Registration for this conference is now open:
Student/Unwaged: £40
Waged: £60
See the website for a full programme.
Keynotes include Nina Engelhardt, Emily Howard and Tim Armstrong.
Category: Events
Weekly Shut Up & Write Session for PGRs and ECRs
Following the fantastic discussion at our BAMS careers and support panel at New Work in Modernist Studies, we are setting up a weekly ‘Shut Up & Write’ Session for postgraduate and early career researchers.
Many of our PGR and ECR members have said that they struggle with work precarity and workload pressures, often struggling to find the time to write in between a changeable routine and new teaching commitments. They also told us that writing can be a challenge when they are working alone or in institutions where there are few peers working on a similar area.
That’s why we’re setting up our Shut Up & Write session. For three hours a week, we will run the session virtually via Twitter. Follow us @modernistudies to join in, and use the hashtag #modwrite to set your goals, encourage others, chat about your work, and post your progress.
The first session will run Monday 12th February, 2–5pm GMT, and will continue every Monday afternoon thereafter.
For more information on the concept of Shut Up & Write, see this blog post by The Thesis Whisperer https://thesiswhisperer.com/shut-up-and-write/
BAMS Postgraduate Training Day: Career Administration
Wednesday 28 March 2018
Venue: Senate House, London (hosted by RHUL)
Save the date! The 2018 Postgraduate Training Day on Career Administration will be held on 28 March 2018 at Senate House, London. There will be workshops on applications and interviews, publishing, institutional demands in the profession and marketing your skills and experience outside HE. Guest speakers will include Dr Shelley Trower (Roehampton) and Dr Kate McGettigan (RHUL). There will be a small charge for the day of £5 for BAMS members and £10 for non-members. Registration information and the programme for the day will be announced soon.
Join BAMS here: https://bams.ac.uk/membership/
The Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre in association with the New Statesman presents the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2017, Nicola Barker.
Nicola Barker reading from her winning novel, H(A)PPY, and in conversation with Dr Tim Parnell, literary director of The Goldsmiths Prize.
Nicola Barker was born in Ely in 1966 and spent part of her childhood in South Africa. She is the author of ten previous novels – including Wide Open, Darkmans, The Yips and In the Approaches – and two short story collections. She has been twice longlisted and once shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, has won the IMPAC, the John Llewellyn Rhys and the Hawthornden Prizes, and was named one of Granta’s 20 Best Young British Writers in 2003. She lives and works in east London.
FREE to book, for further information and tickets visit: https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=11294
SURREALISMS: Inaugural Conference of the ISSS will be held at Bucknell University Humanities Center, Lewisburg, PA, USA on 1-4 November 2018
A London Beckett Seminar conference on the theme of “Corresponding with Beckett” will be held at the Institute of English Studies School of Advanced Study, University of London, 1-2 June 2018
A new conference on Modernist women and risk will take place on April 6, 2018 at UNSW, Australia.
Between 11 and 16 June 2018, the University of Antwerp’s Centre for Manuscript Genetics will host the 26th International James Joyce Symposium in the city that Joyce and his family visited in the summer of 1926. Belgium is small, so much so that all of the sites Joyce toured that year (Ostend, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and, most importantly, Waterloo) are within a 100-kilometre radius of the conference venue.
In his earliest prose writings, James Joyce described himself as an artist. His brother Stanislaus’s diary and Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography reinforced this image of Joyce as the lone and dedicated creator who was prepared to give up everything for his art. We interpret the title of this conference as both an objective and a subjective genitive – from Joyce’s aesthetic or artistry to pictures of Cork in cork frames – and as a reminder of Joyce’s long afterlife in the creative arts.
We want to explore the role of art as a socially constructed commodity in Joyce’s work as well as trace his fortunes in the fine art and rare book marketplace; we invite studies of the ways in which Joyce crafted his oeuvre, in the wake of The Art of James Joyce, A. Walton Litz’s pioneering study of the creation of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake; and we are also interested in contributions that, creatively or critically, address the impact of Joyce’s artistic persona and work on other artists, in various forms and different mediums. Given the increased visibility of the digital humanities in Joyce studies and the proliferation of multimedia responses to his work, we also encourage contributions that do not necessarily conform to the traditional scholarly paper.
The symposium invites proposals for individual papers and fully-formed panels and multimedia/digital exhibitions. Participants are limited to one paper and one non-paper panel appearance (e.g. as panel chair or respondent). Please keep in mind that all participants must be members in good standing of the International James Joyce Foundation: non-members or members whose registration has lapsed will not be scheduled.
To propose an individual contribution, please submit a 250-word abstract that includes the speaker’s name and academic affiliation (if applicable) alongside the paper or project title. To propose a panel, the panel chair should submit a 500-word abstract on the panel as a whole that includes the names, academic affiliations, and email addresses of all participants; the title of the panel as well as the titles of each individual contribution; and the name and affiliation of the panel chair and respondent (if any). Please note that panels should have a maximum of four speakers. The panel chair may also give a paper – but please note that in this case it is customary for the panel chair to be scheduled last. Please note any date restrictions for individual panelists.
The deadline for paper or panel proposals will be 2 February 2018, Joyce’s birthday. Proposals can be sent to joyce2018@uantwerpen.be. For more information on the conference, please visit uahost.uantwerpen.be/joyce2018.
The call for papers is now open for Mathematics and Modern Literature 2018, a two day conference to be held at The University of Manchester on Thursday 3rd and Friday 4th May 2018.
About the conference
Mathematics and Modern Literature is a collaborative, interdisciplinary conference exploring the ways in which writers active between the late nineteenth century and the twenty-first century engage with, represent or reflect upon mathematics in their work.
We are delighted to announce that our keynote speakers for this event will be Dr. Nina Engelhardt (The University of Cologne) and Professor Tim Armstrong (Royal Holloway, University of London). Dr. Nina Engelhardt is a lecturer in English and American Studies at The University of Cologne and has published on the topic of mathematics and science in modernist literature, particularly the works of Thomas Pynchon. Her monograph Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Professor Tim Armstrong is based within the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. His recent publications include The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature and Modernism: A Cultural History. Professor Armstrong is also the co-editor of the Edinburgh University Press series Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture, one of the organizers of the long-running London Modernism Seminar, and a member of the executive committee for the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).
MATHEMATICS AND MODERN LITERATURE
On the face of it, few activities, disciplines or modes of thinking seem as disparate or as incommensurable with one another as those of mathematics and literature. If, according to a common, broadly ‘Platonic’ conception of the subject, mathematics insists upon rigor and exactitude in order to discover eternal, objective and universal truths, literature is often imagined as addressing itself to that which is irreducibly human, subjective, particular or contingent. Where the one may be lauded for yielding access to a neutral, unchanging domain of that which is the same forever and for all, the other might be celebrated as the privileged medium of that which differs, or of that which is true or real for us as creatures of material, historical, cultural, intellectual and linguistic change.
Just as this sketch of ‘literature’ will not suffice—failing, as it does, to take account of the significant and often dramatic ways in which our conception of literature and the literary has shifted since the late nineteenth century—so the opposing caricature of mathematics proves inadequate to register the crises and developments that affected the field—and the ways in which mathematicians and others understood it—over the same period.
As historians of mathematics such as Herbert Mehrtens and Jeremy Gray have suggested in recent decades, mathematics at the turn of the twentieth century may be seen to have been in the midst of a critical and pervasive ‘modernist transformation,’ roughly contemporary with the modernist movements in the arts with which we are generally more familiar. Rooted in developments during the nineteenth century, including the invention of non-Euclidean geometries as well as the elaboration of set theory, ‘modern’ or ‘modernist’ mathematics was subsequently characterised by its tendency to trouble or to break with established notions of mathematical truth, representation, intuition and meaning. As their subject became increasingly abstract and axiomatic in its approach, mathematicians laboured through what became known as the subject’s ‘foundational crisis,’ impelled by an anxious sense of the need to devise or discover a new, firmer footing for the science.
