MAMO Conference 2027

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The 6th Middle Ages in the Modern World conference (MAMO). Lincoln College Oxford, 22-24 June 2027. themamo.org

CFP for MAMO 2027. You can find a plaintext version of this CFP at <https://shorturl.at/0FJjY>
Josh Davies
Hanseatic festival in King’s Lynn. Image: Mirabelle Dominé-Walley.
Session 3C: Pedagogy and Practice [Room K020] Chair: Laura Varnam Kirsty Bolton (University of Oxford): Medieval and Modern Experiences of Migration Karen A. Winstead (The Ohio State University): Medievalism as Pedagogy: Creating “Wicked Students” Brendan O’Connell (Trinity College Dublin): Teaching Medieval Complaint through Sara Ahmed
Session 2D: New Theoretical Approaches [Room K020] Chair: Karen Winstead Usha Vishnuvajjala (SUNY-New Paltz): Medieval(ist) Mothers and Daughters: One Avenue for Reconciling Medieval Studies and Medievalism Studies Sophia Philomena Wolf (University of Freiburg): Experiments with Blank Spaces: Condensation and Expansion in Contemporary Retellings Caroline Banerjee (City, University of London): Liveable Cities and Liveable Bodies: Stepping into Power in Caroline Bergvall’s Alisoun Sings
Session 2C: Visibility, Connectivity, Creativity: Honouring Medieval Women’s Stories in the Modern World [Room K019] Chair: Fran Allfrey Laura Varnam (University College, Oxford): Wealhtheow on the Whale-Road and Beyond: Poems for Heorot’s Queen and Reflections on Writing Her Story / Herstory Sheila Passey (University of Wolverhampton): Reclaiming Aethelflaed: Feminist Storytelling and the Challenges of Adapting Early Medieval Herstories into Modern Historical Fiction Daisy Black (University of Wolverhampton): A Many-Woman Show: Yde and Olive, Women’s Work and Storytelling as Medievalist Feminist Praxis
Session 3B: Christianity and Medievalism (II) [Room K018] Chair: Michelle Sauer Emmet Taylor (University College Cork): Mythconceptions: ‘Paganized’ Retellings of Lebor Gabála Érenn Allie Richardson (University of Tennessee Knoxville): Exploring Japanese Demonology: The Red Book of Appin in Anime and Manga Lucie Herbreteau: Who will kill the dragon? Rewriting the legend of Saint George and the dragon for children in the 20th and 21st century
Session 2B: Christianity and Medievalism (I) [Room K018] Chair: Eleanor Janega Helen Young (Deakin University): “The New Middle Ages” and Twenty-First Century Christian Nationalism Sarah Schnödewind (University of Hamburg): Between Popular Culture and New Age. The Modern Reinterpretation of the Cathars in “The Cathar Tarot: The Secret Wisdom of the Cathars”
Session 3A: Landscapes and Medievalisms (II) [Room K016] Chair: Eduardo De Oliveira Correia Fran Allfrey (University of York): Medieval stories in a neolithic landscape Kathryn Maude (The National Archives) and Emily Robinson (University of Sussex): Curating the Medieval: Telling the ‘Lost’ History of a Sunken Island Bathsheba Lockwood Brook (University College London): Moving Encounters: Towards an Affective Practice of Walking in Refugee Tales
Session 2A: Landscapes and Medievalisms (I) [Room K016] Chair: Simon Trafford Emma Nuding (University of York): More Foreign than ‘Fellow’: Finding the Early Medieval with Charles Kingsley and St Guthlac of Crowland Maia Blumberg (Queen Mary University of London): Local Medievalisms and ‘Nostalgia for the Ordinary’: The Case of Malmesbury Linsey Hunter (UHI): Why here? Why now? An analysis of Identity and Place in retellings of the legend of Finella, Lady of the Mearns, c. 1900-c.1960
Session 1D: Medievalism and Scholarship Today [Room K020] Chair: Kathryn Maude Camille Campos Fragoso (EHESS, Paris): Searching for Oneself in the Medieval Past: Trans Erasures, Cis Gestalts, and the Limits of Historiography Peter Jones (University of Plymouth): MORRÍSLAND Glöggt er gests augað (William Morris & Iceland)
Session 1C: Modern Mysticism [Room K019] Chair: Sarah Salih Michelle M. Sauer (University of North Dakota): Modern Adaptations of the Medieval Anchoritic Lifestyle Mirabelle Dominé-Walley and Luke Walker: Into the Mystic Eduardo De Oliveira Correia (King’s College London): ‘To Give Rise to a True Image’: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love
Session 1B: Crusade Imagery in the 21st Century: Symbol, Image, and Action [Room K018] Chair: Daisy Black Eleanor Janega: Nostalgia, Easy Answers and the Battle for the Public Imagination Matthew Gabriele (Virginia Tech): Crusade Studies Haunted by the So-Called Clash of Civilizations Mike Horswell: Back to the Crusades: Reflecting on Crusader Medievalism after 9/11 in Comics Brett Whalen (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill): Response
