Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in April 2017

Mother Figures and Representations of Motherhood in English-speaking Societies
Université François Rabelais, Tours, France, 3-5 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 1 September 2016

Alternately celebrated and pilloried, mother figures have been assigned contradictory roles throughout the histories of English-speaking societies. Reflecting the power structures and conflicts of their times, they have been portrayed as pillars of society, providing material and emotional security, and models of sacrifice, or vilified for failing to perpetuate the expected values of individual responsibility and self-control. Nearly a century after winning political emancipation and almost half a century after the historic struggles for sexual emancipation—which yielded unequal results from one country to another—, women in all segments of society in the USA, the Republic of Ireland, the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth are still regarded as second-class citizens, particularly when viewed and politicised through the lens of motherhood and mothering. While social change has gradually progressed since early conflicts for emancipation, improvement has been opposed by an increasingly stigmatising rhetoric targeting the most vulnerable women — teenage mothers, lone mothers, surrogate mothers, disabled mothers, older mothers, adoptive mothers, migrant or mothers identified in racial terms, women raising their families in urban or rural poverty, mothers with AIDS, lesbian or transsexual mothers, sex workers, inmates with children or mothers whose children are in foster care: each of these figures of ‘inadequate,’ ‘dysfunctional’ or ‘undeserving’ motherhood is held responsible for her situation. Access to sex education, information on reproductive rights or structures to address her specific needs are increasingly restricted and conditional. Traditionally extolled as an accomplishment in a woman’s life, motherhood is nonetheless equated with a loss of status or personhood for women when the state or other legal persons endowed with ethical legitimacy can claim a right to interfere with their access to sex education, reproductive rights, family benefits, day-care or parenting choices.

This conference aims to question the various ways in which motherhood is judged, how political choices are translated into cultural representations of mothers as either icons or scapegoats, and how these representations are received and challenged in a quest for either conformity or agency.

The following approaches are particularly welcome, whether they address the USA, the UK, the Republic of Ireland, the Commonwealth or the English-speaking parts of Africa:

• Representations of mother figures and motherhood in literature, the arts, and popular   culture
• Representations of motherhood in religious traditions and New Religious Movements
• Roles assigned to mother figures in the perpetuation of gender roles.
• The evolution of legislation on the age of consent and family policies since the 19th century
• Sex education and the prevention of teenage pregnancies
• Forms of mothering and choices of traditional or alternative mothering styles
• Motherhood and racial or ethnic Othering
• Inmates who are mothers
• Mothers in the military
• Motherhood and urban or rural poverty/downward mobility
• Motherhood and homosexuality
• Motherhood and transsexuality
• Motherhood among sex workers
• Motherhood and social and sanitary norms
• Motherhood and disability/AIDS/illness
• Teenage pregnancy
• Older motherhood
• Lone motherhood
• Single motherhood by choice
• Adoption
• Surrogate motherhood and ectogenesis
• Foster care and stigmatisation of ‘inadequate’ parenting

Eugenicist undercurrents in scientific and political discourse

300-word abstracts along with a short CV in English should be sent by September 1, 2016 to Dr. Cécile Coquet-Mokoko cecile.coquet-mokoko@univ-tours.fr and Prof. Fabienne Portier-Le Cocq fabienne.portier-lecocq@univ-tours.fr. Best papers will be published.

(posted 18 May 2016)

Recognition: Continuity/Discontinuity
Salzburg University, Austria, 3-7 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 October 2016

http://www.sbg-plus-kultur.at

“The Easter School was a very rewarding and inspiring experience, both on an intellectual and on a personal level. And all that with the added bonus of beautiful Salzburg!” – “I enjoyed the impressive variety of topics and the fact that the participants came from very different backgrounds. I also liked that people were at different stages in their work” – “a wonderful occasion to discuss academic topics from a range of different perspectives, and seeing the rehearsal was a real treat!” – “fruitful discussions, very friendly atmosphere and well organized event”
Participant testimonies from the 2016 Salzburg Easter School

