CFP: Celebrating Belle da Costa Greene: An Examination of Medievalists of Color within the Field (Saint Louis University)

We are very pleased to share this timely CFP (on behalf of Dr. Tarrell Campbell at Saint Louis University). Please circulate widely!

CALL FOR PAPERS

“Celebrating Belle da Costa Greene: An Examination of Medievalists of Color within the Field” (November 30-December 2, 2018,  Saint Louis University)

The African American Studies Program at Saint Louis University invites paper and panel proposals for “Celebrating Belle da Costa Greene: An Examination of Medievalists of Color within the Field,” a conference to be held at the Center for Global Citizenship on the campus of Saint Louis University in the heart of Midtown Saint Louis, Missouri.

The contemporary state of Medieval Studies is at a crossroads. Will the field remain an open, safe, and inclusive environment--reflective of its always, already integrated history--or will the present atmosphere of isolated thinking, white supremacy, and delimited academic freedom continue to reign? In accordance with those who seek the light, this conference will celebrate the life and accomplishments of Belle da Costa Greene and will contribute to the developing field of scholarship centered on the meaning of the “medieval” and “Middle Ages” as relates increasingly interdisciplinary and cross-regional conceptions of the premodern world. More specifically, the conference represents an opportunity to focus on those aspects of the “medieval” and “Middle Ages” specifically of interest to Medievalists of Color and in alignment with the life of Greene. Greene was a black woman who had to pass as white in order to gain entrance and acceptance into the racially fraught professional landscape of early twentieth-century New York. She was a prominent art historian and the first manuscript librarian of the Pierpont Morgan collection. She was also the first known person of color and second woman to be elected a Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (1939). According to the Morgan Library & Museum website, "Greene was barely twenty when Morgan hired her, yet her intelligence, passion, and self-confidence eclipsed her relative inexperience, [and] she managed to help build one of America's greatest private libraries." Her legacy highlights the professional difficulties faced by Medievalists of Color, the personal sacrifices they make in order to belong to the field, and their extraordinary contributions to Medieval Studies.

This conference invites researchers to consider any aspect of the field as regards the life of Belle da Costa Greene; moreover, this conference invites scholarly perspectives of the “Other Middle Ages” by presenting research and resources that address the connectivity and mobility of the globe c. 500-1600 CE, particularly as relates the movements of racialized and othered bodies. Even more, the conference invites researchers who focus on new and novel ways of employing medieval historiographical, bibliographical, cosmological, etc. conceptions for contemporary analyses and explorations of human endeavors. What work (and violence) does the idea of “the Middle Ages” do in our scholarship, and what do we gain from a shared or comparative notion of the medieval? What do we lose when the field acts in a parochial manner, closing itself off and ostracizing scholars of color as Others. Papers and presentations will aim to contribute to a more inclusive view of the premodern world that de-centers European interpretations of the Middle Ages and recognizes dynamic globalisms and transient contemporary times.

Please include the title of proposed paper or panel and an abstract of about 500 words outlining how the paper or panel will fit with the conference theme. Be sure to include five keywords associated with the paper or the panel, name, title, position, affiliated institution, and a short biographical statement (40-50 words each) for all authors involved.

Faculty and graduate students are also welcome to apply to deliver a lightning talk + complementary paper and/or a primary source-based research presentation. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words.

Lightning Talks

The conference will hold two panels of lightning talks (8 minutes each) based on short, pre-circulated papers (approx. 4 pages) summarizing current work on globalized conceptions of and connections within the medieval world. Lightning talks will engage field- or region-specific conceptualizations of “the medieval/Middle Ages.”

Roundtable discussions with respondents will follow. 

Primary Source-based Research Presentations

Submissions will also be accepted for 15- to 18-minute research presentations, each focused on a particular medieval primary source (text, image, object, etc.) that is useful for thinking in comparative or global perspectives. The source (an image or a selection from the source) should be pre-circulated to attendees.

Each talk will be followed by a moderated discussion.

All presenters are asked to submit a brief bibliography (5-10 entries) on resources related to their lightning talks or research presentations. After the symposium, these bibliographies will be curated and will contribute to the development of a canon of literatures on the global Middle Ages made always available to conference participants and attendees.*

Nota bene : The submission of a paper and/or panel proposal must be on the understanding that if the proposal is accepted, then the author (or authors) will register for and attend the conference.

The costs of attending the conference, including registration fees, travel, accommodation and other expenses, are the responsibility of the presenter(s) or their institutions.

Deadline: September 28, 2018

How to Apply:

Applications should be submitted in PDF form to conference organizer Tarrell R. Campbell (tarrell.campbell@slu.edu) by September 28, 2018. Those submitting paper, panel, lightning talks, and primary source presentations should prepare separate abstracts, respectively. Please include the following information:

Name:
Affiliation:
Faculty/Graduate Student/Independent Scholar:
Field:
Regional Specialization:
Proposed Format (Paper/Panel/Lightning Talk/Primary Source Presentation):

Abstracts of no longer than 500 words.


Notifications of acceptance will be made by no later than October 15, 2018.

***Interested in helping to organize the conference or conducting a workshop?***

Contact tarrell.campbell@slu.edu for more information.

BABEL: Call for Parliamentarians and #BABEL17

a message from the BABEL WORKING GROUP

[Prepping or organizing for January 20? See Jeffrey's rundown of resources and events.]

Parliament of birds. 'Attar, Mantiq al-Tayr (Conference of the Birds), dated AH 898 (1493-94 CE). Bodleian Library MS Elliott 246, fol. 25v; explore more here.

BABEL 2017 CALL FOR PARLIAMENTARIANS

BABEL is an ever-evolving entity. Historically, our leadership has been comprised in a couple of different ways – thriving on the time and energy of a couple of people, steered by a dozen committee members, or driven by several subcommittees. The one constant over time has been the energy of BABEL’s membership. With our 2017 elections, it is time to evolve once again, to better harness the energy of BABELers everywhere. We aspire to avoid hierarchies, foster balance, encourage individual commitments, embrace inclusiveness, and recruit/mentor newbies, all while caring for our fundamental responsibilities and seeding new growth. We therefore imagine a new rhizome: a parliament of monsters. First and foremost, we welcome all members of the BABEL community (yes, this means you) to become as involved as you would like to be. A number of parliamentarians will be elected, and will include anyone who applies, is willing to put in the work, and then puts in the work. We will also be electing three fates responsible for three aspects of leadership: spinning visions, numbers, and timing. Finally, the parliament will include a number of chompers, who will mentor and speed parliamentarians and fates as they deliver on their promises.

