CALL FOR PAPERS: Gender and Emotion

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2016
The University of Hull

6th – 8th January 2016

The grief-stricken faces at Edward’s deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry; the ambiguous ‘ofermod’ in The Battle of Maldon; the body-crumpling anguish of the Virgin witnessing the Man of Sorrows; the mirth of the Green Knight; the apoplectic anger of the mystery plays’ Herod and the visceral visionary experiences of Margery of Kempe all testify to the ways in which the medieval world sought to express, perform, idealise and understand emotion.

Yet while such expressions of emotion are frequently encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines, defining, quantifying and analysing the purposes of emotion and its relationship to gender often proves difficult. Are personal items placed in early Anglo Saxon graves a means for the living to let go of, or perpetuate emotion, and how are these influenced by the body in the grave? Do different literary and historical forms lend themselves to diverse ways of expressing men’s and women’s emotion? How does a character expressing emotion on stage or in artwork use body, gender and articulation to communicate emotion to their viewer? Moreover, is emotion viewed differently depending on the gendered identity of the body expressing it? Is emotion and its reception used to construct, deconstruct, challenge or confirm gender identities?

This conference seeks to explore the manifestations, performances and functions of emotion in the early to late Middle Ages, and to examine the ways in which emotion is gendered and used to construct gender identities.

Proposals are now being accepted for 20 minute papers. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

• Gender and emotional expression: representing and performing emotion
• The emotional body
• Philosophies of emotion: theory and morality
• Emotional objects and vessels of emotion
• Language and emotion and the languages of emotion
• Preserving or perpetuating emotion
• Emotions to be dealt with: repressing, curtailing, channelling, transforming
• Forbidden emotion
• Living through (someone else’s) emotion
• The emotions of war and peace
• The emotive ‘other’
• Place and emotion
• Queer emotion

We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology and drama. A travel fund is available for postgraduate students who would otherwise be unable to attend.

Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black at d.black@hull.ac.uk by the 7th September 2015. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study (if applicable).

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Life of Testimony / Testimony of Lives - a life-writing conference

Testimony evokes first and foremost legal connotations and images of the courtroom. In this context testimony is bound by strict procedural conventions and the act of testifying in a courtroom can incur actual legal consequences. Outside of the courtroom, however, life-writing (in its broadest sense) can serve as a form of testimony which, while not necessarily causing specific legal ramifications, presents a life’s experience for judgment by the public. This relationship between an idea of testimony and the practice of life-writing is twofold: on the one hand, authors of life-writing may have certain testimonial or confessional intentions and use writing as a way of bearing witness. Readers, on the other hand, may interpret various forms of life-writing as testimony even if the author’s intentions about recording their experience are unknown. The act of interpreting or employing life-writing as testimony thus demands ethical scrutiny from readers as well as scholars using such materials.

This conference aims to explore the notion of testimony as an idea that pervades the practice, reception and interpretation of life-writing across time periods, academic disciplines and literatures. We are interested in testimony as a broad concept, and hope to investigate its scope and impact as an interpretive lens through which the breadth of life-writing can be viewed. Not only does testimony bear witness to the lives of individuals, it takes on a life (and even an afterlife) of its own as it is read and reinterpreted throughout history.

Confirmed Keynotes: Professor Paul Strohm (Columbia University), Professor Roger Woods (Nottingham University).

Papers are invited from all scholars (including postgraduate students) across the fields of (comparative) literature, history, philosophy, art, cultural studies, religious studies, curation and conservation of archival material, memory studies, and film studies. Topics could include but are not limited to:

· The ethics of producing, reading and interpreting life-writing as a form of testimony
· Stylistic, rhetorical and aesthetic dimensions of life-writing
· The relationship between authors and readers of life-writing
· Truth and subjectivity
· The afterlife of testimony
· Images as testimony
· Culture as testimony, eg. published diaries of Holocaust survivors
· Persuasion and manipulation of and within life-writing sources
· Instrumentalisation of life-writing for political purposes
· Life-writing as (historical) evidence and the act of bearing witness
· Life-writing and the law
· Reappropriation and adaptation of life-writing in popular culture
· History and the individual
· Challenges and conditions of writing lives

The conference will be hosted at Queen Mary University of London (Arts Two lecture theatre) on 5 and 6 May 2016, the registration fee will be £35,-/£20,- (non-concession/concession).

