Memory: Myth and Modernity
Limina 12th Annual Conference
The University of Western Australia
28 July, 2017

Conference Website

Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies is a peer-reviewed academic journal published at the University of Western Australia since 1995. The 12th Annual Limina Conference will be held on 28 July 2017 at The University of Western Australia.

Limina’s annual conference aims to foster a supportive environment in which early career researchers and postgraduates can present their latest research findings. We are pleased to invite abstracts for panel sessions and individual papers on the 2017 conference theme of ‘Memory: Myth and Modernity’.

Memory provides us with a framework for reading the past, as well as for shaping our present identities and future aspirations. If, as recent scholarship has attested, these memories can be influenced variously by selective reporting of the media, the digital revolution, physical and mental trauma, and our cognitive biases, then it is incumbent on us to analyse how and what we remember. The 12th annual Limina conference seeks to explore the importance of memory with respect to such issues.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Individual and collective identity
• National and cultural memory
• Narrative and autobiography
• History, places and events
• Nostalgia and the imagination
• Emotions and memory
• Trauma, injury and war
• Ethics of memory
• Gender and sexuality
• Migration and displacement
• Social, psychological and scientific approaches to memory

Submission Guidelines

Please send:

1. A title
2. An abstract (maximum 200 words)
3. A short biography (maximum 50 words)

to liminajournal@gmail.com with ‘Memory 2017’ in the subject line. The deadline for submissions is 31 March, 2017.

Chivalry and its Anxieties: 1000-1600
Saint Louis University
June 19-21, 2017

We invite proposals for papers, sessions, or roundtable discussions for an upcoming conference to be held at Saint Louis University on June 19-21, 2017. This mini-conference, held during the Fifth Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, aims to bring together scholars from across disciplines to consider questions of chivalric culture and warfare. Conceptions of chivalry tend to lean toward one of two extremes: valorizing and romanticizing knighthood, as chivalric fiction and knights themselves so often did, or the opposite, condemning knights as murderous thugs and dismissing chivalry as a self-deceiving sham. The knightly vocation was in many ways a difficult one – considering not only the physical hardships of war, but also the moral ambiguities and pragmatic hazards of wielding power, dispensing justice and violence, and winning and preserving status and reputation. What was the relationship of chivalry, theoretically the guiding ethos of the professional warrior class, to the actual challenges faced by knights? If it was applicable to knights’ ordinary activities, what kind of guidance did it offer? This conference will consider how chivalric precepts and attitudes intersected with the realities of knightly life.

Preliminary guiding questions for proposals include:

• How did chivalry interact with warfare, in conception and/or practice?
• What were the implications of chivalry for gender, for the performance and policing of masculinity, for idealized versus real-life relations with women?
• How did chivalric notions of honorable conduct in war interact with the more theoretical doctrines of just war and/or the law of arms?
• In what ways might chivalric fiction have had echoes in knightly real life – e.g. pageantry and social display, military activity, individual ethics and behavior?
• What were the impacts of politics, society, religion, and culture on chivalry and warfare?

These questions are merely for guidance; applicants are invited to submit brief proposals for papers or panels addressing the conference’s themes. We encourage submissions for 20 minute papers from a range of disciplines including: history, religious studies, literary studies, anthropology, archaeology, manuscript studies, and art history. The hope is that this conference will provide a forum for discussion and collaboration between scholars and across disciplines. Graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early-career faculty are particularly encouraged to apply. Please submit a brief CV along with an abstract of roughly 300 words to Craig M. Nakashian (craig.nakashian@tamut.edu) by December 15. Direct any questions or concerns to Craig Nakashian, Anne Romine (aromine@slu.edu) or Sam Claussen (samclaussen@gmail.com).

Adapting Medieval and Early Modern Culture
Centre for Adaptations
Trinity House, De Montfort University, Leicester
Friday 3 March, 2017

The convoluted histories of medieval and early modern monarchs, reformers and rebellions have inspired plays, novels, poems, fairy tales and a recent outpouring of popular medieval and early modern adaptations in novels, film and television, such as Merlin, The Game of Thrones, The Tudors and Wolf Hall. We invite proposals that discuss the adaptation of the medieval and early modern periods in film, television, animation, plays, novels and poetry.

