Registration for this conference is now open:
Student/Unwaged: £40
Waged: £60
See the website for a full programme.
Keynotes include Nina Engelhardt, Emily Howard and Tim Armstrong.
Author: modernistudies
Literature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850-1950
NEW deadline for submissions:
April 2, 2018
17–18 July, 2018 – University of Kent
Keynote Speakers: Professor Helen Small, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
Professor Priscilla Wald, Duke University
This conference aims to stimulate a wide-ranging discussion about the interactions between British and American literature, education, and the sciences of the mind between 1850-1950. We welcome paper and panel proposals on any aspect of British or American literature, education and/or the sciences of the mind broadly construed.This conference is part of Dr Sara Lyons’ (PI), Dr Michael Collins’ (Co-I) and Dr Fran Bigman’s (Research Associate) AHRC-funded project, Literary Culture, Meritocracy, and the Assessment of Intelligence in Britain and America, 1880–1920. The project is an investigation of how British and American novelists understood and represented intellectual ability in the period, with a particular focus on how they responded to the rise of intelligence testing and the associated concepts of I.Q. and meritocracy. For additional information, please visit our website: https://research.kent.ac.uk/literaryculture/
Possible topics include literature and:
• Teaching and Being Taught; pedagogical theory and practice
• Representations of Places of Learning
• Examinations, grades, scholarships, qualifications
• Inequality, Discrimination, and Exclusion in Education
• Academic Success and Failure
• Literacy and Illiteracy
• Intellectuals, Experts, Professionalism
• Autodidacticism, Informal Education
• Varieties of education: aesthetic, classical, moral, religious, scientific, technical
• Learning Styles and Types of Intelligence
• Intellectual ability and disability
As well as literature and:
• Professionalisation/ Institutionalisation of Psychology
• Social Psychology
• Developmental Psychology
• Psychometrics and personality testing
• Physiology and psychology
• Psychological Schools and Controversies
• Psychology and Philosophy
• Experimental Psychology
• Psychiatry
• Sexology
• Parapsychology
• Eugenics
• Language and Cognition
Please submit an individual proposal of no more than 350 words or an outline for a 3 paper panel proposal to sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com by 2 April 2018. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Please include your name, a short bio, and email address in your proposal.
Corresponding with Beckett
A London Beckett Seminar conference at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1–2 June 2018
Extended deadline call for papers: 31 March 2018
What does it mean to correspond with Beckett? How does Beckett’s correspondence give us insight into the work? In what ways are critical reading and writing a form of correspondence with an author? What would it mean to perform the epistolary? The publication of the fourth and final volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett marks an appropriate moment to take stock of the role of autobiography in research, and the importance of the epistolary in literary studies. A recent review by Cal Revely-Calder cautions that letters “are not propositions, manifestos, or statements of intent”, but rather “rough forays, conducted in private”. Corresponding with Beckett raises issues around the development of the “grey canon” (S.E. Gontarski), the use of digital resources, translation, visual metadata, and the role of corollary correspondence. Given Beckett’s hesitation to render the personal public, the conference will address how we negotiate issues of privacy, permissions, and copyright. The conference will generate new thinking on the letter as artefact, the textual and stylistic aspects of the epistolary, and will explore the legacy of a correspondence project and how the research that underpins it can be deployed for further research. Using literary correspondence and related materials raises older literary questions on authorial intention and reading methodologies that continue to inform literary analysis. In the age of Snapchat and WhatsApp, correspondence is primarily digital: the conference will question the longevity of contemporary digital correspondence, and explore strategies for future engagement with the epistolary in literary research.
Topics to be addressed include, but are not limited to:
- The epistolary.
- The legacy of the archive.
- Digital correspondence.
- Privacy and copyright.
- The “grey canon”.
- Corollary correspondences.
- Visual metadata.
- Location registers.
- Ethics and the epistolary.
- Authorial intentionality.
- Literary criticism as correspondence.
- Performing letters.
Keynote
The Legacy of the Grey Archives
Lois M. Overbeck (Emory University), Director: Letters of Samuel Beckett Project.
AHRC CHASE Doctoral Masterclass
Writing Beckett: Scholarship and the Exigencies of Publication
Jennifer M. Jeffers (Cleveland State University), Editor: New Interpretations of Samuel Beckett in the Twenty-First Century, Palgrave Macmillan; and former Research Assistant: The Letters of Samuel Beckett.
