Call for Papers: ANS 2021, San Francisco, CA, January 7-10, 2021

The American Name Society (ANS) is now inviting proposals for papers for its next annual conference. The 2021 conference will be held in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America. Abstracts in any area of onomastic research are welcome. The deadline for receipt of abstracts is June 30, 2020. To submit a proposal, simply complete the 2021 Author Information Form.

Please email this completed form to ANS Vice President Laurel Sutton using the following address: <laurelasutton@gmail.com>. For organizational purposes, please be sure to include the phrase “ANS 2021” in the subject line of your email. Presenters who may need additional time to secure international funding and/or travel visas to the United States are urged to submit their proposal as soon as possible.

IMPORTANT: Because of the current global COVID-19 pandemic, it is unclear whether the conference will proceed as planned. If the LSA decides against an in-person meeting, we will consider online alternatives so that scholars may still present their important research. We will provide updates on the conference status at the ANS website and through email.

All proposals will be subjected to blind review. Official notification of proposal acceptances will be sent on or before August 30, 2020. All authors whose papers have been accepted must be current members of the ANS and need to register with both the ANS and the Linguistic Society of America. Please feel free to contact ANS Vice President Laurel Sutton should you have any questions or concerns.

A downloadable PDF of the Call for Papers can be found here.

We look forward to receiving your submission!

Official Statement on ANS 2021 Conference

As you probably know, our annual conference is held in conjunction with that of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). While there has been no official statement from the LSA about the next annual conference, we are monitoring the latest guidance about COVID-19 and are developing contingency plans for the ANS 2021 should it need to be postponed or cancelled. We hope, of course, that we will be able to convene next January. However, our top priority is the safety and welfare of our members and guests. We will continue to keep you informed as we move forward with our preparations for ANS 2021. Please look for the official Call for Papers later this week!

Onomastic Congress in Poland

Dear Participants,

The organizing comittee of the 27th International Congress of Onomastic Sciences 2020 in Kraków is aware of the threat caused by the spread of coronavirus (COVID-19), and we are closely monitoring the evolving situtation.

At the moment, state and local authorities in Poland recommend canceling only events to take place in March and April. THERE ARE CURRENTLY NO PLANS TO CANCEL OR POSTPONE the ICOS Congress in Kraków, which is scheduled to be held on 23-28 August 2020. However, we will continue following the situation and in case of any changes we will inform you immediately.

If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact us. Please also follow the news on the congress website https://icos2020.ijp.pan.pl

The Conference “The Borders of Early Medieval England”, Cambridge, UK, July 11-12 2020

Saturday 11 – Sunday 12 July 2020

GR 06/07, Faculty of English, 9 West Road, Cambridge

Domesday Book reveals that England in 1066 was bounded by complex borderlands to the north and west and criss-crossed with a plethora of internal boundaries demarcating hundreds, shires and other districts. How did these borders and boundaries operate? How did they evolve over time from earlier borders, such as the early Mercian border demarcated by Offa’s Dyke?

Programme

Saturday 11 July 2020

Session 1 9:30–11am

Rory Naismith (Cambridge): ‘“Bige Habban”: Money, Trade and Cross-Border Traffic’.

Neil McGuigan (St Andrews): ‘Scots, Normans and the End of Middle Britain: the Emergence of the Anglo-Scottish Border’.

Tom Lambert (Cambridge): ‘Jurisidictional Boundaries and Local Custom in Anglo-Saxon England’.

Session 2 11:30am–1pm

David Parsons (CAWCS): ‘Place-names and Offa’s Dyke’.

Keith Ray (Cardiff): ‘A Purposefully Multiplex Border? The Late C8th – Early C9th Mercian Marchland with Wales’.

Rachel Swallow (Liverpool): ‘Shifting Border, Shifting Interpretation: what the Anglo-Norman Castle of Dodleston in Cheshire might be trying to tell us about the Eleventh-Century Northern Anglo-Welsh Border’.

Plenary lecture 2–3pm

Chris Lewis (Institute of Historical Research): ‘England’s Boundaries 1066–1086 and the Limits of Domesday Book’.

Session 3 3:30–5:30pm

Oliver Padel (Cambridge): ‘King Athelstan and the Cornish’.

Robert Gallagher (Kent): ‘Language, Landscape, Borders and Bounds: Ninth-Century West Saxon Charter Production and its Possible Implications’.

Rebecca Thomas (Bangor): ‘Asser and the Borders of Alfred’s Kingdom’.

Charles Insley (Manchester): ‘The Merfynion and the Mercians: the Anglo-Welsh Borderlands before the March’.

Sunday 12 July 2020

Session 4 9:30am–11am

David Thornton (Bilkent): ‘I’m an Englishman in Newport: Anglo-Saxon Landholding in Domesday Wales’.

Jacob O’Neill (Lancaster): ‘Exploring Ecclesiastical and Tenurial Landscapes across a Frontier: Two Case Studies from the Anglo-Welsh Border’.

Ben Guy (Cambridge): ‘The Pattern of English Policy towards Wales in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’.

Session 5 11:30am–1pm

Alex Woolf (St Andrews): ‘The Fosse Way: The First English March?’.

Richard Purkiss (Oxford): ‘The Limits of the Danelaw’.

Ben Allport (Bergen): ‘Political and Spiritual Borderlands: Danelaw Conversion Strategies and the Dedications to St Clement’.

Registration
Registration costs £20, inclusive of lunch and refreshments on both days.

To register, simply fill out the form below

REVISED Call for Papers for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 7-10, 2021

ANS Panel at the Modern Language Association Conference

January 7-10 2021, Toronto, Canada

Please note the revised deadline: MARCH 31, 2020

The American Name Society is inviting abstract proposals for a panel with the literary theme “Toponyms and Literaryscapes”. Although toponyms are often taken for granted in our daily lives, they bear considerable potential for acquiring personal and social meanings depending on their contexts and co-texts of use. These multi-layered meanings are often utilized by authors as a literary resource to evoke associations or invoke evaluative positioning. Papers accepted for this panel will explore how the meaning potential of place-names—be they real or fictional—is effectively harnessed to shape literary settings within specific works or by specific authors. Examples of themes that can be addressed include toponyms choice/invention and their connotations; toponyms in translation; toponyms in literary theory; and toponyms and intertextuality.

For more information about the MLA, check out the official website.

Proposal submission process:

Abstracts proposals (350 words) should be sent as an email attachment (PDF format) to Dr. Luisa Caiazzo (luisa.caiazzo@unibas.it>
Proposals should include “MLA 2021 proposal” in the subject line of the email;
All submissions must include an abstract title, the full name(s) of the author(s), the author(s) affiliation(s), and email address(s) in the body of the email and NOT with the abstract
REVISED DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 8pm GMT on 31 March 2020. Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 3 April 2020
Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers
For further information, please contact Dr. Luisa Caiazzo <luisa.caiazzo@unibas.it>.

A downloadable version of the Call for Papers can be found here.

More information about ANS and MLA conferences is available on the Conferences page of this website.

13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora

If you are interested in extracting proper names and named entities from comparable corpora, do not hesitate to submit your paper for the 13th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora in Marseille (France, May 11 2020).

In the language engineering and the linguistics communities, research in comparable corpora has been motivated by two main reasons. In language engineering, on the one hand, it is chiefly motivated by the need to use comparable corpora as training data for statistical NLP applications such as statistical and neural machine translation or cross-lingual retrieval. In linguistics, on the other hand, comparable corpora are of interest in themselves by making possible cross-language discoveries and comparisons. As such, it is of great interest to bring together builders and users of such corpora.

Call Deadline: 25-Feb-2020

Submission Information: Please see the BUCC 2018 website at http://comparable.limsi.fr/bucc2020/

What’s in a Name? An Historical Perspective on Place Names in West Bath

In the third lecture (February 1, 2020) of the Town History Series, Don Bruce will present a number of stories about the origin and meaning of place names in West Bath (Maine, USA).

The Sagadahoc History and Genealogy Room announces its sixteenth annual Town History Series, jointly sponsored by the Patten Free Library and the Bath Historical Society. On five Saturday mornings in January and February, from 10:30-11:30 A.M., people from the five towns that support the Library will present aspects of their towns’ histories in the Community Room of the Patten Free Library. The Series will be filmed for showing on local TV. The talks will be free and open to the public.

McGill BA student receives American Name Society’s Emerging Scholar Award

Congratulations to McGill BA student, Marielle Côté-Gendreau, who was recently awarded the American Name Society Emerging Scholar Award, which recognizes “outstanding scholarship of a names researcher in the early stages of his/her academic or professional career”. She received the award for her submitted article “Tracking Napoleon, his name and his myth in 19th century French Canada: Sociodemographic regard on a revealing naming pattern“, at the 2020 Annual Meeting of the American Name Society, which meets concurrently with the Linguistics Society of America, last week in New Orleans. Congratulations Marielle!

Call for Papers for the Modern Language Association (MLA) Conference, Toronto, Canada, January 7-10, 2021

ANS Panel at the Modern Language Association Conference

January 7-10 2021, Toronto, Canada

For more information about the MLA, check out the official website.

Proposal submission process:

Abstracts proposals (350 words) should be sent as an email attachment (PDF format) to Dr. Luisa Caiazzo (luisa.caiazzo@unibas.it>
Proposals should include “MLA 2021 proposal” in the subject line of the email;
All submissions must include an abstract title, the full name(s) of the author(s), the author(s) affiliation(s), and email address(s) in the body of the email and NOT with the abstract
DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 8pm GMT on 31 March 2020. Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 8 May 2020
Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers
For further information, please contact Dr. Luisa Caiazzo <luisa.caiazzo@unibas.it>.

A downloadable version of the Call for Papers can be found here.

More information about ANS and MLA conferences is available on the Conferences page of this website.

Call for Papers: CSSN 54: Canadian Society for the Study of Names , Ontario, Canada, May 30-31 2020

The Canadian Society for the Study of Names (CSSN) / Société canadienne d’onomastique (SCO) will hold their annual meeting as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada, May 30-31, 2020, at Western University in London, Ontario.

The theme of the 2020 Congress is “Bridging Divides,” but papers on any onomastic topic are welcome:

Personal names (e.g. family names, nicknames, naming trends and systems, etc.)
Place names (e.g. streets, settlements, rural names, rivers, etc.)
Names in literature
Names in society (e.g. identity, power, perceptions, attitudes, forms of address, etc.)
Names and linguistic landscape (e.g. public road signs, advertising billboard signs, street signs, commercial shop signs, etc.)

Presentations are allotted 20 minutes, with an additional 10 minutes for questions and discussion. Please submit an abstract of 150-250 words, including the title of your paper and indicate whether you would like your paper to be considered for this year’s special panel.

Please email your abstract to: <jonathan.lofft@mail.utoronto.ca>

Please see the official call for papers for more details.

DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by February 1st, 2020.