Author: modernistudies

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Save the date: Collaborating Couples, Bristol, 18-19 April 2017

An interdisciplinary conference entitled Beyond Genius and Muse: Collaborating Couples in Twentieth-Century Arts will be hosted by the music department of the University of Bristol in 2017. Put the date in your diary now!

About the conference

Common perceptions of the artist still picture a lonely genius in a room of their own, writing, painting, or composing great works in isolation while amanuenses or, more likely, their wives take care of worldly matters. Conversely, cultural history can sometimes cast artists as vessels floating on a tide of external events. Reality is more complex, especially in the twentieth century: here, the pace of change in societal and relationship dynamics render both these imaginary positions problematic. Re-imagining collaborating couples can force us to rethink the paradigms of working relationships in the arts.

Whether couples collaborated or hindered each other, what are the means to describe such complex creative partnerships? How can feminism and new theories in gender and queer studies help shift perceptions and rediscover hidden powers and intimate connections? What methodologies can we use to research and write about intra-art and interdisciplinary couples? How do such couples perceive themselves and their work?

Whether in cases where traditional roles are reversed or where their intactness poses limitations to research, this conference seeks to engage with all kinds of collaborating couples.

Organising committee

Dr Annika Forkert (Organiser; Music, University of Bristol)
Dr Adrian Paterson (English, NUI Galway)
Dr Sarah Terry (English, Oglethorpe University)
Dr Tom Walker (English, Trinity College Dublin)

Further information will be hosted here and on the conference website as more details become available. Watch this space!

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CFPs News Postgraduate

Introducing The Modernist Review

We are delighted to announce that the British Association for Modernist Studies will now be hosting its own online space for new work in modernist studies, The Modernist Review.

The Modernist Review is designed to provide a platform for scholars and others with a keen interest in modernism to share emerging work across a range of interests.

We believe that accessible does not necessarily mean less rigorous. While we intend to make The Modernist Review an interesting read for non-academic audiences, we also want it to be a good place to share those research off-cuts that don’t really fit anywhere else.

If you’ve come across a curious book, poster, film or quotation which doesn’t work in your current project, this is where to send it. Similarly, if a late-night thought leaves you with a thousand words on the state of modernist studies, we’d like to see them.

Visit us now here, and please do consider submitting! (You can also follow us on twitter @modernistreview)

Thank you,

Helen Saunders and Stephanie Boland (PGR reps)

 

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CFP: Edited collection: Oceanic Modernism

The call for papers is now open for submissions to an edited collection entitled Oceanic Modernism. The collection will be edited by Matthew Hayward and Maebh Long (University of the South Pacific).

Abstracts are due by September 30, and completed essays will be required by 31st January, 2017.

About the collection

In 1987, Raymond Williams’s ‘When was Modernism’ questioned the way in which a narrow selection of European and American writers had come to stand for an entire epoch. In the two decades since, modernist studies has undergone a radical reorientation, and critics such as Susan Stanford Friedman, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Andreas Huyssen, Simon Gikandi, Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel have continued to reassess the temporalities, spatialities and formal components of modernism and modernity. The received, Eurocentric conception is giving way to new frameworks—alternative modernities, multiple modernities, modernity at large, new world modernisms, geomodernisms, transnational modernisms—which recognise the countless other experiences and articulations of a modernity now seen as global and interactive. While power relations remain uneven, in literature as in economics, assumptions of Western priority no longer hold. As the ‘new modernisms’ have shown, models of production predicated on a self-determining European core and a derivative periphery not only deny the creative agencies of the greater part of the modern world, they misconstrue the already compromised nature of the so-called ‘classical’ forms themselves. Now a contested term, modernism no longer simply denotes a particular aesthetic movement, born and perfected in Europe and America in the first decades of the last century. In a global sense, it names a range of aesthetic responses, to a modernity experienced in different ways, by different people, at different times.

