Proposals are should be submited to qtgsu.ucsb@gmail.com before 11:59pm on Friday, October 12 (deadline has been extended from September 1st, 2018.)
Medieval Studies Mini-Conference
Please join us May 3, 2018 at 12:30-1:45pm in South Hall 2623 (Sankey Room) for a pre-mini-International Congress on Medieval Studies Conference! The UCSB Medieval Literatures Center will be previewing the work of University of California Santa Barbara medieval graduate students. Come hear our exciting new research before it goes on the road!
Christene D’Anca, Department of Comparative Literature, “Death and Its Aftermath in the Middle Ages”
Jessica Zisa, Department of English, “The Pseudo-Mulier in an Age of #Resistance”
Please contact Medieval Literatures Research Assistant Joyce King (jlking@umail.ucsb.edu) for more information.
UCSB’s 2018 Medieval Studies Conference
The UC Santa Barbara’s Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference 2018 planning committee is excited to present “The Politics of Pleasure: Social Networking in the Middle Ages,” where scholars from diverse backgrounds will explore the varied and complex ways in which pleasure, leisure, competition, entertainment, friendly feelings, and play facilitated the very serious and often obnoxious business of politics – relaxing boundaries to allow for their renegotiation.
The Keynote this year will be presented by Professor Christine Chism from UCLA. Our very own Professor Sharon Farmer will be delivering the closing responses for the papers.
Please join us on May 5, 2018 at 9:00 a.m. in the IHC McCune Conference Room. There will be refreshments throughout the day, lunch, and a wine and small plate reception at the end.
UCSB 2018 Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference Planning Committee:
Christene d’Anca, Department of Comparative Literature
Joyce King, Department of English
Anna Rudolph, Department of History
Talk by Ruth Evans on “Margery Kempe’s Internal Reality”
Pre-New Chaucer Society Congress Mini-Conference
Please join us this Thursday, May 26th, from 12 – 2 pm in the Sankey Room (South Hall 2623), for a pre-mini-New Chaucer Society Conference!
This July, our Medieval Literatures research center is proud to be sending several members to the New Chaucer Society Congress in London. This Thursday, four of our members will present rough drafts of their papers to be workshopped. We will hear:
Jonathan Forbes, “Fragments of Debate: Group Experience in the Headlinks of the Canterbury Tales”
Shay Hopkins, “Encoding Wayfinding Techniques in the Hagiographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108”
Rachel Levinson-Emley, “Arcite’s Inexpressible Love: Hereos and Bleeding in The Knight’s Tale”
Paul Megna, “Chaucerian Anger”
Reading Like the Reeve with Elizabeth Scala – May 16th @ 4 pm
Please join us for a seminar-style discussion of excerpts from Elizabeth Scala’s 2015 book, Desire in the Canterbury Tales. This book “examines the collection’s manner of generating stories out of division, difference, and contestation. It argues that Chaucer’s tales are produced as misreadings and misrecognitions of each other. Looking to the main predicate of the General Prologue’s famous opening sentence (‘longen’) as well as the thematic concerns of a number of tale-tellers, and working with a theoretical model that exposes language as the product of such longing, Scala posits desire as the very subject of the Canterbury Tales and misrecognition as its productive effect. In chapters focusing on both the well-discussed tales of fragment 1 and the marriage group as well as the more recalcitrant religious stories, Desire in the Canterbury Tales offers a comprehensive means of accounting for Chaucer’s poem” (Ohio State University Press). We will be reading and discussing both the Introduction and Chapter Two: “Misreading Like the Reeve.”
Elizabeth Scala is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas, Austin. She writes and teaches about Chaucer, the history of Chaucer studies, and the textual environments of medieval literature. Her recently published essays focus on the circulation of desire in the Canterbury Tales; the phallic jokes in the General Prologue and modern historicist criticism; and illustrations of the Canterbury pilgrims in manuscript and modern books. She has published The Post-Historical Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), a collection of essays co-edited with Sylvia Federico. She is also one of the editors of the journal Exemplaria: Medieval / Early Modern / Theory.
