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PKMS 2020 Conference CFP: Working Through and Beyond the “Global Turn” in Medieval Studies

January 5, 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS
Working Through and Beyond the “Global Turn” in Medieval Studies
The 15th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference
 
Date: May 1, 2020
Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY
Keynote Speaker: Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
 

The 15th Pearl Kibre Medieval Study annual conference will consider the field of medieval studies beyond Eurocentrism and other tacit cultural, geographical, and temporal assumptions on the study of the Middle Ages, inviting scholars to engage in the “global turn” in medieval studies. The field of medieval studies suffers internally and externally from an image of narrowed focus; the perception that the field preoccupies itself solely on one culture, language, race, or religion. In recent decades, medieval scholars have sought to work against this perception and move beyond geographic, national, disciplinary, linguistic boundaries; pulling from multiple sources across a wide variety of languages, literatures, artifacts, and cultures to enrich their academic interrogations. Along with striving to include more diverse primary material, the field has also seen an increase in the variety of theoretical apparatus applied to the Middle Ages, such as critical race theory and post-colonial studies. The result of these efforts is the reshaping of ideas concerning the Middle Ages, no longer as a secluded and homogeneous time between Antiquity and the Renaissance, but a period of global cultural production in conversation with its predecessors and successors.

The 2020 PKMS conference will embrace this “global turn” in medieval studies, expanding upon the ongoing conversations concerning the insular perception of the Middle Ages and the constant struggles to escape the geopolitical and disciplinary confines of our field. We invite papers that take ‘global’ approaches to the studies in the Middle Ages, geographically, methodologically, and/or pedagogically. We also particularly welcome papers that reassess the geographical and temporal confines of medieval studies as a discipline. We invite proposals for intersectional and/or interdisciplinary papers in medieval studies from all disciplines, regions, languages, methodologies, theoretical approaches, etc. We also welcome proposals for papers on the practical aspects, challenges, and benefits of interdisciplinary and intersectional work in medieval studies.

Submit 250-word abstracts to medieval.study@gmail.com by January 31, 2020.

Potential topics include, but not limited to:

Geography, Nations and Borders in and about the “Global Middle Ages”

  • Studies in early globalization
  • Merits (and vice versa) of studies in the Global Middle Ages
  • Decentering Europe in the study of the Middle Ages
  • Disrupting the notion of Translatio Imperii
  • The exclusion of figures within limited national boundaries
  • The relationship (power dynamic) between the Western and Eastern Middle Ages.
  • The exclusion of the African Middle Ages in mainstream medievalism

Historicity and Historical Narratives in and about the “Global Middle Ages”

  • Global inheritance of medieval thought
  • Re-classifying temporal categorization (the Middle Ages, but in the middle of what and where?)
  • Diversity (cultural, religious, literary, political, economic) in the Middle Ages stemming from global relationships

Literature and Language in and about the “Global Middle Ages”

  • Polylingualism
  • Comparative analysis on a global scale
  • Perspectives on the ‘global literature’
  • The claiming of bodies/characters for national use
  • Culture erasure/editing in medieval literature and contemporary criticism

Pedagogy of the “Global Middle Ages”

  • Teaching a “global” Middle Ages
  • The defense or denial of euro-/white-centrist works/organizations
  • Theorizing the idea of “global” in medieval studies
  • The “Global Middle Ages” as an interdisciplinary approach to medieval studies
  • What does the “global” Middle Ages (or medieval studies) mean for euro-medievalists, or for Early English medievalists?
  • New theoretical approaches to established texts

PKMS 2019 Conference CFP: Crossing Boundaries

November 12, 2018 / 1 Comment on PKMS 2019 Conference CFP: Crossing Boundaries

Crossing Boundaries: Towards an Interdisciplinary Medieval Studies

Date: May 3, 2019

Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY

Keynote Speaker: Shirin Khanmohamadi, San Francisco State University

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study’s 14th annual conference in May will showcase a variety of scholarship with interdisciplinary or intersectional approaches. It will also consider the field of medieval studies in light of recent conversations such as those about Eurocentrism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia at Leeds and Kalamazoo. It will specifically seek to open spaces for graduate students and other potentially vulnerable members of academia to engage with the recent debates and other complicated and controversial topics.

The 2018 PKMS conference explored the relationship between French and English departments, literatures, and cultures. The 2017-2018 workshop series focused on decentralizing Europe in medieval studies in our research and teaching. Medieval scholars often work across disciplines, but the institutional lack of communication across disciplinary borders has become more apparent recently, and the need to collapse those borders more urgent. The 2019 PKMS conference will expand those conversations beyond England and France, bringing together medieval scholars who work in various disciplines and with various methodologies for this day-long conversation, as the culmination of a year of graduate-student workshops on interdisciplinarity and intersectionality in medieval studies.

We invite proposals for intersectional and/or interdisciplinary papers in medieval studies from all disciplines, regions, languages, methodologies, theoretical approaches, etc. We also welcome proposals for papers on the practical aspects, challenges, and benefits of interdisciplinary and intersectional work in medieval studies. Submit 250-word abstracts to medieval.study@gmail.com by December 31, 2018 JANUARY 31, 2019.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Spatial, temporal, and disciplinary boundaries in medieval studies
  • The history of medieval studies
  • The “Global Middle Ages”
  • Global views of the European Middle Ages
  • Working with multiple languages
  • Working with translations and editions
  • Medieval translations and adaptations of texts
  • Studies in comparative religion
  • The politics of medievalism
  • Legal status of women in various regions, religions, etc.
  • Representations of women across multiple contexts
  • Medieval studies and a method of colonization
  • Similar traditions in Western and non-Western contexts
  • Digital Humanities in medieval studies
  • Medievalists and medicine / medieval medicine
  • Dis/ability in the Middle Ages
  • Medievalists teaching non-medieval topics and texts
  • Later uses of medieval music, art, and motifs
  • Medieval ideologies and constructions of identity surrounding gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and social class

CFP: Race and Religion in the Middle Ages

October 23, 2018 / 1 Comment on CFP: Race and Religion in the Middle Ages

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study
Call for Papers

Race and Religion in the Middle Ages:
An Interdisciplinary Roundtable and Workshop

Wednesday, December 12, 2018
6-8pm

This roundtable will feature students from various disciplines discussing their work on race and religion in the Middle Ages.

To submit a proposal for a five-to-ten-minute presentation, email a 100-word abstract to medievalstudy@gmail.com by Friday, November 30, 2018.

Potential topics:

  • race and religion in medieval thought
  • religious world-maps
  • contemporary scholars and medieval race
  • racism in medieval studies
  • conversion and conversion narratives
  • interfaith marriage and relationships
  • inter-religious interactions and perceptions
  • whiteness and perceived whiteness
  • medieval race in the modern consciousness

Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Dec 1 2018

August 22, 2018

Tell your students about this opportunity!

The Thirteenth Moravian College Undergraduate Conference in Medieval and Early Modern Studies will be held on Saturday December 1, 2018 on Moravian’s campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  We’d be delighted if you’d bring the conference to the attention of your students and colleagues and encourage students to present or attend presentations and performances at the conference. CFP posters will be coming soon by snail mail.

We sincerely welcome contributions from all departments in explorations of connections to the period between approx. 500 C.E. and 1800 C.E. In the past, we’ve had some great papers, panels, and poster presentations that began as coursework, in addition to engaging performances in music, drama, and dance. The conference generally draws over 200 people and typically features presentations and performances by 80 to 100 students from 30 schools or so.

