Call for Papers

The Total Library: Aspirations for Complete Knowledge in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

The 27^th Biennial Conference of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program of Barnard College 

Barnard College, New York City

December 5, 2020

ONLINE CONFERENCE

Plenary Speakers:

Ann Blair (Harvard University) 

Elias Muhanna (Brown University)

According to Borges, “The fancy or the imagination or the utopia of the Total Library has certain characteristics that are easily confused with virtues.” This one-day conference will explore the aspiration for complete knowledge in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, an aspiration expressed in atlases, herbals, encyclopedias that were meant to mirror and maybe tame the diversity of the earth by including in their pages everything. Whether virtuous or problematic, the fantasy of the complete mastery of knowledge created utopias of learning. In our current moment when the value of knowledge is under question, we invite scholars of multiple disciplines (art history, history, literary studies, religion, history of science) to raise questions about the technologies, social structures, and modes of thought that shape what knowledge means at a given moment.

PLEASE NOTE THAT, DUE TO COVID-19, THIS CONFERENCE WILL BE HELD ONLINE VIA ZOOM. WE ARE EXTENDING THE SUBMISSION DEADLINE TO SEPTEMBER 1. Please submit an abstract of 250-300 words and a 2-page CV to Rachel Eisendrath, reisendr@barnard.edu.

Call for Papers Marco Manuscript Workshop 2021: “Immaterial Culture” February 5-6, 2021

The sixteenth annual Marco Manuscript Workshop will take place Friday, February 5, and Saturday, February 6, 2021. Sessions will meet virtually via an online platform. The workshop is led by Professors Maura K. Lafferty (Classics) and Roy M. Liuzza (English), and is hosted by the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. This year’s workshop will consider some of the recent challenges that researchers have faced with the suspension of travel, the closing of libraries and universities, and the quarantine restrictions that have kept so many of us in our homes. How can our field, which has always emphasized the importance of physical place and tactile artifacts, work successfully in isolation and at a distance? What does it mean for us when our work takes place in an incorporeal world of light and numbers rather than ink and flesh, in matrices of data rather than dusty rooms? We propose to explore the advantages and disadvantages of this “immaterial culture,” and to think about how our work is shaped by access or lack of access to manuscripts, texts, catalogues, and objects. We would like to hear about experiences working remotely, discoveries made using virtual archives or catalogues, or advice on how to study manuscripts without visiting archives or how to teach codicology without a library. We welcome stories of scholars who have been productive in constrained circumstances. We would also like to learn from the experience of those for whom archives have been inaccessible for other reasons – scholars who are homebound, visually impaired, or otherwise physically challenged, or those whose access to libraries and collections has been restricted or denied. How have these constraints shaped your work? What can these experiences tell us about our discipline? We welcome presentations on any aspect of this topic, broadly imagined. The workshop is open to scholars and graduate students in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. This year’s workshop will be virtual, but we hope to retain as much of the format and the flavor of our in-person meetings as possible. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchange ideas and information with other participants. We will prepare an online repository where presenters can place abstracts, presentations, or supporting material for access by all attendees. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to be more like a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work, to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together towards developing better professional skills for textual and codicological work. We particularly invite the presentation of works in progress, unusual problems, practical difficulties, and new or experimental models for studying or representing manuscript texts.

The deadline for applications is October 9, 2020. Applicants are asked to submit a current CV and a two-page abstract of their project to Roy M. Liuzza, preferably via email to rliuzza@utk.edu. Presenters will receive a $500 honorarium for their participation.

The workshop is also open at no cost to scholars and students who do not wish to present their own work but are interested in sharing a lively weekend of discussion and ideas about manuscript studies. In order to keep the virtual sessions manageable, preregistration will be required and spaces will be limited. Further details will be available later in the year; please contact the Marco Institute at marco@utk.edu for more information.

Big Dating: Using Big Data to Date Medieval Texts

Applicants are sought for a fully-funded four-year Provost’s Project Award
PhD doctoral award at Trinity College Dublin on the Big Dating project to
start in September 2020 (or later, if Covid-19 does not permit it). The
award comprises the student’s full tuition fees (EU or non-EU) and an
annual stipend of €16,000. These doctoral awards are generously funded
through alumni donations and Trinity’s Commercial Revenue Unit.

The Big Dating project explores quantitative and/or computational
approaches to the language of medieval texts, particularly those from
England in the long twelfth century, which evade the periodisation of
English into ‘Old’ and ‘early Middle’. The successful applicant will be
expected to devote up to 24 hours per month of work to this project, as
well as complete a PhD thesis.

The topic of the student’s PhD thesis is not prescribed, but will be
developed between the student and the supervisor. Possible approaches
include (but are by no means limited to):

   - Computer-assisted philological analyses of particular texts or groups
   of texts
   - Cluster analysis of text languages to identify potential dating
   criteria
   - Work towards developing an automated parser and/or lemmatiser for late
   Old English and early Middle English
   - Bottom-up periodisations of Old and Middle English

Students interested in the doctoral award are invited to email the
Principal Investigator, Dr Mark Faulkner (faulknem@tcd.ie) with expressions
of interest by 22 May 2020. They may subsequently be invited to submit a
CV, academic transcripts, a sample of written work and the names of two
academic referees and asked to take part in a Skype interview. The final
stage of the application process will involve the submission of a formal
PhD proposal to Trinity.

