CFP: Strata

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, to strataconference@gmail.com by Monday 9 March 2015.

strataconference@wordpress.com

AFTERMATH: the Cultural Legacies of WW1
The Arts & Humanities Research Institute at King’s, in conjunction with the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina, is staging a major international conference on the Cultural Legacies of World War I, to be held at King’s from 21-23 May 2015.

The conference will cover a wide range of aspects of how the First World War changed the world, such as its geopolitical aftermath (and its current repercussions in the Middle East); how people thought about future wars; the war’s impact on social history, the arts and popular cultures, and on science, technology, nursing and medicine.

Confirmed Keynote speakers include:

Dr Santanu Das, Department of English, King’s College London

Prof. David Edgerton, Director, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, KCL

Dr Kate McLoughlin, University of Oxford

Anne Marie Rafferty, Professor of Nursing Policy at the Florence Nightingale School of Nursing and Midwifery,KCL

Dr Eugene Rogan, Director, The Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford

Prof. Sir Simon Wessely, Vice Dean for Academic Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, KCL

Please send proposals (not more than 300 words) for papers of 20-25 minutes to:

max.saunders@kcl.ac.uk and laura.douglas@kcl.ac.uk

by 1 February 2015.

Postgraduate Conference ‒ Announcement and Call for Papers

St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London

will host a one-day Postgraduate Conference entitled

‘Digesting Modernity: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food’

on

Saturday 18^th April 2015

Food sustains a discussion about historical, sociological, anthropological and political changes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries both in Britain and abroad. Throughout the nineteenth century food production in England declined and the importation of foodstuffs from the colonies increased. This change in what and how food was eaten created anxieties about the role of women, inherent attitudes towards other races and the European perception of itself as the bastion of civilization. One unforeseen extension of importing food from distant lands was the growing problem of cannibalism through the shipwreck of merchant ships, a phenomenon which questioned societal codes of conduct and Victorian perceptions of morality. Food was used as a tool through which to examine political anxieties such as anarchy and capitalism, liberty and revolution. Food changed the status of women throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing them as moral agents of good cooking. Food crosses boundaries not just of race, class, nationality and gender, but across academic disciplines. This conference aims to bring together new and established views on how food can contribute to Modernist Studies.

Outline of the Conference

The conference will take the form of an interdisciplinary programme reflecting the diversity of current postgraduate work in food studies; it encourages contributions from new and established scholars working in the field of modernism who are eager to share their thoughts and research.

Papers considering food in literature, art, history, film, theatre or theological studies are welcome. Conference panels might include:

‘Food and Film’: Food as a cinematic motif, occasions of eating in film

‘The Politics of Food’: Vegetarianism/Veganism/Cannibalism

‘Economies of Food’: Famine/Gluttony

‘Aesthetics of Food’: Metaphorical eating, the art of food

‘Theology of Food’: The Eucharist, sacred food, sacrifice, religious symbolism of food

‘Food and Modern Literature’: Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Zola, Hardy, Orwell, James

‘Food in the Media’: Journalism, advertising, cook books

Call for Papers

The School of Arts and Humanities invites proposals for papers for a Postgraduate Conference on ‘Digesting Modernity: An Interdisciplinary Study of Food’ to be held at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.

Proposals for papers of 20 minutes and for panels on all topics related to the representation of food in Modernism are invited.

Abstracts of about 300 words should be sent no later than 30^th January 2015 in MS Word format to the conference organizer: kim.salmons@btinternet.com.

Confirmation of acceptance will be communicated within one week of the closing date.

Cost: The conference fee is £25 and includes lunch, tea and coffee.

Payment details: to be advised.

Call for papers

‘Perfectly phrased and quite as true’: Aphoristic Modernity, 1890–1950

We hold this truth to be self-evident: the conference will take place on the 4th of July 2015, at King’s Manor, University of York

Plenary speakers:
Dr Mark Sandy, Durham University
Dr James Williams, University of York

‘You cut life to pieces with your epigrams’, says Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray to Lord Henry. His statement is itself an adept epigram, encapsulating a particular kind of aphoristic writing which is pointed and authoritative, yet retains a hint of frivolity. Although aphoristic and epigrammatic writing hails from antiquity and has always been a diverse and popular literary genre, the final years of the Victorian era saw a surge in the popularity of the aphorism. As the rhythms of life and industry accelerated, along with the consumption of information, aesthetic fashions followed suit, and the aphorism came to encapsulate the condensation, spontaneity and fragmentation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity. As Henry James’ epigrammatic assessment of the Victorian novel implied, ‘loose, baggy monsters’ were out, economy of language was in, and the art of aphorism was revivified.