As far-reaching as this critical revaluation may have been, Oceania remains largely ignored in modernist studies. With few notable exceptions, collections on global modernisms have left out the region altogether, quietly implying either that Oceania has had no aesthetic responses to modernity, or that it has had no modernity at all. Yet from at least the 1960s, Pacific writers and artists have been explicitly and self-consciously engaged in articulating Oceanic modernities. In a movement closely related to postcolonial independence in some countries, and to indigenous rights movements in others, Oceanians explored tensions between tradition and modernity, female and male, the village and the city, local and foreign, the indigenous and the indentured. These artists challenged and adapted all manner of inheritances, from the rich oral and other expressive traditions of the Pacific, including weaving, pottery, dance and tattooing, to other world modernisms, to the Indian literary and mythical heritage brought to the region, often forcibly, through the indentured labour system. Imbricated and transnational, Oceanic art and literature are thus eminently modern, with modernity understood not simply as rupture, amalgamation, and change, but—following Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas and Zigmunt Bauman—as the conscious reflection on the contemporary.

This edited collection positions this aesthetic movement as an Oceanic modernism. It considers the relationship between Oceanic works and the modernities from which they emerged; the relationship between Oceanic works and other modernisms, however so defined; and the advantages and limitations of applying the modernist rubric to Oceanic works.

Submission details

We invite submissions that consider Oceanic modernism/modernity, with possible topics including but not limited to:

  • Literature, Art, Theatre, Dance
  • Weaving, Tattoos, Architecture, Cultural Practices
  • Colonialism and Postcolonialism
  • Nationalism and Transnationalism
  • Independence, Indigeneity and Indenture
  • Tradition and Modernisation
  • Globalisation and Capitalism
  • Gender, Racial and Cultural Relations
  • Influence, Adaptation and Appropriation

Please send your title and a 500-word abstract to oceanicmodernisms@gmail.com by 30 September, 2016. Completed essays will be due by 31st January, 2017.

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Call for submissions CFPs

CFP: Writing Europe, Kingston, Nov 2

The call for papers is now open for a one-day conference on Writing Europe, to be held at Kingston University, London on Wednesday, November 2nd.

Proposals are invited by August 15th.

About the conference

In the wake of the European referendum result, what does literature have to contribute to current and future thinking about the relationship between the UK and the rest of Europe? How are works of fiction engaging with the socio-political shifts of the new millennium? And does literature still possess a pragmatic political function? In this one day conference, we aim to provide a forum for academics to position their own work in relation to the idea of European identity, and indeed to consider what part literature and those who study it might have in the forthcoming political landscape.

Submissions

Papers are invited in two formats:

  • Conventional 20 minute papers
  • 10 minute ‘thought pieces’ which represent immediate responses to the current situation

We welcome diverse interpretations of the conference theme. Subjects for discussion might, however, include:

  • Representations of UK/European relations
  • Representations of Europe and/or European migrants
  • The refugee crisis and its wider ramifications
  • The British ex-patriot community in Europe
  • The ‘lessons’ of literature in the wake of the referendum: models of community, identity politics and the economy
  • Regional UK identities and their contribution to European identity
  • The causes of Brexit: national identity in literature
  • The role of the academic and/or the literary text in relation to Brexit as a discourse of major political change
  • The role of dystopian/utopian literature in anticipating or imagining political futures for Europe

How to submit

Please send 200-250 word abstracts with brief biographical notes (50 words) to S.Upstone@kingston.ac.uk or KShaw@lincoln.ac.uk by 15th August.

Please indicate on your abstract whether you would like to present a 20 minute or 10 minute paper. Panel proposals also welcome.

Select papers will be invited to contribute to a related edited collection.

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Call for submissions CFPs

CFP: Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities – Vienna, 29 Sep–1 Oct

We are proud to open a call for papers for Irish Modernisms: Gaps, Conjectures, Possibilities, an international conference dedicated to testing the borders of Irish Modernism to be hosted by the Dept. of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, 29 Sept–1 Oct 2016.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is August 1st.

