Current Semester's Listings: Publications and Conferences

Rethinking Early Modern Print Culture
An international and interdisciplinary conference at
The Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
Victoria University in the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
15-17 October 2010

The view that early modernity saw the transformation of European societies into cultures of print has been widely influential in literary, historical, philosophical, and bibliographical studies of the period. The concept of print culture has provided scholars with a powerful tool for analyzing and theorizing new (or seemingly new) regimens of knowledge and networks of information transmission as well as developments in the worlds of literature, theatre, music, and the visual arts. However, more recently the concept has been reexamined and destabilized, as critics have pointed out the continuing existence of cultures of manuscript, queried the privileging of technological advances over other cultural forces, and identified the presence of many of the supposed innovations of print in pre-print societies. This multi-disciplinary conference aims to refine and redefine our understanding of early modern print cultures (from the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century). We invite papers seeking to explore questions of production and reception that have always been at the core of the historiography of print, developing a more refined sense of the complex roles played by various agents and institutions. But we especially encourage submissions that probe the boundaries of our subject, both chronologically and conceptually: did print culture have a clear beginning? How is the idea of a culture of print complicated by the continued importance of manuscript circulation (as a private and commercial phenomenon)? How did print reshape or reconfigure audiences? And what was the place of orality in a world supposedly dominated by print textuality? What new forms of chirography and spoken, live performances did print enable, if any?

Other possible topics might include:
* Ownership of texts and plagiarism; authorship; “piracy”
* Booksellers and printers, and their local, national, and international networks
* Readers and their material and interpretative practices
* Libraries, both personal and institutional
* Beyond the book: ephemeral forms of print and manuscript
* Text and illustration, print and visuality
* Typography, mise en page, binding, and technological advances in book-production

We invite proposals for conference papers of 20 minutes and encourage group-proposals for panels of
three papers. Alternative formats such as workshops and roundtables will also be considered.

Abstracts of 250 words can be submitted electronically on the conference website,
http://www.crrs.ca/events/conferences/print/

The deadline for submissions is 15 December 2009.
All questions ought to be addressed to the conference organizers, Grégoire Holtz (French, University
of Toronto) and Holger Schott Syme (English, University of Toronto), at printconference@gmail.com.

Love and Sight in Late  Medieval and Early Modern English Literature
Early Modern Studies Seminar (EMSS), University of Toronto
April 22 and  23, 2010  

This is a graduate interdisciplinary conference welcoming papers from all fields of study.

Correlations between love and sight abound in the late medieval and  early modern periods, but perhaps the most familiar relationship  between the two is causative:  that one sees before one loves, and one  loves what one sees.  Even causation between love and sight proves  dynamic and capable of reversal, however, indicating that a wide range  of relationships exist between love and sight - and between loving  subject and beloved object - in these periods.

Of course, correlations between love and sight extend beyond the  immediate expression of erotic or romantic love. Love and sight play  important roles in religious devotion, and the gods wreak havoc with  both the sense and the emotion. Descriptions like blazon and ekphrasis  work to convey sensory/emotional experience in language, and media  like illustration, illumination, performance, film, etc. impact the  viewer?s experience of a text.  Likewise, optics and humoral  psychophysiology inform and historicize tropes of love and sight in  provocative ways.

This conference is eager to explore how late medieval and early modern  writers imagine and describe the relationships between love and sight,  and we are very pleased to announce the plenary speakers for this  conference will be Professor Suzanne Akbari (University of Toronto)  and Professor Katherine Rowe (Bryn Mawr College).  Professor Akbari  will speak on "The Geometry of Love" and Professor Rowe will give a  paper entitled "Architectures of Shakespearean Desire: Virtual Globe  Theaters from Hollar to Second Life.?  Possible topics for this  conference include, but are not limited to:

Apparitions, ghosts, projections and visitations
Blazon, ekphrasis and other description
Blindness
Dreams, illusions, hallucinations, visions, etc.
Film/new media adaptation
Humoralism
Icons, illustration, illumination, portraits, emblems, etc.
Language
Light/darkness
Optics
Performance
Perspective
Physiology
Religious devotion
Space/spatiality
Subject-/objectivity
Time/temporality

Abstracts should be no more than 300 words.  The submission deadline  is Friday, January 15, 2010.  Please submit your proposals to:  emss.conference@gmail.com

The Renaissance Arts of Science and Nature
A Two Day Conference held by the Early Modern Colloquium
The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
February 19-20, 2010

Keynote Speakers: Laurie Shannon (Northwestern University), Carla Mazzio (SUNY Buffalo)

The Early Modern Colloquium, a graduate interdisciplinary group at the University of Michigan, is requesting submissions for its conference on the arts of science and nature in early modern culture, to be held February 19-20, 2010.

