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Clare Wilson, History

Occitania, troubadours, crusades

Event Honoring Gordon Whatley – Nov. 21

On November 21, 2014, starting at 3 p.m., the Ph.D. Program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center will host an event honoring Gordon Whatley on the occasion of his retirement.

At 3 p.m., students and colleagues will speak about Gordon’s work at CUNY, and at 4 p.m., there will be a lecture:

Robert Upchurch, University of North Texas
“An Anglo-Saxon Bishop and his Book: Liturgical Performance as Pastoral Care in the Wake of the Norman Conquest.”

The talk tells a story of Bishop Leofric of Exeter and a book of pastoral materials he used to navigate the regime change of 1066. Both book and bishop weathered the Norman Conquest, and I suggest the former aided the latter in doing so. As spiritual head of a city that found itself in a precarious political position in the wake of William’s victory, Leofric put to practical use a set of episcopal rites for public penance that had been earlier compiled for study. The bishop’s performances of highly-orchestrated, dramatic Ash Wednesday and Maundy Thursday services helped him to mend the frayed social fabric of his city and to shepherd a motley flock through the aftermath of extraordinarily tumultuous times.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

The event will take place at the CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, in room 4406 (English Program).

ICMS (Kalamazoo) 2015 Call for Papers: “Medieval Celebrations”

ICMS 2015 Panel

Medieval Celebrations

The people of the medieval world found plenty of reasons to celebrate and many ways to do so. They celebrated the seasons and the passage of time. They celebrated the life and resurrection of Christ and His host of saints. They celebrated kings and fools. They celebrated with formal ritual and with chaotic debauchery. This panel aims to identify the many forms of medieval celebration. Topics for presentations include but are not limited to:

•    Festivals, feasts, and food
•    Holy days and saints days
•    Forms of ritual
•    The Mass
•    Coronation
•    Baptisms, weddings, and funerals
•    Entertainment and performance
•    Agriculture and pagan vestiges
•    Markets
•    Mockery and foolery

Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words by September 15, 2014.
Include your name and affiliation.
Papers must be 15-20 minutes in length.
Submissions should be emailed to medievalstudy@gmail.com

Call for Papers: “Persecution, Punishment and Purgatory in the Long Middle Ages”

10th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference

CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
November 7, 2014

Persecution, Punishment and Purgatory in the Long Middle Ages

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, the CUNY Graduate Center’s student-run organization for medieval studies, announces its tenth annual Graduate Student Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center on Friday, November 7, 2014. This year’s theme, Persecution, Punishment and Purgatory, is designed to address a number of methodological, historical, and theoretical issues within the diverse fields of medieval studies ranging from late antiquity to the early modern period. We invite grad students to submit proposals.

Submit a 300-word abstract by September 5th to medieval.study@gmail.com

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

  • Origins and uses of persecution
  • The result of religious and ethnic pogroms
  • Forced conversions and expulsions
  • Persecution as a method of socio-cultural nation and identity formation
  • The character of legal and extra-legal punishment,
  • Punishment as a form of discipline
  • Self-inflicted punishment
  • The role of punishment in the family
  • The variations of punishment based on class, status, and gender
  • Punishment as social control
  • Concepts of the afterlife
  • The relationship between sin/punishment and the afterlife
  • Liminal spaces
  • Peripheries

Medieval Congress (K’zoo) Run Through

Salutations, medievalist friends!

We are planning a run-through for anyone that is giving a paper at Kalamazoo (or anywhere, really). We are meeting in the medieval study (room 5105) on Friday, May 2, at 4:00pm. At 4:45, we will hold an official group meeting. Following the meeting, everyone is welcome to stay for pizza and a medieval-themed movie!

We hope to see you there!

SYMPOSIUM To commemorate the retirement of DAVID GREETHAM

SYMPOSIUM
To commemorate the retirement of DAVID GREETHAM
from the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center.

FRIDAY APRIL 11
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, ROOM 4406
CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, New York, NY 10016

Schedule of Events
12:00: Welcome: Carrie Hintz, Deputy Executive Officer; Master of Ceremonies: Ammiel Alcalay, Deputy Executive Officer.

12:15: Textual Workshop, Thesis Room, 4th Floor: Randall McLeod, University of Toronto: “Fiatflux”
A light lunch will be served. Limited to 15 participants: RSVP to david.greetham@gmail.com.

