The Medieval Academy Blog

Call for Papers
Sensorial Encounters: Body, Object, and Environment
2016 KU History of Art Graduate Student Symposium, October 14-15, 2016
Kress Foundation Department of Art History, University of Kansas, Lawrence

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Bissera Pentcheva, Associate Professor, Department of Art & Art History, Stanford University

The multi-sensory nature of experience has been the focus of much recent art historical scholarship. Many of these writings have drawn on the important critical and philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gilles Deleuze, Didier Anzieu, and Luce Irigaray. Participants in this symposium will explore some of the ways in which the senses, broadly conceived, generate and/or mediate aesthetic encounters. We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that consider how interactions between and/or among bodies, objects, and environments, whether real or virtual, make meaning .

We welcome proposals from graduate students at the M.A. or Ph.D. level that address topics from a wide range of time periods and geographic locations. We invite object-based and theoretical approaches.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Embodiment and perception
• Intertwining
• Five senses and beyond
• Artistic process
• Sensations
• Performance, ceremonies, and rituals
• Materiality
• Objects meant to be touched, handled, and/or carried
• Writing, action, and gesture
• Environments
• Spectatorship and participation
• Trauma
• Skin-ego and the sound envelope

Please submit an abstract (250 – 300 words) and C.V. to kusymposium@gmail.com by April 1, 2016. We will notify successful applicants by May 2, 2016.

Call for papers
Radboud University, Nijmegen

Devotio
Individualization of religious practices in Western European Christianity
(c. 1350 – c. 1550)

Wednesday, 26 – Thursday, 27 October 2016

Religiosity was ubiquitous during the later Middle Ages. Divine services influenced both the public domain and the course of each individual’s life, and thus established a widely experienced communality. Individual believers, however, had ample opportunities to develop a highly personalized devotion, side by side with, and sometimes even slightly detached from official doctrine. Their creativity and the diversity of their inner beliefs are the main focus of this conference.

The transmitted source material is perhaps as diverse as the many forms of personal devotion, and meditational literature and prayer books are on closer inspection often highly individualized products, sometimes sizeable compositions demonstrating personal choices and convictions, and testifying to inner development as well as interchanged experiences.

Recent historiography has pointed at this individualization of Western Christianity in the later Middle Ages, and focused on the preponderance of personal devotion at the cost of shared religious practices. Thus, representatives of the Modern Devotion especially propagated that the quality of religious life was determined no less by personal, inner devotion in one’s own heart than by shared liturgy. Thomas a Kempis, for instance, emphasizes the importance of an intense, and personal, desire for God. Who lacks this, ‘must long for this desire’ (Imitation of Christ, III, 14, 8).

Individualization inevitably resulted in greater diversity of religious life, but did not automatically lead to too much divergence. Religious communities, but lay groups also, discussed about beliefs and practices, sometimes very candidly. They could disagree, but nevertheless did not loose touch of one another. This conference aims to establish how individual believers were not only children of their age, but shaped this age as well.

Keynote speakers:
Prof. dr. John van Engen (University of Notre Dame, USA): “Alijt Bake (1413-1455) of Utrecht and Gent: Self-conscious Author and Spiritual Autobiographer”.
Prof. dr. Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University, USA): “How to read a picture book: Visualizing Scripture in the Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin”.

Prof. dr. Nigel Palmer (Oxford University, UK): “Anti-Seuse, or: Meditation on the whole life of Christ in the fifteenth century”.
Dr. Kathryn Rudy (University of St Andrews, UK): “Semi-standardised books of hours that are afterwards personalised”.

Call for papers
We invite proposals for papers on ‘Individualization of Religious Practices’ from various  disciplines and perspectives, in particular in relation to the history of culture, literature, religious life, spirituality, liturgy, psychology, hagiography, etc, presenting the findings of new or ongoing research. Contributions should be in German or in English. Each individual will be given a total of 30 minutes, i.e. 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

This call is directed to senior researchers and PhD students, but MA students are also cordially invited to submit a paper for separate sessions.

Organisers. Radboud University, Nijmegen: Faculty of Arts – Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies – Titus Brandsma Institute.

