Wednesday, March 5, 2014

Deadline extended on Call for Participants: Roots & Routes Summer Institute

Dear colleagues and students, 
 
We are delighted to announce the third of three annual Roots & Routes Summer Institutes on knowledge production in the premodern Mediterranean and in the Digital Age. The Institute, which will take place at the University of Toronto Scarborough from May 26th to June 3rd, 2014, is generously supported by the University of Toronto's Connaught Fund and is completely free of charge to all participants. We hope you can join us! Please read on for details on the Institute’s format, theme, and application procedure (or go directly tohttp://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/ to apply).
 
 
Format:
 
Unlike traditional academic conferences, the Roots & Routes Summer Institute features a combination of informal presentations, seminar-style discussions of shared materials, hands-on workshops on a variety of digital tools, and small-group project development sessions. Hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough, the institute welcomes participants from a range of disciplines interested in engaging with digital scholarship; technical experience is not a requirement. Graduate students (MA and PhD), postdoctoral fellows and faculty are all encouraged to apply.
 
Through its exciting roster of activities the Institute encourages participants to develop a more coherent and explicitly transdisciplinary analytical framework for their scholarship using digital tools and methodologies. Participants will explore new formats for conducting research and communicating their findings. By teaming up with information technology specialists and digital scholarship experts working outside the Mediterranean, participants will have a chance to build long-term collaborative projects to enhance their ongoing individual research agendas. In order to maximize the potential for future collaboration and broad, thematic conversations, groups will be composed of participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and at different stages of their scholarly careers, from senior scholars to advanced undergraduates. Participants are encouraged to engage each other’s materials, bring insights from their own fields of expertise to a broader methodological and conceptual discussion, and begin to draw out connections between what are often seen as disparate fields of knowledge.
 
 
Annual Theme:
 
This year's theme, "Sociability and Materiality," aims to capture a range of historical problems and their attendant methodological and epistemological challenges. Participants are invited to define and approach this theme from the position of their individual disciplines and research interests. For example, what place does "the Mediterranean" have in discussions about manuscript, print, and digital cultures and their interpretation? What can historians, art historians, archaeologists, and other scholars learn from one another when tackling these problems? (How) are themes such as sociability and materiality useful in the study of the premodern Mediterranean? How does the recent resurgence in the history of material culture speak to longer-term interest among historians of the book in the materiality of textual artifacts?How can attention to materiality and sociability make salient the various practices of knowledge production of different disciplinary traditions, and what do such practices entail? What new ways of envisioning archives (as processes as well as products) are being facilitated by digital technologies? How do digital media and methodologies change the ways in which we identify, access, and interpret historical records? What might "collaborative research" in digital environments have to learn from (and teach) the history of earlier forms of scholarly sociability? 
 
 

Application Guidelines:
 
To apply, please go to our online registration site, http://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/. Applicants should submit by March 21, 2014 a CV and a brief proposal (up to 600 words) that includes a discussion of their current research and a specific object they would like to present and further develop digitally. This object may be a text, an artifact, a dataset, or a cluster of any of the above. Once accepted, participants will be asked to compile a bibliography of relevant readings to share with others in advance, as well as to install and become familiar with a few digital tools (e.g. Zotero), to allow us to explore more advanced features and digital skills at the institute itself. Participants are not expected to have prior programming knowledge or other advanced digital skills, but should be genuinely interested in the potential of digital tools to challenge and transform current research practices. 
 
Selection announcements will be made by March 30, 2014. 
 
**Participation in the Institute is free of charge. Travel and accommodation bursaries may be available for out-of-town graduate students. ** 
 
For more information about the Institute, check out our website: http://serai.utsc.utoronto.ca/rrsi2014.
 
Please contact the organizers at rrsi2014[at]utsc.utoronto.ca for further information or to get involved in the organizing process.
 
 
Concurrent Local Events:
 
We encourage and aim to facilitate interaction between the Roots and Routes Summer Institute attendees and the following concurrent local events. Details to follow.
 
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians 
“Histories on the Edge / Histoires sur la brèche”
May 22-25, 2014  
Toronto, Canada
 
In addition to an exciting roster of sessions on all aspects of the history of women, gender, and sexuality, this year’s Berks will feature a Digital Lab where attendees will have an opportunity to interact with the people behind a range of international digital history projects. Detailed program coming soon.
 
