Medieval Ecologies, 2022 New England Medieval Conference (NEMC), Colby College, October 8, 2022

The 2022 New England Medieval Consortium conference will meet on 8 October 2022 at Colby College (Waterville, ME). This conference will provide an opportunity for medievalists working across a range of disciplines and geographic areas to join in conversation about premodern ecologies and their literary historical representations, as well as their material and cultural entanglements. We interpret “ecologies” broadly as interaction and interrelation within and between human, animal, and material worlds. Accordingly, we invite papers that may ask such questions as: How can the textual and material evidence of the past inform our understanding of human interactions with the natural world, including anthropogenic impacts, practices of care, cultivation, environmental remediation, and the longue durée of environmental change? How can ecocritical approaches enrich our understanding of the Middle Ages? What do the philosophical and theoretical perspectives of premodern thinkers offer to the Environmental Humanities? How might medieval ways of knowing the world shape understandings of contemporary environmental crises? Might premodern epistemologies and ontologies disrupt contemporary understandings of biodiversity, practices of care, and our interconnectedness to animal, vegetal, and fungal critters?

We invite abstracts for twenty-minute papers, as well as pre-organized panels of three papers.