Category: Postgraduate

CFP: British Society for Literature and Science Tenth Annual Conference, University of Liverpool, 16-18 April 2015

The tenth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science will take place at the University of Liverpool, on 16-18 April 2015. Keynote talks will be given by Professor Keith Barnham (Imperial College London), Dr Patricia Fara (University of Cambridge), and Dr Claire Preston (Queen Mary University of London).

The BSLS invites proposals for twenty-minute papers, or panels of three papers, on any subjects within the field of literature and science. In addition, ‘flash talks’ of up to 7 minutes on any topic are invited for a special plenary session. Other formats are also welcomed, but please email your suggestion to the organisers (viabsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk) for consideration, well in advance of the submission deadline.

This year the organisers would particularly welcome proposals addressing the themes of light, optics, vision and colour, and proposals for papers, panels or roundtables on engaging the public with literature and science research. However, the BSLS remains committed to supporting and showcasing work on all aspects of literature – including comparative literature and European and world literatures – and science, medicine and technology.

Proposals of no more than 250 words, together with the name and institutional affiliation of the speaker, and a biographical note of around 50 words, should be sent in the body of messages (not in attachments) to bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk. Proposals for panels should include a separate proposal and biographical note for each paper. The closing date for submissions is Friday 5 December 2014.

The conference fee will be waived for two graduate students in exchange for written reports on the conference, to be published in the BSLS Newsletter. If you are interested in being selected for one of these awards, please mention this when sending in your proposal. To qualify you will need to be registered for a postgraduate degree at the time of the conference.

Accommodation: please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels will be made available soon on the forthcoming conference website.

Membership: conference delegates will need to register as members of the BSLS (annual membership: £25 waged/ £10 unwaged). It will be possible to join the BSLS when registering for the conference online.

For further information and updates about the conference, please contact Greg Lynall (bsls2015@liverpool.ac.uk). A conference website will be available in due course.

PLEASE NOTE DEADLINE EXTENDED TO 30 SEPTEMBER. POSTGRADUATES PRESENTING A PAPER WILL HAVE ONE NIGHT’S ACCOMMODATION (APPROX 30 EUROS) FUNDED BY THE KMS.
Katherine Mansfield in the Short Story Tradition

International Conference organised by The University of Limerick in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

INCLUDING

Katherine Mansfield Society Annual Postgraduate Day

21-22 November 2014

Guest Speakers:

Gerri Kimber, Claire Davison-Pégon and

 Heather Ingman

Katherine Mansfield is widely regarded as one of the most influential short story writers of the twentieth century: her experiments with subject matter, style, theme, setting, handling of subjectivity, and point of view have had a lasting impact on the genre.  Like her contemporary James Joyce, Mansfield simplified plot to highlight a moment of revelation, thereby approaching, in Willa Cather’s words, “the major forces of life through comparatively trivial incidents.”  A passionate reader and translator of Chekhov, an accomplished musician, a sometime-actress and impersonator with a deep interest in cinema, and a friend and associate of numerous painters and writers, Mansfield brought to the short story form a wide-ranging engagement with the aesthetic movements of her time.  As the “little colonial walking in the London garden patch,” moreover, Mansfield exemplifies Edward Said’s contention that “Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.”

We invite proposals for this two-day international conference.  The first day of the conference will feature postgraduate scholarship; the second day of the conference is open to all Mansfield scholars. Proposals should address the multiple ways in which Mansfield engaged with and contributed to the short story form. Topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Mansfield and her contemporaries (Joyce, Woolf, Lawrence, Rhys)
• Mansfield and the modernist short story
• Mansfield and Chekhov
• Mansfield and women writers of the short story
• Mansfield and New Zealand
• Mansfield and the little magazines
• Mansfield’s use of other media (e.g. music, cinema, painting)
• Mansfield and narrative theory
• Mansfield and exilic subjectivity
• Thematic innovations (domesticity; home; food; marriage)
• Mansfield and urban geographies; the flaneuse; travel

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference

organisers: kmintheshortstorytradition@gmail.com

Deadline for abstracts: 30 SEPTEMBER 2014

SCOTTISH NETWORK OF MODERNIST STUDIES

Modernism at War 

University of Glasgow, Saturday 18 October 2014

Keynote speakers:  

Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), ‘War Modernism as Commemorative Trauma’

Randall Stevenson (University of Edinburgh),”Hoarse Oaths that Kept Our Courage Straight”: Language and War, Modernism and Silence’

The Scottish Network of Modernist Studies will be holding a one-day symposium entitled ‘Modernism at War’ at the University of Glasgow on 18 October 2014. Proposals are invited from academics and post-graduates for 20-minute presentations on any topic addressing war in modernist writing and art (including film and other media), the aesthetics and politics of commemoration, trauma and reconstruction, war elegy, anti-war and anti-art, war and the avant garde, war and the archive, war and pedagogy, methodologies for studying war and modernism, or any other related issues and approaches.

Short proposals for papers, expressions of interest and queries should be sent to Vassiliki Kolocotroni  (Vassiliki.Kolocotroni@glasgow.ac.uk) by Friday 5 September 2014.