Session 1A: Workshop [Room K016] MedievalWiki – A Wikipedia citation-a-thon for MAMO 2025 Organised by Fran Allfrey (University of York), Lucy Hinnie (University of Leeds and Wikimedia UK), Lucy Moore (University of York), and Richard Nevell (University of Exeter and Wikimedia UK). With billions of page-views every month, and its content scraped to power artificial intelligence, digital assistants, and search engines, there’s a case to be made that Wikipedia is one of the most effective ways to get the Middle Ages out into the modern world. However, Wikipedia tends to reproduce biases and exclusions that exist in the real world. Work by women, BIPOC, and queer scholars is under-represented on medieval historical topic pages, which often rely on a limited number of cited sources. In this hands-on workshop, we will introduce participants to key concepts and practical tools for Wikipedia editing. Participants will be split into folks who have edited before and first-time editors. Experienced editors will be invited to select existing Wikipedia pages to audit and improve, and to gather research to cite. First time editors will learn the basics of editing before moving to live editing to improve articles together.
Session 3D: Chaucer: Scholars and Theories [Room K020 – hybrid session] Chair: Mary Boyle Yasmin Ibrahim (King’s College London): Eleanor Hammond (1866-1933): A Scribe of Chaucer Wan-Chuan Kao (Washington and Lee University): Anaracialism and Its Situatedness
Session 3A: Workshop [Room K016] Radicalisation: Medievalism and the Extreme Right Dr Rachel Moss, medievalist and Co-Investigator of the University of Northampton’s Extreme Right Research Network (ERRN), will lead an interactive workshop that asks what role medievalism plays in radicalising people into extreme right spaces, and what role we – as educators and experts in the Middle Ages – can play in the vital work of combatting rising extremism. Rachel will introduce the work ERRN has been doing with practitioners in the charitable and law enforcement sectors to identify and address radicalisation, particularly of young people and online spaces, and we will then use the session to collectively brainstorm strategies and resources for developing our activist potential within our fields of interest.
Session 2D: Chaucer: At Home and Abroad (II) [Room K020 – hybrid session] Chair: Helen Brookman Mary Boyle (St Edmund’s College, Cambridge): Dirty Great Literature: The Canterbury Tales in German Hugo Lacoue-Labarthe (Université Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle): Impersonating Chaucer: Pier Paolo Pasolini and J.R.R. Tolkien, aspiring medieval poets in the 20th century? Candace Barrington (Central Connecticut State University): “This false traytour Deeth”: Chaucer in Iran
Session 2C: Medievalism and the Epic [Room K019] Chair: Ben Parsons Daniel Sawyer (University of Oxford): Early Forms and Modes for Unusual Readerships: A Case Study Julio San Román Cazorla (Complutense University of Madrid): ‘You’re a Girl Dragon!’: The Evolution of Epic Identity in Beowulf from the Anglo-Saxon Poem to Maria Dahvana Headley’s Feminist Adaptation Josephine Spelsberg (King’s College London): Sexist or feminist? A comparison between the fifteenth-century epic Salman und Morolf and the twenty-first-century motion picture Jennifer’s Body
Session 2B: The Middle Ages in Modern Games (IV): Education and Exploration [Room K018] Josip Mihaljević (Old Church Slavonic Institute): Web Games for Learning and Promoting the Glagolitic Script James Worth (University College London): Creating the Age of Apocalypse: Game Mechanics as Pedagogical Tools for imparting a Historiographical Periodisation of West Roman Collapse in Total War: Attila Thom Gobbitt (Karl Franzens Universitat, Graz): Rules Lawyers’ Time: Early Medieval Laws, Plot, and Gamification
Session 2A: Institutional Use and Misuse [Room K016] Chair: Andrew Elliott Gwen Seabourne (University of Bristol): Legal Medievalisms: appeals to the ‘medieval’ in modern common law sources Eleanor McDonald-Dick (University College London): Anti-Normanism by Omission: Discussions of the Origins of Kyivan Rus’ in English-language news and popular history media following the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand (Appalachian State University): Working off the Past? Monuments and the Medieval Imaginary in Austria and the American South Michael Makin (University of Michigan) First as Farce, then as Tragedy? The Death, Rebirth, and Subsequent Weaponization of East-Slavic Medievalism in Russia and Ukraine
Session 1D: Chaucer: At Home and Abroad (I) [Room K020] Chair: Daniel Sawyer Helen Brookman (King’s College London): At home with the medieval: reading Chaucer with Mary Eliza Haweis and the National Home Reading Union Nancy Warren (Texas A&M University): Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in Colonial Virginia: Aphra Behn’s The Widow Ranter Ben Parsons (University of Leicester): Unmilitary and Perverted: Chaucer in Zululand in the 1870s and 80s
Session 1C: Death, Burial, and Strange Survivals: The Norse-Gothic Response and Literary Receptions in Britain [Room K019] Chair: Josephine Spelsberg Sharon Choe (University of Copenhagen): Loðbrók, Lodbrach, Lodbrog: Revisiting Norse Death in Eighteenth-century Britain Maggie Pavleszek (University of York): “Lost in the wind and the night”: Ship Funerals and Imperial Anxiety in H. Rider Haggard’s Eric Brighteyes (1891) Hannah Armstrong (University of York): Strange Survivals: Sabine Baring-Gould and the Norse-Gothic
Session 1B: The Middle Ages in Modern Games (III): Periodisation Beyond the West [Room K018 – hybrid session] Chair: James Worth Muhammad Abdul Karim: No Middle Ages in Timor: Understanding the concept of Middle Ages in Temukung: Cultivation in Drylands Kristina Wittkamp (University of Passau): Medievalisms in Russian-language computer games – depictions of Rus’ between fantasy and historical simulation Hirohito Tsuji (University of East Anglia): Japanese Stereotypes in Medievalist Games: The Onimusha series
Session 1A: Online Use and Misuse [Room K016] Chair: Gwen Seabourne Kenna L. Olsen (Mount Royal University): Beyond Medieval Mimicry to Chaucer’s Wicker House: Evoking Medieval English Experientialiality via Immersive Performances of Medieval English Texts Andrew B.R. Elliott (Independent Researcher): Amusing, Awful, and Artificial: AI & Medievalism Rachel Moss (University of Northampton): Medieval chivalry, social media and the emotional drivers of radicalisation into extreme right online cultures
Session 3B: Spanish and Portuguese Medievalisms [Room K018] Pedro Martins (NOVA University Lisbon): “The Cradle of the Nation”? The Medievalist Construction of Guimarães in Modern Portugal (1887-1940) Ana Maria Machado (University of Coimbra): Portuguese Studies in Medievalism. The Humildade gloriosa, by Aquilino Ribeiro Claudia Fernández Estrada: Contemporary Arthurianism: Negotiating the Global and the Local through Exclusion and Identity.
Caroline Bergvall is Global Professorial Fellow, Queen Mary University, London, and a Henry Moore Artist Fellow 2025. Award-winning writer and interdisciplinary artist who works across languages, media, and artforms. Her work includes books, performances, installations, soundworks, drawings. She often works collaboratively, and explores materials from both contemporary and historical contexts. Her research frequently involves transhistoric approaches to languages. The recipient of many international commissions and fellowships, noted works include the book trilogy Meddle English (2011), Drift (2015), awarded a Cholmondeley Award, and Alisoun Sings (2019). With Dr. Joshua Davies co-edited the collection of essays, Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics: Migratory Texts and Transhistorical Methods (2023, Arc Humanities Press). Currrent performances include Nattsong, and the conversational Conference of the Birds. Of French-Norwegian heritage, based in London.
Session 3A: Screen and Stage (II): Mid-Century Theatre Beatrice Wilford: Desire Against the Will in I Know Where I’m Going!: Medievalism in Powell and Pressburger Victoria Turner (University of St Andrews): Performing Aucassin and Nicolette: amateur theatre and local medievalism in twentieth-century England Sara Torres (University of New Mexico): Magic to Do: Musicals and Medievalism on the Mid-Century Stage
17:00-18:00 Plenary: Angela Weisl (Seton Hall University) and Robert Squillace (New York University) [Safra Room] Contested Spaces: Medievalisms in a Global Context Contested Spaces: Medievalisms in a Global Context, considers how Global Medievalisms engage with space—real, cartographic, imagined—through a variety of forms of contestation, whether literal (battles, wars, the displacement of peoples, etc.) or figurative. In so doing, we wish to continue a conversation about what “Global Medieval” might mean and how we might usefully understand these terms and their value. Through a series of exempla ranging from the Tsui Hark’s Detective Dee films and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus in Mumbai, to Historical Medieval Combat leagues and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, we hope to offer a taxonomy of spatial contestation: temporarily medievalized spces, structurally medievalized spaces, fictions set in historical medieval spaces, and fictions set in invented medievalized spaces in order to map the global contestations of the spaces of medievalism itself.