We therefore issue our 2017 Call for Parliamentarians. If you would like to serve, please submit a proposal for a project by Jan 31 for public discussion until Feb 13. Suggestions are welcome from those who have ideas for projects but cannot serve at this time, and candidates are welcome to adopt legacy projects or routine necessities. Projects may be large or small. Starting on Feb 14, the current steering committee will discuss and select as many of these projects as possible, resulting in our roster of 2017 parliamentarians and giving each 2017 parliamentarian a project by Feb 23. Please note that all parliamentarians will be expected to join Slack, the platform where our conversations take place, and to participate in larger conversations about the running of BABEL.

To propose and discuss projects, please visit this shared document of proposals.

Legacy Projects and Routine Necessities could include:

• Website redesign and maintenance
• Annual Spring fundraiser
• Awards
• Regular conference sessions and events (Kzoo, MLA, MAA, etc)
• Biennial BABEL Meeting
• Social media presence
• Documentation of BABEL events
• Ensure BABEL events and actions are accessible
• Invite and include various communities as part of BABEL events – poets, scientists, PoC, queers, Anglo-Saxonists, high school students…

P.S. 

The Call for Sessions for #BABEL17 ("MAKE / RISK / WORK" in Reno, NV, 26-29 October 2017) is now extended to January 31!

CFP: Method and the Middle English Text

by JONATHAN HSY

[Happy first day of classes to those of you who are starting a new term today! Check out Karl's SMALL THINGS syllabus.]

Quick note to ITM readers: I've updated my grand collation of deadlines for upcoming medievalist things adding a few new items (many of them related to disability studies), so feel free to check it out. I also call your attention to this just-publicized CFP for "Method at the Middle English Text" to be held at UVA on April 8-9, 2016.

Quoting from the conference website:

The Graduate Medieval Colloquium at the University of Virginia, along with organizers from the University of Pennsylvania and UC Berkeley, invites submissions for a graduate student conference and colloquium: 

Method and the Middle English TextApril 8-9, 2016The University of Virginia in Charlottesville 

Keynote speakers: Andrew Cole (Princeton University), Alexandra Gillespie (University of Toronto), Patricia Ingham (University of Indiana, Bloomington), Steven Justice (UC Berkeley), Kellie Robertson (University of Maryland), Emily Steiner (University of Pennsylvania). 

The study of Middle English literature has long been characterized by methodological debate. In the 1960s, E. T. Donaldson’s medievalist new criticism contended with D. W. Robertson’s exegetical criticism; in the 1990s, the relative merits of psychoanalysis and historicism were repeatedly weighed in the pages of Speculum. Today, though the camps are more fluid and the range of methods more diverse, a similar division obtains between the practitioners of “old” and “new” methodologies. On the one hand are the more traditional practices of philology, codicology, paleography, lexicography, biography, and forms of historicism, materialist and other. On the other hand are the newer methodologies, such as ecocriticism, object-oriented ontology, new materialism, affect studies, new formalism, disability studies, queer theory, and the digital humanities. 

Advocates of methods both old and new have not hesitated to argue for the merits of their respective approaches. Missing from these discussions, however, is a sense of how these different methods and intellectual investments can operate together as a scholarly praxis. How, for instance, can one combine an interest in codicology with an interest in ecocriticism, biographical readings with affect studies, materialist historicism with the new materialisms, philology with new formalism? This conference aims to produce just such scholarship. Our goal is not to correct or affirm any specific view or theoretical model. Rather, we desire a scholarly disposition of both/and, rather than either/or. 

The conference will address these questions through three thematic strands led by the plenary speakers: Modes of Knowledge (Alexandra Gillespie and Patricia Ingham), History and Literature (Steven Justice and Emily Steiner), and Philosophy and Form (Andrew Cole and Kellie Robertson). 

Submissions addressing one of these three thematic strands are sought from graduate students for: 

• Abstracts for twenty-minute papers that combine at least one old and one new methodology, to be organized in sessions.

• Abstracts for roundtables centered on one or two set primary texts. Instead of using these texts in order to apply some theoretical method, we ask that roundtable presenters treat these texts as theoretical works in themselves. What methods, in other words, do the texts themselves ask us to consider? What can they teach us about medieval or modern theoretical methods?

Presenters will also be invited to participate in seminars, conducted by the plenaries and conference organizers and dedicated to discussion of a selection of critical texts. These seminars are designed to complement the roundtables and panels, addressing the methodological questions, cruxes, and problems from the theme of each strand. 

Please submit abstracts of one page in length to methodandme@gmail.com by November 1, 2015. Preliminary inquiries and expressions of interest are most welcome.

For more information (including the full lineup of plenary pairings), visit the conference website!

Summer Digest 2015: Digital Publics, Diversity, Disability, Donuts

by JONATHAN HSY

[First, read all about JEFFREY's two new collaborative projects!]

NOTE: UPDATED with a few more links on August 31, 2015.

Summer is coming to a close and a new academic year approaches. It was productive and eventful summer for me, but the downside was I never got around to writing any new blog posts here at ITM.

In the spirit of trying new things, I present what I'm calling an ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) Summer Digest 2015: my own idiosyncratic listing of some interesting links and noteworthy things that happened over these summer months. (This list also gives you a vague sense of "What Jonathan Did Over Summer Break.")

ICMY Medievalist Summer Digest 2015

Conference Roundups:

May: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI (#Kzoo2015):

• This #Kzoo2015 blogroll is my earlier compilation of blog posts and links [last updated May 30]; the 2015 conference also marked the emergence of the silly but somehow oddly compelling #MedevalDonut meme. JEFFREY also played a big part in all this. (A brief resurgence of #MedievalDonut also occurred on World Donut Day; check out these tweets archived by Sjoerd Levelt!)

• N.B. Leila K. Norako's writeup after Kalamazoo about the "Public Medievalist" roundtable and a lively session marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.

June-July: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, Lincoln, UK (#MAMO15):

• "Diverse Pedagogies of Medievalism" Roundtable (org. Helen Young). Presenters: Helen Young, Kim Wilkins, Molly Brown, Carol Robinson [virtually via recorded presentation], Dorothy Kim, and Jonathan Hsy. The full videorecording is available online (includes a link to Robinson's presentation and a link to the slides from my talk), and there's also bit more info at Medievalists.net.

July: International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (#IMC2015):

• Panel of public medievalists (org. by the Grad Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America). Presenters: Matthew Gabriele, Andrew James Johnston, and Erik Kwakkel: see Peter Konieczny's curated archive of live-tweets.

• Roundtable entitled "The Twitterati: Using Twitter in Scholarship and Pedagogy" (org. Carla María Thomas). Presenters: Dorothy Kim, Jonathan Hsy, Kristen Mapes, Angela Bennett Segler, and Kristen Mapes. Check out my curated archive of live-tweets from the session and this excellent summary of the conversation (by Carla María Thomas); note also a summary of the undelivered presentation by Shyama Rajendran. N.B. you can also read the full text of the informative talk by Kristin Mapes, and explore Mapes' collected data on twitter usage at Kalamazoo and Leeds in 2014.

