We welcome submissions for work that intersects Indigenous Studies and Medieval Studies for three panels at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies Kalamazoo, Michigan ‧ May 9-10, 2025

“Red Reading the Premodern” (hybrid panel)

This panel takes up Cherokee scholar Scott Andrews’ 2018 challenge to interpret (non-Indigenous) literature from Indigenous perspectives, an approach that he labels a 'Red Reading,’ and extends it to premodern texts. Red Reading allows us to reconsider premodern texts, divorcing them from engrained approaches towards a plurality of perspectives. Our session takes a global approach to Indigeneity, and we welcome approaches and methods that extend from Indigenous communities within and beyond Turtle Island (examples of the latter includes Sami, Asante, Okinawan, or Zapotec to name but a few). The threads of Red Reading are many, and we welcome papers that consider (but are not limited to) the following areas of interrogation: 

• Reading premodern texts through Indigenous literary approaches and methods

• The representation of Indigenous peoples in premodern texts

• The early threads of settler-colonial ideologies 

• Indigenous adaptations/retellings of medieval texts

• Indigenous translations of medieval stories/texts

Organized by Brenna Duperron & Sarah LaVoy-Brunette

Contact: Brenna.Duperron@dal.ca

“Relational Approaches to the Indigenous Turn” (in-person panel)

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews coined the term “Indigenous turn” when describing the recent medievalist engagement with Indigenous studies. Recent scholarship (e.g., Akbari 2023; Price 2024) demonstrates the potential for an Indigenous turn that is relational when combined with other critical approaches such as trans theory, gender and sexuality studies, premodern critical race studies, the Global Middle Ages, and others. This panel asks for critical contributions that take up relational approaches to the Indigenous turn that ultimately challenge and depart from white, heteronormative subjectivities by accounting for complexity, nuance, liminality, and/or queerness in their analyses.

Organized by Sarah LaVoy-Brunette & Jordan Chauncy

Contact: sfl39@cornell.edu

“Slowly Engaging with the Indigenous Turn” (in-person roundtable)

In 2020, Bitterroot Salish scholar Tarren Andrews, in discussing the recent Indigenous turn in medieval studies, asks medievalists to “slow down” their engagement with Indigenous studies, “to be more deliberate, to be thoughtful, and to consider first the ethics of kinship and reciprocity that we owe Indigenous peoples, places, and communities who have labored to craft Indigenous studies as an academic field” (2). This roundtable asks medievalists to discuss their own internal work and process of slowing down–the self-reflection, self-examination, reassessment, and reorientation needed to ethically and critically engage with Indigenous studies.

Organized by Sarah LaVoy-Brunette & Tarren Andrews

Contact: sfl39@cornell.edu

Abstract submissions due September 15th, 2024 to the ICMS Confex site: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/cfp.cgi