This year's Colloquium invites you to consider the following sub-themes, organized by collaborators from across Medieval Studies. To submit to a sub-theme, simply indicate this on the abstract submission form, and your work will be submitted to the theme organizers for consideration. Any paper not selected by organizers will be returned to the General Call, unless otherwise indicated.
Mystic or Monster? Abjection, Authority, and the Limits of the Sacred
Amanda Leary (U Wisconsin-Madison)
Zaccary Haney (Loyola U Chicago)
This session explores how mysticism functioned both as a rebellion against institutional structures of authority and as a refuge for those seeking direct access to the divine beyond clerical mediation. Women such as Angela of Foligno, Marguerite Porete, and Catherine of Siena do not simply offer private visions; they rebel against and expose the fragility of the theological and institutional systems meant to contain the sacred. Pulled back toward the center by male authors and canonized by male popes, mystical narratives exist in the tensional space between the sacred and the abject, remaining on the margins for us modern readers as we are confronted with their abjection, with them as the abject... (click for more)
Marx Again
Taylor Cowdery (UNC Chapel Hill)
R.D. Perry (U of Tennessee, Knoxville)
This thread invites papers and panel proposals that engage, whether directly or more loosely, with the thought and legacy of Karl Marx. Since the New Left, Marxian thought has been a staple of Anglo-American literary criticism but, apart from some prominent engagements, its influence within medieval studies has been less pronounced than in other subfields. In light of Marx’s well known interest in the history of the European Middle Ages, and in a moment of austerity politics in the contemporary academy as well as cronyism in the wider polity, we feel that now is perhaps an especially good time for medievalists to think anew with Marx... (click for more)
Dialectics of Resistance and Refuge
Shoshana Adler (Vanderbilt)
Mariah Min (Brown)
In response to the conference theme this thread invites panels and papers that take up the problems of contradiction in medieval modes of resistance and refuge. Moments of revolt paradoxically reinforce and clarify the strictures of existing power, and models of refuge inevitably encode restrictions into sanctuary. What notably dialectical forms can resistance/refuge take, when they imagine themselves to be ongoing formations? We are interested in work oriented toward that dialectic, addressing questions around the failures of rebellion, the restrictions of refuge, and the ever-deferred promises of revolution... (click for more)
Converted Bodies in Medieval Literature
Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk (Yale)
Claire Crow (Yale)
Conversion narratives often lead to transformations of the body: its appearance, affiliations, actions, and visibility. Scenes of conversion become sites of celebration, resistance, and violence. This subtheme invites panels to consider how medieval texts and artifacts conceptualize and stage conversion as a process inscribed on and through the body. This thread interrogates the medieval body in all its artistic representations with the following caveat: representation does not exhaust lived experience. Manuscript illustrations, poetic descriptions, and theatrical performances of medieval bodies rely on aesthetics to convey culturally specific meaning... (click for more)
Borders and Border Crossing
Claire Davis (U of Toronto)
Emily Youree (U of Louisiana at Lafayette)
Every space of refuge is delineated by a border—whether physical, geographical, political, or social. In turn, these borders often become sites of resistance. Transgressing borders is a common anxiety and liberatory action in many medieval texts, from the selectively destructive Red Sea crossing in the Old English poetic Exodus to the freedom Lanval finds with his fairy consort in Marie de France’s lai. By considering borders within a frame of resistance and refuge, this subtheme hopes to broaden conversations about the limits that medieval writers (and current medieval scholars) explore in their work, drawing attention to people and objects that operate in the margins... (click for more)
Care and Control in Urban Communities
Lucy Barnhouse (Arkansas State U)
Allison Edgren (Loyola U New Orleans)
Especially in times of crisis, medieval cities struggled to both care for and control their inhabitants. Decisions about whom to support or regulate–and how–shaped the lives of city residents and could divide or link discrete communities within the city. Moreover, as they are today, cities in the Middle Ages were often loci of conflict over questions about who deserves care, what forms of social control are necessary, and how resistance should be exercised. This sub-theme therefore welcomes papers and panels considering how care and control were exercised in medieval urban communities, from any disciplinary and methodological perspectives and on all periods and places within the Global Middle Ages... (click for more)
Medieval Studies and Refuge/A Refuge for Medieval Studies
Heather McRae (Westminster College)
The Sewanee Medieval Colloquium is in many ways a refuge for medievalists. It offers us a temporary home for deep thought about the topics that made so many of choose the Middle Ages as our topic of study and a time for discussions with like-minded people over informal coffee break or formal panels. This refuge is needed more than ever. Academics in general—and medievalists in particular—have faced increasing challenges in recent years. ... (click for more)
On the Run: Movement as Resistance and Refuge
Lynneth Miller Renberg (Anderson U; Universitet i Tromsø)
Implied in sanctuary creation is the idea of sheltering in place, of stillness; inversely, seeking sanctuary also requires flight. Likewise, resistance implies both holding ground and pressing forward, requiring choreographed movement. In its most obvious forms, movement obscure individuals and enable more successful resistance, a subversive choreography that also makes resistance and refuge difficult to track. This subtheme invites approaches that explore how these moving bodies – social, political, legal, and/or religious – provide potent responses to crises, often from those marginalized in more traditional textual petitions... (click for more)
From Resistance to Refuge: Body Sovereignty, Community, and Care
Sarah Baechle (U of Mississippi)
Carissa M. Harris (Temple)
This thread welcomes proposals for papers that explore the relationship between care, refuge, and body sovereignty capaciously rendered, including gender and reproductive self-determination and sexual autonomy. Papers might explore the roles of institutions (such as hospitals or almshouses) or individuals in granting refuge or facilitating care for pregnant singlewomen or victim-survivors of sexual assault. They can analyze the self work of recovering from violence, the embodied labor of quotidian demands of familial and domestic care, or the relationships between such individual and communal care, especially informed by contemporary critics such as... (click for more)
Performing Resistance and the Refuge of Performance
Jeffery G. Stoyanoff (Penn State Altoona)
The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society
Scholars of early drama studies have been considering drama as a form of resistance since at least (and likely before) Claire Sponsler’s seminal monograph, Drama and Resistance (1997). The playfulness of dramatic performance is an ideal site of resistance. And even if playwrights, directors, and actors are not attempting to stage resistance, audiences (past, present, and future) have their own role in reading resistance in what they see (or imagine to see when reading play texts) before them. The Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society enthusiastically sponsors this sub-theme, seeking both veteran scholars of early performance studies as well as folks who seek to join us in our resistance and to find refuge in the possibilities of performance... (click for more)
Fictions of Resistance & Refuge
Clint Morrison Jr. (U of Texas at Austin)
Jonathan F. Correa Reyes (Clemson)
Resistance and Refuge reside alongside each other in contemporary fictions. In modern media, franchises like Star Wars create fictions of resistance in shows like Andor and across films; refuge receives similar treatment. These fictions do little more than paint a picture of a resistance without dissent, conversation, or stakes beyond initial victory while promising an ever-safe refuge as long as one does not leave the confines of the narrative. This session seeks to build on scholarship analyzing ideations of resistance and refuge in the Middle Ages. To be certain, medieval narratives were deployed as aides to oppressive systems by providing narrative frameworks to unjust ideologies and practices. However, cultural fictions also allowed authors to envision different circumstances, to imagine the world as it should be. It is in this sense that we speak of fictions of refuge..... (click for more)