Professor Michael Schoenfeldt, Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (UWA Node) Free Public Lecture

EDIT: Unfortunately Professor Michael Schoenfeldt has had to cancel his trip to Australia at short notice.  Regretfully therefore the following event has been cancelled.  Apologies for any inconvenience.

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions UWA node, Free Public Lecture:

“Places of Pleasure and Pain: Environment and Embodiment in Spenser and Milton”, Professor Michael Schoenfeldt (John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan)

Date: Wednesday 21 October, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Webb Lecture Theatre, Geography and Geology Building, The University of Western Australia

While we in the twenty-first century rightly worry about the ways humans contaminate their environment, early modern writers were far more concerned about how the environment contaminates human. Renaissance medicine and ethics conspired to produce a porous sense of self, always in danger of pernicious environmental influences. I would like in this session to explore the ways that England’s two greatest epic poets, Edmund Spenser and John Milton, investigate the relationship between environment and embodiment. Lacking a full vocabulary of inner pleasure, both Spenser and Milton keep projecting pleasure outward into space, into gardens of illicit temptation or divinely sanctioned gratification. Milton learns from Spenser the ability to create landscapes that put immense ethical pressure on his subjects For Milton, though, pleasure has a different ethical valence; his Garden of Eden is a Bower of licit bliss. The Fall of humanity, moreover, entails the primal act of environmental contamination, as the effects of human sinfulness are felt throughout creation. For Milton, finally, Hell is less a physical place than a state of internal agony, and so cannot be escaped. But Paradise becomes as well an internal state, which ameliorates the agony of our exile from the original garden of fulsome pleasure.

Michael Schoenfeldt is the John Knott Professor of English Literature at the University of Michigan, where he has taught since he received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. He is the author of Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (University of Chicago Press, 1991), Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge, 1999) and The Cambridge Introduction to Shakespeare’s Poetry (2010); and editor of the Blackwell Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (2006). He is currently editing John Donne in Context for Cambridge, writing a book for Blackwell’s entitled Reading Seventeenth-Century Poetry, and researching a book-length study of pain and pleasure in early modern England.

Crusading Masculinities: International Workshop – Call For Papers

Crusading Masculinities: International Workshop
University of Zürich, Switzerland
30 March – 1 April 2016

Conference Organisers: Matthew Mesley (University of Zürich), Natasha Hodgson (Nottingham Trent University, UK) and Katherine J. Lewis (University of Huddersfield, UK). The workshop has been generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. We also gratefully acknowledge support for postgraduate attendance provided by the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East.

In the last decade significant research on the role and representation of women in the crusades has been produced, yet the rich varieties of ideas about medieval manhood prevalent throughout crusade sources remain largely untapped. Gendered comparisons were often used to draw distinctions between the men who took the cross and their enemies, and authors of crusade narratives regularly commented on the manliness of different individuals and groups during crusade expeditions. Masculinity was also a feature of preaching: gendered language was central to the communication of the crusade message and to its enduring popularity. Medieval men existed in a hierarchical world, but even during the short time at which crusading was at its height, social constructs such as masculinity were subject to change. Crusaders were not just a hybrid of secular and ecclesiastical ideals: they represented a spectrum of masculinities from a cross-section of medieval society: rich and poor, laymen and clergy, traders and settlers, fighters and pilgrims. They encountered and reflected on the masculine ideals of different religions, sects and cultures: Christian, Jewish and Muslim. The development of military orders in the early to mid-twelfth century represented another significant shift in elite male identity. The enormous popularity of crusading and the military orders is a testament to their central place in the developing debate over ideal manhood in medieval society.
This workshop’s aim is to bring together scholars from the fields of gender history and crusader studies, in order to examine and highlight the variety of masculinities which were represented in the context of the crusades.

Confirmed speakers include: Anthony Bale (Birbeck, University of London); Niall Christie (Langara College, Vancouver); Paul M. Cobb (University of Pennsylvania); Susan Edgington (Queen Mary University, London); Yvonne Friedman (Bar-llan University, Ramat-Gan); Natasha Hodgson (Nottingham Trent University); Linda G. Jones (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona); Ruth Mazo Karras (University of Minnesota); Katherine J. Lewis (University of Huddersfield); Christoph Maier (University of Zürich); Matthew M. Mesley (University of Zürich); Alan V. Murray (University of Leeds); Helen Nicholson (Cardiff University); Dion C. Smythe (Queen’s University Belfast).

