Medieval Colloquium Gather April 1–2

The 42nd annual Sewanee Medieval Colloquium will meet Friday and Saturday, April 1–2, at the University of the South. The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Medieval Natures,” and the meeting will include more than 80 papers discussing medieval science, literature, music, art, history, philosophy and religion. 

Caroline Walker Bynum (emerita, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and Columbia University), will give the Brinley Rhys Memorial Lecture at 5:30 p.m., Saturday, April 2, in Gailor Auditorium. Her topic will be “Nature, Matter and Miracles: Medieval Evidence for the Life of Things.” A major figure in medieval history for three decades, Bynum has pioneered the study of gender in medieval history, especially with her books, “Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages” (1984) and “Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women” (1988). 

Carolyn Dinshaw (New York University) will deliver the Edward King plenary lecture at 5:30 p.m., Friday, April 1, in Gailor Auditorium. She will talk about “Black Skin, Green Masks: Medieval Foliate Heads, Racial Trauma and Queer Worldmaking.” Dinshaw holds the Julius Silver, Roslyn S. Silver and Enid Silver Winslow Professorship of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and has made a significant contribution to a variety of fields, including medieval Western European culture and literature, feminist studies, sexuality and LGBTQ studies, ecology and ecocriticism, history of cartography, and theories of temporality. Her work, especially “Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics” (University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) and “Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Post-modern” (Duke University Press, 1999), made her a powerful voice in Queer Theory, and were instrumental in introducing Queer Theory into Medieval Studies. 

Kellie Robertson (University of Maryland) will lead a seminar on “Defining Nature,” at 1:30 p.m., Friday, April 1, in University Archives. It will feature papers investigating the boundaries of nature by scholars of various fields. Robertson specializes in the interactions of literature and science in the medieval and the Renaissance; her current book, “Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Natural Philosophy” (forthcoming from University of Pennsylvania Press), explores the relationship of late medieval poetry to physics, and the ideations of nature that both produced under the influence of Aristotelian science. She has previously published extensively on medieval work and labor, including “The Laborer’s Two Bodies: Labor and the ‘Work’ of the Text in Medieval Britain, 1350-1500” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 

All events, except meals, are free and open to the Sewanee community. More information, including the complete schedule, is available at <http://medievalcolloquium.sewanee.edu>.