Call For Submissions: Into the Woods (anthology)

From magical places steeped in mysticism to evil foreboding places of unspeakable terror, the forest is a place of secrets, a place of knowledge, a place of death, and a place of life. But it is also a vulnerable place easily lost to the chainsaw and the drill. Our fascination with what may lie within the woods is an enduring one. Bewilder us, scare us, entertain us. Take us on a journey… into the woods.

What we want: Edgy, dark and weird fiction. Any interpretation of the theme is welcome – and we have no preconceptions about what ‘into the woods’ might mean. Any genre considered: dark fantasy, (sub)urban fantasy, Gothic, horror, sci fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, biopunk, dystopian, slipstream. We’re looking for original and fresh voices that challenge and unsettle. (And, please remember, we do not publish misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia or racism.)

Editor: Hannah Kate

Publisher: Hic Dragones

Word Count: 3000-7000

Submission Guidelines: Electronic submissions as .doc, .docx or .rtf attachments only. 12pt font, 1.5 or double spaced. Please ensure name, story title and email address are included on the attachment. Email submissions to Hic Dragones. Submissions are welcome from anywhere, but must be in English.

Submission Deadline: Monday 13th June 2016

Payment: Contributor copy: 1 copy of paperback, eBook in ePub and/or mobi format; permanent 25% discount on paperback (resale permitted); 1 free eBook from our catalogue.

More information: email or visit the Hic Dragones website.

Call for Submissions: Nothing (anthology)

Bleak landscapes, empty hearts, insignificant lives, dystopian futures, extinction, limbo, uncertainty, death. A beautiful void or a horrific state of being. The simple complexity of nothingness.

Submissions wanted for a new anthology of short stories based on the theme of nothing.

What we want: Edgy, dark and weird fiction. Any interpretation of the theme is welcome – and we have no preconceptions about what ‘nothing’ might mean. Any genre considered: dark fantasy, urban fantasy, Gothic, horror, sci fi, steampunk, cyberpunk, biopunk, dystopian, slipstream. We’re looking for original and fresh voices that challenge and unsettle. (And, please remember, we do not publish misogyny, misandry, homophobia, transphobia or racism.)

Editor: Hannah Kate

Publisher: Hic Dragones

Word Count: 3000-7000

Submission Guidelines: Electronic submissions as .doc, .docx or .rtf attachments only. 12pt font, 1.5 or double spaced. Please ensure name, story title and email address are included on the attachment. Email submissions to Hic Dragones. Submissions are welcome from anywhere, but must be in English.

Submission Deadline: Monday 5th September 2016

Payment: Contributor copy (1 copy of paperback plus eBook in ePub and/or mobi format); permanent 25% discount on paperback (resale permitted); 1 free eBook from our catalogue.

For more information: email or visit the Hic Dragones website

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2016: Gender and Emotion

The University of Hull
6th – 8th January 2016

Call for Papers

The grief-stricken faces at Edward’s deathbed in the Bayeux Tapestry; the ambiguous ‘ofermod’ in The Battle of Maldon; the body-crumpling anguish of the Virgin witnessing the Man of Sorrows; the mirth of the Green Knight; the apoplectic anger of the mystery plays’ Herod and the visceral visionary experiences of Margery of Kempe all testify to the ways in which the medieval world sought to express, perform, idealise and understand emotion.

Yet while such expressions of emotion are frequently encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines, defining, quantifying and analysing the purposes of emotion often proves difficult. Are personal items placed in early Anglo Saxon graves a means for the living to let go of, or perpetuate emotion? Do different literary and historical forms lend themselves to diverse ways of expressing emotion? How does a character expressing emotion on stage or in artwork use both body and articulation to communicate emotion to their viewer? Moreover, is emotion viewed differently depending on the gendered identity of the body expressing it? Is emotion and its reception used to construct, deconstruct, challenge or confirm gender identities?

This conference seeks to explore the manifestations, performances and functions of emotion in the early to late Middle Ages, and to examine the ways in which emotion is gendered and used to construct gender identities.

Proposals are now being accepted for 20 minute papers. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

- Gender and emotional expression: representing and performing emotion
- The emotional body
- Philosophies of emotion: theory and morality
- Emotional objects and vessels of emotion
- Language and emotion and the languages of emotion
- Preserving or perpetuating emotion
- Emotions to be dealt with: repressing, curtailing, channelling, transforming
- Forbidden emotion
- Living through (someone else’s) emotion
- The emotions of war and peace
- The emotive ‘other’
- Place and emotion
- Queer emotion

We welcome scholars from a range of disciplines, including history, literature, art history, archaeology and drama. A travel fund is available for postgraduate students who would otherwise be unable to attend.

Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black by the 7th September 2015. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study (if applicable).

Further details will soon be available on the conference website.

CFP: Telling Tales: Manuscripts, Books and the Making of Narrative

The biennial conference of the Early Book Society 2015

The next biennial conference of the Early Book Society will take place at the University of Oxford, from lunchtime on Thursday 2 July 2015 to early afternoon on Sunday 5 July 2015. Abstracts of 300 words or fewer for 20-minute presentations should be sent to the organizers by 30 November 2014 to the conference e-mail address. Abstracts should include your name, affiliation (where relevant) and email address. Computers and data-projectors will be available for all sessions; speakers would need to bring presentations on a memory stick / USB plug-in device. People who have other AV needs should specify this on their abstract.

The theme, which may be interpreted narrowly or broadly, invites special attention to the material records of different genres of narrative, such as verse, romance, chronicle, biography or history. It might consider the ways that manuscripts, printed books and other media serve a narrative function: whether page layouts were modified for chronicles and annals, whether collections of documents were compiled to tell stories, whether images in books are important components of storytelling, whether poems on monuments recount lives.

The topic also invites participants to tell different kinds of stories about early books. In particular, we may reflect on our storytelling as scholars. What is the role of biography – of the author, of the ‘celebrity’ scribe, of the idiosyncratic reader – in the study of early books? How sure can we be of cause and effect, of chronology and dating, of different kinds of paleographical, codicological and bibliographical evidence, in studying these books? Are history and narrative the best models for ‘book history’ or might studies of manuscript and print serve literary criticism, linguistics or philology in other ways?

Finally, papers which concern books in or around Oxford are also encouraged. But, in general, proposals for papers on any aspect of the history of manuscripts and printed books from 1350 to 1550, including the copying and circulation of models and exemplars, style, illustration, and/or the influence of readers and patrons, artists, scribes, printers, are welcome.

Accommodation and most meals will be available at St Anne’s College, Oxford. Most lectures will take place there too, but part of the conference will take place in the newly renovated Weston Building of the Bodleian Library, which reopens officially in March 2015. There will be ‘masterclasses’ with manuscripts on show, a visit to the exhibition and some optional visits, on a first-come-first-served basis, ‘behind the scenes’ to departments of the library. We are grateful to the Centre for the Study of the Book in the Bodleian for co-hosting the conference and sponsoring these events.

The website with details of registration and accommodation will go live later this winter and will be announced on the EBS listserv, Facebook, and also on the EBS website.

For those making travel plans, there are some preliminary points to bear in mind.

Depending on availability, accommodation might be in St Anne’s or other Colleges for extra nights before or after the conference. Oxford is about an hour from central London by rail. The closest international airport is London Heathrow, and from there and from London Gatwick there is a convenient coach service, The Airline, which can be booked in advance. Birmingham International Airport is also close and has direct train connections to Oxford every half an hour.

People planning to combine the conference with a research trip might be reminded that the Special Collections department at the Bodleian Library and the Colleges’ libraries tend to be busy with visitors in the summer months, so planning is advised, given that dozens of early book enthusiasts will be in town!

Also, Leeds International Medieval Congress begins the day after our conference, on Monday 6 July 2015. Travel from Oxford to Leeds on Sunday evenings takes three and a half hours by rail, direct or with one change, and if booked far enough in advance (up to three months in advance) can cost (at this year’s rates) as little as £45.

