Author: modernistudies

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Anna Kavan Symposium – London – CFP deadline 30 April

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CFP: Anna Kavan Symposium

11th September 2014

Institute of English Studies, London

ANNA KAVAN: HISTORICAL CONTEXT, INFLUENCES AND LEGACY

Kavan-paintingAnna Kavan’s publication history spans from her early novels under the name Helen Ferguson in the late 1920s and early 1930s to her last work which won Brian Aldiss’ prize for ‘Sci-Fi Novel of the Year’ in 1967.  Her own life story has been widely reported in magazine articles, book reviews and popular biography, but there has been little serious scholarly attention to her writing.  The often sensationalized focus on Kavan’s biography, particularly her adoption of her own fictional character’s name, her long-term heroin addiction, and her psychological difficulties, has overshadowed serious critical attention to her work.  Yet, her writing continues to be published in English and translation, to hold fascination for new generations of readers, and to interest or influence other writers and artists.  This symposium aims to bring together scholars with an interest in Kavan to promote an increasing academic focus on her work.  The day will be a forum for knowledge sharing, with the broad aims of historicizing Kavan’s work, situating her within the literary and intellectual context of her times, and charting her legacy as a writer.  The symposium will close with a public event in the evening at which leading contemporary writers will discuss Anna Kavan’s work in relation to their own writing. 

The symposium will primarily focus on Kavan’s fictional writing, but also welcomes those working on her biography, her journalism, her little-studied artwork and her philosophical or intellectual influences.  Papers might include the following topics:

  • Comparative readings of Kavan’s fiction with her contemporaries and the authors who have admired her since (e.g. Doris Lessing, J G Ballard, Anais Nin, Maggie Gee).
  • Connections/differences between her writing as Helen Ferguson/ Anna Kavan.
  • High Modernist influences on Kavan’s work.
  • Readings of Kavan’s fiction that historicize her writing in the context of the Second World War, the Cold War and 1960s counterculture.
  • Kavan’s theoretical or philosophical influences.
  • Feminist readings and reassessments of Kavan’s work.
  • Examination of the (post-)colonial aspects of Kavan’s fiction and journalism.
  • Kavan’s engagement with visual cultures, including her own artwork.
  • Studies of Kavan’s use of form (especially the short story) and narrative style (especially her distinctive uses of first and third person narrative).
  • Theories of autobiography and fiction and their impact on the reception of Kavan’s life and work.
  • Kavan’s writing of madness, asylum incarceration and opiate addiction.
  • Kavan’s literary networks (e.g. her friendships with Rhys Davies, Kay Dick, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and others, and her associations with Cyril Connolly and Jonathan Cape).
  • Issues of genre including interpretations of Kavan’s work as ‘Science Fiction’.
  • Kavan’s journalism (in Horizon) and its relation to her fictional writing.
  • Other writers’ engagement with Kavan and the legacy of her work.

Presentations should take the form of 20-minute papers. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words toinfo@annakavan.org.uk by 30 April 2014.  For further information visit http://annakavansymposium.wordpress.com/

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public – CFP 21 February – Keynote confirmed

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public

Friday 9 May 2014

Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

 

 

port

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent decades modernist studies has seen an explosion of scholarship undermining the myth of modernist isolation from commercialised literary production, with critical attention focused largely on the engagement of modernists with mass markets and popular cultural forms.  Less attention has been given to how mass culture itself responded to and approached modernism. This one-day symposium seeks to explore the two-way relationship between artists and popular audiences; how modernists found a public and how the public also took ownership of modernism.  While modernist writers and artists played with or actively assimilated mass market tactics, the mass markets themselves played with or actively assimilated high modernist techniques.  As mass audiences became increasingly aware of the modernist revolution, modernism not only found its public face, but also met a public increasingly active in refiguring modernism’s profile.  This symposium aims to bring together scholars interested in debating alternative methods of approaching and interpreting interactions between mass markets, popular culture and modernism.
We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers, which might address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:
  • Approaches to modernism in mass market periodicals
  • Individual modernist writers and the commercial press
  • Mass market publishing and modernist outputs
  • Advertising and modernist design
  • Modernism and celebrity
  • Modernism and fashion
  • Middlebrow culture
  • Methodological issues arising from the study of modernism in mass culture