Broadly conceived, this conference intends to investigate the relationship between the arts and sciences in the early modern period. In contrast to modern disciplinary practices, which tend to distinguish between – if not divorce – humanistic practice from scientific endeavor, extant works from the early modern period reveal a complicated, potentially constitutive relationship between these two fields of intellectual inquiry, evinced by the term “natural philosophy”. How might cross-disciplinary thinking – modern and early modern – inform our understanding of the early modern period? We seek submissions that address these issues or which respond to any of the following
questions:

To what extent did the arts and natural sciences/philosophies depend upon one another during the early modern period?

How were these “disciplines” delineated from – and/or defined in relation to – one another?

How can we, as modern scholars, approach and consider potential dialogues between these disciplines? In what forms did such exchange(s) take place?

What factors enabled the distinction between the arts and the sciences?

How did scientific praxes – including but not limited to alchemy, humoral medicine, anatomy, mathematics, geometry, optics, or astronomy – inform early modern culture?

How did such praxes appear within, influence, inform or challenge the fields of literature, visual art, music, or architecture?

How did the relationship of sciences to the arts inform the orders of nature, the taxonomies in which humans and animals were placed in relation to one another?

In what ways did craft or artisanal practice enable a merging of science and art?

How might contemporary scientific practice and knowledge inform our understanding of the arts in the early modern period?

This conference is co-sponsored by the Early Modern Colloquium, the Program in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and the Departments of English and Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan. We therefore welcome submissions from these disciplines and a wide range of others, including history, art history, musicology, theater history, philosophy, and
anthropology. Priority will be given to graduate students.

200-250 word proposals should be sent to Andrew Bozio (bozio@umich.edu) by December 1, 2009.

Networks and Connections in World History
Northeastern University, Second Annual Graduate Student Conference
March 27-28, 2010

The Northeastern University History Graduate Students and the NU History Department invite submissions to their upcoming graduate student conference, "Networks and Connections in World History." Graduate students working in all disciplines of the arts and social sciences are encouraged to submit topical papers, artwork and documentaries.

The conference invites scholarly work that challenges our notions of boundaries and borders. Interdisciplinary papers that employ innovative methodologies to examine world history are welcome. Participants are specifically encouraged to consider how networks have affected gender identities, migration and diasporas, religious affiliations, and the movement of commodities and ideas throughout world history. Because gender in particular remains an understudied aspect of world history, students who submit papers on gender will be eligible to take part in a roundtable discussion on this subject that will conclude the conference. Submissions to this conference should be prepared to explore some of the following questions:

How do transnational networks and connections manifest themselves differently
throughout the world?

How are such networks formed and what impact do these networks have on the
construction of identities or ideologies?

How have networks and connections countered the historical influence of the nation-state? How can the study of connections shed light on moments of disjuncture and disconnection in world history?

Both individual and panel proposals will be considered. Regardless of medium (visual media or scholarly paper), panelists will have fifteen minutes each to present. The following documents should be sent to the program committee at nugradconf2010@gmail.com by December 1, 2009, to be considered. Selected panelists will be notified via email by January 15, 2010.

Individual Panelists:

- 250 word abstract describing paper or artwork. Please specify the type of
media you will be presenting, and include your name, email address, and phone
number.
- List of supplies needed, if applicable
- Brief curriculum vitae

Panels:
- 250 word abstract for each paper or artwork to be presented with the panel
- List of all panel members (3 per panel) with chairperson designated.
(The conference committee will also assign chairpersons, if necessary).
- 250 word abstract that discusses the theme of the panel - Brief curriculum
vitae for each panelist

Please contact nugradconf2010@gmail.com with any questions.

4th Annual Sacred Leaves Graduate Symposium

University of South Florida Libraries
Tampa, Florida

February 18 & 19, 2010

The DEADLINE for submission has been EXTENDED to December 11, 2009
Presenters will be notified by December 18, 2009

Encountering the “Other” in the Medieval World: Textual Examinations of Resistance and Reconciliation Across the Traditions, 500-1500

Papers are welcome on, but not limited to, Judaism, Christianity or Islam in Europe and Asia during the Middle Ages (500-1500):

• Views of difference, diversity and pluralism

• Expressions of shared identities and common values

• Texts of threat, terror and violence

• Traditions affirming connection, inclusivity and reconciliation

• Patterns of religious, political and cultural imperialism

• Forms of cross-cultural exchange and dialogue

• Delineations of ethnic and vernacular boundaries

Exempla may be drawn from manuscripts and illuminations, critical editions, and portrayals in art and architecture.

This year’s keynote speaker and senior scholar is Dr. David Nirenberg, the Deborah R. and Edgar D. Jannotta Professor - John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, Department of History, and in the College - The University of Chicago.

