Author: modernistudies

Fourth international conference at The University of Hull Friday 12^th June 2020

Co-organised by Dr Sue Kennedy and Professor Jane Thomas

This conference aims to rekindle the energy unleashed at the inaugural conference on British Women’s Writing 1930 to 1960: Revision, Revival, Rediscovery in 2016 at Hull University that was taken forward in conferences at Chichester University in 2017 and 2018. The fourth conference seeks to gather more research and discussion from scholars of women’s literature of this period and to continue the re-evaluation of women’s writing occupying a liminal place in ‘the canon’ of British literature as taught by the academy.

The conference will also launch the publication of Liverpool University Press’s essay collection British Women Writers 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves, that arose from the first conference, edited by Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas.

https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/books/id/52606/

This fourth conference in the series offers speakers and audience a forum to give new life to readings of more  works by neglected women authors. We offer a space to consider the problems lamented by Kristin Bluemel and Phyllis Lassner in the first issue of the journal Feminist Modernist Studies in 2017 that are still faced by scholars of early and mid-twentieth-century writing by and about women that is ‘not modernist in terms of style, politics or coterie’ in the face of the preferences of publishers and academic institutions for research on topics admitted to a modernist canon.

The emphasis on the work of neglected women writers celebrates their non-canonical and middlebrow status; works that Elizabeth Maslen describes as among the ‘texts which we neglect to our very great loss’, of which there remain too many.

A distinguishing feature of these conferences has been the interest of an increasingly appreciative section of the reading public in women’s writing of this period, aided by the steadfast work of recovery performed by publishing houses, notably Virago, Persephone and most recently, Handheld Press and cultural commentators and journalists like Lucy Scholes.

Keynote speakers will be:

Dr Kate Macdonald, literary historian, writer and director of Handheld Press, a small independent publishing house based in Bath that republishes forgotten fiction and authors from the twentieth century. Recent publishing successes include Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin, Inez Holden’s Blitz Writing and Rose Macaulay’s What Not.

Dr Lucy Scholes, a cultural critic who writes for The Financial Times, The Telegraph, NYR Daily, The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub and Granta, among other publications, with an emphasis on recovering the work of lost women writers. She writes “Re-Covered”, a monthly column for the Paris Review about out-of-print and forgotten books that shouldn’t be, and is the Managing Editor of the literary magazine, The Second Shelf: Rare Books and Words by Women.

Call for papers

We welcome papers that approach a wide range of forms and genres: fiction, poetry, drama, life writing, film, particularly the lesser-known contributions of women writers to what might be seen as ‘untypical’ of female authors, extending and augmenting the excellent contributions to the first three conferences.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for papers of no more than 20 minutes or panels of 3 associated papers.

Examples might include the following, although other topics are most welcome:

• Writing about war and the aftermath of two world conflicts
• Writing against war; interwar political consciousness
• Domestic fiction; gender, class, families
• Race
• Post-colonial writing
• Queer writing; writing against the norm
• Science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy
• Life writing/autobiography
• Fiction for children
• Historical fiction
• Crime fiction
• Periodicals/magazines
• Poetry
• Drama
• Adaptation for film or stage

https://britishwomenwriters1930to1960.com

Please include a brief personal biography (about 50 words).

Do contact us if you have any questions and for submissions

Closing date for submissions March 17^th 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS
Spatial Modernities: Mapping the Physical and Psychological World Symposium

 Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

16 May 2020

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Gregory (Lancaster University)

Since the ‘spatial turn’ in the 1970s, scholars, theorists, scientists, and intellectuals across the globe have been carving out new critical, theoretical, and methodological concepts to expand and redefine the scope of space. Inspired by the fantastic ways that space and modernity interact, scholars have been bringing new experiences and interpretations to understandings of spatial modernity or modern spatiality. The borders of modernities and spatiality blurred and the spark of inspirations flickered.

This poses exciting opportunities and challenges to modern studies: What are ‘spatial modernities’ and how are they developed in and beyond humanities? How do the meanings and implications of space and modern evolve across the global world? How does the physical and psychological modernity respond to these modernities? How do we define, clarify, complicate, and push the debate over the borders forward? How does the map work or fail in the mysterious unfamiliar place?

The principle aim of this symposium is to encourage a robust, diverse, and interdisciplinary conversation on place, space, or map in the modern world. The Cmods postgraduate forum tenth annual symposium invites proposals for 15-minute papers. We wish to push the limits of how we interpret and understand spatial modernity as a categorical term. We encourage physical or material perspectives on architecture, geography, landscape, territory, region, area, and city, discussions on the invisible, imaginative, and psychological worlds, explorations of psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space, and conversations about the roles of maps in the modern era.

