Category: CFPs

Rebecca West: Celebrity, Publicity, Memory

New York University, September 21-22, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Faye Hammill

Centering on the contested and still-evolving reputation of Rebecca West, this conference explores the processes by which a celebrity writer passes into cultural memory. How have scholars selectively created their own Rebecca Wests? How do recent cultural representations reinforce or contest her reputation? How did West’s peers create or contribute to the memory of West? How did West’s manipulation of her own image affect the way she is remembered? How does the history of West’s celebrity—the shaping and misshaping of her image—compare to that of other writers and artists of her period? Are women writers, and West, remembered primarily in a gender context? How can we understand West in light of recent theorizing of modernist celebrity by critics such as Aaron Jaffe and Faye Hammill? And what does West’s work contribute to conceptualizing larger aspects of personal and cultural memory?

These questions, and others, can productively frame discussions of West’s fictional and non-fictional work. We also welcome abstracts on other topics related to West’s voluminous oeuvre.

Please send abstracts of up to 200 words by June 15, 2013, to Ann Norton at anorton@anselm.edu

Date of event: 16-17 November 2013
Venue: Queen Mary, University of London, E1 4NS
Closing date for submissions: 14 June 2013
Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Kripal (Rice University)

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

Many literary and popular authors and performers during the mid twentieth century represented altered states of consciousness in their work, responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as interplanetary contact, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies, spiritualisms, shamanism, erotics, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition, distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.

What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between European, North American and non-Western sources? How did investigations cross the borders between arts, sciences, religion, education and the military?

Priority will be given to submissions that show potential for sparking discussion across disciplinary boundaries, and are accessible to a non-specialist audience.

We are especially keen to hear from women contributors, and those whose work extends beyond British and North American contexts.

Please send a talk summary of approx 300 words and author bio of approx 50 words to: altconsc@qmul.ac.uk by 14 June 2013.

Speakers accepted onto the programme will have 20 minutes to speak.

This event is generously supported by: the British Society for the History of Science, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

Reminder: Call for Papers due May 31

Remediating the Avant-Garde: Magazines and Digital Archives
Princeton University
October 25-26, 2013

The Blue Mountain Project at Princeton University is a a freely available electronic repository of art, music, and literary periodicals that both chronicle and embody the emergence of cultural modernity in the West. We are currently digitizing 34 titles published in Europe and the United States between 1850-1923, in French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Polish, Finnish, and Danish.

The Blue Mountain Project is seeking paper proposals for a two-day conference, to be held in Princeton, New Jersey on October 25th and 26th, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Johanna Drucker, Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA.

Context of inquiry
The aim of our conference is to explore the fertile conceptual and practical ground where traditional area studies, periodical studies, digital humanities, computer science, and library and information science converge. We are interested in how these fields inform each other and challenge us to think and create in new ways, both as builders of digital resources and as scholars and teachers of avant-garde periodicals. The following set of questions will frame the conference discussions:

· What intellectual and technological insights emerge when we attempt to represent avant-garde periodicals – their specific aesthetic, material, and social features; format; diverse historical, linguistic and national specificities – in the digital environment?
· What are the potentials, and what are the risks, for intellectual engagement with avant-garde periodicals when they are remediated in the digital environment? What positive and/or negative impact can the application of new methods of representation and analysis have on both short-term research and teaching and longer-term understanding of this material?
· Can we define a set of priorities, or best practices, for representing avant-garde periodicals in the digital environment?

Papers sought
We welcome, in particular, papers that touch upon topics such as:
– aspects of remediating visual, verbal and musical texts
– methods of representation (e.g. bibliographic description and analysis, ontology design, text encoding, linked data, interface)
– methods of analysis (e.g. full-text searching, data mining, visualization, GIS, topic modeling)
– dynamics of control by reader/user vs. control by system/format
– pedagogical practices

Submission details
Paper proposals (abstract 500 words, plus short author bio) due: May 31, 2013
Acceptance notification: June 15, 2013
Send proposals and inquiries to: Natalia Ermolaev: nataliae@princeton.edu

This conference is being made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

For more information on the Blue Mountain Project, please visit: http://library.princeton.edu/projects/bluemountain

Edith Wharton Symposium: 22 and 23 August 2013, Liverpool Hope University, UK
Organisers: William Blazek and Laura Rattray
Keynote Speakers: Pamela Knights and Gary Totten
Call for Papers: extended deadline 27 May 2013

We warmly invite papers on the life and work of Edith Wharton for an international symposium, co-sponsored by the Wharton Society, to be held in Liverpool in August 2013.

The symposium marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Wharton’s much-read and much-analyzed novel The Custom of the Country. Described as the writer’s “greatest book” by Hermione Lee in her 2007 biography, and listed by Wharton herself at the end of a long and prolific career as one of her own favourite works, The Custom of the Country arguably remains the author’s most complex and controversial novel. To mark the centenary, many of the panels and keynotes will be devoted to topics pertaining specifically to this landmark text.

However, we also warmly welcome papers on any aspect of Wharton’s life and work, and the work of her contemporaries, both male and female, canonical and non-canonical, European and American. Papers might offer readings of any of Wharton’s texts, in any genre; Wharton’s work in relation to any of its nineteenth- and twentieth-century contexts; Wharton in a transatlantic literary context; Wharton and her contemporaries; narrative strategies; the writer’s dialogue with modernism and modernist aesthetics; Wharton’s influence on contemporary writers and popular culture. As another centenary approaches, we also seek papers treating Wharton and her contemporaries in the contexts of World War I.