Proposals of a maximum of 100 words should be sent to Cassandra Hunter (P11235624@my365.dmu.ac.uk) by 15 December, 2016.

Forms of the Supernatural on Stage: Evolution, Mutations
Université François-Rabelais de Tours, France
7-8 September, 2017

The subject presents an obvious specific interest in the English context, given the impact of the religious reforms (and counter-reforms) over the sixteenth century. On the one hand, the medieval biblical plays, miracles and moralities disappeared (though in chronologically and geographically uneven fashion), while, despite sporadic upsurges of a theatre of Protestant propaganda, the dramatic representation of sacred personages and explicitly religious themes became progressively more difficult, to the point of near-impossibility. On the other hand, from the development of the Elizabethan public theatre in the 1570s, playwrights found indirect and innovative means of dramatising spiritual issues and entities. With respect to dramatic works ranging from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, contributors to the Round Table will attempt to identify points of rupture and continuity in evolving dramaturgical practices, taking into account the operations of censorship, as well as questions of genre, the mentality of spectators, and staging techniques.

Proposals (200-300 words) for 30-minute papers in English should be directed to Richard Hillman (rhillman@free.fr) by 15 December, 2016.

Hamlet and Emotions: Then and Now
St Catherine’s College, The University of Western Australia
10–11 April, 2017

Enquiries: Paul Megna (paul.megna@uwa.edu.au)
Organisers: Paul Megna and Bob White
Registration: This is a free event, but registration is required. Register online here.

Ian McEwan’s recent novel Nutshell (2016), in which Hamlet is an unborn foetus, is only the latest in a line of appropriations of Shakespeare’s plays stretching back to 1600. Hamlet itself stretches beyond the seventeenth century, drawing on sources that date back to twelfth-century Denmark, and referring within itself to relics of older drama that Shakespeare may have seen as a boy in Stratford. Hamlet looks both backwards and forwards in time. The play also covers a remarkable range of emotional states, including anger, love, hatred, grief, melancholy and despair. Indeed, Hamlet stages a plethora of emotional practices: a funeral and a marriage, a vindictive ghost in purgatory, a young woman whose mental equilibrium has been dislodged by the murder of her father by her own erstwhile lover, an inscrutable monarch under suspicion of murder, a couple of mordantly cheerful gravediggers, and a young prince back from university and grieving for his deceased father. This symposium invites new readings of the play, focusing on any aspect of its emotional life in the widest sense.

International Visitors:

• Kevin Curran (University of Lausanne)
• Richard Meek (University of Hull)
• Kathryn Prince (University of Ottawa)
• Naya Tsentourou (University of Exeter)

We envisage papers from a range of disciplines and points of view, which may contribute to any of the Centre’s four research programs – Meanings, Change, Performance or Shaping the Modern. Some possible areas of discussion are mentioned below, but they are by no means exclusive. We aim at producing a book proposal, so completed papers ready for publication will save time when approaching a publisher. Please send proposals for 20-minute papers, including a title and presenter details, to Paul Megna (paul.megna@uwa.edu.au) by Tuesday 28 February, 2017

Possible topics:

• How scholarship on the history of the emotions can help us to better understand Hamlet and vice versa
• Emotional regimes, communities and practices in Hamlet
• Emotions and language
• Hamlet, melancholy and depression
• Female consciousness
• Revenge and anger in Hamlet
• Hamlet and non-Shakespearean Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and literature
• Emotional accounts of the afterlife and other religious ideas in Hamlet
• Hamlet’s emotional medievalism and allusions to medieval drama
• Nostalgia in Hamlet, as well as nostalgia for Hamlet in adaptations, appropriations and re-writings
• Gendered emotion in Hamlet and its descendants
• Emotional reactions to Hamlet through the centuries
• Hamlet’s influence on theories of emotion
• Emotions in adaptations of Hamlet (including novels, movies, popular culture).
• Staging of passions, perturbations, affections, etc.