Category: Postgraduate

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.

The T. S. Eliot Society will sponsor two sessions at the 2014 annual conference of the American Literature
Association, May 22-25, at the Hyatt Regency Washington on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Please send proposals (up to 250 words), along with a brief biography or curriculum vitae, to Professor Nancy K. Gish (ngish@usm.maine.edu). Submissions must be received no later than January 15, 2014.

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