IARHS Sponsored Sessions at the 60th ICMS, Kalamazoo, MI, May 8-10, 2025

The International Association for Robin Hood Studies is sponsoring the following sessions at the 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies:

Session 186 (Virtual): Care and Caring in the Robin Hood Legend and the Outlaw Tradition
Presider: Lesley Coote, Independent Scholar
Organizer: Anna Czarnowus, Uniw. Śląski w Katowicach

Maid Marian: Boldly Caring for Self and Others
Sherron Lux, International Association for Robin Hood Studies

“What’s your reward for all this?”: Affective Messaging in the Robin Hood Tradition
William J. F. Hoff, Univ. of Melbourne

The Honor of a Noble Outlaw: Banditry and Piracy in Venetian Dalmatia
Marco Rampin, Libera Univ. Maria SS. Assunta

Care and Emotions in “A Lyttel Geste of Robyn Hode”
Anna Czarnowus, Uniw. Śląski w Katowicach

 

Session 444 (Virtual): Expanding Our View of Sherwood: Exploring the Matter of the Greenwood in Comics (A Roundtable)
Sponsors: Medieval Comics Project; International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
Presider: Alexander L. Kaufman, Ball State Univ.
Organizers: Carl B. Sell, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College
 

A roundtable discussion with Michael A. Torregrossa, Bristol Community College;
Carl B. Sell, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Irene García Ruano, Univ. de Valladolid

CFP: ICMS 2025 & IARHS-Sponsored Sessions (2)

 

The International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS) is sponsoring two sessions for The 60th International Congress on Medieval Studies, which takes place Thursday, May 8, through Saturday, May 10, 2025: https://wmich.edu/medievalcongress/call

The Congress’ deadline for abstract proposals is Sunday, September 15, 2024. All abstract proposals must be made through the Congress’ Confex system to be considered, links below provided. For queries regarding the IARHS-sponsored sessions, please contact the individual session organizer.

 

Care and Caring in the Robin Hood Legend and the Outlaw Tradition (Virtual)

Organizer: Anna Czarnowus (annaczarnowus@op.pl)

Sponsor: IARHS

The Robin Hood legend and the outlaw tradition have been associated mainly with violence and transgression. Various outlaws committed violence and avoided harsh punishment by the legal systems they lived it. They transgressed against accepted social norms. Yet self-care and acts of caring about others have been parts of those legends as well. Hiding yourself in the wilderness was an example of caring about yourself. Outlaws also cared about those whom they treated as their guests, to mention Robin Hood’s hospitable treatment of Sir Richard atte Lee. They cared  about their families, as the legend of Ned Kelly and his life among his relatives shows. Kindness was something that paid, sometimes literally, as when Robin Hood got his money back from the Virgin Mary. The ethics of care has been inseparable from the outlaw legends.

Click here to submit a proposal to this paper session: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/paper/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=6326

Please also email your abstract proposal to the organizer at: annaczarnowus@op.pl.

 

Expanding Our View of Sherwood: Exploring the Matter of the Greenwood in Comics (A Roundtable) (Virtual)

Organizers: Michael A. Torregrossa (medievalinpopularculture@gmail.com) and Carl Sell (cscarlsell@gmail.com)

Sponsors: Medieval Comics Project & IARHS

There are thousands of comics based on or inspired by the Matter of the Greenwood, and, although Robin Hood scholars (working since the 1990s) have started to share some information about this corpus, much work still remains to be done to more fully assess the world of Sherwood Forest depicted in their panels. Therefore, in this co-sponsored session, we hope to create a deeper connection between Robin Hood Studies and Comics Studies to highlight items from this rich collective and provide ideas and reflections on how to find, access, and employ Robin-Hood-themed comics in our classrooms and research.

Click here to submit a proposal to this roundtable session: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2025/round/papers/index.cgi?sessionid=5826

CFP: SEMA 2024 IARHS Sponsored Session

 

International Association for Robin Hood Studies 

Call for Papers

2024 Conference of the Southeastern Medieval Association 

10-12 October, Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia

The Robin Hood/Greenwood legend has endured for over 500 years, largely because of its mutability. As social-cultural and political climates change, Robin and Marian and the legend shift accordingly, sometimes in seemingly extreme directions. From the late 15th-early 16th-century Gest of Robyn Hood to the Late Medieval and Early Modern ballads and plays; to the folklore enthusiasts and the plays, poems, and episodic 19th-century novels; to the 20th-century’s plethora of novels, children’s books, movies, television programs, comics, and games; to the 21st-century’s novels, films, and streaming video: Robin and Company have been yeoman outlaws, aristocratic outlaws, outlaws who help the poor and oppressed, outlaws who seek to help restore traditional government, outlaws who seek to help create a more equality-based government, outlaws who protest foreign wars, outlaws who participate in foreign wars. They can be congenial, aloof, intense, detached. Their Greenwood homes range from forest floor to treehouse community. Their numbers  include men, women, and even children of an increasingly wide variety of races, ethnicities, and religions. They may appear medieval, somewhat medieval, early modern, modern, or a bewildering mix of times and places. They inhabit not only England, but Scotland, Wales, and the United States, among other places.

What social-cultural or political climate changes might influence one or more of these expressions of the Greenwood legend?

In keeping with the 2024 conference theme of the Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA), “Climate,” the International Association for Robin Hood Studies invites paper proposals for a session titled “Robin Hood: The Legend in Social-Cultural and Political Contexts.”  SEMA 2024 will be in-person in Augusta, Georgia, 10-12 October.  Please send a 150- to 250-word abstract or proposal on any aspect of social-cultural and/or political climate and the Greenwood legend or various aspects thereof to Sherron Lux at sherron_lux@yahoo.com by Sunday 7 July 2024, with any technology requests. 

IARHS Sponsored Sessions for the 59th ICMS, Kalamazoo, MI, May 9-11. 2024

The International Association for Robin Hood Studies is sponsoring the following two sessions at the 59th International Congress on Medieval Studies, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI, USA, from May 9-11, 2024.

Session 45 (Virtual), Thursday, May 10, 10:00 AM CST
"Ecomedieval Robin Hood"
Sponsor: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
Presider: Anna Czarnowus, Uniw. Śląski w Katowicach
Organizer: Anna Czarnowus

“Under the grene wode tree”: Eco-Anxiety, Outlaws, and Ecotonal Landscapes in the Lytell Gest of Robyn Hode
Catherine Brassell, Univ. of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign

“An imperishable masterpiece”: Outlawry, Self-Reliance, Scientific Knowledge, and Reverential Awe in B. B.’s (Denys Watkins-Pitchford’s) Brendon Chase (1944)
Alexander L. Kaufman, Ball State Univ.

Paradise Gained: Nature and Religious Affirmation in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
Julie Loveland Swanstrom, Augustana Univ.

“The outlaw’s friend”: Domesticating the Greenwood in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood
Christian Sheridan, Bridgewater College

Session 379 (Virtual), Saturday, May 11, 10:00 AM CST
"Outlaw Environments"
Sponsor: International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS)
Presider: Alexander L. Kaufman, Ball State Univ.
Organizer: Anna Czarnowus, Uniw. Śląski w Katowicach
 

Constructing Outlaw Environments: Space, Time, and Belonging in the Outlaw Imaginary
William J. F. Hoff, Univ. of Melbourne 

The Natural and the Courtly in A Lytell Geste of Robyn Hode
Anna Czarnowus 

Robin Hood in Greenwood... Camped
Sherron Lux, International Association for Robin Hood Studies

Resistance Narratives: Comparative Study on Social Banditry, Robin Hood, and Brazilian Literature
Vitor Nunes da Silva, Univ. Federal de Sergipe

Biennial IARHS Conference CFP

 

Robin Hood and Other Social Bandits in Folk and Popular Culture

HYBRID biannual conference of

the International Association for Robin Hood Studies

26-27 June 2025

The Jagiellonian University, Cracow (Poland)

(and ONLINE)

The Robin Hood tradition has inalienably been a part of popular culture and some of its elements undoubtedly come from folk culture. Already Robin Hood ballads or rhymes, as they are also called, represented popular culture. The idea of a social bandit or a bandit rebel, understood by Eric Hobsbawm as the one who “challenges the economic, social and political order” (Bandits 7), is related to social justice and injustice, which has always been present in folklore. Not only the medieval and later Robin Hood can be defined as a social bandit, but such outlaws as Janosik and Ondrašek, provincial as they are according to Hobsbawm (Bandits 47), fulfill the criteria for it. The two lived respectively in the Slovakian and Polish mountains in the 18^th and 19^th centuries and in the legends they opposed both aristocracy and the Hapsburg rule that stood behind this aristocracy. In Australia Ned Kelly has its admirers, who relate him both to the class conflicts of the 19^th-century Australia and to the social wrongs that supposedly affect some Australians at present.

            Both folk and popular cultures have been open to the concept of social ills that outlaws may oppose, or at least such are the legends about them.

 

The topics related to this may refer to literary texts, films, graphic novels, and all the other material that represents popular and folk culture. The topics may include, for example:

 

-outlaws that opposed social injustice: the legend and the historical background

-reworking old myths into those that cater for the current needs

-ideologies behind the idea of social justice in the texts of culture about outlaws

-the concept of the law and justice in outlaw narratives

-popular reworkings of old myths about social bandits

-nationalistic and racist uses of the outlaw myths

 

All other topics related to this are also welcome.

 

Please send your 200-word abstract by March 31, 2025 to Dr. Anna Czarnowus at:

annaczarnowus@op.pl