New Chaucer Society London 2016: CFP

by J J Cohen

The call for papers has been posted for NCS16 London: check it out here. Thanks to Kellie Robertson and Emily Steiner and the program committee, it's going to be quite a conference: the nine threads collect an astonishing number of smart and creative sessions:
1. London: Books, Texts, Lives
2. Error
3. Medieval Media
4. Scientiae
5. Chaucerian Networks
6. Ritual, Pageant, Spectacle
7. Corporealities
8. Literary Forms
9. The Uses of the Medieval
Open Topic Sessions
Poster Groupings

ALL the sessions are well worth your time. I'm posting the two I'm organizing here and asking you to please submit a 250 page abstract via this webpage by April 15.

4. Environing London
Roundtable
This roundtable gathers some recent work by medievalists and others on ecology and ecotheory. It asks participants to discuss, what happens when we consider London as an urban ecosystem that surrounds (that is, environs) overlapping systems of life while being environed by others (the Thames as estuarine microclimate, weather in constant flux or as part of a Little Ice Age, the long durations of geological history)? Short papers will provoke a lively discussion of the impress of ecosystem on text, and of the possibility of reading ecological change and catastrophe from the literary archive. This session will welcome papers that ruminate over longues durées, so that A Burnable Book meets theBook of the Duchess meets the fossil record and archives of ice and fire.

47. Are We Postcolonial Yet? Pale Faces 2016 
Paper panel
This session will ponder the ways in which literary medieval studies has both changed and resisted some profound challenges to its self-identity over the past decade and a half. Returning to the theme of Carolyn Dinshaw's 2000 Biennial Lecture in London ("Pale Faces: Race, Religion and Affect in Chaucer's Texts and Their Readers"), presenters will wonder about diversity among medievalists, the place of the personal, the matter of race, and the decolonization of medieval studies as a discipline. Sixteen years after Dinshaw's lecture, in the wake of important work by scholars like Ingham, Heng, Warren and Davis (among many others), we will ask if we are postcolonial yet, and wonder why we remain so pale.