TGHS Postgraduate Conference Call for Papers: 

Encounters and Exchanges in a Global Past

The Oxford Transnational and Global History Seminar is inviting submissions for a postgraduate conference, Saturday 25 June, 2022. The conference will be held in person in the Oxford History Faculty.

We welcome submissions on the theme 'Encounters and Exchanges in a Global Past.' We will explore the ways in which encounters and exchanges were experienced in the near and distant past. Despite the recent proliferation of frameworks for understanding contact and the exchange of goods, ideas and biota that accompanied it, contact is rarely considered from a truly global perspective that spans millennia, continents and disciplines.

We welcome interdisciplinary submissions relating to exchanges across time and space. We are particularly interested in submissions on the infrastructure that underlay encounters and exchanges, such as technology and ideology; multi-scalar interaction; the role of translation in contact; the environmental history of encounters and exchanges.

Sessions will consist of 20 minute papers with time for questions and discussion.

Interested postgraduates should send a 400-word abstract and brief biography to oxfordtghs@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 1 May 2022

 Call for Papers -The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives

The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives
24 April 2023 – 27 April 2023

Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Switzerland

We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers in the field of medieval sensory studies for the international workshop ‘The Senses: Present Issues, Past Perspectives.’ The workshop is organised by Prof. Annette Kern-Stähler (University of Bern, Switzerland), Prof. Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow, UK), and Dr. des. Laura Bernardazzi (University of Bern, Switzerland) and is funded by the Congressi Stefano Franscini, Monte Verità, Switzerland, and the University of Bern.

The Workshop
This workshop will bring medieval studies in conversation with sensory research in contemporary science and philosophy. The workshop will consist of a series of six panels, each of which will address a key topic in contemporary sensory research. Each cluster will include an articulation of the issue by a contemporary philosopher or scientist, followed by two responses by scholars in medieval studies. We are inviting medievalists in all disciplines to join one of the following panels:

1. Multimodal Perception. How was the interaction of the senses understood in medieval culture? How does the construction of the senses in medieval culture enrich our understanding of the contemporary problem of multisensoriality and cross-modal perception?
2. The Problem of Pain. What role do the senses play in the perception of pain? How do we account for the disparity between an experience of a physical event (such as piercing or tattooing) and expressions of this event in language and art?
3. Sensory Engineering. How can medieval understandings of sensory compensation and/or enhancement elucidate the aims and achievements of contemporary sensory engineering involving, for example, the creation of robotic limbs or the development of sophisticated forms of sensory substitution or augmentation?
4. Hallucination and Illusion. How do we, and how did people in the medieval past, distinguish between veridical perception and illusions and/or hallucinations? How did people in the medieval past evaluate such illusions we today call perseveration, diplopia, polyopia and dysmorphopsia? How did medieval writers and artists depict illusions and hallucinations?
5. Virtual Reality and Digital Sensoriality. What is the role of the senses in the construction of virtual reality? How might we use digital technology to recover the medieval sensorium, and in which ways do such technological efforts compete with those using medieval archaeological remains (e.g. buildings, pilgrims’ flasks, saints’ relics, food vessels) and other artefacts?
6. Proprioception and Kinesthesia. How does a body orientate itself in an environment? How are proprioception and kinesthesia articulated in medieval art and literature?

The Venue
Situated on a hilltop in the sunniest region of Switzerland, the venue has been at the heart of European intellectualism, idealism, and cultural dialogue for almost two centuries. Today, Monte Verità continues to be a meeting place of minds and a cultural centre through Congressi Stefano Franscini, a platform of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (ETH Zurich) hosting between 20 and 25 events organized by professors working at Swiss academic institutions, and a regular program of public events. The venue is also home to a museum complex and extensive gardens.

Please send an abstract of 200 – 250 words by 30 June 2022 together with a short statement indicating your affiliation and the panel you are interested in to: sensesconference.ens@unibe.ch

 The road to Rome: Aspects of religious conflict and mobility in the greater Mediterranean, 700-900, Tübingen, April 8-9, 2022

The conference is hybrid. For online (Zoom) registration please contact viola.osswald@student.uni-tuebingen.de or markus-piet.kleemann@student.uni-tuebingen.de.

 Papers are sought for ‘The Medical Paratext’ a conference organised by Petros Bouras-Vallianatos (University of Edinburgh) and Sophia Xenophontos (University of Glasgow), funded by the Wellcome Trust to be held, to be held on  7-8 September 2022 at the University of Glasgow.

‘Paratext’ is a term coined by Gérard Genette in 1987 to refer to the material surrounding a printed text, including titles, prefaces, introductions, and footnotes. The notion of the paratext has recently been introduced to the study of medieval codices, with scholars working on medieval palaeography and codicology currently negotiating its various categorisations and the challenges thereof. An important category of medieval manuscripts that has often been neglected in that respect is that of medical codices. This conference aims to plug this gap by applying the concept of the paratext right to the very heart of the study of medieval medical manuscripts containing texts in a variety of languages, including Arabic, Persian, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and other European vernacular. It thus seeks to make a significant advance in our understanding of how medieval medical manuscripts were used by their producers and consumers.

We are interested in encouraging theoretical reflection on the following subjects/questions:

• Different kinds and categories of paratextual elements (e.g. prefaces, foliation, decoration, illustrations, diagrams, annotations of any sort, colophons) and their significance;
• Transformation of texts through paratexts. How can the use of specific paratextual elements enhance/influence the reading/understanding of a particular medical text/theory?
• Paratextual elements as visual aids, especially, but not exclusively, in scholastic settings;
• The features of scribal and editorial paratextuality in medical works;
• Extensive paratexts (e.g. commentaries and scholia) and their function;
• The mobility of paratexts (e.g. their infiltration into the main text) and the transmission of the resulting ‘hidden’ paratext;
• Medical paratexts and their reception;
• Paratext and memory in medieval medicine (e.g. through the lens of cognitive theory);
• Paratext as a means of tracing the history of medical codices through time, geographical and social space;
• Paratext as a means of constructing and disseminating medical knowledge.

Confirmed speakers:

•    Giulia Ecca (Sapienza University of Rome) Sivan Gottlieb (Bar-Ilan University)
•    Fabian Käs (University of Cologne)
•    David Langslow (The University of Manchester)
•    Oliver Overwien (Humboldt University of Berlin)
•    Ignacio Sánchez (University of Warwick) Anna Maria Urso (University of Messina)
•    Iolanda Ventura (University of Bologna)
•    Elvira Wakelnig (University of Vienna)

Our aim is to hold a face-to-face event. Each paper will be 30 minutes long followed by a session of questions and answers (around 10 minutes). We are looking for papers dealing with original and previously unpublished material; extended versions of the papers will form a peer-reviewed edited volume. For a brief introduction to the medieval paratext, please see the study by Cooper.

Scholars are invited to submit abstracts of ca. 250 words to sophia.xenofontos@glasgow.ac.uk and petros.bouras-vallianatos@ed.ac.uk by 30 April 2022.