 

Please send abstracts with a brief biographical note and full contact details to the symposium organisers, Dr Rod Rosenquist (rod.rosenquist@port.ac.uk) and Dr Alice Wood (alice.wood@port.ac.uk), by 21 February 2014.  Participants will be notified by 1 March 2014.  Any queries may be directed to either of the email addresses above or visit http://www.port.ac.uk/centre-for-studies-in-literature/literature-events/symposium-2014-public-modernism–modernisms-public/
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Events Postgraduate

Modernist Magazines Research Seminar – Thursday 20th February

Dear colleagues,

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will be held next Thursday (February 20th) in Room 234, Senate House, at the slightly later time of 6.30pm.

Dr Jason Harding, author of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain (OUP 2002), will speak on ‘The Use and Abuse of Archives: Reading The Criterion and Encounter magazines’.

There is no specific reading, but participants can familiarise themselves with The Criterion and Encounter at the following websites:

http://modernistmagazines.com/magazine_viewer.php?gallery_id=287

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter

We look forward to seeing you next Thursday.

With best wishes,

Aimee Gasston, Chris Mourant and Natasha Periyan

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: Modernist Criticisms

Modernist Criticisms
Graduate Conference
Saturday 7 June 2014
Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex
Keynote Speaker: Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway
 
Call for Papers  
 
Our conceptions of modernism are not just informed by its literature. As is widely recognized, essays including Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’ and Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ provide these writers – and their readers -alternative methods of approaching literary questions and a wider arena within which to expound and explore their theories. But while the critical texts of these canonical figures are well known and studied, work by various minor figures of the period, and this work’s engagement with their artistic concerns, is still frequently overlooked. Many kinds of writing remain marginalized within studies of modernist literature, including work for commercial publications and political movements, for educational instruction, and writing beyond the literary scenes of London and Paris. Research into early twentieth-century literary culture has stimulated important discussions surrounding the production and reception of modernist criticism, including the impact of publishing practices and the professionalization of intellectual pursuits. But this research prompts a need for further enquiry into how critical and creative writing in this period are mutually engaged with these cultural contexts in view.
 
This graduate conference aims to develop debates on the intersections between criticism and literature in modernist culture. It also aims to integrate recent research on the literary culture of modernism with the study of both canonical and non-canonical critical texts. Papers are especially welcome on marginal or marginalized critics and criticism. Submissions are invited on topics including but not limited to:
 
• creative practice as critical practice and vice versa 
• modernist notions of taste, highbrow culture, the avant-garde
• critical audiences: universities, magazine readership, literary groups, the reading public, etc.
• British critical traditions: Hazlitt, Arnold, Pater, Eliot, Leavis, etc.
• the essay genre
• modernists criticizing modernists: factions, coteries and disputes
• critical localities: transatlantic and continental criticism, literary scenes, salons, etc.
• originality as an aesthetic criteria
• criticism as it in surfaces in other genres: letters, memoirs, life-writing, etc.
• the professional or dilettante critic
• modernist criticism relating to gender, class, race and sexual identities
• criticism, manifestos and artistic movements
• the influence of science, empiricism, sociology
• comparative and interdisciplinary critical practices
 
The conference is specifically aimed at graduate students and early-career academics, and encourages interdisciplinary exchanges. Abstracts of around 250 words in length for twenty-minute papers, along with a brief biographical note, should be submitted viamodernistcriticismsconference.wordpress.com by 7 March 2014.
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Uncategorized

AHRC Doctoral Studentship in English Literature – The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh

via David Bradshaw at the Faculty of English, Oxford

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UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FACULTY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

AHRC Doctoral Studentship in English Literature – The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh.

Applicants are sought for a three-year, fully-funded Studentship (including both fees and living costs) to work towards a DPhil (PhD) in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford on the AHRC project The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. The Studentship will commence in October 2014 and is open to UK nationals, or EU nationals who have resided in the UK for 3 years or more. The successful applicant will normally have achieved a Master’s degree with distinction (or equivalent) in English Literature or a relevant subject, but does not necessarily have to be a Waugh specialist at the commencement of the Studentship.

