For more information about the UPenn CFP Listserv go to:
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/

A Weekend Conference to be held at Rye College, East Sussex, 18-19 October 2008

Proposals for papers are welcome on any matters relating to 'Medieval Seas' broadly defined, covering the period c.500-c.1500. Possible subjects include: shipping and shipbuilding; material remains/maritime archaeology; navigation; cartography and world view; society at sea and ashore; trade; war at sea; artistic and literary expressions of the sea and maritime affairs; maritime law.

Contributions are encouraged from established scholars and early career researchers.

Proposals for 30-minute presentations should take the form of title and brief abstract. The deadline for proposals is Monday 7 April 2008.

Proposals and enquiries should addressed to:
Dr Richard Gorski
Department of History
University of Hull
Hull HU6 7RX
r.c.gorski@hull.ac.uk

An international conference organised by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, in association with the Bodleian Library, marking the 600th anniversary of the publication of Arundel’s Constitutions.

16th – 18th April 2009
University of Oxford

* Mapping Chronologies (chaired by James Simpson)
* The Dynamics of Orthodox Reform
* Humanism and Intellectual History
* Literary Self-Consciousness and Literary History
* Discerning the Discourse: Language and Spirituality
* Heresy and its Textual Afterlife

Plenary speakers to include: Jeremy Catto, Anne Hudson, David Lawton, Miri Rubin and Sarah Beckwith
Conference respondent: Nicholas Watson

Please send 500 word abstracts by 1st May 2008 to vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk
Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford OX2 6QA

Conference committee: Vincent Gillespie, Helen Barr, Santha Bhattacharji, Mishtooni Bose, Kantik Ghosh, Annie Sutherland, John Watts

34th Annual Meeting: Southeastern Medieval Association
Bodies, Embodiments, Becomings
2-5 October 2008
Saint Louis University
Saint Louis, Missouri
co-hosted by the Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, Saint Louis University, and the BABEL Working Group
For more information, visit the website at http://www.siue.edu/babel/SEMA2008CallForPapers.htm

Plenary Speakers:
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University (author and editor: Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages; The Postcolonial Middle Ages; Medieval Identity Machines; Thinking the Limits of the Body; and Identity, Hybridity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles)

Steven F. Kruger, Queens College, CUNY Graduate Center (author and editor: Queering the Middle Ages; AIDS Narratives: Gender and Sexuality, Fiction and Science; Dreaming in the Middle Ages; Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America; and The Spectral Jew: Conversion and Embodiment in Medieval Europe)

In his book Medieval Identity Machines, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen writes that we know the human body "is divisible into semidiscrete systems (nervous, digestive, circulatory, excretory, reproductive), but that these structures nevertheless form a bounded whole, a singular organism. The human body is therefore described as a marvel of God or of evolution, a system so autnomous from its environment that it can dream theology and science in order to envision how it came to be the culminating creation in a world of similarly distinct bodies and objects." But what if the body is less than this idealization and also "more than its limbs, organs, and flesh as traced by an anatomical chart"? What if it is "open and permeable," and what if "corporeality and subjectivity--themselves inseparable--potentially included both the social structures (kinship, nation, religion, race) and the phenomenal world (objects, gadgets, prostheses, animate and inanimate bodies of many kinds) across which human identity is spread?" Cohen urges us to see bodies as "sites of possibility" that are "necessarily dispersed into something larger, something mutable and dynamic, a structure of alliance and becoming," and which are always on the verge of escaping "the confines of somber individuality" in order to connect with other bodies and other worlds. Therefore, there is no "being," per se, only "becoming."

For the 34th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association, we invite paper and session proposals on any topic relative to the Middle Ages, but we especially encourage those proposals that address any and all aspects of the body, embodiment, and becoming in medieval arts and letters. Consider our definition of body to be wide open, to include human and nonhuman bodies, bodies of language and manuscripts and texts, bodies of history, bodies of knowledge, and bodies (of all types) as sites of transformation and possibility, of departures and arrivals, of enclosure and openness. Consider, also, if you will, the gendered body, the racialized body, the phenomenological body, the sexualized body, the colonial body, the medicalized body, the pathologized body, the animal body, the erotic body, the loving body, the spiritual body, the abnormal body, the medieval body, the communal body, the hybrid body, the post/human body, and so on. Consider the relationships between body and self-identity, between body and art, between body and mind, body and culture, body and technology, body and world, and so on. Consider, finally, the ways in which bodies and embodiment emerge out of historical times and spaces, and out of historical processes of becoming (coming-to-be through time and space).

Deadline for Submission: Friday, 30 May 2008

Send Paper or Session Abstracts to:
Eileen Joy
Department of English
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
ejoy@siue.edu [Submissions must be made via email.]

Call for Papers and Sessions

24th Annual Conference of the Medieval Association of the Midwest

September 26th and 27th, 2008

North Dakota State University

Proposal deadline: July 1, 2008

Send submissions via snail mail or email to:

Carlos Hawley
Department of Modern Languages
Minard Hall 320, North Dakota State University
Fargo, ND  58105-5075
carlos.hawley@ndsu.edu

The Heroic Age, Issue 14: Law and Legal Culture in the Early Middle Ages
Guest Editor: Andrew Rabin, University of Louisville

The Heroic Age invites submissions for a special issue on law and legal culture in the early middle ages. We construe the subject of this issue broadly, and we are eager to receive submissions representing a variety of perspectives, methodologies, national or ethnic cultures, and disciplines. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): royal legislation, legal manuscripts, law in/and literature, legal procedure, charters and diplomatics, writs and wills, dispute resolution, theories of law and justice, canon law, editing medieval law, law and philosophy, perceptions of medieval law in later periods, law in/and art, international law, and intersections between medieval Asian and European legal traditions. We welcome traditional philological and historicist approaches, as well as those informed by modern critical theory. Prospective contributors should feel free to contact Andrew Rabin (andrew.rabin_at_louisville. edu) if they have any questions.

Articles should be 7000 words including bibliography and endnotes, and conform to The Heroic Age’s in-house style. Instructions may be found at http://www.heroicage.org/authors.html. All submissions will be reviewed by two readers according to a double-blind policy. All submissions should be sent to haediting_at_yahoo. com. The deadline for submission is July 1st, 2008.