Showing posts with label GMS. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMS. Show all posts

Monday 17 August 2015

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

The University of Hull
6th – 8th January 2016

Call for Papers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further details will soon be available on the conference website.

Wednesday 9 July 2014

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2015

Gender, Dirt and Taboo

7-9 January 2015
Bangor University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thursday 18 July 2013

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2014

9‐11 January
The University of Winchester

Gender and Status

Keynote speaker: Barbara Yorke, Professor Emerita of Early Medieval History, University of Winchester

In a social hierarchy, gender and status are closely interrelated. These beliefs create constraining bonds, which can limit but also encourage attempts to circumvent them. We can discern different methods of both manoeuvring within social status and also breaking free of it.

The extent to which gender determines and informs status has led to different medieval explanations of this system. The 2014 Gender and Medieval Studies Conference welcomes a range of multifaceted or interdisciplinary approaches to the topic of Gender and Status in the Middle Ages. The examination of both femininities and masculinities, individually or in conjunction to each other, with theoretical or interpretive approaches from literature, history, art history, archaeology, music history, philosophy, theology or any related discipline are especially desired. We would also like to offer early‐stage postgraduate students the opportunity to share their research in progress through poster presentations.

Areas that could be explored (but are not limited to) include:

- Economics
- Social status
- Mobility
- Employment
- Corpus Christi
- Spheres of influence
- Life cycles
- Access to power
- Authority
- The concept of ‘status’
- Servitude and slavery
- Marital status
- Sexuality
- Poverty

The GMS 2014 will include a round table on gender and pedagogy, and we are seeking academics with teaching experience from a wide range of disciplines to participate.

We invite proposals for 20‐minute papers or posters on any aspect of this topic. Please e‐mail proposals of approximately 250 words, including your contact details and affiliation (if applicable), to the conference convenors by 2 September 2013. For session proposals, please include all participants’ names, affiliations, paper titles and abstracts. If you would like to participate in the pedagogy round table, please express your interest to the committee at the same email address.

Sunday 17 June 2012

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2013

Gender in Material Culture

Corsham Court, Bath Spa University
4th-6th January 2013


Keynote Speakers
Prof. Catherine Karkov, University of Leeds
Dr Simon Yarrow, University of Birmingham

From saintly relics to grave goods, and from domestic furnishings to the built environment, medieval people inhabited a material world saturated with symbolism. Gender had a profound influence on production and consumption in this material culture. Birth charms and objects of Marian devotion were crafted most often with women in mind, whilst gender shaped the internal spaces of male and female religious houses. The material environment could evoke intense emotions from onlookers, whether fostering reverence in religious rituals, or inspiring awe during royal processions. How did gender influence encounters with these objects and the built environment? Seldom purely functional, these items could incorporate complex meanings, enabling acts of display at every level of society, in fashionable circles at European courts or amongst civic guilds sponsoring lavish pageants. Did gender influence aesthetic choices, and how did status shape the way that people engaged with their physical surroundings? In literary texts and in art, the depiction of clothing and objects can be used to negotiate symbolic space as well as class, gender, sexuality and ethnicity. Texts and images also circulated as material objects themselves, with patterns of transmission across the British Isles, the Anglo-Norman world, and between East and West. The exchange of such objects both accompanied and enacted cross-fertilisation in linguistic, political and cultural spheres.

The Conference will consider the gendered nature of social, religious and economic uses of ‘things’, exploring the way that objects and material culture were produced, consumed and displayed. Papers will address questions of gender from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, embracing literature, history, art history, and archaeology.

Themes will include:
• adornment, clothing and self-fashioning
• the material culture of devotion
• objects and materialism
• the material culture of children and adolescents
• the material culture of life cycle
• emotion, intimacy and love-gifts
• entertainment and games
• memory and commemoration
• pleasure, pain, and bodily discipline
• production and consumption
• monastic material culture
• material culture in literary texts

Please e-mail proposals of approximately 300 words for 20 minute papers to the GMS committee by 14 September 2012. Please also include your name, research area, institution and level of study in your abstract.

Tuesday 15 November 2011

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2012: Gender and Punishment

Martin Harris Centre, University of Manchester
11-13 January 2012

Registration is now open for GMS 2012: Gender and Punishment. Click here to register or here to visit the conference website.

Programme

Wednesday 11 January

12:45-1:45pm: Registration (Foyer)

1:45pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks by Dr. Anke Bernau (University of Manchester) (John Thaw Studio Theatre)

2-3:30pm: Keynote Lecture (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: Professor Gale Owen-Crocker (University of Manchester)
Professor Dawn Hadley (University of Sheffield): Masculinity and Mass Graves in Anglo-Saxon England

3:30-4pm: Coffee (Foyer)

4-5:30pm: Parallel Sessions

Panel 1a: Torture and Spectacle (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) David Matthews (University of Manchester): “Take example, and thereof beware”: The Medieval Execution Ritual
(ii) Megan Welton (University of Notre Dame): Diversis angustiata cruciatibus: Adelheid of Italy and Tenth-Century Capture, Torture, and Gender
(iii) Iain MacInnes (UHI Centre for History): “A somewhat too cruel vengeance was taken for the blood of the slain”: punishment of rebels and traitors in medieval Scotland, c.1100-c.1400

Panel 1b: Holy Women and Punishment (G16)
Chair: TBC
(i) Jessica Cheetham (University of Bristol): Mechthild of Magdeburg and Vicarious Punishment
(ii) Clare Monagle (Monash University): Authority and Punishment in the Letters of Hildegard of Bingen and Catherine of Siena
(iii) Kate E. Bush (The Catholic University of America): Cani Giudei: Anti-Semitism in the Sermons of Saint Catherine of Bologna

5:30pm: Close

6pm: Wine reception at International Anthony Burgess Foundation (Engine House, Cambridge Street)

*****

Thursday 12 January

9:30-11am: Parallel Sessions

Panel 2a: Space and Punishment (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Sergi Sancho Fibla (Universitat Pompeu Fabra): Marguerite d’Oingt’s Pagina Meditationum. The female hell for the “brothers of flies”
(ii) Polly Stevens Fields (University of Nevada, Reno): Reconsideration of Hrothwissa’s Convent Dramas: Source and Site of Female Punishment in Paphnutius
(iii) Kristin Distel (Ashland University): Holy Fear as Incentive for Enclosure

Panel 2b: Presence and Absence in Punishment (G16)
Chair: TBC
(i) Drew Maxwell (University of Edinburgh): “Traytur untrew and trowthles”: Women's roles as punishers and teachers in the concept of trowth within Ywain and Gawain and Sir Launfal
(ii) Hannah Priest (University of Manchester): “De l’altre part la dame a prise”: Hiding Punitive Violence Against Women in Insular Romance
(iii) Carl G. Martin (Norwich University): “Par destresce e par poür”: Bisclavret’s Constrained Bodies

11-11:30am: Coffee (Foyer)

11:30-1pm: Parallel Sessions

Panel 3a: Law and Punishment (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Daniela Fruscione (University of Frankfurt): Adultery, gender and punishment in the 7th century: Legal and social frames
(ii) Charlene M. Eska (Virginia Tech): Castration in Early Irish Law
(iii) Gillian R. Overing (Wake Forest University): Within Striking Distance: Gender, Insult and Injury in Some Anglo-Saxon Laws

Panel 3b: Virgins and Punishment (G16)
Chair: TBC
(i) Christine Williamson (University of York): The Moment of Death in the Passiones of the Virgin Martyrs: Exploring Gendered Forms of Execution in Medieval Hagiography
(ii) Sarah Schäfer (University of Paderborn): “Letting Satan in…” On teeth, tongues, throats and symbolic defloration in Female Saints’ Legends
(iii) Stavroula Constantinou (University of Cyprus): Holy Violence: Crime and Punishment in the Miracles of Saint Thecla

1-2pm: Lunch (Foyer)

2-3:30pm: Parallel Sessions

Panel 4a: Punitive Scripts of Selfhood (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Emily Rhodes (University of Bristol): Punishment & Imitatio Christi: Medieval Holy Women Creating Purgatory
(ii) Sarah Macmillan (University of Birmingham): Punishment, Pain and the Invisible Injuries of Christina Mirabilis
(iii) Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota): Devotional Violence and Sacred Sacrifice: Asceticism, Flagellation, and Penetration in A Talkyng of the Loue of Gode

Panel 4b: Gendered Punishment (G16)
Chair: TBC
(i) Rachel Jones (Cardiff University): Punishing the Unruly Female Saint: The Anomalous Case of Mary Magdalene
(ii) Inna Matyushina (University of Exeter): Punishments in Chastity Tests
(iii) Anastasija Ropa and Edgar Rops (University of Wales, Bangor): Gender specific punishment in the ‘Queste del Saint Graal’ and contemporary legal practice

3:30-4pm: Coffee (Foyer)

4-5:30pm: Keynote Lecture (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: Dr. Anke Bernau (University of Manchester)
Professor Karen Pratt (King’s College, London): Does the punishment fit the crime, or only the person? The intersection of gender, class and punishment in Old French
Literature

5:30pm: Close

7pm: Conference Dinner at Felicini (Oxford Road)

*****

Friday 13 January

9:30-11am: Parallel Sessions

Panel 5a: Uncanny Bodies and Punishment (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Stephen Gordon (University of Manchester): Post-Mortem Punishment and the Fear of the Errant Corpse in Writings of William of Newburgh
(ii) Patricia Skinner (University of Swansea): The Gendered Nose and its Lack – some thoughts on medieval rhinectomy
(iii) Katja Fält (University of Jyväskylä, Finland): Men, Women and Devils - Representations of Gender and the Diabolic in the Late-Medieval Wall Paintings of the Diocese of Turku (Finland)

Panel 5b: Discipline and Punish (G16)
Chair: TBC
(i) Kathy Frances (University of Manchester): Penance and Punishment: The Male Body and Masculine Bonds in John Audelay the Blind’s Counsel of Conscience
(ii) Frank Battaglia (College of Staten Island/CUNY): Boys Should Be Heroes: Beowulf’s disciplinary discourse
(iii) Rachel Friedensen (Western Michigan University): Si invita passa est: Consent and Gender in Anglo-Saxon and Frankish Penitentials
11-11:30am Coffee (Foyer)

11:30-12:30pm: Panel 6: Timely Punishment (John Thaw Studio Theatre)
Chair: TBC
(i) Beverly R. Sherringham (Farmingdale State College, New York): The Graceful Fall: Medieval Misogyny as a Redemptive Precursor to an Egalitarian Society
(ii) Daisy Black (University of Manchester): Troublesome Flotsam: Verbal Resurrections of a Drowned Past

12:30-1:30pm: Lunch (Foyer)

1:30-2:30pm: GMS Business Meeting (G16)

3-4:15pm: Optional Workshops

(i) John Rylands Library Manuscript Collections (John Rylands Library, Deansgate)
or
(ii) The Heronbridge Skeletons (led by Dr. Bryan Sitch) (Manchester Museum, Oxford Road)

4:15pm Conference Close

*****

Registration is now open. Click here to register. For more information, visit the conference website or the University of Manchester website, or email the conference convenors.

Thursday 31 March 2011

CFP: Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2012

Gender and Medieval Studies Conference 2012
The University of Manchester

Gender and Punishment

With keynote speakers Professor Karen Pratt (King’s College London) and Professor Dawn Hadley (University of Sheffield)
11th—13th January 2012

Proposals are now being accepted for 20-minute papers

Punishment is intrinsically related to the way in which authorities (such as the church, monarchy and state) seek to control, enforce and legislate the behaviour of individuals, communities and nations, and accordingly it plays an integral role in regulating bodies, spaces, spirituality and rela-tionships. Representations of punishment - whether threatened, enacted, depicted or performed - are regularly encountered by medievalists working across the disciplines of literature, history, art and archaeology. This conference seeks to explore functions and manifestations of punishment in the Middle Ages and to consider to what extent these are determined by, or aim to determine, gender identity. How is punishment gendered? How does gender intersect with punishment? Topics to consider may include but are not limited to:

  • Punishment in the beginning; the medieval understanding of the Fall.

  • Punishment, pedagogy and gender: the use of punishment in teaching.

  • Christianity, gender and punishment; treatment of the sinful body.

  • Punishment of Jewish, Saracen and heretical men and women.

  • Personal identity and self-inflicted acts of punishment.

  • The (gendered) use of space as punishment.

  • Regal punishments; punishments enacted upon or by medieval rulers.

  • Punishment and the regulation of perceived sexual deviance.

  • Punishment and spectacle; performance of punishment on and off the stage.

  • Gender relations in specific acts of punishment.

  • Confession and penance (as punishment): gendered role of confessor; issues relating to differences between female and male confession and penance.

  • Hell, the diabolic, and representations of gender.

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


Please e-mail proposals of no more than 300 words to organiser Daisy Black by 1 September 2011. All queries should also be directed to this address. Please also include biographical information, detailing your name, research area, institution and level of study if applicable.


Further details are available on the conference website.