Brenna Duperron and Sarah LaVoy-Brunette are continuing to build the 'Indigenous turn' with some exciting panels for the 61st International Congress on Medieval Studies (May 14-16, 2026), which include:

• “The Glo(cal) Middle Ages on Turtle Island” (hybrid panel);
  
• and “Settler Medievalism: Ideology and Practice” (hybrid panel).

Abstract submissions due September 15, 2025 to the ICMS Confex site:

https://icms.confex.com/icms/2026/prelim.cgi

 

Send any questions to myself (brenna.duperron@unbc.ca) or Sarah (sfl39@cornell.edu).

“The Glo(cal) Middle Ages on Turtle Island” (hybrid panel)

The Global Middle Ages tends to re-emphasize the ‘Old World’ myths by expanding the focus out of Europe into Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. This panel considers how our localities (e.g., Indigenous North America) should be centered in this conversation. Given that ICMS takes place at Western Michigan University on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Bodewadmi Nations, what role should the Land play in how we teach the Middle Ages on these Lands? Within this turn outward to the globalized Middle Ages, how do we return to the local? How does our geographic positioning impact our understanding of the Middle Ages and medievalism? What role does Indigenous North America have in our understanding of the Middle Ages or the impacts of medievalism?

“Settler Medievalism: Ideology and Practice” (hybrid panel) 

The (re)imagining of the medieval has a long-standing political impulse across both White nationalism and settler-colonial ideology–often facilitating an overlap of these value systems. Helen Young and Stephanie Downes note that politics embedded in popular medievalism radicalizes audiences who “would not engage in political manifestos” (2). However, this settler medievalism appears across political manifestos and popular medievalism: Thomas Jefferson famously evoked the early Middle Ages to justify a homogenous White America. Both George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler cosplayed as a medieval knight or crusader in propaganda images. This panel considers the overlap between settler (and/or White nationalist) ideology and medievalism. How has medievalism been evoked? How has it been twisted into a political tool?