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.