2019 Oxford Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Network Conference

Monday 24 June 2019 (Trinity Term W9) Room 2, Taylor Institution, University of Oxford

The Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Network of the University of Oxford is pleased to announce its 3rd annual Graduate Conference. The theme of this year, as chosen by the graduate students of the Medieval & Modern Languages Faculty, is Bodies and Embodiment. We welcome submissions from all graduate students working in the field of Medieval & Modern Languages. The deadline for submissions of proposals is 1 May 2019.

Call for Papers (Bodies and Embodiment) 

The portrayal of the body is prevalent across literary, visual and sonic texts, as is the body’s consumption of these media. Naked and clothed bodies; bodies at the peak of their physical form and bodies in all their abject materiality; bodies experiencing pleasure and bodies racked with pain; culturally coded bodies; marginalised bodies; queer bodies; bodies performing violence and bodies performing all sort of gestures across historical, cultural and physical spaces; hybrid bodies incorporating technological and animal elements; bodies of text, film or artwork.

The 2019 Oxford Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Network Conference seeks to explore how bodies are presented across any and all media, from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as to investigate which role the body plays in consuming all these media through reading, watching, listening, etc. In particular, the Conference aims to reflect on the body as an intersecting point between crucial issues of social and political relevance such as identity, gender, sexuality, race and marginalisation.

We particularly encourage papers tackling the relationship between body and mind (e.g. how and when are bodies presented as separate from the mind? Does it make sense to talk about a mind-body division?); the notion of ownership and agency (e.g. are we owned by our bodies, or do we own them? What happens when we change our body to better align it with our self-perception?); and the objectification of the body (e.g. how and when do texts and media represent a body as an object? What happens when we objectify our own bodies?).

Submissions

We welcome 20-minute papers from all graduate students working in the field of Medieval & Modern Languages. Submit your 250-word abstracts to ml-grad-net@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk by Wednesday 1 May 2019 (Trinity Term W1) on these and other issues related to the theme, including – but not limited to – the following:

• Nudity and costume
• Bodies and gender identity
• Bodies and sexuality
• The body in sexual imagery
• Marginalised bodies; control and autonomy
• The body in activism and social movements
• Political conceptions of the body
• The body as source of aesthetic pleasure
• Perfecting, redesigning, and changing the body
• Mind-body division/dualism
• The objectified body
• Bodies and performance
• Consuming art through the body; reading and the body; writing and the body
• Affect theory
• The text as corpus
• Bodily imagery (body as metaphor)
• Phenomenological readings
• Bodily gesture and cognition
• Translating bodily gesture
• Pain and illness; sick or disarticulated bodies
• The body and violence
• The senses
• The limits of the body
• The fragmented or mutilated body
• Non-human bodies; hybrid bodies
• The haunted body

Previous Graduate Conferences

The 2019 Conference is the 3rd annual Graduate Conference organised by the Medieval & Modern Languages Graduate Network. The theme of the Conference has been chosen by the master’s and doctorate students of the Modern & Medieval Languages Faculty of Oxford. You may find a list of the previous Graduate Conferences here below:

• 2018 Conference: In the Margins (18 June 2018)
• 2017 Conference: Chaos and Order (19 June 2017)

Contacts

For any queries, please get in touch with:

• Luca Mazzocchi       (Academic       Events     Officer      of     the      Graduate               Network)         –  mazzocchi@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk
• Yvette Siegert (President of the Graduate Network) – siegert@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk

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