Call for Participants: Overcoming the Reconquest Zombie

Call for Participants (AHA annual meeting, Jan. 6-9, 2022, New Orleans). Deadline: May 28.

Overcoming the Reconquest Zombie: panel/roundtable sponsored by the American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain.

Despite the fact that most (though of course not all) who study the Iberian Peninsula have abandoned the nineteenth-century nationalist framing of the Middle Ages as the era of Reconquista, this framing and its terminology are still often encountered in adjacent scholarly fields as well as popular histories. This unsurprising persistence of outdated historical narratives becomes especially troubling in the context of the use and abuse of this history by right-wing extremists and its strategic deployment by the politicians empowered by those same groups. But to meet the “academic challenge” (as Alejandro Garcia-Sanjuan has described it) posed by this zombie idea (quoting Paul Krugman, a bad idea that won’t die), we must go beyond the simple turning of the historiographical page on Reconquest narratives in our research and teaching. Scholars of the Iberian Middle Ages, it would seem, must mount a vigorous effort to displace it and replace it with new historical paradigms. This panel will highlight new approaches to both research and teaching which might meet the challenge posed by the appropriation of this history by bad actors, and offer new, better ways of understanding medieval Iberia. Anyone interested in participating should email Miguel Gomez (mgomez1 AT Udayton DOT edu) no later than Friday, May 28.