Author: modernistudies

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Call for submissions

CFP: Affective Ecologies of the Modernist Body (Edited Collection)

Affective Ecologies of the Modernist Body: Call for Proposals (Edited Collection)

We seek to complete an edited collection on the modernist body with high quality proposals for chapters. The collection aims to examine ecologies of bodies’ relations to their surrounds in early twentieth-century modernism. From artist Hans Bellmer’s distorted dolls, to Rupert Brooke’s “dust” in a “corner of a foreign field,” to Virginia Woolf’s “orts, scraps, and fragments,” concepts of early twentieth century bodies – textual, phenomenological, cultural, political, and physical – fall to pieces, and we seek to ask how these pieces may aid us in reconceptualizing the modernist body in light of its new affective and ecological surrounds.

We welcome all approaches to the question of the modernist body’s conceptualization or re-/de-conceptualization, specifically those that span disciplinary and geographical bounds. Accepted chapters thus far address bodies in motion through dance, bodily thermality, erotics, decomposition, and bodily remainders in writers including W.B. Yeats, H.D., Lynd Ward, E.M. Forster, and Evelyn Waugh. We solicit proposals that may address topics that supplement or challenge these ideas, including:

·      “greened” or “queered” bodies

·      robotic, wounded or prosthetic bodies

·      negotiations of embodiment or permeability

·      affective landscapes and the body

·      environments of affect

·      colonial or non-Western modernist bodies

·      bodies at war in WWI or WWII landscapes

·      excesses of affect or disaffection on the homefront

·      suffrage, force-feeding, body activism

·      bodies’ publicness (or “publicity”) and urbanization

The book proposal will be sent out to publishers in January 2016, and chapters must be completed by June 2016. Abstracts of 300-400 words and a brief 2-page CV must be submitted to editors Molly Hall molly_hall@my.uri.edu and Kara Watts kara_watts@my.uri.edu by December 1st. Please address your abstracts to both editors.

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CFPs

Masculinity and the Metropolis: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Art History, Film, and Literature

Call for papers

University of Kent, 22nd – 23rd April 2016

This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Kent, takes as its starting point the range of complex and contradictory engagements between masculinity and the developing metropolis since the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout this period the metropolis maintained a paradoxical status as a place of liberation and possibility, but simultaneously as one of alienation, sin, and oppression. What do responses to the modern city in visual art, film, and literature tell us about masculinity as it both asserts itself and registers its own anxieties, and subsequent representations of the city? In what ways do these contrasting positive and negative conditions, which encouraged complex responses, fit within the framework of masculinity?

In the wake of industrialization artistic reactions to modern urbanity were spurred on by the rapid growth of cities and the transition from rural to metropolitan living. This caused socio-cultural changes and a diverse range of masculinities to develop within the metropolis in terms of race, class, and sexualities. How has masculinity been visualized with the construction of this modern cityscape and ideas of the urban? And later in the 20th Century, how did artists registering with ideas of deindustrialization or feminist and queer art forms affect or approach theories of masculinity and the urban? Can we construct an overarching lineage on this relationship? As one starting point, the so-called “crisis of masculinity”, and the way it is represented in various media, can be connected in interesting ways to the rise of the metropolis. This conference will bring together scholars from varying fields in order to begin a dialogue regarding the way theories of masculinity and the metropolis have developed in tandem, charting their evolution from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Scholars with diverse interests and approaches to this broad subject are welcome with papers concerning various media within the 20th and 21st centuries.

Examples of subjects invited for submission include, but are in no way limited to:

  • Representations of the male and masculinity in metropolitan society within literature, film, and fine art. Contributions from theatre, and music are also welcome.
  • Male as artist or witness to the evolving physical cityscape
  • Modern and contemporary responses to 19th Century representations of industrialisation and the urban / de-industrialization and the changing nature of the urban and the masculine
  • The metropolis as a milieu of capitalist oppression, and how this can be related to masculinity
  • Urban photography and the metropolitan male identity
  • Masculine national identities within the cityscape
  • Masculinity and the nocturnal city
  • The modern or contemporary flâneur
  • Cityscape planning and the organization of male spaces
  • Destruction of the city and the crisis of masculinity
  • The male Superhero
  • Masculinities and sexualities within the metropolis
  • Depictions of the urban male and race
  • The relationship of masculinity to musical sub-cultures / the protest song and music as social commentary
  • Feminist, gay, and / or trans artistic reactions to masculinity and the urban
  • Masculinity and dramatic performance within the metropolis

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham

Dr. Hamilton Carroll, University of Leeds

Dr. Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck, University of London

Submission process
We invite submissions of short abstracts (300 words) accompanied by a brief biography (100 words). The time slot for presentations is 20 minutes with a 10 minute session for questions at the end of each panel.