The Project

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh (CWEW) is an AHRC-funded project jointly led by Professor Martin Stannard (University of Leicester) and Professor David Bradshaw (University of Oxford), in collaboration with seven project partners including the Evelyn Waugh Estate and the Humanities Research Center, Texas. The project will produce the first scholarly edition of the complete writings of Evelyn Waugh, with Alexander Waugh as General Editor and OUP as publisher. CWEW will include a very large quantity of Waugh’s previously unpublished letters and personal writings as well as the writer’s novels, short stories, biographies and ephemera. The project is likely to form the largest scholarly edition of a British author to date. Publishing begins in 2016, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Waugh’s death. The project blog may be viewed at: http://staffblogs.le.ac.uk/waughandwords/

Nature and Scope of the Doctoral Studentship

The Studentship is focused on one of the project’s central areas of enquiry: Waugh’s inter-war travel writing. There is currently no scholarly edition of any of Waugh’s travel books. The Student’s supervisor will be editing two of them, and the Student will be examining the whole cultural and bibliographical context of all five of the inter-war texts with a view to producing a book from the thesis that could be submitted to OUP as a companion volume to the edition. He or she will also be invited to co-edit the proceedings of the project’s international conference in 2015.

Waugh wrote six travel books, publishing five in the 1930s. This decade is increasingly regarded as a golden age of travel writing and the Student will be poised to investigate not only Waugh’s books but also his numerous travel essays, and his many letters written about and during the course of his travels, and to examine their relation to travel books written by his friends and acquaintances such as Robert Byron and Graham Greene, as well as other inter-war exponents of the genre. Research questions to be addressed could be:

  • In what sense does Waugh reconfigure the genre of travel writing?
  • How fictionalised are his accounts of the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, British Guiana and Mexico?
  • What themes spill into the travel writings from his fiction and vice-versa?
  • In what sense does the cultural history of these writings inform the cultural context of the 1930s as a whole?

This DPhil will be a precursor of the renewed critical interest in Waugh which the Edition is expected to trigger. It will be one of the first critical works to interpret the mass of new materials the Edition will reveal and the Student will have access to a vast resource of unpublished letters etc. by and about Waugh.

Supervision and Support

The Student will be attached to the Faculty of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford. He or she will be supervised by Professor David Bradshaw, and will also work closely with the project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Martin Stannard, and Research Associate, Dr Barbara Cooke, who are both based at the University of Leicester.

In Oxford, the Student will have access to the Bodleian Libraries, with their superb specialist collections. The Humanities Division, and English Faculty offer extensive research and teaching training programmes, taking students through from research methods, to job
interviews, public engagement, and applying for research grants. The Student will be encouraged to take courses throughout their period of study. Oxford offers a wealth of relevant research seminar series which run throughout the year, in addition to numerous
interdisciplinary series, and conferences. The Student will be encouraged to take advantage of these academic offerings, but also to gain professional training through working with the project team in public engagement activities, and giving papers at or organising conferences.

 

Further Information

If you would like to discuss any aspect of the project informally, please contact Professor Bradshaw at: david.bradshaw@worcester.ox.ac.uk or Dr Cooke at: bc144@leicester.ac.uk.

If you would like discuss the application process please contact the Oxford English Graduate Office at: graduate.studies@ox.ac.uk.

 
TO APPLY

Applicants must apply by Friday, 28 February 2014 using the graduate application form available at:
http://www.ox.ac.uk/admissions/postgraduate_courses/index.html

 

Completing the form:

  • The Programme of Study is RESEARCH | 000592 | DPhil English
  • You must clearly state ENGL Waugh Studentship for the Departmental Studentship Applications reference on page 6 of the application form.

Applications must include:

  • 3 academic references
  • Relevant transcripts
  • Either two pieces of work of 2,000 words apiece, or a single piece of 4,000 words (please note that it is stated in the Graduate Admissions application guide that you should submit 2 pieces of 2,000 words, however the Faculty of English accept a single piece of 4,000 words and staff at the Admissions Office are aware of this).
  • CV
  • Research Proposal of around 2 pages – this should also outline your academic interests, prior research expertise, if any, in Waugh studies, and explain how your interests and experience make you a suitable candidate for this Studentship.

Further information on the graduate admissions criteria may be found at:
http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/prospective-graduates/admission/selection-criteria

At the time of your application, please also e-mail graduate.studies@ell.ox.ac.uk to inform us that you have submitted an application for the above Studentship.

Closing date: Friday, 28 February 2014.

Interviews of short-listed candidates will be conducted in mid-March.

Applications already submitted for the DPhil English programme:
If you have already applied to the DPhil in English programme, you do not need to submit a second application in order to apply for the Waugh Studentship. If you wish to be considered for the Studentship, please register your interest by contacting graduate.studies@ell.ox.ac.uk and also attach a revised research proposal relevant to the Studentship. Applications for the Studentship will be considered separately.

If you have any queries about the application process, please contact:
graduate.studies@ell.ox.ac.uk

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE STUDENTSHIP

You cannot hold this award in conjunction with any other significant Studentship (eg. an AHRC award). If you are offered and wish to accept an alternative award, you must let us know as soon as possible.

The award is subject to your continued enrolment and satisfactory progress on the course; and to continued and satisfactory progress relating to the one day’s research assistance as part of the Studentship.

Applicants will be admitted as Probationary Research Students and will be subject to the standard procedures and arrangements for transfer to DPhil. status. If they are unsuccessful in transferring to DPhil. status as laid down in the Examination Regulations, the Studentship funding will cease. 

The maintenance grant will be paid in three termly installments (each year) direct to the recipient’s bank account, at the beginning of each academic term. It is the recipient’s responsibility to ensure that the Faculty has up to date account details for payment.

All data supplied by applicants will be used only for the purposes of determining their suitability for the post, and will be held in accordance with the principles of the Data Protection Act 1998 and the University’s Data Protection Policy.

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

EAM 2014 ‘Utopia’ – deadline extension

‘Utopia’

The deadline for abstract submission to the 4th EAM conference in Helsinki, 29.-31. August 2014, has been extended to 5 February. At that time we will close!

http://www.eam2014.com/

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Jobs

Associate Professorship in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Irish Literature, Oxford University

Dear Colleagues,

The Faculty is advertising a new Associate Professorship in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Irish Literature, in association with Hertford College, to start on 1 October 2014 or as soon as possible thereafter. The salary range is £43,745 to £58,739 p.a. Please feel free to forward this vacancy to anyone who might be interested.
The appointed person will be required to provide thirty-six lectures per year or equivalent (in lectures and classes) for the English Faculty; to provide, for every week of full term, six hours per week of tutorial teaching or equivalent for the College; and to undertake examining and graduate supervision when requested. The successful candidate will have a doctorate in a relevant field, an excellent record in teaching, research and published scholarship in Irish literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and will be able to supervise and examine graduates in this field. The College requirements for teaching are for small-group and tutorial teaching from 1830-present. The appointed person will also be expected to contribute to administration in the Faculty and the College.
Further information (including details about how to apply) can be obtained from http://www.english.ox.ac.uk/news-events/current-vacancies-0.
The closing date for applications is 12.00 pm (noon) on Friday 28th February 2014.
Best wishes
Lindsay

Dr Lindsay Rudge
Head of Administration and Finance

Faculty of English Language and Literature
St Cross Building
Manor Road
Oxford
OX1 3UL

01865 (2)71096
Lindsay.rudge@ell.ox.ac.uk

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CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: David Jones: Christian Modernist?

David Jones: Christian Modernist?
Oxford, 10-13 September 2014

‘Modernism’ in literature and the arts is associated with cultural and political rebellion, ‘making it new’ through formal experimentation, and a widespread drive towards a regenerated New Era of human history. For many modernists, Christianity stood for a bygone era to be overcome; the reactionary, dead hand of the past.

