NEH Institute at Tufts University - Working with Text in a Digital Age

"Tufts University invites applications to “Working with Text in a Digital Age”, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities (July 23-August 10, 2012) that combines traditional topics such as TEI Markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics.  Faculty, graduate students, and library professionals are encouraged to apply.  Applicants should submit proposals by February 15, 2012.   Participant proposals must include CVs and statements of purpose (no more than 1,000 words) describing how they will be able to use participation in the Institute to advance their subsequent careers. Participants must be committed to collaborative work and to publication of results from this Institute under a Creative Commons license. Participants should identify source materials with which they propose to work during the Institute and which must be in the public domain or available under a suitable license. In an ideal case, source materials would include both texts for intensive analysis and annotation and one or more larger corpora to be mined and analyzed more broadly. Statements of purpose must describe initial goals for the Institute. For more information or to submit applications, please contact lcerrato@perseus.tufts.edu.

We particularly encourage participants who are committed to developing research agendas that integrate contributions and research by undergraduates, that expand the global presence of the Humanities, and that, in general, broaden access to and participation in the Humanities. Preference will be given to participants who are best prepared not only to apply new technologies but to do so as a means to transform their teaching and research and the relationship of their work to society beyond academia."

Centre for e-Research Seminar: Digital Transformations of Research and Styles of Knowing

Digital Transformations of Research and Styles of Knowing

Ralph Schroeder, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute

Eric T. Meyer, Research Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute

Tuesday 17 January, 6.15pm, Anatomy Museum. Followed by drinks.

In recent years, large-scale research programmes have been implemented across the globe with labels like e-Science, e-Infrastructure and cyberinfrastructure (Meyer and Schroeder 2009). It has been argued that 
these various digital transformations have fundamentally changed how research is done. In this paper, we challenge this argument, and suggest instead that there are more specific changes in particular areas of 
research that have taken place. To delimit the scope of what can be considered a digital transformation of research or ‘e-Research’ (since these could potentially encompass a vast range of phenomena), we define 
these as the distributed and collaborative use of digital tools and data in the production of scientific knowledge. One feature that e-Research efforts share is that they consist of online research technologies with a digital component, though what this component consists of varies among particular e-Research projects (for example, data in a digital format, the use of computing power to perform processing, or the creation of complex visualizations with computer graphics). We argue, however, that this variety in technologies is not infinite, but that there are a limited number of these components which can be identified.

Please register to attend at:http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2658460527

About the speakers:

Dr Eric T. Meyer is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research in the area of social informatics focuses on understanding how digital technologies enable changes in the way people work, relate and interact. A particular focus has been studying how the practices of research are changing as digital tools and data become central in the sciences, social sciences, and arts & humanities. He is broadly interested in a fundamental question regarding how technology and practice are related: what evidence is there that technology has enabled people and organizations to do entirely new things? More information is available at: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=120

Ralph Schroeder is Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is director of research at the Institute and director of its Master's degree in 'Social Science of the Internet'. His 
books include 'Rethinking Science, Technology and Social Change' (Stanford University Press 2007) and 'Being there Together: Social Interaction in Virtual Environments' (Oxford University Press 2010). 
Before coming to Oxford, he was Professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden. His current research is focused on the digital transformations of research.

Call for papers at the SBL international meeting July 2012

Digital Humanities and Manuscripts, chaired by David Hamidovic and Claire Clivaz.


The process of editing of ancient biblical manuscripts, as well as of editing other ancient Jewish and Christian manuscripts, has been transformed by the emerging digital culture. The digitalization of the manuscripts raises technical questions, such as automatic reading or multispectral imagery, and leads us to new challenges. How do we understand the "text" in the digital culture? In addition, the capacity to study and valorize online a specific manuscript challenges the notion of “critical edition”.?The seminar welcomes proposals of papers about ancient Hebrew, Greek or Arabic manuscripts - either literary or documentary texts - in the fields of biblical studies, early Jewish and Christian studies. We hope to receive papers either on technical points, or new interpretations with digitalization or data managing, or questions about the notion of “critical edition”.

All the details are here:

http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/Congresses_CallForPaperDetails.aspx?MeetingId=20&VolunteerUnitId=574

The call for papers ends the 1st of February. 

International Studies in Medievalism(s) Call for Student Participation

The International Conference on Medievalism (http://www.medievalism.net/conferences.html) will be hosted by Kent State University Regional Campuses (particularly Stark and Trumbull) on October 18-20, 2012, on the Stark Campus.  This conference is a great opportunity for student scholastic involvement.

