Call for Threads/Abstracts/Panels
THE 49TH SEWANEE MEDIEVAL COLLOQUIUM
History and Personhood
April 5th-6th, 2024
University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee
Threads Due 1 August 2023/ Abstracts & Panels Due 1 November 2023
The understanding of identity, in the medieval as in the modern, rests within discourses of science, medicine, religion, visual representation, literary imagination, legal definition, and historical record, among many others. Personhood is both imagined and policed by historical actors in a given time period -- but also by those looking back to uncover narratives and images of the past. This conference asks participants to consider how we construct the history of people and persons, as well as how people, in turn, construct history. We invite conversations around the ideas of persona, personhood in historical chronicle, visualizations of identity-categories, the limits of the anthropocene, voicing as subjectivity, and more.
Papers might be interested in the construction of royal identity, of personhood marked by faith, in legislated systems of inclusion or exclusion, or how sensation determines what it means to be human. Panels might address the role of ‘the historical turn’ in modern scholarship, the nature of literary biography, or how we address personhood as a contested category in our classrooms. The conference welcomes papers focusing on any area or region of the globe and encourages participation from faculty working on material from Asia, Africa, or the Americas. Finally, we hope for interdisciplinary work addressing how categories or discourses around personhood disrupt our familiar, modern departmental divisions.
How to Participate:
SUBMIT A PAPER ABSTRACT (DUE: NOV 1)
Colloquium Format: One of the unique elements of the Colloquium is its use of a respondent-format. Papers for each panel are pre-circulated to a selected respondent 1 month before the conference meeting. The respondent takes this time to read each paper and create a response that addresses the individual papers and poses questions for the panelists. This guarantees that each presenter has the opportunity for an established scholar to engage with their work, and the responses set the initial terms for the questions and conversation at the end of each panel.
Commenters are generally established figures in the field with a significant record of publication; participants in the Colloquium are generally limited to holders of a Ph.D. and those currently in a Ph.D. program.
We have two exciting plenary speakers for this year's event. Our plenary lectures will come from Dr. Marion Turner (The University of Oxford) and Dr. Kristina Richardson (The University of Virginia).
For more information, https://new.sewanee.edu/academics/medieval-colloquium/2024-conference-info/