Call for Papers

Call for Journal Submissions:

The open access online journal entitled Literature is calling for papers for a special issue on Realpolitik in Renaissance and Early Modern British Literature.

The collection of essays will offer innovative readings of British literature of the Renaissance and early modern period that reflect the influence of realpolitik, especially as embodied in Machiavelli’s writings, and The Prince in particular. Topics of interest for this volume may include (but are not limited to) the following: the depiction of major Machiavellian tenets; the contrasting of the traditional concept of the divine right of kings with the secular view of power; the portrayal of women as astute Machiavels; the concealment of secret plotting through literal and figurative disguises, with the characters who are most adept at dissembling being the most challenging to detect as political strategists; the appearance of Machiavellian strategies in literary works that are not overtly political in nature; the subversiveness of literary texts that explore early modern politics; and the literary depiction of conspiracies and planned invasions, like those occurring in early modern England. The deadline for the submission of essays is April 30, 2024, and the recommended minimum word count is 4,000 words, with no maximum word count limitation. Send a 400 to 600 words abstract to Dr. Carolyn Brown, guest editor, at brownc@usfca.edu.

Submission Deadline: April 30, 2024

For more information, consult this link: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/literature/special_issues/313AC1CI2D

Reproductive Justice after Roe: Lessons from the Premodern Classroom

As reproductive justice and academic freedom come under attack, the Medieval Institute Publications’ book series “Premodern Transgressive Literatures” facilitates student engagement with these endangered and empowering premodern histories. Reproductive Justice after Roe: Lessons from the Premodern Classroom, a new volume in this series edited by Maeve Callan, Emma Maggie Solberg, and Valerie Traub, invites proposals for essays of 5,000-7,000 words exploring pedagogy relating to topics including abortion, infanticide, miscarriage, contraception, parental and infant mortality, quickening or ensoulment, bodily sovereignty, the regulation and/or management of fertility, and reproductive justice in the premodern period, making connections to the contemporary challenges of a post-Roe world.

Submission Deadlines: Please send abstracts of 500 words to Emma Maggie Solberg by 1 December 2023 at esolberg@bowdoin.edu. Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be notified by January, with a full draft due by September 2024.

See the CFP info sheet for more information.

Dies Legibiles (Smith College undergraduate journal of Medieval Studies)

Dies Legibiles, Smith College’s undergraduate journal of Medieval Studies, is currently soliciting submissions for our fourth edition! This is a great opportunity for undergraduates from your institution to publish their work. The deadline to submit is March 15th 2024. Please forward this information to your colleagues and students.

Submission Deadline: March 15th, 2024

Submission Requirements:

Papers must be relevant to the period 400 - 1600 CE.
Papers must be between 1,500 - 8,000 words in length.
Author must be a current undergraduate student.

Submissions in languages other than English are accepted. We also accept submissions in creative mediums (artwork, translations, etc.). Submissions should be sent as a Google Doc via our website. More information about the journal can be found online and any further questions may be directed to dieslegibiles@smith.edu.

Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies

Comitatus, published annually under the auspices of UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, invites the submission of articles by graduate students and recent PhDs in any field of late antique, medieval, Renaissance, or early modern studies. We particularly welcome articles that integrate or synthesize disciplines.

Deadline for Volume 55 (2024) submissions: March 4, 2024

The editorial board will make its final selections by May 2024

Please send submissions as email attachments to Allison McCann, Managing Editor, Comitatus (allisonmccann@humnet.ucla.edu). Submissions guidelines can be found here.

http://cmrs.ucla.edu/publications/journals/comitatus/

Call for Conference Talks:

Slavery and Technology in Greco-Roman Worlds

This conference explores the relationships between slave systems and technology in antiquity. Participants will examine how we should understand the complex dynamics—not only in Greco-Roman antiquity but also in other cultures and time periods—between enslaver, enslaved, and technological development. Questions include how ontological categories like "technology" or "instrument" interact with categories like "free," "slave," "property," "ownership." "work," how people can use technologies to help establish, enforce, resist, or even dismantle systems of power and oppression, and how enslaved peoples could leverage their technical knowledge to gain social standing or preserve and express their ethnic identities through culturally marked tools. This conference will help us to reevaluate modern assumptions about forced labor and technological development, and whether compulsive, exploitative systems prevent technological development or result from it.

January 26-27, 2024

In-person at UC Davis

The conference schedule can accommodate one or two more speakers. If any UCD graduate students or faculty are interested in sharing relevant research, please contact Colin Webster (cwebster@ucdavis.edu) by Nov. 3 for details . For a full conference description, please see the conference website: https://sites.google.com/view/slaveryandtechnology/home?authuser=

Body Matters!: Disability in English Literature to 1800

CFP (Deadline: November 17th, 2023)

The Early Modern Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, invites paper proposals for its 2024 conference, “Body Matters!: Disability in English Literature to 1800,” to be held at UCSB on March 1 and 2, 2024. Attending to the presence of disability in the premodern world, this interdisciplinary conference invites proposals that address medieval, early modern, and eighteenth-century literary and cultural texts. We are thrilled to announce our keynote speakers, Dr. Rachael King (UCSB), Dr. Bradley Irish (Arizona State University), and poet Jos Charles.

