Here’s another fun CFP for your consideration…. come play in Kansas City, MO this September!
CFP: “Examining Contagion”
MEARCSTAPA-sponsored panel at Mid-America Medieval Association annual conference, Saturday, September 16, 2017, at University of Missouri-Kansas City
Session organizer: Melissa Ridley Elmes, Lindenwood University
Session presider: Melissa Ridley Elmes
Dysentery, Typhoid Fever, Smallpox, Influenza, Ergotism, Leprosy, Plague. Contagious practices such as witchcraft and heterodox religions. Such monstrous diseases and practices were unpredictable, virulent, recurrent, and seemingly uncontainable throughout the medieval period. In keeping with this year’s MAMA conference theme of “networks” MEARCSTAPA (Monsters: The Experimental Association for the Research of Cryptozoology Through Scholarly Theory and Practical Application) invites papers from any discipline for a panel on the subject of contagion, broadly construed. Papers might consider contagion as monster, or monster as contagion; networks of thought about contagion; networks of literary texts and/or images featuring contagion; medieval medical approaches to contagion, lay- and religious approaches to contagion, how contagion influenced communities, the relationship between witchcraft and disease, witchcraft and/as contagion, heterodox practices and/as contagion, how those afflicted with disease might see themselves or be seen as monstrous, and similar. Please send 250-word abstracts and a brief bio to Melissa Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) by May 30, 2017.
