Author: modernistudies

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CFPs Postgraduate

Digital Diversity 2015: Writing | Feminism | Culture

Digital Diversity 2015: Writing | Feminism | Culture

Orlando turns 20

Edmonton, Canada 7-9 May 2015

How have new technologies transformed literary and cultural histories? How do they enable critical practices of scholars working in and outside of digital humanities? Have decades of digital studies enhanced, altered, or muted the project to recover and represent more diverse histories of writers, thinkers, and artists positioned differently by gender, race, ethnicity, sexualities, social class and/or global location?  This conference examines the trajectory of feminist digital studies, observing the ways in which varied projects have opened up the objects and methods of literary history and cultural studies. It marks the twentieth anniversary of the start of the Orlando Project, an ongoing experiment in digital methods that produces Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles, from the Beginnings to the Present (orlando.cambridge.org). Alongside pioneering projects such as the Women Writers Project, the Corvey Project, the Dickinson Electronic Archives, the Perdita Project, and the Victorian Women Writers Project, Orlando blazed a new path in the field, bringing together feminist literary studies with emerging methods of digital inquiry.  These twenty years have witnessed a revolution in how we research, produce, and circulate knowledge. It is time to reflect upon the impact of the digital turn on engagement with the literary and cultural past.

We welcome presentations that will together reflect on the past, present, and future of digital literary and cultural studies; examine synergies across digital humanities projects; and stimulate exchanges across such fields as literary history, history, art history, cultural studies, and media studies.

Potential topics include:

  • Transformations and evaluations of feminist, gender, queer and other recuperative literary studies
  • Digital manifestations of critical race studies, transatlantic/transnationalist or local/community-based approaches
  • Collaborations between digital humanities specialists and scholars in other fields
  • Born-digital critical and creative initiatives in cultural history (journals, blogs, electronic “branch” projects, crowdsourcing, multi-media, and interactive projects)
  • Editorial initiatives, digitization and curation of primary texts, representation of manuscripts and the writing process
  • Inquiry into texts, networks, and historical processes via visualization and other “distant reading” strategies
  • Authorship and collaboration: the work of women and other historically marginalized writers, traditional models of scholarship, and new conditions of digital research and new media
  • Sound and sight: sound and visual arts studies in digital environments
  • Identities and diversity in new media: born-digital arts in word, sound, and image, in genres including documentaries, blogs, graphic novels, memoirs, hypertexts and e-literature
  • Conditions of production: diversity in academia, publishing, library, information science, or programming, past and present
  • Cultural and political implications of particular tools or digital modes of presentation
  • Pedagogical objectives, practices, environments
  • Dissemination, accessibility, and sustainability challenges faced by digital projects

The conference will include paper/panel presentations as well as non-traditional presentation formats. Please submit abstracts (500 words for single paper, poster, or demonstration, and 1500 words for panels of 3 papers or workshops) along with a short CV for each presenter. We are applying for funding to support the participation of students and emerging scholars.

We welcome proposals for other non-traditional formats. Half- to full-day workshops will be held on the first day of the conference; demonstrations and poster presentations will be embedded in the conference program. Proposals for workshops should provide a description, outline, and proposed schedule indicating the length of time and type of space desired.

The deadline for all submissions is  26 September 2014. Send proposals and CVs by email, to digdiv2015@gmail.com. Follow us on Twitter @digdiv2015.

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Events

Oscillate! Metamodernism and the Humanities – Glasgow, Tuesday, September 16th, 2014

Oscillate!

Metamodernism and the Humanities

An Interdisciplinary Conference on Critical, Creative and Cultural Practice.

Tuesday, September 16th, 2014

University of Strathclyde; Confucius Room, Lord Hope Building; 141 St James Road, Glasgow

facebook.com/OscillateStrathclyde : @OscillateStrath

Keynote speaker: Dr Timotheus Vermeulen, assistant professor in cultural studies and theory, University of Nijmegen, editor of Notes on Metamodernism

‘Metamodernism displaces the parameters of the present with those of a future presence that is futureless; and it displaces the boundaries of our place with those of a surreal place that is placeless. For, indeed, that is the ‘‘destiny’’ of the metamodern wo/man: to pursue a horizon that is forever receding.’
(Notes on Metamodernism, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, 2010)

The postmodernism of the period following the Vietnam War is presumed dead, or at best dormant, no longer the vanguard. So what comes next? What are the defining characteristics of cultural logic post-9/11, post-Lehman Brothers? One of the most compelling interventions in the post-postmodernism debate is metamodernism, an increasingly contested and exasperating matrix of critical theory nominalism encompassing theories such as altermodernism and neomodernism.

The Journalism, Creative Writing and English Literature postgraduate students at the University of Strathclyde are pleased to announce a new research symposium uniting emerging work in the arts and humanities to explore the concept of metamodernism. This event is open to Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers or scholars working in any area of the arts, humanities, information sciences or social sciences. We are delighted to be joined by Dr Timotheus Vermeulen, who will deliver an opening lecture on metamodernism and offer concluding responses to the day’s discussion.

Deriving from Plato’s term metaxy, meaning ‘in between’ or ‘the movement between opposing poles’, metamodernism is offered by cultural theorists Timotheus Vermuelen and Robin van den Akker to describe a “structure of feeling” which departs from the “plenty, pastiche and parataxis” of postmodernism in favour of a state of oscillation between the idealism and optimism of modernism, and the cynicism and doubt of postmodernism: “It yearns for a truth it knows it may never find, it strives for sincerity without lacking humour, it engages precisely by embracing doubt.” From music to film, from architecture to journalism, the postmodernist urge to subvert and deconstruct has given way to a sincere desire to reinvent, reconfigure and create something new from the scraps of postmodernist decay.

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: British Society for Literature and Science Tenth Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 16-18 April 2015

CFP: British Society for Literature and Science Tenth Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 16-18 April 2015

The tenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Liverpool, on 16-18 April 2015. Keynote talks will be given by Professor Keith Barnham (Imperial College London), Dr Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), and Dr Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London).

The BSLS invites proposals for twenty-minute papers, or panels of three papers, on any subjects within the field of literature and science. In addition, ‘flash talks’ of up to 7 minutes on any topic are invited for a special plenary session. Other formats are also welcomed, but please email your suggestion to the organisers (viabsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk) for consideration, well in advance of the submission deadline.

This year the organisers would particularly welcome proposals addressing the themes of light, optics, vision and colour, and proposals for papers, panels or roundtables on engaging the public with literature and science research. However, the BSLS remains committed to supporting and showcasing work on all aspects of literature – including comparative literature and European and world literatures – and science, medicine and technology.

Proposals of no more than 250 words, together with the name and institutional affiliation of the speaker, and a biographical note of around 50 words, should be sent in the body of messages (not in attachments) to bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk. Proposals for panels should include a separate proposal and biographical note for each paper. The closing date for submissions is Friday 5 December 2014.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Accommodation: please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels will be made available soon on the forthcoming conference website.

Membership: conference delegates will need to register as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged). It will be possible to join the BSLS when registering for the conference online.

For further information and updates about the conference, please contact Greg Lynall (bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk). A conference website will be available in due course.

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CFPs Postgraduate

Deadline Extended: Katherine Mansfield in the Short Story Tradition

PLEASE NOTE DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 30 SEPTEMBER. POSTGRADUATES PRESENTING A PAPER WILL HAVE ONE NIGHT’S ACCOMMODATION (APPROX 30 EUROS) FUNDED BY THE KMS.
Katherine Mansfield in the Short Story Tradition

International Conference organised by The University of Limerick in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

INCLUDING

Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Postgraduate Day

21-22 November 2014

Guest Speakers:

Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison-Pégon and

 Heather Ingman

Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century: her experiments with subject matter, style, theme, setting, handling of subjectivity, and point of view have had a lasting impact on the genre.  Like her contemporary James Joyce, Mansfield simplified plot to highlight a moment of revelation, thereby approaching, in Willa Cather’s words, “the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents.”  A passionate reader and translator of Chekhov, an accomplished musician, a sometime-actress and impersonator with a deep interest in cinema, and a friend and associate of numerous painters and writers, Mansfield brought to the short story form a wide-ranging engagement with the aesthetic movements of her time.  As the “little colonial walking in the London garden patch,” moreover, Mansfield exemplifies Edward Said’s contention that “Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.”

We invite proposals for this two-day international conference.  The first day of the conference will feature postgraduate scholarship; the second day of the conference is open to all Mansfield scholars. Proposals should address the multiple ways in which Mansfield engaged with and contributed to the short story form. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Mansfield and her contemporaries (Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys)
  • Mansfield and the modernist short story
  • Mansfield and Chekhov
  • Mansfield and women writers of the short story
  • Mansfield and New Zealand
  • Mansfield and the little magazines
  • Mansfield’s use of other media (e.g. music, cinema, painting)
  • Mansfield and narrative theory
  • Mansfield and exilic subjectivity
  • Thematic innovations (domesticity; home; food; marriage)
  • Mansfield and urban geographies; the flaneuse; travel

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference

organisers: kmintheshortstorytradition@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: 30 SEPTEMBER 2014

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Events

Shame and the Act of Writing: A One Day Symposium – Warwick, Friday 19th September

Shame and the Act of Writing: A One Day Symposium
Friday 19th September
Millburn House (A0.26/28), University of Warwick
 
You are cordially invited to join us for this one day symposium which brings together writers from across the disciplines to reflect on the place of shame in different practices of modern(ist) writing.  Our speakers include:
 
Geoffrey Gilbert (Paris), author of Before Modernism Was: Modern History and the Constituencies of Writing
John Goodby (Swansea), author of The Poetry of Dylan Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall
Denise Riley (UEA), author of Am I That Name? and Impersonal Passion
And our themes will include:
  • the place of shame in the ‘affective turn’ within the Humanities and Social Sciences
  • the cultural configurations of shame and writing around questions of class, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity
  • the translation of shame across linguistic and cultural borders
  • shame and new media practices, especially the negotiation of the private/public spheres  
  • the shame of reading forbidden texts
  • shame and plagiarism (or the writing of borrowed words)
  • the writer’s shameful practices (e.g. writer’s block; interminable editing and re-drafting; the abandonment or destruction of writing; and the anxieties of ‘confessionalism’ or ‘impostureship’).
 
To register, please follow the links from this page www.warwick.ac.uk/shameproject
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Jobs

Lecturer in English Studies (Modern Literature), Durham University

Applications are invited from outstanding candidates who have research and teaching interests in twentieth-century literature. The successful candidate will be expected to have an excellent publication record and research profile, which will complement the Department’s existing strengths in twentieth-century British literary studies. He or she will also be able to make a significant contribution to undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and including research supervision.

 

http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/AJN294/lecturer-in-english-studies-modern-literature/

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CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism

Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism,
1895 to 1945
 
17-18 April 2015
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London.
http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ies-conferences/ageofmodernism
 
Keynote Speakers:
Nick Freeman (Loughborough) on style and morality after Wilde
Michèle Mendelssohn (Oxford) on ‘Black Dandyism’
 
Call For Papers
This interdisciplinary conference intends to open discussions about the meaning and significance of Aestheticism and Decadence as these movements evolved between 1895 and the mid-twentieth century. Aestheticism and Decadence were not vanquished with Wilde’s imprisonment but, rather, continued as vital and diverse forms in twentieth century aesthetics and culture. Their influence was in some cases openly acknowledged by the authors in question, but often it was oblique and obscured as many later writers, most famously the High Modernists, eschewed any admissions of such a debt.
 
This conference considers Aestheticism and Decadence from three main angles:
1) the continuing evolution, diversification and internationalisation of    
     Aestheticist and Decadent ideas and forms;
2) how writers, artists, critics, musicians engaged with the figures and ideas of     
     nineteenth century Aestheticism and Decadence.
3) the production of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ and the posthumous representation of Decadent and Aestheticist writers, particularly Wilde, Swinburne and Pater, in memoir, biography and literary criticism
 
We encourage proposals that address these Aestheticist and Decadent afterlives in the context of their cultural, political and social moments, and which engage with the problematics of these terms.
 
Subjects might include but are not limited to:
 
*Decadents and Aesthetes publishing after 1895 (e.g. Machen, Beerbohm, Lee)
*Decadents and Aesthetes who refashioned themselves and are now considered Modernists (e.g. Yeats)
* The concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ in post-1895 literature and art
* The cultural and artistic legacies of fin de siècle decadence in ‘Modernist’ works
* Reappraisals of Decadent tensions such as deviant sensuality and ‘reserve’
* The Decadent/Aesthetic individual in the modern city
* Decadent tropes and characters in the ‘middle-brow’ novel
* Reworkings of Decadent literary forms
* Decadence/Aestheticism on film/in photography
* Decadence/Aestheticism in Music
* Critiques and denunciations of nineteenth century Aestheticism/Decadence
* The influence of and engagement with Aestheticism/Decadence in non-
   Western cultures
* Decadence/Aestheticism in the United States
* The presentation of Decadents/Aesthetes in monuments, biographies, histories, memoirs.  
 
Writers and artists who could be explored within these contexts are legion, but some notable cases include:
 
*Arthur Symons
*Max Beerbohm
*Arthur Machen
*M. P. Shiel
*Victor Plarr
*Ernest Rhys
*Henry Havelock Ellis
*Thomas Hardy
*Edward Thomas
*Rupert Brooke
*Lord Alfred Douglas
*Frederick Rolfe (Baron Corvo)
*Michael Field
*Ronald Firbank
*W. B. Yeats
*A. J. A. Symonds
*Charles Ricketts
*Eric Gill
*W.T. Horton
*Thomas Sturge Moore
*Vernon Lee
*T. S. Eliot
*Ezra Pound
*H. D.
*Rose Macaulay
*James Joyce
*D. H. Lawrence
*Wyndham Lewis
*Edith Wharton
*Evelyn Waugh
*The Sitwells
*Cyril Connolly
*Aldous Huxley
*Beverley Nichols
*Ford Madox Ford
*Virginia Woolf
*Christopher Isherwood
*John Betjeman
*Carl Van Vechten
*Ben Hecht
*James Huneker
*F. Scott Fitzgerald
 
And the ‘afterlives’ of:
 
* Oscar Wilde
* The Pre-Raphaelites
* Algernon Charles Swinburne
* Walter Pater
* John Ruskin
* Lionel Johnson
* Ernest Dowson
* Aubrey Beardsley
 
Please send Abstracts of 250 words with a short bionote to Dr. Kate Hext and Dr. Alex Murray atdecadence.modernism2015@gmail.com by the 30th of November 2014.
Categories
CFPs

CFP: Rural Modernity: A Collection of Essays

Call for Chapter Proposals

 

Rural Modernity: A Collection of Essays

Deadline for Proposals: December 31, 2014

 

Edited by Kristin Bluemel, Monmouth University and

Michael McCluskey, University College London

 

We are seeking proposals for submissions to a collection of essays devoted to the theoretical and historical elaboration of the concept of rural modernity as it is worked out in literary, artistic, and other cultural objects and movements in early

twentieth-century Britain.

 

Please email queries to

Kristin Bluemel: kbluemel@monmouth.edu or

Michael McCluskey: michael.mccluskey@ucl.ac.uk

 

 

Despite the interwar explosion of books, advertisements, films, paintings, and pictures that depicted rural life, no study to date has looked into representations of the rural across diverse media. Nor has any study considered the relation of rural representation in early- and mid-twentieth-century culture to rural people who, as much or more than urban dwellers, grappled with the forces and effects of modernization and modernity. Rural Modernity aims to bring together essays on fiction, non-fiction, arts, crafts, and films to identify the interconnected—at times conflicting—ideas that images of the rural helped to circulate and to open up “rural modernity” as a particularly useful framework for further studies of interwar art and literature, and, more broadly, British culture.

 

Possible subjects include Writers: H. E. Bates, Adrian Bell, Kenneth Grahame, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Thomas Hardy, Winifred Holtby, A. A. Milne, H. J. Massingham, Beverley Nichols, A. G. Street, Flora Thompson, Mary Webb, Francis Brett Young Artists: Evelyn Dunbar, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Thomas Hennell, Laura Knight, Clare Leighton, John Nash, Paul Nash, Samuel Peploe, Gwen Raverat, Eric Ravilious, Stanley Spencer, Philip Wilson Steer Preoccupations: villages, cottages, country houses, farming, gardening, tourism and motoring, ramblers and anglers, folk dancing, Peacehaven and the Plotlands movement, rural industries and organic communities Media: books, prints, paintings, illustrations, photography, film, and mass print media.

 

The aims of writers and artists who engaged with ideas of the rural—evocation of lost worlds, celebration of new discoveries, participation in modernist experiments—tell only part of the story, and, while the essays included in Rural Modernity explore these motivations, they also seek to move beyond perceived oppositions between rural and urban/art and craft/modernism and middlebrow. The conception of rural modernity argued for in this collection makes connections within—and between—these distinctions while allowing for the complexity of the idea of “rural modernity” itself. How was it imagined? How was it marketed? Who promoted it and who opposed it? How have social historians and cultural geographers contributed to our understanding of rural modernity, and how can the concept of rural modernity contribute to literary studies, film studies, print culture studies, and art history?

