The 2022 Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS) Conference will be held in person in Perth, Australia at the University of Western Australia and online via Zoom from 27–30 June 2022. The theme of the 2022 conference is ‘Reception and Emotion’, and the call for papers is open until Monday 10 January 2022.
The conference committee welcomes all approaches to topics related to ‘reception and emotion’ broadly conceived (and conceived either together or separately: i.e., on reception and emotion, or on either reception or emotion), including but not limited to: trans-cultural, trans-temporal, trans-disciplinary, translation, global studies, creative misreadings, theatrical and literary revivals, forgeries, homages, cultural counter-strikes, regimes of periodisation, etc. The committee welcomes proposals considering the usefulness or otherwise of reception history as a methodology: is ‘transformation’ more helpful than ‘reception’, for example, for appreciating the active role of the audience of a text, play, or idea?
Work on emotions can be similarly broad, covering, for example, what is evidenced from the ‘receivers’ and from the ‘received’ (thinking of work, for example, on how Indigenous people have received missionaries and their doctrines; how medievalists have reacted and acted in relation to the worrying associations of their discipline; even how humanities scholars feel about their reception in contemporary political circles; Jan Plamper’s suggestion that historians should keep ‘field diaries’ about their personal response to work in the archives; are there ‘objective’ studies?). What has been the value and downside of the ‘emotional turn’ in humanities studies? How do we as scholars of the past deal with presentist notions of ‘relevance’, and need we consider past scholarship as ‘outdated? How can we marry approaches from humanities and life sciences in ‘emotions history’?
Call for Papers
The conference committee invites proposals for 20-minute papers, 90-minute themed panels (of no more than 4 speakers) or workshops. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to:
- The reception of ideas about emotion in medieval/early modern texts;
- Reception and transformation of ideologies across time and space;
- The emotions of an audience in the reception of a play or sermon;
- The emotional impact of a text on a reader;
- Rituals and practices of receiving guests and dignitaries (and their emotional effects?);
- The reception of the past: medievalism and early-modernism;
- The reception of bodies / emotions and bodies / embodiment;
- Reception / emotion and sexuality;
- Reception / emotion and race;
- Reception / emotion and gender;
- Reception / emotion and music / art.
Proposals for 20-minute conference papers should consist of:
- A title;
- An abstract (max. 200 words);
- A short biography (max. 50 words).
The conference committee welcomes themed panel or workshop session proposals for the conference. Proposals should consist of:
- Panel/Workshop Title;
- Proposed Chair (if available);
- Details of each presenter and paper as described above.
Submissions should be emailed (as a Word document attachment) to: anzamems2021@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions: Monday 10 January 2022.
For more information, see https://www.anzamems2021.com/call-for-papers.