We are delighted to confirm that the keynote speakers for this event will be esteemed Wharton scholars Dr. Pamela Knights (Durham University) and Professor Gary Totten (North Dakota State University). Dr. Knights, who has published extensively on Wharton, is perhaps best known as the author of The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton, while Professor Totten is the immediate past president of the Wharton Society and editor of Memorial Boxes and Guarded Interiors: Edith Wharton and Material Culture.

The symposium will be held on the Hope Park campus of Liverpool Hope University, located within five miles of the Liverpool city centre. Moderately priced, ensuite campus accommodation will be available to delegates for the duration of the symposium. Day rates are also available. For those wishing to stay on and explore Liverpool after the symposium, an additional night’s accommodation will be available, and we will be arranging a morning tour of the city and/or – by special request for Beatles fans – of influential sites for the group, followed by lunch together before departing.

Please send any queries and 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers (indicating any equipment/technical requirements) and a brief biographical note by 27 May 2013 to Laura Rattray via e-mail: custom@hope.ac.uk

Registration will open at the beginning of June. Further information and updates will be posted on the symposium website: http://www.hope.ac.uk/custom

We hope you’ll join us for this friendly and timely gathering of Wharton and early twentieth century scholars in August.

Sponsors: Liverpool Hope University and the Edith Wharton Society

Call for Papers

Date of event: 16-17 November 2013
Venue: Queen Mary, University of London, E1 4NS
Closing date for submissions: 14 June 2013
Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Kripal (Rice University)

This meeting will explore the theme of altered consciousness in relation to popular culture, psychology, philosophy, religion, medicine and literature during the period 1918-1980.

Many literary and popular authors and performers during the mid twentieth century represented altered states of consciousness in their work, responding to and participating in research relating to such topics as interplanetary contact, ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy, mind-altering drugs, psychic therapies, spiritualisms, shamanism, erotics, conversion, revivals, somnambulism, precognition, distraction, group mind, multiple personality, hypnotism, lucid dreaming, Vedanta, hysteria and automatism.

What was the continuing legacy of nineteenth-century approaches to mind and spirit? How did work at the fringes of psychiatry and psychology intersect with mind sciences that consolidated their authority during the mid-twentieth century? What are the key interactions between European, North American and non-Western sources? How did investigations cross the borders between arts, sciences, religion, education and the military?

Priority will be given to submissions that show potential for sparking discussion across disciplinary boundaries, and are accessible to a non-specialist audience.

We are especially keen to hear from women contributors, and those whose work extends beyond British and North American contexts.

Please send a talk summary of approx 300 words and author bio of approx 50 words to: altconsc@qmul.ac.uk by 14 June 2013.

Speakers accepted onto the programme will have 20 minutes to speak.

This event is generously supported by: the British Society for the History of Science, and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Centre for the History of the Emotions, and the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary, University of London.

CALL FOR PAPERS [DEADLINE: 1ST OF JULY]

Listening to Literature, 1900-1950

12-14 March 2014 – University of Leuven, Belgium

Keynote
Julian Murphet (University of New South Wales, Sydney)

This three-day conference seeks to survey the impact of aural media (phonograph, gramophone, telephone, radio) and other major sound events of the first half of the twentieth century on the literature of the period. Through in-depth analysis of the different ways in which modernist and avant-garde authors reflected on and incorporated sound and aural technologies in their writings, we aim to explore the literary soundscape between 1900 and 1950.
The first half of the twentieth century – “the age of noise” in the words of its contemporaries – is littered with events crucial to the history of modern aurality. The phonograph and its successor, the gramophone, enabled man to record and replay sound. Telephone and radio enabled long distance verbal communication. The combustion engine filled the big city with its incessant mechanical drone. And of course there were the two World Wars, whose aural impact – deafening bombings, nerve-shattering sirens, the rhythmic stamping of marching feet and the continuous drone of planes overhead – can hardly be overestimated.
This conference aims to explore the impact of these and other related events on the literary landscape of the period, looking for the answers to such questions as:

* How is sound represented? What techniques are used to represent sound?
* What kinds of sounds are represented and how do they compare? What function do the represented sounds fulfill within the literary work?
* Was the representation of sound altered by the introduction of new aural media such as the phonograph or telephone?
* How were the various aural media themselves represented? What is their function within the literary work? How are they used as a literary motif or device in the work of particular authors?
* How can we study sound within the literary work? How does fictional sound relate to actual sound?
* Are there substantial differences in the treatment of sound within the period, for instance between modernism and the avant-garde, but also between authors, genres, generations? And if so, how can they be explained?
* How does the literary representation of sound relate to that of the other senses? Do they fulfill different functions within the literary work?

We welcome both theoretical and case-based studies on these and other questions central to the mapping of the literary soundscape between 1900 and 1950. Proposals (in English) should be sent to ltlconference@arts.kuleuven.be by 1 July 2013. These should contain a 300-word abstract as well as a short bio listing contact and affiliation details.

The first day of the conference will cater specifically to postgraduate students, enabling young and promising scholars to present their research and collaborate with their peers.

This conference is organized by the Leuven-based research team MDRN. For more information, visit http://www.mdrn.be. If you have any further questions, please contact tom.vandevelde@arts.kuleuven.be or tom.willaert@arts.kuleuven.be.