Announce

"Engaging the World: The Jesuits and Their Presence in Global History"

Lisbon, Portugal | 17–19 June 2020

Co-organized by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College and Brotéria in Lisbon, in partnership with the Catholic University Portugal.

Scattered around the globe for nearly five centuries of evangelization, Jesuit missionaries adopted different strategies to communicate with local communities. They were pivotal cultural mediators, serving as cartographers, astronomers, ethnographers, and anthropologists. They were also artists who adapted to local styles, translators and grammarians of native languages, and correspondents who conveyed images of societies previously unknown to European audiences. They fostered commerce and accompanied scientific voyages. They published journals, treatises, biographies, travel logs, and maps, and they participated in worldwide networks circulating literature and art. This symposium is hosted in Portugal, from which thousands of Jesuits departed to engage with people and environments on a global scale. This scholarly event will investigate how such a global engagement developed over time, how it varied from place to place, and how it was similar in different settings.

Proposals are welcomed from across thematic, chronological, and disciplinary boundaries that address methods or instruments the Jesuits used to engage the world and its natural or societal environs. Presentations might address such questions as these:

What strategies did Jesuits employ when, as articulated by their Constitutions, “dispersed throughout Christ’s vineyard to labor”?

How did the internal structure of the Society of Jesus (and the personalities of the Jesuits themselves) facilitate or hinder missionary labors?

How were those labors impacted by external forces, either local or global, cultural or political? For example, how did the Jesuits’ relations with different European powers spark, facilitate, limit, or curtail evangelization efforts within competing global empires?

How did Jesuit missionaries and their superiors determine where to labor (“consideration should also be given to where greater fruit is likely to be reaped”) and whom to evangelize (“the spiritual aid which is given to important and public persons ought to be regarded as more important, since it is a more universal good”)? What are revealing examples of successful determinations and unsuccessful ones?

What were the benefits, hindrances, and consequences of Jesuit accommodation to local customs and virtues? How can Jesuit accommodation be seen in art, theological treatises, scientific work, and pedagogical approaches?

How can we recapture the motives of these Jesuit missionaries, and how those motivations changed from one location to another or over time? And what might these motivations reveal about the Society of Jesus and its many places in the world?

How can indigenous people be seen in the books, maps, correspondence, and other materiality produced by Jesuits? And in what ways do those sources obscure those communities? What new sources should be consulted to better understand the indigenous people’s experiences with Jesuit evangelization?

Is there (or has there been at any point) evidence of a distinctively Portuguese trait to the roots of the Jesuits’ worldwide mission?

The 2020 Symposium will be the sixth annual scholarly conference organized by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies. The Institute is pleased to collaborate with Brotéria, the new cultural center of the Jesuits in Lisbon, in organizing this event on the Jesuits’ global engagements. Previous symposia have taken place in Boston (in collaboration with Boston College), Nairobi (with the Jesuit Historical Institute of Africa), and Seville (with the Universidad Loyola Andalucía).

Proposals and a narrative CV (together no more than 500 words) are due before the end of Monday, October 28, 2019. Proposals for individual papers or panels are accepted. Contact the Institute with questions (iajs@bc.edu). Selected papers may be peer-reviewed and published in open access following the event.

More details are available at The Portal to Jesuit Studies: https://jesuitportal.bc.edu/news/june-2019-call-for-papers-for-the-2020-international-symposium-on-jesuit-studies-engaging-the-world/

University of Padova 29–30 June 2020

Traditionally attributed to King Solomon and defined by Rabbi Akiva as the “Holy of Holies” among the sacred scriptures (Mishnah Yadayim 3:5), the Song of Songs is one of the most fascinating and controversial Biblical books. Fervently read and carefully explained, celebrated as a key to the supreme mystery of the union between God and men, the Song of Songs, the primary source for the Christian pervasive metaphor of the sacred marriage and eros, was a text crucial not only to the Middle Ages, but also to the Renaissance period.

This ambivalent book, which combined a sensual celebration of love with a well-established tradition of allegorical interpretation, held a particular appeal for poets. While its scriptural nature and exegetical reading allowed the text to function as a source of symbolically and allegorically charged images, the Song of Solomon stood up as one of the few Christian alternatives to classical love poetry, and was therefore destined to play a significant role in the shaping of European poetry from its very beginning.