For access to PDFs of both of the chapters we will be reading, please email the Medieval Literatures RA at medievalliteratures@gmail.com
The seminar will be held in South Hall 2635 from 4 to 5 pm, with a reception following from 5 – 7 pm in the Sankey Room, South Hall 2623.
Announcing New Fall 2014 Medieval Literatures Events
– “On the Beach,” the 3rd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, will be held on the campus of UCSB from Oct.16-18. This conference will feature many medieval speakers, both from UCSB and elsewhere, on a wide range of subjects. We have done our best to plan an exciting and vibrant multi-disciplinary event, cutting across a wide swath of temporalities, fields, art- and design-practices, and institutional and para-institutional locations. “On the Beach” is co-sponsored by the UCSB College of Letters and Sciences, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Film and Media Studies, Media Arts and Technology, Art, Comparative Literature, Spanish and Portuguese, Germanic and Slavic Studies, History, English, Literature and the Environment, Literature and the Mind, the Early Modern Center, and many other units on campus and off (a full list of co-sponsors is available on the program). Note that the IHC is devoting its 2014-2015 public events series to “The Anthropocene,” a topic that sponsors wonderful synergies between the themes and speakers of BABEL’s event and the IHC’s current concerns.
The program can be found at http://babel-meeting.org/2014-meeting/2014-program/. We hope to see you during the conference — all sessions, plenary talks, and social events are open and free for UCSB students and faculty. Email Eileen Joy (eileenajoy@gmail.com) if you would like to pre-register. Please share the program widely; we thank you for your support.
– Introducing a new writing and work-shopping group for the Medieval and Renaissance/Early Modern graduate student scholars in the English department. Our goal is to meet once a month, and discuss a piece of in-progress writing, circulated one week before the meeting. Works can include prospectus drafts, chapter drafts, seminar papers, conference papers, articles, or anything else on which like-minded scholars would like feedback from other pre-1650 scholars.
Our first meeting will be Friday, November 21st, at noon, location TBA. We will be discussing a chapter draft by Jonathan Forbes, which will be circulated a week earlier, November 14th. At our second meeting, tentatively scheduled for mid-December, Kristy McCants will share and ask for feedback on a conference paper she intends to incorporate into a chapter. In addition to welcoming all of you to these two meetings, we also welcome any of the grad students to volunteer to have their piece work shopped. Please also feel free to email me with any questions. This will, we hope, prove to be a source of lively camaraderie and academic fellowship. We hope to see you all there!
– Shay Hopkins will present her PAMLA Conference paper on the Havelok legend and historiography, Monday, October 27th, 10 am, location TBA.
– Scott Kleinman, Medieval Literature and Digital Humanities professor at CSU Northridge, will be on campus Wednesday, December 3rd, time and location TBA.
– Stay tuned for more announcements about upcoming speakers and events Winter and Spring quarters!
Medieval Graduate Student Conference This Weekend
2nd Annual Medieval Literatures Lecture
Please join us for the 2nd Annual Medieval Literatures Lecture!
Thursday, May 2. 4:00 – 5:00 in SH 2617
Professor Bruce Holsinger, University of Virginia
“Literary Friendship & Historical Fiction: Scenes From Medieval London”
Prof. Holsinger is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at UVA, but he is also the author of the forthcoming novel A Burnable Book (Harper Collins 2014) set in London in 1385 and featuring John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer.
Come hear Prof Holsinger talk about his experience of writing and
publishing historical fiction and read selections from his novel.
Medieval Talk This Thursday, 4/25
THURSDAY, April 25th at noon in HSSB 4041
Nicole Archambeau, Dept of History & Religious Studies, UCSB
“Identifying Health Care Providers in the Later Middle Ages”
What did people in the 14th century do when they were sick? The answer
was often far more complex than traditional research in the history of
medicine shows. By sifting through the narratives of people coping
with their own and loved-ones’ health care, we find that people used
all available methods and even created new ones when needed. We also
see that medieval concepts of health care extended beyond the
boundaries of the physical body to include the passions or what
contemporaries called “accidents of the soul.” Healers and sufferers
saw that sadness, fear, and anxiety could damage physical health and
were health problems in their own right.