Medievalism Scholarship Featured on Georgia Tech Cable Network

Katherine Marchand, a show producer, writer, and anchor for the Georgia Tech Cable Network, approached LMC's Richard Utz some months ago about featuring his work on Medievalism for a show called "Ramblin' Research," a source for students to learn more about professors with "interesting research" on our campus: HERE YOU GO

ISSM Conference 2015 in Pittsburgh

SAVE THE DATE! 2015 ISSM CONFERENCE
When: October 2-4
Where: Pittsburgh, PA, (where you can play with clouds at the Warhol Museum, nibble your way through the Strip District Markets, take a break at the National Aviary or the Carnegie Museum of Art, or catch a performance by some of the country's most innovative musicians)

Theme: Mapping Medievalisms
Over the last few years, the conference has given increased attention to forgotten and marginalized medievalisms, the darker aspects of medievalism that haunt our headlines, and our own self-imposed limits on exploration. We invite you to submit proposals on any aspect of "mapping" medievalism; there is a great deal of, er, latitude for submission. A formal call for proposals will be posted shortly, but feel free to send early ideas, questions, and comments to either Lauryn Mayer (lmayer@washjeff.edu) or Amy Kaufman (Amy.Kaufman@mtsu.edu).

Richard Utz to deliver Keynote at U of Bamberg

Andrea Schindler (Bamberg), Axel Müller (Leeds), and Siegrid Schmidt (Salzburg) are hosting Heroes of the Past in the Present. Formations of European Identities through Literature in the Post-Medieval World (Alte Helden – Neue Zeiten. Die Formierung europäischer Identitäten im Spiegel der Rezeption des Mittelalters) at the U of Bamberg, Germany, 9-12 April 2015, and Georgia Tech's Richard Utz will deliver a keynote, "Beyond Sherwood Forest: Robin Hood Goes Global." 

Valerie Johnson and Richard Utz publish in Medievalism on the Margin

Valerie B. Johnson, a Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow, and Richard Utz, LMC Chair, both contributed essays ("Ecomedievalism: Applying Ecotheory to Medievalism and Neomedievalism"; "Medievalism Studies and the Subject of Religion") in volume 24 (2015) of Studies in Medievalism, entitled Medievalism on the Margin: Some Perspective(s).

The volume, edited by Karl Fugelso, Vincent Ferré, and Alicia C. Montoya, not only defines medievalism's margins, as well as its role in marginalizing other fields, ideas, people, places, and events, but also provides tools and models for exploring those issues and indicates new subjects to which they might apply. The eight opening essays address the physical marginalizing of medievalism in annotated texts on medieval studies; the marginalism of oneself via medievalism; medievalism's dearth of ecotheory and religious studies; academia's paucity of pop medievalism; and the marginalization of races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, and literary characters in contemporary medievalism. 

Seven subsequent articles build on this foundation while discussing: the distancing of oneself (and others) during imaginary visits to the Middle Ages; lessons from the margins of Brazilian medievalism; mutual marginalization among factions of Spanish medieval studies; and medievalism in the marginalization of lower socio-economic classes in late-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain, of modern gamers, of contemporary laborers, and of Alfred Austin, a late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century poet also known as Alfred the Little. In thus investigating the margins of and marginalization via medievalism, the volume affirms their centrality to the field.

Contributors: Nadia R. Altschul, Megan Arnott, Jaume Aurell, Juan Gomis Coloma, Elizabeth Emery, Vincent Ferré, Valerie B. Johnson, Alexander L. Kaufman, Erin Felicia Labbie, Vickie Larsen, Kevin Moberly, Brent Moberly, Alicia C. Montoya, Serina Patterson, Jeff Rider, Lindsey Simon-Jones, Richard Utz, Helen Young.

SELIM Conference Invites Papers on Medieval Studies and Medievalism

SELIM, Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, invites all scholars interested in the field to participate in its 27th International Conference, which will be hosted by the Department of English and Germanic Philology of the University of Granada from September 17th to 19th, 2015. Papers dealing with any aspect of Medieval English (including, of course, Medievalism) are welcome, especially those concerning literary or linguistic history.Abstracts should be sent to Dr. Rafael J. Pascual (selim27@ugr.es). The deadline for abstracts is May 31st, 2015. We will acknowledge receipt and acceptance as soon as the proposal has been peer-reviewed.

