CFP 2026 Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting (Amherst, MA 3/19-21/2026)

2026 Medieval Academy of America Annual Meeting:

Consortiums and Confluences

Call for Papers

The 101st annual Meeting of the Medieval Academy of America will take place on March 19–21, 2026 on the campuses of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Amherst College, and will also include events at Mt. Holyoke College and Smith College. Hosted by the Five College Consortium, the theme of the meeting is “Consortiums and Confluences.” The program will bring together scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds addressing the medieval world and critical topics in Medieval Studies. Our plenary lectures will be given by Elly Truitt (Associate Professor of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania), Peggy McCracken (Incoming President of the Medieval Academy of America and Professor of French, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan), and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco (Augustus R. Street Professor of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative Literature at Yale University). We are excited to welcome you to Amherst, MA, and its environs, and look forward to meeting you, learning from you, and celebrating our shared commitment to Medieval Studies.

Click here for more information and the full Call for Papers.

NeMLA Sponsored Sessions March 2025

We are organizing the following sessions for the 56th Annual Convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association to be held in Philadelphia, 6-9 March. The full schedule is available online and registration is required to attend. 

Thursday, Mar 6 - Track 4 (02:15-04:15 PM)

4.12 Saving the Day for Medieval Studies: Using Comics for Teaching the Middle Ages (Roundtable)
Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Bristol Community College
Chair: Karen Casebier, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Location: 402 (Media Equipped)
Pedagogy & Professional & Cultural Studies and Media Studies

"The Medieval Comics Project: Ongoing Efforts to Expand the Field of Medieval Comics Scholarship" Michael Torregrossa, Bristol Community College

"From Borders to Panels: Integrating Comic Books into Medieval Studies Pedagogy" Rachael Warmington, Seton Hall University

"Reshaping Literary Canon: Graphic Novels as the Future of Classics" Derek Castle, University of New Hampshire

"Marvel 1602 and its Connection to the Scientific Enlightenment" Madison Cothern, University of Memphis

Sunday, Mar 9 - Track 22 (08:15-10:15 AM)

22.20 (Re)Animating the Middle Ages: Adapting the Medieval in Animated Media (Seminar)
Chair: Michael Torregrossa, Bristol Community College
Chair: Karen Casebier, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga
Location: 410 (Media Equipped)
Cultural Studies and Media Studies & Interdisciplinary Humanities

"Animating Marie de France : Emile Mercier’s Bisclavret (2011)" Karen Casebier, University of Tennessee-Chattanooga

"Possibilities and Pitfalls in Arthurian Animation: An Exploration of the Darkstalkers Series (1995)" Michael Torregrossa, Bristol Community College

"The Black Knight: Women “Passing” as Knights in Children’s Entertainment" Megan Arnott, Lakehead University

"Cartoon Saloon's Wild Women: Monstrous Genders in Irish Animated Medievalism" Colin Wheeler, Kennesaw State University

"A Modern Look at Late Medieval Religion and Literacy in Obsidian Entertainment’s Pentiment" Olivia Mathers, Lehigh University

"Heresy and Crusades: How Modern Fascists Appropriated the Medieval Aesthetics of Warhammer 40k" William Weiss, Independent Scholar

CFP Tolkien and War! - Tolkien at UVM Conference (2/2/2025; Hybrid 4/5/2025)

Tolkien at UVM Conference

deadline for submissions:
April 5, 2025

full name / name of organization:
The Tolkien at the University of Vermont Conference

contact email:
cvaccaro@uvm.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/10/31/tolkien-at-uvm-conference

Tolkien and War! is the theme of the 21st annual Tolkien at the University of Vermont conference on April 5th. This is a hybrid event!!

We are excited to have John Garth as our keynote speaker, and we are encouraging all abstracts but will give priority to those on the theme. Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• War in Europe
• War in Middle-earth
• War and Tolkien's poetry
• Heroic battle poetry
• War and Tolkien's English
• War in the films/Tv shows
• Gender/Sexuality and War
• Psychology and War
• Religion and War

Please submit 200 word abstracts to cvaccaro@uvm.edu by Sunday February 2nd!


