Monthly Archives: February 2016

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Call for Papers: Hospitable Modernism, deadline 1 April 2016

Hospitable Modernism
One-Day Conference
May 27th 2016
University of Sussex
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Kate McLoughlin (Oxford)

This conference invites participants to think broadly about the term “hospitable” and the different ways that hospitality could be at work in modernist texts.

Existing scholarship into “modernist parties” invites further consideration of hospitality as the gracious welcoming of guests, usually within the home of the host or hostess. Food, drink, and entertainment are all suitable topics of discussion for this conference. Thinking about the environment in which hosting occurs could motivate explorations of the hospitable places that exist beyond the private home, such as the varying salons of modernism. Discussion of the figure of the host or hostess, aristocratic or otherwise, could generate literary, social, or economic discussions of hosting and of hospitality. More generally, the bodies that appear within modernist texts could be examined in the ways that they function as hospitable spaces.

Derrida’s work on l’hospitalité in the context of l’étranger extends the idea of hospitality across new thresholds. In this light, hospitality can lead into discussions of nationalism and of “host” countries. Xenophobia, fascism, or patriarchy could all be regarded as inhospitable applications of the laws of hospitality. War might be considered as a catalyst for hospitable or inhospitable relations. The slipperiness of the terms host / guest may generate discussions of the uncanniness and / or the reversibility at the centre of hospitality. “The guest (hôte) becomes the host (hôte) of the host (hôte). These substitutions make everyone into everyone else’s hostage. Such are the laws of hospitality”.

Finally modernism itself may be considered as hospitable or inhospitable in terms of the relationships that appear between modernist texts and writers. Subjects that may be considered in this vein include: to whom does modernism extend its cordial invitation? What could be defined as the hospitable spaces of modernism? Who is turned away from the modernist party and why?

Subjects to be considered may include but are not limited to:

  • Modernist party-going and party-giving
  • Literary and artistic salons
  • Food and drink in modernism
  • Dancing / musical modernism
  • Hosts / guests in modernist literature
  • The body as a hospitable space
  • Friendliness / generosity / animosity
  • Inhospitality in modernism
  • Elitism
  • Host as enemy / host as ghost
  • Derridean hospitality – l’hospitalité / l’étranger
  • Hospitable / inhospitable borders
  • Nationalism – “Host” countries
  • Hospitable modernist families – literal / textual / intellectual
  • Literary hospitality

Proposals are encouraged from all researchers working in modernist studies with abstracts from graduates and early-career researchers particularly welcome. Preference will be given to papers that foster interdisciplinary exchange. Abstracts of 250 words are invited for 20-minute papers.

The Call for Papers closes on April 1st 2016. Please send abstracts along with a brief biographical note to hospitablemodernismconference@gmail.com.
This Event is sponsored by the Centre for Modernist Studies, Sussex.

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Call for Papers: L’Atalante ‘Desire and Eroticism in Dictatorial Times’, deadline 8 April 2016

The team behind L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos is pleased to announce the publication of the volume 21, dedicated to the First World War anniversary and the relationship between cinema and historical memory. All the contents are available for free on their website.

There is a call for papers for Volume 23, to be published in January 2017. The main theme is the representation of Desire and Eroticism in Dictatorial Times (Film Strategies Against Censorship in Totalitarian Regimes), and articles will be accepted from March 20th to April 8th, more information here

L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos is a biannual non-profit publication published in Valencia (Spain) with the collaboration of different institutions and universities and indexed in several and relevant scientific journal indexes and catalogues. Find more information about the journal here.

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Opportunity: Birkbeck Gender Sexuality (BiGS) steering committee

Birkbeck Gender Sexuality (BiGS) is looking for two post-graduate reps for its steering committee.

BiGS organises a range of events throughout the year – from panel discussions to performance art – that showcase and engage the research interests of staff and students at Birkbeck engaged in gender and sexuality studies.  As a post-graduate rep, you would have the opportunity to propose and organise events, and foster postgraduate teaching and research in this area.