Please send your abstract as an attachment (.pdf or .doc) to: masculinemetropolis@gmail.com

The subject of the email should contain the words: “Masculinity and the Metropolis submission”

The body of the email should include author(s) name, affiliation, abstract title and the email address you would like us to use to communicate with you.

Deadline for submissions: 20 December 2015.
Notification of acceptance/non-acceptance: 26 January 2016.

Registration

Postgraduate students / University of Kent Staff and Students: £10
Other researchers: £20

Accommodation

Premier Inn

Abode Canterbury

The Falstaff Hotel

All hotels are in city centre, a 10-20 minute bus, or 10 minute taxi ride from the University.

Registration will be required prior to the conference. Registration opens on the 1st of March 2016. Details on how to register will follow in due course.

Contact: masculinemetropolis@gmail.com

Organizers

James Finch, History of Art

Hannah Huxley, Centre for American Studies

Sara Janssen, Film

Margaret Schmitz, History of Art

With a special thanks to our sponsors: The University of Kent’s History of Art and Visual Cultures Research Centre, Aesthetics Research Centre and the Centre for Film and Media Research.

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CFPs

[Keynote Speakers and Poetry Workshop Confirmed] Sensory Modernism(s) 2

SM2, University of Leeds, December 11-12 2015
 
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Richard Brown (University of Leeds)
 
Professor Jeff Wallace (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Sensory Modernism(s)#2 is a two-day interdisciplinary conference due to be held at the University of Leeds. The event, organised by the university’s Sensory Modernism(s) research group, follows the highly successful inaugural conference event held earlier this year. The conference will seek to address the interrelationship of modernism with sensory perception. We invite abstracts proposals for twenty-minute papers which address this theme, but will welcome proposals which offer an alternative mode of presentation, such as films or performance art. 
 
Poetry and the Senses Workshop (11th December)
As part of the conference, Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow Helen Mort will run a one hour creative writing workshop with prompts and exercises designed to get you thinking differently about how the senses can be used in poetry. No previous creative writing experience is necessary, just a notebook and pen!
Papers/presentations

Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following topics and their relevance to the general scope of the conference:

Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Cinematography
Radio
Medicine
Anthropology
Aesthetics
Linguistics
Literature and the marketplace
Animals
Sexuality
Abstracts of 200-300 words, with a brief bio of no more than 200 words, should be emailed to sensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 11th November  2015.

Conference Organisers: Georgina Binnie, Daniel Kielty, Andrew Moore and Crispian Neill.

—
Sensory Modernism(s): Cultures of Perception (11-12/12/15)
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Call for submissions CFPs

Reminder: Call for book chapters- Mediated Cities

Publication and conference call

Please pass this information to colleagues you feel may be interested. Thanks.
Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City
Abstract deadline: 15 Nov 2015

http://architecturemps.com/bristol-uk/

Skype / Virtual Presentations Welcome
Together with Intellect Books and UCL Press the academic journal Architecture_MPS is preparing a range of publications on the theme of ‘Mediated Cities’. Specifically aligned with its conference series these publications will be in the form of Special Issues of the journal, online publications and print books. The next conference in the series is Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City. Details below:

Dates: 01-03 April 2016
Place: Bristol, UK
Organisers: Architecture_MPS, CMIR, UWE
Venue: Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts

For more details of the associated publications, see: http://architecturemps.com/publications-2/

Conference details: http://architecturemps.com/bristol-uk/

Categories
Call for submissions

CFP: Peer Reviewed Cluster on Modernist Digital Humanities

From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Modernism and Digital Humanities

We are seeking argumentative position papers for “>From Practice to Theory: A Forum on the Future of Digital Humanities and Modernist Studies,” a prospective peer-reviewed cluster for the Modernism/modernity Print-Plus Platform.

From digital archives (The Modernist Journals Project, Modernist Magazines Project, Modernist Versions Project, the Modernism Lab) to digital production platforms (Modernist Commons); from experimental reading practices (Infinite Ulysses, The Hypertext Waste Land) to recovery projects (Orlando, The Modernist Archives Publishing Project), scholarship in modernism has been at the forefront of digital humanities practice. As the twentieth anniversary of the Modernist Journals Project approaches, such scholarship is ceasing to be a novelty, and it appears that a distinctive digital humanities particularly of and for modernism could emerge. Given that this is a moment of transition in modes of scholarly research, what could this modernist digital humanities look like?

This cluster will theorize emergent or possible relationships between modernism and the digital humanities and seeks to consider recent digital projects and/or scholarship in order to distil original theses about “the modernist digital humanities.” Why does it seem so productive to use digital humanities methods to explore modernism? Are the digital humanities reinventing or rebooting a kind of modernism? What new models of modernism could emerge out of our engagement with digital tools?

