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CFPs NWIMS Past Events

New Work in Modernist Studies 11, online, 10 Dec 2021 (deadline 20 Oct)

About the conference

The eleventh one-day graduate conference on New Work in Modernist Studies will take place online on Friday 10 December 2021, in conjunction with the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), the London Modernism Seminar, the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, the Northern Modernism Seminar, the Midlands Modernist Network and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

BAMS is dedicated to fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion (please see our Code of Conduct).   As in previous years, this conference will take the form of an interdisciplinary programme reflecting the full diversity of current graduate work in modernist studies; it encourages contributions both from those already involved in the existing networks and from students new to modernist studies who are eager to share their work.  We particularly encourage proposals from BAME students, who we recognise are underrepresented in the field.

Usually the event is open only to students at British and Irish institutions as we offer each student a travel bursary.  However, as the event will be held virtually again this year, we encourage PhD students from around the world to apply.  The conference will be held during the working day in the UK (approx. 9.30am – 5pm, with regular breaks); please let us know if you are attending from elsewhere in the world and need this to be taken into account.

The day will include a plenary session, with details to be confirmed.

Unfortunately, the coffee breaks and drinks reception will still have to be in your own home this year.  We are keen to enable the making of connections that usually happens in those spaces between academic papers and panels, and are working on ways of doing so.

Proposals
Proposals are invited from registered PhD students for short (10 minutes maximum) research position papers.  Your proposal should be no more than 250 words. Please also include a short biography of no more than 50 words.  If you are outside the UK and Ireland, please give your location and time difference to the UK.

Proposals for and questions about the event should be sent to nwims@bams.ac.uk.

Deadline for proposals: 9am UK time, Wednesday 20 October 2021.

Acceptance decisions will be communicated within two weeks.

Applicants and delegates are encouraged to let us know about any access needs they might have, and if we are able to adjust the application or presentation process, we will endeavour to do so.

Registration
We’ll host the conference by Zoom, and there won’t be any charge to attend.

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Call for submissions CFPs

CfP: Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem at 100 (Online cluster; abstract deadline 1 Oct 2021; article deadline 1 Mar 2022)

Modernism/modernity Print Plus Cluster Proposal

2020 marked the 100th anniversary of “modernism’s lost masterpiece,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem. Published by Hogarth Press in the spring of 1920, and typeset by Virginia Woolf, this ground-breaking long poem maps the range of continental avant-garde aesthetics of the 1910s even as it both engages and anticipates the mythical methods and epic conventions of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

This proposed Modernism/modernity Print Plus cluster hopes to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism and early twentieth-century poetics. While scholars such as Julia Briggs, who produced the first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), and Sandeep Parmar, who edited the first critical edition of Mirrlees’s Collected Poems (2011), have done the important archival and recovery work that restored Paris to critical attention, Peter Howarth solidified Paris’s position within the modernist “canon” with his chapter, “Why Write Like This?,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), which introduces readers to the disorienting pleasures of modernism’s most famous poems through an extended analysis of Mirrlees’s “difficult” work (16). Building on these approaches, this cluster aims to initiate a new wave of Paris scholarship that complicates and extends the poem’s aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political import on the occasion of its centenary.

This Print+ cluster will demonstrate how engagement with Paris speaks not only to Mirrlees’s text but also to broader interests within modernist studies. We therefore seek a selection of articles that both pay tribute to the exceptionality of the poem and insist on the “complex intersections” that resist canonical trends of exceptionalizing marginalized writers like Mirrlees. While some interventions may consider detailed aspects of the poem, its influences, and its legacies, others may focus on Mirrlees’s work more generally and in relation to her contemporaries. Additionally, given M/m’s long history of engagement with Eliot and the The Waste Land, especially their recent Print+ cluster on “Reading ‘The Waste Land’ with the #MeToo Generation,” we seek contributions that help us to respond to the urgent questions: why Paris and why now? As an alternative to revisiting TWL’s position within the High-Modernist canon, can we, to quote the editor of the Eliot cluster, examine the ways in which Paris “acts as a kind of test case of how the #MeToo generation can change the way we read”? How might this poem spark new conversations about the relation among gender, sexuality, and power in modernist studies?