We would like to invite offers of twenty-minute papers relating to the crusades on the following themes:

  • Competing masculinities/men and social status
  • Masculinities and public display/rituals
  • Clerical and/or lay masculinities
  • Gender and Late Medieval Crusading Ideals
  • Masculinities and violence/non-violence
  • Masculinities and the family
  • Female masculinities
  • Women as audience/women in relation to masculinities
  • Representations of masculinities in art/material culture/music
  • Individual exemplars of masculinities and leadership roles
  • Military Orders and masculinities
  • Crusading Memory and Masculinities
  • Cross-cultural encounters: gendering the ‘enemy’
  • Muslim and Byzantine perspectives
  • Spanish and Eastern-European perspectives
  • Crusading Medievalism and Masculinity

Papers can be in relation to any historical forum where crusading formed a relevant ideological component, and we also welcome papers from scholars who explore non-textual sources. We are happy to accept submissions over a broad chronological timescale, in relation to crusading activity or representation across Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East – from a range of disciplinary perspectives. We are particularly keen to encourage postgraduates to offer papers and hope to be able to provide postgraduate speakers with financial support towards travel costs, accommodation, and registration. There is space for up to thirty participants.

If interested please send an abstract of not more than 300 words to matthew.mesley@uzh.ch, by November 15, 2015.

Questions and queries about the conference programme or the call for papers can also be directed to the email above.

Professor Peter Robinson, University of Sydney Special Seminar

“Is Digital Editing really Editing? The Canterbury Tales Project and other adventures” Professor Peter Robinson (University of Saskatchewan)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 3:00-5:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room N397, John Woolley Building, The University of Sydney
Registration: For further information please contact mark.byron@sydney.edu.au

Please join us for a discussion by Peter Robinson, centred on a demonstration of the new system for collaborative online editing: textual communities (http://textualcommunities.usask.ca/). This project, developed out of the University of Saskatchewan, establishes a new model of partnership between scholars and readers everywhere in exploring texts. Increasingly, the base materials for research into texts are available on the internet: especially, as images of manuscripts, books and other documents. The huge volume of material now available, even for just one work (such as the 84 manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales) requires many people to research them to identify the documents, to make copies of them, to annotate them, to make transcripts of them, to compare and analyze them. This project provides an infrastructure and tools to allow anyone, anywhere interested in a text to contribute to its study, as part of a community working together.

Peter draws on decades of experience in developing digital tools for scholarly editing and has produced a number of landmark digital scholarly editions, including the Canterbury Tales Project.

Peter Robinson is Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He has developed several computer-based tools for the preparation and publication of scholarly editions, and is active in the development of standards for digital resources. He has published and lectured on matters relating to computing and textual editing, on text encoding, digitization, and electronic publishing, and on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. As well as his own editions of Old Norse and Middle English texts, he has collaborated with other scholars on the publication of editions of collections of historical documents, Armenian texts, the Greek New Testament and Dante’s Monarchia and Commedia. His current major interest is in the creation of online “textual communities.”

Dr Corioli Souter, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Free Public Lecture

“Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties”, Dr Corioli Souter (Adjunct Lecturer in Archaeology, UWA, and Curator, Department of Maritime Archaeology, Western Australian Museum)

Date: 4 November, 2015
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Theatre Auditorium, University Club, University of Western Australia
Register: Free, but RSVP essential. For full information and to register, please visit: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/bennett

Shipwrecks of the Roaring Forties is an Australia Research Council (ARC) funded project that is making a significant contribution to our understanding of Europeans active in the Indian Ocean and our region during the 17th and 18th centuries through the unique window into the past provided by these maritime archaeological sites. The project is led by UWA’s Associate Professor of Archaeology Alistair Paterson in partnership with researchers from the Western Australia Museum and other national and international partners.

The project builds on the early work by the Western Australian Museum which pioneered underwater archaeological excavations centred on shipwrecked Dutch United East India (Vereenigde Oostindishe Compagnie or VOC) vessels that passed through the Indian Ocean.

This early work set the international benchmark for excavation and management of post-medieval and early modern wreck sites. These historic events placed Australia at the forefront of maritime archaeology globally, and led to Western Australia enacting the world’s first underwater heritage legislation, followed by the Commonwealth, in 1976. Forty years on, the shipwrecks, associated terrestrial sites and artefact collections continue to be examined using new methodologies and technologies.

This lecture is an overview of the archaeological discoveries with a special focus on the 2015 excavations of the Batavia related sites.

