The Contemporary Medieval: Critical and Creative Methods, Practices, and Environments (Seminar)
Harbour Centre 1520

Organizers: Joshua Davies (King's College London), Clare A. Lees (School of Advanced Studies, University of London), Gillian R. Overing (Wake Forest University)

We want these sessions to constitute a sustaining and inclusive, reflective and exciting seminar that enables all core participants to explore our current work-in-progress and to develop ideas about the contemporary medieval.

We think the best way to achieve this is to take collective responsibility for our work over the three days that we meet, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of the three papers/proposals per session and chair of more usual seminar and conference structures. As we are scheduled to meet 8:30-10:30 each morning, this is perhaps just as well! We would, in short, like this to be a properly shared seminar and we are not convinced we need chairs to help us do this. So we list all core participants for each seminar.

In order to facilitate our working over the three days, each core participant will prepare a short position paper, set of questions, quotations or extracts from a text or texts, image/images (max 500 words, could be less) in advance of our seminar that speaks both to our individual work and to the contemporary medieval. We will circulate these in advance of IONA. Over the course of the seminar participants are invited to speak to the subject of their submitted paper and respond to our evolving discussions.

We will do the same thing and we will use our three contributions in the first meeting to set up the seminar, clarify expectations and aims, and set out issues.

We ask that anyone who wishes to attend these seminars email Josh Davies (Joshua.davies@kcl.ac.uk) at the earliest opportunity.

Day 1: Performance, Race and Environment

Josh Davies, ‘Anglo-Saxon Environments’
Clare Lees, ‘Communities of Attention: Practice, Audience, Gender’
Gillian Overing, ‘American/Medieval: Emergence, Divergence, Collaboration’ James L. Smith (Trinity College, Dublin)

Day 2 Discussion Leaders: 'Practice, Audience, Gender'
Denis Ferhatović (Connecticut College)
Jennifer Knight (University of South Florida)
Haruko Momma (University of Toronto)
Sharon Morris (University College London)
Max Stevenson (University of California, Berkeley)

Day 3 Discussion Leaders: 'American/Medieval'
Donna Beth Ellard (University of Denver)
Mary Kate Hurley (Ohio University)
Sharon Rowley (Christopher Newport University)
Renée R. Trilling (University of Illinois)
Ulrike Wiethaus (Wake Forest University)