CFP: Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, c. 900-1500

Keltologie, Philipps-Universität Marburg
8-10 April 2015

Keynote speakers: Prof. Helen Fulton (University of York), Prof. Dr. Erich Poppe (Philipps-Universität Marburg) and Dr Sif Rikhardsdottir (University of Iceland)

We are delighted to announce a symposium at Philipps-Universität Marburg on the role of cross-border literary borrowings in the construction of political, national, regional and cultural identities in the British Isles, Ireland and Iceland across the long period c. 900-1500. Proposals for papers are invited on processes of translation and adaptation across insular vernacular languages and/or Latin; discussions of broader cross-border thematic influences and correspondences; lines of transmission and textual distribution; the role of ecclesiastical and secular institutions in cross-border insular literary contact; perceptions of other insular peoples and constructions of otherness/ similitude; cross-border manuscript and book circulation; literary engagements and intersections with cross-border material and visual culture; linguistic borrowings across insular languages.

This is intended to foster discussion about contemporary methodologies in comparative literary studies by international scholars working in Celtic Studies, English and Norse. We hope that these conversations will make an important contribution to a growing field of research into the shape of pre-modern cultural and political mentalities.

Proposals are also welcomed from doctoral students and early career scholars, and we hope to have small subsidies available for accommodation costs.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words by 2 January 2015 to Dr Victoria Flood.

CFP: Masculinities in the British Landscape

14-17 May 2015

A multi-disciplinary, multi-period conference to be held at Harlaxton College, the British Campus of the University of Evansville, outside of Grantham, Lincolnshire.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Howard Williams (Chester): ‘From Stonehenge to the National Memorial Arboretum: Megaliths and Martial Masculinity in the British Landscape’

This conference seeks to explore current and historical concepts of masculinities in the British landscapes. From depictions of masculine control to landscapes of masculine employment, the conference wishes to explore the ways masculinity has been marked on the landscape and expressed in landscape terms.

Proposals will be accepted from all eras from the prehistoric to the contemporary. The geographic area covered will be not only England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but also the historic scope of ‘Britishness,’ including former British Empire states in their colonial and post-colonial periods.

Proposals are encouraged from any discipline, including (but not limited to) archaeology, art history, criminology, folklore studies, history, literature, philosophy, sociology and theology. Topics might include:

- The naval seascape
- Sculpted and symbolic landscapes
- Agricultural landscapes
- Ritualized landscapes
- Gender, crime and urban topography
- Employment and land
- Geographic concepts of masculinity
- Masculinity, empire and the landscape
- Religious masculinity and the monastic landscape
- Landscapes of masculinity through war, rebellion and protest
- Textual depictions of masculinities and landscapes

Please send 200-word proposals for 20-minute papers or 600-word proposals for 3-paper panels to the conference convenors by 1 December 2015. Informal queries can be made to Dr Edward Bujak or Dr Katherine Weikert.

Please click here for the conference website.

The Conference is generously supported by the Economic History Society.

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

CFP: Manhood in Anglo-Saxon England

Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies (MANCASS)
Easter Conference 2015

Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, UK
7-9 April 2015

Proposals for 20 minute papers on this topic are invited. Topics that the conference will include, but are not limited to:

• Male identities and constructions of masculinity
• Literary presentations and representations of manhood
• Laws and Penitentials
• Male sexualities
• Manhood and Archaeology
• Representations of masculinity in art

We are looking for submissions (approx. 300 words) on these and related subjects to reach us by 30th November 2014. Please send submissions, and direct enquiries to the conference director, Dr Charles Insley, Department of History, University of Manchester.

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2015

Gender, Dirt and Taboo

7-9 January 2015
Bangor University

‘to embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of manure’

Odo of Cluny

The Middle Ages are synonymous with dirt – bodily, spiritual, linguistic and literary. People lived in closer proximity to the material reality of filth: privies, animal waste, the midden, and while walking city streets. Keeping one’s body and clothes uncontaminated by filth would have represented a challenge. The Church took great pains to warn about the polluting effect of sin, and the literal and metaphorical stains that it could leave upon body and soul. The Middle Ages remains (in)famous, to some, due to the perception that its comedy is simply ‘latrine humour.’ Women, with their leaky and pollutant bodies, lie at the heart of the medieval materiality of filth. Throughout her life course, a woman engaged with dirt; in bearing children, caring for the sick, working within the household and outside of the home, listening to sermons in church and to literature in a variety of contexts. In the misogynist discourse of Churchmen such as Odo of Cluny, woman was little more than dirt herself. Odo of Cluny did not acknowledge that manure is, of course, essential to healthy new growth.

