CFP: Holy Women, Holy Places: Gender, Publics, and Religion (grad) (9/21/07; 12/06/07-12/07/07)

CALL FOR PAPERS
Holy Women, Holy Places: Gender, Publics, and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
An interdisciplinary graduate student colloquium hosted by the Medieval and Early Modern Institute at the University of Alberta
December 6-7, 2007
NEW Deadline for submissions: September 28, 2007
The Medieval and Early Modern Institute invites submissions for “Holy Women, Holy Places: Gender, Publics, and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” its 4th Annual Graduate Student Colloquium taking place December 6-7, 2007 at the University of Alberta.

Keynote address by Professor Andy Orchard, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto: “Wholly Women?: Female Religious in Anglo-Saxon Literature and History” This colloquium is the final event of the Medieval and Early Modern Institute’s “2007: Year of Holy Women.” In addition to discussions of individual holy women, we invite interrogations of the contexts, places, and/or publics within which these women are situated. We also encourage discussions of holiness itself, how it is gendered, politicized, historicized, or authorized, as well as the people, places, texts, audiences, and communities that may be excluded from, or constructed by, the category of “holy.” How does holiness, or un-holiness, interact with identity and/or community formation in the medieval and/or early modern period in Europe?
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- famous (or infamous) holy women or men
- constructions of publics using holiness
- medieval or early modern historical accounts of holiness
- expressions or manifestations of (un)holiness in texts, culture, and/or the body
- constructions of holiness in religion, literature, history, etc.
- communities as they relate to pilgrimage, travel, the landscape and/or the nation
- (un)holy places or (ir)religious spaces
- audiences for and/or performances of saintliness
- theories of individual and/or communal identity formation
- gender and/or sexuality in religion, literature, culture, etc.
- technology and the representation and/or construction of gender, publics, and/or religion
- (un)authorized spirituality in politics, history, culture, etc.
Submissions on these and related topics are welcome from fields including, but not limited to, history, classics, language and literature, religion,
art history, drama, music, architecture, and cultural studies. Please send abstracts of 300 words or less, and a one-page cv, to judith.anderson_at_ualberta.ca.
Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Funding may be available to subsidize travel to the conference; please indicate in your email if you would like to be considered. Deadline for submissions is September 21, 2007.

CFP: Renaissance Conference of Southern California (11/1/07; 2/2/08)

Renaissance Conference of Southern California
Annual Meeting
2 February 2008
Huntington Library, San Marino, CA
The RCSC welcomes paper proposals on the full range of Renaissance disciplines (Art, Architecture, History, Literature, Music, Philosophy, Religion, Science)
2008 Annual Keynote Lecture Frances Dolan
Author of: Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime (1994); Renaissance Drama and the Law (ed.) (1996); Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (1999).

Please send 1-page c.v. and 400 word abstract (for15-minute paper) by regular or electronic mail. Send electronic proposals to lkermode_at_csulb.edu and please paste
your c.v. and abstract into the body of your message rather than attaching it.
Send proposals by mail (4 copies if possible) to: George L. Gorse, RCSC President
Art History Department, Pomona College, Claremont, CA 91711
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: November 1, 2007
Please see our website: www.rcsca.org

CFP: MCLLM 2008

CALL FOR PAPERS
The 16th annual Midwestern Conference on Literature, Language, and Media (MCLLM) will be held February 29 and March 1, 2008, at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, Illinois, to coincide with African American History Month and Women’s History Month.
Confirmed keynote speakers: David Bevington (of the University of Chicago) on race and gender in Shakespeare, and Russ Castronovo (of the University of Wisconsin at Madison) on American and African American history including the military-industrial complex.
Proposals are solicited for fifteen- to twenty-minute papers from scholars at all career stages, from beginning graduate students to established and senior scholars. MCLLM invites papers on all areas of literary, language, and media studies, especially proposals that innovatively address topics congruent with the expertise of our speakers: early modern British drama and gender studies, or American literature with an emphasis on African-American studies, globalism, militarism, or trade history.
Individual or panel (three to four people) proposals are welcome.
Deadline for submissions: November 1, 2007. Please include a cover page
with your name, affiliation, mailing address, and email address.
Accepted contributors will be notified via email by December 10, 2008.
Please submit your 250-word (one page) abstracts as an attachment to:
mcllm2008_at_gmail.com
Contact: Elizabeth Bowman & Christina Gilleran
Graduate Department of English
Northern Illinois University
Additional information can be found at the conference website:
http://www.engl.niu.edu/mcllm/.

CFP: Thinking Gender 2008 at UCLA

This public conference highlights feminist research on women, sexuality, and/or gender by graduate students across all disciplines. We welcome individual papers or preconstituted panels. For individual papers, please email a 250-word abstract, a CV (2 pages maximum), and a brief bibliography. For panels, please submit a 250-word abstract describing its topic along with abstracts for each paper. Please see the submissions guidelines before submitting your proposal.

See PDF of CFP here.

“’Boasting of silence’: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State”

Brayman Hackel, Heidi. “’Boasting of silence’: Women Readers in a Patriarchal State.” in Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker Eds. Reading, Society and Politics in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 101-121.

“This essay considers three prescribed forms of female readerly silence—restraint from public reading, limitations on linguistic proficiency and abstention from vocal criticism—as the context for women’s habitual silence in the margins of their books” (101).

As she does more extensively in her book, Hackel here reconstructs the reading experience of early modern women from more evidence than simply marginalia because “women often demonstrated otherwise that books played an important role in their lives” (114).

[the book I refer to is Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005.]