The Medieval Academy Blog

(Re)Animating the Middle Ages: Adapting the Medieval in Animated Media
Co-organizers Michael A. Torregrossa, Karen Casey Casebier, and Carl B. Sell

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

Call for Papers – Please Submit Proposals by 30 September 2024
56th Annual Convention of Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Philadelphia Marriott Downtown (Philadelphia, PA)
On-site event: 6-9 March 2025

Rationale

Our conception of the Middle Ages is usually formed by the versions of the medieval past we experienced as children, and, because they are considered suitable for young viewers, animated depictions of this world often represent our earliest exposure to the events, personages, and stories of this era. Consequently, the animated creations of the Walt Disney Company have played a huge part in shaping our collective image of the Middle Ages, but the corpus of medieval-themed animation is truly vast. It has been expanded greatly by the output of many other content producers across the globe through anime, cartoons, films, games, streaming videos, and theatrical shorts. (See our list of representative texts–at https://tinyurl.com/ReAnimatingtheMiddleAgesCFP–for examples.)

Despite animation’s important role in shaping how we perceive and receive the medieval past, the field of Medieval Animation Studies remains limited, especially compared to the fluorescence of Medieval Film Studies and Medieval Television Studies over the past four decades. In this panel, we seek in particular to build upon the pioneering work of medieval-animation scholar Michael N. Salda and provide additional insights into the ways medieval-themed animation has impacted our contemporary world. Presenters might explore anime, cartoons, films, games, shorts, and videos produced through traditional ink-and-paint, stop-motion, claymation, or computer-generated imagery. Selections should represent and/or engage with some aspect of the medieval, such as artifacts, characters, settings, themes, etc. These might be central to the narrative, tangential, or appearing solely as cameos. (For ideas and support, we have created a list of representative texts and a resource guide devoted to studies of medieval-themed animation. It can be accessed at https://tinyurl.com/ReAnimatingtheMiddleAgesCFP.)

Submission Instructions

In this panel, we seek in particular to build upon the pioneering work of medieval-animation scholar Michael N. Salda and provide additional insights into the ways medieval-themed animation has impacted our contemporary world. Presenters might explore anime, cartoons, films, games, shorts, and videos produced through traditional ink-and-paint, stop-motion, claymation, or computer-generated imagery. Selections should represent and/or engage with some aspect of the medieval, such as artifacts, characters, settings, themes, etc., presented as central to the narrative, tangential, or appearing solely as cameos.

For ideas and support, please see our list of representative texts and resource guide devoted to studies of medieval-themed animation at https://tinyurl.com/ReAnimatingtheMiddleAgesCFP.

All proposals must be submitted into the CFPList system at https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21105 by 30 September 2024. You will be prompted to create an account with NeMLA (if you do not already have one) and, then, to complete sections on Title, Abstract, and Media Needs.

Notification on the status of your submission will be made by 16 October 2024. If accepted, NeMLA asks you to confirm your participation with the session chairs by accepting their invitations and by registering for the event. The deadline for Registration/Membership is 9 December 2024.

Be advised of the following policies of the Convention: All participants must be members of NeMLA for the year of the conference. Participants may present on up to two sessions of different types (panels/seminars are considered of the same type). Submitters to the CFP site cannot upload the same abstract twice.(See the NeMLA Presenter Policies page, at https://www.nemla.org/convention/policies.html, for further details,)

NeMLA offers limited funding for travel to graduate students and to contingent faculty, adjunct instructors, independent scholars, and two-year college faculty. Details can be found at the NeMLA Travel Awards page at https://www.nemla.org/awards/travel.html.

Thank you for your interest in our session. Please address questions and/or concerns to the organizers at MedievalinPopularCulture@gmail.com.

For more information on the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture, please visit our website at https://MedievalinPopularCulture.blogspot.com/.

Roundtable: “Slowly Engaging with the Indigenous Turn” (in person)
60th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Kalamazoo, Michigan

May 9-10, 2025

Roundtable: “Slowly Engaging with the Indigenous Turn”

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews, in discussing the recent Indigenous turn in medieval studies, asks medievalists to “slow down” their engagement with Indigenous studies, “to be more deliberate, to be thoughtful, and to consider first the ethics of kinship and reciprocity that we owe Indigenous peoples, places, and communities who have labored to craft Indigenous studies as an academic field” (2). This roundtable asks medievalists to discuss their own internal work and process of slowing down–the self-reflection, self-examination, reassessment, and reorientation needed to ethically and critically engage with Indigenous studies.

Abstracts due September 15th, 2024 to the ICMS Confex site: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/cfp.cgi

Organized by Sarah LaVoy-Brunette & Tarren Andrews

Contact: sfl39@cornell.edu

Panel: “Relational Approaches to the Indigenous Turn” (in-person)
60th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Kalamazoo, Michigan

May 9-10, 2025

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews coined the term “Indigenous turn” when describing the recent medievalist engagement with Indigenous studies. Recent scholarship (e.g., Akbari 2023; Price 2024) demonstrates the potentials for an Indigenous turn that is relational when combined with other critical approaches such as trans theory, gender and sexuality studies, premodern critical race studies, the Global Middle Ages, and others. This panel asks for critical contributions that take up relational approaches to the Indigenous turn that ultimately challenge and depart from white, heteronormative subjectivities by accounting for complexity, nuance, liminality, and/or queerness in their analyses.

