Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Friday, July 20, 2018

We are seeking submissions for sessions on “Living in the Carolingian
World” at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies in
Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 9-12, 2019.

The “Carolingian World” is a phrase invoked by scholars to delimit a
place or a concept enmeshed in the political, religious, and cultural
plans of Carolingian elites, whose domains spanned most of western and
much of central Europe from the mid-eighth until the end of the ninth
century. Yet the “Carolingian World” did not map onto any specific
borders or boundaries so much as it reflected the reach and ambitions
of its rulers and thinkers who imagined their unique place in history
and the world. The extent to which those living under Carolingian rule
and influence experienced a “Carolingian World” is less clear. These
sessions invite papers to consider this question from a variety of
perspectives. We particularly welcome papers on topics that focus on
the daily lived experiences of non-elites who inhabited the
Carolingian empire, including expanded investigation of early medieval
Europe in methodological and conceptual terms to incorporate material
evidence and biological data and categories of analysis like gender,
age, or the environment. In short, these sessions will address a
question crucial to understanding how the Carolingian empire was
experienced by the majority of people living under its rule: what did
it mean to live in a “Carolingian World”?

Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words before September 15,
2018 to the session organizers, Noah Blan and Valerie L. Garver, at
noahblan@umich.edu noahblan@umich.edu>.

Thursday, July 19, 2018


*Workshop on Scholarly Digital Editions, Graph Data-Models and Semantic Web
Technologies*
Université de Lausanne, 3-4 June 2019
<http://wp.unil.ch/graphsde/>

*Call for Papers*
Digital texts processed by machines are linear strings of characters, but
in most research activities in the Humanities (philology, linguistics,
corpus-based analysis, cultural heritage, etc.) we store them in
*databases* and
we add *markup* to the text, that is a kind of intelligence made computable
thanks to the use of widespread data-models, formats and standards.
In the last decades, the popularity of *graph* data-models has increased,
in accordance with the *semantic web* proposition and the development of
standards such as RDF and OWL. Graph databases, in the form of triple
stores (such as Graph-DB) or of labeled-property-graphs (Neo4j), are
regarded as powerful and flexible solutions by research and cultural
institutions, and private companies alike.
The workshop is held to explore possible interactions between *digital
texts*, the *graph* data-model, *scholarly editions* and the *semantic web*.
The combinations of these objects/concepts, pursued in the last decades,
remains experimental to date, and it represents one of the possible
development for the field of *digital scholarly editing*.
Contributions on one or more of the following topics are particularly
welcome:

   - the conceptualization of *text as graph*;
   - the use of *graph-databases* for digital editions;
   - the* semantic web resources* for building digital scholarly editions;
   - the *interoperability* among digital texts through Linked Data
   Vocabularies;
   - the *integration* of graph flavoured data into xml documents.

We welcome contributions from those involved in the development of *tailor-made
solutions* for small scale projects as well as of large-scale
*infrastructure*, focused on the *theory* and/or on the *practice* of this
happy or unhappy combination.
The workshop includes *presentations* and a *working group* session.
Please note that the word 'workshop' means here a place for sharing ongoing
research and not a hands-on training.
*Invited speakers*

   - Ronald Haentjens Dekker (Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences – Humanities
   Cluster)
   - Samuel Müller (University of Basel - National Infrustructure for
   Editions)
   - Michele Pasin (Springer Nature)
   - Tobias Schweizer, Sepideh Alassi (University of Basel – Digital
   Humanities Lab)
   - Georg Vogeler (University of Graz)

*Scientific committee*

   - Gioele Barabucci (University of Cologne)
   - Fabio Ciotti (University of Rome Tor Vergata)
   - Claire Clivaz (Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics)
   - DASCH (University of Lausanne)
   - Simon Gabay (University of Neuchâtel)
   - Frederike Neuber (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanties)
   - Elena Pierazzo (University of Grenoble-Alpes)
   - Michael Piotrowski (University of Lausanne)
   - Matteo Romanello (EPFL)
   - Elena Spadini (University of Lausanne)
   - Francesca Tomasi (University of Bologna)
   - Aris Xanthos (University of Lausanne)


*Important dates*
*9 December 2018*. Deadline for the submission of abstracts
*14 January 2018*. Notification of acceptance
*15 April 2019*. Camera-ready version of the papers
*3-4 June 2019*. Workshop