Please email an abstract of no more than 500 words to Elizabeth Tucker, Symposium Coordinator, at etucker@lib.usf.edu by December 11, 2009. Notification of acceptances will be emailed by December 18, 2009. Please include the title of your paper, name, affiliation and email address.
Each paper selected will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation. Presenters will be asked to submit their complete paper by February 1, 2010.

Elizabeth Tucker, Assistant to the Director - Special & Digital Collections // Coordinator - Sacred Leaves Symposium
University of South Florida Libraries
4202 E. Fowler Avenue, LIB 122
Tampa FL 33620-5400
etucker@lib.usf.edu
813.974.1198 FAX: 813.396.9006

For more information about the symposium, and to download a PDF of the Call for Papers, please visit: http://MedievalStudies.lib.usf.edu

17th Annual Charles F. Fraker Conference

The Turning Point: Crisis & Disaster

March 25-27 at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Submissions Deadline: December 21, 2009

The term "crisis" itself is difficult to detach from current political and economic developments. The impetus of this conference is to discuss the rhetorical use (and/or abuse) of this word by examining how ideas of crisis and disaster have been thought and expressed through aesthetics, history, and theory.

How do we define "crisis"? What are the less-explored contexts of this word we can consider? How does crisis relate to disaster (if it does)? Through examinations of textual representations and textual manifestations of crisis, we resuscitate the idea of crisis as a turning point that requires judgment and discernment and whose implications extend to: Culture, Identity, Sexuality, Politics, Economics, Nature, Ethics, Religion, Representations of Death and Life, History and its Constructions, Technology...  [this list is not meant to be either exhaustive nor restrictive].

Submission Instructions: Presentations may be given in English, French, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish and should be related to Francophone, Hispanic, Lusophone or Italian cultures. Please send a 250-300 word abstract to fraker2010abstracts@ctools.umich.edu. Questions? Contact the Organizing Committee at fraker2010@umich.edu.

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega
A Graduate Symposium on the Poet’s Universe
Yale University
April 9-10, 2010

Keynote Speaker: Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta (Yale University)

On behalf of the Department of Italian Language and Literature, we are pleased to announce a Graduate Student Symposium on Dante, to be held on April 9-10, 2010 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Dante’s Divine Comedy is a totalizing vision—a work emanating from and culminating in the poet’s glimpse of a universe “bound with love in a single volume.” In the 21st century, the goals of universal digitization and constant accessibility that mark our information age might seem far removed from Dante’s vatic rendering of the cosmos, and yet our technological models of thought might equally be understood as the current form of an encyclopedic impulse that stretches back to, and extends well beyond, the 14th century.

Dante’s Volume from Alpha to Omega will explore how the encyclopedism of today can enrich, inform, or obscure our understanding of Dante’s universe and its poetic representation.

In the interests of interdisciplinarity, paper topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

-Receptions of Dante: commentary, exegesis, and philology
-Representations of Dante: the visual, acoustic, and cinematic arts
-Dante and the place of language
-Dante and the sciences
-Poetry as knowledge and self-knowledge
-In the shadow of the Comedy: the “minor” works
-Nature, necessity, and freedom in the Comedy
-The world outside the secretissima camera: social/institutional history in Dante’s time
-Justice earthly and divine
-Dante and the lyric tradition
-Theology, history, and the politics of exile
-Classical and medieval theories of love
-Ethics and psychology
-Style and rhetoric
-Theological and philosophical debates in the thirteenth century

Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes (approximately 9-10 pages of double-spaced text) and may be in Italian or in English.

Please submit an anonymous abstract (no longer than 250 words) and, on a separate page, a cover sheet with the title of your paper, your name, affiliation, and contact information (including telephone and e-mail address).

Kindly send this information as Microsoft Word file attachment to yaledantesymposium@gmail.com by November 15, 2009. Further information will be available on the events webpage of the Yale Italian Department http://www.yale.edu/italian/news/index.html as the symposium draws nearer.

Forms of Life in the Eighteenth Century
Indiana University, Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies
May 12-14 2010.

This workshop is part of a series of annual interdisciplinary events that has been running since 2002, with 12-15 scholars presenting and discussing papers on a broad topic in a congenial setting.

Our topic for 2010 is "The Forms of Life." We'd like to consider the implications of the 18th-century debate about the nature of life and the turn to vitalist proposals of an animating force, broadening beyond the discourses of physiology and the natural sciences, where many of these ideas originate, to consider their connections elsewhere in the period.

Why does the idea of a life force emerge (or re-emerge) at this moment?

