Donald Bullough Fellowship for Medieval Historian – Call For Applications

Donald Bullough Fellowship for Medieval Historian
University of St Andrews
St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies

The St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies invites applications for the Donald Bullough Fellowship in Mediaeval History, to be taken up during either semester of the academic year 2014-15.

The Fellowship is open to any academic in a permanent university post with research interests in mediaeval history. The financial aspect of the fellowship is a subsidy (up to £3000) towards the cost of travel to St Andrews and accommodation during your stay. Previous Fellows have included Dr Christina Pössel, Professor Cynthia Neville, Dr Ross Balzaretti, Dr Marlene Hennessy, Professor Warren Brown. The fellowship is currently held by Dr Edward Coleman.

The Fellowship carries with it no teaching duties, though the Fellow is expected to take part in the normal seminar life of the mediaeval historians during their stay in St Andrews. Weekly seminars, held on a Monday evening, run from September – December, and February – May. You will also be invited to lead a workshop on your chosen research theme during your stay. Fellows are provided with computing facilities and an office alongside the mediaeval historians in the Institute. The university library has an excellent collection for mediaeval historians.

You should send a letter of application by the advertised closing date, together with a scheme of research for the project on which you will be engaged during your time in St Andrews. You should also enclose a CV, together with the names of two academic referees, who should be asked to write by the closing date. All correspondence should be addressed to saimsmail@st-andrews.ac.uk

The closing date for applications is 31 March 2014.

Further enquiries may be addressed to the Director, Professor Simon MacLean (saimsmail@st-andrews.ac.uk) or to colleagues in the Institute, whose contact details may be found on http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims/

Dig It Journal – Call For Papers

Dig It: the Journal of the Flinders Archaeological Society
Call for Papers – 2014 edition

The editing committee of Dig It is delighted to invite undergrad and postgrad students and recent graduates from all around the world to submit a contribution for consideration in our 2014/1 edition, to appear in May 2014.

Dig It is a student‐run journal of the Flinders Archaeological Society. The publication began in 1997 and after a hiatus of eight years, it was relaunched in 2012. The purpose of Dig It is to provide students, from undergrad through to postgrad and recent graduates, with the opportunity to practise and familiarise themselves with writing, publishing, editing and the reviewing process involved in professional publications. In addition, it aims to keep aspiring archaeologists connected and informed about what is happening in the archaeological community.

Dig It accepts original research articles, research essays, personal opinion pieces, book reviews and thesis abstracts. Details about the guidelines for contributors can be found here: http://flindersarchsoc.org/digit/guidelinesforcontributors.

All contributions are reviewed by the editors and a panel of reviewers; however original research articles and essays additionally undergo a stricter and anonymous peer review process also involving external experts.

We welcome contributions from local, interstate and international undergrad and postgrad students and recent graduates. If you want to contribute a research article or essay to Dig It 2014/1, please send an abstract of 200 words. For personal opinion pieces, book reviews and thesis abstracts, a more informal expressions of interest is sufficient.

The submission deadline for abstracts (for original research papers and essays) or expressions of interest (for other contributions) is 4th February 2014. Both should be emailed to dig.it@flindersarchsoc.org. Please mind that when sending an abstract for a research article or essay, contributors must provide names and email addresses of three persons with expertise in the field the paper relates to, which can be contacted by the editors of Dig It about peer reviewing. Reviewers can be of any academic status, however students or recent graduates are preferred in agreement with the mission statement of Dig It as providing the opportunity for professional training to students.

The editing committee of Dig It will inform you about whether or not your contribution will be considered within three weeks after 4th February and advise you on the further production schedule.

Professor Helen Hills, ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture

ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Miraculous Affects: Inventing Corpses in Baroque Italy”, Professor Helen Hills (The University of York)
 
Date: Monday 10 February 2014
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: Napier Building, Level 1, Room 102, The University of Adelaide
Enquiries: Janet Hart, Tel: (08) 8313 2421

By what awakening is this blood kindled to see again the bitter hours of its torments? By what heat is it rarefied, what virtue makes it move, and from where does it draw such beauty?’

This paper examines the interplay between affect and religion through materiality in order to bring into relation material and spiritual approaches that have too often excluded each other.  Thus in investigating the interplay between emotion and religion in baroque Italy and their material implication, I focus on the miracle and affect and the divergent ways in which they come to matter in art and architecture. At the heart of this paper is the slippery question of the relic. At once the remains of a human, marked by deeds of a saint, and left behind as ‘deposit’ or pledge of the saint now glorified in heaven, relics occupied many registers simultaneously and ambiguously in early modern Europe. They are fertile ground for the scholar interested in emotions and power—divine and mundane – and their material intersection, including their intersection in and implication in material form in art and architecture. I take miracles seriously. Thus the paper seeks to draw into relation matters that may seem to be mutually exclusive: the material and the spiritual. What are the affective requirements each places on the other; how is the material implicated; how are miracles, sacrifice, and sanctity entailed in materiality? Thus how might we reconsider these miracles in relation to affect, ritual and architecture?

My paper takes two contrasting case studies to prise open these complex issues. The first is the miraculously liquefying bloods of St John the Baptist and of San Gennaro (St Januarius) in Naples and affective responses and materializations to them and of them. The second is Stefano Maderno’s St Cecilia (1600) in the basilica of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere, one of a series of curious sculptures, made partly to celebrate the finding of the relics of saints in 17thC Rome, that stage the body of the saint as dead.  In both cases, I seek to treat the superlative richness of baroque architecture and sculpture as also affectively productive, including productive of new forms of religious authority and civic power in the baroque city.

Wellcome Library – High Resolution Images From Collection Now Available For Free

The Wellcome Library in London has recently announced that over 100,000 high resolution images including manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography and advertisements are now freely available through Wellcome Images: http://wellcomeimages.org
 

“Drawn from our vast historical holdings, the images are being released under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) licence.

This means that they can be used for commercial or personal purposes, with an acknowledgement of the original source (Wellcome Library, London). All of the images from our historical collections can be used free of charge.

The images can be downloaded in high-resolution directly from the Wellcome Images website for users to freely copy, distribute, edit, manipulate, and build upon as you wish, for personal or commercial use. The images range from ancient medical manuscripts to etchings by artists such as Vincent Van Gogh and Francisco Goya.”

For more on this announcement, please visit: http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-culture-made-free-through-wellcome-images

Associate Professor Tracy Adams – PMRG/CMEMS@UWA/ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture

PMRG/CMEMS@UWA/ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions lecture
“Marriage Passion and Love”, Associate Professor Tracy Adams (The University of Auckland)

Date: Monday 10 February 2014
Time: 6:30 – 7:30pm
Location: Webb Lecture Theatre, G21, Geography Building, The University of Western Australia**

This project follows the careers of a female network originating at the court of Anne of France (1461-1522), regent for her brother Charles VIII, and mentor to many girls who went on to illustrious careers: Marguerite of Austria, Louise of Savoy, Diane de Poitiers and Anne of Brittany. To this original circle I add the next generation: Anne of Brittany’s daughters Claude, Queen of France and Renée, Countess of Ferrara, together with Louise of Savoy’s daughter, Marguerite de Navarre, who in turn trained her own daughter, Jeanne d’Albret. Master of politics, Anne passed on knowledge about succeeding in a man’s world. Her father Louis XI chose her to be unofficial regent on his deathbed, apparently believing that in this way she would encounter less opposition than if she were formally appointed. Although female regency in France continued to be exercised unofficially, it was an important institution. From the beginning of Anne’s regency until Louis XIV came of age, ending the regency of Anne of Austria, the kingdom was for all practical purposes ruled by women for about 42 years, which is to say that, in a kingdom that prohibited female rule, women ruled about 25% of that time.