Proposals for 20 min papers should be sent to londonbeckettseminar@gmail.com by 31 March 2018, and should include:
Title of the presentation.
Abstract of approximately 300 words.
Biographical statement of approximately 100 words.
Details of audio-visual requirements.
Indication of any enhanced access requirements.
Organisers
Stefano Rosignoli, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin.
Dr Derval Tubridy, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Call for Papers: New Directions in David Jones Research
Inaugural Research Seminar of the David Jones Research Center
7–8 June 2018
Join us this June to inaugurate the David Jones Research Center, housed within the Honors College at Washington Adventist University. Designed to be a collaborative space for scholars interested in the work of artist and poet David Jones, the center seeks to:
- foster original scholarship concerning David Jones and associated subjects
- support emerging scholars in the field
- facilitate focused research seminars to be held once per year with the aim of producing a published volume
- organize or support further public lectures, exhibitions, and conferences, as interest and resources permit
The first day of this two-day research seminar will feature presentations outlining the present state of David Jones studies in light of recent publications in the field. Papers (of no more than 2000 words) might use material and themes from the following works as points of departure, critique, wondering or reframing:
Thomas Dilworth, David Jones, Artist, Painter, Engraver, Poet
Erik Tonning, Jamie Callison and Anna Johnson, editors, David Jones: A Christian Modernist?
Thomas Berenato, Anne Price-Owen and Kathleen Staudt, David Jones on Religion, Politics and Culture: Unpublished Writings (forthcoming)
Paul Hills and Ariane Banks, The Art of David Jones: Vision and Memory
The second day of the seminar will use reflections and reactions to the material presented on the first day to discuss new possibilities and directions the field of Jones studies might take, and how these directions might inform the future programming of the David Jones Research Center. In addition to papers responding to the recent scholarly works listed above, we welcome papers describing work in progress and new ideas.
Paper proposals (250 words) may be sent to: honorscollege@wau.edu
Deadline: April 7, 2018
For more information please visit: www.wauhonorscollege.org/djcenter/
CFP – Edited Volume: The Modern Short Story and the Magazines: 1880-1950 – eds Elke D’hoker and Chris Mourant
This essay collection aims to bring together and represent the growing body of research into the close ties between the modern short story and magazine culture in the period 1880-1950 in Britain and Ireland.
That the rise of the modern short story in the late-nineteenth-century was made possible by the exponential growth of the magazine market is well-known. Following the famous example of the Strand, more and more magazines made it their policy to publish only self-contained works of short fiction rather than the serialized novels which had been popular for much of the nineteenth century. As a result, the number of stories published rose dramatically and so did the diversity of the short fiction output: different magazines preferred different genres, topics, and styles; writers and agents became adept at pitching their story at the most appropriate – and best-paying – magazine. The end of this “golden age of storytellers”, as Mike Ashley has called it, is similarly bound up with the periodical market. As TV took over as the most popular form of entertainment, the number of magazines that published short fiction declined dramatically around 1950 and this had a major impact on the overall popularity, production and publication of short fiction.
If most critics accept the intertwined fate of the short story and the periodical press, the actual interaction between short stories and the magazines in which they were published has only recently become an object of sustained scholarly attention. Short fiction studies, with its longstanding emphasis on canonical authors and on the modernist short story, is only now beginning to investigate the impact of periodicals on the generic and formal development of the modern short story as well as to take into account middle- and lowbrow forms of short fiction which flourished in particular in the magazine market. Research within periodical studies, on the other hand, is typically focused on the periodical as a single if fragmented textual whole with a specific ideological, political or social dimension rather than on the status of one literary genre within that textual whole.
Situated at the crossroads of these two research domains, this essay collection aims to investigate the presence, status, and functioning of short stories within various magazines – literary, popular and mainstream – from 1880 to 1950, in both Britain and Ireland. The perspective of this investigation will be two-fold: the impact of a given magazine context and co-texts on the production, publication and reception of short stories will be considered, as well as the specific status, positioning, function and role of the short stories within the textual and ideological whole of magazine text.
Specific research questions may be (but are not limited to) the following:
- What opportunities did magazines afford short story writers? And what constraints (financial, formal, ideological) did publication in magazines place on short story writers?
- How are short stories positioned and presented within a magazine, and how does this affect their meaning?
- What is the relation between the ideological and thematic identity of the magazine and the ideological and thematic concerns of the short stories it published?