Our hope is that a Print+ cluster, which will be widely accessible and allow for an unprecedented engagement with the poem through the platform’s ability to include digital material (archives, visual culture), together with the recent publication of a new, smaller, and more affordable edition of the poem (Faber & Faber 2020), will facilitate the inclusion of Paris on more syllabi, igniting future waves of scholarship centered on this long under-appreciated poem and its networks.

Topics may include:

Teaching Paris

Hogarth Press

The history of the circulation of Mirrlees’s poem

The poem in relation to its (anti)colonial and Imperial interventions

Paris in dialogue with non-Western Modernisms

Mirrlees and translation

Mirrlees’s materialism

Cinema and visual culture

The city poem

Psychoanalysis and poetic form

Politics of poetics/aesthetics

Gender and sexuality in Paris

Queer(ing) Paris

*Abstracts (~250 words) due: October 1 2021. Please send to editors Nell Wasserstrom and Rio Matchett at wassersn@bc.edu and r.a.matchett@liverpool.ac.uk with the subject line “Hope Mirrlees Print+ Submission.” The editors also welcome queries.

*Selected abstracts will be followed by short articles (~3000 words) due March 1 2022. The cluster will then be submitted in its entirety to M/m for peer review.

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Call for submissions CFPs News

Call for nominations in D.H. Lawrence Studies (deadline 6 Sep 2021)

The D.H. Lawrence Society of North America is pleased to invite nominations for the following awards in Lawrence studies:

The Harry T. Moore Award for Lifetime Achievement in and Encouragement of Lawrence Studies.

The Mark Spilka Lectureship.  Lecture by a distinguished Lawrence scholar to be delivered at the International Conference. Awarded no less than once per decade.

The Extraordinary Service Award.  For service to the DHLSNA and/or Lawrence studies in general.

The Biennial Award for a book by a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies.  For a book substantially, though not necessarily exclusively, devoted to Lawrence.  Only books published from August 2018 to July 2021 will be considered. 

The Biennial Award for an article by a Newly Published Scholar in Lawrence Studies.  Only articles or book chapters published from August 2018 to July 2021 will be considered.  Chapters published in multi-author collections such as D.H. Lawrence in Context or the Edinburgh Companion to D.H. Lawrence and the Arts are eligible for this award, as are individual chapters in single-author volumes.

All nominations and self-nominations should be sent to DHLSNA President Elect Ronald Granofsky at granofsk@mcmaster.ca and must be received no later than Labor Day, 6th September 2021.  Winners will be announced in the Spring 2022 Newsletter.

Adam Parkes (President, DHLSNA)

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Call for submissions CFPs

CfP: Reading in theory and in higher education practice (journal SI; abstracts 15 July 2021; articles 15 Oct)

[Call for Articles]

Reading in theory
and in higher education practice

Special issue of CLW – Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap (2022)
ed. by Janine Hauthal & Hannah Van Hove

deadline for abstracts: 15 July 2021; deadline for articles: 15 October 2021

Over the past few decades, the field of literary studies has increasingly been interested in the question of how we read (Bennett 1995; Littau 2006). Developments in cognitive and cultural studies, hermeneutics, reception theory as well as digital humanities have contributed to enlarging our understanding (of theories) of reading and have gradually brought together previously separated domains of study such as reader-response theory (Iser 1976), narratology (Genette 1972/1983), sociology of reading (Bourdieu 1979) and history of reading (Manguel 1996). While, initially and most influentially, approaches to reading in the context of literary studies have viewed reading as a cognitive process and focused on the content of texts, cognitive literary studies and narratology (Herman 2002) shifted the focus to the mental processes by which readers make sense of texts. More recent approaches have pushed further in this direction by conceptualizing reading as social cognition and exploring it as an embodied act (Caracciolo 2014; Kukkonen 2017, 2019). In distinction to the field’s tradition of ‘close reading’, different ways of reading have also engendered methodological innovations, tellingly called ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2005, 2013; see also Bode 2017) or ‘hyper reading’ (Hayles 2012), which, in turn, have played a role in the current rise of interest in the future of reading in the attention economy of the (post)digital age (Berg/Seeber 2016; McLean Davies et al. 2020; Sommer 2020).

