Greetings from Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia.

 This summer Rare Book School is excited to offer four courses designed specifically to advance the research of scholars in medieval and renaissance studies. 
Introduction to Paleography, 800–1500 introduces students to the book-based scripts and the text typologies of the western European Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from Caroline minuscule through early print. Taught by Consuelo Dutschke, Curator of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts at Columbia University, this course will provide students with the basic tools for working with medieval codices and enable them to read the texts and to recognize categories of script. This course will be taught in Charlottesville June 9–13. See the course website for a complete description. 

During the same week, June 9-13, RBS will offer a course in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on The Medieval Manuscript in the 21st Century. Taught by Will Noel, Director of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Dot Porter, Curator of Digital Research Services at the Schoenberg Institute, this course guides students of both the digital humanities and manuscript studies through the concepts and realities of working with medieval manuscripts in the twenty-first century. By considering critical issues relating to using medieval manuscripts in a digital world, students will engage the idea of "digital surrogacy" and explore the implications of representing physical objects in digital forms. See the course website for a complete description. 
Students interested in manuscript studies may also consider Introduction to Western Codicology, taught by Albert Derolez, Emeritus Professor at the Free Universities of Brussels and author of The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This course surveys the development of the physical features of manuscript books. By teaching students to examine manuscript materials, structure, and layout, among other elements, this course goes beyond traditional research on the study of script and illumination and introduces students to alternate methods of uncovering information in a codex. To give students the widest possible exposure to a variety of manuscripts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the course will take a field trip to libraries in Washington, DC. This course will be taught in Charlottesville 16–20 June.See the course website for a complete description. 

For students familiar with basic skills in paleography, codicology, and the history of the hand-produced book, RBS is offering Advanced Seminar: Medieval Manuscript Studies, taught by Barbara A. Shailor, Deputy Provost for the Arts at Yale University and former Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale. Students will spend the week analyzing and discussing fragments and codices at the Beinecke Library. In addition to transcribing difficult scripts, students will have the opportunity to attend workshops by Yale conservators on topics such as inks and pigments, parchment, paper, watermark identification, and collation. This course will be taught in New Haven, Connecticut during the week of July 28–August 1. See the coursewebsite for a complete description. 
Rare Book School is currently receiving applications for this course--and all other--courses. To apply, please visit please myRBS to set up your account and submit your application materials. For general information on the application process, visit the RBS Application & Admissions page.  

Please write to rbs_programs@virginia.edu if you have any questions about either course or the application process. 

We look forward to hearing from you!

David Grant Smith

Program Assistant | Rare Book School 

dgs4cb@virginia.edu

Texts and Contexts CFP

CALL FOR PAPERS: Texts and Contexts, A Manuscript Conference at the Ohio State University, November 14-15, 2014, sponsored by the Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies. Submission deadline: August 15, 2014.

 

Texts and Contexts is an annual conference held on the campus of the Ohio State University devoted to Medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, incunables and early printed texts in Latin and the vernacular languages. The conference solicits papers particularly in the general discipline of manuscript studies, including palaeography, codicology, reception and text history. In addition to the general papers (of roughly 20 minutes), the conference also hosts the Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture, established in memory of the late Virginia Brown, who taught paleography at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies for some 40 years. We also welcome proposals for sessions of two to three papers which might treat a more focused topic. 

 

The Virginia Brown Memorial Lecture speaker for 2014 is Francis Newton, Professor Emeritus at Duke University. This year’s Texts and Contexts will also celebrate the centenary of the publication of E.A. Lowe's The Beneventan Script. There will be several panels devoted to Beneventan script and its use in the transmission of texts. In addition, Hope Mayo, the Philip Hofer Curator of Printing and Graphic Arts at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, will speak on her recent work on E.A. Lowe.

Deadline extended on Call for Participants: Roots & Routes Summer Institute

Dear colleagues and students, 

 

We are delighted to announce the third of three annual Roots & Routes Summer Institutes on knowledge production in the premodern Mediterranean and in the Digital Age. The Institute, which will take place at the University of Toronto Scarborough from May 26th to June 3rd, 2014, is generously supported by the University of Toronto's Connaught Fund and is completely free of charge to all participants. We hope you can join us! Please read on for details on the Institute’s format, theme, and application procedure (or go directly tohttp://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/ to apply).

 

 

Format:

 

Unlike traditional academic conferences, the Roots & Routes Summer Institute features a combination of informal presentations, seminar-style discussions of shared materials, hands-on workshops on a variety of digital tools, and small-group project development sessions. Hosted by the University of Toronto Scarborough, the institute welcomes participants from a range of disciplines interested in engaging with digital scholarship; technical experience is not a requirement. Graduate students (MA and PhD), postdoctoral fellows and faculty are all encouraged to apply.