In the context of the 2017 Salzburg Easter Festival production of Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, the Salzburg Easter School offers PhD students, advanced MA students, and young artists an international transdisciplinary forum dedicated to fostering dialogue between the theory and practice of art. The forum offers workshops in festival management, seminars with Europe’s creative and theatrical elite, and exclusive access to Salzburg’s Cultural Institutions and the production’s dress rehearsal. In addition, participants will have the opportunity to present their own research in poster and oral presentations. Together we will discuss and debate the cultural and aesthetic significance of recognition, continuity, and discontinuity across academic and artistic disciplines.
The 2017 Easter Festival production of Die Walküre offers an outstanding opportunity to reconsider the significance and dimensions of recognition in the theatrical event in both theory and practice. Act One of Wagner’s opera closes with a pivotal recognition scene: as Siegmund expresses his love for Sieglinde, she strives to understand her recognition of him only to realise that it rests with the echo of her own voice and the reflection of her own image. The scene is exemplary of the power of ‘recognition’ in theatre to shape plots, organise knowledge, develop interpersonal relations, produce emotions, and determine outcomes and moralities across genres.
In drama studies, recognition has been a sustained and privileged focus from Aristotle’s concept of anagnorisis to the current ‘cognitive turn’. Rather than restating past gains, however, we propose to open this conversation up to a more expansive definition of theatre that takes account not only of dramatic content but also of the dynamic interrelationships in productions between embodied spectatorships, sites of performance, economic frameworks, and evolving technologies. As the Easter Festival production will re-create Günther Schneider-Siemssen’s sets from the 1967 staging of the opera, it presents a unique opportunity to consider the role of continuity and discontinuity in theatre practice and history. The 2017 Salzburg Easter School offers participants a platform to discuss this re-production in terms of a process of transformation, concerning both its theatrical aesthetics and meta- and para-theatrical histories.
PLUS Kultur / Atelier Gespräche® | http://www.sbg-plus-kultur.at
Contact: ATELIER_GESPRAECH@sbg.ac.at | +43-662-8044-4422 / 4428 2
TOP (L-R): Heinrich Schmidinger, President of Salzburg University © Eva Maria Griese / PhD-Students of the 2014 Salzburg Easter School / Manfred Trojahn, Peter Ruzicka, Intendant of the Salzburg Easter Festival, Sabine Coelsch-Foisner © Brigitte Haid / Florentine Klepper, Martina Segna, Anna Sofie Tuma © Eva Maria Griese
BOTTOM (L-R): Philipp Stölzl, Paolo Bressan © Brigitte Haid / Otello, Salzburg Easter Festival 2016 © Forster / 2014 Salzburg Easter School / Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Project Leader © Eva Maria Griese
The Salzburg Easter School is held on the premises of Salzburg University in cooperation with the Salzburg Easter Festival and aims to foster dialogue between the theory and practice of art. The programme combines PhD-presentations, seminars, workshops in festival management and discussions offered by Europe’s cultural elite, including Peter Ruzicka (composer and artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival) and marketing expert Roland Ott. To ensure fruitful discussions and a maximum benefit, participants are expected to study Die Walküre and read selected critical texts sent to them upon acceptance of their proposals.
We welcome proposals focusing on:

• Wagner’s Die Walküre in the contexts of operatic history and performance histories
• theoretical conceptualisations of recognition from Aristotle to the present day
• recognition as a generic, thematic, aesthetic, and cognitive property of the theatrical event
• continuity and discontinuity in set, costume, lights, stage design, and choreography
• cognitive theatre studies

