Science at Court, 1285-1450
An interdisciplinary conference at Newnham College, Cambridge
3-4 June, 2016

From the anonymous Middle English Court of Sapience to Nicole Oresme’s Livre du ciel et du monde to the lavishly illustrated copies of Pliny’s Natural History produced for the Visconti family, medieval scientific discourse was often inflected by – and constructed around – literary, musical, and artistic forms present at court.  This conference invites abstracts on what it means to “do science at court” in the late medieval period, particularly in the context of literature, music, and the arts.

How do tradition, law, and power dictate the boundaries of science? How do ethics or political science affect natural philosophy? How do didactic poems or works of counsel, conduct, and governance blur the boundaries between science and mimesis?  What is the relationship between empiricism and narrative or visual forms? How does music do mathematical and political work?

Science at Court welcomes proposals on any aspect of art at court in the context of late medieval science.

Due to the generous support of Newnham College, travel subsidies will be available for attendees who may have difficulty obtaining funds.

Please send abstracts to Dr. Tekla Bude (tlb33@cam.ac.uk)  by 15 January, 2016.

You can follow updates on the conference here: www.scienceatcourt.com

The 8^th Annual Graduate Conference at the University of Pennsylvania welcomes papers on the topic ‘Performance’. The conference will take place on 18^th March, 2016. The Keynote Speaker will be Prof. Theresa Coletti from University of Maryland.

Papers are encouraged to address any aspect of the performances, whether planned or improvised, exceptional or everyday, which formed an integral part of medieval culture. This conference will also seek to understand how performance enables critical readings of medieval texts by considering communal reading as a dramatic enterprise, from the rhetorical techniques of lectores to the responses of audience members. Papers may approach the topic of performance from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, such as History, Art History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Theater History, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Cultural History.

Please submit abstracts for 15-20 minute papers to pennmedieval@gmail.com by January 10, 2016. Submissions should include your name, paper title, email, and institutional and departmental affiliation. The deadline for full paper submission, not to exceed 10 pages, is March 6, 2016.

Paper or session proposals are invited for the 43rd Saint Louis Conference on Manuscript Studies, organized by the Vatican Film Library and to be held at Saint Louis University in St. Louis, MO, 14–15 October 2016. The guest speaker will be Madeline H. Caviness (Mary Richardson Professor Emeritus, Tufts University), speaking on “Medieval German Law and the Jews: The Sachsenspiegel Picture-Books.”
Proposals should address the material aspects of late antique, medieval, or Renaissance manuscripts. Papers are twenty minutes in length and a full session normally consists of three papers. Submissions of papers may address an original topic or one of the session themes already proposed. Submissions of original session themes are welcome from those who wish to be organizers.

Please submit a paper or session title and an abstract of not more than 200 words by 15 March 2016 via our online submission form. Those whose proposals are accepted are reminded that registration fees and travel and accommodation expenses for the conference are the responsibility of speakers and/or their institutions. For more information, contact Erica Lauriello, Library Associate Sr for Special Collections Administration, at 314-977-3090 or vfl@slu.edu . Conference information and online submission form are posted at http://lib.slu.edu/special-collections/programs/conference.

For further details, please visit:

http://www.medievalart.org/icmacommunitynews/2015/11/4/call-for-papers-43rd-saint-louis-conference-on-manuscript-studies-14-15-october-2016

The Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York is pleased to introduce an interdisciplinary conference from 28^th to 29^th June 2016, which that welcomes graduate students who are new to presenting their research, as well as more experienced students who would like to prepare for conferences later in the summer. Through a mixture of traditional panels, anonymous feedback sessions, and open discussions, this two-day conference will provide attendees with a unique opportunity to practice delivering papers and develop otherpresentation skills – such as creating more effective visual aids and navigating questions posed by the audience – in a friendly and constructive environment.

Proposals are now being accepted for 20-minute papers. This conference is interdisciplinary, and we welcome medievalists from all relevant academic departments. Topics to consider may include, but are not limited to:

Cross-border connections: for example diplomatic, linguistic and aesthetic;

Texts in their contexts: including codicological and textual communities;

Interactions between politics, church and society.

We likewise welcome papers being prepared for Leeds IMC 2016, including the theme ‘Food, Feast and Famine’. Please email proposals of no more than 300 words to the conference organisers at cms-grad-conf@york.ac.uk no later than Friday 27th November, along with your name, institution, and area of research.

‘Approaching the Medieval’ postgraduate conference
Newnham College, Cambridge, 4th May 2016
With keynote speaker Robert Mills (University College London)

We are delighted to open the call for papers for the inaugural conference hosted by ‘Approaching the Medieval’, a cross-disciplinary postgraduate reading group at the University of Cambridge.

We welcome 20-minute papers from graduate students and early career researchers in all areas of medieval studies, across languages, cultures and disciplines: history, history of art, philosophy, theology, history of science, musicology, palaeography and codicology, archaeology, literature, philology and linguistics. Papers should be given in English. Please submit 250-word abstracts to approachingthemedieval@gmail.com by 1st February 2016.

Our keynote speaker, Robert Mills will give an address entitled ‘How to Do Things with Fur’. Dr Mills is Reader in Medieval Art and Director of the LGBTQ Research Network at University College London.

For more information, please see the attached Call for Papers, or visit https://approachingthemedieval.wordpress.com/conference/