• "Queer Manuscripts" thread: two sessions (orgs. Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt); check out Watt's archive of live-tweets from these conversations.

July: London Chaucer Conference ("Science, Magic, and Technology"), University of London, UK (#Chaucer2015):

• Plenaries by J. Allan Mitchell and Lisa H. Cooper; browse my archive of all the live-tweets.

Online Conversations and New Communities:

Public Medievalists (forum):

• Open access (i.e., FREE) postmedieval forum on "The Public Middle Ages" (featuring Holly A. Crocker, Marion Turner, Brantley L. Bryant, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Matthew Gabriele, Bruce Holsinger, Leila K. Noriko, David Perry).

• Over on his own blog, Perry offers this posting with his reaction to Bryant, his reaction to Kennedy, and reaction to Gabriele [more postings may be forthcoming].

• Richard Utz (at the Chronicle of Higher Education), "Don't Be Snobs, Medievalists." Note David Perry's subsequent response, and Utz responding to Perry.

#ILookLikeAProfessor (twitter hashtag):

• This twitter hashtag was created to combat stereotypes in academia and started a number of conversations about gender, race, class, disability, and the "public face" of university instructors and educators. Read accounts by co-creators Adeline Koh, Michelle Moravec, and Sara B. Pritchard; see also this piece by Kelly J. Baker (addressing gender as well as disability). The meme was also picked up by Buzzfeed, Colorlines, and Mashable (with a few medievalists featured each time).

The Lone Medievalist (community):

• New online network oriented toward anyone who is the only medievalist scholar in their campus or community; access via the website (requires login), Facebook community page, or follow on twitter @LoneMedievalist.

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (SSDMA): 

• The SSDMA launched a Facebook group that is open to anyone interested in the study of disability, impairment, and varied modes of embodied difference in medieval culture.

Various other things (for academics on and off the tenure-track):

• Katie Rose Guest Pryal (at Chronicle Viate) offers an excellent perspective on freelance academics as public intellectuals.

• Eric Anthony Grollman (via Conditionally Accepted) collates some sound advice for new assistant professors.

New Open Access Publications:

• Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. Entire inaugural (2015) issue "Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation" is available online; among a stellar international array of contributors are Simon Gaunt, Karla Mallette, and David Wallace.

• The Medieval Globe (edited by Monica H. Green). The inaugural (2014) issue "Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Plague" features a range of interdisciplinary and international contributions. Green's essay on "Making the Black Death Global" is well worth your time.

Upcoming Dates and Deadlines:

• Aug 31 (thread/session proposals due): Medieval Colloquium “Medieval Natures” in Sewannee, TN (plenary lectures by Caroline Walker Bynum and Carolyn Dinshaw; with "Defining Nature" seminar by Kellie Robertson), Apr 1-2, 2016.

• Aug 31 (individual paper proposals due): International Medieval Congress (Theme: “Food, Feast & Famine”) in Leeds, UK, Jul 4-7, 2016.
  
  
• Sep 1 (initial abstracts): edited volume on Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World (co-editors: Richard H. Godden and Asa Simon Mittman)

• Sep 15 (early registration ends): BABEL Meeting “Off the Books” in Toronto, ON, Oct 9-11, 2015 (featured speakers: Micha Cárdenas, Malisha Dewalt, David Gersten, Alexandra Gillespie, Randall McLeod [aka Random Cloud], Whitney Anne Trettien).

• Sep 15 (proposals due): Fordham Conference “Manuscript as Medium” in NYC, Mar 5-6, 2016 (confirmed speakers: Jessica Brantley, Kathryn Rudy, Andrew Taylor).

• Sep 15 (paper proposals due): International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 12-15, 2016.

• Sep 15 (paper/session proposals due): MLA (Modern Language Association of America) International Symposium "Other Europes: Migrations, Translations, Transformations” in Düsseldorf, Germany, Jun 23-26, 2016.

• Sep 30 (session proposals due): International Medieval Congress (Theme: “Food, Feast & Famine”) in Leeds, UK, Jul 4-7, 2016.

• Oct 15 (paper/sessions proposals due): GW MEMSI (Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute) Graduate Conference "Premodern Disorder” (keynotes: Sharon Kinoshita, Drew Daniel) in Washington, DC, Feb 16, 2016.

• Oct 15 (paper/panel abstracts due): “Composing Disability: Crip Ecologies" at GWU (speakers include Sunaura Taylor and Riva Lehrer) in Washington, DC, Apr 7-8, 2016.

• Oct 16 (abstracts due): BABEL, punctum books, and Studium join forces for the MLA (Modern Language Association of America) Subconference, Austin, TX, Jan 6-7, 2016.

• Oct 15-16: “The Provocative 15th Century” at the Huntington, CA (orgs. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown). Presenters: Anthony Bale, Anne Bernau, Jessica Brantley,  Lisa H. Cooper, Andrea Denny-Brown, Shannon Gayk, Alexandra Gillespie, Robert Meyer-Lee, Jenni Nuttall, Catherine Sanok, James Simpson, Daniel Wakelin).

• Oct 30: “Futures of the Past” Conference at GWU in Washington, DC. Presenters: Kim Hall, Patricia Clare Ingham, J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Coll Thrush, Henry S. Turner.
  
  
• Nov 1 (proposals due): “Method and the Middle English Text” at UVA (plenary pairings: Alexandra Gillespie & Patricia Ingham; Andrew Cole & Kellie Robertson; Steven Justice & Emily Steiner), Charlottesville, VA, Apr 8-9, 2016.

• Nov 1 (proposals due): “Romance in Medieval Britain” at UBC in Vancouver, BC (plenaries: Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Corinne Saunders), Aug 17-19, 2016.
  
  
• Nov 2 (proposals due): Vagantes Grad Student Conference (including keynote by Diane Wolfthal on “Occupy the Middle Ages: Representations of Household Help”) at Rice University, Houston, TX, Feb 18-20, 2016.

• Dec 15 (queries and proposals): “Making Early Middle English” at University of Victoria, BC, Sep 23-25, 2016.

• Dec 31 (proposals due): “Anglo-Saxons 2016: Exchange, Cultures, Ideas, and Materials” in Edinburgh, Jun 9-10, 2016.

• Jan 31 (submissions welcomed from Fall 2015 term): Digital Medieval Disability Glossary, Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (see the CFP here; if you you have difficulty reading the image file, try this link).

Castration anyone?

