The Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Student Interdisciplinary Network (MARGIN) is proud to announce our theme for the 2020–2021 academic year: Apocalypse and Revelation. We are inviting short talks that touch on these issues in the Medieval and Early Modern periods, as well as on their reception in or in comparison with later periods. Given the contemporary obsession with the apocalyptic whether political, spiritual, or medical, we are looking for papers that speak to feeling, dread, or even longing for apocalypse and/or its power to reveal in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods. From the Greek ἀποκάλυψις, an apocalypse is at root a “revelation,” and this year, we hope to explore how the relationship between the contemporary vision of apocalypse and revelation, divine or otherwise, intersect, coexist, and complicate one another. Speakers are invited to address this topic from a diversity of perspectives and methodologies.
Graduate students at all levels and in any discipline are encouraged to submit work ranging from drafts of conference papers to more formal presentations of between 15-18 minutes. Graduate students doing work on non-Western material are highly encouraged to submit. We have opted for a new, shorter format in order to put two papers in conversation during each session and hold longer discussions after the talks. This format seems to work well for Zoom. All talks will be held virtually.
Submissions may focus on topics including, but not limited to:
- Christian, religious eschatologies
- Upheaval, destruction & disaster
- Plague and its consequences
- Medieval and Early Modern iconography
- Prophetic or historicist visions
- Epistolary and/or prophetic modes of literature
- Allegories of spiritual paths
- Struggle between Christians and non-Christians
- Pseudonymity and symbolic imagery
- Christian and/or Jewish cosmologies
- Unveilings, revolutions
- The year 1000
- Apocalypticism as driving social and political change
Please send a short description (150-200 words) of your proposed session (talk, paper, workshop) to [email protected] no later than November 9. Please include a short bio as well.