 

Through its exciting roster of activities the Institute encourages participants to develop a more coherent and explicitly transdisciplinary analytical framework for their scholarship using digital tools and methodologies. Participants will explore new formats for conducting research and communicating their findings. By teaming up with information technology specialists and digital scholarship experts working outside the Mediterranean, participants will have a chance to build long-term collaborative projects to enhance their ongoing individual research agendas. In order to maximize the potential for future collaboration and broad, thematic conversations, groups will be composed of participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and at different stages of their scholarly careers, from senior scholars to advanced undergraduates. Participants are encouraged to engage each other’s materials, bring insights from their own fields of expertise to a broader methodological and conceptual discussion, and begin to draw out connections between what are often seen as disparate fields of knowledge.

 

 

Annual Theme:

 

This year's theme, "Sociability and Materiality," aims to capture a range of historical problems and their attendant methodological and epistemological challenges. Participants are invited to define and approach this theme from the position of their individual disciplines and research interests. For example, what place does "the Mediterranean" have in discussions about manuscript, print, and digital cultures and their interpretation? What can historians, art historians, archaeologists, and other scholars learn from one another when tackling these problems? (How) are themes such as sociability and materiality useful in the study of the premodern Mediterranean? How does the recent resurgence in the history of material culture speak to longer-term interest among historians of the book in the materiality of textual artifacts?How can attention to materiality and sociability make salient the various practices of knowledge production of different disciplinary traditions, and what do such practices entail? What new ways of envisioning archives (as processes as well as products) are being facilitated by digital technologies? How do digital media and methodologies change the ways in which we identify, access, and interpret historical records? What might "collaborative research" in digital environments have to learn from (and teach) the history of earlier forms of scholarly sociability? 

 

 

Application Guidelines:

 

To apply, please go to our online registration site, http://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/. Applicants should submit by March 21, 2014 a CV and a brief proposal (up to 600 words) that includes a discussion of their current research and a specific object they would like to present and further develop digitally. This object may be a text, an artifact, a dataset, or a cluster of any of the above. Once accepted, participants will be asked to compile a bibliography of relevant readings to share with others in advance, as well as to install and become familiar with a few digital tools (e.g. Zotero), to allow us to explore more advanced features and digital skills at the institute itself. Participants are not expected to have prior programming knowledge or other advanced digital skills, but should be genuinely interested in the potential of digital tools to challenge and transform current research practices. 

 

Selection announcements will be made by March 30, 2014. 

 

**Participation in the Institute is free of charge. Travel and accommodation bursaries may be available for out-of-town graduate students. ** 

 

For more information about the Institute, check out our website: http://serai.utsc.utoronto.ca/rrsi2014.

 

Please contact the organizers at rrsi2014[at]utsc.utoronto.ca for further information or to get involved in the organizing process.

 

 

Concurrent Local Events:

 

We encourage and aim to facilitate interaction between the Roots and Routes Summer Institute attendees and the following concurrent local events. Details to follow.

 

Berkshire Conference of Women Historians 

“Histories on the Edge / Histoires sur la brèche”

May 22-25, 2014  

Toronto, Canada

http://berks2014.com

 

In addition to an exciting roster of sessions on all aspects of the history of women, gender, and sexuality, this year’s Berks will feature a Digital Lab where attendees will have an opportunity to interact with the people behind a range of international digital history projects. Detailed program coming soon.

 

 

Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 

“Borders without Boundaries”

May 24-30, 2014    

Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada

http://congress2014.ca

 

In addition to over seventy scholarly associations meeting at Congress, this year’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI@Congress) will convene Wednesday, May 28 to Friday, May 30 2014. For more details go to: http://dhsi.org/events.php

Call for papers for MLA convention Vancouver, Canada, January 8-11, 2015

"Monstrous water and water monsters in the medieval and early modern imagination"Water monsters and water as monstrous are both part of the same complex -- the reminder that there are extents to our reach as human beings and a vast world that we cannot be part of, a place of multifaceted Otherness. Water spawns its own horrible offspring, birthing creatures from its depths. Water is vast and we are reminded by it of our limits; it is simultaneously a site of veneration and fear, of new life and loss. Like most monsters, water shares something with us -- we are largely made up of water -- but that shared similitude, that monstrous drop within us, does not give us the ability to comprehend it -- it is both us and completely Other to us.

 

There is a richness to exploring the link between water as monster and the monstrous within the water. Often in literature and visual representations, water has been written with the imagery of the subconscious and it links that subconscious with the monstrous figures at the fringes of our minds, those assemblages of our repressed fears and anxieties

Submissions should explore aspects of medieval and early modern literary and visual culture in respect to water monsters or instances of monstrous waters.

 

To submit send a 300 word abstract and short CV to Tina Boyer, boyertm@wfu.edu by March 15th, 2014. Please include your name, title, and affiliation on the abstract itself.

