Category: Uncategorized

Please read the following information before completing the questionnaire. The link to the questionnaire can be found at the bottom of the page.

BAMS is committed to supporting our members and to challenging the various forms of discrimination found within academia and within modernist studies. By filling in this form, you will help us to build an accurate picture of the make-up of our membership and of the modernism community more broadly, and to ensure equality and diversity within the association. The questionnaire is open to BAMS members and to anyone with an interest in BAMS, so you are welcome to complete the questionnaire even if you are not currently a member.

The questionnaire will take approximately 10 minutes to complete and your answers will be entirely anonymous.

The first part of the form is an equality and diversity questionnaire designed to help us to assess the make-up of our membership and of the modernism community. All questions are optional.

The second part of the form is a short survey asking for your feedback on equality, diversity and inclusion within BAMS. This is designed to enable us to identify issues and to work towards greater equality and diversity within the organisation. We really welcome any comments and feedback that you may provide in this section, but all questions are optional.

Completing this questionnaire is completely voluntary and you are not under any obligation to consent to complete it. Submitting a completed questionnaire is an indication of your consent to participate in the study. You can withdraw at any time prior to submitting your completed questionnaire. Once you have submitted your questionnaire anonymously, your responses cannot be withdrawn as it will not be possible to identify which questionnaire is yours.

We realise that some of you may enter information about prior negative experiences of discrimination or harassment and that this questionnaire may act as a trigger for anyone with any such prior experiences. We are most grateful for your feedback, but request that you avoid providing information on the questionnaire by which individuals or institutions could be identified. As the questionnaire is anonymous, we will not be able to identify you to take direct action or offer support. If you would like to report any such instances or discuss your experiences within BAMS in confidence, please contact us as set out in the BAMS Code of Conduct policy. If required, we will also provide a forum for further discussion and support in relation to issues raised by the questionnaire.

The data collected from the questionnaire will be kept anonymously. All data will be stored securely and will be deleted after a period of 10 years. If you choose to provide any information by which you, other individuals, or institutions could be identified, that information will not be accessible to anyone outside of the BAMS Executive Committee. We will ensure that any such data will not be included in any publications or communications to members that might arise from the questionnaire.

If you have any questions about the questionnaire or would like to discuss equality, diversity and inclusion issues in relation to BAMS, please contact Juliette Taylor-Batty (j.taylor-batty@leedstrinity.ac.uk).

Please click here to begin the questionnaire

Postgraduate English, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, has been publishing postgraduate research biannually since the year 2000 and is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the world. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

The journal aims to provide a space for postgraduate students and early-career researchers to showcase their work and receive feedback from established academics. While the journal is based in the UK, we seek to cultivate an international range of contributors and judge submissions primarily for strength of argument and fresh insight over a fixed writing style.

We invite postgraduate students and early-career researchers to submit papers of 5000 – 7000 words, or book reviews of 1000 – 2000 words by Friday 19th November 2021, for consideration for the journal’s 43rd edition. 

Papers can be on any theme or area of literary research; we will also consider work with an interdisciplinary focus. Submissions must follow the MHRA Style Guide. If submitting a book review, please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review.  

Submissions should be sent as an anonymised Word document to the current editors, Hannah Voss and Vicky Penn, at pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk. Submissions should also include a cover sheet in a separate document, detailing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, ORCID id if you have one, and a 200 – 300 word abstract that indicates five keywords for indexing. Please note our full guidelines and editorial process on our website: https://community.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/about/editorialPolicies.

For queries or further information contact: pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk.

We look forward to receiving your submission! 

We were deeply saddened to learn of the death of Laura Marcus on Wednesday 22 September, after a short illness. During the course of her distinguished career, Laura was a friend, teacher, and colleague to many of us. Her work on autobiography, Virginia Woolf, psychoanalysis, and cinema profoundly informed the modernist studies we practise now, and her books, characterised by historical depth, theoretical acumen, and vivid prose, were justly lauded: The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007) was awarded the MLA’s James Lowell Prize.

Laura was a sparkling orator. Many modernists, all over the world, have been enthralled by her brilliant papers at the conferences and seminars she so much enjoyed attending. We were grateful to have Laura as our introductory speaker at the 2010 Inaugural BAMS conference in snow-laden Glasgow. She truly recognised the importance of our organisation in fostering the modernist community in the UK. Collaboration was at the heart of Laura’s work; this is reflected not only in her strong presence at academic events, but in her many co-authored publications, including Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (1999) and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2004), and her work on Women: A Cultural Review. 

Laura was a caring, considerate listener. BAMS members, past and present, have benefited from her interested and astute questions about our own work, her candid career advice, and her amazing ability to untangle and clarify knotty thinking. She was incredibly generous with her time, despite the numerous scholarly projects, committees, and other academic labours that took up considerable space in her diary. She was notably supportive of early career scholars, and was deeply committed to the graduate students she taught and supervised at Kent, Southampton, Birkbeck, Sussex, Edinburgh, and Oxford, and the remarkable number of doctoral candidates she examined.

Laura was also a wonderful, witty friend. Alongside the deeply intellectual conversations, we will cherish the moments of lightness and merriment we shared with her: chats about the sumptuous costumes in Mad Men; her inexplicable – yet strongly felt – dislike of red sauce; and the many giggly taxi rides back from conference dinners. For many of us, Laura was the model for the scholars, teachers, and colleagues we aspire to be.

Avant-Gardes / Contagion / Hygiene is an interdisciplinary symposium hosted online by the University of Glasgow on 26 November 2021.

The event brings together scholars in the fields of art history, theatre, visual culture, and literature to explore intersections and interactions, dating from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, between the artistic avant-garde and themes of health and hygiene, such as illness, contagion, cleanliness, and contamination.

Whilst the ongoing covid-19 pandemic has brought these themes – as well as the complex and highly charged discursive field they inhabit – to the fore of popular and political discourse, they have always been central to debates around processes of modernisation.

Examining the artistic oeuvres of some of the great names of modern art – Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, Pablo Picasso, George Orwell, Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, et al. – the symposium investigates instances where the heightened political, social, and cultural currencies embedded within such hygienic issues have been mobilised, and subversively exploited, to fuel the critical strategy at play.

As such, the symposium promotes an interdisciplinary and socio-historically contextualised understanding of the criticality of the avant-garde gesture and seeks to cultivate scholarship that moves beyond and transgresses the limits of traditional academic subjects to produce innovative and thought-provoking connections and interrelations across various fields.

Full Program with Abstracts

Speakers
David Hopkins (Professor of Art History, University of Glasgow)
Anthea Callen (Professor of Art, Australian National University)
Fae Brauer (Professor of Art and Visual Culture, University of East London)
Carl Lavery (Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Glasgow)
Abigail Susik (Associate Professor of Art History, Willamette University)
Allison Morehead (Associate Professor of Art History, Queen’s University)
Alison Syme (Associate Professor of Modern Art History, University of Toronto)
Peter Fifield (Lecturer in Modern Literature, Birkbeck, University of London)
Disa Persson (Doctoral Researcher in Art History, University of Glasgow)

Please register for your free ticket now to receive updates and a link to the online event.

Questions: Disa Persson / d.persson.1@research.gla.ac.uk

Call for Submissions: Issue 42

Postgraduate English, Durham University’s online peer-reviewed literary journal, has been publishing postgraduate research biannually since the year 2000 and is one of the longest-running online postgraduate literary journals in the world. In recent years the journal has received reprint requests from academic publishers.

The journal aims to provide a space for postgraduate students and early-career researchers to showcase their work and receive feedback from established academics. While the journal is based in the UK, we seek to cultivate an international range of contributors and judge submissions primarily for strength of argument and fresh insight over a fixed writing style.

We invite postgraduate students and early-career researchers to submit papers of 5000 – 7000 words, or book reviews of 1000 – 2000 words by Friday 28th May 2021, for consideration for the journal’s 42nd edition.

Papers can be on any theme or area of literary research; we will also consider work with an interdisciplinary focus. Submissions must follow the MHRA Style Guide. If submitting a book review, please contact the editors in advance with details of the book you wish to review.

Submissions should be sent as an anonymised Word document to the current editors, Hannah Voss and Vicky Penn, at pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk. Submissions should also include a cover sheet in a separate document, detailing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, ORCID id if you have one, and a 200 – 300 word abstract that indicates five keywords for indexing. Please note our full guidelines and editorial process on our website: http://community.dur.ac.uk/postgraduate.english.

For queries or further information contact: pgeng.submissions@durham.ac.uk.

University of Leuven
9-10 December 2021

This interdisciplinary symposium, open to contributions on all art forms, aims to explore the deepest temporal strata of the so-called “historical” or “classic” avant-gardes. Our goal is to chart how these avant-gardes, both within Europe and beyond, engaged with the longue durée, with “prehistory”, with deep time and with civilizations more temporally remote than Greco-Roman Antiquity.

Confirmed invited speakers include Antonia Lant (NYU Tisch) and Maria Stavrinaki (University Paris I Pantheon-
Sorbonne).

Rationale
Scholarship of the last decades has stretched the geographic delimitations of the classic avant-gardes both on the European continent and beyond. A considerable amount of scholarly energy in recent decades has gone into articulating a renewed pan-European and decentered view of the classic avant-gardes that leaves behind previous assumptions of centralized loci of avant-garde activity within a handful of major European metropolises. At the same time, research on cognate movements in the arts stemming from the Americas, the African continent and the Middle East, Asia and Japan has further expanded our view of the avant-gardes, demonstrating that the historical avant-gardes were not only a European but also a multifarious global undertaking.

