ISSEME 2021 will be a hybrid in-person/online event hosted at four separate locations for one day each over the course of a week.
DATES
Thursday, 17 June: Winchester University (Winchester, UK)
Friday, 18 June: Concordia University (Montréal, Canada)
Monday, 21 June: Flinders University (Adelaide, Australia)
Tuesday, 22 June: Leiden University (Leiden, Netherlands)
THEME
“Contributions” will be the theme of the twentieth biennial conference of the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England. Under this broadly conceived and inherently positive rubric, we invite papers that focus on individuals, groups, sources, events, artifacts, and phenomena that have contributed and/or continue to contribute to the study of early medieval England. We intend this theme both to highlight and to celebrate the spirit of collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and dialogue between diverse parties that has typified our field at its best. Alongside scholarly contributions, we wish to celebrate contributions from outside traditional academia including, for example, creative work by Seamus Heaney and Maria Dahvana Headley, heritage sites like the West Stow Anglo-Saxon Village and Jarrow Hall, and popular media like The Last Kingdom and Vikings that have sparked greater interest in our field, especially among undergraduate students. Likewise, we wish to celebrate contributions made by migrants to and from early medieval England, such as Adomnán, Hadrian of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus, Boniface, Willibrord, Leoba, Alcuin, and Asser.
By focusing on contributions—academic and popular, medieval and modern, English and non-English, Anglophone and non-Anglophone—we hope this conference will help to dispel myths of an early medieval England that was exclusionary, isolated, and culturally homogenous and contribute to building a more inclusive and constructively pluralistic field.
More information to follow soon.