Salisbury Presents Two Papers in UK

Eve Salisbury has recently returned from the UK where she presented two papers. The first, entitled “The Palimpsestuous Text: Incest, Intertextuality, and the Confessio Amantis” was given at the International John Gower Society Conference in London; the second—“Chaucer and Literary Pilgrimage”---was presented at the New Chaucer Society Conference in Swansea, Wales.

Third Coast Writing Project to Host National Conference

The English Department's Third Coast Writing Project, now concluding its 15th Summer Institute, has been chosen as the host of a national conference for the National Writing Project.
Some 200 to 300 teachers from across the country are expected to attend the National Writing Project Rural Sites Network Conference March 13-15, 2009, at the Radisson Plaza Hotel. The conference will highlight WMU and the communities in and around Kalamazoo. For full information, see: http://www.wmich.edu/wmu/news/2008/07/029.html

Utz to Organize Medievalism Sessions at IMC (CFP)

Studies in Medievalism is sponsoring three sections for next year's International Medieval Congress. If you are interested, please contact Richard Utz (richard.utz@wmich.edu).

1) "What, in the World, is Medievalism? Global Reinventions of the Middle Ages."
For next year's congress, Studies in Medievalism is sponsoring a roundtable discussion which, as the punctuation in the session title attempts to indicate, would like to extend existing discussions of Medievalisms in the postmedieval west to non-western, westernized, or only marginally western regions, nations, and cultures. Specifically, we intend to include five to eight scholars from the areas of political science, anthropology, economics, cultural history, literary and language study, music, and the fine arts to discuss notions of the "medieval" in Turkey, Russia, Bulgaria, China, Japan, Korea, South America, India, and Australia/New Zealand (to name but a few) to present a panoramic view of global receptions. The main goal of the round table is to provide a forum for congress participants to encounter the rich, but often less well-known notions of the "medieval" in countries and cultures which negotiate prevalent western ideas of the past with their traditional cultural paradigmata.

2) "Expatriate Medievalisms." This paper session wants to investigate the experience of western voyagers, expatriates, and emigrés who, displaced from their countries and cultures of origin, brought with them and often transmuted ideas of the "medieval" to their new "homes." The "extraterritorial" experience, as George Steiner called it, provides for often original insights into definitions of the Middle Ages, as new architectures, landscapes, climates, literary genres, languages, and theories lead to a veritable "Babel" of identities among political exiles, sentimental travelers on the grand tour or "going west," from soldiers on foreign shores to scholars and artists on their year(s) "abroad." Contributions to this topic might include personal biographical accounts of current medievalist expatriates.

3) "Religious Medievalisms." This paper session intends to provide a forum for the discussion of how various religious traditions have viewed the Middle Ages or how images and stereotypes of, for example, the Catholic or Christian Middle Ages have dominated the popular and scholarly reception since the Renaissance. Specifically, the session is meant to seek answers as to diverse reconfigurations of the "medieval" by the Reformation, Counterreformation, Enlightenment, Modernism, and Postmodernism, Vatican II; by writers, artists, musicians, etc. with missionary intentions; and by scholars who recognized the central role of Medieval religion for their cultural theories. Finally, the organizers would welcome scholarship on how specific religious organizations and communities have redefined their own medieval roots through the centuries.

Sally Wood in Bermuda

A pre-constituted panel submitted by Scott Slawinski to the Society of Early Americanists for its conference in Bermuda (March 2009) has been accepted. The panel, titled "Sally Wood and Early Republican Culture," aims to enlarge scholarly interest in this important but heretofore neglected gothic author from the earliest years of the nineteenth century. The panel's paper topics include: "Women Writers and Women’s Rights in the Correspondence of Judith Sargent Murray and Sally Wood" (by Karen A. Weyler, University of North Carolina at Greensboro), "The Speculation of Dorval" (by Scott Ellis, University of Southern Connecticut), "Gothic Anxiety and the Illuminati in Sally Wood's Julia and Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond " (by Michael Cody, East Tennessee State University), and "Sally Wood's Complex Portrait of Europe" (by Scott Slawinski, Western Michigan University). As Professor Ellis aptly stated upon news of the acceptance, "There's nothing like talking about a Maine writer in March while in Bermuda."

Tiffany Translated into Turkish

Grace Tiffany's 2005 novel, The Turquoise Ring, has just been issued in a hardcover Turkish translation. (Since "The Turquoise Ring" actually means "The Turkish Ring" this seems like a good thing!)