This notable geographical expansion of our understanding of the classic avant-gardes contrasts sharply with our still very limited historical and temporal view of the avant-gardes. Indeed, whereas we have long moved beyond assertions that the avant-gardes were exclusively concerned with the present or the future, or that the avant-gardes responded only to immediately predating, 19 th -century trends, the classic avant-gardes’ relationship to the distant past remains understudied. Certain periods revisited by the classic avant-gardes, such as the Middle Ages and the Baroque, have already figured quite prominently in research. However, more distant time periods still present ample opportunity for investigation.

This symposium seeks to further our understanding of the historical avant-gardes by reconsidering their outer temporal parameters. The European avant-gardes located the founding moment of dominant “European” culture in the Renaissance marriage of European Antiquity and Christianity. Part of their working assumption was, accordingly, that sources for rebooting European culture had to be located in periods before the Renaissance, if not, before the arrival of Classical Antiquity. If we follow this logic, then cultures belonging to pre-European periods abound, both on the European continent (from the Minoans and Mycenaeans to the Etruscans, Celts and Illyrians) and beyond (from what is generically called “prehistory” to Ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian times). Which of these or other pre-European cultures did the classic avant-gardes revisit and enter into meaningful dialogue with? How and why? And which of these cultures did it by and large neglect and why? In a global context, which historical moments did exo-European avant-gardes invoke?

Papers
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers that explore the longue durée in avant-gardes launched either from the European continent (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism, Vorticism, Ultraism, Surrealism, Constructivism, Neue Sachlichkeit, …) or other from other continents (Mavo, Art and Freedom, Anthropophagia, Estridentismo, Muralism, …) during, roughly, the first half of the 20 th century. Contributions can be focused on case- studies of individual avant-gardists, movements or more comparative analyses. Possible approaches to consider are:

• Forgotten or neglected primitivisms and deviant ontologies; and the language of primitivism itself – Is the discourse of “primitivism” apt to capture the full complexity of the avant-gardes’ ties to the longue durée?
• Understudied mediating actors, practices and discourses – how did the avant-gardes come to learn about the pre-European? Who or what shaped their views of it? And what role did scientific disciplines such as anthropology and ethnography, among others, play in lesser studied contexts?
• Aesthetic representations of the longue durée – how does the pre-European manifest itself in the art forms and practices of the avant-gardes? What role did different art forms and media (and their combinations) play here? What aspects of the pre-European cultures were highlighted? (How) did these representations contrast with those of historians and historiographers?
• Anachronisms, chronological schisms and temporal vortices, pathways into the past, the archaeological fragment which invites imaginative completion; confrontations of the prehistoric in the present and the foreign in the familiar.
• Pre-European periods and cultures as manifestations of a different, deep-temporal ecological awareness in the avant-gardes – we continue to see the avant-gardes mostly as products of the industrialized modern metropolis, but (how) did their exploration of the longue durée also not give shape to another understanding of the environment?
• (How) did the avant-gardes recuperate and co-opt the past? To what extent did they attempt to meld ancient civilizations into contemporaneous cultures (e.g. Europeanizing the ancient Egyptians)?
  
  Papers presented will be considered for inclusion in an edited volume.

Practical
Before Europe: The Classic Avant-Gardes in the Long Durée will take place in the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Given the current health and travel situation, we are open to alternative arrangements in light of contingencies. The
symposium language is English.
Those wishing to attend are requested to send an abstract (max 500 words) to leannerae.darnbrough@kuleuven.be
by Wednesday, June 30 th 2021 as well as a short biography (max 200 words) including institutional affiliation and up
to five previous publications. Abstracts should be in Word format.

Organization
This symposium is convened by Sascha Bru and Leanne Rae Darnbrough.
It is hosted by the MDRN research lab of the University of Leuven.

International Virginia Woolf Society Panel for MLA 2022

“The future is dark, which is the best thing the future can be, I think.” Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Woolf’s Darkness,” opens with this quotation from Woolf, and follows with a discussion that celebrates Woolf’s investment in uncertainty and even darkness as a space of possibility. As Solnit writes, darkness is the time in which “things merge, change, become enchanted, aroused, impregnated, possessed, released, renewed.”

In a similar vein, Paul Saint-Amour notes that Woolf’s “diary entry for June 27, 1940, reads, ‘I can’t believe there will be a 27th June 1941.’ All the same, she went on to make one of the most radical feminist statements of her time, on behalf of a future she didn’t believe she would live to see.” Woolf has, Saint-Amour marvels, “the courage to make both connections and distinctions — between men and women, soldiers and civilians, one’s own death and another’s death — in the face of a threat that would efface them all.”

