Monthly Archives: October 2017

29th SEDERI International Conference – Call for Papers

29th International SEDERI Conference

Changing states: ideas of metamorphosis in early modern England University of Alcalá, Guadalajara Campus 9-11 May 2018

We are pleased to announce that the 29th International Conference of the Spanish and Portuguese Society for English Renaissance Studies (Sederi) will be held at the University of Alcalá’s campus in Guadalajara (Spain) on 9-11 May 2018. As the English translation (“river of stones”) of our host city’s originally Arabic name (“wād al-ḥaŷarah”) reminds us, linguistic and cultural transfer often entails metamorphosis. In this case, the figuratively dead name regains metaphorical life around its own metamorphic fusion of liquid and solid states. This conference takes as its theme the notion of changing states and the cognate trope of metamorphosis in early modern England. In a period of great political, social, scientific and cultural transformation, a reality in flux was challenging models of stability and permanence, while identity in all ambits of individual and collective life was up for grabs. The conference therefore calls for papers and round tables on ideas of metamorphosis in early modern England and welcomes contributions on the following and other related subjects and issues:

  • Tropes of metamorphosis in scientific, political and literary discourse
  • Comic and tragic transformations  
  • Metamorphic subjectivities: sexual, national, racial and ethnic, cultural or religious
  • Transformations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
  • Transplanted selfhood: exiled and colonial identities, cultural mimesis and co-adaptation
  • Stability and permanence, innovation and revolution, mutability and decline
  • Natural transformations, monsters and prodigies
  • Translation, adaptation and transfiguration within and across genres and art forms
  • “Transport”, ecstasy, transmigration, metempsychosis and out-of-body experiences
  • Early modern Epicureanism
  • English transformed: language change in the early modern period
  • Rhetoric of change: metaphor, allegory, symbol  

The following guest lecturers have already confirmed their participation:

Clark Hulse (University of Illinois at Chicago)

Lynn Enterline (Vanderbilt University)

Farah Karim-Cooper (Shakespeare’s Globe)

Papers will last 20 minutes and will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Proposals must include the following information:

  • The full title of your paper.
  • A 200-word abstract.
  • Any technical requirements for the presentation.
  • Your name, postal address and e-mail address.
  • Your institutional affiliation
  • Your SEDERI membership status (member, non-member, application submitted). 

Please submit your proposal as an e-mail attachment (preferably .doc or .docx) to organisation sederi29@uah.es before 11 February 2018. For more details about the conference, you are invited to visit the conference website at https://sederi29.wixsite.com/sederi2018.

Editorial Team Position

Chris Jones (Canterbury) and Klaus Oschema (Ruhr University Bochum) are looking for an enthusiastic collaborator to join the editorial team of a book-length project (under contract and due for publication in 2018). The position would be well-suited to a doctoral student nearing completion or an ECR. Those involved in the project will require good French and excellent copy-editing skills. Anyone interested should contact Chris Jones (chris.jones@canterbury.ac.nz) for further details.

13th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop: “Transmission” – Call for Applications

Call for Applications:
13th Annual Marco Manuscript Workshop: “Transmission”
February 2-3, 2018
 

The thirteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and Saturday, February 2-3, 2018, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English), and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

For this year’s workshop, we invite papers that explore the idea of “Transmission.” Few texts are preserved in their author’s own hand; most surviving manuscripts are copies of copies, each hand-made, and each differing to a greater or lesser degree, by design or accident, from the copy before it. The more successful or important or popular a work, the more copies were produced, and the more difference and variation exists among the surviving copies; but even a work that survives in only one copy may represent the end of a series, potentially a long one, of moments of textual reproduction. Texts may travel in groups or be tucked into solitary margins; they may gather in closely-knit families or diverge in significant and sometimes strange ways. Whatever hidden chances may have led to their survival, every manuscript has a story to tell about its origins, its readers, and its place as a link in the chain of transmission. How do we reconstruct these stories? Do the traditional tools of textual criticism reflect the reality of textual transmissions? What can a text tell us about its own history? We welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined.

The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer both practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their participation.

The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do not wish to present their own work but are interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies.

Further details will be available later in the year; please contact Roy Liuzza or the Marco Institute for more information.

How to Apply:

The deadline for applications is November 15, 2017.

Applicants are asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to rliuzza@utk.edu, or by mail to the Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430.

Annual CSANA Meeting 2018- Call for Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR THE 2018 ANNUAL CSANA MEETING, IN CONJUNCTION WITH THE 40TH ANNUAL UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA CELTIC STUDIES CONFERENCE, MARCH 8-11, 2018, ROYCE 314, UCLA CAMPUS

We welcome proposals for academic papers of twenty minutes in length having to do with Celtic Studies. To propose a paper, please send in an e-mail attachment your name, affiliation, paper title, and an abstract of approximately two hundred words to Dr KAREN BURGESS, Conference Coordinator, kburgess@ucla.edu. Also, please indicate any computer or audio-visual needs. The deadline for submission is Friday, January 12, 2018.