We welcome abstracts from postgraduates and colleagues on all aspects of gender, dirt and taboo and from a broad range of disciplines, including history, archaeology, book history, literature, art history, music, theology and medicine.

Papers are particularly welcome on, but are not limited to:

The language of dirt
Dirt in texts/‘dirty’ texts
Landscapes of dirt
Bodily dirt
Dramatising dirt
Dirt and spirituality
Dirt and sexuality
Controlling/cleansing dirt
The comedy of dirt
The science of dirt

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words, for papers lasting 20 minutes, no later than 30 September 2014 to Dr Sue Niebrzydowski (School of English, Bangor University) for consideration. Please also include your research area, institution and level of study in your abstract.

It is hoped that The Kate Westoby Fund will be able to offer a modest contribution (but not the full costs) towards as many student travel expenses as possible.

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.

CFP: Bodies Beyond Borders: The Circulation of Anatomical Knowledge, 1750-1950

Leuven, 7-9 January 2015

Bodies Beyond Borders is a scholarly conference on the circulation of anatomical knowledge that indicates the heighted interest in the history of anatomy in Leuven. This conference fits in with two current projects on the history of anatomy in Leuven. The first is a research project on Anatomy, scientific authority and the visualized body in medicine and culture (Belgium, 1780-1930), that is conducted in our research group, Cultural History since 1750. The project is supervised by Kaat Wils, and co-supervised by Raf de Bont, Jo Tollebeek and Geert Vanpaemel, and has two PhD fellows, Tinne Claes and Veronique Deblon and one postdoctoral fellow, Pieter Huistra. This research project takes as its object the history of anatomy in Belgium in the ‘long nineteenth century’.

Secondly, Leuven will celebrate a Vesalius year in 2014-2015, to commemorate the 500th birthday of Andreas Vesalius. The mainstay of the programme will be the exhibition Unravelling the body. The theatre of anatomy, of which Geert Vanpaemel will serve as curator. This exhibition studies Vesalius himself, but also his work influenced representations of the human body and the tradition of anatomical research. These themes will also be included in Bodies Beyond Borders, our conference that takes up the question: how does anatomical knowledge move from site to another? Whereas our research project focuses specifically on Belgium, the conference will have a broad geographical scope in its topics as well as its speakers.

Call for Papers

How does anatomical knowledge move from one site to another? Between 1750 and 1950 the study of anatomy underwent great changes, as a part of the development of scientific medicine, through public anatomies, as well as in the interplay between the two. How did these changes spread geographically? How did knowledge about newly discovered lesions travel from one hospital to another? What was the role of anatomical models in the spread of the public consciousness of syphilis, for example? Was the spread of this knowledge hindered by national borders, or did anatomical knowledge cross those borders easily? These questions are concerned with what James Secord terms ‘knowledge in transit’. To seek an answer to these questions, a conference focusing on the circulation of anatomical knowledge between 1750 and 1950 will be organized in Leuven from 7-9 January 2015. Confirmed speakers are Sam Alberti, Sven Dupré, Rina Knoeff, Helen MacDonald, Anna Maerker, Chloé Pirson, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez and Michael Sappol.

Knowledge does not move by itself – it has to be carried. To better understand how anatomical knowledge moves from place to place, we will seek to trace the trajectories of its bearers. Some of those bearers were tied very specifically to the discipline of anatomy: wax models, preserved bodies (or parts of them) or anatomical atlases, for example. These objects are polysemic in nature, tending to have different meanings in different contexts and for different audiences. It makes the question of how anatomical knowledge travelled all the more pertinent if, for example, wax models that went from a Florentine museum to a Viennese medical training institution underwent a shift in meaning en route. But bearers of knowledge less specifically tied to anatomy were equally important: articles, books and individual persons to name but a few examples.

For our conference we welcome contributions regarding the geographical movement of anatomical knowledge between 1750 and 1950. We are equally interested in ‘scientific’ and ‘public’ anatomy – as well as in exchanges between the two domains. Therefore, we encourage contributions about bearers of anatomical knowledge as wide-ranging as persons (scientists, students, freaks), objects (models, preparations, bodies or body parts), visual representations (films, atlases, wall maps) and practices (dissections, travelling exhibitions), as well as their (transnational and intranational) trajectories.

Paper proposals must be submitted by 1 June 2014.

Please send a 300-word abstract to Pieter Huistra. 

