Category: Postgraduate

Intellectuals & the Great War
An International Conference.
Ghent University, December 17-19, 2014

Ghent University announces a First World War conference, scheduled to take place from 17-19 December 2014. The focus of this international scholarly gathering is on the role of the intellectual in the First World War. It aims to explore the ways in which intellectuals, working in different fields and contexts, dealt with the strain, the shock and the aftermath of WWI. We invite papers that look into the position of the university during the war; the ways in which academia and the ‘monde international des esprits’ dealt with the issue of action and commitment, and what it meant for thinkers to be confronted with the physical aspects of war. In the vast field of WWI studies, relatively little attention has been devoted to the role of the intellectual. When this topic has been tackled the debate rarely reached a transnational, multidisciplinary level. In bringing together scholars from different academic and national backgrounds, the 2014 Ghent conference seeks to do justice to the many faces of the intellectual during WWI and wants to trace what the scholarly world now owes to them. We aim to address the strategies and narratives of both the Entente and Central European intellectuals, of both patriots and collaborators in occupied territories.

The Great War broke out at a time of educational reform. Due to demographic changes and social reforms the early twentieth century speeded up the democratization of higher education, which had slowly begun in the second half of the nineteenth century. The fact that colleges started to open their doors to men and, in some cases women, from different social backgrounds changed the profile of the intellectual, from armchair scholar to public figure and intrepid adventurer. The impact of the First World War on this development cannot be overestimated. Those not out on the battlefield had to confront the questions if and how to contribute and react. In which ways did the events influence innovative developments, within the fields of the sciences, philosophy, literature and the arts? In which ways was the question how to make sense of the broken minds, the many maimed and dead bodies dealt with across disciplines? What survives today of the insights or techniques that question yielded? How do twenty-first-century intellectuals, engage in writing and rewriting the history of 1914-1918, look back on the attempts of our peers to mobilize their minds and bodies? More specifically, the conference proposes four avenues, with four intellectual disciplines, for discussion:

· Science

The positioning of the academic and scientific world at large during the First World War is this section’s focus. We also welcome papers that seek to find an answer to what it meant to be an academic at the time, both intellectually and practically. We are interested in the legitimization of scientific and technological progress made in service of the war effort. Finally, we also invite papers that aim to understand the impact in terms of continuity and discontinuity of the First World War and the Russian Revolution on the transnational circulation of ideas and cultural goods. We encourage proposals that deal with the individual life-story of scientists, engineers, social and human scientists, to open up to a larger perspective.

· Literature

In this section we want to explore the impact of the Great War on early twentieth-century as well contemporary literature. Possible topics include: WWI as a period of literary innovation; the production and reception of patriotic and non-pacifist texts; the image of war poets as “doomed youth”; generation gaps in the war effort; the production of nationalist literature before, during, and after the war; the decision for authors whether to swell the ranks or to comment from the sideline; the ideal of heroism; the employment of women in factories and other previously male domains; the formation of new social norms in masculinity and femininity; war poetry by female writers and its exclusion from anthologies until after 1980; nature and the countryside as a scene of war and peace; the representation of trauma during and after the War Effort.

· Philosophy

Paper proposals that deal with any aspect of philosophy’s relationship to the First World War and its reception among philosophers are welcome. Topics could include the role of the war in the thought (and lives of) particular philosophers (e.g. Wittgenstein, Otto Neurath, Carnap, Bergson, Russell, Reinach, Eucken, etc). We are especially interested in papers that explore the role of the war in the rise (and decline) of philosophical movements (analytic philosophy, phenomenology, Lebensphilosophie, positivism) and their broader relationship to larger intellectual and political movements. We also welcome contributions that deal with the philosophy and morality of mass war and that trace the ways in which current debate in ethics relates to 1914-1918, with the use of arms, with the philosophy of history, and with the social responsibility, if any, of intellectuals.

· Artists and architects

Paper proposals dealing with the following themes are welcomed: The Great War as artistic motif; the war as catalyst for the development of new artistic currents as well as for the rise of a new type of artist coping with industrial modernity; the use of visual media in the war effort; the relation between the arts and new war-related visual practices (such as aerial photography or camouflage techniques); industrial warfare as a nihilist “Gesamtkunstwerk” in relation to avant-garde currents such as Futurism and Dada; the development of new international contacts and forms of collaboration among artists within pacifist circles in exile; architectural conferences and education of architects abroad; exiles returning to their home country; confrontation of local and international ideas about rebuilding the country ; et cetera.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are due via email (intellectualsandthegreatwar@gmail.com) by Feb 1, 2014, and should take the form of a 1-page abstract accompanied by a short CV; in the case of complete panels, proposals should consist of an abstract and short CV for every panelist together with a short CV for the chair (if different).

