Category: CFPs

CFP: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism, 6-7 April 2018

Post author By modernistudies
Post date October 4, 2017
1 Comment on CFP: Sylvia Townsend Warner and Modernism, 6-7 April 2018

Conference location: Friends’ Meeting House, 6 Mount Street, Manchester.

Confirmed speakers: Claire Harman and Jan Montefiore.

Today, when political misinformation abounds, nationalism and Fascism have reappeared, and we find ourselves contending with ideology in simple, complex and covert forms, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s writing seems ever more relevant. In turns insightful, comic, cutting, and poignant, her texts ask what art is for, and how we might navigate personal relationships, social change, belief and the past. Warner has an acute sense of the relationship between material conditions and human consciousness, of place and the ordinary. This conference seeks papers that analyse her importance for studies of, among other possibilities, modernism, politics (specifically communism), gender and sexuality.

Claire Harman’s 1989 biography began a revival of interest in Warner. Virago published her fiction, Carcanet the Collected Poems, and Literature Compass undertook a special issue in 2015. Her relationship with Valentine Ackland and the queerness of Summer Will Show have attracted critical attention, and Lolly Willowes continues to feature on undergraduate courses on gender and sexuality. Critical discussions of Warner’s work though deserve to be broadened further in terms of themes and the texts addressed – for example her later novels, short stories and non-fiction. She participated in Marxist, musical and artistic communities, and had friends such as composers Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gerald Finzi; poet, journalist and editor Edgell Rickword; prominent Communist Party member Tom Wintringham; and poet Edith Sitwell. Warner published 6 novels and 11 collections of short stories during a literary career that spanned 5 decades. An expert musicologist, she translated Proust, published widely in the New Yorker, wrote a travel guide to Somerset, a biography of T. H. White, a short book on Jane Austen, six collections of verse, and a wealth of material is to be found in her non-fiction, diaries, letters and essays.

The range of Warner’s work and thought has not yet received its due. We welcome proposals on any aspect of her writing, translation or musicology, especially those committed to taking debate in new directions.

Proposals for 20-minute papers will be considered, including (but not limited to):

Modernism
The historical novel
Critical Theory
Postcolonial Warner
Marxism
Feminism
Realism
The Communist Party
Everyday life
Review culture
Fascism and the 1930s
Lesbian modernism
Translation
Travel writing
Queer Warner
Cultures of the left
Left Review
Relations with particular writers, artists and composers
Internationalism
Books, magazines and publishers
Letters and diaries
The New Yorker
Warner and Europe
Music, musicology and composition
Biography

Organisers: Dr Howard J. Booth (University of Manchester) and Dr Gemma Moss (Birmingham City University).

We welcome proposals on any aspect of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s work, especially those committed to taking debate in new directions. 250 word proposals should be sent to stwconference2018@gmail.com by 30 January 2018.

There are two bursaries for graduate students of £100, kindly offered by the Sylvia Townsend Warner Society (http://www.townsendwarner.com/); please write to the conference email address above for information on the application procedure.

CFPs

CFP: Virginia Woolf, Europe and Peace, June 2018

Post author By modernistudies
Post date October 2, 2017

The 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf will take place on 21-24 June, 2018 at Woolf College, University of Kent, Canterbury.

About the conference

Marking 100 years since the end of the First World War and 80 years since the publication of Three Guineas, the 28th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf invites papers addressing the dual theme of Europe and Peace. From the ‘prying’, ‘insidious’ ‘fingers of the European War’ that Septimus Warren Smith would never be free of in Mrs Dalloway to Woolf’s call to ‘think peace into existence’ during the Blitz in ‘Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid’, questions of war and peace pervade her writings. They are also central to Woolf’s Bloomsbury circle, exemplified in John Maynard Keynes’The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Peace at Once and Leonard Woolf’s Quack, Quack! While seeking proposals that address the European contexts and cultures of modernism between wars, we also encourage exploration of how these writings can help us think through what it might mean to create peace in Europe today amid various political, humanitarian, economic and environmental crises.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Bloomsbury and pacifism
Literature of the First and Second World Wars
The Spanish Civil War
The Armistice and Paris Peace Conference
Three Guineas and its legacies
International/transnational/cosmopolitan Woolf
Bloomsbury and the European avant-garde
Feminism, queer studies and LGBT+ politics
Empire, race and ethnicity
Woolf and continental philosophy/theory
European translations of Woolf and Bloomsbury
Ecological/environmental/economic crises
Violence, trauma and fascism
Bloomsbury and classical antiquity
Woolf across visual art, film, dance and music
Travel writing and European journeys

How to submit

Abstracts of max. 200 words for single papers and 500 words for panels should be sent to vwoolf2018@gmail.com by 1 February, 2018.

Organising Committee: Derek Ryan, Ariane Mildenberg, Peter Adkins, Patricia Novillo-Corvalán

See our website for more information.

