Funded PhD and MA fellowships in scholarly editing, medieval/early modern culture and digital humanities

PhD and MA fellowships in medieval/early modern culture and digital humanities: the Canterbury Tales, Medieval Codes, and Textual Communities projects

Following funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities and Research Council of Canada and the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Department of English at the University of Saskatchewan is inviting applications for four-year PhD and one/two year MA scholarships to work on the following research projects:

•The Canterbury Tales Project (http://www.textualcommunities.usask.ca/web/canterbury-tales)

•The Textual Communities Project (http://www.textualcommunities.usask.ca/)

•The Medieval Codes Project (http://medievalcodes.ca)

Applicants should propose a MA or PhD topic related to some aspect of these projects. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

•The manuscripts, incunables, and textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales

•Analysis of large manuscript traditions, including use of mathematical/statistical/phylogenetic methods

•Theory and practice of scholarly editing in the digital age

•The effect of the digital revolution on our models of the humanities, archives and the community

•Digital humanities and scholarly editing/archival collections

•Information structures and features in medieval documents

•Medieval manuscript layout and navigation

Successful candidates will join one of the Canterbury Tales, Textual Communities, or Medieval Codes projects, commencing in September 2015.

Facility with Latin or a modern European language and skills in computing will be particularly valuable, but not essential. We welcome applicants from anywhere in the world. With support from SSHRC and the university, we are able to offer funding towards research travel and training, with scholarship and other support for subsistence during study to qualified students. You will be joining a small but vibrant international cohort, currently including students from Italy, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Mexico.

Please follow the Department of English guidelines for application, which can be found at http://artsandscience.usask.ca/english/graduate. In your cover letter, please specify that you are applying for this position and provide a substantial description of your research interests as they relate to the projects named above.

For more information about these research opportunities, please contact Peter Robinson at peter.robinson@usask.ca, or Yin Liu at yin.liu@usask.ca. Complete applications should be lodged by 8 February, 2015; late applications may be considered if funding is still available.

Late Antique and Medieval CFP

Connections, Networks, & Contexts 

17 April 2015 

Run by the Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society from the University of Edinburgh 

The Late Antique and Postgraduate Society (LAMPS) at the University of Edinburgh is holding a one day conference on the theme of Connections, Networks, and Contexts within the time period of Late Antique to Medieval. While interdisciplinary approaches to academic research may have been less common just a few years ago, there has recently been an increased interest in working across disciplinary boundaries. For the last five years, the Late Antique and Medieval Postgraduate Society from the University of Edinburgh has worked under a similar ethos, organising seminars for postgraduate students to present their work and exchange ideas across academic disciplines. 

We welcome proposals for 20 minute papers and A3 posters from any relevant department, including Archaeology, History, Classics, History of Art, Literature, Language Studies, and Islamic Studies among others. Early career scholars and postgraduate students are invited to submit abstracts of up to 300 words for papers, and 200 words for posters, to lampsedinburgh@gmail.com. To be considered, proposals must be received by 2 March 2015. Confirmations of acceptance will be sent at least one month in advance. This conference is being put on with the support of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. 

Bemidji State University Graduate Students Mini Grant Deadline

Please inform all graduate students of the following opportunity:

The College of Arts and Sciences; the College of Health Sciences & Human Ecology; the Center for Extended Learning, Library & Library Services; the Office of Student Development & Enrollment; and the School of Graduate Studies have joined hands to offer the following opportunity for graduate students.

Awards of up to $400 each are available to graduate students who are in good standing, are fully matriculated (see mini-grant cover sheet), and are ready to pursue research (if conducting research for their thesis/research paper).

For complete guidelines and application materials, please go to the BSU School of Graduate Studies website at

http://www.bemidjistate.edu/academics/graduate_studies/

Please note: The deadline for submission of the mini grant proposal is Friday, February 27, 2015.

Thank you!

BSU Graduate Committee

Joan Miller, Director

School of Graduate Studies #48

Bemidji State University

1500 Birchmont Drive NE

Bemidji, MN 56601

888-386-8464

218-755-2027

218-755-2258 (FAX)

Please note: the School of Graduate Studies has relocated to Deputy Hall 111.

42nd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, 16–17 October 2015 Vatican Film Library

Conference information is posted at http://libraries.slu.edu/special_collections/stl_conf_manu.  

