A session in honour of Ann Dooley will be held at the upcoming meeting of the Canadian Society of Medievalists (Wilfried Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, May 27-29). The session on Monday, May 28, is organized by CMS alumnae Giselle Gos and Joanne Findon. For more details see the program of the meeting.
Current CMS students and alumni are well represented at this year’s CSM meeting, so don’t miss out on it!
We congratulate Suzanne Akbari and Lawrin Armstrong for each securing a SSHRC Insight Grants in support of their research. Well done! Suzanne Akbari’s project is entitled “Universal Histories and the Poetic Narration of the Past, 1100-1450″; Lawrin Armstrong will do research on “The Organic Intellectuals of Early Renaissance Florence”.
Congratulations to Grace Desa, Catherine Monahan, and David Townsend, on having passed the 25-year service threshold at the U of T, and to Rosemary Beattie, on having passed the 40-year threshold just before her retirement on April 30th. The years of dedicated service are a crucial component of CMS’s success and were warmly acknowledged by President David Naylor at a ceremony held at the Faculty of Music on the 8th of May. Congratulations also to Grace, on the birth of her first grandchild, Liliana, born at 4:05 on the morning of Saturday, May 12th, 7.27 lbs. (and growing).
The Centre for Medieval Studies has seventeen speakers at the 47th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo (May 10-13, 2012). The speakers are:
The Centre is soliciting one-page abstracts from CMS students for 30 minute papers to be delivered at next fall’s Freiburg-Toronto Graduate Student Colloquium (October 4-6), which will be held in Toronto. The theme, “Integrating Bodies of Knowledge”, reflects the essential point of the colloquium exchange, namely, a broad range of research explored across academic disciplines and international perspectives. Abstracts on any medieval topic will be given full consideration.
This colloquium is jointly sponsored by the Centre for Medieval Studies and the Mittelalterzentrum of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. Participants will present their work as part of a three-day-long exchange of ideas and techniques with scholars from Freiburg. Each paper will have a respondent, a specialist chosen from the faculty of the partner institution, to offer insight and direct discussion. Costs for lunch and dinner will be covered for CMS presenters. Six abstracts will be selected on a competitive basis.
Abstracts should be submitted by 16 May to Professor John Magee (email hidden; JavaScript is required).
Click here for a hardcopy of this Call for Papers.
CMS alumnus Randall Rosenfeld has received a special honour – no doubt a first for a CMS alumnus: he had an asteroid named after him. Information on asteroid (283990) Randallrosenfeld, first discovered in September 2004, is most easily found on the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s site. The asteroid is also announced on the website of the IAU’s Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (see the last page of this document).
Randall Rosenfeld is the national archivist of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. He has created a first-class archive that provides an insight on the development of Canadian astronomy in the last century, and has brought old but valuable observing records to light.
Randall has also just won the 2012 Simon Newcomb Award of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada for excellence in astronomical writing. Congratulations!!
The 4th Annual Canada Chaucer Seminar is pleased to present a special two-day gathering in honour of Richard Firth Green, taking place at the University of Toronto, April 27–28, 2012.
Truth and Tales: Medieval Popular Culture and the Written Word
Keynote speakers will be Richard Firth Green (Ohio State), Barbara Hanawalt (Ohio State), and Andrew Taylor (Ottawa).
Other speakers include Thomas Hahn (Rochester), Michael Johnston (Purdue), Kathleen Kennedy (Penn State Brandywine), Lisa Kiser (Ohio State), Rachel Koopmans (York), Robyn Malo (Purdue), Alastair Minnis (Yale), William Robins (Toronto), Fiona Somerset (Duke), M.J. Toswell (Western Ontario), Michael Van Dussen (McGill), Nicholas Watson (Harvard), Karen Winstead (Ohio State), and Stephen Yeager (Wayne St).
All sessions will take place at the Centre for Medieval Studies, 125 Queen’s Park, 3rd Floor.
For the full program, please visit http://groups.chass.utoronto.ca/chaucer/
For further information, contact email hidden; JavaScript is required.
To transit downtown from Pearson International airport: from the Pearson Terminal, take the 192 Airport Express to Kipling Subway Station. Take the subway eastbound to St. George Station.
To transit downtown from Toronto Island Airport: a free shuttle bus runs from the ferry terminal at Toronto Island Airport to a hotel about a block from Union Subway Station. Take the ‘University-Spadina’ subway line northbound from Union and get off at either Museum (closest to the conference building) or St. George (closest to the hotel). Transit fares are $3 one-way.
If you do not wish to transit, you may take a taxi; fares to downtown should be ca. $35-40 from Pearson and ca. $15–20 from Toronto Island Airport.
Here are some upcoming talks of current CMS students:
Peter Buchanan, “Caedmon and the Gift of Song in Black Mountain Poetics”, The Eighth Annual ASSC Graduate Student Conference – “Philology”, University of California, Berkeley, 24-25 February 2012.
Patrick Meusel, “Cynewulf at the Crossroads: the Stylistic Influence of Vernacular Homiletic Prose and Christian-Latin Verse in Christ B”, Cambridge Colloquium in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic 2012: Junctions and Crossroads, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic, University of Cambridge, 22-26 February 2012.
Jessica Lockhart, “He Will Rock You: Havelok’s Boulders and the Problem of Wonder in Havelok the Dane”, Romance in Medieval Britain Conference, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, 24-26 March 2012.
Elizabeth Watkins, “An Incomplete Text: Le Roman de Waldef and Cod. Bodmer 168”, Romance in Medieval Britain Conference, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, 24-26 March 2012.
Registration is now open for CMS’s 33rd Medieval Colloquium, “Imitation, Emulation, and Forgery: Pretending and Becoming in the Medieval World”:
Imitation implies both a faithfulness to its sources and also an inherent differentiation, and medieval culture used this space that embodied both sameness and difference as a particularly fertile zone; the religious found an imperfect mirror within the world and humanity, reflecting the transcendent world beyond matter; saints imitated Christ and one another, authors and poets looked to the models of both Christian and pagan antiquity, texts were copied and diffused, artists looked to the work of their forbears and the world around them, and knights fashioned themselves in the guise of the heroes of romance.