Manuscripts and Premodern Performance: Reassessing the Evidence

Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society

Leeds International Medieval Congress

July 3-6, 2023

The relationship between manuscript and performance in medieval drama has long been a subject of debate. Do extant premodern play texts bear witness to actual or idealized performances? What function did early drama manuscripts serve? What role should drama manuscripts play in determining our understanding of the world of medieval performance?

With the turn towards extractivism and energy as objects for critical inquiry, minerals and fossil fuels have become crucial additions to categories of cultural, political, and materialist analyses. The international workshop Archives of the Planetary Mine will explore the intersections between culture, materiality, politics, energy consumption, and extractivism across the Americas, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its purpose is to address the geohistorical magnitudes of energy consumption and critical engagements with the logic of extraction as a condition of possibility for cultural production.

In his seminal work, Poetics of Relation (1990), Édouard Glissant posited the term “commonplace” as a means to rethink the role of genre in a transatlantic frame. Taking as its object the "flood of convergences, publishing itself in the guise of the commonplace,” this formulation complicates any attempt to read genre as a closed system of inherited traits. Rather, the notion of the commonplace draws our attention to the unspoken norms that sustain literary communities across time and space. Positive in Glissant’s account, commonplaces have also worked to police the boundaries of what counts as literature and who is counted within its canons of literary value.

Is the UK a country of immigration? British immigration historian Panikos Panayi says yes. Although its history and founding are not comparable to that of the United States, which is synonymous with the history of immigration, the history of Britain is also not unrelated to immigration. On the contrary, for the past 200 years, immigration has been a major driving force in history, leading to significant changes in British society. In the context of the dissolution of the British Empire and the decline of the British economy after World War II, Englishness has emerged as a public concern by British people who ask themselves, “What is British?” or “What is English?”.

Resilience and Resistance: Embracing Disability Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Fiction proposes a space for scholars to present research on disability studies and narrative agency in British fiction from the period. Disability studies is concerned with altering the contemporary political landscape to procure protections for disabled individuals and communities, question structures which uphold barriers to equal access, and challenge ideologies of ability that affirm ableist notions of social participation. Disability studies also challenges individuals and scholars to analyze the historical, literary, medical, and social understandings of disability to dismantle ableist structures.

Call for Papers
Historical Fictions Research Network Online Conference
(17 to 19 February 2023, Zoom)

The Historical Fictions Research Network (see https://historicalfictionsresearch.org/) aims to create a place for the discussion of all aspects of the construction of the historical narrative. The focus of the conference is the way we construct history, the narratives and fictions people assemble and how. We welcome both academic and practitioner presentations.

This panel invites interdisciplinary proposals that bring to attention the multiple, contradictory, and shifting approaches that encompass the studies of the Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region. The overarching aim of this panel is to shed light on the theoretical and political significance of intersectionality for critical engagement with the SWANA region. We invite contributions examining how the relationalities of bodies, cultures, and cultural productions in the SWANA region and its diasporas shape discourses across nations, re(li)gions, and languages as they converge and diverge in their religious, racial, ethnic, and gender*sexuality-based identities.

Call for Papers: “Cognition, Stigma, and Inclusivity,” a Special Issue of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind

Eds. Wyatt Moss-Wellington, Margrethe Bruun Vaage, and Catalin Brylla

Deadline for abstract submissions: 15 November 2022

58th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, May 11-13, 2023

This panel invites contributors to present projects integrating the digital humanities with medieval environmental history research.

Inspired by the upcoming publication Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities, we are eager to hear from our colleagues about the digital methods and tools they use to “observe, interpret, and manage nature” in the pre-modern space.

This panel seeks to explore the various way in which the medieval body is reproduced within medieval culture and later imaginings of the ‘medieval.’ We interpret the term ‘body’ broadly as spanning from bodies within literature or art, to manuscripts as products of bodies, and thematic or generic bodies of work.

[sic] – a journal of literature, culture and literary translation invites submissions for the upcoming 26th issue. We accept:

• original research papers: 5,000 to 7,000 words including references and footnotes
• reviews: up to 2,000 words
• translations of literary texts: 5,000 to 7,000 words

The New Americanist welcomes submissions to their upcoming issue which relates to American studies in any manner, and uses literary or cultural materials or activities as its points of reference. We especially welcome submissions by independent researchers, doctoral students, and early career academics.

Dear all,

Authentic, scholarly, and unpublished chapters are invited from academician for publication in a book on Issues in Popular and Children’s Literature. The book will be published with an ISBN. Authors are requested to strictly follow the submission guidelines. Contributors can submit in the areas of drama, prose, poetry, fictional and non-fictional work of art broadly based on the works and writers from Children’s Literature.

We would charge no publication fee. The soft copy of the printed book shall be sent to the contributors after publication. They can buy the book from the publisher at discounted price if they want in hard copy.

PopCRN (UNE’s Popular Culture Research Network) hosting a virtual symposium exploring uniforms in popular culture to be held online on Thursday 20th April 2023.

This symposium aims to interrogate the ways that uniforms are used to in popular culture. We invite papers which examine uniforms of every type, from the formal to the informal, from military to sports and school uniforms. We welcome papers from researchers across the academic spectrum and encourage papers from postgraduate researchers and early career researchers. Presenters will have the opportunity to publish a refereed journal articles in a special symposium edition of Clothing Cultures.

Topics can include, but are not restricted to: