41^stAnnual Medieval and Renaissance Forum:    

Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance  

Friday and Saturday April 16-17, 2021 

  

Call for Papers and Sessions 

We are delighted to announce that the 41^stMedieval and Renaissance Forum: Scent and Fragrance in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance will take place virtually on Friday, April 16 and Saturday April 17, 2021.   

 

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) or panel proposals that discuss smell and fragrance 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 Deirdre Larkin, Managing Horticulturist at The Cloisters Museum and Gardens from 2007 to 2013,who will speak on “Every Fragrant Herb: The Medieval Garden and the Gardens of The Cloisters.” 

 

Deirdre Larkin is a horticulturist and historian of plants and gardens. She holds an MA in the history of religions from Princeton University and received her horticultural training at the New York Botanical Garden. She was associated with the Gardens of The Cloisters for more than twenty years and was responsible for all aspects of their development, design, and interpretation. Ms. Larkin was the originator of and principal contributor to the Medieval Garden Enclosed blog, published on the MMA website from 2008 through 2013. Ms. Larkin lectures frequently for museums, historical societies, and horticultural organizations. In 2017, she was a Mellon Visiting Scholar at the Humanities Institute of the New York Botanical Garden, where she researched the fortunes and reputations of medieval European plants now naturalized in North America. Her gardens in upstate New York serve as a laboratory for further investigations in the field.  

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.  

 

Graduate students will be eligible for consideration for the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award. More information about this new award will be available soon.  

 

We welcome undergraduate sessions but ask that students obtain a faculty member's approval and sponsorship.   

 

Please submit abstracts and full contact information on the google form available at https://forms.gle/CHdqrEK8pVps7Wa89. 

  

Abstract deadline: January 15, 2021 

 

Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2021 

 

As always, we look forward to seeing (virtually) returning and first-time participants in April! 

 Call for Papers – Cornell Medieval Studies Student Colloquium at Cornell 2021 – Movement

Movement: 2021 Medieval Studies Student Colloquium

The Medieval Studies Program at Cornell University is pleased to announce its thirty-first annual graduate student colloquium (MSSC). The conference will take place on the 26th and the 27th of March, to be held virtually over Zoom.

This year’s colloquium focuses on the theme of movement. Movement denotes the movement of peoples, cultures, thoughts and goods, the migration of plants and of animals. What happens to movement when it is frozen in stone (the swoop of hair across a person’s face in a marble statue)? How does an idea change when it is translated from one language to another? We are interested in movement defined broadly and represented across a range of disciplines.

We invite 20-minute papers that investigate movement in the Middle Ages as defined by/within a range of different disciplines and perspectives. Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

The migration of people, animals, and plants;
Cultures of movement;
Translation and adaptation (of cultures, languages, etc.);
Traditions that involve physical or spiritual movement;
Cosmology and the movement of celestial bodies;
Trade and movement in economics;
The stagnation or absence of “movement;”
Detainment;
The representation of “movement;”
Displacement, dispersal, or diaspora;
Moving into the “unknown;”
Temporal movement;
Effects of movement;
Ethics of movement.
Preference will be given to papers from underrepresented backgrounds and disciplines. We strongly encourage submissions that expand these themes and categories of inquiry beyond Christian, Western European contexts. We invite submissions in all disciplines allied to Medieval Studies, including Asian Studies, Africana Studies, Critical Race Studies, Near Eastern Studies, literature, history, the history of art, archaeology, philosophy, classics, theology, and others. Abstracts on all topics will be considered, though priority will be given to those which address our thematic strand.

Please send abstracts by January 15, 2021 to Alice Wolff at acw262@cornell.edu.

 Society for Classical Studies 153rd Annual Meeting

January 5–8, 2022
San Francisco

Call for Papers for a Panel Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity

Panel Title: Gender, Power, and the Body in Late Antiquity

Organized by Melissa Harl Sellew, Classical & Near Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota

We invite paper proposals that address some aspect of the interconnections amongst gender, embodiment, and expressions of power in the late ancient world.

Recent work (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology, 2006; Cawthorn, Becoming Female, 2008; Graybill, Are We Not Men? 2018; Marchal, Appalling Bodies, 2020) has advanced our understanding of how power of various sorts (whether that be in political, military, familial, civic, or religious contexts) is presented and effected through one’s bodily presence. These negotiations and claims can often involve compelling gestures of gendered presentation and performance, which sometimes challenge — or more often underscore — prevailing social norms. The diverse cultures of late antiquity and Byzantium offer rich sites for exploring how bodily practices work to express claims for power and its active expression.

We hope to convene a panel of papers that draw on a broad range of literary, visual, or documentary material, encompassing historical, medical, philosophical, religious, or other relevant sources. Presentations may involve communities from any geographical or linguistic location of the Mediterranean and Near East. The time span for the panel is more or less from the third century CE into the middle Byzantine period (ca. 200 – 1100 CE).

Examples of research questions might include (but not be limited to): how contemporary disability studies inform ideologies of ascetic practice; how gender variance potentially modulates effects in oratory or juridical speech; how literary texts (prose or verse) project notions of power via images of gendered presence; how practitioners of ritual power (“magic”) compel divine forces through bodily action; how discourses of suffering, “virginity,” or sexuality operate in martyrological contexts; or how sculpture, mosaics, coinage, painting, or other visual sources convey messages of embodied potency. Proposals evincing a robust use of theoretical interpretive approaches would be especially welcome.

Please send abstracts of no longer than 500 words that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS Guidelines for Authors of Abstracts) as an email attachment to Melissa Harl Sellew, University of Minnesota, at sellew@umn.edu by February 1, 2021. Please ensure that the abstracts are anonymous. The organizer will have all submissions reviewed anonymously, and the decision will be communicated to the authors of abstracts by the end of March 2021, leaving enough time that those whose abstracts are not chosen can participate in the individual abstract submission process for the 2022 SCS meeting. 

Attachments area