Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 – Call For Papers
Freie Universität Berlin
30 June – 2 July, 2016

Speakers:

• Professor Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History University of Oxford
• Professor Monique Scheer, Historical and Cultural Anthropology, University of Tübingen
• Professor Laura M. Stevens, Department of English, University of Tulsa

Conference Committee:

• Professor Daniela Hacke (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Professor Claudia Jarzebowski (Freie Universität Berlin)
• Professor Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia)
• Associate Professor Jacqueline Van Gent (University of Western Australia)
• Professor Charles Zika (University of Melbourne)

Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 is an international conference jointly sponsored by the Freie Universität Berlin and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100-1800, with the further involvement of scholars from The Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. It will draw on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise in addressing the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods. The conference thus brings together two major areas in contemporary Humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed and performed in pre-modern contexts, both by individuals and within larger groups and communities; and the study of pre-modern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges and understandings, within Europe and between non-Europeans and Europeans.

The period 1100-1800 saw a vast expansion of cultural movement through travel and exploration, migration, mercantile and missionary activity, and colonial ventures. On pilgrimage routes to slave routes, European culture was on the move and opened up to incomers, bringing people, goods and aesthetic objects from different backgrounds into close contact, often for the first time. Individuals and societies had unprecedented opportunities for new forms of cultural encounter and conflict. One major question for the conference to consider is finding the appropriate theory and methodology that will account for the place of emotions in this varied history.

Such cross-cultural encounters took place within a context of beliefs – popular, religious and scientific – that were propagated in literary, historiographical and visual sources, with a heritage reaching back to the classical period, and with a long religious tradition. One strand of the conference will deal with the changing literary and visual cultures that mediated European understandings of African, Mediterranean and Asian peoples, practices and environments, and which reveal the image of Europe and Europeans in other regions. Literary works (travel narratives, histories, epics and romances, hagiography), theatrical performances, visual artefacts and musical compositions were highly important in forming the emotional character of cross-cultural contacts, and the nature of literary, visual and performance culture. They responded to new cultural influences and created the emotional habits and practices through which cultural understandings were received and interpreted.

The conference will also explore the role emotions played in shaping early modern and late colonial encounters between indigenous peoples and Europeans. This might include the emotions embedded in missionary work and conversion, as viewed from both sides of these transactions, and in European settlements built on slavery. Evidence is provided by the accounts of participants, in the records of European and colonial government sponsoring and regulating their populations, in personal correspondence, and also in the associated visual and material record, including maps and ethnographic illustrations, propaganda and other responses by indigenous subjects.

Tracing emotional cultural movements also invites consideration of the variety of spaces – ships, villages, churches, courts, rituals and dreams – in which cultural movements and contacts occurred, and emotive responses to environmental features. This might also include the emotional responses of non-Europeans who found themselves in European environments.

More generally, the conference will consider the affective strategies of early modern Europeans in the acquisition, exchange and display of colonial objects. What emotional transformations did objects undergo in their passage across Europe and between European and other societies? What was the role of emotions in the formation of early ethnographic texts and collections, and in the museum culture of early modern Europe?

This last question leads to the issue of retrospective emotions, as observers in modernity look back on the long history of cross-cultural contact and write its course. How have their desires and emotional projections influenced understanding and reception?

Emotions: Movement, Cultural Contact and Exchange, 1100-1800 will extend over two-and-a-half days, including three plenary sessions by distinguished invited speakers, several Round Table discussion groups, and numerous panels consisting of three 20 minute papers plus discussion. One or more refereed publications of essays based on proceedings are expected.

Paper proposals

For individual paper proposals, individuals should submit a paper title, abstract (c. 250 words), your name, brief biography (no more than 100 words), institutional affiliation and status and contact details. For panel proposals, the organiser of the panel should submit the same information for each of the three speakers, and the name of the person to chair the panel. Please send the proposals to Ms Francisca Hoyer (FU Berlin) and Ms Pam Bond (CHE) by 31 October, 2015.

Courtly Pastimes: The Fifteenth Triennial International Courtly Literature Society Congress
University of Kentucky, Lexington
24–29 July, 2016

Paper topics may include, but not be limited to:

• Hunting, falconry, jousting and tournaments
• Festivals, ceremonies and celebrations
• Games and sports
• Dance, music, songs and poetry
• The Garden: Plants and Nature (real or symbolic, in treatises, in visual arts)
• Animals (real, mythical, literary, heraldic, emblematic)
• Domestic animals (horses, lap dogs, hunting dogs, household cats)
• Exotic pets
• Reading and writing
• Sewing, embroidery, textile arts
• Amorous dalliances
• Courtly spaces: Decorous interiors, decorative objects, fabrics and furnishings
• Warriors dismounted: Knights at court (courtly conduct, speech, dress)
• Courtly Elements in Epic
• Special Topic: 500 Years of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (anniversary of publication of the first edition)

Additional topics concerning medieval and Renaissance era courts of any country are welcomed.

Papers may be presented in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.
Presenters are asked to respect a twenty-minute limit on three-person panels.
Organized sessions (4-paper maximum) or round tables are encouraged.