The School also includes guided tours of the Autograph Collection of the Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum and Residenzgalerie Salzburg, a cultural tour of the city, and access to the Salzburg Easter Festival’s cultural fringe, including the dress rehearsal of the opera production. Participants will obtain a certificate and a copy of their poster. The total cost amounts to €250, including coffee breaks and daily lunch. Accommodation with breakfast can be arranged by the organisers in Salzburg’s historic city centre for €50 per night in a double room. In individual cases it may be possible to offer some support, but students are requested to seek funding from their home institutions.
If you are interested in presenting a poster and paper at the 2017 Salzburg Easter School, please submit your proposal (500 words), as well as a bio and motivation (together, 500 words), to Prof. S. Coelsch-Foisner at ATELIER_GESPRAECH@sbg.ac.at by 15 October 2016. Participation is limited to 20 participants.
Organised by: PLUS Kultur/Atelier Gespräche, University of Salzburg, Unipark, Erzabt-Klotz-Str. 1, 5020 Salzburg, Austria

(posted 26 July 2016)

Performing the Urban: Embodiments, Inventories, Rhythms: 16^th EACLALS Conference
University of Oviedo, Spain, 3-7 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2016

http://www.eaclals-oviedo17.com

The rapid and continued growth of cities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has intensified academic interest in the urban, as material reality and as imaginary or symbolic construction. A postcolonial perspective on the theory and practice of the urban expands Eurocentric notions to include different ways of inhabiting, performing or embodying a variety of cities, while dissecting neo-colonial and decolonial gestures of urbanization and of representation. In a globalised world in which the network economy appears to be intrinsically connected to the urban, postcolonial studies also invite us to decentre this dominant narrative by examining the margins and limits of the urban, or indeed non-urban spaces in which other ways of being and dwelling exist or may emerge.

High levels of mobility currently typify urban space. Cities have become places of encounter par excellence, bringing strangers together in spaces of embodied proximity, containing opportunities for both inclusion and exclusion of difference. The various forms of globalization have brought about a movement of persons across national borders, most often leading to city dwelling and a diverse experience and performance of the urban. In this context, and in the different specific locations and historical circumstances that characterize the post-colonial, how do individuals or collectives appropriate and perform urban space? Amid the new technologies and shifting geopolitical maps of the present century, how are urban communities imagined and performed? In times of perceived insecurity, are the urban capabilities described by Saskia Sassen being weakened by fear or by the power of the nation-state? How are urbanites contesting these sweeping narratives and other hegemonic ideologies affecting the contemporary post-colonial world? How is the urban performed emotionally?

This conference is an invitation to rethink, research and discuss the urban (and the counter-urban) as performance and construction, and to do so from a variety of disciplinary approaches, theoretical perspectives and creative productions.

Papers are invited on topics under the following headings:

• Performing the urban: enactments of the urban, rhythms, social patterns, identities, subjectivities, imaginaries.
• Performance as an urban practice: urban spectacles, audiences; agents, choreographers of the urban; the urban space as stage. Urban drama, comedy, art.
• Changing performances: resisting the urban; sustainable cities; eco-urbanity.
• Embodied urban encounters: living urban contact; post/trans/human bodies; transcultural exchange. Intersections, cross-overs.
• Bodily performances: art, politics, leisure; street-dwelling.
• Urban inventories: structural, architectural, archival, museums.
• Urban rhythms and historical rhythms: changes in the perception and enactment of cities. Post/colonial shifts (wars, fears, occupation, liberation).
• Emotional performances of the urban.
• Writing the city: urban literature, the global city as post/colonial text.

Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2016
Reply on acceptance by 15 December 2016
We invite contributions for 20-minute papers or 90-minute panels addressing the conference topic.
Please send a 300-word abstract for individual papers or 450-word abstract for panels, accompanied by a short bionote of all speakers (100-150 words) and 5-6 keywords, to: eaclals.oviedo@gmail.com.
Or through the conference website at:
http://www.eaclals-oviedo17.com/en/proposals.php

