The Medieval Academy Blog

Call for Papers:  Ritual, Performance, and the Senses
AVISTA Medieval Graduate Student Symposium
University of North Texas
March 23-24, 2017
Deadline for submission: February 1, 2017

The proliferation of images painted onto monumental structures, the illuminations of manuscripts, the intricacies of ivory carvings and the construction of architectural sculpture in the Medieval Period evince a highly visual culture. As such, medieval scholars have focused heavily on visual reception theory to ascertain the role of the visual within the fabric of medieval society.  Key to many studies is the pivotal role of rituals within the society, particularly in terms of how the medieval person would have absorbed their culture, namely the other senses. As performances would have involved not only the visual, but also the tactile, the aural, gustatory and olfactory, the combination of the sensory experience created a transitory environment within – or outside – the architectural structures that delineated the medieval world.

Ritual and the beginning of performative drama not only created a sensory experience but served to support pre-conceived societal distinctions. From the most exclusive performance, the mass, to the most public ritual, the intercity procession, rituals both enforced and challenged the social barriers of the time. As such, the development of rituals have a history all their own, from the most mundane acts of lay piety shown through blessings, to dramas focused on the lives of the saints and the life of Christ, to the most important feast days, and to the imperial rituals associated with the temporal sphere. Rituals were not confined only to the monastic or ecclesiastical environments, but permeated all segments of society.

The 2017 AVISTA medieval Graduate Student Symposium at the University of North Texas invites papers from all disciplines and all medieval eras on any topic, but preferences those that address topics of ritual, performance, or sensual experience. Such topics may include but are not limited to:

• The interconnected use of the senses
• Ritual history
• The notion of Medieval Performance Art
• Lay ritual/noble ritual
• Manuscript as a performance
• Sensual props, cues, and rubrications
• Societal divisions created by rituals
• Architecture as stage and backdrop
• Processional routes/pilgrimages
• Music and sensual stimulation
• The archaeology of the senses
• Landscape and topography of performance
• The language of the senses
• Sensual cosmology
• Sensual dreprications

Send papers to: Dr. Mickey Abel (mickey.abel@unt.edu)

Submission deadline: February 1, 2017

Call for Papers
Othello’s Island 2017

The 5th annual multidisciplinary conference on medieval, renaissance and early modern studies and their later legacies

Venue: Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR)

Nicosia, Cyprus, 6 to 8 April 2017

with optional historic-site visits on 9 April

Acollaborative event organised by academics from CVAR, Northern Arizona University, Sheffield Hallam University, SOAS University of London the University of Kent and the University of Leeds

www.othellosisland.org

Convenors

• Emeritus Professor James Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University (USA)
• Professor Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
• Dr Sarah James, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK)
• Dr Michael Paraskos, SOAS University of London (UK)
• Benedict Read FSA, University of Leeds (UK)
• Dr Rita Severis, CVAR (Cyprus)

We welcome applications from researchers to present papers at the 2017 edition of Othello’s Island.

First held in 2013, Othello’s Island now a well established annual meeting of academics, students and members of the public interested in medieval and renaissance art, literature, history and culture.

Othello’s Island is growing in size and stature every year. In 2016 over seventy academics from across the world presented papers at the conference, whilst also experiencing the medieval and renaissance art, architecture and historical sites of Cyprus.

This experience ranged from the island’s material culture, such as the French gothic cathedral of Nicosia, through to the remarkable living culture of the island that is still deeply affected by its medieval and renaissance past.

In 2017 we are interested in hearing papers on diverse aspects of medieval and renaissance literature, art, history, society and other culture.

Papers do not have to be specifically related to Cyprus or the Mediterranean region and do not have to be connected to Shakespeare.

It is worth looking at the range of papers from past conferences to see that previous speakers have covered topics ranging from slavery in medieval Cyprus and Malta, to the impact of Italian Renaissance art on Cypriot Byzantine painting, to the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and Margaret Cavendish.

That said, given our location, Cyprus, the Levant and the Mediterranean do impact on the conference. In part this is because Cyprus is a real gem for anyone interested in medieval and renaissance history. Experience from the conference over the past four years shows that for researchers interested in placing their text-based research in a material context, visiting the island adds a new dimension to their studies. This comes in part from the conference itself, but also from the rich treasury of architectural and other material culture relating to the period that is available on Cyprus.

