Showing posts with label postgraduate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label postgraduate. Show all posts

Friday 1 August 2014

CFP: Literary Margins and Digital Media

Seminar of the Academia Europaea and the University of Wrocław
15–17 April 2015

The Academia Europaea Knowledge Hub Wrocław and the University of Wrocław invite young scholars (PhD candidates and postdocs), to take part in the Seminar Literary margins and digital media, to be held in Wrocław (Poland) on 15–17 April 2015.

Context and rationale

Traditional elite culture is becoming increasingly marginalized, while forms of cultural expression which were seen as marginal during the first half of the twentieth century, or which, in the terminology of Bourdieu and Even-Zohar, were located at the periphery of the cultural field, have been gaining a more prominent place. The three vital factors that have played a crucial role in this phenomenon are the commercialisation of cultural life, democratic access to culture, and the development of the Internet and new media. The aim of this conference is to discuss the implications of these shifts for European literatures, and particularly for those of Central and Eastern Europe.

First, special consideration will be given to the evolution of literary genres which were until recently deemed marginal from the perspective of the traditional cultural centre, such as children’s and young adult literature, popular literature and, in recent times, electronic literature. Second, a related issue to be discussed will be ways in which literature repositions itself with regard to contemporary technological and social developments. Of interest here is not so much the question whether traditional literary culture will be displaced by new media, but rather in what manner literature reacts to these developments and retains its significance either through a symbiosis with other modes of cultural expression or by generating new genres.

Tracks

Terminology and concepts
- Do the existing terminology and traditional methods of literary analysis apply to analyzing electronic literature? Is there a need for developing new approaches?
- How does the transition from the book as an art object (‘liberature’) to electronic literature occur?
- What new genres have emerged in cyberspace?
Crossing boundaries
- Is the division into high and low culture relevant in cyberspace? What are processes involved in textualisation of visual signs and visualisation of the text?
- How does literature exists in the nonlinguistic realm? How are the limits of language challenged?
- How do elements of subcultures move to the mainstream in the context of new media?
Ethics
- Stealing or recycling? How to define the use of traditional literature for digital purposes?
- What is the status of the author in cyberspace?
- What is the role of digital culture and new media in the preservation and dissemination of national cultural heritage?
Age and media
- How does age affect media preferences and use?
- Is the distinction between children’s literature and adult literature still valid in the context of new media?
- What forms of cultural convergence are emerging within children’s culture?
Readers and consumers of popular culture
- How does the evolution from the reader (of traditional print literature) to the active performer or player proceed?
- What alternative forms of sharing cultural experiences have emerged thanks to social media and participatory culture?
- What are possible methods of empirical research into readers and popular culture audiences?
Games
- Are computer games a literary genre?
- What processes are involved in turning literature into games and games into literature?
- What is the aesthetics of alternative and artistic games?
Future: dangers & possibilities
- What is the future of translation in view of instant translation available on the Internet?
- How to promote new media literacies among children and adults?
- What may be potential applications of popular culture and media convergence in education?
- What are possible uses of games in developing media literacies?
- Remediation – a new life for historical texts?
- How is children’s publishing in Central and Eastern Europe being affected by multimedia?
- What is the influence of new media on the development and status of popular literature?

APPLICATION: For registration, click here. Submit a 300-word proposal, a curriculum vitae with a list of publications by October 5, 2014. All applicants will be notified about the selection of participants before October 31, 2014.

REQUIREMENTS: Presenters are required to submit a 3,000-5,000 word description or excerpt (i.e., chapter, article, etc.) to be circulated among participants by March 1, 2015. All workshop participants are asked to read these submissions prior to the workshop. The paper should be an unpublished one. Presenters who do not meet the submission deadline will not be able to present their work.

SEMINAR LANGUAGE will be English.

FINANCIAL ARRANGEMENTS: The organizers will cover the conference fee and the costs of accommodation*, travel**, insurance and publication.

SCIENTIFIC AND ORGANISING COMMITTEE
Irena Barbara Kalla (University of Wrocław)
Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak (University of Wrocław)
Dorota Michułka (University of Wrocław)
Bogumiła Staniów (University of Wrocław)
Bożena Czarnecka (University of Wrocław)
Pieter Emmer (Academia Europaea)
Siegfried Huigen (University of Wrocław)
Stefan Kiedroo (University of Wrocław)
Aleksandra Nowak (Academia Europaea)

All correspondence, including submission of proposals and final papers, must be addressed to Aleksandra Nowak or via the website.

