For the Tenth Biennial Blackfriars Conference, colloquies will take one of three formats: Research Paper Discussion, Actor Facilitated Exploration, and Round Table Discussion. All colloquies are 75-minute sessions. This new format paves the way for focused, research-driven exploration and discussion of Early Modern theatre practice and academia.

RESEARCH PAPER DISCUSSION:

Organizers: Nathaniel Mills (mills175@umn.edu), Konstantina Karageorgos (konstantina.karageorgos@oneonta.edu). Submit paper proposals at acla.org (portal for submissions opens 8/30)

Hair as a source of a serious study and research is often trivialized and overlooked. The Foreword to the volume entitled Hair: Styling, Culture and Fashion (2008) expresses the idea that “hair [has] exciting and diverse potential as an academic topic […], so critical analysis of its practice and experience provides a fascinating and engaging entry point to contemporary debates around the body and its fashioning” (ix).  It calls for “a serious approach” to hair, as “a subject area richly deserving of new research” (ix).  Indeed, hair is an exciting field of research that recently, mostly due to the rise of fashion and hairstyles of African diaspora, has started to get more recognition.

 UPDATE:

We have extended the due date for abstracts, please submit your abstract by OCT 15. Accepted full-length papers will be due June 1, 2019.

Special Issue on Queer African Screen Media for Journal of African Cultural Studies 

This session at the 2019 International Congress on Medieval Studies examines the many valences of wounds in late medieval Christianity, focusing on themes surrounding wounds and wounding both visible (corporeal and/or material) and invisible (rhetorical and allegorical). The image of the wounded body held a central place in late medieval Christian practice and material culture; the wounds of the crucified Christ were tangible reminders of his Passion and served as foci of veneration, while stigmatic saints and maimed martyrs were marked as holy by means of bodily trauma.