At this time, in addition to the general invitation for conference papers by scholars, I invite undergraduate students to submit for participation in a medievalist video game poster session workshop (co-sponsored with Medieval Electronic Multimedia Organization). This workshop will be held in two ways. One way will be during an afternoon of the conference (in a room filled with the appropriate technology), where conference participants may wander from station-to-station of presented medievalist games.  Each participant will have a station (a table) at which both the poster and the game will be made available to conference participants. The poster may be constructed of either paper poster board or be electronic (such as a PowerPoint presentation on a laptop). NOTE regarding the video game demonstrations at the conference: the game and the necessary equipment might have to be supplied by the presenter, but there will be some pieces available for general use.  The other way that one might present would be fully online, in a password protected area, where electronic posters will be accessible to all conference participants for several weeks.  Participants may be considered to present in both the physical and virtual environments.  There are a limited number of stations available for the at-conference (physical) presentations.

The theme is Medievalism(s) & Diversity (see the attached description)--proposals must address this conference theme.  Please encourage your students to submit completed posters and the attached form for consideration by June 1, 2012.  In addition, please also consider submitting a paper proposal yourself (for the conference in general).  Finally, please share this announcement with others.

Late Antiquity Newsletter -- Call for Papers, APA 2013 Seattle

Letters in Late Antiquity

Organizer:  Noel Lenski, University of Colorado at Boulder

Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity

We are fortunate to have more letters and letter collections from Late Antiquity than from the rest of Greco-Roman antiquity combined. These offer a wealth of information on personal relations, social history, the history of the family, political alliances, religious concerns, and daily life. Additionally, late antique letters open a broad window onto the literary concerns of authors and their world, reflecting as they do the power this genre exerted over the formation of literary personae and their performance on the cultural stage. Despite this vast wealth of material, it has only begun to receive the attention it deserves in the last decade, which has seen an burgeoning of new studies on epistolography.

The 2013 panel of the Society for Late Antiquity will be devoted to the subject of epistles in all of their manifestations, Latin and Greek (as well as Coptic and Syriac), prose and verse, religious and secular, literary and bureaucratic, textual and epigraphic. It seeks to explore why this form of expression suited the late antique world so well and to explore the research avenues opened up by the letters we have. Questions might include: What constituted a literary epistle? To what earlier traditions of epistolography do Late Antique authors appeal? Why do late antique authors choose so often to express themselves in this genre? In what way do late antique letters differ from those of earlier periods? How were letters transported and exchanged? To what extent did the collapse of territorial integrity in the Roman world affect the transmission of letters? What do letters reflect about social relations and patronage networks? How were letters used as instruments of power by their authors, be they estate holders, bishops, sophists, or emperors? How was the composition, transmission, receipt and collection of letters used as a method for self-expression and self-assertion?

We invite the submission of abstracts offering new approaches to these problems. One-page abstracts (ca. 500 words) for papers requiring a maximum of 20 minutes to deliver should be sent no later than February 1, 2012 by email attachment as .doc or .rtf files to Noel Lenski atlenski@colorado.edu. Please follow the APA's instructions for the format of individual abstracts. All submissions will be judged anonymously by two referees. Those whose papers are accepted must be members of the APA by March 1, 2012 and must attend the 2013 meeting in Seattle. For further information, please contact Noel Lenski, Department of Classics, University of Colorado at Boulder at the email address above.

Guide to Evagrius Ponticus

Guide to Evagrius Ponticus

The inaugural edition of the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, a digital-only, peer-reviewed reference work about the fourth-century monastic theologian, has been released. Updated quarterly, it provides definitive, integrated lists of Evagrius’s works, of editions and translations of those works, and of studies related to his life and thought. The Guide also includes a sourcebook of key ancient testimonies to Evagrius and his reception, in English translation, as well as a checklist of images from the ancient world.

The Guide takes relatively new approaches to open-access academic publishing in the digital humanities, and so is anticipated to develop over the coming years. Future editions will include a manuscript checklist, images of manuscripts, transcriptions of those manuscripts, and open-source critical editions of Evagrius’s writings.

http://evagriusponticus.net/

Posted by: Joel Kalvesmaki (kalvesmakij@doaks.org).

24th International Conference of Philosophy, Samos, July 2012

THE PHILOSOPHY OF INTER-HUMAN RELATIONS AND THE RELATIONS WITH OTHER NATURAL BEINGS IN THE GLOBAL ERA

The Conference will take place in the famous inland of Samos (Pythagorion-a sea-side resort in the Aegean) in Greece between 15th -25th of July 2012.

The Conference intends to provide a broad forum for exploring crucial issues concerning the Philosophy of inter-human relations and the relations to other beings in our age. This means that all legitimate fields of study and philosophical research are included in the scope of the Conference, provided that the authors of conference papers concentrate on the main issues of the Conference. We are particularly interested in all branches of philosophy and of course we pay special attention to academic research papers relevant to the burning moral issues and problems concerning inter-human bonding and other relations and our stance to the world at large in our global era.