The conference will be held from December 17-19, 2014 at Het Pand, Onderbergen 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium. We welcome papers in English, French, German, and Dutch.

For more information please visit the conference website: http://www.intellectualsandthegreatwar.ugent.be/

Keynote speakers:

1. Christophe Prochasson and Anne Rasmussen (EHESS) authors of Au nom de la patrie. Les intellectuels et la Première Guerre mondiale (1910-1919).

2. Santanu Das, Senior Lecturer at the University of London, author of Touch and intimacy in First World War literature and Race, Empire and First World War Writing.

3. Roy MacLeod, Professor Emeritus of (Modern) History at the University of Sydney, and an Honorary Associate in the History and Philosophy of Science. Author of ‘The Scientists Go to War: Revisiting Precept and Practice, 1914-1919’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 2 (1), (2009), 37-51, and ‘Science and Scientists,’ Jay Winter (ed.) Cambridge History of the First World War Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), vol. 5, 434-459, 704-708.

4. Annette Becker, at l’Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and senior member of l’Institut universitaire de France. She is the author, with Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau, of 1914-1918, Retrouver la guerre (Gallimard, 2000).

5. Sophie De Schaepdrijver, Pennsylvania State University, author of De Groote Oorlog – Het Koninkrijk België tijdens de Eerste Wereldoorlog (1997).

Romantic Heirs: Receptions, Legacies, Dialogues Since 1900

DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACTS: 30TH NOVEMBER 2013

The University of Sheffield, 17th January 2014

Keynote Speakers: Prof. Matthew Campbell (University of York) and Prof. Michael O’Neill (Durham University)

Also includes a special concert held at Sheffield Cathedral, featuring original settings of Romantic poetry composed and performed by students of the Department of Music. See programme below.

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‘To search for what you already are is the most benighted of quests, and the most fated’

– Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

Marking forty years since Bloom’s provocative study on the enduring influences of Romantic writers, the University of Sheffield invites the submission of papers for a free one day conference on the receptions, legacies and dialogues of Romantic literature. The study of Romanticism and its legacies sprawls across periods, disciplines, and forms, and this conference will contribute to growing scholarship in this field. The AHRC-funded “Romantic Heirs” project has hosted events at the University of Sheffield and the University of Durham throughout 2013 with the aim of promoting the work of postgraduate and early-career researchers interested in this subject. This concluding conference invites papers which consider the future of Romantic studies, in particular how this might pertain to theories of tradition and influence. Topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

● Modern and contemporary receptions of Romanticism in poetry, prose, and drama;

● Romantic revisionism;

● the history of Romantic canonisation (e.g. inclusion of overlooked women writers) and its impact on literature and criticism;

● Romantic revolutions and/or the avant-garde;

● new readings of Romantic texts;

● the legacy of Romantic pan-Europeanism and/or its postcolonial contexts;

● the impact of the ‘Romantic child’ on subsequent and current society;

● adaptations of Romantic texts, figures, and events in film and visual cultures;

● Gothic and Romantic legacies and adaptations;

● transatlantic Romanticism;

● Romantic landscape, ecology and animal studies;

● recent and future impacts of Romanticism on policy, the arts, and psychology;

● Romanticism’s impact upon ideas of self, society, and nationhood;

● Critiques/ new readings of Bloom’s theory.

Panel proposals and abstracts of up to 300 words for 20-minute papers to be submitted to romanticheirs@sheffield.ac.uk by 30th November. Please get in touch if you will have any problems meeting this deadline.

Romantic Heirs Concert (1)

The fourth biennial conference of EAM

The European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies

University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland 29.-31.8.2014

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CLOSED PANELS

(Scroll down for the full calls for papers and chairs)

UTOPIA

Modernism and Avant-gardism are artistic languages of rupture. Both were directed against traditional ways of conceiving art, often assuming an antagonistic position in relationship to existing cultural and social institutions and relationships. This conference explores the utopian alternatives which Modernist and avant-garde artists offered to existing society. This was not always simply a question of taking an outside position: for example, the Russian avant-garde was co-opted by the early Soviet state in an uneasy – and temporary – alliance to give birth to the New Man. The 2014 EAM conference in Helsinki commemorates the centenary of the break-out of the First World War by taking as its starting point the many utopian dreams within European literature and arts as well as their collapse in the face of the horrors of war. The effects of the War lasted throughout the century, and the conference will also explore the utopian dimensions of the neo-avant-garde, be it that of the West which dreamed alternatives to conformism and consumer society, or of the East which sheltered alternatives to socialist dystopia. We thus invite proposals for contributions that deal with the alternatives that modernism and the avant-garde offered to existing reality: utopias; chimeras; dreams; abstractions; desires; myths; dystopias; cityscapes or impossible landscapes; politics or anti-politics; the body freed or harnessed; erotic or amatorial liberation; the retreat into private worlds or the mapping of bold alternatives; the avant-garde as alternative to or embodiment of the state; the utopian moment in the nihilistic or rebarbative art-work. We welcome contributions across all areas of avant-garde and modernist research or practice: art, literature, music, architecture, film, artistic and social movements, lifestyle, television, fashion, drama, performance, activism, design and technology.

