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The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce its annual essay prize competition for 2016, open to all, on the subject of:

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND RUSSIA

The winner will receive a cash prize of £200 and the winning essay will be considered for publication in Katherine Mansfield Studies (the peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press).

The distinguished panel of judges will comprise:

Professor Galya Diment

University of Washington, Seattle, US, Chair of the Judging Panel

Dr Rebecca Beasley

University of Oxford, UK

Dr Joanna Wood

Author of Katerina: The Russian Katherine Mansfield, NZ

Professor Claire Davison

Sorbonne Nouvelle, France

Essays that address all aspects of Katherine Mansfield and Russia, whether literary, cultural, historical, or biographical, are welcomed. Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• KM and Chekhov
• KM and Tolstoy
• KM and Dostoevsky
• KM and Russian Literature
• KM and Marie Bashkirtseff
• The Hogarth Press and Russia
• Translating with Koteliansky
• KM and Constance Garnett
• KM and the Russian Revolution of 1917
• KM, Gurdjieff and his Institute
• KM and Russian Ballet and/or Theatre

Submissions of between 5000–6000 words (inclusive of endnotes), in Word format and using MHRA style formatting, should be emailed to the Guest Editor for this volume, Professor Galya Diment, accompanied by a 50 word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

A detailed MHRA style guide is available from the Katherine Mansfield Society website:

http://www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 August 2016

1 Prize essay flier 2016

The Modernist Studies Association seeks nominations for this year’s MSA Book Prize, to be awarded to a monograph book with a printed copyright date of 2015. The prize is given each year to a work that makes a significant contribution to modernist studies. The recipient will receive $1000 plus up to $600 toward travel expenses to the 2016 MSA conference, where the award will be presented.

Instructions

To nominate a book for the MSA Book Prize, please send an email to David Ayers (D.S.Ayers@kent.ac.uk) as soon as possible and then contact your publisher to ask that a copy of your book be sent to each of the three committee members, at the following addresses:

• 1. David Ayers: School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NX UK
• 2. Suzanne Hobson: Department of English, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS UK
• 3. Alan Golding: Department of English, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292 USA

Please let your publisher know that books must be received by committee members no later than 15 March. Books arriving after that date may be considered for the prize but are not guaranteed consideration.

Self-nomination is strongly encouraged, as it saves a step in the process and helps assure timely receipt of books. Whether a book is nominated by the author or by someone else plays no role in the Committee’s deliberations.

Please note also that books published in years other than the ones mentioned above (2015 for the MSA Book Prize) are ineligible. This exclusion applies even if a revised edition or paperback was published in 2014 or 2015.

Submissions will not be returned.

The MSA Board is extremely happy to announce a new source of research funding for MSA Members. Please find the link for the below announcement at https://msa.press.jhu.edu/members/research.html

Happy researching!

MSA Research Grant

The MSA Research Grant aims to help scholars of modernism conduct their research through visits to archives, collections, and other pertinent sites. Applications will be selected on the basis of the merit of the proposed research and demonstration of need. As this grant is supplementary to other sources of support, applicants must also apply for any available support from their home institutions and the target site.

Purpose: The funding is designed to supplement other existing sources of support, enabling scholars to travel to archives or other pertinent sites to conduct original research.

Eligibility: All scholars are eligible, regardless of stage of career, employment status, or institutional affiliation (or lack thereof). Applicants must be members of the MSA. MSA Board members are not eligible for the Grant. Applicants may apply more than once, but preference will be given to those who have not held the grant previously. Preference will also be given to those who have sought other sources of support for the proposed research.

How to Apply:

• submit a 500-word statement

◦       outlining the research to be conducted

◦       indicating whether the materials can be accessed in any other way (e.g., they are digitized and available online), and/or that such forms of access are inappropriate for the proposed research

◦       outlining support options provided by the target archive or facility and indicating why MSA support is needed in addition to them (proof of having applied for these other sources of funding is required)

◦       outlining support options provided by their home institutions (if they have them) and indicating why MSA support is needed in spite of them (proof of having applied for these other sources of funding is required)

◦       including a budget showing

◦       anticipated travel costs (eligible costs include economy travel, accommodations, and meals)

◦       how much institutional support the applicant has sought and/or received

◦       how much support is being sought and/or has been received from other sources

◦       how much is being sought from the MSA (up to a max. of $5,000USD)

• submit your application by email to the Vice President (Jessica Berman, jberman@umbc.edu)
• deadline for submission of applications is 1 February.
• successful applicants will be required to provide a minimum 500-word research report on the activities supported by the grant, for publication on the MSA website, within one month of completing the research trip.

Decisions: Applications will be adjudicated by three members of the Board. All applicants will be notified of the decision.

