Category: CFPs

University of Notre Dame London Centre,
1-4 Suffolk Street, London, SW1Y 4HG, United Kingdom
25-26 September 2015
Keynote Speakers: Professor Richard Canning, University of Northampton; Professor Martin Stannard, University of Leicester; Professor Stephen Schloesser, S.J., Loyola University Chicago
For Full CfP visit: www.avantgardecatholicism.org
Deadline for submissions: 11 May 2015
Proposals should be emailed to: avantgardecatholicism@gmail.com

In Jacques Maritain’s endnotes to his Art et Scholastique, citations from Thomas Aquinas sit side-by-side with extracts from Jean Cocteau, Pierre Reverdy and accounts of Cezanne. Yet, this creative tension has proved difficult to reconcile with existing assumptions about the avant-garde: religion can be construed as one more bourgeois prejudice from which the artist needs to free him or herself; or else artistic productions can be accorded a quasi-religious reverence that circumvents the need for institutional religion. Failing that, and thanks to the unacknowledged influence of various secularisation theories, one might think it impossible to be forward-thinking and yet hold religious views.

The key historical event around which these ideas coalesce is the 1907 Papal Bull, Pascendi Dominici Gregis which condemned a range of new intellectual movements under a single heading: “modernism”. While apparently inauspicious for the creative tension this conference plans to examine – one recent critical study has suggested that literary modernism took its impetus from a positive appropriation of the term from Catholic discourse – attempts to steer clear of suspicious topics gave rise to wide-ranging discussion of aesthetics within Catholic circles.

Viewed more widely, there are numerous instances in English and French decadence, the artistic communities centred on Eric Gill at Ditchling and Capel-y-ffin and the crop of post-war British Catholic novelists – alongside the work of figures such as Pasolini, Gaudí and Marechal – where artistic experimentation has become manifest as an outpouring of intense Catholic renewal. Recognition of this phenomenon demands a far-reaching revision to the narratives told about twentieth-century artistic endeavour and, indeed, a re-consideration of the way in which Catholicism has come to position itself in relation to society.

This two-day conference will initiate this revisionary process by foregrounding the stimulus Catholic thought has provided for artistic experimentation, across the globe, from the 1890s onwards.

Saturday, 19 September 2015

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) at Wolfson College, Oxford

With funding from the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Centre for Life-Writing Research at King’s College London (CLWR)

 

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Sarah Churchwell	Andrew O’Hagan
Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities, University of East Anglia 2015 Writer in Residence, The Eccles Centre at the British Library	Novelist Creative Writing Fellow, King’s College London

 

In the last decade, the fields of life-writing and celebrity studies have separately gained traction as areas for provocative critical analysis, but the significant connections between them have been overlooked. In celebrity studies, stories about individual people are examined through national, cultural, economic and political contexts. The function of the person’s image is considered rather than the life from which that image was/is derived. Conversely, life-writing does not always take into account the impact of celebrity on the life, and instead portrays it as an event rather than a condition with psychological impact which could be an integral part of the narrative.

 

Through a one-day conference entitled ‘After-Image: Life-Writing and Celebrity,’ we want to consider the interplay between celebrity and life-writing. The conference will explore ideas of image, persona and self-fashioning in an historical as well as a contemporary context and the role these concepts play in the writing of lives. How does the story (telling) of a historical life—of Cleopatra or Abraham Lincoln, for instance— alter when we re-read it in terms of celebrity? What is the human impact of being a celebrity— in the words of Richard Dyer, ‘part of the coinage of every day speech’? And how does this factor in when we use archival materials related to celebrities, such as diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews, press accounts, oral histories, apocryphal tales, etc.? Furthermore, what are the ethical responsibilities of life-writers when approaching such famous stories?

Possible topics for papers include but are not limited to:

• Celebrity in the fields of literature, politics, entertainment and public life
• Historical reevaluations of celebrity from earlier periods
• Royal lives
• The politics of writing celebrity lives
• The psychology of celebrity
• Fame, famousness, fandom, stardom, myth and/or iconicity
• The celebrity as life-writer (i.e. celebrity memoirs, etc.)
• Using celebrity lives in historical fiction
• The celebrity and identity
• Showmanship, freak shows and the circus
• Identity, power and violence in lives of the famous
• Images and the press
• Writing celebrity lives from below

We also welcome papers on any issues arising from these questions and disciplines.

The conference organizers invite abstracts for individual 20-minute presentations/papers or panel proposals. Presenters should submit abstracts of 300 words by 15 May 2015 to Nanette O’Brien (nanette.obrien@wolfson.ox.ac.uk) and Oline Eaton (faith.eaton@kcl.ac.uk). Please send your abstract as a separate attachment in a PDF or Word document, and include on it your name, affiliation, and a brief bio.