Please submit a short abstract (c. 300 words) and a short bio (c. 100 words) to Lotte Fikkers and Melissa Schuh at lifeoftestimony@gmail.com by Sunday 17 January 2016. Notification of acceptance will be given by 8 February 2016.

CALL FOR PAPERS: The Idea of a Life, 1500-1700

Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University

MBI Al Jaber Auditorium, Corpus Christi College, Friday 17 June 2016

‘I pray you, in your letters, 

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am’ 

-- Othello, Act 5, Scene 2

What was a life in early modern England and Europe? What patterns and templates were used to sort, sift, organise and represent experience? How were models for a life produced and reworked? How was a life evaluated, in terms of various sorts of good — moral, spiritual, civic, familial, economic? What were the moments, and what were the processes, by which a representation of a life was circulated? Are Burckhardtian models of the birth of Renaissance individuality and depth still useful to describe early modern culture, or do we need new paradigms? If much recent early modern work has been organised around ideas of networks, coteries and communities, how has the idea of a life
been revised? 

If autobiography is often seen as a nineteenth-century form, what kind of pre-history does it experience in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How has the turn to the archive reformed our sense of early modern lives? For scholars today, what is the status of biography as a way of organising analysis of the period?

The Centre for Early Modern Studies at Oxford University invites proposals for 20-minute papers on topics that engage with the idea of a life, 1500-1700, from any disciplinary perspective. Papers are welcome on English or European materials, and from all disciplinary perspectives.

Papers might include (but are not limited to) topics such as:

• Life and the archive: inclusions, exclusions, mediations
• Memorialization: modes of remembering a life
• Recording lives: note-taking, diary keeping, commonplace books, information management
• Classical models of a life
• Saints lives and martyrologies
• Public and private lives: honour, service, love, family
• Typology and reiterated lives
• Interiority and inwardness
• Experimental predestinarianism, and the search for signs of grace
• Conduct books
• Fulfilment, contentment, happiness
• Posthumous lives, reputation, honour, influence
• Forms of autobiography and experiments in life-writing
• Lives of artists
• Exemplary lives
• The good life
• The role of biography in early modern studies
• Editing lives and letters
• The stages of life: youth and age.

Please send a 300-word proposal and a brief (one-page) CV to Dr Adam Smyth
(adam.smyth@balliol.ox.ac.uk) by 25 April 2016.

POSITION: Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Warwick

Italian Studies at the University of Warwick is seeking a postdoctoral Research Fellow as part of the ERC-funded Starting Investigator Grant on ‘Aristotle in the Italian Vernacular: Rethinking Renaissance and Early-Modern Intellectual History (c. 1400-c. 1650)’. The Research Fellow will have an 18-month appointment and will conduct research on topics related to the interpretation of Aristotle’s works in the Italian vernacular, with particular attention to the genres of Aristotelian works written in Italian. The deadline for applications is 1 February 2016.

For full details, please see here.

Dr David Lines
Italian Studies
School of Modern Languages and Cultures
University of Warwick
Coventry CV4 7AL
United Kingdom

Tel. +44 (0)2476 523 250

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural

"Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural" an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal published biannually by Penn State Press, actively seeks submissions of articles and will consider proposals for special themed issues, subject to review.

"Preternature" provides an interdisciplinary, inclusive forum for the study of topics that stand in the liminal space between the known world and the inexplicable across cultures and historical periods. The journal embraces a broad and dynamic definition of the preternatural that encompasses the weird and uncanny-magic, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, esotericism, demonology, monstrophy, and more, recognizing that the areas of magic, religion, and science are fluid and that their intersections should continue to be explored, contextualized, and challenged.

Visit the journal website at:

https://www.editorialmanager.com/preternature/default.aspx

Or contact the editor, Debbie Felton (Classics, Univ. of Mass), felton@classics.umass.edu for further details.