Category: CFPs

Modernism and the Moral Life
A Symposium | Manchester, 30 May 2014

Keynote speakers:
Professor Jay Bernstein (New School for Social Research)
Professor Esther Leslie (Birkbeck College, University of London)

Call for papers

No engagement with modernist works can fail to be struck be their ethical intensity. Often considered solely in terms of a radical break with aesthetic norms and existing socio-cultural institutions and relationships, modernism also demonstrates a marked preoccupation with questions of how to live, the nature of the good, the status of the subject and the social bond, and the relation between ethics, aesthetics and politics. While recent years have seen a renewed interest in the relationship between modernism and ethics, much of the work in this field has tended to (i) conceive of ethics simply in terms of an openness to ‘otherness’, or (ii) suggest that modernism signals an ‘overcoming’ of the ethical as such. While important work has been carried out from these perspectives, this conference invites participants to radically rethink the ways in which it is possible to understand the relation between modernism and the moral life. We invite papers that investigate the multiple ways in which the struggle to lead a human life is undertaken and articulated within modernist cultural production. At the same time, we are interested in the ethical and political investments—whether declared or presupposed—of modernism’s ongoing critical reception. Of particular interest, therefore, are papers which reflect upon their own historical moment and connections with current political, economic and ecological debates.

The conference is designed as an opportunity for rigorous interdisciplinary exchange between the spheres of critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, politics, literature, sociology, history, theology, the visual arts, architecture and music. We invite proposals for papers from scholars whose work looks to analyse the connections between aesthetics, ethics and politics in any and all of these fields. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

– the relation between style, form and ethics in modernist cultural production
– the extent to which ‘life’ entails or excludes the ‘moral’ in modernist thought
– theory and/as ethics
– ethics and language
– modernism and revolution
– utopia
– gender, ethics and critique
– modernism, vision and ethics
– violence and war
– after ‘otherness’
– The limits of liberal humanist approaches to literature and ethics
– perfectionism, authenticity, sincerity, bullshit, narcissism, hedonism, elitism, virtue, duty, commitment, loss of sensitivity, happiness, loneliness, anxiety, inequality, humanism and anti-humanism in the discourses of modernism

Proposals for twenty-minute papers should be directed to the convenors, Ben Ware and Iain Bailey, at morallife@gmx.co.uk, by 10 January 2014. Participants will be notified by 20 January. Additional information is posted at our conference website, modernismmorallife.wordpress.com.

Call for papers

A Valentine To Gertrude Stein:
The Reception of Gertrude Stein in the Arts and Humanities

8 – 10 May 2014

Hosted by the University of Copenhagen, Denmark
and co-organized with Ghent University and Linköping University

As a writer and famous art collector, Gertrude Stein inspired generations of poets and painters; as a cultural icon she inspired feminist and gay activists, and her influence seems to be increasing still. Today, Stein’s impact is felt and recognized across such diverse fields as literature, theatre, film, visual arts, dance, performance, etc.
Because Stein’s influence has manifested itself to a wide extent through artistic appropriations and re-mediations, academic research has had troubles catching up with this diverse, cross-disciplinary reception. In recent years, however, we have seen how artists and scholars working in the crossover field between artistic practice and academic research have increasingly reflected the interdisciplinary reception of Gertrude Stein.
Several large conferences host well-attended panels on Gertrude Stein each year but Stein, in contrast to her modernist peers, has only rarely been the subject of a multiple-day scholarly gathering and thus has not received the same attention and scrutiny as her (male) contemporaries.

This conference will focus on the interdisciplinary reception of Stein among artists and academics, and create a platform for in-depth and extended Stein discussion. The event celebrates the 100th anniversary of the publication of Stein’s seminal poetry collection, Tender Buttons. This book of prose poems is itself an interdisciplinary work of literary still lifes, collage texts obsessed with issues from the visual arts like perspective, visuality, texture, space, materiality and physical objects.

The conference will be located in Copenhagen and reflect the growing Scandinavian interest in Gertrude Stein, while at the same time reaching out to a broader European and US community. During the last decade a community around the Danish Gertrude Stein Society and the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen has initiated, inspired and supported a number of new translations, readings, presentations as well as stage productions of Stein’s writing, making Copenhagen the perfect site for a conference focused on the exchange between artists and scholars.
In connection with the conference, an artistic program will take place with performances of theatrical and musical pieces based on Stein’s work, as well as readings of Stein’s work and works by poets inspired by Stein.

It is a major goal of the conference to establish a meeting between European and American Stein research. Stein herself made a great point of staging herself as a truly American writer – perhaps even the quintessential American writer. However, her influence on European art and thinking has been substantial, and alongside American academic scholarship, a strong European Stein research community has developed. And of course, her own work was written in a European environment and formed by her first-hand experience of European movements in art and culture.
The aim of this conference is threefold:
We wish to bring together European and American research on Stein, and create a meeting between different generations of researchers.
We wish to focus on the interdisciplinary reception and impact of Stein’s work.
We want to reflect exchanges between theory and practice, i.e. between academic and artistic approaches to Stein’s work.

We are very proud to welcome six keynote speakers, all of whom are distinguished representatives of Gertrude Stein’s diverse and transatlantic reception in the arts as well as humanities:
Marjorie Perloff
Heiner Goebbels
Catharine Stimpson
Isabelle Alfandary
Steven Meyer
and Juliana Spahr

Proposals
We welcome paper and panel proposals reflecting one or several of these five interdisciplinary perspectives:

Performance in the broadest, cross-disciplinary sense: theatrical, artistic, literary, and social (e.g. performing as a male genius)
Literary thinking: Gertrude Stein and/in philosophy and aesthetic theory
Remediation/re-enactment: Gertrude Stein in modern or contemporary art and literature
Gender, history and politics: biographical and historical approaches to Stein’s life and work
Transatlantic perspectives: Europe and America in Gertrude Stein’s work and the reception of it.

The conference language is English. Proposals are welcome from individuals, and from panels of three or four. We especially welcome panel proposals.

Panel proposals should include the following information:
Title of panel
A summary of the panel topic (300 words)
A summary of each individual contribution (300 words)
Name, address and email contact of individual contributors
Short biography of individual contributors

Individual proposals should include the following information:
Title of paper
Name, address and email of contributor
A summary of the contribution (300 words)
Short biography of the contributor

Refereering of proposals will be conducted by the conference organizers.
Extended deadline:
Please submit proposals to the conference email address gertrudestein@hum.ku.dk by
20 January 2013. Participants will be notified of their acceptance by 14 February 2014.

Conference organizers:
Laura Luise Schultz, Associate Professor, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, laura@hum.ku.dk
Sarah Posman, Postdoctoral Researcher, FWO, Dept. of Literature, Ghent University, Belgium
Solveig Daugaard, PhD Student, Dept. of Culture and Communication, Linköping University
Tania Ørum, Associate Professor, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
Mette Tranholm, PhD Student, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen

REGISTRATION FEE: 50 €

IMPORTANT NOTE
Recently, it has been decided that the finals of The EuroVision Song Contest are to take place in Copenhagen at the exact time of the conference. This event, which attracts an audience of more than 20.000 lovers of popular music from all over Europe, will surely provide a lively international atmosphere in the city during the conference, but it unfortunately also puts an extreme pressure on city hotels. We therefore urge all participants to book accommodation as soon as possible. As prices are rising with the demand, we advise you to look for alternatives to traditional hotel accommodation such as https://www.airbnb.dk/ or http://www.hay4you.com/da/

Please do not hesitate to contact the conference organizers by e-mail gertrudestein@hum.ku.dk for assistance!

Please also consult our homepage: http://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/gertrudestein

The conference is supported by
The Carlsberg Foundation
The Danish Council for Independent Research

Emblems and Enigma: The Heraldic Imagination

An Interdisciplinary Symposium to be held at the Society of Antiquaries of London on Saturday 26th April 2014

CALL FOR PAPERS

In his 1844 short story ‘Earth’s Holocaust’, Nathaniel Hawthorne sees heraldic signs reaching ‘like lines of light’ into the past, but also as encrypted and obsolete. Proliferating and arcane, unique, ubiquitous, and inscrutable, the heraldic has been a major presence across the arts since medieval times; yet it remains, culturally and critically, enigmatic.

The organisers of this interdisciplinary symposium, Professor Fiona Robertson (English Literature, St Mary’s University College) and Dr Peter Lindfield (History of Art, University of St Andrews), invite proposals for twenty-minute papers on any aspect of the employment and perception of the heraldic in literature, history, art, architecture, design, fashion, and contemporary and historical practice.

