Category: CFPs

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CFPs

The Classics in Modernist Translation–CFP (April 30 and May 1, 2016, Montréal, Québec); deadline January 10, 2016

“Portals, Gates”: The Classics in Modernist Translation
 
As Steven Yao observes in Translation and the Languages of Modernism, both the practice and the idea of translation were integral to experimental early twentieth-century modernist work in English: “feats of translation not only accompanied and helped to give rise to, but sometimes even themselves constituted, some of the most significant Modernist literary achievements in English.” And in their translation work, many anglophone modernists were especially responsive to the literatures of Ancient Greece and Rome. As H.D. would note of the work of Euripides, whose plays she translated, “these words are to me portals, gates.”
 
Modernists Ezra Pound, H.D., W.B. Yeats and E.E. Cummings—among others—pursued translations of work from dramatists and poets such as Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Homer, Sappho, Meleager, Theocritus, Catullus, Horace, Ovid, and Propertius. In some cases they developed more traditional translations, aimed to render in English a text from another language, culture, and time; in other instances, they ventured more maverick translations, often construed by contemporary reception studies as adaptations or interventions (which sometimes incurred the ire of early twentieth-century scholarship). For many modernists, such translation work not only served as “good training”—as Pound phrased it—but also contributed to the enrichment of English beyond its ordinary boundaries, allowing fine-grained and radical access to the aesthetic and intellectual wisdom of a corpus of ancient literature they saw as valuable to the present. Many even used the concept of translation (the word’s etymology suggests “carrying across”) to capture a broader modernist commitment to bringing over to the early twentieth century resources of the ancient past, its cultural archive—to speak to questions, conceptual nodes and problematics of the contemporary moment. 
 
Situated at the intersection of Classical studies, Modernist studies, and Translation studies, this conference invites commentary on the work of early twentieth-century modernist “translation,” broadly interpreted – responses by modernist writers to texts and cultural materials from the Classical world. With this conference, we seek to redress a gap in Classical reception studies, which to date engages little early twentieth-century work. We welcome papers, performances, and creative or multimedia work addressing 
 
  • more traditional translation work, such as work for the Poets’ Translation Series edited by Richard Aldington, Yeats’s King Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus, and Louis MacNeice’s Agamemnon;
  • more experimental translation work by modernists such as Pound (e.g. Homage to Sextus Propertius, Women of Trachis) and H.D. (e.g. Hippolytus Temporizes, Ion); 
  • freer appropriations and adaptations of Classical material, such as H.D.’s responses to Sappho and Meleager; Pound’s and Joyce’s engagements with the Odyssey; Pound’s and H.D.’s work with the Eleusinian mysteries; and Cummings’s experiments with Catullus, Homer, and Greek myth.
Please send 250-word abstracts, along with current cv, to miranda.hickman@mcgill.ca and lynn.kozak@mcgill.ca by January 10, 2016. The conference will take place in Montréal, Québec, Canada, April 30 and May 1, 2016.
Miranda Hickman
Department of English
McGill University
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CFPs

Masculinity and the Metropolis: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Art History, Film, and Literature

Call for papers

University of Kent, 22nd – 23rd April 2016

This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the University of Kent, takes as its starting point the range of complex and contradictory engagements between masculinity and the developing metropolis since the beginning of the twentieth century. Throughout this period the metropolis maintained a paradoxical status as a place of liberation and possibility, but simultaneously as one of alienation, sin, and oppression. What do responses to the modern city in visual art, film, and literature tell us about masculinity as it both asserts itself and registers its own anxieties, and subsequent representations of the city? In what ways do these contrasting positive and negative conditions, which encouraged complex responses, fit within the framework of masculinity?

In the wake of industrialization artistic reactions to modern urbanity were spurred on by the rapid growth of cities and the transition from rural to metropolitan living. This caused socio-cultural changes and a diverse range of masculinities to develop within the metropolis in terms of race, class, and sexualities. How has masculinity been visualized with the construction of this modern cityscape and ideas of the urban? And later in the 20th Century, how did artists registering with ideas of deindustrialization or feminist and queer art forms affect or approach theories of masculinity and the urban? Can we construct an overarching lineage on this relationship? As one starting point, the so-called “crisis of masculinity”, and the way it is represented in various media, can be connected in interesting ways to the rise of the metropolis. This conference will bring together scholars from varying fields in order to begin a dialogue regarding the way theories of masculinity and the metropolis have developed in tandem, charting their evolution from the beginning of the 20th Century to the present day. Scholars with diverse interests and approaches to this broad subject are welcome with papers concerning various media within the 20th and 21st centuries.