EAM website: http://www.eam-europe.be/

Conference website: http://www.eam2014.com/

For all the enquiries about the conference, please contact us eam2014@meetingsmill.fi

CALL FOR PAPERS AND CLOSED PANELS, November 1st – January 30th

All the submissions will be done with the online abstract submission form in our website: http://www.eam2014.com, bottom ”Abstracts”. There you will also find a link to the list of open panels and peer seminars. The maximum length of all the submissions is 200 words.

You can either submit

1) A CLOSED PANEL. A CLOSED PANEL consists of between THREE and TWELVE speakers. The CHAIR(s) may present a paper if desired. A closed panel may include no more than two doctoral students. These panels are ‘closed’ in the sense that they will include only the speakers whose names are submitted by the chair – they are of course presented before a conference audience. On the online abstract form the chair(s) will supply the title and a brief description of the panel, the titles of the papers that will be presented in the panel, name and affiliation of the chair(s) and all the speakers.

2) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL to join an OPEN PANEL listed on the website, http://www.eam2014.com, click on the bottom ”Abstracts”.

3) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL to a PEER SEMINAR. Please check the list of peer seminars on the website, http://www.eam2014.com, please click on the bottom ”Abstracts”. For the peer seminar, participants circulate short position papers (2000 words) one month before the seminar. The papers are discussed at the seminar. There is NO audience at the peer seminar which is closed to the rest of the conference. Doctoral students may apply to participate in a seminar and this can be a good way to get accepted to the conference for people whose work is at an early stage.

4) An INDIVIDUAL PROPOSAL without specifying a panel and the organisers will assign your paper to a panel if accepted.

The participants will be informed about the acceptance of the papers by February 28th.

The official languages of the conference are English, French and German. Both papers and entire panels are accepted in all the three languages. A paper submitted to an open panel MUST be in the language of that panel.

Conference convenors and the EAM network chairs

Prof. David Ayers, University of Kent, UK / Dr. Marja Härmänmaa University of Helsinki, Finland

The scientific committee of the EAM 2014 conference

Professor Henry Bacon, University of Helsinki / Professor Natalia Baschmakoff, University of Eastern Finland / Professor Tomi Huttunen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Irmeli Hautamäki, University of Helsinki / Dr. Teemu Ikonen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Timo Kaitaro, University of Helsinki / Dr. Janna Kantola, University of Helsinki / Professor Pirjo Lyytikäinen, University of Helsinki / Dr. Alfonso Padilla, University of Helsinki / Dr. Riikka Rossi, University of Helsinki / Professor Pekka Pesonen, University of Helsinki / Professor Kirsi Saarikangas, University of Helsinki / Professor Riikka Stewen, Academy of Fine Arts / Professor Harri Veivo, University of New Sorbonne / University of Helsinki

EAM_call_for_papers mh11112013FINAL PUBLIC

Please see the attached CFP below for information about ‘Katherine Mansfield and France’ which will be held in Paris, 19–21 June 2014.

Paris 2014 Call for Papers

May Sinclair Society Introductory Symposium – Call for Papers

The newly-launched May Sinclair Society is to hold its Introductory Symposium on Friday, 18 July 2014. The symposium is organised by the May Sinclair Society: http://maysinclairsociety.com/ with the support of the Humanities Research Centre, Sheffield Hallam University. A keynote talk will be given by Professor Suzanne Raitt of the College of William and Mary, Virginia.

Papers are invited on any aspect of Sinclair’s life and work. Although this will primarily be an academic event, contributions from associates or enthusiasts of Sinclair would be particularly welcome. Please forward 300-word abstracts in a Word document format to maysinclairsociety@sheffield.ac.uk by 31 March 2014.

Admission to the event will be free and lunch and refreshments will be provided. There will also be an optional visit to the Swaledale Museum on Saturday 19 July, which includes a guided walk taking in Sinclair’s house and some of the buildings which inspired her settings for Mary Olivier and The Three Sisters. Details will be forwarded along with registration documents.