*up to 4 nights
** up to certain maximum: Western Europe – up to 100 EUR, Central and Eastern Europe – up to 150 EUR

Friday 13 June 2014

CFP: 'Profitable and spedful to use': Medieval and Early Modern Prayer

A Postgraduate Conference

Friday 19th September 2014, Cardiff University

Generously funded by Cardiff University Graduate College, this one-day conference will address the theme of prayer in the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Given its pervasive nature as an element of Medieval and Early Modern culture, prayer is often overlooked by scholars as a discrete topic of enquiry. Prayer’s very ubiquity in the literature, historical record and material culture of the time has led, perhaps counterintuitively, to a lack of sustained critical attention, at least in some disciplines. In the context of a religiously-literate society, prayer performs many functions beyond its role in worship, with its artistic, rhetorical and performative aspects often used for propagandistic, interrogative or subversive means, among others.

The topic of prayer has of late gained momentum amongst Early Modern scholars, but in Medieval Studies it is only just beginning to emerge as a field of enquiry. This conference aims to bring together researchers in this up-and-coming area. This theme is, by its nature, interdisciplinary, encompassing literature, history and religion, and we are seeking to reflect this interdisciplinarity throughout the day’s events. By inviting speakers from these, and related, disciplines, we hope that the day will offer a broad and rich insight into Medieval and Early Modern prayer.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) will be giving a keynote lecture.

We invite papers from researchers in the fields of archaeology, architecture, art history, history, language, literature, music, philosophy, politics, religion, and other relevant disciplines to submit abstracts of 300 words. Topics can include:

- Literary prayer
- Theory of prayer
- Prayer in liturgy
- Prayer and music
- Prayer and Biblical translation
- Prayer and rhetoric
- Prayer and violence
- Language of prayer
- Prayer as protest
- Prayer manuals
- Prayer books
- Prayer and politics
- Teaching on prayer
- Private devotion
- Prayer as magic
- Physical manifestations of prayer (e.g. objects, buildings, art, etc.)
- Any other related topic

Please send abstracts for papers of 20 minutes by the 9th of July 2014 to Judith Dray and Sheri Smith.

Thursday 3 April 2014

CFP: 'To Die Would be an Awfully Big Adventure': The Glory and the Gore of Death and Horror Through the Ages

Bangor University, UK
Friday 6 June 2014

Abstracts are now being invited for the 10th annual Medievalism Transformed conference at Bangor University, a one-day interdisciplinary event sponsored by the School of English Literature. We will be convening to explore the medieval world and its sustained impact on subsequent culture and thought.

Papers are welcome from all disciplines related to medieval studies as well as modern expressions of medievalism. All topics within the general scope of the conference will be considered, including:

• Preparing for death
• Dying well
• Limbo / Purgatory
• Underworld
• Disease / Black Death / Medicine
• Ghosts
• The Occult / Cults
• The grotesque
• Apocalypse
• Saints / Martyrdom
• Theme of horror in medieval literature

Your proposal for a 20-minute paper should be no longer than 300 words. Please make submissions electronically to the conference convenors by 18 April. Proposals should be accompanied by your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and contact information. Please also specify any audio / visual requirements.

Letters of acceptance will be sent via email unless a hard copy is requested.

Wednesday 19 February 2014

CFP: Fons Luminis: Using and Creating Digital Medievalia

Fons Luminis, a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary journal edited and produced annually by graduate students at the Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Toronto, provides a forum in which to address, challenge, and explore the content and methodologies of our various home disciplines. We invite current graduate students to submit papers relating in some way to the 2015 journal theme, “Using and Creating Digital Medievalia.”

Since the mid-twentieth century, computing has been and continues to be a major factor in the medievalist’s research. From Father Busa’s creation of the Index Thomasticus in the 1940’s to current library and archival digitization projects, computational methods are essential aspects of the medievalist’s occupation. Papers are encouraged to address: medievalist use of digitally stored information; social scientists and librarians as creators and/or curators of knowledge about the Middle Ages; future directions of digital humanities; the importance of digital humanities to work in paleography, codicology, diplomatics, and text editing.

Articles may also focus on topics including (but not limited to) mapping and space, the impact of digitization on concepts of the archive, and digital tools in teaching.