As such, we welcome papers from postgraduates and early career researchers working in literature, archaeology, language and linguistics, philosophy, history, music, art, media, geography, and other fields. Some thematic prompts include, but are not limited to:

• physical, metaphorical, embodied ways to explore modernity and space, place, and/or map
• critical and creative approaches to the connection between modernity and space
• time and space in modern studies
  ● spaces and places of the future or fantastical spaces
  ● the commodification of place, space, and/or map
• psychogeography and modernity
• psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space
  ● politics of place, space, or map (territory sovereignty, colonialism, and empire, etc)
• space, place, and/or map & gender, sexuality, religion, race, migration, animal, and environment

We welcome proposals from postgraduates (master and Ph.D. students) and ECRs. Please send an abstract (300-500 words) along with a brief bio (100 words) to (cmods-pgforum@york.ac.uk) by 8 March 2020. Queries can be directed to this email address also. We are open to receiving standard presentations and encouraging non-traditional forms of participation. HRC (Humanities Research Centre) has generously funded the travel bursaries of £150 for non-funded PGs (MA or Ph.D.) or precariously employed ECAs who are in need.

Our Website:  https://www.york.ac.uk/modernstudies/postgraduate-forum/#tab-2     

Our twitter: Countervoices( @cmodspgforum1) https://twitter.com/cmodspgforum1

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/countervoice/

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Gregory

Professor Ian Gregory is a geographer, historian and director of Lancaster Digital Humanities Hub. He is a geographer by training and has spent much of his career working applying Geographical Information Systems (GIS) to historical research, a field that has become known as Historical GIS. As a result of the growth of Digital Humanities, he has become particularly interested in using GIS with texts as well as the more traditional quantitative sources. Further information and publications could be checked here https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/staff/gregoryi/ . He has been involved in a number of projects that are concerned with what has become known as ‘Spatial Humanities’, a field that is concerned with using geographical technologies to better understand the geographies of our history and culture. Projects he has been involved in include:

• Spatial Humanities: Texts, GIS, Places (ERC funded)
• Geospatial Innovations in the Digital Humanities: A deep map of the English Lake District (the Leverhulme Trust)
• Great War Lancaster: Streets of Mourning and Community Memory (Heritage Lottery Fund)
• Reassembling the Republic of Letters (COST)
• Troubled Geographies: Two centuries of religious division in Ireland (funded by the AHRC/ESRC’s Religion & Society programme)
• Mapping the Lakes (British Academy funded)

Women Writers and Social/Political Activism
A special issue of Women: A Cultural Review

Call for Abstracts
Guest Editors: Lise Shapiro Sanders and Carey Snyder
Deadline for Submissions: August 1, 2020

The early twentieth century abounded with movements that reshaped women’s lives—including those for women’s suffrage, peace, birth control, and better working conditions, among others. Women writers addressed these issues not only in socially and politically engaged journalism, but also in feminist manifestoes, poetry, fiction, and drama. This special issue explores the relationship between women’s writing and social and political activism, from the 1890s to the 1940s. The collection will be comprised of a series of case studies, with a focus on non-canonical and ephemeral archival materials. In framing this focus, we are particularly interested in genres and forms of writing that are on the periphery of, if not totally excluded from, the purview of literary studies. Responding to recent calls for more scholarship on women writers in the period, this collection seeks to recover the place of social and political activism in shaping women writers’ relationships to modernity. With close attention to genre and literary form, our collection foregrounds neglected archival material by activist women, thus enriching our understanding of women’s contributions to early twentieth-century literary and cultural history.

Prospective contributors are invited to submit a 500-word abstract and a brief bio to Lise Shapiro Sanders (lsanders@hampshire.edu) and Carey Snyder (snyderc3@ohio.edu) by August 1, 2020. Selected contributors will be invited to submit full articles by May 1, 2021. Acceptance and publication in the special issue will be subject to review by the journals’ editors and external peer reviewers.

The next London Modernism Seminar will the place on Saturday 8 February, 11.00-13.00 at King’s College London, Room S0.12 in the Strand Building.

The theme of the seminar is Science and we’re delighted to have Cleo Hanaway-Oakley and Rachel Murray as our speakers. More details about their talks can be found below. Everyone is welcome to attend and there is no need to pre-book a place.