 

This special session is organized by MEARCSTAPA: an organization committed to the scholarly examination of monstrosity as an area of social and cultural interest to past and present societies. Our inter/trans/post/pre-disciplinary approach allows us to explore the significance of monstrosity across cultural, temporal, and geographic boundaries. We are interested in a multivalent approach using materials on monsters and monstrosity from literary, artistic, philosophical, and historical sources.

 

_______________________________________

Just a bit more time to send in submissions for the 2014 UST Graduate English and Art History Conference

Call for Papers
University of St. Thomas
English Graduate Conference
Friday, April 25, 2014

Please forward this message to your graduate students – a CFP poster is attached. Thank you,

The University of St. Thomas English and Art History graduate programs will hold an interdisciplinary conference on Friday, April 25, 2014.

While papers addressing any aspect of literature, visual arts, and culture will be considered, we particularly welcome proposals for papers exploring the topic of Visualizing the Past/Imagining the Future.

·         How do conceptions of the past or future inform and/or constrain the process of literary or artistic production?

·         How have artists and writers imagined the future in utopian or dystopian terms?

·         In what ways have literary or historical eras (e.g., the “dark ages” or Romanticism) been idealized or demonized by writers or artists of later eras?

·         In what ways is the practice of literary or art history promoted and/or constrained by conceptions of “truthiness” or other aspects of postmodern culture?

·         How are historic conceptions of time (e.g., apocalypse, millennialism, geologic time, periodization) created and/or expressed in literary and artistic texts?

·         How might non-human and manufactured environments of the future construct or be constructed by literary and visual texts?

·         In what ways does the narrative of memory affect the construction of language, communities, societies, and cultures?

·         How do digital technologies [re]shape conceptions of the past and/or the future?

·         How may literature and the visual arts mold the future concept of the human in the wake of social, cultural, and technological transformations?

We encourage analyses of literary, artistic, architectural, cultural, cinematic, digital, and/or other textualities.

Email two-page (maximum) proposals for individual presentations or for panels of three to all members of the conference program committee:

Alexis Easley, maeasley@stthomas.edu,

Heather Shirey, hmshirey@stthomas.edu,

and Marty Warren, mlwarren@stthomas.edu,

by March 15, 2014. Final papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum) to present.

nathan

34th Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium

10, 11 and 12 October 2014
The Thompson Room (Room 110)
Barker Center, 12 Quincy Street
~

Call For Papers

The organizers of the 34th Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium acknowledge with thanks the support of
The Provostial Funds Committee for the Arts and Humanities
The Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures & The Friends of Harvard Celtic Studies.

The John V. Kelleher Lecture

Ann Parry Owen
Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies
University of Wales.

Y Prydydd Gŵr: Changing Concepts in the Welsh Praise Poetry Tradition, 1150-1500
~
Thursday, October 09, 2014, 5:00 pm
Harvard Faculty Club, 20 Garden Street Cambridge, Massachusetts

This event is open to members and invited guests of the Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures. The public is invited to attend if space is available. Due to limited seating space, admission to the event is not guaranteed.

---

Future Dates for the John V. Kelleher Lecture and the Harvard Celtic Colloquium. 
N.B.: Please note that these dates are tentative and may be subject to change.      

Twelfth John V. Kelleher Lecture                                              October 8, 2015
Thirty-fifth Annual Harvard Celtic Colloquium                       October 9, 10, 11, 2015            

SLA Panel for APA 2015 Meeting, New Orleans Travel, Travelers, and Traveling in Late Antique Literary Culture

Travel, Travelers, and Traveling in Late Antique Literary Culture

Please note that the deadline for submitting abstracts for the following panel sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity has been extended until 21 March 2014 (apologies for cross-posting).

Organizer: Cam Grey, University of Pennsylvania

Sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity

 

The 2015 panel sponsored by the Society for Late Antiquity at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association on Jan. 8-11 in New Orleans, will explore aspects of travel and traveling in late antique literary culture. Narratives of travel can be found structuring devotional pilgrimage accounts and ethnographic treatises, and they constitute a crucial element in hagiographical texts, where the saint’s physical journey often functions as a metaphor and analog for his or her spiritual journey. These narratives are also enlisted for political and military purposes, such as the anonymously authored fourth-century Itinerarium Alexandri or accounts of travel contained in historiographical works. Meanwhile, the phenomenon of the imperial adventus acquired an unprecedented level of ceremony and ritual in the period, and envoys and ambassadors traveled extensively both within and beyond the boundaries of the empire, treating with domestic and foreign potentates. Aristocratic and ecclesiastical letter writers penned—and preserved in their collections—letters of recommendation for an extraordinary variety of individuals, who appear to have walked or rode the roads of the Roman with little regard for the apparent deterioration in safety and security that haunts a work like Rutilius Namatianus’ De Reditu Suo.