El Grupo de Investigación y Estudios Medievales del Centro de Estudios Históricos de la Facultad de Humanidades de la Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (República Argentina) organiza el VII Simposio Internacional “Textos y Contextos”: abordajes sensoriales del mundo medieval, los días 5 al 7 de abril de 2017 e invita a participar a medievalistas de las diferentes disciplinas que conforman las Ciencias Humanas y Sociales, con el objeto de presentar y discutir los diversos temas que conforman la agenda sensorial de nuestras investigaciones.

Theoretical foundations

Sensory History: Its Meaning and Importance

Mark M. Smith (University of South Carolina, USA)

Sensory history stresses the role of the senses—including explicit treatments of sight and vision—in shaping peoples' experiences in the past and shows how they understood their worlds and why.  It is careful not to assume that the senses are some sort of "natural" endowment but, rather, locates their meaning and function in specific historical contexts.  Sensory history generally is less inclined to reject vision in favor of the other senses or to define itself against a field or subject.  Instead, sensory history is positioned within the coordinates of multiple fields.  At its most powerful, sensory history is explanative, allowing historians to elucidate by reference to both visual and non-visual senses something that makes little or less sense if understood simply or exclusively as a scopic phenomenon.

Sensory historians rarely argue that attention to the sensate radically reinterprets what we already know about the place and time under study.  Instead, they tend to claim that attention to the sensory past allows us a deeper appreciation of the texture, meaning, and human experience of that past and that this in itself sometimes helps us to reinterpret in modest but important ways what we already know.  For the most part, sensory history is largely about texturing, deepening, and complicating issues with which we are already familiar but that nevertheless require deeper interrogation and understanding.  It helps fulfill one of the prime mandates of historical inquiry: to expand understanding of the human experience. 

Sensory history, then, is both field and habit and offers historians of all periods and places a way of thinking about the past, and a way of becoming attuned to the wealth of sensory evidence embedded in any number of texts, evidence that is quickly apparent once and, ironically, looked for.

These words of Professor Mark Smith, whom we thank the courtesy of thinking and writing them as a foundation for our call, reflect the importance of sensory studies. It is precisely in the context of the expansion of these studies that the Medieval Research and Study Group of the Center of Historical Studies of the Department of Humanities  of the National University of Mar del Plata (Argentina) organizes the Seventh International Symposium “Texts and Contexts: sensory approaches to the medieval world”, we welcome the participation of all medievalists, regardless of the discipline in which they develop their studies – Social or human sciences, literature, an so on –, to present and discuss the various issues that shape our sensory research agenda.

Submission guidelines

The timetable for the presentation of papers will be from 4^th July, 2016 until 28^th February, 2017. Papers must be sent to the following email address:

jornadas@giemmardelplata.org 

Formatting Guidelines

Text formatting: A4 size paper  – Word processor for Windows format (.doc, .docx)

Length: minimum length 9 pages –  maximum length 15 pages.

Page margins: Use standard page margins(do not alter their size).

Body of the text: 12-point Times New Roman font, 1,5 line spacing, first line indentation, justified.

Footnotes: 10-point Times New Roman font, single-spacing, no indentation. They shall be numbered consecutively with Arabic numbers, and they should be placed after the period in the reference line, not before it.

Title: Centered, in capital letters, and at the beginning of the article.

Author information: below the title, first name and surname, institutional dependence, email.

Images/Graphics/Tables:  They mustbe properly identified.

Key words and abstracts: Papers must include five keywords and a small abstract. The latter should have a maximum length of ten lines. All papers must also include the corresponding Spanish or English translation of both the keywords and the abstracts.

Quotations: Book references in the body of the text are not allowed. All references must be included as the footnotes, at the end of each page, and must formatted using the following guidelines:

Books

Author (name, LAST NAME), Book Title, Location, Publisher, Year, Page(s).

E.g.:

Nilda GUGLIELMI, Pasiones políticas en la Italia medieval, Mar del Plata, Eudem, 2012, pp. XXX.

Article or chapter in a book

Author (name, LAST NAME), “Article Title”, in Author (dir.,/ed.), Book’s Title, Location, Publisher, Year, Page(s). E.g:

Mariana ZAPATERO, “Una costumbre alimentaria: el consumo de carne a través de las fuentes literarias bajomedievales”, en Gerardo RODRÍGUEZ (dir.), Textos y Contextos (II): exégesis y hermenéutica de obras tardoantiguas y medievales, Mar del Plata, Eudem, 2012, pp. 311-329.

Journals

Author, “Article title”, Journal, volume (Year), Page(s). E.g.:

Juan Francisco JIMÉNEZ ALCÁZAR, “Cruzadas, cruzados y videojuegos”, Anales de la Universidad de Alicante. Historia Medieval, 17 (2011), pp.

363-407.

Archival signatures:

ACRONYM FILE (in capital letters), subsection and series (if any), and document number. E.g.:

AHN, Clero, carp.5, nº 3

Websites and electronic publications: References must include the URL in which they were found, and the retrieval date.

In cases where the same reference is repeated:

a) Use Ibídem when the same source has already been mentioned in the preceding reference.

b) If the source has already been mentioned, but there are other references in between, please include only the SURNAME OF THE AUTHOR, and the expression op. cit.

Texts quotations (in the case of direct quotes only): Long direct quotations, extending for over two lines, should be formatted using 11-point Times New Roman font, and single-spacing. The text should be between quotation marks, justified, and indented one centimeter from the left margin. E.g.:

“Long direct quotations, extending for over two lines, should be formatted using 11-point Times New Roman font, and single-spacing. The text should be between quotation marks, justified, and indented one centimeter from the left margin”.

Words or phrases in Greek or Arabic: Accents and distinction between long and short  should be ignored. The transcriptions should follow the general guidelines of all Spanish publications.

Enrollment

Speakers Teachers, researchers, and college graduates	$ 600
Speakers Undergraduate students	$ 300
Conventioneers with certificate of attendance	$ 200
Conventioneers (no certificate)	free

General Coordinators

• Dr. Gerardo Rodríguez (National University of Mar del Plata/CONICET, Argentina)
• Lic. Gisela Coronado Schwindt (National University of Mar del Plata / Southern National University/CONICET, Argentina)

Scientific Committee

• Dra. Clara Bejarano Pellicer (University of Seville, Spain)
• Dra. Cristina Diego Pacheco (University of Lorraine, France)
• Dr. Yannis Hamilakis (University of Southampton, England)
• Dr. David Howes (Concordia University, Canada)
• Dr. Richard Newhauser (Arizona State University, United States)
• Dr. Eric Palazzo (University of Poitiers, France)
• Dr. Juan Ruiz Jiménez (Secondary School “Generalife”, Spain)
• Dr. Mark Smith (University of South Carolina, United States)

Organizing Committee

Secretary: Prof. Viviana Talavera

Comitee Members

•  Dra. Laura Carbó
•  Dra. Mariana Zapatero
•  Lic. Alberto Asla
•  Lic. Miguel Ángel De Candia
•  Prof. Juan Manuel Gerardi
•  Ms. Noelia Banegas
•  Mr. Máximo Bravo
•  Mr. Pablo Escudé
•  Mr. Miguel Pinto
•  Ms. Johana Sosa