The following plenary speakers have confirmed their attendance:
- Leonard Neidorf (Harvard University) – “The Transmission of Beowulf 
and the History of the English Language”
- Rodrigo Pérez Lorido (Universidad de Oviedo) – “Syntax and Language 
Processing in Early English”
- Tom Shippey (Saint Louis University) – “Beowulf Criticism: From 
Tolkien to Fulk”

For further details, please visit our website:
www.ugr.es/~selim27

Position Available: Asst. Editor, The Year's Work in Medievalism

The Year's Work in Medievalism, a refereed journal published under the auspices of the International Society for the Study of Medievalism, is seeking applications for the position of assistant editor. Prior experience in the areas of editing and publishing is definitely an asset. Candidates for this position should have a strong interest, and hopefully some prior experience, in researching the reception of medieval culture in postmedieval times. Please send a concise "letter of interest" and CV as one single PDF to richard.utz@lmc.gatech.edu and edward.risden@snc.edu. We do not expect the average weekly workload for the assistant editor to go beyond 1 hour. The initial appointment will be for a two-year period. The deadline for applications is January 25, 2015.

Valerie Johnson and Richard Utz publish in MEDIEVALISM NOW

The special 28 (2013) issue of The Year's Work in Medievalism, entitled MEDIEVALISM NOW, edited by Ed Risden, Karl Fugelso, Richard Utz, is now available. It includes essays by Valerie Johnson and Richard Utz. 

Here is the Table of Contents:

• E. L. Risden: Introduction 
• Valerie B. Johnson: Ecomedievalism: Medievalism's Potential Futures in Ecocriticism and Ecomaterialism  
• Amy S. Kaufman: Lowering the Drawbridge   
• Elena Levy-Navarro: A Long Parenthesis Begins   
• Nickolas Haydock: Medievalism and Anamorphosis: Curious Perspectives on the Middle Ages  
• Kevin Moberly & Brent Moberly: There is No Word for Work in the Dragon Tongue   
• E. L. Risden: Miyazaki's Medieval World:  Japanese Medievalism and the Rise of Anime  
• Karl Fugelso: Embracing Our Marginalism:  Mitigating the Tyranny of a Central Paradigm   
• Carol L. Robinson: The Quest for a Deaf Lesbian Dwarf (or Anyone Else that Might Have Been Excluded) in Medievalist Video Games: A Response to Karl Fugelso’s ‘Manifesto’   
• Jesse G. Swan: Relaxation and Amateur Medievalism for Early Modernity: Seeing Sir Henry Yelverton as a Woman in Love and a Bureaucrat Threatened in the 1621 Parliament   
• Helen Young: Place and Time: Medievalism and Making Race  
• Richard Utz: Can We Talk About Religion, Please? Medievalism’s Eschewal of Religion, and Why it Matters  

Access to Medievalism Now

Past, Present, and Neo

The text below is an uncorrected, pre-ublication version of a concise essay, "Past, Present, and Neo" published in Humanistic Perspectives in a Technological World, ed. Richard Utz, Valerie B. Johnson, and Travis Denton (Atlanta: School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014), 139-40:

Past, Present, and Neo

Richard Utz 

"The past is never dead. It's not even past."

William Faulkner

 At first sight, few cities could have less of a link with the Middle Ages than Atlanta. Founded in 1837 to provide a train terminus to connect the port of Savannah with the Midwest, and about 3,500 miles and 400 years removed from Old Europe, Georgia’s capital seems to be quintessentially modern. Nevertheless, an alert first time visitor might notice dozens of medieval signposts: 

At the airport’s baggage claim, a colorful screen display invites her to be “swept away to an age of bravery and honor” and partake in “a feast of the eyes and appetite with all the splendor and romance” of medieval Spain at the Atlanta Castle of Medieval Times, a dinner theater chain. A courtesy van, which treats her as if she were a noble lady at a medieval court, takes her to her downtown hotel, the Knights Inn. After a change of clothes, she takes a taxi to the Catholic Cathedral of Christ the King, where she attends her college roommate’s wedding, which includes the celebration of the Eucharist, a sacramental ritual originating in the Fourth Lateran Church Council’s decision on transubstantiation in 1215. She is especially impressed by the performance of members of the Atlanta Early Music Alliance, who perform wedding songs from before 1800, accompanied by instruments made according to medieval and early modern building instructions. On her way out of the Cathedral, a Knights of Columbus honor guard greets the guests who are then bused to the wedding reception at Rhodes Hall on Peachtree Street. There, our visitor admires the Victorian Romanesque revival architecture and watches as the photographer takes pictures of the newlyweds before a backdrop of stained-glass windows depicting the rise and fall of the Confederacy and a gallery of saintly-looking generals. Her day continues with a guided afternoon visit to the Margaret Mitchell House arranged for some of the non-Atlantan guests by the wedding planner. The guide ends his narrative of Mitchell’s biography with informing his audience how she was killed by a speeding car on Peachtree Street in 1949. She was on her way to the cinema to watch A Canterbury Tale, a British war-time movie loosely linked with Geoffrey Chaucer’s late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales. Inspired by the story of Mitchell’s life, our visitor ends her day by renting David O. Selznick’s film version of Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind in her hotel room. She drifts off to sleep shortly after taking in the famous introductory foreword: “There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind....”

