Call for Papers

Networks of Knowledge (NoK) & Networks and Neighbours (N&N) are two projects dedicated to interrogating social, political and intellectual connectivity, competition and communication between persons, places and things in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. We are excited to announce that we have come together to bring you an international, interdisciplinary conference on social and intellectual networking in the Early Middle Ages.

The conference aims to explore the existence, performance and sustainability of diverse scholarly, intellectual, social and material networks in early medieval worlds. We will engage manuscripts, artifacts and theories over several panels framed by two categories: people and history & ideas and society. The first references networks of scholars, thinkers, writers, and the social and political histories related to their productions. The second imagines the transmission of ‘knowledge’, as information, as rhetoric, as object, and as epistemic grounding. In addition, we will have a dedicated panel for interrogating the applicability of social network theory for early medieval studies.

We welcome proposals for 30-minute papers that investigate the theoretical possibilities and problems of researching early medieval networks, that attempt to re-construct historical networks, that critically analyse ‘information’, and that may contribute in diverse ways – theoretically, methodologically, and epistemologically – to our understanding of early medieval connectivity. The proposal deadline is: 1 March 2017.

We envisage a conference with ample time for discussion and active participation of the audience. To this end, we will assign discussants, potentially from those submitting proposals.

The conference is entirely free and open to anyone, and all presenters will have their accommodation covered. Meals will be provided during the conference, and we aim to reimburse travel costs.

The results of the conference may be published by N&N, in association with NoK, as an open-access edited volume, subject to double-blind peer-review.

Proposals should be submitted to Dr. Michael J. Kelly and Dr. Sven Meeder at conference@networksofknowledge.org