Papers might address:

·       Definitions of digital humanities tailored for modernism

·       Definitions of modernism as seen through the lens of digital humanities

·       New genres or types of modernist digital humanities scholarship

·       The modernist roots of contemporary digital cultures

·       The limits of digital humanities for understanding modernism

·       Barriers or threats to digital scholarship, especially those specific to modernist studies

·       The political affordances—or blindnesses—of digital humanities in addressing questions of gender, sexuality, race, empire, class, religion, etc

·       The economic or vocational contexts of digital scholarship, including literal costs and the question of professionalization in a difficult job market

·       The relationship between modernist digital scholarship and pedagogy

Preference will be given to polemical essays that reflect upon the position of digital humanities within modernist scholarship. Readings or examples from modernist art and literature should primarily be used in the service of this larger thesis, not as ends in and of themselves.

Please submit abstracts of 400 words Shawna Ross (shawnaross@tamu.edu) by December 15, 2015. The Print Plus Platform is an online environment, and we welcome and encourage electronic supplements to your writing (data, images, film, code, demo). Full essays of 3,000 words are due by March 1, 2016.

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Seminars

London Modernism Seminar – 7 Nov

The next London Modernism Seminar will take place on Saturday 7 November, 11-1pm, in Room 349 Senate House, University of London. The theme is flamboyant modernism and we are very pleased to welcome as speakers Faye Hammill (Strathclyde) on ‘Noël Coward, Rebecca West, and the modernist scene’ and Deborah Longworth (Birmingham) on ‘A Family Party: Modernism and the Sitwells’. You can find a short biography and abstract of Faye Hammill’s paper below.
The London Modernism Seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism. You can find directions to the venue and the full seminar programme on the Institute of English Studies website: http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/53/Modernism+Seminar
Best wishes,
The Seminar Organisers
—
Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk 
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway, University of London, t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk
David Ayers, University of Kent, David Ayers, dsa@kent.ac.uk
Rebecca Beasley, Queen’s College, Oxford, rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths University of London, h.carr@gold.ac.uk
Peter Fifield, Birkbeck University of London, p.fifield@birkbeck.ac.uk
 
Faye Hammill, ‘Noël Coward, Rebecca West, and the modernist scene’
Coward and West shared a long friendship, and often met each other at theatrical openings, on transatlantic liners, and at parties hosted by the ‘international set’. Their wary negotiation with one another’s celebrity and cultural value played out not only at these social events but also in print, through reviews, gossip columns, and memoirs. Using the relationship between Coward and West as a case study, this talk explores the social scene of modernism, with attention to the suggestion of theatricality in the word ‘scene’. It takes up the notion of the ‘modernist party’ as, on the one hand, a kind of stage on which celebrities from different spheres performed together, and, on the other, a happening which, through reports in print, contributed to the forming of literary reputations and to the public fascination with modern style.
 
Faye Hammill is Professor of English at the University of Strathclyde. She is currently working on a project on ‘Noel Coward, print culture and popularity’, funded by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship. Her most recent monographs are Magazines, Travel, and Middlebrow Culture (2015), co-authored with Michelle Smith, and Sophistication (2010). She is the founder of the AHRC Middlebrow Network, and has also led an AHRC project on Canadian magazines.
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CFPs

PRESUMED AUTONOMY: Literature and the Arts in Theory and Practice

Call For Papers

10–13 May 2016

Department of English, Stockholm University

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy. 

The four-day conference seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to assess, from the perspective of the present, the historical trajectory of autonomy as it has been conceptualized, recognized, assumed, deployed, and questioned by critics and practitioners of art, and to explore artistic, philosophical, cultural, and institutional negotiations of art as embedded in and entangled with the multiple heteronomies of market, state, religion, education… (a list that cannot be complete). As there are important intersections between various definitions of autonomy as well as artistic practices, several methodological and thematic strands will be brought together in four streams:

–Autonomy and the Avant-garde 

–Theories of aesthetic autonomy 

–Fields, markets, capitals, commodities and autonomy 

–Autonomy and the body

The conference organizers invite contributions that address the issues indicated in the rubrics above. You can choose either to earmark your abstract for one of the streams, or send it in for general consideration. The list below can be taken to indicate the scope of those particular and general concerns, while not necessarily restricting the possibilities. Proposals for presentations should address the problematics of autonomy in relation to one or several of the following thematic headings:

•aesthetic codings of the modern: myths, styles, temporalities, and techniques

•affect

•the architecture of thought

•biopower and control

•capitalism

•the commodity

•contemporary critical efforts to re-theorize form

•the debate between activist and normative formalisms

•early twentieth-century theorizations of literature and modern art

•ecologies

•fields of cultural production

•education, the university: formation, reproduction and defense of autonomy

•forms of capital

•global modernisms

•the historical avant-garde

•inaesthetics

•institutions

•living materialities

•national, transnational, and postnational frameworks

•object-oriented vs. becoming-oriented paradigms

•politics

•the (post)human body

•spaces, territories, place

•the state as the source of autonomy or heteronomy

•“world literature,” the postcolonial condition, and economic globalization

Confirmed Keynotes: Nicholas Brown (University of Illinois, Chicago), Gisèle Sapiro (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris), Anne A. Cheng (Princeton University), Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London), Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Peter Kalliney (University of Kentucky) and Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist University).

