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Call for Papers: New Approaches to Medieval Romance from the Eastern Mediterranean and Beyond c. 1100-1500

University of Birmingham, 5 December 2019

Deadline: 7 November 2019

In recent decades, the study of medieval romance literature has benefited from the application of new theoretical and methodological approaches, ranging from gender historical perspectives to global and ecocritical theory. However, in comparison with the still wider body of literature dedicated to western medieval romance, the Byzantine romances remain a relatively under-studied group of texts. Despite clear evidence of intertextuality between the romance literature of Byzantium and other parts of the medieval world, much work remains to be done in order to understand how the romances are situated within their historical, literary, and social contexts, on both the Byzantine and global medieval stage. This workshop aims to examine the value of new historical or literary approaches to these texts, and ultimately consider them from a multidisciplinary perspective. What can new perspectives on the Byzantine romance tell us about the world in which they were created? What can be learned from the theoretical approaches being applied to romance literature from other parts of the medieval world? What links exist between Byzantine romance and romantic texts from other medieval cultures, and what do these reveal about the broader literary and cultural networks of that time?

This workshop will focus on discussion of short papers. We welcome proposals for papers of ca. 15 minutes investigating the romance from any methodological perspective, and focusing on romances from any part of the medieval world. The romance, here, is defined broadly as encompassing the genres of love poetry and epic stories with romantic elements. The event will take place over one day on Thursday 5 December 2019 at the University of Birmingham.

The workshop will conclude with a keynote lecture from Elizabeth Jeffreys (Oxford), as part of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies’ annual lecture series. Please send abstracts of no more than 150 words to novasish@bham.ac.uk by 7 November 2019.

Potential topics for discussion might include, but are not limited to:
• Comparative/ intertextual approaches to medieval romance
• Rhetorical techniques in romance literature
• Global perspectives on medieval romance
• The romances in their political and religious contexts
• Social historical approaches to the romance, focusing on themes such as:
◦ Gender and sexuality
◦ Race/ethnic identities
◦ Marginalisation and (dis)ability

This workshop will take place at the University of Birmingham on Thursday 5th December 2019 and finish with a lecture from Elizabeth Jeffreys as part of the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies’ annual lecture series.

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Call for Papers: Fourteenth International Conference of Iconographic Studies

Rijeka, Croatia, 28-29 May 2020

Deadline: 15 January 2020

Iconography and Hagiography
Visualizing Holiness

The range of literary sources that concern the saints has been immensely wide over the long period of time and has presented central feature of the Christian literary and visual culture. This conference seeks to explore the ways and mechanisms of the translation of these sources in visual language in Eastern and Western Christianity. Scholars are invited to present proposals on different topics on the relation between hagiography and iconography. Academic papers that will approach these subjects from interdisciplinary and methodologically diverse angles are welcome. The themes and subjects include:

– lives, martyr acts, hagiographical romances, and edifying tales represented in visual arts in East and West
– Legenda aurea and iconographic programs
– individualization vs. generalization in hagiography and iconography
– group representations of saints as reflections (or not) of the universal or local pantheon
– question and role of gender in visualizing sanctity
– saintly bodies in visual arts – relics, spectacles, perfomances, and religious devotion
– new research instruments for hagiographical texts and images – new technologies, digitisation, data-bases and open access repositories
– iconography of new saints – visual/textual representation of contemporary holy persons – a reflection of his/her personality, given the availability of biographic information, or conformism to universal patterns
– popular iconography in the age of the printing press (such as for example holy cards from the 17th century – Antwerp – and 19th century – Saint-Sulpice)
– saints and the new media – how images (photo’s, movies, comic books etc.) on the web, Facebook, Instagram, etc. function in relation the hagiographical texts, classical lives and legends, and their narrative strategies

Paper proposals should be submitted electronically to cis@ffri.hr by January 15, 2020

A paper proposal should contain:
1. full name, institution, affiliation, address, phone number, e-mail address
2. title
3. abstract (maximum 2 pages – 500 words)

Invitations to participate will be sent out by email before February 15, 2020

There is NO registration fee

Administration and organizational costs, working materials, lunch and coffee breaks during conference, closing dinner as well as all organized visits are covered by the organizers.
The presented papers will be published in the thematic issue of IKON – journal of iconographic studies in May 2021.

