The UCLA Medieval and Early Modern Student Association, sponsored by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies, is pleased to announce the call for papers for our 6th Annual Conference: Translations: People, Texts & Objects in Motion Across the Early Global World. The conference will be held in the Humanities Seminar Room, Royce 306, on Saturday, May 2, 2026.
In his landmark 1611 dictionary, the Tesoro de la lengua castellana, the Castilian linguist Sebastián de Covarrubias noted that the verbs “to translate” in Spanish, traducir and trasladar, possessed both the meaning of words moving between languages and of movement of objects across space. Translation involved people, words, objects, images, and ideas in motion across spaces, boundaries, languages, and cultures in the medieval & early modern world. How do you understand translation? What was lost, gained, or hidden in translation? How did translation involve active processes of making and unmaking, (re)interpretation, and (mis)understandings? How did institutions, states, and empires attempt to control, limit, or censor translation? Who were the intermediary agents involved in rendering translations? How did translation function across material forms and the visual world, beyond solely the textual? How did movement itself transform the ideas, objects, words, or images that travelled?
We invite submissions from all fields of global medieval and early modern studies, including but not limited to history, literature, history of art and architecture, archaeology, philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, and gender and sexuality studies, that engage with translation, broadly conceived.
Please email an abstract of your proposed presentation (250 words) to the officers of MEMSA at memsa.ucla@gmail.com by February 27, 2026.
Acceptances will be sent out on March 13, 2026.
Organized by the Officers of MEMSA: Sofía Yazpik, Miranda Heaner, Hugo Peralta-Ramírez, and Chase Smith. Sponsored by the UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies