Calls for Papers in Classics

Dining Divinely: Banqueting in Honour of the Gods
July 7-9, 2010
The Department of Classics at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

Commensality marked a range of public and private occasions in the ancient Mediterranean world. This colloquium will explore the evidence for banquets and feasts held in conjunction with or as a form of religious observance. Offers of papers from any branch of Classical Studies concerning the following topics are welcomed:

• The archaeological evidence for banquets (architecture, furnishings, food remains, representations of banqueting) with a religious dimension.
• Banquets associated with particular religious festivals or rites, or part of private occasions with a religious dimension (eg funerals).
• Literary or epigraphical evidence for religious banqueting.

An abstract of 250 words indicating the thesis, evidence and conclusions of the paper offered and including the name, academic affiliation, postal address and email address of the presenter should be sent to the conference organiser at the address below. Email attachments and facsimiles are preferred. Papers will be 20-30 minutes long, depending on the final number of participants.

Abstracts must be received on or before October 1, 2009. Authors of accepted papers will be notified by December 15, 2009. The registration fee will be around US $120/€85 (postgraduates US $85/€60).

Organiser:
Alison B. Griffith Ph: ++64-3-364-2987 ext. 8578
Department of Classics Fax: ++64-3-364-2576
University of Canterbury alison.griffith@canterbury.ac.nz
Private Bag 4800
Christchurch 8140
NEW ZEALAND

Exploring Childhood Studies

The graduate students of the Department of Childhood Studies at Rutgers University, Camden invite submissions for papers and poster presentations for their first formal graduate student conference on April 9, 2010. Graduate students from all disciplines who are engaged in research relating to children and childhood are encouraged to submit proposals.

The field of childhood studies engages in both theoretical and empirical study of children and childhood within historical, contemporary, interdisciplinary, multi-cultural, state, national, and global contexts. Each combination of perspectives provides new insights into the lives of children and the families, cultures, and societies in which they are embedded. The interdisciplinary nature of the field is one of its greatest strengths and the core of its remarkable potential for scholarly advancement, but also leaves the field open for exploration and interrogation, and its borders difficult, if not impossible, to define.

In an attempt to define this emerging and diverse field, the Exploring Childhood Studies conference proposes defining Childhood Studies by “doing” childhood studies; the conference will explore the field by offering explorations within it. We seek papers from all disciplines that keep the child, children, and childhood as their central focus, providing critical thought and insight while locating them in different contexts, fields, and ideologies.

In keeping with what we believe is the essential interdisciplinary nature of Childhood Studies, this conference seeks to be interdisciplinary itself. We seek proposals from all disciplines—education, literature, economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, law, political science, history, criminology, philosophy, medicine, religion, film studies, and cultural studies—as well as interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary scholarly work.

The range of open topics within this field is as broad as the contexts of the experiences of children and childhood: war, health, rights, gender, poverty, wealth, policy, ethics, popular culture, globalization, school, family, home, sexuality, community, and representations in all modes of fiction. The field of Childhood Studies itself is open to interrogation.

Selected papers will be grouped into panels that may be based around discipline, theme, or perspective, but will demonstrate the common grounding of the papers in their mutual exploration of children and childhood studies.

Paper presentations should be limited to 20 minutes in length. Please send 250-word abstract for paper or poster presentation (specify which) and cover letter with name, current level of graduate study, affiliated university, and email address to m_modica@vfcc.edu. Include the words “conference abstract” in subject line, and include name on the cover letter only.

For further information, contact: Patrick Cox at ptcox@camden.rutgers.edu or Anandini Dar at anandini@camden.rutgers.edu.

Deadline for submission is October 31, 2009. Accepted presenters will receive email notification by January 10, 2010.

Home to the Department of Childhood Studies and The Center for Children and Childhood Studies, Rutgers–Camden is a leader in the national and international discourse on the state of children and childhood. We are very proud of the fact that Rutgers–Camden is the first and only PhD-granting Department of Childhood Studies in the nation, which has now entered its third year. We look forward to introducing the larger academic community to our fellow students, exemplary faculty and unique program, and to engaging in vigorous and stimulating discussions with our peers throughout academia.