We invite articles which engage with reading as either cognitive process, physical activity, social behaviour or institutionalized practice (Birke 2016: 8-11) or blend these aspects in considering their interactive dynamics. Contributions may engage with, but are not limited to, the following questions: If meaning is no longer recognized as being carried solely by texts, where do we locate (the production of) meaning? Do experimental, hybrid and/or intermedial texts require different reading strategies? How are readers constructed and written (about)? How are we to account for the challenges posed by gendered and intersectional theories of reading? How do digital textualities affect reading practices? How do the readings we teach relate to the flourishing of online book culture and layman’s criticism? What are the (disciplinary, social, neurological) consequences when analysis through machine algorithms is recognized as a form of reading as valid as close reading? How do we as scholars understand (ourselves as) readers? In the age of the entrepreneurial neoliberal university, how (much time or credit points) do we invest in reading and what kind of readers and readings do literary curricula foster in the face of demands of employability?

For the special issue publication, we welcome contributions of 5,000 words (incl. footnotes) in English. The deadline for articles is 15 October 2021. Please send an abstract of max. 500 words and a 100-word author bio to Janine Hauthal (janine.hauthal@vub.be) and Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.beby 15 July 2021. Contributions will be published in a special issue section of CLW – Cahier voor Literatuurwetenschap, a peer-reviewed journal published by Academia Press. All manuscripts should reference and be formatted according to the CLW style guide and may be submitted in Word format. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed and are scheduled for publication in autumn 2022.

References

Bennett, Andrew (ed.). Readers and Reading. Longman, 1995.

Berg, Maggie & Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. U of Toronto P, 2016.

Biebuyck, Benjamin. “Het aandikken van vriendschap: Zes thesen over het academische literatuuronderwijs [The thickening of friendship: Six theses on teaching literature at university].” CLW 11 (2019): 135-143.

Birke, Dorothee. Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel. De Gruyter, 2016.

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, translated by Richard Nice. Harvard UP, 1984 [1979].

Caracciolo, Marco. The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach. De Gruyter, 2014.

Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell UP, 1980 [1972].

—. Narrative Discourse Revisited, translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cornell UP, 1988 [1983].

Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. U of Nebraska P, 2002.

Hayles, Katherine. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. U of Chicago P, 2012.

Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, translated by the author with David Henry Wilson. Johns Hopkins UP, 1978 [1976].

Kukkonen, Karin. A Prehistory of Cognitive Poetics: Neoclassicism and the Novel. Oxford UP, 2017.

—. 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet. Oxford UP, 2019.

Littau, Karin. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Polity, 2006.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. Penguin, 1996.

McLean Davies, Larissa, Katherine Bode, Susan Martin and Wayne Sawyer. “Reading in the (Post)Digital Age: Large Digital Databases and the Future of Literature in Secondary Classrooms.” English in Education 54.3 (2020).

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees. Verso, 2005.

—. Distant Reading. Verso, 2013.

Sommer, Roy. “Libraries of the Mind: What Happens after Reading.” Diegesis – Interdisciplinary E-Journal for Narrative Research/Interdisziplinäres E-Journal für Erzählforschung 9.1 (2020): 83-99 (www.diegesis.uni-wuppertal.de/index.php/diegesis/article/download/376/580).

