July 6-8, 2023
REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!
To register please visit https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/eighth-international-piers-plowman-society-conference
Travel and accommodation information is available at https://www.sas.ac.uk/events/attending-event/conference-accommodation
The conference theme “Piers Plowman Today” invites participants to think about how and why we read Piers Plowman now and what future directions Langland scholarship might take. While the program committee welcomes proposals on any topic related to Langland studies, we particularly invite papers that engage with the conference theme, broadly construed. Possible topics include the history of Langland studies, the poem’s afterlives, approaches to pedagogy, issues of topicality and temporality, and Langlandian interventions in contemporary questions of social justice, postpandemic recovery, and ecological concern. Building on insights generated by the Piers Plowman Expo (2021) and the Piers Plowman Reading Group (2020-22), we might consider not only how reading the poem now enables us to reflect on our contemporary moment, but also how contemporary concerns and interpretive practices can help us read Piers Plowman in new ways.
In addition to papers that address the conference theme, IPPS welcome papers on a wide array of topics, including the literary, historical, religious, intellectual, textual-codicological, and critical contexts of Piers Plowman and related poetry and prose in the traditions of didactic and allegorical alliterative writing. We also welcome papers on Langland’s contemporaries, including Chaucer.
A note on remote participation: while the conference venue is not equipped to run a fully-hybrid program, we are hopeful that we will be able to provide some streaming and asynchronous access to a limited number of talks and sessions. We are also exploring options for those who are unable to attend the conference in person but still wish to present a paper. If you anticipate that you will need remote accommodations, please contact Rebecca Davis (radavis@uci.edu) when you submit your proposal.
View the full Call for Papers as a pdf here: