Received from Dr. Craig Whittall Key Details Colonies, Camps and Captive Spaces of Empire Workshop Date: 2nd July 2024 Location: London Call for Participants pdf. Event Overview This interdisciplinary workshop brings together two convergent, but not yet connected, fields of colonial history – historical practices of domestic and agricultural labour ‘colonies’, which embodied many of the hallmarks of colonialism, and the coercive and captive spaces of overseas empires in which forms of colonial power were put into direct material practice, namely colonial concentration camps, penal colonies and reformatory/residential schools. These two highly interdisciplinary traditions of scholarship have yet to be brought into productive alignment. On the one hand, ‘domestic’ colonies, labour camps, and other disciplinary reformatories have been explored by researchers such as Barbara Arneil (2017), John Field (2013) and, in the European context, Stephen Toth (2019). The development of ‘imperial’ equivalents of these institutions in European empires has been explored by Clare Anderson (2000, 2018) and her major ‘Carceral Archipelago’ European Research Council project. The history of colonial concentration camps is a relatively new area of focus that is rapidly expanding, led by Aidan Forth (2017, 2024), Elizabeth van Heyningen (2013), Jonas Kreienbaum (2019), and David Olusoga and Casper Erichsen (2011) Guest […]

by Antonia Anstatt (Merton, University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham) The ‘Gender and Sainthood, 1100-1500’ Conference was held at the History Faculty of the University of Oxford on the 5th and 6th of April 2024, and was organised by Antonia Anstatt (University of Oxford) and Ed van der Molen (University of Nottingham). Bringing together scholars from the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Canada, and the US, the conference aimed to place the complex cultural categories of sanctity and gender into conversation with each other via the methodological lens of queer theory and trans studies. While the relationship between sainthood and gender has been well-trodden ground in the field for some time thanks to the work of scholars such as Caroline Walker Bynum, Barbara Newman, and John Coakley, and the increasing awareness of medievalists of the possibilities that trans and queer theories offer to a wide range of areas of research made now an opportune time to revisit this familiar convergence of categories from a new and exciting angle.    The conference took as its starting point the 2021 publication of Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-Hall and Blake Gutt. This volume starts […]