I examine Anne of France’s extended circle as an “emotional community” with the goal of understanding how members were prepared emotionally to exercise power while conforming to a repertoire of female stereotypes. Their libraries are of special interest, because in the works they shared we find models for ideal emotional modulation. I will present from a chapter on marriage, passion, and love. Passionate love was the result of an imbalance of humors; marital affection was an idealized, modulated emotional state between spouses in dynastic marriages. I compare some idealized representations of marital relationships in works from the libraries of the women with reports about these relationships from chronicles and ambassadors’ letters. These sources are all “texts”, of course, but I believe that, in comparing what was perceived as an ideal with impressions of the women, we find clues as to how they assimilated and manipulated their emotional models. 

This public seminar is hosted by the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group (PMRG), The Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS) and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.

**Associate Professor Tracy Adams will also be delivering this lecture at both the University of Sydney (4 Feb.) and the University of Melbourne (14 Feb.)

book:logic 2014 – Call For Papers

book:logic 2014
University of Newcastle, Australia
April 26, 2014

Keynote speakers:

  • Thomas August (Associate Professor of English, New York University, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow)
  • Molly O’Hagan Hardy (Digital Humanities Curator, American Antiquarian Society, American Council of Learned Societies Fellow)

Hosted by Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender of the University of Newcastle.

Do conventional and digital humanities scholarship grapple with the materiality of texts in different ways? What challenges and possibilities do print and electronic environments pose for the presentation, editing and analysis of literary texts?

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers or panels on the symposium theme, “Literary Histories, Material Cultures, Digital Futures” or any topic associated with book:logic symposia in the past.

Please send abstracts and a short bio to wendy.alexander@newcastle.edu.au by February 23, 2013. As in the past, the event itself is free but numbers are limited. To avoid disappointment please register early with Wendy at the above address.

The symposium this year falls in the post-Easter mid-semester break, and also the ANZAC Day long weekend. We hope that this will facilitate rather than prohibit travel to Newcastle, and apologise if the date presents a conflict with prior commitments. The city itself is well worth a weekend (or even long weekend) visit and the symposium hotel is opposite Newcastle beach. A range of accommodation options will be available and the symposium will be followed by a dinner locally.

Please do not hesitate to contact Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender if you have any questions.

Byzantine Culture in Translation – Call For Papers

Byzantine Culture in Translation
Australian Association for Byzantine Studies XVIIITH Biennial Conference,
University of Queensland
28-30 November, 2014

Byzantine culture emanated from Constantinople throughout the Middle Ages, eastwards into Muslim lands and central Asia, north into Russian, Germanic and Scandinavian territories, south across the Mediterranean into Egypt and North Africa and westwards to Italy, Sicily and the other remnants of the western Roman Empire. Byzantine culture was translated, transported and transmitted into all these areas through slow or sudden processes of permeation, osmosis and interaction throughout the life of the Empire, from the fourth century to the fifteenth and far beyond. Various literary aspects of Byzantine culture that were literally translated from Greek into the local and scholarly languages of the Medieval West and Muslim Middle East include dreambooks, novels, medical and scientifica texts and works of Ancient Greek literature. Yet translation was a phenomenon that stretched far beyond texts, into the areas of clothing and fashion, the visual arts (especially icons) and architecture, military organisations, imperial court ceremonial, liturgical music and mechanical devices. This conference celebrates all aspects of literary, spiritual or material culture that were transported across the breadth of the Empire and exported from it. Papers are welcome on all aspects of Byzantine culture that exerted some influence – whether lasting or fleeting – and were translated into non-Greek-speaking lands, from the early Byzantine period to the present day.

Confirmed speaker: Maria Mavroudi, University of California – Berkeley

Convenor: Dr Amelia Brown, The School of History, Philosophy, Religion and
Classics, University of Queensland

Papers of 20 minutes are now sought on any of the topics mentioned above. Please send a title and abstract of 200 words along with your own email address, affiliation and title to the convenor at conference@aabs.org.au.

Closing date for submissions: 31 August.

Bursaries:

Two bursaries of $500 each will be offered to postgraduate students or postdoctoral fellows who present papers and are not residents of Queensland. Applications may be sent with abstract and CV to Bronwen Neil, President of AABS, at president@aabs.org.au. Please supply your residential address and a short (150 words max.) explanation of your financial circumstances, stage reached in your studies and any other relevant information. Membership of AABS is required for successful applicants; please see the web site at http://www.aabs.org.au/members/ for membership subscriptions. Deadline for bursary applications is 31 August.

