The Medieval Academy Blog

‘Borderlines’ is an annual postgraduate conference in medieval and early modern studies, which aims to bring together researchers in a variety of disciplines, at MA, PhD and postdoctoral level, from across Ireland, Britain, Europe and around the world. The theme of this year’s conference will be ‘Site & Sound’. Amongst our many inheritances from the medieval and early modern ages, perhaps the most apparent and accessible are the streets, churches and landscapes we share with our ancestors. Along with these sites we have inherited a host of cultural assumptions about our spaces – big and small – from the home, through the city and the country, to our nations and the wider world around us.

While echoes persist in the spaces we inhabit, the languages we speak and the music we enjoy today, the sounds of the medieval and early modern ages are often obscured by the signal to noise ratio of the past to the present. In this conference, we hope to explore the sites and sounds of the past as the framework for an open and interdisciplinary consideration of current research in medieval and early modern studies. We welcome papers from researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Codicology, Drama, Film Studies, Folklore, Geography, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Music, Paleography, Philosophy and Theology. Topics may include (but are not limited to):
– Architecture and landscapes in the past and through time.
– Spatial dichotomies: urban/rural, public/private, male/female.
– The acoustics of space.
– The archaeological site and the idea(s) of excavation.
– The space of the page, the painting or the statue.
– The spaces and sounds of the text.
– Oral tradition.
– Drama on the stage and the page. Its spaces, sounds and spectacles.
– Art music, popular music and folkmusic in the past and in modern revivals.
– Music and space in the past and the present.
– Religious spaces, sounds and silences.
– Space, sound and the senses.
– (Re)creations of medieval and early modern spaces and sounds in film and television.

Please submit proposals of 250 words to borderlinesxvi@gmail.com by 1st March 2012.

On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life

Symposium, Wednesday May 9^th, 2012
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Deadline: March 12^th, 2012

The On the Edge committee seeks papers for a symposium accompanying the May 9th preview of the exhibit On the Edge: Medieval Margins and the Margins of Academic Life. We invite papers from graduate students and faculty that consider questions and problems related to the margins, either medieval or modern. Lucy Freeman Sandler, Professor of Art History Emerita, New York University will be the keynote speaker for the symposium.

Honoring the twentieth anniversary of Michael Camille’s Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art, the On the Edge exhibit will pair marginalia in illuminated manuscripts with photographs of life at the University of Chicago.  Camille’s groundbreaking work brought light to the confluence of the serious and the playful, the sacred and the profane in medieval manuscripts and architecture. The serious and the playful also converge at the university.  University life is defined not only by cutting edge research, but also by superstitions, protests, scavenger hunts, streakers in sneakers, social groups, and dance marathons. The On the Edge exhibit and symposium will explore the symmetry between the margins of academic life and medieval margins.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

Architecture
Alterity
Center and periphery
The betwixt
Manuscripts: marginal imagery, textual emendations and notes
Margins of the university
Marginalized academic disciplines
Parody and play
Queering the middle ages

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words for a 20 minute talk to kLwood@uchicago.edu by March 12^th, 2012 if you are interested in presenting at the symposium. Attending ICMS the next day? Kalamazoo is just a short train ride from Chicago.

On the Edge will be on view from May 19 – August 10, 2012 at the Special Collections Research Center Exhibition Gallery.

Medieval Section within the GNEL/ASNEL Annual Conference, Berne, May 18 – 20, 2012, on “Post-Empire Imaginaries?  Anglophone Literature, History and the Demise of Empires” (http://www.gnel2012.ens.unibe.ch)

Call for Papers
In the past decade, postcolonial theory has increasingly been applied to studies of
the Middle Ages, re-examining a range of canonical works, such as Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales, and rethinking the hitherto clearly demarcated temporal
boundaries between the modern and the medieval. While the first momentum of what
has become postcolonial medievalism struggled with questions of anachronism,
scholars like Jeffrey Jerome Cohen have since shown that rather than being
inherently different and having become obsolete, the very mediacy of the Middle
Ages makes room for transhistorical intersections between the medieval and the
modern.

Within the context of the GNEL/ASNEL conference on post-empire imaginaries, we
invite papers on all aspects of medieval literature and culture that revolve around
premodern imaginations of both a distant other and/or a local self. In a world in which
there are vast areas of terra incognita, imaginaries step in to fill the void of the
unknown. Medieval histories, chronicles and stories of pilgrimage and peregrination
shape and negotiate fictions of alterity just as they create ideas of sameness and
identity. History here does not merely form the backdrop against which these stories
are told but it is part of the meaning they construct. The historicity of both ideological
and geographical mapping of familiar and alien spaces, therefore, will form a
common ground for discussion, linking our section on the Middle Ages to the wider
framework of the conference as a whole. By investigating both cross-cultural and –
temporal imaginaries, we will be looking beyond traditionally demarcated boundaries
of empire(s) and re-examine Medieval Europe as pre- and post-empire at the same
time. Medieval fictions of alterity and sameness not only gave rise to modern notions
of empire but were already concerned with a certain post-empire nostalgia expressed
in such works as Gildas’s Concerning the Ruin of Britain.

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:
* premodern colonialism/imperialism
* medieval Orientalism
* geographical/ideological mapping
* medieval Christianity and Islam
* translating culture
* Anglo-Saxon England as postcolony of the Roman Empire
* medieval (literary) hybridity and alterity
* medievalism and historical trauma

Confirmed keynote speaker:
Alfred Hiatt, Reader in Medieval Literature and Culture, Queen Mary, University of London, U.K.

Papers are restricted to 20 mins. Please submit your abstract (max 200 words) and a short bio before 1 March 2012 to:

Prof. Dr. Annette Kern-Stähler
Chair of Medieval English Studies
English Department
University of Bern
Länggass-Strasse 49
CH-3012 Bern
Switzerland
annette.kern-staehler@ens.unibe.ch
Conference Website: http://www.gnel2012.ens.unibe.ch