Category: Postgraduate

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

FINAL CALL: *this Friday* Modernism Now! 2014 – BAMS Conference CFP

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR MODERNIST STUDIES

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE 2014

MODERNISM NOW!

26–28 June 2014
Institute of English Studies
Senate House, London

Keynote Speakers

Tyrus Miller (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Jacqueline Rose (Queen Mary, London)

Modernism Now! is a three-day international, interdisciplinary conference organised by the British Association for Modernist Studies, designed to explore modernisms throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The conference aims to discuss the past achievements of modernism, its possible futures, and to provide a review of current activity in the field. In Modernism and Theory, Neil Levi has recently suggested that in thinking about modernism we consider ‘the idea of a contemporary perpetuation of artistic modernism’ and that we see ‘modernist works as events whose implications demand continued investigation.’

Modernism Now! will explore these issues in three distinct ways:

  • The conference aims to represent the diversity of modernisms, and calls for papers assessing modernist writers, artists, texts and performances from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, methodological standpoints, and theoretical perspectives.
  • The conference will explore the ongoing use of ‘modernism’ as a cultural, philosophical, and artistic category, analysing how and where modernism functions as a continuing aesthetic in the twenty-first century, across multiple disciplines, geographies, and traditions.
  • The conference hopes to provide a review of current research in modernist studies, inviting panels and papers (joint or individual) that report on the work of research projects, editions, exhibitions, societies, and institutions.

Topics might include (but are not restricted to):

  • Modernist futures and legacies
  • Past and previous modernisms
  • The idea of a contemporary modernism e.g. how modernism informs the practice of contemporary artists/ writers/ performers
  • Modernism as a continuing event
  • Issues in presenting modernism today (new editions, exhibitions, etc)
  • Current debates in world literature and global modernist studies that stretch the historical/geographical framework of modernism
  • The ‘nowness’ (Jetztzeit) of modernism; the new and the now
  • Assessments of individual writers, artists, performers, texts, works of art that explore their status and relevance today
  • Historical assessments of the term ‘modernism’
  • New trends in modernist studies
  • Anachronism
  • Disciplinary borders and boundaries around modernism today
  • ‘Early’ and ‘late’ modernisms; periodizing modernism
  • Current theorisations of modernism as a social/ cultural/ philosophical/ political category
  • Modernism and the tradition of the avant-garde
  • Singular and plural modernism(s)

The conference is open to anyone working on modernism, with reduced registration for BAMS members. Current annual membership rates (which include a subscription to Modernist Cultures) are £30 standard; £25 student; £45 international standard; £35 international student. Join BAMS here: https://bams.ac.uk/membership/

We will be offering some bursaries to enable postgraduate members of BAMS to attend the conference.

Proposals are welcomed for individual 20 minute papers, or panels of 3-4 speakers. Proposals for papers should be 250 words long. Panel proposals should include a short paragraph naming the organiser of the panel and explaining its rationale as well as a 250 word abstract for each paper. Panels from single institutions are acceptable. For all proposals, please also include a short biographical statement in the same document. Word format preferred.

Proposals should be emailed to modernismnow@bams.ac.uk by February 28th 2014. The organising committee will be in touch with delegates by mid-March.

Conference Organising Committee
Sarah Chadfield (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Suzanne Hobson (Queen Mary, University of London)
Chris Mourant (King’s College London)
Sophie Oliver (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Cathryn Setz (University of Oxford)
Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

 

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

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

 

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

Call for Papers

19th May 2014

University of Kent, Canterbury

Organiser: Dr. Michael J. Collins (University of Kent)

Plenary Lectures by Professors Nancy Bentley (University of Pennsylvania)

and Brad Evans (Rutgers, New Jersey)

 

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 April 17th 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.

 

 

Sponsored by The School of English, Centre for American Studies, and Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities.

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate Uncategorized

CFP Deadline 3 March: Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920

CFP: COSMOPOLITANISM, AESTHETICISM, AND DECADENCE, 1860-1920

* DEADLINE APPROACHES* March 3rd2014

UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD, 17-18 JUNE 2014
STEFANO EVANGELISTA – JONATHAN FREEDMAN  – MICHÈLE MENDELSSOHN

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 fewer than 500 words) how the conference relates to your research.

