Monthly Archives: September 2018

CFP Cross-cultural comparison in the premodern world

The Oakley Center, which has its home at Williams College, invites paper proposals for ‘The Global Archive of Comparison’, a conference and subsequent edited volume on the history of cross-cultural comparison in the premodern world. The conference will be held at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts (26–28 September 2019) and is organized by Alexander Bevilacqua. Anthony Grafton (Princeton) will deliver the keynote lecture.

Drawing on the study of humanistic traditions from across the globe in the era before 1800, the conference aims to assess the many ways comparison has served in the history of cross-cultural study. Through a series of focused case studies, scholars will ask: what forms of analogy, simile, equivalence, etc., did past thinkers employ, and what kinds of comparisons did these enable? How did such intellectual tools facilitate the transmission of texts, religion, or ideas from one context to another? What did they preclude? The goal is to reconstruct the range of ways that people of the past mediated intellectual traditions through comparative mechanisms. The further aim is to demonstrate the relevance of the premodern world to contemporary reflection on comparison.

The conference welcomes the work of advanced doctoral students and both young and established scholars in the fields of history, religion, philosophy, and literature.a.

Proposals — which should include a 500-word abstract, a brief curriculum vitae, and complete current contact information — should be sent by 15 October 2018 to the conference organizer.

Contact Info: 

Oakley Center for the Humanities and Social Sciences
90 Denison Park Drive
Williamstown, MA 01267

Contact Email: 
ab24@williams.edu
 
URL: 
http://web.williams.edu/resources/oakley/

CFP Medieval and Early Modern Spaces and Places 2019: Experiencing the Court

The early modern court adopted and developed exemplary cultural practices where objects and spaces became central to propagating power as well as places for exchange with other powers. This combination of images, objects, and sounds confronted the senses, making a powerful and distinctive impression of the resident family and the region they represented: flickering candlelight on glass and gold vessels adorned credenze (sideboards); musical instruments announced royal entries or provided entertainment; brightly coloured tapestries covered the palace walls along with paintings of biblical or mythological stories; cabinets displayed antiquities or rarities; perfume burners permeated the air; while the smells and tastes of rare delicacies at the centre of dining tables made for a multi-sensory spectacle.

This year the Open University’s Spaces & Places conference will address the theme of ‘Experiencing the Court’ by exploring the senses and the lived experiences of courtly life, whether based in a particular residence or defined by the travels of an itinerant ruler. The conference will take place at the Open University’s partner institution Trinity Laban Conservatoire on 3 – 4 April 2019.  As Trinity Laban’s King Charles Court was once the site of Greenwich Palace, it is a fitting venue for a conference exploring court life. This annual conference is fundamentally interdisciplinary: literary, musical, architectural, artistic and religious spaces will be the subjects of enquiry, not as discrete or separate entities, but ones which overlapped, came into contact with one another, and at times were in conflict.

The conference will examine life at court and will consider the following questions:

  • How can approaching the court in terms of the senses provide new methodologies for understanding each institution?
  • How were medieval and early modern courtly spaces adapted and transformed through the movement of material and immaterial things?
  • Which particular aspects of political, social and economic infrastructures enabled the exchange of objects and ideas?

Papers that address new methodologies, the digital humanities, object-centred enquiries, cross-cultural comparisons, or new theoretical perspectives are particularly welcome.

Please send a 150 word abstract along with a short biography to Leah Clark (leah.clark@open.ac.uk) and Helen Coffey (Helen.coffey@open.ac.uk) by 15 November 2018.

For further information, see http://www.open.ac.uk/arts/research/medieval-and-early-modern-research/spaces-and-places-2019

 

New Book Series: Critical Emotion Studies (Brill)

Critical Emotion Studies is a peer-reviewed, transdisciplinary series of monographs and edited volumes dedicated to the critical analysis of emotions, meaning that emotions are theorized as contextual, relational, and shifting. While Critical Emotion Studies encompasses a broad and complex range of disciplines and topics of inquiry, it shares three core assumptions: that emotions and reason are not distinct, but are intertwined in all decision-making processes; that emotions, rather than being limited to individual and private experiences, are socially constructed and experienced, particularly through language; and that every culture inculcates a structure of feeling that serves to produce and reproduce dominant cultural values and norms.

The series aims to promote research on issues that are connected to understanding emotions as socially constructed, tied to culture and history, expressed through language and deeply enmeshed in power relations. This may include political and diplomatic approaches, but also those that treat of points of social and cultural convergence, justice, gender, race and ethnicity.

