Daily Archives: 7 May 2018

CFP: Graduate Student and Early Career Scholar Panel, Medieval Legal History Workshop at ASLH 2018

The American Society for Legal History invites paper submissions from graduate students and early-career scholars for a panel at a pre-conference workshop. This will take place immediately preceding the ASLH annual meeting (8-11 November 2018, Houston, Texas) on Thursday 8 November. The topic of the workshop is Medieval Legal History, with medieval broadly defined as between late antiquity and early modernity.

Applications for the panel close on 15 June 2018.

The Medieval Legal History Workshop aims to present the work of a number of scholars of medieval law and society who are new to the ASLH’s annual meeting. In this way, we hope to promote scholarship in this area of legal history and to encourage medieval historians to attend the Society’s meeting. The graduate student and early-career scholar panel will be composed of four speakers, who will present short papers of 10-12 minutes, followed by a robust discussion period afterward. Besides this panel, the event will also be composed of two longer-form talks with commentators, and a pre-circulated-paper workshop of three papers with two commentators.

As such, we encourage applications from PhD students, postdocs and VAPs who work on or with law in the late antique and medieval periods in its political, social, and cultural aspects and who have not traditionally attended the society’s meetings. We notably encourage applications from any legal tradition of the period, including (among others) Byzantine, Canon, Chinese, Islamic, or Jewish law. The goal of the panel is to provide graduate students and early career scholars the opportunity to participate in the ASLH community in a more intimate setting, present their own work, and make meaningful contact with other presenters, attendant faculty, and other participants.

Applications to the workshop should include a current curriculum vitae, a title and abstract for the proposed talk. Applicants whose proposals are accepted will receive some support toward conference hotel and travel.

Queries and applications should be sent by email to Ada Kuskowski (akusk@upenn.edu) by June 15th, with the subject line “ASLH 2018 Graduate Student and Early-Career Scholar Panel.”

Further information on the ASLH 2018 annual conference can be found at http://aslh.net/upcoming-conference/

CFP Ways of Knowing: Graduate Conference on Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School

The Science, Religion, and Culture program at Harvard Divinity School announces the 7th annual “Ways of Knowing: Graduate Conference on Science and Religion at Harvard Divinity School.”

26-27 October 2018
Harvard Divinity School
Cambridge, MA

Inaugurated in 2012, this multi-day event is made up of thematic panels that cross areas of science studies, religious traditions, academic disciplines, and theoretical commitments. In addition, the conference features special panels on professionalization, addressing both academic and non-academic careers, and a keynote address. The conference aims at promoting lively interdisciplinary discussion of prevailing assumptions (both within and outside the academy) about the differentiation, organization, authorization, and reproduction of various modes of knowing and doing science and religion.

Last year, more than 100 students and early career scholars representing over 60 graduate programs worldwide gathered to present their research. Following the success of our previous conferences, we invite graduate students and early career scholars to submit paper proposals from of a variety of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary perspectives.

General Call for Papers

We seek papers that explore scientific and religious practices and modes of knowing, especially in relation to this year’s central theme, “Race and Indigeneity”. We welcome the use of all sorts of theoretical tools, including discourse analysis, gender theory, queer theory, race theory, disability theory, postcolonial theory, performance theory, and ritual theory. Papers may focus on any period, region, tradition, group, or person. We welcome papers from variety of disciplines, including anthropology, history, sociology, religious studies, Science and Technology Studies, history of science and intellectual history among others.

Possible approaches include, but are not limited to, the following:

  1. Explorations of a specific way of knowing, being, and engaging the world in relation to scientific and/or religious traditions and their interactions.
  2. Historical, sociological, and/or anthropological analyses of the cultural processes that support a specific scientific or religious discourse or practice, its authoritative structures, and/or its strategies of inclusion and exclusion.
  3. The cultural and historical discourses, articulations and developments of scientific, technological and medical knowledge, institutions, agents, exchanges, etc.
  4. The cultural and historical discourses, articulations and developments of religious practices, knowledge, institutions, agents and exchanges, etc.
  5. Analyses of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, sexuality, and/or gender with respect to scientific or religious texts, practices, or performances.
  6. Comparative examinations of scientific and religious texts and/or their interpretations, with attention to the historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and/ or intellectual contexts that mediate and delimit different interpretative strategies and practices.
  7. Analyses of the interplay between religion and scientific, moral, and/or legal discourses, practices, and authorities.
  8. Critical analyses of the scholarly production and dissemination of knowledge on science or religion.