You can find directions to the venue here:https://www.kcl.ac.uk/visit/strand-building

Abstracts:

Cleo Hanaway-Oakley, ‘a most curious look towards the red light’: Colour Blindness across the Victorian-Modernist Divide

In 1891 Thomas H. Bickerton, a leading ophthalmologist, declared: ‘COLOUR-BLINDNESS has now passed from the category of ailments denominated interesting, and is recognized as a visual infirmity the importance of which cannot be over’. Indeed, during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, non-normative colour vision acted as a keystone in discussions on economics, public safety, employment, medicine, philosophy, anthropology, and genetics.

This multifaceted fascination with colour vision is reflected, in various ways, across the literature of the period. Dickens’ and Conrad’s texts engage, albeit indirectly, with debates about shipping and railway accidents – with Conrad also alluding to ‘primitive’ colour vision. Woolf’s and Joyce’s considerations are more abstracted, but they continue some of the earlier discussions surrounding colour vision’s connection to knowledge, language, power, and other senses.
By discussing canonical modernists alongside writers on the margins of modernism, as well as those usually labelled ‘Victorian’, this paper demonstrates how colour vision caught the attention of different writers in different ways. As well as analysing literary texts, I will be drawing upon research conducted as part of my fellowship at the Science Museum, London. Blending object-based research, historical study, and literary analysis, I am starting to investigate the changing cultural status and signification of colour blindness, c. 1860-1940.

Dr Cleo Hanaway-Oakley is Lecturer in Liberal Arts and English at the University of Bristol. She is also a Science Museum Research Associate and Membership Secretary for the British Association for Modernist Studies. Her first monograph, ‘James Joyce and the Phenomenology of Film’, was published by Oxford University Press in 2017. She is currently working on a new book-project provisionally entitled ‘Multifocal Modernism: Literature and Non-normative Vision’.

Rachel Murray, ‘Modernism and the Insect Body’

From the carapaced figures of Wyndham Lewis’s war paintings to the human swarms of D. H. Lawrence’s interwar fiction, modernism teems with entomological imagery. Identifying a shared fascination with the aesthetic possibilities of the insect body, my paper will propose that this order of life can shed new light on modernism’s formal innovations, its engagement with key socio-political concerns, as well as its questioning of the boundaries of the human.

Rachel Murray is a postdoctoral research fellow at Loughborough University. Her book, ‘The Modernist Exoskeleton: Insects, War, Literary Form’, will be published by Edinburgh University Press in April 2020.

On the anniversary of her birth, a panel of experts explore the extraordinary life and writings of Nan Shepherd. Dr Scott Lyall will be joined by Dr Kerri Andrews, Erlend Clouston, Professor Alison Lumsden and Dr Samantha Walton to discuss the significance of Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, her novels and poetry, place in the Scottish Literary Renaissance, and influence on the nature writing of today. There will be readings of Shepherd’s work by actress Sarah Innes, and an audience Q&A. This event is supported by the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Imprints of the New Modernist Editing: Blue & Green: A one-day practical workshop in pochoir printing, led by Jane Hyslop (project Co-Investigator) Edinburgh College of Art, Friday 21st February 2020 

During the modernist period the pochoir printing technique was used extensively in fashion illustration. It offers a unique, liminal space between printing and painting in which artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Man Ray and Max Ernst became interested. Many of them made works associated with or including texts and imagery moved across the page allowing colour to be brought into the textual sphere. 

This workshop will start with a short presentation offering insight into the technique, its history and applications. There will then follow a hands-on workshop enabling participants to gain direct experience of using pochoir, taking its conceptual focus the relationship between image and text in the material form of the book. 

Virginia Woolf’s Blue and Green has been selected as the text which will be investigated offering a rich and evocative range of imagery that can be explored. 

Participants will start by working together tracing imagery, cutting stencils and mixing paints to learn how layers of colour can be applied. They will then have the opportunity to make their own imagery using the pochoir technique to make a series of prints to take away from the event. 

Jane Hyslop is a Lecturer in Painting and Illustration at Edinburgh College of Art. Her work is centred upon print and the artists’ book with recent research into pochoir printing, its history and application in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. 

Please note that all expenses for participants, including UK travel, catering, and accommodation if required, will be covered. To apply for this workshop please complete a brief application form by noon on Monday 27th January 2020. Successful applications will be confirmed by Thursday 30th January 2020. 

Contact: imprintsnme [at] gmail.com