(posted on behalf of Larissa Tracy)

Castration Volume — Call for Papers

This is a call for submissions for a collected volume on castration in classical, medieval, or early modern tradition.

This volume, inspired by a series of discussions at the International Medieval Congress at Leeds, 2010, will investigate the social, cultural and moral implications of literal/actual castration and/or genital mutilation from historical, literary, artistic or legal sources, interrogating the boundaries of punishment and social taboos in the medieval/early-modern world.

Punishment, dismemberment and violence have come to the fore in the last ten years as very active fields of study and discovery, and yet castration and genital mutilation are often regarded as taboo. This volume seeks to address a gap in scholarship, focusing on actual accounts of castration, rather than theoretical interpretations or analysis.

We welcome submissions in any area of classical/medieval/ or early modern studies as long as they deal with representations or accounts of actual castration (or the threat of it).

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Dr. Larissa Tracy, kattracy@comcast.net by Oct. 1, 2010.

You should go to Berlin

by J J Cohen

I'll be there. So will Roderick Ferguson, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz and Susan Stryker. You should come too.
It's not a medievalist conference, but it is a conference in need of medievalists. Aren't we all about affect, space and temporality?

CFP is below.
--------------

Queer Again? Power, Politics and Ethics

23.-25. September 2010

International Conference of the Department of English and American Studies and the
Research Training Group “Gender as a Category of Knowledge”

The concept of queer is volatile and, at times, difficult to grasp. As a result, we need a continuous review of the fields and debates within Queer Theory. In his 2004 study No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman manoeuvred queer theory into a kind of aporia and thus deep crisis that persists to this day. Subscription to an “ethics of futility”, as Edelman suggests, signals that the borders of ethical thinking have been reached. However, in debates following the publication of Edelman’s book (as for instance, in the Social Text issue of 2005 with the programmatic title What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?) the ethical impetus of queer criticism confronted and challenged the dominance of the so-called antisocial thesis. This ongoing debate and the regular recurrence of the antisocial thesis in its different manifestations reveals a pressing need to reflect anew the relationship between queer and theory, art, ethics, and politics.

Taking this as a starting point for the conference, we want to take up the iterative moment that seems inherent in the concept of queer: queer is regularly in a state of crisis that needs to be made productive, and in this way it can be continuously reworked and reshaped. We want to provide a space to further the debate about sexuality and gender and their multiple interconnections in fields of power.

The panels will be organised along two thematic strands. The first, Affect, Space and Temporality, is concerned with the ethical and political potential of queer and the different political conceptions of queer that arise as a result.
Possible topics to be addressed include:

• queer strategies and practices in art/visual culture and literature
• conditions and possibilities of political activism
• normativity, citizenship and recognition
• queer utopias/imagination
• political and ethical implications of sexual dissidence
• rethinking concepts of temporality and space, generation or community
• varying meanings of queer in different geographical and temporal contexts

The second strand, Limits and Boundary Crossings, takes up current theoretical debates with regard to disciplinary and other boundaries and crossings of these boundaries.
Possible questions to be discussed include:

• Which limits and/or transgressions of these limits occur when different theoretical fields interact (e.g. queer theory and        transgender theory or postcolonial theory or crip theory/disability studies)?
• What are the limitations of queer? What are the inclusions and queer produces in specific contexts that demand new critical/queer interventions?
• How can queer theory be situated in current academic and activist spheres?
• What does the focus on interdependent relationships (of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, (dis)ability etc.) mean for the formation of a queer ethics?

Keynote speakers include
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,
Roderick Ferguson,
Judith Halberstam,
José Esteban Muñoz
and Susan Stryker.

We invite abstracts for 20-minute papers. Abstracts should be in English and not exceed 500 words. They should be accompanied by a short biographical sketch of about 250 words and sent to queer.conference[at]hu-berlin.de by March 31st 2010.

The conference language will be English. The conference location is wheelchair accessible. We will try to provide sign language interpreters as well as child care in case of need. We kindly ask participants to let us know about applicable requirements or other special needs by April 30th 2010.

Please note that travel funds can only be granted in exceptional cases and we ask participants to apply in time for travel funding at their home institutions.

Contact:

queer.conference[at]hu-berlin.de

Organisation:

Eveline Kilian	Maja Figge	Vojin Saša Vukadinovic
Jens Borcherding	Elahe Haschemi Yekani
Adrian De Silva	Beatrice Michaelis

CFP: Disney's Medievalisms

Call for Papers: Disney's Medievalisms

From medieval fairs to modern films, the industries of popular culture continually revisit and reinvent the Middle Ages, entertaining audiences while generating a profit.  And Disney's--both Walt's and the Corporation' s -- contribution to this field is virtually unparalleled. From its many "medieval" films (Sword in the Stone, Robin Hood, A Kid in King Arthur's Court) to its re-creations of fairy-tale romances (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Enchanted), from its architecture of iconic castles to its renovation of outmoded identities (princesses, pirates), Disney¹s multifaceted medievalism is America's most culturally visible monument to the western Middle Ages -- a monument that, like all of Disney's products, has been globally disseminated. However, since Disney's Middle Ages spans from his pre-Mickey retellings of fairy tales, through the studio's early princess films and into 're-writings' of the company's own traditions in more recent films, this monument is itself continually under reconstruction.

Our proposed essay collection "Disney's Medievalisms" will tackle this cultural legacy from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including literary, cinematic, architectural, and sociological. It will address such questions as: How do the Middle Ages figure in Disney's essentially American historical narrative? What do Disney's turns to medievalism reveal about twentieth- and twenty-first-century cultural concerns, and why are the Middle Ages a preferred setting for modern's children entertainment? How do the child and the medieval intersect, and to what end?

Potential contributors should contact Susan Aronstein (aronstei@uwyo.edu) and Tison Pugh (tpugh@mail.ucf.edu) with 200-word abstracts of their proposals by May 1, 2010. Professor Aronstein is the author of Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia, and Professor Pugh is the author of Queering Medieval Genres and the co-editor of two collections addressing 'medieval' cinema: Race, Class, and Gender in "Medieval" Cinema and Queer Movie Medievalisms.

CFP: Insular Identities and the Borders of Medieval Britain

by J J Cohen, on behalf of Katherine H. Terrell

Insular Identities and the Borders of Medieval Britain
Northeast Modern Language Association, April 7-11 2010, Montreal, Quebec

While England, Scotland, and Wales each produced their own bodies of literature in the Middle Ages, their physical proximity at times engendered a sense of shared literary culture, even as the fraught political relations among them complicated any notion of a shared identity. This panel seeks to explore Britain's insular identities through an examination of its borders, and invites papers dealing with depictions of borders, bordered identities, border theory, or cross-border relations in medieval Britain. Send abstracts to Katherine H. Terrell: kterrell@hamilton.edu by 30 September.

