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.
Forgiveness, Pardon, Indulgence
Harry Cushman (UNC Chapel Hill)
Spencer Strub (Princeton)
In addition to marking a time of celebration, in both its original ancient context and in its medieval re-imaginings, jubilee served as a designated time for the forgiveness of debts (whether spiritual or material), pardon of past wrongs, and release from obligations related to labor and property. This thread invites session proposals that consider the place of forgiveness, pardon, and indulgence in rituals of celebration in the global medieval world. Questions to consider might include... (click for more)
Performing Celebration; Celebrating Performance
Jeffery G. Stoyanoff (Penn State, Altoona)
Medieval drama studies have come a long way over the last fifty years. Our field continues its meticulous work with records and manuscripts, but we have invested a great deal of attention and scholarship, too, into performance as research. To understand the extant dramatic texts we have, we first must remind ourselves that these texts are but resonances of more elaborate performances... (click for more)
Medieval Practices of Adaptation
Britt Mize (Texas A&M)
Amber Dunai (Texas A&M, Central Texas)
At no time has intellectual culture been more committed to honoring the authority and authorities of the past than in the Middle Ages. Yet medieval adaptations of earlier works and media objects are often profoundly inventive. Indeed, adaptation is a central and lively mode of medieval creativity: a phenomenon due for systematic investigation, both in its very fact and in its processes and forms. While it is possible in any era for creative adaptation to take a deliberately violent or iconoclastic approach to sources, most often it does not. Adapters usually see their creative interventions—however radical—as... (click for more)
Anti-Jubilee: Feminist Killjoys, When the Party Ends
Sarah Baechle (U of Mississippi)
Carissa Harris (Temple U)
On June 24, 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion and explicitly invoked medieval common law as precedent, Texas Attorney General Ken
Paxton’s office published a press release titled “AG Paxton Celebrates End of Roe v. Wade; Announces Abortion Now Illegal in Texas” proclaiming the establishment of a new annual agency holiday to commemorate the legal denial of reproductive self-determination to everyone in the country’s second most populous state. This thread invites papers which capaciously consider the intersections between festivity and violation... (click for more)
Joyous Movement: Celebratory Motion and Affect
Lynneth Miller Renberg (Anderson U)
Clint Morrison (UT Austin)
Jubilee is often joined by joyous movements as people celebrate and commemorate milestones with performance. In our modern digital context, most people recognize joyous movement when they see it, from TikTok dances to end zone celebrations, wedding processions to Pride parades. These activities embody emotion through movement within shared cultural markers and boundaries, marking celebrations and powerfully conveying emotions to both performers and
witnesses.... (click for more)
Nostalgia in the Medieval World
Anthony Perron (Loyola Marymount)
The theme for this year’s Sewanee Medieval Colloquium, “Jubilee,” suggests a celebratory remembrance of the past. Yet, anniversaries are also opportunities to reflect on what has been lost and to compare a diminished present with a happier past. In a word, nostalgia. In crafting a history to be longed for, nostalgia, of course, edits, essentializes, (re)creates, and distorts its subject. Moreover, as a fundamentally emotive engagement with pasts distant or near, nostalgia conveys sorrow and grief over the contemporary world... (click for more)
Rejoicing and Recurrence
Catherine Sanok (U of Michigan)
Claire Waters (UC Davis)
The theme of Jubilee, which can call to mind feasting or feast days (religious and secular), papal spectacle, and eternal rejoicing, among other things, draws our attention to many aspects of recurrence. Those aspects might include frequency (how many iterations constitute recurrence? how is recurrence experienced: as rare or regular?), scale (what is the recurring unit? is it large or small, and how does that matter?), and networks (e.g. poetic stanzas, sequences of images, narrative doublings), times (e.g. hours, feasts, days, years), and practices (reading, prayer, domestic and agricultural work) as they help us to think about aspects of jubilation and rejoicing... (click for more)
Medievalism from Caxton to Hope Emily Allen
Stacie Vos (U of San Diego)
To what extent is scholarship on the Middle Ages a joyful, celebratory activity? This sub-theme invites participants to think about the ways in which the medieval past has come down to us through mediators, chief amongst them printers like Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde who describe textual editing and other forms of scholarly activity in celebratory ways. Caxton's prologues, for instance, constantly offer praise, or "great thanks and laud" to the authors whose work he has prepared for publication. How does this form of praising the medieval reappear with Victorian and Modernist medievalist projects? How has this praise changed over the centuries, and what has changed about whom is praised? (click for more)
Bad Taste & Guilty Pleasures
Kamila Kaminska-Palarczyk (Yale)
Arielle McKee (Wake Forest)
Guilt responds to some feeling of wrongdoing. Whether acknowledging transgressive behavior, indulgence in excess, or succumbing to forbidden desire, guilt is an intimate experience felt within faculties of the mind. Although felt in private, guilt is a learned psychological intervention that, in turn, polices “good” and condemns “bad” behaviors. Medieval didactic literature, religious treatises, and legal texts variously leverage the concept of guilt in order to habituate the individual into moral
virtue... (click for more)
The Event
Shoshana Adler (Vanderbilt)
Mariah Min (Brown)
What goes into the making of an event? What transforms detail into evidence? How does a singular moment, its edges uncertain, become the grounds on which scholarship builds an
argument larger than the moment itself? What is the relationship between a narratological detail, a historical occurrence, a person—and the conclusions that are drawn from them? How does a case study become a case study?
In response to the conference theme of “Jubilee,” we are interested in what it means for details to be made meaningful; how particularities are partaken of, en route to productive abstraction. The methodology of the humanities frequently depends upon extrapolating out of singularity... (click for more)
Colloquium Seminar
The Colloquium Seminar, which happens every other year, allows participants a workshop environment where they can learn new approaches or encounter new disciplinary methods. Participants will meet in a series of Zoom sessions with the seminar leader before the conference to experiment with connections between their own research interests and the seminar topic. Then, at the conference itself, the group will discuss their interdisciplinary collaborations during an in-person roundtable session.
Prior experience with the seminar topic is in no way required, and we are looking for a wide array of approaches, objects of study, and voices.
Click here for this year's full CFP and submission guidelines
