MAPPING SPACE MAPPING TIME  MAPPING TEXTS

An International  Conference

16th and 17th July, 2020. The Knowledge Centre, The British Library, London.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference is hosted by the AHRC Funded Chronotopic Cartographies project (Lancaster University) in partnership with The British Library and comes out of the primary research of this project into the mapping of space and time for fictional works, with no real-world correspondence.  Chronotopic Cartographies develops digital methods and tools that enable the mapping of literary works by generating graphs as maps directly out of the coded text.  

See: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/chronotopic-cartographies/

The Call for Papers emerges from the project and the interdisciplinary fields that it draws upon and connects – literature; narratology; corpus linguistics; onomastics; digital and spatial  humanities; geography; cartography; gaming. We welcome papers from those working in or across these fields but also from anyone with an interest in the problematics of mapping, visualising and analysing space, time and text from any disciplinary perspective. We seek to bring together and juxtapose different approaches in order to advance knowledge.  

Questions and Areas of Interest:  What kind of digital models are most useful for the Humanities?  How do insights from the Humanities reshape digital methods? How do we map unquantifiable space and place?  What happens if we release mapping from GIS? How can we connect virtual, actual and imaginative pathways meaningfully? How do we productively connect visual and verbal meaning?  How do we accommodate the multiple dimensions of literature within 2D, 3D or 4D space? How do we ground time? Does everything have to happen somewhere? What can mapping a text uncover or reveal? 

We invite submissions in the form of either 20 minute papers or 5 minute Poster sessions. Individuals giving a paper or poster session may also wish to run informal workshops in shared knowledge sessions. 

Abstract Deadline: EXTENDED TO 29th February 2020.  

Notification of Acceptance: 20th March 2020.

E-mail Abstracts to Conference Organiser Dawn Stobbart: d.stobbart1@lancaster.ac.uk

Queries to Chronotopic Cartographies Project PI Professor Sally Bushell: s.bushell@lancaster.ac.uk

SHORT PAPERS: Abstracts of 300 words.  POSTERS: Abstracts of 150 words.

WORKSHOPS: Brief description + technical requirements.

The conference fee is £150 (standard) £75 (concessions) for this two-day event.  A limited number of bursaries will be available.

Telepoetics

Dana Research Centre, Science Museum, London, 27 May 2020

Deadline for proposals: 10 March 2020

www.crossedlines.co.uk

From the ‘waves of sound, transmitted o’er the line’ in Jones Very’s ‘The Telephone’ (1877) to the ‘thin voice speak[ing] / from a drowning world’ in Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Six Rings’ (2018), telephones have been calling in and across literary texts for almost one hundred and fifty years. But although considerable research on the smartphone has been undertaken in recent media and cultural studies, the relationship between telephony and literature remains largely neglected. In fact, as Nicholas Royle points out in Telepathy and Literature (1991), ‘really we have no idea what a telephone is, or what a voice is, or when or how. Least of all when it is linked up with the question of literature’. Taking the ‘question of literature’ as its starting point, this AHRC-funded symposium will address the telephone’s propensity to facilitate and mediate but also to interrupt communication on a local and global scale, as well the ways in which it taps into some of the most urgent concerns of the modern and contemporary age, including surveillance, mobility, resistance, power and warfare. Exploring its complex, multiple and mutating functions in literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present day, we will consider both historical and recent manifestations of the telephone, and its capacity to call across languages and cultures.

Celebrating the potential of the telephone to operate at the intersection between the literary, the critical, the personal and the political, we envisage a structure to the symposium that will facilitate a range of voices, conversations and modes of address: rather than keynote lectures, the day will consist of short 10-minute papers, variously ‘interrupted’ by creative and critical calls from invited speakers including Mara Mills (New York University), Eric Prenowitz (University of Leeds), Nicholas Royle (University of Sussex) and Will Self (Brunel University). Further speakers are to be confirmed.

We invite proposals for 10-minute critical and creative papers that explore the relationship between literature and telephony in a range of global contexts and from the nineteenth century to the present day. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• privacy and surveillance
• communications warfare
• mobility and globalization
• technologies of desire
• telephony as translation
• textual interference, interruption or interception
• lyric calling and texting
• telephony and D/deaf experience
• telephony and labour
• ethics and answerability
• voice and address

Please submit a 250 word proposal to sam.buchan-watts@ntu.ac.uk by 10 March 2020.

We are committed to fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion and have set aside a travel fund to support independent early career scholars and under-represented groups in academia. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please include a 150-word statement explaining what you will gain from attendance and an estimate of your travel costs.

LATES AT THE SCIENCE MUSEUM
The symposium will be followed by a Communication-themed ‘Lates’ event at the Science Museum from 18:45 to 22:00 on 27 May. The Science Museum’s Lates are free and open to all, and typically attract more than 2500 visitors per night. Inviting members of the public to reflect on the history of telecommunications and to imagine its possible futures, our event will provide a space to think about the relationship between language, culture and technology. If you are interested in contributing to this ‘Lates’ event, please email sam.buchan-watts@ntu.ac.uk by 10 March 2020. For more information, visit https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/be-part-science-museums-lates

This event is part of the Crossed Wires project led by Dr Sarah Jackson (Nottingham Trent University) and funded by the AHRC.
https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH%2FR005613%2F1

2020 marks 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 herself, 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 one-day conference aims to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism. 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 conference seeks 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.