CFP: Romance Temporalities

by J J Cohen, on behalf of Amy Burge

This panel should be right up the alley of many ITM readers. [What does 'right up the alley' even mean? Am I being anachronistic in using the idiom for a medieval research project? Should I have said 'right inside the scriptorium'? Anyway ...]

Proposed Sessions by the Medieval Romance Society

45^th International Congress on Medieval Studies, 2010

Romance Temporalities

In recent years, medievalists have increasingly considered the medium of time as a dynamic position from which to analyze the medieval as we explore and question our own temporally determined relationships to the period we study. As evidenced by the publication of criticism such as Robert Rouse’s The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance, this heightened awareness of our temporal distance from our scholarly subjects has also encouraged us to explore the conflations, confusions, uses, and abuses of time and periodization at work in medieval literature itself. We are no longer satisfied with the idea of histories and chronologies—whether purportedly factual or openly fictional—as linear, progressive, or innocent. Medieval romance, in particular, offers today’s readers a rich array of timely challenges, from temporal discontinuities and ahistorical moments to shifting verb tenses. The three proposed sessions of the Medieval Romance Society aim to address questions such as, “How does time function in romance?” “How does our modern understanding of medieval romance infiltrate contemporary literature?” “How do we teach medieval romance today in fun, accessible, and responsible ways?”

The Medieval Romance Society would like to invite papers that explore how we understand medieval romance in our contemporary world, both as critical researchers and as teachers of romance. We value interdisciplinarity and welcome proposals from graduate students as well as established scholars. Though papers should be presented in English, we hope to include papers on romances of multiple medieval languages. One-page abstracts (or 250 word abstracts for the roundtable) should be submitted by September 15 to Amy Burge at ab519@york.ac.uk.

“Once Upon a Time:” Romance Temporalities

Critics have long acknowledged the “once upon a time” trope at work in medieval romance, but we are increasingly uneasy with the innocence and “merely” fantastic or escapist motivations assumed in its deployment. This session invites reconsiderations of what kinds of temporal systems are at work in medieval romance (and why), how romance makes use of revisionary chronologies, how it imagines its pasts and futures.

Temporal Touching Roundtable: Medieval Romance and Popular Culture

Although medieval romance and popular culture are distinct genres, scholars increasingly recognize the productivity of blurring the medieval/modern divide in order to examine the relevance of the medieval to the modern. This roundtable session aims to explore the transmission of medieval romance into modern popular culture and to investigate the benefits of diachronic research to medieval studies.

Time for Romance? Teaching Medieval Romance in a Modern World

How do we, as teachers, mediate the “otherness” of medieval romance in the classroom? On the one hand, we have a responsibility to help students learn about medieval cultures as distinct from our own; on the other hand, we want to help them view medieval literature as accessible and enjoyable as an object of study. This session invites papers by teachers of medieval romance to share their strategies and engage in critical exploration of the challenges of teaching romance, particularly to undergraduates.

Kzoo CFP: "The Other, the Outsider, and the Outlaw in Medieval Romance"

posted on behalf of Michael Wenthe

Proposals are welcome for a special session on The Other, the Outsider, and the Outlaw in Medieval Romance. This session will direct attention to all those figures who lie outside the normative bounds of privileged romance identity, inviting perspectives from such theoretical currents as postcolonial theory, feminism, queer theory, disability studies, and marginality theory in order to shed new light on how the methods and functions of majority-culture narrative could approach the issues and challenges raised by figures on the margins of medieval society. Ideally, the session will encourage further discussion and reflection on how scholars employing different critical approaches can learn from each other's methods and conclusions, the better to extend and refine conceptions of the self and the other (broadly considered) as explored in medieval romance. One-page abstracts are due by September 15. Please direct inquiries and abstracts to Michael Wenthe at wenthe@american.edu.

More CFPs -- Columbia Medieval Guild and Kalamazoo

by Mary Kate Hurley

Hello all! I've finally returned from my whirlwind of world travel, and have plenty to post about. First, however: A few CFPs have been posted in the past few weeks (and of course the listservs are positively teeming with them), so I thought I'd add a couple to the list. First off, a CFP for a special session at Kzoo organized by yours truly, with Bruce Gilchrist rounding out the ticket, on "Beowulf, Bakhtin and Beyond: Literary Theory and Old English Texts." Then, another Kzoo CFP for a panel organized by Jennifer Garrison (St. Mary's College, Calgary), "Between Thinking and Feeling: Reading Devotionally in Medieval England," a topic that I think might be quite interesting to a number of readers of this blog. And finally, from my home institution, a CFP for 2009's Columbia University Medieval Guild Conference, focusing on "Approaches to the Medieval City." I have to highly recommend the MedGuild Conference -- it's a great opportunity to A. come to New York, and meet the awesome NYC medievalists and B. present in a well attended graduate student conference.

Find the info after the break!

I. Kalamazoo 2010: Beowulf, Bakhtin and Beyond: Literary Theory and Old English Texts

“The epic world is an utterly finished thing, not only as an authentic event of the distant past but also on its own terms and by its own standards; it is impossible to change, to re-think, to re-evaluate anything in it. It is completed, conclusive and immutable, as a fact, an idea and a value. This defines epic distance. One can only accept the epic world with reverence; it is impossible to really touch it, for it is beyond the human realm, the realm in which everything humans touch is altered and re-thought. This distance exists not only in the epic material, that is, in the events and the heroes described, but also in the point of view and evaluation one assumes toward them; point of view and evaluation are fused with the subject into one inseparable whole. Epic language is not separable from its subject, for an absolute fusion of subject matter and spatial-temporal aspects with valorized (hierarchical) ones is characteristic of semantics in the epic. This absolute fusion and the consequent unfreedom of the subject was first overcome only with the arrival on the scene of an active polyglossia and interillumination of langauges (and then the epic became a semiconventional, semimoribund genre).”

Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination ed. Holquist. 17

Bakhtin’s description of the epic, reproduced in part above, characterizes the genre as a static object, susceptible to distillation down to a single idea, a single, fixed voice whose distance from the modern cannot be breached. As one reads Bakhtin’s essay, Beowulf, perhaps distressingly, seems to fit Bakhtin’s profile of the epic rather too well, with its valourization of the heroic past and its definitive sense of being an elegy for a lost world. However, is there a way that Beowulf can escape or elude such apparent fixedness? Indeed, can Beowulf, if it even is an epic, serve notice that reformulation of Bakhtin’s theory is needed? And if so, does Beowulf then project into the modern world, Bakhtin’s world of the novel, more decisively, and more unsettlingly, than we have realized?

