Saturday, March 17th 2018, University of Pennsylvania
Keynote Speaker: Masha Raskolnikov, Cornell University
This conference explores the forms and contexts of vulnerability in the Middle Ages, defining vulnerability as a state of being that precedes but does not necessarily entail violence and as a condition that is temporalized, oriented toward a future that is potentially hazardous. What are the methods by which the Middle Ages constructed and maintained states of vulnerability? If we think of vulnerability as entailing threat, what are the methods by which people or things are constructed as threats? What did it mean for medieval people to be living under threat?
We invite 15-20 minute papers on this subject from any discipline, including History, Art History, Musicology, Literary Studies, Religious Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
The construction of race and alterity
Gendered vulnerability and issues of care or protection
Ecological threat and disaster
Class, resource scarcity, and economic precarity
(Dis)Ability and illness
Trials, court cases, and legal actions
War and political conflict
Heresy and threats posed by religious orthodoxy
Vulnerable and damaged material texts or objects
The positions of medievalists in modern society
Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words as attachments to pennmedieval@gmail.com by January 15, 2018. Submissions should include your name, paper title, email, and institutional and departmental affiliation. Papers will be due March 10, 2018 for distribution to faculty respondents.