Along with its subgenera, such as the epigram, the witticism, and the apophthegm, the aphorism expresses the kernel of a truth in surprising ways, while playfully destabilising it – a duality embodied by Friedrich Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human (1878), one of the first modern works to undermine the systematised nature of western philosophical thought by employing aphoristic writing. On a more quotidian level, with advances in modern media drawing the cult of celebrity into the literary world, modern and modernist writers became celebrated for their bon mots. Accordingly, the nimble one-liner popularised by Wilde and Mark Twain was taken up and turned to different purposes by later public figures such as G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, T.S. Eliot, and Dorothy Parker. As this diverse company suggests, the aphorism can assume as many styles and modes as possible themes, while its airtight economy squeezes and condenses meaning rather than whittling it. Like a quaint contraption ingrained with cryptic clues that slowly spool out meaning, the modern aphorism is ‘neither a truism on the one hand, nor a riddle on the other’, as the late-Victorian journalist, John Morley put it.

This one-day conference aims not only to showcase the distinctive character of aphoristic writing in modernity, but also to rehabilitate the critical status of this miniaturised, ephemeral literary genre. We invite 20 minute papers and panel proposals on any of the following variations upon this theme (although respondents should not consider themselves restricted to these topics):

·         Aphoristic subgenres (epigram, apophthegm, maxim, proverb, sententia, etc.)
·         Aphorisms and politics
·         Celebrity and sound-bites
·         Paradox and/or self-contradiction
·         Technical ingenuity and/or innovation of thought
·         Aphorisms and modernism
·         Aphorisms and decadence
·         The stylistics of aphorisms
·         Witticisms and quips
·         Earnestness and irony
·         Quibbling and wordplay
·         Management of meaning: ambiguity, multiplicity, denseness
·         fel vs mel epigrams
·         The practice of quotation
·         Epigraphs, dedications and other paratextual fragments
·         Aphorisms implanted within larger texts
·         Aphorisms and literary theory
·         Modern aphoristic writing as influenced by antiquity and the Renaissance
·         Anti-aphorisms: platitudes and commonplaces
·         Anti-aphorisms: parody and nonsense aphorisms
·         Conversational and anecdotal aphorisms

Panels will follow the format of three 20-minute papers followed by questions. Abstracts of no more than 250 words are invited by 1st April 2015. Please email submissions to aphoristicmodernity@gmail.com

Writing Literary History: Europe 1900-1950

14-16 September 2015, University of Leuven

This conference is an initiative of the MDRN research lab at the University of Leuven (www.mdrn.be), which focuses on European literature from the (long) first half of the twentieth century. Recognizing that (modern) literary history is currently one of the main sites of theoretical and methodological reflection in literary studies, the conference aims to take stock of recent scholarship and to investigate how literary historical research has modified our understanding of writing between 1900 and 1950. We welcome proposals for papers which consider the following overall research questions and perspectives:

• Many crucial notions in literary studies have been revalued in recent years in the practice of literary history. These include archive, period, book, event, media, genre, generation, objects, style and the senses. How exactly has this conceptual revaluation affected our view of literature’s and writers’ complex dynamics and functions between 1900 and 1950? What aspects and notions of writing require further attention in future literary histories?

• Recent decades have seen an explosion of new or revised approaches in literary history. These include digital humanities, media archaeology, cognitive approaches, evocriticism and literary Darwinism, ecocriticism, object-oriented theories, affect theory and many more. Which of these are of special value to the history of literature from the modernist period and why?

• Our understanding of literature’s ‘context’ has gone through drastic changes in the past decades. Once universally understood as the immediate institutional, economic or political constellation surrounding a text, ‘context’ in present-day literary studies means a lot of things, from the ‘brain’ (in cognitive studies) to the ‘universe’ (in so-called Big History). How can these drastic redefinitions help us to reconceive the history of literature between 1900 and 1950?
• Place and space always have been said to be of significance to the historical development of European literature. What new approaches to space and place (from translation studies and memory studies to post-socialist research and geologically inspired methods working with concepts like deep time) allow us to reread the regional, national and transnational circulation of European writing during this half century?

• Which new forms of reading to have gained weight in recent years (from distant reading and uncritical reading to non-reading and beyond) are of relevance to the historiography of literature from the modernist period? Similarly, what new or hitherto neglected aspects of the materiality, reception and production of texts can help us to cast new light on the writing in the period?

• The first half of the twentieth-century saw the rise of many historiographical methods (from Formalism and early structuralism to neo-Marxism and early Critical Theory) that went on to play a crucial role in literary history. What aspects of these methods still hold potential today? Are there perhaps other approaches in literary history developed during the period have remained largely neglected but still hold promise?

Proposals for 20-minute presentations are welcome before 4 May 2015 and can be sent to: mdrn.wlh@gmail.com. Case-based contributions that can help us to revisit the writings from the modernist period will be considered, but our principal aim is to foster methodological and conceptual debate and to enhance the dialogue between the major literary and historiographical research traditions within Europe and beyond. For that reason proposals on general theoretical and methodological topics in the field of literary historiography (always with an emphasis on the period 1900-1950) will be favored. A selection of papers will be published after the conference.

For more information, visit www.mdrn.be.