CFP: “Robin Hood and Medieval Outlaw Communities,” IARHS Sponsored Session(s) at Leeds IMC, July 5-8, 2027

The Leeds International Medieval Congress has chosen “Communities” as its theme for 2027. The International Association for Robin Hood Studies is organizing sessions around this broad theme and is particularly interested in scholars who would like to explore the theme of communities along the following lines of inquiry:

•  Communities of outlaws in medieval literature and history (and their post-medieval incarnations): especially structures, hierarchies, rules, regulations, symbols, identifiers, language/communication, space, administration, and legal considerations and contexts
•   Robin Hood and performance communities (medieval to modern): especially records of performance, communal identity, ritual, shared/amplified political and ideological beliefs, performance networks, performance and collective memory, performance and belonging
•  Robin Hood and communities of practice (medieval to modern): communities/schools of authors, Robin Hood and audience(s), manuscript communities, printing communities, editorial communities, scholarly communities, disciplinary communities.

Paper proposals on the Robin Hood and medieval outlaw tradition as related to other aspects of “communities” will be considered as well.

Papers will be 15-20 minutes long, either in-person or hybrid (please inform your intentions to deliver a paper remotely in your submission).

Please send any queries and proposals (approximately 200 words), including your full name, affiliation, email address, paper title, and any accessibility requirements to Alex Kaufman alkaufman@bsu.edu by September 15, 2026.

For information on Leeds IMC 2027, please see https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2027/.

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