Call for papers for a major conference

Being Modern: Science and Culture in the early 20th century

Institute of Historical Research, London 22-24 April 2015

Engagement with science was commonly used as an emblem of “Being modern”, across culture in Britain and the western world in the years around the First World War. Today, historical studies of literature, art, design, lifestyle and consumption as well as of the human sciences are exploring intensively, but frequently separately, on that talk of “science”. Historians of science are exploring the interpenetration of discourse in the public sphere and expert communities. This pioneering interdisciplinary conference is therefore planned to bring together people who do not normally meet in the same space. Scholars from a range of disciplines will come together to explore how the complex interpretations of science affected the re-creation of what it was to be modern.

Please see the website for more details: http://www.qmul.ac.uk/being-modern/

Submissions for four types of presentation and discussion are sought:

1. disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
2. cross-disciplinary panels of three x15 minute papers and discussion
3. Focus on research presentations of 5 minutes plus two minute discussion each will provide opportunities particularly for graduate students
4. Poster sessions

Closing date 19 October 2014. Get in early – competition will be strong!

Submissions to: research@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

Enquiries to: Robert.bud@sciencemuseum.ac.uk

CFP: Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Issue #88, Fall 2015: Virginia Woolf in the Modern Machine Age

 

The Virginia Woolf Miscellany invites submissions of papers that address the role of everyday machines in the life and/or works of Virginia Woolf. From typewriters and telephones to gramophones and the wireless; from motor-cars and combat aeroplanes to trains and department store elevators; from cameras and film projectors to ranges and hot water tanks, the commonplace technologies of the modern machine age leave their trace on Bloomsbury. To what extent are these and other machines represented, hidden, implied, avoided, embraced, or questioned by Woolf and her circle and characters? What is the place of labour and mass production, or the role of the handmade or bespoke object, in the context of such technologies and the desires with which they are implicated? What are the ramifications for the individual’s everyday navigation of modernity, domesticity, and/or community? Alternatively, what is the influence of everyday technologies in our own interactions with Woolf and her writings? Please submit papers of no more than 2500 words to Ann Martin (ann.martin@usask.ca) by 31 March 2015.

Call for Manuscripts

Special issue on “The Banalization of War” 

Issue editors: Graham MacPhee and Angela Naimou

 

War both establishes and destabilizes the fundamental distinctions between civilian and combatant, compatriot and alien, and the lawful and the illegitimate. Yet arguably there is another set of distinctions whose fragility has been exposed by the new modes of military violence emerging post–9/11, namely that between emergency and routine, crisis and continuity, the spectacular and the prosaic, the extraordinary and the banal. Military violence, traditionally justifiable only as the temporary suspension of the norms of civility in a state of exception, seems to be becoming increasingly routine and everyday as evidenced by a broad range of tendencies: from securitized responses to political dissent and the deployment of military technologies in law enforcement, border surveillance, and corporate activity to the transformation of combat weapons into consumer goods and the proliferation of war-simulation computer games. This banalization of war is dramatically illustrated by the spatial and temporal condensations of drone warfare. For the drone operator based in a suburban command center, the locus of military agency lies deep within the domestic space and “wartime” is woven into the fabric of everyday temporality, while the globe is reimagined as a battlefield.

 

Attention to the banalization of war in the post-9/11 period provides an opportunity to rethink conceptions of “wartime” as integral and discrete across wider historical and geographical parameters. In fact, the imbrication of war and everyday life has long been a structuring principle for the Atlantic slave trade and for colonial societies, while in the present it is experienced in very different ways—from service workers and translators whose labor facilitates war and occupation, to refugees, undocumented migrants, and those whose deaths would constitute “collateral damage.” This special issue of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies invites essays that explore both the long histories of “wartime” and its differential meanings in the present—as mediated through literature, culture, and society, and as experienced along axes of immediacy and distance, urgency and banality, bodily violence and the pleasures of spectacle. This special issue is especially interested in contributions that interrogate and complicate the historical and geographical parameters of war across national, international, and transnational contexts.

 

Relevant topics would include (but are not limited to):

• Literary and/or filmic representations of the militarization of everyday life
• Cultural histories of the banalization of “wartime”
• The militarization of visual experience in gaming, virtual environments, film and television
• Military/non-military distinctions and the construction race
• Discursive strategies for the normalization of militarized violence
• Narratives of survival and resistance at the intersection of “wartime” and the everyday
• Gendering and re-gendering wartime/conflict zone and the domestic and the everyday
• Humanitarian law, human rights, and the porosity of wartime/war space
• The racialization of “violence” and “civility”
• The fate of civility, normativity, and exception under the routinization of violence

 

Potential contributors are encouraged to contact the issue editors at the email address below to discuss potential contributions: please include an abstract (c.500 words). Manuscripts should be double-spaced and between 8,000 and 12,000 words. For further details on manuscript submission and preparation see: http://www.wcupa.edu/_academics/sch_cas.lit/submissionGuidelines.asp

 

Contact: collit@wcupa.edu

Submission date: December 31, 2014