Othello’s Island itself has developed a reputation as one of the friendliest medieval and renaissance studies conferences in the world today, and it is also genuinely interdisciplinary. In part this is due to the relatively small size of the event, which generates a true sense of community during the conference.

For more informaton and submission deadlines please visit
www.othellosisland.org

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Frater, Magister, Minister et Episcopus”
The Works and Worlds of Saint Bonaventure
The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University
July 12-15, 2017

The Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University will host a major international conference dedicated to the intellectual heritage and contemporary significance of Saint Bonaventure.

Individual papers, panels, and workshop proposals are sought that engage the academic, pastoral, and socio-political aspects of this topic. Possible themes include, but are not limited to the following:

• Bonaventure’s Theological Legacy and Contemporary Theology
• Bonaventure’s Use of Philosophical and Theological Sources
• Aesthetics, Art, and Bonaventure
• The Franciscan Order under Bonaventure’s Leadership
• Bonaventure as Preacher
• Ecology, Pope Francis, and Bonaventure
• The Image and Role of Women in Bonaventure’s Writings
• Bonaventure, Franciscan Ministry, and Spirituality
• Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas
• Bonaventure, Paris, and Medieval France

Proposals are due by November 18, 2016.  Notifications of acceptance, rejection or need for alterations will be sent to authors by January 13, 2017. Please send a paper proposal/ draft of your text via email no later than November 18, 2016, directly to:

Fr. David Couturier, OFM Cap.
Franciscan Institute St. Bonaventure University
Murphy Building – Room 100
St. Bonaventure, NY 14778
dcouturi@sbu.edu

Organizing Committee:

Joshua Benson (Catholic University)
Timothy J. Johnson (Flagler College)
Dominic Monti OFM (St. Bonaventure University)
Katherine Wrisley-Shelby (Boston College)
Marie Kolbe Zamora OSF (Silver Lake College)

The International Lawman’s Brut Society and Brigham Young University invites scholars of all ranks who specialize or have interest in Lawman, Brut narratives, and Britain’s legendary history, to come together for a conference in the mountains of the American West. Presentations of scholarly work on any aspect of Lawman’s vibrant and compelling early Middle English verse chronicle are welcome. But especially encouraged are paper proposals that address comparatively the way that Lawman, Wace, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and/or any other relevant or illuminating Brut narrative, imagine the conception of Britain. For our purposes in this conference “conception” can mean origins, beginnings, and genealogies; the concepts and conceits Lawman and other writers turn to in order to constitute Britain as a distinct political, ethnic, and cultural entity; and finally how Lawman and other writers conceptualize Britain as meaningful and significant—indeed, as an historical and literary place of special meaning and significance in the world.

Proposals of 300 words or less should be submitted by Oct. 15, 2016 to:

Joseph Parry
Undergraduate Education
Brigham Young University
Provo, UT 84602
USA

We ask that conference presentations not exceed 20 minutes (10–11 double-spaced pages read at a comfortable pace). For further information or specific inquiries please feel free to contact Professor Parry (Joe) directly at joseph_parry@byu.edu. We look forward to being with you where the conversation and the place itself will be highly elevated (6570 feet/2002 meters above sea level).

On 26 and 27 January 2017, the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society will be hosting an international graduate conference. A selection of researchers and artists will be invited to participate in panels, in which their 20 minute papers and creative work will be discussed. Participants should currently be undertaking a PhD. When submitting a proposal for a paper presentation or a work of art, please make sure to include a short biography.

The title of the conference, “Landscape: Interpretations, Relations, and Representations,” has been chosen in order to explore landscape in the broadest sense. When analysed as a theoretical concept, landscape evokes strong spatial connotations and vivid imagery by means of our perceptions of the world. However, as the world undergoes impactful developments – often discussed with buzzwords such as industrialisation, globalisation and digitisation – the very notion of what is, arranges, informs, and changes a landscape has altered in accordance with these dynamic processes. Our conference will interrogate ways in which to analyse shifts in conception and approach throughout history. Participants are invited to critically explore and reflect on cultural artefacts and practices that project, trace, or confront these processes through the concept, genre, or medium of landscape. By seeking to gather an interdisciplinary and intercultural selection of academic papers and works of art, we aim to encourage an open dialogue among a unique mix of artists and researchers.