Visit the Department of Childhood Studies here: http://childhood.camden.rutgers.edu/

Living the Lunar Calendar: Time, Text and Tradition: Update

The Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, January 30th – February 1st, 2010
Tu B'Shvat 5770

The “Living the Lunar Calendar” Conference — held under the full moon of the Jewish festival of the New Year for Trees— will investigate the place of calendar reckoning in human society and culture. Focusing on the Moon as a marker of the passage of time, the conference will address a wide variety of issues regarding the application of astronomical and calendrical rules to everyday life, and beyond to the shaping of cultural identity.

The lunar calendar with its irregular pattern of 29/30 day months, requiring an uneven number of months to match the passage of an annual solar/stellar cycle brings with it a measure of uncertainty. It can be observed that the Moon is at one and the same time both constant and unpredictable, leading civilizations to adopt divergent modes of reflection on the stable and unstable components of their existence in time. With the Moon, time does not only exist in nature, but needs to be regulated by man. Human measures of day, month, and year, must live with these uncertainties. In cultures that use the lunar calendar, one must find answers to such mundane questions as: “When does the month, the year, begin? How are salaries and interest to be calculated over months of uneven length and years of unequal months? Is the date in one city the same in all cities?”

More generally, cultures had to account for the apparent anomaly in nature, defining just how much human involvement is required in fixing the central concepts of time. This ideological dilemma joined forces with the political and societal conflicts in antiquity, both within the great empires as well as smaller ethnic and cultural entities. The calendar thus participated significantly in the formation of civilization and identity.

We will gather at the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem (BLMJ) and the site of Qumran on the shores of the Dead Sea, to address these types of issues in sessions covering the cuneiform Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient Israel, The Greco-Roman World, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Far East, Africa, and Mesoamerica. Central focus will be given to the ancient world, but with an open eye towards later periods. Papers are invited by scholars on the following general topics:

• Everyday Life in Lunar Regulated Societies
• Calendrical Principles, especially in regard to harmonizing the Lunar Calendar with other systems such as the Egyptian civil calendar, the Julian Calendar, the Jewish sectarian system of 364 day years.
• Cultural Statements about the Moon, the Sun, the Stars and the concept of Time.
• Anthropological, Sociological, and Philosophical trajectories of the above.

Participants in the conference include:

Jonathan Ben-Dov (Haifa University)
Wayne Horowitz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Stanislaw Iwaniszewski (National Institute of Anthropology and History, Mexico)
Shalom Paul (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature)
Lawrence Schiffman (New York University)
John Steele (Brown University)
Sacha Stern (University College London)

Reminder: Submission of papers are invited by the Academic Organizing Committee:
Jonathan Ben-Dov (Haifa University), Wayne Horowitz (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Shalom Paul (Hebrew University of Jerusalem and The Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature), John Steele (Brown University), Filip Vukosavović (BLMJ), and should consist of a title and a short abstract.

Presentations will be between 25-45 minutes including time for questions, and are to be delivered in English. The deadline for submissions is 31st July, 2009.

The conference will be held under the auspices of the Bible Lands Museum Jerusalem, The CAENO Foundation and The Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and Associated Literature, and will include three days of sessions and events at the Museum, with an afternoon and evening at Qumran. Technical details will be provided at a later date. For further information and submission of abstracts, please contact curatorial@blmj.org.

*All programs subject to change*

Cross-cultural Influence in the Roman World, McMaster University
3 October 2009

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Emma Dench, Harvard University

Abstracts for papers on cross-cultural influence in the Roman world are sought for the Classics Graduate Conference at McMaster University on Saturday, 3 October 2009. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, to be submitted to the address provided below. We encourage papers exploring both the acclimatization of foreign peoples to Roman culture and the impact of those indigenous cultures on the Romans themselves. A wide range of subjects are acceptable, including, but not limited to, material culture, religion, linguistics, dress, warfare, and political practices.

Papers delivered at the conference should be 15-20 minutes in length.

Submit abstracts electronically to Patricia White at whitepl@mcmaster.ca.

