The Canadian Society of Medievalists - Calls for Papers EDID 2026

Call for Papers 1: You Are On Native Land: Understanding Medieval Studies in Turtle Island

The EDID Committee of the CSM/SCM invites papers on Indigeneity and the medieval.

It has been over a decade since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released their report and 94 Calls to Action. Academia was called to decolonize, reconcile, and Indigenize their approach to research, scholarship, and the classroom. In response to a long history of colonial violence from researchers (ranging from tokenism to extraction), Indigenous scholars of the medieval, such as Wallace Cleaves (Tongva), Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish), and Sarah LaVoy-Brunette (White Earth), have stressed the importance of real and thorough engagement with Indigenous communities and thought in this work. This panel builds on the excellent conversations from the 2025 International Congress of Medieval Studies’ “Slow Engagement” Roundtable, which asked medieval scholars to consider how they’ve ‘slowed down’ to be responsible and reciprocal in their learning, approaching, or engaging with Indigenous Studies. This panel asks the following questions: what role has Medieval Studies played in answering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call? What role does Medieval Studies have in reconciliation more broadly? How do/should we continue to engage with Medieval Studies on Indigenous lands? For non-Indigenous scholars, what changes to your approaches have you made? This session will focus on best practices for the inclusion of Indigenous approaches to Medieval Studies and/or on (re)considering the exclusion of Indigenous groups from the larger narratives of the past.

Papers might consider:

•How can we respectfully and appropriately engage with Indigenous methodologies in our approaches to medieval studies?

•How can we engage relationally across Indigenous Studies and other forms of critical approaches, such as Critical Race Studies, Queer or trans studies, gender studies, etc.?

•How have Indigenous communities responded to, engaged with, subverted, or appropriated medieval studies or medievalism?

•How can a field like medieval studies engage with the 4Rs of Indigenous research: respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility?

•What are some critiques of current or historical approaches among non-Indigenous scholars and/or the harms undertaken from extractive research protocols among others?

•What do personal and/or scholarly engagements with Indigenous communities, identities, and Knowledge Keepers look like for different medievalists, and what has been learned from such engagements?

•What has been the impact of colonialism on the discipline of medieval studies? Alternatively, how have medieval studies been an essential tool in colonialism?

Presentations may be in either English or French and should be 15- 20 minutes in length. Please submit proposals by email by January 10, 2026.For Inquiries or Proposal Submissions, please contact Siobhain Bly Calkin at siobhain.calkin@carleton.ca.

Proposal Submission Details: Paper proposals must include a document giving the title plus a one-page abstract (without identifying the author). A separate document should consist of a one-page curriculum vitae which includes the paper’s title at the top.

**Scholars need not be members of the Canadian Society of Medievalists to submit proposals but, by the time of the conference, must be members in good standing and are expected to pay their 2025-26 annual membership fees to CSM / SCM by March 15, 2026 if they are not already members.

Call for Papers 2: Queer World-Making

The EDID (Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Decolonization) Committee of the CSM/SCM invites papers for a session on queer world-making in medieval studies. This session takes as its starting point the idea that queerness is not only an identity category or critical lens, but also a mode of imagining, creating, and inhabiting other worlds. We are interested in how medieval texts envision alternatives to normative ideals, and in how queer approaches to these texts might open transformative possibilities.

This panel invites work that embraces queerness as expansive, intersectional, and intertwined with other modes of resistance and re-worlding. We especially welcome papers that engage the intersections of queerness and race, disability, trans studies, postcolonial critique, Indigeneity, and class.

Papers might consider:

•Queer spatialities, utopias, and/or ecologies in medieval literature and art

•Queer desire and embodiment in practices of world-making

•The politics of imagining otherwise: resistance, refusal, and possibility

•World-building and/or world-making in adaptation (fantasy, games, fandom, etc.)

•Queer pedagogy as institutional or epistemological world-making

Presentations may be in either English or French and should be 15- 20 minutes in length. Please submit proposals by email by January 10, 2026. For Inquiries or Proposal Submissions, please contact Siobhain Bly Calkin at siobhain.calkin@carleton.ca.

Call for Papers 3: Medieval Engagements with Disability

The EDID (Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Decolonization) Committee of the CSM/SCM invites papers for a session that will explore disability in the medieval past and/or the ways in which disability studies and medieval studies fruitfully intersect. The session welcomes papers that consider understandings of non-standard human bodies from the medieval past and/or reflect upon the ways in which, as Godden and Hsy write, “the study of disability in the Middle Ages challenges modern narratives of bodily integrity and autonomy” (334). The non-standard body in the Middle Ages takes on a variety of forms both familiar and unfamiliar to us today, from the use of spectacles to colonies of lepers. Disability is here understood inclusively as a broad spectrum of somatic and sensory capacities, and contributors are encouraged to explore the topic widely, including considerations of disability within medieval studies from lived realities to fictional representations.

Papers might consider:

Constructions of disability and difference, and the power structures they engage
Ideas of “stare-able” (Garland-Thompson) or “eccentric” (Baswell) bodies and how they reconfigure identities and societies
Prosthesis and/or prostheticized bodies
Mobility impairments and aids, and/or responses to them
Sensory impairments and/or responses to them
Rethinking bodily coherence and integrity
Differing medieval understandings of disability
The temporality of disability
How disability intersects with other axes of identity (religion, race, queerness, class, etc.) in the medieval period

Presentations may be in either English or French and should be 15- 20 minutes in length. Please submit proposals by email by January 10, 2026. For Inquiries or Proposal Submissions, please contact Siobhain Bly Calkin at siobhain.calkin@carleton.ca.

Call for Papers 4: Understanding Medieval Race-Making

The EDID (Equity, Diversity, Inclusivity and Decolonization) Committee of the CSM/SCM invites papers for a session on medieval race-making.

Until recently, texts written prior to the 16th century were often considered “before race.” It was popularly understood that the concept of ‘race’ began with the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the discovery of the “New World” and the scientific Enlightenment’s interest in categorization. Scholars such as Stuart Hall, Matthew X. Vernon, Cord Whitaker, Geraldine Heng, and Dorothy Kim, among others, have worked to disrupt this misconception, expanding our understanding of race not only temporally and geographically, but to reconsider how it extends past skin colour to encompass a variety of social, physical, and cultural categories that human society has linked to race and race-making. Paradoxically, the idea that ‘race’ is a modern construction, however, reinforces the myths of the medieval period itself as an insular space without global or trans-national reach. These continued myths have spurred current white supremacist usage of the medieval in their justification and execution of violence (such as the attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand and Charlottesville, the Sons of Odin group, or the January Insurrection Attempt in the US).

This panel asks the following questions:

What does race-making look like in the premodern?
How did we understand the idea of race before modern discourses on imperialism and colonialism?
How do modern discourses on imperialism, colonialism, and race help us understand medieval race?
Alternatively, how does modern discourse on race shape how race-making or race is engaged within medievalism?
How did the premodern imagine alterity? How did they define themselves?
How did the premodern understand the Indigenous vs the colonizer?
We are open to any question that considers how race and race-making work in the Middle Ages and/or medievalism.

Presentations may be in either English or French and should be 15-20 minutes in length to allow ample time for discussion. Please submit proposals by email by January 10, 2026.For Inquiries or Proposal Submissions, please contact Siobhain Bly Calkin at siobhain.calkin@carleton.ca.

Proposal Submission Details: Presentation proposals must include a title and brief (250 word) abstract of the proposed presentation (which does not identify the author) as well as a separate one-page curriculum vitae which includes the presentation’s title at the top.

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Calls for Papers EDID 2026