Monday, January 30, 2017

‘Approaching the Historical’ is a one-day symposium exploring literary linguistic approaches to Old, Middle, and Early Modern English texts, being held in June 2017 at the University of Nottingham. Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted by 27 February 2017. Full details can be found in the attached PDF document.

Kind regards,

Katrina Wilkins
PhD Researcher, Teaching Affiliate
University of Nottingham
School of English
katrina.wilkins@nottingham.ac.uk

Friday, January 27, 2017

Global Digital Humanities Symposium

March 16-17, 2017
Union Building, Lake Huron Room
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan

Please register by: Friday, March 3, 11:59pm EST
Free and open to the public. Register at http://msuglobaldh.org/registration/

Digital Humanities at Michigan State University is proud to continue its symposium series on Global DH into its second year. We are delighted to feature speakers from outside of the area as well as expertise and work from faculty at Michigan State University in this two day symposium. 

Schedule

Thursday, March 16, 2017
  • 12:00-12:30 - Opening Remarks
  • 12:30-2:30 - Lightning Talk Session
  • 2:45-3:45 - Cultural Memory, Identities, and Social Justice
    • Shifting Representations of Zulu Identities, from Analog to Digital, Liz Timbs, MSU
    • Humanizing Data –or- DH against archival violences, Anelise Hanson Shrout, Cal State Fullerton
    • Witnessing Hate: Case Studies in Data, Documentation, and Social Justice, Andrea Ledesma, Brown
  • 4:00-5:00 - De-coding and re-coding literary canons
    • Forgetting the Famines: the Kiplings and their Indian Interlocutors, Amardeep Singh, Lehigh University
    • Retelling the Story of Okonkwo: A Digital exploration of the Clash of Cultures in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Tunde Opeibi, University of Lagos, Nigeria
    • Towards a Platform for Studying and Analyzing Chinese Poetry, Chao-Lin Liu, Harvard
  • 5:15-6:45 - ARC Panel: Access, Data, and Collaboration in the Global Digital Humanities

Friday, March 17, 2017
  • 9:00-10:00 - Keynote: Elizabeth LaPensee, MSU
  • 10:15-11:15 - Reconfiguring Narrative: Connectivities in Literary and Game Studies
    • Contending with Hegemonies, Exploring Linkages and Possibilities of Assertions in the Global South: A Study through Role Playing Computer Games, Siddhartha Chakraborti, Aligarh Muslim University
    • Hacking "el sistema": Digital Hyper-Punk Fiction in Latin America, Eduardo Ledesma, UIUC
    • Annotation, Bibliography, and Networks: Systems of Textual Classification for Premodern Chinese Texts, Evan Nicoll-Johnson, UCLA
  • 11:30-12:30 - Mapping and 3D Environments
    • Boundary-work: mapping borders, edges, and margins in “Fortress Europe, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Western Michigan
    • The $500 Challenge: 3D Modeling of Heritage Structures in Endangered or Developing Areas, William Spates, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, KK Birla Goa Campus 
  • 12:30-2:30 - Lunch (provided)
  • 2:30-4:00 - Workshop
  • 4:15-5:15 - Imagining the Past, Present, and Future of Digital Humanities(or Defining Digital Humanities: The Political and Ethical Stakes)
    • Archival Emanations and Contrapuntal Transformations: Digital Cultural Productions in Post-1965 Indonesia, Viola Lasmana, University of Southern California
    • Gaps and Silences: A Case Study in Web Archiving Diverse Content, Sigrid Anderson Cordell, Catherine Morse, Jo Angela Oehrli, Juli McLoone, Meredith Kahn, Michigan
    • Afrolatin@ Digital Humanities: Complex Global Interconections in Search of Social Justice, Eduard Arriaga, University of Indianapolis
  • 5:30-6:30 - Closing remarks and Keynote: Padmini Ray Murray, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology
  • Reception

Kristen Mapes
Digital Humanities Coordinator
College of Arts and Letters
Michigan State University
COMITATUS: A JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE STUDIES, published annually under the auspices of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, invites the submission of articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of medieval and Renaissance studies.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 48 (2017): 1 FEBRUARY 2017.