When I share this obviously fictional narrative with my students, they quickly catch on and research and identify dozens of other examples of how individuals, groups, corporations, and nations have recreated, reenacted, and reinvented the medieval past to make statements in their own postmedieval art, architecture, entertainment, literature, politics, race, religion, and sports. They soon notice that, while practically all these older forms of “medievalism” employ some kind of technology and scientific practice to represent what we know about the “real” Middle Ages, there now also seems to exist a new and different kind of connecting with medieval culture, one related to the ways in which various new media allow for heretofore unknown representations of space, story, and time.

More often than not, such recent narratives, with which my students tend to be more familiar than I, no longer make any serious attempt at heeding what scholars have established about the “real” Middle Ages. In fact, they (for example: Arcanum, Guild, Skyrim, Medieval: Total War, World of Warcraft) are content with creating pseudo-medieval worlds that playfully obliterate history, authenticity, and historical accuracy and replace history-based narratives with “simulacra” of the medieval, employing images and narrating stories that are neither an original nor the faithful copy of an original, but entirely “Neo.” Does this mean that these new simulational media will fundamentally change how we speak about and relate to the past? Will we no longer, as first Renaissance humanists and later Enlightenment thinkers have admonished us, try to become ever more perfect as human beings by studying the original stories, language, and motivations of our predecessors? And will this shift in our relationship to humanity’s past contribute to the “posthuman” or “transhuman” kind of world science fiction writers and futurologists have been contemplating?

I am convinced that our students, with their strongly interdisciplinary curricular focus, are particularly well prepared to investigate “medievalist” as well as “neomedievalist” narratives, and Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and particularly the School of Literature, Media, and Communication provide the perfect intellectual lab spaces to do that.  As “critical makers” who write and interpret, build and critique, play and create, they are able to shape the future developments at the intersection of ever so many humanistic, sociological, and technological practices. In their lives and careers, past, present, and “Neo” will be of equal importance.    [© R. Utz, 2014]

Open Access in the Academy, and What it Means for Medievalism Studies

Open Access in the Academy, a roundtable at the 29th Intl. Conference on Medievalism, Georgia Tech, October 2014, with Thomas Hahn (Rochester), Kevin J. Harty (La Salle), Leah Haught (LMC/Georgia Tech), J. Britt Holbrook (SPP/Georgia Tech), Fred Rascoe (Library/Georgia Tech),  Paul Sturtevant (Smithsonian & publicmedievalist.com), Jesse G. Swan (Northern Iowa), Robin Wharton (Georgia State), and Richard Utz (LMC/Georgia Tech], is now available online at Georgia Tech's SmarTech repository in multiple versions.

LINK TO VIDEO HERE

Utz Publishes on Medievalism's Lexicon

Richard Utz recently published a short essay, "Medievalism’s Lexicon: Preliminary Considerations," in Perspicuitas, an open-access journal  published by the University Essen-Duisburg, Germany. The essay is accessible HERE.

Program for 29th Intl. Conference on Medievalism Now Available

Thanks to Leah Haught and Valerie Johnson, we now have the draft program for the 29th Conference ready for view.

Leah Haught appointed Associate Editor of Medievally Speaking

Good news about the future of Medievally Speaking: Dr. Leah Haught, who has been serving as an excellent Assistant Editor for our journal since 2012, has agreed to taking on the position of Associate Editor. Leah holds a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.  Her research interests include Arthurian romance and historiography, medieval and early-modern conceptions of authorship, and literary representations of gendered behavior. She is currently a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow in Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and, together with Dr. Valerie Johnson, co-host of the 29th International Conference on Medievalism at Georgia Tech (October 24-25, 2014).