CfP: Heroic Narratives and the Reshaping of History, University of Copenhagen, 11th-12th June 2015

Please consult the website for further information: https://heroicnarrativesandthereshapingofhistory.wordpress.com/

(apologies for cross-posting)

Call for Papers -- 2015 Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies

42nd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, 16–17 October 2015

Vatican Film Library—Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections

St. Louis, MO

The Vatican Film Library invites paper submissions or session proposals for the 42nd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, to be held at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO, 16–17 October 2015. The conference is organized annually by the Vatican Film Library and its journal, Manuscripta, and is the longest running conference in North America devoted exclusively to medieval and Renaissance manuscript studies. The two-day program each year offers sessions on a variety of themes relating to medieval book production, distribution, reception, and transmission in such areas as paleography, codicology, illumination, textual transmission, library history, cataloguing, and more. 

Guest Speaker for 2015:

Stella Panayotova (Keeper, Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)

Papers or session proposals should address the material aspects of late antique, medieval, or Renaissance manuscripts. Submissions may address an original topic or one of the session themes already proposed (see below). Papers are 20 minutes in length and a full session normally consists of three papers. If you are interested in organizing one of these sessions, or wish to suggest a paper or session of your own, please contact us as soon as possible.

Proposed Sessions

Submissions are welcome for any of the following sessions already proposed.

• Old Book, New Book: Refurbished Manuscripts in the Middle Ages
• Even when they were tailored to the taste of specific patrons, it was understood that manuscripts would outlast their owners: they were future family heirlooms, to be circulated in networks of gift exchange, inheritance, and resale. In what ways did the patrons and producers of manuscripts anticipate the inevitable change of hands? Under what circumstances did new owners expand or alter legacy manuscripts, and how did they respond to the taste of previous owners? This session calls for papers that examine the social, political, and intellectual import of secondhand medieval books.

• Gravity vs. Levity
• “Man is a rational, moral animal, capable of laughter.” (Notker Labeo, d. 1022). While this may be considered a truism by some, the question of the role played by humor in medieval manuscripts remains somewhat indistinct. Is a joke in a manuscript ever just a joke? Subversive, witty, parodic, didactic, and broadly entertaining imagery is the focus of this session.  What role did humor play in society and how is that displayed in a concrete fashion within the pages of books? 

• A Good Read: The Production of Vernacular Texts in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Italy and their Public 
• While there is a great deal of documentary evidence for the production and readership of vernacular texts in Italy in the fifteenth century, we know relatively little about their thirteenth- and fourteenth-century patronage and the process of their production. Nonetheless, a considerable number of prose and verse manuscripts written in French, Franco-Italian, or Franco-Venetian survives, often resplendently illustrated and obviously produced for wealthy patrons. See the Fordham University website created to explore this topic: http://legacy.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/medieval_studies/french_of_italy/index.asp. This panel seeks papers that consider the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century production and circulation of these manuscripts in Italy, discuss their patrons and readers; and examine the organization of their production by individuals or workshops based in urban, court, or private milieus. At this time university textbooks were being produced under university supervision for quality control; what evidence can we find for the regulation of quality in this manuscript genre?

Please send a title and an abstract of not more than 200 words to Susan L’Engle (lengles@slu.edu) by 1 March 2015. Those whose proposals are accepted are reminded that registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses for the conference are the responsibility of speakers and/or their institutions.

For more information, contact Erica Lauriello, Library Associate for Special Collections Administration, at 314-977-3090 or elauriel@slu.edu. Conference information is posted at http://libraries.slu.edu/special_collections/stl_conf_manu. 

Mary Jaharis Center Grants Competition

Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture Grants

The Mary Jaharis Center for Byzantine Art and Culture is pleased to announce its 2015-2016 grant competition. Our grants reflect the Mary Jaharis Center’s commitment to fostering the field of Byzantine studies through the support of graduate students and early career researchers and faculty.

Mary Jaharis Center Dissertation Development Grants target graduate students who have completed all coursework, language requirements, and exams necessary to advance to Ph.D. candidacy. Grants are meant to assist with the costs of travel associated with the development of a dissertation proposal in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived, e.g., travel to potential research sites, museum collections, research and special collections libraries. The goal of these grants is to assist students in refining their initial ideas into a feasible, interesting, and fundable doctoral project.