Part of an ongoing project conducted by Camilla Caporicci at the University of Padova, funded through the MSCA (Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) Seal of Excellence@UNIPD Initiative, this conference aims at exploring the complex and multifaceted processes through

which the Song of Songs entered, influenced and interacted with late medieval and Renaissance European poetry (13th–17th centuries). We welcome 20-minute paper proposals on (but not limited to) the following topics:

verse translations and paraphrases of the Song of Songs

the employment of the Song of Songs in the tradition of mystic writings

the use of the Song of Songs in religious poetry

the role of the Song of Songs in the development of European lyric poetry, particularly the sonnet tradition, with special attention to the ambivalent relationship the text establishes with courtly and Petrarchan codes

the influence exercised by the Song of Songs on pastoral poetry

the persistence and evolution of specific Song-related topoi (e.g. the black but beautiful beloved; the woman as flower, fountain and garden enclosed; the syntactic topos of the descending description...)

the gender-related dynamics characterizing the poetic appropriation of the Song of Songs by female poets, or in homo-erotic texts

the philosophical and religious implications of the poetic use of the Song of Songs, examined in relation to coeval paradigms of thought

the politico-religious poetic employment of the text, with particular reference to the Catholic-Protestant debate

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words and biographies of no more than 150 words to camilla.caporicci@unipd.it and alessandra.petrina@unipd.it by 31 January 2020.

Saturday, 21 March 2020 The Huntington Library and Gardens Pasadena, CA

Plenary Roundtable

Interdisciplinary Research and the Renaissance: How to Do It

Amy Buono (Art History, Chapman University) Katherine Powers (Music, California State University, Fullerton) Martine van Elk (English, California State University, Long Beach)

Call for Papers

The RCSC, a regional affiliate of the Renaissance Society of America, welcomes proposals for individual papers as well as complete panels on the full range of Renaissance disciplines (Art, Architecture, History, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religion, Science). In keeping with the 2020 Plenary Roundtable theme, papers and panels that employ interdisciplinary modes of inquiry are especially encouraged. The RCSC promotes the study of the period c. 1300–1800, broadly interpreting the Renaissance within a global framework. Please note that membership in the RCSC is required for conference participation.

Please see our website for membership details.

Individual paper submissions should include:

abstract of approximately 250 words

contact information and one-page CV

Panel Submissions are welcome and should include:

contact information and one-page CV for organizer / chair names and abstracts (c. 250 words) for all presenters

one-page CVs of all presenters

title and short (c. 150 word) description of the panel itself

Please submit all application materials here or on our website (http://rcsconline.org/), where you can also find more information about the conference.

Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2019

If you have any questions, please contact the RCSC president, Heather Graham (heather.graham@csulb.edu).

Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

February 7–8, 2020 Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona

Unfreedom marked the lives of various people in the premodern world. Many factors played a role in shaping the forms of unfreedom prevalent in the premodern era: violence and coercion; shame and dishonor; disconnection of kin groups and destruction of social networks; and individual and collective strategies for economic, political, and social success that depended on the subjection of others. This year’s conference will focus on those whose status was defined primarily in terms of unfreedom, coercion, and constraint rather than the enjoyment of freedoms or privileges, including but not limited to slaves, serfs, captives, prisoners, pledges, hostages, and forced marriage or concubinage. We welcome panels and papers that theorize and/or historicize the status of unfreedom in medieval and renaissance contexts.

Deadlines: Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis until midnight, Mountain Standard Time on November 10, 2019. Please submit an abstract of 250 words and a brief CV to ACMRSconference@asu.edu. Proposals must include audio/visual requirements and any other special requests; late requests may not be accommodated.

Information for presenters: All sessions (panels, roundtables, workshops, etc.) are 90 minutes long. In order to maximize conversation and collaboration, sessions should be comprised of three to five 10-minute, individual presentations of new, cutting-edge work followed by discussion.

How does literature respond to event(s), monumental changes, ruptures and transitions? This upcoming conference at Warwick University attempts to answer some of these questions.

The conference invites abstracts that address, but may not necessarily be restricted to, the following areas:

Theories of Event and Literary Event 

Questions of Testimony and Writing

Literature and Change

Plasticity, Contingency and Speculation

Practices of Reading

Fragility and Literature

Biopolitical Events

Climate‘change’asanundoingofallevents

Theories of Non-Event

Postcolonialiality and Event

Re-definition of event from a world-literature perspective 

Inviting proposals for 20-minute presentations. Please submit at least 350-word abstracts, along with a short biographical note (50-100 words) by November 10th, 2019 to litandevent@gmail.com.

More details can be found here: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/event/cfp/