Last updated November 1, 2024

CFP Social Media and the Medieval - TSW Special Issue (2/28/2025)

Social Media and the Medieval - TSW Special Issue

deadline for submissions:
February 28, 2025

full name / name of organization:
The So What (Arthuriana's Public Humanities Project)

contact email:
thesowhatpub@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/12/02/social-media-and-the-medieval-tsw-special-issue

The So What welcomes proposals for short, public-facing pieces — whether critical, pedagogical, or creative — on social media accounts that engage with the medieval period for a special issue of TSW planned for on-line publication in 2025 or early 2026.



Whether it’s Instagram, Twitter (currently known as X), YouTube, TikTok, or other social media platforms, we’re interested in social media that engages with, or remediates, the medieval period on various subjects, including history, literature, manuscripts, animals, physical objects, etc. Some accounts may take a more straight forward, literal approach while others may utilize humor and parody. We are interested in pieces on any medieval-focused social media, with potential topics included, but not limited to:



- Intersections of social media and public humanities

- The role of social media within the digital humanities

- Social media and humor (obscure jokes, parody accounts, medieval camp, and more!)

- Social media’s role in academia

- Using social media in the classroom

- How social media does or does not expand the idea of the medieval beyond western Europe

- How social media reinforces and/or subverts periodization

- Intersection of social media and modern meme culture

- Critical readings of specific accounts and using medievalism to include or exclude

- Fama in the Internet Age

- Medieval (and Medievalist) Influencers



Full CFP also available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i-E14ByShGSq2TQYRLWa4-695xsHo8H5/edi...



Last updated December 5, 2024

CFP Spanning the Globe: Thinking across Geographies in Medieval and Medievalism Studies (1/22/2025 Medieval and Renaissance Forum, Kenne NH 3/28-29/2025)

45th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum: Spanning the Globe: Thinking across Geographies in Medieval and Medievalism Studies

deadline for submissions:
January 22, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Medieval and Renaissance Forum

contact email:
mpages@keene.edu

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/01/02/45th-annual-medieval-and-renaissance-forum-spanning-the-globe-thinking-across. 

45th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum:

Spanning the Globe: Thinking across Geographies in Medieval and Medievalism Studies

Keene State College

Keene, NH, USA

Friday and Saturday March 28-29, 2025



Call for Papers and Sessions



We are delighted to announce that the 45th Medieval and Renaissance Forum will take place in person on Friday, March 28 and Saturday March 29, 2025 at Keene State College in Keene, New Hampshire. This year's conference considers the Global Turn in all elements of our field—Medieval Studies, Renaissance/Early Modern Studies, Medievalism, and "Renaissance-ism." As always, we also welcome papers on any and every topic related to the Middle Ages or the Renaissance as well as papers on medievalism. We plan to hold the 45th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum in person with a limited number of virtual presentations.

We welcome abstracts (one page or less) from faculty, students, and independent scholars. If you are an undergraduate student, we ask that you obtain a faculty member's approval and sponsorship.



Graduate students are eligible for consideration for the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award upon submission of their essays by March 1, 2025. The winner of the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award will win $100 to be used for registration and/or travel expenses to the 46th Annual Medieval and Renaissance Forum (travel expenses including but not limited to transportation to and from the conference and accommodations while in Keene). The winner of the South Wind Graduate Student Paper Award will be announced at lunch on Friday, March 28, 2025.



Please submit abstracts and full contact information on the google form available at:



https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfmaw5chDsckRFiAhXQVDA61v6uznfNjwVaEVHXZ4MWQT1xgg/viewform?usp=dialog



This year’s keynote speaker is Angela Jane Weisl, Professor of English at Seton Hall University, who will speak about "Spanning the Globe: Getting Global in Medievalism and Medieval Studies"

Angela Jane Weisl is Professor of English at Seton Hall University. A scholar of both Medieval Studies and Medievalism, she is the author of Conquering the Reign of Femeny: Gender and Genre in Chaucer’s Romance, The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures in Contemporary Culture, and the co-author, with Tison Pugh, of Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present. Her collection, Medievalisms in a Global Age, co-edited with Robert Squillace came out from Boydell and Brewer in 2024, and their co-authored project, tentatively titled Global Medievalisms and the Contest of Space, is under contract at Routledge. She is also the Executive in Charge of Presentations for the International Society for the Study of Medievalism. She played Mean Teacher and Zombie Chaucer in the Seton Hall University English Club Zombie Movie. From years of teaching History of the English Language, she is known around Seton Hall as the “Dr. of HEL.”

