Monthly Archives: September 2023

Fellowship: ANU Humanities Research Centre

Applications for the 2024 ANU Humanities Research Centre Visiting Fellowship Program on the theme of “Time, Place, Everywhen” are now open.

Applications close Friday 20 October 2023

Apply Now

2024 marks the 50th year of the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC). To celebrate, the HRC is supporting research into different ideas of time and place and paying respect to Indigenous people through the theme of ‘everywhen’.

Everywhen brings together a sense of ever-present time with people, culture, law, the landscape and cosmos. While the term is associated with ANU anthropologist W.E.H Stanner, the fusion of time and place has deep origins and broad application.

Via research projects, as well as lectures, advocacy and art, the HRC invites world-class Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers to showcase the flourishing of the humanities and cognate fields by addressing the following questions and topics.

  • How have people from around the world and throughout history integrated time and place?
  • How can different conceptions of time and place unsettle practices of assimilation, extraction, and domination?
  • Regenerative approaches to knowledge and culture in higher education and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.
  • Everywhen-related examples of art, activism, public engagement and collaboration that advance truth telling, healing and belonging.
  • Through studies of language, literature, religion, material culture and history, what can be known and registered about everywhen and what can’t be?

How can changing ideas of time and place foster creativity and wellbeing?

2024 marks the 50th year of the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC). To celebrate, the HRC is supporting research into different ideas of time and place and paying respect to Indigenous people through the theme of ‘everywhen’.

Everywhen brings together a sense of ever-present time with people, culture, law, the landscape and cosmos. While the term is associated with ANU anthropologist W.E.H Stanner, the fusion of time and place has deep origins and broad application.

Via research projects, as well as lectures, advocacy and art, the HRC invites world-class Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers to showcase the flourishing of the humanities and cognate fields by addressing the following questions and topics.

  • How have people from around the world and throughout history integrated time and place?
  • How can different conceptions of time and place unsettle practices of assimilation, extraction, and domination?
  • Regenerative approaches to knowledge and culture in higher education and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.
  • Everywhen-related examples of art, activism, public engagement and collaboration that advance truth telling, healing and belonging.
  • Through studies of language, literature, religion, material culture and history, what can be known and registered about everywhen and what can’t be?
  • How can changing ideas of time and place foster creativity and wellbeing?

More details on ANU website

Member Publication: Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic

Long-standing ANZAMEMS members Constant Mews and Kathleen Neal have just had their edited collection, Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic, published with Amsterdam University Press.

Justice and injustice were subjects of ongoing debate in medieval Europe. Received classical and biblical models both influenced how these qualities of moral and political life were perceived, discussed and acted upon. Important among these influences was the anonymous seventh-century Irish text, On The Twelve Abuses of the Age, a biblically-inspired discussion of the moral duties particular to each sector of society. This volume probes its long influence, and its interaction with the revival of classical ideas. By bringing together scholars of political thought and practice, in lay and religious contexts spanning the seventh to fourteenth centuries, this volume crosses boundaries of periodisation, discipline and approach to reflect upon the medieval evolution of concepts of injustice and means of redress. Contributions address how ideas about justice and injustice were discussed among scholars and theologians, and how those ideas were translated into action through complaint and advice throughout the medieval period.

CONSTANT J. MEWS is Emeritus Professor and formerly Director of the Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University (Australia). He specializes in the religious and intellectual history of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, on which he has published widely, but is also completing Aidan Breen’s edition of DDAS for the Corpus Christianorum.

KATHLEEN B. NEAL is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University (Australia). She specializes in later-medieval political culture and communication. Her monograph The Letters of Edward I: Political Communication in the Thirteenth Century was published by Boydell Press in 2021.

Order your copy of Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic here!

