CFP

Catherine Conybeare is organizing a panel under the aegis of the
Medieval Latin Studies Group at the 2009 meetings of
the American Philological Association in
Philadelphia.

The title of the panel is _Lusus et Ludibria_: Late
Latin Laughter. The description is below.

If you are interested in presenting, please send an
abstract (500-800 words) by *February 1, 2008*, to
Andrew Cain, MLSG Secretary-Treasurer,
Dept. of Classics, 248 UCB, University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO 80309 USA, or via email to
ac@colorado.edu.

If not, but you know others who might be, please
circulate this announcement as widely as you like!

Panel description: Lusus et Ludibria: Late Latin
Laughter

A recent efflorescence of works explores emotion,
gesture, and performance. But what of an elusive
phenomenon that betrays emotion, that must be
performed, but which falls into no easy category?
Fundamentally involuntary and unpredictable, laughter
may challenge or confirm the possibilities of
communication. It is heard in the triumph of the
tyrant and the resistance of the martyr. Restrained
hilaritas is saintly; rampant risus is devilish. What
people may laugh at, and why, offers a vivid and
unconventional glimpse of an age or a moment.

We welcome submissions for this panel across a wide
textual and methodological range, engaging genres that
provoke laughter, laughter textually embedded,
typologies of laughter, and more theoretical
discussions of the conceptual parameters that laughter
simultaneously proposes and undermines.

-- Catherine Conybeare Associate Professor of Classics Director of
the Graduate Group Senior Editor, BMCR Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr PA
19010 +1 610 526 5036