Author: modernistudies

The organisers invite proposals for papers and presentations on the theme of ‘strata’ in the period 1845-1945 across the arts, humanities and social sciences, for a one-day interdisciplinary conference specifically aimed at postgraduate students.  In association with the University of Birmingham’s Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity and hosted by the College of Arts and Law, the conference will showcase current research from a variety of critical perspectives and use this to springboard dialogue across disciplines and institutions.

The period 1845-1945 saw the rise of the skyscraper, the development of underground railways in metropolitan centres, landmarks in archaeological discovery including the ancient city of Troy in 1868, the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 and the Sutton Hoo ship-burial in 1939. In the early twentieth century, the radiometric dating of strata revolutionised geology, while psychology moved into a laboratory setting, and pioneers such as Sigmund Freud developed ground-breaking analytical techniques to penetrate the unconscious. Thus, the era was one in which countless varieties of heights and depths were explored, their treasures exposed and their findings made to impact upon the ways in which both the external world and the internal self were perceived.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Psychic strata, consciousness, identity, dreams, multiple personalities

Geology, archaeological finds, fossils, artefacts, burial and tombs

Social and economic hierarchies, class boundaries

Artistic layering – collage, fashion, prosody, layers of narrative

Temporal strata, antiquity and modernity, time travel

The internal / external – anatomy, the body, skin; physical, mental, emotional

Layers of meaning – approaches to interpretation and criticism

Coatings and veneers – make-up, masks and disguises, truth and reality

Weather – layers of snow, ice and clouds

Architecture – buildings, structures extending up or down, the multi-storey

The symposium will be held at the University of Birmingham on Friday 8 May 2015. Please submit 200 word abstracts for 20 minute presentations, along with a 50 word biography, tostrataconference@gmail.com<mailto:strataconference@gmail.com> by Monday 9 March 2015.

Charles Taylor recently claimed that we live in “a secular age,” one in which a wide range of religious practices – and ways to opt out of those practices – are available. Today we might follow traditional forms of observance, establish new kinds of worship that are not strictly religious, or reject devotional pursuits altogether. Is Taylor right, or have these options always existed in varying degrees, in various periods and places?

This conference explores how religious and secular concerns overlap and inform modes of belief and forms of pious (and impious) expression. Rather than approach the sacred and the secular in dualistic terms, we seek ways to understand how the categories intersect and criss-cross. Rather than simply map religion onto literature or vice versa, we invite papers that conceptualize and describe the interrelation between the two. We welcome diverse ways of framing and pursuing the conference theme and hence encourage contributions from scholars not only in literary and religious studies, but also from visual studies, history, philosophy, psychology, archeology, and elsewhere, both within and across religious traditions and in the public sphere.

We welcome papers from graduate and undergraduate students.

Send 300-word proposals to:
Jennifer Gurley, Department of English,
Le Moyne College (gurleyja@lemoyne.edu) and

William Robert, Department of Religion,
Syracuse University (wrobert@syr.edu)

Deadline for proposals: March 1, 2015
Notification: April 1, 2015

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Thursday, October 1 at 4 p.m. through Saturday, October 3 at 9 p.m.
Central New York Wine Country Tour (optional) on Sunday, October 4 from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

September 24-27, 2015

Hosted by Clemson University at the Hyatt Regency in Greenville, SC

Call for Papers

ASAP/7 invites proposals from scholars and artists on the relations between the public—broadly conceived – and contemporary visual, literary, performing, musical, and media arts. From parks, schools, and museums to monuments, performances, and protests, the public encompasses less a specific domain than a varying set of political institutions, community spaces, and cultural objects. Whether construed as virtual or bureaucratic, as utopian or ecological, the public can be both a catalyst for artistic production and an object of cultural critique. Although we gladly accept outstanding proposals on any topic relating to the contemporary arts, we encourage participants to think inventively about the intersections between and among the public, its manifestations and conceptualizations, and the arts of the present.

POSSIBLE TOPICS INCLUDE:

• “Outsider,” Self-taught, and DIY Art
• Social Protest and the Arts
• Monuments and Anti-monuments
• Private and Civic Life
• Land Art
• Art Squats and Artist-run Collectives
• Pedagogy and Art Education
• Media Ecologies
• Political Aesthetics
• Neoliberalism and Late Capitalism
• The Commons
• Urban Planning, Bureaucracy, and Built Environments
• Regional/Transnational Geographies
• Landscapes, Cityscapes, Soundscapes
• Gender, Sexuality, Spectacle
• Spaces of Race, Ethnicity, Migration
• Temporality, Commemoration, Futurity
• Design, Architecture, and Infrastructure

The program committee will consider papers on these or any other topic relating to the contemporary arts. In keeping with our mission, we are especially interested in sessions that feature more than one artistic medium and more than one national tradition. The program committee will give preference to panels and roundtables that feature papers by scholars and artists working across and between disciplines.