The typical presentation format consists of a 15-minute paper or a 45-minute group performance, but alternative formats are certainly considered. Both registration and submission of proposals will open October 1 and will be handled via the conference website. The deadline for the submission of proposals is November 3. For a look at past conferences, please visit our website at http://www.moravian.edu/medieval/

We’re still working on final details for our plenary speaker and concert; those details will be announced soon on the conference website.  The day typically runs from about 9:00am-4:00pm, with performance and reception following. Registration and all activities (apart from lunch) are free for presenters and attendees.

Bethlehem, in eastern Pennsylvania, is easily accessible from the Philadelphia area (about an hour and a half’s drive), the New York City area (about two hours’ drive), and other locations in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.

We would be happy to answer any questions you might have about the conference. Please look out for the cfp and feel free to email questions to sandybardsley@moravian.edu.

CFP for 2019 Kalamazoo

July 20, 2018

Exchanging Cultures: Anglo-French Relations in the Middle Ages

Scholars agree that English and French, whether language, literature, or culture, had a strong relationship in the Middle Ages. Despite their mutual interactions and back-and-forth distribution of power, the portrayal of the relationship has remained fairly static, frequently described as French influence on English writing but not the other way around. Rather than a unidirectional influence, however, we should perhaps consider the relationship to be one of exchange. How might English ideas have influenced French ones? How might both peoples have viewed each other on a day-to-day level?
Because of traditional departmental divisions, it is difficult to satisfactorily answer these questions in a manner which incorporates both perspectives. Furthermore, there is a deep separation between lines of inquiry discussed by scholars in English and those discussed by scholars in French. Influenced by Channeling Relations in Medieval England and France, the conference hosted by the Pearl Kibre Medieval Study in 2018 which featured pioneers in the field Ardis Butterfield and Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, this panel aims to bring together these two traditionally separate groups for a conversation that is truly interdisciplinary.

While this panel focuses on literary and cultural exchanges between England and France, we welcome submissions that also incorporate other perspectives, particularly non-western.

Please submit abstracts to Steve Kruger at skruger@gc.cuny.edu

Tactics for Teaching Diverse Pasts: A Crowd-Sourced Online Compendium

May 29, 2018

(original post)

How do we share the diversity of the past with our students? How can we actively resist white supremacy, patriarchy, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and other modes of oppression? And how might we challenge evolutionary assumptions about progress and modernity which may play into students’ misformed notions of the past?

We would like propose a casual, informal, no-budget, open-access collection of teaching strategies for diversifying the study of early texts. We’re seeking concrete ideas that have worked in your literature classrooms: exercises, texts, critical lens, assignments, and other ideas. The goal is less polished writing than a kind of public brainstorming and sharing of ideas that work.

We’d like to request submissions that map out a single teaching idea that has worked in your classroom. Submit ideas using our online form before June 15, 2018.

Submissions should include the following information:
• Title
• Type of Institution
• What kind of class you’ve used this tactic in (upper- or lower-level, in-person or online, approximate size)
• The tactic itself
• Why and how it was effective, any problems you faced, and what you might do differently next time
• Amount of time required, in class and for any homework assignments

Submissions will be collected, organized, and uploaded to a website for others to use, adapt, and share.

Boyda Johnstone (Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY)

Matthew Harrison (West Texas A&M)

Lone Medievalist Course (Re)Design Workshop

May 15, 2018

Reposting from the Lone Medievalist Facebook page:

Have a medieval-focused course you want to design or redesign for the next academic year? Would you like to workshop it with others? Join the Lone Medievalist Course (Re)Design Workshop!

The philosophy this workshop is based on is Backward Design, a pedagogical approach that begins with course goals and outcomes before moving into instructional strategies, assignments, and assessment. We will workshop through the method with the goal of providing feedback, ideas, and suggestions for participants to consider as they work on a chosen course.

When: July 16-August 10th (four weeks)

Format: There will be two synchronous Google Hangout meeting times scheduled per week (possibly Mondays and Thursdays, time depending on those who sign up), but participants can choose one to attend (unless you want to be in both!). The two times are to increase the chances for participation. They will have the same focus each week. In addition, there will be asynchronous opportunities to provide and receive feedback as well as take a look at suggested readings and materials.