Mary Jaharis Center Dissertation Grants are awarded to advanced graduate students working on Ph.D. dissertations in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. These grants are meant to help defray the costs of research-related expenses, e.g., travel, photography/digital images, microfilm.

Mary Jaharis Center Publication Grants support book-length publications in the field of Byzantine studies broadly conceived. Grants are aimed at early career academics. Preference will be given to postdocs and assistant professors, though applications from non-tenure track faculty and associate and full professors will be considered. We encourage the submission of first-book projects.

The application deadline for all grants is February 15, 2015. For further information, please see http://maryjahariscenter.org/grants/.

Call for Participation: Delaware Valley Medieval Association

The Delaware Valley Medieval Association (DVMA) announces a call for speakers for upcoming meetings. The DVMA hosts up to four meetings a year to showcase scholarship from members working or living in New Jersey, Eastern Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Maryland. If you have a project you would like to present at a DVMA meeting, please add your name to our speaker pool! We may contact you if your research complements the theme of an upcoming meeting. Independent scholars and graduate students are especially encouraged to submit. 

To add yourself to the pool, fill out our Speaker Interest Survey here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1miT7A2RQKPLtxalLI_3MaDPl3Z7ZFpRsVZaw-HYausU/viewform

You can find out more about the DVMA, including membership information, at our website, http://www.dvmamedieval.com/. 

-- 

Maeve Doyle

Whiting Fellow in the Humanities and Ph.D. Candidate, History of Art

Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, PA, USA

Graduate Student Representative, Delaware Valley Medieval Association

Deadline Soon! Spring School (IDE, DiXiT) Advanced XML/TEI technologies for Digital Scholarly Editions, 13-17.4.15, Graz

*[Apologies for cross-posting]*

Call for Participation:

IDE meets DiXiT – Spring School 2015

Advanced XML/TEI technologies for Digital Scholarly Editions

We are very pleased to announce the Spring School on Advanced XML/TEI technologies for Digital Scholarly Editions organized and endorsed by the the Institutefor Documentologyand Digital Editing(IDE) and the Digital Scholarly Editions Initial Training Network (DiXiT). The spring school will be run and held at the at the Centre for Information Modelling – Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the University of Graz from 13th to 17th April 2015.

The spring school is directed to participants with previous experience in XML/TEI editing who would like to involve themselves more intensively with the creation of digital scholarly editions based on the international encoding standard XML TEI P5. Besides addressing specific issues and use cases of text encoding, the participants will be trained what to do with the data once the encoding is done and how to process it further until the publication on the WWW. To this end the teaching will strongly focus on XPath, XSLT, HTML and CSS as technologies for the web publication of digital scholarly editions. 

Since the level of this spring school is advanced, previous knowledge of TEI practices is not only recommended but necessary for participation.

The lectures will be held by experts from the field of Digital Scholarly Editing, related to the DiXiT network or the IDE (James Cummings, Franz Fischer, Ulrike Henny, Torsten Schaßan, Martina Semlak, Magdalena Turska, Gunter Vasold, Georg Vogeler). Tara Andrews (Univ. of Bern) has agreed to give a keynote.

The School will cover the following areas:

• issues when working with XML TEI P5 (to be proposed by the participants)
  
• customization of the TEI schema
  
• creating web pages with HTML/CSS and JavaScript and JQuery
  
• transforming the TEI XML with XSLT/XPath
  
• publishing frameworks for digital scholarly editions
  
• use cases for research on and with digital scholarly editions
  

The IDE-meets-DiXiTSpring School on Advanced XML/TEI technologies for Digital Scholarly Editions is open to interested scholarsanywhere in the world with previous experience in digital scholarly editing with the TEI. As the course will strongly focus on practical exercise, we can accept only applications which can bring own material for the exercises. All teaching will be in English.

The course offers 20 positions. Participants will be required to arrange their own accommodation and travel to Graz. The participation fee will be 100 EUR. A limited number of bursaries will be available for the participation fee, travel and accommodation in particular for participants from less developed countries and from Eastern Europe.

Application closes on 10st February 2015 and early registration is highly recommended.