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

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP – Objects of Modernity: 2-day Conference and ECR British Academy Event, Birmingham

downloadimages

 

Objects of Modernity

Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity

The University of Birmingham, 23-24 June 2014

Confirmed Keynote: Dr Ulrika Maude (University of Bristol)

 Conference blog: http://objectsofmodernity.wordpress.com/

art-deco-sterling-silver-enamel-tea-coffee-spoons-2-190-p

What were the objects that shaped modernity? How did they function? Who created them, used them and reflected on their significance?

This two-day conference, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Cultural Modernity at The University of Birmingham and partially funded by the British Academy, seeks to bring together researchers from a range of disciplines in order to reflect upon a cultural history of modernity by way of its objects. This burgeoning field of study, which encompasses scholarship on material cultures, the history of technology, social theory and psychoanalysis and which has been pioneered by the ‘cultural phenomenology’ of Steven Connor and the ‘thing theory’ of Bill Brown amongst others, has spawned new, interdisciplinary research from literary critics, art historians, philosophers, sociologists and cultural historians. Yet this work has often not been drawn together in such a way as to reflect upon its specific significance as a subject of study or its relevance for more traditional forms of historical analysis. Answering the question of how a particular object should be read entails an assumption about its readable qualities and interpretive value. Reflecting upon the key interpretive tools that allow objects to become meaningful in this way will therefore be a fundamental component of the conference and, while the nature of the final panels cannot be predicted in detail, it is envisaged that several methodological or thematic strands will run throughout. These will include, but are not limited to:

  • The Phenomenal. How do ‘the things themselves’ of phenomenology shape our being-in-the-world? How do they throw us into a world of cultural practices that make our experience precisely what it is?
  • The Phantasmagoric. How do objects both display and hide their inherent traits? How do they circulate? Who possesses them?
  • Obsolescence and Waste. What happens when apparently ‘modern’ objects become obsolete? What kind of an object is rubbish?
  • The Materiality of Art. What kind of object is the book, painting or sculpture? How does its ‘thingness’ mediate the experience of art?
  • Subject and Object. In what ways can human bodies (or their parts) be considered objects? How have technological innovations altered bodies and subjectivities? Are objects invested with human traits?

The approach of this conference is therefore both thematic and methodological rather than period specific. However, it is also true that the range of questions referred to above can be most effectively addressed when given some limited terms of reference. As such, the organizers are looking for papers that deal broadly with the period 1850-1950.

The second day of the conference features a research networking forum, generously supported by the British Academy, which will run parallel to the academic conference. 

At this forum, we are seeking Early Career Researchers in academia, in heritage management and in the creative arts to talk about their professional and creative encounters with objects of modernity. The forum will provide an opportunity for ECRs working across different disciplines to come together to talk about the ways in which objects of modernity (physical, phenomenological, imagined) function in art, literature and culture, and will offer researchers a space in which the challenges of such objects (hermeneutic, methodological and curatorial) can be debated in an interdisciplinary way. ECRs from the heritage sector in particular will be encouraged to bring along information about their institutional collections, particularly in areas they consider to be untapped. The aim of the forum is to help unlock some of the resources, archives and collections of objects, things and artefacts of the industrial and post-industrial heritage of the UK to ECRs, and to help forge new professional, cross-disciplinary connections that will shape a growing and fertile field of study in the coming years.

We welcome all participants to both events at a reception and buffet dinner on Monday 23rd June.

Those interested in speaking at the academic conference should submit a 500 word abstract, together with a brief biography, to Dr. Rex Ferguson (r.ferguson@bham.ac.uk) by 14 April 2014. Those interested in presenting at the networking event should send the same information to Dr. Dan Moore (d.t.moore@bham.ac.uk) by the same date.

Categories
Events Postgraduate

British Society for Literature and Science Conference 2014: Registration Open

British Society for Literature and Science Conference 2014: Registration Open

 
Registration is now open for the ninth annual conference of the British Society for Literature and Science, which will take place at the University of Surrey, Guildford, on 10-12 April 2014. Keynote talks will be given by Professor Jim Al-Khalili (University of Surrey), Professor Bernard Lightman (York University, Toronto), and Professor Mary Orr (University of Southampton). The conference will finish with an opportunity to visit Down House, the home of Charles Darwin, on the afternoon of Saturday 12 April.
 
Accommodation: please note that those attending the conference will need to make their own arrangements for accommodation. Information on local hotels is available on the 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.
 
