March 2022 | The Quotidian and the Divine: Gendered Economies of Monasticism in Christian Anatolia (16th-19th century)

Call for Papers

Twelfth Annual International Graduate Student Workshop

March 17-18, 2022

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Wednesday, December 15, 2021

Over the decades, the Center for Armenian Studies at U-M has fostered a critical dialogue with graduate students around the globe through our annual graduate student workshops. Together with our faculty, graduate students, and visiting and post-doctoral fellows we have pushed scholarship in Armenian Studies in new directions through our collective efforts. Our interventions in the study of Armenian history, literature, translation studies, materiality and the visual arts can be gauged by a carefully curated set of initiatives we have undertaken that will have a long-term impact on the field. The Twelfth Annual International Graduate Student Workshop is a great opportunity to bring together a wide range of disciplines that have engaged closely or obliquely with Monasticism in Anatolia.

Scholars of the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East have highlighted the complexities of cultural and social life in the empire’s provinces, yet monasticism and monastic life as a social institution remain unstudied. Monasteries have been explored as sites of state cooperation and their leaders as agents of the state, but how can a focus on the social and economic life of monasteries critically reassess themes such as piety, community, and empire?

The church was a critical institution for the physical and spiritual livelihood of Armenians and other Christian communities in Ottoman Anatolia. Monasticism existed interdependent of the church; monks and nuns sustained the church’s labor as spiritual shepherds of their communities and served as material stewards of the land and holy spaces. In particular, gendered aspects of monastic life, including the protocols of sexual and spiritual discipline that shaped intimacy and religious life (e.g. celibacy), offer rich vantage points through which the social fabric of confessional communities comes into view. The multiple social, sexual, and spiritual hierarchies that configured these spaces and the relationships they created have yet to be examined.

This workshop seeks to approach such historiographical lacunae with the following questions:

• How was monastic life represented by the church, by laypeople, and by the Ottoman state?
• What did daily life in the monastery entail?
• How did the practices of monasticism change over time?
• What was the relationship between spiritual, material, sexual and economic conditions in monasteries?
• How did monks and nuns represent their work and networks as communal?
• What relationship does religion, and monasticism in particular, have to conceptions of and claims for sacred geographies?

This international graduate student workshop invites graduate students to present their research around the themes of monasticism, gender, sexuality, religion/spirituality, economy, and community.

Please send an abstract (250 words) along with a CV to cas.workshops@umich.edu

by December 15, 2021.

Successful applicants will need to submit a paper of no more than 8-10 double-spaced pages by February 28th, to be circulated among workshop participants.

Some funds are available to cover travel expenses. Per donor guidelines, preference will be given to those traveling from the Republic of Armenia.

This workshop, sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Center for Armenian Studies and funded by the Alex Manoogian Foundation is organized by Kathryn Babayan (Department of Middle East Studies & History, U-M) and Kelly Hanavi, PhD Candidate, Department of History & Women’s Studies, U-M.