- How does the periodical context influence the reception of the story?
- How are authors presented in the magazines? How are their stories advertised? When, where and why are stories published anonymously?
- How does a given author pitch his or her stories to a particular magazine?
- How does a magazine set out markers (implicitly or explicitly) for specific genres or styles for the short fiction it publishes?
By addressing these questions, the book as a whole aims to illustrate (a) the impressive variety of short stories published in magazines in the period (from so-called literary stories in avant-garde little magazines or mainstream literary journals, the entertaining yet didactic stories published in women’s or family magazines, to the genre fiction that dominated a host of popular magazines); (b) the different methodological/theoretical concerns that are at stake in the study of periodical short fiction; and (c) the historical developments short fiction and the magazines in which they were published underwent between 1880 and 1950.
We invite chapters that address these issues through case studies and/or more general historical overviews. 500-word proposals for chapters can be sent to the editors (elke.dhoker@kuleuven.be and C.mourant@bham.ac.uk) by 30 March. Upon acceptance, the deadline for the full chapters is 1 September 2018. The editors will submit a book proposal to Edinburgh University Press
Registration is now open for the BAMS Postgraduate and Early Career Researcher Training Day: Career/Administration. Reserve your place at the RHUL online shop:
(£5 for BAMS members and £10 for non-members).
Wed. 28 March 2018, 10.00am (first session at 10.30am) – 5.10pm.
Location: Room 104, Senate House, London WC1 7HU (central London)
The ninth annual BAMS training day this year will focus on career administration and university administration in the early career (especially as it impacts on the expectations of job applicants and ECRs). The focus will be on practical advice, but the day will also allow candidates to focus on the profession as it is currently developing, and to reflect on their own skills, and indeed on how they might be put to use outside academia. While the day is organized by BAMS, its general focus means that students working in other areas should find it equally valuable, students in the TECHNE consortium are especially encouraged to attend. You can find the full programme here.
The training day is hosted by the Department of English at Royal Holloway and the TECHNE consortium and will be led by members of the BAMS executive as well as TECHNE staff.
CALL FOR NOMINATIONS
For: The 2018 Election of the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC) Executive Steering Committee + up to two Postgraduate Representatives.
On 31 December 2017 the three-year term of the MONC Executive Steering Committee came to an end. We now invite nominations for membership of the Steering Committee and up to two postgraduate representatives. The closing date for nominations is 8 March 2018; the online election will take place between 12 – 23 March 2018.
For more information, see the MONC website.
Dear BAMS members and friends
The election for up to two new Postgraduate Representatives to sit on the BAMS Executive Steering Committee opened on Saturday 10 February. If you have BAMS membership for 2018 you should have received an email from Electionbuddy with a unique link to the online election on Saturday morning. Please check your clutter and junkmail files if you have not seen this email. If you still don’t have an email from Electionbuddy contact Suzanne Hobson (s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk) with proof of membership (email receipt from EUP/Paypal) and we will arrange for you to be sent a ballot. The election will close on Wednesday 28 February 2018.
It’s not too late to join BAMS and vote in the election: https://bams.ac.uk/membership/
As above, please send proof of membership purchase to s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk in order to receive your ballot.
The four nominees are: Emily Mills, Gareth Mills, Sean Richardson and Imola Nagy-Seres. Please see below for their biographies and supporting statements.
Emily Mills, University of Nottingham
Nominated by Nathan Waddell
Emily is a third-year PhD student at the University of Nottingham. Her research, which is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) through the Midlands Three Cities (M3C) consortium, explores to what extent modern editorial theory can illuminate and resolve the challenges involved in reading and interpreting postmodern literature. Bringing postmodern fiction into dialogue with contemporary text-editing models, her research aims to shed new light on both and to investigate what is understood by the term ‘postmodernism’ in the contexts of both fiction and editorial theory. As part of her research, Emily has undertaken a fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center (2016-17), awarded through the AHRC International Placement Scheme, and she was the recipient of a Theodora Bosanquet Bursary in 2017.
Statement
My work on postmodern fiction has had two offshoots which demonstrate my suitability for the role: a concern with how practices of editing modernist fiction can help us reformulate traditional editorial theories; and a growing interest in Ford Madox Ford, which led me to present a paper considering his work in relation to Julian Barnes and the legacies of modernism at the 2017 BAMS conference.