Confirmed keynote speakers, writers, performers:
Ien Ang, Western Sydney University
Javier Bauluz, Pulitzer Prize photojournalist
Amanda Coogan, Performer
Angie Cruz, University of Pittsburgh
Helen Gilbert, Royal Holloway University
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, University College London
Ramón Grosfoguel, UC Berkeley
Simone Lazaroo, Murdoch University
Belén Martín-Lucas, University of Vigo
Alecia McKenzie, Writer, Performer
Manjula Padmanabhan, Author, artist
Aritha van Herk, University of Calgary (Anna Rutherford Lecture)
(Further speakers pending confirmation)

(posted 31 October 2016)

Understanding (Human) Nature: XIII International SAAS Conference
Department of English, University of Extremadura, Cáceres, 5-7 April 2017
Deadline for propoals: 15 October 2016

How can we define (human) Nature? What is implied in being human? What is a human? What have human beings done to/with/against Nature? These nagging questions hve been at the core of philosophy and science since antiquity, never finding a definitive answer. In the American context, the Human / Nature seem to be a work in progress in need of constant redefinition each time a new discovery is made, a new boundary is broken. Likewise, the Western world seems at present haunted by the animal question, a question that goes on a par with the definition of what is like to be a human. Historically, women, slaves, peoples of color, the mentally unbalanced, and the disabled were deprived of their human status. The twentieth century marked by the horrors of two world wars led philosophers to the question of the human with a heightened intensity. Heidegger, Lévinas, Derrida, Agamben have been fundamental in working towards a redefinition of the human , and such was the extent towards which this debate increased that in 1966 Michel Foucault proclaimed the end of Man in The Order of Things: An Archaelogy of the Human Sciences, prompting the beginning of the posthuman turn. But does Nature still exist, after Emerson’s romantic analysis, and after classic images of America as an open and wild space?.

In the midst of all these changes, American literature, art, history and culture have revealed their power to continue studying and evaluating (Human) Nature.

Given the breadth of the topic in question, we welcome papers that approach the question of (human) Nature from multiple theoretical and critical frameworks, within American Studies. Proposals for 20-minute papers can address (but are not limited to) any of the areas and topics listed below:

• Discourse and gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, disability, class and/or species
• Literature and the consequences of the Anthropocene: climate change, species extinction, overpopulation, waste…
• A chronology of the human: from the homo sapiens to the homo ecologicus and the homo digitalis
• Rethinking the human in fantasy, science fiction and/or speculative fiction
• Rethinking the human in film, television, comic books and graphic novels
• The new others: alien, cyborgs, monsters, “freaks,” superheroes, and machines
• From cogito ergo sum to the embodied mind and the new discourses on matter
• Questioning logocentrism
• (Re)defining and (re)negotiating the humanities after the death of Man
• Rethinking and rewriting Nature/Landscape/Environment in American ethnic literatures and studies
• The (re)presentation and (re)articulation of Nature in American Studies
• Sense of place/belonging
• The American sublime
• From environmental crisis to devastation
• The greening of American Studies

The conference languages will be English and Spanish.

For more information about the Conference:

http://www.saasweb.org

https://sites.google.com/site/saasconference2017/home

For the list of panels: http://www.saasweb.org/CALLFORPANELS.html

(posted 23 September 2016)

The Street and the City – Thresholds
University of Lisbon, Portugal, 5-7 April 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 10 March 2017

The Street and The City – Thresholds is the second of a series of multidisciplinary conferences with special emphasis on cities and the life that has evolved around them through time. Although English studies play a central role in this conference series from both cultural and geographical points of view, other fields of study relating to the conference theme are welcome. The first International Conference The Street and the City – Awakenings drew participants from a wide array of disciplines, such as literature, architecture, sociology, tourism or gender studies, to name but a few. This second conference aims for a comprehensive view of the street and the city focusing on its streets and people as well as on its less known spaces and hidden gems.

