Call for Papers:  Eudora Welty and Modernism (American Literature Association, San Francisco, May 26-29, 2016)

This panel will investigate Eudora Welty’s relationship with modernisms–regional, national, transnational, or global. Papers welcome on any aspect of the subject: the extent to which her work (fiction, nonfiction, photography) is shaped by a modernist aesthetic, modern or modernist temporalities and spatialities in Welty’s work, fragmentation and discordance in the work or the career, shifts in voice and perspective within specific texts or across her career in response to modernity or modernism, ruins as modernist trope in her writing and/or photography, modernity and loss, urbanization and/or urbanity, the trace of Europe or European modernism in her work.

Please send proposals of 300-500 words to Professor Julia Eichelberger at EichelbergerJ@cofc.edu by January 10, 2016.

We are pleased to announce the ALMS Conference 2016 Call for Papers. Deadline for proposals is 8 January 2016:

WITHOUT BORDERS…

Archives, Libraries, Museums and Special Collections (ALMS) 2016, an International LGBTQ+ Conference hosted by London Metropolitan Archives, Bishopsgate Institute and the Queer London Research Forum at the University of Westminster.

Dates: 22 – 24 June 2016 Location: London

Background

ALMS is an international conference focussed on the work by public, private, academic, and grassroots organisations which are collecting, capture and preserving archives of LGBTQ+ experiences, to ensure our histories continue to be documented and shared. The conference began in Minnesota in 2006 when the Tretter Collection and Quatrefoil Library co-hosted the first LGBT ALMS Conference. The last conference took place in Amsterdam in 2012 and saw archivists, activists, librarians, museums professionals and academics from around the world coming together to share success stories and discuss challenges involved in recording LGBTQ+ lives.

CALL FOR PAPERS 2016

To reflect our emerging global community, the 2016 conference is titled ‘Without Borders’. Papers are invited from across the heritage, cultural, academic and grassroots communities. Our aim is to generate a dialogue within the co-dependent fields of LGBTQ+ historical research and collecting, and share experiences, ideas and best practice through a programme of presentations and short talks that explore margins, borders, barriers and intersections, past and present. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Barriers –in accessing LGBTQ+ content within existing collections, and in collecting material from LGBTQ+ communities
• Intersections – collecting, cataloguing or researching subjects which share multiple / contrasting identities
• Margins – researching elusive or liminal subjects; learning, research or projects taking place outside formal institutions
• Connections – uniting individuals or communities across boundaries through heritage or research
• Border police – navigating the formal standards of the heritage sector, including official terms and language or constructions of identity

We invite 200 word abstracts offering informal 10-minute presentations that share work-in-progress or provide an introduction to new projects or research that address these themes.

We also invite 300 word abstracts for 20-minute papers or presentations exploring the themes in more detail.

We particularly welcome contributions from BME / QPOC (Black Minority Ethnic / Queer People of Colour) and Transgender communities, as well as from those living outside the UK and USA.

In order to encourage dialogue and share knowledge in LGBTQ+ histories and cultures, London Metropolitan Archives, Bishopsgate Institute and the Queer London Research Forum at the University of Westminster are delivering the ALMS conference 2016 on a not-for-profit basis. The conference is not being funded as part of a wider project and the organisers are unable to cover speakers’ costs except in cases where keynote or invited speakers are prevented from attendance for financial reasons. A limited number of bursaries for attendees will be made available at the beginning of 2016.

Abstract deadline: Friday 8 January 2016 Abstracts to: jan.pimblett@cityoflondon.gov.uk

Further details: https://www.facebook.com/LGBTQALMS?fref=nf

Cosmopolis and Beyond

 Literary Cosmopolitanism after the Republic of Letters

Trinity College, Oxford (18-19 March 2016)

Cosmopolitanism, derived from the ancient Greek for ‘world citizenship’, offers a radical alternative to nationalism, asking individuals to imagine themselves as part of a community that goes beyond national and linguistic boundaries. Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in cosmopolitanism in the humanities and social sciences, especially within philosophy, sociology and politics. Cosmopolitanism, however, has also exercised a shaping influence on modern literary culture. It is well known that during the Enlightenment it found an embodiment in the Republic of Letters. Its evolution thereafter included uneasy alliances with the idea of Empire in the nineteenth century, and with the experiments of the international avant gardes and modernist circles, and the phenomenon of globalisation in the twentieth. Through these, and more, cultural formations cosmopolitanism has given rise to new ways of writing, reading, translating and circulating texts; these processes have, in turn, led to new understandings of individual and national identity, new forms of ethics and new configurations of aesthetic and political engagement. From Kant to Derrida, cosmopolitanism has in the course of history been seen as fostering peace and communication across borders. Far from being uncontroversial, though, it has also been attacked by those who have denounced its universalism as impossible and its social ethos as elitist.