Deadline for abstracts: 15 July 2009
Announcement of acceptances of abstracts: 15 August 2009

'Text/Performance'

It is ten years since Don Fowler died, and one of his last yet most substantial contributions to Classical scholarship, Unrolling the Text, is currently in a process of thorough revision prior to its imminent publication. As a final spur to see this book put into print, its editors and other members and students of the Classics faculty at Oxford University will hold a workshop in Jesus College on 22^nd/23^rd September 2009 to consider how the debate in which it participates has developed in the last ten years and to assess the lacuna that Fowler’s unpublished arguments may have left in this debate.

With Unrolling the Text, Fowler offers a powerful defence of the textual status of Roman literary culture, advancing probing post-structuralist arguments to critique the logocentric assumptions held by many Classicists (Latinists and Hellenists alike) about the supplementary nature of the written texts that come down to us from antiquity. In the face of a perceived tendency on the part of many Classicists to downplay the role of the written word in the generation of literary meaning, Fowler plots a narrative of the production and reception of literature in Rome that attempts to restore to the text a crucial role within these signifying processes. However, the ten years since Fowler’s death have seen intellectual developments in Classical scholarship that challenge his defence of the textual status of Roman literature and culture. In particular, an engagement with the work of social and cultural anthropology, performance theory and cognitive science on the part of certain Classicists of late has focused attention on the body as the primary site of knowledge, experience and language; a consequence of this new commitment is to encourage us to see ancient texts as traces of embodied practice, and to locate these texts within traditions of speech and performance rather than in relation to other texts. These developments raise important questions about where we locate literary meaning – within the texts we read, or in the spaces outside them. Thus on grounds apparently different from those which Fowler was originally intent on confronting, new critical approaches have arisen which pose a challenge to the ideas set out in Unrolling the Text, presenting us with an opportune moment to re-examine this book and assess where its arguments stand in the contemporary intellectual climate.

In this workshop, we want to identify the points of tension between Fowler’s defence of textuality and alternative views which treat texts as replicas of embodied experience, and to explore how, if at all, it may be possible to plot these ideas in dialogue with each other. We will consider how the insights into embodied practices gleaned by Classicists from theories of performance and other cognitive and anthropological discourses might be refined by engaging with Fowler’s textualist perspective, and how the arguments that he makes in Unrolling the Text might in turn be modified by their insights. While Fowler’s main project concerns the textual status of Latin literature and culture, the tensions that we aim to address in this workshop will be familiar to many Hellenists – from Homeric scholars to those working on sympotic epigram. We thus seek participants working on any area of ancient Greek or Latin literature whose research confronts the tension between text and performance to offer short presentations (20-30 mins) outlining any of the theoretical problems or issues that they have encountered recently. We hope to hear from anyone interested in the ways in which texts replicate or interact with oral practices or in the methodological problems involved in trying to tie ancient texts to the embodied experiences that stand outside textuality. We ask all participants to try to engage in one way or another with the arguments that Fowler sets out in the introduction to Unrolling the Text, and will circulate a copy of this (along with some further bibliography) to anyone interested in participating. This workshop is intended to be as exploratory as possible. We are as interested in addressing the theoretical assumptions that underpin the narratives constructed by scholars about the textual or performance issues surrounding or generated by the texts that they deal with as in the specific details of those narratives. Graduate students are especially encouraged to participate.

Anyone interested in offering a presentation should send a brief outline of it to francesca.martelli@classics.ox.ac.uk by 24th June 2009. Enquiries of any kind should be sent to the same address.

Dr Francesca Martelli
Mellon Career Development Fellow in Classics
Jesus College
Oxford OX1 3DW

"PRE-MODERN LEGAL FICTIONS"

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures at the University of California, Irvine announces its Second Annual Graduate Student Conference:

PRE-MODERN LEGAL FICTIONS
Friday & Saturday, November 13-14, 2009, at UC Irvine
With a key-note address by Laurie Shannon, Associate Professor of English and the Wender Lewis Teaching and Research Professor, Northwestern University

"…fictions are to law what fraud is to trade.” –Jeremy Bentham

This conference will explore the intersection between the practice of law and other forms of extra-legal thought (including literary, theological, artistic or other cultural forces) and the figural extension of both to cultural expression. In the broadest sense, "legal fiction” refers to any work of literature or art that takes law or the practice of law as its central thematic focus. We also invite papers dealing with "legal fictions” in any pre-modern period in the technical sense – that is, any fictional assumption invoked in law to solve procedural difficulties (e.g. corporate personhood).

