"Dissent and Dissonance"

North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Duke University

Friday-Saturday, February 16-17, 2007

The Eighth Annual North Carolina Colloquium in Medieval and Early Modern
Studies will be held at Duke University on February 16-17, 2007. This
year's graduate student colloquium encourages interdisciplinary
discussion of our topic, "Dissent and Dissonance," among scholars of the
Middle Ages and early modernity. We will convene to explore the contours
of resistance to religious, political, cultural, aesthetic, and
institutional traditions and discourses in premodern or early modern
contexts, negotiating the very terms of order and dissent. We solicit
papers that interpret resistance not by reducing analysis to
all-encompassing categories of "orthodox" and "heterodox," but by
considering the varieties and gradations of dissent and discord
available to medieval and early modern traditions and institutions.

Paper topics might address, but are not limited to, the following:

-What constitutes an establishment or an institution? Are these active,
static or otherwise?

-What constitutes orthodoxy? What is its relationship to dissent? How do
these terms influence one another in medieval and early modern contexts?

-Does order/orthodoxy ever (or always) bear the traces of dissent?

-How do the very terms "dissent" and "orthodoxy" naturalize particular
cultural, political or periodic understandings of regimes of order and
disorder?

-How might we think about the performance of dissent in architecture,
images, mode of dress, actions, language, or social/political practice?

-How does dissonance relate to the impetus to revision (aesthetic and
musical revisions of harmonics/harmony; social and/or political revision
proceeding from discord)?

Please submit paper proposals (250 words max) with full name and
institution to medren_at_duke.edu by December 1, 2006.

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Received on Fri Nov 10 2006 - 18:42:46 EST