The IARHS will be sponsoring one virtual and two hybrid sessions at the 61th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI (USA). Submissions to these sessions are due by Friday Sept. 15, 2025, via the ICMS's Confex system. Please share this post widely!
Session organizers are listed after each session title; if you have questions about a specific session, please directly email the session's organizer.
Modality note: In virtual sessions, participants are all live via the digital Confex Zoom system. In hybrid sessions, participants are all live, with a mix of in person on Western Michigan University's campus and virtually via the Confex Zoom system; virtual speakers will be projected onto a large screen at the front of the room in Kalamazoo. The IARHS is an international organization and recognizes that travel to the conference site is not possible nor safe for many: when conference organizers permit, we are committed to offering hybrid and virtual sessions.
Session 1 (Virtual): Affect and Feeling in the Robin Hood and Outlaw Traditions (Anna Czarnowus; annaczarnowus@op.pl)
We can discuss affect, feeling, and emotions in the Robin Hood and outlaw tradition, since affect studies, the discussion of feeling (including religious feeling), and the history of emotions allow us to see the plots and the characters in the narratives in question in a new light. This session will explore which affective strategies are adopted in specific texts, films, graphic novels, and games, and how emotional communities are constructed in them. Engaging with these emotional communities, presenters might consider which types of affect, feelings, and emotions should be propagated and which should be suppressed.
Session 2 (Hybrid): Political Outlaws and the Politics of Outlawry (Valerie Johnson; valerie.johnson@montevallo.edu)
This panel invites presentations on Robin Hood texts, performances, artifacts, references and evocations that participate in the ongoing lively public discourse connecting medieval outlaws to politics, political figures or political moments. For centuries the Robin Hood tradition has been evoked as modern political capital, and in the past decade alone has appeared in French tax protests, British and Spanish supermarket thefts, and American healthcare claim adjustments. Outlawry has likewise been politicized, paradoxically lauded as integral to functional governments and societies. We encourage presenters to consider a range of potentially intersecting and comparative perspectives, whether period, discipline, genre, modality, etc.
Session 3 (Hybrid): Remembering the Middle Ages: Memories of the Medieval across Time and Space (A Roundtable), co-sponsored by the IARHS with the Association for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching of the Medieval in Popular Culture and the International Arthurian Society, North American Branch (IAS/NAB) (Michael A. Torregrossa; Siân Echard, sian.echard@ubc.ca; Alexander L. Kaufman, alkaufman@bsu.edu)
Heather Arden claims that medievalisms manifest as the “survival, revival, or re-creation” of aspects of the Middle Ages. These works display the continued importance in how the era is viewed and shape a unique relationship with those who restore and/or participate in them. In this co-sponsored session, we seek to ally scholars of popular culture and medievalisms along with those who study the legendary traditions of the Matter of Britain and the Matter of the Greenwood to share new and neglected works that highlight the many ways we remember the Middle Ages and have restored it to life.
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