Abstract deadline: January 22, 2025



Presenters and early registration: March 15, 2025



As always, we look forward to greeting returning and first-time participants to Keene!




Last updated January 2, 2025

CFP ‘Getting Medieval’: Fantasy and the Middle Ages (2/3/2025; Spec Issue Messengers from the Stars)

Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy No. 8, 2025 [updated]

deadline for submissions:
February 3, 2025

full name / name of organization:
Messengers from the Stars

contact email:
mfts.journal@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2024/07/22/messengers-from-the-stars-on-science-fiction-and-fantasy-no-8-2025-updated

Messengers from the Stars is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, offering academic articles, reviews, and providing an outlet for a wide range of creative work inspired by Science fiction and Fantasy. The 2025 issue will be dedicated to the following theme:

‘Getting Medieval’: Fantasy and the Middle Ages

Traditionally distinguished by the presence of supernatural or magical elements, otherworldly settings, epic quests and archetypal characters, Fantasy fiction has been an incredibly popular genre since its inception. Indeed, as highlighted by scholars like John Clute, much of world fiction “has been described, at one time or another, as fantasy” (337). Although Fantasy is sometimes perceived as a form of escapism and at other times as a legitimate fictional realm with its own internal logic, the influence of the Middle Ages has remained a constant element in the construction of Fantasy worlds. From the use of folklore, myths, medieval legends and sagas, different contemporary authors look to the past as a source of inspiration, adapting, transforming and rewriting narratives to not only suit contemporary tastes and ideals but also to mirror present-day anxieties and fears. The works of J. R. R. Tolkien, George R. R. Martin, Robin Hobb, Joe Abercrombie, Marion Zimmer Bradley or Juliet Marillier, among others, are good examples of how the Middle Ages have served to fire the imagination.

Bearing this in mind and acknowledging that Fantasy continues to expand and develop, offering a diverse array of narratives as well as endless possibilities for storytelling and creative exploration, in this number we are especially interested in how Fantasy fiction uses the medieval past to create storylines that resonate with contemporary audiences across geographic, linguistic, cultural and political boundaries. We consider Fantasy in broader terms, including literature, cinema, television, comics/graphic novels, video games, music, etc., and are especially interested in submissions that expand the fields of knowledge and landscapes represented in the journal.

Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Arthuriana in Fantasy;
• Female Agency in Medieval Fantasy;
• Fantasy and the Global Middle Ages;
• Heroism and Monstrosity in Fantasy;
• Medieval Emotions in the Fantasy Genre;
• Medieval Spaces and Places in Fantasy;
• Medievalism, Neomedievalism and Fantasy;
• (Mis)Perceptions of the “Medieval” and the “Middle Ages” in Works of Fantasy;
• Which Middle Ages is it? – Identity in Fantasy.

Submissions, between 4000 and 6000 words in English, must be sent to mfts.journal@gmail.com by February 3, 2025. The authors will be notified by the end of March, 2025.

In addition, you can propose a book or film review. We welcome book and film reviews on current science fiction and fantasy research and PhD dissertations. Reviews should be between 500 to 1,000 words. Longer reviews, e.g. dealing with more than one book, must be agreed upon with the Editorial Board.

Books available for review:

Kotsko, Adam. LATE STAR TREK: The Final Frontier in the Franchise Era. University of Minnesota Press, 2025. ISBN 978-1-5179-1910-8
Lapoujade, David. Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick. Trans. by Erik Beranek. University of Minnesota Press, 2024. ISBN 978-1-5179-1461-5.

If you wish to review a title which is not in the list, then please email the Editors directly with your suggestion, as we do consider all requests for recent and forthcoming titles, especially from publishers already listed. If the book or film you wish to review is more than 3 years old, then you would need to demonstrate its significance to its field for it to be considered.

All submissions must follow the journal’s guidelines available here: https://messengersfromthestars.letras.ulisboa.pt/journal/submission-guid....