Examples of subjects invited for submission include, but are in no way limited to:

  • Representations of the male and masculinity in metropolitan society within literature, film, and fine art. Contributions from theatre, and music are also welcome.
  • Male as artist or witness to the evolving physical cityscape
  • Modern and contemporary responses to 19th Century representations of industrialisation and the urban / de-industrialization and the changing nature of the urban and the masculine
  • The metropolis as a milieu of capitalist oppression, and how this can be related to masculinity
  • Urban photography and the metropolitan male identity
  • Masculine national identities within the cityscape
  • Masculinity and the nocturnal city
  • The modern or contemporary flâneur
  • Cityscape planning and the organization of male spaces
  • Destruction of the city and the crisis of masculinity
  • The male Superhero
  • Masculinities and sexualities within the metropolis
  • Depictions of the urban male and race
  • The relationship of masculinity to musical sub-cultures / the protest song and music as social commentary
  • Feminist, gay, and / or trans artistic reactions to masculinity and the urban
  • Masculinity and dramatic performance within the metropolis

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Deborah Longworth, University of Birmingham

Dr. Hamilton Carroll, University of Leeds

Dr. Gabriel Koureas, Birkbeck, University of London

Submission process
We invite submissions of short abstracts (300 words) accompanied by a brief biography (100 words). The time slot for presentations is 20 minutes with a 10 minute session for questions at the end of each panel.

Please send your abstract as an attachment (.pdf or .doc) to: masculinemetropolis@gmail.com

The subject of the email should contain the words: “Masculinity and the Metropolis submission”

The body of the email should include author(s) name, affiliation, abstract title and the email address you would like us to use to communicate with you.

Deadline for submissions: 20 December 2015.
Notification of acceptance/non-acceptance: 26 January 2016.

Registration

Postgraduate students / University of Kent Staff and Students: £10
Other researchers: £20

Accommodation

Premier Inn

Abode Canterbury

The Falstaff Hotel

All hotels are in city centre, a 10-20 minute bus, or 10 minute taxi ride from the University.

Registration will be required prior to the conference. Registration opens on the 1st of March 2016. Details on how to register will follow in due course.

Contact: masculinemetropolis@gmail.com

Organizers

James Finch, History of Art

Hannah Huxley, Centre for American Studies

Sara Janssen, Film

Margaret Schmitz, History of Art

With a special thanks to our sponsors: The University of Kent’s History of Art and Visual Cultures Research Centre, Aesthetics Research Centre and the Centre for Film and Media Research.

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CFPs

[Keynote Speakers and Poetry Workshop Confirmed] Sensory Modernism(s) 2

SM2, University of Leeds, December 11-12 2015
 
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Richard Brown (University of Leeds)
 
Professor Jeff Wallace (Cardiff Metropolitan University)
Sensory Modernism(s)#2 is a two-day interdisciplinary conference due to be held at the University of Leeds. The event, organised by the university’s Sensory Modernism(s) research group, follows the highly successful inaugural conference event held earlier this year. The conference will seek to address the interrelationship of modernism with sensory perception. We invite abstracts proposals for twenty-minute papers which address this theme, but will welcome proposals which offer an alternative mode of presentation, such as films or performance art. 
 
Poetry and the Senses Workshop (11th December)
As part of the conference, Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow Helen Mort will run a one hour creative writing workshop with prompts and exercises designed to get you thinking differently about how the senses can be used in poetry. No previous creative writing experience is necessary, just a notebook and pen!
Papers/presentations

Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following topics and their relevance to the general scope of the conference:

Philosophy
Psychoanalysis
Cinematography
Radio
Medicine
Anthropology
Aesthetics
Linguistics
Literature and the marketplace
Animals
Sexuality
Abstracts of 200-300 words, with a brief bio of no more than 200 words, should be emailed to sensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 11th November  2015.

Conference Organisers: Georgina Binnie, Daniel Kielty, Andrew Moore and Crispian Neill.