The Comitatus editorial board will make its final selections by early May 2017. Please send submissions as email attachments to Dr. Blair Sullivan, sullivan@humnet.ucla.edu.
Big Data and Medieval Studies: the Present and Future of Medieval Text Archives
Trinity College Dublin, 27-28 June 2017

The last thirty years have seen the production of numerous large archives of medieval English texts, including the Dictionary of Old English Corpus (c. 3 million words), the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (c. 1.4 million words), the Manchester Eleventh Century Spellings Database (c. 300,000 words), the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (c. 650,000 words) and the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse (c. 5 million words). Since each of these freestanding corpora was built for a different purpose, there is minimal interoperability, and the user must learn separate user interfaces and search protocols for each. Their extraordinary collective power as a tool for cultural, historical, literary and linguistic analyses thus remains to be exploited. Early publications using the materials produced by the Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP) have shown the revolutionary power of big data to reconfigure our understanding of the early modern, print past. This colloquium seeks to catalyse a similarly radical transformation in the possible methodologies for the study of the medieval period, by encouraging collaboration to increase the use and utility of existing text archives and setting a blueprint for their future development.

The colloquium will feature presentations from all the major text corpora of medieval English. A small number of places have been reserved for other contributors, and abstracts are now sought for 15-20 minute papers describing methodologically innovative, current research using these or other medieval text archives. Types of research particularly relevant to the aims of the colloquium include:
•    Research that spans multiple corpora that are non-congruent (e. g. parsed and unparsed corpora, manuscript-focused and text-focused corpora, corpora of texts in different languages)
•    The use of text archives for purposes beyond which they were designed
•    The use of text archives to address broader cultural, literary or historical research questions

Abstracts of 250 words should be submitted to Mark Faulkner (faulknem@tcd.ie) by 26 February 2017.

Wednesday, January 25, 2017

The journal Anastasis. Research in Medieval Culture and Art of The  Research Center of Medieval Art "Vasile Dragut" invite you to send articles.  The future issue has as  subject Sens and nonsens in medieval imagination, and the deadline to transmit the articles is January 30, 2017.
 

The magazine also has two permanent selections, for articles that do not fit into the theme of the issue:Medieval Culture and Civilization and Medieval Culture in Contemporary Research.
 
We are looking forward to receiving your contributions,
Best regards,
Codrina Ionita
NEW RESOURCE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Using Primary Sources, a new and wide-ranging open access e-textbook from Liverpool University Press, the University of Liverpool Library and the Department of History at the University of Liverpool is now available viahttp://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pages/using-primary-sources.

The e-textbook showcases digitised archival material together with guides from leading experts that will enable students to use and interpret primary sources for their field of study.  Funded by JISC as part of its ‘The Institution as E-Textbook Publisher’ project, Using Primary Sources responds to the question ‘will the institution as e-textbook creator help students by providing a more affordable higher education, and promote a better, more sustainable information environment for libraries, students and faculty?’

Covering major themes within the medieval, early modern and modern periods, such as religion, ideas, conflict and class, this unique open access resource provides students with the opportunity to examine rare and original material including letters, photographs, legal documents, pamphlets, diaries and audio recordings. Accessible via computer, tablet or phone, Using Primary Sources will also demonstrate how students can integrate the source material into their own written work.

Alternatively, for more information visit:

Please contact Alison Welsby (awelsby[at]liv.ac.uk) for further details.

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

Discussion of the state of the field of early modern and medieval studies at H-EarlySlavic

by Yelena Kalinsky
Subscribers of H-Medieval may be interested in a conversation taking place at H-EarlySlavic in response to the Early Slavic Studies Association President Don Ostrowski's recent state of the field message (included in the thread).
H-Medieval subscribers can comment on that discussion by subscribing to H-EarlySlavic.

Yelena Kalinsky
H-Net Associate Director, Research & Publications

CFP: "Southern Outlaws" The 11th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies

by Alex Kaufman
CFP: "Southern Outlaws," The 11th Biennial Conference of the International Association for Robin Hood Studies
June 16-17, 2017 at Auburn University at Montgomery, Alabama, USA
The theme for this two-day international conference is “Southern Outlaws,” and proposals are welcome on any aspect of “southern” outlawry, banditry, piracy, and other transgressive activities and movements. Such topics spanning the fields of outlaws of the Southern United States, Australia, and South America are particularly welcome. Papers are also invited that explore the metaphorical and spatial conceptions of a “southern” outlaw, especially bad outlaws and trickster figures, and the ways in which geographical and topographical features create and foster outlawry. Papers on the Robin Hood tradition are also welcome. Conference participants will enjoy a variety of peer-reviewed papers from a number of academic fields: literature, history, folklore, theatre, music, anthropology, sociology, geography, art history, and media studies.
We are now accepting paper proposals as well as proposals for fully formed paper sessions and round table sessions. Please download the appropriate form, complete it, and submit it by March 1, 2017. Acceptance of paper proposals will be done on a rolling basis. Undergraduate and graduate paper proposals are especially welcome.
Here is the link to the conference website where proposal forms can be found: www.cas.aum.edu/robin-hood
   
Dear Colleagues, 

You are invited to our departmental graduate conference titled Great Incompletes: Italy's Unfinished Endeavors, to be held on February 3-4 2017. Kindly find here attached the conference program.