*Where*
Université de Lausanne – 1015 Lausanne – Switzerland
*Language*
The language of the workshop will be English.
*Abstract submission*
We invite researchers to submit abstracts for a 30 mins contribution (20
mins + 10 mins Q&A) by December 9, 2018. Abstracts will be reviewed
double-blind by the members of the scientific committee, and all
submissions will receive several independent reviews.
Instructions for formatting and submitting abstracts will be published in
September 2018.
*Camera-ready paper submission*
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by January 14, 2019.
The authors of accepted abstracts should send a camera-ready version of
their paper by April 15, 2019. The papers will be made available on the
workshop platform.
Before the workshop, the papers will be paired and a discussant will be
assigned to each participant. The discussant must prepare two questions,
that the corresponding author will receive twenty days before the workshop
and should address in her/his presentation.
Instructions for formatting and submitting camera-ready papers will follow.
*Proceedings publication*
The authors of accepted contributions will be invited to submit a revised
paper after the conference, to be published in an open-access, electronic
conference volume endowed with persistent identifiers.
*Organization committee*

   - Elena Spadini (Université de Lausanne, CRLR)
   - Francesca Tomasi (Università di Bologna)

*With the support of*

   - Centre de recherche sur les lettres romandes
   <http://www.unil.ch/crlr/home.html> (CRLR), Université de Lausanne

*In collaboration with*

   - Digital Humanities and Digital Knowledge
   <https://corsi.unibo.it/2cycle/DigitalHumanitiesKnowledge> (DHDK),
   University of Bologna
   - Section des sciences du langage et de l’information
   <https://www.unil.ch/sli/fr/home.html> (SLI), Université de Lausanne
   - Lausanne Laboratory for Computational and Statistical Text Analysis
   <http://unil.ch/llist/en/> (LLIST)

Wednesday, July 18, 2018


Please consider submitting a proposal to my roundtable at the 54th International Congress on Medieval Studies titled "Playing the Past: Race, Gender, and Heroism in Gaming." This year's ICMS will be held on May 9-12, 2019 on the campus of Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. I attach my Call for Papers below.

Thank you so much, and I look forward to receiving your proposals.

Best,
Ali Frauman
PhD Candidate, the Department of Comparative Literature
Indiana University, Bloomington

  Playing the Past: Race, Gender, and Heroism in Gaming (A Roundtable)
Video and PC gaming have come to play a substantial role in popular consciousness in the 21st century and the medium itself offers a uniquely immersive experience unfathomable in other facets of popular culture. In virtual “medieval” and fantasy worlds, a player gets the chance to live the story rather than being a passive observer, and in MMORPGs like World of Warcraft, he or she can even relate to other players as that character, experiencing the world as priest or paladin existing in an expansive virtual space. However, the interactive nature of these games also raises important questions about how we conceptualize and create the past and the impact these imagined worlds can have on notions of the “medieval” for a non-academic audience.

 Often these games leave women behind in the role of damsels in distress, drawing from modern conceptions of “medieval” chivalric codes that do not make space for female adventurers and heroes. Moreover, race often refers to various humanoid creatures like trolls and goblins, and these fantasy “races” are often included in lieu of real racial and ethnic diversity on the grounds that fantasy creatures are somehow “more medieval.” When a developer chooses to include women or people of color in their “medieval” video game, alt-right gamer movements like Gamergate have resisted, claiming the game has become “ahistorical” by allowing anyone but white men into their pseudo-medieval fantasy. This roundtable will raise questions about how the past has been used in gaming to alienate non-white, non-male players, and the extent to which gaming developers have managed to resist medievalist tropes as held in popular consciousness.

 Each participant will give a 7-10-minute presentation, which will be followed by a roundtable discussion. Possible topics can include but are not limited to constructions of the past in video game medievalisms, problematic uses of race and gender in fantasy gaming, and the mobilization of faux medievalism against inclusivity by online movements like Gamergate. Please submit a 200 word abstract to Ali Frauman at afrauman@indiana.edu by September 15th, 2018 and direct any questions to the same address. Thank you!

Monday, July 16, 2018

This is a brief reminder that the organizers of Shifting Frontiers
XIII (being held March 14-17, Los Angeles) are now accepting paper
proposals. We invite papers examining the impact and response of
communities and individuals to "disasters" (defined broadly as
economic, environmental, political, religious, cultural upheaval).
Paper proposals should be received no later than October 1, 2018, and
may be sent to sbjornlie@cmc.edu. For more details, please visit the
webpage link:
https://www.cmc.edu/history/shifting-frontiers-in-late-antiquity<https://eur01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cmc.edu%2Fhistory%2Fshifting-frontiers-in-late-antiquity&data=02%7C01%7C%7Cc0f819afd8924a02ba4208d5ead9128a%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636673140388294143&sdata=JC9vGSNnuH56LhdY89RNKo3ErscqIZIAoNC7d%2BsPHdY%3D&reserved=0>
Any questions may be addressed to Shane Bjornlie at sbjornlie@cmc.edu
On behalf of the Shifting Frontiers XIII organizers, msb

