The Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is pleased to announce its Third Annual Undergraduate Conference entitled “Corpus: the Body in the Middle Ages and Renaissance.” The conference will take place on April 19, 2013 at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. They are currently calling for abstracts from interested undergraduates.
Medieval and Renaissance views of the body have come to us from a rich trove of sources, from poetic portrayals in texts to mappae mundi to figures sculpted from stone. This conference seeks to address the numerous and changing depictions of bodies during the early periods from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Some potential topics include holy and unholy bodies, the body as metaphor, theatrical portrayals of bodies, the body in music, medieval medicine and the advent of anatomy, the body in pain and at play, superstitions and the gendered body, Byzantine, Islamic and Jewish perspectives on bodies, depictions of bodies in art and print, bodies bound by canon and secular law, and monstrous races.
All submitters should send an abstract of no more than 250 words, including their name and college affiliation (if applicable), to mylitalo@utk.edu by no later than February 4, 2013. Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 19. Additionally, the Marco Institute plans to award seven $100 travel grants to non-UT students on a competitive basis. A $250 prize funded by Keith Taylor will be awarded to the best paper presentation. A $15 registration fee will be collected on the day of the conference.
The plenary speaker is Elina Gertsman, Assistant Professor of Medieval Art at Case Western Reserve University. She is the author of The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages: Image, Text, Performance (2010) and the editor of Visualizing Medieval Performance: Perspectives, Histories, Contexts (2010), Crying in the Middle Ages: Tears of History (2011) and Thresholds of Medieval Visual Culture: Liminal Spaces (2012).