We invite all interested graduate students from any university in any discipline to submit a one-page abstract on any topic dealing with pre-modern legal fictions. Abstracts should be 300 words or less and should be submitted by August 15, 2209.

Suggested themes or topics:

· Trial scenes or literary representations of legal concepts and/or procedures in pre-modern poetry, drama, or prose.
· Instances in early cultures of the "legal fiction” which, as 19th century historian Henry Maine writes, "conceals or affects to conceal, the fact that a rule of law has undergone alteration, its letter remaining unchanged” (Ancient Law, Ch, II).
· The figure of the lawyer or advocate in pre-modern literature and/or other media.
· The use and/or development of legal fictions in pre-modern societies.
· Development of capital as a legal fiction (i.e. early examples or origins of commodity fetishism, etc.).
· Modern or contemporary reception of pre-modern legal fictions.
· The origin and development of "the state of nature” as a fiction or fantasy that structures the political and legal imagination before and through the Enlightenment.
· The effect of religious law on images in literature and iconography.

Please e-mail submissions or questions for further details to one of the following conference organizers:

Robin Stewart, English – stewartr@uci.edu
C.J. Gordon, Comparative Literature – cjgordon@uci.edu
Alexander Perkins, Classics – adperkin@uci.edu

Accepted participants will be notified by September 15, 2009. Accommodations with UCI graduate students can be arranged to save participants the cost of hotels, but each participant must pay the cost of travel to and from the conference.

The Group for the Study of Early Cultures focuses mainly on fields that investigate pre-modern societies, including but not limited to: Classics, Late Antiquity, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, 18th Century Studies, East Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and Islamic Studies. We are also interested in a wide range of disciplinary approaches to Early Cultures, including literary studies, history, art history, drama, visual studies, sociology, culture studies, anthropology, political science, philosophy, and religious studies. For more information about our organization, please visit our website: http://www.humanities.uci.edu/earlycultures/

10TH UNISA CLASSICS COLLOQUIUM in cooperation with the Department of New Testament and Early Christian Studies
University of South Africa, Pretoria
Date: October 15 - 17, 2009

‘Family as Strategy in the Roman Empire'

Papers are hereby invited on any aspect of the family in Greco-Roman antiquity and early Christianity that may be seen to further illuminate the conference topic. The interdisciplinary link is deliberate and aligns with the historical emergence of early Christianity as part and parcel of the Roman Empire. The approach of this conference seeks to emphasize that family, house and household were contextualised within the social and power relations of the time. Apart from literary investigations, we would like to encourage contributions with an historical or archaeological concern. Enquiries regarding theoretical and methodological issues, such as the interaction between literary and material evidence, the design of interpretive strategies and the fabrication of a socio-historiography are also welcomed.

The last few decades have witnessed an explosion of studies on a multitude of aspects concerning the family in Greco-Roman antiquity. This conference wishes to contribute to the ongoing debate by exploring the specific ways in which the family was used as a strategy for a variety of social purposes. On the one hand, the family was generated by political, economic, cultural and moral forces. On the other hand, it functioned reciprocally to cultivate, reinforce and sustain the very practices from which it emerged.

The family may be interrogated in terms of its various dimensions; for instance, as a social site occupying space. It may be asked how the individual’s place was determined in interaction with his or her family? How was the family, in terms of cultural discourses, strategically utilised as microcosm within a particular macrocosm? Exactly what was public and what was private in the workings of the Graeco-Roman family and how rigid was this distinction? How was the family determined by and—in its turn—fashioned material sites and cultural products: household architecture, art, decoration, utensils, and the like? The family may also be investigated in terms of its temporal dimension, such as its legacies from pre-colonial times, its role in Romanization and the ideal of Romanitas, as a nucleus of identity, cooption, and resistance. Furthermore, Early Christianity emerged as part and parcel of this complex discursive world and structured itself in continuity (e.g. patriarchy), but also deviated from the model in significant ways, for instance in how desire and gender was regulated within the structures of family life, and in its cultivation of movements such as asceticism and monasticism. How was the dominant family discourse appropriated by early Christianity and to what extent did the family as a form of strategy cooperate in the Christianization of the Roman Empire?