This conference intends to explore different literary manifestations of the cosmopolitan ideal, broadly conceived, and its influence on modern literary culture. It seeks to tease out elements of continuity and rupture in a long history of literary cosmopolitanism that goes from the decline of the Republic of Letters to the era of globalisation. In order to do so, it aims to foster a dialogue between experts in different fields of literary studies (English, modern languages, comparative literature) and different historical periods.

Proposals are sought from all areas of literary studies, and cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches are particularly welcome. Possible angles on literary cosmopolitanism might include: translation; the media, transport and communication technologies; networks; migration and rootedness; nationalisms; provincialism; political and social spaces (city, nation, empire); places and institutions; emotions, gender and sexual identity.

Keynote address by Emily Apter (NYU).

Organised by Stefano Evangelista (Oxford).

Deadline for abstracts: 15 November 2015. Please send a title and 300-word abstract to the conference administrator, clement.dessy@gmail.com.

This conference is part of the AHRC-funded research project The Love of Strangers: Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle, led by Stefano Evangelista.

Dr Stefano Evangelista
Fellow and Tutor in English
Trinity College, Oxford, OX1 3BH
Tel: (01865) 287496

CFP Literary Cosmopolitanism

Dear Colleagues,
 
I am pleased to invite you to the upcoming
1st International Biennial Symposium of American Studies—DEUSAS—organized
by the Department of American Studies at Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir,
Turkey, April 27-29 2016.
 
The symposium is open to a wide variety of disciplines and approaches with
the aim of discussing the Sacred and the Sublime in connection with the
United States. We encourage submissions about literature, culture,
religion, philosophy, politics, sociology, the visual arts, film and the
media in any strand of American studies. Proposals for twenty-minute
presentations should be submitted to deusamericanstudies@gmail.com by
November 13, 2015 at the latest. Submissions should include a 250 word
abstract in English and a short biographical description.
 
No registration fee will be required, though those who would like to
participate (whether as delegate or attendee) are expected to register
their names on our website, http://deusas.deu.edu.tr, or to contact the
Symposium Coordinator, Dr. Richard Parker at richard.parker@deu.edu.tr or
deusamericanstudies@gmail.com.
 
We look forward to welcoming you all to the beautiful city of Izmir!
 
Please feel free to distribute this to any colleagues or students you
think may be interested in participating.
 
Best wishes,
 
 
Dr. Richard Parker

Object Emotions: Polemics
(April 15-16, 2016, Cambridge University)

Organizing Committee: Padma Maitland (UC Berkeley); Christopher P.
Miller (UC Berkeley); Marta Figlerowicz (Yale U); Hunter Dukes (U
Cambridge); Hannah Rose Woods (U Cambridge).

“Object Emotions: Polemics” continues a critical dialogue about new
directions in humanities research and theory that began at UC Berkeley
in 2013 and continued at Yale in 2015. This series of conferences is
inspired by the heightened attention to objects and emotions as new
points of entry into history, literature, art, architecture, area
studies, and the social sciences. Through focused attention on the role
of things and feelings, materials and affects, we aim to foster
interdisciplinary reflections about the intersections between thing
theory, affect theory, the histories of emotions, and new materialisms.

Papers presented at the two prior meetings addressed topics as varied as
the ennui of poetic syntax, the felt traces of Chinese calligraphy, the
mixing of pleasure and pain in the design of a nineteenth century girls’
school, and the politics of castration and swordplay in Quentin
Tarantino’s Kill Bill. These divergent projects were organized into
panels around common threads of questions related to spatiality,
temporality, personhood, cultural production, and historiography.

Object Emotions: Polemics seeks critical responses to the emergence of
these intersecting discourses. For example, how do objects and emotions
establish new intellectual grounds, complicate existing histories, and
help us question the assumptions that motivate our disciplines? What are
the limits to affect theories, object-oriented criticism, or speculative
realisms and their local applications? What are the social and political
origins of the current turns to emotions and objects? How do we account
for the newness of “new materialisms” and how might the use of such
theories change when we consider them within other contexts—cultural,
social, political? Do these theories extend certain critical biases or
discourses of power and how might we restore what has been left out, or
occluded by, these new critical turns? How do these approaches to
objects and emotions reflect broader struggles with the formation of
departments and academic institutions as such?

We welcome papers that address any of these questions, or related ones,
with reference to how we might complicate current models for using
affect studies, materialisms, or emotional histories in our respective
disciplines. We also welcome projects that situate these polemics in
relation to specific case studies or individual works of literature,
art, or architecture.

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Padma Maitland at
padmamaitland@berkeley.edu by November 10, 2015.  We will send responses
by December 15, 2015.  The conference itself will take place at
Cambridge University on April 15-16, 2016.