Central Theme: Race and Indigeneity

The central theme for this year’s conference is “Race and Indigeneity.” We seek papers that engage the ways in which science and/or religion have shaped and been shaped by the concepts and political realities of race and indigeneity across diverse traditions, disciplines, times, and regions. Papers might focus on Indigenous knowledges and the ways in which they have been construed and taken up as science and/or religion; the role of race in the development and practice of different religious traditions and scientific disciplines; legacies of scientific racism, science and empire, and colonial missionary activity; the relationship between race and indigeneity as they relate to knowledge production. Proposals might also interrogate the role of racial identity or Indigenous sovereignty in competing claims to religious and scientific authority, religious texts or scientific theories that deal with construction of race or the Indigenous, and methodological approaches to the study of science and religion as they relate to race and indigeneity. We welcome a broad range of papers that address the theme of race and indigeneity from a range of methodological approaches and in the context of various traditions, disciplines, historical periods, and geographic regions.

Submission Instructions

Individual Papers: Please submit a 300-word abstract explaining the topic, main argument, and methodology of the project. You will be asked to specify whether you are submitting your proposal to the General Call or to one of the Special Call modules. Individual papers will be organized into panels and should not exceed 20 minutes in delivery.

Pre-Organized Panels: Proposals for panels on a particular topic may also be submitted to either the general or special calls. These should include three to five papers, including a respondent paper. Please submit: 1) a 300-word summary of the focus and purpose of the panel, specifying how each paper contributes to the overarching theme; 2) a 300-word abstract for each paper explaining the topic, main argument, and methodology of the project; 3) the name and contact information of the panel organizer/chair.

Proposals are due by Friday, May 18 through the WOK 2018 Submission Portal:

http://bit.ly/wok18

All inquiries can be directed to Iman Darwish, Conference Coordinator, at wok-src@hds.harvard.edu.

CFP for two panel proposals for ANZAMEMS 2019

Speakers are invited to submit paper proposals for two panels at ANZAMEMS 2019 on “Rereading the Medieval and Early Modern” and “Language and Agency from Medieval to Modern”.

Submissions for these panels close 10 August 2018. Please email your completed proposal to BOTH mgerzic@gmail.com and jennifer.nicholson@sydney.edu.au.​ An overview of each panel is provided below. See the attached PDF for full details.

Rereading the Medieval and Early Modern

For Vladimir Nabokov, the process of re-reading is always constructive: “A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader.” For Patricia Meyer Spacks, re-reading — though satisfying for pure literary analysis — can reveal unwelcome truths about the past, and cause disenchantment with works we used to love. While a first reading depends (primarily) on the expectation of pleasure (of a vicarious or hermeneutic kind), re-reading draws on critical self-awareness. According to Michael Riffaterre, only a second and separate retroactive reading can produce “significance” by identifying and reconfiguring the various perspectives of the text. Thomas Leitch argues that re-readings allow for an “appreciation of the story through an analysis of the ways in which it achieves its initial effects.” If we all already know what will happen in medieval and early modern texts, what changes for us when we return to them? Do different words, phrases, symbols, and ideas become important when refocused by class, gender, and race? How do these texts have different meanings when read in different contexts? Are re-readings better readings? This panel aims to examine the process of re-reading the medieval and early modern, in revisitations and adaptations.

Language And Agency From Medieval To Early Modern

Nearly a decade ago, Ardis Butterfield proposed that “we cannot understand Englishness without seeking to understand what was then its superior cultural other of Frenchness”. She also argued for the “strangely elusive” notion of medieval Englishness, where “we find ourselves in a verbal world that is both fragmented and plural, where audiences are not merely ‘English’, but multilingual (in varying degrees), partly local, partly international, and from more than one social, cultural, and intellectual background.”​ How do medieval or early modern texts engage with relationships between language(s) and agency? How might gender or education, religious or otherwise, play a part in writers’ engagement with different kinds of agency? How might language(s) grant or withhold agency? What is different or indeed similar between medieval and early modern engagements with language and agency?

Download (PDF, 106KB)

Download (PDF, 120KB)