35th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association: Knowing and Unknowing

The 35th Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Medieval Association will take place October 15-17, 2009, at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. The theme of this year's meeting is Knowing and Unknowing.

 Call for Papers

What did medieval peoples know about their world?  What do we know about the Middle Ages?  We welcome papers on all aspects of the Middle Ages, but we particularly encourage papers that consider the role of knowledge.  Suggested topics include medieval education, medieval philosophies of what can and cannot be known, material artifacts such as manuscripts that let us "know" more about the Middle Ages, the exploitation of the Middle Ages by post-medieval scholars and artists, the limits of knowledge in medieval literature, knowledge of self, and knowledge (or lack thereof) of others.

Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Please submit abstracts (250 words or less) electronically at https://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/gShQhq/SEMAabstract.

2009 Annual Meeting Website

For complete information on the 2009 annual meeting, abstract submission, and registration, visit the conference website on the Vanderbilt University server at http://sitemason.vanderbilt.edu/site/gShQhq/sema2009.

Plenary Speakers

Sarah Kay, Princeton University, author of Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, Cambridge, 1990; The Chansons de geste in the Age of Romance, Oxford, 1995; Courtly Contradictions, Stanford, 2001; The Place of Thought : the Complexity of One in Late Medieval French Didactic Poetry, Pennsylvania, 2007.

John Tolan, Université de Nantes, author of Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, Columbia, 2002; Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages, Florida, 2008; St. Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter, Oxford, forthcoming 2009.