SASMARS 2012, Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch, South Africa

2010-11-20T03:56:00.000-08:00

‘Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’

Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2012

Convener: P rofessor David Scott-Macnab

We are pleased to announce that the 21st Biennial Conference of the Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies will be held at Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch, South Africa, on 30 August-2 September 2012.

The theme of the conference is ‘Mortality and Imagination: The Life of the Dead in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’. In an effort to facilitate a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary conversation, we encourage scholars working in any discipline to submit abstracts addressing this theme. We also invite scholars working on any related aspectof the Middle Ages or Renaissance to submit abstracts for consideration.

Please send proposals (250-300 words) for 20-minute papers to Professor David Scott-Macnab by 31 January 2012.

Keynote Speaker: Professor Helen Fulton, BA (Sydney), Dip. Celt (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Sydney)

We are delighted that Professor Helen Fulton, BA (Sydney), Dip. Celt (Oxon.), Ph.D. (Sydney), has accepted our invitation to be the keynote speaker at the 2012 conference.

Helen Fulton is Professor of Medieval Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature and the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Her main research areas are medieval literatures, Celtic studies, Arthurian literature, and critical theory.

A graduate of Linacre College, Oxford, and the University of Sydney, Helen has held a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and Visiting Research Fellowships at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and the Institute of English Studies, University of London. She has over 50 publications, including 7 authored or edited books, and has convened 3 major international conferences as well as organising numerous sessions at international conferences. She has given 6 keynote addresses and many invited papers in the UK, US and Australia. She is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College, the editor of a refereed journal (Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion), and a member of several editorial boards including the University of Wales Press. She has been the founding Director of three research centres and played a major role in research strategy in her previous post as Director of the Research Institute for Arts and Humanities at Swansea University.

Helen has extensive experience of leading research projects in the UK and Australia, acting as Principal or Co-Investigator on 13 funded projects (British Academy, AHRC, Australian Research Council). She recently collaborated as Co-Investigator on an AHRC-funded research project, ‘Mapping Medieval Chester’, using digitization and GIS mapping (http://www.medievalchester.ac.uk/) and is now leading two teams in the development of further projects, ‘Middle English in Medieval Wales’ and ‘Britain, Ireland and the Italian Renaissance: Reception and Influences’. Other current research includes an edition of the Middle Welsh version of the Troy story (Ystorya Dared) and completion of a monograph, The Medieval Town Imagined. Her most recent publications are the edited collections Companion to Arthurian Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009) and Urban Culture in Medieval Wales (University of Wales Press, forthcoming).

SASMARS 21st Biennial Conference, September 2012

SASMARS 2012, Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch, South Africa