The Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Interdisciplinary Student Network (MARGIN) is proud to announce its third annual student-led series: OUT OF PLACE / OUT OF TIME. This academic year the series will have two separate, but related, themes for the spring and fall semesters. The theme for the fall semester is "Out of Place" and the theme for the spring semester is "Out of Time." This year's series is inspired by the wide breadth of work by NYU professors on the topics of place and time - from Carolyn Dinshaw's How Soon Is Now?: Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time to Sarah Kay's The Place of Thought to Mary Carruthers' The Book of Memory to Christopher Wood and Alexander Nagel's Anachronic Renaissance. These are only a few noteworthy examples of groundbreaking works that consider not only the physical and temporal worlds we occupy but also their boundaries and limits.
This year we consider what sorts of bodies and things (physical, metaphysical, textual) fall out of sync with their environments. What might be the utility or harm of such temporalities and localities? What happens when we find ourselves out of time? In The Place of Thought, Kay wonders, in regard to allegorical works like Roman de la Rose, why does thought have a place (in the case, Deduit's Garden)? Following Kay, we ask, when does thought not have a place? How might thought be placed or misplaced or even mis-timed, as Wood and Nagel, have shown through their explorations of Renaissance anachronism. The theme is intentionally broad to encourage a wide range of papers from across the University, including departments that have been underrepresented in medieval and renaissance studies. In particular, non-European or non-Western material from the fifth to seventeenth century will not be out of place in our series.
PARTICIPATION IN THE SERIES:
We welcome any graduate student to present work on topics related to place and space - pasts, presents, or futures - and what happens when we find ourselves outside of them, or even trapped within them. We will have three or four student-led sessions each semester. As always, our student speaker is in charge of the presentation style. Our meetings are informal (again: lots of wine and cheese!), but offer ample opportunities for students to share work-in-progress for feedback or share more polished work. We hope these presentations will help you develop your work as well as our own. Our group is interdisciplinary in flavor, and MARGIN's members believe our group perspectives are greater than the sum of their parts. Past MARGIN leaders have been inspired to write papers in response to their peers' work. Presenters have even gone on to refine and present their work at international conference or publish it. The sessions will culminate in the late spring with our own conference, MARGIN's annual symposium.
In response to a student suggestion, we will also offer one off topic/theme night this year. If you would like to present a paper for MARGIN that seems *ahem* OUT OF PLACE within the year's theme, suggest it to us. We want as many Med/Ren students as possible involved with our group! You will find an option to suggest an off topic presentation by following the link below.
The time is now! If interested in presenting your work for the spring semester, please fill out the google form linked HERE. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch. Email us at nyumargin@gmail.com. More information about MARGIN can also be found on facebook. The submission deadline for "Our of Time" and our off-topic evening, which will take place in spring 2019 semester, is November 1st, 2018.