British Association for Modernist Studies - Website Designed and Developed by Callum LeithWe are delighted to announce the results of the 2018 BAMS essay prize:
Winner: Ned Hercock (ECR, independent scholar), ‘Hard Objects in George Oppen’s Discrete Series’
Runner up: Eleanor Careless (Sussex), ‘Muriel Rukeyser and the Security of the Imagination: Poetry and Propaganda in 1940s America’
The winner will receive £250 of books and the winning and runner-up essay will both be published in a forthcoming issue of Modernist Cultures.
Weekly Shut Up & Write Session for PGRs and ECRs
Following the fantastic discussion at our BAMS careers and support panel at New Work in Modernist Studies, we are setting up a weekly ‘Shut Up & Write’ Session for postgraduate and early career researchers.
Many of our PGR and ECR members have said that they struggle with work precarity and workload pressures, often struggling to find the time to write in between a changeable routine and new teaching commitments. They also told us that writing can be a challenge when they are working alone or in institutions where there are few peers working on a similar area.
That’s why we’re setting up our Shut Up & Write session. For three hours a week, we will run the session virtually via Twitter. Follow us @modernistudies to join in, and use the hashtag #modwrite to set your goals, encourage others, chat about your work, and post your progress.
The first session will run Monday 12th February, 2–5pm GMT, and will continue every Monday afternoon thereafter.
For more information on the concept of Shut Up & Write, see this blog post by The Thesis Whisperer https://thesiswhisperer.com/shut-up-and-write/
Call for Papers for Volume 11 of Katherine Mansfield Studies (the annual yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press), and the associated Essay Prize, on the theme of Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim. The Guest Editor for the volume will be Dr Isobel Maddison, Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, and Chair of the International Elizabeth von Arnim Society, who will join the permanent editorial team: Dr Gerri Kimber, Professor Todd Martin, and Dr Aimee Gasston.
Literature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850–1950
Deadline for submissions: 1 March 2018
Contact email:
sciencesofthemindconference@gmail.com
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 1 March 2018. Papers will be limited to 20 minutes. Please include your name, a short bio, and email address in your proposal.
BAMS Postgraduate Training Day: Career Administration
Wednesday 28 March 2018
Venue: Senate House, London (hosted by RHUL)
Save the date! The 2018 Postgraduate Training Day on Career Administration will be held on 28 March 2018 at Senate House, London. There will be workshops on applications and interviews, publishing, institutional demands in the profession and marketing your skills and experience outside HE. Guest speakers will include Dr Shelley Trower (Roehampton) and Dr Kate McGettigan (RHUL). There will be a small charge for the day of £5 for BAMS members and £10 for non-members. Registration information and the programme for the day will be announced soon.
Join BAMS here: https://bams.ac.uk/membership/
Call for nominations for up to two Postgraduate Representatives to join the BAMS Executive Steering Committee
On 31st December 2017, the two-year terms of 2 of our 3 current Postgraduate Representatives came to an end. We now invite nominations for up to 2 new PG Representatives to join the BAMS Executive Steering Committee. Nominations will now be accepted up to 8 February 2018, and the online election will take place 10–28 February 2018.
Candidates are sought from registered doctoral students who have completed their first year of study. They require a nomination from an existing member of BAMS and must themselves be members of the association. Instructions for joining BAMS can be found here. The final selection will be made through an online election process open to all BAMS members.
Candidates are asked to submit a brief biography as well as a 250-word proposal outlining their vision for the future of BAMS, their suitability for the role and their envisaged contribution to the association. The name of the nominator should be included in the proposal.
Applications should be emailed to the Secretary of BAMS, Claire Warden (claire.warden@dmu.ac.uk) no later than 8 February 2017. Further information about the nominations process as well as information about the role from one of our outgoing BAMS PG Reps can be found on the attached document.
Further information
Enquiries about the Postgraduate Representative positions can be directed to Suzanne Hobson (BAMS Chair): s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk
Here is some information about being a BAMS PG Rep from one of our outgoing postholders:
“I would recommend that anyone with an interest in modernist studies applies for the PGR representative position. I’ve been in the role since Spring 2016, working with Stephanie Boland and Ruth Clemens. Day-to-day, the role involves administrative duties, such as sharing CFPs, managing the website and social media accounts, running our blog (themodernistreview.co.uk) and dealing with PGR issues. To this end, we recently ran our annual PGR conference, and work is underway on organising next year’s conference; you’ll also have the opportunity to run events and workshops, and speak on behalf of BAMS at conferences. (Occasional) travel is reimbursed on expenses and you can fit work in around your own schedule.”
Helen Saunders (helenkatesaunders@gmail.com)
Call for Papers
Reading Walter de la Mare, 1873–1956: ‘a voice which has no fellow’
20–21 September 2018, University of Cambridge
By whom, and by what means, was this designed?
The whispered incantation which allows
Free passage to the phantoms of the mind?
. . .
By the delicate, invisible web you wove —
The inexplicable mystery of sound.
