Language, Power, Geography, Great Lakes Adiban Society sponsored, hybrid panel at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, May 9–11, 2024

For the International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 9-11, 2024 Kalamazoo, MI) the Great Lakes Adiban Society seeks papers discussing the interconnected “lives of great languages” from across the Afro-Eurasian landmass before 1820.

By “great languages,” we refer to translocal tongues that connected ideas, power, and peoples among overlapping geographies of the pre-modern world. Such languages include Arabic, Aramaic, Bantu languages, Chinese languages, Greek, Hindi languages, Jewish languages, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, Slavic, and Turkic. Among these traditions and many others, multilingual authors wrote, recited, and crafted texts that reroute current conceptions about politics, religion, and belonging.  Analyses of such translocal linguistic and cultural regimes provide scholars ability to understand how classes of professionals, educated elites, and local thinkers produced interconnected social practices at near global scale.

We invite papers from scholars focused on culture, religion, literature, trade, linguistics, and visual arts that explore connections, divergences, and parallel frames among histories of translocal peoples, languages, and texts. By addressing broad categories of power, geography, and creativity, we seek to foster dialogue and points of comparison among scholars whose research concentrates on the linguistic traditions of the globalized pre-modern world.

Submissions should be made through the conference website.