CALL FOR PAPERS
IMAGINING MEDIEVAL IDENTITIES

22nd Annual Conference of the
ILLINOIS MEDIEVAL ASSOCIATION
25-26 February 2005
Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Keynote Speakers

Richard W. Kaeuper, Professor of History, University of Rochester
· William Marshal, Lancelot, and the Issue of Chivalric Identity

Roberta L. Krueger, Professor of French, Hamilton College
· Constructing and Questioning Identity in Medieval Conduct Literature
(Each speaker will offer a response to the other's paper.)

Debates about models of medieval identities continue to thrive. Some scholars have embraced the arguments of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, but others question the applicability of his model to the Middle Ages. This conference seeks to enrich and extend Anderson's arguments about print textuality by expanding the inquiry into manuscript and oral cultures, as well as by reading the ways in which "identity," broadly defined, is produced or contested via a variety of persons, institutions, and communities.

To explore the intricacy and flexibility of identity as it is formed and formulated by individual, social, cultural, narrative, familial, or aesthetic influences, we invite papers that explore and build upon this issue through readings of specific texts as well as those that analyze identity theoretically.

Select conference papers will be published in the journal Essays in Medieval Studies.

Please send one-page abstracts for papers or for complete panels by October 1, 2004 to

Anita R. Riedinger or M. Addison Amos
Department of English, MC 4503,
SIUC, Carbondale, IL 62901
Graduate students should include CVs. Electronic submissions (or questions) are also welcome: Prof. Anita Riedinger / [log in to unmask]; Prof. Mark Amos / [log in to unmask].

Further information available at  http://www.illinoismedieval.org