CFP Medieval Uncanny: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference (expired 1/31/2024)

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The Medieval Uncanny: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference

deadline for submissions: January 31, 2024

full name / name of organization: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study

contact email: medieval.study@gmail.com

source: https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2023/11/10/the-medieval-uncanny-pearl-kibre-medieval-study-18th-annual-conference

What: Pearl Kibre Medieval Study 18th Annual Conference

Where: Hybrid, hosted through The Graduate Center, CUNY

When: Friday 3 May 2024

There’s a great deal of attention and sensitivity paid to continuities between the medieval period and the present day, continuities that animate projects as diverse as Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages to fan-studies readings of works like The Book of Margery Kempe, The Matter of Britain, and Roman de la Rose. This work (often correctly) insists that the medieval world never really went away; it was only dissolved into modernity. But despite the best efforts of scholars to make the vestiges of the Middle Ages intelligible, so many aspects of the period remain obscure, unruly, and decidedly weird. It is this weirdness that we are terming the medieval uncanny, the residue of the Middle Ages that resists simple functionalism. Following Stephanie Trigg and Carolyn Dinshaw, if we give up thinking of the medieval past as a static and knowable place, what can we do?

This conference will explore the uncanny and related terms– the weird, the abject, the spectral–  that describe the moment of rupture which can’t be assimilated by modern perspectives or previous experience, an experience common to contemporary readers and medieval ones. These are moments when a modern reader becomes very aware of the temporal and cultural distance of the Middle Ages, or when a character experiences a sudden shift from the normal to the fantastic. We also notice shifts within medievalist representations of the period, moving from technicolor epics to more somber, weirder stories. These modern adaptations use medieval culture as intertext, marshaling the medieval setting to produce a product that is truly uncanny. We welcome projects that explore these moments of distance, and what they tell us about the potential for uncanniness to be generative in the face of disconnection, unfamiliarity, or surprise.

Submissions might address the following topics:

• The weird and the eerie in lais, fabliaux, memento mori, etc.
• Mystics and unconventional relationships to devotion
• Psychoanalytic theory and medieval texts
• Human and non-human relationships
• Cousins of the uncanny (the Gothic)
• Uncanny medievalisms in film, video games, contemporary literature, etc.

Nonmedievalists, nonacademics and scholars outside the field of English are encouraged to apply. To submit your application, please fiill out the google form here.

Questions may be directed to medieval.study@gmail.com. Abstract Deadline: January 31 2024

Registration Deadline: April 1 2024

Last updated November 15, 2023

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