We therefore welcome papers 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. We invite proposals that consider any aspect of the poem, its influences, or its legacies as well as papers focusing on Mirrlees’s work more generally and in relation to her contemporaries.

The conference will take place on June 10, 2020 at the Maison de la Recherche Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France. It will include a panel discussion with Deborah Levy, Sandeep Parmar, Lauren Elkin, and Francesca Wade as well as a reception celebrating the launch of a new edition of the poem (forthcoming May 2020 by Faber & Faber).

Abstracts due February 15, 2020 to Rio Matchett (R.A.Matchett@liverpool.ac.uk) and Nell Wasserstrom (wassersn@bc.edu).

The next biennial conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM) will be held at the University of Leuven from 17 to 19 September 2020 on the theme of CRISIS.

Keynote speakers include Boris Groys, Ken Hirschkop, and Christine Poggi.

A call for roundtable proposals (deadline 1 Jan.) and for paper and panel proposals (deadline 1 February) can be consulted on the EAM’s website (http://www.eam-europe.be/).

Join CRISIS!

This conference is organised by Sascha Bru and hosted by the MDRN research lab (www.mdrn.be) based at the Arts Faculty of the University of Leuven. The local organising committee further includes Mark Delaere (Musicology), Leen Engelen (Film Studies), Hilde Heynen (Architecture), Kate Kangaslahti (Art History, principal co-organiser), Bart Philipsen (Theatre & Performance Studies), Anne Reverseau (UC Louvain, Photography), and Inga Rossi-Schrimpf (curator Royal Museums of Fine Arts Brussels, RMFAB). The conference is sponsored by the Lieven Gevaert Centre for Photography (LGC) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA).

New deadline: 23 January 2020

Katherine Mansfield: Germany and Beyond

Bad Wörishofen, Germany

21-22 March 2020

An international conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society

Hosted by the Bad Wörishofen Mayorality and Tourist and Spa Bureau

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Dr Gerri Kimber

Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3, France

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

It is  well known that Katherine Mansfield’s first book of stories, In a  German Pension (1911), was  inspired by her eight months’ stay in the Bavarian spa town of Wörishofen in 1909 at the age of 21, but the importance of Germany and all things German in her writing has not been explored in any depth until recently. Although Mansfield did not return to Germany in the same way as she kept visiting France, her spiritual home in Europe, Germany continued to hold a fascination for her long after her 1909 sojourn, and myriad associations can be traced in her fiction as well as her notebooks and letters.

This two-day conference aims to open up to new scrutiny the impact of Germany on Mansfield’s work and life: its language, peoples and cultures. These range from the setting in Munich of her story ‘The Little Governess’, to her passion for music by composers such as Beethoven, Bruch, and Wagner, her love of the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and literary influences such as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, her longing for her German classes at Queen’s College in Harley Street because of the dashing Professor Walter Rippmann, reveals her early devotion. Another influence on her love of German and Germany is the writing of her cousin, the writer Elizabeth von Arnim, widow of Graf Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a member of the Prussian aristocracy, and her friendship with Elizabeth, which developed during her stay in Montana,  Switzerland in the last two years of her life.

It is entirely fitting that this conference will be held in Bad Wörishofen, a Bavarian spa town that honours Mansfield as one of its most famous residents and a significant cultural icon in fostering local civic pride and identity. Last year, on the occasion of her 130th birthday, a specially commissioned statue of Katherine Mansfield gazing out over the Iceberg Pond in the Spa Park, was unveiled.

The Katherine Mansfield Society is therefore delighted to host, together with the Bad Wörishofen Mayorality and Tourist and Spa Bureau, a conference that aims to explore and celebrate what Germany meant to Mansfield and what it points to in her vision of the world.

Suggested topics for papers might include (but are not limited to):

• Wörishofen and artistic inspiration:  Mansfield’s In a German Pension 
• Bavaria and the German Pension stories: nationality, gender and satire
• German poetry in the works of Mansfield (e.g. Heinrich Heine)
• German music: classical and modernist
• German art, architecture and visual culture in Mansfield’s writing
• German/Prussian family connections: Elizabeth von Arnim
• Mansfield, travel, Germany and ‘beyond’
• Mansfield and fairy tales
• The gothic and fantastic:  Germanic sources and influences
• The legacy of Mansfield in German writing today
• The German reception of Mansfield’s works
• German influences in Mansfield’s education (e.g. Walter Rippmann)
• Translating into German / German translations of Mansfield’s work
• Teaching and studying Mansfield in Germany today
• Mansfield, Sebastian Kneipp, naturopathy and other holistic therapies
• The Germans and Germany as sources for Mansfield’s imagination
• Mansfield and Frieda von Richthofen (wife of D. H. Lawrence)
• Mansfield as icon and inspiration for German cultural production

NB: All other topics will be considered 

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a 50-word bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organisers:

Dr Delia da Sousa Correa (Open University, UK),

Dr Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK),

Monika Sobotta (Open University, UK)

and Professor Janet Wilson (University of Northampton, UK)

 at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

Submission deadline: 23 January 2020