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CFPs

CFP: Modernist Objects, Paris Sorbonne, 13-16th June 2018

Post author By modernistudies
Post date October 2, 2017
1 Comment on CFP: Modernist Objects, Paris Sorbonne, 13-16th June 2018

The Third International Conference of the French Society for Modernist Studies (SEM) will be held 13-16^th June 2018, Paris Sorbonne University (VALE EA 4085)

About the conference

In a line which seems pre-emptively levelled at Aaron Jaffe’s The Way Things Go exactly one century later, Richard Aldington wrote in The Egoist that “one of the problems of modern art” is that “to drag smells of petrol, refrigerators, ocean greyhounds, President Wilson and analine [sic] dyes into a work of art will not compensate for lack of talent and technique.” This was December 1914. In the next few decades, psychoanalysis sought to make sense of the trivial, thinkers inquired into the status of the mass-produced object, and the rise of feminist and Labour movements posed the prosaic and essential question of material comforts. Modernist art and literature focused on the mundane, as emblematized by the everyday object, which now crystallized our changing relation to the world. The anachronistic frigidaire patent in Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” ordinariness in William Carlos Williams’s famous “red wheelbarrow,” defamiliarization in Gertrude Stein’s “Roastbeef” are but a few possible variations on the object, its importance becoming central to the British neo-empiricists and the American Objectivists. Papers could examine the claim that the poetry and prose, the visual and performing arts, and the music of the Modernist era accounted for a shift in object relations with an intensity of observation in proportion with the changes which so profoundly affected the experience of living in industrial times. This SEM conference invites English-language contributions that cover the widest range of reflections on Modernist objects.

Keynote speakers

Rachel Bowlby (University College London); Douglas Mao (Johns Hopkins University).

How to submit

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

– the object vs the thing

– instruments and tools, technology, the machine

– the object as mass-produced commodity; resistance to consumption

– waste, junk, obsolescence, recycling

– the material presence of the book or the magazine in everyday life

– architecture, machines for living

– the Utopian potential of the crafted object

– the gift and the unalienable object

– objects, social identities and intimacy

– the object and/in space

– the object in/of science

– non-human agency

– the object in the Anthropocene

Scientific Committee:

Hélène Aji, Rachel Bowlby, Vincent Bucher, Noëlle Cuny, Xavier Kalck, Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, Douglas Mao, Scott McCracken, Caroline Pollentier, Naomi Toth

Please send proposals (300 words) and short biographies to Hélène Aji, Université Paris Nanterre (helene.aji@parisnanterre.fr), Noëlle Cuny, Université de Haute Alsace (noelle.cuny@gmail.com), and Xavier Kalck, Université Paris Sorbonne (xkalck@gmail.com) no later than November 15^th, 2017. Notification of decision: December 15^th, 2017.

CFPs Events NWIMS Past Events Postgraduate

CFP: New Work in Modernist Studies, 15th December 2017

Post author By modernistudies
Post date October 1, 2017

BAMS_GREEN (1) About the conference

The seventh one-day Graduate Conference on New Work in Modernist Studies will take place on Friday 15th December at the University of Leeds (School of English), 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).

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 students who are eager to share their work.

The day will close with a plenary lecture by Dr Hope Wolf, Lecturer in British Modernism, and Co-Director of the Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex. Previously she worked at the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. In 2017 she curated an exhibition on Sussex Modernism at Two Temple Place, London. She continues to work on this project, which explores the lives and works of diverse artists and writers including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Eric Gill, David Jones, Edward James, Serge Chermayeff, Roland Penrose, Lee Miller, Edward Burra, and many more. She is also working on a further project and exhibition to be held at the 1930s modernist venue, the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, on the Surrealist artists Grace Pailthorpe and Reuben Mednikoff. Hope enjoys working with museums and galleries. She held a Collaborative Doctoral Award with the Imperial War Museum, and ran a course with curators at the Museum of London. She has compiled an anthology of First World War writing for Hutchinson/Vintage, and has published in Textual Practice, Life Writing and A Cambridge History of English Autobiography; publications in press include an article on David Jones, measurement and poetic calibration for a British Academy/Oxford University Press collection.

Proposals

Proposals are invited, from PhD research students registered at British universities, for short (10 minutes maximum) research position papers. Your proposal should be no longer than 250 words, and please include with it a short (50 words) biography. If you wish to apply for a contribution to your travel expenses you should also include an estimation of travel costs with your proposal (see below for details). Proposals should be sent to nwims2017@gmail.com to which any other enquiries about the conference should also be addressed.

Deadline: 5pm Saturday 4 November 2017. Acceptance decisions will be communicated within ten days.

Registration

Conference registration will open soon. Registration must be completed by 1 December at the latest. The conference fee is £25 (£15 for BAMS members) and includes lunch, coffee and a wine reception. The day will run 10am – 6pm.

Bursaries

Travel costs: It is anticipated that a subsidized contribution to all travel costs over £20 will be offered to all postgraduates who contribute to the conference. This means that we will aim to pay the amount that remains after the first £20 for which you will be responsible. If your travel expenses are less than £20 we will not be able to contribute. Please note that funds are limited and our ability to contribute depends on your co-operation in finding the cheapest fares. To apply for a travel bursary please include a separate indication of your estimated travel costs with your proposal. This will not be taken into account when assessing your proposal.

