Medieval History

TheEarlyModernColloquium at the University of Michigan

invites abstracts for papers for their interdisciplinary graduate student conference

Performance and Materiality in Medieval and Early Modern Culture

at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 11-12^th, 2016

with conference keynotes by

Professor Jill Stevenson (Department of Theatre Arts, Marymount Manhattan College)

and

Professor Andrew Sofer (Department of English, Boston College)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the agency of nonhuman objects. Practitioners of ?New Materialism? such as Bill Brown, Graham Harman, Jane Bennett, and Bruno Latour have provided scholars with tools for investigating the relationships between things both material and immaterial. The questions posed by these figures have challenged preconceptions about subject/object distinctions in disciplines including Archeology, History, Musicology, Literature, Philosophy, Science Studies, and many more. Likewise, in the field of medieval and early modern performance studies, scholars such as Seeta Chaganti and Claire Sponsler have interrogated the generic boundaries of dramatic texts, and embraced a wider field of texts and traditions, while scholars such as Jonathan Gil-Harris and Andrew Sofer have used the concept of ?stage property? to explore the semiotics and ritual actions of drama.

This conference will dialogue between performance studies and material culture, two fields that have proven especially fruitful for early modern and medieval scholars in the past years, and we are looking for papers that engage either or both of these fields. Some questions this conference hopes to pose include: how is medieval and early modern performance shaped by material conditions? How are props and other performing objects contributing to theories of materiality? What role do nonhuman objects such as props, costumes, devotional objects, art, and architecture play in premodern performance? How can we best understand the agency of nonhuman objects in these environments? What do recent theories like Object-Oriented-Ontology or Extended Cognition have to offer thinking about past performances?

Please submit 250-300 word abstracts for 15-20 minute papers to Sheila Coursey ([email protected]) or Tony Gillum ([email protected]) with the subject heading ?EMC Conference? by January 10th, 2016. The Early Modern Colloquium is an interdisciplinary graduate student group at the University of Michigan and will give priority to abstracts submitted by graduate students.

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Medieval History