For more information about BiGS  visit our website, and join our mailing list.

If you would be interested in finding out more about the role of post-graduate representative, please contact the BiGS Director, Dr Kate Maclean, directly – k.maclean@bbk.ac.uk.

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Call for Papers: ‘Bridging the Divide: Literature and Science’, deadline 1 April 2016

Bridging the Divide: Literature and Science
3rd June 2016 hosted at the University of Kent
Organised by the Universities of Kent and Sussex
Keynote speaker: Dr Pamela Thurschwell – Sussex

Website: https://literatureandscience2016.wordpress.com


‘Science and literature are not two things, but two sides of one thing’ – Thomas Huxley

The relationship between literature and science has been a perennial subject of debate. Is there a divide between these two fields, or are they in fact two sides of one thing? The Universities of Kent and Sussex present a one-day conference on the 3rd June 2016, aimed at interrogating discourses around this subject.

Over the centuries, scientific inquiries have influenced writers, artists and theorists. Literary representations of science can record developments and changes, speculate as to future discoveries or challenge contemporary theories. Bridging the Divide welcomes submissions which span the range of literary studies from the classical to the medieval, from the early modern to the digital age, encompassing creative writing and interdisciplinary approaches.

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

Medical humanities and ethics / The environment and ecocriticism / Science fiction, speculative fiction and myth / Digital and computational humanities / Psychoanalysis, sexology and identity / Post-, trans- and antihumanism / Technologies of gender, cyber- and technofeminism / Evolutionary theory, social Darwinism, eugenics / Climate change, urbanisation and the anthropocene / Animal studies / Technologies of writing and material culture

This call is open to MA and PhD students from all institutions, including those who have completed PhDs in the last two years. We welcome abstracts for 20-minute papers, short creative pieces, and readings from postgraduate students by 1 April 2016 to be sent to kentconference2016@gmail.com. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words. The conference will conclude with a wine reception.

Please include details of your current level of study and home institution. For creative readings, please send a short example of your work.

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Call for Papers: Birkbeck Insitute ‘Space, Identities and Memory’, deadline 11 March 2016

Space, Identities and Memory: Call for Papers

We invite postgraduate researchers, academics, activists, artists, and practitioners from across disciplines to contribute to the Birkbeck Institutes’ (BIH/BISR) annual two-day conference held from the 13th to the 14th May 2016.

This year’s conference theme seeks to examine the interplay between identity, space and memory, exploring the ways in which identities may be created, formed and informed by spatial and temporal contexts. In particular, we seek to examine to what extent identities are performed in response to political, social and cultural pressures, including historical circumstances leading to the construction of acceptable and unacceptable identities.

The conference aims to capture the complex overlaying of identities in time and space, and the agency of individuals and communities as they address their own complex understandings of the temporality of identity. Conversely, we hope the conference will highlight how space and time are influenced and shaped by everyday life, sociabilities, mobilisations and processes of subjectivation. In particular, we are seeking papers that engage with topics such as:

  • The built environment: how are housing, architecture, urbanity and concepts of public and private space harnessed in the self-fashioning of individual and communal identity?
  • Gender, sexuality and race, the politics of becoming and the deterritorialisation of the body;
  • ’Home’, domesticity and concepts of solitude and isolation across time and space;
  • Spaces of dissent and resistance: how is memory imbricated in public spaces as sites of encounters, direct action and creative practices?
  • Displacements and borders: constructing or disassembling boundaries from local to global;
  • Explorations in the use of maps, social cartography and critical geography;
  • Exclusion and inclusion in institutional spaces: how have institutionalised spaces cemented or challenged contemporary and past perspectives on identity?
  • Narrating the past: memorialisation, contestation and re-enactment
  • Innovative methods and approaches in the investigation of the intersections between space, identity and memory

Our first confirmed keynote speaker is Andy Merrifield. The conference will conclude with a round table bringing together activists, practitioners and academics.