Conference Organizers

Ruth Clemens and Anne Reus, Leeds Trinity University, and Jivitesh Vashisht, University of Leeds

CFPs Postgraduate

The British Association for Modernist Studies Essay Prize 2017

Post author By modernistudies
Post date July 9, 2017

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 31 October 2017. The winner will be announced by 31 January 2018.

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 or rtf format to modernistcultures@gmail.com and conform to Chicago style.
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 Suzanne Hobson, Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies, at s.hobson@qmul.ac.uk

CFPs Events Postgraduate Uncategorized

CFP: Come to Montpellier this September for “Ford and the Other”

Post author By modernistudies
Post date May 9, 2017

Proposals are invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford and the other to be held at Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone, Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France, from September 7-9, 2017.

CFPs Events Seminars

Roll up for Craft Modernism: an assembly at the University of Sussex, 15 June

Post author By modernistudies
Post date April 28, 2017

What is “craft modernism” – and how do you enact it in a group? See below for a message from Dr Annabel Haynes and Dr Hope Wolf on their June 15 “assembly”.

CFPs Events Postgraduate

Submissions open for Sussex Modernists and Transformations in the Twentieth-Century Landscape, June 7

Post author By modernistudies
Post date April 1, 2017

The call for papers is now open for Sussex Modernists and Transformations in the Twentieth-Century Landscape, a one-day conference to be held at the University of Sussex on June 7th.

CFPs Postgraduate

Submit to “Movement and/in/of the City”, a postgraduate conference at University of Kent

Post author By modernistudies
Post date March 15, 2017

The call for papers is now open for “Movement and/in/of the city”, a postgraduate conference to be held at the University of Kent on June 16th, 2017.

About the conference

The notion of ‘movement’ has particular pertinence to our present cultural moment: across the globe, we live in a period marked both by unprecedented movements of population and by new popular political movements of all types. Yet the idea of ‘movement’ as a literary preoccupation is as old as the earliest recorded literature itself, defining the quest/journey narratives of the ancient world. Movement can be conceived on the grandest geological or even planetary spatial and temporal scale, but by the same token is also perceived daily and personally in the individual human body.

The issue of movement intersects with that of the city and its representation. The flâneur at the centre of Benjamin’s texts roams the city and merges with the flow of its crowd. Movement and the city thus seem to be related to issues of modernity. Lately, the figure of the flâneur and Benjamin’s stance on modernity has been renegotiated to leave space to the flaneuse, the woman in the city, as Lauren Elkin’s book Flaneuse or Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon illustrate. Movement, the city and writing are closely linked and result in a “rhetoric of walking,” such as it is defined by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life. The city is at the centre of various writings, from the eighteenth century onwards (one might think of the wandering adventures of Moll Flanders or Dickens’s novels and writing habits for instance), and is a favourite postmodern topos as exemplified by such works as Angela Carter’s The Passion of the New Eve and Zadie Smith’s N/W, amongst others.

Movement in the city bears witness to changes in terms of its improvement and ordering (we might think of Haussman’s works in Second Empire Paris or the grid shape of New York’s streets) but also to political changes. Thus, movement in the city can be linked to political movement as the marches in various American cities against Trump’s policies are showing. The latter political movements seem to be using the city as a site to ground their plea and thus turn the city in a new text.

We seek submissions on this theme from across the full breadth of literary studies and related disciplines, from the classical to the contemporary. Interdisciplinary perspectives are strongly encouraged, as are creative writing responses.

Topics might include, but are by no means limited to:

Movement, the city and modernity: Benjamin, the flâneur, the crowd vs. women’s appropriation of movement and the city, the flaneuse
Revolution and the city: riots, marches, petitions, from the 19^th century (Marx, Engels, Tale of Two Cities, to contemporary protests against Donald Trump, protests in Paris following terrorist attacks)
Moving on: the city and its transformations, transports, speed, fragmented vision of the city vs. totalised vision
Circulation of objects in the city: commodities, letters, refuse etc.
Psychogeography, mapping the city
Migration, immigration in the city: diaspora, postcolonial re-visiting of the city
Neo-Victorian cities
Utopian/dystopian cities

This call is open to MA and PhD students from all institutions, and ECRs who have completed PhDs in the last two years. We welcome abstracts for 20-minute academic papers and creative readings/performances. Innovative presentation formats are encouraged. Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words and must be sent by 1^st April 2017 to kentpgconference2017@gmail.com as pdf. Please include details of your current level of study and home institution. For creative readings, please send a short example of your work.

CFPs Postgraduate Seminars

Join the Black Artists & Modernism project at “Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings”, December 2017

Post author By modernistudies
Post date March 7, 2017

The Black Artists & Modernism research project is pleased to announce the forthcoming conference, Conceptualism – Intersectional Readings, International Framings, in collaboration with Van Abbemuseum. The conference will take place from Friday 8th December to Saturday 9th December 2017 at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.