Join the CLCS Celtic Forum at the MLA Convention!
Washington, DC, January 6-9, 2022
PROPOSALS DUE March 15, 2021
- Teaching Celtic Languages Without a Celtic Program (A Roundtable Session)
As universities continue to cut funding and support for the humanities, smaller specialist fields such as Celtic Studies increasingly find themselves fighting for survival where they are not already eliminated in the academy. Graduates of such programs, and/or native speakers of Celtic languages, fortunate enough to secure stable and/or permanent employment in higher education, typically find homes in History, English and Literature, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Archaeology, and Linguistics programs. With the exception of those employed in linguistics, in these departments they are rarely afforded the opportunity to teach Celtic languages as part of their official deployment. Without formal programs in Celtic Studies, those interested in teaching these languages at the college level often must resort to doing so as co-curricular or independent study work, which is often also unpaid and unrecognized for the purposes of faculty evaluation, promotion, and tenure. When this is possible, there may be little to no institutional support provided for this work, placing the whole responsibility of developing and delivering materials and locating support resources on the professor in question.
With all of these roadblocks noted, however, there is still a desire among those who have studied and speak these languages to offer them to their students, and there is a strong demand from undergraduates and graduate students to study Celtic languages in order to broaden their skill set, improve their ability to read primary sources, and displace the Anglophone focus of much of literary studies. This session seeks participants who have developed innovative, creative, and out-of-the-box ways of offering Celtic language study without a Celtic program’s support to discuss their approaches and offer advice and recommendations to the audience. By sharing ideas in a supportive forum, it is anticipated that teachers and other practitioners will improve their ability to study and teach Celtic languages in their home institutions.
Submit 200-word abstracts for 10-minute roundtable talks to Melissa Ridley Elmes (MElmes@lindenwood.edu) and Georgia Henley (ghenley@anselm.edu) by March 15, 2021.
- Close Reading the Material Text
The CLCS Celtic and Old Norse forums are proposing a joint-sponsored special session on material texts from the medieval to the modern era. Literary studies has increasingly incorporated the close study of material objects into its purview, examining the physical characteristics of the objects in which literary texts are contained—including readerly marks, writing surfaces, types of ink, defacement by cutting or tearing, and spills and stains—to gain a better understanding of literary production and its reception. In addition to this haptic focus, recent work has attended to the value of holistic approaches to manuscripts, compilations, and miscellanies, examining the entire physical context in which texts appear rather than considering works individually. Recent studies include Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan’s Stanford-based project on the material history of communication technologies, which explores how meaning has been conveyed by material objects throughout history, or the new focus in Norse Studies on material philology, represented by Judy Quinn and Emily Lethbridge, eds., Creating the Medieval Saga: Versions, Variability, and Editorial Interpretations of Old Norse Saga Literature (2010) and Emily Lethbridge and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir, eds., New Studies in the Manuscript Tradition of Njáls Saga: The historia mutila of Njála (2018), or even the popular film Secret of Kells which is profoundly grounded in medieval materiality and cultural contact. By addressing the material features of the written communication technologies that undergird literary texts, scholars are better able to work interdisciplinarily and comparatively, uniting disparate fields of study by common methodologies.
This proposed session offers one such opportunity for comparative work for Celtic and Old Norse Studies, two fields that are currently turning attention towards the technological aspects of written communication. We welcome proposals on any aspect of material studies relating to Celtic and Old Norse literatures or their reception to the modern day, including book history, communication technologies, network studies, and new philology.
Submit 250-word abstracts for 15-minute papers and a short bio to Georgia Henley (ghenley@anselm.edu) and Melissa Mayus (mayusm@trine.edu) by March 15, 2021.
Panel co-sponsored by the Celtic and Old Norse CLCS forums. This panel is not guaranteed.