Author: modernistudies

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ESPRit Postgraduate Workshop on Periodical Studies

Paris-Sorbonne, 26 June 2018
Applications are invited for a day-long postgraduate workshop on periodical studies at Paris-Sorbonne on 26 June 2018 as part of ESPRit’s Seventh Annual International Conference, ’Periodicals In-Between: Periodicals in the Ecology of Print and Visual Cultures’ (27-29 June 2018 at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris; see the CFP at http://www.espr-it.eu/).
About ESPRit
The European Society for Periodical Research is an international scholarly organisation that promotes, fosters and disseminates research on all aspects of European periodical cultures from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. It has a thoroughly interdisciplinary agenda and multilingual approach, and transcends specific thematic interests. Though its emphasis is on European periodical research, it also welcomes research extended to other related cultural areas (the Americas, East Mediterranean, Maghreb, etc.) ESPRit’s core publication, the Journal of European Periodical Studies (http://ojs.ugent.be/jeps), a biannual peer-reviewed online journal, publishes research from a broad range of critical, theoretical and methodological perspectives, including, but not limited to, cultural history, literary studies, art history, gender studies, media studies, history of science, and digital humanities. As the official journal of ESPRit, the Journal of European Periodical Studies offers scholars a forum for sharing their research and exchanging ideas across disciplinary borders.
About the workshop
The Workshop is for Masters and PhD candidates who wish to participate in the organisation’s research activities. Sessions will focus on: (1) different theoretical and methodological approaches to periodical studies, which will be explored in workshop format with participants; and (2) the preparation of graduate researchers for professional engagement in the field of periodical studies. Selected candidates will have the opportunity to present their work and receive personalised feedback from workshop moderators. Confirmed workshop moderators include leading periodical scholars, Prof Laurel Brake, Prof Anne-Rachel Hermetet, Prof Matthew Philpotts, Prof Evanghelia Stead, Dr Céline Mansanti, Dr Hélène Védrine, etc. The workshop will offer the opportunity to connect with people who are at a similar stage in their career as well as support and advice from later-stage scholars and experts in the field.
Application process
Please forward the following in English and/or French via email to ESPRitPG2018@gmail.com by 1 February 2018:
— a cover letter explaining your reasons for applying to the workshop (max. two pages, min. 11-point)
— a brief CV (max. two pages, min. 11-point)
— an abstract of your major research project (max. 500 words)
— a paper on the role of periodical studies in your research (max. 1000 words).
The organisers regret that they are not in a position to offer travel bursaries at this point but the conference fee will be waived for selected participants to the workshop. Participants will be selected by a scientific committee with the agreement of the ESPRit Steering Committee. Their decision will be communicated to all applicants by 15 March 2018.
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NWIMS Past Events

New Work in Modernist Studies 2017

We are pleased to publish the programme for the seventh annual postgraduate conference in New Work in Modernist Studies, Friday 15th December 2017, hosted at the School of English, University of Leeds.
The conference is organised collaboratively between the University of Leeds and Leeds Trinity University and in conjunction with the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), the London Modernism Seminar, the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, the Northern Modernism Seminar, the Midlands Modernist Network and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

Continue reading “New Work in Modernist Studies 2017”
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Submit now! Mathematics and Modern Literature, Manchester, 2018

The call for papers is now open for Mathematics and Modern Literature 2018, a two day conference to be held at The University of Manchester on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th May 2018.

About the conference

Mathematics and Modern Literature is a collaborative, interdisciplinary conference exploring the ways in which writers active between the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first century engage with, represent or reflect upon mathematics in their work.

We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers for this event will be Dr. Nina Engelhardt (The University of Cologne) and Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London). Dr. Nina Engelhardt is a lecturer in English and American Studies at The University of Cologne and has published on the topic of mathematics and science in modernist literature, particularly the works of Thomas Pynchon. Her monograph Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Professor Tim Armstrong is based within the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature and Modernism: A Cultural History. Professor Armstrong is also the co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture, one of the organizers of the long-running London Modernism Seminar, and a member of the executive committee for the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

MATHEMATICS AND MODERN LITERATURE

On the face of it, few activities, disciplines or modes of thinking seem as disparate or as incommensurable with one another as those of mathematics and literature. If, according to a common, broadly ‘Platonic’ conception of the subject, mathematics insists upon rigor and exactitude in order to discover eternal, objective and universal truths, literature is often imagined as addressing itself to that which is irreducibly human, subjective, particular or contingent. Where the one may be lauded for yielding access to a neutral, unchanging domain of that which is the same forever and for all, the other might be celebrated as the privileged medium of that which differs, or of that which is true or real for us as creatures of material, historical, cultural, intellectual and linguistic change.

Just as this sketch of ‘literature’ will not suffice—failing, as it does, to take account of the significant and often dramatic ways in which our conception of literature and the literary has shifted since the late nineteenth century—so the opposing caricature of mathematics proves inadequate to register the crises and developments that affected the field—and the ways in which mathematicians and others understood it—over the same period.

As historians of mathematics such as Herbert Mehrtens and Jeremy Gray have suggested in recent decades, mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century may be seen to have been in the midst of a critical and pervasive ‘modernist transformation,’ roughly contemporary with the modernist movements in the arts with which we are generally more familiar. Rooted in developments during the nineteenth century, including the invention of non-Euclidean geometries as well as the elaboration of set theory, ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ mathematics was subsequently characterised by its tendency to trouble or to break with established notions of mathematical truth, representation, intuition and meaning. As their subject became increasingly abstract and axiomatic in its approach, mathematicians laboured through what became known as the subject’s ‘foundational crisis,’ impelled by an anxious sense of the need to devise or discover a new, firmer footing for the science.

By 1931, the foundational crisis in mathematics had largely petered out, while any residual hope of placing mathematics solidly upon a provably complete and consistent set of axioms was dispelled by the work of Kurt Gödel. However, the field of mathematics has continued to experience profound developments since its ‘foundational crisis,’ from algebraic geometry, topology, group theory and category theory to probability, chaos theory, cryptography and computer science. In addition to ‘modernist’ mathematics, then, Mathematics and Modern Literature also sets out to explore how writers have engaged with later developments in the science, up to and including the influence of (big) data, code and algorithmic technologies upon contemporary literature.

How do writers during this period encounter, understand and interact with mathematics, whether basic, elementary or advanced, whether ‘classical’ or ‘modern(ist)’? To what extent do they negotiate contemporary developments within the field of mathematics? How have authors engaged with the the invention of computational machines and computer programming language, and how have interpretive practices, such as digital humanities, shaped the way we read and interpret texts? What is at stake when we read for quantity?  How are mathematical objects, symbols, concepts and ideas invoked, adapted, deployed, emulated, played with or transformed in literary texts? What kinds of meanings, implications or significance—political, philosophical, social, religious, magical, affective or otherwise—do mathematics and mathematical objects, processes and ideas have for writers? To what extent are these meanings, implications and ideas reproduced, subverted or critiqued in their work?

SUBMISSIONS / HOW TO SUBMIT

This conference invites papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to:

  • mathematics and politics
  • mathematics and gender
  • biopolitics / (big) data / code / algorithms
  • digital humanities and the implications for reading / interpreting texts
  • the concept of universality / objectivity / neutrality in literature and mathematics
  • mathematics, literature and affect
  • mathematics and the everyday / extraordinary.
  • mathematics and pedagogy
  • mathematics and the concept of genius / amateurism
  • ‘modernist’ mathematics and its relations to literary and artistic modernism(s)
  • mathematics and form
  • mathematics and style
  • mathematics, literature and truth / proof or measurement / verification
  • mathematics and magic / mysticism
  • the relations between quality and quantity
  • representations of mathematicians and the institution of mathematics
  • mathematics and experimentation
  • mathematics as language / language as mathematics
  • mathematics and poetic meter / rhythm
  • the meanings and aesthetics of mathematical symbols
  • methodologies of literature and mathematics studies

The conference also welcomes contributions that address mathematics in painting, sculpture, music, dance and architecture—in addition to or alongside literature—during the same period.

Please send proposals (250-300 words) for fifteen-minute papers to mathmodlit@gmail.com by 5th February 2018. Please include a short (100-150 word) biography with your abstract. Notification of decision will be made by 19th February 2018.

Panel submissions will also be considered and should be 45 minutes in length. Please send 750-800 word abstract for panel submissions plus individual biographies. Please note that all male panels will not be accepted.

Lunch, refreshments and a wine reception will be provided on both days. Further details will be released in due course, and registration will open in February 2018.

FOLLOW UPDATES ON THE CONFERENCE WEBSITE

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CfP: Periodicals In-Between – Periodicals in the Ecology of Print and Visual Cultures, Paris 27–29 June 2018

7th International Conference of the European Society for Periodical Research

http://www.espr-it.eu

27–29 June 2018 in Paris

The 7th annual conference of the European Society for Periodical Research will explore how periodicals from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century function as mediators of alternative or experimental forms of publication and as springboards for other publishing and cultural activities. Many periodicals gave birth to publishing houses by using their printers’ networks and by treating their issues as experimental or more conventional test cases and economic drivers both in the book and the print industry and in the arts and crafts. Often, the periodical is a vehicle for science enthusiasts, trade or professional organizations, literature and arts connoisseurs: volumes of aggregated materials published over the year, then bound in hard covers to resist time, respond to the needs of such readers. Or the opposite may be the case: publishers or galleries issue a periodical or magazine to underpin their publication list, to foster their artists, to test new formulas or to retain their audience. The phenomenon extends to prints, both as bonuses to subscribers and as original works. The study of such a phenomenon in its international scope would highlight the relations of periodicals with the world of publishing, art galleries, various salons and circles of influence, as well as with several alternate forms of publication, of new ideas, trends, and manifestos.

How is the standard history of book and print publishing extended by more nuanced considerations of media structures – economic and symbolic – that focus on the role of periodicals? What questions emerge when we consider periodicals as key drivers of print and visual cultures, the materiality of publications, their exchange value, and their function as cultural operators? We invite papers, panels, round table proposals that address these issues.

Topics could include but are not limited to:

— Periodicals and publishing houses

— Periodicals and galleries or salons

— Periodicals and print networks

— Periodical economies

— Periodicals and intertextuality; hybridization; remediation

— Parts; instalments; supplements; annuals

— Periodicals and prints for subscribers

— Periodicals and print-outs

— Periodicals and albums

— Periodicals as bound volumes/”books”

— Quotidian periodical cultures

— Alternative periodical cultures

Please send proposals in either English or French for 20-minute papers (max. 250 words), panels of three or four papers, round tables, one-hour workshops or other suitable sessions, together with a short CV (max. one page), to 2018ESPRit@gmail.com. The deadline for proposals is 31st January 2018.

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Registration Open: New Work in Modernist Studies 2017

BAMS_GREEN (1)

Registration is now open for New Work in Modernist Studies 2017, held this year at the University of Leeds on Friday 15th December. To register, please follow this link: http://store.leeds.ac.uk/product-catalogue/faculty-of-arts/new-work-in-modernist-studies-2017

About the conference
NWiMS 2017 will be the seventh one-day graduate conference in modernist studies held in conjunction with the London Modernism Seminar, Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, the Northern Modernism Seminar, and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS). As in previous years, this conference will take the form of an interdisciplinary programme reflecting the full diversity of current graduate work in modernist studies; it encourages contributions both from those already involved in the existing networks and from students new to modernist students who are eager to share their work. The full programme will be announced soon, and will include a keynote lecture by Dr Hope Wolf, University of Sussex.

There is a conference registration fee of £15 for BAMS members and £25 for non-BAMS members, including lunch, coffee and a wine reception at the end of the day. Membership of BAMS will entitle you to discounted rate for NWiMS 2017 (current members will also qualify for the discount). Memberships cost £50 (£40 student rate) per annum (including hard copies of Modernist Cultures) and £35 (£30 student rate) per annum (online access to the journal only).As well as the discounted rate for NWiMS, new and renewing members of BAMs will receive:

•      A print subscription to Modernist Cultures which is published four times a year

•      Online access to Modernist Cultures

•      Free or reduced access to all BAMS events including postgraduate training days, conferences, and the ‘New Work in Modernist Studies’ graduate symposia

•      Access to members-only content on the BAMS website, including training resources and publisher discounts

•      Eligibility for entry to the BAMS essay prize for early career researchers

Please contact Ruth, Anne, and Jivitesh at NWiMS2017@gmail.com if you have any questions about the conference.

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Professor Laura Marcus will give the Richard Hoggart Lecture at Goldsmiths, University of London

Tuesday November 14th, 6.30 -8pm , 137a Richard Hoggart Building

Professor Laura Marcus,  

‘”Minnows in a heated pool”: film-going and fiction in the mid-twentieth century’. 

In ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957), Richard Hoggart writes rather scathingly of the passive mass audience in cinemas and for TV, which was then relatively novel as a household resource. He is particularly hostile at this time to US mass culture, though this is mitigated after his year in the US, where he was when the book was published. This lecture addresses the broader context of intellectual and literary reflection on cinema spectatorship, focusing particularly on early cinema journalism and on the work of J.B. Priestley, whose similarly cool response to cinema coexisted with his close involvement in the filming of some of his own works.

Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College, Oxford. Widely influential in modernist and feminist studies, Laura’s books includeAuto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014).  She is currently working on scholarly editions of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.

Find out how to attend here.

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CFPs

Submit now to Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities!

The organisers of Queer Modernism(s) have opened the call for papers for their second conference, “Intersection Identities”. Read their message and find out how to submit now.

Continue reading “Submit now to Queer Modernism(s) II: Intersectional Identities!”
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Call for submissions CFPs

CFP: Special Issue (2018) of The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies (Tarr: 100 years on)

Wyndham Lewis’s quintessentially modernist novel Tarr was published in 1918 (Knopf, USA; Egoist Press, UK). To commemorate the centenary of the novel’s publication, the 2018 volume of JWLS seeks 7- to 10,000-word essays reconsidering Tarr’s significance, legacy, and meaning. We are particularly interested in essays approaching Tarr from innovative angles and standpoints. All submissions should try to engage with the most relevant scholarship. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to:

  • the legacy of Tarr and its achievements;
  • the contexts of social satire and avant-gardism informing the novel;
  • Lewis’s self-questioning accounts of artistic and social ideals through Tarr;
  • connections between Tarr and contemporary art movements, especially Vorticism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Impressionism;
  • the relationships between Tarr and other modernist and non-modernist texts, works, and creative disciplines and practices, across painting, sculpture, dance, and music;
  • Tarr and magazine history / the politics of serial publication;
  • the aesthetics of the novel in relation to Lewis’s work as a painter;
  • interdisciplinary approaches to the novel that situate it in various critical contexts (e.g. psychological explorations of Tarr’s characters; sociological analyses of Tarr’s institutions and settings; applications of contemporary gender studies and queer theories);
  • Tarr’s source materials and international influences;
  • the politics of studying, teaching, researching, and publishing on Tarr today.

How to submit

We are also seeking 1- to 2,000-word book reviews of works of critical scholarship. To submit, or to discuss an idea for, an article or Tarr-related book review for the 2018 issue of JWLS, please contact either of its Co-Editors: Dr Louise Kane (lkane@ccga.edu) and Dr Nathan Waddell (n.j.waddell@bham.ac.uk).

Completed essays will need to be submitted to the JWLS Co-Editors by 1st April 2018, to allow sufficient lead-time for peer review. Publication is anticipated for the fourth quarter of 2018.

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CFP: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism, 6-7 April 2018

Conference location: Friends’ Meeting House, 6 Mount Street, Manchester.

Confirmed speakers: Claire Harman and Jan Montefiore.