The following may be considered the essential and desirable qualifications
for the award:

Essential

   - A Master’s (completed or in progress) in linguistics or Medieval
   Studies
   - A first-class (or equivalent) undergraduate degree in a relevant
   subject
   - Demonstrable communicative competence in English

Desirable

   - Good working knowledge of Old and Middle English
   - Experience using major medieval corpora and electronic resources (e.
   g. Dictionary of Old English Corpus, Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle
   English, Penn Parsed Corpus of Middle English Prose)
   - Familarity with the techniques of quantitative and/or computational
   linguistics

CFP: Inducing a Passion for the Medieval: Student-led Activities with
Manuscripts, A Roundtable
by Vicky McAlister
Southeastern Medieval Association Conference, Spartanburg SC, 5-7 November
2020 [1]

We invite proposals for c. 10 minute presentations for this proposed
roundtable for SEMA 2020. Submissions are invited from all disciplines.
Topics might include, but are not limited to: using manuscripts in the
classroom, using digitized manuscripts, experiential activities influenced by
manuscripts, and how teaching with manuscripts can be done remotely in the
Covid-19 era. We are especially keen to hear from participants based in
libraries, archives, and museums.

Please email a proposal of 100-200 words length and a short bio to Vicky
McAlister vmcalister@semo.edu [2] and Roxanne Dunn rdunn@semo.edu [3] before
Friday 22 May. We will submit accepted proposals to SEMA for their
consideration by the 5 June deadline.


[1] https://southeasternmedieval.wordpress.com/conference/
[2] mailto:vmcalister@semo.edu
[3] mailto:rdunn@semo.edu
Read more or reply:
https://networks.h-net.org/user/login%3Fdestination%3Dnode/6113491

Led by Prof. Michele Tomasi, the Art History Department of the
University of Lausanne is hosting an international conference titled
"Within and without the manuscript: interactions between illumination
and the other arts" on October 22nd-23rd, 2020.

The call for papers is open until May 15th, and we would like to
explore this question with papers from a broad geographical and
chronological range, including the Early Middle Ages, too often set
aside in such methodological approaches.


Could you please forward this call for paper to the EMF list?


Thank you very much in advance.


Kind regards,



Sabine Utz

Head Curator

Musée cantonal d'archéologie et d'histoire

Lausanne






----- Nouveau contact -----


Sabine Utz
Conservatrice en chef
+41 21 316 34 43
sabine.utz@vd.ch


Palais de Rumine
Place de la Riponne 6
CH – 1005 Lausanne
www.mcah.ch<http://www.mcah.ch/> – mcah@vd.ch

Attachments area

              

Society for the History of Discoveries Student Essay Prize
by Lydia Towns
*STUDENT ESSAY PRIZE*

*SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  15 May of each year*

Areas of eligible research include:  voyages of exploration, travel
narratives, biography relevant to the history of discoveries and exploration,
history, cartography, the technologies of travel, impact of travel and
cultural exchange, and other aspects of geographic discovery and exploration.

*Who is Eligible:*  Students from any part of the globe currently enrolled
in a college or university degree program and who will not have received a
doctoral degree prior to *15 May *of the submission year. *Note:  Graduating
high school or college students accepted into a program but who do not begin
classes until fall  of the submission year are NOT eligible. *
*The Research Paper:*  An eligible research paper shall be original and
unpublished, written in English, between 3,000 and 8,000 words, plus
footnotes or endnotes.  Papers written for college or university class
assignments are encouraged, but students may write specifically for this
prize.  A reasonable amount of illustrative and tabular material will be
welcome, but is not required.

The awardee will receive a prize of $500.00 (US) and will be invited to
present a version of the paper at the annual meeting of the Society for the
History of Discoveries.  Information about participation in the conference
will be provided to the awardee upon notification of the award, including
details concerning costs and travel funding.  Acceptance of the prize is not
contingent upon your ability to attend the conference.  Additionally, the
awardee will be invited to submit the winning paper to the society’s peer
reviewed journal, Terrae Incognitae, for which it will undergo the usual
review process prior to formal acceptance for publication, of which there is
no guarantee.

 For more information and formatting instructions visit
https://discoveryhistory.org/student-prize/ [1]

*SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:*

*Submission Deadline:*  *15 May*
Electronic submissions only to:
Dr. Anne Good, committee chair amg@reinhardt.edu [2]
Subject line:  SHD Student Prize
*Questions?*  Contact Dr. Good, committee chair amg@reinhardt.edu [3]




[1] https://discoveryhistory.org/student-prize/
[2] mailto:amg@reinhardt.edu
[3] mailto:amg@reinhardt.edu





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Dear medievalists,

your are interested in persons? The ACDH-CH at Austrian Academy of
Science invites you to participate in a Summer School on Digital
Prosopography. It will take place in Vienna, 06-10. July 2020 and
include courses on data creation, modelling with CIDOC-CRM, network
analysis, linked open data, text encoding in the work with historical
persons. Interested people should sent a CV (max. 1 page) and a brief
description of their prosopographical project (max. 500 words) to
digital.prosopography@oeaw.ac.at, which will help us to decide on
eligibility. Places on the summer school will be allocated on a
first-come-first-serve basis. The participation at the summer school is
free of charge. Please find details on the event at
https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/detail/event/summer-school-people-in-the-digital-age-digital-prosopography/


Looking forward to your application!

Georg

--
Prof. Dr. Georg Vogeler, M.A.

Director
Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften | Austrian Academy of Sciences
Sonnenfelsgasse 19, 1010 Wien, Österreich | Vienna, Austria
T: +43 1 51581-2200
georg.vogeler@oeaw.ac.at

Chair for Digital Humanities at Zentrum für Informationsmodellierung,
University of Graz

Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik <http://www.i-d-e.de>
ICARus <https://icar-us.eu/en/>
Digital Medivalist <https://digitalmedievalist.wordpress.com/>
Data for History <https://dataforhistory.org/>

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