CFP: Afterlives 2025

Afterlives: Reinvention, Reception, and Reproduction

November 15, 2025 

 

Stained glass window
David statue at Forest Lawn
Forest Lawn Museum overview
Michelangelo statue group

Call for Participation

The Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at California State University, Long Beach, in collaboration with , invites submissions for the biennial conference, Afterlives: Reinvention, Reproduction, and Reception. We invite scholars from any discipline to approach the ways in which texts, objects, and images of the ancient, medieval, and Renaissance past have been reimagined, repurposed, reconstructed, and reproduced in later periods. 

The deadline for all abstracts, roundtables, and panel submissions is June 1, 2025. 

Recent scholarship illuminates the ways in which narratives of the past are constructed according to the interests of later periods. This conference seeks to further these investigations. Forest Lawn Museum is an ideal site for exploring the afterlives of the past as constructed or reconstructed in the present. Founded in 1906, Forest Lawn is home to dozens of reproductions of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance works of art and architecture. It was created with the goal of bringing the Grand Tour to Southern California when travel to Europe was not accessible to the vast majority of American society. From full-scale marble replicas of Michelangelo鈥檚 sculpture to buildings that freely combine classical, Romanesque, and Gothic elements in novel and imaginative ways, this version of the Grand Tour was both influenced by and influential upon the culture of twentieth-century California. Rather than simply replicating existing works of art and architecture, entirely new monuments were created, which simultaneously call upon the past while proliferating new experiences, meanings, and identities. 

This conference invites investigation of such uses of the past with the broadest possible scope. We invite scholars and advanced graduate students to consider engagements with the past in terms of ongoing processes of reinvention, reproduction, and reception. Papers that address popular culture, such as contemporary fantasy literature, film, and television, gaming, popular and folk music, theme parks and other immersive amusement sites, AI-generated reconstructions, historical reenactments, costume design, and cultural or folkloric festivals, are welcome. Studies on medievalisms and scholarship on reproductions of antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance are also encouraged, including investigations of architectural reconstructions, medieval and Renaissance narratives of antiquity, the role of medievalism in museums, and non-European perspectives on reinventions of the past. 

We welcome proposals for twenty-minute papers as well as planned panels of three papers pertinent to the conference themes and their manifestations anywhere in the world. We also welcome proposals for roundtable discussions. 

Individual paper submissions should include:

  • abstract of approximately 150 words
  • contact information and one-page CV 

Panel Submissions should include:

  • contact information and one-page CV for organizer / chair 
  • names and abstracts (c. 150 words) for all presenters 
  • one-page CVs of all presenters
  • short (c. 150 word) description of the panel itself 

Roundtable Submissions should include:

  • abstract of approximately 150 words
  • contact information and one-page CV for each participant

Please send all application materials to: afterlives@csulb.edu.

Afterlives: Reinvention, Reproduction, and Reception will be an in-person conference. Participants should be prepared to meet at Forest Lawn Museum on November 15. After a lunch provided on the patio overlooking the Verdugo mountains, Museum Director, Dr. James Fishburne, will lead conference participants on a behind-the-scenes tour of Forest Lawn Museum and its holdings. A reception will follow the event.