New Chaucer Society Conference (July 15-19, 2010), in Siena, Italy

If any of you are interested in the relation between cognition and alterity--either medieval or modern cognitive theories and difference of various kinds, particularly but not necessarily in relation to medieval women writers/thinkers/mystics--I would invite you to consider submitting an abstract for at least one session of "Cognitive Alterities," a session planned for the Biennial New Chaucer Society Conference (July 15-19, 2010), in Siena, Italy. (There is also a Babel Working Group conference in the works for Austin, Texas, in 2010, at which I have been promised a session.) I am also scheduled to edit an issue on "Cognitive Alterities" for the new Palgrave-Macmillan journal, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies to come out in 2012.

Abstracts do not have to focus on Chaucer to be included; they are due (by email) by 15 July 2009. The general call for abstracts has been posted on the New Chaucer Society webpage at http://artsci.wustl.edu/~chaucer/congress/congress2010call.php

Thanks! Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have questions. Jane Chance

SESSION 65 (PAPERS): COGNITIVE ALTERITIES

Session organizer: Jane Chance (jchance@rice.edu)

Recent postmodern work in psychoanalytic theory and gender studies has opened windows into how early literatures processed and manifested concepts of subjectivity and the personal on the one hand and cultural difference (sexual, gender, racial, class, national) on the other. This panel on cognitive alterities would draw upon the current medical and theoretical research into neurobiology and how the brain functions (and dysfunctions) to shed light on how the Middle Ages incarnated an understanding of diversity in cognitive processes. Contemporary neuro-scientists such as Antonio Damasio (The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 2001; Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, 2003) have examined in experiments the diverse effects of emotion and the personal, particularly after injury or other impairment, on the brain's processes of decision-making and judgment, modes of consciousness, language, memory, and the creative. This session invites papers (preferably interdisciplinary) on the Middle Ages: how the mind thinks differently, and how medieval cultures imagined in such differences the individual and personal, through various forms of subjective media.