Category: CFPs

The Landscape, Space, Place Research Group at the University of Nottingham is pleased to announce a Call for Papers for its ninth annual postgraduate workshop.

‘There and back again’: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Workshop on Travel

Monday 22^nd June 2015

University of Nottingham

Keynote Speaker: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

To travel is unavoidable, whether as part of the everyday or the exceptional. It can be political or leisurely, routine or unexpected, real or imaginary. Travel can create different spatial, bodily, and object identities, as (un)familiar places and landscapes are negotiated, and borders and boundaries are crossed and re-crossed. It can have multiple implications and legacies and can be represented and documented in diverse, sometimes surprising, ways.

This workshop aims to emphasise and explore the richness of travel in its multivalent forms, from antiquity to modernity and beyond. We will consider travel in relation to social, political, cultural, and environmental forces, as we ask how it is interpreted across the arts, humanities, and social sciences.

Papers are invited on – but are by no means limited to – the following themes:

• The narration and representation of travel
• Journeying in/through the landscape
• Spatial identity and place
• Travel and temporality
• Modes and methods of transport
• Home, abroad, belonging, displacement
• Departures and arrivals
• Origins, destinations, and the in-between
• Crossing borders and boundaries
• The implications and legacies of travel

This is a one-day, interdisciplinary workshop that seeks to offer postgraduate students an opportunity to present related work at any stage of their research within a friendly, supportive and stimulating environment. It is the ninth annual postgraduate workshop to be run by the Landscape, Space, Place Research Group and hosted by the Schools of English and Geography at the University of Nottingham.

We welcome abstracts of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers from all current postgraduate students. Please send, along with a short biography, to lsp.pgworkshop@nottingham.ac.uk by Friday 8th May 2015.

Organising Committee:  Alexander Harby, Alice Insley, Hollie Johnson, Mark Lambert, Xiaofan Xu & Emma Zimmerman

Further details can be found in the attached CFP.

Visit the LSPRG website: http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/lsprg/index.aspx

Thursday 2 July 2015, Durham Castle, Durham University

Keynote speaker: Dr. Ian Biddle, International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University

‘Music means exactly the way everything else does and at the same time may not mean at all and at the same time means in ways that nothing else can.’ (Lawrence Kramer, Interpreting Music (2011))

This one-day interdisciplinary postgraduate conference seeks to explore the myriad ways in which literature and music interact to construct meaning. In recent years, musicology has embraced new critical approaches, not least from literary theory and criticism, in order to understand music as constitutive of identity – gender, sexuality, nationality, race – and suggest radical ways in which music signifies through language and metaphor. These developments suggest that literary studies can continue to inform analysis of music in productive ways, while approaches from musicology can also stimulate fresh perspectives on literary works by prompting a reassessment of the way in which music functions in relation to the literary text.

We invite submissions on any period or any literature in English or other modern languages, and from those using methodologies drawing on literary criticism and musical analysis. Theoretical contributions and submissions incorporating elements of musical performance are also welcome.

Topics might include (but are not limited to):

• Music and literary form (e.g. leitmotif, serialism, minimalism).
• Musicians in literature (e.g. George du Maurier’s Trilby, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu).
• Poetry set to music (e.g. the Medieval Lyric, Goethe, Stéphane Mallarmé, A.E. Housman).
• Lyrics as literature (e.g. Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen).
• The libretto as work of literature (e.g. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, W.S. Gilbert, W.H. Auden).
• Musical performances in literature (e.g. the piano in Jane Austen, opera in E.M. Forster and Alan Hollinghurst).
• Music and song in dramatic performance (e.g. lyric and aurality in Medieval and Early modern drama and masque).
• Musical adaptation of literary works (e.g. operas on Medieval Romance, Shakespeare or Pushkin, symphonic poems on Shakespeare or Dante).
• Allusions to musical works in literature (e.g. T.S. Eliot and Wagner, Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, folksong in Lorca).
• Musical notation or illustrations incorporated within literary texts (e.g. Medieval manuscripts, Ingeborg Bachmann’sMalina).
• The relationship between ‘New Musicology’ and contemporary literary theory.

Abstracts of up to 300 words for papers of 20 minutes should be sent to musicandlit2015@gmail.com by 5pm on 8 May 2015. Please also include full contact details and a brief biographical note, and specify any audiovisual equipment you will require.

Contributors to the conference will be invited to submit their work to an upcoming volume of Postgraduate English, a peer-reviewed online journal based at the Department of English Studies, Durham University.

