Three announements

• ITM congratulates reader Nick Haydock on the publication of his book MOVIE MEDIEVALISM: THE IMAGINARY MIDDLE AGES. You can view a blurb -- as well as his awesome awesome awesome book cover -- here. Well done Nick!
• On Sunday 6 April (4pm, BST), BBC Radio 4's bookclub will be discussing Simon Armitage's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The program is repeated on Thursday 10 April, 4pm BST. Details here. For bringing this to our attention ITM thanks Kate Ash of the University of Manchester who writes "I was at the recording of the programme and Armitage provided an insightful discussion of his work."
• The following special issue of parallax will be of interest to many ITM readers. Thank you, MOR, for sending it my way:
  

  'The Life of the Gift' 16:1 (54)
  parallax calls for papers for a themed issue on the life of the gift, to be edited by Myra J. Hird, Professor and Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University, Ontario hirdm@queensu.ca. The aim of this themed issue is to invite critical reflections upon a broadly defined understanding of 'gifting' and its purchase on enduring interdisciplinary issues and debates (such as 'cost-benefit' scenarios) centred on culture/nature, human/nonhuman, self/other and foreign/familiar bifurcations. It begins with a series of questions about gifting as ontology: Can gifting be 'embodied' if it has no presence and is only an economic relation? If giving is often corporeal and non-volitional, then what about gifts between humans and other-than human bodies? How might we recognize and respond with such gifts, for instance the corporeal gifting of 'companion species', natural disasters, health, symbioses, ecology, nano-engineering, reproduction and so on? If we can enter into relations of give and take with nonhuman others, what about their relations with each other? Can we imagine giving or gifting as a condition beyond human life, or even beyond life? What is lost and what is gained – what ethical openings and foreclosures are enabled – by such a radical extension? Contributions are welcomed from the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities including philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, history, literature, art history, film studies and the visual arts, geography, sociology, gender studies, queer theory, biology and physics. Contributors may also wish to provide more empirically focused analyses of gifting. We particularly welcome contributions that approach the topic from interdisciplinary perspectives. Submission Deadline: 1 December 2008.