Announce

June 15–17, 2020 Saint Louis University Saint Louis, Missouri

The Eighth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 15–17, 2020) is a convenient summer venue in North America for scholars to present papers, organize sessions, participate in roundtables, and engage in interdisciplinary discussion. The goal of the Symposium is to promote serious scholarly investigation into all topics and in all disciplines of medieval and early modern studies. The plenary speakers for this year will be David Abulafia, of Cambridge University, and Barbara Rosenwein, of Loyola University, Chicago.

The Symposium is held annually on the beautiful midtown campus of Saint Louis University. On campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments as well as a luxurious boutique hotel. Inexpensive meal plans are also available, although there is a wealth of restaurants, bars, and cultural venues within easy walking distance of campus. While attending the Symposium, participants are free to use the Vatican Film Library, the Rare Book and Manuscripts Collection, and the general collection at Saint Louis University's Pius XII Memorial Library.

The Eighth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies invites proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions.

The deadline for all submissions is December 31, 2019. Decisions will be made in January and the final program will be published in February.

For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/

Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst

February 22, 2020

What are the ecological affordances of thinking with the medieval and early modern past? How can the environmental humanities inspire eco-mimetic modes of thinking and writing? This think-tank conference invites research-in-progress that parses the entanglements of nature and culture, the human and the nonhuman, the material and the metaphysical, to explore how medieval and early modern ecocritical scholarship might speak directly to contemporary political and social concerns.

The conference will include three panels, grouped thematically according to distinct modes of ecological entanglement:

Ruins: Pre- and early modern texts, often imperfectly preserved, testify to the ruinous forces of nature as experienced in earlier centuries. The cultural artifacts damaged by water, rot, and fire evinced a “human” struggle with and against the “natural” world. Furthermore, the vast cultural, material, and textual ruins of medieval England were unearthed, consumed, and repurposed by early moderns in myriad ways. How might these entanglements of the past inform a modern posture toward environmental catastrophe? Do contemporary scholars have an obligation to salvage “dead” languages, “primitive” technologies, and “erroneous” science, and why?  

Graftings: For the pre/early modern scholar, grafting as a motif allows us a model for ecocriticism that is entangled with the nonhuman world. Inspired and provoked by the early modern debates about the ethics of human gardeners mixing breeds and types of plant life, this panel is especially interested in experimental, multimodal, and/or interdisciplinary projects which articulate ecological questions across historical periodizations and traditional disciplines. For instance, how might we “graft” a pre/early modern cultural or material artifact onto 21st-century economics in order for that particular, vibrant object to bear fruit?  

Stratification: Ruptured, layered, diachronous and synchronous, the geological record has produced a rich repertoire for rethinking human temporalities. Entangled with non-literary environments, pre/early modern literary texts often re-imagine futurity, causation, and pattern. How can ecological readings of literary texts help us to uncover alternatives to disciplinary periodization and heterolinearity? How might these texts prompt 21st century readers and scholars to be more receptive to, for example, “queer” temporalities or “crip” temporalities?

Each panelist will give a 10-minute proposal aimed at generating conversation. Emphasis will be placed on sparking exploratory, lateralized conversations between panelists and audiences. If you are interested in submitting an abstract for one of the panels below, please submit a 500-word abstract to conference organizers, John Yargo and Melissa Hudasko, at marenaissanceconference@gmail.com by November 15, 2019.

University of Edinburgh

30th of January to 1st of February 2020

The University of Edinburgh is hosting an interdisciplinary international conference entitled Memories of Loss, Dreams of Solidarity. The conference examines intricate processes of political memory-formation in the wake of systemic political violence. It invites reflection on competing national mythologies, their affective modalities, genres and material instantiations. We also welcome analyses of critical artistic interventions, in particular in relation to their ability to reveal the ambiguities and complexities of political violence and to sketch images of alternative futures. The goal is to displace the predominant victim-perpetrator binary, challenge linear political visions of transcending the past and nurture visions of solidarity that remain deeply anchored in the murky terrain of past complicities and resistances. We aim to bring together perspectives from political theory, memory studies, art, history, transitional justice, literature and film to interrogate the risks and potentials involved in remembering histories of violence and loss.

Confirmed speakers:

Emily Beausoleil, Victoria University

Vikki Bell, Godsmith, University of London

Mihaela Czobor-Lupp, Carleton College

Hans Lauge Hansen, Aarhus University

Melissa Steyn, University of Witwatersrand

Joseph R. Winters, Duke University

We invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

What role can imagination play in problematising the memorialisation of political violence?

How does nostalgia factor in processes of memorialisation? Is nostalgia a necessarily conservative force?

What is the political value of melancholia and disappointment in relation to revealing the residual effects of systemic violence?

