The Medieval Academy Blog

Textual Heritage and Information Technologies
El’Manuscript-2022
Innsbruck, Austria
5-9 September 2022
https://www.uibk.ac.at/congress/elmanuscript2022-slawistik/

We are pleased to invite submissions of abstracts for the
El’Manuscript-2022 international conference on the creation and
development of information systems for storage, description, processing,
analysis, and publication of medieval and early modern hand-written and
printed texts and documentary records. Any person involved in the
creation or application of these resources —including researchers;
instructors; staff of libraries, museums, and archives; programmers, and
undergraduate and graduate students— is welcome to participate.

El’Manuscript 2022 is the ninth in a series of biennial international
conferences entitled “Textual Heritage and Information Technologies”.
The conferences bring together linguists, specialists in historical
source criticism, IT specialists, and others involved in studying and
publishing our textual heritage. Along with the lectures, a summer
school will be part of the conference, which will allow practitioners to
become familiar with various systems and methods for working with
manuscripts and texts.

The working language of the 2022 conference is English. In the
philological sections talks in Russian are welcome but must be
accompanied by powerpoint slides in English. Accepted abstracts will be
published in print and online before the conference.

Papers presented at the conference will be published in the 2023 volume
of the peer reviewed journal Scripta & e-Scripta and on the
textualheritage.org website.

Click here for more information.

Multilingual Dynamics of Medieval Literature in Western Europe
Utrecht University
21–23 September 2022

The medieval world was by no means monolingual. Languages flourished and grew, circulated and travelled across geo-political frontiers. This was true of vernacular languages and perhaps especially so for Latin, a cosmopolitan language par excellence. The multilingualism of the medieval world has been at the forefront of research agendas over the past decade across medieval studies. But what were the stakes and consequences of multilingualism for literary culture? And how do these change if we think of multilingualism through cultural, social, artistic, or material lenses? As part of the NWO-funded research project ‘The Multilingual Dynamics of the Literary Culture of Medieval Flanders, c. 1200- c. 1500’, we invite proposals for 20 minute papers addressing any aspect of medieval literature and literary culture. Papers should address not only what has been missed in previous scholarship, but also ask where the study of the multilingual in medieval literary culture should turn its attention in the future. Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• court and urban communities and their language(s)
• administrative multilingualism
• monastic multilingualism
• commercial issues
• reception milieux
• genre and linguistic frontiers
• contact zones

We welcome proposals from scholars at all career stages—and from all disciplinary backgrounds. We particularly encourage applications by early career researchers. To this end, younger colleagues and those without permanent positions will be eligible to apply for financial support with the costs of accommodation and travel. At the time of publishing this Call, it is our intention to hold the conference in person in Utrecht. The working language will be English. Speakers may be invited after the conference to contribute to a book of essays, which we hope to publish in Open Access in early 2023. Proposals of no more than 250 words should be sent to the project team at multilingualdynamics@gmail.com by 1^st April 2022.

For further information about the NWO ‘Multilingual Dynamics’ project at Utrecht University, visit: https://multilingualdynamics.sites.uu.nl/.

Call for MAA Session Proposals
2023 AHA Annual Meeting, Philadelphia

Proposals due 15 February

The Medieval Academy of America invites proposals for sessions at the upcoming annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Philadelphia, January 5-8, 2023.

Each year the Medieval Academy co-sponsors sessions at the AHA’s annual meeting. This year, we aim to sponsor sessions that address an overarching theme of interest both to MAA members and broader audiences:

“(Re)Constructing the Middle Ages through Migrations, Mobilities, Mediations.” We offer this theme in encompassing terms. We imagine that panels might address a range of topics that include: indigenous and global perspectives that extend and challenge previous conceptions of the period; considerations of the field from historical scales that reveal temporal, geographic, or conceptual incongruities, from microhistories to civilizational studies; new narrations of the medieval past from unexpected or previously de-centered locales, objects, or persons; configurations of the field that blur or eradicate geographic, temporal, conceptual, or linguistic boundaries; reckonings of the medieval that jettison or expose its medievalist, nationalist, and colonialist legacies. How does your work invite reconsiderations of what is medieval? We’d love to hear from you!

We invite all manner of session programming, and strongly encourage MAA members to think beyond traditional paper panels. Roundtables, lightning talks, interviews, field conversations, pedagogical workshops, digital labs, performances, working sessions, and any other experimental and inclusive forms of knowledge-sharing you might propose will be received with enthusiasm.

We especially encourage session proposals from scholars representing a variety of identity positions and academic ranks and affiliations, including graduate students and independent scholars. We also encourage session proposals from scholars whose work features sources, geographies, and populations that are under-represented in traditional reckonings of “the medieval.”

The committee is happy to provide feedback on draft session proposals; please reach out to us at ahacommittee@themedievalacademy.org. In addition, MAA members may receive feedback on proposals as part of the review process.

How to submit a session proposal

There is a two-stage process for submitting a session proposal for MAA and AHA co-sponsorship.

1) Members of the Medieval Academy submit session proposals to the MAA’s AHA Program Committee through the online submission form by 11:59 p.m., February 1, 2022.

2) If the session proposal is approved by the MAA’s AHA Committee, the session organizer will be informed by February 11 and will then be responsible for submitting the proposal directly to the AHA before the deadline of 11:59 p.m., February 15, 2022, indicating that the session has the sponsorship of the Medieval Academy of America.

For more information, please see FAQ: Organizing MAA/AHA Sessions.

September 30-October 1, 2022
Newberry Library

Proposal Deadline: Tuesday, March 15, 2022

In 2018, “Attending” asked how Early Modern women’s action and agency shaped their lives and world. In 2022, we will turn to performance, asking how women’s performances of power, gender, and art before 1800 provide powerful paths towards understanding their lives and our own today. The conference will ask such questions as: How do medieval, early modern, and Indigenous women draw on various forms of power, from the racial to the religious, to perform different roles? How was the category of “woman” itself contested, reinforced, and complicated through the performance of gender? What did women choose to perform through music, dance, and visual art? Lastly, what responsibilities and possibilities do we have as scholars who teach and share our work with the public?

The conference will retain its innovative format, using a workshop model for most of its sessions to promote dialogue, augmented by a keynote lecture and a plenary panel on each of the four conference topics: power, gender, art, and public humanities/pedagogy.

We welcome proposals for workshop sessions. The submission deadline is Tuesday, March 15, 2022.

Workshops are 90-minute sessions organized by a group of two to four leaders who circulate readings, questions, and other materials in advance through the conference website. Leaders spend no more than twenty minutes framing the issues and opening up the conversation, then facilitate active participation and focused discussion. The best workshops are often comparative and interdisciplinary, and all allow participants to share information, pass on knowledge, ask advice, and learn something new. All workshop organizers are expected to register for, attend, and participate in the entire conference, not just their workshop.

For more information about the conference, including a list of plenary speakers and information about submitting a workshop proposal, please visit the conference website here: https://www.newberry.org/09302022-attending-women-1100-1800-performance

If you have any questions about the conference, please send an email to attending@newberry.org