Presentations should reflect one, or more, of the following themes:

1) Landscape aesthetics:

Throughout time, humans have laboriously and effectively incorporated, appropriated, and envisaged material and immaterial concepts of landscape in order to express aesthetic modes and practices. This includes, for example, the symbolic language of the European Middle Ages where landscape was an expression of divine order and human humility, and also the current debate on environmental pollution, which has arguably generated a whole new eco-aesthetics of landscape. This subtheme of the LUCAS Conference invites participants to explore the realm of aesthetics with regard to landscapes by posing two key questions: A) How have landscape representations figured in the arts as ways of knowing, engaging, communicating with, and finally, appropriating the world through perception? B) Which affective and performative processes and objects have been borne out of, and operate because of these figurations?

• The onset, developments, and limitations of landscape as an aesthetic concept
• The aesthetics of pollution
• Land art and landscaping
• Landscapes between reality and fiction
• The affective registers of landscape
• Landscape aesthetics in the Anthropocene
• Corporeal engagements with landscape
• Exchanges between the sciences, the arts, and landscape

2) Landscape and identities:

As an expression of the complicated entanglement between ourselves and our environments, landscapes inform and shape many perceptions and relations within the world. Over time, the way we have perceived our physical environment has undergone immense changes. The second subtheme, therefore, seeks to reflect on the idea of landscape as a projection screen for power and identity in different times and places. Papers and presentations should be centred around modes of transition, mediality, and experiencing of landscapes, and the ways they hamper, perpetuate, or stimulate human interaction within and with the environment.

• Landscape and embodiment
• Landscape and subjectivity
• Landscape and knowledge
• Landscape and power
• Identities and territories (human and non-human)
• Hybrid landscapes
• Ekphrasis

3) Mnemonic and digital realms of landscape: 

The third subtheme of the LUCAS Conference aims to provide a platform for discussion of the wide spectrum of landscapes, from souvenirs to cyberspace. Cyberscapes and memoryscapes have an expanding influence on knowledge production, circulation, and consumption. For instance, over the last decade, video games have increasingly gained visibility as interactive spaces which stage and negotiate fantasy narratives through aesthetic registers of digital landscapes. Increasingly complex landscapes mapped with Web 2.0, for example, and advances in memory technologies introduce new conversations and new approaches towards the very concept of landscape.

• Digital and virtual landscapes
• Landscapes in games
• Memoryscapes
• Landscape objects: the mnemonic function of souvenirs/photographs, for example in the contexts of tourism or pilgrimage
• Digital research tools for mapping spatial relations

Ultimately, the LUCAS Graduate Conference aims to reflect the institute’s interdisciplinary and international character. As such, the two-day conference will provide a platform for PhD students in the humanities, from Leiden as well as other universities in the Netherlands and abroad, to present and exchange their ideas.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Two internationally renowned scholars, Professor W.J.T. Mitchell and Professor D.E. Nye will give keynote lectures during the conference:

Prof. W.J.T. Mitchell is Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, where he also served as Chair of the English Department from 1988 to 1991. He has been the editor of Critical Inquiry since 1978 and contributes to the journal October. His books include the influential works Iconology (Chicago, 1986), Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994), Landscape and Power (Chicago, 1994) and What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago, 2005) for which he received the MLA’s 2006 James Russell Lowell Prize in Language and Literature. His latest book is Image Science: Iconology, Media Aesthetics, and Visual Culture (Chicago, 2015).

Prof. D.E. Nye is Professor of American Studies at the University of Southern Denmark. He is the only person who has won all three of the highest awards given by the Society for the History of Technology: The Dexter Book Prize (1993), The Sally Hacker Book Prize (2009), and the Leonard da Vinci Medal (2005). His works include American Technological Sublime (MIT Press, 1994), Narratives and Spaces (New York, 1997), Technologies of Landscape: Reaping to Recycling (Massachusetts, 2000) and The Anti-Landscape (Amsterdam, 2014). He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize twice.

HOW TO APPLY

Please send your proposal (max. 300 words) outlining a 20-minute paper along with a brief bio (max. 150 words) before 1 October, 2016 to lucasconf2017@gmail.com.You will be notified whether or not your paper has been selected by 1 November, 2016. Should you have any question regarding the conference and/or the proposal, please do not hesitate to contact the organising committee at the same email address. The conference website can be found here: http://hum.leiden.edu/lucas/lucasconference2017/

The LUCAS Graduate Conference welcomes papers from all disciplines within the humanities. A selection of papers will be published as conference proceedings in the Journal of the LUCAS Graduate Conference: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/jlgc/. For those who attend the conference, there will be a registration fee of €50 to cover the costs of lunches, coffee breaks, excursions and other conference materials. Unfortunately, we cannot offer financial support for travel or accommodation expenses.