 

This is an interdisciplinary conference, designed to foster creative thinking and new research agendas. To this end, we encourage papers from a diversity of disciplinary backgrounds that explore the interconnections of space, identity and memory.

We are particularly interested in receiving contributions from artists and practitioners in education, the heritage sector or related fields to participate in this interdisciplinary conference.

 

Proposals

We warmly welcome abstracts for 20-minute panel papers. Abstracts should be between 200-300 words in length. Please include a short biography with your submission.  The deadline for submission of abstracts is the 11/03/2016. Authors will be notified regarding the acceptance of their paper after submissions have been reviewed and no later than 31/03/2016.

Contact Details

Please send enquiries and proposals to bihbisrconference@gmail.com

For further information please visit the conference website at https://bihbisrconference.wordpress.com/

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UCL Interdisciplinary Seminar Series: ‘The Aesthetic Experience – Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny’, 11 February 2016

Interdisciplinary Seminar Series
Organised by Lesley Caldwell

“The Aesthetic Experience – Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny”
Gregorio Kohon in conversation with Professor Sharon Morris

Date: Thursday 11 February 2016
Time: 6pm – 7.30pm
Location: UCL Main Campus

For more information and to register please visit: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/psychoanalysis/events/interdisciplinary-seminars
For any additional queries please contact: events.psychoanalysis@ucl.ac.uk
*Please note that admission is free but places are limited

Psychoanalysis Unit
Research Dept of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology
University College London

Art, literature and psychoanalysis are concerned with the unrepresentable, making silence heard, darkness visible. They share a “commonality of experience”, and the uncanny, as described by Freud, is a fundamental component of that commonality. This also includes the bleakness of borderline experience, uncertainty, anxiety, aloneness, silence; the reception of an artwork may evoke or touch or awaken in ways that may be difficult to understand or even bear. Psychoanalysis and the aesthetic share the task of making a representation of the unrepresentable, but they are separated by their own individual and contrasting ways of making the attempt. The artist Sharon Morris will explore these ideas with the psychoanalyst Gregorio Kohon.

Speaker Biographies
Gregorio Kohon is a Training Analyst of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Originally from Argentina, he moved to England in 1970, where he studied and worked with R.D.Laing and his colleagues of the anti-psychiatry movement. He has edited and written several books on psychoanalysis and has published four volumns of poetry in Spanish. In 2015, he published Reflections on the Aesthetic Experience –
Psychoanalysis and the Uncanny.

Sharon Morris is an artist and poet, born in west Wales, trained in photography and video at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she is currently Deputy Director and Head of the Doctoral Programme. She also holds an MA in psychoanalytic theory from Middlesex University. Her research is concerned with the relationship between words and images and is best described as cross-disciplinary.

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Call for Papers: Othello’s Island 2017, deadline 1 January 2017

Othello’s Island 2017

The 5th annual multidisciplinary conference
on medieval and renaissance studies
and their later legacies

Venue: Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR)
Nicosia, Cyprus, 6 to 8 April 2017
with optional historic-site visits on 9 April

Advance Notice CALL FOR PAPERS

a collaborative event organised by academics from
Sheffield Hallam University, SOAS University of London
University of Kent, University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds

www.tiny.cc/othello2017

Convenors

  • Emeritus Professor James Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University (USA)
  • Professor Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
  • Dr Sarah James, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK)
  • Dr Michael Paraskos, SOAS University of London (UK)
  • Benedict Read FSA, University of Leeds (UK)
  • Dr Rita Severis, CVAR (Cyprus)

We welcome applications from researchers to present papers at the 2017 edition of Othello’s Island.

First held in 2013, Othello’s Island now a well established annual meeting of academics, students and members of the public interested in medieval and renaissance art, literature, history and culture.