 Please submit your paper abstract (about 500 words) and a brief biographical note either by email to autonomy@english.su.se or clickPROPOSAL SUBMISSION for online submission. The deadline for submissions is on 15 December, 2015.

Conference organizers: 

Gül Bilge Han (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Bo G. Ekelund (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Hans Färnlöf (Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University) 

Marina Ludwigs (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson (Department of English, Stockholm University)

Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva (Department of English, Stockholm University)

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CFPs

CFP: AUTHORSHIP AND APPROPRIATION

8th and 9th April 2016, University of Dundee

To celebrate the publication of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, edited by Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge University Press, 2015), we invite proposals for 20-minute papers that address the theory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of literary texts in any period. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

* The theory or practice of editing, collaboration, or “secondary” authorship;
* Translation, allusion, imitation and other forms of textual appropriation;
* The creative exchange between poetry, drama, non-fiction and the novel;
* Filmic, theatrical, operatic, musical or visual adaptations of literary texts;
* Counterfeits, forgeries, plagiarisms or other unacknowledged alterations;
* Continuations, extensions, parodies or pastiches of literary texts;
* The presence or impact of appropriative texts in a pedagogical context;
* Republication in anthologies, abridgements, magazines or other print and digital fora.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to Daniel Cook (d.p.cook@dundee.ac.uk) before 15th December 2015. We also welcome pre-fabricated panels of no more than three speakers, sponsored roundtables involving no more than five speakers, or alternative formats. Competitive travel bursaries will be available for Postgraduates and Early Career scholars based in the UK or Ireland (enquire within).

The programme and registration form will be available in the new year. Information about travel, accommodation, and the plenary speakers can be found on the website:

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Scholarships

International Joyce Foundation scholarships

The International Joyce Foundation is offering at least 6 scholarships worth $1,000 each to postgraduate and research students wishing to present at “Anniversary Joyce”, the XXV International James Joyce Symposium which will be held at the Institute of English Studies in London in June 2016. The deadline for applications is 15 February. Further details are available from the IJJF website at http://joycefoundation.osu.edu/foundation/scholarships.

For information about the Symposium, please visit http://anniversaryjoyce.com/

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CFPs

Call for Papers: Obscure Modernism

Birkbeck, University of London, 27 February 2016

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London)

Dr. Ian Patterson (Queens’ College, Cambridge)

This conference invites contributions on the more obscure aspects of modernism and modernist cultural production. Obscure modernism denotes, on the one hand, those works, artists and writers who have been forgotten or neglected by scholarship to date and whose full meaning and value we are only now beginning to appreciate. On the other hand, obscure modernism can also signify the result of an intentional act of obfuscation on the part of the artist, aimed at creating an aura of difficulty, mystical secrecy or utter senselessness. In modernist texts which resist legibility and in forms of modernist cultural production which are difficult to access or extremely limited in scale, obscurity can be seen as an underlying structural principle of the work itself.

By focussing our attention on what remains obscure within modernism, this conference ties in with the ongoing critical recovery of the less prominent or valued aspects of modernist culture under the auspices of the New Modernist Studies. In addition to this, we invite speakers to consider modernist obscurity not only as the passive result of artistic failure or critical misapprehension but as an active act of resistance to institutionalised forms of attention. This includes, for instance, the productions of the historical avant-garde which adopt obscurity in order to resist their incorporation into the institution of art. By considering the scholarly mantra to recover and recuperate vis-à-vis a modernism which can be viewed as inherently obscure, we hope to stimulate a renewed debate around the status of obscure work and its critical recovery within Modernist Studies.

We invite proposals for papers that could focus on, but are not limited to, topics such as:

  • Obscure figures or groups within modernism
  • Lesser-known works by prominent figures
  • Regional modernisms
  • The institutional space of modernism, and the dynamics of resistance and recuperation
  • The politics of critical recovery
  • Modernism and the occult/esoteric
  • Difficulty
  • Opacity
  • (Mis-)translation
  • Dealing with obscure material: modernist archives, small presses, limited editions, theatre and performance studies
  • Creative reconstructions of modernism

Submission guidelines:

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include a 250-300 word abstract and a short bio. Please send your proposal to obscuremodernism@gmail.com.

Submission deadline: 1st December 2015

Organised by Evi Heinz, Paul Ingram and David Miller.