Throughout the centuries cities have been hubs of cultural experience and exchange, bringing people together time and again. The streets have been the public space where peoples and individuals both merge in a web and are isolated in the crowd. Cities have also channelled the voices of unsatisfied or rebellious citizens in periods of crises, or become a platform for gathering collective support in dire moments. In times of such conflicts, cities open up spaces for hope and multicultural dialogue. Such dynamics and challenges of an urban milieu constantly pose new questions to researchers concerning, for example, aspects of aesthetic and political representation, and the ways they are interpreted and experienced. Thus, studies of such currents and challenges have become highly diversified, promoting a variety of perspectives of the space we identify ourselves with.

Lisbon is the 2017 Ibero-American Capital of Culture, in the words of the City Council, an “event [which] will be the catalyst for a year of artistic innovation, in which there will be recognition of the historical processes and exchanges of ideas that underpin the relationships between European and American cities, and an acknowledgement of current artistic production, which is unique and intrinsically diverse”. In this sense, we wish to welcome everyone to share this urban atmosphere, which goes beyond the boundaries of Europe and connects the city in a global way.

The Second International Conference The Street and the City – Thresholds will take place at the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon, and at the Estoril Higher Institute for Tourism and Hotel Studies from 5 to 7 April 2017.

This scholarly meeting keeps its primary goal of fostering an interdisciplinary debate within English studies and of serving as a productive space for disseminating the most recent academic research alongside the studies of culture, urban studies and other fields of interest in relation to cities, their spaces and cultures. While encouraging the interchange of different academic perspectives, the Organising Committee also aims to promote informal networking gatherings among its participants.

As such, topics and themes of interest – related to the Street and/or the City –  include, but are not restricted to, the following:

1. Aesthetic Representations of the City
2. Cities as Havens of Hope or Despair
3. Streets and Cities as Hives of Negotiation
4. Gendered Urban Spaces
5. Imagined Cities
6. Literary Cities
7. Mobility in the City and Urban Flows
8. Streets, Consumerism and Fashion
9. Sustainable Cities
10. The City and Community Expressions
11. The City and the Commons
12. The Street and the Senses
13. The Political Street
14. The Tourist and the Flâneur
15. Urban Cultural Heritage
16. Urban Rhythms

We welcome suggestions for papers, pre-organised panels, and roundtables (20 minutes per speaker) by 28^th February 2017, to be submitted on the conference webpage.

Abstracts of 300 words for individual papers of twenty-minute duration. Please include the full title of your paper, name, institutional affiliation, contact information (postal address and e-mail address) and a bionote (max. 100 words).

Round tables of up to four speakers plus a chairperson. Please include a 500-word proposal and a bionote for each speaker (max. 100 words each).

Panels of three speakers plus a chairperson. Please include a brief description of the panel (300 words) and a 300-word abstract and a bionote for each speaker (max. 100 words each).

Contact email: thestreetandthecity@gmail.com

(posted 3 March 2017)

Edward Thomas 1878-1917: The Arras Conference
Université d’Artois, Arras, France. 6-7 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 April 2016

In the name of the Université d’Artois and the Textes et Cultures research group (EA 4028; ‘Translittéraires’ research team), and the University of Poitiers, FORELL research group (EA 3816; ‘B1’ research team), we invite you to take part in an international conference in honour of the centenary of the death of Edward Thomas.
Born in Lambeth on 3 March 1878, Thomas was killed by a shell at the battle of Arras on 9 April 1917 and is buried nearby at Agny. Since then he has become one of the most highly regarded English poets of the last hundred years, loved by fellow writers and the general public alike.
The centenary of the poet’s death affords an ideal opportunity to revisit Thomas’s work – poems, fiction, travel writing, autobiography, literary criticism, letters, war diary – in order to offer new insights into it and reassess its significance. As an indication of the wealth of inspiration to be found in his writing, Thomas has recently been the subject of a play by Nick Dear, The Dark Earth and the Light Sky, Faber, 2012. Equally he has attracted the attention of a number of biographers including Matthew Hollis, All Roads Lead to France, Faber, 2011, and Jean Moorcraft Wilson who offers the first complete biography of the poet for over a generation, Edward Thomas : From Adlestrop to Arras, Bloomsbury, 2015. His Collected Poems, Bloodaxe, 2008, were last published in a critically acclaimed annotated edition by Edna Longley.
All manner of critical, theoretical, prosodic and thematic approaches are welcome. Among possible topics:

• Thomas’s poetics;
• his language, diction, prosody and metre;
• Thomas and the importance of friendships in poetry;
• Wales and Welsh influences in Thomas’s poetry;
• Thomas’s views on/reviews of other poets;
• the meaning of the term ‘war poet’ in relation to Thomas;
• the family constellation in Thomas’s poetry;
• responses to Thomas’s writing in his lifetime;
• Thomas’s prose and its possible links with his poetry;
• influences on Thomas;
• Thomas’s own influence on other poets and writers;
• genre issues such as ‘pastoral’, ‘post-pastoral’, ‘Nature poet’, ecopoetics, and ‘love poetry’;
• the pursuit of the Self and the feeling of being inhabited, if not haunted, by an Other;
• Thomas’s ‘superfluous man’;
• etc.

Please send proposals for 20’ papers in English in the form of 200-word abstracts plus brief bio-biblio to the organisers, Adrian Grafe adrian.grafe@univ-artois.fr and Andrew McKeown andrew.mckeown@univ-poitiers.fr, by April 15th 2016.
A publication is planned of selected papers in the form of essays arising from the conference.

(posted 23 January 2016)

Culture and Cognition in Language: Formulaic Language as a Cultural and Cognitive Phenomenon
University of Rzeszów, Poland, 6-7 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 30 January 2017

Conference website: http://www.ccl.ur.edu.pl

The Institute of English Studies at the University of Rzeszów has the pleasure of announcing the inaugural conference of the planned cycle of scholarly meetings entitled Culture and Cognition in Language. The cycle is aimed at viewing language as both a cultural and cognitive phenomenon. We would like to invite academics specialising in any field of linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic, but contributions in the following research areas will be especially welcome: .

￭ cognitive linguistics
￭ cultural linguistics
￭ semantics
￭ morphology
￭ sociolinguistics
￭ pragmatics
￭ psycholinguistics
￭ typology
￭ contact linguistics

The conference will be open for papers on all topics discussing language from the cultural and cognitive perspective.
However, this year’s leading theme is: Formulaic Language as a Cultural and Cognitive Phenomenon

Confirmed keynote speakers:

prof. Zoltán Kövecses, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
prof. Henryk Kardela, Maria Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin

In recent years there has been a growing interest in the nature and role of formulaic language due to the fact that it not only plays an important role in language production and acquisition but also reflects cultural and social values. As observed by Siyanova-Chanturia (2015), formulaic language may include collocations, binomials, multi-word verbs, idioms, speech formulae, discourse markers, lexical bundles, expletives, grammatical constructions, etc.
We would like to suggest the following topics as the starting point for the discussion and/or the source of inspiration:

￭ Formulaic language as a reflection of cultural beliefs
￭ Formulaic language as a manifestation of social values
￭ Formulaic language as a socialising tool
￭ Psycholinguistic function of formulaic language
￭ Imagery behind the creation of formulaic language
￭ Transparency and compositionality of formulaic language
￭ Formulaic language and first language acquisition
￭ Formulaic language as basis for word play
￭ Formulaic language and lexicalisation patterns
￭ Pragmatic aspects of formulaic language
￭ Semantic aspects of formulaic language
￭ Morphological aspects of formulaic language
￭ Formulaic language and predictability
￭ Formulaic language and language change
￭ Unpredictability of formulaic language
￭ Formulaic language as fixed and semi-fixed grammatical constructions
￭ Formulaic language as an instantiation of periphrasis
￭ Syntactic fixedness of formulaic language

We invite submission of proposals for 20-minute presentations. Abstracts of a maximum 300 words should be submitted by January 30, 2017  at our website www.ccl.ur.edu.pl/abstract.html. All proposals will be reviewed by the organizing committee.  Notification of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2017.