Othello’s Island is growing in size and stature every year. In 2016 over seventy academics from across the world presented papers at the conference, whilst also experiencing the medieval and renaissance art, architecture and historical sites of Cyprus.

This experience ranged from the island’s material culture, such as the French gothic cathedral of Nicosia, through to the remarkable living culture of the island that is still deeply affected by its medieval and renaissance past.

In 2017 we are interested in hearing papers on diverse aspects of medieval and renaissance literature, art, history, society and other culture.

Papers do not have to be specifically related to Cyprus or the Mediterranean region and do not have to be connected to Shakespeare.

It is worth looking at the range of papers from past conferences to see that previous speakers have covered topics ranging from slavery in medieval Cyprus and Malta, to the impact of Italian Renaissance art on Cypriot Byzantine painting, to the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and Margaret Cavendish.

That said, given our location, Cyprus, the Levant and the Mediterranean do impact on the conference, not least because for anyone interested in medieval and renaissance history Cyprus is real gem, full of architectural and other material culture relating to the period. This includes museums filled with historic artefacts, gothic and Byzantine cathedrals and churches and a living culture that has direct links to this period.

Othello’s Island has developed a reputation as one of the friendliest medieval and renaissance studies conferences in the world today, and it is also genuinely interdisciplinary. In part this is due to the relatively small size of the event, which generates a true sense of community during the conference.

For more informaton and submission deadlines please visit

www.tiny.cc/othello2017

All information here is subject to confirmation and possible modification

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Call for Papers: 3rd International Postgraduate Conference on Modern Foreign Language, Linguistics and Literature, deadline 21 April 2016

3rd International Postgraduate Conference on Modern Foreign Language, Linguistics and Literature, University of Central Lancashire, UK

Call for Papers
The University of Central Lancashire will host the 3rd International Postgraduate Conference on Modern Foreign Languages, Linguistics and Literature on 21st June 2016. The keynote speaker will be Professor Hayo Reinders.

Abstract submission guidelines
Abstracts should be no longer than 400 words (excluding title, keywords, and references) and should be submitted as a word attachment to the conference email address (mthomas4@uclan.ac.uk) using participant’s university email. The submission email should contain the participant’s name, affiliation and email address.

The abstract should be written in Times New Roman, 12 pt, single spacing but should not include the author’s name or any other identifying information. The deadline is 21st April 2016.

Papers may be submitted in three strands: research (reporting on data arising from field testing), conceptual (theoretical studies) or poster presentations. No late submissions will be accepted. All submissions will be blind peer-reviewed. Accepted abstracts will be allotted 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for discussion.

Information on registering for the conference will be available by 30th April 2015. The conference is free for participants and presenters and refreshments will be provided.

Key dates
Abstract submission: 21st April 2016
Notification to presenters: 30th April 2016
Conference: 21st June 2016

Publication guidelines
Presenters will also be invited to submit their papers for publication in a special edition of the peer-reviewed Journal of Second Language Teaching and Research (http://pops.uclan.ac.uk/index.php/jsltr/).

Conference Address
Adelphi Building, School of Journalism, Language and Communication, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE.

Registration
Please register as a conference participant by following the link below. A copy of the event will be requested at the conference.

http://www.eventbrite.com/e/3rd-international-postgraduate-conference-on-modern-foreign-language-linguistics-and-literature-tickets-21211998659

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Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar: Robin Veder, 2 March 2016

We are very pleased to welcome Robin Veder (Penn State Harrisburg) to speak at the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar.