The aim of the Conference is to open discourse and to promote the exchange of ideas on the following issues:

1. Inquiry into the ontology of relations

2. Examination and assessment of theories and means regarding kinds of communication among persons, institutions and states (ancient and modern)

3. Review and evaluation of theories (or conceptions) of friendship, love, eros  agape  and enmity (ancient and modern)

4. Inquiry into theories that have (a) been put forth and implemented as bases for human bonding and (b) what conclusions can be drawn from these experiences and (c) to examine the influence of these concepts on such aspects of human intercourse and on social institutions such as community cohesiveness, communication, social dialogue, political change and  stability and psychological well-being. (How do people get together at a time when individualism, alienation, loneliness and fragmentation are on the rise and how can the technological character of our global era help to bridge the gap or reinstate the real communication and bonding among people?)

5. Investigation of the kind of relations that man has developed and adopted towards other beings in the world and evaluation of the results of these relations for humanity and the world itself in our global era.

For full information please see the First Circular which will be made available shortly and will be posted later on our Website: http://www.iagp.gr ,http://www.hri.org/iagp/

 

Contact person: Prof. Konstatine Boudouris, President of the Organizing Committee, kboud714@ppp.uoa.gr

"Medieval Structures of Power" Grad Conference, Princeton University

Graduate Conference in Medieval Studies at Princeton University

Medieval Structures of Power

April 14, 2012

Call for Papers

The Program in Medieval Studies at Princeton University invites submissions for its nineteenth annual graduate conference in Princeton, New Jersey.

Keynote Speaker: Thomas Bisson, Professor of Medieval History, Emeritus, at Harvard University

Closing Address: Stephen Murray, Professor of Medieval Art History at Columbia University.

Structures of Power

“The state exists chiefly in the hearts and minds of its people: if they do not believe it is there, no logical exercise will bring it to life".  This insight from Joseph Strayer’s now-classic Medieval Foundations of the Modern State points to the powerful noetic and psychological underpinnings of any successful polity or social group. Belief in the bonds of fealty, in the communion of the saints, and in other figurations of corporate unity: these were primary structures of power in the Middle Ages.  With the formal advent of purgatory during the thirteenth century, the church extended its power over individual souls into the afterlife; meanwhile, medieval men and women still on earth remained subject to the “soft power” of innumerable discursive, cultural and artistic practices. Yet the medieval exercise of power could just as often be concrete and brutal, from the ius maltractandi, or right of mistreatment, that local lords claimed over their serfs, to the use of torture in legal cases, the harsh physical punishment of malefactors, or the bloody suppression of revolts.   

If medieval power itself was founded on a variety of structures (military, economic, social, familial, legal, administrative, religious), much of medieval life was also organized around physical structures. Castles proliferated, a visual embodiment of their owner’s dominance over the countryside; city walls encircled and protected the rights of the people within; and great Gothic cathedrals, mapped onto a blueprint of heaven, reached to new heights, as if forming a ladder to the kingdom of God. While power was often imposed from above, by the few on the many, was a collective undertaking such as cathedral building an expression of the power of a community? Proposals are encouraged that interpret “structures of power” broadly, and look for them in unexpected places.

How did these structures function? How was power imposed, experienced, negotiated, and contested in the Middle Ages, and how did it impact the lives of ordinary men and women? We invite the submission of proposals from a variety of disciplines, time periods, geographies, source materials, and methodological approaches.  Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

*Power at the local level: predatory lordship and the “feudal revolution”; aspects of freedom and serfdom; rights of adjudication; the influence of aristocratic families; feud, retribution, and private justice.               

*The growth of regional power: royal and ducal prerogatives; high justice; taxation; armies; state formation.

*Resistance to power: Urban riots and peasant revolts; aristocratic rebellions; legal challenges to authority; the “weapons of the weak.”

*Political power: obtaining and legitimizing power; theories of kingship and the state.

*Architectural Power: Churches, city walls, crusader castles

*Power structures in the arts: patronage, visual and verbal representations of power in writing, plastic arts, drama

*The power of literacy and the written word  

*Disciplinary power: from torture and execution to clemency and pardon.

*Economic power: money, credit, and interest; royal revenues; merchants and guilds.

*Religious power: inquisition and penance; excommunication and interdict; the church’s power in the afterlife; the power of priests and of laypeople; the power of the sacraments.

In order to support participation by speakers from outside the northeastern United States, we are offering a limited number of modest subsidies to help offset the cost of travel to Princeton. Financial assistance may not be available for every participant; funding priority goes to those who have the furthest to travel. Every speaker will have the option of staying with a resident graduate student as an alternative to paying for a hotel room.

Interested graduate students should submit abstracts of no more than 500 words to Jenna Phillips (structuresofpower@gmail.com) by February 5th, 2011.

All applicants will be notified by February 20th, 2011. Presentations should be no longer than 20 minutes.