My vision for the future of BAMS is, therefore, to expand the range of its literary-historical focus. In addition to promoting the work of BAMS at unaffiliated conferences, I propose to organise a symposium exploring how modernist scholarship influences research on the work of different chronological epochs, and especially in the post-1950 period. Such an event would bring new scholars into BAMS, particularly those who may not consider themselves modernists, and also present different opportunities for interdisciplinary research partnerships. In this respect, I would hope to work with the Midlands Modernist Network to nurture scholarly relationships between BAMS and PhD students based at the six institutions in the M3C network (Birmingham, BCU, De Montfort, Leicester, Nottingham, and NTU).
I have excellent organisational skills, having helped to organise the M3C Research Festival in 2017; I can help manage the BAMS website and contribute to its social media accounts, having contributed similarly to the New Modernist Editing project in 2017; and given my experience with matters of proofing and copy-transmission, I would be keen to contribute to the running of The Modernist Review.
Gareth Mills, University of Reading, University of Bath
Nominated by Nicola Wilson
I am an AHRC funded second year PhD student at the University of Reading, studying Wyndham Lewis and the publishing industry. I am a contributing reviewer for the Journal of Wyndham Lewis studies and the Journal of Beckett studies, and founder and co-organiser of the Modernist Periodicals Reading Group based at Reading. Last year I founded the interdisciplinary academic outreach journal Question (www.questionjournal.com), of which I am co-editor, now available in print in bookshops and libraries in the Southwest, Wales and London. I also co-coordinate the Gender and Sexuality Research Network at Reading and manage its blog.
Statement
As the current editor of a journal and coordinator of two research groups I have developed relevant competencies in editorial processes, cross-institutional organisation, web design, administration, and social media promotion, and would be very keen to bring this experience to BAMS.
Having experience of the benefits of a setting up a lively postgraduate publishing forum with the new journal Question, one of my priorities would be the revival of The Modernist Review and its website. Where the senior quarterly publication, Modernist Cultures, offers regular insights into a current confluence of research on a specific theme (‘Global Modernism’), a postgraduate publication could not only offer a supportive, rigorous forum for new PhD work but become an exciting indicator of on-the-cusp new research in its own right.
The increasingly central place of archival work to modernist studies in general stands to benefit from BAMS’ national outreach. I would support the growth of information-sharing workshops to complement the wealth of existing skills-based support, which is mostly aimed at newer members.
Finally, I would encourage the current trend in AHRC backed doctoral training consortiums of linking publications in journals, such as The Modernist Review, to more popular online news and opinion sites. The Conversation and Aeon are emerging as influential news sources backed by academics which have had, as yet, a sporadic engagement with modernist research. Opportunities for engagement would have a good impact on early membership uptake too – thereby getting newer PGRs in the BAMs information loop earlier.
Imola Nagy-Seres, University of Exeter
Nominated by Suzanne Hobson
Imola is in the third year of her PhD studies in English Literature at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on the phenomenology of touch in the modernist novel. She holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Leeds and completed her BA studies at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. Her reviews have been published in the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, and she is currently working on an article for the inaugural issue of the Elizabeth Bowen Review. She has written shorter pieces for The Virginia Woolf Blog and The University of Exeter Doctoral College Blog.
Statement
I have attended events organised by BAMS for two years. In 2016 and 2017 I presented papers at the New Work in Modernist Studies Conference in London and Leeds, and in April 2017 I participated at the Postgraduate Training Day in Leicester. I have found these events not only intellectually challenging but also reassuring in the sense of making doctoral students feel part of a larger community of like-minded peers and academics.
As a postgraduate representative I will contribute to the maintaining and strengthening of community spirit within BAMS. Writing a doctoral dissertation represents a challenge, but there are many ways in which students’ academic skills and mental wellbeing can be improved. I would like to organise study days with a specific focus on research skills, such as writing and editing dissertations and journal articles, preparing for the viva, and revising the thesis into a monograph. While many universities offer general workshops on these topics, I think that students would benefit more from subject-specific training and the possibility to talk to journal editors. As the representative of Graduate Teaching Assistants at Exeter, I have gained experience in organising a series of workshops for PhD students teaching English literature.
Finally, as a postgraduate representative I will ensure that BAMS continues to offer support for students to share innovative ideas on online platforms such as The Modernist Review. As stated in my biography, I have experience in writing blog posts for non-academic audiences, and would be happy to relaunch The Modernist Review.
