The Medieval Academy Blog

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.

The fifth annual Canada Chaucer Seminar will be held at the University of Toronto on Saturday, April 27th, 2013. The aim of the seminar is to provide a one-day forum that will bring together scholars, from Canada and elsewhere, working on Chaucer and on late medieval literature and culture.

The 2013 gathering will include plenary papers by Ardis Butterfield (Yale) and James Weldon (Wilfrid Laurier), several sessions of conference papers, and a concluding roundtable.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute conference papers on any aspect late medieval English literary culture.  Submit one-page abstracts by 15 January 2013 to:

william.robins@utoronto.ca

and

gisellegos@fas.harvard.edu

William Robins
Associate Professor of English and Medieval Studies University of
Toronto
416-585-4432
william.robins@utoronto.ca

Dr. Giselle Gos
Post-doctoral Fellow
Department of English
Harvard University
gisellegos@fas.harvard.edu

The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce its Third Annual Undergraduate Conference entitled “Corpus: the Body in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.”  The conference will take place on April 19, 2013 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.  They are currently calling for abstracts from interested undergraduates.

Medieval and Renaissance views of the body have come to us from a rich trove of sources, from poetic portrayals in texts to mappae mundi to figures sculpted from stone.   This conference seeks to address the numerous and changing depictions of bodies during the early periods from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives.   Some potential topics include holy and unholy bodies, the body as metaphor, theatrical portrayals of bodies, the body in music, medieval medicine and the advent of anatomy, the body in pain and at play, superstitions and the gendered body, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish perspectives on bodies, depictions of bodies in art and print, bodies bound by canon and secular law, and monstrous races.

All submitters should send an abstract of no more than 250 words, including their name and college affiliation (if applicable), to mylitalo@utk.edu by no later than February 4, 2013. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 19.   Additionally, the Marco Institute plans to award seven $100 travel grants to non-UT students on a competitive basis.   A $250 prize funded by Keith Taylor will be awarded to the best paper presentation. A $15 registration fee will be collected on the day of the conference.

The plenary speaker is Elina Gertsman, Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University.  She is the author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010) and the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (2010), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (2011) and Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces (2012).