Contributions may take the form of a scholarly essay or focus on the study of a particular manuscript. Articles must be written in English, follow the 16th edition (2010) of The Chicago Manual of Style, and be at least 4,000 words in length, including footnotes. Quotations in the main text in languages other than English should appear along with their English translation.

As usual, we continue to accept other submissions on any aspect of medieval studies and welcome longer review articles (approximately 1,500 words) on recent or seminal works in medieval studies.

Submissions must be received by July 1, 2014 in order to be considered for publication.

Inquiries and submissions (as a Word document attachment) should be sent to the editors.

Sunday 9 February 2014

CFP: North Texas Medieval Graduate Student Symposium

8th Annual University of North Texas
Medieval Graduate Student Symposium

October 2nd, 2014

Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Relevance

We are happy to announce that the College of Visual Arts and Design of the University of North Texas in Denton Texas will be sponsoring our 8th Annual Medieval Graduate Student Symposium on Thursday October 2nd, 2014. Details can be found on the UNT symposium website.

This year the Symposium will be held in conjunction with the annual conference of the Texas Medieval Association, October 3-4, 2014. All Symposium participants are invited to attend TEMA’s meetings free of charge.

General Theme: “Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Relevance”

Keynote Speakers:

· Dr. Barbara Rosenwein, Loyola University, Chicago: "Jean Gerson's Interdisciplinary Theory of Emotions"

· Dr. Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia: "Voice/Text/Character: Historical Fiction in the Archives"

Discussant:

· Dr. Joan Holladay, University of Texas, Austin

Call for Papers

While we will entertain papers on any topic, from any discipline of Medieval Studies — Art History, Religion, Philosophy, English, History, Foreign Languages, Music — we particularly welcome those that engage the multifaceted topic of “Interdisciplinarity in the Age of Relevance.” We encourage submission of papers that have been submitted and/or delivered elsewhere.

Travel subvention of $300 will be awarded to the best paper.
Deadline for submission of a 300 word abstract is June 1, 2014. Selected full papers will be due September 15th, 2014.
Paper Abstracts of 300 words should be sent to Mickey Abel   

Sunday 15 September 2013

CFP: The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages

2nd Annual Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium Conference

Call for Papers

Keynote Speaker: Professor Geraldine Heng
Perceval Fellow and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, with a joint appointment in Middle Eastern studies and Women’s studies at the University of Texas at Austin

The students of the Indiana Medieval Graduate Student Consortium (IMGC) are pleased to announce that we are accepting submissions for the second annual IMGC conference, 'The Geographic Imagination: Conceptualizing Places and Spaces in the Middle Ages', to take place on 28 Feb-1 Mar 2014 at the University of Notre Dame.

The transnational turn in the humanities over the last two decades has put increasing pressure on our ideas of nationhood and has provided us with a liberating awareness of the constructedness of the spaces we study. New methodologies have developed in response to this pressure as scholars turn to comparative approaches, borderland studies, histoire croisée, studies of empire, and oceanic models in order to accommodate the ambiguities of nationhood and of conceptions of space. Suggested by seminal transnational studies, such as Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, many critics now study “the flows of people, capital, profits and information.” Recently, David Wallace’s ambitious literary history of Europe has adopted a similarly fluid approach to culture, avoiding a study of “national blocks” of literature, organizing itself instead along transnational itineraries that stretch beyond the European sphere. The Middle Ages offer a particularly broad and rich era in which to encounter fluid notions of space, as any glance at a medieval map such as the famous Hereford mappa mundi invitingly suggests. We invite presentations from all fields to explore any aspect of the medieval “geographic imagination,” of conceptions of space, place, and nation: ideas of geography, cartography, transnational identities and networks, intercultural encounters, mercantile routes, travelogues, rural and urban spaces, religious places, and concepts of locality and local identities.

The IMGC is delighted to announce that our keynote speaker this year will be Dr Geraldine Heng, well known to many of us for her exhaustive and provocative study of medieval romance, Empire of Magic, and her subsequent work on race in the Middle Ages.

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by 15 Dec, 2013 on the conference website. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests.

This conference is generously sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies. The Nanovic Institute is committed to enriching the intellectual culture of Notre Dame by creating an integrated, interdisciplinary home for students and faculty to explore the evolving ideas, cultures, beliefs, and institutions that shape Europe today.

Tuesday 13 August 2013

CFP: Death and Decay

This call for papers invites submissions from Postgrads or Early Career Researchers on the subject of ‘Death and Decay’ for the third edition of HARTS + Minds, an online journal for students of the Humanities and Arts, which is due to be published online in Winter 2013-14.

