Animals, Animalities, and Ecocriticisms in Hagiography 

Modality: Hybrid 

Sponsor: Hagiography Society, Medieval Ecocriticisms 

Organizers: Julia Salkind (julia.salkind@marquette.edu) Grace K. DiModugno (gd69@fordham.edu) 

Hagiography frequently focuses on its human subjects, yet more could be said about the natural world which lies beyond the human. Such analyses of the natural world are increasingly a concern in our modern world and exploring the intersections between our planet and saints opens the way to larger ecological discussions. This session invites paper proposals which explore the natural world from flora to stones, to animals and animalities, and other sects of the natural world living in hagiography, connecting these discussions to larger concerns pertaining to our natural world and its divinity today.

Eco Approaches to Medieval Trans Studies

Modality: In-Person

Sponsor: Society for Queer Medieval Studies (SQMS), Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Johanna W. Alden (aldenja@bc.edu)

Increasingly, the interdisciplinary field of trans studies is engaged in ecocritical analyses, and also in questions of what it means to study premodern transness in the medieval past. This panel welcomes papers that sit at the intersection of such inquiries. How can we better understand the entanglement of trans lives and trans bodies in relation to their environmental context? What does it mean to think ecocritically about premodern trans subjects and trans epistemologies? This panel will showcase research that utilizes ecocritical approaches to trans medieval studies, including approaches thinking through questions of posthumanism, tranimality, the blue humanities, or ecotheologies.

Eco-Crafting: Material and Experience (A Roundtable)

Modality: Hybrid

Sponsor: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Ilse A. Schweitzer (schwei53@msu.edu), Coral Lumbley (clumbley@macalester.edu)

Medieval Ecocriticisms invites proposals for the roundtable Eco-crafting: Material and Experience. Participants are invited to give 5-minute presentations on their personal experiences in crafting with materials also used by medieval artisans. Participants should highlight one object (or, better, bring the object or component materials) to support their discussion of how working with the physical material supports new perspectives on a particular medieval object or artisanal tradition. Ultimately, the roundtable's goal is to illuminate how crafting connects our medieval scholarship to the natural ecological world. Crafts might include glassmaking, ceramics, natural dying, fiber and textile work, papermaking, leatherwork, and ink-making.

New Voices in Medieval Ecocriticism

Modality: In-Person

Sponsor: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Asher Courtemanche (ac2457@cornell.edu), Ryan A. M. Randle (rar348@cornell.edu)

The Society of Medieval Ecocriticisms (SMECO) invites proposals for papers by emerging scholars in ecocriticism. Presenters for ‘New Voices’ include graduate students, early career scholars, and other scholars newly engaging with ecocritical studies. Paper proposals on any topic relating to environment or environmental history, animal studies, place-based studies, landscape studies, trans/queer ecologies, critical Indigenous studies, and/or engaging with methods or approaches rooted in ecocriticism are all welcomed.

Rethinking Ecotheory (1): Disentangling Medieval Ecocriticism

Modality: Hybrid

Sponsor: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Hunter Allen Phillips (hap48@cornell.edu), Basil Arnould Price (Basil.Price@oneonta.edu)

This series of sessions questions ‘entanglement’ as the predominant idiom of ecocritical thinking, arguing that the medieval past both yields and necessitates alternative ways of thinking about our ecological investments, both affective and ontological. How can ecocritical discourse benefit from attuning to bodies and environments in the Middle Ages for whom entanglement is either a problem or an impossibility? We welcome papers that “rethink nature as a limit” (Swarbrick & Tremblay, 2024), considering how the natural world or “Nature” in the Middle Ages makes demands on precarious bodies in a precarious world where uncomfortable boundaries trouble or refuse entangled thinking.

Rethinking Ecotheory (2): Disappointing Medieval Ecocriticisms

Modality: In-Person

Sponsor: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Hunter Allen Phillips (hap48@cornell.edu), Basil Arnould Price (Basil.Price@oneonta.edu)

This series of sessions questions ‘entanglement’ as the predominant idiom of ecocritical thinking, arguing that the medieval past both yields and necessitates alternative ways of thinking about our ecological investments, both affective and ontological. In this session, we invite papers which grapple with the disappointing, dissatisfying, and disconcerting relationalities embedded within medieval ecological imaginaries or practices, or the ways in which the premodern past eludes our desire for eco-motional rescue. We welcome papers from any area of medieval studies that explore the bad feelings that attend medieval relations with the environment, and problematize contemporary theorisations of a harmonious, reciprocal mesh.

The Weird and the Horrific: Eco-Horror and the Eco-Weird

Modality: In-Person

Sponsor: Medieval Ecocriticisms

Organizer: Brooke H. Findley (bhf2@psu.edu)

Environmental thought as it intersects with weirdness, horror, wonder, and alterity. Proposals might engage with the uncanny, the eerie, the horrific, hauntings and the ecology of haunted places, wonder and horror as responses to the natural world, environments that create a sense of "wrongness" or weirdness, the alterity of the natural world, environmental crisis as a “weirding” of the natural world, the weird gap between the human and non-human, alienation as a response to the natural world, ecological terror, and more.