California State University, Long Beach 4th Annual Medieval & Renaissance Students' Association Conference CFP

California State University, Long Beach Medieval and Renaissance Student’s Association
& Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies


Fourth Annual Student Conference Call for Papers
February 25, 2012
California State University, Long Beach
Long Beach, California

THE Medieval and Renaissance Students' Association at CSULB is seeking
proposals for individual papers and group panels from graduate and undergraduate
students in all disciplines for its Fourth Annual Student Conference. Proposals should be
sent as presentation abstracts of 250 words or less. Presentations should be
approximately 15-20 minutes in length, allowing an additional 5-10 minutes for
discussion and questions.

MaRSA welcomes proposals from all disciplines and levels of study, but
submissions should be limited to topics ranging from the Medieval through Early
Modern periods. Modern topics relevant to this period, such as anachronism or
medievalism, as well as proposals pertaining to regions outside of Europe, are also
welcome.

Accepted participants will also be given the opportunity to work with MaRSA in
publishing their work in a collection of essays on the conference's proceedings.

Proposals should include:
• The presenter or panel organizer's name and contact information
• A presentation title
• A 250-word abstract


The deadline for abstracts is February 4, 2012;
A list of accepted participants will be announced by February 6th.
Proposals should be submitted in the body of an e-mail to: csulbmarsa@gmail.com
Please use the following subject heading when submitting abstracts: MARSA 2012
Inquiries may be directed to the MaRSA staff at csulbmarsa@gmail.com.
To register, or for information, go to www.sites.google.com/site/csulbmarsa/.
The Medieval and Renaissance Students' Association at California State
University, Long Beach, founded in 2007, is the student association of the Center
for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and is dedicated to fostering an arena of
collegial dialogue and support for the pre- and post-baccalaureate community.

CFP: APA 2013: Latin Translations in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

The Medieval Latin Studies Group invites proposals for papers on the translation of texts into Latin in the post-Classical period for a panel to be held at the annual meeting of theAmerican Philological Association in Seattle in January, 2013.
 
In recent years, the study of translation has emerged as a vital area of scholarly and critical inquiry across different disciplines. In our field, translation has come to be recognized not only as an important component of the study and reception of Latin literature, but also as an essential and continuing characteristic of Latin literature itself. For this panel we welcome submissions on translators from late antiquity or the medieval period and on any Latin text from this period that is a translation, whether broadly or narrowly defined. Both close analyses of translated texts (for example, a reading of the Latin translation of a Greek epigram that illuminates the translational technique of a particular author) and more theoretically-inclined explorations of ancient translators and of modes of translation (for example, the strategies of translation for non-elite audiences) are encouraged.
 
One-page abstracts of papers requiring no more than 20 minutes to deliver should be submitted by February 1, 2012, preferably via email attachment to bmulliga@haverford.edu or via surface mail to Bret Mulligan, Hall Building, Haverford College, Haverford, PA 19041. Abstracts will be judged anonymously. Membership in the Medieval Latin Studies Group is not required to submit an abstract.

For more information, please contact the panel organizer, Bret Mulligan, at bmulliga@haverford.edu

ACLS Public Fellows program: call for applications

ACLS invites applications for the second competition of the Public Fellows program. The program will place 13 recent Ph.D.s from the humanities and humanistic social sciences in two-year staff positions at partnering organizations in government and the nonprofit sector. The positions and organizations are listed below. The program, made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims to demonstrate that the capacities developed in the advanced study of the humanities have wide application, both within and beyond the academy.

 

In 2012, the ACLS Public Fellows will be appointed to the following positions:

 

• Carnegie Mellon University – Assistant Director of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation
• Consumers Union – Policy Analyst
• Council of American Overseas Research Centers (CAORC) – Global Projects Manager
• Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) – Program Coordinator and Analyst, Anvil Academic Publishing
• Forum on Education Abroad – Associate Director
• German Marshall Fund of the United States – Program Officer, Leadership and Alumni Development
• Human Rights Watch – Human Rights Researcher/Advocate
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Associate Development Officer
• National Conference of State Legislatures – Legislative Studies Specialist
• Newberry Library – Assistant Director, Digital Initiatives and Services
• New York Public Library – Special Projects Coordinator
• Oxfam America – Policy and Research Advisor
• Union of Concerned Scientists – Democracy Analyst

 

Applications are accepted only through the ACLS Online Fellowship Application system (ofa.acls.org) by March 21, 2012. Please do not contact any of the organizations directly. See acls.org/programs/publicfellows for complete position descriptions and application information.

 

Applicants must have received their degrees in the last three years and aspire to careers in administration, management, and public service by choice rather than circumstance. Competitive applicants will have been successful in both academic and extra-academic experiences. Applicants must possess U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status; have a Ph.D. in the humanities or humanistic social sciences conferred between January 2009 and the application deadline; and not have applied to any other ACLS fellowship programs in the 2011-2012 competition year, including the New Faculty Fellows program.