– Week 1: Backward Design and Course Goals/Outcomes
– Week 2: Instructional Strategies
– Week 3: Learning Activities and Assignments
– Week 4: Feedback and Assessment

Facilitator: Kisha Tracy, in addition to being the co-founder of Lone Medievalist and Associate Professor of English Studies, is also the Co-Coordinator of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Fitchburg State in Massachusetts. In this capacity, she facilitates numerous course (re)design workshops for faculty. She also teaches a graduate course on Learner-Centered Assessment for a higher education teaching certificate program. Given this experience, she decided to run a workshop just for medievalists wanting to (re)design a course in a workshop environment in order to get feedback from others!

Sign Up/Questions: Please email Kisha at ktracy3@fitchburgstate.edu if you would like to sign up for the workshop or have any questions!

UPDATED CFP: Channeling Relations in Medieval England and France

December 29, 2017

Channeling Relations in Medieval England and France

Organizers: Stephanie Grace-Petinos (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Deborah McGrady (University of Virginia); Elizabeth Robertson (University of Glasgow); Sara Rychtarik (Graduate Center, CUNY)
Date: May 4, 2018
Location: CUNY Graduate Center
Keynote Speaker: Ardis Butterfield

For medievalists, interdisciplinary work has always been a necessity, and our major annual conferences reflect this need to broaden our understanding of the dynamic and widespread time period. While medieval scholars may specialize in one area of medieval studies, they also understand that separating traditions – by culture, language, religion, geographic borders, etc. – can create a limited and narrow understanding of the Middle Ages. This is especially the case for medievalists who study medieval England and France. Although, or perhaps because, they were frequently engaged in war, these two countries had many rich literary and cultural exchanges over the course of the Middle Ages. For Middle English scholars, French literature and music are often valuable resources for the sources of the works of popular authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, and so are often read in medieval English classes. Yet why is Chaucer not routinely read in French departments? Or, on the other side, medieval English texts, law, as well as literature, were often written in French, not English. But British literature survey courses often limit their coverage of the Anglo-French corpus to one or two lais of Marie de France.

This one-day conference offers the opportunity for scholars, whether they usually preserve or cross departmental lines in their own work, to come together with scholars from departments with whom they may not routinely discuss academic work/research/approaches. While this conference focuses on literary and cultural exchanges between England and France, we are not discounting other traditions and welcome submissions for individual papers or full panel proposals that also incorporate other perspectives, particularly non-western.

Topics to be discussed can include, but are by no means limited to:

  • A text that belongs to both the English and French traditions
  • A text, legend or corpus of characters that exist with variations in each tradition
  • A textual theme shared by both traditions
  • A historical event that occurred in both traditions (i.e. The Hundred Years War)
  • Religious orders or religious figures prominent in both England and France
  • Historical or literary figures that travel throughout England and France
  • French texts that circulate within England; English texts that circulate within France; English and/or French texts that circulate within both England and France

This event is hosted by Pearl Kibre Medieval Study at the CUNY Graduate Center, with contributions by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program.

Please send abstracts of 250 words to pkmsconference@gmail.com by January 31, 2018.

Teaching the Middle Ages Workshop Documents and Resources

May 11, 2017

Lesson Plan Workshop with Paola Ureni

Points to consider:
Connect to our time for student interest

Medieval and Now shares common ideas (mind, soul, individual, etc.)

Greater complexity in those concepts for Medieval

Helpful links

http://medievalhighered.omeka.net/

This site is a collection of materials for teaching medieval classes. Particularly recommended is the Medieval or Modern questionaire. (Note: may require registration).

https://globalchaucers.wordpress.com/

A blog which explores the impact of Chaucer’s works around the world. Includespedagogical ideas and resources, such as “Teaching the Wife of Bath through Adaptation.”