Abstracts due September 15th, 2024 to the ICMS Confex site: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/cfp.cgi

Organized by Sarah LaVoy-Brunette & Jordan Chauncy

Contact: sfl39@cornell.edu

Panel: “Red Reading the Premodern” (hybrid)
60th International Congress on Medieval Studies

Kalamazoo, Michigan
May 9-10, 2025

This panel takes up Cherokee scholar Scott Andrews’ 2018 challenge to interpret (non-Indigenous) literature from Indigenous perspectives, an approach that he labels a ‘Red Reading,’ and extends it to premodern texts. Red Reading allows us to reconsider premodern texts, divorcing them from engrained approaches towards a plurality of perspectives. Our session takes a global approach to Indigeneity, and we welcome approaches and methods that extend from Indigenous communities within and beyond Turtle Island (examples of the latter includes Sami, Asante, Okinawan, or Zapotec to name but a few).

The threads of Red Reading are many, and we welcome papers that consider (but are not limited to) the following areas of interrogation:

• Reading premodern texts through Indigenous literary approaches and methods
• The representation of Indigenous peoples in premodern texts
• The early threads of settler-colonial ideologies
• Indigenous adaptations/retellings of medieval texts
• Indigenous translations of medieval stories/texts

Abstracts due September 15th, 2024 to the ICMS Confex site: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/cfp.cgi

Organized by Brenna Duperron & Sarah LaVoy-Brunette

Contact: Brenna.Duperron@dal.ca

Are you interested in working with medieval charters? Do you want to learn new interdisciplinary working methods?

The ERC project “People And Writing” was born with the aim of investigating non-aristocratic written production and the level of participation of local societies. One of the main objectives is to create a methodology that allows a complete understanding of writing through the analysis of preserved manuscripts. Our goal is to open this methodology to society as a whole and *we want you to be part of it!*

This workshop will consist of testing this methodology using five digitized original documents* from northern Portugal, dating from the 10th to the 12th centuries. After the registration process is complete, we will invite all participants to a meeting (online) where we will explain in detail what the activity will entail, providing access to the necessary materials and working tools, as well as the composition of the working groups. From that moment, the groups can start working autonomously on the activity (online), for which they will have one month to complete. Once finished, each group will receive a correction proposal to compare the results. After that, each individual will need to fill out an evaluation questionnaire.

Interested? We would love to have your collaboration. Don’t let anything hold you back, this activity is open to all audiences and professional profiles, regardless of their field of expertise. No previous knowledge of palaeography is required.

• Registration form <https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdcWGqHDTaaO_S-lzHWZ58L1dNgi2Dh5XgTqyT4HlNGv4w0eQ/viewform>
• Initial meeting date: September 30, 2024 (5:00 PM CEST)
• Activity completion and response submission: October 31, 2024
• Approximate total hours of teamwork: 10 hours
• Registration deadline: September 15

The International Albertus Magnus Society (IAMS) Call For Papers for the International Mediaeval Congress (IMC), Leeds, UK, 7-10 July 2025

The International Albertus Magnus Society (IAMS; https://www.albertthegreat.org) would like to sponsor one or more sessions during the International Mediaeval Congress (IMC), Leeds, UK, 7-10 July 2025  https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2025/.

For 2025 the IMC will have as its theme “Worlds of Learning.” Although individual papers need not address this theme explicitly, nonetheless it offers numerous opportunities for AlbertuH-nets Magnus scholars. Papers might examine Albert’s role in the creation of the Dominican educational curriculum; the influence of his works through vernacular translations; his reception of Greek, Hebrew, or Arabic sources; and much more. The IMC deadline for proposed sessions is September 30, 2024. We invite scholars to submit proposals by September 15, 2024 to Irven M. Resnick (Irven-Resnick@utc.edu) and Mercedes Rubio (mercedes.rubio@villanueva.edu). A proposal requires a title and an abstract not to exceed 100 words. Please include your full name; email address; postal address; telephone number; full affiliation details (department, institution); and title (e.g. Dr, Ms, Mr, Mx, Professor etc).

Although we would prefer in-person presentations, virtual presentations will also be considered. A ninety-minute session typically offers three papers; each presenter will be allowed 20 minutes, to be followed by 10 minutes of questions and discussion. Papers may be presented in languages other than English, although these may have a more limited audience. It will be necessary to include an abstract in English, nonetheless.

If you have any questions, please contact either Irven M. Resnick (Irven-Resnick@utc.edu) and Mercedes Rubio (mercedes.rubio@villanueva.edu).