Please contact us for any additional information
Contact person:
Antonia Zurga
Center for Iconographic Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of Rijeka
Sveucilisna avenija 4, 51 000 Rijeka, Croatia
E-mail: cis@ffri.hr
web page: http://ikon.ffri.hr

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Call for Papers: Armenia & Byzantium Without Borders III

Graduate and Early Career Workshop

Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, 8–10 May 2020

Deadline: 31 October 2019

Within the framework of ‘Moving Byzantium: Mobility, Microstructure and Personal Agency,’ a five-year project funded through the Wittgenstein-Prize (http://rapp.univie.ac.at), ‘Armenia & Byzantium without Borders III’ is a three-day workshop focusing on social and cultural mobility between Armenia and Byzantium in the Middle Ages. This workshop continues a scholarly conversation initiated in April 2018 at the University of Vienna by Dr. Emilio Bonfiglio and Prof. Claudia Rapp and now run in joint partnership with Dr. David Zakarian and Prof. Theo Maarten van Lint at the University of Oxford. The 2020 Workshop will be held at the Division of Byzantine Research, Institute for Medieval Research, of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

We invite advanced PhD candidates and early career scholars working in the fields of Late Antique, Armenian, Byzantine, and Middle Eastern Studies to submit proposals for 20 min. papers connected with the main topics of ‘Moving Byzantium’, with a focus on aspects of social and cultural mobility of persons, objects, and/or ideas between Armenia and Byzantium throughout the Middle Ages. We are particularly interested in new research showing interaction and communication on both literary and material grounds between the Byzantine world and the Armenians.

Papers presented at the workshop will be accompanied by a senior scholar’s 10 min. response, followed by a general discussion. The workshop will be inaugurated with the lecture of our keynote speaker, Dr. Tim Greenwood from the University of St Andrews.

Travel and accommodation expenses of scholars selected for presentation at the workshop will be covered by the ‘Moving Byzantium’ project.

Paper proposals including:
· University affiliation
· Graduate level
· Title of the paper
· Abstract (300 words max)
· CV

Must be sent by the 31st of October 2019 to Dr. Emilio Bonfiglio (emilio.bonfiglio@oeaw.ac.at) and our project-coordinator Dr. Paraskevi Sykopetritou (paraskevi.sykopetritou@univie.ac.at).

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Call for Papers: Inspiration and Institution in Christian History

Ecclesiastical History Society Winter Meeting, Carr’s Lane Chapel, Birmingham, 18 January 2020

Deadline: 31 October 2019

The Winter Meeting continues with the 58th Summer Conference theme of Inspiration and Institution. As ever, the intention is to attract a broad spectrum of papers from across the history of Christianity.

Since the apostolic age, the history of Christianity and Christian churches has seen a constant dialectic between inspiration and institution: how the ungoverned spontaneity of Spirit-led religion negotiates its way through laws, structures and communities. If institutional frameworks are absent or insufficient, new, creative and dynamic expressions of Christianity can disappear or collapse into disorder almost as quickly as they have flared up. If those frameworks are excessively rigid or punitive, they can often quench the spirit of any new movements. Without dynamic movements of this kind, even well-functioning church institutions struggle to avoid sclerosis. And once institutionalised, inspirational movements can change their nature remarkably quickly, whether by calcifying or by settling down from sectarian unruliness into denominational respectability.

The deadline for proposals of 20-minute papers on the theme is 31 October 2019. For full details, see https://ecclesiasticalhistorysociety.com/winter-meeting-2/

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Call for Papers: Crusading in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Encounters & Representations

Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East 9th International Conference: Crusading Encounters (Royal Holloway, University of London, 29 June–3 July 2020)

Deadline: 1 October 2019

Organisers: Charlotte Gauthier, Katherine J. Lewis, Francesca Petrizzo. Sponsored by the Northern Network for the Study of the Crusades.

In the prologue to his Godeffroy of Boloyne, published in 1481, William Caxton explains that when reading of Godfrey’s exploits during the First Crusade he discerned striking similarities between Godfrey’s time and his own. Just as Godfrey had fought the enemies of Christendom, so modern men needed to do the same; Caxton warns that, even as was writing, the Ottoman Turks were occupying Otranto in Southern Italy and from there threatening the whole of Western Europe. These dangerous circumstances compelled him to make Godfrey’s life available in English to offer inspiration and encouragement for a crusade. Caxton’s prologue is often cited as evidence of the continuing currency of crusading in the later Middle Ages. Crusading continued to be an actual experience for many men in this period, and for others it was an influential pious and/or chivalric aspiration. Yet in comparison to the wealth of scholarship considering the ‘classic’ era of crusading, there continues to be rather less investigation of crusading in the later medieval and early modern periods. We therefore invite papers which consider any aspect of crusading in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, relating to the SSCLE conference theme of ‘Crusading Encounters’. We welcome offers of papers from scholars working in the areas of history, literature, art, archaeology, musicology or any other relevant discipline.

Paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

· Crusading enterprises and encounters in specific geographic areas
· Crusade-related diplomatic encounters
· Encounters with the ‘Other’ and representations of alterity: Turks, heretics, and other crusade antagonists
· Memorialisation of crusading: national/familial/individual
· Artistic, literary and fictional responses to crusading
· Appropriations and representations of earlier crusades and crusaders as part of the contemporary rhetoric of holy war
· Intersections between crusading, chivalry and lordship
· Crusading and gender – in relation to women and/or men
· Medievalism: modern depictions of fifteenth and sixteenth century crusades and crusaders

Please send abstracts of c. 300 words to k.lewis@hud.ac.uk by 1 October 2019.

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Call for Papers: Acts of Excommunication in the Late Antique and Early Islamicate Middle East

Leiden University, Netherlands, 12-13 March 2020

Deadline: 1 October 2019

As part of the ERC-funded project, “Embedding Conquest, Naturalising Muslim Rule (600-1000)”, at Leiden University, this conference aims to bring together both senior and junior scholars to present research which illuminates the dynamics implicit in the act of excommunication and associated practices: ostracism, anathema, and other forms of religio-social exclusion, among the major religious communities of the Islamicate world, 600-1200 CE: including various Christian and Jewish denominations, Sunni, Shiʿi, ‘Khārijī’ and other groups within Islam; Zoroastrians and other relevant groups.

The workshop will focus on “acts of excommunication”, meaning that its primary focus will be specific cases, whether real or imagined, which display the dynamics and implications of excommunicatory practices. The discussion of specifc (pseudo-) documents is particularly encouraged. While participants will be asked to focus on specific cases, they should show how these examples illuminate the larger frameworks within which their cases occurred.

Topics to be covered might include the following:

· Excommunicatory statements in contracts and oaths
· Excommunication as a tool in managing institutional hierarchies and hierocracies
· Maximal and minimalist excommunication
· Exclusions from ritual, social activities, trade, place and space
· Political rebels
· Overlapping or contested jurisdictions
· Enforcement issues
· Excommunication at centre and periphery
· Conversion and apostasy

Scholars of Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam often study excommunication in separate silos, developing separate vocabularies and models. However, during the early Islamic period, these communities shared space and ideas. When compared, various contexts (theology, ritual, eschatology, social mores) indicate isomorphisms which suggest that different religious communities were as connected as they were divided.

Excommunication is a tool of coercion, and as such, it deserves to be studied in comparative context which might highlight the operation of intersecting power dynamics in society.

This workshop aims to move beyond the idea that acts of excommunication were purely the result of theological issues. Instead, this workshop aims to explore acts of excommunication as social and political as well as religious practice, with important implications for activities in local communities, but also for interactions with wider society and with governing authorities within the early Islamic empire.

While the theological, doctrinal and legal backdrop are important, an act of excommunication does not simply flow from the conceptual force of a doctrinal transgression, but rather it is situated within a set of overlapping fields which may include economic, institutional, familial, political, ethnic, linguistic and generational aspects. These fields, in turn, contributed to how an act of excommunication came to be interpreted and positioned within evolving systems of law, theology and doctrine.

The output of this workshop will be an open-access special issue on the topic of excommunication in and around the early Islamicate empire, to be published in Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta: The Journal of Middle East Medievalists.

Contributions to this workshop will be understood to be works in progress, with final versions to be submitted for the special issue. Please send an abstract of around 300 words to e.p.hayes@hum.leidenuniv.nl by October 1st, 2019. Pre-circulation of papers will not be necessary, but final versions of papers for publication will be requested by September 2020. If you are unable to attend the workshop, but would be interested in submitting to the special issue, please indicate this.

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Call for Papers: Mike Clover and the World of Late Antiquity

Deadline: 21 September 2019

Sponsored by the Mike Clover Memorial Consortium.

Following the untimely death of Mike Clover, a much beloved and admired scholar of Late Antiquity in general and the Vandals in particular, his students, colleagues, and friends are proposing a series of conference sessions in his honor for the Leeds International Medieval Conference, 6-9 July 2020. Given Mike’s interests, the theme for next year’s conference, “Borders,” makes this initiative even more appropriate. We would welcome submissions on the kinds of topics that Mike liked to work on, things like barbarians/Vandals, prosopography, the Historia augusta, Ammianus, hagiography, coinage, and late Roman history in general.

