Just Get Yourself High: Join the BABEL Working Group

by EILEEN JOY

But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Myra Seaman and I are delighted to announce that the BABEL Working Group is launching today a brand-new website, which you can see here:

NEW WEBSITE: The BABEL Working Group

If you are not already a member of BABEL, why don't you join? As we like to say [often], BABEL is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional assemblage with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership carries with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they require. Our chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful “being-together” with others who work alongside us in the leaning towers of the post-historical university where we roam as a multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.

A little more conventionally, we also like to say that we are a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholars (primarily medievalists, but also including persons working in other temporal periods and fields, such as early modern and Victorian studies, critical and cultural theory, film and women’s studies, critical sexuality studies, and so on) in North America, the U.K., Australia, and beyond who are working to develop new cross-disciplinary alliances among the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new “critical humanisms,” as well as to develop a more present-minded medieval studies and a more historically-minded cultural studies.

To join BABEL [which does provide you with a discounted subscription rate to postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies], simply email me [at: ejoy@siue.edu] and ask to be added to our list-serv, which is a news-only [not a discussion] list-serv, and therefore will not clutter up your email inbox. Every month or so, you will receive email digests of where BABEL is going and what projects and events it has cooking, and also various calls for assistance with our ongoing events and projects, such as [don't forget] our 2nd Biennial Meeting in September 2012 in Boston:

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

Or our panels for the 2012 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which you can see HERE [and if you are interested in participating on any of these, please let us know, also at: ejoy@siue.edu]. You can also follow us on Facebook HERE.

If you join BABEL today, you can start bossing us around, and we really like that. Plus, we'll send you a free case of "no regrets." Cheers!