Dates: 27-29 September 2016

Venue: Monash University Prato Centre, Palazzo Vai, Prato, Italy

Confirmed Participants/Keynotes:

Professor J.M. Coetzee (Adelaide)

Professor Zoë Wicomb (Strathclyde)

Professor David Attwell (York)

Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford)

Other Participants/Keynotes to be confirmed

Convenors:

Professor Sue Kossew (Monash)

Dr Melinda Harvey (Monash)

Conference Outline:

There has been enormous international scholarly interest in J.M Coetzee’s writings in recent years. Since 2010, four major international conferences (Sydney, Wuhan, Leeds and Adelaide) have been held and two literary biographies, nine monographs and over four hundred book chapters and journal articles have been published on his work. Despite this, very little has been written on what we are calling, as a deliberate provocation, ‘Coetzee’s women’: on his female narrators and characters; or on the women writers who have influenced him and have been compared with him. This three-day international conference asks preeminent and emerging scholars to bring their attention to bear on ‘Coetzee’s women’, broadly conceived, as well as possible reasons for the lack of sustained critical engagement with this theme until now.

Possible paper topics include: Female ventriloquism |Love, sex and desire | Mothers and daughters | The woman writer |Female mentors and carers |Violence against women |Youth and aging | Women and race |Beauty |Coetzee and Gordimer |Women and power |The female gaze |Coetzee and Lessing | Women’s silence and speech | The male gaze |Women and education |Coetzee on women’s writing | Women’s knowledge | Feminist and queer readings of Coetzee’s writings

An intended outcome of this conference is an edited volume of scholarly essays.

Abstracts of not more than 250 words and a 50-word bio are invited and should be sent to the conference convenors by 1 April 2016.

This event is hosted by the Centre for Writers and Writing, Monash University and kindly supported by the Faculty of Arts.

All enquiries should be directed to the organisers:

Professor Sue Kossew (sue.kossew@monash.edu)

Dr Melinda Harvey (melinda.harvey@monash.edu)

CFP

The School of English – The University of Sheffield holds an interdisciplinary research conference on Thursday 19 May 2016, entitled Scheherazade in Classical, Modern and Postmodern Worlds.

Scheherazade is the legendary female storyteller of Alf layla wa Layla or The Thousand and One Nights or what is often known in English as the Arabian Nights. She uses narrative to preserve her life and the lives of other women victims of her tyrannical ruler-husband, Shahryar. She can be seen as a multicultural emblem since the origin of the tales themselves comes from a multiplicity of sources, including Indian, Persian, Baghdadi and Cairene, later translated into European and numerous other languages. Over the years, Scheherazade has been analysed from a very great range of academic perspectives due to the variety of interpretations of her character and role.  Immediately, after the advent of interdisciplinary criticism in the late twentieth century, she began to be studied and analyzed by scholars from various fields including Anthropology, Linguistics, Psychology and Literary Theory.  As a result of the various studies she was hailed as a literary and mythical figure who is a brilliant narrator and an artist who has created a profound work of art. The modern psychological analysis of Scheherazade demonstrates that her stories speak to the unconscious of the individual to help him or her to transform destructive impulses into harmless fantasies.

Other twentieth-century analyses of the Arabian Nights have focused on the manuscript history of the stories, their structure and narrative techniques as well as their influence on Western literature and culture.

This conference will address the question of the history of Scheherazade, how she is analysed in the fields of Anthropology, Linguistics, Psychology, Literary Theory, how feminist, deconstructionist, and poststructuralist scholars view her, her adaptation and influence on Western literature and culture.  It will reassess her history from a twenty-first century perspective, viewed in the light of contemporary relations between the Arabic world and the West, following Jorge Luis Borges’ insight that in many ways Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights constitute ‘a vast dream of Islam, that invaded the West’.

Research students and academics are warmly invited to contribute to the conference.

The keynote speaker is Dr Richard van Leeuwen, a lecturer in Islamic Studies at the Department of Religious Studies of the University of Amsterdam.

All paper submissions will be peer reviewed and a proceedings volume is planned.

Submit proposals up to 250 words for 20 minute papers (followed by 10 minutes for discussion). The deadline for submission is 25^th of February 2016.

Please include your name, email address and short biography. Proposals and any enquiries should be sent to Bushra Juhi Jani at: egp12bjj@sheffield.ac.uk 

Details of how to register for the event will be posted on Facebook and Twitter by 10^th of May 2016.  We hope you’ll be able to join us!

Check Facebook on this link: https://www.facebook.com/Conference-894639423965734/?skip_nax_wizard=true

Check Twitter on this link: https://twitter.com/Scheherazade016?lang=en-gb

The conference is sponsored by the Arts & Humanities Post Graduate Forum

Topics may include but are not exclusively restricted to the following:

cultural studies and historical approaches

film and television

gender studies and sexuality

text and intertextuality

postcolonialism

theatre

theory