Corioli Souter’s current research interests include remote sensing survey techniques for the discovery and mapping of shipwreck and terrestrial sites and the archaeology of contact between Aboriginal Australians and visitors along the Western seaboard. She has also established collaborations with terrestrial archaeologists for the investigation of shipwreck survivor camps and other maritime terrestrial sites such as those found in the Abrolhos, the Dampier Archipelago, as well as the South west and Kimberley coasts. Over the last few years, Corioli has developed and provided content for exhibition projects including Immerse: Exploring the Deep (2011), Lustre: Pearling & Australia (2015) and Indian Ocean Stories (2016), a collaboration with the British Museum.

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner, Massey University (Wellington Campus) Free Public Lecture

“Do the arts and the humanities still have a place in the contemporary university system, and do they still matter?” Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner (University of Queensland)

Date: Monday 19 October
Time: 5:30-6:30pm
Venue: The Pit, Te Ara Hihiko, Massey University (Wellington Campus), Entrance E, Tasman St, Wellington, Aotearoa, New Zealand
Contact: Elspeth Tilley
Register: Free public event, all welcome. More info here.

As universities the world over corporatise and commercialise, and as the university increasingly defines itself as a location for training, on the one hand, and scientific research, on the other, the connection between the university and a liberal education is starting to attenuate. A key location where the pressure of such an evolution is being felt is in the disciplines within the humanities and creative arts sector.

Join Professor Graeme Turner as he draws upon a major study of the condition of the humanities, arts and social sciences in Australia, and addresses the placement of these disciplines in a context where the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) are sucking up most of the oxygen.

Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner is the founding Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies (2000-2012), and one of the leading figures in cultural and media studies in Australia and internationally. His research has covered a wide range of forms and media – literature, film, television, radio, new media, journalism, and popular culture. He has published 23 books with national and international academic presses; the most recent is (with Anna Cristina Pertierra) Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (Routledge, 2013). A past president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2004-2007), an ARC Federation Fellow (2006-2011) and Convenor of the ARC-funded Cultural Research Network (2006-2010), he has had considerable engagement with federal research and higher education policy. He is only the second humanities scholar to serve on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. In collaboration with Dr Kylie Brass, Professor Turner is the author of a major research monograph prepared for the Department of Industry and the Academies of Humanities and Social Sciences, Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia (2014), and he has been appointed as the chair of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel for ERA 2015. His current research projects include an ARC funded international comparative study of the social function of television in the post-broadcast digital environment in collaboration with Dr Anna Cristina Pertierra, a collection of essays on Asian television histories, co-edited with Dr Jinna Tay, to be published by Routledge in 2015, and the completion of his book, Reinventing the Media, also to be published by Routledge in 2015. In 2015 he will be the Bonnier Visiting Professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Stockholm University.

ANZAMEMS Member News: Chantelle Saville, Thoughts on the 10th ANZAMEMS Conference @ UQ, July 2015

Chantelle Saville, Doctoral Candidate, University of Auckland

ANZAMEMS Report 2015 – Reflections on an inspiring week.

When you find your flight home preoccupied by a swarm of ‘highly important ideas’ that you really must jot down on paper, you know for sure that you have attended a splendid conference. That is exactly what the experience of the ANZAMEMS Conference 2015 was like for me.

There was a real global atmosphere to the conference this year, with presenters attending from Scotland, Russia, Israel and the South Pacific. The theme of the first Round Table session was, in fact, ‘The Global Medieval’, discussing the prospects for future research aimed at bridging the gaps between continents and outlooks during the medieval and Early Modern period. With a number of conference panel presentations focused outside of Medieval Europe – such as “Japanese Political Thought in the 17th and 18th Centuries” – I would say that we are already on our way to achieving some great research with a ‘global’ perspective.

It was a pleasure to finally meet Samuel Baudinette (Monash University), and Prof. Yossef Shwartz (Tel Aviv University), both of whom spoke on the same panel as myself. Academics with an intellectual commitment to medieval philosophy and Dominican theology are few and far between in the South Pacific, so the opportunity to engage with a network of scholars outside the University of Auckland who share an interest in this area was greatly welcomed. I found that the discussion during and after, my panel session was very insightful, especially the challenging questions put to me following my presentation. Further, I found that listening to and observing how others presented their papers got me thinking hard about how I might present my own research more effectively, giving me models for future conference presentations.

Other papers that caught my interest included Prof. Andrew Lynch’s presentation “Reading ‘Violence’ in Later Medieval Narrative”, in which he interrogated the meaning of ‘violence’ as a medieval concept, arguing that ‘violence’ was understood more as an ’emotional force’ than a ‘physical force’. I also enjoyed Dr Diana Jefferies paper “Making Meaning of Mental Illness”, which presented a brilliant interdisciplinary approach to making meaning of mental illness in The Book of Margery Kempe and Thomas Hoccleve’s Complaint. Drawing upon her skills and expertise in the field of contemporary nursing, she emphasised the need to try to understand how the authors of the Middle English texts conceptualised and thought about the conditions they were suffering, rather than giving them a ‘post-diagnosis in hindsight’. Especially interesting was Diana’s descriptions of the kind of ‘care’ Margery and Thomas received, and the kind of ‘care’ that an individual suffering from mental illness might expect to receive today.