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CFPs

CfP: Smallness: Myths, frames and avatars of the late modern (26 Nov 2021; deadline 30 June)

Grupo Poéticas, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Research Seminar

Smallness: Myths, frames and avatars of the late modern

In an effort to reach beyond the conspicuous, the large and clearly visible, the spectacular and magnified, this seminar is an invitation to read, watch and assess smallness, detail, imperceptibility, following Virginia Woolf’s direction: “let us not take for granted that life exists more in what is commonly thought big than what is commonly thought small” (“Modern Fiction”). Physical smallness comes to be explored, thematised and staged in different genres and formats, from literature to art, from tiny everyday materiality to the most peculiar oddity. Beyond the material and the metaphysical, this seminar also aims at exploring other notions around littleness, such as brevity, lightness, paucity, miniature.  By examining the practice of writers and artists whose work has used small-scale methods or gravitated upon minuteness, concision and the virtually unnoticeable, we are ready to revise and rethink aesthetic and  literary categories investigating the social and symbolic stature that smallness can engender.  

From Emily Dickinson’s “We should not mind so small a flower” to Louise Glück’s “small chips of matter”, from Deleuze and Guattari’s and Pascale Casanova’s “minor (or small) literature”, to Sianne Ngai’s revisions on the “cute,” and Mandelbrot’s elaboration on “fractals,” we aim at reflecting upon smallness, the infinitesimal and the microtextual. In view of our ongoing interest in myth, this seminar will open up a space for reflection on small or minor myths, in relation to larger founding societal and cosmological narrative frames.  Presentations should focus on any recent literary or artistic practice in order to reassess its value against large-scale ways of reading and interpreting reality in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We are seeking 350 w. abstracts (with 3 keywords) by June 30, 2021

Please, send us your short bio (150 w.) and affiliation

Proposals should be sent to Professor Esther Sánchez-Pardo (esanchez_pardo@filol.ucm.es).        

Our seminar will be held both online and face-to-face at U. Complutense

Structure: Two keynotes and a number of selected presentations

Notification of acceptance: July 23, 2021

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CFPs

CfP: Moving the Centre: Toward Radical Futures (Online, 4-6 Aug 2021; deadline 5 Apr)

Cross-Disciplinary Postgraduate Research Conference on Post/Decolonial and Global Studies

4th – 6th August 2021

University of Glasgow – Online

Call for Proposals

Website: https://movingcentre2021.wordpress.com

Important Dates

Deadline for submissions: 5th April 2021

Notification of acceptance: by 14th May 2021

Conference dates: 4th, 5th and 6th August 2021

The climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic have only exacerbated the already stark inequalities and inequities that are pervasive around the globe, which run along class, gender, and race lines; a state of injustice that was decried on a global scale in 2020 by a multitude of social justice movements, such as Black Lives Matter, in transnational solidarity. The members of this conference organising committee, a group of PhD students from the College of Arts and the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow, assembled with a view to planning a cross-disciplinary event that would try to grapple with these issues, as well as with decolonising movements more broadly.

‘Radical futures’, for us, are those in which these disadvantages and privileges are considerably reduced and, one day, eliminated completely. Futures in which every human being has guaranteed access to basic human rights; in which every nation and community is free to safely experience the world from their own perspective, according to their own values; in which there are no hierarchical relationships between these cultures, and in which we benefit from the richness of diversity. This is why we have included part of the title of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s 1993 book, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, in our own conference title.

Building on Priyamvada Gopal’s ideas (‘Insurgent Empire: A Discussion with Priyamvada Gopal’ 2020), we interpret decolonisation as a constant process of reparation, compensation, restitution, and re-education, instead of a fixed state to be achieved exclusively as a final result. In other words, we see decolonisation as both the means and the end, as the continued struggle toward a more just and inclusive world. Our radical futures are thus both decolonisation (the process) and decolonised (the state). It is within this framework that we see this conference as a platform for dialogue and collaboration. Rather than to provide definite answers, the main aim of this event is to foster reflection on and enable conversation about not only decolonial futures as a goal, but also the concrete steps that would need to be taken when working toward these futures, as well as to address the past and present of empire, (neo)colonialism, and anticolonial struggles. We see this conference as an exercise in awareness raising, a space to promote a better understanding of the current state of affairs and wider participation in the process of decolonisation.

