The Ceræinaugural virtual conference, held over 26–27 April 2024 and organised around the theme of Metamorphosis, Transformation, and Transmutation, is just under two months away, and the committee has been busy planning a varied programme from the submissions we have already received. However, in order to provide ample opportunity for scholars at all stages of their research career to attend and present their research to an international audience, they are pleased to announce that they have extended the Call for Papers by an extra 2 WEEKS only.
THE CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS WILL NOW CLOSE ON 14 MARCH 2024.
Please email your submission for a 20-minute (+ 10 minutes Q&A) presentation to ceraejournal@gmail.com, including:
a 150–200 word abstract,
your academic affiliation and title (if any),
a short 50-100 word biography,
the time-zone from which you will be presenting.
Cerae is also please to announce the two keynote speakers for the conference, Associate Professor Alexandre Roberts from the University of Southern California Dornsife, and Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Stephanie Trigg from the University of Melbourne. Further details on our keynotes can be found on the website.
The conference will be held entirely online, via Zoom, and all sessions will be recorded and made available on the website for a limited time after the conference has concluded to allow for continued discussion. To ensure that the conference is accessible to all scholars, regardless of financial position, there will be a nominal attendance fee of approximately $5-10 AUD (the final amount yet to be finalised by the committee). 100% of the proceeds from the conference will directly contribute to the ongoing operational costs of the journal to help in their commitment to remain fully independent and open-access.
Following our 2023 conference, Limina: A Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies is inviting articles for peer review for its forthcoming special issue on the conference theme ‘Crisis’, scheduled for publication in late 2024. We welcome scholarly contributions of 5000-7000 words written for a non-specialist audience.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
Social, political, historic, economic, ecological, psychological, or identity crises
Theorising crises
Media depictions of crises
Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies
War and conflict studies
Extremism studies
Disability studies
The intersection of overlapping crises and their impact
The ‘polycrisis’ or ‘everything crisis’
Limina also accepts unsolicited submissions of critical essays, long form literary reviews, and academically informed reflections from across Australia and the world. They can range from 3000-4000 words and must be written in a scholarly and professional manner abiding by Limina’s style guide. Subject matters can be broad for our general edition, but would need to dovetail with the theme of ‘Crisis’ for our special edition.
Limina encourages HDR students and early career researchers (ECRs) to submit papers.
Please submit your article as an email attachment in MS Word format or Rich Text Format (RTF) to liminajournal@gmail.com by 15 March 2024.
In a separate document, please also provide:
Your name
Your email address
Your institutional affiliation
The title of the article
A 150-word abstract
List a minimum of 6-8 words for your article
A statement certifying that this article is not under consideration elsewhere
This triennial event brings together major associations for the study of literature in Australia and welcomes scholars and postgraduate students working on any aspect or field of literary studies. We seek papers on the theme of ‘Chaos and Order’. Literary scholarship and literary practice can both be understood as ordering processes: a work of creative writing is an attempt to build meaning by drawing on, and framing, the chaos of experience. So too, whether the research be qualitative or quantitative in method, literary scholarship considers how meaning might traced and interpreted within literary works, forms, periods and literary fields, applying modes of order to them through this critical reception.
While literary study involves the broad expanses of time and space that comprise the histories of oral and written literature, such works are studied now because they continue to speak to us, in what is a challenging present moment. Order might be applied to make sense of chaos, but equally too much order, or newly applied kinds of order have the potential to create chaos. Just as ‘order’ might be understood in positive or negative terms, ‘chaos’ does not have to be understood in solely negative terms: it might be understood, rather, as that which allows the potential for new kinds of creation.
We are open to all interpretations of ‘Chaos and Order’ and all methodologies applied to the study or practice of literature.
We invite papers and panels, including but not limited to the following topics:
How literature (from any period or tradition) helps us understand chaos and order.
What literature can do (be it political, ideological, affective, existential, ethical, imaginative, social, personal) in relation to the chaos and orders of the present.
How literature is imbricated in, produces, or resists systems of order or power (reproduces or contests dominant ideologies; literature and Empire; literature and propaganda; literature and social change/transformation for example)
How the opportunity to write and/or publish has been and is now determined by systems of order (gender, class, sexuality, race, ethnicity, cultural capital, markets).
How book history and print culture has responded to (or influenced) periods of chaos.
How particular methodologies might offer new ways of seeing old problems.
How particular methods might collaborate or generate chaos through conflict.
How pedagogical systems might solve or cause problems (both within universities and between primary, secondary and tertiary forms of education).
Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2024.
Please send an abstract of 150 words and biographical note of 100 words to Anthony Uhlmann a.uhlmann@westernsydney.edu.au
Jointly held by the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, the Australasian Universities Languages and Literature Association, the Australasian Association for Literature, the Australian University Heads of English, the Australasian Victorian Studies Association, The Australasian Children’s Literature Association, The Australasian Modernist Studies Network
The editorial team for Bloomsburyʼs Cultural History of Monarchy welcome proposals for the six volumes in their collection. Of particular interest to ANZAMEMS membership will be the volumes on the Medieval Age, the Early Modern Era, and the Long 18th Century.
Note that this call is different to a normal edited collection where authors propose topics on varied subjects which relate specifically to their research. Instead, the editors are looking for proposals from authors who are interested in writing one of the specific chapters in one of the particular volumes of the series. Each volume will contain chapters under the headings:
Conceptualizing Monarchy Rites, Ritual and Ceremonial Religious, Intellectual and Cultural Patronage Place and Space Image and Representation Intradynastic, Imperial and International Networks Court, Counsel and Community Legacy: Funerary Culture, Memorialization and Myth-Making
For further details on the project, including how to submit a proposal, please see the below pdf.
Abstracts are sought for an edited collection on women’s expression in early medieval English society. Abstracts of up to 300 words are due 20 December 2023. See the CFP below.
Imaginary Communities: Reading, Writing and Translating Early Modern Women’s Fiction
University of Huelva, Spain 17-18 October, 2024
Traditional approaches to the ‘origins of the novel’ question in the English context have often overlooked the role played by women’s contribution to the development of the genre. Minor works, anonymous texts, fiction signed by women, as well as those works bearing a female pseudonym, were usually considered second-rate and were rarely included—with only a few exceptions—in canonical histories of the novel. A female history of the novel genre cannot be written in isolation from other women novelists across Europe, who no doubt exerted an enormous influence on the English novel market, and on women novelists in particular. This seminar proposes a discussion of women’s printed fiction during the seventeenth century from a pan-European perspective to help us situate the early days of the novel in their true transnational context. The fictional works translated into English from different European tongues, the growing popularity of women’s fiction among readers, as well as the cross-influences between English and non-English novels allegedly authored by women, or their different markets—accounting for the influence that women printers and booksellers played in the publication and dissemination of fiction—will also be of our concern. It is our contention that it is possible to read the complex network of readers, writers and other agents of the novel market as belonging to an active, though imaginary, community contributing to the development of the novel form. We would like to assess the relevance that this growing female contribution had in the evolution of the genre.
We invite 20-minute papers which discuss crosscurrents or influences among texts authored by European women, as well as about biographical and/or cultural relationships at work between women writers and intellectuals in the period of study. We aim to discuss whether we can trace a continuum in European women’s fiction which explains transitions of genre/gender and literary culture, from the perspective of transculturality, drawing on all literary sources as fields of cross-media influences. We will consider papers about English women’s native fiction, like Aphra Behn, Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, as well as about translations and adaptations of continental women’s works printed in England, as the examples of Marie de Lafayette, Mlle de la Roche Guilhem, Madeleine de Scudéry, or María de Zayas, among others, make clear.
Some of the suggested topics are the following:
Women’s contribution to the rise and development of fiction in English
French nouvelles and English novels: mutual allegiances and liaisons
Spanish novelas, the picaresque and the world of roguery
Letter exchanges: the early novel and epistolarity
Assessing gallantry across borders: from French to English
Towards a transnational theory of the novel
Political diatribes and religious debates in early prose fiction by women
Intersections of gender and genre across national borders
Translation, revision and adaptation in the seventeenth-century novel: translations of women’s texts, female translators of works by men.
Female histories of the book: printing, publishing and bookselling across national borders
Popularity, canonicity, and the new female readership for the novel: reality or wishful thinking?
Romancing the novel and novelizing the romance
Framed-nouvelles and female narrators
Women’s worlds in historical fictions
The worlds of domesticity: wives, daughters, she-workers, servants
Keynote speakers:
Dr Erin Keating, University of Manitoba Dr Mary Helen McMurran, Western University Dr Leah Orr, University of Louisiana at Lafayette
The journal Perspective : actualité en histoire de l’artwill explore, in its 2025 – 1 issue, the relations between labor and art history, understood both as a scholarly discipline and the material under study.
That which we collectively term “labor” is today the subject of rapid changes and fierce debates which, in an often caricatural way, pitches those for whom labor is a value in and of itself (work or else laze about) against those who question the value of labor: Which type of work is useful to society? Are the conditions acceptable where labor is active? Is labor a form of domination ()? Posing these questions from an art-historical point of view allows us to start from scratch. This volume suggests that we study the relationships between labor and art history along four axes:
The debate over art as labor: How has art history participated; effected changes in its vocabulary; and interacted with those artists, art critics, or philosophers who played a role in this debate?
Art as a process of production: Which strands of art history have turned their attention more to the production of art than to its reception and through what type of theoretical, methodological, and ideological apparatus?
The iconography of labor: What contributions does art history furnish, through the analysis of images, to our knowledge of the realities or representations of labor? What does it borrow from or contribute to other humanistic disciplines that study labor?
Art history as labor: What are the material conditions in which art history is produced? How do these conditions vary in relation to individual, local, and/or historical situations?
Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than December 11, 2023. Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in January 2024, while articles will be due on May 15, 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
The Eleventh Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies (June 10-12, 2024) 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 Renaissance studies.
The plenary speakers for this year will be Cynthia J. Hahn, of Hunter College and the City University of New York, and John Witte, Jr., of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University.
The Symposium is held annually on the beautiful midtown St. Louis campus of Saint Louis University. On campus housing options include affordable, air-conditioned apartments as well as a more luxurious hotel. Inexpensive meal plans are also available, and 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 BooksDivision, and the general collection at Saint Louis University’s Pius XII Memorial Library. These collections offer access to tens of thousands of medieval and early modern manuscripts on microfilm as well as strong holdings in medieval and Renaissance history, literature, languages, manuscript studies, theology, philosophy, and canon law. The Jesuit Archives & Research Center is adjacent to the university and also accessible to Symposium attendees.
We invite 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, and organizing at least two sessions in coordination with each other is highly recommended. All sessions are in-person.
Mini-conferences hosted by societies or organized around a theme occur in the context of the SMRS. Paper submitters are welcome to submit their paper for general consideration at the Symposium or for one of the mini-conferences. This year’s mini-conferences are:
49th Annual St. Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies
All areas of manuscript studies, including but not limited to paleography, textual criticism, codicology, preservation and curation, and art history, are welcome
Lowry Daly, SJ Plenary Speaker: Daniel Hobbins (University of Notre Dame)
Boethius 2024: The 1500-Year Memorial Conference
The 2024 Conference on John Milton
The submission portal will open on November 1. The portal has buttons for submission to the main SMRS and for each of the mini-conferences. The deadline for all submissions is December 31, 2023. Decisions will be made by the end of January and the final program will be published in March. For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/.
12th-14th September 2024 Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies
CFP Deadline: 1 December 2023
Children in the early modern world were dependent upon caretakers in many ways: physically, socially, and emotionally. Children could also be subjected to and negotiated social and economic dependencies, including conditions of serfdom, indentured labour, servitude, slavery, and family ties. Highly mobile, children were traded and trafficked between households, across cultural boundaries, and over land and oceans. These experiences could be exacerbated through considerations of gender and (premediated) sexuality. Wedged between these intersections of power, space, and (in)visibility, children have frequently been neglected in history writing, with their limited traces in archives contributing to this marginalisation. Following recent calls for praxeological approaches, global history, and the history of material culture, their silences are beginning to break.
We wish to foreground children’s representations, articulations, and their experiences in archival and visual narratives as modes of overcoming their assumed absences in the historical record. Children shaped dependent relationships, not least in their capacity as future adults. A child’s entry into strong asymmetrical dependencies may have been involuntary but they needed to adapt. Processes of adaptation, negotiation, and rejection, in turn, stabilised and destabilised dependencies. Under strong and enduring forms of asymmetrical dependency (i.e. chattel plantation slavery), enslaved children were paradoxically first treated as incomplete units of labour, but upon reaching physical maturity encountered a state of permanent infantilisation through calculated deprivation by enslavers. Accounting for both the violence of strong asymmetrical dependency and its archives, while recovering children’s agency, is a challenge for historians.
It is the aim of this conference to conceive of children not as isolated, ‘minor’ subjects in history but as seminal agents. We welcome papers that:
Explore the experiences of dependent children in the early modern world through novel approaches, particularly that of the history of emotions and/or microhistory;
Consider the gendered dimensions and gendered disparities of childhood experiences;
Interrogate institutional frameworks of slavery, dependency, serfdom, capitalism, and the family from the ground up;
Investigate archival and visual sources that recover child-authored narratives and early modern discourses about children, childhood and infantilisation; and
Interpret how these narratives may have reinforced or challenged dependent relationships, communities, and spaces.
The conference probes the possibility of an integrative global approach to the history of children in the early modern world. We welcome examples of research on all world regions, including indigenous studies and the history of borderlands. We also encourage interdisciplinary contributions and creative theoretical engagements.
We welcome submissions from advanced doctoral students, early career researchers, and senior scholars. Please submit your abstracts of ca. 300 words along with a short biographical note to earlymodern@dependency.uni-bonn.deby 1st December 2023. The conference will take place in person in Bonn and limited travel funding may be available for speakers. Please indicate in your submission if you require funding. Successful applicants will be notified by 30th December 2023.
This conference is organised by the German-Australian DAAD-Universities Australia collaborative project Child Slaveries in the Early Modern World: Gender, Trauma, and Trafficking in Transcultural Perspective (1500-1800) of early career researchers from the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences of the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at the University of Bonn: Joseph Biggerstaff, Susan Broomhall, Kristie Flannery, Claudia Jarzebowski, Jessica O’Leary, and Lisa Phongsavath.
ANZAMEMS Conference 2024 Ōtautahi Christchurch, New Zealand 8 – 11 February 2024
Legacies & Relevance
In addition to encouraging papers related to the theme, the ANZAMEMS conference welcomes paper and panel proposals on all aspects of medieval and early modern studies, including medievalism.
Submissions for individual papers and panels should be made by 15 October via the conference website: https://www.anzamems2024.co.nz/
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
Tarren Andrews, Yale University Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the program in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University
Tarren is a Bitterroot Salish scholar and documented descendant of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Her forthcoming book brings Indigenous studies questions and methods to Old English law and literature with the aim of understanding how Anglophone settler colonial ideologies developed in the early medieval North Atlantic, long before the first contacts between Europe and North America.
Wallace Cleaves, University of California, Riverside Associate Dean and Director of the University Writing Program at UC Riverside, Director of the California Center for Native Nations
Wallace’s work, teaching, and research centre around the fields of composition, medieval literature, and Indigenous methodologies. He is a member of the Gabrieleno/Tongva Native American tribe, the Indigenous peoples of the Los Angeles area, and is the co-founder and president of the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy which received the first land return for the Tongva people. He is co-author of the 13th edition of St. Martin’s Guide to Writing.
Natasha Hodgson, Nottingham Trent University Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Research in History, Heritage, and Memory Studies at Nottingham Trent University
Natasha’s research and teaching focus mainly on the medieval period, with a special interest in the crusades, gender, and social and cultural history. She is the author of Women, Crusading and the Holy Land in Historical Narrative (Boydell, 2017), co-editor of Crusading and Masculinities (2019) and most recently edited Miracles, Political Authority and Violence in Medieval and Early Modern History (2021) for Routledge.
CONFERENCE THEME: Legacies and Relevance – Exploring the Medieval & Early Modern World Beyond Europe
How does pre-modern European History “add value” in Australasia? Is its study the vestige of an outdated colonial legacy? Or is it something else? Where does it stand in a world of toppled statues and questioned legacies? In the face of a previous Australian government overtly committed to defunding the Arts and a New Zealand government with similar aims (but a less confrontational way of putting it), and universities in both countries cutting staff, should we now re-focus the curricula of universities across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand on what matters? But what does matter? And who should decide?
In the wake of a global pandemic, which has re-written “business as usual,” is it time for a reformation or for holding fast? This conference will showcase the best of scholarship across a range of disciplines pursued by medieval and Early Modern scholars, but will also seek to ask complex and challenging questions about the future of our discipline. Can the study of medieval and Early Modern Europe help to meet the needs of our times? What is the role of the medieval or Early Modern scholar in Australasian society? Indeed, what was it? In considering these issues, we encourage the exploration of questionable as well as positive legacies, and offer a forum to consider the possible future(s) of our discipline.
ANZAMEMS SEMINAR: A seminar for PG and ECRs will take place at the University of Otago, Dunedin on 13 February. Further details to follow via the conference website.
For all academics enquiries, please contact the conference co-convenors:
