Please join us this Thursday, May 26^th, 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”

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.

– “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!