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Nonhuman Forms of Thought (Sponsored Paper Session)

53rd International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan

May 10-13, 2018

In critiquing the efforts of new materialists (Bennett, Coole and Frost, and others) to develop a concept of agency that accounts for the emergent properties of matter, Hannes Bergthaller argues that the preoccupation with blurring boundaries between human and nonhuman matter has made it difficult to draw legitimate and necessary distinctions between subjects in the world. The danger, for Bergthaller, is a kind of ethico-fatalist surrender to the contingency of matter that leaves us with no reason to preserve any species, even human beings. Bergthaller thus proposes autopoiesis — the concept of a self-limiting and self-organizing system, borrowed from biology — as a solution to the problem of limitless materiality.

Call for Papers

The Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Student Association of the Ohio State University Annual Conference

Special Colloquium Topic: "Something Sexy: Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction"

Date: Saturday, 28 October 2017

Abstracts due: 1 October 2017

UPDATE: Call for Panel proposals for the 32nd European Association for American Studies and 63rd British Association for American Studies Conference

4 – 7 April 2018, King’s College London, University College London, and the British Library

Panel Title:

“Fictional Representations of North American Ideological Environment/ Space

and Place Divisions”

The distance between human and non-human across medieval culture could be populated by a plethora of hybrid beings whose identity lingered between the two categories, creating a space of indeterminacy, of life in-between species. Humanoid monsters with animal features, or animals with disturbing resemblances to humans, traced a constellation of possibilities of life in the continuum. Wherever these monsters appeared in art, literature and science, the possibility for the human body to merge with the animal brought along reflections concerning ethnic identity, cultural norms, relation with the environment, social and political order.