CFP for "Women at Sea" Symposium

I am excited to announce that Roberta Magnani, Rachel Moss, and I are organizing a one-day symposium on the topic of "Women at Sea," which will take place on July 1st at the lovely National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, Wales. You can find the symposium website here. Please take a look at our call for papers, and please share this CFP with others who might be interested. We welcome papers from various disciplines, as well as creative pieces, and we're excited to see the many ways in which people might respond to the topic.

Symposium: Women at Sea

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea, Wales

July 1, 2016

Call for Papers

Keynote Speakers: Dorothy Kim and Jonathan Hsy

Countless women float through the waters of medieval narrative. In romance, Constance is pushed repeatedly into the waves without a rudder, often with an infant in her arms. Hagiography gives us Mary Magdalene’s journey to spread Christianity, sometimes with fate guiding her ship and other times with a captain and crew to do the sailing. Egeria makes a pilgrimage across the Mediterranean in the 4th century, and Margery Kempe travels from England to Jerusalem in the 15th. These women at sea populate the realms of literature and history, as well as the shadowy space between fact and fiction.

Tales of women at sea call our attention to questions of agency. The sea can seem to be dominated by men in economic and martial terms, and the woman at sea is often set adrift by men who on land have ultimate power over her. But perhaps at sea, a woman enters a more generative and transformative space. The woman at sea is frequently unmoored, lost, vulnerable, her direction chosen by wind and fate. Yet the sea may also open up a more feminine, queer, imaginative space: the woman adrift in a place of transformation, negotiation and transition in which she can re-cast her sense of self.

The sea is a place where boundaries are no longer visible, where there are no direct paths. The sea is its own space (and the largest on the planet), but it also overlaps with land. It is outside of national realms, but functions as a conduit between those realms. And while the edge of the ocean is a boundary, the open sea seems boundless. It defies linearity. Thus, women in oceanic narratives can inhabit a different temporality than is available in narratives defined by land. They enter an exceptional space, a place where bodies need not be territories.  

This symposium seeks presentations from all disciplines, including creative responses and innovative re-imaginings that put medieval narratives in dialogue with current empowering or traumatic experiences of women at sea. Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words to womenatseasymposium@swansea.ac.uk by 26 February 2016.

CFP: Animals in Arthuriana, Kalamazoo Medieval Congress 2014

"The Questing Beast," by Arthur Rackham

Courtesy of The Camelot Project

CFP: Animals in Arthuriana

Kalamazoo Medieval Congress 2014

Sponsored by The Rossell Hope Robbins Library at the University of Rochester

My colleague Kara L. McShane and I are gathering papers for a panel on Animals in Arthuriana for the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 8-11, 2014) at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. We've been talking for a while about the fascinating roles animals play in the Arthurian tradition, and Kara has also been working on a wonderful Arthurian Bestiary for The Camelot Project, and we're hoping that this panel will reflect the excitement we feel about the topic. For a conference affectionately called "The Zoo," we feel that this subject will be particularly appropriate.

From dragon-laced dreams to lion companions to warhorses, animals play a vital role in a wide range of Arthurian materials. Kara and I invite proposals engaging with the varying roles of animals within the realms of Arthurian literature, art, film, etc. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to, the relationships between humans and animals in Arthuriana (for example, a knight and his horse), the historical place of animals in the tradition, the distinction (or lack thereof) between humans and animals, figures who can not be easily categorized as human or animal, animals symbolism and heraldry, prophetic animals, the adaptation of animals for contemporary Arthurian media, and more. 

Please send 250-300 word abstracts to me at kristi.castleberry@gmail.com by September 15th.

Calling all Northern Arthurian Enthusiasts!

The New Chaucer Society has published the CFP for its upcoming conference in Reykjavik (July 16-20), and I am already counting the days before I can hop on a plane and revisit Iceland — one of my favorite places on the planet.

This conference promises an array of exciting threads, and several of them focus on intersections between Scandinavian cultures and those of Continental and Insular medieval Europe. I'm going to be organizing and presiding over a session entitled "Northern Arthurs," and I'll provide the description here for easy reference:

This panel will explore the literary treatment of Arthur and his knights in the cultures of the North, a subject that Geraldine Barnes has identified as "ripe for further investigation within the fields of medieval translation, cross-cultural relations, and the reception of Arthurian narratives." Following the work of Marianne E. Kalinke's edited book The Arthur of the North, the panel seeks to inspire additional research in this area by addressing questions like the following: how does a study of the riddarasögur -- Scandinavian versions of Arthurian narratives -- offer up new perspectives on both the literary culture of the North and on the pervasiveness of Arthurian materials? How do such narratives reflect and adapt to their cultural surroundings? What does the transmission of such texts -- indelibly tied as they are to the traditions of continental and Insular Europe -- reveal about the intersections of Scandinavian, Continental European, and Insular traditions in the late Middle Ages?

If you, or anyone you know, are interested in submitting a paper proposal on this topic, you can reach me at lknorako@gmail.com. I'll be accepting proposals through June 1st and would be delighted to hear from you. One of the many wonderful aspects of NCS is its active inclusion of graduate students, and I am hoping very much to include at least one grad student (if not more) in the session.

On a related (and important!) note, I also want to mention an upcoming conference in Oslo (23-25 May, 2013) entitled "The Arthur of the North." Paper proposals are due to the organizers by March 1st, and you can find all of the relevant details here. Marianne Kalinke — who has played a consistent and pivotal role in this emerging sub-field of Arthurian studies — will be one of the plenary speakers, as will David Wallace and Raluca Radulescu. All in all, it promises to be an exciting gathering, and I am looking forward to hearing all of the new ideas and conversations that will doubtless emerge.