For further information please see: https://www.dur.ac.uk/english.studies/events/?eventno=23906

You can follow the Conference on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/musicandlit2015/

———UCL ENGLISH GRADUATE CONFERENCE, FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2015————

Dissidence < Latin dissidēntia, < dissidēre to sit apart, disagree

featuring guest speaker Prof. Stefan Collini and second speaker to be announced

“The stories we are told today have stopped making sense” — Adam Curtis

As Britain staggers towards another General Election, the question of dissidence is more pressing than ever: drifting inertly in the face of unprecedented changes to higher education and our public sector, and after the convulsions of 2008 and 2011, have we as a society lapsed into indifference?

The 2015 UCL English Graduate Conference invites proposals for 20 minute papers on the theme of dissidence.

If literature has always provided a forum for dissent, rebellion and resistance and, as such, has frequently acted as a catalyst for change, how might models from the literary-historical past provide a framework for thinking about resistance in the present? Can we keep going as we are? Do we simply need “stories we can believe in”, or do we need to cultivate new methods of critique? And if so, how might literature or literary studies show the way?

This conference will therefore not only address the place of dissidence in literature, but also the place of culture in society and its potential as a site for critique. What kind of space for resistance can be opened up by literature and culture, and what does literary scholarship have to contribute? Are we, as scholars, dissidents – or were we ever?

The aim of this conference is to provide an opportunity for postgraduates working across the UK and internationally to present their own work – and to frame it within a wider conversation about the place of humanities in the twenty first century. Papers can address the topic of dissidence in any period of literary history, consider texts from any country, and originate from any theoretical perspective.

Proposals are particularly welcomed along the following strands, although other interpretations will be gladly received:

* Social/Political Dissidence — outsider figures / models of resistance / commitment

* Aesthetic Dissidence — generic shifts / cultures of dissent / outsider & oppositional aesthetics / canonical re-orientations / new media and literature / modernism’s afterlives

* Textual Dissidence — divergent readings / the readerly & the writerly / hermeneutics of suspicion

* Sexual Dissidence — queer voices / feminism / gender identity politics

* Spatial/Temporal Dissidence — subversive literary spaces / the space of literature / exile / diaspora / history / utopias / dystopias

Please submit 300 word proposals, accompanied by brief biographies, to dissidence.ucl.english@gmail.comby Friday 17 April.

The State of Fiction: Don DeLillo in the 21st Century

10 June 2015, University of Sussex

Writing also means trying to advance the art. Fiction hasn’t quite been filled in or done in or worked out. We make our small leaps. Don DeLillo, 1982

This one-day conference will address the state of fiction in contemporary American culture by focusing on the extensive oeuvre of Don DeLillo, from the 1970s to the present day and beyond. DeLillo commented shortly after the publication of The Names that fiction had not yet been ‘filled in,’ ‘done in,’ or ‘worked out.’ How do we read this thirty years later, in the shadow of not only DeLillo’s major works but also the events that have characterised our move into the Twenty-First Century? How have DeLillo’s small leaps between the New York of Players (1977) and the New York of Falling Man (2007) ‘filled in’ fiction? Has DeLillo’s pervasive influence across contemporary American culture ‘done in’ postmodernism? Is the novel in the Twenty First Century already ‘worked out’?

Proposals for presentations of 20 minutes or for pre-formed panels of 1 hour are invited; topics, which should be rooted in the work of DeLillo, may include but are not limited to:

·       The novelist in contemporary (American) culture: canonicity, influence, consumption

·       New contexts: 9/11, Occupy, neoliberalism, globalisation

·       ‘The Power of History’: the state and the shadow-state, popular culture, paranoia

·       New realisms: crisis, terror, apocalypse, childhood, metafiction

·       Language: the individual and the crowd, the everyday and the event, ekphrasis

·       New forms: genres, adaptations, translations, multilingualism

·       The ends of postmodernism? Forebears, afterlives, lateness

·       Environment, global warming and waste

Submissions that are interdisciplinary in nature are particularly encouraged. Abstracts of up to 250 words in length and a brief biographical note should be submitted at delilloconference2015.wordpress.com by 19 March 2015.

To be held at the University of Reading, Special Collections, Friday 10^th July 2015

“We are thinking of starting a printing press, for all our friends stories. Don’t you think it’s a good idea?” (Virginia Woolf to Lady Robert Cecil, October 1916. Letters 2:120).

Much scholarship has been undertaken in recent years on the “institutions”, producers, and materialmakers of literary modernism. Such work has aided our understanding of the cultural and textual production of modernist writing and has been particularly prominent with regards to the important role played by periodicals and small and little magazines. The Modernist Journals Project http://modjourn.org/ is one example among many of the dynamic research taking place in this area.

This one-day symposium, taking inspiration from such scholarship, will offer an opportunity to focus on the publishers and publishing houses who also helped to make and produce modernism. Papers are invited from scholars and groups of scholars working on any global publishing house related to modernist writing – from Faber & Faber to Mills & Boon, from Chatto & Windus to the Gregynog Press, from Grant Richards to Tauchnitz. We hope that the day will offer an opportunity to explore some of the multifarious connections between these publishing houses and the writers, illustrators, press workers, managers and editors with whom they were associated. The day is being organised to coincide with the launch of the Modernist Archives Publishing Project (MAPP, funded by SSHRC 2013-15) which we hope, through working with other teams, to expand from the Hogarth Press as case study into the wider publishing landscape of the period.

Papers might explore themes and concepts such as:

–       Publishing and textuality

–       Publishing history and the history of reading

–       Publishing books and the little magazines

–       The roles of publishers, editors, press workers

–       Censorship and innovation

–       Editing

–       Digital initiatives in book and publishing history

Please submit abstracts for papers (300 words max) to Dr Nicola Wilson, n.l.wilson@reading.ac.uk no later than Friday 8^th May.

Further information about the symposium can be found at https://publishinghistory.wordpress.com

Co-organised by Dr Nicola Wilson and Dr Claire Battershill, University of Reading and MAPP

www.modernistarchives.com

‘Sensory Modernism(s)’, seeks to address the interrelationship of modernism with sensory perception. The spirit of the conference is interdisciplinary, and invokes characterisations of modernism derived from a wide range of discursive domains. The one-day conference will be held at the University of Leeds on Thursday May 21.

Keynote Speakers: Dr Richard Brown, Dr Christina Bradstreet, Caro Verbeek

http://http://modernismsenses2015.weebly.com/

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers which address the theme of modernism and the senses. 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 tosensorymodernisms2015@gmail.com by 15 April 2015.

“Air”

We invite papers which explore  modernism not in its more visible, spectacular, and externalized manifestations, but rather in unforeseen points, junctures, landscapes, interstices and borders, including the juxtaposition of intellectual and private life, past and present, the life of the mind and divided, alternative, fragmented, patched up, or precarious lives. We encourage all sorts of contributions on the significance of modernism when it is revolutionary otherwise, in more silent, dispersed ways, or when modernism itself becomes an atmosphere or a mood, thus a concept that can do its work only if it captures something as elusive as mood.

For example, through repetition over time, how might aesthetic modernism transfer to the lives we live, and become present in them? Is it plausible to think of modernism as an atmosphere of one’s daily life in the present? When? How? Where?  Given the popularity and the expandability of modernism, doesn’t the concept itself raise the question of modernism as that of passage, transit, transmission? One, therefore, can imagine a geographical transit: an Anglo-American modernism that passes, let’s say, through Italian hermeticism to re-emerge, over  time, in all kinds of Anglo-American modernism’s others.  However, one might also imagine quite a different kind of transit, a less geographical and more atmospheric transit. This less spectacular modernism may be felt to be in the air when it  impacts on us in unforeseen ways, making waves of meaning (and meaningfulness) right in the middle of our daily lives, when past intellectual and aesthetic residues, introjected verbal and visual memories of ideas, sensations, and readings, combine with our local position to open up conceptual, theoretical, creative possibilities and potentialities. It’s like being between mountains and sea, suddenly released from the limits of the local to experience an ampler, more global belonging. How does affect for/from modernism flow into public research? What are the other, improper places of modernism?

The panel is open to anyone from any discipline who wishes to explore how modernist objects—archival, textual, musical, visual, mnestic, or other– enter daily life, create sustenance, and incite creativity, conceptual and of other kinds.

Please contact panel co-organizers to discuss ideas, or send a 250-word abstract, along with a brief biography, by April 5 to:

Carla Billitteri at carla.billitteri@umit.maine.edu and Mena Mitrano at mmitrano@luc.edu, or

mena.mitrano@tin.it

The Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association invites proposals for papers about any aspect of the culture of Berlin for presentation at the 2015 RMMLA convention, Oct. 8-10 in Santa Fe, NM.

The Berlin panel at RMMLA includes scholarly presentations on literature, film, language, culture and history related to Germany’s metropolis, among other possible approaches. Presentations are approximately 15 minutes in length. An abstract (1 page) is requested no later than April 1, 2015.

Please submit proposals electronically to session chair Dr. David Caldwell: david.caldwell@unco.edu . Requests for additional information and other questions may also be directed to the chair at this e-mail address.

Membership in RMMLA ($35 faculty dues) will be expected of participants. Conference registration fees will also apply.  Other information about the RMMLA and the 2015 convention in Santa Fe is available at the organization’s website:  http://rmmla.innoved.org/conferences/conf15SantaFe/default.asp
Keywords: Berlin, Germany, literature, film, culture