Alice Raw
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aliceraw.bsky.social
Alice Raw
@aliceraw.bsky.social
88 followers 120 following 6 posts
Historian of medieval gender and sexuality
Currently writing about pleasure and protests
Mark Kaplanoff Fellow in History, Pembroke College Cambridge
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aliceraw.bsky.social
Call for Papers! Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis #medievalsky #Fissures2026
Fissures: Gender and Political Crisis 17-18 September 2026 Pembroke College, University of Cambridge Gendered work on medieval popular politics has tended to revolve around the exceptional. This workshop explores how studies of gender can reconfigure discourses of medieval political community. We ask how attending to gendered bodies and identities might help us better understand the fissures in political culture in medieval Europe. Marking, for example, women’s participation as either absent or rare confines their involvement to the historical margins. How did literary as well as non-literary texts from various genres, ranging from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, engage with gendered political action? How did ideas of gender stabilise or destabilise political performances? We invite abstracts for 25-minute papers, as well as expressions of interest for participation. We welcome papers with a historical, literary, or interdisciplinary focus. Potential topics could include but are not limited to: • Frameworks for understanding non-normative gender expressions in political spaces. • Studies of politics at the intersection of gendered, queer, or trans methodologies. • Histories of masculinities in political community. • Emotion and/or Affect • Weaponized/defensive gender • Manoeuvring bodies through political crisis • Inclusion and exclusion • Different sites of political discourse, such as domestic and non-violent conflict. Collectively, the papers will interrogate the role of gender in political discourse. Selected papers may be considered for inclusion in an edited volume. Means-based bursaries for speakers may be available by further application. Please submit a title and abstract of no more than 200 words to Alice Raw (ar889@cam.ac.uk) and Abbie Fray (abigail.fray@unibe.ch) by 16 January 2026.
November 11, 2025 at 2:35 PM
aliceraw.bsky.social
Good morning to this footnote and no one else
(From E. Kosofsky Sedgewick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C., 2004), 123-151.)
I am thinking here of Timothy Gould’s interpretation (in a personal communication, 1994) of Emily Dickinson’s poem that begins ‘‘ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—/ That perches in the soul—’’ (116, poem no. 254). Gould suggests that the symptoms of fluttering hope are rather like those of posttraumatic stress disorder, with the difference that the apparently absent cause of perturbation lies in the future, rather than in the past.
August 14, 2025 at 8:58 AM
aliceraw.bsky.social
Just thinking about this delightful ghost hand imprinted in CUL EDR D/2/2. Only visible as you turn the page in the light.
April 24, 2025 at 7:26 PM