It is worth noting that I am a doctoral candidate in the late stages of thesis completion, so my decision to attend the ANZAMEMS conference this year was not automatic and I was not completely at ease in my environment due to the constant anxiety of finishing my work. However, the members of the ANZAMEMS community whom I talked with during lunch and tea breaks were entirely supportive and empathetic towards my position, offering advice on how to cope and manage the pressure of completing a large research project. This, I feel, is one of the very valuable aspects of the ANZAMEMS organization. As the generational spectrum of members stretches from MPhils to senior research academics, there is great opportunity for those with advanced experience to offer their personal insights to the members of the community on the first rungs of the academic ladder.

On behalf of the graduates who received travel bursaries this year I would like to thank those who enabled us to attend the conference. It was a truly rich and productive collaborative experience.

Uni of Otago: Marsden-funded MA Early Modern Theatre and Skill – Call For Applications

Applications are now being accepted for a Marsden-funded MA scholarship on the topic of Early Modern Theatre and Skill. Candidates will write a thesis under the supervision of Professor Evelyn Tribble at the University of Otago. Scholarships are for one year, include full fees for domestic students (New Zealand and Australian) and carry a stipend of NZ$13,000.

Interested students should write to Professor Tribble: evelyn.tribble@otago.ac.nz with a brief introduction and a possible topic.

See more about Professor Tribble’s research on her staff webpage and on her academia.edu webpage.

Further information about the Otago Research Master’s is available on the University’s Research Master’s webpage and the Department of English & Linguistics’ postgraduate pages.

Creativity and the City, 1600–2000 – Call For Papers

Creativity and the City, 1600–2000
University of Amsterdam
27–29 October, 2016

Organized by Amsterdam Centre for Cultural Heritage and Identity, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Keynote Speakers

  • Jo Guldi, Brown University
  • Ilja Van Damme, Antwerp University
  • Scott Weingart, Carnegie Mellon University

This international and interdisciplinary conference on the history of creativity and the city aims to bring together recent research in the fields of history, arts, and digital humanities. In the last decade, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have explored the complex interplay between places and their culture using a variety of methods and approaches. The conference examines the relationship between cultural artefacts (art, books, etc.) and the urban networks and spaces in which they were conceived, (re)produced, distributed, mediated, and consumed in early modern and modern Europe. How such issues can be studied by means of existing and novel (digital) methods, as well as comparative and long-term approaches, is the second major theme of the conference.

We invite researchers in the fields of history, arts and culture, urban studies, media studies and the digital humanities to submit abstracts. Papers may address all kinds of cultural expressions and products—from books, (applied) arts and theatre, to films, media and music. The committee particularly invites scholars who will reflect on methodological questions and the use of computational techniques for historical research.

The list of possible themes includes but is not limited to:

  • Space and place (built environment, local amenities, spatial distribution, transnational connections, etc.)
  • Entrepreneurs and firms (business strategies, networks, collaboration and competition etc.)
  • Intermediaries and institutions (guilds, societies, museums, policy, etc.)
  • Markets and labour markets (distribution, training, cross-sectoral linkages, etc.)
  • Text analytics for historical corpora (information retrieval, pattern recognition, tagging and annotation, etc.)
  • Digital cultural heritage (3D/4D modelling, visual and audio-visual content analysis, etc.)
  • Analysis and visualization (prosopography, network analysis, discourse analysis, etc.)

Please submit your details, abstract (300 words max.) and 5 key words before 15 November, 2015 through the conference management system. When your paper is embedded in a larger research project, please also provide its title and affiliation. A scientific committee will evaluate the abstracts and sessions will be formed on the basis of the selected papers. For inquiries, please contact us at achi.red@uva.nl.

Abstract submission: 15 November, 2015
Notification of abstract acceptance: Early January, 2016
Registration will open in February 2016.

James Bennett, UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Free Public Lecture

“View from the Shore: the cultural impact of globalization on Indonesia during the Age of Spices”, by James Bennett (Curator of Asian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia and co-curator of Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices).

Date: 21 October
Time: 6:00pm
Venue: Theatre Auditorium, University Club, The University of Western Australia
Register: Free, but RSVP required. To register or for more info, see: http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/bennett.

