The Medieval Academy Blog

Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Interdisciplinary Network
Second Graduate Symposium
New York University | May 17, 2018

MARGIN reads Messy Bodies

Last year, in our end-of-the-year symposium focusing on the afterlife of Ovid in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, we found ourselves confronting surprisingly queer, surprisingly metamorphosed, messy bodies, bodies that frequently demanded decidedly messy methodological engagements, between disciplinary categories or at their margins. With all this in mind, we continue our group exploration of the body with this year’s symposium.

Messy bodies are all of our bodies. They 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 a body. They remind us that no “body” may be taken as a given, requiring (even while confounding) construction in discourse, images, and other media.

For our second graduate symposium, we invite submissions for 20-minute papers from any discipline in Medieval and Renaissance studies, engaging with aspects of bodies that do not fit cleanly into modern notions of normativity. 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- and early-modern bodies (in film, art, literature)

In the spirit of our interdisciplinary group, we hope that students from various departments will contribute to this ongoing dialogue around the limits and challenges of working as, with, and through bodies. We are happy to announce that our keynote speaker will be Dr. Heidi Hausse (Mellon Research Fellow & Lecturer in History, The Society of Fellows in the Humanities—Columbia University).

Please submit a 250-word abstract with a 50-word bio (.pdf or .docx preferred) to nyumargin@gmail.com with “Symposium submission” in the subject line, by March 9. Decisions will be notified by March 20.

Link: http://as.nyu.edu/marc/margin/margin-symposium/symposium2018.html

CALL FOR PAPERS

October 19-20, 2018 “Medieval Unfreedoms: Slavery, Servitude, and Trafficking in Humans before the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade”

Across the medieval world (c. 500 — c. 1500), multiple forms and degrees of unfreedom—slavery, serfdom, forced concubinage, coerced labor, captivity, and bondage—co-existed. Slaves and other unfree people made crucial, but often obscured, marks on societies that accorded them varying degrees of power even as they constrained and exploited them. Trade in humans tied together distinct cultural zones, religions, and geographic regions.

Shifting definitions of freedom and unfreedom shaped evolving social systems, and helped to shape developing concepts of race, ethnicity, social status, and cultural difference and belonging from Iberia to Ethiopia and from Iceland to Persia and beyond. Scholars have long pondered the decline of an ancient Roman slave society and the legacy of both Roman and late-medieval forms of unfreedom for the emergence of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (and the concomitant transformation of slavery) and of colonial systems of race, power, and government. This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at Binghamton University, seeks to bring together scholars whose research relates to unfreedom before the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

We hope to foster conversations across traditional disciplinary boundaries about the definitions, cultural significance, and evolution of unfreedom in disparate parts of the medieval world. How does examining conceptions of freedom and unfreedom inform our understanding of medieval cultures? What is the legacy of medieval definitions of liberty and bondage? We particularly welcome comparative perspectives on unfreedom across religious and geographical frontiers.

We invite papers from a variety of disciplinary and methodological perspectives on any topic related to medieval unfreedom, including:

Forms of unfreedom after the end of ancient slavery and on cultural frontiers

Unfreedom in the Byzantine, Islamic, and Latin Christian worlds

Trafficking in humans across political and religious frontiers

Concepts of humanity, race, ethnicity, religion, and freedom

Gender, sexuality, and unfreedom

The interaction between slaving zones and centers of power

The unfree at royal and aristocratic courts

Textual and artistic unfreedoms

Law, rights, and unfree status

Manumission, social capital, and social mobility

Varieties of coerced and unfree labor

Raiding, piracy, and unfreedom

Resistance and rebellion against bondage

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: MAY 1, 2018.

Abstracts for individual papers and for sessions are invited. Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Send abstracts and a brief CV to cemers@binghamton.edu.