With this in mind, we want to invite postgraduate research students in all academic disciplines to think about how their own research or subject area stands in respect to these issues. We also welcome submissions by early-career researchers who have finished their PhD in the past three years. Our aim is to be as inclusive as possible; we want to encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary exchange between the arts and humanities, social and life sciences, and STEM subjects. We believe these explorations and dialogues to be a key initial step in the direction of a decentred world that someday will become ‘a universal garden of many-coloured flowers’ (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o 1993).

Proposal topics might include (but are not limited to):

  • Envisioning intersectional radical futures within the arts and humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and/or STEM subject areas;
  • Marginality and periphery; consequences of a fixed centre and limiting viewpoints in the different disciplines; hegemony and power structures in the current state of affairs;
  • Decolonisation in academia: gatekeeping and the burden of change; decolonisation in education and curriculum at all levels;
  • Decolonisation of knowledge production and exchange: cartography, space and place, memorialisation and trauma, museums, among others; post/decolonial modernities;
  • Decolonisation in medicine: intersections between physical and mental health; (dis)abilities;
  • Decolonisation in language and linguistics; postcolonial translation;
  • Obstacles/Barriers to decolonisation: the instability of political and economic systems;
  • Difference, identity and representation; Black, Brown and all People of Colour in the UK: histories and (dis)connections; boundaries within the UK; Brexit;
  • Mobility, migration, refugees, and diaspora;
  • Indigenous empowerment and re-valuation in settler-colonial nations;
  • Pasts, presents and futures of empire, and transgenerational imperialism and racism, including their ecological dimensions;
  • Forgotten/ignored heroes, scientists, contributors and activists, especially female ones;
  • (Post/Neo)colonial tourism; environmental racism and climate justice; the Anthropocene; (post/neo)colonial ecologies;
  • Postcolonial urban studies and urban ecologies;
  • The unequal impact of the COVID-19 pandemic around the world: economic, political, social, cultural, and health consequences;
  • Food safety and security; food production.

Ways to Participate

  1. A 20-minute paper
  2. A poster/short presentation
  3. An alternative session/workshop

Submission Guidelines

Submit an abstract for a 20-minute paper: these submissions will be sorted thematically into three-paper panels after acceptance.

Submit an abstract for a short presentation: to encourage participation from early postgraduate research students, we would like to offer room for short (5-to-10-minute) presentations where you might give an overview of your research, present a poster, carry out a short analysis of a text or artwork, or explain a concept of importance or new approach to your work. This is an opportunity to gain conference experience in the early stages of your research. Please note that early-stage postgraduate research students are not limited to this option and are welcome to propose a paper or alternative session/workshop.

Submit a proposal for an alternative session or workshop: we would like to encourage proposals for alternative sessions. This may include, for example, practice-based research showcases consisting of a short performance or audio/visual presentation, or workshops addressing specific issues and/or texts (in the broadest sense of the word). Please include as much detail as possible in your application, explaining your time and technology requirements. When proposing your alternative session or workshop, please keep in mind that we plan to host this conference on Zoom. If other technology/software is required, this should be accessible and fairly user-friendly. If you have any ideas for proposals and you are not sure if they fit within these technical restrictions, please get in touch.

If interested in participating, please email: arts-movingthecentre2021@glasgow.ac.uk with a short bio (around 100 words), including institutional affiliation, and a proposal of 300 words maximum. Please specify in your application which style of presentation you intend to give and submit your proposal as either a Word or PDF document. General enquiries can also be sent to this email address.