Organizing committee: dr Ewa Konieczna, dr Anna Dziama, dr Bożena Duda

Scientific board: prof. Przemysław Łozowski, prof. Robert Kiełtyka, prof. Livia Körtvelyessy, prof. Hanna Rutkowska, prof. Pavol Štekauer, prof. Agnieszka Uberman

(posted 18 January 2017)

21^st-Century Theories of Literature: Ethics, Tropes, Attunement
University of Warwick, UK, 6-8 April 2017
Deadline for proposals (papers and panels): 15 January 2017

Following the success of the 2014 conference “21^st-Century Theories of Literature: Essence, Fiction and Value”, which drew over eighty participants from across the globe and several of whose papers are about to be published as essays in Andrea Selleri and Philip Gaydon (eds.), Literary Studies and the Philosophy of Literature: New Interdisciplinary Directions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016 – forthcoming), this conference seeks to broaden the avenues of conversation between aesthetics and literary studies that were opened on that occasion by prompting scholars from both fields to engage with each other in an actively interdisciplinary study of topics shared by literature and philosophy.

This time, too, there will be three overarching themes: (1) Ethics; (2) Tropes; (3) Attunement. The main questions to be explored are, respectively: (1) whether and how literature and ethics can provide reciprocal illumination, and how each field’s established lines of enquiry can help the other; (2) how literary studies and the philosophy of literature negotiate non-literal meaning, and the linguistic models which the respective practices imply; (3) how the theories and practices of the two fields can be brought to bear on one another. For each of these themes there will be parallel sessions with papers by scholars at all stages of their careers, and a double keynote session that will feature established scholars from each field.

Abstracts of 400-500 words for 20-minute presentations should be sent to the organisers at fveconference@live.warwick.ac.uk by 15/1/2017. We would particularly appreciate an engagement with both philosophical and literary-critical literature, but this is not a requirement as long as your argument is broad enough to be of interest to a large interdisciplinary audience. We welcome case studies and historical analyses, as long as there is an explicit theoretical dimension to the discussion. Possible themes may include but are not limited to:

Ethics

• Illustrations of ethical themes in fiction
• Illumination of ethical themes through fiction
• Doing, deeds and actions and consequences in fiction
• Narrative and the formation of character
• Fiction as experimentation with situation and response
• Narration and judgement
• Fiction and habitus
• Implied attitudes in literature
• The ethics of reading

Tropes

• Literary vs figurative meaning
• Tropes as conveyors of philosophical meaning
• Tropes and genre
• Tropes across and between cultures
• The evolution of tropes in history
• Tropes and quantitative literary theory
• Reading protocols and figurative language
• Tropes and the history of hermeneutics
• Tropes in expository vs non-expository prose

Attunement

• Generality and particularity in literature and philosophy
• Literary affect and hermeneutic interpretation
• Literary immediacy and concept generation
• Modes of argument: what could each field take from the other
• Literary plots: cases/examples for philosophers?
• Literary works as case studies to illustrate philosophical issues: enrichment or appropriation?
• The limits of language and how to tackle them
• Philosophical contributions of “literary” writers
• Philosophers and style

In addition to the main themes, a section of the conference will be devoted to panels on subjects of interdisciplinary interest proposed by the participants. If you wish to propose a panel, the deadline is also 15 January 2017. Panels should include three or four 20-minute papers, and not all panellists should share the same disciplinary affiliation.

This conference is made possible by the generous funding of the British Society of Aesthetics and of Warwick’s Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts.
We aim to keep the conference fees as low as possible and we are exploring further sources of funding. We will be able to provide at least two travel bursaries of up to £700, and we may be able to offer some smaller bursaries: if you are a postgraduate or unwaged scholar, please indicate whether you want to be considered for a bursary, and the institution at which you are enrolled, when submitting your abstract.