Manuscripts should be at least 80,000 words in length (including footnotes and bibliography). Manuscripts may also include illustrations and other visual material. The editors will consider proposals for original monographs, edited collections, translations, and critical primary source editions.

Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts by email to the publisher Jason Prevost. For more information, see http://www.brill.com/cres

Series Editor: Simon Koschut, Freie Universität Berlin

Editorial Board

  • Karin M. Fierke, University of St. Andrews
  • Emma Hutchison, The University of Queensland
  • William M. Reddy, Duke University
  • Steven C. Roach, University of South Florida
  • Christian von Scheve, Freie Universität Berlin

CFP Canadian Society of Medievalists Annual Meeting, 3-5 June 2019

The 2019 Congress of the Canadian Society of Medievalists will be convened 3-5 June 2019 in Vancouver, B.C. The special theme for this year’s Congress is “Circles of Conversation,” but papers for the CSM Annual Meeting can address any topic on medieval studies. Proposals for sessions of three papers are also invited. Presentations may be in either English or French. Bilingual sessions are particularly welcome.

Proposals should include a one-page abstract and a one-page curriculum vitae. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes’ reading time. Proposals for complete sessions should include this information in addition to a title and a brief explanation of the session and its format. Please indicate if the proposed session would be suitable as a joint session with another learned society.
Please submit proposals for individual papers by 15 December, 2018 and proposals for sessions by 15 January, 2019 by email to Kathy Cawsey (kathy.cawsey@dal.ca) or via our website https://www.canadianmedievalists.org/. You must be a member of the CSM by the time of your presentation.

CFP Women & Power: Redressing the Balance

Paper proposals are invited for the conference Women & Power: Redressing the Balance, to be held at the University of Oxford, 6-7 March, 2019

Throughout 2018 the National Trust is running a programme of public events, exhibitions and new interpretation to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act which granted some women the right to vote in British parliamentary elections for the first time. We are one of many heritage, cultural and academic institutions marking this anniversary.

Many of the programmes, exhibitions and events responding to the centenary this year are not only exploring the stories of 100 years ago but openly questioning the representation of women’s lives in the histories inherited by curators and researchers, and experienced in public life, today. This two day conference will bring together researchers and heritage professionals to reflect on previous practice, explore the delivery of and response to events of 2018, and look forward to the future of representing women’s histories.

Papers are invited on, but by no means limited to, the following topics:

  • Innovative responses to celebrating the 2018 centenary in the cultural, heritage and academic spheres
  • Examples of knowledge exchange and public engagement between academia and the cultural and heritage sectors, centred on women’s histories
  • Case studies of socially engaged and participatory practice exploring women’s histories
  • The practical challenges of researching, teaching and interpreting women’s histories
  • Examples of addressing intersectional barriers to accessing women’s histories, in particular working class women, women of colour, and LGBTQ+ women
  • Public, press and audience responses to spotlighting women’s histories

The conference programme will include 20-minute papers and a number of shorter spotlight talks.  We also welcome innovative ideas for panel discussions (maximum three speakers plus chair). Please specify which you are applying for in your abstract. We hope to publish a selection of revised conference papers in a peer-reviewed journal or as an edited collection after the conference.

Please send abstracts of between 200 and 300 words to ntpartnership@humanities.ox.ac.uk along with a short biography by 29 October, 2018.

This conference is jointly organised by the National Trust and the University of Oxford. For further information, see http://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/call-papers-women-power-redressing-balance

CFP Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions

Paper proposals are invited for a two-day symposium on Complaint and Grievance: Literary Traditions
14-15 February 2019
National Library of New Zealand / Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.

‘O woe is me / To have seen what I have seen, see what I see’. Shakespeare’s Ophelia, wooed and cast aside by her one-time lover, Hamlet, amplifies her woe in the open-ended expression of grief that characterises complaint, a rhetorical mode that proliferates from the poetry of Ovid to the Bible, from the Renaissance to the modern day.

This symposium explores the literature of complaint and grievance, centring on the texts of the Renaissance but welcoming contributions from related areas. Shakespeare (A Lover’s Complaint) and Spenser (Complaints) are central authors of Renaissance complaint, but who else wrote complaint literature, why, and to what effect? Female-voiced complaint was fashionable in the high poetic culture of the 1590s, but what happens to complaint when it is taken up by early modern women writers? What forms—and what purposes—does the literature of complaint and grievance take on in non-elite or manuscript spheres, in miscellanies, commonplace books, petitions, street satires, ballads and songs? What are the classical and biblical traditions on which Renaissance complaint is based? And what happens to complaint after the Renaissance, in Romantic poetry, in the reading and writing cultures of the British colonial world, in contemporary poetry, and in the #metoo movement?

Keynote speakers:

  • Professor Danielle Clarke, University College, Dublin
  • Professor Kate Lilley, University of Sydney
  • Professor Rosalind Smith, University of Newcastle, Australia

We invite anyone with an interest in the literature of complaint and the politics of grievance to submit a 250-word paper proposal by 31 October 2018 to the conference organiser, Sarah.Ross@vuw.ac.nz.

This conference is supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund, as part of the three-year project ‘Woe is me: Women and Complaint in the English Renaissance’.

CFP Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference

Animal/Language: An Interdisciplinary Conference will be held in conjunction with the art exhibition “Assembling Animal Communication” at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX
21-23 March 2019.

Animals and language have a complicated relationship with one another in human understanding. Every period of history evinces a fascination with the diverse modes of communicative exchange and possibilities of linguistic community that exist both within and between species. Recent critics of anthropocentrism are far from the first to question the supposed muteness of the “dumb animal” and its ontological and ethical ramifications. Various cultures have historically attributed language to animals, and we have developed an increasingly sophisticated scientific understanding of the complex non-verbal communicative systems that animals use among themselves. New research complements millennia of human-animal communication in the contexts of work, play, and domestic life.

Some people have extensive experience with real, live animals. Some primarily encounter animals as products of the food industry. Some focus on animal representations in text or image, or deploy the abstract figure of “the animal” as limit or counterpart of the
human. These interactions condition different ways of “thinking with animals,” including: using them in and as language or in experimentation, recruiting them as symbols and metaphors, incorporating them into idiomatic expressions, projecting moral values onto them, and ventriloquizing them for purposes of cultural critique. A vast archive of literary, artistic, philosophical, historical, religious, and scientific explorations testifies that the boundaries and complementarities relating animals and language have always captured the human imagination.

Animal/Language aims to create an interdisciplinary dialogue on the relationship between “animals” and “language” that considers both what connects and what separates these two key terms. The conference hopes to generate new scientific inquires and creative synergies by initiating conversation and exchange among scholars in the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences. We therefore invite researchers from all fields, periods, and geographical areas to propose contributions engaging questions such as:

  • What are the real, imagined, or potential relationships between animals and language(s)?
  • What are animal languages?
  • What spaces or functions does the animal occupy within human language and cultural
  • representation?
  • What is the role of animals in aesthetic or artistic meaning-making processes?
  • How do our interactions with animals shape our conceptions of animals and language?
  • How and why do we communicate with animals?
  • How and why do animals communicate with us?
  • How and why do animals communicate with one another?
  • What philosophical, ethical, and political questions are raised by different ways of
  • affirming and denying connections between animals and language?
  • How does the question of animal language connect to issues of gender and class?
  • How should any of the above questions be historicized?

The conference will be held in conjunction with the art exhibition “Assembling Animal Communication”, featuring the work of artists Catherine Chalmers, Catherine Clover, Darcie DeAngelo, Lee Deigaard and Maria Lux. Scheduled events will also include live canine and equine communication demonstrations. The conference will have no registration fees; further details regarding accommodations will be provided on the conference website: https://www.depts.ttu.edu/classic_modern/AnimalLanguageConference.php

Proposal Submission Deadline: 30 September, 2018

Proposals for 20-minute papers should be no more than 300 words long and include 3-5 keywords identifying your discipline and topic(s). All abstracts will be reviewed anonymously; please provide author name(s) and affiliations in your submission email, but omit them from your abstract itself. Please submit all proposals (in .docx or .pdf form) and questions to animallanguage2019@gmail.com. Accepted participants will be notified in early November.

 
 

Funded MA Scholarship at Victoria University of Wellington

This scholarship is being offered as part of Associate Professor Sarah Ross’s Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Funded project on “Woe is Me: Women and Complaint in Renaissance England”. The scholarship is open to both New Zealand and Australian applicants.