By 1931, the foundational crisis in mathematics had largely petered out, while any residual hope of placing mathematics solidly upon a provably complete and consistent set of axioms was dispelled by the work of Kurt Gödel. However, the field of mathematics has continued to experience profound developments since its ‘foundational crisis,’ from algebraic geometry, topology, group theory and category theory to probability, chaos theory, cryptography and computer science. In addition to ‘modernist’ mathematics, then, Mathematics and Modern Literature also sets out to explore how writers have engaged with later developments in the science, up to and including the influence of (big) data, code and algorithmic technologies upon contemporary literature.
How do writers during this period encounter, understand and interact with mathematics, whether basic, elementary or advanced, whether ‘classical’ or ‘modern(ist)’? To what extent do they negotiate contemporary developments within the field of mathematics? How have authors engaged with the the invention of computational machines and computer programming language, and how have interpretive practices, such as digital humanities, shaped the way we read and interpret texts? What is at stake when we read for quantity? How are mathematical objects, symbols, concepts and ideas invoked, adapted, deployed, emulated, played with or transformed in literary texts? What kinds of meanings, implications or significance—political, philosophical, social, religious, magical, affective or otherwise—do mathematics and mathematical objects, processes and ideas have for writers? To what extent are these meanings, implications and ideas reproduced, subverted or critiqued in their work?
SUBMISSIONS / HOW TO SUBMIT
This conference invites papers on topics that might include, but are not limited to:
- mathematics and politics
- mathematics and gender
- biopolitics / (big) data / code / algorithms
- digital humanities and the implications for reading / interpreting texts
- the concept of universality / objectivity / neutrality in literature and mathematics
- mathematics, literature and affect
- mathematics and the everyday / extraordinary.
- mathematics and pedagogy
- mathematics and the concept of genius / amateurism
- ‘modernist’ mathematics and its relations to literary and artistic modernism(s)
- mathematics and form
- mathematics and style
- mathematics, literature and truth / proof or measurement / verification
- mathematics and magic / mysticism
- the relations between quality and quantity
- representations of mathematicians and the institution of mathematics
- mathematics and experimentation
- mathematics as language / language as mathematics
- mathematics and poetic meter / rhythm
- the meanings and aesthetics of mathematical symbols
- methodologies of literature and mathematics studies
The conference also welcomes contributions that address mathematics in painting, sculpture, music, dance and architecture—in addition to or alongside literature—during the same period.
Please send proposals (250-300 words) for fifteen-minute papers to mathmodlit@gmail.com by 5th February 2018. Please include a short (100-150 word) biography with your abstract. Notification of decision will be made by 19th February 2018.
Panel submissions will also be considered and should be 45 minutes in length. Please send 750-800 word abstract for panel submissions plus individual biographies. Please note that all male panels will not be accepted.
Lunch, refreshments and a wine reception will be provided on both days. Further details will be released in due course, and registration will open in February 2018.
Tuesday November 14th, 6.30 -8pm , 137a Richard Hoggart Building
Professor Laura Marcus,
‘”Minnows in a heated pool”: film-going and fiction in the mid-twentieth century’.
In ‘The Uses of Literacy’ (1957), Richard Hoggart writes rather scathingly of the passive mass audience in cinemas and for TV, which was then relatively novel as a household resource. He is particularly hostile at this time to US mass culture, though this is mitigated after his year in the US, where he was when the book was published. This lecture addresses the broader context of intellectual and literary reflection on cinema spectatorship, focusing particularly on early cinema journalism and on the work of J.B. Priestley, whose similarly cool response to cinema coexisted with his close involvement in the filming of some of his own works.
Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature and Fellow of New College, Oxford. Widely influential in modernist and feminist studies, Laura’s books includeAuto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994), Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997/2004), The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) and Dreams of Modernity: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Cinema (2014). She is currently working on scholarly editions of Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf.
British Association for Modernist Studies - Website Designed and Developed by Callum Leith 