Deadline Extended: Please submit abstracts by Midnight, Sunday April 19th
Call For Papers
Fiesole: a Digital Early Career Symposium
6th-8th May 2020, 10am-3pm EST (3-8pm GMT)
‘To have compassion for the afflicted is human: it is a quality appropriate to all, but most especially those who have needed comfort in the past and have found it in others.’ - Boccaccio, Decameron, Proem, l.1
Times of global insecurity enhance positions of precarity. For graduate students, early career academics, and independent scholars the disruption of the 2020 ‘conference season’ means not only a lost (or delayed) opportunity to present our work to other members of the field, but also the loss of spaces critical for the production of community. We miss discussions necessary to developing intellectual work, but more pressingly we miss the friends and colleagues who make our contingent and peripatetic lives viable. Moreover, we recognise that the increasing precarity and insecurity of the current moment disrupts the possibility of ‘business as usual’ even as the neo-capitalist university insists that it should not. Our capabilities are diverted, dispersed, and diminished. At this symposium, more so than ever, we make room for mess, for speculation, for the problems and dead ends of the research process. It is the time to come together as a community in our digital Fiesole and share our words: to support communities in crisis; produce art to sustain us in the present; and provide hope through future collaboration and creative thought.
This digital symposium brings together early career and otherwise contingent scholars of the Middle Ages (in whatever capacity) to discuss current research. We invite you to submit your stray, orphan, and otherwise dispossessed papers for 20 minute panel presentations or 5-10 minute lightning discussions (of any sort). We also encourage creative papers, pseudo-papers, or papers reflecting on the current pandemic! These papers can be complete or in-progress: the important thing is for you to share what you would like. Please send title, format, and a short abstract of no more than 250 words (whether repurposed, half-fledged, or otherwise contingent) to Julia.King@uib.no AND james.sargan@utoronto.ca by 5pm EST (10pm GMT) on Sunday 12th April.
Nota: This conference will be held on Zoom, and is open to any interested participants who identify as a precarious researcher. Zoom etiquette will be distributed in advance of the conference. The final hour of the symposium will be dedicated to a social hour, in the spirit of conference networking and connection.