The symposium will take place from 9.30 to 5 at the Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London. The programme will include a keynote address by Professor Vaughan Hart (University of Bath); a special session on the heraldry of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey; and papers on eighteenth-century antiquaries’ exploration of the heraldic, and on heraldry in nineteenth-century British and American literature.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

– the languages and grammar of heraldry

– armoiries parlantes, allusions and puns

– imaginary and fantastical heraldry

– decoration and display

– blazonry and identity: nations, groups, individuals

– mock- and sham-heraldics; parody and subversion

– practices of memory and memorialisation

– history, development, and modern practice

– blazon and the body

– heraldic revivalism; medievalism; romance

– enigma, error, and absence: the bar sinister and the blank shield

– individual designers, writers, and collectors

– gendered identity

– hierarchies of signs

– international and interdisciplinary perspectives

Proposals of 200 words should be sent to the organisers at heraldics2014@gmail.com by 10 January 2014.

Fiona Robertson and Peter Lindfield plan to edit a collection of essays arising from the symposium.

Further information will be available on the symposium website, http://heraldics2014.wordpress.com.

CFP: Ethnography and American Culture in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 1870-1920

Plenary Lectures by Professors Nancy Bentley (University of Pennsylvania) and Brad Evans (Rutgers, New Jersey)

The University of Kent, Canterbury
19th May 2014
Organiser: Dr. Michael J. Collins (University of Kent)
Sponsored by The School of English, Centre for American Studies, and Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Recent scholarship on the relationship between social science and the creative arts in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era USA has sought to question more traditional understandings of the era as the moment when scientific inquiry and artistic expression finally “broke” from one other. The perception that ethnography became a scientific discipline whose reach extended solely to universities and specialist periodicals is belied by the period’s rich and vibrant use of ethnographic materials and concepts in a huge variety of different artistic and cultural settings, including literature and mass-market periodicals (Harper’s, Scribner’s, Century), early film and photographic exhibitions, illustration, design, and architecture.
In other words, renewed attention has begun to be paid not just to the work of Gilded Age and Progressive anthropologists within their own institutional and disciplinary contexts, but how that work was diffused and circulated in the period’s popular culture. These questions of diffusion invariably raise further questions relating to the dangers implicit in the cultural appropriation, aestheticisation or marketisation of ethnographic subjects.
This one-day symposium will attempt to unite literary studies and print culture with intellectual history, anthropology, the history of science and visual culture studies in order to explore how mainstream media related to emergent social-scientific disciplines in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era United States. As such, we welcome proposals for 20 minute papers on any topics related to the themes and concerns of the conference. Please send a CV, brief biography and an abstract of no more than 300 words to
ethnographyandamericanculture@kent.ac.uk by February 28th 2014

The symposium will conclude with the first British screening of a new version of the American photographer Edward Curtis’s important, 1914, silent feature film, In the Land of the Head Hunters (the first major motion picture to star Native North Americans) at the Gulbenkian Cinema on The University of Kent campus. Based on recent archival research, in 2008 a collaborative team led by Aaron Glass (now at the Bard Graduate Center), Brad Evans (Rutgers), and Andrea Sanborn (of the U’mista Cultural Centre in BC) oversaw a new restoration of the film that returned the film’s original title, title cards, long-missing footage, color tinting, initial publicity graphics, and original musical score—now thought to be the earliest extant original feature-length film score in America.
(http://www.curtisfilm.rutgers.edu/)

Professor Brad Evans, who served on the team restoring the film, will be providing an introductory lecture. A Q&A will follow the screening.

Dr. Michael Collins
Lecturer in American Literature – The University of Kent (http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/profiles/mcollins.html)
Deputy Director of American Studies (Recruitment)
British Association for American Studies – Website and Communications (www.baas.ac.uk)
Open Library of Humanities – Early Career and Advocacy Forum (https://www.openlibhums.org/)

COSMOPOLITANISM, AESTHETICISM, AND DECADENCE, 1860-1920

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 17-18 JUNE 2014

This conference is supported by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH) and the Faculty of English Language and Literature of the University of Oxford.

Over the past twenty years, the term “cosmopolitanism” has been the focus of intense critical reflection and debate across the humanities. For some, it represents a potential remedy for oppressive and antagonistic models of national identity and a means of addressing the ethical, economic, and political dilemmas produced by globalisation. Others consider it a peculiarly insidious form of imperialism, and argue that it advocates an untenable ideal of a privileged, rootless observer, detached from — and disposed to romanticise or commodify — very real injustices and inequalities. Meanwhile, the “transatlantic” has emerged as a popular critical framework and field of inquiry for historians and literary scholars. But the “transatlantic” is also sometimes perceived as a problematic category insofar as it can serve to reinforce the narrow focus on Anglo-American culture that the “cosmopolitan” ideal aspires to overcome.

