Thursday, December 11, 2014

Undergraduate English Majors, Submit Papers to the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Colloquium 2015!



The Medieval and Renaissance Studies Consortium announces its sixth annual colloquium, an academic conference for undergraduates from participating Michigan colleges and universities. The colloquium will be held on April 11, 2015.

Hosted by Kalamazoo College; Kalamazoo, MI
Contact: Amy L. Smith
Department of English

Proposals due January 30th. Undergraduate students at participating institutions are invited to submit proposals for individual papers and panels on any topic in medieval and Renaissance studies. The Consortium encourages submissions from across the academy.

Generally, a student submits an abstract based on a major research paper he or she is writing or has written for a college course. Individual abstracts should be limited to 200 words.


The student then revises the paper for presentation at the conference. The version of the paper presented should be no more than 15 minutes long (usually about 7-8 double-spaced manuscript pages) and should present original scholarship.


Proposals for panels should consist of two to three papers; panel proposals should contain the names of panel’s organizer, names of the presenters and individual abstracts for each paper.
  Proposals will be reviewed by a committee from the participating colleges, and students whose proposals are accepted will present their work at the conference in the spring.

Sunday, December 7, 2014

Nagle essay on Sade published


Chris Nagle's most recent essay, co-authored with Indiana University colleague Courtney Wennerstrom, is the first chapter in a new collection entitled Sade's Sensibilities. Edited by Kate Parker and Norbert Sclippa, the book is part of Bucknell University Press's Aperçus: Histories Texts Cultures series, and its publication coincides with the bicentenary of Sade's death.

Sade’s Sensibilities tells a new story of one of the most enduring and controversial figures in European literature. Blending ideas about subjectivity, identity and natural philosophy with politics and pornography, D.A.F. de Sade has fascinated writers and readers for two hundred years, and his materialist account of the human condition has been widely influential in post-structuralism, nihilism, and feminism. This new collection of essays considers Sade’s Enlightenment legacy, both within and beyond the narratives of radicalism and aberration that have historically marked the study of his oeuvre. From different points of view, these essays argue that Sade engaged with and influenced traditional Enlightenment paradigms—particularly those related to sensibility, subjectivity, and philosophy—as much as he resisted them. They thus recover a Sade more relevant, even foundational to our twenty-first century understanding of modernity, selfhood, and community. In Sade’s Sensibilities Sade is no longer a solitary, peripheral radical, but an Enlightenment philosopher in his own right.