Organising committee. Prof. dr. Johan Oosterman (Radboud University Nijmegen), Prof. dr. Peter Nissen (Radboud University Nijmegen), dr. Rijcklof Hofman (Titus Brandsma Institute), dr. Charles Caspers (Titus Brandsma Institute).

Venue. Radboud University Nijmegen.

Time. 26–27 October 2016. The conference will begin around 10.00 on Wednesday and end around 16.00 on Thursday.

Deadline. Please submit a paper or session title and an abstract of not more than 300 words before 1 May 2016. Abstracts and papers should be mailed to Rijcklof Hofman:

rijcklof.hofman@titusbrandsmainstituut.nl

The text of the email should include name, position, affiliation and contact details of the author of the abstract. Those whose proposals are accepted are reminded that registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses for the conference are the responsibility of speakers and/or their institutions.

Registration. Registration costs are € 70 for senior researchers, € 40 for junior researchers. A € 20 discount is available for  members of NOSTER and of the Research School for Medieval Studies, as well as for students. Registration includes coffee/tea breaks, the conference dinner on Wednesday evening, and a lunch on Thursday.

Accommodation can be found in various categories. For this and further information on Radboud University Nijmegen please consult the information guide: http://www.ru.nl/english/@698777/ects_guide/ , a brief version on accessibility, with maps, is available here http://issuu.com/radbouduniversiteit/docs/radboudwegwijzer-nl?e=6804048/11267045, cfr also  http://www.ru.nl/english/vm/search/@701941/bereikbaarheid/ (in Dutch).

The Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA) invites proposals for papers on the theme of “Place and Power” for its 55^th meeting, October 6-8, 2016. The meeting is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and University of Tennessee Knoxville and will take place at the Downtown Hilton, Knoxville, Tennessee.

We invite individual submissions and panels from all disciplines exploring any aspect of medieval places and medieval powers as they were conceptualized, experienced, imagined, and embodied. We welcome papers considering, but not limited to:

• Places as spaces, territories, and/or boundaries
• Sacred and profane spaces
• Practices of power
• Geopolitics and the environment
• Gendered and sexualized power

As the conference date coincides with the 950^th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, we also seek sessions and papers pertaining to the Norman Conquest. We desire a variety of methodological approaches to the theme, including eco-criticism, landscape studies, gender studies, and environmental perspectives. Proposals on other medieval topics or relating “Place and Power” to teaching are also welcome. Several sessions will be devoted to undergraduate research so we encourage submissions from undergraduate students.

Please submit proposals for sessions and for individual papers athttp://goo.gl/forms/Xi6JTYSnjk no later than June 1, 2016. For more information, seehttps://southeasternmedieval.wordpress.com.

 ‘All the World’s a Stage’: Performing Identity in Everyday Life, one-day inter-disciplinary conference, University of Bristol, 1^st July 2016.

Keynote Speakers: Dr Angela McShane, Royal College of Art/ V&A
Dr Eleanor Standley, University of Oxford/ Ashmolean Museum

This conference will explore the concept of performance and its role in the construction of individual and communal identities. From a person’s choice of dress in the morning to what they eat at night: When and how should we conceive of such everyday actions as having a role in the performance and construction of identities? How have public acts and rituals been used to construct and contest group identities? And how have the meanings of these performative acts endured or changed over time?

This conference seeks to interrogate the diverse ways in which performance theory can enhance our understanding of the construction of identities. It aims to draw together researchers from a broad range of disciplines, including: History, Art History, History of Design and Material Culture, Anthropology and Archaeology, Theatre, English, Classics and Film Studies.

Possible themes for 20 minute papers include (but are not limited to):

• Materiality, objects and works of art as Performance
• Performative violence
• Ritual, ceremony and festivity
• Sports and Recreation
• Space and place
• Performing gender
• Food and drink
• Memory

Speakers are invited to submit abstracts of 200 words in English, along with a short biography (approx. 100 words) to performingidentity2016@gmail.com by 31st March 2016.

For further information, please visit our website at: www.bristol.ac.uk/history/events/conferences/all-the-world-is-a-stage/