Tag Archives: boundaries

CFP: CEMS International Graduate Conference (Budapest, 1-3 Jun 17)

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mediterraneanBudapest, Central European University, June 1 – 03, 2017
Deadline: Jan 31, 2017

The Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies (CEMS) at Central European
University and its junior members are proud to announce the forthcoming
Fifth International Graduate Conference on Building, Bending, and
Breaking Boundaries in the Eastern Mediterranean World.

 

This three-day conference invites graduate students of Late Antique, Islamic, Jewish,
Byzantine, Medieval, Ottoman studies, and related disciplines, to present their research on the manifold and complex processes of constructing, negotiating, transgressing, and subverting social, political, cultural, or confessional boundaries in the eastern Mediterranean from Antiquity to the Early Modern period.

Conference Description

What is a border? What are the sites and strategies of
boundary-construction and who are its agents? Boundaries shape and
forge categories by enforcement and reinforcement of power ingrained
within a built environment, conceptual or physical. Thus, they do not
necessarily indicate territorial margins, but can also embrace
theoretical, temporal, and metaphorical borders. They can be natural or
artificial, sharp or blurry; they can be understood in positive and/or
negative terms as means of protection or as instruments of exclusion;
and they can mark conceptual territories, such as “the human,” “the
holy,” “the family,” or “the natural world.” Triggered by new waves of
immigration, the meaningfulness of state borders and the necessity of
their control have been subject to debate, alongside questions
concerning the boundaries surrounding identities, cultures or
religions. Moving beyond the border of nation-states and the “clash of
civilizations” paradigm, the main objective of this conference is to
explore the historically contingent, fluid, and dynamic nature of
borders by shedding light on the intricate mechanisms through which
boundaries were erected, maintained, crossed, and transgressed
throughout the eastern Mediterranean world.

Possible paper topics might include, but are not limited to:

Border ontologies and epistemologies
Negotiating, contesting, and appropriating spaces – sites of cultural,
religious, social, political, economic, artistic encounters,
transformations, and exchange
The dynamics of borders and identities – the role of different sensory
mechanisms in (re)articulating communal boundaries and identities,
multiple identities and cultural mobility
Practices of representation – multisensory engagement with various
aspects of daily life, the anthropology of smells and sounds, sumptuary
restrictions on food
Bordering the body – the politicization of bodily images and the
genderization of conflicts
Geopolitics, power practices, sovereignty
Politics of translation as means of enforcement, representation, and/or
appropriation
Please submit by January 31, 2017 a short paper proposal (no more than
250 words, together with a brief biography and contact information) to
the following address: cemsconference@ceu.edu

Keynote Speakers

Verena Krebs (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

David Thomas (University of Birmingham)

Greg Woolf (Institute of Classical Studies, London)

Accommodation and Travel Grants

All participants will be offered accommodation for the full duration of
the conference (3 nights) at the CEU Residence Center. In order to
encourage the participation of individuals with limited institutional
support a small number of partial travel grants will be available to
cover travel expenses. Those who wish to be considered for the grant
should include an additional justification alongside their paper
proposals. Please note that there is no conference fee. For further
information, do not hesitate to contact the organizers at
cemsconference@ceu.edu .

Call for Sessions: ‘360° – Places, Boundaries, Global Perspectives,’ IV Forum Medieval Art

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GERMANY-COURT-US-NAZI-ART-JEWSCall for Sessions: ‘360° – Places, Boundaries, Global Perspectives,’ IV Forum Medieval Art, Berlin and Brandenburg, September 20 – 23, 2017
Deadline: June 1, 2016.
The 4th Forum Medieval Art will focus on research at the geographical
and methodological boundaries of classical medieval studies. The
various venues in Berlin and Brandenburg are the starting point, where,
on the one hand, local medieval topics will be discussed, and on the
other hand, the rich collections of Byzantine and Middle Eastern art
are available. Accordingly, the conference will highlight the
interaction of Central European medieval art and artistic production
with other regions ranging from Eastern Europe, Byzantium, the Middle
East, the Caucasus and the Mediterranean to the British Isles and the
Baltic region. Thus research areas such as Byzantine Studies or Islamic
Art History will be brought into the focus and consciousness of
medieval studies, particularly in the context of the severely
threatened artistic and architectural monuments of the Middle East.
Especially welcome are topics discussing phenomena such as migration,
media transformation and cultural paradigms. By asking for culturally
formative regions at the borders of “Europe” and transcultural contact
zones, definitions of the Middle Ages can be put up for debate. As a
counterpart to this panorama, research about the region of Brandenburg
and Berlin will also be presented. This includes subjects of museum
studies and the history art of and in Berlin, where the development of
areas of cultural exchange has a long tradition.

