ICMS Kalamazoo Call for Papers

May 8-10, 2025

International Courtly Literature Society—North American Branch

Please note that all sessions are scheduled to take place in person and that the deadline to submit abstracts is September 15. Please contact organizers (listed below) with questions about sessions/proposals. Use the link under each session to submit a proposal for that session. If you have any technical questions about using the proposal portal, contact icms@confex.com.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Song: Gendered Voices in Religious and Secular Lyric (ID: 5957)

• Organizer: Chris Callahan (callahan@iwu.edu)
• Description: This session seeks to showcase recent scholarship in lyric composition, performance, and patronage that focuses on women, religious as well as secular, and on cultural minorities in Christian Europe. It welcomes proposals that cross borders, genders, languages, and cultural traditions. 
• Link to submit proposal

The Eye of the Beholder: Courtly Representations of Beauty (ID: 6004)

• Organizer: Gloria Allaire (gkallaire@gmail.com)
• Description: Lavish displays of magnificence, whether adorning persons or the spaces that they inhabited, were an undeniable feature of aristocratic courts. Poets celebrated physical attributes of men and women; painters captured their subjects in flattering light; architects, artists, and landscape designers furnished suitably noble settings for courtly activities. Clothing, jewelry, objects and furnishings served to enhance the importance of their possessors by surrounding them with material beauty. The added dimensions of music and dance accompanied and elevated these visual statements. This interdisciplinary panel will explore the ways in which beauty was the aesthetic handmaiden of political power and rank.
• Link to submit proposal

Tortured Poets: Verse and Violence in Courtly Literature (ID: 6085)

• Organizer: Shawn Cooper (sp.cooper@icloud.com)
• Description: To be aware of current events is to be aware of the violence of the modern world, a theme present in contemporary poetry and lyric. Medieval authors were similarly confronted by violence both in stories and experience. Addressing both the relationship between violence in verse, and the use of verse to depict and subvert violence, can help us to understand our connection to the past, and critique our own approaches to writing about and around violence. Panelists should prepare a paper of 10-15 minutes in length, and connect their research to texts within the sphere of courtly literature, broadly understood.
• Link to submit proposal

Courtly Literature: The Next Generation (ID: 6096)

• Organizer: Susanne Hafner (hafner@fordham.edu)
• Description: Medieval Studies has been undergoing major recalibrations in recent years, both in its geographical, chronological, and methodological range and in the definition of the authors, audiences, topics, and contexts of medievalist work. How does the traditional field of “Courtly Literature” fit into these shifts? Does its corpus have to be redefined, expanded, or purged to reflect a Global Middle Ages? And how does the concept of courtliness help us think through new questions? This session expressedly invites junior scholars to contribute to this moment of reassessment. Underfunded speakers are eligible for scholarships of $250 per person.
• Link to submit proposal

No Stranger in Medieval Society: A Roundtable in Honor of Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden (ID: 6100)

• Organizer: Susanne Hafner (hafner@fordham.edu)
• Description: Stephanie Cain Van D’Elden has not only been one of the most influential medieval Germanists of the 20th century, she has also been a generous mentor to generations of students and colleagues. This roundtable will bring together some of them, inviting them to share their work as it reflects Stephanie’s impact on medieval Germanist research.
• Link to submit proposal

The Power of Love: Affection and Authority in Courtly Settings (ID: 6317)

• Organizer: Shawn Cooper (sp.cooper@icloud.com)
• Description: Love and power have always offered both delight and danger to those who pursue them, especially when they are intertwined. Perhaps at no other time have these primal drives collided so broadly and enduringly as in the high medieval court, with its culture of chivalry and its ideal of amour courtois, expressed in word and deed. To better understand these concepts is to better understand the medieval world more generally. Panelists should prepare a paper of 10-15 minutes in length, and connect their research to texts related to the medieval court and its associated settings, broadly understood.
• Link to submit proposal

Arthurian Kingship: Queens, Kings, Lords, Military Commanders, and More (ID: 6408)

• Co-sponsored with IAS-NAB
• Organizer: Jonathan Martin (jsmart5@listu.edu)
• Description: Arthurian literature has much to say about rulership: what makes a good ruler? Is rulership gendered? How do Arthurian rulers demonstrate the good and bad sides of how a ruler should behave? And what should one do about a bad ruler? Given the context of seeking “council and advice,” to what extent are Arthurian rulers imagined as leading, and to what extent as led? Participants might look at issues such as Erec’s withdrawal from his kingly duties in favor of private love, or Arthur’s handling of the trial of the Countesses of Black Thorn.
• Link to submit proposal