Aestheticism and decadence, which flourished as broad artistic tendencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, speak directly to the issues at stake in contemporary debates about “cosmopolitanism” and “transatlanticism”. This is firstly because they evolved out of transnational dialogues between artists, writers, and critics. But it is also because aestheticism and decadence tended to celebrate an ideal of a disaffiliated artist or connoisseur whose interests ranged freely across history, language, and culture, and who maintained an ironic distance from the conventional determinants of identity. Over the last two decades, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism and decadence have become established and extremely lively areas of research in the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and art history. Our conference aims to bring together established as well as emerging scholars in these fields, and to explore how the attractions and problems of “cosmopolitanism” illuminate, and can be illuminated by, current scholarly debates about aestheticism and decadence.

Plenary Speakers:

Dr Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College, Oxford)
Professor Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan)
Dr Michèle Mendelssohn (Mansfield College, Oxford)

Possible topics for papers include, but are not restricted to:

Border crossing/flânerie/tourism/expatriatism
Aestheticism/Decadence and the Ideals of World Citizenship/Literature
Cosmopolitan Communities and Identities
Cosmopolitan Forms and Formalisms
The Poetics of Cross-Cultural Influence/Translation
The Politics of Aestheticism, Decadence, and/or Cosmopolitanism
Networks of Artistic and Scholarly Exchange
Anti-cosmopolitanisms: Nationalism, Philistinism, and Xenophobia
Visual Culture and the Consumption of Art
Salons, coteries, and clubs
Print culture and the circulation of texts beyond national borders
Exile, Hospitality, Assimilation, and Strangers
Consumerism and Mass Culture
Elitism, Democracy, and Culture/Kultur
Transatlantic Fashion and the Circulation of Commodities
The ethics of Aestheticism, Decadence and/or Cosmopolitanism
World Religions, Alternative Spiritualities, and Cosmopolitan Secularisms
Regional Writing/Forms of Localism/Homelands
Cosmopolitan Detachment/Aesthetic Disinterest
Decadent/Aesthetic Cities
The aesthetics of particularity/universality
The pathologisation of Decadence/Cosmopolitanism
Transatlantic Celebrity/The Cult of the Artist

We will provide four fee-waiving places at the conference: two are reserved for graduate students who wish to attend and serve as conference reporters, and two are reserved for early career researchers (i.e., graduate students or scholars who have recently completed a PhD but do not currently have a supportive institutional affiliation) who wish to deliver a paper and would otherwise struggle to attend. If you would like one of these fee-waiving places, please write to us and briefly explain (in less than 500 words) how the conference relates to your research.

Please send proposals (of 500 words or less) as pdf or Word attachments to cosmopolitanism.conference@gmail.com by March 3rd 2014.

For more information visit
http://www.cosmopolitanism1860-1920.org/

Organizers: Dr. Emily Coit (Worcester College, Oxford), Dr. Sara Lyons (University of Kent) and Dr. Michael Collins (University of Kent)

Panels organized by the Ezra Pound Society at the American Literature Association Conference in Washington DC, May 22-25, 2014:

Ezra Pound and Other World Cultures – organized by Prof. Robert Kibler.

“All ages are contemporaneous” especially in literature, Ezra Pound wrote in 1910. To be sure, his life work drew a vast array of other peoples, their worlds, their ideas, into his own contemporaneous literary universe. We know the people, the places, and the ideas drawn together. But it works the other way too, for Pound enters into interpretive dialogues with other worlds, understood not just as parts of his own vision, but also as entities discrete unto themselves.
In this call for papers we seek scholars, artists, and performers to undertake an examination, broadly considered, of other-world cultures engaged by Pound. What various ends do his appropriations of them serve, and how is his own literary universe co-opted, disrupted, or transformed by the exchange? We are here in search of new meanings and fresh paths. Please send your 350 word abstracts as Word documents both to Robert Kibler, panel organizer, at Robert.kibler@minotstateu.edu, and to Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Secretary, Ezra Pound Society, at demetres@unb.ca, no later than January 10, 2014.

Ezra Pound and Archibald MacLeish – organized by Demetres Tryphonopoulos.

The panel will discuss any aspect of Pound’s relationship with Archibald MacLeish, including their correspondence, Pound’s reception of MacLeish’s poetry, and MacLeish’s role in ending Pound’s incarceration at St. Elizabeths. Please send your 350 word abstracts as Word documents to Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Secretary, Ezra Pound Society, at demetres@unb.ca no later than January 10, 2014.

For information on the ALA and its 2014 meeting, please see the ALA website at http://alaconf.org.