CALL FOR PAPERS FOR PANEL

BIRDERS WITHOUT BORDERS: HOW REPRESENTATIONS OF BIRDS INTERRUPT GENDER/SPECIES/GENRE/PERIOD CATEGORIES

INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON MEDIEVAL STUDIES, KALAMAZOO, 8-10 MAY 2025

DUE BY 15 SEPTEMBER 2024

In medieval and early modern literature and visual art, birds flit in the background and they bring main character energy; they are human companions, human proxies, or they ignore humans altogether; they are represented allegorically, metaphorically, and literally, sometimes all in the same text. Behind and informing birds’ textual ubiquity, medieval and early modern people interacted with birds in wild and domestic spaces in and across urban and rural zones.

This bird-forward in-person panel thus considers how the use of birds in literary and scientific texts intersect in medieval and early modern literature, challenging traditional understandings of birds as mere tropes, symbols, or textual ornamentation. Instead, this panel invites new arguments and insights into their broader literary and cultural implications. This panel offers ample room for conversations across many rapidly evolving fields: gender studies, eco-critical studies, animal studies.

Submissions might consider these questions in their proposals:

- How do representations of birds enable the crossing of all kinds of boundaries-- species, genre, gender, periodization?

- What kinds of arguments arise when we consider the overlap or cross-disciplinarity of literary texts and scientific texts?

- What do birds potentiate in these texts that other animals do not?

- What can we do with ostensibly scientific or ornithological texts besides use them as expository background to explain esoteric birdy references?

Contact Sara Petrosillo (sp220@evansville.edu) or Lexi Toufas (atoufas@unc.edu) with any questions.

Please submit 300-word abstracts by September 15, 2024 to: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6106