Help Lorraine Stock

Perry Neil Harrison of Baylor University has started a Go Fund Me campaign to help out Lorraine Stock of the University of Houston. According to the site, Lorraine lost her house during the recent hurricane Harvey.

Lorraine is an invaluable member of our community of medievalismists, and I wish her and her family well.

If you can offer her any support, the campaign can be accessed at https://www.gofundme.com/lorraine-stocks-hurricane-recovery or from the widget below.

Michael Torregrossa
Founder/Blog Editor, The Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture

CFP The Medium Aevum is the Message: Appropriation, Reinvention, and Reception of the Middle Ages in Popular Culture (9/21/2017; ACLA 2018 at UCLA)

Great title; do note the impending deadline:

ACLA: The Medium Aevum is the Message: Appropriation, Reinvention, and Reception of the Middle Ages in Popular Culture
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/09/04/acla-the-medium-aevum-is-the-message-appropriation-reinvention-and-reception-of-the

deadline for submissions: September 21, 2017

full name / name of organization: ACLA Annual Conference

contact email: katherine.mcloone@csulb.edu



Organizers: Ilan Mitchell-Smith and Katherine McLoone.

A panel at the annual ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) Conference at UCLA: March 29 - April 1, 2018.
Sponsored by the Cal State University Long Beach Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

From the Renaissance invention of the term medium aevum to modern colloquial usage of “medieval” as a pejorative, the era between the fourth and the fifteenth centuries has been a site of contention through which western culture defines both its fears and its ideals.

Contemporary popular culture is no exception. Some works—such as Game of Thrones or the latest King Arthur movie—explicitly engage medieval tropes. Others, including fantasy novels and superhero comic books, allude more obliquely to the long tradition of medievalism, or the representation of the Middle Ages, often while drawing on stereotypical medieval tropes of the knight, the damsel, and the monster. As we have recently seen with news coverage of various white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, these allusions and “medieval” references, tropes, and images are also often used to further extremist social and political agendas.

This panel will explore representations of, and engagements with, the Middle Ages in popular culture. Although papers on works such as Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings are welcome, we hope to expand the discussion of popular medievalism to include political and social reappropriations, the use of medieval tropes in works that are not ostensibly medieval, and even the challenges of overcoming medievalist confirmation bias in the classroom.



We invite you to submit a 250-300 word proposal to our panel through the ACLA portal by 9 AM EST on Sept 21, 2017 (portal open 12 PM EST Aug 31, 2017). Feel free to be in touch with us at any time: Ilan Mitchell-Smith (ilan.mitchellsmith@csulb.edu) and Katherine McLoone (katherine.mcloone@csulb.edu)

Last updated September 6, 2017

CFP Innovative Technologies: Modern Responses to the Medieval (A Roundtable) (9/10/17; Kalamazoo 2018)

Do note impending deadline:


Kzoo 2018: Innovative Technologies: Modern Responses to the Medieval (A Roundtable)
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2017/09/05/kzoo-2018-innovative-technologies-modern-responses-to-the-medieval-a-roundtable

deadline for submissions: September 10, 2017

full name / name of organization: Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies

contact email: hortulus@hortulus-journal.com



Hortulus: The Online Graduate Journal of Medieval Studies is sponsoring a roundtable at the Kalamazoo International Congress on Medieval Studies in 2018. Innovative Technologies: Modern Responses to the Medieval (A Roundtable) Please send abstracts of no more than a page, along with a current CV and the Participation Information Form (available on the Medieval Congress Submissions page:http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to Gwendolyne Knight and Ryan Lawrence at hortulus@hortulus-journal.com by September 10. This session is open to all.

CFP: As a born-digital journal created and run entirely by a rotating staff of graduate students, Hortulus concerns itself deeply and directly with innovative technologies used within Medieval Studies. The roundtable for the ICMS 2018, Modern Responses to the Medieval, will interrogate this topic from two points. Firstly, what can we learn today from medieval attitudes towards novelty and innovative technologies? And, secondly, in what ways can we innovate by drawing on medieval sources? Recent studies, for example, have attested the usefulness of drawing upon medieval medical recipes in modern medicine, as in the case of a recipe from Bald’s Leechbook which led to the creation of a new antibiotic. In addition, relationships between medieval (celestial/geographic) cartography and digital cartography might prove useful, as do new examinations of medieval science, such as the Ordered Universe project, which analyses the writings of the medieval scholar Robert Grosseteste and its relevance to quantum theory. Panellists are also encouraged to engage with the introduction of postmodern ideas into medieval studies; especially those that are innovative at the moment (e.g. robotics, cyborgs, AI, technoculture).


The session organizers wish to bring people together to share experiences, compare approaches, as well as discuss potentials and potential problems. We invite papers that explore efforts to apply innovative technologies to the field of Medieval Studies, but also those which both explore and challenge innovations which apply medieval strategies to modern problems. The session will be structured as a roundtable with a series of short ten- and fifteen-minute papers (the number and duration to be determined depending on response), with ample time for discussion.


Last updated September 7, 2017