M. Shane Bjornlie, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Roman and Late Antique History

Chair, Department of History, Claremont McKenna College

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

CALL FOR PAPERS – ‘Big Data’ in Medieval Studies

54th International Congress on Medieval Studies
<http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions>
Western Michigan University; May 9-12, 2019

Sponsored by Digital Philology: A Journal of Medieval Cultures
<https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/digital-philology-journal-medieval-cultures>

Organized by Susanna Allés-Torrent (University of Miami) and Albert
Lloret (University of
Massachusetts Amherst)

The creation of digital collections of texts, or textual corpora, for
research and preservation may be one of the seminal technological
innovations in the digital humanities that still remains at the core
of many text-oriented disciplines, including those belonging to
medieval studies.

When creating a textual corpus, digital humanists face many key
choices that will determine their project’s success. These decisions
include the selection of standards, format types, methods for text
recollection, searchability, access, lemmatization, and
interoperability, among others.

Once a textual corpus is created, quantitative analysis allows
researchers to study texts from a variety of critical perspectives and
methodologies: statistics, stylometry, authorship atribution and
verification, intertextuality, script recognition, stemmatology, text
mining, topic modeling, etc.

These analytical methodologies are linked to the study of large
amounts of information, to which one may be tempted to refer to as big
data. But what constitutes “big data” in medieval studies and the
digital humanities at large? Does thinking of textual corpora as “big
data” help frame their forms and uses?

We invite paper submissions that reflect on the theory, practices, and
challenges of creating— and researching through—textual corpora,
including but not limited to:

• protocols and technologies for the creation of textual corpora.
• examples of textual corpora.
• methologies for the study of textual corpora (e.g., stylometry,
stemmatology, script
recognition, etc.).
• theory of textual corpora and “big data” in medieval studies.

Please send a 100-word abstract and a Participant Information form to
Susanna Allés-Torrent and Albert Lloret at lloret@umass.edu
lloret@umass.edu
> by September 15.


Susanna Allés Torrent
Assistant Professor
University of Miami
http://susannalles.com
susanna_alles@miami.edu

Monday, July 9, 2018

Marco Manuscript Workshop 2019: “Bits and Pieces”
February 1-2, 2019
Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

The Fourteenth Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday and
Saturday, February 1-2, 2019, at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville. The workshop is organized by Professors Maura K. Lafferty
(Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English), and is hosted by the Marco
Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

For this year’s workshop, we invite papers on the theme “Bits and
Pieces.” Some manuscripts have survived the centuries bright,
pristine, majestic, and complete; most have suffered at least some
minor damage or loss; some manuscripts, however, seem no more than
ragged scraps. They lack beginnings, or endings, or middles; they
tantalize with their incompleteness. These fragments still have much
to tell us, though they make us work to learn it. The reader of
incomplete manuscripts and fragments faces a broad array of problems –
how to extrapolate missing text, how to fill the gaps in a page or a
text, how to read a faded and worn leaf, how to combine dispersed
fragments into a whole, how to represent the fragment in a modern
edition in a way that renders it legible while still acknowledging its
brokenness. Some fragments are already repaired, either bound into
florilegia, rewritten by a well-meaning early reader, or patched and
glued and restored in ways that sometimes obscure as much as they
preserve; in such cases the modern reader may have to deconstruct an
earlier reader’s traces before reconstructing the original text. The
problems and rewards of studying manuscript fragments, large and
small, are many; we welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic,
broadly imagined.

The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field
who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy.
Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project;
participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context,
discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange
ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years,
the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference;
participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished
work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer both
practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together
towards developing better professional skills for textual and
codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works
in progress, unusual manuscript problems, practical difficulties, and
new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript
texts. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their
participation.

The deadline for applications is November 2, 2018. Applicants are
asked to submit a current CV and a two-page letter describing their
project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to
rliuzza@utk.edurliuzza@utk.edu
>, or by mail to the Department
of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN
37996-0430.

The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do
not wish to present their own work but are interested in sharing a
lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies.
Further details will be available later in the year; please contact
Roy Liuzza or the Marco Institute at
marco@utk.edumarco@utk.edu> for more information.