‘Embodied Elitism, Energy Regulation, and the American Audience for Modernism’

Date and time: Wednesday 2 March, 6 pm

Location: Senate House, London, Room 261

Early twentieth-century American modernists – artists, art critics, art models, and art historians – reified the American taste for modernism in an embodied elitism. Key figures in the American avant-garde repeatedly formulated modernist aesthetic experience in terms of somatic self-consciousness, specifically kinesthesia, the sense of movement. By learning to regulate postural alignment and breath, they cultivated and controlled kinesthetic responsiveness, a practice that perfectly complemented the ‘introspective’ protocol of experimental physiological psychology, which American university laboratories were conducting and dispersing to the art community via theoretical and pedagogical texts. Veder contends that in both the body cultures of modernity and the physiological aesthetics of modernism, the concept of ‘poise’ figured as a discourse of energy regulation. Building upon Bourdieu, Veder shows that in this context, the hexis of poise accompanied the habitus of physiological aesthetics, both contributing to a new kinesthetic category of elite identity formation.

Robin Veder is Associate Professor of Humanities and Art History/Visual Culture at Penn State Harrisburg. She received her doctorate in American Studies from the College of William in Mary, and she has held post-doctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center for American Modernism, Harvard’s Garden and Landscape Studies Program at Dumbarton Oaks, and in spring 2016, the Institute for Advanced Study at Durham University. She is author of several articles on transatlantic art history, visual culture, history of the body, and landscape studies of the long nineteenth century, appearing in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, American Art, Visual Resources, Journal of Victorian Culture, Modernism/Modernity, and International Journal of the History of Sport. Veder’s book, The Living Line: Modern Art and the Economy of Energy, was published by the Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England’s Visual Culture Series in 2015.

For more details and information about other sessions, see: https://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com.
Follow on twitter: @Litviscult

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Call for Papers: Samuel Beckett & World Literature, deadline 26 February 2016

SBWL

University of Kent
4 – 5 May 2016

Keynote Speakers
Stanley E. Gontarski, Florida State University
Fábio de Souza Andrade, University of São Paulo

 

Almost unknown before the première of En attendant Godot in 1953, the immediate success of the play led to Samuel Beckett very quickly acquiring an international reputation. Since then, his works have been translated into numerous languages, and have exerted a considerable influence upon art and literature across the world. The award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 confirmed Beckett’s status as a major figure in world literature.

However, while there is no doubt that his oeuvre lends itself to translation and adaptation, Beckett’s concern with directorial and verbal precision cautions against misappropriation, notwithstanding the seemingly decontextualised nature of his postwar writings. Moreover, in light of his global dissemination, Beckett’s commitment to ‘impotence’, ‘ignorance’, and ‘impoverishment’ takes on a new meaning. Despite the prevailing tendency to consider Beckett as an absurdist, his works resist being circumscribed by any literary and aesthetic category, and perhaps for this very reason have flourished in cultures very different from the one in which they originated.

So what is it in his writings that enables this global circulation? In what ways is Beckett culturally reciprocated and refracted? How do nation and nationality figure in his writings? These are some of the many questions that arise when considering Beckett as amongst the foremost figures of world literature today.
This international conference is designed to address the questions of Beckett as a figure of world literature and world literature as figured in Beckett. We would like to invite papers, presentations, and performances from students, academics, artists and fellow enthusiasts on the following topics, although participants should not consider themselves restricted by these:

  • Beckett’s influence, reception and circulation across disciplines
  • Rethinking global modernism in the light of his works
  • Beckett as a selftranslator
    and studies of Beckett in translation
  • Cinematographic and theatrical adaptations of Beckett’s plays
  • The intercultural, sociological, and political dissemination of Beckett’s work
  • Beckett and global contemporary criticism and theory
  • Reappraising Beckettian motifs through appropriations and relocations
  • Teaching Beckett as part of international French and English curriculums
  • Beckett and the literary field
  • Retracing publication and translation trajectories
  • Beckett’s circulation in the digital world

Abstracts and proposals of no more than 300 words are invited by 26 February 2016. Please email submissions to beckettworldlit@kent.ac.uk, along with a short bio. Please also use this email address if you wish to contact the organisers with any queries. Please visit our website for more information and for latest updates or add us on Facebook.
This conference is supported by The Centre for Modern European Literature and the Humanities Faculty Research Fund, University of Kent.

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