Abstract deadline: 15 September 2026
Medievalists working with personal names, place-names, naming practices, identity, language, or communities are invited to submit proposals for the returning Medieval Onomastics panel at the International Medieval Congress (IMC) 2027 in Leeds.
Sponsored by the Institute for Name-Studies (INS), University of Nottingham, the session is being organised by Tristan Alphey and Rachel Maloney. The call welcomes 20-minute papers dealing with names and naming anywhere in the medieval world, without restriction to a particular geographical area. Both anthroponymy and toponymy are explicitly included. The call has also been published by the American Name Society.
Medieval names and “Communities”
The special thematic strand of the 2027 International Medieval Congress is “Communities”, making onomastics particularly well suited to the congress theme. Names can reveal how medieval communities identified themselves and others, constructed boundaries, preserved memories, marked belonging, negotiated migration, or expressed linguistic, ethnic, religious, occupational, and social affiliations.
The official IMC call highlights such subjects as linguistic markers of communities, multilingualism, migration, spaces and places, inclusion and exclusion, collective identity, belonging, commemoration, and origin traditions. All of these offer obvious possibilities for onomastic investigation.
Possible contributions might therefore examine, among many other subjects:
- personal names as indicators of ethnic, linguistic, religious, or social affiliation;
- naming patterns within urban, rural, monastic, mercantile, aristocratic, or migrant communities;
- surnames, bynames, nicknames, and occupational names as expressions of social identity;
- the relationship between place-names and settlement communities;
- naming and renaming following conquest, migration, conversion, or political change;
- multilingual naming environments and language contact;
- names as evidence for inclusion, exclusion, or perceptions of outsiders;
- commemoration and collective memory through names;
- gender and naming practices;
- networks reconstructed through anthroponymic evidence;
- names in chronicles, charters, tax records, cartularies, literary texts, or inscriptions;
- digital and quantitative approaches to medieval name corpora.
The scope is nevertheless deliberately broad: a paper does not have to address the “Communities” theme directly. The organisers welcome work on the role of names and naming in the medieval period from any geographical region.
A continuing place for onomastics at Leeds
The 2027 call continues a striking recent presence of onomastics at the Leeds congress. In 2024, the programme included no fewer than three linked sessions under the heading Onomastics: Crisis or Stasis?, sponsored by the Institute for Name-Studies at Nottingham. Papers ranged from the naming of newcomers in late medieval England to personal names and regional identity in the Icelandic sagas.
A dedicated Medieval Onomastics session followed in 2025. Its papers dealt with subjects as diverse as naming in Gamelyn, associative naming in Lombard Italy, surnames and ethnic identity among merchants in medieval Mazovia, and Old English personal-name vocabulary.
The momentum continued at IMC 2026 with the round table “Medieval Onomastics in Britain: Looking Forward”, organised by Tristan Alphey and bringing together specialists including Jayne Carroll, James Chetwood, Chris Lewis, and Peter McClure to discuss both the achievements and future challenges of the discipline.
The forthcoming 2027 panel therefore forms part of a developing series rather than an isolated session, helping to establish medieval name studies as an increasingly visible component of the world's largest annual gathering of medievalists.
About the Institute for Name-Studies
The Institute for Name-Studies at the University of Nottingham is one of the principal centres for academic onomastic research in Britain. It brings together work on both personal and place-names and also houses the offices and collections of the English Place-Name Society. Its research uses name evidence to investigate questions of language, landscape, settlement, society, and historical change.
Submission details
Prospective speakers should submit:
an abstract of no more than 200 words, together with
a short biography including academic affiliation and contact details.
Submissions should be sent to:
Tristan Alphey tristan.alphey@gmail.com
Deadline: 15 September 2026
Organisers: Tristan Alphey and Rachel Maloney
Sponsor: Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham
The panel-specific deadline should not be confused with the general IMC deadline for independently submitted individual papers, which is 31 August 2026. IMC session proposals have a later deadline of 30 September 2026. The Medieval Onomastics call is a separate call through the session organisers and explicitly gives 15 September as its submission deadline.
International Medieval Congress 2027
The International Medieval Congress 2027 will take place at the University of Leeds from Monday 5 to Thursday 8 July 2027. It will again be a fully hybrid congress, allowing both in-person and virtual participation. The IMC regularly brings together scholars from more than 60 countries and describes itself as Europe's largest forum for medieval studies.
For onomasticians, the 2027 theme offers an especially productive question: what can names tell us about the communities of the medieval world — and what can communities tell us about the names people chose, inherited, imposed, remembered, and transformed?
With its unusually broad geographical scope and openness to both personal and place-name research, this call offers an excellent opportunity for onomasticians, historical linguists, medieval historians, philologists, geographers, genealogists, and scholars working with documentary or digital data to bring names to the centre of the study of medieval communities.
Official IMC 2027 Call for Papers
Institute for Name-Studies, University of Nottingham