For Anglo-Saxonists know that reading Beowulf—or any Old English literary text—is never a simple task. The historical and cultural setting of the text must be considered, and even those massive contexts cannot even be approached until the language itself has been mastered. The work of the Old English literary critic, then, can seem as laborious and ambitious as defeating a giant, or a dragon—all the moreso when the very texts can seem exercises in poststructural defeatism, in just making sense of them at a primary level.

For this session, we therefore propose papers on topics which embrace both Old English literature and modern literary theory. We seek both to build on the excellent collection The Postmodern Beowulf: A Critical Casebook and to extend these theoretical practices to Old English texts at large. So, by situating Old English texts in discourses such as those initiated by Bakhtin, Barthes, Jakobson, Iser, Jameson, Jauss and Scarry (among others), this panel will explore the way in which modern literary theory speaks to, if not always about, the Old English text, and what can be gained through the juxtaposition of the two.

Abstracts: 250 words, send to mk.hurley-at-gmail.com, with a participant information form attached (available on the congress website), by Sept 15.

II. Kalamazoo 2010 CFP: "Between Thinking and Feeling: Reading Devotionally in Medieval England"

Over the past two decades, medieval literary scholars have largely embraced the term 'vernacular theology' as an alternative to the previous term, 'devotional literature,' in order to describe the diverse array of English religious writings which sought to intellectually engage their readers in theological debates. This opposition between 'theology' and 'devotion,' however, creates a division between thought and affect that is not representative of the diversity of medieval religious writings. By questioning this division, this session will seek to contribute to the growing body of scholarship on medieval reading practices and to expand the ways in which we think about so-called 'devotional' reading. Papers could explore such topics as: the intellectual work of affective piety; the ways in which an Old English or Middle English text depicts and/ or invites a particular model of devotional reading; differences between orthodox and heterodox reading practices; gendered reading practices; religious allegory and affect.
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a Participant Information form (available at www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress) to Jennifer Garrison (jennifermgarrison-at-gmail.com) by Sept. 15, 2009.

III. Medieval Guild Conference: "Approaches to the Late Medieval City"

The Columbia University Medieval Guild with the support of Columbia Department of English and Comparative Literature is pleased to announce its 20th Annual Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference, "Approaches to the Late Medieval City," taking place on 30 October, 2009.

The aim of this conference is to explore the place of the city in late medieval life and thought. Medieval cities were spaces of exchange, conflict and creativity, drawing together multiple ways of acting in and thinking about the world. Medieval scholars have approached the city in a variety of ways ? through the interconnections of literatures, performances, political contexts, modes of defining identity, and forms of authority. We invite papers from a variety of critical perspectives, methodological approaches and disciplines in order to develop a multi-dimensional understanding of the late medieval city. How does the city shape late medieval social life and forms of creativity? How do cultural imaginings of self, community and nation, and the social organizations that are their practical counterparts, shape the city in turn? What continuities or fissures can we map in the spaces, times, ideas and practices of late medieval cities?

Topics of inquiry may include, but are not limited to:

-Institutions: religion; education and universities; kingship; the state and national identity

-Associational Polity: social contest and revolt; factions; guilds; religious
fraternities; emerging and obsolete identities or classes

-Intersections: mercantile, literary and global connections between cities;
cosmopolitanism; translation; conversion; trilingual England

-Performances in the City and of the City: court ceremonies; ritual; city genres and narratives of the city; Corpus Christi and other city entertainments

-Documents and Manuscript Culture: uses of the archive; reading practices; textual production; textual communities; patronage

-Spatial Configurations: city geography and the city in geography; city versus country;architecture and space

-Temporality: relationships to a real or imagined past, present and future; clock time;chronicles


Please send your proposal (no longer than 300 words) for a 15 to 20-minute paper to the organizers at latemedievalcity-at-gmail.com by August 15th 2009. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter's name, institutional affiliation (including department), email address, mailing address, and telephone number. Please also indicate if you would be willing to moderate a panel.

CFP: Theorizing the Borders: Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain

by J J Cohen

I met Katherine Terrell a few years back when she invited me to give a paper at Hamilton College. She contributed a terrific essay to Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages, on "Subversive Histories: Strategies of Identity in Scottish Historiography." Now she and Mark Bruce are assembling their own collection, on Scotland and Britain. Interested? Email Katherine and let her know: kterrell@hamilton.edu The collection looks like it will be a very important one.
-----------------------
One of the most fascinating current conversations in medieval studies concerns the application of post-colonial theory and border studies to the literature and culture of medieval Britain. Since the 2000 publication of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s The Postcolonial Middle Ages, several studies have addressed the creation and manifestation of bordered identities in medieval texts. However, while these studies have tended to couch the question of liminal identities in terms of England’s relationship with neighboring others such as the Irish and Welsh, internal others such as England’s (present or past) Jewish population, and more distant others like Muslims of the Middle East, there have been few studies of England’s nearest and arguably most contentious other: Scotland. Texts that originate in the Anglo-Scottish marches, as well as texts that actively seek to negotiate Anglo-Scottish cultural and political relations, offer some of the most fruitful occasions for the exploration of medieval borders, nationalism, and identity formation.

However, despite the recent growth in medieval Scottish studies, the last book devoted to a general exploration of cross-border literary influences was Gregory Kratzman’s Anglo-Scottish Literary Relations 1430-1550 (Cambridge University Press, 1980); Rhiannon Purdie and Nicloa Royan’s collection on The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (Boydell Press, 2005) only begins to fill the gap. Anglo-Scottish relations have received more comprehensive attention from historians: for example in the work of Robin Frame and of Rees Davies, and in Andy King and Michael Penman’s recent collection, England and Scotland in the Fourteenth Century: New Perspectives (Boydell Press, 2007). Yet scholarship on cross-border literary relations, as well as work that addresses the interrelations between the literature and history of the two nations, remains scattered and underrepresented.

The proposed anthology, Theorizing the Borders: Scotland and the Shaping of Identity in Medieval Britain, will explore the roles that Scotland and England play in one another’s imaginations, addressing such questions as: How do subjects on both sides of the border define themselves in relation to one another? In what ways do they influence each other’s sense of historical, cultural, and national identity? What stories do they tell about one another, and to what ends? When do texts produced on the Anglo-Scottish border reify or critique mainstream notions of Scottish and English identities? How does the shifting political balance—as well as the shifting border—between the two kingdoms complicate notions of Scottishness and Englishness? When do hybrid categories come into being? We envision this as an interdisciplinary collection, bringing together literary scholars and historians working on both Scotland and England, with the goal of advancing scholarship on medieval Anglo-Scottish relations and the formation of identity.

CFP: Sanctity

by J J Cohen

Posted on behalf of favorite ITM love object Cary Howie.