As Woolf teaches critics how to write clearly and sympathetically in the midst of uncertainty or darkness, her works offer a primer on hope, wonder, and play. Such achievements are hard-earned; Woolf rejects sentimentalism even as she reimagines distraction, uncertainty, and dread to awaken such wonder. This panel seeks papers that show us how and where hope surfaces in Woolf’s writing.

Potential topics include:

• The transformation of the sublime in Woolf’s modernism
• Woolf’s reactions to nature
• Woolf’s alternatives to national memorials following the First World War
• Ethical and aesthetic responses to the war
• Portrayals of childhood
• The place of art, frivolity and joy during times of darkness
• How does Woolf’s oeuvre combat popular portrayals of Woolfian melancholy?

Please send CVs and abstracts of 300 words to Angela Harris (angela.cat.harris@gmail.com) by
March 15.

The Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (ISSN 2506-8709) offers an online publication platform to researchers who wish to explore various aesthetic ‘crossings’ concerning media, genres and/or spaces. Targeted squarely at investigating the ‘in-between,’ the journal seeks contributions from scholars broadly covering medial, literary, generic, spatial and cultural crossings that bridge a plurality of potential discourses, modalities, and methodologies. We particularly welcome articles focusing on e.g. intra-, inter- and transmedial phenomena, hypermedia, genre hybridization and mixing, (inter-/cross-)cultural exchange, networks, interactions, contact zones, entanglements, cross-border movements, multilingualism, transnationality, topographies, etc. 

We welcome contributions between 5,000 and 6,000 words (references and footnotes included) in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian or Spanish. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed. JLIC supports textual as well as multi-media formatting. All work submitted to JLIC should reference and be formatted according to our Author Guidelines. Articles may be submitted in Word format. Figures, video and audio files etc. should be saved separately from the text. 

The deadline for articles is 26 April 2021. Please send an abstract of maximum 500 words (in English and, if applicable, also in the language of your article, i.e. Dutch, French, German, Italian or Spanish) and a list of 5 keywords (in the same (two) language(s)) and a 100-word author bio (in English only) to jlic@vub.be by 28 February 2021. Potential contributors should bear in mind that a two-stage review process is envisaged for full essays. In the first stage, articles will be reviewed by one of the journal editors. In the second stage, articles will be double-blind peer-reviewed by at least one external anonymous expert referee.  

JLIC considers all manuscripts on the strict condition that: 

– the manuscript is your own original work, and does not duplicate any other previously published work, including your own previously published work. 

– the manuscript has been submitted only to the Journal of Literary and Intermedial Crossings; it is not under consideration or peer review or accepted for publication or in press or published elsewhere. 

– the manuscript contains nothing that is abusive, defamatory, libellous, obscene, fraudulent, or illegal. 

– the author has obtained the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in their article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your article for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. 

Transnational Jean Rhys investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys’s entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys’s writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.
Table of contents

Introduction: On reading Rhys transnationally
Juliana Lopoukhine (University of Paris-Sorbonne, France), Frédéric Regard (University of Paris-Sorbonne, France) and Kerry-Jane Wallart (University of Orléans, France)

Part 1 Lines of transmission: Rhys’s continental transculturalism
1. The white Creole in Paris: Joséphine, Colette and Jean Rhys’s Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight
Elaine Savory (New School, USA)
2. Strange defeat: Good Morning, Midnight and Marc Bloch’s L’Étrange défaite
Scott McCracken (Queen Mary University of London, UK)
3. ‘Also I do like the moderns’: Reading Rhys’s reading
Andrew Thacker (Nottingham Trent University, UK)
4. ‘Parler de soi’: Jean Rhys and the uses of life writing
Simon Cooke (University of Edinburgh, UK)
5. Jean Rhys and Indonesia: A lineage and alineage
Chris GoGwilt (Fordham University, USA)

Part 2 Lines of flight: Rhys’s transnational legacy
6. Jean Rhys in Australian neo-Victorian and Great House imaginaries
Sue Thomas (LaTrobe University, Melbourne, Australia)
7. Twisted lines in Caribbean postcolonial Modernism: Jean Rhys and Edward Kamau Brathwaite
Françoise Clary (Rouen University, France)
8. Dressing and addressing the self: Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and the cultural politics of self-fashioning
Denise deCaires Narain (University of Sussex, UK)
9. ‘Competing conversations’: Voice and identity in Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset
Kathie Birat (University of Lorraine, France)
10. ‘A journey into the familiar underworld’: Revisiting Jean Rhys in Caryl Phillips’s A View of the Empire at Sunset
Catherine Lanone (Université Sorbonne-Nouvelle, Paris, France)
11. ‘The small things that they’ve not been able to talk about’: An interview with Caryl Phillips about his novel A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018)
Kerry-Jane Wallart

Non-canonical British literature: 1890-1945

Abstracts by 15 April – DEADLINE EXTENDED

Papers due 30 August 2020