The University of California, Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies invites papers for two sponsored sessions at the 51st International Congress on Medieval Studies, to be held from May 12-15, 2016:

The University of California, Berkeley Program in Medieval Studies
invites papers for two sponsored sessions at the 51st International Congress on
Medieval Studies, to be held from May 12-15, 2016:

Post-War Scholarship and the Study of the Middle Ages I: Huizinga

Post-War Scholarship and the Study of the Middle Ages II: Panofsky

These sessions are an extension of the series that began at the 49th Congress, with panels on Auerbach and Kantorowicz, and continued at the 50th congress, with panels on Arendt and Curtius. As in the past, each session this year examines one of the major intellectual figures of the post-war period, considered in light of their own contemporary moments and their lasting influence in our own. The first session is dedicated to the work of Johan Huizinga and the second to Erwin Panofsky. Each of these scholars has contributed to our understanding of the Middle Ages and to the methodologies we use in our studies--literary, historical, philological, political. Their work has also helped the Middle Ages to remain in the peripheral vision of those scholars working in other and later fields. Huizinga, in many ways one of the founders of cultural history, presented us with a decadent late Middle Ages and a world in decline, a vision of the period that still sets the terms of the debate about the period both for the broader public and in the work of many scholars. Panofsky’s homology between the structures of Scholastic thought and the architecture of the gothic cathedral stressed the importance of habitus, a concept that influenced the work of his early French translator, Pierre Bourdieu, and has continued to be an important concept in sociology and discourse analysis. Despite citations of their work by Medievalists declining steadily since the 1980s, their ideas have become ever more ingrained in scholarly assumptions about the Middle Ages. It is time now to revisit these ideas and directly address the intellectual contexts in which they were formed.

We invite papers from all disciplines that engage with the scholarship
of Huizinga or Panofsky. Please submit abstracts of no more than one page
along with a participant information form
<http://wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF> to
berkeleymedievalstudies@gmail.com by September 10th, 2015.