— From T. S. Eliot, ‘To Walter de la Mare’
We invite proposals for a two-day conference in Cambridge, U.K., which aims to re-evaluate Walter de la Mare’s place in literary history; to read his work on its own terms; to consider what it meant for him to write as he did from the end of the nineteenth century, through the turbulent decade between 1911-1922, and on into the mid-twentieth century; and to explore the ways in which the legacy of de la Mare’s writing might challenge current conceptions of literary ‘modernism(s)’.
Discussions of all aspects of his work are invited: poetry, prose fiction, plays, essays, anthologies, and archives. Fresh consideration by scholars in diverse fields will be encouraged, including, but by no means not limited to, literary studies, sound studies and musicology, theology, philosophy, and cognitive science.
Participants might consider the following in relation to Walter de la Mare:
Genres and art forms
Topics
Literary affinities and connections
These prompts are certainly not meant to be comprehensive, and other topics are welcome. To propose a paper, please send an abstract of 300 words and a brief biographical note of 50 words to readingwalterdelamare@gmail.com by 31st March 2018. Papers should be 20 minutes in length. Decisions will be made by late April 2018.
Visit our website (https://readingwalterdelamare.wordpress.com) for more details. If you have any questions, please get in touch with the conference organisers (Yui Kajita and Anna Nickerson) at the above address.
Call for Papers: The Working-Class Avant-Garde
One-day Symposium, London | Friday 22nd June, 2018
This symposium seeks to examine contributions to the twentieth-century British avant-garde by artists and writers of working class heritage. The avant-garde is often conceived to be the domain of the elite – those with the financial backing, education, and networks to succeed in this competitive arena. Indeed, studies such as John Carey’s divisive text, Intellectuals and the Masses, have understood the high intellectualism of the twentieth-century avant-garde to have developed in response to the improved education of the mass populace: a means to retain the divide between the masses and the elite. This symposium solicits papers about artists and writers who are outliers to this rule: the working-class figures who partook of the elite world of the avant-garde.
In recognising the fluidity of the term ‘working class’, and indeed its changing conditions through the twentieth century, we welcome studies of artists and writers who represent this designation relative to their own generation. Equally, as the definition of ‘avant-garde’ may well be contested, we propose an inclusive and flexible understanding of the term. Notable figures may include Henry Moore, DH Lawrence, Merk Gertler and David Bomberg in the early twentieth century, or later figures such as the ‘Two Roberts’, Merseybeat poets, and some YBAs. Studies of lesser-known figures of the avant-garde are welcomed, as are papers on the conditions of working class artists during the twentieth century.
Did their background influence their practice, or was it rejected in favour of a depoliticised aesthetic? Who were the patrons, institutions, art schools and collectives who supported these figures? How did the cultures and ideas of the working classes influence the development of British art throughout the twentieth century?
We invite proposals for papers of 20 minutes in length. Please send proposals of no more than 250 words, along with a brief biographical note to: atrott@brookes.ac.uk. The deadline for proposals is Sunday 11th March, 2018.
Speakers will be given the opportunity to publish their papers in a peer-reviewed edited volume.
The symposium will take place on Friday 22nd June, 2018. In keeping with the symposium’s theme, it will be held at London South Bank University, previously the Borough Polytechnic, and home of Bomberg’s Borough Group.
This symposium is organised collaboratively by:
Dr Alexandra Trott (Oxford Brookes University, Fine Art)
Dr Leon Betsworth (London South Bank University, English)
Dr Nick Lee (Royal Holloway, University of London, Media Arts)
AMSN4: Modernist Comedy & Humour
The Australasian Modernist Studies Network Conference
http://amsn.org.au/amsn-conferences/amsn4/
University of Melbourne, 26-28 October 2018
Jandaschewsky Clowns, 1903. Image by Talma & Co. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Sydney.
Humanities scholars are devoting new attention to the aesthetics, politics, and social significance of comedy and humour. For instance, in their 2017 special issue of Critical Inquiry on comedy, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai note competing trajectories of modern social life: on the one hand, “people are increasingly supposed to be funny all the time,” and on the other, “humourlessness is on the rise.” In the same issue, Ngai opposes the labor-saving operations of the “gimmick” to Victor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht’s practices of making methods of production visible. These tensions and oppositions suggest the usefulness of attending to comedy and humour in the field of modernist studies, which in recent years has rethought traditional oppositions among popular, high modernist, and avant-garde cultural forms.
We invite papers that engage with comedy and humour across the interdisciplinary field of modernist studies. How do comedy and humour reflect and affect the geographical, temporal, and cultural expansiveness of contemporary modernist studies, and what might Australasian scholarship contribute to this expansion? When are comic genres and styles normative, subversive, or ambivalent? When is laughter a mode of detachment, and when is it a way of being in relation? Who is in on the joke, and why does it matter?
Possible topics might include:
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a bio of no more than 150 words to modernistcomedy@gmail.com as an attachment by March 30th 2018.
Professor Nick Salvato’s visit is supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions.
Conference committee:
Dr Sarah Balkin, University of Melbourne
Professor Ronan McDonald, University of Melbourne Elizabeth McLean, University of Melbourne
Jessica Marian, University of Melbourne
Questions may be directed to sarah.balkin@unimelb.edu.au.
Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of ten previous novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. She lives and works in east London.
FREE to book, for further information and tickets visit: https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=11294
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