Categories
CFPs Postgraduate

CFP: Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange

SCIENCE AND CULTURE IN LATIN AMERICA: TRANSMISSION, CIRCULATION, EXCHANGE

Saturday, 18 April 2015
Trinity College, University of Oxford (UK)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Paper abstracts are invited for “Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange”, a one-day international symposium to be held in Trinity College, University of Oxford on Saturday, 18 April 2015. In this inaugural event of the AHRC-funded research network on Science in Text and Culture in Latin America, our aim is to discuss (inter)disciplinary questions raised by academic and creative explorations of science and culture in Latin America. We also seek to find points of connection and divergence between the study of this cross-fertilization in the region and the frameworks that have informed the study of science and cultural practices elsewhere. We thus invite contributions that ask how creativity is imagined in science, literature and other forms of cultural and artistic practice, and how the methodological frameworks of literature and science studies translate to the Latin American context. Confirmed speakers include Jens Andermann (Universität Zürich), María del Pilar Blanco (Oxford), Sandra Gasparini (Universidad de Buenos Aires), and Gabriela Nouzeilles (Princeton University).

We invite proposals for 25-minute papers for panel sessions, and 10-minute position papers for a forum on current research directions. The former should explicitly address one or more of the broader methodological and disciplinary issues listed below; the latter may focus on any aspect of research on the relationship between science and cultural texts in Latin America. Papers may be given in English or Spanish.

Paper topics may include the following:

  1. (1)  explorations of aesthetic and scientific cross-fertilizations in Latin American arts, including literature, film and other practices;

  2. (2)  examinations of how aesthetic innovations are encouraged by experimentation with the language of science;

  3. (3)  discussions of the methodological frameworks employed in science & culture studies, and their relevance in the Latin American context;

  4. (4)  investigations of the historical study of science’s relationship to the arts across different cultural contexts, in Latin America and beyond;

  5. (5)  discussions that explore whether we might hypothesize a Latin American specificity within the growing field of literature and science studies across different regions.

Abstracts should be 250-300 words in length. Please email your submissions, together with a C.V., to Joanna Page (jep29@cam.ac.uk) and María del Pilar Blanco (maria.blanco@trinity.ox.ac.uk) by 1 September 2014, specifying whether you wish your paper to be considered for a panel session or the research forum. All participants in panel sessions will be asked to circulate their papers in advance of the conference; those giving short presentations in the research forum are also welcome to circulate longer versions of their papers in advance.

One travel bursary of US$1,250 will be awarded, on a competitive basis, to a participant who is resident in North, Central or South America and either currently studying for a doctorate or within three years of having received their doctorate (by the date of the conference).

“Science and Culture in Latin America: Transmission, Circulation, Exchange” is the first of four international symposia that comprise the AHRC-funded research network on Science in Text and Culture in Latin America, which will run from 2014 to 2016. For more information on the network’s schedule of events, please visit our website (http://www.latin-

american.cam.ac.uk/science-text-culture) or email Joanna Page (jep29@cam.ac.uk) and María del Pilar Blanco (maria.blanco@trinity.ox.ac.uk).

Categories
Events Postgraduate

Academic Open Day at The National Archives

The National Archives will be holding an Academic Open Day on Wednesday, October 15th, 2014. This event is designed to illuminate the research activities undertaken here at the Archives, whilst encouraging networking and discussion with the wider academic community. As the official archive and publisher for the UK government, and for England and Wales, we are the guardians of some of our most iconic national documents dating back over 1,000 years. Indeed, with a vast array of material and documentary resources currently housed at The National Archives, there is considerable potential for collaboration with academics to unlock the untold narratives residing here, making them accessible and audible to a wider public.

 

We would, therefore, be delighted to welcome our academic and research director colleagues to our Open Day, to hear about the Collaborative Doctoral Partnerships and Doctoral Training Programmes in place at The National Archives, as well as our plans for collaborative MA Programmes and the development of a Research Fellow scheme. We are eager to hear from our HE colleagues about potential research networks and collaborations, as well as about how The National Archives could work to develop research across the disciplines.

 

Attendance at the Academic Open Day is free but spaces are limited, so we would be grateful if attendees could emailresearch@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk with the following information:

Name of attendee(s)

Organisation

Email Address

Indication of consent to be named on the delegates list

Any dietary or accessibility requirements

 

A programme of events will be distributed shortly, but please do not hesitate to contact The National Archives Research Team at the same email address should you have any questions.