theory

FINAL CALL for papers: 1 spot remaining

This panel interrogates the title “The Uncanny and Sublime: The Liminality of Knowledge” by asking: what constitutes knowledge when it emerges from thresholds—moments of affect, disorientation, or aesthetic rupture? How does the liminal “unknowing” of the uncanny and sublime inform new modes of intellectual inquiry? Does this liminality reorient traditional ways of thought?

“And away above all with the body, that idée fixe of the senses!” Nietzsche has philosophy proclaim. For it is “infected with every error of logic there is, refuted, impossible even,” and “impudent enough to behave as if it actually existed.” The body has long been one of philosophy’s more persistent preoccupations as it’s impossible to define without distortion yet impossible to fully discard. From Plato’s call to transcend the body in search of truth to Descartes’ relegation of the body to mere extension, philosophy has long sought to escape or sanitize embodiment. Even phenomenology, which counters the Cartesian account, privileges the lived body of perception over the objective, material body and its historical conditions.

CERÆ: An Australasian Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

invites submissions for hybrid panels at the Leeds International Medieval Conference 2026 (July 6-9) on the theme of

Premodern Timeliness and Timelessness

Time is a construct with notoriously blurry definitions and boundaries. The artificiality of time can evoke anything from comforting nostalgia to worrying anachronism. Ceræ invites papers that deal with the unfocused and unreal aspects of premodern temporality, including but not limited to:

Rob Nixon describes, ‘slow violence’, as “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space”, one “that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). This seminal work raised the critical question of the strategic difficulties of representing the impact of such violence, especially as it crossed national, ethnic, cultural, linguistic and even gendered borders.  

Beside You in the C19:

Elizabeth Freeman’s Legacies

The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Biennial Conference

March 12-14, 2026, Cincinnati, OH