How are living forms distinguished from each other? What sorts of decisions create the hierarchies of animate forms (and, for instance, what gets called "animal")? Which lives matter and which don't? How might we reconsider eighteenth-century answers to these questions in light of twenty-first-century rethinking of life and animality? How is the line drawn distinguishing the living and the non-living, animate being and thing? Participants might also consider the implications of contemporary thinking about life for the discourse of political economy, in its treatment of populations, masses, collective life and the role of hunger in history and also for developments in the religious sphere. One might also turn to the numerous Pygmalionic fantasies of animation in art and criticism, from "tableaux vivants," illuminated statuary, life-like automata and still lives to critical pronouncements on the living body as the highest achievement of true art.

Papers might address topics such as:

--organisms and organization, self-organization
--animals and animation
--the life sciences and the social sciences
--the culture of sensibility and irritative physiology
--monstrosity
--aesthetic and living form
--the "life" of the imagination
--competing notions of life

The workshop format will consist of focused discussion of four to six papers a day, amid socializing and refreshment. The workshop will draw both on the wide community of eighteenth-century scholars and on those working in this field at Indiana University-Bloomington. The workshop will cover most expenses of those scholars chosen to present their work: accommodations, travel (up to a certain limit), and most meals.

We are asking for applications to be sent to us by Friday, January 8, 2010. The application consists of a two-page description of the proposed paper as well as a current brief CV (no longer than three pages).

Please email or send your application to Dr. Barbara Truesdell Weatherly Hall North, room 122, Bloomington, IN 47405, Telephone 812/855-2856, email voltaire@indiana.edu<mailto:voltaire@indiana.edu>.

Papers will be selected by an interdisciplinary committee. All submissions will be acknowledged by e-mail within a fortnight: if you have not received an acknowledgment by Jan. 22, 2010, please contact Barbara Truesdell or Dror Wahrman.

Further information can be found on our website, http://www.indiana.edu/~voltaire/, or you can Find us on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Center-for-Eighteenth-Century-Studies-at-Indiana-University/129787018885>.

For additional details and queries please contact the director of the Center:
Dror Wahrman, Dept. of History, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405 e-mail dwahrman@indiana.edu<mailto:dwahrman@indiana.edu>.

Medieval and Early Modern Rajasthan
December 15, 2009

Sri Venkateswara College, New Delhi, India plans to organise a two-day conference of selected papers which offer opportunities to scholars to study and analyse the developments in writing of history of Medieval Rajasthan. We take medieval in the most liberal manner, the way it is taught in India, meaning from 1200 to 1800 AD. Any field and specialisation is welcome as long as it refers to medieval Rajasthan.

We are applying for funds and are confident of providing a very good pad for scholarly discussions. The conference will be open for panelists and registered participants.

It is to be held at a very convenient location and in the middle of December 2009. The last date for submission of abstract is October 30, 2009. you may use kumarnirmal42@gmail.com for sending abstract by email. Please also send your affiliations with that.

Organisers will help in finding suitable accommodation of participants if contacted early, but participants will have to pay for the same. besides we propose to levy some registration fee, as determined and approved by our college and the funding agency. If any thing more, don't hesitate to write to me.

Dr. Nirmal Kumar, Department of History
Sri Venkateswara College
Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi 110021
India
tel: 91-11-24118590

Unruly Letters and Unbound Texts

February 5-6, 2010
Marco Institute for Medieval & Renaissance Studies
University of Tennessee, Knoxville

This year's focus will be on texts and manuscripts that cross or confound the boundaries scholars have tried to place around them, that do not fit neatly into the genres or categories of modern scholarship, or that post peculiar difficulties of definition, categorization or reading. These might include: macaronic and multilingual texts, prosi-metric and metri-prosaic texts, glosses and commentaries, diagrams and tables, ciphers and strange alphabets, incongruous or appropriated forms and textual designs, miscellanies and composite manuscripts, and manuscripts in the age of print.

The workshop is open to scholars and students at any rank and in any field who are engaged in textual editing, manuscript studies, or epigraphy. Individual 75-minute sessions will be devoted to each project; participants will be asked to introduce their text and its context, discuss their approach to working with their material, and exchanged ideas and information with other participants. As in previous years, the workshop is intended to more a class than a conference; participants are encouraged to share new discoveries and unfinished work to discuss both their successes and frustrations, to offer both practical advice and theoretical insights, and to work together toward developing better skills for textual and codicological work. Presenters will receive a stipend of $500 for their participation.

The deadline for proposals is October 1, 2009. Applicants are asked to submit a current c.v. and a two-page letter describing their project to Roy M Liuzza, Department of English, University of Tennessee, 301 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0430 or via email to rliuzza@utk.edu.

More information is available at http://web.utk.edu/~marco/.