Submissions (title and brief abstract) can be sent to Ralph Mathisen, ralphwm@illinois.edu. The deadline for submissions in September 21. Subsequently, the wheels at the IMC will grind slow but fine, and the IMC states, “we anticipate being able to notify paper/session proposers whether their proposal has been accepted into the programme by the December prior to the IMC.”

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Call for Papers: The COMELA 2020, The Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology 2020

Deadline: 15 November 2019

Following the growth of The Global Network for Linguistic Anthropology, we announce The COMELA 2020, The Conference on Mediterranean and European Linguistic Anthropology 2020.

Purpose and Structure – Over 500 scholars globally will gather to present papers and engage in progressive discussion on the Linguistic Anthropology, Language and Society, and related fields, of The Mediterranean and Europe. The COMELA is fully Non-Profit, where all publishing with the JOMELA (its scholarly journal) is free, as the COMELA refuses to implement a pay to publish system. The COMELA sources funding/grants to assist people in impeded economic positions, who require funding to access the COMELA Conference, and display strong ability in their work. COMELA proceedings will be indexed with SCOPUS and will contribute to ranked and cited publications for all those accepted to present, as well as publishing papers in Top Tier Journal Publication Special Issues.

Location – American University of Greece, Athens, Greece
Date – September 2-5, 2020
Theme – Bounded languages … Unbounded, a theme highly pertinent to Mediterranean and European regions and countries in the current climate of transnationalism. The COMELA 2020 theme, “Bounded languages … Unbounded,” encapsulates the ongoing struggle throughout Mediterranean and European regions. The tension between demarcation and legitimization of languages, language ideologies, and language identities, is entering an era where new modes of interactivity require language communities with roles superordinate to the past. Flexible citizenship now operates within, and not only across, language communities, to unbind languages, yet to create new boundaries never seen throughout history. The COMELA 2020 invites work on shifting boundedness of Language Communities of the Mediterranean and Europe. Submissions should acknowledge and describe processes of language shape, change, and ideology, pertinent to social, cultural, and political histories and futures, of Mediterranean and European regions, or work by those working in Mediterranean and European regions.

Keynote and Plenary Speakers – Jan Blommaert and other prominent Keynote Speakers

Official Partners
• Taylor and Francis Global Publishers (Official Partners)
• SOAS, University of London
• University College London
• Over 120 academic institutions globally (University of Hawai’i, Temple University, University of Illinois University, Montclair State University, Ohio State University, University College Dublin, Stockholm University, and so forth)
• Scientific Committee of over 120 academics globally prominent in Linguistic Anthropology and related fields

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS OPENS – June 1, 2019
Publications – Several Special (Top-Tier/Scopus/ISI/ACHI/SSCI) Journal issues and monographs are planned with well ranked publications and publishers only, from papers submitted to the COMELA 2020 that meet review requirements. Ample assistance is provided to revise papers.
Abstract Submissions – The Call for Abstracts is now open, at the following link, with all information. https://comela2020.acg.edu
Anthropological Excursion – Attica, Greece (final day) – Several options to select from.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecomela
Twitters: https://twitter.com/The_COMELA

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Call for Papers: IMC 2020

University of Leeds, 6-9 July 2020

Deadline: 31 August 2019 (papers), 30 September 2020 (sessions)

The International Medieval Congress (IMC) provides an interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of all aspects of Medieval Studies. Papers and session proposals on any topic related to the Middle Ages are welcome, and each year the IMC also chooses a special thematic focus. In 2020 this is ‘Borders’.

For further information, see https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/medieval/news/article/1339/call-for-papers-imc-2020.

Please note that the SPBS offers a grant to support a Byzantine-themed panel at the IMC. The deadline for applications for SPBS sponsorship is 1 September 2019.

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Call for Papers: Crusading Encounters

SSCLE 9th International Conference, Royal Holloway, University of London, 29 June-3 July 2020

Deadline: 1 November 2019

The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East is pleased to announce its 9th International Conference, Crusading Encounters, at Royal Holloway, University of London, 29 June – 3 July 2020.

​Applications for sessions of three 20-minute papers each on the theme ‘Crusading Encounters’, or for individual papers, are welcome. Themes could include, but are not limited to:

• Interactions (real or imagined) between crusaders and indigenous peoples
• Crusading archaeology
• Impact of crusading on the environment or natural world
• Intellectual influences of crusading on medicine, science, culture, language/literature
• Intermarriage, travel and/or communication between peoples, borders, languages
• Encounters with the crusading past

Please note that there will be a maximum of three sessions in any one strand.​

All applications for sessions and papers must be received at sscle2020@gmail.com by 1 November 2019.

For further details, see https://www.sscle2020.com/