SESSION FORMATS:

We welcome and encourage creative and alternative presentational styles, alongside traditional papers and panels. Seminars, workshops, panel debates, artist discussions, films, installations, visual displays, and PechaKucha sessions will all be considered. Seminar leaders are asked to propose topics by the deadline and to submit the full roster of participants by 3.15.2015. Seminars normally meet for a single session, and papers are circulated among participants in advance of the conference.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

Abstracts and session submissions should include the following information:

1. Title of paper or session
2. Author(s): name and contact information (including email address)
3. Format and style of presentation
4. Abstract or session description:

• 300-word abstracts for individual papers; or
• 700-word abstracts for:

Panels (3-4 participants)

Roundtables (5-9 participants)

Seminars (8-10 participants)

Other formats

5. Brief descriptions (up to 150 words) of work and publications for each participant
6. Optional: up to two jpeg images, each under 2MB, to complement your proposal

Proposed sessions should include speakers from more than one institution. We welcome submissions from a wide range of disciplines, academic ranks, and institutional positions, as well as from practicing artists in any medium.

PLEASE SEND PROPOSALS TO: asap7.greenville@gmail.com

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: 02.15.2015

A preliminary announcement for the summer symposium “Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible,” including a seminar “The ‘dailiness’ of everyday life”

Nordic Summer University, Heterologies of the Everyday research circle

18-25 July, 2015, Druskininkai, Lithuania.

Keynote speakers: Ben Highmore and Roberta Mock.

Everyday space is a space of relational practices, where lives unfold within the fluid relationscapes of spaces, things and others around us. These everyday relationscapes are grounded by material and historical circumstances within the ideological landscape of a body-politics. This symposium considers political dimensions of the everyday and aims at imagining a new “aesthetic politics of the ordinary” (Ben Highmore). According to Jacques Rancière, “Human beings are tied together by a certain sensory fabric, a certain distribution of the sensible, which defines their way of being together; and politics is about the transformation of the sensory fabric of ‘being together’.” This symposium will consider new possibilities for political and aesthetic renewal.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to

–          sensation and togetherness as the connecting links between small events of the everyday and the life of the polis;

–          heterological, differential moments of the everyday;

–          everyday aesthetics as a ground for art, but also for politics and social life;

–          artistic representations of the everyday in the context of the polis.

–          the single day as an entry point to understanding the everyday; dialogues between a single day and the everyday as such.

Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and a short bio to Epp Annus, by 1 May 2015 (annus.1@osu.edu). If you wish to participate without giving a paper, kindly send a short (150-300 word) description of yourself and your interests, also by 1 May 2015. Later submissions may be considered, should there still be available places.

The symposium also includes a seminar “The ‘dailiness’ of everyday life”. Potential participants will be invited to submit a short position paper (2-3,000 words) on the topic in advance of the seminar. These papers will be circulated among participants in advance of the session and will form the basis of the seminar discussion. The seminar will be limited to 12 participants, but auditors will be welcome. Please send abstracts (300-500 words) and a short bio to Bryony Randall, by 15 April 2015 (Bryony.Randall@glasgow.ac.uk). Proposals are invited on any aspect of the single day and the everyday, but participants may wish to consider the following questions as part of their contributions:

What does a focus on the ‘dailiness’ of everyday life, its daily temporality, bring to our understanding of contemporary literature, culture and society? How does this intersect with key issues of class, race, gender and sexuality that underpin experiences of the everyday? Or put another way, how can the data, narratives, experiences and affects captured in a single day be mobilised to help us understand and transform the ’distribution of the sensible’? And how do recent discoveries and preoccupations that form the epistemology of our times affect the space that dailiness and the day occupy in representations of contemporary life? (for example information surfeit; preoccupation with loss of memory; new understanding of the plasticity of memories).

The symposium “Everyday politics: Redistributions of the sensible” is organized by the research circle Heterologies of the Everyday, which is part of the Nordic Summer University network. This circle aims to address what is most relevant and unavoidably present for every human being: everyday existence. This is an interdisciplinary project that works at the intersection of cultural studies, philosophy, literary criticism, art criticism, film studies, urban studies, anthropology, sociology and human geography.

The 2015 Summer Session of the Nordic Summer University will take place in Druskininkai, Lithuania, in a 19th century spa resort:http://www.groupeuropa.com/europa_royale/hotel_druskininkai/about_hotel_druskininkai/

See further announcements or contact annus.1@osu.edu for practical information (including participation fees and travel tips). Childcare is provided for children starting from age 3.

Please find attached a CFP for a one day conference on the theme of grace in literatures in English: https://queenmaryenglish.wordpress.com/cfp-grace-conference-190615/

Cfp_Grace (1)

One-Day Conference

Sponsored by the Sussex Centre for Modernist Studies

April 20th 2015

Keynote Speakers: Professor Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins University) and Dr. Natalia Cecire (Sussex)

More information available here

Proposals due 1st March 2015
modernismschildconference@gmail.com