The 50th Sewanee Medieval Colloquium:
Jubilee!
It's our 50th birthday, and we're having a party! Please join us Feb 28th-Mar 1st, 2025 for a very special Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. This year’s conference theme is intended to be as capacious as possible to encourage previous presenters, respondents, and plenaries to return to the Colloquium to celebrate what lies ahead for Medieval Studies. The meeting is intended to celebrate the ways in which the conference has fostered conversations between established scholars and new voices in the field. To this end, we hope to create as many panels as possible that pair former attendees with new, emerging scholars as we think about the future of the discipline.
Papers and panels might consider themes of celebration, exaltation, feasting, and festivals. Presenters also might address other forms of “party,” including what it means to “take part,” to “participate,” and to “partake of.” (Parti-colored clothing is also on the table.) Other options include thinking about anniversaries, processions, and attention to commemoration and historiography. We welcome work that addresses the ways in which the natural world becomes enfolded in human celebrations, how gender roles are at play in acts of memorialization, the way legal language defines participation in a suit, how chronicles and annals encode yearly progress, when celebration can turn violent or destructive, and more. And above all, we encourage work from across all disciplines and geographic areas that addresses how we think about how a marker like this represents a half century of change in the field, with an eye to where we might go next.
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