Website: https://movingcentre2021.wordpress.com

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Call for submissions CFPs Essay Prize Past Events Postgraduate

BAMS Essay Prize (deadline 16 July 2021)

The British Association for Modernist Studies invites submissions for its annual essay prize for early career scholars. The winning essay will be published in Modernist Cultures, and the winner will also receive £250 of books.

The BAMS Essay Prize is open to any member of the British Association for Modernist Studies who is studying for a doctoral degree, or is within five years of receiving their doctoral award. You can join BAMS by following the link on our membership pages: https://bams.ac.uk/membership

Essays are to be 7-9,000 words, inclusive of footnotes and references.

The closing date for entries is 16 July 2021 (the final day of the Festival of Modernism). The winner will be announced at the start of the new academic year.

Essays can be on any subject in modernist studies (including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnography, film studies, history, literature, musicology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, and visual culture). Please see the editorial statement of Modernist Cultures for further information: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/mod.

In the event that, in the judges’ opinion, the material submitted is not of a suitable standard for publication, no prize will be awarded.

Instructions to Entrants

Entries must be submitted electronically in Word format to modernistcultures@gmail.com and conform to the MHRA style guide.

Entrants should include a title page detailing their name, affiliation, e-mail address, and their doctoral status/ date of award; they should also make clear that the essay is a submission for the BAMS Essay Prize.

It is the responsibility of the entrant to secure permission for the reproduction of illustrations and quotation from copyrighted material.

Essays must not be under consideration elsewhere.

Enquiries about the prize may be directed to Claire Warden, Chair of BAMS (c.warden@lboro.ac.uk)

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CFPs

The Writer as Psychological Warrior, online conference (12-16 July 21; abstracts 19 Mar)

The Writer as Psychological Warrior: Intellectuals, Propaganda, and Modern Conflict

Online conference, hosted by Durham University12-16 July 2021

The tendency of the modern state is to wipe out the freedom of the intellect, and yet at the same time every state, especially under the pressure of war, finds itself more and more in need of an intelligentsia to do its publicity for it.
George Orwell, ‘Poetry and the Microphone’ (1943)


Writing in 1943, George Orwell reflected upon the challenges posed for both governments and intelligentsia by the rapid growth in wartime propaganda production. If the British government had begun the war ‘with the more or less openly declared intention of keeping the literary intelligentsia out of it […] after three years of war almost every writer, however undesirable his political history or opinions, has been sucked into the various Ministries or the BBC’. As Orwell recognised, the recruitment of cultural actors by government information and psychological warfare departments changed both spheres, since the ‘tone and even to some extent the content of official propaganda’ were ‘modified’ by the new entrants – a negotiation known all too well to Orwell himself due to his own role as a propagandist during the war.


At a moment when disinformation and ‘fake news’ are of pressing political concern, this conference aims to understand these debates as part of a longer history of propaganda across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, decades in which new military and media technologies raised political warfare to the status of the ‘Fourth Fighting Arm’ of the state and consequently made cultural figures integral actors in modern conflict. Organised by the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘The Political Warfare Executive, Covert Propaganda, and British Culture’, this event invites papers from a range of disciplines, periods of study, and global perspectives, with topics that might include:

  • Revaluation of writers and organisations in the light of new or overlooked propaganda archives
  • Study of the evolution of propaganda techniques and cultural modes between conflicts or between competing states
  • Narratives disseminated through historical disinformation campaigns: what traces of these remain in cultural discourse? How have they been contested or countered? How do they compare to contemporary narratives?
  • Cultural representations of propaganda service
  • The impact of technological change on the form, content, dissemination or influence of propaganda (radio/film/television/social media)
  • Life as a propagandist: how did intellectuals combine their official duties with their personal and cultural spheres? What forms of propaganda service have been marginalised or overlooked in archival records or later histories?
  • Material and visual culture of propaganda (leaflets/posters/ephemera)​

We invite proposals for papers of between 10-20 minutes. Due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic this event will take place entirely online: speakers will be asked to record their papers as sound files, to be circulated to conference participants in advance of online panel discussions.
We plan to produce an edited collection drawing on selected contributions to the event.
Please send proposals (max. 300 words) together with a short biographical note to Guy Woodward at guy.t.woodward@durham.ac.uk by 19 March 2021.

