The Medieval Academy Blog

UCLA MEMSA Graduate Student Conference:
Pedagogical Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Studies

The last two decades have seen radical revisions to curricula at universities and colleges around the world.  But have curricular changes been accompanied by pedagogical developments? When it comes to teaching, graduate students often learn by doing. By virtue of their experiments and their proximity to the undergraduate curriculum, they are among the most innovative educators on their campuses. The Medieval and Early Modern Students Association at UCLA invites graduate students to share their experience at a conference on June 7 that deals with teaching Medieval and Early Modern material in the undergraduate classroom. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following topics and lines of inquiry:

• Methodological approaches that lend themselves to Medieval and Early Modern Studies
• Classroom conditions (ideological, practical, technological, social/cultural, financial, theoretical) that shape approaches and assumptions in literary study
• Accessibility of older material to today’s undergraduates
• Student-directed learning and the canon
• The learning goals of an historical curriculum
• Presentism and productive anachronism
• Reception history and the critical heritage
• Challenges and opportunities of teaching older material
• Textual criticism and the literary archive
• Digital approaches and 21^st-century technology in the Medieval and Early Modern classroom
• Surveying the survey course
• Transformative pedagogy and Medieval and Early Modern studies
• Creating dialogues across the curriculum
• Performance studies
• Synthesizing research and reading with other undergraduate disciplines
• Seminar learning vs/and lecture learning
• Teaching writing in the Medieval and Early Modern studies
• Translation and multilingualism (teaching in translations vs. original languages)
• New Historicism and student learning
• Politics and pedagogy (teaching race, gender, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern studies)
• Theory in Medieval and Early Modern studies

We welcome abstracts from a variety of fields within or adjacent to Medieval and Early Modern studies. While specific teaching techniques are encouraged, we’d like papers that include a broader theoretical and pedagogical scope. Abstracts of less than 500 words for 20-minute papers should be emailed to memsa.ucla@gmail.com by March 15 with the subject line CONFERENCE ABSTRACT. Papers should be timed to less than 20 minutes.

The Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) is organizing the 6th Annual International Conference on Mediterranean Studies, 26-29 March 2013, Athens, Greece. The conference website is: www.atiner.gr/mediterranean.htm.

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars, researchers and students from all areas of Mediterranean Studies, such as history, arts, archaeology, philosophy, culture, sociology, politics, international relations, economics, business, sports, environment and ecology, etc.
The registration fee is €300 (euro), covering access to all sessions, two lunches, the official dinner of the conference (Greek Night), coffee breaks and conference material. Special arrangements will be made with a local luxury hotel for a limited number of rooms at a special conference rate. In addition, a number of social events will be organized: A Greek night of entertainment with dinner (the official dinner of the conference), an archaeological tour (urban walk) of Athens, a special one-day cruise in the Greek islands, and a one-day visit to Delphi. Details of the social program are available at http://www.atiner.gr/2013/SOC-MDT.htm
Please submit an abstract (email only) to: atiner@atiner.gr, using the abstract submission form available at http://www.atiner.gr/2013/FORM-MDT.doc by the 18 February 2013 to: Dr. Gregory A. Katsas, Academic Member of ATINER and Associate Professor, The American College of Greece-Deree College, Greece. Abstracts should include the following: Title of Paper, Full Name (s), Affiliation, Current Position, an email address, and at least 3 keywords that best describe the subject of your submission. Decisions are reached within 4 weeks.

If you want to participate without presenting a paper, i.e. organize a panel (session, mini conference), chair a session, review papers to be included in the conference proceedings or books, contribute to the editing of a book, or any other contribution, please send an email to Dr. Gregory T. Papanikos, President, ATINER (gtp@atiner.gr).

The Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER) was established in 1995 as an independent academic association with the mission to become a forum, where academics and researchers – from all over the world – could meet in Athens to exchange ideas on their research and to discuss future developments in their disciplines. Since 1995, ATINER has organized more than 200 international conferences, symposiums and events. It has also published approximately 150 books. Academically, the Institute consists of five Research Divisions and twenty-three Research Units. Each Research Unit organizes an annual conference and undertakes various small and large research projects. Academics and researchers are more than welcome to become members and contribute to ATINER’s objectives. The members of the Institute can undertake a number of academic activities. If you want to become a member, please download the form (membership form). For more information or suggestions, please send an email to: info@atiner.gr.

The Mediterranean Seminar/UCMRP is proposing two sessions for the 128th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association to be held in Washington DC, 2-5 January 2014.

The theme of the Meeting is “Disagreement, Debate, Discussion”.

The first session: “Debating Muslim-Christian-Jewish Relations in the Medieval Mediterranean” will focus on the various scholarly interpretations of the nature of such inter-communal relations. Were these relations characterized by convivencia or a “clash of civilizations”? Or are there better paradigms for accounting for such interaction? How did contemporaries see such relationships… as problematic, or paradoxical?

The second session: “Muslims, Christians and Jews Disputing in the Medieval Mediterranean” will look at disputations and debates that were carried out at the time by members of different faiths. This may include formal verbal disputations, polemical writing and correspondence, ideological trends (eg.: crusade, and Jihad), missionizing, and other forms of debates, dialogues and discussions.

Scholars interested in presenting in either of these sessions should submit:
– a 200 wd abstract
– a 200 wd biographical statement
– a 2-3 page CV
– complete contact information (including phone number)
– a request for AV equipment (if necessary)
– and confirmation that the paper will be presented in person, with a length of no more than 20 minutes.

All of this should be submitted in Word (doc) format (not pdf, please) to:
Brian Catlos and Alex Novikoff
by 7 February 2013.

Faculty and scholars of the University of California who present in these sessions will be eligible to apply for travel support through the Mediterranean Seminar.

University of California, Santa Barbara Medieval Studies
Annual Graduate Student Conference

May 18, 2013
University of California, Santa Barbara

Call for Papers: “Says who? Contested Spaces, Voices, and Texts”
Keynote Speaker: Professor Steven Justice, Department of English, UC Berkeley

Since Henri Lefebvre’s 1958 The Social Production of Space, medieval scholars have increasingly been interested in the interplay between the political, the economic, and the cultural with the concept of physical space. How is space constructed by social forces, and how is society influenced by either physical or ideological spaces? More specifically among these social forces, our conference focuses on the concept of authority: who gets to say how political, cultural, and economic processes take place within a specific space, and how they are spoken of, written of, and remembered? Conversely, how might speaking itself be a form of resistance against authority? We encourage interdisciplinary discourse around the theme of authority in any aspect(s) of law, culture, and society in the Middle Ages. For example, how do kings maintain authority over their subjects, and how is this authority constructed or contested? How do writers establish the authority of their texts, and why do they even need to? How was God’s authority sometimes challenged or undermined? Or was it?

Possible topics include but are not limited to:
•    war as a means of contesting spaces or territories
•    winners and losers: who gets to tell the story?
•    public versus private space: who controls and defines these spaces and how?
•    God as the ultimate authority: religious discourses and conflicts
•    establishing authorship, auctoritas, and differing roles in the creation of oral narratives, manuscripts, or printed editions
•    alteration of texts (by scribes, commentators, or translators, for example) as a means of contesting authority and asserting one’s power
•    linguistics: code-switching or language use as contesting authority or asserting one’s power or independence
•    process and performance of speech as constructing or resisting authority (such as in court culture, pageantry, or parliament)
•    use of heraldic motifs (how were they used or changed?) in books
•    patronage as a form of contestation or affirmation of one’s power
•    gendered spaces and voices: women patrons, women’s vs. men’s roles
•    the creation, use, and transformation of urban spaces

The conference is open to graduate students studying the Middle Ages (300-1500) in all disciplines, geographical regions, and stages of research.

We welcome 250- to 300-word abstracts for presentations 20 minutes in length. Please submit your name, email, university, and departmental affiliation with your abstract to Anneliese Pollock (anneliese_pollock@umail.ucsb.edu) by February 15, 2013.