About the conference

Over the course of the past two decades, the coordinates of Irish studies and modernist studies have shifted dramatically. Where once the critic may have nodded in agreement with Ezra Pound’s estimation that Joyce “writes as a European, not as a provincial” and approved of Pound’s implication of an oxymoronic quality to the notion of an Irish Modernism, the ongoing historicising turn has irrevocably problematised these critical commonplaces. Significant studies re-positioning Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett’s modernist impulses in their Irish contexts have traced their sustained, if often contentious engagements with overlapping debates regarding Irish aesthetics, politics, and identities. At the same time, the previously assured binaries of Revivalist and Modernist creative modes have been profoundly complicated and disrupted.

The rise of New Modernist studies, with its insistence upon a plurality of modernisms, has also refocused the critical lens to look to marginal modernisms and previously neglected genres, forms, and sites of publication or expression. Casting a critical eye across this transformed landscape, Edwina Keown and Carol Taaffe observe that if “the incompatability of modernism and Ireland gradually became a critical staple, juxtaposing an enlightened internationalism with an insular and conservative nationalist culture,” recent critical work has revealed “not only the importance of modernism to Ireland, but also of Ireland to modernism”.

The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism, published in 2014, presents an ideal occasion to take stock of this critical turn, to evaluate its past and future influence in the field and investigate it for gaps, oversights, and unfulfilled potential. Boasting contributions by leading figures in the field, the volume aims both to stabilise and push the ground upon which Irish Modernism can be conceived. A note by the editor Joe Cleary impresses that this volume “serves as an incisive and accessible overview of that brilliant period in which Irish artists not only helped create a distinctive national literature but also changed the face of European and Anglophone culture”.

This vantage encourages us to complicate and nuance our historical view in a dual direction, noting the anti-realist experimentation of the Revivalist turn away from the modern alongside Jean-Michel Rabaté’s insistence that “in most recently produced histories of the concept of modernity, the return of the past is too often overlooked because the declaration of the ‘new’ is taken at face value”. A vista of new critical considerations thus comes into view, incorporating Irish modernism’s roots in, and debts to, the 19th century as well as residual or belated modernisms in mid-century and (post-)Celtic Tiger Ireland; the too often marginalised importance of women’s writing to the Irish avant-garde; the interventions of Irish-language, bilingual, and diglossic modes; the exchanges and clashes of mass culture and rural modernisms.

Keynote Speakers

Patricia Couglan (University College Cork)
Barry Sheils (University College Dublin)

Submissions

The conference invites critical, scholarly, and creative responses to the question of Irish Modernism as characterised in this Cambridge Companion. Rather than restating past gains, we propose to initiate a conversation that treats the field’s borders, coordinates, and key texts as fluid and open to further investigation.

As we mean to foster dialogue, debate and exchange on this focused topic, in addition to the submission of papers (15–20 minutes in length) and themed panels (maximum 3 speakers), the organisers particularly welcome alternative forms of presentation and dialogue, such as roundtables, workshops, debate motions (and debaters), creative responses, etc. which tackle the question of Irish Modernism and engage with the parameters of the Cambridge Companion project.

Topics for presentation & discussion include:

  • Direct responses to The Cambridge Companion to Irish Modernism
  • Unearthing omissions, oversights; proposing expansions, additions
  • Its value and place beside previous engagements with the concept; e.g. Kearney, Transitions: Narratives in Modern Irish Culture (1987), Booth and Rigby, Modernism and Empire (2000), Keown and Taaffe, Irish Modernism: Origin, Contexts, Publics (2009),
  • Reviewing the European, American, and Imperial modes, communities, and geographies that shape Irish modernism (and vice versa)
  • Mediating between traditional and modern scripts, local and international perspectives, mass and minority cultures, and between avant-garde and conservative approaches to science, history, religion, and literary tradition
  • Marginal modernisms, neglected forms
  • Testing and revising the relationship between the Anglo-Irish Literary Revival, Irish-language writing, Romanticism, Realism, Modernism, Late Modernism, Postmodernism, New Modernist Studies etc.
  • Neglected genres and forms, such as journals, newspaper columns, autobiography, oral history, westerns, sci-fi, fantasy, performance, visual arts, ‘political theatre’.

