Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 29th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, to be held at Yale University on Saturday, March 31st, 2012. The theme will be “Audience in the Middle Ages.”
The organizers hope that this broad heading will elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of medieval studies. Among many potential areas of focus are performance; orality; spectacle and spectatorship; transmission and circulation; decrees, bulls, charters, and other public documents; drama; liturgy and sacred music; sermons, lectures, and disputation; reception history; and coteries. Further, we look forward to receiving proposals that take more theoretical approaches to ideas of audience in the medieval period. We also welcome investigations of the post-medieval reception of medieval life and thought.
The conference will feature a plenary lecture by Elaine Treharne, Professor of English at Florida State University. Professor Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford, forthcoming), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), among many others.
Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length and read in English. Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent by e-mail to audience.yale@gmail.com, or a hard copy may be mailed to:
Audience in the Middle Ages
c/o Joseph Stadolnik
Department of English
Yale University
P.O. Box 208302
New Haven, CT 06520-8302
The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012. Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award.