 
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 
“Borders without Boundaries”
May 24-30, 2014    
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
 
In addition to over seventy scholarly associations meeting at Congress, this year’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI@Congress) will convene Wednesday, May 28 to Friday, May 30 2014. For more details go to: http://dhsi.org/events.php

Call for papers for MLA convention Vancouver, Canada, January 8-11, 2015

"Monstrous water and water monsters in the medieval and early modern imagination"Water monsters and water as monstrous are both part of the same complex -- the reminder that there are extents to our reach as human beings and a vast world that we cannot be part of, a place of multifaceted Otherness. Water spawns its own horrible offspring, birthing creatures from its depths. Water is vast and we are reminded by it of our limits; it is simultaneously a site of veneration and fear, of new life and loss. Like most monsters, water shares something with us -- we are largely made up of water -- but that shared similitude, that monstrous drop within us, does not give us the ability to comprehend it -- it is both us and completely Other to us.
 
There is a richness to exploring the link between water as monster and the monstrous within the water. Often in literature and visual representations, water has been written with the imagery of the subconscious and it links that subconscious with the monstrous figures at the fringes of our minds, those assemblages of our repressed fears and anxieties

Submissions should explore aspects of medieval and early modern literary and visual culture in respect to water monsters or instances of monstrous waters.
 
To submit send a 300 word abstract and short CV to Tina Boyer, boyertm@wfu.edu by March 15th, 2014. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself.
 
This special session is organized by MEARCSTAPA: an organization committed to the scholarly examination of monstrosity as an area of social and cultural interest to past and present societies. Our inter/trans/post/pre-disciplinary approach allows us to explore the significance of monstrosity across cultural, temporal, and geographic boundaries. We are interested in a multivalent approach using materials on monsters and monstrosity from literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical sources.
 
_______________________________________

Just a bit more time to send in submissions for the 2014 UST Graduate English and Art History Conference

Call for Papers
University of St. Thomas
English Graduate Conference
Friday, April 25, 2014

Please forward this message to your graduate students – a CFP poster is attached. Thank you,

The University of St. Thomas English and Art History graduate programs will hold an interdisciplinary conference on Friday, April 25, 2014.
While papers addressing any aspect of literature, visual arts, and culture will be considered, we particularly welcome proposals for papers exploring the topic of Visualizing the Past/Imagining the Future.
·         How do conceptions of the past or future inform and/or constrain the process of literary or artistic production?
·         How have artists and writers imagined the future in utopian or dystopian terms?
·         In what ways have literary or historical eras (e.g., the “dark ages” or Romanticism) been idealized or demonized by writers or artists of later eras?
·         In what ways is the practice of literary or art history promoted and/or constrained by conceptions of “truthiness” or other aspects of postmodern culture?
·         How are historic conceptions of time (e.g., apocalypse, millennialism, geologic time, periodization) created and/or expressed in literary and artistic texts?
·         How might non-human and manufactured environments of the future construct or be constructed by literary and visual texts?
·         In what ways does the narrative of memory affect the construction of language, communities, societies, and cultures?
·         How do digital technologies [re]shape conceptions of the past and/or the future?
·         How may literature and the visual arts mold the future concept of the human in the wake of social, cultural, and technological transformations?

We encourage analyses of literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, cinematic, digital, and/or other textualities.
Email two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or for panels of three to all members of the conference program committee:
Alexis Easley, maeasley@stthomas.edu,
Heather Shirey, hmshirey@stthomas.edu,
and Marty Warren, mlwarren@stthomas.edu,
by March 15, 2014. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.


nathan

Tuesday, March 4, 2014

34th Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium

10, 11 and 12 October 2014
The Thompson Room (Room 110)
Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street
~

The organizers of the 34th Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium acknowledge with thanks the support of
The Provostial Funds Committee for the Arts and Humanities
The Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures & The Friends of Harvard Celtic Studies.

The John V. Kelleher Lecture


Ann Parry Owen
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
University of Wales.

Y Prydydd Gŵr: Changing Concepts in the Welsh Praise Poetry Tradition, 1150-1500
~
Thursday, October 09, 2014, 5:00 pm
Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Garden Street Cambridge, Massachusetts

This event is open to members and invited guests of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. The public is invited to attend if space is available. Due to limited seating space, admission to the event is not guaranteed.


Future Dates for the John V. Kelleher Lecture and the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. 
N.B.: Please note that these dates are tentative and may be subject to change.      
Twelfth John V. Kelleher Lecture                                              October 8, 2015
Thirty-fifth Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium                       October 9, 10, 11, 2015            

Saturday, March 1, 2014

SLA Panel for APA 2015 Meeting, New Orleans Travel, Travelers, and Traveling in Late Antique Literary Culture

Travel, Travelers, and Traveling in Late Antique Literary Culture

Please note that the deadline for submitting abstracts for the following panel sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity has been extended until 21 March 2014 (apologies for cross-posting).