Call for Submissions
L'Esprit Créateur
Special Issue: Sanctity

From Eulalie to Derrida, sanctity performs a series of crucial and complicated functions for French literature and philosophy. This special issue will address the figure of the saint as it gets deployed in contexts sacred and profane, and as it embodies ongoing concerns with materiality and transcendence, exclusion and belonging. The "communion of saints" should be understood, in this way, as widely as possible: as a name for the kinds of sharing or belonging that sanctity at once names and enables; as the ensemble of gestures, liturgical and otherwise, through which these kinds of sharing take place; as the barest thinking of material togetherness. Radically heterogeneous and radically constitutive of communities, in this world and beyond this world, saints condense especially powerful wishes and anxieties about where we’re going—and who "we" are, in the first place and the last.

Deadline for submissions: 1 July 2009. Maximum length: 6000 words. Please address all inquiries to Cary Howie, csh34@cornell.edu.

CFP: Undergraduate Med/Ren Conference at Longwood

by J J Cohen

(from Kat Tracy, Longwood University)

Dear Colleagues,

Please find attached a Call for Papers for the Third Annual Meeting in the Middle Undergraduate Research Conference in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Longwood University. The conference is March 27 & 28, 2009, and abstracts are to due to either Steven Isaac or me by Feb. 2, 2009.

This year's conference explores the margins of the medieval world: monstrosity, minorities, languages, gender, marginalized communities, monstrous behavior (violence, torture, etc.), countries on the outer edge of the medieval maps (Ireland, North Africa, Spain), non-Christian traditions ... So please encourage your students to submit papers on any discipline of medieval or Renaissance studies. If you have theatre students interested in performing, please let us know.

This year's plenary speakers are Jeffrey Jerome Cohen from George Washington University and Theresa Vann, Joseph S. Micallef Curator of the Malta Study Center at Hill Monastic Manuscript Library.

Registration information will be available on our website: www.longwood.edu/medieval very soon.

WOOFING AND WEEPING: The State of Research, or No One Knows But God

by KARL STEEL

First, like Mary Kate, I want to call attention to a Kzoo 2009 session, sponsored by the Medieval Club of New York, and chaired by me:

ANIMALS AND ETHICS
In much of his late work, Jacques Derrida characterized the question of the animal as "not one question among others" but the question that "represents the limit upon which all the great question are formed and determined, as well as all the concepts that attempt to delimit what is ‘proper to man,’ the essence and future of humanity, ethics, politics, law, ‘human rights,’ ‘crimes against humanity. ‘genocide,’ etc." The humanism that utterly divides humans from animals is a legacy of the Christian Middle Ages; consequently, the Middle Ages is an ideal site for exploring the development of the modern concept of the human. It is also, however, a place in which other possibilities for human/animal relationship might be discovered. When and where is anthropocentrism suspended? Such moments might be discovered in hunting practices, chivalry, various literary texts--Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Chrétien de Troyes' Yvain, traditions of the "hairy saint"--and medieval theology and philosophy (from either Christian or non-Christian traditions), all of which might productively be used to think through, for example, the phenomenological ethics of Ralph Acampora, the assemblages of humans, animals, and objects in Deleuze and Guattari, and even perhaps the responsibility promoted by Levinas, despite his indifference to the question of animals.

On with the show! Several weeks ago, I discussed stumbling upon the weeping of animals in Ava's version of the 15 Signs of the Last Judgment. In response to Eileen's request that I clarify my interest in this scene, I wrote (slightly edited):

Given the profound anthropocentricism of sacred history--since however much God or Creation matters, God and Creation matter only insofar as they serve humankind--any acknowledgment of other lives is always in excess of what is required. Animal life should not rate; after all, they have no share in the afterlife, there's no friendship possible with them, they can be the recipient of only indirect duties, &c. I think here of Heidegger's conviction that animals, in their total captivation in their world and thus their total inability to relate to the future, can only "perish," that they cannot die [since writing this, I've discovered some roots of Heidegarrian animal thinking in Schopenhauer, who wrote "indeed the brutes do not properly speaking feel death" and "between the brute and the external world there is nothing, but between us and the external world there is always our thought about it"]

Yet in Ava we have several stanzas concerned solely with disruptions to animal life. We can conceive of these stages of the 15 signs as a systematic undoing of creation (hence the fish first, then fowl, then beasts of the field), and hence as moving in a trajectory towards the human. Nevertheless, Ava--and I hope not only Ava--marks the suffering of animals as a particular suffering in creation. It's not simply that the mountains are falling, the seas turning to blood, freshwater is turning bitter, and all the other business from John's Apocalypse.

Instead, in excess of what is strictly necessary for her project, which nowhere else pays much attention to animals, Ava acknowledges the lives and deaths and passions of animals. And she acknowledges the relations of animals with each other. Her acknowledgment does not redeem animals, but I'd say that the fact that animals cannot be redeemed increases the interest. We might say that we see zoē--mere life--and "animal sacer" given what they should lack: a voice, a sadness, rage, a death that matters, even at the very moment when their deaths, in a sense, matter least of all (since they're not being sacrificed anymore to human appetite or instrumentality). And we might say that this is not "given" but is rather revealed. At the very moment humans pass into redemption, at the very moment when their lives are marked for eternity as the only lives that 'really matter,' we see--maybe!--the catastrophe of human indifference to animal life. Sacrificed life, a life only as means, speaks and reveals itself as what it was all along, as life, as an end in itself, but only at the moment of its destruction. This is the one moment, the only moment, when animal life is for itself.

To this I'll add that we see a grief that cannot be sacrificed. Whatever the fear of humans during the last 15 days, their fear will be exchanged for something, whether heaven or hell; but whatever the fear--or love, in fact--of animals, they ultimately get nothing for it. Certainly the fear of animals has been put on display for humans, since, insofar as it astonishes humans, since insofar as it's being expressed in a particular genre with a particular purpose, it is being sacrificed to the generation of proper human piety; but this is not all there is. My argument--and this, I hope, begins to answer Nicola's complicated comment on the previous post--may include: a) that animals are shown to experience more fully than humans the injustice of the end of hope and dread; b) that animals do in fact get closer than humans to the Great Impossibility, namely, the experience of their own deaths, since, after all, humans, even in dying, leap over their own deaths into eternal life.