Abstracts

If you wish to propose a paper, panel, roundtable, workshop, debate motion (and debaters), creative response, etc. please submit a 250-word abstract, together with a short biographical note, to irishmodernismvienna@gmail.com by 1 August 2016.

Tamara Radak (University of Vienna)

John Greaney (University College Dublin)

Paul Fagan (Salzburg University/University of Vienna)

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Call for submissions Essay Prize Past Events Postgraduate

The British Association for Modernist Studies Essay Prize 2016

The British Association for Modernist Studies invites submissions for its annual essay prize for early career scholars. The winning essay will be published in Modernist Cultures, and the winner will also receive £250 of books.

 

The BAMS Essay Prize is open to any member of the British Association for Modernist Studies who is studying for a doctoral degree, or is within five years of receiving their doctoral award. You can join BAMS by following the link on our membership pages: https://bams.ac.uk/membership

 

Essays are to be 7-9,000 words, inclusive of footnotes and references.

 

The closing date for entries is 31 October 2016. The winner will be announced by 31 January 2017.

 

Essays can be on any subject in modernist studies (including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnography, film studies, history, literature, musicology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, and visual culture). Please see the editorial statement of Modernist Cultures for further information: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/mod.

 

In the event that, in the judges’ opinion, the material submitted is not of a suitable standard for publication, no prize will be awarded.

 

Instructions to Entrants

Entries must be submitted electronically in Word or rtf format to modernistcultures@gmail.com and conform  to Chicago style.

 

Entrants should include a title page detailing their name, affiliation, e-mail address, and their doctoral status/ date of award; they should also make clear that the essay is a submission for the BAMS Essay Prize.

 

It is the responsibility of the entrant to secure permission for the reproduction of illustrations and quotation from copyrighted material.

 

Essays must not be under consideration elsewhere.

 

Enquiries about the prize may be directed to Jeff Wallace, Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies, at jwallace@cardiffmet.ac.uk.

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Postgraduate Scholarships Studentships

PhD Scholarship: The Literature of the First World War, Liverpool Hope

A PhD scholarship is available for Autumn 2016 or January 2017 start at Liverpool Hope. 

Proposals are invited on the topic of The Literature of the First World War by July 31st.

About the award

Vice Chancellor’s PhD Scholarship Award
Department: English
Research Supervisors: Dr Guy Cuthbertson and Dr William Blazek
Research Topic: The Literature of the First World War

This award will cover full tuition fees and a monthly maintenance grant each year for a maximum of three years of full-time doctoral study (subject to evidence of satisfactory progress and periodical review as deemed suitable by the supervisory team).

Successful candidates may also have the opportunity to support undergraduate teaching (no more than 6 hours per week) as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA).

The project

The successful candidate will be supervised by Associate Professors Guy Cuthbertson and William Blazek, both of whom have published widely in the field of First World War literature.

They will consider proposals on any aspect of First World War literature, but their own research has been focused on the literature of Britain and the USA.

A focus on Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, the Georgians, Edwardian legacies, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, other American writers, or life-writing would be especially welcome.

Liverpool Hope has excellent library resources for the study of the First World War.

About the department

English at Liverpool Hope performed very well in REF 2014 with war writing highlighted as an area of strength. We are one of the top 30 universities in the country for English, based on the quality of our research publications.A third of the research outputs were rated as world-leading. In the category of “World-leading Research”, we came above the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol, Reading, Leeds, Keele and Lancaster, among others.

The official REF feedback stated that “[a] large proportion of the outputs were judged to be internationally excellent or world-leading. This included outputs from across all the main research themes included in the submission, with a particularly high proportion of outputs in editorial work, war writing, and gender studies producing significant innovation and important points of reference”.

