We are writing about this year’s Thirteenth Century Conference, which will run between 6 and 8 September 2021. We have taken the decision to go ahead with the conference, but in virtual form. Our reasoning for taking an early decision on this is that we would rather plan for a virtual conference from the outset than plan for an in-person event and be forced to re-arrange it at the last minute. Taking this decision early means that we can optimise the format and, we hope, run a really good conference, with potentially the opportunity for more people than usual to join us. If it does turn out to be possible to meet in person, we will explore creating a hybrid conference in which we have both in-person and virtual delegates.
In the virtual format, we feel the conference should run across 1.5 days in the period 6-8 September: we think that we’ve all found that full days in front of the screen are both tiring and make it hard to concentrate, and that shorter sessions would therefore be a good
starting point. The plan is that papers will be submitted ahead of time and sent out to delegates before the conference either as text papers or pre-recorded videos, so that papers are not presented ‘live’ online, but rather read/watched in advance. The sessions will then consist of structured discussions of the papers.
The theme of the 2021 conference will be ‘Recovery and Renewal’. We are keen to see flexibility and creativity in proposed papers, and we are happy to receive ideas for longer texts of 7-8,000 words, or shorter texts (2-4,000 words), or video presentations of up to 45 minutes.
Please also feel free also to make joint proposals for multi-paper sessions, and we will, as usual, look to put together sessions with linked papers. We want to assemble at least one round table discussion of 3+ papers, for example.
Please send submissions to ams88@cam.ac.uk by 14 February 2021. If you are not interested in submitting a paper, but you would be interested in chairing a session, please let us know. We will consider all papers/contributions on the basis of merit and their connection to the theme and the other proposals that we receive.
Medieval Art Research 