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Nations and Empires of the Early Modern Period
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI
March 9-10 2012

Keynote Speakers: Joyce MacDonald, University of Kentucky, and Daniel Vitkus, Florida State University

The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the University of Michigan, is seeking submissions for a conference on the construction of nations and empires in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. This conference will engage with the idea of emerging and changing national identities in this period. More specifically, it will investigate the particular social dynamics that characterize negotiations between categories such as the foreign and the domestic or the individual and the state. How is the status of the nation and its inhabitants defined? How does the cultural production of nation engage with shifting political realities? Do changes in geographical borders or ideologies produce new discourses of difference in terms of race, religion, gender, sexuality, class, and/or disability?

We welcome papers that examine how early modern writers, collectives, and cultures grappled with these questions within a series of interrelated realms—e.g., academic, artistic, economic, epistemological, geographical, legal, medical, occult, philosophical, private, public, religious, scientific, and theatrical. Potential topics might include radical religious dissent, the rise of Protestantism and/or the Counter-Reformation, colonialism and expansion in the Americas, the beginnings of the slave trade, the shift from monarchy to commonwealth in seventeenth-century England, relations between the East and West, or European interactions with the Ottoman Empire.

Please send a 250-word abstract to Cordelia Zukerman (czukerma@umich.edu) and Leila Watkins (lrwatkin@umich.edu) by January 15, 2012.

Borderlines XVI – Site & Sound 20-22 April 2012
Queen’s University Belfast
Conference Website

Special guest speaker: Prof. Paul Strohm (Columbia University)

Borderlines is an annual postgraduate conference in medieval and early modern studies, which aims to bring together researchers in a variety of disciplines, at MA, PhD and postdoctoral level, from across Ireland, Britain, Europe and around the world. The theme of this year’s conference will be Site & Sound. Amongst our many inheritances from the medieval and early modern ages, perhaps the most apparent and accessible are the streets, churches and landscapes we share with our ancestors. Along with these sites we have inherited a host of cultural assumptions about our spaces – big and small – from the home, through the city and the country, to our nations and the wider world around us. While echoes persist in the spaces we inhabit, the languages we speak and the music we enjoy today, the sounds of the medieval and early modern ages are often obscured by the signal to noise ratio of the past to the present. In this conference, we hope to explore the sites and sounds of the past as the framework for an open and interdisciplinary consideration of current research in medieval and early modern studies. We welcome papers from researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Codicology, Drama, Film Studies, Folklore, Geography, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Music, Paleography, Philosophy and Theology.

Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Architecture and landscapes in the past and through time.
• Spatial dichotomies: urban/rural, public/private, male/female.
• The acoustics of space.
• The archaeological site and the idea(s) of excavation.
• The space of the page, the painting or the statue.
• The spaces and sounds of the text.
• Oral tradition.
• Drama on the stage and the page. Its spaces, sounds and spectacles.
• Art music, popular music and folkmusic in the past and in modern revivals.
• Music and space in the past and the present.
• Religious spaces, sounds and silences.
• Space, sound and the senses.
• (Re)creations of medieval and early modern spaces and sounds in film and television.

Please submit proposals of 250 words to borderlinesxvi@gmail.com by 1st March 2012.

Follow Borderlines on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/BorderlinesXVI
Join the Borderlines Community on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/Borderlines.ie

21st Biennial Conference of the Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 30 August-2 September 2012
Conference Website

The theme of the conference is: Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2012

Keynote Speaker:  Helen Fulton, Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her main research areas are medieval literatures, Celtic studies, Arthurian literature, and critical theory.

In an effort to facilitate a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, we encourage scholars working in any discipline to submit abstracts addressing this theme. We also invite scholars working on any related aspect of the Middle Ages or Renaissance to submit abstracts for consideration.

Please send proposals (250-300 words) for 20-minute papers to Professor David Scott-Macnab by 31 January 2012.

South Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean: Cultural Interactions Conference
Museo Italiano, Carlton, Melbourne, July 17-21, 2012.
Conference Website

Hosted by the Centre for Greek Studies and the A.D. Trendall Research Centre for Ancient Mediterranean Studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, this conference will focus on the movement of people and interactions of culture in the region of Southern Italy and Sicily from antiquity until the present. This inter-disciplinary conference seeks to foster critical analysis of geographical and chronological interconnections between Southern Italy, Sicily and the Mediterranean. Consideration of cultural interaction, population movements, and changing religious and philosophical ideas over a period of approximately 3000 years will prompt scholarly discussion around continuity and change over time in this region of the Mediterranean.

Abstracts of 300 words are being sought from academics and graduate students. Abstracts should be sent to Sarah Midford at s.midford@latrobe.edu.au before 6th February 2012. Papers will be programmed into 30 minute timeslots and should be no longer than 20 minutes.

**Edit: the deadline for abstract submissions has been extended until the of 17th of February 2012.**

Medieval Multilingualism in the British Isles
Graduate Conference of Magdalene Medievalists Society 2012
Magdalene College, Cambridge, Saturday 21st July, 2012
Conference Website

Keynote Speaker: Dr Tony Hunt, St Peter’s College, Oxford

Call for papers – now open 

Abstract submission date: February 1 2012

We invite papers that address any aspect of the interaction between the speakers of different languages in the Middle Ages, including, but not limited to:

• attitudes to the tres linguae sacrae and to the vernaculars
• pedagogy and medieval perceptions of language acquistion
• translation
• orality and its depictions
• medieval views of linguistic history
• code-switching, miscellanies and scribal practice

Submissions acepted from graduate students and early career scholars in English and other languages and literatures, History, Linguistics, and all related disciplines. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length; please send abstracts of 250 words or less to Sara Harris at mms@magd.cam.ac.uk by February 1st, 2012.

The Australian Early Medieval Association 8th annual conference will be held from Friday 27 to Saturday 28 April 2012, at the University of Queensland.

Please visit the conference website for more details.

Call for Papers

This conference addresses the theme of LAND and SEA in the Early Medieval World, ca. 300-1100. 

Papers are invited which explore the persistence of contact by sea across coastal and riverine landscapes from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages, in areas ranging from Ireland to the Levant, Scandinavia to the shores of North Africa. The early Middle Ages were a dynamic era of seaborne travel which enabled important advances in technology, distributed new religious ideas and laid the foundations of the modern globalized world. Loss of some communications routes and cohesive aspects of ancient civilization happened alongside the expansion of the Vikings or the establishment of the Islamic hajj. Around the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, along the English Channel and down the Red Sea, coastal communities built boats, imported and exported raw materials, manufactured and traded in goods and services and interacted with people across the waters.

Papers on any aspect of the continuing historical, cultural and social impact of trade and travel networks throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages are invited. Topics of focus could include, for example, travel literature, shipwreck archaeology, piracy, trade routes, fishing or pilgrimage.

Abstracts on the conference theme, of about 300 words for papers of 20 minutes are now sought from interested participants. Panel proposals of three 20-minute papers are also welcome. All submissions should be sent to the organizers by email to conference@aema.net.au by 12 January 2012.

Limited travel assistance may be available upon application, to support visitors to Brisbane for this conference.

Enquiries and submissions should be directed to the conference convenor:

Amelia R. Brown
School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics
University of Queensland
St Lucia, Qld 4072
conference@aema.net.au