Entry Criteria

Applicants applying for PhD should normally possess a Masters degree which matches the descriptor for a Level 7 qualification in the UK Framework of Higher Education Qualifications, and compromises:

EITHER a Masters Degree with Distinction from a UK University;

OR a Masters degree with Merit from a UK University, INCLUDING a Distinction grade for the Dissertation [or equivalent];

OR a Masters Degree from a UK University that does not offer awards with Merit, the Registrar having confirmed that the profile of marks awarded by that University satisfies or exceeds Liverpool Hope University’s requirements for the award of a Master’s Degree with Merit, AND that the Dissertation [or equivalent] was awarded a Distinction grade;

OR an equivalent qualification from outside the UK. Please note that equivalency of qualifications is judged by Liverpool Hope University, and all decisions are final.

In addition applicants must be able to demonstrate a high level of competence in written and spoken English.

Please note: As the successful candidates will undertake a PhD through full-time study there will be an expectation for you not to take an external commitment or job during the duration of the PhD studies. The only work that the candidates will be permitted to undertake is the GTA role for providing teaching support.

How to apply

Applicants must apply via our online application system.  Please see the ‘Apply Now’ tab: http://www.hope.ac.uk/research/postgraduateresearch

In the first instance, applicants must go through our ‘Expression of Interest Stage.’ This is normally reserved to general applications for candidates proposing the topic. Please enter the following statement in the expression of interest box: ‘Vice Chancellor’s Scholarship’ only. This will enable us to process your application quickly, and give you access to the full application, which must be submitted no later than 31 July 2016. Three references must be sent directly from your referees to researchdegrees@hope.ac.uk prior to the deadline.

It is currently expected that, following the application deadline, interviews shall take place the week of 22 August 2016. Applicants are requested to reserve this period.

Please contact Guy Cuthbertson at CuthbeG@hope.ac.uk if you would like to discuss a proposal.

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Grant: Travel grants for MSA 18, Pasadena, Nov 17-20

Applications are now open for travel grants to attend MSA18 in Pasadena, California this November. The deadline for applications is July 22nd, 2016.

Who can apply

“MSA Travel Grants are open for application to anyone. We prioritize advanced graduate students, first-time grant recipients, and those with little or no access to institutional support.”

Apply here.

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Contribute: BAMS response to the EU referendum result

Dear BAMS members and others,

In the wake of the EU referendum result last week, where the UK voted to leave the European Union, BAMS wishes to re-affirm its commitment to supporting modernist studies across Europe and maintaining links with colleagues on the continent.

In recognition of this, we’re inviting our colleagues across modernist scholarship to share a sentence expressing what “Europe” means for their work.

This could be how the content of your research reflects transnational movements; how scholarly links with institutions overseas have informed your career; or just how friendships and collaborations with European academics matter to you.

If you want to contribute, please submit your line using the form below as soon as possible, and by July 8th at the latest.

Thank you!

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CFP: Edited volume on Science, Technology, and 20th-century Irish Literature

Submissions are welcomed for a volume focused on science, technology, and Irish literature of the revival and modernist period. The deadline for initial proposals is August 15th.

 

About the volume
Since W. B. Yeats infamously wrote in 1890 that “the man of science is too often a person who has exchanged his soul for a formula,” the anti-scientific and Luddite bent of the Irish literary and cultural revival has often been taken as a given.  Recent scholarship, however, has questioned this perspective and has begun to tease out a more complicated vision of Irish writers’ relationship to scientific and technological development. This collection seeks to provide a more nuanced view of Irish writers’ engagement with science and technology as well as the relationship between Irish revival writers and Irish modernism. It aims to capture not only the varied ways that Irish writers were plugged into the scientific and technological impulses and networks of the age but also the myriad outcomes of their representations – the ways that they shaped modern Irish attitudes, aesthetics, ideologies, and more.

Submission details
We welcome submissions on canonical and non-canonical authors, as well as those that interpret the category of “literature” in new ways. We also welcome submissions from both emerging and established scholars.

How to submit
The editors seek 250-500 word proposals for original contributions and a 100-word biography (included selected publications) by August 15, 2016.

Please copy all editors:
Kathryn Conrad, kconrad@ku.edu
Cóilín Parsons, Coilin.Parsons@georgetown.edu
Julie McCormick Weng, mccormi5@illinois.edu