The organising committee:

Praveen Sewgobind,  Lieke Smits, Tecia Vailati and Anna Volkmar

2017 Association of Art Historians annual conference
Loughborough University, 6-8 April 2017

Call for papers for all-day session

Prints in Books: The Materiality, Art History and Collection of Illustrations
Convenor: Elizabeth Savage, Cambridge University, leu21@cam.ac.uk

Deadline: 7 Nov 2016

Book illustrations, especially from the hand-press period (1450-1830), are an essential but traditionally overlooked source of art historical information. Although the hierarchies of fine art over popular art are dissolving and modern disciplinary distinctions between text and image (or art and book) are giving way to cross-disciplinary and holistic approaches to printed material, printed images that happen to be inside books often fall outside the remits of art historical, literary, bibliographical and material research.

One reason is that practical and academic barriers impede access to the art historical information that book illustrations can provide. Due to incompatible cataloguing standards adopted by libraries and art museums, researchers can struggle to identify book illustrations across collections. Cataloguing protocols may reduce hundreds of significant woodcuts in a book to the single word ‘illustrated’; some world-leading graphic art digitisation initiatives exclude book illustrations. As the global digitised corpus expands, will book illustrations be more represented in print scholarship or will they continue to fall into the gap between art and book? As material objects and visual resources, should they be considered bibliographical, art historical or iconographical material? And how do such classifications influence their interpretation?

This interdisciplinary, all-day session seeks to establish a platform for discussion about the position of printed book illustrations in graphic art scholarship. Theoretical and object-based papers related to any aspect of collecting, cataloguing and interpreting printed book illustrations, broadly defined, are welcome, as are papers that explore the materiality, iconography, historiography or art history of pictures printed inside books.

Please email 250-word paper proposals, including your name, affiliation and email, to the convenor by 7 Nov 2017. Full proposal guidelines at http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/sessions2017/session25.

Call for Papers
Medieval Studies on Television Screens
Proposals by 30 June 2016

Session sponsored by the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

For the 27th Annual Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association, Atlantic City, New Jersey, 3-5 November 2016

Following the success of previous sessions at both the International Congress on Medieval Studies and meetings of the Popular Culture Association, the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture seeks proposals for a sponsored session on the topic of Medieval Studies on Television Screens for inclusion under the Beowulf to Shakespeare: Popular Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Area at the 27th Annual Conference of the Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association to be held at the Tropicana Casino & Resort in Atlantic City, New Jersey, from 3-5 November 2016.

The medieval is represented on television, as in other forms of medievalism, through four basic types of stories distinguished by their settings. Narratives might be set fully in medieval past, or the medieval may be reimagined in anachronistic settings, such as the pre-medieval past (a site of origins), post medieval eras (including science fictional futures) or secondary worlds.

In this session, we hope to continue the work begun in the recent studies like Arthurian Animation: A Study of Cartoon Camelots on Film and Television (2013) by the late Michael N. Salda, Arthurian Legends on Film and Television (2000) by Bert Olton, Cinematic Re-Imaginings of Arthurian Literature (2015) edited by Tara Foster and Jon Sherman, Mastering the Game of Thrones: Essays on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (2015) edited by Jes Battis and Susan Johnston, The Middle Ages on Television: Critical Essays (2015) edited by Meriem Pagès and Karolyn Kinane, Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2016) by Carolyne Larrington, and Women in Game of Thrones: Power, Conformity and Resistance (2014) by Valerie Estelle Frankel and in the ongoing efforts of numerous bloggers, essayists, and thesis and dissertation writers working independent of dedicated publications on the medieval on screen.

Papers might address any of the following aspects of medievalism on television:

Animated or live-action series with medieval themes
Films made for television or television miniseries with medieval themes
Fantasy series or telefilms inspired by the medieval
Allusions to the medieval in otherwise non-medieval television productions
One-off episodes featuring appearances of the medieval
Commercials with medieval themes
Television documentaries and other educational television about the medieval past
Television adaptations into other media depicting the medieval

An ever-expanding list of potential works can be found at our website: https://medievalstudiesonscreen.blogspot.com/.

Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words and a brief biography to the organizer, Michael A. Torregrossa, at MedievalStudiesonScreen@gmail.com.