They may be in any medium, including painting, print, drawing, sculpture and photography.

The conference aims to be both informed and provocative and to provide a robust forum for new and contemporary perspectives. These will include:

  • how portraits shape social values and invent new possibilities for defining ‘human kind’
  • the importance of place and provenance in the interpretation of portraits
  • how portraits form a bridge of self-interpretation between Britain and colonial society
  • the bonding role of portraits, their exchange as gifts, as agents in friendship and social cohesion, as testament to empathy and kinship
  • the interaction of portraits with other art forms and cultural media, including theatre, literature and music, photography and film
  • the role of portraits as records of social exclusion, isolation and displacement
  • issues of authorship, attribution, restoration and the multiplication and copying of portraits

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short CV to portrait-conference@unimelb.edu.au

Deadline for proposals is Friday February 12, 2016.

Keynote speakers

  • Dr Mark Hallett, Director of Studies, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
  • Dr Martin Myrone, Lead Curator Pre-1800, Tate Gallery
  • Dr Kate Retford, Senior Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck University of London

The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk) has provided funding for graduate bursaries. Please direct your enquiries to portrait-conference@unimelb.edu.au. For further information and to keep up-to-date, please visit the conference website (http://culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/human-kind-international-conference).

The Manuscript Book: A Series of Free Public Lectures

The University of Sydney is offering a series of free public lectures on the Medieval Manuscript Book.

Sponsored by ANZAMEMS, MEMC and the Fisher Library

Haraldur Bernharðsson, “Language change and scribal practice in 14th-century Iceland: An examination of three scriptoria”

and

David Andrés-Fernández, “The Processional as a liturgical book”

Date: Tuesday, 9 February
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Fisher Library (Seminar Rm, Level 2)

Margaret M. Manion, “Manuscript Treasures in the Kerry Stokes Collections”

and

Rodney M. Thomson, “Interrogating Manuscripts: the Scholar as Detective”

Date: Wednesday, 10 February
Time: 5:00pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room (A20 – John Woolley Building)

For more information, please visit: http://anzamems.org/?page_id=10#CURRENT

ANZAMEMS Member News: Pippa Salonius – PATS (2015) Report

Pippa Salonius, Independent Scholar

Thoughts on the ANZAMEMS PATS @ University of Canterbury, November 2015
ANZAMEMS: Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminar ‘Medieval and Early Modern Digital Humanities’ Report

I recently had the pleasure of attending the ANZAMEMS postgraduate training seminar hosted by the University of Canterbury in Christchurch on 18 November 2015. The day was devoted to learning about digital humanities. Two keynote speakers, Professor Evelyn Tribble (University of Otago) and Professor Patricia Fumerton (University of California, Santa Barbara) presented work in their fields of English culture and literature, considering two key academic databases: EEBO (Early English Books Online) and EBBA (English Broadside Ballad Archive). Tribble discussed EEBO in terms of affordance and materiality, drawing attention to how the database can facilitate academic research, but also pointing out its weaknesses. As an art historian, I especially appreciated her highlighting the fact that viewing an object on a screen results in a flattened distortion of its image. In response to this problem, companies such as Factum Arte use digital technology to produce three-dimensional facsimiles of our cultural heritage (see their digitalisation of the earliest known Beato de Liébana manuscript at the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid http://www.factum-arte.com/pag/46/Digitalisation-of-Beato-Emilianense-BNVIT14-1). Unfortunately, costs are high and as of yet few websites are able to provide their viewers with these types of images.

Tribble’s argument was nicely complemented by Fumerton’s description of the English Broadside Ballads Archive (EBBA). As the driving force behind this on-going digital project, Fumerton was able to give a clear description of the current database and its potential as a working tool, as well as providing insight into on-going questions of its future and development. I found the multimedia aspect of EBBA fascinating. The inclusion of images, text, and sound within a single database and the possibility of search queries in all medium was inspirational and sophisticated stuff! I have since spent many stolen moments exploring the database, moving between ballads, examining their images, and listening to vocal performances of their lyrics. Fumerton’s information has greatly expanded my own understanding of the digital platform, forcing me to reconsider the didactic value of its technology, and its capacity to promote interdisciplinary research. The papers concluded with a lively discussion on the controversial nature of open-access and funding of online digital humanities research tools, with particular reference to ProQuest’s recent revocation of EEBO subscriptions to learned societies due to a downturn in revenues.

In the afternoon workshop, Dr James Smithies (University of Canterbury) presented us with an exemplary model of a formal proposal for a digital humanities project, the ‘Digital Project Scope Document’. His practical approach was encouraging as he attempted to demystify the expectations of its content and layout held by university administrative and funding bodies, as well as external non-academic partners. Drawing on his experience in the Digital Humanities program at the University of Canterbury, Smithies was enthusiastic and convincing in his insistence on the fundamental importance of digital humanities as an integral working tool for current and future academics. His session opened the floor nicely to the critique of postgraduates who presented their own digital projects. These projects ranged from the planning stages to actual websites, and included proposals for interactive web resources tracing political dissent in medieval London, a website for open source translation of medieval European texts, and a comprehensive database mapping Byzantine and medieval art in New Zealand collections. The seminar closed with a panel comprised of Joanna Condon (Macmillan Brown Library), Dr Chris Jones (University of Canterbury), Dr James Smithies (University of Canterbury), and chaired by Anton Angelo (University of Canterbury), who highlighted various points raised during the day of discussion, confronting them with issues of change and context in the world of digital humanities.

As befits the topic, a video recording of the seminar has been posted on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYb2GDxvIpk&feature=youtu.be. Many thanks to Dr Tracy Adams (University of Auckland) and Dr Francis Yapp (University of Canterbury) whose respective roles as compere and organiser assured that the day progressed seamlessly and successfully. Finally, it is always a pleasure for me to be among fellow enthusiasts of medieval and early modern times, whose ideas challenge my own and whose energy is contagious. Thank you.