Session 2C: Paston Letters, Lives and Legacies [Room K020 – hybrid session] Diane Watt (University of Surrey): God’s Own Gentlewoman: Writing a Biography of Margaret Paston Holly Maples (University of Essex and College of William and Mary): Margaret Paston’s Women of the Roses Karen Smyth (University of East Anglia): Walking in Paston Footprints
Session 2B: The Middle Ages in Modern Games (II): Cycles and Breaks [Room K018] Graham Culbertson (University of North Carolina): Roguelites and Eternal Recurrence: Medieval Cycles of Catastrophe in Wildermyth Maria Vrij (University of Birmingham): Seasons and seasonality: Charting the passage of the year in historical games Robert Houghton (University of Winchester): A Time of Transition or A Time of Crisis? The Periodisation of the Middle Ages in Sid Meier’s Civilization VII Vinicius Marino Carvalho (State University of Campinas): How to address hyperobjects in historical video games?
Session 2A: Screen and Stage (I): Modern Cinema [Room K016] Christopher Richards (University of Birmingham): ‘They celebrated like berserkers’: Interrogating the Glorification of Violence in Robert Eggers’ The Northman Felipe Brandi (NOVA University Lisbon): When Cinema Aims to Reveal How Little We Know About Medieval Life. The Middle Ages, Cinema and the European Imaginary of the 1980s. Patrick Masters: Templars in Space – The influence of the Knights Templar on Star Wars
Session 1C: 18th and 19th-century Medievalisms [Room K020] Crystal Biggin (University of Nottingham): Translating Boccaccio in Charlotte Lennox’s Shakespear Illustrated (1753–54) Lucinda Menaul (King’s College London): The ‘Knight in Shining Armour’ and the ghost of Pegasus in William Morris’s ‘The Earthly Paradise’ Akari Kobayashi (University of Oxford): Re-evaluating Elizabeth Siddal’s Lady of Shalott (1853) via Medievalism Natalie Hanna (University of Liverpool): Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Medieval Feelings
Session 1B: The Middle Ages in Modern Games (I): Chronological Flexibility [Room K018 – hybrid session] Kate Cook (King’s College London): Collecting or understanding the past? Attitudes to the Roman period and interactions with past time in medievalist games Baha Tan Oral and Deniz Özyurda-Ergen: Elastic Histories: Time and Player Interaction in Medieval-Themed Games Marcus Jensen: Audio amalgamation: Collapsing temporalities in Medieval fantasy game soundtracks Robin Kessler (East Stroudsburg University): Balancing the overpowered in OverPower
Session 1A: Gawain Revisited [Room K016] Sabina Rahman (University of Sydney): “Make Merry, and Tell Me What You See”: Visibility of Race in Colonialist Fantasy and David Lowery’s The Green Knight (2021) Simran Dhaliwal (Hughes Hall, Cambridge): The Green Knight’s Temporal Assimilation Stacy Kessler (Indiana University of Pennsylvania): From Gawain to TikTok: Beheading the Tortilla
Daisy Black. https://themamo.org/keynote-speakers/
Image: Gawain Between Two Deaths (2025) by Michael Eden.
Michael Eden. https://themamo.org/keynote-speakers/
Mary Flannery. https://themamo.org/keynote-speakers/
Professor Angela Weisl: https://www.shu.edu/profiles/angelaweisl.html
Description of workshop: Radicalisation: Medievalism and the Extreme Right Dr Rachel Moss, medievalist and Co-Investigator of the University of Northampton’s Extreme Right Research Network (ERRN), will lead an interactive workshop that asks what role medievalism plays in radicalising people into extreme right spaces, and what role we – as educators and experts in the Middle Ages – can play in the vital work of combatting rising extremism. Rachel will introduce the work ERRN has been doing with practitioners in the charitable and law enforcement sectors to identify and address radicalisation, particularly of young people and online spaces, and we will then use the session to collectively brainstorm strategies and resources for developing our activist potential within our fields of interest.