For the application we need from you

• your name, address, e-mail, institutional affiliation (if applicable)
  
• a short description of your project
  
• this online questionnaire
  

If you want to be considered for the bursary please give indicate

• approximate amount for travel and accommodation expenses
  
• do you need a reduction on the participation fee?
  
• academic status (graduate student, PhD student, PostDoc, fully trained scholar, other)
  

Please send your application and any question you have to dixit@uni-graz.at

We will publish further information on the school at http://www.i-d-e.de/aktivitaeten/schools/spring-school-2015

CFP Deadline soon! Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association

CALL FOR PAPERS – Medieval/Early Modern  

Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference of the German Studies Association (www.thegsa.org) 

Washington, D.C., October 1-4, 2015

YMAGINA (Young Medievalist Germanists in North America, http://www.ymagina.org) is pleased to announce the following calls for papers for sessions at the 2015 GSA conference.  

1. Lacunae

We invite papers investigating and/or challenging gaps in literal, metaphoric, and linguistic/philological contexts in premodern German text and art. Both frustrating and exciting for opening interpretive possibilities, the lacuna functions necessarily as negative evidence, and yet remains one of the fundamental units of premodern textual data: illegible passages in manuscripts; missing, torn, pierced, or otherwise damaged manuscript leaves or pages in printed books; missing source texts only discernible from later derivations or copies (i.e., lacunae in stemmata); imperfect transmission or utter lack of musical notation for lyric texts; works mentioned as part of an author’s oeuvre or listed in library catalogs but now lost; and semantic, syntactic, or morphological change with murky evidence of transition all characterize but do not exhaust the conceptual range of the lacuna in understanding our inescapably fragmentary field.

2. Sense Deprivation

The word Sinn possesses a vast array of meanings. In addition to designating direction of motion and the meaning of words, ‘sense’ refers to a number of different human faculties, including the five senses, consciousness, and even social or spiritual awareness. For this session, we invite papers on the lack of any of these forms of sense: disorientation or wandering; meaningless expressions and nonsense; blindness, deafness, and other inhibitions of sense perception; fainting, falling unconscious, or ecstatic states; deception of the senses by magic or demonic influences (invisibility or hallucinations); senseless figures such as the wild man or the fool; and loss of memory, among many other possible topics. ‘Sense’ seems to be a necessary and underlying condition of being human and the mode by which human experience becomes intelligible. This panel seeks to interrogate instances of insufficiency or lack in medieval and early modern German contexts.

3. Beginnings and Endings

Both individually and culturally, human perception gives precedence to beginnings and endings. Cultures process the most recent past and the time of origins, while the details in between remain vague. Cognitively, children and adults display a learning bias toward beginnings and endings of words. The implications of these tendencies for medieval and early modern cultural and linguistic production are “end”-less. The incipit of a poem, the prologue of a medieval romance, or the illuminated initials of a book entice us. The ending may be clever, grand, or fragmentary. Colophons and rubrics offer tantalizingly partial insight into the way scribes understood the texts under their pens. Meaning can be generated linguistically through prefixes and suffixes or initial and final syntactic placement. The creation story and the last judgment determined the way in which people lived their lives and perceived their own significance in history and in the cosmos. This panel seeks to open a scholarly discussion about the significance of beginnings and endings in a period of Germanic literary, cultural, and linguistic production that we persistently designate as the “Middle” Ages.

4. Open Call for New Research

In addition to sessions on the topics listed above, we would like to be able to showcase ongoing research on other aspects of medieval and early modern Germanic culture and language. We therefore welcome submissions concerning work in progress on topics unrelated to the specific calls.

We seek 15- to 20-minute papers, in English or German. Please send an abstract (max. 250 words) and a brief CV that includes institutional affiliation by MONDAY, JANUARY 26, 2014, to ymagina.gsa@gmail.com

2015 YMAGINA Organizers

Adam Oberlin (The Linsly School/Universiteit Gent)

Sharon M. Wailes (Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis)

CJ Jones (University of Notre Dame)

COmitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies deadline

Published annually under the auspices of the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, COmitatus invites the submission of articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of medieval and Renaissance studies.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE FOR VOLUME 46 (2015): 1 FEBRUARY 2015.

The Comitatus editorial board will make its final selections by 1 May 2015. Please send submissions as email attachments to Dr. Blair Sullivan, sullivan@humnet.ucla.edu.