Calls for papers

Thinking with Mysticism

Introduction

This day symposium on 31 May 2019 will explore how the mystical, the prophetic, enthusiastic or the apophatic were deployed, to political, scientific or artistic purposes. It will look at what thinkers did with mysticism (broadly defined), the strategies of thought or the practices they developed, and the ways in which they then used these strategies to animate, to energise, to trouble their world.

Find out more.

Keynote speaker

Dr Sarah Apetrei (Keble College, Oxford), is the author of Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (Cambridge, 2010) and co-editor of An Introduction to Jacob Boehme: Four Centuries of Thought and Reception (Routledge, 2014)

Also speaking is Dr Shazia Jagot (University of Surrey), on medieval Sufi mysticism and science.

Call for papers

We seek papers that engage with how mysticism mattered beyond the self, and the religiosity of the individual - in politics, community, in relation to medicine or science, the natural world, and the scholarly world. We encourage papers from a wide temporal as well as religious spread. 

Please send abstracts (approximately 250 words) or expressions of interest to Kevin Killeen by 8 Feb 2019.

Speaking Internationally: Women’s Literary Culture and the Canon in the Global Middle Ages

Introduction

We are delighted to announce an international conference to be held at Bangor University, North Wales, 26-28 June 2019. This conference is the latest event in association with the International Research Network, Women's Literary Culture and the Medieval Canon.

Our last conference, held at Bergen in 2017, encouraged lively conversations that focused predominantly on European texts and authors. We aim to extend this dialogue by speaking internationally, and examining how our understanding of medieval European women writers and the canon might be enhanced by taking a more global perspective. What new light is shed by adopting a global perspective on medieval women's literary modes and practices? What evidence exists for social and intellectual connectivity between European women’s textual culture and that of women living in the lands that border the Mediterranean and beyond? How do medieval women represent the global in their works and to what purposes?

Keynote speakers

• Jonathan Hsy, The George Washington University
• Shazia Jagot, The University of Surrey
• Elaine Treharne, Stanford University

Call for papers

The conference will be full of conversation: a series of ‘in conversation with’ network members, poster presentations, panel discussions, and twenty-minute papers. We welcome individual and collaborative papers that speak internationally on topics that might include the following:

• Women as authors
• Women as patrons
• Book ownership and use in the household
• Genre and gender
• Literary reception
• Women as translators
• Women readers
• Book ownership in women’s religious communities
• Manuscript production
• Literary influence
• Textual transmission
• Collaboration
• Women, literature and location: place, travel, pilgrimage
• Women, literature and life-course
• Literature and trade.

Paper abstracts of no more than 250 words, plus a short biography, should be sent to Dr Sue Niebrzydowski and Professor Liz Herbert McAvoy by 31 October 2018. Successful speakers will be notified shortly thereafter, and online registration will open in late November 2018.