EXTENDED DEADLINE UNTIL APRIL 15

2^nd International Conference of the University of Banja Luka (BiH) in cooperation with Institute of English Studies, University of London (UK)

CELLS – CONFERENCE ON ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERARY STUDIES

Present-day Perspectives on Language, Literature and Culture.

Banja Luka, June 12th and 13th, 2015

CALL FOR PAPERS

The Department of English, at the Faculty of Philology, University of Banja Luka (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London (United Kingdom) are pleased to announce second conference on English language and literary studies CELLS: Remaking Tradition: Present-day Perspectives on Language, Literature and Culture.

The aim of the conference is to provide an international forum for the exchange of ideas and experiences across the fields of English language and literary studies, with particular emphasis on cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary issues raised in the fields of literature, culture, linguistics, translation studies and applied linguistics. Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• the study of globalisation, acculturation and migration in contemporary studies of language, literature and culture;
• juxtaposition and interdependence of tradition and contemporariness in ideology, tradition, customs, norms, routines, etc.;
• literature and economics/the economy;
• tradition in translation studies: mediating between source and target language cultures and languages;
• the place of mono/plurilingualism in contemporary approaches to the study of language, literature and culture;
• rewriting of basic postulates in approaches to foreign language teaching.

The official language of the conference is English. 

PLENARY SPEAKERS

– Wim Van Mierlo (Acting Director of Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK)

– John Frederick Bailyn (Professor and Doctoral Program Director at Stony Brook University, New York, USA and Director of SUNY Russia Programs Network)

Guest Lecturer to celebrate the 21st anniversary of the Department of English:

– Dijana Jelača (Adjunct Assistant Professor at St. John’s University, New York, USA)

SUBMISSION OF ABSTRACTS

Please send an abstract of up to 300 words (MS Word 2003-2007) to the following e-mail address: cells@unibl.rs

Abstracts should be anonymous containing only the name of the paper, the body of the abstract and references.

Please send the following information in the body of the e-mail:

• Title of the paper
• Name of the author(s)
• Affiliation of the author (s)
• Key words
• E-mail address
• Bio note (no more than 100 words)

IMPORTANT DATES

20^th April, 2015                     Deadline for Submission of Abstracts

30^thApril, 2015                      Notification of Acceptance

5^th May, 2015                                    Registration

CONFERENCE FEE

The conference fee is 60 Euros. The fee includes:

• conference pack
• conference break refreshments (lunch, snacks and beverages)
• conference dinner
• publication of selected papers in the conference proceedings

ACCOMMODATION

Accommodation can be arranged by the organisers upon request.

CONFERENCE WEBSITE

All the details and important information can be found at the conference website.

www.cellsbl.com (active from January 25^th, 2015)

A selection of papers will be published after the conference.

CONTACT:

E-mail: cells@unibl.rs

We look forward to your proposals.

Organising Committee:

Dr Željka Babić, University of Banja Luka, BiH

Dr Wim Van Mierlo, University of London, UK

Dr Tatjana Bijelić, University of Banja Luka,BiH

Dr Petar Penda, University of Banja Luka, BiH

Modernism – cosmopolitan and international in its connections and networks – found its home in cities, regions and locales. And yet provincialism and localism are still dirty words in criticism surrounding literary and artistic responses to modernity: they remain tinged with the reactionary and the conservative. Many narratives of artistic culture of the period 1890-1950 maintain that advanced aesthetics move from core to province, losing vitality as they become part of a supposedly ‘middlebrow’ culture. But what if the current were reversed? What if the local, the regional, the provincial, the civic and the municipal were the sites of artistic energy rather than cultural backwaters? Terms such as ‘local’ and ‘regional’ have more recently been animated by the reaction against financial and consumerist globalisation, but a glance backwards reveals that artists and writers of the modernist period were engaging with ideas of the local too, and that many of them were located far away from the metropolitan ‘centre’.

This two-day conference on 22nd-23rd June 2015, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at the University of Birmingham, invites academics, postgraduate students, curators and other arts and heritage professionals to come together to discuss the many ways in which our current literary and artistic maps of modernism might be redrawn so that proper attention can be paid to local cultural nodes and networks. The organisers are looking for papers on any aspect of the topic. Potential speakers might talk about such issues as the following:

• Literary and artistic responses to civic, local, municipal, regional and provincial modernity
• Local, civic, municipal and regional activities, groups, coteries and enclaves
• Rural modernisms
• The concept of the ‘region’
• Rejections/reformulations of internationalism
• Town planning and urban design
• Public art
• Contemporary re-imaginings/re-workings of the spaces and places of civic modernity

Papers should be 20 minutes long. For further information about the conference, or to submit an individual or panel proposal, contact Dr Daniel Moore (d.t.moore@bham.ac.uk). The deadline for proposals is Monday 18th May.