Opening Poem: Joyce Ashuntantang (University of Hartford)

1:30-3:30: Panel Discussion: Autopsies: The Textual Body after David Greetham
Marta Werner, Moderator (D’Youville College)
Panelists: Emily Lauer (Suffolk County Community College). “Judge a Book by its Cover: Textual Scholarship of Pop Culture.”
Katherine D. Harris (San José State University), “Marking the Body, Marking the Text: David Greetham’s ‘Archive Fever’ ”
Jeffrey Drouin, (University of Tulsa), “Iconoclastic Textuality: The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive”
Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland), “.txtual Forensics”

3:30-4:00: Open session for comments, embarrassing recollections, brickbats, etc.

4:00-5:30: Friday Forum Lecture(s): Randall McLeod, “It’s Greek to David: Two Demi-Talks”

Closing Poem: Joyce Ashuntantang.

6:00—on: Post-symposium Party in Thurgood Marshall events room at 80 LaSalle Street, Morningside Gardens: No. 1 train to 125 Street. RSVP to rberson@gmail.com.

This event is not organized by the PKMS, but so many of us have been influenced by Professor Greetham that it is important we show our appreciation. (Remember how he moderated our roundtable last fall..?)

More Medieval Studies Events

Annual IUDC Graduate Student Colloquium
The Annual Graduate Student Medieval New York Colloquium
SUNY Stony Brook Manhattan Campus
Friday, March 14, 2014 – 9:30 – 4:30
http://medren.columbia.edu/events/annual-iudc-colloquium/

The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading  Mediterranean
34th Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval Studies
Fordham University, Lincoln Center Campus
Saturday, March 29-30, 2014
http://www.fordham.edu/mvst/conference14/
http://www.fordham.edu/academics/programs_at_fordham_/medieval_studies/french_of_outremer/

Medieval Congress
The 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies
Western Michigan University
May 8-11, 2014
http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/

Medieval Celebrations — Ninth Annual PKMS Interdisciplinary Student Conference

Friday, February 28: 10:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
CUNY Graduate Center, room 9207

10:30    Registration
11:00    Panel 1:
              “The Uses of Rhetoric, Ritual and Wood in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale” Jason Hoelzel (Brooklyn College)
              “Medieval Festivals” Margaret Stella (University of Virginia)
12:00    Lunch Break
1:00      Roundtable: Medieval Celebrations
              Richard Gyug (Fordham University, History)
              Francesca Sautman (Graduate Center & Hunter College, French)
              Maureen Tilley (Fordham University, Theology)
2:30      Panel 2:
              “Aelred of Rievaulx and the Legitimizing Role of the Sacraments” Chad Turner (Graduate Center-CUNY)
              “The Via Sacra as venue of negotiated power in Rome” Chris Petitt (Graduate Center-CUNY)
3:30      Reception

The Ninth Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Interdisciplinary Student Conference
with the generous support of the Doctoral Students Council, Henri Peyre French Institute, Medieval Studies Certificate Program, and History, English, Music, Art History, Philosophy, and Theatre departments.

Boccaccio’s 700th Birthday Party

Greetings, friends of the medieval and early modern eras!

2013 is the 700th birthday of our boy Giovanni Boccaccio, and before the year is out, we’d would like to throw him a party.
The party will be co-chosted by the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study and the Early Modern Interdisciplinary Group.

Monday, December 16 (reading day)
5:00 pm
GC, room 5414

The party is potluck. We encourage you to try a period or themed recipe, but that is not at all required. (If everyone brought an authentic dish, we might end up with another evening of six pies and three versions of carrots.) Check out www.godecookery.com for ideas.

If you know what you might bring, please comment below. If you plan to come but don’t know what you might bring, comment below.

We hope you can join us in celebrating the birthday of a famous plague survivor. Oh, and author, poet, and humanist.

New Directions in Medieval Scholarship – Roundtable

Friday, November 15, 3:00pm
CUNY Graduate Center, room 5409

New Directions in Medieval Scholarship
Fifth Annual Roundtable
Pearl Kibre Medieval Study

Moderator: David Greetham, Graduate Center, English

  • Lauren Mancia, Brooklyn College, History
    “Affective Devotion as Emotional Reform in the Eleventh-Century Benedictine Monastery”
  • William McClellan, Baruch College, English
    A reading of the Clerk’s Tale and the Man of Law’s Tale using Al Shoaf’s “reading history-as-ethical-meditation”
  • Katharine Goodland, College of Staten Island, English
    “Medieval Drama in Black and White”

Following the presentations, all are encouraged to engage in open discussion regarding current trends in medieval studies.

Guest Speaker: Jocelyn Wogan-Browne

Friday, November 8, 2013 – 3:00 pm
Graduate Center, CUNY – room 5409

Utility French and the Making of English Literate Culture

In recent years, historical socio-linguistics and attention to manuscript culture have broadened our approach to ‘literary history,’  and re-contexualised our post-medieval term, ‘literature’.  These perspectives help to bring into view a broader spectrum of medieval writings and to trouble boundaries between the literary and the documentary.  This paper will explore the new rush to textuality, to writing down disciplinary, occupational, and technical knowledge in treatises, compilations, and encyclopaedias across the thirteenth century in England.   Literary scholars have tended to focus study of utilitarian writing, as also of bureaucratic and documentary cultures, on Anglophone writings in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but these texts form only one strand of a more complicated multilingual story.

Jocelyn Wogan-Browne,
Thomas F. X. and Teresa Mullarkey Chair of Literature,
English Department,
Fordham University

Call for Papers: Medieval Celebrations

9th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
February 28, 2014

“Medieval Celebrations”

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, CUNY Graduate Center’s student-run organization for medieval studies, is hosting their ninth annual graduate student conference: Medieval Celebrations. We invite grad students to submit proposals about celebrations of all kinds.

Topics for presentations include but are not limited to:
·       Festivals, feasts, and food
·       Holy days and saints days
·       Forms of ritual
·       The Mass
·       Coronation
·       Baptisms, weddings, and funerals
·       Entertainment and performance
·       Agriculture and pagan vestiges
·       Markets
·       Mockery and foolery

We also invite grad student performers of medieval music or dramatic arts to submit proposals for short performances (up to 30 minutes; please include estimation of time).

Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words by Nov. 30 Dec. 13, 2013.
Include your name and affiliation.
Papers must be 15-20 minutes in length, and performances no more than 30 minutes.
Submissions should be emailed to medievalstudy@gmail.com

Call for Papers: Medieval Congress 2014

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study is currently accepting abstracts for its panel at the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (May 8 – 11, 2014) titled: “New Media and the Medieval Ages.”

The field of medieval studies has a relatively long and recognized history of scholarship assisted by technology. One of the first to merge new advances in technology with humanities scholarship was a medievalist, Fr. Roberto Busa, who in the 1940s conceived and developed the Index Thomisticus—a tool for performing text searches within the massive corpus of Aquinas’s works—in collaboration with IBM. Today dozens of digital resources are available for the medievalist: online collections of digitized manuscript images, full-text databases, online scholarly editions, and tens of thousands of books and journals.  One of the more recent and popular trends amongst medievalists in new media technology is the transformation of widely conceived medieval texts and data into new forms of media and technology. Projects such as Piers Plowman Electronic Archive and the Mapping Medieval Chester project exemplify only a few of the innovative applications of new media to our study of the medieval world.

Shared amongst these projects’ use of digital tools is an emphasis on remediation, taking data in one form and transforming and transposing it into another form of usable media. Additionally, through a greater focus on developments in contemporary technology, or as result of its proliferation, scholars and researchers have also become more attuned to the use, development, and creation of medieval technologies in the contexts of the written word, manuscripts, works of art, music, architecture, warfare, urban planning, and others.  The panel “New Media and the Middle Ages” aims at addressing some of the key concepts, questions, and methodologies concerning the convergences between developments in both new and old technologies and our study of the medieval past. Papers might address such questions as:  What insights might digital humanities allow in our study of medieval texts, architecture, music, manuscripts, and art?  What kinds of multimedia objects or events existed in the medieval period, and how might we as modern scholars still have access to them? What are the consequences of considering medieval manuscripts, texts, and works of art as multimedia works?

Other topics for presentations include:

  • Translation and dictionary projects
  • Digital projects in the visual and performance arts
  • Encoding of medieval manuscripts and printed texts
  • Management and preservation of digital resources
  • The cultural impact of the new media
  • The role of digital humanities in academic curricula
  • Funding and sustainability of long-term projects

Please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words by September 15, 2013.
Include your name and affiliation.
Papers must be 15-20 minutes in length.
Submissions should be emailed to medievalstudy@gmail.com along with a completed participant information form (found at http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html)

Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, Medieval Studies Certificate Program
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY

Symposium: Christ Among the Medieval Mendicants

Friday August 23, 2013
8:30am-6:30pm

We would like to invite everyone to a symposium at the Graduate Center on August 23, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Corpus Christi as a feast day and in conjunction with the Morgan Library’s exhibit “Illuminating the Faith”
www.eventbrite.com/event/7450226829