We hope many of you will participate in this exciting event. Twelve graduate students from different institutions will tackle the issue of incompleteness from different disciplinary perspectives, Benoit Felici's documentary "Unfinished Italy" will be shown and discussed with the author, and Prof. Thomas Harrison (UCLA) will deliver a comparative keynote speech titled "The Art of the Incomplete", in which he will rethink art as "articulation of incompleteness" . Throughout the event, coffee and light refreshments will be served. A wine and cheese reception will close both days of work, and a common lunch will be offered on the 4th. 

All of us organizers believe this to be an important and meaningful opportunity for our department to open to the contemporary scholarly field and to share a communal moment of cultural reflection and exchange. We would therefore like to thank all Italian Department faculty members for their support, and Lani Muller and Aurelia Rabot-Hernandez for facilitating this event's realization. 

We are at your disposal for any further information you may require, and are looking forward to seeing you all there!

All the best, 

Carlo Arrigoni
Massimiliano Delfino 
Nassime Chida 
Matteo Pace 

Monday, January 23, 2017

Conference: ‘“Why is my pain perpetual?” (Jer 15:18): Chronic Pain in the Middle Ages’
Date: Friday, 29 September 2017
Extended deadline for abstracts: Wednesday, 1 March 2017
 
Pain is a universal human experience. We have all hurt at some point, felt that inescapable sensory challenge to our physical equanimity, our health and well-being compromised. Typically, our agonies are fleeting. For some, however, suffering becomes an artefact of everyday living: our pain becomes ‘chronic’. Chronic pain is persistent, usually lasting for three months or more, does not respond well to analgesia, and does not improve after the usual healing period of any injury.
Following Elaine Scarry’s (1985) seminal work The Body in Pain, researchers from various humanities disciplines have productively studied pain as a physical phenomenon with wide-ranging emotional and socio-cultural effects. Medievalists have also analysed acute pain, elucidating a specifically medieval construction of physical distress. In almost all such scholarship – modern and medieval – chronic pain has been overlooked.
The new field of medieval disability studies has also neglected chronic pain as a primary object of study. Instead, disability scholars in the main focus on ‘visible’ and ‘mainstream’ disabilities, such as blindness, paralysis, and birth defects. Indeed, disability historian Beth Linker argued in 2013 that ‘[m]ore historical attention should be paid to the unhealthy disabled’, including those in chronic pain (‘On the Borderland’, 526).This conference seeks specifically to pay ‘historical attention’ to chronic pain in the medieval era. It will bring together researchers from across disciplines working on chronic pain, functioning as a collaborative space for medievalists to enter into much-needed conversations on this highly overlooked area of scholarship.
 
Prof Esther Cohen (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), one of the foremost scholars on pain in the Middle Ages, will deliver the keynote address at the conference.
 
Relevant topics for this conference include:
·         Medieval conceptions and theories of chronic pain, as witnessed by scientific, medical, and theological works
·         Paradigms of chronic pain developed in modern scholarship – and what medievalists can learn from, and contribute to, them
·         Comparative analyses of chronic pain in religious versus secular narratives
·         Recognition or rejection of chronic pain as an affirmative subjective identity
·         Chronic pain and/as disability
·         The potential share-ability of pain in medieval narratives, such as texts which show an individual taking on the pain of another
·         The relationship between affect and the severity, understanding, and experience of pain
·         The manner in which gender impacts the experience, expression, and management of an individual’s chronic pain
 
If you’re interested in speaking at the conference, please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a brief bio to the organiser, Alicia Spencer-Hall (a.spencer-hall [at] ucl.ac.uk), by 1 March 2017. Please also stipulate your audio-visual requirements in your submission (e.g. projector, speakers, and so forth).
 
NB Speakers will need to register for the conference in due course. The registration fee is £20. The fee is waived completely for concessions (students, the unwaged, retired scholars).
 
If you have any queries, including access requirements, please do not hesitate to contact the organiser.
 
