Far Out! (A Roundtable)
Sponsoring Organization(s)
BABEL Working Group
Organizer Name
Suzanne Conklin Akbari
Organizer Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Presider Name
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Lara Farina
Presider Affiliation
George Washington Univ., West Virginia Univ.
Paper Title 1
Discussant
Presenter 1 Name
Dorothy Kim
Presenter 1 Affiliation
Vassar College
Paper Title 2
Discussant
Presenter 2 Name
Melissa Ridley Elmes
Presenter 2 Affiliation
Univ. of North Carolina-Greensboro
Paper Title 3
Discussant
Presenter 3 Name
Anna Wilson
Presenter 3 Affiliation
Univ. of Toronto
Paper Title 4
Discussant
Presenter 4 Name
Matthew Bryan Gillis
Presenter 4 Affiliation
Univ. of Tennessee-Knoxville
Paper Title 5
Discussant
Presenter 5 Name
Karen Cook
Presenter 5 Affiliation
Univ. of Hartford
Paper Title 6
Discussant
Presenter 6 Name
Drew Daniel
Presenter 6 Affiliation
Johns Hopkins Univ.
Start Date
14-5-2016 10:00 AM
Session Location
Fetzer 1005
Description
Far Out! [A Roundtable]
The second of the BABEL Working Group’s linked panels will discuss methods, affiliations, and inquiries that come close to – or even cross – the limits of “serious scholarship” and “acceptable work” in medieval studies. We seek examples of eccentric researchers, inconvenient amateurs, crazy ideas, and questionable medievalisms as material for thinking about what our disciplines and institutions will tolerate, what they will not, and why. Have we, as a field, abandoned interesting ideas and approaches because they are too far from the mainstream? Scholars such as Candace Barrington, Brantley Bryant, Louise D’Arcens, Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephanie Trigg, Richard Utz, Lawrence Warner, and Anna Wilson have productively raised the issue, and the Material Collective hosted a rich session at the ICMS in 2014 on “Faking It.” As a favorite phrase of the North American counterculture, “far out” expresses enthusiasm as well as surprise at the unexpected; in this spirit, we seek to locate the points at which medieval scholarship or medievalist creations hover provocatively between genius and junk. Presenters may discuss, among other topics: hippie/New Age medievalisms, wishful thinking, terrible reconstructions, tattoo Celticism, Beowulf for capitalists, discredited research, fanfic and cosplay, argumentative wrong turns, poetics and performance art, conspiracy theorists, ciphers and cryptology, gaming communities and online collectives, and academic distaste. Alternately, they may propose projects, pedagogies, and perspectives that are utterly and unabashedly “out there.”
Far Out! (A Roundtable)
Fetzer 1005
Far Out! [A Roundtable]
The second of the BABEL Working Group’s linked panels will discuss methods, affiliations, and inquiries that come close to – or even cross – the limits of “serious scholarship” and “acceptable work” in medieval studies. We seek examples of eccentric researchers, inconvenient amateurs, crazy ideas, and questionable medievalisms as material for thinking about what our disciplines and institutions will tolerate, what they will not, and why. Have we, as a field, abandoned interesting ideas and approaches because they are too far from the mainstream? Scholars such as Candace Barrington, Brantley Bryant, Louise D’Arcens, Carolyn Dinshaw, Stephanie Trigg, Richard Utz, Lawrence Warner, and Anna Wilson have productively raised the issue, and the Material Collective hosted a rich session at the ICMS in 2014 on “Faking It.” As a favorite phrase of the North American counterculture, “far out” expresses enthusiasm as well as surprise at the unexpected; in this spirit, we seek to locate the points at which medieval scholarship or medievalist creations hover provocatively between genius and junk. Presenters may discuss, among other topics: hippie/New Age medievalisms, wishful thinking, terrible reconstructions, tattoo Celticism, Beowulf for capitalists, discredited research, fanfic and cosplay, argumentative wrong turns, poetics and performance art, conspiracy theorists, ciphers and cryptology, gaming communities and online collectives, and academic distaste. Alternately, they may propose projects, pedagogies, and perspectives that are utterly and unabashedly “out there.”