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One of the major international medievalists scholarly gatherings happens every July in Leeds: the International Medieval Congress. This year the general subject is “Materiality”, and we think that this something digital medievalists can say a lot about:

Medievalists have long been aware that the objects of their research are conditioned by their materiality —  that the shape of a charter or a manuscript is a part of its meaning. Since the 1980’s, recognition of this principle has elevated the study of material culture to a field within the broader discipline of Medieval Studies.  At the same time libraries, research institutions, and museums have been intent on producing digital catalogues and images of their collections.

The result of these initiatives is a mass of data and metadata constituting a new frontier for digital methods: 3D modeling, multispectral imaging, and Handwritten Text Recognition create new modalities of representation, while Controlled vocabularies, Linked Data, Ontologies and APIs like IIIF enhance the possibilities to model and share descriptive data. Superadded to these developments, digital methods for the interpretation of source material and presentation of research results have grown beyond the materiality of printed books and articles: data publications have started to gain traction in the community; complex visualizations tell more than a description by words, and digital editions incorporate experimental forms of interaction with research data that goes beyond the traditional forms of publication. In all of this, Medievalists have been leaders in adopting digital methods to work with the physical heritage of the Middle Ages.

Given this ferment, the Digital Medievalist community is looking for proposals presenting projects making use of these new technologies to give further – and new! – insights into the materiality of sources, and how medievalists work with cultural heritage data to understand better the impact of the digital methods on our understanding of the Middle Ages.

Please send your proposal (300 Words incl. a short CV) to dm.imc2019@gmail.com by Sept. 25th.

ANZAMEMS 12th Biennial Conference 2019

Call for Papers, Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminars and Bursary Application

The Committee of the ANZAMEMS 2019 Conference (5-8 February 2019) invites paper and panel proposals, PATS expressions of interest, and bursary and prize applications to be made by the dates set out below.

Call for Papers Deadline: 31 August 2018

Travel Bursary and George Yule Prize Application Deadline: 30 September 2018

Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminars Application Deadline: 31 August 2018

Call for Papers and Panels

The theme for ANZAMEMS 2019 is Categories, Boundaries, Horizons. Categories and boundaries help us to define our fields of knowledge and subjects of inquiry, but can also contain and limit our perspectives. The concept of category emerges etymologically from the experience of speaking in an assembly, a dialogic forum in which new ways of explaining can emerge. Boundaries and horizons are intertwined in their meanings, pointing to the limits of subjectivity, and inviting investigation beyond current understanding into new ways of connecting experience and knowledge. Papers, panels, and streams are invited to explore all aspects of this theme, including, but not limited to:

• the limitations of inherited categorization and definition
• race, gender, class, and dis/ability boundaries and categories
• encounters across boundaries, through material, cultural, and social exchange
• the categorization of the human and animal
• national and religious boundaries and categorization
• the role of interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research
• temporal boundaries and categories, including questions of periodization

Proposals for papers on all aspects of the medieval and early modern are also welcome.

For more information and to submit a proposal, visit the website here: https://anzamemsconference2019.wordpress.com/call-for-papers/

Call for Postgraduate Student & ECR Travel Bursary, Kim Walker Postgraduate Travel Bursary and George Yule Prize Applications

Postgraduate and Early Career Scholars meeting the requirements to apply for bursaries and prizes are encouraged to apply before 30 September 2018.

For more information and to submit an application, visit the website here: https://anzamemsconference2019.wordpress.com/bursaries-prizes/

Call for Applications to Postgraduate Advanced Training Seminars

The PATS will run on 4-5 February 2019, as a two-day training seminar preceding the conference.

Strand 1, Digital Editing and the Medieval & Early Modern Manuscript, will focus on the skills of paleography and codicology as well as digital editing and text encoding as participants collaboratively create an edition of a manuscript.

Strand 2, Doing Digital Humanities: From Project Planning to Digital Delivery, will focus on the skills of digital project management, and aims to assist participants to develop their own digital projects with the support of instructors.

For more information and to submit an application, visit the website here: https://anzamemsconference2019.wordpress.com/pats/

CFP: Early Medieval Education
ICMS, Kalamazoo 9-12 May 2019

Scenes of instruction and learning fill early medieval literature and art–Boethius at Philosophia’s knees, Alcuin and Charlemagne discussing rhetoric, Lioba recalling Eadburga’s poetic instruction. Education, as Irina Dumitrescu pointed out in her monograph, Experience of Education in Anglo-Saxon Literature (2018), is the common factor shared by the scribes, authors, and other producers of the medieval texts remaining to us. What was early medieval education and how did those students and teachers experience, remember, and act on their learning? This panel will explore the role of early medieval education as a driving force behind literary, intellectual, and cultural production and exchange. This panel welcomes scholarship from across medieval studies disciplines and geographical foci. It aims to engage global, theoretical, and material methodologies, to discover both broad and localized instances and impacts of early medieval education. Diverse approaches, including historical, art historical, archaeological, literary, and musicological, are welcome. The following are some examples of topics that papers in this session might address:

• Early medieval pedagogies: the evidence in art, glosses, correspondence, and                    material remains
• Methods of scriptural interpretation: how was exegesis learned and taught?
• Learning and materiality: the intellectual alongside the embodied
• Learning communities and networks across time and place
• Teacher-student relationships and early medieval classrooms

Organizers: Sophia D’Ignazio (Cornell University) and Ryan Lawrence (Cornell University)

Please send any queries and proposals (250 words) for 20-minute papers to: Sophia D’Ignazio, sd769@cornell.edu, by September 15, 2018.

Biennial London Chaucer Conference: Chaucer and Europe
Friday 28^th– Saturday 29^th June 2019

Hosted by the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Keynote addresses by Professor Laura Kendrick (University of Versailles) and Professor David Wallace (University of Pennsylvania).

Call for Papers:

The Biennial London Chaucer Conference 2019 seeks proposals for 20-minute papers, or for panels (consisting of three 20-minute papers), on any topic related to this year’s conference theme: ‘Chaucer and Europe’. Papers should primarily address issues relating to Europe and its influences, ideas, and traditions in the age of Chaucer and his contemporaries, or in later works which engage with Chaucer’s literary afterlife. The conference aims to explore not only how the works of such great European writers as Dante, Boccaccio, Machaut, and Froissart influenced Chaucer and his contemporaries, but also how European literary traditions, forms, and styles informed the literature produced in England during the later Middle Ages. The conference also welcomes papers which explore, or engage creatively, with ideas of place, travel, and commerce in Europe, as well as issues of identity (regional, national, and international), otherness, and borders and boundaries. Interdisciplinary topics and approaches are most welcome as the conference hopes to bring together scholars and postgraduate students working in a range of disciplines and departments.

Possible topics might include:

The influence of European works and writers on Chaucer and/or his contemporaries

European literary traditions (including genres, forms, styles, and themes)

European settings, geographies, and landscapes

Europe and the global

Place and identity

National and international identities

Transport, mobility, and migration

Pilgrimage, war, and crusading

Translation, languages, and multilingualism

Borders and boundaries

Modern ideas of Medieval Europe

Proposals for single 20-minute papers should include a 250-word abstract (as well as name and affiliation). Proposals for three-paper panels should take the form of three separate abstracts as well as a brief discussion of the rationale behind the session (the name of the three speakers and, if possible, an appointed chair, should also be included). Proposals should be sent to Alastair Bennett, Hetta Howes and Natalie Jones, at londonchaucer2019@gmail.com by January 31st 2019.

Messy Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Body in Pre-Modern Culture

54th ICMS | May 9-12, 2019

Following our end-of-the-year symposium, the Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Interdisciplinary Network welcomes papers for our two sessions on Messy Bodies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Body in Pre-Modern Culture.

Messy bodies are all of our bodies. Once we take a good look at them, it becomes clear that the instantly legible body is nothing more than a construct. Bodies resist categorization, they push against their own boundaries, they complicate our understanding of medieval and Renaissance subjectivity and individuality; ultimately, they show how we—modern scholars—still need to consider what constitutes the often racialized or gendered body. They remind us that no “body” may be taken as a given, requiring (even while confounding) construction in discourse, images, and other media.

On the one hand, we are particularly interested in the ways in which the psychological, emotional, and sensorial potentials of the human body express themselves semiotically and semantically. On the other, we want to explore what constitutes human or non-human bodies, following discussions on materiality, animal studies, and critical theory.
We envision our double session as a forum for discussion that engages with premodern bodies as physical and symbolic entities that both stand for and disrupt prescriptive discourses on bodily and social functions, including sexuality, and political participation. Following our mission to foster collaboration across disciplines, we welcome submissions from all fields, from any and all areas of the globe.
Submissions may focus on topics including, but not limited, to:

• humoral and medical theories and practices queer and trans* bodies
• critical race theory
• disability studies
• object-bodies and objectified-bodies
• post-humanisms (including considerations of ontology, networks, animal studies, and
• cybernetics)
• pre-, early-, and post-modern theories of embodiment, subjectivity, and agency violence to the body
• dynamics of mind, body, and soul
• modern responses to pre-modern bodies (in film, art, literature)

Please submit a 200-word abstract with a short bio (.pdf or .docx preferred) to nyumargin@gmail.com with “Kalamazoo submission” in the subject line, by September 15. Questions can also be addressed to the same e-mail. Abstracts not accepted to our sessions will be forwarded to the IMCS for consideration in general sessions.