Scholars from the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, the National University of Ireland, Galway, the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, Trinity College, and the University of California, Berkeley, have been invited to speak at the event, on topics including Welsh historical linguistics and metrics, traditional Gaelic storytelling, and classical Irish bardic poetry, on which there will be a special seminar session.

There will be no registration fee. Information about the program, hotels, the banquet, and transportation will be sent out in the latter half of January, 2018. We thank the UCLA sponsors of this event: the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Department of English, the Division of Humanities, and the Indo-European Studies Program.

Medieval Academy of America – Upcoming Grant Deadlines

MAA News – Upcoming Grant Deadlines

The Medieval Academy of America invites applications for the following grants. Please note that applicants must be members in good standing as of September 15 in order to be eligible for Medieval Academy awards.

Birgit Baldwin Fellowship
The Birgit Baldwin Fellowship provides a grant of $20,000 to support a graduate student in a North American university who is researching and writing a dissertation for the Ph.D. on any subject in French medieval history that can be realized only by sustained research in the archives and libraries of France. It may be renewed for a second year upon demonstration of satisfactory progress. (Deadline 15 November 2017)

Schallek Fellowship
The Schallek Fellowship provides a one-year grant of $30,000 to support Ph.D. dissertation research in any relevant discipline dealing with late-medieval Britain (ca. 1350-1500). (Deadline 15 October 2017)

Travel Grants
The Medieval Academy provides a limited number of travel grants to help Academy members who hold doctorates but are not in full-time faculty positions, or are contingent faculty without access to institutional funding, attend conferences to present their work. (Deadline 1 November 2017 for meetings to be held between 16 February and 31 August 2018)

The Outlaw, Sewanee Medieval Colloquium – Call for Papers

Medievalists, please consider submitting an abstract to our exciting group of panels on Outlaw Rhetorics and Outlaw Acts and join the lively conversation at the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium! The deadline is October 26.

The Outlaw: Outlaw Rhetorics/Outlaw Acts

Organizer (Outlaw Rhetorics): Lydia Yaitsky Kertz, Columbia University (lydia.kertz@gmail.com)

Organizers (Outlaw Acts): Jeremy DeAngelo, Carleton College (jeremydeangelo@gmail.com); Valerie Johnson, University of Montevallo (valeriebjohnson@gmail.com)

The outlaw is banished from society for real or alleged crimes, and in literature becomes an expression of resistance, whether to law, order (or disorder) of any type, culture, or periodization. This sub-theme encourages papers that take up the concept and of the outlaw or outlawry more generally. We particularly encourage papers that address the political status of the greenwood – the space offering safe harbor to the displaced, the ostracized, and the dispossessed – or well known outlaws (fictional or historical) including Robin Hood, Hereward the Wake, Eustace the Monk, and Fouke Fitz Waryn. Additionally, we also seek papers that treat these figures or the concept of outlawry in new and innovative directions, and encourage creative interpretation of the outlaw as rogue or deviant, with a particular emphasis on thinking, action, cultural exchange, and material ecologies.

We seek to place papers in two tracks, Outlaw Rhetorics and Outlaw Acts. To this end, we propose a series of questions: Is there such a thing as a good outlaw? To what extent are the deeds of criminals to be commended? How does outlaw rhetoric comment upon the justice system and its representatives? How might tales of resistance be used to normalize tyrannical actions? Is there such a thing as outlaw space? Can the material or environmental even be outlaw, or is such roguery limited to the human or animal?

Comment: Jennifer Jahner, California Institute of Techology (Outlaw Rhetorics); Alexander Kaufman, University of Auburn, Montgomery (Outlaw Acts)

Converging Approaches to the Study of the Iberian Reconquista – Call for Papers

The Woolf Institute, University of Cambridge, is looking for papers for the workshop, “Converging Approaches to the Study of the Iberian Reconquista” to be held on 12-14 February 2018.

A fundamental aim of the proposed workshop is to go beyond the dominant narrative of conquest, that has framed the Christian military advance in terms of change versus continuity: whether the Christian takeover amounted to a military, feudal conquest breaking with the Islamic past; or whether Latin rule was mitigated by surrender treaties, hybrid ethno-cultural institutions and pragmatic tolerance or coexistence, known as ‘convivencia’ among scholarly circles and in popular culture.

The 20-minute papers may address the following suggested themes, but not exclusively:

• The relationship between space, local communities and political allegiance
• Changes in urban and rural structures
• The evolution of institutions and socio-economic systems
• Contrasting pre- / and post-conquest pools of evidence (written and archaeological)
• Non-Christian perspectives on the Latin conquest
• Representations of conquest and transition: for instance, narratology (particularly narratives of crusade/jihād), biology and demography (from anthroponymy to isotope analyses), or iconography (images of power, both secular and religious).
• Different theoretical approaches in framing the Christian takeover (‘postcolonial studies’, ‘emotions’, frontier studies, feudalism…)

There is no registration fee for this conference. Interested participants are encouraged to submit a 200-300 word abstract to Rodrigo García-Velasco (rig25@cam.ac.uk). The deadline for submissions is October 30th, 2017.