Siena, and Summer

by J J Cohen

Passport: check. European adapter for my laptop: check. Headphones to drown out potential annoying seatmate on endless trans-Atlantic and trans-European flights: check. BABEL t shirt: check. I depart tomorrow for the New Chaucer Society conference in Siena, and am hoping to see many ITM readers there. We medievalists are underpaid and unfairly stereotyped, AND on top of that our archives, conferences and historically relevant sites are in such shitty locations, but we deal.

For this NCS I put together a two sequence panel on "Touching the Past" that I hope you'll consider attending:

Session 37: TOUCHING THE PAST (Thread C)
Session Organizer: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) Chair: George Edmundson (Dartmouth College)

• Jaime A. Friedman (Cornell University) “The Surfaces of Emelye’s Body”
• Claire Barbetti (Duquesne University) “Ekphrasis and Polytemporality in Pearl”
• Miriamne Krummel (University of Dayton) “The Touch of Happenstance or a Staged Encounter? Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ Reenacts The York Mystery Cycle”

Session 62: TOUCHING THE PAST (Thread C)
Session Organizer and Chair: Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University)

1. Mary Kate Hurley (Columbia University) “Chaucer's Anglo-Saxons”
2. Eileen Joy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) “No Longer Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer's Griselda and Lars von Trier's Bess McNeill”
3. Karl Tobias Steel (CUNY Brooklyn) “Weeping with Erkenwald, or Complicit with Grace”

That second session is history making: all four ITM bloggers! In the same room! At the same session! We expect the supernova that results from simultaneous bodily presence to blast a crater through Siena that will someday form a volcanic lake. Yes, some medieval tchotchkes will be lost in the resultant firestorm but, whatever, they've been around for a long time.

I'm also presenting in NCS's first ever-blogging panel:

Session 60: BLOGGING, VIRTUAL COMMUNITIES, AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES (Thread M) Session Organizer: Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) Chair: John Ganim (University of California Riverside)

• Jeffrey J. Cohen (George Washington University) "Blogging Past, Present and Askew"
• Carl S. Pyrdum, III (Independent Scholar) “Blogging on the Margins: Got Medieval, Medieval Blogging, and Mainstream Readership”
• Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne) “How do you find the time? Work, Pleasure, Time and Blogging”
• Jonathan Jarrett (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) “An Englishman’s Blog is his Castle: Names, Freedom and Control in Medievalist Blogging”
• David Lawton (Washington University, Saint Louis), Respondent

For those who are traveling: safe and happy journeys. For those who are not: don't worry, this is 2010. The conference will be blogged.