by J J Cohen
... is a great place to dine. It's also a great place to hold a conference, and New Chaucer Society will be doing just that in 2012.
There's still time to dream up a panel proposal. And if you are thinking about oceans or ecologies, send it my way.
Ecologies (convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu
How do we analyze ways of living and forms of life? Possible topics for sessions include: decentering the human; the lived environment; posthumanism and landscape studies; textuality and the imagining of worlds; nature and ethics; preservation, sudden change, and catastrophe; problems of scale; natural and unnatural disaster. Sessions might contemplate mountains, rivers, forests, rocks, air, glaciers, trees, fire or weather in texts and as actors. This thread will conclude with a session on 'Ecology/Sciences,' examining the intersections of ways of knowing with forms of life.
Oceans (Convener: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, jjcohen@gwu.edu)
What happens when we reconceptualize communities as shared marinal and littoral spaces (the Mediterranean, the Channel, the North Sea, the Irish Sea) rather than as land-based, national or regional demarcations? Possible topics for panels include the sea in medieval texts, shipwrecks, piracy, being lost at sea, transit, human trafficking, merchant narratives, maps and utopias. We also welcome proposals on contemporary oceans as a way of collecting current medieval studies (e.g. Chaucer and the Pacific or Chaucer in Japan). This thread will conclude with a session on 'Neighbor/Oceans,' bringing together different ways of thinking about propinquity and community.
I really like the way these two topics might interconnect: i.e., oceans have ecologies. Seems simplistic at first, but then you think of Saint Brendan and that Fish that was not an Island (but it sure seemed like one at first)...
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