—
Sensory Modernism(s): Cultures of Perception (11-12/12/15)
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Call for submissions CFPs

Reminder: Call for book chapters- Mediated Cities

Publication and conference call

Please pass this information to colleagues you feel may be interested. Thanks.
Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City
Abstract deadline: 15 Nov 2015

http://architecturemps.com/bristol-uk/

Skype / Virtual Presentations Welcome
Together with Intellect Books and UCL Press the academic journal Architecture_MPS is preparing a range of publications on the theme of ‘Mediated Cities’. Specifically aligned with its conference series these publications will be in the form of Special Issues of the journal, online publications and print books. The next conference in the series is Digital-Cultural Ecology and the Medium-Sized City. Details below:

Dates: 01-03 April 2016
Place: Bristol, UK
Organisers: Architecture_MPS, CMIR, UWE
Venue: Arnolfini Centre for Contemporary Arts

For more details of the associated publications, see: http://architecturemps.com/publications-2/

Conference details: http://architecturemps.com/bristol-uk/

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CFPs

PRESUMED AUTONOMY: Literature and the Arts in Theory and Practice

Call For Papers

10–13 May 2016

Department of English, Stockholm University

Ever since the emergence of the modern marketplace for cultural goods, literary texts and art works have, on occasion, defied the expectations of its readers and audience, affronted their moral ethos, or flaunted a disregard for their sensibilities and norms. The potential power of art to disrupt the perceptions of its audience was foregrounded in the critical discourse of the modernists and the historical avant-garde and this possibility continues to animate critical debates, particularly those organized around some understanding of autonomy. With the all but complete commodification of every artistic and literary practice, it is more urgent than ever to pose the question whether we can still presume autonomy. 

The four-day conference seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines to assess, from the perspective of the present, the historical trajectory of autonomy as it has been conceptualized, recognized, assumed, deployed, and questioned by critics and practitioners of art, and to explore artistic, philosophical, cultural, and institutional negotiations of art as embedded in and entangled with the multiple heteronomies of market, state, religion, education… (a list that cannot be complete). As there are important intersections between various definitions of autonomy as well as artistic practices, several methodological and thematic strands will be brought together in four streams:

–Autonomy and the Avant-garde 

–Theories of aesthetic autonomy 

–Fields, markets, capitals, commodities and autonomy 

–Autonomy and the body

The conference organizers invite contributions that address the issues indicated in the rubrics above. You can choose either to earmark your abstract for one of the streams, or send it in for general consideration. The list below can be taken to indicate the scope of those particular and general concerns, while not necessarily restricting the possibilities. Proposals for presentations should address the problematics of autonomy in relation to one or several of the following thematic headings:

•aesthetic codings of the modern: myths, styles, temporalities, and techniques

•affect

•the architecture of thought

•biopower and control

•capitalism

•the commodity

•contemporary critical efforts to re-theorize form

•the debate between activist and normative formalisms

•early twentieth-century theorizations of literature and modern art

•ecologies

•fields of cultural production

•education, the university: formation, reproduction and defense of autonomy

•forms of capital

•global modernisms

•the historical avant-garde

•inaesthetics

•institutions

•living materialities

•national, transnational, and postnational frameworks

•object-oriented vs. becoming-oriented paradigms

•politics

•the (post)human body

•spaces, territories, place

•the state as the source of autonomy or heteronomy

•“world literature,” the postcolonial condition, and economic globalization

Confirmed Keynotes: Nicholas Brown (University of Illinois, Chicago), Gisèle Sapiro (L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales, EHESS, Paris), Anne A. Cheng (Princeton University), Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London), Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Peter Kalliney (University of Kentucky) and Lisa Siraganian (Southern Methodist University).

 Please submit your paper abstract (about 500 words) and a brief biographical note either by email to autonomy@english.su.se or clickPROPOSAL SUBMISSION for online submission. The deadline for submissions is on 15 December, 2015.

Conference organizers: 

Gül Bilge Han (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Bo G. Ekelund (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Hans Färnlöf (Department of Romance Studies and Classics, Stockholm University) 

Marina Ludwigs (Department of English, Stockholm University) 

Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson (Department of English, Stockholm University)

Irina Rasmussen Goloubeva (Department of English, Stockholm University)

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CFPs

CFP: AUTHORSHIP AND APPROPRIATION

8th and 9th April 2016, University of Dundee

To celebrate the publication of The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction, edited by Daniel Cook and Nicholas Seager (Cambridge University Press, 2015), we invite proposals for 20-minute papers that address the theory and practice of the adaptation and appropriation of literary texts in any period. Topics might include but are not restricted to:

* The theory or practice of editing, collaboration, or “secondary” authorship;
* Translation, allusion, imitation and other forms of textual appropriation;
* The creative exchange between poetry, drama, non-fiction and the novel;
* Filmic, theatrical, operatic, musical or visual adaptations of literary texts;
* Counterfeits, forgeries, plagiarisms or other unacknowledged alterations;
* Continuations, extensions, parodies or pastiches of literary texts;
* The presence or impact of appropriative texts in a pedagogical context;
* Republication in anthologies, abridgements, magazines or other print and digital fora.

Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be emailed to Daniel Cook (d.p.cook@dundee.ac.uk) before 15th December 2015. We also welcome pre-fabricated panels of no more than three speakers, sponsored roundtables involving no more than five speakers, or alternative formats. Competitive travel bursaries will be available for Postgraduates and Early Career scholars based in the UK or Ireland (enquire within).

The programme and registration form will be available in the new year. Information about travel, accommodation, and the plenary speakers can be found on the website:

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CFPs

Call for Papers: Obscure Modernism

Birkbeck, University of London, 27 February 2016

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London)

Dr. Ian Patterson (Queens’ College, Cambridge)

This conference invites contributions on the more obscure aspects of modernism and modernist cultural production. Obscure modernism denotes, on the one hand, those works, artists and writers who have been forgotten or neglected by scholarship to date and whose full meaning and value we are only now beginning to appreciate. On the other hand, obscure modernism can also signify the result of an intentional act of obfuscation on the part of the artist, aimed at creating an aura of difficulty, mystical secrecy or utter senselessness. In modernist texts which resist legibility and in forms of modernist cultural production which are difficult to access or extremely limited in scale, obscurity can be seen as an underlying structural principle of the work itself.

By focussing our attention on what remains obscure within modernism, this conference ties in with the ongoing critical recovery of the less prominent or valued aspects of modernist culture under the auspices of the New Modernist Studies. In addition to this, we invite speakers to consider modernist obscurity not only as the passive result of artistic failure or critical misapprehension but as an active act of resistance to institutionalised forms of attention. This includes, for instance, the productions of the historical avant-garde which adopt obscurity in order to resist their incorporation into the institution of art. By considering the scholarly mantra to recover and recuperate vis-à-vis a modernism which can be viewed as inherently obscure, we hope to stimulate a renewed debate around the status of obscure work and its critical recovery within Modernist Studies.

We invite proposals for papers that could focus on, but are not limited to, topics such as:

  • Obscure figures or groups within modernism
  • Lesser-known works by prominent figures
  • Regional modernisms
  • The institutional space of modernism, and the dynamics of resistance and recuperation
  • The politics of critical recovery
  • Modernism and the occult/esoteric
  • Difficulty
  • Opacity
  • (Mis-)translation
  • Dealing with obscure material: modernist archives, small presses, limited editions, theatre and performance studies
  • Creative reconstructions of modernism

Submission guidelines:

Proposals for 20-minute papers should include a 250-300 word abstract and a short bio. Please send your proposal to obscuremodernism@gmail.com.

Submission deadline: 1st December 2015

Organised by Evi Heinz, Paul Ingram and David Miller.

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CFPs

Rudyard Kipling and Europe – Call for Papers

 University of Bologna  6/7 September 2016

Confirmed Speakers:

Stephen Bann, University of Bristol

Howard J. Booth, University of Manchester

Jan Montefiore, University of Kent

Harry Ricketts, Victoria University of Wellington

Papers are invited that address Rudyard Kipling’s engagement with the history, politics, and culture of mainland Europe. Though he reached a huge audience there, Kipling’s response to, and impact upon, continental Europe has been little discussed – an omission this conference aims to address. More can be said than that he loved France and its culture and held negative views about Germany. In fact, his response to continental Europe was complex, and changed over time. Kipling had a keen sense of Europe’s history, whether political, religious and cultural. Importantly, the European and British Empire contexts – where Kipling is usually viewed in terms of the latter – are not wholly separate and distinct. The global politics of Kipling’s time was formed by competing, mostly European, nations, empires and political movements.

