The Southern African Society for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (SASMARS) is pleased to announce that the 27th Biennial International SASMARS Conference will be held from 3 to 6 September 2026 at the Mont Fleur Conference Venue in Stellenbosch. Papers for this interdisciplinary conference may cover any period within the Middle Ages and Renaissance, in any geographical space, and deal with any area of interest or discipline that could be relevant to the topic “Journeys – Borders – Encounters”.
Ideas to consider could include, but need not be limited to:
Travel and migration
Spiritual journeys and pilgrimage
Trade routes, trade, and trade goods
Encounters between cultures, peoples, religions, and the like
Physical or metaphorical boundaries
Maps and map-making
Environments and ecology
Medicine and medical knowledge exchange
Intellectual and textual encounters and exchanges
War and campaigning
Proposals should consist of a title and abstract of up to 250 words, as well as the author’s name, affiliation, contact details, and a brief biography of no more than 100 words. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes when read (approximately 2 500 words) and will be followed by Q & A.
Please submit proposals by email to Carin Marais by 31 December 2025.
The keynote speaker for the 2026 conference will be Professor Jordi Sánchez-Martí of the University of Alicante, Spain.
Sánchez-Martí is a professor in English Literature and a Partner Principal Investigator on Re-mediating the Early Book: Pasts and Futures (REBPAF). He has a particular interest in Middle English romances and their transmission, as well as Iberian books of chivalry in English translation and their circulation. He has received an H.P. Kraus Fellowship from the Beinecke Library (Yale), a Katharine F. Pantzer Fellowship in Descriptive Bibliography from Houghton Library (Harvard), and a Philip A. Knachel Fellowship from the Folger Shakespeare Library. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institut für Buchwissenschaft, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a Visiting College Research Associate at Wolfson College (Cambridge).