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CFPs Seminars

CfP: Collaborations & Networks symposium, 4-5 Sep 2021 (abstract 31 Mar; deadline 31 July)

Virtual Symposium

Irish Women’s Writing Network

4-5 September 2021

The period 1880-1940 was marked by the emergence of a diverse range of Irish women writers into both the public sphere and public consciousness. This development was not accidental but was instead fostered by a variety of networks and collaborations that connected Irish women to one another across space and time. Katharine Tynan and Dora Sigerson, for instance, hosted literary gatherings at their family homes that facilitated wider networks of influence, while collaborative writing efforts forged by Irish women during the period stretched from the works of Somerville and Ross through to the transnational publishing efforts of the Ladies’ Land League and into educational and journalistic endeavours in which Irish women played central roles. These included the foremost Irish literary periodical of the day, The Irish Monthly, in which women writers featured regularly, and the Irish Fireside Club, whose central ‘Uncle Remus’ role was fulfilled by two Irish women writers (Rose Kavanagh and Hester Sigerson). Meanwhile, the efforts of women editors including L. T. Meade, whose London-based periodical Atalanta promoted Irish authors abroad, and family-based connections from the widely known (Constance and Markievicz and Eva Gore-Booth) to the more obscure (M. E. Francis, Agnes Castle and Margaret Blundell) were central to Irish women’s creativity and innovation.

With close attention to both individual collaborations and wider networks, the symposium will direct attention to how women writers endeavoured to tell, share and publish their stories. Recognizing the need for research in the field of Irish women’s writing that moves beyond the single-author approach, we are particularly interested in work that considers new critical perspectives on women writers’ creative innovations through collaboration across genres and media and their personal networks and strategies to establish themselves as writers within a rich web of personal connections alongside institutional and infrastructural possibilities, both at home and in transnational contexts.

This symposium will feed into a double issue of English Studies.

Prospective contributors are invited to submit 300-word abstracts for max. 15-minute papers for the one-day symposium. Topics might include but are not limited to the following:

  • collaborations between literature and other forms of production (ie. co-authoring; text and image; dramatists and theatre makers)
  • cross-media storytelling
  • collaborative work and activism
  • collaborations across genres
  • collaborations across media
  • women writers and their private and public networks
  • collaborations between networks
  • self-promotion (memoir/autobiography; travel writing; journalism)
  • salons, “At Homes”, reading groups
  • learned societies and associations
  • alternative networks and spaces (incl. National Library of Ireland; British Library; the Society of Women Journalists etc)
  • networking through paratexts (dedications; prefaces etc)
  • writers and their publishers
  • writers, editors, periodicals and print cultures
  • national and transnational collaborations and networks
  • writing women’s literary history in the period
  • protegées and mentors
  • women writers’ archives and archive networks
  • methodological approaches and challenges

Format

In keeping with the theme of ‘Collaborations and Networks’, the symposium’s structure will follow a more engaged format to focus on time for dialogue between participants. Speakers will be invited to submit short papers of 2500 in advance, which will form the basis of a 10-15 minute presentation to be followed by facilitated discussions via a respondent. Presenters will be encouraged to prepare some questions and/or flag areas where they would like specific feedback. Given this format, there is a 2-stage submission process:

  1. Please submit your 300-word abstract for 15 mins presentations with title and a short biography to collaborationsandnetworks@gmail.com by 31st March 2021.
  2. Accepted papers of max. 2,500 words are due by 31st July 2021.

Publication

For the publication of the double-issue of English Studies, we seek to invite a selection of symposium contributors to submit an extended article of max. 10,000 words by 31st January 2022. All submissions considered for publication will be subject to peer review.

