Tuesday, December 26, 2017

Call for papers:

"The Micropolitics of Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages"

2nd Research Forum of the Tübingen Center of Advanced Studies
“Migration and Mobility in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages”

Tübingen, Germany, 19-20 July 2018

organized by
Mischa Meier, Steffen Patzold and Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/de/115759


Narratives of the age of migrations tend to privilege the large-scale mobility of ethnically denominated groups. Recent research has questioned this focus from many angles and has led to a growing consensus that new approaches are needed which put the large-scale migrations into perspective, integrate other forms of mobility into the picture, and develop a clearer understanding of the social processes involved, both among the mobile groups and individuals as well as within the societies where they arrive. This conference proposes to explore an approach to the age of migrations that takes account of these redirections in scholarship by focusing on the micropolitics of mobility in late antique and early medieval local societies in a broad timeframe from ca. 250 to 900 CE.

By exploring the micropolitics of mobility on a broad basis of case studies we hope to achieve a clearer understanding of a number of key problems in the social history of migration and mobility in the period. Questions we wish to address include:

  • How did local societies accommodate and integrate immigrants of different kinds?
  • What were fields of ensuing social conflict (e.g. in the areas of religion, economy, political participation) and how were these conflicts settled?
  • How did local societies transform in reaction to immigrant groups?
  • Which differences can we observe between individual and group immigrations?
  • How did geographical mobility translate into social mobility?

We invite papers from younger as well as established scholars working in all relevant fields (history, archaeology, literature) which discuss these or other related aspects of the micropolitics of mobility. Applicants are requested to submit a short abstract for a paper of 25 minutes, a title, and a short CV by 22 January 2018 to luisa.luiz@altegeschichte.uni-tuebingen.de. We will cover travel and accommodation costs for the speakers.

For organizational questions, please contact luisa.luiz@altegeschichte.uni-tuebingen.de, for all other issues write to mischa.meier@uni-tuebingen.desteffen.patzold@uni-tuebingen.de or sebastian.schmidt-hofner@uni-tuebingen.de.

Monday, December 18, 2017

39th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum: 
Image and Visual Experience in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
Keene State College
Keene, NH, USA
Friday and Saturday April 13-14, 2018

Call for Papers and Sessions
We are delighted to announce that the 39th Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Image and Visual Experience in the Middle Ages and Renaissance will take place on April 13 and 14, 2018 at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. 

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss images and visual experience in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Papers and sessions, however, need not be confined to this theme but may cover other aspects of medieval and Renaissance life, literature, languages, art, philosophy, theology, history, and music.


This year’s keynote speaker is Jeffrey F. Hamburger, Kuno Francke Professor of German Art and Culture at Harvard University who will speak on “The Diagram Paradigm in the Middle Ages—and Beyond.”

 

Professor Hamburger's teaching and research focus on the art of the High and later Middle Ages. Among his areas of special interest are medieval manuscript illumination, text-image issues, the history of attitudes towards imagery and visual experience, German vernacular religious writing of the Middle Ages, especially in the context of mysticism, and, most recently, diagrams, the topic of his forthcoming book: From Cross to Crucifix: Typology, Diagrams and Devotion in Berthold of Nuremberg's Commentary on Hrabanus Maurus' In honorem sanctae crucis.  Dr. Hamburger is also the author of several other books, including St. John the Divine: The Deified Evangelist in Medieval Art and Theology (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002), The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany (New York: Zone Books, 1998), Nuns as Artists: The Visual Culture of a Medieval Convent (Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), and The Rothschild Canticles: Art and Mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).

All papers presented at this year’s Forum are eligible for inclusion in Selected Proceedings of the 39th Medieval and Renaissance Forum, to be published by Cambridge Scholars Press.  Contributors interested in publishing their work in this volume should submit their revised essays by May 15, 2018.

Students, faculty, and independent scholars are welcome. Please indicate your status (undergraduate, graduate, or faculty), affiliation (if relevant), and full contact information, including email address on your proposal.

We welcome undergraduate sessions, but require faculty sponsorship.  

Please submit abstracts, audio/visual needs, and full contact information to Dr. Robert G. Sullivan, Assistant Forum Director at sullivan@german.umass.edu.

Abstract deadline: January 15, 2018

Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2018

We look forward to greeting returning and first-time participants to Keene in April!

