Call for Papers - PCDP 2019: Fairies and the Fantastic

February 22-23, 2019

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the Ohio State University invites abstracts and panel proposals on the topic of Fairies and the Fantastic.  The submission deadline is October 31, 2018.  In the Prologue to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale, the narrator reminisces about a time when the land was full of fairies and the Elf Queen danced merrily on the green.  In the centuries since Chaucer, fairies, far from disappearing, have lived on in the popular imagination and its creations.  This conference is especially interested in Fairies and the Fantastic in the broadly conceived Medieval and Renaissance periods, but it also invites papers that look back to earlier examples of fairy belief or that explore the uses of fairies in later popular culture.  All approaches are welcome, from literary, artistic, cinematic, and gaming analyses, to historical and cultural investigations.  We also encourage papers with broad geographical scope that examine the ‘presence’ of fairies outside Western Europe--in Scandinavia, Persia, and other parts of the world.

Twenty-minute papers will be organized thematically into two-hour sessions of four papers each, ranging across two days. Submissions for entire sessions are welcome, in which case a session title and abstract should be submitted, along with individual paper titles and abstracts from the different presenters.

Abstracts for sessions and individual papers should be limited to 250 words.

Please submit them along with any questions to cmrs_gaa@osu.edu.

In keeping with the spirit of past PCDP events, the academic conference will be part of a broader ‘carnival’ of events and activities, including food- and culture-ways demonstrations; exhibits of artwork, books, and manuscripts; combat; gaming; and Cosplay.  We welcome proposals for non-academic presentations and activities.

Keynote address: Chris Woodyard, “The Many Roads to Fairyland”