The next Cambridge medieval French seminar will take place this Thursday, 5th February. Ella Williams, UCL, will be giving her paper entitled, ‘Eastern fantasies: Francophone literature and territorial politics in Angevin Italy’. The seminar will start at 5pm (for 5.15) in the McGrath Centre, St Catharine’s College. Wine, water and apple juice will be served.
As usual, we’ll be taking our speaker to dinner afterwards. Anyone attending the seminar will be most welcome to accompany us.
Crossroads of Knowledge: Literature and Theology in Early Modern England
Trust Room, Fitzwilliam College
Registration Deadline: Friday 6 February 2015.
Literature and Theology in Early-Modern England is a one-day colloquium to mark the launch of our new, five-year interdisciplinary research project, funded by the European Research Council. The colloquium will look from a variety of perspectives at the intersection of theology and literature in early modern England, with a particular alertness to the project’s overall thematic foci (doubt and unknowing, knowing and knowingness). Professor Debora Shuger (UCLA) will give a plenary address to the colloquium. The round table will be chaired by Dr Rowan Williams. For details, visit http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/26037
At the 14th Biennial Romance in Medieval Britain conference, held at the University of Bristol in April 2014, it was decided that the 15th Biennial Conference (2016) would be held outside of the British Isles for the first time.
It is now, therefore, my pleasure to make an early announcement of the date and location of the 2016 Romance in Medieval Britain Conference, which will be held at the Point Grey Campus of The University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada, from the 17th – 19th August, 2016.
As many of you will know, the Biennial Romance in Medieval Britain conferences have concerned themselves with that diverse body of literature generally termed ‘Romance’ originating from, and/or circulating within, the British Isles during the medieval period. Its remit also includes the circulation of British romances on the continent, and the post-medieval influences of romance. All boundaries – temporal, linguistic, geographic, and generic – are flexible. As the 2016 conference will be held in Canada, we will be especially encouraging bi-lingual and multi-lingual approaches to Romance.
At this stage, this is merely a ‘hold this date’ announcement, and a full notification of the conference and a formal Call For Papers (both open and thematic streams) will be circulated in late 2015.
In times of austerity, it is more than ever essential that what and how we value, and the far-reaching effects of any such valuation, be closely examined. The need for such attention has become particularly urgent within universities, where recent reductions of funding have sparked a sharp increase of debate over ‘the value of the Humanities’. With that in mind, the Oxford English Faculty Graduate Conference 2015 invites papers on all aspects of ‘value’, as a concept that has, and will always inspire great passion, and great controversy.
Contributors may consider, but need not be limited to:
– Texts that reflect certain values, and how they are constructed.
– Markers of value: use and usefulness, difficulty, religious significance, political engagement, artistic integrity etc.
– Valuations along lines of gender, racial, national, linguistic and sexual difference.
– The combining and clashing of distinct value-systems.
– Valuation in material culture: money, wealth, and commodity, especially in the literary marketplace.
– The idea of intrinsic versus commodity value.
– The relationship between aesthetic and ethical values.
– Value and the canon: ways in which one set of texts becomes valued above another.
– Formal value: emphasis and accent within texts.
– Value and editorial decision: the formation of the ‘authoritative text’.
– The value, or non-value, of certain methods and approaches to the study of literature.
– Attempts to resist the allocation or expression of value; hidden or concealed values; the power of assumed values.
Applications are welcome from graduate students at all stages irrespective of institutional affiliation, and working on all aspects of English Studies. Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers, to be delivered as part of panels of three. Individual proposals (of 250 words), and panel proposals (of up to 700 words), for three papers that interact under a common theme, are accepted. Please send proposals to value.conference@ell.ox.ac.uk.
The deadline for submissions is *23rd February 2015.* The one-day conference will take place on *Friday 5 June* 2015.
We’re very pleased to have appointed a new website coordinator, Shirley Zhang, who will be helping to improve the Research Group website and increase links between members by sharing research news.
Shirley is a PhD student whose research focuses on Malory’s ‘Book of Sir Tristram’ and its known sources. She is interested in the transitional features of Malory’s reworking of the Arthurian characters and motifs, and trying to answer questions about authorial intention through close textual comparison and discourse analysis.
If you’ve just published something, are organising an event, or have made a research discovery you want to share please email her at sz308[at]cam.ac.uk.
Memory, Memorialization, and Forgetting: The 5th Annual Graduate Conference, Department of English, University of Toronto, 23-24 April 2015
“Memory is a tough place.”
Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
How do we think and feel memory? Memory can be conceptualized as a cabinet for preserving life’s most important artifacts, or as a film that we are constantly re-shooting and re-editing in our minds. For some, memory is synonymous with the self; for others, it is a phantom limb, or a ghost. Language can house sites of memory in the structures of its words and genres as words accrue meanings and become histories that expose, through the nuances of a voice’s expression, the places where those words’ histories mix with their speaker’s memories.
The relationships between sites of memory and memory itself are always fraught. Asfragmentation seems to be ever-increasing, the impetus to memorialize seems more urgent now than ever. Transnational flows of cultural artifacts, objects, and goods, as well as migration, diaspora, and dispersal occasion numerous sites of remembering, mis-remembering, and forgetting.How are such planetary changes involved in the ways that we recollect, conceptualize, and memorialize our affective histories?
The University of Toronto’s Department of English welcomes both academic and creative submissionsto our 5th annual graduate conference. We encourage submissions from a variety of disciplines that foreground literary and theoretical positions which address the conference themes of memory and remembering. Presentations of 15-20 minutes may range from traditional seminar papers to creative works of literature, poetry, film, et al.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
• memorialization, deja vu, unexpected recollection
• statues, monuments, figurines
• events, ordinary happenings
• history, herstory
• rupture, loss, forgetting
• amnesia, repression, sublation
• false testimony, witnessing, mis-remembering
• the collective unconscious, deep time, sedimentation
• atavism, blocked historical knowledge, annexed history
• spectrality, hauntings, phantasmagoria
• archive, digital memory, database aesthetics
• destruction of archives, records, art
• home, belonging, nostalgia
• affect, attachment
• uprootings, diaspora
• life writing, autobiography, memoir
• trauma, wound, schism
• medieval memory
• cultural memory (gastronostalgia, tradition, clothing and textile)
• personal/collective remembering/forgetting
Please send 250-word abstracts and 50-word bios to
uoftenglishgradconference2015@gmail.com. Creative proposals are also
welcome.
We look forward to reading your submissions.
Deadline for submissions is 30 January 2015.
The Medieval Reading Group will meet on Wednesday at 5.15 in the English Faculty, GR-05 to hear Professor Heide Estes from Monmouth University read a paper on “Anglo-Saxon Riddles, Talking Animals, and Ecocriticism”. Professor Estes has published on Old and Middle English languages, literature and culture, with interest in gender theory and ecocriticism. Please see below for abstract.
The session will be followed by wine and cheese straws. All are very welcome.
Abstract: The presence of animals in the Old English Riddles is complex and unstable. Numerous animals are described in some detail; many are narrated in the voice of the animal itself, occasionally in protest against the cruelty of the human “enemy.” This talk draws on the insights of “ecocriticism.” There are many ecocriticisms, focusing variously on animals, on rocks, on women, on trees, and on attempting to theorize why those should matter, but a provisional definition of what unifies these various enterprises is a conviction that things and beings other than the human matter. Several bird Riddles depict wild birds with distinctive detail, suggesting they mattered to the Anglo-Saxons even though they were not domesticated and provided no direct utility to them. The Bookworm Riddle (#47) suggests humans are different from animals because of the capacity for reason, but the Book Riddle (#26) complicates any easy acceptance of this dichotomy. While the Riddles enact the subjugation of animals through violence and through the claim of lack of reason, they also provide an alternative vision whereby animals protest the violence that is done to them, using human language to protest and to designate humans as “the enemy.” What lies behind this project is a commitment to advocacy, to changing our notions of what is “sustainable” and moving our focus from consumption of objects and petroleum-based fuels to human interactions.
On Tuesday, January 27th, Professor Elizabeth Tyler (York) will give a talk as part of the CRASSH seminar series, ‘Multilingualism and Exchange in the Ancient and Medieval World’:
‘From the Severn to the Rhine: Geographies and Social Networks of English Literary Culture, c.850-c.1150’.
Professor Tyler’s research interests include the political and social utility of fiction, female literary patronage, multilingualism, classical reception, history-writing and poetics. Her monograph, ‘England in Europe: English Queens and the Politics of Fiction, c. 1000-c. 1150’, will be immanently published by Toronto University Press. Co-edited collections include ‘Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West’; ‘Treasure in the Medieval West’; and ‘Conceptualizing Multilingualism in Medieval England, c.800-c.1250’.
The talk will take place at 5pm in the Alison Richard building, Room SG2.
This week Orietta Da Rold, along with colleagues at Cambridge University Library and Stanford University, launched an exciting MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) they have developed, called ‘Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts‘. It’s a free course, open to the public and has already got a lively and expanding community following it.
Here’s a video in which you can find more about the team and a description of the course to whet your appetite:
Digging Deeper: Making Manuscripts introduces you to the study of early text technologies, focusing principally on the medieval book, but covering other textual objects, too, such as scrolls and diplomata. The Digging Deeper team of scholars from Stanford and Cambridge reveals how to investigate manuscripts within repository settings and through online resources, what to look out for when confronted with manuscript images, and how to exploit all the information a manuscript offers. You will learn major characteristics of book production, the terms and methods used by manuscript historians to describe the book, and key themes in early book history. Where were manuscripts made and who made them? What kinds of materials were used and what can those materials tell us? What kinds of texts were created and copied during these centuries? How did multilingualism matter in the medieval period? In pursuing these questions, you will study some of the most significant and beautiful books held by the university libraries of Cambridge and Stanford.
Orietta has also been awarded a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant to carry out research on ‘Mapping Medieval Paper in England’. The grant provides seed funds for a larger project on paper, which will aim to refine the data set and the methodology which can then be used to carry out wider research on the significance of paper in written communication. The project will be launched in February with the aid of a Research Assistant. Watch this space for news of the coming website too!
Alastair Bennett (Royal Holloway, University of London) gave a stimulating paper to the Medieval Research Seminar on ‘”Vox in choro, mens in foro”: distracted prayer and divided selves in some medieval rules for living and Piers Plowman’ on Wednesday 21 January.
Amongst Alastair’s previous publications are: ‘Covetousness, “Unkyndenesse”, and the “Blered” Eye in Piers Plowman and ‘The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale’, Yearbook of Langland Studies 28 (2014), and ‘Brevis oratio penetrat velum: Proverbs, Prayers and Lay Understanding in Late Medieval England’, New Medieval Literatures 14 (2012).