The fifth biennial conference of the Society for the Medieval Mediterranean will take place at Ghent University from Monday 10th July to Wednesday 12th July 2017.

The theme of the conference is “Communities, Imaginations and Emotions in the Medieval Mediterranean”. We welcome papers from all disciplines that study emotions, imaginations and communities in, of and across the Medieval Mediterranean. This theme invites a variety of lines of inquiry, a number of which are suggested below. How were emotions produced, expressed and communicated? To what end were imaginations used and abused? In what ways were communities perceived and understood? What communalities and particularities are there? Which challenges do the literary, historical, archaeological and other sources pose in this respect?

The keynotes will be delivered by Professor Marina Rustow (Princeton) and Professor Nikolas Jaspert (Heidelberg).

Topics of the Conference

Topics of the conference include, but are by no means limited to:

• Emotional and imagined communities
• Selfing and othering
• Identity and alterity, senses of belonging, ties that bond
• Memory, nostalgia and the imagined or idealized past
• Mirabilia, wonders and magic
• Worldviews and other social schemata
• Mobility across borders
• Emotional and communal dimensions to identity
• Honour and shame, social codes and values
• Emotions bodily felt, orally expressed
• Reading and sharing emotions
• Methodological problems when inquiring emotions and imaginations

Call for papers and panels

We invite 200-300 word abstracts for individual 20-minute papers relating to the conference theme. Participants are encouraged to submit proposals for panels of 3 papers – in this case, the panel proposer should collate the three abstracts and submit them together, indicating clearly the rationale behind the planned panel. A pdf version of the call for papers and panels is accessible here.

First deadline:

Abstracts for individual papers and proposals for panels should be emailed to the conference email address (smm2017@ugent.be) by Monday 31^st October 2016. Applicants will be notified regarding the acceptance of their paper or panel by January 2017.