Useful texts (not necessarily medieval)

“Why Read the Classics” Italo Calvino http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/10/09/why-read-the-classics/

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”

For teaching the Gothic

Eve Sedgwick The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (used with Scooby-Doo episodes)

Writing instruction materials

Gaipa_Engaging-Sources

GordonHarvey

Sample syllabi

F15-syllabus-338(1)

CHAUCS15(1)

Alberghini.371

Sample lesson plans

lessonplanjephthahsdaughterlessonplanonchaucerandplagiarism lesson plans – lanval and the wanderer Beowulf OE guidelines

https://www.cynthiarogers.info/game-of-love-handout

Stay tuned for information about our final workshop of the semester.

A CFP of Possible Interest for Kalamazoo

August 13, 2016

Passing along for our colleagues at Rutgers:

Cultural and Literary Transmission in the Global Middle Ages (Kalamazoo 2017)

Sponsored by the Rutgers Program for Medieval Studies

Organizers: Izzy Stern and Erik Wade

Scholarship on the global Middle Ages has flourished in recent years, examining the role that a global community played in the medieval period. Such work demonstrates the remarkable links between various civilizations in the medieval period and the extent to which the Middle Ages truly were a hotbed of trade. Recent scholarship has considered the cultural interactions of trade, literary transmission, pilgrimage, religious conversion, explorers, colonization, and military expeditions. Building off of this work, this panel seeks to consider the role of intercultural interactions in the Middle Ages.

This panel seeks entries from all disciplines and invites applicants to interpret “interactions” broadly. Presenters may discuss literary interactions, military, exploratory, cultural, trade, political, religious, or anything else. Whether investigating the story of Abul-Abbas—the elephant given to the Carolingian Emperor Charlemagne by the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid—or the spread of coal-based iron production in eleventh-century China or the tenth-century journey of Ahmad ibn Fadlān from Baghdad through modern-day Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to the camp of the Bulghār khan on the Volga river, papers may consider a variety of kinds of “interactions” in a globalized medieval period.

How did medieval writers and historians conceive of these interactions? How were these interactions recorded or remembered? How often was a particular story’s genealogy and foreign origins remembered, for example? What can we say about the trauma caused by these often violent interactions? How do these interactions help us reconceive of usually static terms such as “culture,” “country,” “nation,” and others? How did medieval people see themselves fitting in to the scale of the “global?” In modern depictions of the medieval world, how have these interactions been forgotten in the preservation of a white Middle Ages?

Please send questions, abstracts of 300 words, and participant information forms (http://www.wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to both Izzy Stern (isabel.stern@rutgers.edu) and Erik Wade (erik.wade@gmail.com) by September 10.

CFP for 2017 International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI

July 7, 2016

CFP: Persecution, Punishment, and Purgatory I-II: Methodological Considerations, Historical Explorations

Sponsored by the Medieval Studies Certificate Program, Graduate Center, CUNY

52nd International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 11-14, 2017, Kalamazoo, MI

Societies and cultures shape themselves in part through a series of exclusions, and those exclusions may involve both individual punishment and the persecution of particular groups. Of course, medieval societies and cultures had their own distinct modes of exclusion, punishment, and persecution. R.I. Moore famously, if controversially, argued for the “formation of a persecuting society” in the Central Middle Ages; interestingly, the same moment sees (in Jacques LeGoff’s terminology) “the birth of Purgatory.” These panels consider these issues in two different directions: methodological, asking how we read the limited documentary evidence to understand the position of the persecuted, as well as the persecutor, and historically, looking at representations in a variety of documents (e.g. trial records, art, and literature) to consider these questions through disparate methodologies (Please specify which panel you are applying to).

Please send 250-word abstract and PIF to skruger@gc.cuny.edu by September 15, 2016.