Full details on the new AABS web site at http://www.aabs.org.au

16th-Century Manuscript Could Rewrite Australian History

“A tiny drawing of a kangaroo curled in the letters of a 16th-century Portuguese manuscript could rewrite Australian history.

The document, acquired by Les Enluminures Gallery in New York, shows a sketch of an apparent kangaroo (”canguru” in Portuguese) nestled in its text and is dated between 1580 and 1620. It has led researchers to believe images of the marsupial were already being circulated by the time the Dutch ship Duyfken – long thought to have been the first European vessel to visit Australia – landed in 1606.”

To read more about this discovery, click here

Error and Print Culture, 1500-1800 – Call For Papers

Error and Print Culture, 1500-1800
A One-Day Conference at the Centre for the Study of the Book
Oxford University
Saturday 5 July, 2014

Recent histories of the book have replaced earlier narratives of technological triumph and revolutionary change with a more tentative story of continuities with manuscript culture and the instability of print. An abstract sense of technological agency has given way to a messier world of collaboration, muddle, money, and imperfection. Less a confident stride towards modernity, the early modern book now looks stranger: not quite yet a thing of our world.
What role might error have in these new histories of the hand-press book? What kinds of error are characteristic of print, and what can error tell us about print culture? Are particular forms of publication prone to particular mistakes? How effective were mechanisms of correction (cancel-slips; errata lists; over-printing; and so on), and what roles did the printing house corrector perform? Did readers care about mistakes? Did authors have a sense of print as an error-prone, fallen medium, and if so, how did this inform their writing? What links might we draw between representations of error in literary works (like Spenser’s Faerie Queene), and the presence of error in print? How might we think about error and retouching or correcting rolling-press plates? What is the relationship between engraving historians’ continuum of difference, and letter-press bibliographers’ binary of variant/invariant? Was there a relationship between bibliographical error and sin, particularly in the context of the Reformation? How might modern editors of early modern texts respond to errors: are errors things to correct, or to dutifully transcribe? Is the history of the book a story of the gradual elimination of error, or might we propose a more productive role for slips and blunders?
Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome on any aspect of error and print, in Anglophone or non-Anglophone cultures. Please email a 300-word abstract and a short CV to Dr Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014.

Print Networks Conference – Call For Papers

Print Networks Conference
St Anne’s College, Oxford
22-23 July, 2014

Keynote speaker: Professor Simon Eliot

The conference will take education and the book trade as its theme. Papers are invited on any aspect of printing, publishing, distribution and bookselling for education, broadly defined, since the beginnings of print until the present. How did the book trade and education mutually profit from and shape each other? What was the book trade’s impact on the the development of institutions of learning; the organization of knowledge; pedagogies and technologies of instruction; and on both formal and informal education, including self-help? Papers with an interest in the provincial book trades in Britain are particularly welcomed, as this has been the historical theme of the Print Networks series, but so too are papers on the relationship between metropolitan and provincial book cultures, national and transnational print economies, and on interactions between print and other media. Papers will be considered for publication in Publishing History, the journal of Print Networks.

An abstract of no more than 400 words of the proposed paper (of 25-30 minutes duration) should be submitted by 31 January 2014 to Giles Bergel via email (giles.bergel@ell.ox.ac.uk) or at the address below:

Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
Manor Road
Oxford
OX1 3UL
United Kingdom

It is understood that papers offered to the conference will be original work and not delivered to any similar body before presentation at this conference.

Fellowship

The Print Networks Conference offers an annual fellowship to a postgraduate scholar whose research falls within the parameters of the conference brief, and who wishes to present a paper at the conference. The fellowship covers the cost of attending the conference and some assistance towards costs of travel. A summary of the research being undertaken and a recommendation from a tutor or supervisor should also be sent to the above email or postal address by 31 January 2014.

Accommodation and dining will be available at St. Anne’s College: information on this will be provided along with the conference programme after the closing date for submissions.