To register for the conference please visit the University of Surrey online store at http://tinyurl.com/p92lleg. The deadline for registration is 27 March 2014.
 
Information about how to get to the University of Surrey is available here:http://www.surrey.ac.uk/about/visitors/travel/.
 
For further information and updates about the conference, please contact Gregory Tate (g.tate@surrey.ac.uk) or visit the conference website at http://tinyurl.com/pp6ubz5.
Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate Uncategorized

Anna Kavan Symposium – London – CFP deadline 30 April

ies-logologo

CFP: Anna Kavan Symposium

11th September 2014

Institute of English Studies, London

ANNA KAVAN: HISTORICAL CONTEXT, INFLUENCES AND LEGACY

Kavan-paintingAnna Kavan’s publication history spans from her early novels under the name Helen Ferguson in the late 1920s and early 1930s to her last work which won Brian Aldiss’ prize for ‘Sci-Fi Novel of the Year’ in 1967.  Her own life story has been widely reported in magazine articles, book reviews and popular biography, but there has been little serious scholarly attention to her writing.  The often sensationalized focus on Kavan’s biography, particularly her adoption of her own fictional character’s name, her long-term heroin addiction, and her psychological difficulties, has overshadowed serious critical attention to her work.  Yet, her writing continues to be published in English and translation, to hold fascination for new generations of readers, and to interest or influence other writers and artists.  This symposium aims to bring together scholars with an interest in Kavan to promote an increasing academic focus on her work.  The day will be a forum for knowledge sharing, with the broad aims of historicizing Kavan’s work, situating her within the literary and intellectual context of her times, and charting her legacy as a writer.  The symposium will close with a public event in the evening at which leading contemporary writers will discuss Anna Kavan’s work in relation to their own writing. 

The symposium will primarily focus on Kavan’s fictional writing, but also welcomes those working on her biography, her journalism, her little-studied artwork and her philosophical or intellectual influences.  Papers might include the following topics:

  • Comparative readings of Kavan’s fiction with her contemporaries and the authors who have admired her since (e.g. Doris Lessing, J G Ballard, Anais Nin, Maggie Gee).
  • Connections/differences between her writing as Helen Ferguson/ Anna Kavan.
  • High Modernist influences on Kavan’s work.
  • Readings of Kavan’s fiction that historicize her writing in the context of the Second World War, the Cold War and 1960s counterculture.
  • Kavan’s theoretical or philosophical influences.
  • Feminist readings and reassessments of Kavan’s work.
  • Examination of the (post-)colonial aspects of Kavan’s fiction and journalism.
  • Kavan’s engagement with visual cultures, including her own artwork.
  • Studies of Kavan’s use of form (especially the short story) and narrative style (especially her distinctive uses of first and third person narrative).
  • Theories of autobiography and fiction and their impact on the reception of Kavan’s life and work.
  • Kavan’s writing of madness, asylum incarceration and opiate addiction.
  • Kavan’s literary networks (e.g. her friendships with Rhys Davies, Kay Dick, Sylvia Townsend-Warner and others, and her associations with Cyril Connolly and Jonathan Cape).
  • Issues of genre including interpretations of Kavan’s work as ‘Science Fiction’.
  • Kavan’s journalism (in Horizon) and its relation to her fictional writing.
  • Other writers’ engagement with Kavan and the legacy of her work.

Presentations should take the form of 20-minute papers. Please send proposals of no more than 300 words toinfo@annakavan.org.uk by 30 April 2014.  For further information visit http://annakavansymposium.wordpress.com/

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public – CFP 21 February – Keynote confirmed

A Public Modernism/Modernism’s Public

Friday 9 May 2014

Centre for Studies in Literature, University of Portsmouth

KEYNOTE SPEAKER: Professor Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University)

 

 

port

CALL FOR PAPERS

In recent decades modernist studies has seen an explosion of scholarship undermining the myth of modernist isolation from commercialised literary production, with critical attention focused largely on the engagement of modernists with mass markets and popular cultural forms.  Less attention has been given to how mass culture itself responded to and approached modernism. This one-day symposium seeks to explore the two-way relationship between artists and popular audiences; how modernists found a public and how the public also took ownership of modernism.  While modernist writers and artists played with or actively assimilated mass market tactics, the mass markets themselves played with or actively assimilated high modernist techniques.  As mass audiences became increasingly aware of the modernist revolution, modernism not only found its public face, but also met a public increasingly active in refiguring modernism’s profile.  This symposium aims to bring together scholars interested in debating alternative methods of approaching and interpreting interactions between mass markets, popular culture and modernism.
We invite 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers, which might address, but are by no means limited to, the following topics:
  • Approaches to modernism in mass market periodicals
  • Individual modernist writers and the commercial press
  • Mass market publishing and modernist outputs
  • Advertising and modernist design
  • Modernism and celebrity
  • Modernism and fashion
  • Middlebrow culture
  • Methodological issues arising from the study of modernism in mass culture