In the context of modernism, we often think of “revolution” in terms of rupture and rejection, stylistic advances, and the wholesale dismissal of the past in favour of the mandate to “make it new.” However, “revolution” also refers to “a convolution; a twist; a turn; a loop” or a “cyclical recurrence” (OED). Our sense of modernist rupture must necessarily be formulated alongside this notion of cyclicality. This panel aims to explore the ways in which modernist writers play with and borrow from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, in all its convolutions, twists, turns, and loops, with the aim of examining how this intertextuality can be interpreted as a form of revolution. Proposals for papers on modernist reworkings of wonderland are very welcome and might also be considered for an edited collection.

London College of Fashion, Saturday 12th March 2016

Convenors: Reina Lewis, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, and Andrew Stephenson, University of East London.

On 27 July 2017, it will be fifty years since the passing of the Sexual Offences Act that decriminalised homosexuality in England and Wales for consenting male adults. As Lord Arran declared, it was ‘an awesome and marvellous thing’ and it repealed the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act, passed in 1885, that made homosexual acts between consenting male adults illegal. As is well documented, it was the Oscar Wilde trial in 1895 that generated publicity about the ‘illicit’ nature of male homosexuality and exposed its thriving subcultures in London. Following his conviction, Wilde’s dandified style and witty bravado became the dominant paradigm for the homosexual artist-genius. Homosexual subcultures were widely linked to the fashionable world of the creative arts – from fashion, interior decoration, theatre and music, to fine art, design, photography and film.

Taking the period from c.1885 to 1967 as our loose historical frame and seeking to expose the complex forms of queer identity and self-fashioning emerging in these decades, this conference will explore the varied cultures and lifestyles of gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans artists, designers and creative individuals working and thriving in Britain in this period. Pushing beyond well-rehearsed urban stereotypes and current categories for understanding sexuality, papers are invited to address a broad range of creative practices and representational strategies to signal how the fabric of culture in Britain, its communal spaces and geographies and its same-sex group identities (actual or imaginative) were being modernised and updated according to shifting social, sexual and emotional imperatives.

Given the number and range of queer artists, designers and creative professionals active in this period, this timely conference will demonstrate for the first time how these homo-, bi- or trans-sexual experiences, lifestyles and forms of sexual desire flourished in Britain whilst, at the same time, being under the threat of scandal and criminal prosecution.

Keynotes:
Laura Doan, University of Manchester
Christopher Breward, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Closing date for proposals: 31st May 2015
Please send abstracts (300 words) to reina.lewis@fashion.arts.ac.uk and a.p.stephenson@uel.ac.uk

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) is currently accepting submissions for its 1 1/2 hour professional session at the 2016 College Art Association Annual Conference, which will take place February 3-6, 2016 in Washington, DC. We welcome proposals on any aspect of the history, theory, or practice of printmaking from any chronological or geographic category. Preference will be given to proposals that call for a wide array of papers covering printmaking’s rich history.

Details:

• Individual or co-chaired sessions are welcome
• Proposals should include a title for and a short description of the session (no more than 500 words)
• Chairs and co-chairs must include CVs with submission
• Chairs and co-chairs must be active members of CAA and APS at the time of the annual conference.

Deadline for proposals: May 1, 2015

To ask questions or submit a proposal, please email info@printscholars.org.

Despite modernity’s rapid medicalization of life, medicine plays a
surprisingly minor role in most histories of modern art. But attention
to modernism’s embodied forms raises intriguing questions about modern
art’s medicalized creators, patrons, and viewers. This session invites
papers that interrogate the creative connections between modernism and
medicine in order to contest, expand, and transform our understandings
of the nexus between art and medicine in the modern period. In
particular, we welcome papers that consider artists’ new representations
of the body and bodily functions in terms of medicine’s new
epistemological models, therapeutic regimes, and techniques for
producing and disseminating knowledge. Topics might include artists’
depictions of medical subjects and experiences of illness and disease;
relationships between artists and doctors; medical patronage; public art
and medical institutions; the use of medical discourse in art criticism;
the architecture and design of private clinics and public hospitals.

Please send an abstract (1-2 pages, double spaced), a Letter of
Interest, a Submission Form and current CV by May 8 to: Gemma Blackshaw,
gemma.blackshaw@plymouth.ac.uk, and Allison Morehead,
morehead@queensu.ca. For more information, please see:
http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf
<http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf>