Category Archives: cfp

CFP MEMS Festival, University of Kent

Join us online for the University of Kent’s seventh annual MEMS Summer Festival. This two-day event celebrates Medieval and Early Modern history, 400 – 1800, and encourages a wide range of interdisciplinary topics, including but not limited to politics, religion, economics, art, drama, literature, and domestic culture. MEMS Fest aims to be an informal space in which postgraduate students, early career researchers, and academics can share ideas and foster conversations, whilst building a greater sense of community. Undergraduate students in their final year of study are also welcome at the conference.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for individual research papers of 20 minutes in length on ANY subject relating to the Medieval and Early Modern periods. The research can be in its earliest stages or a more developed piece.

We also encourage 700-word abstracts proposing a three-person panel, presenting on a specific subject or theme in Medieval or Early Modern studies. If you have an idea and would like us to advertise for it, please contact us at memsfestival@gmail.com.

Deadline for all Paper and Panel Proposals is Friday 30th April 2021. All applications must be sent to memsfestival@gmail.com with ‘MEMS Fest 2021 Abstract’ as the subject of the email.

CFP Old English Poetry and its Legacy

John D. Niles, Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Professor of English Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, has long been a major voice in Old English studies. This special issue of the international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Humanities, together with a resultant book, will celebrate his achievements while promoting innovative work in the field.

The collection will focus on the legacy of Old English poetry broadly conceived and will include, for example, studies of particular poems, themes, or verse passages; of the translation or reception history of particular texts; of linguistic features of the poetry and their subsequent influence; of current historical and archaeological studies and how they illuminate the poetry or vice versa; of Old English poetry’s influence on various fields such as music or art; and of how an understanding of Old English prose or medieval Latin literature enriches appreciation of the poetry.

We welcome contributions that address fundamental issues in the Humanities from any meaningful perspective, combining past and present concerns in order to blaze a path toward the future. Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly welcome. All submissions will be critically reviewed by peers, aiming for the highest possible scholarly level. Being an online journal, the published papers will reach their desired audiences faster, more reliably, and much more easily than traditional print versions, while upholding the same, if not even higher, scholarly standards.

The deadline for submissions is 31 December 2021. For more information see the attached flyer.


CFP Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at MLA

Join the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship at the MLA Convention in Washington, DC, January 6-9, 2022 | PROPOSALS DUE March 15, 2021

1. Magic and Gender in Medieval Literature
Magic was omnipresent in the Middle Ages: theorized by natural philosophers, debated by theologians, written about in a wide variety of practical texts and literary genres, and undertaken by a wide range of practitioners, including what Richard Kieckhefer has described as “a clerical underworld.” Unlike the early modern obsession with witches, most medieval magical instruction books limit the knowledge they hold to learned men. Yet in literature, gender seemingly is no barrier for who can cast spells, create potions, or divine the future. While the “authority” of magic is recorded in books understood as the parvenu of men and in particular, of clerics, the practice of magic throughout the medieval period is undertaken by male and female, alike. In fact, more often women, particularly women of the fey and euhemerized goddesses, are wielders of powerful magic. This panel investigates the gendered slipperiness surrounding depictions of magic in medieval literature.

Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio for 15-20-minute papers to Melissa Ridley Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) and Kersti Francis (kersti.francis@gmail.com) by March 15, 2021.

2. Gendered Violence in Old English Literature
The Old English MLA forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship are proposing a jointly-sponsored session on gendered violence in Old English literature. The last decades have witnessed an increased interest in research on the relationship between gender and violence in the Middle Ages, with new studies exploring the construction of gender through violence and women as its victims. Gender theory and feminist studies have done much to refine methodologies used in this research, especially in the late Middle Ages. Still, there is a great deal of work to be done in the area of gendered violence, in particular in the literature of the early English era.

Submit 300-word abstracts and a brief bio to Melissa Ridley-Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) or David F. Johnson (djohnson@fsu.edu) by March 15, 2021

Panel co-sponsored by the Old English Forum and the Society for Medieval Feminist Studies. This panel is not guaranteed.

For more information and suggested topics please see the PDF below.

CFP Limina Journal

Limina: a Journal of Historical and Cultural Studies is a cross-disciplinary peer-reviewed journal at the University of Western Australia, run by the Limina Collective.
We are committed to decreasing barriers to the publishing process and the communication of research, especially for early-career researchers. As such we are completely Open Access and charge no Article Processing Fees.

Submissions to our annual General Editions are always welcome. A secondary issue of the journal is usually dedicated as a Special Edition: these are usually dedicated to papers from our annual conference, but proposals for Special Editions of papers from other workshops/symposia/conferences are welcome.
All articles are subject to a double-blind peer review process. We also accept Perspectives, and Book and Cultural Reviews for inclusion in our issues.
For more info see – https://www.limina.arts.uwa.edu.au/future

A Call for Papers is currently in place for our annual conference ‘Adaptations in the Humanities: Reimagining the Past, Present, and Future’ to be held 30 September – 2 October 2021 (digitally enabled). Deadline 12 April 2021 – see https://conference.pmrg.org.au/

We welcome your support of Limina. You can follow us on Twitter and Facebook, or join our mailing list to keep up to date with our CFP, editions and events. You can contact us directly at liminajournal@gmail.com.

CFP Weapons, Wounds, Warfare online workshop series

Weapons, Wounds, Warfare – An Interdisciplinary Online Workshop Series, 2021, University of Auckland, New Zealand

If death and injury are central to warfare, so are the tools that cause bodily harm. This interdisciplinary workshop series, hosted by the University of Auckland’s ‘War in Context’ research hub across March-October 2021, explores the cultures of violence and control that form around military weaponry by focusing on the wounds they inflict and the (at least perceived) pain and suffering they provoke. It investigates the ways in which individuals, communities, states, and militaries imagine, represent, adapt, and receive military technologies in the context of their wounding capacity.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we had to postpone and then reimagine the more traditional conference on this theme we had initially planned for December 2020. We therefore invite proposals for panels or papers to be offered either in person (for New Zealand-based contributors), via live-stream, or pre-recorded as part of a series of events spread throughout 2021. Individual presentations should be 30 minutes in length, and those offered in person or live-streamed will be followed by a Q&A session of no more than 20 minutes in length. Panels should be approximately 40 minutes in length, with 20 mins for Q&A.

Papers should focus on particular weapons (or types of weapons), the context in which they are used, and the ‘wounds’ they cause. We welcome papers from any historical period, including today, and hope to attract scholars from a wide range of disciplines and cultural perspectives. As such, ‘wounds’ can, and indeed should, be interpreted in a broad way and can encompass not only physical, but psychological, social, cultural, and political damage.

It is planned that the workshop will form the core of a publication – either a peer-reviewed edited collection or special edition of an academic journal. All presenters will be encouraged to contribute to this publication. If you would like to offer a paper for the publication (but not present to the public) please let us know.

Proposals should include a title, an abstract (no more than 250 words), a brief presenter
biography (no more than 250 words) and your preferred mode of delivery (in person, livestream or pre-recorded). Please indicate when (in terms of dates: March-October) suits you best. We welcome proposals from scholars at all stages of their careers, including graduate students and early career scholars. Please send you proposals to the Series organizers at this email address: warincontext@auckland.ac.nz by 20 February 2021.

We have a small amount of funding available to bring New Zealand-based scholars to
Auckland to contribute in person.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us: Prof. Maartje Abbenhuis
(m.abbenhuis@auckland.ac.nz), Assoc. Prof. Jeremy Armstrong
(js.armstrong@auckland.ac.nz), and Dr Thomas Gregory (t.gregory@auckland.ac.nz)

CFP Piecing together the past: fragments of medieval and early modern books in Australia and New Zealand

Piecing together the past: fragments of medieval and early modern books in Australia and New Zealand

Editors: Anna Welch (State Library Victoria) and Nicholas Sparks (The University of Sydney)

In the medieval and early modern period, old books were routinely cut up and reused to make new books: the materials involved – whether prepared animal skin or paper – were simply too valuable to discard. Manuscript and printed leaves from dismembered books were reused in the bindings of newer books, either as structural support, fly leaves, or as the outer surface of the binding itself. Parchment could be scraped back to create a new but never entirely blank writing surface. In both types of reuse, layers of palimpsest texts and provenance stories offer scholars a chance to recover otherwise unknown voices and histories. Conceptually, fragments also support new approaches to the interrelated histories of reading and authorship, and to considerations of the reception of books as material objects, both in the past and in the modern era.


The pragmatism of this practice of recycling combined with modern advances in technology and digital connectivity – and the scholarly impetus to study unique physical cultural material in the age of mass digitization – have given rise to a new field of study: fragmentology. Digital humanities initiatives have facilitated entirely new ways to reconstruct fragmentary elements of our medieval and early modern past, and have shown again the potency of collaborative, multidisciplinary research. Fragments present challenges and opportunities for study precisely because of their liminal nature: they sit between manuscript culture and the era of print, and challenge the delineation between traditional the academic categories of palaeography and codicology, conservation, the history of binding, art history, bibliography, provenance research and the history of the book trade.


