We are thrilled that IONA is back!
The 2024 conference will take place on the Strand Campus at King’s College London from Wednesday 26 June to Friday 28 June 2024.
Registration will open in March 2024. Stay tuned for CFPs from organizers of our seminars, workshops and labs!
IONA is an international conference on the islands of the North Atlantic that brings together scholars of early medieval Ireland, Britain, and Scandinavia to imagine cooperative, interdisciplinary futures for the study of North Atlantic archipelagos during the early medieval period.
IONA 2024 invites proposals for three kinds of sessions: seminars, labs, and workshops. These sessions will meet over two days of the conference to foster extended discussion. They should be designed to develop competencies and skills, enrich interdisciplinary and comparative methods, and widen geographic and temporal scope for early medievalists.
• Seminars will take up a specific issue, question, methodology, or problem, and consist of a group of 8-12 scholars sharing their work on that topic. Organizers will eventually circulate their own CFP for their seminar and choose their own participants. At present, we seek proposals for seminars (not individual paper proposals).
• Workshops will be run by an expert on a particular competency—e.g., early medieval paleography, critical race theory, or Old Norse language—as a kind of bootcamp for scholars in the field. These could include active learning, tutorials, or masterclasses in a particular skill.
• Labs will put scholars into conversation to test out new theoretical engagements, methods, or approaches. An organizer might want to assign a text beforehand or ask participants to take on a particular kind of methodological or theoretical angle to produce a collaborative learning experience. Organizers of a lab may want to solicit participants with a CFP of their own.
For all three types of sessions, organizers will have complete autonomy in organizing their session, from soliciting proposals to running the seminars (though we at IONA can help). Organizers may wish to ask participants to pre-circulate materials. The conference is open to other types of session proposals as well.
To propose a seminar, workshop, or lab, please send a 250-word proposal to Josh Davies (Joshua.davies@kcl.ac.uk) by 31 January 2024.
Looking ahead to what we hope will be a safer and better academic year in 2022-23, now is a good moment to think about IONA’s next steps and we are inviting you all to be part of the discussion.
You will find on this website a draft constitution and harassment policy (under About: https://www.ionaassociation.org/draft-constitution-and-policies) and we welcome feedback on these documents.
We would also like to invite you all to propose papers or themes for IONA-sponsored sessions at the Leeds IMC in July 2023. We hope these sessions will be the next step in the recalibration of the organisation. We would also like to host a roundtable discussion regarding the future of IONA at Leeds. If you would like to participate in an IONA-sponsored session please email one of us at the addresses below before 2 September 2022. Information about the conference is available here: https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2023/
If you would like to offer feedback on the draft constitution or harassment policy, or would like to get involved in the organisation, please get in touch with one of us.
With best wishes, Josh, Georgia and Matt
joshua.davies @ kcl.ac.uk
ghenley @ anselm.edu
mhussey @ sfu.ca
In the wake of the reporting of Al Jazeera’s A.I. unit on the harassment and abuse by Old English scholar Andy Orchard and historian Peter Thompson, IONA deplores their actions as well as the institutional cultures that perpetuate, allow, and support sexual harassment, predation, and abuse, which fall disproportionately on the shoulders of BIPOC, LGBTQIA+ and women scholars. IONA calls on Oxford University, Cambridge University, and the University of Toronto, as well as the field of medieval studies as a whole, to take real action by holding these perpetrators accountable and working to create a safer, better workplace and scholarly future for women and BIPOC students and colleagues.
Please listen to the voices of the brave women who helped bring these gross violations out into the open and take real action against abuse. Institutional safeguards against lawsuits, and other structures of power that protect institutions above individuals, primarily serve to protect abusers, perpetuate abuse against our students and colleagues, and alienate the broader public from our field.
IONA has sent this statement to the English Faculty at Oxford, the Provost of Trinity College at the University of Toronto, and the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at Cambridge University.
For the reporting, see: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/19/oxford-professors-abused-position-with-sexist-and-drunken-conduct
Matthew T. Hussey, Georgia Henley, and Joshua Davies, pro-tem steering committee
In the wake of the murders by police of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick (murderd by white supremacists), Tony McDade in Tallahassee, Dion Johnson in Phoenix, Regis Korchinski-Paque in Toronto, Sean Reed in Indianapolis, and so many others, compounded by the violent suppression of protests by the State and the drastic inequalities that have caused COVID-19 to disproportionately affect Black Americans (and BIPOC in nations like Sweden, UK, Brazil and across the world), the steering committee of IONA expressly condemns the systemic racism that continues to produce the ongoing violence against Black people and other people of color, not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, Europe, and wherever else it occurs.
Medieval studies--and especially early medieval studies--has always been a complicit and, often times, agentive partner in systemic racism. We have a responsibility to work actively to dismantle white supremacy and structural racism in our field and beyond. This work includes but is not limited to uplifting the voices and scholarship of Black and other scholars of color; listening to Black students and colleagues, especially when they express their frustration and anger with academic meritocracies that are built upon exclusion; challenging the structures that perpetuate racism in our departments, workspaces, and universities; engaging in anti-racist education; using our classrooms and syllabuses to dismantle long-held white supremacist ideologies and teach historical voices of color; financially supporting racial justice, and participating in politics at the local level.
IONA aims to be a collective space in which researchers, artists, teachers, and students can challenge the white supremacy of our field, and in that way, do our part to dismantle the structures of imperialism, colonialism, and racism. We stand in solidarity with the uprisings in the US and around the globe that are speaking truth to power about racial inequality and its historic ties to capitalism.
We pledge to devote substantial space in our programming of the next IONA conference to the work of our marginalized students and scholars, and in honor of the Black lives lost to police brutality and white supremacy we have donated the profit from merchandise sales at IONA Vancouver to the RaceB4Race conference series.
