MSSC 2025 : Cornell MSSC 2025: Dissonance and Dysphoria

The Medieval Studies program at Cornell is pleased to announce the 35th annual Medieval Studies Student Colloquium (MSSC), which will take place in person at Cornell University in the A.D. White House on Saturday, February 22nd 2025. The theme of this year’s conference is “Dissonance and Dysphoria.”

We invite proposals for papers exploring the non-normative, the aporetic, and the discordant in the Middle Ages. What, in our narrativizing of the Middle Ages, resists the so-called “unsuitable”? Papers are encouraged to approach this theme from an expansive range of disciplines and perspectives, especially those which have been absent or underrepresented within Medieval Studies. In keeping with the conference theme, we also invite proposals for non-traditional academic presentations, which might include musical performances, artistic showcases, poetry readings, and other creative projects. We especially invite you to consider the harmful and transphobic history of the term “dysphoria” and how it might be recovered as we linger on what futures emerge from encounters with the uncomfortable and the disruptive.

Possible questions you might consider are:
How are binary logics of gender troubled in the Middle Ages?
How does medieval literature, drama, or history deal with discomfort as affect?
How and where are feelings of discomfort and fractured identities produced?
Where are the productive fault lines in personal, social, political, cultural, and religious identities?
What incongruencies exist in medieval art, philosophy, theology, and the historical data on these subjects?
Where does dissonance emerge in medieval music, and how does it factor into conceptions of the harmonic in music and beyond?
How can theories of the Global Middle Ages disrupt our understanding of the Middle Ages and its (imagined) boundaries?
What kinds of characters resist standard models of unified subjectivity?
How do interactions with the non-human world in the Middle Ages trouble human-centered
models of subjectivity?

Papers may respond to, but are certainly not limited to, these questions as we urge you to drift alongside or wrestle with the unassimilable

Papers from underrepresented fields and backgrounds are particularly welcome. We invite submissions from all fields and disciplines adjacent to Medieval Studies, including but not limited to English Literature, History, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Queer Theory, Disability Studies, Mad Studies, Africana Studies, Animal Studies, Affect Theory, Anthropology, Archaeology, Art History, Asian Studies, Classics, Critical Race Studies, Indigenous Studies, Comparative Literature, Romance Studies, Near Eastern Studies, Philosophy, and Theology.

Abstracts should be 200-300 words and must be submitted via Google form by November 15,
2024. (tinyurl.com/MSSC2025)