Medievalism Uncloistered: Bringing Underrepresented Voices into the Conversation

Friday September 27 at 1pm EST, NYU

The Middle Ages often evoke images of academia’s exclusive domain, yet the richness of medieval studies can be greatly expanded through dialogue with those outside traditional academic circles. This webinar will explore how engaging with diverse communities — across educational, cultural, and social spectrums — can deepen our understanding of the medieval world and its influence on our present moment. Our speakers will share their experiences working with varied publics whose diverse interests and backgrounds demand genuinely novel approaches — through prison education, social media, podcasting, and modern archives. They will discuss how these interactions have not only broadened their own perspectives but also enriched the field of medieval studies. Join us to learn how expanding our conversation partners through new modes of engagement can lead to more inclusive and dynamic scholarship.

Speakers: Jon Correa-Reyes (Clemson; The Multicultural Middle Ages), Stefanie Matabang (UCLA), Olivia Swarthout (Weird Medieval Guys), and Mary Wellesley (London Review of Books)
Register here.

Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.

On September 19, 2024 at 3:30 pm PT, please join the UBC Department of English Language & Literatures (EL&L), Centre for European Studies (CES), and Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies (CENES) for “Translation, Multilingualism, Poetics: Language Work in Muslim and Jewish Diasporas.” 

Buchanan Tower 323 or virtually via Zoom

Full event detailshttps://english.ubc.ca/events/event/translation-multilingualism-poetics/

Registration linkhttps://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eqwZo56AShuE6q2

This interdisciplinary roundtable brings together three Muslim and Jewish scholar-translator-poets —  Denis FerhatovićRahat Kurd, and Anna Elena Torres — to discuss the cross-currents of their work and the generativity of translation and multilingualism in Jewish and Muslim cultural work, with particular attention to dissension from state-sponsored narratives.

Denis Ferhatović (Connecticut College) will discuss his new translations of sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkish and twentieth-century Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry, as well as his original Bosnian-language poetry, in the context of excavating a fuller and queerer historical multilingualism in Bosnia, beyond modern South Slavo-centric heteronationalisms. Rahat Kurd, award-winning Vancouver poet, will share poems and research from her in-progress poetry collection, tentatively titled THE BOOK OF Z, on the Biblical/Quranic figure of Potiphar’s wife, known in multiple sources of Persian and Urdu poetry, and Persian/Mughal art, as Zulaikha. Anna Elena Torres (University of Chicago) will discuss material from her new book Horizons Blossom, Borders Vanish: Anarchism and Yiddish Literature, on Yiddish anarchist aesthetics from the nineteenth-century Russia through the modernist avant-gardes of Warsaw, Chicago, and London to contemporary antifascist composers. Rather than focusing on narratives of assimilation, Torres intervenes in earlier models of Jewish literature by centering refugee critiques of the border that cultivated stateless imaginations.

Carceral Angels: An Abolitionist History of the Sheriff

Seeta Chaganti (UC Davis)

February 5, 2024

The NYU Consortium Medievalists and Medieval and Renaissance Center are excited to host Dr. Seeta Chaganti’s talk titled “Carceral Angels: An Abolitionist History of the Sheriff.” The event will take place on February 5th at 6:00pm EST in the event space at NYU’s English Department (244 Greene St.) and over Zoom.
In-person attendees without NYU IDs are required to register here. Masks are encouraged. Please reach out to Emily (erg395@nyu.edu) with any questions!
The Zoom invitation is below:
Time: Feb 5, 2024 06:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://nyu.zoom.us/j/94191900259
Meeting ID: 941 9190 0259

American Society of Irish Medieval Studies

We would like to invite you to attend the Virtual General Meeting for the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, on Zoom, May 17 at 4pm EST/3pm CST. You do not have to be a member to attend our AGM, and we hope to see many of you then!

Join Zoom Meeting

https://longwood-edu.zoom.us/j/95384516510?pwd=cVl0bmlCQ3VGYmJKejMxZDF2UDNBQT09

Meeting ID: 953 8451 6510

Passcode: 019765

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You do not have to be a member to attend our AGM, and we hope to see many of you then!

All the best,

Dr. Larissa “Kat” Tracy

Professor, Medieval Literature

Longwood University

Pronouns: she/her

Series Editor: Explorations in Medieval Culture (Leiden: Brill)

Editor: Incite, Journal of Undergraduate Research for CCCAS

President, American Society of Irish Medieval Studies

Vice-President, MEARCSTAPA

Department of English and Modern Languages

tracylc@longwood.edu

kattracy@comcast.net

Www.mementomedievalia.com

New Directions in Indigenous Book History

We invite the general public to join us for a free virtual symposium on “New Directions in Indigenous Book History.”

New Directions in Indigenous Book History

Free, public virtual symposium to be held on 

Thursday, March 23rd, and Friday, March 24, 2023

Registration is free and open to the public

Visit the conference website for a full program.

After the ten-year anniversary of Phillip Round’s Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (2010) and at the twentieth anniversary of Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), we invite the general public to join us in a free, two-day, virtual symposium in which national and international scholars will offer analyses, reflections, and provocations on the material book’s historical and continuing relation to Indigenous peoples and communities. We will also take the occasion to mark the flourishing—though still nascent—field of scholarship on the materialities of the Indigenous book and the productive interventions such scholarship has made into the traditionally settler-oriented fields of bibliography, scholarly editing, and book history.

Though critical attention to Indigenous print culture has done well to document and examine a wide range of media and genres used by Indigenous writers across the centuries, here we narrow the focus to books specifically. How might we define the Indigenous book? Where does Indigenous book history engage with and depart from other histories of the book? How has the book moved within and across Indigenous communities, both local and global? In what sense can the book be claimed as Indigenous? Topics will include community-engaged partnerships and collaborations; book arts; materiality and form; making Indigenous books; reclaiming genres; and relations with archives, audiences, and libraries.

Machine-generated captions will be provided during the live event. Recordings will be posted to YouTube with human-reviewed captions in English.

Co-sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of America & the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography | Organized by Dr. Amy Gore & Dr. Daniel Radus

— 

Amy Gore

Preferred pronouns: she/her/hers

Why Do Pronouns Matter?

Assistant Professor of English

North Dakota State University

Minard 318E42

Dept. 2320, P.O. Box 6050

Fargo, ND 58108-6050

We collectively acknowledge that we gather at NDSU, a land grant institution, on the traditional lands of the Oceti Sakowin (Dakota, Lakota, Nakoda) and Anishinaabe Peoples in addition to many diverse Indigenous Peoples still connected to these lands. We honor with gratitude Mother Earth and the Indigenous Peoples who have walked with her throughout generations. We will continue to learn how to live in unity with Mother Earth and build strong, mutually beneficial, trusting relationships with Indigenous Peoples of our region.

Analogues and Kinship: A Talking Circle

MEDIEVAL PASTS / INDIGENOUS FUTURES

March 10, 2023

10:30am-3:30pm EST

To register to attend in person, click here.

For those who would like to attend virtually, please complete ZOOM LINK registration here.

Faculty House, Columbia University

With Suzanne Conklin Akbari (Princeton University), Tarren Andrews (Yale University, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Gage Diabo (Concordia University, Kanien’kehá:ka), Emma Hitchcock (Columbia University), Audra Simpson (Columbia University, Kahnawà:ke Mohawk) and Stephen Yeager (Concordia University)

Sponsored by CEMS, Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement, Medieval & Renaissance Studies, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University Seminar on Medieval Studies, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity      

Analogues are a key category of evidence in medieval literary studies. When parallels between phrases, imagery, or narrative elements in stories are specific enough that they do not seem to be merely conventional, they empower us to make claims about the shared histories of texts and traditions, and so also about connections in and between the cultural milieux that produced them. Analogic claims narrativize not only the historical relationships between texts in the past but also political relationships between nations in the present. The people who share stories are generally considered to be kin, and the study of analogues aims precisely to determine which people share stories. The studies of analogues so common to medieval studies are always in this sense studies of kinship, between not only medieval peoples but also their modern descendants.

The first half of the day the primary circle members—Tarren Andrews (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Gage Diabo (Kanien’kehá:ka), Emma Hitchcock, and Stephen Yeager—will share thoughts and engage in a conversation about the above prompt. After a lunch break, the workshop will reconvene, and the circle will expand to include all participants in the ongoing conversation. We recommend participants review the following bibliography and welcome further additions to our discussion.

We are asking for participants who attend this Talking Circle and workshop to come prepared to think alongside one another about this complex question, to generously and sincerely discuss the stakes of the analogic methods that so regularly, and perhaps even subconsciously, shape our research practices. The following materials in pdf format will be sent to those who register:

  • Bradway, Tyler and Elizabeth Freeman. “Introduction: Kincoherence/Kin-aesthetics/Kinematics.” Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form. (2022)
  • Rifkin, Mark. “Introduction.” When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty. (2011)
  • Simpson, Audra. “Indigenous Interruptions.” Mohawk Interruptus: Political Live Across the Borders of Settler States. (2014)
  • excerpt from Williams, Kayanesenh Paul. Kayanereko:wa: The Great Law of Peace. (2018)

Colonial Entanglements

Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World: Tensions, Nordic Colonialism and Indigeneity

Chair of Nordic History, Universität Greifswald 02-03.02.2023

Colonial Entanglements and the Medieval Nordic World: Tensions, Nordic Colonialism and Indigeneity

For livestream link go to: https://geschichte.uni-greifswald.de/ng-tag/ 

02-03.02.2023

Location: Konferenzraum, Domstraße 11 (Main University building), 17489 Greifswald

Registration and link for streaming: tba

Thursday, 02 February

09:00-09:30 Introduction and Welcome

Prof. Dr Cordelia Heß (Greifswald)

09:30-10:30 Indigenous methods

Dr Timothy Bourns (London): “Can we access a counter-narrative to the Vínland sagas through Kaladlit okalluktualliait?”

Dr Keith Ruiter (Suffolk): “What do Windigos Have to Do with Vikings?: Seeing Early Scandinavian Legalism with Two Eyes”

11:00-12:00 Colonial medievalisms I

Hannah Armstrong (York): “Beyond ‘Lost’ White Communities: Kalaallit Nunaat, Norse medievalisms, and the Indigenous Turn”

Jay Lalonde (New Brunswick): “‘… there is a strong leaven of the old Norse blood in nearly all of us’; Settler Colonialism and the Vínland Mythology”

12:00-13:00 Colonial medievalisms II

Dr Gwendolyne Knight (Stockholm): “Magical Stereotypes and Lived Realities in Medieval Sápmi”

Dr Christina Lentz (Tromsø): “Colonialism 2.0? Perspectives on medieval history in Norwegian textbooks”

14:30-15:30 Crusades

Dr Thomas Morcom (Oslo): “Raider, Crusader, Far-Traveller? The Complexity of Old Norse Depictions of the Expedition of Sigurðr jórsalafari”

Dr Sabine Walther (Bonn): “The Baltic crusades in an Icelandic mirror? The case of Yngvar the Far-Travelled”

16:00-17:30 Keynote 

Dr Laura Gazzoli (Wien): “From the beginning? Colonial entanglements in the far north and the Baltic and the formation of Scandinavian identities, c. 800–c. 1100”

Friday, 03 February

10:00-11:00 Spatial dimensions of colonialism

Basil Arnould Price (York): “The King and His Skattland: A Postcolonial Approach to Post-Commonwealth Iceland”

Prof. Thomas Wallerström (Trondheim): “The Gulf of Bothnia, 1300–1621, as a ‘third space’”

11:00-12:00 Colonial semantics

Carina Damm (Leipzig): “Sámi and Bjarmar as Brokers in the Medieval Fur Trade”

Prof. Alexandra Petrulevich (Uppsala): “The East Norse Echo: Swedish Medieval and Post-medieval Discourse on finnarkareler and lappar

13:30-14:30 Religion

Dr Christian Koch Madsen (Nuuk): “Far from Rome – Religious Beliefs and Otherness of the Medieval Greenland Norse”

Dr Solveig Marie Wang (Greifswald): “Christianity, Conversion and the Saami in the Medieval Period”

14:30-15:30 Panel discussion and conclusion

Organisers: Prof. Dr Cordelia Heß, Prof. Dr Clemens Räthel, Dr Solveig Marie Wang, Erik Wolf. For any enquiries please contact: wangs@uni-greifswald.de.

Mike Bintley and Patricia Dailey

Nov 11, 2022

Mike Bintley (Birkbeck, University of London) and Patricia Dailey (Columbia University)

Location: Harvard University

“Tree Felling/Tree Feeling”

Online Event; Register here
12:00 PM EST

Sponsored by CEMS and the Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.