Topics might include, but certainly are not limited to:

  • the origins and uses of persecution
  • the experience 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 and devotional 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

12th Annual PKMS Graduate Student Conference CFP

June 16, 2016

Pre-Modernisms: Friday, October 28th, The Graduate Center, CUNY

As the famous sayings go, everything old is new again, and history repeats itself. How many times have we heard someone described as a Renaissance man or woman, or something that seems old-fashioned called “medieval?” Scholars of these periods often find, of course, that such evaluations are, at best, inaccurate. However, trans-temporal approaches to study and even historical anachronisms can produce fruitful new inquiries into our fields, from contemporary children’s literature that engages in medievalisms to produce new fantasy worlds to queer and transgender studies that attempt to see the past from non-normative perspectives. This conference aims to bring together a wide variety of scholars of different disciplines and especially different time periods to pair what we know about the classical, medieval, and early modern periods with what later times perceive about these periods and how they manipulate the past for present agendas. As such, this conference is aimed not only at pre-modern scholars, but also at scholars of later and contemporary periods whose work engages in envisioning the past.

Please submit a 300-word abstract no later than September 15 at 5 PM.

E-mail: medieval.study@gmail.com

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Arthurian Tradition

Early Book Collections

Architectural Styles

Medieval TV and Film

Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Historical Fiction

J.R.R. Tolkien

Historically Based Political Rhetoric

History of Marginal Perspectives

Law and the Legal Tradition

Renaissance Humanism

Philosophical Traditions

Renaissance Faires and Period Dress

Medieval and Early Modern Adaptations of Classical Texts

Premodern Recipes and Remedies

Contemporary Classroom Approaches

Linguistic Developments

Premodern Historiography (including history plays)

Call for Papers for 11th Annual PKMS Graduate Student Conference

November 19, 2015

“Sanctity and Sinfulness: Hagiographical Studies in Memory of Tom Head”

11th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference

The Pearl Kibre Medieval Study, the CUNY Graduate Center’s student-run organization for medieval studies, announces its eleventh annual Graduate Student Conference at the CUNY Graduate Center on Friday, February 26, 2016. This year’s conference is dedicated to the work and legacy of Thomas Head. We invite grad students to submit proposals.

The conference will look at how saints and their cults and relics were used to support and/or oppose political ambitions; examine how members of the ecclesiastical and secular hierarchies attempted to balance a desire for God’s peace with the realities of lordship; and explore the patronage of saints, ideals of sanctity, and issues of episcopal influence and its effect on local saints.

Submit a 300-word abstract by December 14th to medieval.study@gmail.com

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

  • Hagiography and hagiographers

  • Cults of saints

  • Ideals of sanctity

  • Peace and Truce of God

  • Secular appropriation of saints

  • Canonization and its process

  • Patronage of saints

  • Frankish lordship

  • Relics

  • Episcopal influence on local saints

We encourage papers to engage Tom’s scholarly legacy.

 

Publishing for Graduate Students: A Recap

July 18, 2015

PublishingforGraduateStudents Chad Turner’s comprehensive notes

Panel Questions

Karl Steel’s Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/karl.steel/posts/10205622561577917

Panelists: Karl Steel, Associate Professor of English Literature at Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center

