Call for Blog Posts: ‘Liturgy, Literature & History: Oswald of Northumbria and the Cult of Saints in the High Middle Ages’, deadline 9 April 2021

On 5 & 6 August 2021, University College London will be holding an online conference, in collaboration with the British Academy and Peterborough Cathedral, which uses the cult of Oswald of Northumbria as a case study to examine the mechanisms by which saints’ cults spread and also the manner in which veneration of the saints drove other forms of political, cultural and social expression.

Although online conferences have the great benefit of enabling participation by delegates from across the world, it is harder to reproduce the informal in-person opportunities for PhD students and Early Career Researchers to talk about their work, connect with peers and mentors, and exchange ideas. To facilitate awareness of PhD/ECR projects and help researchers gain visibility for their projects the conference committee are issuing this call for blog posts.

Blog posts will be hosted on the conference website and publicised over social media. They are currently exploring the possibility of producing a physical newsletter for delegates – if they do this then blog posts would be advertised in this too.

If your research touches on the broader themes of the conference, including but not limited to, medieval liturgy, historical writing, material culture, architecture, the cult of saints, music, literature, or religious communities, and you would like to explore your ideas and share them with an international audience of medievalists interested in similar topics, please consider submitting an abstract. Blog posts of c.600-800 words, with 3-4 accompanying images, will be published in late June / early July.

Please send abstracts of up to 150 words, along with a brief description of yourself (name, stage, affiliation) by 9 April to history.oswald@ucl.ac.uk  with ‘blog’ as the subject line. The committee will let you know if we are able to host your blog post in early May.