Today, when political misinformation abounds, nationalism and Fascism have reappeared, and we find ourselves contending with ideology in simple, complex and covert forms, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing seems ever more relevant. In turns insightful, comic, cutting, and poignant, her texts ask what art is for, and how we might navigate personal relationships, social change, belief and the past. Warner has an acute sense of the relationship between material conditions and human consciousness, of place and the ordinary. This conference seeks papers that analyse her importance for studies of, among other possibilities, modernism, politics (specifically communism), gender and sexuality.

Claire Harman’s 1989 biography began a revival of interest in Warner. Virago published her fiction, Carcanet the Collected Poems, and Literature Compass undertook a special issue in 2015. Her relationship with Valentine Ackland and the queerness of Summer Will Show have attracted critical attention, and Lolly Willowes continues to feature on undergraduate courses on gender and sexuality. Critical discussions of Warner’s work though deserve to be broadened further in terms of themes and the texts addressed – for example her later novels, short stories and non-fiction. She participated in Marxist, musical and artistic communities, and had friends such as composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi; poet, journalist and editor Edgell Rickword; prominent Communist Party member Tom Wintringham; and poet Edith Sitwell. Warner published 6 novels and 11 collections of short stories during a literary career that spanned 5 decades. An expert musicologist, she translated Proust, published widely in the New Yorker, wrote a travel guide to Somerset, a biography of T. H. White, a short book on Jane Austen, six collections of verse, and a wealth of material is to be found in her non-fiction, diaries, letters and essays.

The range of Warner’s work and thought has not yet received its due. We welcome proposals on any aspect of her writing, translation or musicology, especially those committed to taking debate in new directions.

Proposals for 20-minute papers will be considered, including (but not limited to):

  • Modernism
  • The historical novel
  • Critical Theory
  • Postcolonial Warner
  • Marxism
  • Feminism
  • Realism
  • The Communist Party
  • Everyday life
  • Review culture
  • Fascism and the 1930s
  • Lesbian modernism
  • Translation
  • Travel writing
  • Queer Warner
  • Cultures of the left
  • Left Review
  • Relations with particular writers, artists and composers
  • Internationalism
  • Books, magazines and publishers
  • Letters and diaries
  • The New Yorker
  • Warner and Europe
  • Music, musicology and composition
  • Biography

Organisers: Dr Howard J. Booth (University of Manchester) and Dr Gemma Moss (Birmingham City University).

We welcome proposals on any aspect of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, especially those committed to taking debate in new directions. 250 word proposals should be sent to stwconference2018@gmail.com by 30 January 2018.

There are two bursaries for graduate students of £100, kindly offered by the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (http://www.townsendwarner.com/); please write to the conference email address above for information on the application procedure.

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Registration open

Register now: ‘In and Out of American Art: Between Provincialism and Transnationalism 1940-1980’

Registration is now open for the conference ‘In and Out of American Art: Between Provincialism and Transnationalism 1940-1980’ (University of St Andrews, 27th and 28th October).

About the conference

This international conference addresses how categories such as the ‘provincial’, the ‘regional’, and the ‘international’ have operated in relation to American art during the post-war period, as well as how recent developments in art history might enable us to rethink how artists negotiated these terms at the time.
The conference features papers by: Miguel de Baca (Lake Forest College / University of Oxford); James Boaden (University of York); Lucy Bradnock (University of Nottingham); Anthony Gardner (University of Oxford); Larne Abse Gogarty (Humboldt Universität, Berlin); Charles Green (University of Melbourne); Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (École Normale Supérieure); Ed Krčma (University of East Anglia); David Peters Corbett (Courtauld Institute of Art); Moran Sheleg (University College London); Alex J. Taylor (University of Pittsburgh); Amy Tobin (University of Cambridge); 

Leon Wainwright (Open University) and Molly Warnock (Johns Hopkins University).
 
More information about speakers, travel, and other details can be found at the conference website.
The conference is free, but please do register by email so that we can estimate numbers: inandoutofamericanart@gmail.com.