Notification of acceptance: early July, 2014.

CFP: Seventeenth Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists

University of Glasgow, 3–7 August 2015 (post-conference excursion to Iona, 8–9 August 2015)

Call for Papers

The conference theme is “The Daily Life of the Anglo-Saxons”. Ordinary Anglo-Saxons are often less visible to us than the key political and religious figures, but their lives shaped and were shaped by the wider events of the early medieval period. The theme encompasses all aspects of life, whether mundane or glamorous, covering activities such as farming and cooking, trade and craftsmanship, child-rearing and education, as well as government and administration, religion and devotional practices, travel and communication, medicine, art and leisure. The theme is a broad one by design to accommodate not only archaeological and historical investigations, but also explorations of the language, literature and place-names of the period. Papers on open topics are also welcome.

Proposals will be evaluated “blind” by members of the ISAS Advisory Board. Decisions regarding which proposals are accepted will be announced by January 2015.

Papers should be no more than 20 minutes in length, and will be grouped into 3-paper sessions of one hour and 30 minutes in length so as to leave time for questions and discussion. Proposals are welcome for individual papers or for complete sessions. Abstracts, whether for papers or for sessions, should be no more than 500 words in length (including bibliography). Abstracts are also required for individual papers within a proposed session.

Proposals are also welcome for project reports, which should be no more than 10 minutes in length and will be grouped into 5-report sessions of one hour so as to leave a short time for factual questions. Abstracts for project reports should be no more than 250 words in length (including bibliography).

All sessions will be held in a room that is fully equipped with audiovisual and computer equipment. Abstracts can be submitted from 15 June 2014 to 15 October 2014 via the submission site (note: this link will not be active beforehand). There you will receive instructions as to how to submit your proposal. To submit an abstract within the permitted amount of time online, you might wish to prepare it first as a word-processing document, then copy and paste it in. Please note that the deadline of 15 October is necessary to allow time for the reviewing process, and will not be extended.

Please note that in order to present at ISAS Glasgow, it is necessary to be a current member of ISAS. Information on joining ISAS or updating membership can be found on the ISAS website. http://www.isas.us/mem.html

Questions or problems relating to the submission of proposals may be directed either to the conference host, current ISAS President Carole Hough or to Executive Director Martin Foys.

CFP: Mid-American Medieval Association XXXIX: Collectivity and Exchange

with a keynote by Dr Pamela Sheingorn

Papers are invited on a range of topics, including the conference theme of ‘Collectivity and Exchange’ for the annual meeting of the Mid-America Medieval Assn, which will convene on Saturday, 28 February 2015, at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Collectivity might be imagined expansively to include not just temporal but also ephemeral and spiritual communities. Exchange might also be considered in various forms, from economic and material to ideological and philosophical.

Please send proposals of 250 words by 1 December 2014 to:

Dr Virginia Blanton 
Department of English, CH106
University of Missouri-Kansas City
5121 Rockhill Road
Kansas City, Missouri 64110 USA

CFP: All That Gothic: Excess and Exuberance

2nd International Conference

Łódź, 9-11 October, 2014

organised by

Department of British Literature and Culture
Department of American Literature and Culture
University of Łódź

Call for Papers

The Gothic is wildly diverse. It can refer to ecclesiastical architecture, supernatural fiction, cult horror films and a distinctive style of music. It has influenced poets, novelists, painters, musicians, political theorists, social reformers, academics, home décor and fashion. It manifests itself in regional and national diversities. It ruptures borders, defies conventions and ridicules taboos.

Łódź seems an ideal venue for discussions on all things Gothic. This city is post-industrial grandeur with neo-gothic architecture and archetypically Gothic cobbled alleyways. Here the past speaks through dereliction and wistfulness, fresh-glazed modernity overlying cobwebs and broken plaster where cinematic paths lead directly to Polański and Lynch.

The 2014 follow-up to the initial All that Gothic conference, held in Łódź in 2011, aims to capture the evolution of the Gothic, providing accounts of this haunting-to-horrifying cultural mode from its onset to the early years of the twenty-first century, adopting a broad international perspective. Open for inspection under this canopy are such manifestations of the Gothic as the sack of Rome by barbarian tribes, mediaeval architecture, popular culture of the sixteenth century (including ballads and revenge tragedy), political theories of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of the Gothic novel, the Gothic Revival, and the influence of Gothic culture on film, music, and fashion today.

