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!

SNEAK PEEK: Preview of Materiality Sessions at #Kzoo2015

by JONATHAN HSY

Hey medievalists! You can now take a sneak peek of approved sessions for #Kzoo2015 (i.e., the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI, May 14-17, 2015). The sneak preview information is on this page; you can also directly view the sneak preview of sessions as a PDF.

One idea that emerged through some private discussions on Facebook was to think creatively about more dynamic and deliberate "cross-fertilization" across disciplines and subfields. Some of my Facebook friends picked up on a real interest in materiality at the 2014 conference. Through such virtual correspondence it has been noticed (for instance) that musicologists and literary scholars don't actually interact with each other as much as they could (should!) about the intertwined materiality of sound, text, and notation -- so it would be great to put our heads together to think about things like aurality, language, embodied performance, etc. In what other ways can we all move out of our various bailiwicks and "mix things up" in our sessions?

Here's a list of materiality-related sessions for #Kzoo2015. Full contact info is on this PDF.

It's a great slate of sessions. Think creatively! Consider sending in a proposal to a session that is outside your (sub)field or discipline or otherwise allows you to interact with new people! Perhaps a compelling (unofficial) "Materiality" thread can emerge from the conversations that transpire.

Sessions with materiality in title:

Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies (2): Material Iberia I: Devotional Objects, Devoted Bodies; Material Iberia II: Shaping Bodies in Literature and Art

Friends of the Saints (1): Material Engagements with the Friends of God in Post-Roman Europe (panel discussion)

Magistra (1): Mysticism and Materiality (panel)

Material Collective (1): Transgressive Materialities

Medieval Romance Society (3): Romance Materiality I–III: The (Im)materiality of the Book; Romancing the Material; The Material Afterlife

Mid-America Medieval Association [MAMA] (1): Economic and Material Collectivity and Exchange

Musicology at Kalamazoo (1): The Materiality of Music (panel)

postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (1): Quantum Medievalisms (roundtable)

Societas Magica (1): Magic and Materiality

Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship [SMFS] (1): Gender and Materiality in the Middle Ages

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages [SSDMA] (1): Disability and Material Cultures (roundtable)

Special Session: (Im)Materiality in English and Welsh Medieval Culture (1)

Special Session: When Objects Object: Misbehaving Materiality (1)

Sessions otherwise interested in materiality:

George Washington University Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute [GW MEMSI] (1): "Lost" (panel)

Grammar Rabble (1): Unsettled Marks: To #;()@?”:-*! . . . and Beyond! (roundtable)

Academic Disciplines are Zombies

by JONATHAN HSY

Some time ago, I came across a compelling blog posting entitled "Failure and the Future of Queer Studies" -- this is drawn from a panel at NYU that featured many of the big names in queer theory today (in the order that their profiles appear on the blog entry: Halberstam, Gopinath, Duggan, Nyong'o, Pellegrini, Muñoz). This entire posting is worth a read for many reasons (see HERE), but what caught my eye this morning was this statement by Lisa Duggan:

"The disciplines are the zombies of intellectual life right now—like capitalism, they keep coming back from devastating crisis and critique. We are encouraged to describe our work as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary, so that the disciplines may survive alongside our critical practices, fundamentally informing them." 

I find this observation both astute and provocative. In particular, I'm intrigued by the metaphorical description of academic disciplines as zombies, and although Duggan goes on to discuss other things I would like to dwell for a bit on this metaphor's rich implications for how we (academics) speak about our own work. Up to this point, I've been inclined to think of academic disciplines not so much as zombies but as non-corporeal entities, or "ghosts" without bodies. We could say that those of us with interests in multilingual and comparative literary contexts (for instance) are very much "haunted" by implicit notions of nation- and language-based literary histories and related disciplinary distinctions -- even as we aim to do work that crosses those types of boundaries. [*] The forthcoming 2012 Meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Boston (remember to REGISTER, folks!) is sure to provoke creative thinking beyond the disciplines. For instance, one session (org. Laurie Finke and Marty Shichtman) explores the "Uncanny that haunts the site of the university" (see entire list of sessions HERE) -- and I imagine there will be much more about the BABEL Meeting here on ITM as the event nears.