We are seeking proposals for a collected volume focused on medieval and early modern fragments (both in manuscript and print) in Australian and New Zealand collections: the first volume of its kind for the region. Abstracts are welcomed for scholarly articles of up to 8000 words (including notes) that present new research on any aspect pertaining to fragments. Papers that explore fragments via novel, interesting approaches, such as book history, bibliography, palaeography and codicology, art history, literary history, digital humanities, and curatorial practice, are especially welcomed.

Please send us your expressions of interest, including a title, 250-word abstract, and short biography, by Tuesday 26 January 2021. We will be seeking a contract with an academic press that guarantees a fully refereed process for publication. We will confirm acceptance of your abstract before making our proposal to relevant presses by 28 February 2021, with a view to a publication going to print in 2022.

For more information please see the below flyer.


CFP International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England

Flinders University, Adelaide | 21 June 2021

The twelfth biennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England will be held in four different locations in June 2021: Winchester, UK; Montreal, Canada; Leiden, Netherlands; and Adelaide, Australia. The conference will take place either in a hybrid fashion (online and in-situ) or fully online. This means that it will always be possible for you to attend and/or deliver your paper online; if circumstances allow it, you will be able to attend one (or more) days on location.

The Flinders hub in Adelaide particularly welcomes papers that fall under the following four themes:

1. Interpretation, transmission, adaptation and reception
2. Emotions
3. Trade, travel, maritime power and the sea
4. Science and Medicine

Details for the conference as a whole can be found here. For the Adelaide venue, including the full CFP and application portal, see here.

CFP Old Age Care in Times of Crisis, Past & Present

Old Age Care in Times of Crisis, Past & Present
Symposium 8-9 April 2021
Birkbeck & London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London

Rarely in recent history has a global event such as the current pandemic brought care for older people into sharper focus. Now, as in the past, many struggle physically and/or mentally, due to a range of bio-psycho-social factors. The provision of care for older people has involved a host of actors from international agencies and NGOs, national and local governments, charities, campaigners, medical and care professionals, and, of course, families and community networks. What has happened to these endeavours, and to old age care as a whole, in times of crisis? Does crisis bring change – for better or worse – in the practices, ideas, cultures, laws, and structures surrounding care for older people?

In a two-day, cross-disciplinary symposium, we will consider how social care, medical treatment, and the rights of older people have been affected by major events such as war, pandemic, plague, famine, economic depression and austerity, industrialisation, political extremism, enslavement, colonialism, or environmental damage/collapse.

Reflections on old age care in times of crisis are welcome from any discipline across the humanities and social sciences at the symposium which will be held over two afternoons BST on 8 and 9 April 2021. For more information and to submit a proposal by 7 December, please visit the symposium blog.

CFP Royal Studies Network New Digital Seminar Series

The Royal Studies Network are developing a new Digital Seminar Series for members launching in January 2021. The call for proposals for seminars is now open and can be found here: royalstudiesnetwork.org/digital-seminar-series. The deadline for consideration in the 2021 series is 1 December 2020.

For more information or to join the Royal Studies Network please see the website.

CFP Parergon Special Issue 2023

The ANZAMEMS journal Parergon, in print since 1971, regularly produces one open issue and one themed issue annually. Recent and forthcoming themed issues include:


2018, 35.2 Translating Medieval Cultures Across Time and Place: A Global Perspective, guest-edited by Saher Amer, Esther S. Klein, and Hélène Sirantoine
2019, 36.2 Practice, Performance, and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Cultural Heritage, guest-edited by Jane-Heloise Nancarrow and Alicia Marchant
2020, 37.2 Representing Queens, guest-edited by Stephanie Russo
2021, 38.2 Children and War, guest-edited by Katie Barclay, Dianne Hall and Dolly Mackinnon
2022, 39.2 Cultures of Compassion in Medieval and Early Modern Literature and Music, guest-edited by Diana Barnes

We now call for proposals for a future themed issue, specifically for 2023 (40.2). Proposals for the 2023 issue (40.2) should be submitted to the Editor by Tuesday 1 December 2020.

Please send enquiries and proposals to the Editor, Susan Broomhall, at
susan.broomhall@uwa.edu.au


For more information please see the attached PDF.