IONA is a professional organization of early medieval scholars whose work extends from the islands of the North Atlantic; however, we do not perceive our field to be limited by periodization or by place. IONA seeks to develop knowledge, networks, and skills that will not only reinvigorate and rethink early medieval studies but also denationalize and decolonize the field.
The next IONA conference is scheduled for November 2021 and will be held in London. It will be co-organised and co-hosted by Josh Davies and Clare Lees. More information about the conference will be circulated via this list and on the website IONAassociation.org nearer the time.
Currently IONA is run by an interim standing committee and a local organising committee: Donna Beth Ellard, Georgia Henley, Matt Hussey and Mary Rambaran-Olm, along with Clare and Josh as the hosts of the next conference. We are all committed to IONA as an open, inclusive, non-hierarchical, anti-racist and cooperative organisation.
The current committees recognise that there needs to be an open and ongoing conversation about IONA’s future. Many ideas have already been suggested to us informally and have shaped our thinking. We want to be clear that we understand this to be a process of collective building. We want this to be as transparent and collaborative as possible.
As we see it the key issues are as follows:
define the number and membership of a steering committee;
come up with policies and procedures that instructs how steering committee nominations/elections will take place;
draft inclusivity policy and harassment policy;
establish an open and clear means of communication (maybe through the website or just old fashioned email) for IONA folks to contribute, suggest, critique, question;
decide whether IONA will continue as just a conference or if it has different ambitions.
Several of these are being taken up, however in order to facilitate open discussions regarding IONA’s future, we will be hosting informal meetings at Kalamazoo 2020 and ACLA 2021. Details of the meetings will be circulated via this email list and posted at IONAassociation.org. All who are interested in IONA’s future are welcome to attend and share their thoughts. We are also organising a roundtable discussion at the Middle Ages in the Modern World conference that will be held in London in July 2020. We have included a CFP below. If you are not able to attend any of the meetings, there are contact details available on the IONA website to allow you to contribute to the discussion.
CFP: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, London, 2-4 July 2020
Early medieval studies in the modern world: Looking forward to IONA 2021
IONA: Seafaring is a three-day international conference on the islands of the North Atlantic that brings together scholars, artists and others to imagine cooperative, interdisciplinary futures for the study of North Atlantic archipelagos during the early medieval period. It is driven by a capacious understanding of both time and place and a commitment to experiment, inclusion and exchange. Following meetings in Denver in 2016 and Vancouver in 2019, the third meeting of the IONA Association will take place in London in November 2021.
This roundtable discussion will be an opportunity for members of the interim steering committee and others to look forward to the London meeting and beyond, and discuss what the disciplines potentially represented by IONA need and want from the conference and association.
If you would like to join the roundtable please email Josh Davies (joshua.davies@kcl.ac.uk) to reserve a place by Friday 20 December 2019
The Islands of the North Atlantic (IONA) conference in Vancouver, BC last April benefited immeasurably from the labor of the Medievalists of Color. IONA's organizers for Vancouver (Donna Beth Ellard, Matthew Hussey, Georgia Henley) strongly support Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm and her principled stand for radical and substantive change to the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, and we thank her for her work there and in the field more broadly. We have inherited and maintained structures and institutions in early medieval studies that actively and knowingly harm Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as women, queer, trans, disabled, early-career, contingent, precarious, and independent scholars. Only the kind of work undertaken and urged by the Medievalists of Color can transform early medieval studies into a more inclusive field and IONA has tried to follow by aiming to create a space for non-hierarchical, collaborative, interdisciplinary, comparatist, and experimental work from which, we hope, the inherent racism and exclusionary practices of our field can be challenged. IONA could not have begun this work without Mary and her colleagues: we trust her decision and we urge the meaningful changes she calls for.
We will continue to work collectively and collaboratively to take these changes forward as we plan the next conference in London with Josh Davies and Clare Lees.
Medievalists of Color is sponsoring the following exciting panels at IONA: SEAFARING CONFERENCE 2019. Please spread the word and join us!
Organizers: Dr. Mary Rambaran-Olm, Dr. Nahir Otaño-Gracia, and Dr. Valerie M. Wilhite
WORKSHOP: DECENTERING WHITENESS IN MEDIEVAL TEXTS, IN THE FIELD, AND THE CLASSROOM
The purpose of this two-part workshop is to encourage participants to seek out texts, themes and branches of medieval studies beyond white, Christian, Anglo-centric methodologies in research, the classroom, and within our understanding of the field. We encourage scholars from various fields and disciplines to participate in this workshop. The major feature of the workshop is ‘how to be a better ally’ which will allow participants to engage in discussion on what ally-ship means and how one can strengthen ally-ship in the workplace and classroom.
SEMINAR: MOVING THE NORTH ATLANTIC BEYOND IONA
This is a three-panel seminar. When we think of the medieval North Atlantic we tend to think within Anglo- or Euro-centric parameters, much to the detriment of our understanding of the entire region, its history and development. So much is lost in our discussions of the medieval past by excluding regions within or beyond the north. This session seeks 15-20 minute papers on medieval subjects that expand our understanding of the early medieval North Atlantic. Discussions may include papers on topics dealing with medieval Iberia, Africa, and as far north as the Canadian archipelagos to the far reaches of the Canary Islands. Further to this, themes might range from the inclusion of Iberian and African material in North Atlantic Studies to racism and Digital Humanities/academia, and ‘others’ in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Scandinavian, and Welsh studies, history, archaeology, art history and other fields. These sessions will challenge our understanding of the medieval North Atlantic and encourage thinking beyond the norm.
