We are pleased to announce a new editorial team at postmedieval!
Shazia Jagot, Julie Orlemanski, and Sara Ritchey will be the journal’s Editors, supported by our new Managing Editor, Francesca Petrizzo.

Over the past eleven years, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies has been a home for theoretically driven scholarship as well as inclusive and experimental publishing practices -- under the remarkable leadership of Editors Myra Seaman, Lara Farina, and Eileen Joy, Book-Reviews Editor Holly Crocker, as well as the longstanding Editorial Board. The new Editors are excited both to carry on this legacy and to transform it. We are committed to extending postmedieval ’s sense of conceptual adventure, political urgency, and inclusive dialogue to a new generation and to a wider compass of scholars and thinkers. Especially important to us is opening up the geographic and disciplinary traditions that the journal represents, featuring scholarship that reaches across fields, language traditions, locales, modes of inquiry, and levels of access. Our aim is to facilitate collaborative, ethical, and experimental engagements with the medieval and its ongoing reverberations. (Look out for upcoming announcements concerning the new Editorial Board.)

One immediate change at the journal is that we’ll now be publishing more open-topic issues, including the first issues under new editorial leadership. That means we’re looking for submissions! We welcome submissions of 5,000 to 10,000 words for peer-reviewed consideration. Any disciplinary approach that considers premodernity in one of its varied forms or afterlives is warmly invited. For queries and proposals, please contact Managing Editor Francesca Petrizzo at postmedievalED@gmail.com​.

Editor bios​:

Shazia Jagot is a Lecturer in Medieval and Global Literature at the University of York. She is a literary specialist whose research explores the connections, both entangled and diffuse, between Western literary culture and the Islamic world. She is currently writing her first monograph on Chaucer’s Arabic ‘sources’.

Julie Orlemanski is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her monograph Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causality in the Literature of Late Medieval England appeared in 2019. She is at work on two book-length projects: one concerns prosopopoeia in medieval writing; the other follows the tangled genealogies of fictionality and disenchantment to argue for a comparative poetics of fiction.

Sara Ritchey is Associate Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her latest book is ​Acts of Care: Recovering Women in Late Medieval Health ​(Cornell, 2021). She is now interrogating the concepts of periodization and orality in a project that explores trans-temporal engagements with medieval French performance traditions.

Managing Editor bio​:

Francesca Petrizzo is currently also Editorial Assistant at the ​European Journal of International Security​ , and has worked at the International Medieval Bibliography.​ ​ She is interested in masculinity and identity in the Middle Ages, and medievalisms from the Renaissance to the modern era.


Call for Papers: Race, Revulsion, and Revolution

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: JUNE 1, 2019

Guest Editors: M. Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake, Micah Goodrichimage © Doreen Garner, Red Rack of Those Ravaged and Unconsenting (2017), sculpture.

This special issue seeks papers on topics that capsize the racist narrative to which Medieval Studies broadly and Anglo-Saxon Studies especially have been held captive. We ask for papers that embrace ideas and bodies discarded in traditional discourse and that rebels against scholarship that is both sterilized and sterilizing. This issue encourages contributions from various disciplines and methodologies within all of Medieval Studies but wish to highlight the urgent and decisive intersectional work within Anglo-Saxon studies. Through this collaborative endeavor, we hope to create a compilation of essays that will declutter centuries worth of traditionalist, elitist and racist politics in the field. We endeavor to include pieces from various disciplines within Anglo-Saxon studies including literary, history, archaeology, art history, etc. that can serve as a foundational source for scholars and students as well as a catalyst for further research. In particular, we encourage scholarly articles that embrace critical race theory, gender and sexuality studies, class studies, et al., and/or the possibilities for overlap and discussions of intersectionality. Other approaches that confront revulsion and cultivate revolution are welcome.

Read the full call for papers here.

Articles may be collaborative pieces or single-authored. Pending proposal acceptance, completed essays of no longer than 3,000 words (note brevity) will be due October 15, 2019.

Please send abstracts with a brief biographical blurb to Mary Rambaran-Olm, M. Breann Leake and Micah Goodrich at postmed10@gmail.com by June 1, 2019.

Call for Papers: Confessions

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: APRIL 5, 2019

Guest Editors: Abdulhamit Arvas, Afrodesia McCannon, and Kris Trujillo
New Content ItemHow is our devotion to the past shaped by our present devotions to communities, political mobilization, and visions of the world? How are the methods and theories that we bring to our scholarship conditioned by concomitant attachments to values, ethics, and ideals? At the same time that we call contributors to account for their particular positions as subjects shaped in the world, we recognize the numerous crises that shape this world, so we ask: “What matters to you and why does it matter for your scholarship?” For example, how might the growing voices of medievalists of color and queer medievalists require a reconception of the ethical demands of medieval scholarship? How do racism and the threat of white supremacy lend urgency to engagements with critical race theory? How does the #MeToo Movement influence feminist analyses of the past? How do queer and trans activisms play themselves out in ancient, medieval, and early modern scholarship? Does increasing financial inequity motivate examinations of premodern labor? How might xenophobic nationalism and immigration issues inform approaches to the Global Middle Ages or the Global Renaissance? In fact, might premodern models of desire and devotion reflect our own, and when might it be ethically or politically exigent to distance oneself from the devotions of premoderns?

Read the full call for papers here.

We welcome submissions that examine any historical period, cultural context, and geographical region in the premodern world. We especially encourage contributions from early-career scholars as well as contributions that creatively reimagine the form of the confession as, for example, dialogue, interview, manifesto, etc.

In order to be considered for inclusion, please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio to the guest-editors, Abdulhamit Arvas, Afrodesia McCannon, and Kris Trujillo, at <postmedieval10th@gmail.com> by April 5, 2019. Pending proposal acceptance, completed essays of no longer than 3,000 words (note brevity) will be due August 15, 2019.