Organisation: Christian Freigang and Antje Fehrmann (Freie Universität
Berlin), Kai Kappel and Tina Zürn (Humboldt-Universität Berlin) with
further partners in Berlin and Brandenburg

Submission: Please send your submission until June 1, 2016, to
mail@mittelalterkongress.de

More information: www.mittelalterkongress.de

CFP: Discipline and Excess (Cambridge Friday, April 15, 2016)

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BelliniDISCIPLINE AND EXCESS

A Graduate and Early Career Conference, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Friday, April 15, 2016

CFP Deadline:  1st February 2016

We invite paper proposals for Discipline and Excess, a conference which seeks to consider questions relating to boundaries and their transgression until 1750. The theme invites diverse interpretations of “discipline”—moral, religious, cultural, aesthetic, generic, geographic—in papers which explore the realms of penance and perfection, challenge the orderliness implicit in systems of knowledge, or examine the nature of punishment and retribution.

The conference is aimed at early career scholars and graduate students from a range of academic fields. Discipline and Excess is organized by the M.Phil programs in Medieval, Renaissance, and 18th-Century Literature at the Faculty of English. Our external respondent will be Dr. Helen Barr, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford.

Papers should be a maximum of 20 minutes. Please email 250-word abstracts (text only, no attachments) by 1st February 2016 to disciplineandexcess2016@gmail.com.

Possible topics may include:

Crime and Punishment

Bounds of the Mind

Feast and Fast

Disciplining the Body

Exceeding the Page

Intertextuality

Sin, Play, Transgression

Rhetorical Limits

Disciplinary Boundaries

Material

CFP Discipline and Excess Cambridge April 2016-2

Call for papers: Out of the Margins, Cambridge

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manropingtext22The Marginalia Committee (Journal of the Medieval Reading Group, University of Cambridge) are delighted to announce that they will be holding a Tenth Anniversary Conference on September 19th and 20th, 2014. The conference is entitled ‘Out of the Margins: New Ideas on the Boundaries of Medieval Studies’ and our confirmed speakers include Professor Mary Carruthers, Professor Helen Cooper and Dr Máire Ní Mhaonaigh.

Abstracts for short papers are requested before 31st May to outofthemargins@marginalia.co.uk, and further information can be found on the poster and at http://www.outofthemargins.com.

From the borders of material texts to the peripheries of society, the margins of medieval culture have been brought into unprecedented prominence by several generations of scholars across a wide range of disciplines. But have we over-privileged the radical, the liminal and the subversive? Or is it only by means of the edges that the centre can be defined at all? As interested in the edges of the material text as the fringes of society, and with a unique question to ask about how the marginal relates to the central narratives of medieval studies, we intend this conference to be both interdisciplinary and metadisciplinary.

 We invite submissions of 500-word abstracts for short papers, extending a particular welcome to graduate and early-career researchers working in disciplines including but not limited to History, History of Art, Music, English, Modern Languages, Philosophy, and Theology. Topics of papers might include:

  • Textual and Manuscript margins: What is articulated between the edge and the middle? The manuscript margins can be a site of confirmation, conversation or controversy—from the authoritative gloss to the casual doodle.
  • Intellectual margins: Boundaries, relations and tensions between the ‘clerical’ and the ‘lay’; the ‘latinate’ and the ‘vernacular’; the literary and the theological.
  • Radical margins: Controversial or heretical texts, individuals and groups. The question of the extent and generosity of ‘orthodoxy’ and its more or less hostile relationship to the ‘subversive’ or ‘heretical’.
  • Social and economic margins: Voices of the poor, women, of the non-elite and the ‘outcast’ in the Middle Ages, the queer, as well as those who might be considered—but need not always have been—socially ‘on the edge’?
  • Neomedievalism: How the medieval borders onto and interrogates modernity, and how postmodern critique may elucidate aspects of the pre-modern…and vice versa.