Last updated January 14, 2025

CFP Robin Hood and Other Social Bandits in Folk and Popular Culture (3/31/2025; IARHS Conference 6/26-27/2025 Hybrid)

Robin Hood and Other Social Bandits in Folk and Popular Culture

HYBRID biannual conference of

the International Association for Robin Hood Studies

26-27 June 2025

The Jagiellonian University, Cracow (Poland)

(and ONLINE)

source: https://robinhoodscholars.blogspot.com/2024/04/biennial-iarhs-conference-cfp.html

The Robin Hood tradition has inalienably been a part of popular culture and some of its elements undoubtedly come from folk culture. Already Robin Hood ballads or rhymes, as they are also called, represented popular culture. The idea of a social bandit or a bandit rebel, understood by Eric Hobsbawm as the one who “challenges the economic, social and political order” (Bandits 7), is related to social justice and injustice, which has always been present in folklore. Not only the medieval and later Robin Hood can be defined as a social bandit, but such outlaws as Janosik and Ondrašek, provincial as they are according to Hobsbawm (Bandits 47), fulfill the criteria for it. The two lived respectively in the Slovakian and Polish mountains in the 18th and 19th centuries and in the legends they opposed both aristocracy and the Hapsburg rule that stood behind this aristocracy. In Australia Ned Kelly has its admirers, who relate him both to the class conflicts of the 19th-century Australia and to the social wrongs that supposedly affect some Australians at present.

Both folk and popular cultures have been open to the concept of social ills that outlaws may oppose, or at least such are the legends about them.



The topics related to this may refer to literary texts, films, graphic novels, and all the other material that represents popular and folk culture. The topics may include, for example:

-outlaws that opposed social injustice: the legend and the historical background

-reworking old myths into those that cater for the current needs

-ideologies behind the idea of social justice in the texts of culture about outlaws

-the concept of the law and justice in outlaw narratives

-popular reworkings of old myths about social bandits

-nationalistic and racist uses of the outlaw myths



All other topics related to this are also welcome.



Please send your 200-word abstract by March 31, 2025 to Dr. Anna Czarnowus at:

annaczarnowus@op.pl.

CFP Medievalism in Theory / Medievalism in Politics (Studies in Medievalism 35; 6/1/2025)

Sharing on behalf of the editor:

CALL FOR PAPERS

STUDIES IN MEDIEVALISM XXXV

MEDIEVALISM IN THEORY

At one time or another, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and many other stars of late twentieth- or early twenty-first-century theory built at least a portion of their approach on medieval examples. Indeed, quite a few of those scholars, such as Umberto Eco and Hans Jauss, began their career as students of the Middle Ages. We are therefore invited to ask why medievalism played such a prominent role in these developments. Of all the possible past and/or imaginary milieux on which these approaches could have been built, why the Middle Ages? And to the degree that these scholars have referenced specific aspects of that era, why did they do so? What did those particular references bring to theory and how have they impacted its development? Moreover, how has that development commented on those references and perhaps on the Middle Ages as a whole, not to mention Medieval Studies and Medievalism Studies? How has it informed our understanding of what we study and what we do? Studies in Medievalism, a peer-reviewed print and on-line publication, is seeking not only feature articles of 6,000-12,000 words (including notes) on any postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages, but also 3,000-word essays that respond to one or more of these questions. Applicants are encouraged to give particular examples, but submissions, which should be sent in English and Word to Karl Fugelso at kfugelso@towson.edu by 1 June 2025, should also address the implications of those examples for the discipline as a whole. (Note that priority will be given to papers in the order they are received and submissions that have not been translated into fluent English will not be considered.)

MEDIEVALISM IN POLITICS

Owing to multiple inquiries inspired by current wars and/or forthcoming elections, a new short-essay section has been added to SIM 35. As noted in previous CFPs and their results for SIM 29-31, professional politicians have often invoked the Middle Ages to justify their actions. But they are far from alone, for many of their constituents have also deployed medievalism for political purposes. Indeed, much of medievalism, not to mention the study of it, has revolved around politics of one kind or another. Thus, in addition to 3,000-word essays on medievalism “in theory” and to longer articles of 6,000-12,000 words on any postmedieval responses to the Middle Ages, Studies in Medievalism is seeking 3,000-word essays (including notes) on post-medieval ways the Middle Ages have been referenced for political gain. Applicants are encouraged to give particular examples, but submissions, which should be sent in English and Word to Karl Fugelso at kfugelso@towson.edu by 1 June 2025, should also address the implications of those examples for the discipline as a whole. (Note that priority will be given to papers in the order they are received and submissions that have not been translated into fluent English will not be considered.)