CALL FOR PAPERS: Medieval and Early Modern Studies Symposium ‘Sex and Gender Politics’

Venue: Northumbria University, Newcastle

Date: 9 October 2019

Keynote speaker: Dr Elena Woodacre (University of Winchester), author of The Queens Regnant of Navarre: succession, politics and partnership, 1274-1512, lead editor of the Routledge History of Monarchy, founder of the Royal Studies Network

This one-day event hosted by the Medieval and Early Modern Studies research group at Northumbria University, Newcastle, brings together academics, early career researchers, and PhD students for an interdisciplinary symposium linking new and more traditional approaches to medieval and early modern gender studies broadly defined.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of approaches to gender studies to include, for example, incorporation of LGBTQ and challenging heteronormativity, history of emotions, and the recognition that to understand gender relations, we must equally study both femininity and masculinity. At the same time, interdisciplinary approaches, from literature, archaeology, music, history, linguistics, art and performance, continue to provide us with new and exciting ways of unlocking experiences of the past as both physical and sexual, as well as structured by gendered social norms.

We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers on the theme of ‘Sex and Gender Politics’ but are also open to other formats (roundtable discussions, shorter work-in-progress papers, performances, reconstructions, posters etc). We hope that the informal atmosphere of a symposium will provide a friendly forum for both developed work as well as work-in-progress and trying out new ideas.

We welcome proposals relating to gender, sex and politics in their broadest senses. Moreover, we understand the term ‘politics’ broadly, as incorporating both governance and power relations between individuals and groups, therefore relating to court and diplomacy, local, family, and religious politics.

Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

• Expressions of identity
• Mistresses and favourites
• Cross-dressing on stage and beyond
• Sexual violence and harassment 
• Representation and iconography
• Sexuality and eroticism
• Authority and power
• History of emotions
• Consumerism and material culture
• Work and leisure
• Boundaries, restrictions, limitations, and resistance

Please email your proposals to Katarzyna Kosior by 8 July 2019.

ALL FOR PAPE

MaRSA CALL FOR PAPERS: "In the Margins"

Medieval and Renaissance Student Association California State University, Long Beach 

Deadline for submissions:  February 6, 2018
Contact email:  medren.csulb@gmail.com

The Medieval and Renaissance Student Association (MaRSA) of California State University, Long Beach is seeking individual papers as well as panel submissions for their graduate student conference. The conference will be held at the Karl Anatol Center on the campus of CSULB on April 19-20th, 2018.

This year’s theme, “In the Margins,” engages the spaces, both literal and theoretical, that have been allocated to the periphery of the medieval and Renaissance period. Thus, papers and topics that MaRSA would like to engage with embrace the many facets of medieval and Renaissance marginality. As an interdisciplinary conference, we welcome submissions from a wide array of disciplines focusing on the art, literature, and history of the period. Paper and panel topics might address issues (but are not limited to) the following:

• The relationship between marginalia and text
• Liminal spaces and/or identities in medieval and/or Renaissance narratives
• Peripheral and/or non-literary medieval and Renaissance texts
• The appropriation of medieval and Renaissance culture in contemporary political movements and/or popular culture
• Educational and pedagogical approaches to the marginalization of medieval and Renaissance texts
• The boundaries between body and soul as depicted in hagiographical literature and art
• Depictions of alterity in Shakespeare and/or other Early Modern Drama
• Sexuality and nontypical gender expression in medieval and Renaissance texts and/or culture

Presentations should run for approximately 15 minutes. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words along with a current CV by email to medren.csulb@gmail.com by February 6, 2018.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Bodies in Motion in the Early Modern World

‘Bodies in Motion in the Early Modern World’ aims to explore both the politics of physical and spatial movement and its consequences on the geographical and cultural boundaries of the known world between 1500 and 1800.

Keynote Speaker: Dr Morwenna Carr, University of Roehampton

Call for papers:

We are inviting proposals for 20-minute papers and posters from graduate students and early career researchers working on early modern European cultures, literature, history, art history, music, and geography. As well as traditional 20-minute papers, we will select from the submissions 4 papers to participate in a end-of-day roundtable. We are particularly interested in papers reflecting on the role that our research has in illuminating our understanding of events of international political relevance, and on our responsibility to discuss these events from the point of view of experts in the humanities. 