Organizer: Cam Grey, University of Pennsylvania
Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity
 
The 2015 panel sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association on Jan. 8-11 in New Orleans, will explore aspects of travel and traveling in late antique literary culture. Narratives of travel can be found structuring devotional pilgrimage accounts and ethnographic treatises, and they constitute a crucial element in hagiographical texts, where the saint’s physical journey often functions as a metaphor and analog for his or her spiritual journey. These narratives are also enlisted for political and military purposes, such as the anonymously authored fourth-century Itinerarium Alexandri or accounts of travel contained in historiographical works. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of the imperial adventus acquired an unprecedented level of ceremony and ritual in the period, and envoys and ambassadors traveled extensively both within and beyond the boundaries of the empire, treating with domestic and foreign potentates. Aristocratic and ecclesiastical letter writers penned—and preserved in their collections—letters of recommendation for an extraordinary variety of individuals, who appear to have walked or rode the roads of the Roman with little regard for the apparent deterioration in safety and security that haunts a work like Rutilius Namatianus’ De Reditu Suo.

SELIM Conference on Old and Middle English

CFP XXVI SELIM CONFERENCE
The Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, and the Department of English Studies at the Jaume I University, Spain, are pleased to invite members of the Society and other scholars interested in the field to participate in the 26th International SELIM Conference. This year's venue will take place at the Medieval town of Morella (Spain) from September 18th to 20th, 2014
Morella is a city which has become a well-known tourist destination in the last decade. This year marks a special event in the city: Les Converses de Morella. Six hundred years ago, Ferran d'AntequeraSt Vicent Ferrer and Benedicto XIII, known as El Papa Luna, spent two months in Morella discussing the possible abdication of the Pope, which may have solved the problem of the division of the Church. We hope it will be a wonderful framework for the conference. If you want to check on the different aspects of the town and everything it offers, you can go to www.morellaturistica.com
The following plenary speakers have confirmed their participation (see Programme): Dr. Jorge Luis Bueno (Universidade de Vigo), Dr. Juan Camilo Conde (University of Murcia), Dr. Richard Dance (University of Cambridge) and Dr. Jeremy Smith (University of Glasgow).
Scholars interested in offering 20-minute papers (followed by a 10-minute discussion) must send a 100-to-250 word abstract using the on-line form in the Papers and Registration section (see Abstract&Registration) before April 13th.
Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by April.
If you are thinking about coming to Morella, it would be highly advisable to arrange your accomodation as soon as possible, as Morella can still be very busy in September (seeAccommodation). For further information please contact the Organising Committee.
On-line registration and payment will be available in May.
The Organizers welcome papers dealing with any aspect of Medieval English Language and Literature and particularly encourage the submission of papers offering multidisciplinary readings or perspectives on Medieval English texts. We would also like to encourage contributions dealing with the teaching of Old and Middle English. 
A selection of articles will be proposed for publication after the conference. Details will appear on the website
--
María José Esteve Ramos
Professora Titular d'Universitat,  Filologia Anglesa
Dpt d'Estudis Anglesos, Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials
Universitat Jaume I
12071 Castelló

American Folklore Society (Medieval and Early Modern Folklore Section

Call for Papers: American Folklore Society (Medieval and Early Modern Folklore Section)
 
Santa Fe, New Mexico November 5-8
 
Abstracts due Mar. 26, 2014
 
I invite all interested scholars to propose papers for panels sponsored by the Medieval and Early Modern Folklore section of the American Folklore Society, to be presented at the Annual Meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico (Nov. 5–8, 2014). We are organizing two panels at this year's meeting:
 
 
1) Shakespeare and Folklore: How do Shakespeare and his contemporaries incorporate folklore into the theater of the Early Modern period, and help preserve knowledge and tradition in a changing world? How has the continued popularity of Shakespeare fostered its own traditions and incorporated new material into its performance. Papers that deal with media representations are welcome.
 
2) Open Topics: The theme for the conference this year is "Folklore at the Crossroads" (http://www.afsnet.org/?page=2014AMTheme), but papers may deal with any aspect of medieval or early modern folklore.
 
Please send BOTH the short abstract (100 words) AND the long abstract (300) for your 15-20-minute paper to Kerry Kaleba at kerry.kaleba@gmail.com by March 26, 2014. I will also need to submit your institutional affiliation (or status as an independent scholar), and presentation title to AFS. Please include an e-mail address or a phone number where you can be reached before March 31. If your proposal is accepted, you will need to complete and submit the AFS online registration form for a participant in an organized panel at www.afsnet.org by March 31, 2014.
 
 
Best, 
Kerry Kaleba
Co-Convener, AFS Medieval and Early Modern Section 
-- 
Kerry Kaleba
MA Folklore, George Mason University 2012
BA Theatre Arts, Virginia Tech 2009