Yet David Jones’s art, poetry and cultural theory subvert this neat dichotomy. He was a Catholic convert with a deep appreciation of the Church’s ancient liturgy and tradition; but he also conceived his Catholicism as a mode of cultural ‘sabotage’ and a sign of ‘contradiction’. His art and poetry is palimpsestic and fragmentary, inspecting ruins and traces, endlessly fascinated by dense, half-inaccessible layers of meaning stretching back through past cultures into the pre-history of human sign-making. Yet his theory of human culture as sign-making centres on Christ’s entry into the world of signs, epitomised in the Eucharist. Jones saw himself as living in an epoch in which man’s vocation as artist was being twisted out of shape by a technocratic, capitalist civilization obsessed with utilitarian means and ends. The modern artist therefore was a Boethius, shoring up the surviving fragments of the past to make a bridge into a different, regenerated future; a vision which helped Jones to assimilate a wide range of experimental modernist work which, like his own, looked both backwards and forwards at the same time.

This conference will examine the paradox of Jones the ‘Christian modernist’. Does the very concept of cultural ‘modernism’ perhaps need reassessment when confronted with his example? How is his experimental art, poetry and cultural theory relevant to theology? How does his work relate to the theological controversies of his day, especially the ‘modernist crisis’ within the Catholic church and beyond? How does the influence of other modernist art, theory and literature interact with Christian influences (whether theological or artistic) in his work? What was Jones’s influence upon other thinkers and creative artists, both those who shared his religious views, and those who did not? And is his complex vision of human beings as makers and artists who participate in divine creativity through their sign-making – while also hiding this from themselves – still relevant today? Or should it rather be analysed as a product of its time, an unfortunate idealisation that at one point even led Jones to affirm a limited sympathy for the ‘fascist and Nazi revolutions’?

It is the aim of this conference to confront the paradoxes and pleasures of reading and studying Jones head-on, in order to refine and extend our critical vocabulary to encompass an artist and thinker who continues to challenge our preconceptions. Finally, perspectives that challenge the fruitfulness of the whole idea of Jones as ‘Christian modernist’ are also welcome. Are there reasons for steering clear of both terms? Is Jones’s work perhaps better seen as transcending or collapsing such categories?

Contributions are welcome not only from Jones specialists, but also from across modernist studies, theology, religious studies, philosophy, art history, intellectual and political history, aesthetics, poetics, and genetic manuscript studies.

For more information visit:http://modernismchristianity.org/david-jones-conference/

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Events Postgraduate

London Modernism Seminar – Magic Modernism: Saturday 1 February

The first London Modernism Seminar of 2014 will take place on Saturday 1 February in Senate House, Room 349, 11-1pm. The topic will be Magic Modernism and we are very pleased to welcome as speakers Leigh Wilson (Westminster) on ‘C.K. Ogden, Basic English and Magic’ & Caroline Maclean (IES) on ‘Modernism’s Fourth Dimension’. Abstracts of the papers and brief speaker biographies can be found below.

The seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism.

Best wishes,

Suzanne Hobson, Queen Mary University of London, s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway University of London, t.armstrong@rhul.ac.uk
David Ayers, University of Kent, David Ayers, dsa@kent.ac.uk
Rebecca Beasley, Queen’s College, Oxford, rebecca.beasley@ell.ox.ac.uk
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, University of London, h.carr@gold.ac.uk

Seminar website: http://events.sas.ac.uk/events/visitor_events.php?page=ies_seminars&func=results&aoi_id=53
Register for membership of the British Association of Modernist Studies here: https://bams.ac.uk/membership/

Leigh Wilson, ‘C.K. Ogden, Basic English and Magic’
This paper will look at the brief but significant collaboration between C.K. Ogden and James Joyce in the late 1920s. Rather than asking, as most Joyce scholars would, what was in it for Joyce, the paper will consider what was at stake in this collaboration for Ogden. As W. Terrence Gordon has argued, at the centre of Ogden’s work was an idea of ‘Word Magic’ and its destructive and dangerous effects. Through the concept of ‘Word Magic’ Ogden warned against allowing language tyranny over thought, and in the end sought to replace it with a language rooted in the experience of the empirically verifiable world, both theoretically and in his creation and championing of Basic English. Words in Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’, on the other hand, are used, in John Rodker’s words, to ‘speak “in vacuo”’, sundered from instrumental meaning, in order to ‘still preserve much of their ancient magic’. The paper will ask what conclusions can be drawn from Ogden’s sense of the power of Joyce’s writing, and what implications this might have for our readings of language reform projects in the period.

Leigh Wilson is Principal Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Modernism and Magic: Experiments in Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

Caroline Maclean, ‘Modernism’s Fourth Dimension’

What do we mean by the fourth dimension? Time? Space? Both? In short, the idea of a fourth dimension was synonymous with time in the eighteenth century, but with the development of non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometry in the nineteenth century, the concept of a fourth dimension of space became popular. Mathematicians such as Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Riemann and Poincaré began to question Euclid’s axioms of geometry. For example Riemann argued that space was curved thus proving that parallel lines would intersect at the ‘poles’ of a sphere—disproving Euclid’s parallel postulate. Although its roots were non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geometry the idea of an alternative space existing in parallel to our own captured the imagination of artists, writers and filmmakers (as well as spiritualists and theosophists). Russian ‘hyperspace’ philosopher Pyotr Ouspensky insisted that artists were the vanguards of this revolution in perception because perception of the fourth dimension required a new way of thinking and looking, a delayed perception, not unlike Shklovsky’s theory of ostranenie (estrangement). This paper briefly sets out theories of the fourth dimension and goes on to analyse some of the ways different modernists including Butts, Woolf and Eisenstein made use of the concept in their experimental works.

Caroline Maclean is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English studies working on the ways in which the early twentieth-century vogue for Russia entered the story of modernism in Britain. Her book The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain, 1900-1930 is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press. Her article on Eisenstein and the fourth dimension appeared in Literature and History in 2012, and a chapter on Kandinsky, Michael Sadleir and Rhythm in Russia in Britain (OUP) in 2013, edited by Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock.

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CFP Clothes, Working Lives, and Social Change, 1880-1939

Call for Papers: Clothes, Working Lives and Social Change, 1880–1939

(Bishopsgate Institute, London 12–13 September 2014)

Two-Day International Conference

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Professor Eugenia Paulicelli (Queen’s College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Professor Lou Taylor (University of Brighton)

This cross-disciplinary conference explores the relationship between work, clothes and social change at the turn of the twentieth century.

During the long nineteenth century mechanized manufacturing, accelerated modes of production and innovative trades and industries created employment possibilities for an increasingly professionalized workforce. While factory and clerical workers, shop girls and other members of a newly established workforce faced changing working hours and environments, a transformation of clothes paralleled this revolution in trades and industries. New vocations required new vestments at a time when the affordability of mass-produced clothing launched the ready-to-wear industry. Social mobility expressed itself in new sartorial patterns and specific uniforms or dresses became the markers of professional identity and social mobility. At the turn of the twentieth century the histories of dress and labour shared many common Hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute in London’s East End, this interdisciplinary conference brings together scholars from the Humanities, the Social Sciences and the Creative Arts who have research interests in the intersecting histories of clothes and labour at the turn of the twentieth century.

Topics include but are by no means restricted to:

 Sweated Labour and the Clothing Industry

 Clothes and the New Workforce (especially working women)

 Work in the Fashion Industry (seamstresses, models, designers)

 Haute Couture versus Ready-to-Wear Garments

 Film Stars, Celebrity Culture and Clothes

 Textiles and Communities of Immigrant

 Workers (particularly London’s East End)

 Uniforms

 The Politics of Fashion and the Coding of Clothes

 Clothing, Work and Consumption (especially in times of war)

 Work and Rural Dress

The conference organizers invite paper proposals of 300 words by 30 April 2014. Please email abstracts to tailoredtrades@exeter.ac.uk. We invite abstracts from scholars at all career stages and are particularly interested in receiving proposals from textile curators who work on projects related to turn-of-the-century fashion and design.

This conference is part of a series of research events on the interconnected histories of clothes and labour funded by the AHRC Connected Communities programme: http://tailoredtrades.exeter.ac.uk/.