Seminar: The Scattering of Shahjahanabad – Indian Musicians’ Lives in a Time of Crisis, 1739-88

Tuesday 31 October 2023
6:30 pm (AEDST) online only
ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield
Senior Lecturer, King’s College London

Register Here

After more than a decade of political insecurity in Mughal India, the relative stability of the first twenty years of emperor Muhammad Shah’s reign (r. 1720–48) ushered in a significant revival of the arts at the imperial Mughal court in Delhi, Shahjahanabad. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the emperor’s singing teacher and master of the imperial musicians, Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him. Instead, it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember today as the greatest Indian classical musicians of the eighteenth century. Why?

This musical rivalry played out against the geopolitical backdrop of a much more tumultuous drama: what eyewitnesses called the “scattering of Shahjahanabad”. Delhi was repeatedly invaded, sacked, and occupied 1739–61, and Mughal court musicians were forced to flee to the four corners of India, where they had to seek new patrons and employ novel strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians during this time of crisis is copiously documented in a biographical genre new to Indian musical literature at this time: the commemorative compendium of “lives”, or tazkira. In this talk, I will be looking at musicians’ biographies and genealogies in Persian, Urdu and classical Hindi as both a product of this era’s upheaval, dispersal, diversification, innovation, and anxieties; and as a record of these things. Both views give us unusual access to the history of elite artisans on the move in late Mughal India.

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–15/16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018). Her books include Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (CUP, 2023), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India, with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015), and Monsoon Feelings: a History of Emotions in the Rain, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau (Niyogi, 2018).

Katherine trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate studies in Indian music history at SOAS University of London. She came to King’s in 2009 after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. She was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.

ANZAMEMS Conference Revised CFP, Extended Deadline

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:

Chris Jones (chris.jones@canterbury.ac.nz)
Madi Williams (madi.williams@canterbury.ac.nz)

For all practical enquiries (submission, accommodation, etc.), please contact the conference manager:

Mandy Train (mandy@conference.nz)

Public Statement on ACU’s Change Plan

The Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) urges management at the Australian Catholic University (ACU) to reverse the proposed disestablishment of its Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) program, and its wider projected cuts to academic jobs across the Humanities as well as in Social Sciences and in Health. We are particularly dismayed by the planned damage to our field, which in recent years had greatly benefited from the work of brilliant ACU colleagues, and the university’s innovative strategic vision for investment in the humanities.

MEMS research at the ACU is interdisciplinary, conducted by scholars in the named program as well as the Gender and Women’s History Centre, Religious Studies, and Literary Studies. It is particularly clustered in disciplines targeted for job losses, the effects of which will be keenly felt by all staff. With current work from scholars in targeted positions on urgently topical matters including hope, humility, and faith in secular times, queer medievalism, and the history of conspiracy theories and racism, MEMS research at the ACU exemplifies the need for historically-informed approaches to understanding modern and contemporary life and addressing its most pressing problems. Moreover, MEMS scholars’ research on Reformation history and theology, medieval and early modern religious histories, the history of the crusades, women’s spirituality and writing, crucially supports the university’s engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition. The collective and individual work of MEMS scholars across multiple disciplines has continued to deliver new energy and critical visibility to the ACU’s values-based commitment to human dignity, the common good and to equity, diversity, accessibility, wellbeing and sustainability.

If the ACU is committed to continuing the Catholic intellectual tradition by its mission, and to “building on the ancient tradition which gave rise to the first universities in medieval Europe” as articulated in its Faith and Values statement, then MEMS must be central to its vision.

Further, ANZAMEMS wishes to emphasise the extreme dissonance between the proposed plans and ACU’s state mission to act “in Truth and Love” and to be “committed to human dignity.” The lack of any acknowledgement of the human impact on lives, careers, and wellbeing of staff that remain as well as those who may lose their jobs as a result of the Change Management Plan suggests that this guiding statement has been forgotten in the implementation of an ill-considered managerial process.

National and international MEMS experts, including ANZAMEMS members, were recruited to the ACU in recent years as part of a dedicated project to strengthen its research profile and contributions in the humanities and social sciences. They joined the institution in good faith. Some left tenured positions at other institutions, some relocated internationally, some were offered exciting opportunities to develop their promising careers. All now face intense distress and uncertainty with career curtailment and ruin on the near horizon for many. The speed of reversal from recruitment to redundancy must call into question any commitment the ACU makes to academics and their personal and professional wellbeing. This is particularly the case for the entire MEMS team who have been targeted in the current plan.

The ACU’s investment in the Humanities in general and MEMS in particular made it distinctive in the Australian tertiary landscape, offering invaluable clusters of disciplinary and interdisciplinary expertise that were promising to colleagues nationally and internationally as well as to those who went to work there. ANZAMEMS was proud to award funding for a career-building initiative for academic women in 2022, and a training workshop for Australian and New Zealand postgraduates in 2023, both hosted by the MEMS program. In the future, if these changes are implemented, ANZAMEMS and other potential partner organisations will find it difficult to commit to working with the ACU as a result of this sudden and unheralded change in circumstances.

ANZAMEMS stands in solidarity with all staff at the ACU, both academic and professional, and urgently calls on the Vice Chancellor, Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and ACU Senate and Corporation to change these plans which attack MEMS in particular, the humanities in general, and undermine the ACU’s mission and values.

Contact:

Dr Helen Young

President, the Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

president@anzamems.org

Download a copy of this statement as a PDF.

Parergon Performance Pop-up – ANZAMEMS Conference

Call for participants for the Parergon Performance Pop-up! 

The “Parergon Performance Pop-up!” is a series of staged readings curated around the theme Women and Agency. This event is directed by the Parergon early career committee and will be performed live at the 2024 ANZAMEMS conference in Christchurch, New Zealand.  

A series of readers will perform 3–5-minute segments of medieval or early modern poetry, prose or drama that engages with the theme. As this is a staged reading, performers are not expected to costume or memorise their segments. Performers are welcome to propose duologues if they are able to rehearse with their partner in advance of the conference. 

Participants with performance or public speaking experience who would like to participate in this event are invited to contact Anna-Rose (a.k.shack@uva.nl) to register their interest and receive further information. We look forward to hearing from you! 

ANZAMEMS Reading Group

The next session of the semester 2 ANZAMEMS ECR/Postgraduate reading group is scheduled for Tuesday, September 26, on the topic “Violence and Behavioural Control.”

Please find all further details, including the session reading and time, in the attached schedule. Email Emma.Rayner@anu.edu.au / Emily.Chambers@nottingham.ac.uk with any questions.

SEMESTER-2-Schedule-with-Readings-UPDATED-SESSION-ON-MUGHAL-INDIA-POSTPONED-1Download

ANZAMEMS Publication Prizes Open

We are pleased to announce that four ANZAMEMS publication prizes are now open for applications. All prizes are valued at AUD 1000.

Entry for all prizes closes on Monday 30 October 2023, 5:00pm (AWST).

Constant Mews Early Career Publication Prize

The Constant Mews Early Career Publication Prize will be awarded to an Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work in Constant’s broad areas of scholarly interest: the medieval history of religions, intellectual history, and textual editing and translation, published between 1 January 2022 and 31 August 2023 (inclusive of early online publication).

Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize

The Philippa Maddern ECR Publication Prize is awarded to an Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work in any discipline/topic falling within the scope of medieval and early modern studies, published between 1 December 2021 and 31 August 2023 (inclusive of early online publication).

Patricia Crawford Postgraduate Publication Prize

The Patricia Crawford Postgraduate Publication Prize is awarded to a postgraduate student for the best article-length scholarly work in any discipline/topic falling within the scope of medieval and early modern studies, published between 1 December 2021 and 31 August 2023 (inclusive of early online publication).

Anne M. Scott Parergon Journal Prize

The Anne M. Scott Parergon Journal Prize is awarded to an honours student, postgraduate student, or Early Career Researcher (ECR) for the best article-length scholarly work published in Parergon between 1 January 2021 and 31 December 2022.

Further information on eligibility and application processes can be found here. All prize-related queries should be directed to info@anzamems.org.