Announcing the Biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize [postmedieval]

by EILEEN JOY


Myra Seaman, Holly Crocker and I are thrilled to announce the biennial Michael Camille Essay Prize, to be jointly sponsored by postmedieval, Palgrave Macmillan, and the BABEL working group. The competition will be open to early career researchers: those currently in M.A./Ph.D. programs or within 5 years of having received the Ph.D. (for the first award, that will include those graduating in 2007 or later). Essays in all disciplines are encouraged. The prize will be for the best short essay (4,000-6,000 words), on a variable theme, that brings the medieval and the modern into productive critical relation. For 2012, the theme is inspired by Camille’s last book on the gargoyles of Notre Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity (conceptualized and imagined in any way the author sees fit). The award for 2012 will include: publication in postmedieval, 250 dollars, and one year’s free print and online subscription to the journal.

The prize is named after Michael Camille (1958-2002), the brilliant art historian whose work on medieval art exemplified playfulness, a felicitous interdisciplinary reach, a restless imagination, and an avidness to bring the medieval and modern into vibrant, dialogic encounter. In addition, we wish to honor Camille for his attention to the fringes of medieval society, to the liminal, excluded, ‘subjugated rabble,’ and disenfranchised, and to the socially subversive powers of medieval artists who worked on and in the margins. The prize is also named after Camille because his work was often invested in exploring ‘the prism of modernity through which the Middle Ages is constructed’ and because, as his colleague at the University of Chicago Linda Seidel said shortly after his death, he had ‘a mind like shooting stars.’ 

Deadline for submissions is June 30, 2012. Submissions will be judged by a panel of scholars selected from postmedieval’s Editorial Board, and the winner will be announced at the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, to be held September 20-22, 2012, in Boston, Massachusetts. Please send submissions (as a Word document, formatted according to Chicago Manual, author-date style with endnotes + list of references at end) to the editors, Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman, at postmedievaljournal@gmail.com.

Decoding Digital Humanities (London)

We're very pleased to announce that Decoding Digital Humanities (London) is re-starting its regular discussion meetings on:

 * Tuesday 31 January 18:30 *

at The Plough, 27 Museum Street, WC1A 1LH.

For this first meeting we will be discussing the Digital Humanities Manifesto:


http://tcp.hypotheses.org/411


Decoding Digital Humanities began as an informal series of pub meetings organised by the Centre for Digital Humanities at UCL. It has since expanded with several international chapters but still retains
its informal atmosphere.

You will be very welcome to join us for a drink and to discuss all things DH. We look forward to seeing you there.

Best,
Richard

Early Monastic/Ecclesiastic Panel (Congress of the Canadian Society of Medievalists)

I would like to know if there might be anyone interested in joining a somewhat impromptu panel for the Congress of the Canadian Society of Medievalists happening in Waterloo (Ontario, Canada) this May. The panel which we are proposing is focused on early medieval monasticism (roughly 500-900), though it's quite a loosely organized session (we'd be happy for anything connected to the early church). For more information on the conference, check out  http://www.csm.wlu.ca/Scrinium/Scrinium%20Fall%202011.pdf


If anyone has any interest, please send a response shortly as the deadline to apply is in early February.

Hortulus Journal: March 1 Submission Deadline, Special Issue on Medieval Space and Place

Hortulus Journal: March 1 Submission Deadline, Special Issue on Medieval Space and Place

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies
Special Call For Papers for Issue on Medieval Space and Place

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 7, Issue 1: 1 March 2012

The next issue of Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies will be published in May of 2012. This special issue will be devoted to representations and interpretations of spatial order, and place as a socially constructed category, in the art, chronicles, letters, literature, and music of the Middle Ages.

Graduate students working in any discipline and period of Medieval Studies are welcome to submit their articles related to this year’s theme via email to submit@hortulus.net by March 1, 2012. We are also interested in book reviews on recent publications which may be of interest to a broad audience of Medieval Studies scholars. For further information please visit our website at www.hortulus.net.

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is a refereed journal devoted to the literature, history, and culture of the medieval world. Published electronically twice a year, its mission is to present a forum in which graduate students from around the globe may share their ideas.

Posted by: Hortulus Journal (hortulus@hortulus.net).

MSS Online Blog

We've just posted a list of the resources that will be included in the MSSO on launch next year:


http://manuscriptsonline.wordpress.com/2012/01/25/manuscripts-online-the-resources/


You can subscribe to the blog via its RSS feed or by signing up to receive an email when there are new posts.

I hope to be in touch before long with more details of the user testing, but you can also use the blog for more general comments or feedback.