The first Europeans arriving in the Indonesian archipelago in the 16th century encountered wealthy multicultural societies whose maritime networks stretched halfway around the globe. In the emporiums of the great ports of Melaka, Banten and Makassar were Middle Eastern, South and East Asian merchants trading in spices as well as imported luxury products, such as brilliantly dyed Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain.

This environment of commercial vibrancy ensured that the coastal Malay and Javanese sultanates established close connections with the international world of Islam. Muslim identity inspired the development of a sophisticated cultural milieu whose art forms defined an era now known as the pesisir, meaning ‘coastline’. The subsequent ascendancy of the Dutch East Indies Company traumatically impacted on the sultanate rulers’ ability to maintain patronage of the visual and performing arts. By the 18th century, Melaka, Banten and Makassar were reduced to half-deserted provincial towns. A new style of city landscape, nurturing its own distinct Eurasian population and hybrid aesthetic fashions, arose at Batavia, modern-day Jakarta, the Company’s capital in the East Indies.

In this lecture, James Bennett will explore the Indonesian pesisir art featured in Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices. He will discuss the cultural impact of globalization on the art of the archipelago that resulted in 19th century European colonial rulers perceiving its aesthetic identity merely as ‘traditional craft’.

James Bennett is Curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia and co-curator of Treasure Ships: Art in the Age of Spices. He has worked as a professional theatre designer, textile arts lecturer and community arts adviser at Milikapiti on Melville Island, NT. His batik textiles are represented in public collections around Australia. His major exhibitions and catalogue publications include Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation of Southeast Asia (2005), Golden Journey: Japanese art from Australian collections (2009), Beneath the winds: Masterpieces of Southeast Asian art (2011) and Realms of wonder: Jain, Hindu and Islamic art of India (2013).

Shakespeare and Indian Cinema – Call For Papers

Shakespeare and Indian Cinema
London
27-30 April, 2016

Screenings with Q&A: Vishal Bhardwaj’s trilogy Maqbool, Omkara, Haider in collaboration with the British Film Institute – 29-30 April

Keynote Panel: Scriptwriters in discussion

  • Abbas Tyrewala (Maqbool, 2004)
  • Robin Bhatt and Abhishek Chaubey (Omkara, 2006)
  • Basharat Peer (Haider, 2014)

Indian Shakespeare on stage has garnered the increasing attention of academics both Western and Eastern, yet local and regional screen versions continue to be largely overlooked within the scope of Shakespeare on film. It has been a decade since the publication of India’s Shakespeare: Translation, Interpretation and Performance (2005), where Poonam Trivedi observes that despite the seven hundred million speakers of different Indian languages worldwide, Shakespeare’s impact on the theatre and films in these languages has yet to be accorded the critical attention it merits.

In 2014, we hosted a one-day conference in London to discuss the relationship between Shakespeare and Hindi cinema/ Bollywood, the world’s largest cinema industry. In 2016, we seek to widen this discussion to include the relationship between Shakespeare and Indian cinema, bringing together researchers and practitioners to establish the state of current scholarship in this vibrant, underexamined field.

We invite proposals for 20 minute papers (and panels), posters and creative approaches, from scholars of all disciplines including film studies, postcolonial studies, Shakespeare studies and translation studies. These could be on any aspect of Shakespeare and Indian cinema, especially regional cinemas and overlooked aspects of Shakespeare in Bollywood.

Topics could include:

  • prehistories
  • Indian film translations/adaptations/appropriations of Shakespeare’s works
  • practitioners’/directors’/writers’/others’ experiences
  • intertextual adaptations/intermedial crossovers
  • Shakespeare in Indian film festivals
  • documentaries on any aspect of Shakespeare in India/Indian Shakespeares
  • screenplays
  • economics global and local
  • comparisons of Shakespeare in Indian cinema to Shakespearean adaptations in other countries
  • Shakespeare in Indian cinema and regional audience reception
  • beyond Parsi theatre: Indian Shakespeare cinema and other indigenous performance traditions
  • Shakespeare and South-Asian diaspora films
  • challenges of researching Shakespeare and Indian cinema
  • challenges to and importance of building an archive
  • Shakespeare and socio-political campaigns in Indian cinema
  • gendering Shakespeare in Indian cinema
  • artwork and promotional material: posters, flybills, film trailers, coffee table books, music releases

Abstracts of 300 words and/or panel proposals (plus a 50 word bio) should be sent to shakespeareandbollywood@rhul.ac.uk by 25 November, 2015.

Responses will be made by 20 December 2015.