BABEL Meeting aside, it is the impending release of the annual MLA Job Information List (new listings for the 2012-13 subscription year will be searchable HERE on September 14) that really gives new resonance and urgency to Duggan's statement. Later today I'm heading to an annual meeting that the GW English department holds for PhD students who intend to go on the academic job market, and in the lead up to this year's meeting I've been thinking quite a bit about the disjunction between the "trans-" or "inter-" or "cross-" scholarship that many of us would like to see (and encourage graduate students to pursue) and the professional categories that we are obliged to articulate when publicizing academic positions. If I can just speak from a literary standpoint here, I see that (sub)fields with implicit "trans-" elements do appear on the JIL each year - e.g. World Literature, Transatlantic Literature, etc. -- but for the most part literary job ads are more likely to begin with a Very Stodgy Description (e.g. "Early Modern English Literature") with the option of some sort of interesting "trans-" qualification, clarification, or elaboration in the ensuing blurb ("with interests in interdisciplinary approaches..." [or fill in the trans-whatever blanks here]). The quirky academic jobseeker who is earnestly "trans-" oriented -- e.g. someone in any department or program who works across languages or nations or historical periods or whose scholarship incorporates literary analysis and (say) cultural studies, theory, different types of media, music, anthropology, natural sciences, etc. -- faces the question of how to frame her or his work in such way that it conforms to (or convincingly seems to inhabit) a "proper" disciplinary body.

This brings me back to Duggan's notion of academic disciplines as zombies. What I find so powerful about this metaphor is the (threatening, uneasy) corporeality it grants to academic disciplines. As much as we claim to be "post-" disciplinary, certain distinctions simply refuse to die, and indeed they "feed off" the living for their own survival. Their undead agency has material consequences not only for how we think about and conduct research but also the more practical choices that students face (in any stage, as they consider possible life-paths); and the livelihoods of people in academic and academic-adjacent professions can hinge upon whether "the disciplines" (as we know them) endure as disciplines.

So as much as we think about the disciplines as "the zombies of intellectual life right now," are there ways we can address the more pragmatic or systemic ways the zombie-disciplines shape our pedagogy, mentorship, and the risks we take in our own work (individually or in collaboration)? Toying with new language that gets us beyond "trans-" and "inter-" disciplinary mindsets is a start [e.g., the BABEL Meeting description that playfully invokes cruising among disciplines (adapting Muñoz) opens up many great possibilities here]. Will there ever be a day when the professional discourses we employ -- in job descriptions, cover letters, and the like -- actively reflect the most current ways we are conceiving knowledge? How might our own professional discourses actually change the role that the zombie-disciplines play in our professional, personal, and collective lives?

[*] Robert M. Stein notes (in reference to medieval literary studies and comparative literature) that both fields “[bear] the burden of … nationalist ghost[s]” and “[preserve] national boundaries in the act of comparison even as [they] would transgress them in theory.” “Multilingualism,” in Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), at 35.

SNEAK PREVIEW: The 2009 Compass Interdisciplinary Virtual Conference--Breaking Down Barriers

by EILEEN JOY

I very much want to jump into all of the conversations regarding the recent discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard, but I also wanted to offer a sneak preview of Wiley-Blackwell Publishers' upcoming virtual [and entirely free of charge] interdisciplinary conference, "Breaking Down Barriers," which promises to comprise the largest meeting ever of scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and which will run online from October 19th through 30th. The conference aims to cut across academic boundaries – within and between disciplines, between theory and practice, approaches and methodologies by providing a space for multi- and cross-disciplinary review. Papers will tackle one or more of the following sub-themes:

• Paradigms
• Borders
• The Environment/Energy
• Communication
• Justice/Human Rights

I myself will be presenting a keynote address relative to the thread of Justice and Human Rights: "Reading Beowulf in the Rubble of Grozny: Pre/modern, Post/human, and the Question of Being-Together," and other keynote speakers include scholars from social psychology, history, philosophy, linguistics, and physical geography. In addition, there are quite a few papers by medievalists in areas such as disability and waste studies.

Registration for the conference is entirely free at this website and registered delegates will be able to access all papers, keynote addresses and publishing workshops for free. Delegates will also be able to discuss all content and participate in the debates. Currently there are over 700 registered delegates from the U.S., U.K., South America, Canada, Australia, China, Egypt, Germany, Bosnia, India, Iran, Israel, Africa, Spain, Thailand, Turkey, Pakistan, the Netherlands, and many other countries. I see this as a timely opportunity for medievalists to enter into an invigorating global dialogue and debate with scholars in multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences who are concerned with pressing contemporary issues to which premodern studies offer critical resources for reflection.

The conference organizers are already offering sneak peeks at a wide variety of papers to be presented, and if you follow this link to the conference's website, you can see there some of those, such as the medievalist Wendy Turner's paper, "Human Rights, Royal Rights, and the Mentally Disabled in Late Medieval England," and other papers that promise fascinating discussions that touch upon subjects that have vexed and concerned us here at In The Middle, such as Adam Brown's [Deakin University] paper, "Beyond 'Good' and 'Evil': Breaking Down Binary Oppositions in Holocaust Representations of 'Privileged' Jews," as well as Daniel Wasserman Soler's [University of Virginia] "Language and Communication in the Spanish Conquest of America."

There will also be an ongoing set of informal conversations between keynote speakers and conference delegates at a cocktail bar in Second Life, which you can see more about here. So, perhaps I will "see" you there. Cheers.