MLA 2024 Old English Calls for Papers

MLA 2024 will take place in Philadelphia, PA from 4th-7th January. Please consider submitting a proposal for one of the following three sessions sponsored by the Old English Forum. And please share widely–the deadline for all abstracts is 20th March, 2023!

Celebrating Sorrow: Commemoration and Lamentation in Old English

Evocations of sorrow mark loss, but also assert community and endurance: Beowulf’s men mourn together; Deor’s loss animates an imagined shared past. We welcome papers on sorrow and commemoration in Old English. Send 250 word abstracts to smkim2@ilstu.edu.

The Joy of the Feast: Food Production, Consumption and Celebration in Old English

We welcome papers on feast scenes in Old English, representations ranging from celebrations in the hall to the exulting of beasts of prey, from the saints at God’s table to cannibalism. Send 250 word abstracts to smkim2@ilstu.edu.

White Supremacist Myth and the Medieval Past

Contemporary white supremacists using early medieval imagery are part of a longer, troubled history of modern figures writing myths of the medieval world. Examples abound from early nationalist scholarship, Nazi medievalism, white nationalist imagery, etc. This panel seeks papers on the ways that the fields of Old English and Old Norse have been appropriated in white supremacist and nationalist myths. Topics might include contemporary racist imagery and ideology, how the history of medieval studies has colluded with these myths, or how nascent race-thinking appears in the medieval texts themselves. Send 250 word abstracts to heslop@berkeley.edu and jalorden@wm.edu.

MLA 2023 Old English Calls for Papers

MLA Members, please consider submitting an abstract for the following three panels sponsored by the Old English Forum at the upcoming 2023 MLA meeting, to be held 5th-8th January in San Francisco. Please share widely–the deadline for submitting abstracts is 15th March, 2022!

NEW: Old English, Middle English, and Contemporary Trans Studies

Medieval studies is in a moment in which it is re-examining the long-held categories that have traditionally defined its boundaries. As this reconceptualization of the field progresses, Trans Studies offers a number of scholarly methodologies and insights that are changing the way medievalists consider their field and, more specifically, Trans history both in the period and beyond. Indeed, a cohort of emerging and established scholars have recently published groundbreaking new research in the area, including 2019’s special issue of the Medieval Feminist Forum on “Visions of Medieval Trans Feminism” (eds. Bychowski and Kim) and 2021’s Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (eds. Spencer-Hall and Gutt) and Trans Historical (eds. LaFleur, Raskolnikov, and Klosowska). These new works read the medieval archive in light of the work of modern Trans Studies scholars, demonstrating how the latter generates insights into genres as diverse as saints’ lives, mystical texts, and romance. This roundtable panel invites contributions that examine the intersections of medieval studies and Trans Studies, including (but not limited to): papers that show how the conceptual resources of Trans Studies can enrich existing medievalist methodologies and vice versa; reflections on the development of medieval Trans Studies, including work in Trans Studies avant la lettre; innovative approaches to the intersections among feminism, Trans Studies, and the medieval; new readings and insights from the archives that take up these topics; how transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, and intersex lives in the Middle Ages can help clarify, modify, or engage in modern Trans Studies and theory; and how our professional spaces, such as university departments or conferences like the MLA, remain problematic for marginalized scholars working in “traditional” historical and literary fields. We particularly welcome papers that engage with Trans history writ large, from, say, Old English trans masculine warriors to the rich Trans history of this year’s MLA location, San Francisco, with its formative events such as the Compton’s Cafeteria riot.  250-word abstracts for this roundtable session should be sent to Claire Waters (cmwaters@ucdavis.edu) and Mary Kate Hurley (hurleym1@ohio.edu) no later than March 18, 2022. 

Secrets and Secret Writing in Early England

While often represented as cryptologically trivial, early medieval ciphers and other systems for secret communication are preserved in a broad range of contexts and often persistently defy satisfactory decryption. This session welcomes engagements with how and in what sort of contexts secret communications are represented as well as with what such encryptions might signify. Please send 250-word abstracts to Susan Kim (smkim2@ilstu.edu) by March 15 2022.

Death, Disease, and Decay in Early Medieval England

Early English writers knew the end was near. In homilies, law codes, and poems, we are confronted with the fact of a fleeting world and the precarity of everything in it. In our own time, in a late-stage pandemic, scholars have found themselves drawn to the conversations of these long-dead writers about ways of dying well, ways to ward off death and disease, about the ubiquity of decay. This panel seeks papers considering new angles on dying, disease and decay in early medieval England. Topics might include the ars moriendi tradition, the deaths of saints, remedies for disease, the decline of kingdoms, depictions of decay (or its relationship to decadence,) and other related topics. Please send 250-word abstracts to Jennifer Lorden (jalorden@wm.edu) by March 15, 2022.

NON GUARANTEED SESSION: Early Medievalists in the Lab: Reflections on Scientific Collaborations

Medieval studies has recently seen a plethora of innovative research collaborations with scientists: in 2015, Professor Christina Lee’s research with colleagues in microbiology into the effectiveness of early medieval charms against modern MRSA infections was in the news frequently, and began a resurgence of interest both in early medieval medicine and the kinds of knowledge that can be created when we collaborate with colleagues in the sciences. At Ohio State University, the recent Popular Culture and the Deep Past conference emphasized “The Experimental Archaeology of Medieval and Renaissance Food.”  And at Yale, macro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy has revealed that the Vinland Map is – as has been long argued – a modern fabrication.

As funding and prestige for such projects continues to grow, it seems an important moment to reflect on innovative collaborations between researchers in STEM fields and early medieval English, and this panel invites papers that reflect on, report about, or examine the contours of such scholarly endeavors. Potential topics include but are not limited to current research collaborations, potential avenues for future research, and reflections on the ethical and intellectual ramifications of this sort of work.  This session is a non-guaranteed session designed to coincide with the Presidential theme for the 2023 MLA Conference, “Working Conditions.”  Please send 250-word abstracts to Mary Kate Hurley (hurleym1@ohio.edu) by March 15, 2022.

“Revisiting the Legendary History of Deor” now in Medium Ævum

From the essay: “The Deor we know from scholarship is a poem comprising episodes, isolated ‘examples’ illustrating the ‘moral … that when adversity comes we are to endure it, taking what small comfort we can from the thought that it will eventually pass’. This article, however, [argues] that a relative wealth of Germanic analogues allows us to see the legendary episodes not as various stories partly obscured by time, but as points in a well-known, sequential narrative history.”

You can read the article in Medium Ævum here.