For information, contact Elizabeth Casteen at ecasteen@binghamton.edu

We invite applications for participation in the second annual Dartmouth Summer History Institute (Tuesday May 29-Saturday June 2). The theme for 2018 is New Directions in Medieval Religious History.  The aim of the Summer Institute is to bring together the most promising young scholars working on medieval religious history from across our field, to read and workshop pieces of their historical writing as they embark on the transition from dissertation to book, in order to take stock of emerging considerations and approaches.  We are interested in all aspects of religious history, including its links to political, social, cultural, and intellectual history.  Applicants should be in the process of completing their Ph.D. dissertations or in the early stages of revising the Ph.D. as a book manuscript.  (Students finishing Ph.D.s in Spring or Summer of 2018 are encouraged to apply.)  Participants will each furnish a draft article or working dissertation/book chapter central to or exemplary of their larger historical intervention to be workshopped.   In addition to workshopping individual pieces of writing, the Institute will include a variety of fora (receptions, dinners, and lectures) to discuss theoretical and methodological issues in the company of invited senior scholars. For information about the inaugural Institute (on the theme of modern European Intellectual History) held in 2017, please visit http://sites.dartmouth.edu/historyinstitute2017/

Participation in the Institute includes travel, room, and board. To apply send a CV and letter of application with 1-2 paragraphs describing the project and the piece you would intend to workshop by March 1, 2018 to Professors Cecilia Gaposchkin and Walter Simons, Dept. of History. All inquiries, correspondence, and applications can be sent to Dartmouth.History.Institute@dartmouth.edu.

Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies SAMEMES
Sixth International Conference

13-14 September 2018
University of Bern

Secrecy and Surveillance in Medieval and Early Modern England

At a time when government secrecy and surveillance has reached an unprecedented scale, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the history of the forms and cultural means of these operations. This conference will explore medieval and early modern practices of secrecy and surveillance. Karma Lochrie has defined secrecy as the “intentional concealment that structures social and power relationships” and has focused on “operations rather than objects of secrecy”. Such operations may include practices of confession, of riddling and decoding, and of thinking with metaphors for the clandestine (secrets are hidden behind seals, veils, doors, in books or treasure chests). Covert operations also invite us to explore how the unspeakable can be transmitted and how secrets can be owned and administered. Foucault’s notion of panopticism points to an increasing need to control, monitor and discipline individual members of society. Surveillance in this sense goes hand in hand with the establishment of the norms and conventions of behaviour that secrecy and covertness seek to circumvent. What can be known and done is called into question as individuals transgress the cultural and behavioural norms imposed on them by society. At the same time, the powerful elite define the epistemological boundaries between themselves and those who become subjects of suspicion and surveillance. We invite submissions for 20-minute presentations on all aspects of secrecy and surveillance in medieval and early modern England. These may include, but are not limited to:

• Secret identities
• Secrecy, surveillance and gender
• Secrecy, surveillance and religion (confession, heresy, persecution)
• Secrecy and surveillance in the domestic sphere
• Disguise, concealment, camouflage
• Secret pleasures, secret vices
• Hidden objects, hidden truths, hidden agendas
• Surveillance and the establishment of power
• Secret places, secret treasures
• Craft secrecy / intellectual property
• Instruments of concealment and surveillance

Confirmed keynote speakers

• Professor Karma Lochrie (Indiana University)
• Professor Paul Strohm (Prof. em., Columbia University)
• Professsor Sylvia Tomasch (Hunter College, University of New York)
• Professor Richard Wilson (Kingston University, London)

Select papers presented at this conference will be edited by the conference organisers and published as part of the Swiss Papers in English Language and Literature (SPELL) series in the following year.

Please send your 250-word abstracts by 25 March 2018 to both conference organisers, Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler (annette.kern-staehler@ens.unibe.ch) and Dr. Nicole Nyffenegger (nicole.nyffengger@ens.unibe.ch).

SAMEMES also invites submissions for the SAMEMES Early Career Book Prize (first published monograph) that will be awarded on the occasion of the conference. Deadline 25 March 2018. For more information please consult the webpage: https://www.unil.ch/samemes/en/home/menuinst/book-prize.html