I knew that the fifteen signs were a medieval Christian commonplace, but I was also nervous that Ava's attention to animals would be the only place animals received any notice. Time spent with William W. Heist's The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (Michigan State College Press, 1952) and in the meagerness of Brooklyn College's library (would whoever moved The Prick of Conscience please put it back where it belongs?) dispersed all my worries. Here's some of what I discovered:

• Heist argues that the Irish Saltair na Rann is the most important source for the transmission of the 15 signs: there are a few references to animals in it, but as I can't even fake Old Irish, and since Heist offers his translation as provisional, I'm just marking this wellspring and moving on;
• the pseudo-Bede, from the PL (provided in Heist, with a translation): "Quarta die pisces et omnes belluae marinae, et congregabuntur super aquas, et dabunt voces et gemitus, quarum significationem nemo scit nisi Deus." "On the fourth day the fishes and all the sea monsters will both gather together upon the waters and give forth voices and groans, whose meaning no one knows but God." (25);
• Peter Damian's De novissimis et Antichristo (warning: PDF): "The sign of the fourth day: all the monsters and all things that live in the water of the sea will be gathered together upon the sea, roaring and bellowing back and forth as though in contest; and men will not know what they are singing or what they are thinking, but only God will know, by whom all live that His purpose may be fulfilled. These four signs are of the sea, and the next three signs are of the air and ether. The sign of the fifth day: flying creatures of all heaven will assemble in the fields, every kind in its order; these birds will be speaking and weeping together, fearing the coming of the Judge...The sign of the ninth day: all the stones, both small and great, will be split into four parts, and each part will strike the other part, and no man will understand that sound, but only God [this included in the quotation because I thought it might interest Jeffrey]....The sign of the twelfth day: all the beasts of the earth will come from the woods and mountains to the fields roaring and bellowing, not eating and not drinking" (Heist trans, 28).

As I expected, the 15 signs appear frequently in Middle English, and the four or five references that I've examined so far tend to include references to animals. Two examples. In the "Quindecim Signa ante diem Judicii" (ed. in Furnivall, Hymns to the Virgin and Christ EETS OS 23, 118-25) all creation cries out:

"The ix day, wondyr hytt ys,
As the prophecy tellyth hytt I wys:
Thatt all þynge schall speke þan,
And cry in erthe aftyr þe steuyn off man,
And be-mone hem self in owr sy3th
Ryth as þey speke myth" (ll. 100-105)

To forestall any memory work by medieval drama specialists: I did find the reference in the Chester "Antichrist's Prophets," where one of the Expositor's several references to animals runs "All manner of beastes shall rore and crye / and neyther eate nor drynke" (ll. 321-4)

Now, if you're still with me, I want to point out that animals are not the only grieving elements of creation. In an Anglo-Norman version, "the stars fall from heaven and run about the earth like lightning; they shed tears and run under the mountain; they turn black and plunge into the abyss....the moon turns to blood, descends, and tries to run into the sea....all the rivers speak and cry to God for mercy" (28-29, Heist's summary: I haven't examined the original yet). However, my research so far suggests that crying stars and pleading rivers are less common compared to crying and pleading animals. Surely it's easier to imagine an animal crying than a star; and most traditions of the 15 Signs do not include weeping stars, which surely matters in an eschatological tradition whose content remained--remarkably?--stable throughout its life. I'm justified, then, in concentrating on animals, but, at the same time, I thought some of our posthuman ITMers might want to know about the stars, just as they might want to know about the "battling rocks" (debellabunt petrae adinvicem) of pseudo-Bede.

We'll see where this takes me! Hopefully to Kzoo 2009. Suggestions and comments are, of course, encouraged.

(creative common image from here, from flickr user ChinchillaVilla)

Introducing Glossator

So long as we're in a CFPing spirit, may I announce GLOSSATOR, another child of Nicola's genius? Please read on, my fecund friends, as what you're about to encounter is very much at home in the world we all inhabit here at ITM.


Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary
Glossator publishes original commentaries, editions and translations of commentaries, and essays and articles relating to the theory and history of commentary, glossing, and marginalia. The journal aims to encourage the practice of commentary as a creative form of intellectual work and to provide a forum for dialogue and reflection on the past, present, and future of this ancient genre of writing. By aligning itself, not with any particular discipline, but with a particular mode of production, Glossator gives expression to the fact that praxis founds theory.

Glossator is an peer-reviewed open-access journal, sponsored by The Graduate Center, CUNY. It is available online at http://glossator.org.

Editors: Nicola Masciandaro (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Karl Steel (Brooklyn College, CUNY), Ryan Dobran (Brooklyn College, CUNY).

Section Editors: Erik Butler (Emory University), Mary Ann Caws (Graduate Center, CUNY), Alan Clinton (Georgia Institute of Technology), David Greetham (Graduate Center, CUNY), Bruno Gullí (Long Island University), Daniel Heller-Roazen (Princeton University), Jason Houston (University of Oklahoma), Eileen A. Joy (Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville), Sean McCarthy (Lehman College, CUNY), Sherry Roush (Penn State University), Michael Sargent (Graduate Center, CUNY), Michael Stone-Richards (College for Creative Studies), Frans van Liere (Calvin College), Jesús R. Velasco (UC Berkeley), Yoshihisa Yamamoto (Chiba University).

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

The Editors invite submissions for the first volume of Glossator, to be published in 2009.

Glossator welcomes work from all disciplines, but especially from fields with strong affiliations with the commentary genre: philosophy, literary theory and criticism, textual and manuscript studies, hermeneutics, exegesis, et al.

What is commentary? While the distinction between commentary and other forms of writing is not an absolute one, the following may serve as guidelines for distinguishing between what is and is not a commentary:

1. A commentary focuses on a single object (text, image, event, etc.) or portion thereof.
2. A commentary does not displace but rather shapes itself to and preserves the integrity, structure, and presence of its object.
3. The relationship of a commentary to its object may be described as both parallel and perpendicular. Commentary is parallel to its object in that it moves with or runs alongside it, following the flow of reading it. Commentary is perpendicular to its object in that it pauses or breaks from reading it in order to comment on it. The combination of these dimensions gives commentary a structure of continuing discontinuity, which allows it to be consulted or read intermittently rather than start to finish.
4. Commentary tends to maintain a certain quantitative proportion of itself vis-à-vis its object. This tendency corresponds to the practice of "filling up the margins" of a text.
5. Commentary, as a form of discourse, tends to favor and allow for the multiplication of meanings, ideas, and references. Commentary need not, and generally does not, have an explicit thesis or argument. This tendency gives commentary a ludic or auto-teleological potential.

Possible submissions include: critical, philological, and/or bibliographic commentaries on texts, art, music, events, and other kinds of objects. Editions and translations of commentaries, glosses, annotation, and marginalia. Historical, theoretical, and/or critical articles and essays on commentary and commentary traditions. Experimental and/or fictional commentaries.

Submission Deadline: October 31, 2008

Questions, queries may be directed to Nicola Masciandaro: nicolam@brooklyn.cuny.edu

Nous ne faisons que nous entregloser—Montaigne