University of Bologna  6/7 September 2016

Confirmed Speakers:

Stephen Bann, University of Bristol

Howard J. Booth, University of Manchester

Jan Montefiore, University of Kent

Harry Ricketts, Victoria University of Wellington

Papers are invited that address Rudyard Kipling’s engagement with the history, politics, and culture of mainland Europe. Though he reached a huge audience there, Kipling’s response to, and impact upon, continental Europe has been little discussed – an omission this conference aims to address. More can be said than that he loved France and its culture and held negative views about Germany. In fact, his response to continental Europe was complex, and changed over time. Kipling had a keen sense of Europe’s history, whether political, religious and cultural. Importantly, the European and British Empire contexts – where Kipling is usually viewed in terms of the latter – are not wholly separate and distinct. The global politics of Kipling’s time was formed by competing, mostly European, nations, empires and political movements.

Possible themes for papers include

• Kipling and Italy, France, Germany or other nations of mainland Europe
• Kipling, Europe and modernity
• The translation, publishing history and reception of Kipling’s works in mainland Europe
• Kipling and European nationalism
• The wider European dimensions of the history of the British Isles, and its nations and regions, in Kipling’s writing
• Kipling and an independent Ireland
• Kipling, Britain’s empire and other European empires
• Kipling and the European theatres of the First World War
• Kipling and medieval Europe
• Kipling, travel and mainland Europe
• Kipling and the European Left
• Kipling, Europe and wartime propaganda
• Kipling and the rise of Fascism and Nazism
• Kipling, Europe and the United States
• Kipling and European writers and artists

A special issue of The Kipling Journal is planned arising from the conference (subject to its usual peer review process)

Proposals of 250 words for 20-25 minute papers should be sent to Prof. Monica Turci, University of Bologna, at the conference email address kiplingandeurope@gmail.com by 20 February 2016.

International conference, Radboud University (The Netherlands)

26-27 May 2016

Call for papers

What did it mean to define oneself as ‘modern’ in Europe during the period extending from Enlightenment ‘modernity’ to the early 20^th-century modernist movement in the arts? How were national self-definitions in Europe linked during this period to (perceived) modernity, most often in opposition to (perceived) tradition? In other words, what is modernity, when and how did it begin (and has it already ended)? Have we in fact ever been modern?  Is there one modernity, or are there  multiple modernities?

Modernity is without a doubt one of the most vexed concepts in present-day scholarship. Yet it continues to be used across the humanities, in philosophy, political theory and in a variety of other fields as well. Since the beginning of the introduction of the term ‘modernity’, the category of the modern has been used variously to polemically denote a decisive break with the past, the new superseding the old, and a linear view of historical progress onward and upward that succeeded in replacing older, cyclical views. Historically, the role of science, religion, the Enlightenment and political economy add further degrees of complexity to any deployment of the concept.

As scholars in the humanities, understanding and interrogating the concept of modernity is therefore of critical importance for our work. Changing concepts of modernity help us capture and define elements of the past in changing ways, as well as modify the way historians relate to the past. Heritage studies have sharpened our sense of the extent to which the past and its traditions can haunt even the most ‘modern’ societies. Perhaps the most radical change has occurred in the way historians understand the relationship between religion and the modern: a clear dichotomy between past and present has yielded to a fascinatingly complex history of interrelated developments.  Even in the history of philosophy, the evolution of what it means to be modern has changed: calling Spinoza modern does not mean today what it did thirty years ago. Lastly, the subject of modernity has important implications for the humanities at the epistemological level: is there a specifically post/meta/late modern epistemology for the humanities?

The Radboud University Faculty of Arts is pleased to present a conference that will address these questions related to the concept of modernity from the Enlightenment to the early 20^th century. Bringing together international scholars, the purpose of this conference is to take stock of the latest developments in the discussions on modernity, and examine their implications for our understanding of history, religion, national identities and literature.

We invite 20-minute papers or (interdisciplinary) panel proposals (three papers and panel chair) that explore one or more of the following themes:

• the New and the Old, from theology to history

• classic narratives of modernity, and their related concepts: pre-modern versus modern, Dark Ages versus Enlightenment, modernity versus tradition, etc.

• modernity and national identities in Europe

• the problem of continuities: how do narratives of modernity deal with historical continuities?

• modernity and secularization: how does recent work on the religious Enlightenment, among others, render problematic the traditional identification of modernity with secularization?

• modernity and artistic and / or literary avant-gardes: how has the concept of modernity contributed to the (self-)representations of avant-garde cultural movements?

• anti-modernity and national or cultural conservatism: how have the proponents of modernity defined their own movement in relation to other movements, and how have anti-modern movements conversely positioned themselves in the socio-political field?

Authors of papers presented at the conference will be invited to submit a revised version of their paper for publication in a peer-reviewed essay collection.

Please submit your 300-word paper proposal, accompanied by a brief bio-bibliographical statement listing your position and institutional affiliation, by November 10, 2015.

The conference is scheduled to take place in May 2016.

Conference organizers:

Dr. Marguerite Corporaal

Jordy Geerlings, MA

Prof. Dr. Maarten DePourcq

Prof. dr. Alicia C. Montoya

Dr. Mathijs Sanders

The next Nordic Association of English Studies (NAES) conference will take place at the University of Agder, in Kristiansand (Norway), from May 4 to 7 next year. Papers and panels related to modernism are welcome. Please find the call for papers enclosed.

NAES call for papers