8th Annual PKMS Conference: “New Media and the Middle Ages”

med_modFriday, March 1
10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Room 9205
Graduate Center, CUNY
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, 10016

8th Annual PKMS Conference
“New Media and the Middle Ages”

10:00 Registration

10:30 Panel 1: Sacred Technologies: Media and Memory
Moderator: Debra Hilborn, Graduate Center, CUNY

“Office Prayer as Technology-use”
Paul Holchak, English Program, Graduate Center, CUNY
Abstract

“A Multimedia Devotional Panel and the Journey from the Material to the Immaterial”
Sarah Dillon, Assistant Professor, Kingsborough Community College
Abstract

11:45 Panel 2: Digital Exploration: Mapping and Data Mining”
Moderator: David Heayn, Graduate Center, CUNY

“Exploratory Analysis of Arabic Biographical Collections: the case of al-Dhahabi’s (d. 1347 CE) ‘History of Islam'”
Maxim Romanov, PhD Candidate in Arabic and Islamic Studies, University of Michigan
50 Seconds of Islamic History
Abstract

“The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle Map: Google Earth and 1,000-year-old Texts”
Rebecca Shores, University of North Carolina
Abstract

12:45 Lunch Break

1:45 Keynote: “Virtual Mappa, or History Lessons in New Media”
Martin Foys, Associate Professor of English, Drew University; Co-director of the Digital Mappaemundi Project

3:00 Panel 3: Digital Humanities at Work: Current Projects
Moderator: Chase Robinson, Provost, Graduate Center, CUNY

“Mapping a Medieval Career: Jean Gerson, Joan of Arc and the Power of Data Visualization”
Miriam Ward, SUNY New Paltz
Abstract

“Documenting Cappadocia: Building a Community through Digital Scholarship”
Alice Lynn McMichael, Art History, Graduate Center, CUNY
Documenting Cappadocia

4:00 Reception

The Eighth Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Interdisciplinary Student Conference
with the generous support of the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives, Medieval Studies Certificate Program, Doctoral Students Council, and Art History, History, English, Music, and Theatre departments.

Dec. 7, Film Screening: “Restless Heart: The Confessions of Augustine”

Please join us for a screening of the 2010 film “Restless Heart: The Confessions of Augustine,” on Friday, December 7, 2012 at 3:30 pm in the Segel Theater of the Graduate Center, CUNY.* After the film, Marcia Colish (Yale University) will be the respondent. Seating is limited, so we recommend that you RSVP to medievalstudy@gmail.com. Discussion to follow.

Filmed in Europe, RESTLESS HEART is the first full-length feature movie on St. Augustine. Born in North Africa, Augustine studied in Carthage, becoming an accomplished but dissolute orator. After converting to Manichaeism, a guilt-free religion, he was called to the imperial court in Milan to serve as an opponent to the Christian Bishop Ambrose. But when the Empress Justina sent imperial guards to clear out a basilica where Augustine’s mother, Monica, was worshipping, her constant prayers and the witness of Ambrose won him over to Christianity. Serving in Hippo in 430 AD, Bishop Augustine urged the Roman garrison to negotiate with the Vandal King Genseric, but they proudly refused. He passed up a chance to escape on a ship sent to rescue him by the Pope, and stayed by the side of his people. Christian Duguay directed the film, and the cast includes Franco Nero, Johannes Brandrup, Monica Guerritore and Alessandro Preziosi.

*The Graduate Center is located at 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY. The Segal Theatre is on the first floor.

This event is sponsored by the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study.

Medieval Holiday Feast – Dec. 2, 2pm

The feast season is at hand, and the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study intends to celebrate like it’s 1099!

Our Medieval Feast with be Sunday, Dec. 2 at 2pm here at the GC in room 5414.
Because this is a weekend event, be sure to bring your ID. (And if you bring a guest, have them bring a valid ID as well.)

We have traditional carols to sing, and all can participate in a “dramatic” reading of the Chester cycle nativity play.

The feast is a potluck, and we encourage (but do not require) feasters to bring medieval-inspired food. Gode Cookery has a vast collection of recipes in translation:
http://www.godecookery.com/mtrans/mtrans.htm

Comment here if you know what type of food you plan to bring, so that we can ensure our food groups are covered. (Even if you don’t RSVP, we want you come anyway.) We genuinely hope you will join us!