Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies Biennial Conference, University of Melbourne, December 3–5, 2025

The 2025 Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies is delighted to announce its 15th Biennial Conference.

For 2025, as well as papers on any area of medieval and early modern studies, the conference committee particularly welcomes papers on the theme of ‘possibilities’. How did medieval and early modern societies imagine, conceptualize, live with, and manage possibilities? What new interpretations are opened up by thinking about the possible in relation to our methods, approaches and attitudes to past societies and their study in the present and into the future?

Possibility is a multifaceted concept, extending from medieval and early modern perceptions of the future and the unknown to philosophical conceptualizations of capability, powers, and potentials. The possible also prompts us to examine what might seem impossible or unknowable in relation to historical subjects and our disciplinary configurations. Because possibility can open up the space of speculation in our work, this conference particularly invites contributions that consider arguments which are possible, but refuse absolute determination; approaches which develop new possibilities for transdisciplinary conversations; and practices open to the possibilities of new technologies in medieval and early modern studies.

Possible topics include:

• Possibility and future-oriented affects: hope, dread, fear, trust
• Contingency and uncertainty: predicting and managing possible futures
• Possible encounters and worlds
• Possibilities of the body: senses, transformations, habits, and identities
• Thinking possibility, impossibility, compossibility, necessity, and actuality
• The art of the possible: politics, pragmatism, compromise, idealism
• The art of the impossible: medieval and early modern worlds in fantasy, science fiction and speculative writing
• Contemporary methods and im/possibility: fabulation, historical speculation, and counterfactuals
• ‘Another university is possible’: reflections on institutions, pedagogy and curriculum
• Material affordances: the possibilities of material worlds