Showing posts with label KCL. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KCL. Show all posts

Tuesday 18 June 2013

CFP: DigiPal One-Day Symposium

Date: Monday 16th September 2013
Venue: King's College London, Strand
Co-sponsor: Centre for Late Antique & Medieval studies, KCL

It is with great delight that the DigiPal team at the Department of Digital Humanities (King's College London) announce their third Symposium.

We've built up a scholarly camaraderie over the last two years and much look forward to our annual opportunity to discuss and debate the computer-assisted study of medieval handwriting and manuscripts.

How to propose a paper

Papers of 20 minutes in length are invited on any aspect of digital approaches to the study of medieval handwriting and manuscripts.

The topics below might help guide potential submissions:

* terminology for describing handwriting
* visualisation of manuscript evidence and data
* meaning and mining in palaeography
* automatic letter-form identification
* methods for dating/localising script
* crowd-sourcing in palaeography
* the practical and theoretical consequences of the use of digital images
* examples of research that would benefit from a Digital Humanities (or DigiPal) approach

The above are only serving suggestions, so please don't feel limited to these topics.

To propose a paper, please email a brief abstract (250 words max.) to the symposium organizers.

The deadline for the receipt of submissions is 10.23pm on Wednesday 3rd July 2013

What is DigiPal?

For more information, please visit our website or dive in at the deep end.

Friday 9 March 2012

CFP: The Place of Hell: Topographies, Structures, Genealogies

An International conference held at King’s College London and The Warburg Institute on May 31 and June 1, 2013.

Call for Papers

A belief in Hell has been a staple of Christian thought from the earliest period of this religion. The depiction of Hell and its denizens – the devil, demons and the punished sinners – has an equally long history going back to at least the sixth century. From the eleventh century onwards, images of Hell become proliferate and more detailed in their presentation of the damned and their torments – in parallel to such texts as the popular Apocalypse of the Virgin. Artists come up with different solutions in picturing the various torments inflicted upon the sinners as well as the places where these torments take place. In the art of the late Byzantine period and the late medieval west, the various figures of the damned are presented with inscriptions detailing the crimes and sins for which they are being punished. In western Europe, literary texts add detail to the vision of Hell as well, starting with the 11th-century Vision of Tondal and culminating in Dante’s Divine Comedy. The images as well as the texts that we assume they are illustrating offer a rich field for research. Questions of iconography as well as the exploration of social meanings attached to these powerful representations present themselves. The exploration of developments within the body of texts on and depictions of Hell can be particularly fruitful.

The aim of this conference is to explore the place Hell occupied within society and art as well as the way Hell was envisaged as a physical place. The conference is organized as part of the Leverhulme Trust International Network project Damned in Hell in the Frescoes of Venetian-dominated Crete (13th-17th centuries). The island of Crete was governed by the Venetians from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. During this period, the interplay of the religion and culture of the colonizers (Roman Catholic and Italian) and the majority of the population (Byzantine and Greek Orthodox) created tangible tensions. We are therefore particularly interested in material from the historical era covered by the project, approaches that involve comparisons between east and west, and presentations with a particular focus on Crete. Did depictions of Hell on the island’s churches follow theological debates and trends? Was their primary function the edification of the Orthodox congregations, or are other readings possible?

Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:

· Texts about Hell and punishments for sinners in the Greek Orthodox world and/or the Latin west(13th-17th centuries)
· Images of Hell, with particular emphasis on its layout and topography as well as the layout of its pictorial representation
· Comparative papers on the intera_ction between Orthodox and Catholic notions and representations of Hell in the late medieval and early modern eastern Mediterranean
· The origins – both textual and pictorial – of perceptions and representations of the Afterlife and Hell in particular within the Christian tradition
· The use of Hell and punishment for sinners within contexts of social control (especially in rural communities) and afterlife management strategies

Papers by early career scholars soon after the completion of their PhD are particularly welcome.

Papers are restricted to 25 mins. Please send a short abstract and a brief cv to: Dionysios Stathakopoulos and Rembrandt Duits by June 30 2012.

Accepted speakers will be offered free accommodation and either a full refund of or substantial assistance towards their travel costs.