Roy M. Liuzza
Department of English
University of Tennessee
301 McClung Tower
Knoxville, TN 37996-0430

Ph 865-974-6939
Fax 502-415-7477

*“Contact Zones: Fur/Flesh/Fabric/Fieldstone”*

*postmedieval **Special Issue, February 2020*



In the Middle Ages, objects establish the attributes of the human bodies
they constitute and surround. When a knight’s golden spur leaves a bloody
mark on his horse’s ribs, a prophetic sword transforms an ordinary
Englishman into “The Once and Future King,” or the Sibyl’s stony dwelling
amplifies her verbal authority, *things*confirm the chivalric prowess,
royalty, and power of their human affiliates. Objects possess agency and
wield immense identitary capital. The *stuff *so often considered
peripheral to human existence comes to influence and even converge with the
bodies of medieval people. This issue moves out from flesh and inward from
environments to interrogate how the items that enhance, protect, or hide
human bodies constitute human identity.



Inspired by Karen Barad’s *intra-activity*, Donna Haraway’s *contact zones*,
and Stacy Alaimo’s *trans-corporeality*, this issue valorizes the materials
surrounding human bodies as vital to medieval concepts of selfhood and
identity. This issue looks to the corporeal *intra-action* between human
forms and the materials worn by them as a means to understand the
imbrication of human identity with the more-than-human world. It seeks *contact
zones* in textual, historical, artistic, and architectural representation
as sites of multi-directional identitary exchange, often between different
species or materials. It asks how the risks inherent in
*trans-corporeal *embodiment
may undermine or obviate the agency, aims, and aspirations of the human
bodies it implicates. In sum, it interrogates how the things worn, crafted,
and wielded by people mark perceptions of human identity and agency.



Contributors may respond to such questions as:

·         How do the materials that clothe or surround bodies impact their
identity?·         Do all human bodies experience an identitary imbrication
with the materials in their environment? What consequences occur if a body
rejects this enmeshment?·         How do gender, social class, race, and
ability influence hybrid material embodiment? Might such hybrid material
embodiments influence perceptions of gender, social class, race, and
ability in turn? How?

·         How do objects overturn or reinforce human social and moral
hierarchies?

·         Do non-human objects and materials support heteronormative,
anthropocentric, cisgendered, or patriarchal structures of power? Or, do
they help their owners and wearers to reject normativity and construct new
models of embodiment?

·         Do objects participate in or eschew barriers between human
embodiments and the more-than-human world?

·         Is there a site at which the human stops and the non-human world
begins?



Each article will engage with theoretical traditions like new materialism,
posthumanism, or actor-network theory to read non-human objects as
complements to and evocations of human embodiment. Together, the articles
of this issue will assess the entanglement of objects and human identity in
the Middle Ages.



Please submit essay proposals (300 words maximum) by September 15, 2018 to
Elizabeth S. Leet (eleet@fandm.edu). Accepted articles will be due May 1,
2019.

Elizabeth S. Leet, Ph.D.

Visiting Assistant Professor of French
Department of French
Franklin & Marshall College

De Re Militari has five sessions going for Kalamazoo 2019. 
1.  Annual Journal of Medieval Military History Lecture
2. War and Chivalry
3. Early and High Medieval Military History
4. Late Medieval Military History
5. Medieval Military Technology
Deadline is September 15. Proposals should be sent to: veads@sva.edu 

De Re Militari: The Society for Medieval Military History is interested in papers on all aspects of warfare, broadly defined.  Papers from the Kalamazoo sessions may be considered for publication in the Journal of Medieval Military History. https://boydellandbrewer.com/s eries/journal-of-medieval-mili tary-history.html

Monday, July 2, 2018

Chères et chers collègues,

J'ai le plaisir de vous transmettre l'annonce sur l'avancement de «
France-Angleterre, 700-1200 : manuscrits médiévaux de la Bibliothèque
nationale de France et de la British Library, un programme de la Fondation
Polonsky ».

300 manuscrits conservés à la BnF et 300 manuscrits conservés à la British
Library ont été catalogués et numérisés à ce jour. Vous trouverez plus de
détails à cette adresse : https://manuscripta.hypotheses.org/858

Parmi plusieurs événements en préparation, j'attire votre attention sur la
conférence de clôture du programme "France et Angleterre : manuscrits
médiévaux entre 700 et 1200". Elle aura lieu les 21-23 novembre 2018 à
l'Auditorium Colbert (2 rue Vivienne, Paris
<https://maps.google.com/?q=Colbert+(2+rue+Vivienne,+Paris&entry=gmail&source=g>).
Le programme est en ligne à
l'adresse https://polonsky.sciencesconf.org/ et l'inscription est gratuite
mais obligatoire.

En vous remerciant pour la transmission de ce message à d'autres collègues
qui pourraient être intéressés, bien cordialement,

Francesco


Francesco Siri
Chargé des collections / Coordinateur du Programme Polonsky