The Medieval Academy Blog

Romance: Places, Times, Modes

School of English

University College Cork

Cork, 21-22 September 2012

Romance has been one of the most resilient of literary kinds, existing in its own right, moulding itself in other genres, and transforming itself in the long history of its aesthetic and cultural traffic from antiquity to early modern times, and between different cultures. Royal and popular, romance has absorbed, often at once, a plethora of discourses concerned with politics and privacy at crucial moments in European history and in its contacts with the worlds beyond Europe. This conference offers the chance to reassess the nature and importance of romance within the larger frame of cross-cultural, interdiscriplinary, comparative, and theoretical studies. The identification of new romances, the exploration of romance in contact with other genres and modes, and cultures other than English, and the larger reflections romance facilitate in the process of absorption and reconfiguration of places and times in which it is produced—all these are topics of considerable interest and value. At a further lever, such imperatives have much to suggest about the processes by which the romance itself has undergone transformation and has transformed our understanding of its place in literary history across periods and genres, and beyond borders and countries. Contributions to this discussion are invited, covering as wide a range in terms of period, concept and approach as critical imagination can devise, to explore the imaginative suppleness and dynamic of romance across places, times, and modes.

Topics may include but are not limited to

Ethics and politics
Movement in time and space
Travel and geography
Contacts with the East; Islam
Classics
Sources and analogues
Crossovers with other genres
Cross-national / cross-ethnic contacts
Print and manuscript
Theories of romance
Allegory
Religion
Gender and Sexuality
Romance and the arts
Translations and adaptations

A 200-page abstract, including contact information, should be sent to Goran Stanivukovic (G.Stanivukovic@ucc.ie) and Sergi Mainer (S.Mainer@ucc.ie), School of English, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland, before 1 June 2012.

(See our calendar for more conferences)

24.-26.III.2012 : Romance in Medieval Britain. 13th biennial conference (Oxford, University of Oxford, St Hugh’s College). – http://www.medieval.ox.ac.uk/rmb2012/index.html

(See our conference calendar for more conferences)

Voici l’annonce d’un colloque international organisé par l’École nationale des chartes (Paris) les 22 et 23 mars prochains

Parcourir le monde : les voyages d’Orient au Moyen Âge et dans la première modernité”

dirigé par M. Abdullah Al-Khateeb, professeur associé à l’université de Djeddah, directeur du Bureau culturel saoudien,
et Mme Dominique de Courcelles, professeur et directeur de recherche au CNRS.

http://www.enc.sorbonne.fr/parcourir-le-monde-les-voyages-d-orient-au-moyen-age-et-dans-la-premiere-modernite.html

I am organizing a graduate student conference on medieval studies to be held at Yale University on March 31st. We are expecting between fifty and seventy attendees, from universities in the Northeast all the way to California and the UK. I write to inquire whether you have any promotional material, advance copies, or review copies of titles relating to medieval studies which you would like to send us to display during our registration and reception.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE

On March 31, 2012, a group of Yale graduate students will host the 29^th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference.  The interdisciplinary conference, founded in 1983 by the late Prof. Alison Goddard Elliot of Brown University, is hosted on a rotating basis by Yale, the University of Connecticut, and Brown, and it brings together graduate students in Medieval Studies from across the Northeast and, increasingly, from other parts of the country as well.  The conference is organized every year by graduate students, and only graduate students may present papers at the conference.

The title of the 2011 conference is “Audience in the Middle Ages.”  This very broad heading has elicited abstracts from many of the different disciplines that comprise Medieval Studies: from manuscript studies and palaeography, to liturgical studies, to hagiography, literary studies, and the history of art, as well as more theoretical approaches to ideas of audience in the Middle Ages.

The conference will feature a plenary lecture by Elaine Treharne, Professor of English at Florida State University. Professor Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford, forthcoming), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), among many others. We are proud to note that universities in the Northeast (NYU, UConn, Princeton, Villanova) as well as further afield (Birmingham, Cambridge, UC-Berkeley) will be represented.

If you would like to send us materials, please direct them to:

Audience in the Middle Ages
c/o Joseph Stadolnik
Department of English
Yale University
P.O. Box 208302
New Haven, CT 06520-8302