Possible themes for papers include

  • Kipling and Italy, France, Germany or other nations of mainland Europe
  • Kipling, Europe and modernity
  • The translation, publishing history and reception of Kipling’s works in mainland Europe
  • Kipling and European nationalism
  • The wider European dimensions of the history of the British Isles, and its nations and regions, in Kipling’s writing
  • Kipling and an independent Ireland
  • Kipling, Britain’s empire and other European empires
  • Kipling and the European theatres of the First World War
  • Kipling and medieval Europe
  • Kipling, travel and mainland Europe
  • Kipling and the European Left
  • Kipling, Europe and wartime propaganda
  • Kipling and the rise of Fascism and Nazism
  • Kipling, Europe and the United States
  • Kipling and European writers and artists

A special issue of The Kipling Journal is planned arising from the conference (subject to its usual peer review process)

Proposals of 250 words for 20-25 minute papers should be sent to Prof. Monica Turci, University of Bologna, at the conference email address kiplingandeurope@gmail.com by 20 February 2016.

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CFPs

SM2, University of Leeds, December 11-12 2015

Sensory Modernism(s)#2 is a two-day interdisciplinary conference due to be held at the University of Leeds. The event, organised by the university’s Sensory Modernism(s) research group, follows the highly successful inaugural conference event held earlier this year.

The conference will seek to address the interrelationship of modernism with sensory perception. We invite abstracts proposals for twenty-minute papers which address this theme, but will welcome proposals which offer an alternative mode of presentation, such as films or performance art.

Papers/presentations

Papers may address, but are in no way limited to, the following topics and their relevance to the general scope of the conference:

Philosophy

Psychoanalysis

Cinematography

Radio

Medicine

Anthropology

Aesthetics

Linguistics

Literature and the marketplace

Animals

Sexuality

Abstracts of 200-300 words, with a brief bio of no more than 200 words, should be emailed to sensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 11th November  2015.

Conference Organisers: Georgina Binnie, Daniel Kielty, Andrew Moore and Crispian Neill.

—
Sensory Modernism(s): Cultures of Perception (11-12/12/15)
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CFPs

David Jones: Dialogues with the Past

An International, Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of York, U.K. 21-23 July, 2016
In ‘Past and Present’ (1953), David Jones claimed: ‘The entire past is at the poet’s disposal’. The interweaving of this ‘entire past’ with the present moment fundamentally characterises Jones’s art and thought, from his visual reimagining of historical figures, to the etymologically rich allusions of his poetry, to the unusual philosophy of history manifested in his essays and letters. The analysis of Jones’s visual or poetic works often reflects the act of excavation: the unique layering of images, words and ideas, the resonant symbolism and shades of meaning. the blending of cultural traditions and dynamic interweaving of whole civilisations.
As 2016 marks the centenary of the Battle of the Somme which profoundly shaped Jones’s imagination and thought, it provides an ideal moment to reconsider the entirety of Jones’s engagement with the many, various, elusive and intertwined ‘pasts’ through which he conceived history and culture. It will be an opportunity to explore Jones’s own style, subject matter, allusive practice and intellectual questions including the role of ‘memory’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘history’ in art and life, while also reflecting upon Jones’s own past and contemporary moment.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Tom Dilworth (English), Adam Schwartz (History) and Paul Hills (History of Art)
Evening Events:
Screening (21 July) – An Artist’s Retrospect: Selections from Lost Jones Interviews and Programmes Performance (22 July) – Echoing Sacredness and Sound: Sources of Jones’s Audio-Visual Imagination
We welcome papers from scholars and postgraduates of multiple disciplines, including but not limited to: English, History of Art, History, Philosophy, Theology and any others that may offer relevant perspectives to the study of David Jones. Papers might include but are not limited to any of the following topics in relation to the thought and works of Jones and his contemporaries:
The Historical Moment of In Parenthesis (cf. Blunden, Graves, Sassoon)
The WWI Tommy in Visual Art
Dialogues with Cyclical Theories of History
Modern Responses to Tradition of War Poetry
The Poet as ‘Rememberer’
Concepts of ‘Tradition’ or ‘Contemporaneity’ (cf. T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden)
The Classical Tradition
Historical Resonance of Jones’s Painted Inscriptions
The Anathemata and Archaeology
Medievalism and the Welsh Arthurian Tradition (cf. Robert Graves, J.R.R. Tolkien)
Historical or Mythic landscapes and Figures in Visual Art
Biography and Retrospect
Catholicism and Cultural History (cf. Christopher Dawson)
Linguistic Interaction and Etymology: Welsh, Latin, Greek and English
A Jonesian ‘Theology of History?
Proposals for 20-minute papers should be sent to: davidjonesdialogues@gmail.com
The deadline for paper proposals is 31 January, 2016.
Also, see our website at: www.davidjonesdialogues.com