Finally, we're also on Twitter


Yours,
Sharon Howard

Writing Europe

After the success of the Writing England Conference in 2010, "Writing Europe: A Colloquium" aims to draw on a range of approaches and perspectives to exchange ideas about manuscript studies, material culture, multilingualism in texts and books, book history, readers, audience and scribes across the medieval period and beyond

Plenary speakers: William Johnson (Duke University); Kathryn A. Lowe (University of Glasgow); Marilena Maniaci (Universita` di Cassino)

CALL FOR PAPERS:

We welcome proposals from scholars working on writers, book production and use, and responses to texts in any language up to 1450. Abstracts (300 words or less) for papers (20 minutes) should be submitted on-line using the form provided. Please visit the conference web site for additional information. To encourage participation from a range of individuals and institutions, a limited number of bursaries will be available to assist in covering travel expenses for participants with limited institutional support. 

Places are limited to allow us to subsidise costs, including registration, accommodation and meals. Please send your abstract by 31 January 2012. For further information please contact one of the organisers at the e-mail below.


Conference web site:


http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/news/conferences/writing-europe

Writing Europe before 1450 is a collaboration between the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Bergen and the School of English at the University of Leicester, and is generously subsidised by the Centre for Medieval Studies and by the School of English.

Viking Society/Scottish Society for Northern Studies student conference: Saturday 11 February 2012

All welcome! Please spread the word. Travel bursaries are available for third- and fourth-year
undergraduates and postgrads within Scotland, too. For more details, check the link:


http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/seminarsandevents/vikingconference/vikingconference2012/


The Viking Society for Northern Research (VSNR) holds an annual student conference which enables postgraduate students to share a platform with leading academics from around the world.  The conference is the UK’s primary event in Old Norse studies, and regularly attracts international scholars from as far afield as Iceland and Australia.  It is a unique event which enables scholars and students to share research and ideas, and present their work to an international audience.

This year, Glasgow has been chosen to host the conference.  Not only will this be the first time the event has been held in Scotland, it will also be the first time it has been held in association with the Scottish Society for Northern Studies (SSNS).

The theme of this year’s conference is "Language: Contact and Change," which reflects the dual interests of both societies in history and linguistics, as well as showcasing Glasgow’s own strengths in these areas.  The papers will focus on the linguistic contacts between early North-West European cultures and their historical significance appealing to the specialisms of a number of subject areas within
Critical Studies, Humanities, and Culture and Creative Arts.

Books and their Readers in Anglo-Saxon England: A Manuscript Colloquium

Dear colleagues, Organized by the Vidi-project 'Turning Over a New Leaf', on January 27, 2012, the University Library Leiden will host 'Books and their Readers in Anglo-Saxon England: A Manuscript Colloquium'. The keynote address - the third Lieftinck Lecture in Medieval Manuscripts of this academic year - is by Michelle Brown. More details of the event may be found by following this link: http://www.hum.leiden.edu/icd/turning-over-a-new-leaf/manuscript-colloquia/mscolloquia.html

Medieval Multilingualism in the British Isles

CALL FOR PAPERS Medieval Multilingualism in the British Isles The Graduate Conference of Magdalene Medievalists Society Magdalene College, Cambridge, Saturday 21st July 2012 Keynote Speaker: Dr Tony Hunt, St Peter's College, Oxford The phenomenon of multilingualism in the Middle Ages has received an increasing amount of scholarly attention in recent years, with at least two major essay collections and one conference devoted to the topic since the Millennium, and numerous articles and book chapters. This graduate and early career conference aims to give those new to the field an opportunity to contribute to what has become an important site of critical debate. Whilst recent scholarship has become steadily more aware of the interconnected nature of Anglo-Norman and Middle English, the use of Latin and its links to the vernaculars has often provoked less sustained attention than is justified by the language's conceptual and administrative importance. The relationships between the mainstream trilingual culture of England and its contiguous linguistic enclaves (such as Cornish, Cumbric, Welsh, Hebrew, Flemish, Norse, Pictish, Manx, Irish and Scottish Gaelic) also frequently remain comparatively obscure. There is conflicting evidence about the medieval awareness of multilingualism, of the relationships between languages and of the phenomenon of language change; such contemporary treatments of these phenomena as survive often rely extensively on Biblical and Patristic accounts of sacred languages. In view of this complex picture, the conference is intended not only to facilitate a closer examination of the phenomenon of multilingualism, but also of medieval attitudes to its manifestations. We invite papers that address any aspect of the interaction between the speakers of different languages in the Middle Ages, including, but not limited to: - attitudes to the tres linguae sacrae and to the vernaculars - pedagogy and medieval perceptions of language acquisition - translation - orality and its depictions - medieval views of linguistic history - code-switching, miscellanies, and scribal practice We will accept submissions from graduate students and early career scholars in English and other languages and literatures, History, Linguistics, and all related disciplines. Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length; please send abstracts of 250 words or less to Sara Harris, mms@magd.cam.ac.uk by February 1st, 2012. Further information will be available at www.magdalenemedievalists.wordpress.com/conference.

Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century

Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century Call for Papers The Textual Studies team of INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) wish to invite presentation proposals for Beyond Accessibility: Textual Studies in the 21st Century . June 8, 9, and 10, 2012, University of Victoria, Victoria BC, Canada. Keynote speakers: Adriaan van der Weel (Leiden University) and Sydney Shep, (Victoria University of Wellington) At the end of the 20th century, textual studies witnessed a revolution in accessibility to texts with the explosion of the internet. Now we simply take it for granted that digital processes infuse every step of our study, editing, production, and dissemination of texts. The Textual Studies team of INKE invites presentations that address the questions “What is the state of textual studies in the 21st century? What is the important work of textual studies in the 21st century? What are the outstanding issues, challenges, concerns, emerging trends, methods, attitudes, and exciting developments in textual scholarship? Papers may address such questions as * What is the state of the scholarly edition after the transition from print to print and digital? * What is the impact on the material book and on book history of the different kinds of access enabled by the digital medium? * How have authorship attribution studies been transformed by access to so many more searchable texts? * How has the new age of access to materials affected the state of textual studies in various regions of the globe? * How well are scholars being served by traditional and emerging infrastructures for the study, creation, production, and dissemination of texts? * What is the future of, for example, the study of readership and letter writing, genetic editing, and reception history? INKE is a multi-national, multi-disciplinary research initiative, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and partnering organizations, to study, develop, and implement digital environments for reading and research (www.inke.ca). The Textual Studies Team of INKE is researching ways in which the age of manuscript and print production can inform our development and implementation of electronic reading technologies. We invite proposals for papers, posters/demonstrations, and roundtable discussions that address these and other issues pertinent to research in textual studies. Proposals should contain a title, a detailed and focussed abstract (of approximately 300 words) plus list of works cited, and the names, affiliations, and Website URLs of presenters. Please send proposals before 15 December 2011 to richard.cunningham@acadiau.ca. Potential participants in the conference, particularly those coming from abroad, might be interested to take advantage of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, which will just before our conference, from 4-8 June, also at the University of Victoria (http://www.dhsi.org/). A limited number of scholarships for workshop tuition will be available for graduate students participating in the Beyond Accessibility conference. Also of potential interest is the annual conference of the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH/SEMI) at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, 28-30 May, 2012 (http://www.sdh-semi.org/).

NEH Summer Seminar: "Health and Disease in the Middle Ages" (application deadline: 1 March 2012)

NEH Summer Seminar: "Health and Disease in the Middle Ages" (application deadline: 1 March 2012) Applications are being sought for a five-week Seminar for College and University Teachers—"Health and Disease in the Middle Ages"—which is being held June 24 through July 28, 2012, in London, England. Part of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminars and Institutes program, the Seminar is sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) and will convene at the Wellcome Library, the world’s premier research center for medical history. This Seminar will gather together sixteen scholars (including up to two advanced graduate students) from across the disciplines interested in questions of health, disease, and disability in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean. A primary goal is to explore how the scientific technologies of assessing disease prevalence andidentifying pathogens (particularly leprosy and plague) can inform traditional, humanistic methods (historical, literary, art historical, and linguistic) of investigating cultural responses to disease and disability. The Seminar also explores how humanistic studies of medieval medicine can inform modern scientific studies of historical diseases, which are developing at a rapid pace thanks to new methods in paleopathology and ancient DNA (aDNA) retrieval and analysis. Our goal is not simply to foster dialogue among the disciplines regarding the intersections of religion, economics, and medicine in the medieval interpretation and treatment of disease, but also to provide a historical basis for understanding crises in global health today. The two co-Directors, Monica Green and Rachel Scott, are specialists in the fields of medical history and bioarcheology, respectively, and they will be aided by three guest lecturers who bring additional perspectives to interdisciplinary dialogue. Drawing on these multiple areas of expertise, the Seminar advocates studying the material evidence for disease and health-seeking behaviors alongside learned and artistic interpretations. Special emphasis is placed on assisting participants with their independent research projects relating to the History of Medicine, especially those based on unpublished primary sources. The ideal participant for this Seminar will be a faculty member at a university or college, or an advanced graduate student, working in the humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences with an interest in research on medieval medicine. The NEH requires that applicants be United States citizens, residents of U.S. jurisdictions, or foreign nationals who have been residing in the United States or its territories for the last three years. The Seminar is designed for those with no prior background in medical history and does not presuppose any advanced training in the biological sciences. Scholars working on any aspect of medieval Europe or the Mediterranean, and in any discipline, are encouraged to apply. Also, because our understanding of Europe will be expanded by thinking comparatively, scholars with expertise in other premodern cultures (e.g., pre-Columbian Americas or China) are encouraged to apply. The sixteen selected participants will receive a stipend for the five-week Seminar of $3900, to cover airfare, housing costs, and other expenses. Housing has been prearranged at University College London. Admission is competitive. The application process has two parts: Part 1 – submitted directly to NEH: Fill out the initial application form online at the NEH website:https://securegrants.neh.gov/education/participants/. This part is for the NEH’s internal records and is the necessary first step of processing your file. Please print it out since a copy of the form also needs to be included in Part 2. Part 2 – submitted directly to the Seminar Directors, c/o ACMRS (at the e-mail or snail-mail address below): The rest of the application materials consist of a copy of the NEH cover page, a curriculum vitae, a brief essay explaining your interest in the Seminar, and two letters of recommendation. For further information (including a detailed description of the program and the syllabus), please go to the Seminar website:http://acmrs.org/healthanddisease2012. Or write to us or call at: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (ACMRS) 4th Floor, Lattie F. Coor Hall Arizona State University P.O. Box 874402 Tempe, AZ 85287-4402 e-mail:healthanddisease2012@acmrs.org Phone: 480.965.4661

Call for Papers for a Section on Poetry and Prose in Late Antiquity Dear colleagues, I am organizing a section on the dynamics between poetry and prose in late antiquity for the international meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature / European Association for Biblical Studies to be held in Amsterdam, 22-26 of July 2012. The section, which will include a 20 minute papers session(s) and a textual workshop will focus on the above mentioned dynamics in Hebrew, Syriac and Greek literatures. The Call for Papers can be found in the following link: http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/Congresses_CallForPaperDetails.aspx?MeetingId=20&VolunteerUnitId=573 Please do not hesitate to contact me by email (ophirmm@openu.ac.il) for further clarifications and discussion. With best wishes, Dr. Ophir Münz-Manor

DONALD BULLOUGH FELLOWSHIP FOR A MEDIAEVAL HISTORIAN

UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies DONALD BULLOUGH FELLOWSHIP FOR A MEDIAEVAL HISTORIAN The St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies invites applications for the Donald Bullough Fellowship in Mediaeval History, to be taken up during either semester of the academic year 2012-13. The Fellowship is open to any academic in a permanent university post with research interests in mediaeval history. It covers the cost of return travel to St Andrews from the holder’s normal place of work, together with a substantial subsidy towards accommodation while the holder is resident in St Andrews. Previous Fellows have included Dr Christina Pössel, Professor Cynthia Neville and Dr Ross Balzaretti. The fellowship is currently held by Dr Marlene Hennessy. The Fellowship carries with it no teaching duties, though the Fellow is expected to take part in the normal seminar life of the mediaeval historians during their stay in St Andrews. Weekly seminars, held on a Monday evening, run from September – December, and February – May. You will also be invited to lead a workshop on your chosen research theme during your stay. Fellows are provided with computing facilities and an office alongside the mediaeval historians in the Institute. The university library has an excellent collection for mediaeval historians. You should send a letter of application by the advertised closing date, together with a scheme of research for the project on which you will be engaged during your time in St Andrews. You should also enclose a CV, together with the names of two academic referees, who should be asked to write by the closing date. All correspondence should be addressed to The Director, St Andrews Institute of Mediaeval Studies, University of St Andrews, 71 South St, St Andrews, Scotland, KY16 9QW. Please mark the envelope ‘Donald Bullough Mediaeval Fellowship’. The closing date for applications is 30 March 2012. Further enquiries may be addressed to the Director, Dr Alex Woolf (saimsmail@st-andrews.ac.uk) or to colleagues in the Institute, whose contact details may be found on www.st-andrews.ac.uk/saims

Note Deadline!

AUDIENCE IN THE MIDDLE AGES // YALE UNIVERSITY Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 29th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, to be held at Yale University on Saturday, March 31st, 2012. The theme will be “Audience in the Middle Ages.” The organizers hope that this broad heading will elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of medieval studies. Among many potential areas of focus are performance; orality; spectacle and spectatorship; transmission and circulation; decrees, bulls, charters, and other public documents; drama; liturgy and sacred music; sermons, lectures, and disputation; reception history; and coteries. Further, we look forward to receiving proposals that take more theoretical approaches to ideas of audience in the medieval period. We also welcome investigations of the post-medieval reception of medieval life and thought. The conference will feature a plenary lecture by Elaine Treharne, Professor of English at Florida State University. Professor Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford, forthcoming), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), among many others. Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length and read in English. Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent by e-mail to audience.yale@gmail.com, or a hard copy may be mailed to: Audience in the Middle Ages c/o Joseph Stadolnik Department of English Yale University P.O. Box 208302 New Haven, CT 06520-8302 The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012. Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award.