University of North Texas
Medieval Graduate Student Symposium
April 12th and 13th, 2012
Call for Papers

Dear Colleagues,
We are happy to announce that the College of Visual Arts and Design of the University of North Texas will be sponsoring our 6th Annual Medieval Graduate Student Symposium. The Graduate Student Symposium will take place on Thursday April 12th and 13th, 2012. Details can be found on the UNT symposium website-- http://www.art.unt.edu/medieval-symposium/

This year’s theme is Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages. Addressing that theme in this year’s Keynote Address will be Dr. Jean Givens, Professor of Art History at the University of Connecticut, author of Observation and Image-Making in Gothic Art (Cambridge, 2005), which was awarded the 2009 John Nicholas Brown prize by the Medieval Academy of America; Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1220-1550 (co-edited with historians of science, Karen M. Reeds and Alain Touwaide) (Ashgate U.K., 2006); and Reading beyond the Text: Image, Word, and the Illustrated Tractatus de Herbis. The title of her lecture will be "Art History and the Wonders of Nature: The Strange Case of the King's Elephant."

Call for Papers
While we will entertain papers on any topic from any discipline of Medieval Studies—Art History, Religion, Philosophy, English, History, Foreign Languages, Music, we particularly welcome those that engage the multifaceted topic of Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages, whether it be the visual representation of Nature, the written conveyance of the physical attributes of the natural environment to include water, the air, or the earth, or the spiritual philosophy of conservation and ecology.

We encourage submission of papers that have been submitted and/or delivered elsewhere. The deadline for submission of a 300 word abstract is February 1, 2012. Selected full papers will be due March 30th.
Paper Abstracts of 300 words should be sent to:
Abelunt.edu
or
Dr. Mickey Abel
Associate Professor, Medieval Art History
University of North Texas
1155 Union Station #305100
Denton, TX 76203-5017