Thursday, December 14, 2017

MEDITERRANEAN PALIMPSESTS
Connecting the Art and Architectural Histories of Medieval Early Modern Cities


Call for Participation:

The Cyprus Institute, with support through the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, is launching a new research seminar project: Mediterranean Palimpsests: Connecting the Art and Architectural Histories of Medieval and Early Modern Cities. Interested scholars at a formative stage of their careers are encouraged to apply for participation in the project’s three planned workshops in Nicosia, Cordoba/Granada and Thessaloniki/Rhodes.

Directed by Nikolas Bakirtzis (The Cyprus Institute) and D. Fairchild Ruggles (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), the project investigates the layered art histories of medieval Mediterranean cities as the basis for scholarly connections that challenge and move beyond the boundaries of modern historiographies, national narratives and contemporary socioeconomic realities. Set in a region where issues of cultural heritage and identity are currently highly contested, the project looks at the material past to understand its relevance for the present and future. The project’s focus expands on collaborative research on historic Mediterranean cities pursued by the Cyprus Institute’s Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center (STARC) and the Illinois’ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Department of Landscape Architecture of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Mediterranean Palimpsests explicitly avoids nation-based models that emphasize unique, disconnected histories, and instead challenges scholars to consider the medieval Mediterranean as a matrix of cities that, united by the connections forged through trade, royal courts, migrations, pilgrimages, and conquests, produced the material culture and spaces that we encounter today. Questions about spatial context, scale and complexity are not particular to any one city in the Mediterranean, and thus provide common ground for research collaboration.

Addressing these issues, the project’s directors will convene three research seminars that will engage expert advisors and selected emerging scholars, that will explore transition, appropriation and identity in art and architectural history; these will be ten-day programs held in Nicosia (May 7-16, 2018), Granada Cordoba (January, 2019), and Rhodes Thessaloniki (May 2019).

The intense focus on these cities addresses their formation during the medieval and early modern periods, which significantly shaped their subsequent growth and in turn framed the production and experience of art and architecture in the following centuries. But the comparison also extends to Cairo, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Istanbul, Palermo, and other important Mediterranean nodes with the goal of considering the Mediterranean as a connected field, in which medieval cities share the experience of survival, appropriation and reconstruction for modern use.

Eligible scholars, primarily from the Mediterranean region, are invited to apply for one of twelve positions. The program provides travel and lodging costs and museum entrance fees for participating scholars.

EligibilityScholars and researchers who received their PhD in or after 2008 (i.e. within past 10 years) in the fields of art history, architectural history, landscape history, and archaeology are eligible to apply.  Scholars must be willing and able to participate in all three workshops.

Deadline: February 15, 2018. Applicants will be notified of results by the end of February

Application: Applicants should send as email attachments a 3-page Statement of Interest and a Curriculum Vitae to mcities@cyi.ac.cy. The C.V. should clearly state the field of doctoral study and date degree was received, applicant’s nationality, and applicant’s current place of employment or research. 

Project websitehttps://mcities.cyi.ac.cy
Call for Papers: 2018 McGill-Queen's Graduate 
Conference in History: Violence and the Mind


Please note that we have extended the submissions deadline for the 15th annual McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, taking place inMontreal on March 1-3, 2018. Abstracts of no more than 400 words and a brief academic biography (in Word or PDF format) can be sent to mcgillqueens2018@gmail.com.

The theme of this year’s conference, “Violence and the Mind,” will provide a platform for graduate students to explore violence historically by foregrounding the interior lives of historical subjects. We welcome emerging scholars from across the disciplines to present research that questions how violence is produced, elaborated, interpreted and experienced by the mind. For more on this year’s theme, please refer to the attached PDF. To learn more about the McGill-Queen’s Graduate Conference in History, please visit https://mcgillhcgsa.wixsite.com/home/about

This year’s keynote speaker is Dagmar Herzog, Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her book, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

Best regards,

The McGill-Queen’s 2018 Planning Committee 
Department of History and Classical Studies
McGill University

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Global Digital Humanities Symposium at Michigan State University
March 22-23, 2018

We are committed to bringing a wide-ranging and diverse group of participants and presenters for our conference. To further this end, there will be funds available to assist or offset the costs of travel. There is an option to request consideration for travel funds in the proposal form. If you have any questions, please email dh@msu.edu.
Call for Proposals Deadline to submit a proposal: Friday, December 15, 11:59pm EST
Digital Humanities at Michigan State University is proud to extend its symposium series on Global DH into its third year. Digital humanities scholarship continues to be driven by work at the intersections of a range of distinct disciplines and an ethical commitment to preserve and broaden access to cultural materials. The most engaged global DH scholarship, that which MSU champions, values digital tools that enhance the capacity of scholarly critique to reflect a broad range of literary, historical, new media, and cultural positions, and diverse ways of valuing cultural production and knowledge work. Particularly valuable are strategies in which the digital form manifests a critical perspective on the digital content and the position of the researcher to their material.
With the growth of the digital humanities, particularly in under-resourced and underrepresented areas, a number of complex issues surface, including, among others, questions of ownership, cultural theft, virtual exploitation, digital rights, endangered data, and the digital divide. We view the 2018 symposium as an opportunity to broaden the conversation about these issues. Scholarship that works across borders with foci on transnational partnerships and globally accessible data is especially welcome.
Michigan State University has been intentionally global for more than 60 years, with over 1,400 faculty involved in international research, teaching, and service. For the past 20 years, MSU has developed a strong research area in culturally engaged, global digital humanities. Matrix, a digital humanities and social science center at MSU, has done dozens of digital projects in West and Southern Africa that have focused on ethical and reciprocal relationships and capacity building. WIDE has set best practices for doing community engaged, international, archival work with the Samaritan Collections, Archive 2.0. Today many scholars in the humanities at MSU are engaged in digital projects relating to global, indigenous, and/or underrepresented groups and topics.
This symposium, which will include a mixture of presentation types, welcomes 300-word proposals related to any of these issues, and particularly on the following themes and topics by Friday, December 15, 11:59pm EST:
  • Critical cultural studies and analytics
  • Cultural heritage in a range of contexts
  • DH as socially engaged humanities and/or as a social movement
  • Open data, open access, and data preservation as resistance, especially in a postcolonial context
  • DH responses to crisis
  • How identity categories, and their intersections, shape digital humanities work
  • Global research dialogues and collaborations
  • Indigeneity – anywhere in the world – and the digital
  • Digital humanities, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism
  • Global digital pedagogies
  • Borders, migration, and/or diaspora and their connection to the digital
  • Digital and global languages and literatures
  • The state of global digital humanities community
  • Digital humanities, the environment, and climate change
  • Innovative and emergent technologies across institutions, languages, and economies
  • Scholarly communication and knowledge production in a global context
Presentation Formats:
  • 3-5-minute lightning talk
  • 15-minute presentation
  • 90-minute workshop
  • 90-minute panel
Proposal formhttp://www.msuglobaldh.org/submit-a-proposal/

Kristen Mapes
Digital Humanities Coordinator
College of Arts and Letters
Michigan State University

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Call for papers: Conference on Time and Chronology in Creation
 
14th-16th June 2018
 
University of Wales Trinity St David, Lampeter
 
 
 
The stories told about the beginnings of the universe, of places, or of peoples explore how the unfamiliar space and time before us came to be the word in which we live now. Most give a clear explanation of how the space of our world came to be, but fewer of them give a clear explanation of how the chronological framework in which we live came into existence.
 
This conference will explore the ways in which ideas about time and chronology are integrated into the stories about the beginnings of places, spaces and peoples. This could include (but is not limited to):
 
- the linear or cyclical structure of time in cosmogonies
- the personification of time
- deities associated with time and creation
- the starting or restarting of chronological structures at the point of someone’s birth or the founding of a new location
- philosophical approaches to the origin or nature of time
- ideas about origins of peoples or places before the beginning of time
 
We are seeking speakers from across the arts and humanities. We are therefore interested in receiving abstracts from academics and PGRs working on ancient or contemporary religions and philosophy, and scholars working on literary, textual, epigraphic and iconographic sources.
 
Papers will last 30 minutes each with 15 minutes of discussion.
 
If you are interested in giving a paper, please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to Fiona Mitchell attimeandchronologyconference@gmail.com by 1st February 2018. Abstracts should be word documents (.doc/.docx) or PDFs. Please do not include your name or email address in your abstract.
 
Information about the conference will be available at https://timeandchronology.hcommons.org/
 
For updates, please feel free to follow us on Twitter (@timeconfrence) or on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/timeandchronology/)