We look forward to receiving your abstracts.

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CFPs

CfP: Another Revolution: Building Modern Worlds (abstract 28 Feb; deadline 30 June)

For a prospective peer-reviewed cluster on Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform, we seek proposals for original essays that analyze the role of art and culture in building modern worlds in the aftermath of revolutions. Situated within the discourse of global modernisms, the transdisciplinary cluster probes whether there is something intrinsic to the post-revolutionary reconstructive moment that can be teased out through focused studies on contemporaneous constellations between the aesthetic and the political around the globe during the twentieth century.

Demands for revolution emerge whenever the status quo makes an existing social order no longer tenable for a significant portion of the population. Revolution is often understood as a force from below, one in which a group exerts its will against an established governmental or political order. But revolutionaries usually have as their ultimate goal the establishment of a new social or political system—a new normal—rather than a perpetual state of upheaval. They envision new possibilities, and different worlds. The production of culture in various forms—fine art, literature, music, performing arts, visual culture, philosophy, and so on—are essential to their success, both in consolidating the revolution’s narrative, and in producing as well as sustaining the resultant new realities. Indeed, the expectation of their role as spearheads in revolution is embedded in the very phrase “avant-garde.”

If not an exclusively modernist phenomenon, localized revolutions in the modern era have been characterized as affirmative responses to Enlightenment values such as liberty and equality, and have frequently sought to overthrow absolutist, autocratic, and colonial rule. The establishment of new forms of government are often the result. But radical change is by no means guaranteed to be emancipatory, liberal, and egalitarian in character, nor is it always successful. As evidenced by Italian fascism, the so-called “conservative revolution” in Germany during the interwar-period, or the Chinese “Cultural Revolution,” a revolution might well slide into dictatorship, create a power vacuum in which multiple agents claim control, or engender oppressive political systems. Similarly, avant-garde art and culture are not immune from stifling and perverting critical, transgressive impulses. Indeed, their post-revolutionary impact has sometimes been framed as “propaganda,” or as “selling out” to become palatable to “the masses.”

Taken together, the articles chosen for this cluster will map out parallels as well as divergences in “avant-garde” or otherwise transformative cultural attempts to displace “old” worldviews, institutions, and forms of coexistence by asking questions such as “What political developments affected cultural production and vice versa, particularly in their contact with ideological shifts and technological innovations?”, “What factors and conditions enabled new cultural practices and perceptions to take root?”, or “What transnational mechanisms were at work in cultural attempts at building modern worlds?”.

Offering an alternative understanding of revolutionary worldbuilding through culture from the vantage point of an era that is itself characterized by a multiplicity of crises and by profound, though not always progressive transformations, this cluster aims at challenging the once widespread perception of the “failure” of twentieth century revolutions and, with that, of the “death” of the avant-garde.

Topics of particular interest include but are not limited to theoretically-driven case studies from:

–       The Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian avant-garde

–       The 1911/Chinese Revolution and end of the Qing Dynasty

–       The German or November Revolution and the Weimar Republic

–       The Mexican Revolution and cultural renaissance

–       Societal transformation in Japan during the late Taishō period and the Mavo art movement

–       Postcolonial/independence movements in the second half of the twentieth century from Cuba to Iran

The cluster seeks to bring into dialogue regionally-specific scholarship in the humanities, especially in the arts and design, in literary and film studies, and in aesthetic and political theory, to foster a global perspective. We particularly welcome submissions that draw on the unique possibilities afforded by Modernism/modernity’s Print Plus platform. For recent examples of essay clusters, see https://modernismmodernity.org/about.

Abstracts of 250 words accompanied by short biographies are due February 28, 2021. A total of five to seven proposals will be accepted; completed essays of approximately 3,000 words will be due June 30, 2021. Once essays are submitted, the entire cluster will undergo peer review. Please submit abstracts and inquiries to Monica Bravo (bravo@cca.edu) and Florian Grosser (fgrosser@cca.edu).