 

Please send abstracts with a brief biographical note and full contact details to the symposium organisers, Dr Rod Rosenquist (rod.rosenquist@port.ac.uk) and Dr Alice Wood (alice.wood@port.ac.uk), by 21 February 2014.  Participants will be notified by 1 March 2014.  Any queries may be directed to either of the email addresses above or visit http://www.port.ac.uk/centre-for-studies-in-literature/literature-events/symposium-2014-public-modernism–modernisms-public/
Categories
Events Postgraduate

Modernist Magazines Research Seminar – Thursday 20th February

Dear colleagues,

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will be held next Thursday (February 20th) in Room 234, Senate House, at the slightly later time of 6.30pm.

Dr Jason Harding, author of The Criterion: Cultural Politics and Periodical Networks in Interwar Britain (OUP 2002), will speak on ‘The Use and Abuse of Archives: Reading The Criterion and Encounter magazines’.

There is no specific reading, but participants can familiarise themselves with The Criterion and Encounter at the following websites:

http://modernistmagazines.com/magazine_viewer.php?gallery_id=287

http://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter

We look forward to seeing you next Thursday.

With best wishes,

Aimee Gasston, Chris Mourant and Natasha Periyan

Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

CFP: Modernist Criticisms

Modernist Criticisms
Graduate Conference
Saturday 7 June 2014
Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex
Keynote Speaker: Professor Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway
 
Call for Papers  
 
Our conceptions of modernism are not just informed by its literature. As is widely recognized, essays including Woolf’s ‘Modern Fiction’ and Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ provide these writers – and their readers -alternative methods of approaching literary questions and a wider arena within which to expound and explore their theories. But while the critical texts of these canonical figures are well known and studied, work by various minor figures of the period, and this work’s engagement with their artistic concerns, is still frequently overlooked. Many kinds of writing remain marginalized within studies of modernist literature, including work for commercial publications and political movements, for educational instruction, and writing beyond the literary scenes of London and Paris. Research into early twentieth-century literary culture has stimulated important discussions surrounding the production and reception of modernist criticism, including the impact of publishing practices and the professionalization of intellectual pursuits. But this research prompts a need for further enquiry into how critical and creative writing in this period are mutually engaged with these cultural contexts in view.
 
This graduate conference aims to develop debates on the intersections between criticism and literature in modernist culture. It also aims to integrate recent research on the literary culture of modernism with the study of both canonical and non-canonical critical texts. Papers are especially welcome on marginal or marginalized critics and criticism. Submissions are invited on topics including but not limited to:
 
• creative practice as critical practice and vice versa 
• modernist notions of taste, highbrow culture, the avant-garde
• critical audiences: universities, magazine readership, literary groups, the reading public, etc.
• British critical traditions: Hazlitt, Arnold, Pater, Eliot, Leavis, etc.
• the essay genre
• modernists criticizing modernists: factions, coteries and disputes
• critical localities: transatlantic and continental criticism, literary scenes, salons, etc.
• originality as an aesthetic criteria
• criticism as it in surfaces in other genres: letters, memoirs, life-writing, etc.
• the professional or dilettante critic
• modernist criticism relating to gender, class, race and sexual identities
• criticism, manifestos and artistic movements
• the influence of science, empiricism, sociology
• comparative and interdisciplinary critical practices
 
The conference is specifically aimed at graduate students and early-career academics, and encourages interdisciplinary exchanges. Abstracts of around 250 words in length for twenty-minute papers, along with a brief biographical note, should be submitted viamodernistcriticismsconference.wordpress.com by 7 March 2014.
Categories
CFPs Events Postgraduate

EAM 2014 ‘Utopia’ – deadline extension

‘Utopia’

The deadline for abstract submission to the 4th EAM conference in Helsinki, 29.-31. August 2014, has been extended to 5 February. At that time we will close!

http://www.eam2014.com/