Among its more modern concerns, this interdisciplinary conference will foster new readings of popular Gothic productions over the last few decades. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• from Victorian to contemporary High Street Goth/ic fashion
• Gothic performance and art festivals
• Gothic popular fiction from Twilight to Shadow of the Wind
• Goth/ic manifestations across genres: novel, theatre, poetry, music, Goth/ic as film and TV
• such trends and icons as Steampunk, Batman and Lady Gaga,
• theorizations of popular Gothic monsters (from zombies and vampires to werewolves and ghosts) in an age of terror/ism.

Excess and Exuberance are key words in the 2014 edition of All That Gothic. In keeping with the conference theme, individual proposals may address:

• the connections of Gothic fictions to political and industrial revolutions
• Gothic regional and national diversities
• nationalism and racism from Europe to America, colonized and post-colonial populations
• the struggle of "high" with "popular" culture
• changing attitudes towards human identity, life and death, sanity and madness

It is our great honour to announce that our confirmed plenary speakers are:

Zofia Kolbuszewska
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, the author of The Poetics of Chronotope in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon, and The Purloined Child: American Identity and Representations of Childhood in American Literature 1851-2000

Agnieszka Soltysik-Monnet
University of Lausanne, Switzerland, the author of The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in the Nineteenth Century American Gothic and the co-editor of The Gothic in Contemporary Literature and Popular Culture

Catherine Spooner
County College, Lancaster University, the author of Fashioning Gothic Bodies, and Contemporary Gothic, co-president of the International Gothic Association

Conference organisers Agnieszka Łowczanin and Dorota Wiśniewska welcome proposals (maximum 250 words) for panels and 20-minute papers from academics and post-graduate students working in all areas of literary, film and cultural studies. Selected papers will be published in a themed volume.

Abstract submission deadline: 10 August, 2014. Please email abstracts to the conference organisers.

Notification of acceptance: 15 August, 2014.

Registration deadline: 10 September, 2014.

Conference fee:
Polish academics: 500 PLN
Foreign scholars: € 150
Polish Ph.D. candidates: 250 PLN
Foreign Ph.D. candidates: € 80

Conference fee includes conference materials, conference banquet, snacks and beverages and covers the cost of post-conference publication.

For more information, please visit the conference website.

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.

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.

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   

CFP: Hrotsvit 2014: Pageants and Pioneers Conference

To be held on Saturday 31 May 2014 at University of Hull, England

In January 1914 in London, England, the Pioneer Players theatre society produced a remarkable and disturbing play about prostitution. This play was written by Hrostvit, the tenth century nun from Gandersheim. Known also as ‘strong voice’, Hrotsvit has been claimed as the first female dramatist. Edith Craig’s production of the play for the Pioneer Players theatre society and Christopher St John’s translation was part of a programme of encouraging women’s writing for the stage in the period of the campaign for women’s suffrage. The play featured the punishment of the prostitute, Thais, by imprisonment, providing a topical allusion in 1914 to the brutal treatment of suffragettes in London.

This interdisciplinary international conference will mark the centenary of this remarkable production and provide an opportunity for a reassessment of Hrotsvit’s drama, bringing together researchers interested in the modern production of the play as well as the Medieval text and context.

Dr Anna Birch will lead a workshop reading of Paphnutius and a discussion, which will be filmed as part of the ongoing project on Pageants and Pioneers begun in May 2011 with Fragments + Monuments performance and film of A Pageant of Great Women. We look forward also to Pageants and Pioneers 2015, 2016 and 2017.

Confirmed Speakers: Professor Katharine Cockin, Professor Lesley Ferris, Dr Anna Birch, Dr Helene Scheck

Send abstracts of no more than 300 words for papers by 6 January 2014 to Katharine Cockin.

CFP: Reading Animals: An International English Studies Conference

School of English, University of Sheffield, UK
17-20 July 2014

Abstract Deadline: 19 December 2013
Keynote Speakers: Erica Fudge, Tom Tyler, Cary Wolfe, others TBC

Reporting in the journal PMLA on the emergence and consolidation of animal studies, Cary Wolfe drew attention to the role of the Millennial Animals conference, held in the School of English at the University of Sheffield in 2000, as a formative event in this interdisciplinary field. Seeking now to focus the diverse critical practice in animal studies, a second conference at Sheffield seeks to uncover the extent to which the discipline of English Studies now can and should be reimagined as the practice of reading animals.

This conference seeks to reflect and to extend the full range of critical methodologies, forms, canons and geographies current in English Studies; contributions are also most welcome from interested scholars in cognate disciplines. Reading Animals will be programmed to encourage comparative reflection on representations of animals and interspecies encounters in terms of both literary-historical period and overarching interpretive themes. As such, seven keynote presentations are planned; each will focus on how reading animals is crucial in the interpretation of the textual culture of a key period from the Middle Ages to the present. The conference will also feature a plenary panel of key scholars who will reflect on the importance when reading animals of thinking across periods and in thematic, conceptual and formal terms.

Papers should focus on the interpretation of textual animals at any date from the Middle Ages to the present. We seek submissions that read animals in relation to any writers/periods or in terms of the following indicative list of themes:

*Genre/Media/Form/Mode*
animals in genre (adventure; tragedy; classic realism; satire; comedy; epic; lyric; elegy; nature writing; non-fiction, criticism and polemic; detective/mystery; gothic; sf; children's literature; graphic novel)
animal genres (bestiary; fictionalised [auto-]biography; fairy tale; fable; allegory; didactic story; pet memoir)

*Arts, Aesthetics, Philosophies*
reading animals in theatre and performance, music, visual culture, film, dance, theory

*Ethics, Politics, Society*
intersections of species - race - ethnicity - disability - sex - gender - sexuality - class

*History*
animals as subjects and objects of historical interpretation; animal materialisms; post-anthropocentric literary and cultural history

*Science and Technology*
bio-engineering; technologies of animal use; narratives of meat/vivisection; ethology; biosemiotics and zoosemiotics

*Environments and Geographies*
empire and colonialism; politics and poetics of space; globalisation; zoo-heterotopias; extinctions

Abstracts for 20 minute papers (300 words) or pre-formed 3-paper panels (1000 words) are welcome by 19 December, 2013 from researchers at any stage of their career, including early career scholars and postgraduates. Please send by email to the conference convenors.

CFP: True Crime: Fact, Fiction, Ideology

Fact, Fiction, Ideology

6-7 June 2014
Manchester, UK

Keynote Lecture: David Schmid (University at Buffalo, SUNY), author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture: ‘The Moors Murders and the “Truth” of True Crime’

Call for Papers

As Mark Seltzer notes, ‘true crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction’, a popular genre that is obsessed with real-life murder and extreme acts of criminal deviance. Emerging as a genre in magazines of the mid-twentieth century such as True Detective Magazine, and drawing on earlier discourses of confession, memoir and speculation, true crime first received attention as a form of literature with the publication of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966). It has since diversified into a variety of other media, from television series such as Neil McKay’s Appropriate Adult (2011) to Hollywood films about famous works of the genre, such as David Fincher’s Zodiac (2007). In recent horror-crime fiction and film, such as Adam Nevill’s Last Days (2012) and Scott Derrickson’s Sinister (2012), the act of writing and filming true crime is presented as ensnaring its creators in the gruesome worlds they seek to capture. While its adherence to orthodox law and order perspectives, typified by a tendency to present offenders as monstrous and evil, may seem to position true crime as a conservative genre, its fascination with the lives and minds of serial killers can sometimes lend it a transgressive quality.

True Crime: Fact, Fiction, Ideology is an interdisciplinary conference seeking to explore this genre in its myriad incarnations. Proposals are sought for 20 minute papers. Possible topics may include:
• True crime in popular culture
• Forensic psychology and criminology
• Prison narratives and memoirs
• True crime in fiction and metafiction
• The politics of true crime
• True crime and the law
• Theorizing true crime
• Serial killers and profiling
• Taboo crimes
• The ethics of true crime
• ‘Proto-true crime’ – early examples of the mode, predecessors and precedents

Please send 300-word abstracts to David McWilliam and Hannah Priest by 31st March 2014. All enquiries should also be sent to this address.

This conference is organized by Hic Dragones. For more information about the company and its work, please see the Hic Dragones website.