Plenary Speakers and Concert

• Lori Walters, The Florida State University, “Jeux à vendre: Poetic and Amorous Games in Christine de Pizan’s Queen’s Manuscript (London, BL, Harley 4431)”
• Kristen Figg, Kent State University, “Blind Man’s Buff: From Children’s Games to Pleasure Gardens in late medieval France and England”
• Pia Cuneo, University of Arizona, “Emblazoned Saddles: The Courtly Life of Horses in late medieval / early modern Germany”
• Elizabeth Tobey, University of Maryland, “The Sport of Dukes: Palios, Stallions and Racing Stables in Renaissance Italy”
• Courtly music in concert to be performed by Liber Ensemble for Early Music

All conferees must be members in good standing of their respective ICLS branch by the time of the Congress. Graduate students are kindly requested to include a letter of introduction from their supervising professor. Deadline for Submission of Papers (title and abstract, not over 300 words): 1 December, 2015. Abstracts will be posted electronically on the Congress webpage: http://icls2016.as.uky.edu. For particular concerns, contact the Congress organizer: dr.gloria.allaire@hotmail.com

We invite your participation!

“Shakespeare and Our Times”
Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA.
April 14-16, 2016

Conference Website

An interdisciplinary, international conference on the significance of Shakespeare in the early twenty-first century

Plenary speakers:

• Jonathan Dollimore, Independent Scholar of Early Modern Studies and Shakespeare, Editor of Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism
• Ania Loomba, Catherine Bryson Professor of English, University of Pennsylvania, Author of Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism
• Leah Marcus, Edwin Mims Professor of English, Vanderbilt University

What does William Shakespeare mean to us today, and what traces of his thinking can still be seen in our lives? In the context of a week-long, multi-faceted investigation of Shakespeare’s continued presence in our cultural landscape, this three-day conference will probe contemporary manifestations of the Bard. To mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s death we will seek his footprint as we question the legacy of the early colonial mindset in the twenty-first century. Why does this figure among all others endure so persistently? At stake are questions of global imperialism and how it intersects with race, ethnicity, gender, and Shakespeare’s extended influence in what were, for him, newly-emerging colonial locales. How, then, is Shakespeare performed, translated, analyzed today?

Abstracts and panel proposals welcome on these and other topics:

• Shakespeare and Popular Culture
• Gender/Sexuality in Shakespeare
• Shakespeare and the Idea of the Posthuman
• Shakespeare’s Cities
• Shakespeare and International Relations
• Shakespeare and the Sciences
• Why Shakespeare? Shakespeare for Whom?
• Shakespeare and Disaster Management
• Shakespeare and Contemporary Censorship
• Translating Shakespeare
• The Rhetoric of Shakespeare
• Shakespeare and America, Shakespeare in America
• Shakespeare’s Music
• Staging Shakespeare, Filming Shakespeare, Now
• Shakespeare and Language
• Theorizing Shakespeare in the Twenty-First century

250-word abstracts for individual 20-minute papers, or 3-paper panel sessions can be submitted online at http://goo.gl/forms/Cd582zZpa1 by September 15, 2015. Advanced graduate students welcome to apply.

Inquiries about the conference can be sent to:

• Dr. Imtiaz Habib: ihabib@odu.edu
• Dr. Liz Black: eblack@odu.edu
• Dr. Delores Phillips: dbphilli@odu.edu
• Dr. Drew Lopenzina: alopenzi@odu.edu

Women and the Canon: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Christ Church, University of Oxford
22-23 January, 2016

Conference Website

This conference seeks to problematize received notions of canonicity, and therefore of artistic and intellectual authority, by approaching them through their relationship to gender. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the canon as ‘the list of works considered to be permanently established as being of the highest quality’. We are seeking to hold an interdisciplinary debate in which ‘work’ includes all forms of artistic and intellectual endeavour. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any aspect of this topic. Submissions from postgraduate and early career researchers are warmly encouraged. Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following sub-topics:

• Why and how were some women canonized rather than others? (e.g: Sappho, Christine de Pisan)
• What was the relationship of their work with that of their male contemporaries?
• The creation of an alternative canon: is there a ‘female canon’ (e.g: undergraduate electives on ‘Women Writers’)? And how does it interact with the ‘dominant’ canon?
• Have some female creators or thinkers escaped our attention because they were not expressing themselves in an officially recognized medium? (e.g: was the Bayeux Tapestry woven by women?)
• Is the canon created by men for men?
• What are the institutions (educational, legal or other) that uphold the canon? To what degree are they inclusive/exclusive? (e.g: accessibility of fine arts schools to women historically)
• How does the question of gender, canonicity and structures of inclusion and exclusion intersect with issues of race, nationality, class, disability, and/or sexuality and the canon? Which authors from demographics conventionally excluded from the canon (for instance, black women, colonized women, poor women, disabled women, queer women) have begun to feature in alternative canons, and why?
• (How) do these alternative canons articulate an emancipatory feminism?
• Canons of femininity: is there an accepted definition of what is considered feminine or womanly?
• The idea of negative femininity, as in the joining together of negative dialectics and feminism (e.g. work by Drucilla Cornell and Seyla Benhabib)
• Women as audience, critics, editors or assistants to male thinkers or creators: what is the boundary between passivity and agency? (e.g: Simone de Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre’s work; the new documentary film Written by Mrs Bach; art collectors the Cone sisters)

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Dr Elena Lombardi, Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages, University of Oxford
• Prof Suzanne Aspden, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Confirmed respondent:

• Prof Ankhi Mukherjee, Faculty of English, University of Oxford

Please send an abstract of 250 words with a brief biography by 15th September to the following email address: womencanonconference@gmail.com.

We will be pursuing options for publication of proceedings from this conference.

The venue and facilities are fully accessible.