All submissions should adhere to the guidelines available on our website www.harts-minds.co.uk and should be sent with an academic CV to the editors by Friday 4th October.

We accept:

- Articles: Send us an abstract (300 words) and your article (no longer than 6000 words) using the article template available on our website.

- Book Reviews: Between 1000 and 1500 words on an academic text that deals with the theme of Death and Decay in some respect. This would preferably be interdisciplinary, but we will accept reviews of subject specific texts.

- Exhibition Reviews: Between 1000 and 1500 words on any event along the lines of an art exhibition, museum collection, academic event or conference review that deals with the theme of Death and Decay in some respect.

- Creative Writing Pieces: Original poetry (up to 3 short or 1 long) or short stories of up to 6,000 words.

Subjects may include but are not limited to the following:

- Medical Humanities (e.g. parasites, disease, autopsy, the cadaver)

- Rituals and rites of the dead in various cultures, Burial practices

- Death and dying in global literatures

- Visual Death; in art, photography, illustration, in film and television, on stage

- Death personified: the Grim Reaper, Yama + Lord of Naraka, Hel, Hades etc.

- The geography of death; real or mythological

- Decay of buildings, bodies, nature, morals

- Reincarnation, immortality, Afterlife, textual afterlives, Eschatology

- The death of discourse, language, the author, God

- Death as taboo

- War and death

- The future of death in a posthuman world

- Hauntings, the undead, vampires, zombies

- The value of Death

- Dirt and debris, Wrecks and ruins, Flotsam and Jetsam

- Elegy, Obituary, the Funeral March, Eulogy

- Monuments, Memorials and the Archive

- Suicide, both literal and metaphorical

Please consider that HARTS + Minds is intended as a truly interdisciplinary journal and therefore esoteric topics will need to be written with a general academic readership in mind.

Further information can be found on the website and you can get updates on our journal on Facebook.

Co Chief Editors
Jen Baker and Daniel Evers

Tuesday 18 June 2013

Medieval and Early Modern Student Association Postgraduate Conference - The Mutilated Body

8-9 July 2013 at St John's College, Durham University

MEMSA is proud to announce its seventh annual postgraduate conference, an event designed to bring together postgraduate and early career researchers in interdisciplinary dialogue. This year's topic is the Mutilated Body, where delegates will explore aspects of destruction, disability, and personhood in the medieval and Early Modern periods, investigating medical humanities and hagiography, as well as interpretations of the conceptualisation of mutilated corporeality, as typified by books, the nation-state and kingship, or Christendom. Keynote speakers will be Professor Faith Wallis (McGill University) and Professor Charlotte Roberts (Durham University). Delegates will also have the option to tour the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition, following a talk by Professor Richard Gameson (Durham University).

Please click here to register online.

Saturday 2 March 2013

CFP: The Common Denominator 2014

A Postgraduate Conference in British Cultural Studies

20-22 March 2014
Universität Leipzig
Institut für Anglistik

Call for Papers

In ancient Greece, the Pythagoreans worshipped perfect numbers and turned them into musical scales. Two thousand years later, Nicolaus Copernicus still heard their sound in the perfection of the universal spheres. Numerologists, alchemists and the Gnostics all attempt to explain the mysteries of the universe with the precision and beauty of mathematics. And what would the voluptuous garments displayed in Renaissance painting be without the clear lines and structured order of geometry? Already these few examples show that mathematics has always been more than is commonly represented in popular culture in the wider British context. Organised by members and PhD students of the Institute for British Studies of Leipzig University, the aim of this three-day interdisciplinary conference is to bring together researchers from diverse academic and professional disciplines. By establishing mathematics as the common denominator between the individual panels, the links between mathematics and cultural studies are brought into focus. The conference will explore the reception and representation of mathematical concepts across such diverse fields as popular culture, literature, linguistics and didactics.

We invite proposals of 250-300 words for papers of 20 minutes length from postgraduate students and established scholars. Suggested topics may include, but are not limited to the following fields:

• Philosophy: mathematics in history, philosophy and religion, e.g. John Dee

• Politics: mathematics and gender, the British Empire, and Bletchley Park

• Popular Culture: mathematics and their influence on everyday life, recreational mathematics

• The Arts: representations of mathematics in film, the Fine Arts, music, architecture, the aesthetics of mathematical symbols

• Literature: representations of mathematics and mathematicians in literature, mathematical imagery

Proposals should include up to four keywords and indicate a critical approach or theoretical framework. Owing to the international character, the conference language is English. Please e-mail your submissions either as a word document or PDF by 30 June 2013 to the conference email address. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the organizers, Felicitas Hanke, Franziska Kohlt, Andrea Radziewsky, Rita Singer, and Kati Voigt.

Friday 18 January 2013

Call for Submissions: Wounds, Torture and the Grotesque

Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies

Hortulus is a refereed, peer-reviewed, and born-digital journal devoted to the culture, literature, history, and society of the medieval past.

For the spring issue we are highly interested in reviews of books which fall under the current special topic. Our upcoming issue will be published in the spring of 2013, and concerns itself with the theme: wounds, torture, and the grotesque. These subjects have become increasingly popular in medieval scholarship. Hortulus invites full-length articles which consider these themes either individually or in tandem. We particularly encourage the submission of proposals that take a strongly theoretical and/or interdisciplinary approach, and that examine new and previously unconsidered aspects of these subjects.

Possible topics may be drawn from any discipline. Submission guidelines can be found on our website. Contributions may be submitted to the editors via email and are due February 15, 2013. If you are interested in submitting a paper but feel you would need additional time, please send an email and details about an expected time-scale for your submission.

Contact details:
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Twitter 
Website 
Email

Sunday 13 January 2013

CFP: Borderlines XVII: Occupying Space

19th-21st April 2013
Long Room Hub, Trinity College Dublin

Trinity College Dublin are very pleased to announce the call for papers for this year’s Borderlines postgraduate conference kindly funded by the School of English, the Department of History, the Medieval History Research Centre and the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS) TCD.

The theme of Borderlines XVII will be Occupying Space. There is arguably no greater link to our past than that which is tactile. The castles and cathedrals which still occupy our urban and rural spaces are a bridge between the medieval and the modern. The manuscripts and books which have lasted centuries can tell us as much as the contents within. The tools, toys, weapons, clothes and everyday objects our forebears took for granted do not simply embellish historical events, they tell stories all by themselves.

In this conference, we hope to delve into material culture and the concept of physical presence, be it animate or inanimate, from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern period. We welcome papers from researchers in the fields of Anthropology, Archaeology, Codicology, Drama, Film Studies, Folklore, History, History of Art, Languages, Literature, Music, Paleography, Philosophy and Theology. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

-Human relation to objects
-Tools and objects in daily life
-Musical instruments
-Architecture
-Devotional objects
-Art and sculpture
-The body – living or dead
-Weaponry and warfare
-Manuscripts and books
-Clothing and costumes

Check out the website, Facebook and Twitter for info and updates.

Abstracts of 250 words plus a short bio for a 20-minute paper or poster are welcomed from postgraduates (MA, PhD and Postdoctoral students) and should be submitted by Friday February 22nd 2013 to the conference convenors.

Thursday 15 November 2012

CFP: Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages

2nd - 4th May 2013

We are pleased to announce the call for papers for Gender and Transgression in the Middle Ages 2013, a three-day interdisciplinary conference for postgraduate and early career researchers hosted by The University of St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies (SAIMS). Now in its fifth year, the conference aims to create a lively and welcoming forum for speakers to present their research, make contacts, and participate in creative discussion on the topics of gender and transgression in the Middle Ages.

This year’s keynote speaker will be Professor Pauline Stafford, Emeritus Professor in Early Medieval History at the University of Liverpool, who will be speaking on reading gender in chronicles, with special reference to the old English vernacular. We invite postgraduate, postdoctoral and early career researchers from departments of History, Modern and Mediaeval Languages, English, Art History, Theology and Divinity, in addition to scholars working in any other relevant subject area, to submit a paper of approximately 20 minutes that engage with the themes of gender and/or transgression in the mediaeval period. Possible topics for papers might include, but are by no means limited to gender and/or transgression in the fields of:

• Politics: kingship, queenship, the nobility, royal/noble household, royal favourites and mistresses, royal ritual, display and chivalry.

• Legal Studies: men, women and the law, court cases, law-breaking, marriage and divorce.

• Social and economic history: urban and rural communities, domestic household, motherhood and children, widows, working women, prostitution and crime.

• Religion: monastic communities, saints and saints' lives, mysticism and lay religion.

• Literature: chivalric texts, romances, poetry, vernacular works.

