Please see below the following Call for Papers for the next year's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo. Please feel free to circulate as widely as you would you like.
Thank you!
Best,
Eugene Smelyansky
----------------------------
CFP:"FROM INTOLERANCE TO INCLUSION: INTERSECTIONS BETWEEN
TEACHING AND RESEARCH OF PERSECUTION IN THE MIDDLE AGES"
(May 2018)
The panel, “From Intolerance to Inclusion:
Intersections between Teaching and Research of Persecution in the Middle
Ages,” proposes to look at the ways research and teaching of
intolerance and persecution of marginalized groups in medieval Europe
and the Mediterranean can promote a more inclusive vision of the Middle
Ages. In recent years, public perceptions of medieval societies as
culturally and racially homogeneous—explicitly antithetical and hostile
to modern concepts of diversity—have gained a particularly problematic
currency among conservative and right-wing groups. Many a critic has
noticed that this interpretation casts the Middle Ages, with a sense of
wistful nostalgia, as “the good old days”: racially pure, sexually
normative past dominated by universal Christianity and patriarchy. It is
up to medievalists—as educators, as well as scholars—to dispel this
dangerous misinterpretation of the Middle Ages among our students and
the public.
This panel’s organizers would like to suggest that
medievalists have championed, researched, and taught a more inclusive
vision of the Middle Ages for decades, especially in works of
scholarship and courses that deal—perhaps surprisingly—with intolerance
and persecution during this period. Studies of and courses on medieval
heresies and inquisition, interreligious violence, suppression of
non-normative manifestations of gender and sexuality demonstrate, first
and foremost, that the Middle Ages were racially, culturally,
religiously, and sexually diverse. This panel will invite its
participants to discuss their experience with both studying and teaching
persecutions of marginalized groups in the Middle Ages and to share
their approaches to teaching a more inclusive and multicultural vision
of this period to their students and the general public.
Key questions include, but are not limited to the following:
- Strategies for promoting a balanced and inclusive understanding of the period in the classroom and beyond
-
How discussion of persecuted minorities in the Middle Ages can be
usefully placed in modern context; what is gained or lost in the
process?
- How to emphasize medieval diversity in the classroom beyond mere “tokenism”
-
What scholars of the Middle Ages can do to counteract the “alt-right’s”
attempts to claim the period as ultra-conservative utopia
We hope that the panel will initiate conversations and stimulate future scholarship.
Please
send abstracts of up to 300 words, current CV, and the Participant
Information Form (available on the Congress’ Submissions page,
http://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/submissions) to
[log in to unmask] by September 10, or sooner if possible.