Musical practices are inherently woven into a city’s urban fabric: as marker of identity, expression of religious devotion, sonic manifestation of power, or form of entertainment, musicking punctuates the salient moments of a city’s culture. In Naples, for centuries a cultural and political capital and among the most densely populated cities in Europe, music making has always occupied a prominent position in the soundscape of public and private, sacred and secular spaces.

The interdisciplinary conference, Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern, aims to map intersections between the performative dimension of music making and the city’s spaces and places. The organizing committee invites proposals that focus on physical venues (churches, monasteries, theaters, aristocratic palaces, schools, the public piazza, and so on, including their visual programs) as they interface with music performance and production.

We welcome proposals on musicking as a cultural practice from musicologists as well as scholars from sister disciplines, including art and architectural history, archaeology, history, literary studies, and anthropology, on themes and approaches such as manuscript and print production, archival studies, music and gender, patronage/matronage, performance practice, history of the senses, acoustics, history of pedagogy, relationships between music and specific works of art, notions of ability/disability, and instrument making.

Proposals should include a curriculum vitae, a brief narrative biography (max. 150 words), and an abstract (max. 350 words), and may be in either Italian or English. The abstract should also indicate the topic’s relevance to the themes outlined above, and whether the proposed contribution could take the form of a presentation on-site at the monument under discussion. Final presentations (20 minutes) may be made in Italian or English. Please combine these materials in a single Word or PDF document with Lastname_Firstname as the title, and send to lacapraia@gmail.com by 31 January 2023. Selected participants will be notified in mid-February 2023.

Soundscapes of Naples: From the Medieval to the Early Modern is coorganized by the Center for the Art and Architectural History of Port Cities “La Capraia” (a partnership between the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas and the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte) and the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin.

Image details: BnF ms. FR 854, fol. 49r, in Gallica Digital Library

Please join the Graduate Association of Medieval Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the Tenth Annual Medieval Studies Colloquium: “In Sickness and in Health: Medieval Healing and the Community.”

The colloquium will take place Friday, April 21st, 2023, in-person at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with a keynote address by Dr. Erin Sweany (English, Western Michigan University).

The Tenth Annual GAMS Colloquium is sponsored by the Program in Medieval Studies, Department of Art History, Department of History, Department of English, Department of French & Italian, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic +. For accessibility accommodations, please contact: gams@rso.wisc.edu.

The Graduate Association of Medieval Studies at UW–Madison invites abstracts from graduate and undergraduate students on topics relating to sickness, health, and community (broadly defined). Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words to gams@rso.wisc.edu by January 10th, 2023.

For further information visit the conference website.

The next conference of the Renaissance Architecture and Theory Scholars (RATS) will take place on Friday, 24 March 2023 from 8:30 to 17:30 UK time at the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, in hybrid format. 

The conference co-convenors seek proposals for 20-minute papers on topics in the history of Renaissance architecture and theory, broadly defined. We welcome research on all chronologies of Renaissance architectural culture, including its reception in other periods, as well as all geographies implicated in Renaissance architectural culture. We are open to emerging research as well as work that is nearing publication. We encourage any postgraduate student or early career researcher who would like to present original research to submit a paper proposal.

Because the conference will occur in hybrid format, anyone with an internet connection can present research or participate as an audience member from anywhere in the world. A key goal of the upcoming meeting is to expand accessibility to RATS and widen participation among scholars who may not have previously enjoyed the benefits of the RATS community. To that end, the upcoming meeting will also include time for a group discussion on future plans for RATS.

If you would like to present a paper in the conference, please send a title and an abstract of c. 250 words or less, as well as a brief, c. 150-word bio or CV of no more than 2 pages to RenArchandTheoryScholars@gmail.com by Friday, 13 January 2023 at 12 noon UK time.

The University of Oxford and the Open University invite papers for our annual interdisciplinary Early Modern Sensory Experiences (EMSE) conference.

Interest in sensory experiences of the past has grown in recent years, with scholars engaging with both interdisciplinary and anthropological approaches in order to better understand historical lived experiences. This annual conference explores the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and/or olfactory elements of particular experiences across the globe between c.1400 and c.1700.

This year’s conference, ‘Sensory Encounters’, welcomes papers that consider sensory experiences as instances or reflections of cultural exchange and which discuss possible methodologies and approaches to this particular subject. Papers may engage with the following themes, amongst others:

• Transcultural Sensory Experiences: how sensory experiences were integral to encounters and entanglements, with both productive and destructive results.
• Senses and the City: how sensory experiences were encountered in the city, and how they may have contributed to cities as sites of cosmopolitanism.
• Mobility and Circulation: How the movement of people, objects, practices and their associated sensorial experiences gave rise to the transfer of similar, or the development of new, sensory experiences. 
• Subjectivity: How sensory experiences varied according to gender, social class, race or other perceptions of difference.

Papers are invited from scholars working in any discipline, including musicology, art history, cultural and/or social history, religious studies, and book history, on any geographic region between c.1400 and c.1700.

While we understand that scholars may naturally place emphasis on a particular sense or source as a reflection of their own disciplinary background, we encourage speakers to work across senses, sources and disciplines.

Speakers are encouraged to present work in progress and/or address methodological challenges faced in their research.

Please send a 150-word abstract along with a short biography to Leah Clark (leah.clark@conted.ox.ac.uk) and Helen Coffey (helen.coffey@open.ac.uk) by 15 January 2023.

The conference will take place at Kellogg College, University of Oxford, on 8-9 June 2023.

This will be a face-to-face conference. Speakers should therefore ensure that they can attend in person.

Please note that we will not be able to cover travel or accommodation costs for speakers.