Finally, papers concerned with appeals to either the continuity or discontinuity of the family formed in the Roman Empire will also be considered.

Papers are limited to 45 minutes. Please submit abstracts of appr. 200 words via e-mail attachment to the organizing committee by 15 July 2009 at either bosmapr@unisa.ac.za or Olympus@yebo.co.za.

This Conference is a joint project of the Unisa Departments of Classics & World Languages and New Testament & Early Christian Studies.

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Research into Ancient Languages and Early Stages of Modern Languages and the Department of Classical Studies, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic would like to formally announce International Conference on Classical and Byzantine Literature: "Literary crossroads" to be held in 2010 and invite you to submit an abstract for the colloquium.

CALL FOR PAPERS should be submitted no later than January 31, 2010; early submissions are encouraged because the number of conference paper presentations is limited.

ABSTRACTS
Abstracts of papers to be presented in English, German, Italian or French are invited for consideration by the Conference Academic Committee. Please submit your abstract (up to 200 words) in the attached submission form until January 31, 2010 via e-mail to the following address: crossroads@phil.muni.cz. Acceptance notification will be sent to you until February 28, 2010. A letter of invitation to the conference participants can be downloaded at the following address: http://www.phil.muni.cz/wsvj/home/conference/classical-and-byzantine-literature.

PRESENTATIONS
Individual 20-minute paper presentations will be followed by 10 minutes of discussion.

PROGRAMME
Parallel sessions and panel discussions will be scheduled over four days; papers will be grouped by sessions. The conference will also include a junior session within which PhD students can present their papers. The conference programme will be available on the above mentioned website.

PUBLICATION
All papers will be considered for publication in refereed Conference Proceedings that will be launched in 2011.

Call for Manuscripts: Academic Exchange Quarterly (Technology in the Humanities)

Journal: Academic Exchange Quarterly
Issue: Spring 2010 Volume 14, Issue 1
Theme: Technology in the Humanities
Submission Deadlines:
· Early: October 2009 (with opportunity to be considered for considered for Editors' Choice)
· Regular: November 2009

New educational technology provides both increasing pressure and exciting possibilities for teachers in the humanities. It has the power to absorb our time or free it, excite our students or alienate them. We are interested in publishing two types of articles on educational technology: 1) Articles describing how educators are using various new media and technologies; 2) Articles that consider the theoretical, ethical, and budgetary impact of educational technology in all of its emerging forms.

Learn more:

· Information about "Technology in the Humanities” at http://www.rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/5tech.htm
· Submission Procedures at http://www.rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/rufen1.htm

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you!

Sincerely,

Lin Lin
Lin.Lin@unt.edu
Assistant Professor of Learning Technologies
University of North Texas

Brenda I. López Ortiz
lopezorb@stjohns.edu
Assistant Professor of Educational Technology
St. John’s University, NY

Call for Papers: Texts and Contexts: A manuscript conference at The Ohio State University, sponsored by The Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies

The conference seeks to investigate the textual traditions of various texts and genres, including texts in classical Latin, mediaeval Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and the vernaculars. Preference will be given to those abstracts which deal with newly discovered texts and their manuscript settings, or which present new perspectives on established textual traditions. We encourage graduate students and newly established scholars to submit their work.

Plenary speaker: Scott Gwara, University of South Carolina, America's Orphan Manuscripts.

Memorial session for Joseph Lynch with guest speakers, Roger Reynolds, Barbara Hanawalt, and James Bennett.

Email abstracts to epig@osu.edu or send to Professor Frank T. Coulson, Center for Epigraphical and Palaeographical Studies, 190 Pressey Hall, 1070 Carmack Road, Columbus, OH 43210.

OIKOS – FAMILIA: THE FAMILY IN THE ANCIENT GRECO-ROMAN WORLD.
Framing the discipline in the 21st century

5-7 November 2009
University of Gothenburg & University of Birmingham

The fifth ARACHNE conference is organised collaboratively by the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. The conference will take place at the University of Gothenburg 5-7 November 2009. The conference aims to bridge some of the gaps in the study of the family in antiquity: from Archaic Greece to the later Roman world.

The conference will focus on :

American Philological Association

Calls for Papers