Panel in the NeMLA 2016 (Northeast Modern Language Association) convention in Hartford, Connecticut
http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html
This panel will focus on a wide range of cultural responses to the latter two years of the Great War, namely from the beginning of the Battle of Verdun in 1916 to the end of the war in 1918. Proposals on literature, film, painting, graphic arts, music, philosophy, and other cultural forms are welcome. Works from 1916-2015 will be considered. This panel is open to many themes and questions, including but not limited to the following: how have those two years of war influenced actual combatants or fictional characters? Do responses to the long war vary from writer to writer or from novel to novel? Did different countries/languages have distinct or overlapping approaches to representing war after it had been going on for two or more years? How are movements and attitudes toward peace portrayed in the later years of the war? How are particular battles portrayed in the various arts? How does the war affect personal or sexual identity as portrayed in the arts? What are the similarities and differences between combatants and civilians that are represented in the arts? How has the duration of that war affected artistic forms? How has the war affected popular and high culture? Have different cultures or nations reacted in different ways to the war? How is disability that was caused by the war portrayed in the arts? What methodological perspectives are best suited to grasp the Great War? Presentations dealing with non-English writers and works are especially appreciated.

Please contact the chairs Richard Schumaker (rschumaker3@gmail.com) and Marja Härmänmaa (Marja.harmanmaa@helsinki.fi)

Dear colleagues,

please see our CFP for the NeMLA conference in Hartford, Connecticut (US), March 17-20, 2016.

Retelling Stories through Literature and Film

Touching the Body in Pieces: Affective Ecologies of the Modern Body (NeMLA- March 2016, Hartford, CT)

From artist Hans Bellmer’s distorted dolls, to Rupert Brooke’s “dust” in a “corner of a foreign field,” to Virginia Woolf’s “orts, scraps, and fragments,” bodies – textual, phenomenological, cultural, political, and physical – seem to fall to pieces in modernism. How can we conceptualize the modern body in light of its affective and ecological surrounds?

Broadly, this panel seeks to examine these ecologies of bodies and their surrounds in modernism. Specifically, we endeavor to explore textual bodies and their composition (or decomposition) in ways that help us understand the ecological placement of the body as it engages with modernism’s historical and physical environments. What is the relation of modern bodies to both “hard” and “soft” surrounds? How is the natural body “queered” by the natural world or other surroundings? Does the queer intervene in these conceptions of dualistic bodies, as Judith Butler argues? How is the wounded body – which seems to negotiate both the hard and soft by opening permeable bodily and subjective bounds – represented in or through landscapes of war, or in relationships with nature and landscape? What is embodiment, or what are the boundaries of the body and its hard surrounds if the body itself is an affective environment or ecology of its own? How does modernity’s affective shift register or occlude a relationship between subject the “outside”? How is the body and/or its emotions disseminated, or dismantled? Related elements to consider could include WWI, WWII, “publicity,” cities and urbanity, T.S. Eliot’s cool impersonality, nation or politics, robotic or prosthetic bodies; and in parallel, the domestic, rurality, sentimentality, the homefront, sympathy or suffrage.

We welcome all approaches to the question of the modern body’s conceptualization or re-/de-conceptualization, including those that cross disciplinary bounds.

Go to http://www.cfplist.com//nemla/Home/S/15703 to submit a 200-300 word abstract by September 30, 2015. Email molly_hall@my.uri.edu or kara_watts@my.uri.edu with any questions.

CALL FOR PAPERS

University of Warwick, 22-23 January 2016

Translation was an integral part of the literary practice of many twentieth-century writers and thinkers. It provided them with such an important lens for viewing other cultures and their own past that, as Steven Yao argues, the period of modernism could well be dubbed ‘an age of translations’. This conference seeks to explore the role of translation in the development of literary, religious, and philosophical responses to the new realities of the twentieth century, in particular, the disappearance of a stable religious framework and the traumas of totalitarianism, the World Wars, and the Holocaust. The conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, early career researchers and doctoral candidates working in translation studies, comparative literature, history, philosophy, religious studies, and cultural memory studies. Possible paper topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Translating the religious and the mythical in twentieth-century poetry and prose
• Translation and literary, religious, and philosophical responses to twentieth-century traumas
• Religious controversy and translation
• Modern and postmodern myths in translation
• Secularism and postsecularism in translation
• Translation and (trans)cultural memory

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Prof. Susan Bassnett (University of Warwick)

Prof. Jean Boase-Beier (University of East Anglia)

Prof. Peter Davies (University of Edinburgh)

Submission guidelines: Proposals for 20-min papers should include a 250–300 word abstract and a brief bio-note with institutional affiliation and email contact. Please submit your proposal to: transandmodernism@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 30 October 2015