This conference contributes to the ‘Sense and Sensation’ research strand at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies. This strand also comprises a Reading Group focused on chronic pain. To join the Reading Group, pleaseemail the organiser, Alicia Spencer-Hall.

oin us for the 37th Annual Conference of Fordham University's Center for Medieval Studies

Saturday, March 25, 2017        Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus

Online registration is now open! 

 

The Center’s 2017 Conference, The Generative Power of Tradition: A Celebration of Traditio, 75 Yearswill feature two sessions on subjects in which the journal Traditio has historically taken a particular interest: Jews and Christians as well as Mysticism. In addition, the conference will showcase two roundtables on editing medieval manuscripts in the digital age and on popular religion.
The conference will bring together leading scholars in the fields mentioned above, and papers and presentations will address historiography and current research as well as personal intellectual narratives. We look forward to hearing from our speakers and participants on the ways tradition can inspire, provoke, and lead to new questions, addressed from the vantage point of many different fields and areas of expertise.

Center for Medieval Studies


441 E. Fordham Rd.,
FMH 405B
Bronx, NY 10458
718-817-4656
medievals@fordham.edu

Wednesday, January 18, 2017

We invite applications to participate in a training workshop on digital editing of papyrological and epigraphic texts, at the Institute of Classical Studies, London, April 3–7, 2017. The workshop will be taught by Gabriel Bodard and Lucia Vannini (ICS) and Simona Stoyanova (KCL). There will be no charge for the workshop, but participants should arrange their own travel and accommodation.
EpiDoc (epidoc.sf.net) is a community of practice and guidance for using TEI XML for the encoding of inscriptions, papyri and other ancient texts. It has been used to publish digital projects including Inscriptions of Aphrodisias and Tripolitania, Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, Digital Corpus of Literary Papyri, and EAGLE Europeana Project. The workshop will introduce participants to the basics of XML markup and give hands-on experience of tagging textual features and object descriptions, identifying and linking to external person and place authorities, and use of the online Papyrological Editor tool.
The workshop will assume knowledge of papyrology or epigraphy; Greek, Latin or another ancient language; and the Leiden Conventions. No technical skills are required, and scholars of all levels, from students to professors, are welcome. To apply, please email gabriel.bodard@sas.ac.uk with a brief description of your background and reason for application, by February 28, 2017.
All the best,
Simona

--
Simona Stoyanova
Research Assistant in
Classics and Digital Humanities

The New England Medieval Studies Consortium will take place at the University of Connecticut on Friday April 14th, 2017. Our theme for this year's conference is "Medieval Boredom and Tedium." 

We invite you to please distribute the attached call for papers to any and all graduate students whose work may bear on medieval understanding, representation, or reimagining of medieval boredom, tedium, and the passing of time. The CFP for this one-day conference now has an extended deadline: February 15th, 2017

More information can also be found on our website https://uconnnemsc2017.wordpress.com/ 

Monday, January 16, 2017

The Art of Praise: Panegyric and Encomium in Late Antiquity
Organizer: Paul Kimball, Bilkent University
Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity
Near the turn of the last millennium two collections of essays appeared which called our attention to late antique panegyric. The Propaganda of Power: The Role of Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Mary Whitby (1998) underlined the genre's public and political contexts, while Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, edd. Thomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau (2000) explored its links with the forms and practices of biography and hagiography. The contributions to both volumes made it clear that from origins in the fourth century BCE to the end of antiquity (and beyond), panegyric proved a long-lived and highly adaptable platform for the articulation of social relations and the values that supported them. At the meeting of the Society for Classical Studies in Boston, Massachusetts from 4-7 January 2018, the Society for Late Antiquity will sponsor a session to revisit the significance of the rhetoric of praise in late antiquity. We are especially interested in proposals that examine what, if anything, was distinctively "late antique" about late antique panegyric and encomium. In addition to papers addressing this specific question, we also welcome submissions on all aspects of these genres in late antiquity: theory and practice, political and private contexts, literary and declamatory presentations, prose and verse, parodic and ironic, etc.
Abstracts for papers requiring a maximum of twenty minutes to deliver should be sent no later than February 15, 2017 by email attachment to Paul Kimball at pkimball@bilkent.edu.tr. All submissions will be judged anonymously by two referees. Prospective panelists must be members in good standing of the SCS at the time of submission andmust include their membership number in the cover letter accompanying their abstract. Please follow the SCS’s instructions for the format of individual abstracts: https://classicalstudies.org/annual-meeting/guidelines-authors-abstracts. The submission of an abstract represents a commitment to attend the 2018 meeting should the abstract be accepted. No papers will be read in absentia and the SLA is unable to provide funding for travel to Boston.