The project examines English Renaissance women’s engagement with complaint, a powerful and ubiquitous rhetorical more that voices erotic, religious, and political protest and loss. In texts from Spenser’s Complaints to Shakespeare’s play A Lover’s Complaint, this literature foregrounds the voices and bodies of lamenting women, who rail against fickle lovers, harsh deities, or unfavourable times. In the foundational literature on complaint, however, the mode is largely understood as male-authored, an act of literary ventriloquy. Scholars have no collective sense of how Renaissance women writers uses this culturally central mode.

To tackle this lacuna, this Marsden project brings together an internationally recognised research team: Sarah Ross at Victoria University of Wellington; Professor Rosalind Smith at the University of Newcastle, Australia; and Professor Michelle O’Callaghan at the University of Reading. Together, the team is undertaking the first comprehensive interrogation of Renaissance women’s engagement with complaint as writers, readers, patrons, collaborators, editors, and performers. Exploring elite literary texts alongside religious works, gallows confessions, popular ballads and songs, and examining printed works alongside manuscript literatures, the project is producing a new account of how the voices of the disempowered, railing against their circumstances, helped to shaped the literary and social cultures of the English Renaissance.

Applications are invited for MA theses that would benefit from being conducted within this project team environment. Possible focuses include early modern poetry of complaint (amorous, religious, political), poetic forms (sonnets, dialogues, meditations), religious or political prose forms, print or manuscript literatures, and/or categories of female and male authorship.

Students who apply for this scholarship should have a First-Class Honours degree in English Literature. They should also demonstrate a strong background in early modern studies, and outstanding research potential.

Applications close 1 November 2018.

For further information and to apply, please visit the Victoria University of Wellington website.

 

 

SMFS Best Article of Medieval Feminist Scholarship Prize

The call for nominations and submissions for the 2019 Society of Medieval Feminist Scholarship (SMFS) Best Article of Medieval Feminist Scholarship Prize is now open. Articles published in calendar years 2017 and 2018 will be considered for this prize.

Articles submitted for this prize will be assessed on both scholarly merit and relevance to the remit of SMFS. Topics are open, including issues regarding women, gender, trans* studies, feminist approaches and theory, and intersectionality.  Range of study must, however, focus on the medieval period (ca. 500 to 1500).

Deadline for submissions is 1 December 2018.  Announcement of prizewinner will occur in late February/early March.

Please send all submissions electronically (via email), in an attached OFFICIAL pdf version/file of the article with the publication information clearly identified, to Linda Mitchell: mitchellli@umkc.edu. Make sure to include all contact information for the author.

Call for applications: Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History

The American Society for Legal History and the Institute for Legal Studies at the University of Wisconsin Law School are pleased to invite applications for the tenth biennial Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History, to be held 9-22 June 2019 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The purpose of the Hurst Institute is to advance the approach to legal scholarship fostered by J. Willard Hurst in his teaching, mentoring, and scholarship. The Hurst Institute assists scholars from law, history, and other disciplines in pursuing research on the legal history of any part of the world.

The 2019 Hurst Institute will be led by Mitra Sharafi, Professor of Law and Legal Studies (with History affiliation) at University of Wisconsin–Madison. The two‑week program features presentations by guest scholars, discussions of core readings in legal history, and analysis of the work of the participants in the Institute. The ASLH Hurst Selection Committee will select twelve Fellows to participate in this event.

Applicant Qualifications

Scholars in law, history and other disciplines pursuing research on legal history of any part of the world are eligible to apply. Preference will be given to applications from scholars at an early stage of their career (beginning faculty members, doctoral students who have completed or almost completed their dissertations, and J.D. graduates with appropriate backgrounds).

Fellowship Requirements

Fellows are expected to be in residence for the entire two‑week term of the Institute, to participate in all program activities of the Institute, and to give an informal works‑in‑progress presentation in the second week of the Institute. Fellows are expected to engage with scholars from other fields and to foster an atmosphere of collegiality.

Application Deadline: 3 December, 2018

Application Process

(1) Submit the following materials in a single pdf file starting with your last name to ils@law.wisc.edu. Multiple attachments will not be accepted.

  • Curriculum Vitae with your complete contact information.
  • Statement of Purpose (maximum 500 words) describing your current work, specific research interests, and the broader perspectives on legal history that inform your work.

(2) Arrange to have two letters of recommendation sent electronically as a pdf files (these must be on institutional letterhead and signed) to ils@law.wisc.edu by the deadline.

Please note that late or incomplete applications will not be accepted.