What horizons of political hope are opened up by various collective reactions to past violence?

Can painful pasts provide sources for utopian dreaming?

What are the normative implications of understanding violent pasts in terms of complicity and responsibility?

Can artistic production supplement – or even surpass – theory in its power to illuminate the intricate dynamics of societal involvement in political violence?

How can we distinguish between disclosive and obscuring artistic genres and practices of memorialising the murky realities of political conflict?

What are unconventional repositories of dissident political memories, how can we identify them, and what role can these play in problematising official narratives of the past?

How does location and the materiality of the medium affect the political significance of memory and its potential to produce more nuanced understandings of systemic violence?

What happens, politically, culturally and aesthetically, when a former opposed memory becomes a new official memory? How is it possible, if at all, for critical memory to maintain its integrity when co-opted by the state or the cultural industry?

On the basis of what sources can we articulate visions of solidarity in the wake of political struggles?

We encourage applications from various disciplinary backgrounds, including social and political theory, philosophy, history, art, cultural, memory studies, transitional justice and film studies. We welcome contributions from normative, historical, conceptual and comparative perspectives.

Abstract Submission

The deadline for paper abstracts is 30 September 2019. Abstract submissions should include your name, institutional affiliation, contact, paper title, an abstract of no more than 200 words and a brief biographical note.

Notification of acceptance will be given by mid-October at the latest. The selected participants will be asked to submit their papers via email by 10 January 2019.

A limited number of bursaries is available. If you wish to be considered for financial support, please specify the reasons in the relevant rubric in the application form.

To submit your application, follow this link:  https://forms.gle/udaX6jysgrNPsLXDA

Contact 

The conference is organized by the GREYZONE project team. Please direct all your queries to mihaela.mihai@ed.ac.uk. 

A proposed Session for the 55th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI (May 7 to 10, 2020)

Title: Women in Learned Circles and Communities (1400-1650)

Organizer: Anne Larsen

Sponsoring Organization: The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender

During the past decade, there has been increased scholarly attention to women’s participation in cultural production through groups—salons, literary circles, scientific and philosophical circles and academies, religious circles, medical communities, artists’ and performing artists’ communities, correspondence networks, and patronage networks. Such groups provided women key points of entry into public discourses of many sorts. This session will explore the longue durée of learned circles and communities in which women participated over the course of two and a half centuries.

Please send by Friday 6 September an abstract and a brief CV to Anne Larsen at alarsen@hope.edu.

Trinity College Dublin, 29-30 Octobre 2019

Funded by the French Department of Trinity College, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (TCD), the Society for French Studies (SFS) and the Association for the Study of Modern and Contemporary France (ASMCF).  

‘There’s a quality of legend about freaks. Like a person in a fairy tale who stops you and demands that you answer a riddle. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma.’ -Diane Arbus

The symbol of ‘the freak’ is a transcultural allegory that exists across boundaries of nation and discipline. Often perceived as a bad omen, it serves to inform both the pejorative representation of the other and our understanding of the mainstream society which deems the ‘freak’ as other. A cross-disciplinary study of what society finds shocking illuminates the cultural norms that the hegemony considers its constituent pieces. A curiosity or willingness to study the heteroglossia outside of this constituency offers a unique opportunity to expose elements of such hegemonic structures that might otherwise be taken for granted and raise a critical awareness of the processes that define ‘normalcy’ and freakishness. An interdisciplinary approach allows us the vantage point of multiple academic perspectives into what exactly it is in various understandings of the freakthat frightens society and what pieces of society are incompatible with the freak. What elements of cultural consciousness function to define the other as ‘freakish’? To what extent is ‘the freak’ both exiled from society and an extension of society itself? Which elements of ‘the freak’ are defined by society, and which are self-imposed? Is ‘the freak’ simply a caricatured exaggeration of ‘the other,’ or is it something separate?

*

This conference, organised by a postgraduate committee, will explore the concept of the freak in relation to Literature, Cultural Studies, Film, Philosophy, Literary Theory, History, Anthropology, History of Art, Drama, Theology, and Folklore. It will take place in the Trinity Long Room Hub on 29-30 October 2019.

We welcome papers in relation to:

- Psychology and Sociology - Gender Studies - Film Studies - History and Social Studies - Architecture (e.g. gargoyles, grotesques, etc.) - Social, religious, and cultural identity - Biography and autobiography - Ethics in Biology, Immunology, and Medicine - Literary Theory: (e.g. Bakhtin and the carnivalesque, Rabelais and the grotesque, etc.) - Ostracised and marginalised figures in literature and history - Language Studies

We request an abstract of 250-300 words along with a short biography sent to Alexandra Corey & Jason Marrott at thefreakconference@gmail.com by 30 July 2019.