We invite papers that explore a variety of “body matters,” including representations of disability or ability in premodern literature, the continuum of embodiment explored by premodern authors, and the relation of literary bodies to the political and social realm. Questions under consideration may include how a body comes to matter from the medieval period to the eighteenth century, how the boundaries of disability change in different periods, and how forms of literature construct normative and divergent embodiments. Topics may include (but are not limited to):

disability vs. (dis)ability
forms: literary and disability
historical and contemporary performances of disability
prosthesis and technologies of embodiment
the materiality of disability
disability in the archive
disability across media
medical and humoral theory
disability, natural philosophy, and ecocriticism
ethics of care and caring for premodern bodies
disability historiography and disability policy
neurodiversity, neurodivergence, and neurotypicality
intersections of race, critical race theory, and disability
intersections of coloniality, postcolonial theory, and disability
intersections of gender, feminist theory, and disability
intersections of sexuality, queer theory, and disability

Proposals for 15 to 20-minute papers should be 300 words or less. Please submit the proposal along with a one page CV by November 17th, 2023 using our online submission form: https://tinyurl.com/EMCBodyMatters. Please direct questions and concerns to emcfellow@gmail.com.

Eleventh Annual Symposium on Medieval and Renaissance Studies

We invite proposals for papers, complete sessions, and roundtables. Any topics regarding the scholarly investigation of the medieval and early modern world are welcome. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes. Scholarly organizations are especially encouraged to sponsor proposals for complete sessions, and organizing at least two sessions in coordination with each other is highly recommended. All sessions are in-person.

Mini-conferences hosted by societies or organized around a theme occur in the context of the SMRS. Paper submitters are welcome to submit their paper for general consideration at the Symposium or for one of the mini-conferences. This year’s mini-conferences are:

49th Annual St. Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies
- All areas of manuscript studies, including but not limited to paleography, textual criticism, codicology, preservation and curation, and art history, are welcome
- Lowry Daly, SJ Plenary Speaker: Daniel Hobbins (University of Notre Dame)
Boethius 2024: The 1500-Year Memorial Conference (see details)
The 2024 Conference on John Milton (see details)

June 10-12, 2024

Saint Louis University | St. Louis, Missouri

The submission portal will open on November 1. The portal has buttons for submission to the main SMRS and for each of the mini-conferences. The deadline for all submissions is December 31, 2023. Decisions will be made by the end of January and the final program will be published in March. For more information or to submit your proposal online go to: https://www.smrs-slu.org/.

MARGIN Annual Symposium

We are pleased to publish a call for papers for our annual Symposium scheduled for April 2024. The conference will take place in a hybrid fashion, both in-person on the NYU campus and via Zoom for those unable to attend physically. The theme of this year’s symposium is Kinesis and Stasis.

We seek submissions that engage with notions of mobility and immobility in the medieval and early modern periods. From crusaders and pilgrims to conversions and contagions, the movement of mind, body, and spirit underlies many of the characteristic forms of premodern culture and history. Inspired by a growing body of scholarship addressing issues of mobility, we welcome papers that grapple with different forms of movement, as well as stability, confinement, or restricted mobility. The conference this year aims to explore how movement and stasis were perceived, as well as their practical or effective role in premodern social life and material culture.

Please visit the Google Form linked below to learn more and to submit a paper proposal.

MARGIN 2024 Symposium Kinesis and Stasis - Google Forms

The deadline for submission is December 31st, 2023.

MARGIN remains committed to creating broader forums for collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange. We also accept proposals for workshops and presentations beyond our annual conference. Please feel free to contact us for more information (nyumargin@gmail.com).

The Fifth Quadrennial Symposium on Crusade Studies

Madrid, Spain | Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus | October 3-5, 2024

Plenary Speakers: Thomas Asbridge, Queen Mary University of London | Helen Nicholson, Cardiff University

The Symposium on Crusade Studies is a quadrennial conference sponsored by the Crusades Studies Forum of Saint Louis University. The Symposium invites proposals for scholarly papers, complete sessions, and roundtables on all topics related to the crusading movement. Papers are normally twenty minutes each and sessions are scheduled for ninety minutes.

Abstracts of 250 words and session proposals should be submitted online at http://www.crusadestudies.org/symposium-on-crusade-studies.html.

The deadline for all submissions is March 31, 2024.

Late submissions will be considered it space is available. Decisions will be made by the end of April and the program will be published in June.

For more information, or to submit your proposal, go to:

http://crusadestudies.org/symposium-on-crusade-studies.html

Courtly Literature: The Next Generation

Mentorship Opportunity & Conference

March 1-3, 2024

Medieval Studies has been undergoing major recalibrations in recent years, both in its (geographical, chronological, methodological) range and in the definition of the authors, audiences, topics, and contexts of medievalist work. How does the traditional field of “Courtly Literature” fit into these shifts? Does its corpus have to be redefined, purged, expanded to reflect a Global Middle Ages? And how does the concept of courtliness help us think through new questions, such as those about diversity, dis/ability, or social justice?

The 2024 conference invites nine junior scholars to contribute to this moment of reassessment. It will provide “the next generation” with an opportunity to present their research in dialogue with their peers and three invited senior mentors. The event will be in two parts:

Junior scholars will receive one-on-one feedback on a pre-circulated work in progress with one of the three mentors.
All participants will present 20-minute papers at a public conference hosted at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus in New York City

As inclusivity is a major goal for this workshop, the definitions of “junior scholar” and “courtly literature” will be very flexible.

Each participant will receive two nights of free accommodation in Manhattan and a stipend of $400 toward transportation costs.

Applicants are invited to submit:

A CV and cover letter outlining their topic and goals.
A draft of a work-in-progress (seminar paper, conference paper, article, dissertation/book chapter) of no more than 20 pages.
A 200-word abstract for a 20 minute conference paper which can, but does not have to, relate to the work in progress.

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2024

Email to: medievals@fordham.edu

Questions may be directed to hafner@fordham.edu