• Visual culture: depictions, architecture, art, material culture and patronage.

• Masculinity and femininity in the middle ages and their application in current historiography.

• Homosexuality, sexual deviancy and cross-dressing.

To mark the launch of St Andrews Centre for Mediaeval and Early Modern Law and Literature (CMEMLL) we shall be holding a session on medieval law and literature within the broader conference theme of gender and transgression and therefore particularly welcome papers within this field.

Those wishing to give a paper please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to the conference convenors by Monday 11 February 2013. Your abstract should be attached to your email as a Microsoft Word or PDF file and include your name, home institution and what stage of your postgraduate or postdoctoral career you are currently at.

Registration for the conference will be £5 for students/unwaged, £10 for staff, which will cover tea, coffee and lunch on two days, and two wine receptions. All delegates are also warmly invited to the conference meal on Friday 3 May, the cost of which will be covered for speakers. Further details can be found at our website as they come available and we can be followed on Twitter.

Tuesday 20 September 2011

CFP: Identity and Image

18th Annual Postgraduate Medieval Studies Conference

24th‐25th February, 2012

Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol, UK

The University of Bristol hosts the longest‐running international medieval postgraduate conference in the UK. This annual event offers medievalists the opportunity to present their research and discuss ideas in an interdisciplinary setting. The conference is now in its 18th year, and proposals are invited for papers from postgraduates and early career scholars on the theme of Identity and Image.

The aim of this year’s conference is to explore how identity was formed, expressed and understood in the Middle Ages. We are interested in the way individuals and groups constructed images of themselves and others, and how identity was affected by religious, racial, political and other social factors on an international, national or local scale. The theme ‘Identity and Image’ invites consideration of how, and if, we can interpret medieval notions of identity from the textual, visual, musical and material sources that have survived to the present day. We welcome a wide range of discussion from issues of religious and artistic patronage, devotional practice, language choice and material culture to considerations of how the self or the other is presented in literary and visual culture.

Topics may include but are not limited to:
- Religious identities
- National identity
- Linguistic choice or identity
- Autobiography and biography
- Representation of outsiders
- Artistic and religious patronage
- Architecture
- Material culture
- Images of the self and others

Papers must be no more than 20 minutes long

Abstracts of 250‐300 words should be sent by email (by preference) to:
Hannah Walters or to Hannah Walters, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Bristol, Graduate School of Arts and Humanities, 7 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1TB, UK

Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 10th December, 2012

Registration deadline: 21st January, 2012

For further information please visit our website.

Bursaries may be available for travel.

Monday 7 February 2011

CFP: The University of Manchester Medieval Postgraduate Conference

Education and Ignorance:
The Use of Knowledge in the Medieval World c.550-1550

John Rylands Library, Deansgate


Monday 6th-Tuesday 7th June 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

Modern historiography has often depicted the Middle Ages as a period of ignorance, dogma and superstition - a period in which knowledge stagnated and education was both restricted to a privileged minority and dominated by the institutional and ideological authority of the Church. From the Carolingian Renaissance and the rise of the medieval universities to the condemnation of heretical teachings and the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the Reformation, the reality about education and knowledge in the medieval world is undoubtedly far more complex and contested than this picture suggests. This two day conference seeks to explore that reality through a diverse range of disciplines and across the full historical span of the period. We aim to address the questions - How was education theorised, institutionalised and practiced throughout the Middle Ages? How was knowledge controlled, transmitted and transformed? and To what uses were they put both by established ecclesiastical and feudal powers and the social and religious formations that opposed them?

With these questions in mind, we invite proposals for twenty minute papers from postgraduates and early career researchers on a variety of topics including, but not limited to:

  • the losses and restoration of Classical knowledge in the early Middle Ages
  • the development of the medieval universities
  • the educational role of the monasteries and the mendicant orders
  • scholasticism, scepticism and humanism
  • heresy, censorship and reformation ideas about education
  • didacticism in medieval literature, drama, art and architecture
  • material culture and education: manuscripts, libraries, printing etc.
  • theories and methods of learning - memory and scriptural exegesis
  • unconventional and popular learning - alchemy, folk and occult practice

Please email abstracts of 250-300 words to the Manchester Medieval Postgraduate Conference along with your name, affiliation and title of paper. All queries should also be directed to this address. The deadline for submission is 31st March 2011. Selection of papers will be made by 15th April.

For more information concerning the conference, see our website.