Possible topics include (but are not limited too):

• Migrations and Identity
• Urban Space and Topography
• Ability and Disability
• Fictional Genres
• Gender and Sexuality
• Society, Work, and Labour
• Space in Performance, Performance in Space

Paper proposals of up to 200 words, accompanied by a short biography, should be submitted to cemsconference@gmail.com by 31st March 2017. For any queries, please use the same address. A limited number of travel bursaries will be made available.

Location: Council Room (K2.29) King’s Building Strand 

When: 16/06/2017 (09:00-18:00)

Papers to be submitted to cemsconference@gmail.com please also use this address for queries related to the call.  More information here: http://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/cemshub/
Please direct all other enquiries to cems@kcl.ac.uk

CALL FOR PAPERS: Sound in the Early Modern City - Early Modern Conversion

King's College, 11 April 2014, 13:00 - 12 April 2014, 18:00

This, the first in a series of workshops, is devoted to the theme of ‘The Early Modern City as the Site of Conversion’, and will take place in King's College, Cambridge on 10-11 April 2014. A small number of bursaries are available to enable doctoral students to attend; these will cover reasonable travel expenses, accommodation and subsistence costs. Those wishing to apply should send a short CV together with a brief description of their current research project and its relevance to the theme of the Workshop to Iain Fenlon, King’s College, Cambridge, CB2 1ST. The deadline for applications is 15 March 2014.

Whether it is an awakening to a new faith, an induction into a religious cult or radical political movement, a sexual transformation, or the re-engineering of human beings as bio-mechanical “cyborgs,” conversion is a source of fascination, a promise of newness, and a focus of anxiety for people in the twenty-first century. We do not know if such conversions are inward turnings toward a better life or monstrous impositions upon unwitting victims. We cannot fathom how individuals or groups of people are able to convert to a new politics, religion, or way of life all at once and quite completely, as if they had never been other than what they have become. We would not want to part with the freedom of self- determination embodied in conversion, which seems to be its purest expression, even though we are troubled by what radical transformations tell us about the instability and changeability of human beings.

Among other goals, the Forms of Conversion project will develop an historical understanding of conversion that will enlighten modern debates about corporeal, sexual, psychological, political and spiritual kinds of transformation. The project will study how early modern Europeans changed their confessional, social, political, and even sexual identities. These subjective changes were of a piece with transformations in their world—the geopolitical reorientation of Europe in light of emerging relations with Islam and the Americas; the rethinking and the translation of the knowledge of Greek and Latin Antiquity, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam; changes in and changing uses of the built environment; the reimagining of God.

This workshop is part of the CRASSH five year project, Forms of Conversion, in a partnership led by McGill University, including researchers from universities in Canada, the USA, Australia, and England as well as leading centres for the humanities and/or early modern studies, and four of Canada’s top-ranked performing arts organizations.

For further information about this project please contact Simon Goldhill at CRASSH.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Early Modern Jarman

a Jarman 2014 event, 1 February 2014, Anatomy Theatre & Museum, King's College London

We invite proposals for papers (20 mins) on Jarman's adaptations of early modern texts and his deployment of historical figures and images in relation to: punk and the avant garde; national identity; politics and activism; sexuality/gender/desire; HIV/AIDS.

Keynote papers will be given by Jim Ellis (University of Calgary), Jeffrey Masten (Northwestern University) and Pascale Aebischer (University of Exeter). The conference includes admission to the “Pandemonium” exhibition in the Inigo Rooms (Somerset House East Wing), King's College London.

Expressions of interest should be sent to the organizers, Pascale Aebischer and Gordon McMullan, by 29 November 2013. Proposals from PhD students working in all appropriate fields (early modern studies, film studies, art history, etc.) are especially welcome.

The conference fee is £35 (waged) or £25 (unwaged).

Selected papers will be included in a special issue of Shakespeare Bulletin. Proposals of up to 300 words for 6000‐word essays should be sent to the special issue guest editor, Catherine Silverstone, by 8 November 2013.

For further information, see http://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/shakespeare_bulletin/calls.html. The conference is hosted by the London Shakespeare Centre and supported by Shakespeare Bulletin and the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Exeter.