Sean Richardson, Nottingham Trent University
Nominated by Andrew Thacker
Sean Richardson is a second-year doctoral candidate at Nottingham Trent University. He is the host of the Modernist Podcast, the founder of the Midlands Modernist Network, the curator of the Forster50 museum exhibition and the organiser of Queer Modernism(s), Transitions: Bridging the Victorian-Modernist Divide and Orientations: A Conference of Narrative of Place, amongst other conferences. He likes biscuits.
Statement
I believe BAMS is currently doing excellent work to support its postgraduate community and, if elected, would seek to continue building on the achievements of the outgoing postgraduate representatives. To do this, I would focus on:
One: Collecting feedback from our existing members. Last year, BAMS ran its first postgraduate survey. I would like to follow this up yearly, adding to the existing questions and collecting case studies. This data will elucidate how to best support BAMS members, as well as illuminate pathways for progression once the PhD has finished.
Two: Continuing to foster academic achievement at postgraduate level. Our postgraduate community is doing fantastic work, and this deserves recognition. I would like to work to produce a ‘BAMS Certificate of Excellence’. BAMS members would be able to nominate PhD students for this award, providing a mark of recognition.
Three: Diversifying our postgraduate membership. Currently comprised of mostly literature scholars, I believe BAMS can do more to reach out to those in fields such as art history, modern languages and book history, allowing for further interesting, interdisciplinary discussions.
Having run the Modernist Podcast, set up the MMN and blogged extensively on higher education issues, I am heavily invested in platforming postgraduate voices in the modernist community on a local and national level. I would love to continue this structural work as BAMS postgraduate representative, as well as provide a friendly face for members old and new. If you have any questions, you can tweet me at: @southldntabby
Women Poets and Myth (20th and 21st centuries):
Myth, Community and the Environment
Colloquium, 19–20 April 2018
EXTENDED DEADLINE: Monday February 26, 2018
There is a long tradition of poetry by women in which the engagement of the poem with history and myth gave rise to crucial artistic and social constructions that illuminated an era –from Christine de Pizan (14th c) to Sor Juana Ines, from Gabriela Mistral to Carol Ann Duffy-, re-imagined countries and borders, created community across differences and re-created livable worlds. The consequences of those poetics did not go unnoticed in the grand design of women’s poetry and of poetry at large. Their effects show both in poetic aspects and in wider socio-historical formations. In general terms, their poetries underscore community based change.
In recent years, there has been an increasing concern with the continuous human aggressions to the planet. The hazards of ecological disaster together with natural catastrophes and climate change, have been crucial in the exploration of new avenues for contestation to the current state of degradation of the planet. Some of the best contemporary poetry by women turns to nature renegotiating the relationship of the self under late capitalism and the physical world. The move is certainly a forceful response to an indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, lethal pollution of the air, ocean, and earth, and irreversible damage to life. Mother Earth is no longer an inexhaustible repository of resources. In traditional anthropomorphic representation, the goddess is no longer a bountiful, protective force for all life on earth.
At present, women’s poetry dramatizes the urge for conservation and sustainability as well as a communal sense of interaction between the human and the natural. Language, geography, history and nature are no longer understood as separate categories, they come together as part of our complete lived experience.
In our colloquium, we would like to raise a series of questions for discussion such as, why myth still holds such attraction –in the 20th and 21st centuries– for the woman poet? To what extent the engagement with myth contributes to the transformation of society? Is myth still a cohesive element in our societies, or should we understand its persistence as a sign of the past? To what extent does myth assist in raising awareness to an endangered planet at risk? Does myth, still alive, exhibit the vigour and energy in the work of women poets it used to do before? Does myth have pedagogical value? And, finally, is myth –with special reference to community and the environment– still a crucial referent in poetry and intellectual production at present?
Deadline for submission of abstracts and short bios for brief position papers:
NEW DEADLINE: Monday February 26, 2018
Venue:
Facultad de Filología, Universidad Complutense, Madrid.
Contact:
poeticsgroupucm@gmail.com
https://www.humanities.ox.ac.uk/article/ahrc-collaborative-doctoral-award-modernist-home
Applications are invited for a new AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award on ‘The Modernist Home’, offered jointly by the University of Oxford and the National Trust (2 Willow Road, Hampstead).
Deadline 9 March 2018
Informal enquiries can be made to Rebecca Beasley rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk
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