Jennifer Ball Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate Center

Moderator: Mary Catherine Kinniburgh

  • Both panelists admitted to unusual first publication experiences: Karl Steel’s first article as a Master’s student was a translation of French travel literature from a West African who traveled to the Soviet Union; Jennifer Ball’s first publication was her book, which she completed in a post-doc
  • Jennifer Ball never published in grad school, though from her experience on search committees, many more graduate students have publications on their resumes now.
  • Other publications besides articles in peer-review journals are book reviews, book chapters, encyclopedia entries, catalogs [for Art History]
  • Keep priorities–don’t let publishing distract from dissertation writing
  • Karl Steel suggested, after chapters are complete, to take 7000 words of the bulk and submit (Standard journal articles are 6-7000 w0rds)
  • Journal articles are “pithy,” (often stronger) arguments get straight to the point, more condensed that a book, not need to burden with background from the filed
  • Recommended reading Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks Wendy Belcher, Getting It Published and From Dissertation to Book William Germano
  • Book reviews: less important than other genres, suggested mainly if it’s useful to your work
  • How to write a book review: describe the argument in 2-3 paragraphs, end discuss what would have liked to be in it, although for grad students, this should just be evaluation instead
  • How to publish things: people ask; conference networking is important(Often writing projects can be solicited by others as one becomes known in the field)
  • For articles, don’t meander, have a strong central argument; shouldn’t feel like a seminar paper
  • Why an article might be rejected: argument doesn’t hold up because of incorrect facts, weak writing (lacks clarity or organization)
  • blog posts–not as popular as used to be, but still useful for writing, get people to read things
  • Reading your paper like a blog post is a good way of gauging how readers might react
  • Writing groups are useful, having both insiders and outsiders read it
  • Karl Steel suggests writing for 15-20 minutes a day (or banking that time for longer sessions)
  • Getting straight to the point with  articles–start with an anecdote
  • Editing other people’s work will help you in  your own work (as well as helping them)
  • If your professor tells you that you should publish something, you should take their advice on revisions and submit it
  • Conference questions help expand your argument, can be included in drafts
  • Mostly contraction is necessary for revision; focus in on your central argument
  • Publishing early doesn’t mean that you will run out of ideas
  • When submitting to a journal, a cover letter will tell what it’s about
  • Dissertation embargo: Putting dissertation online may not be the problem that it is often feared–so far there has not been a case where it’s prevented something from being published
  • Journals, particularly second-tier publications, are hungry for content–submission is doing them a favor
  • Submission etiquette: Can’t submit to more than one journal at a time
  • usually editors will tell you when to expect it back, generally 2-3 months; it’s okay to ask after 4 months or more (it may be that the reviewer has not gotten back to the editor)
  • Peer reviewers are people in the field outside of the journal
  • The importance of gossip–useful to know the status of journals to be sure if your work will actually be published
  • Peer review is the gold standard
  • Kalamazoo and other conferences are good to meet people–introduce yourself to panelists, follow them on Twitter, send emails, etc.
  • Co-authored works–not the same as a monograph on a CV but still useful–if have a more established person in the field writing with you, it looks good (see Karl Steel’s recent co-authored review essay in postmedieval with Jeffrey Jerome Cohen https://www.academia.edu/11985941/Race_Travel._Time_Heritage_a_review_essay)
  • Rejection is inevitable: get used to it
  • Usual responses: Accepted as is (rare), accepted upon revision, revise and resubmit, rejected
  • Try to follow their submission requirements as closely as possible (formats, etc.)
  • Image rights (manuscripts as well as art)–usually get from libraries, write to them
  • Make sure images are in a TIF file, not JPEG

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

August 4, 2014

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”

July 17, 2014 / 1 Comment on 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

Call for Papers: Medieval Celebrations

September 18, 2013

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

September 4, 2013

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

CFP: New Media and the Middle Ages

October 3, 2012

*Deadline extended to December 7, 2012.*

“New Media and the Middle Ages”
8th Annual Pearl Kibre Medieval Study Graduate Student Conference
CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY
March 1, 2013, 10am-4pm

The field of medieval studies has a relatively long and recognized history of scholarship assisted by technology. The 2013 PKMS Graduate Student Conference 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.

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 medieval texts and data- widely conceived- 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.

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 may 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 new media

· The role of digital humanities in academic curricula

· Funding and sustainability of long-term projects

Graduate students, please submit your abstract of no more than 300 words by
December 7, 2012.
Include your name and affiliation.
Papers must be 15-20 minutes in length.
Submissions should be emailed to medievalstudy@gmail.com