Call for Papers

Medievalisms Area

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

2024 SWPACA Summer Salon

20-22 June 2024

Virtual Conference

Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television, Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language & Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture.

The Medievalisms area invites paper and session proposals on any and all topics relevant to medievalism, which is described by Tison Pugh and Angela Jane Weisl in Medievalisms: Making the Past in the Present (2013) as “the art, literature, scholarship, avocational pastimes, and sundry forms of entertainment and culture that turn to the Middle Ages for their subject matter or inspiration, and in doing so…comment on the artist’s contemporary sociocultural milieu” (1). Medievalism can be approached in many ways, including in terms of media (e.g., literature, architecture, cinema, music, games), chronology (e.g., Early Modern, Romantic, Victorian), geography, and from any number of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives (e.g., cultural studies, media studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and queer studies). Presentations that engage with current conversations in the field are particularly welcome.

Examples of topics relevant to the Medievalisms area include (but are not limited to): 

• Literary Medievalisms

• Cinematic Medievalisms

• Medievalisms in Art, Architecture, Music, and Performance

• Medievalisms in Gaming, LARPing, and Role-Playing

• Medievalisms of Place and Space

• Gender, Sexuality, Race, Ethnicity, Class, etc. in Medievalisms

• Global Medievalisms

• Queer Medievalisms

• Political Medievalisms

• Medievalisms in the Classroom

Proposal submission deadline: 22 April 2024. More information can be found here.