Organisers: Andrea Selleri (Warwick), Marianna Ginocchietti (Trieste), Alex Underwood (Warwick), Giulia Zanfabro (Trieste).

Confirmed keynote speakers: Derek Attridge (York), Claudia Brodsky (Princeton), Maximilian de Gaynesford (Reading), Anthony Ossa-Richardson (Southampton) and Catherine Wearing (Wellesley College).

(posted 14 November 2016)

The 11th International Conference of IDEA
Çankaya University, Turkey, 12–14 April 2017
Deadline for panel proposals: 7 November 2016
New deadline for paper proposals: 25 December 2016

The 11th International Conference on Literature, Language and Cultural Studies in Turkey under the auspices of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE)

The annual, peer-reviewed IDEA Conference, established in 2005 by the Turkish national association for English studies, is the largest and most comprehensive venue for the free exchange and dissemination of ideas on literary, language, and cultural studies in Turkey. It is held at a different university each year, and attended by scholars from around the world as well as around the country.

IDEA 2017 is being hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies, and the Academic English Unit at Çankaya University, which in 2017 will also be celebrating its 20th anniversary as one of the most modern and rapidly evolving research and teaching universities in Turkey.

Conference Topic Areas: The conference covers a wide range of subjects in literary, cultural, and language studies, and welcomes presentations dealing with new interdisciplinary perspectives on these fields, contemporary social and cultural issues, and other areas of investigation. Topics include (but are not limited to):

• English and Comparative Literature: • Literary Theory • Philosophy • Historiography • British, American, Turkish and European Literatures • World Literatures in translation…
• Interdisciplinary Studies: Literature in relation to • Visual Arts • Performance Arts • Film and Media • Music • Science • Social and Political Theory • Issues in Digital Humanities …
• Cultural and Media Studies: • Demographic change and identities • Globalization and social coherence • Belief systems and politics • Contemporary discussions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, diaspora, nationalism • Media representations and regulation • Emerging technologies and ethical issues • Climate issues and the media…
• Translation Studies: • Literary Translation Studies • Narrative approaches to translation • Stylistic approaches to translation (including approaches from Cognitive Poetics) • Ecocritical approaches to translation • Self-translation • Translation and Ideology • Translation and Gender…
• English Language Teaching and Education: • Teaching critical thinking • Neuromyths in ELT and Education • Cognitive science and language learning • Teaching language through culture • Educational issues in Neurolinguistics and Sociolinguistics…

Call for Papers
Proposals are invited for 15/20-minute paper presentations (followed by 5-10 minutes of discussion) in English, in any of the topic areas listed above or other relevant areas.
Please submit proposals for papers (abstracts of 150-250 words) to idea11@cankaya.edu.tr no later than December 25, 2016 (new updated deadline). These must be submitted as email attachments, in Microsoft Word .docx format, and should include the presenter’s (and any co-presenters’/writers’) name, title, institutional affiliation, contact information, and 100-word bio.

Selected papers will be published in the IDEA 2017 Proceedings.

Organization Committee (Çankaya University):
Department of English Language and Literature: Özkan Çakırlar, Yağmur Demir, Neslihan Ekmekçioğlu, Johann Pillai, Berkem Gürenci Sağlam, Özlem Uzundemir
Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies: Barış Emre Alkım, Mustafa Kırca, Ertuğrul Koç
Academic English Unit: Mine Baskan, Ayşe Güneş, Mustafa Güneş, Özge Güvenç, Suna Özcan

Detailed information on registration, conference fees, accommodation, etc. will be provided on the IDEA 2017 conference website (http://www.idea11.cankaya.edu.tr) beginning in September 2016, and regularly updated.

For more information, please visit the IDEA 2017 website, http://www.idea11.cankaya.edu.tr or contact Mustafa Kırca and Berkem Gürenci Sağlam at:

tel (+90) 2331413
email: idea11@cankaya.edu.tr
snail mail: Department of English Language and Literature, Çankaya University, Eskişehir Yolu, 29. km, Merkez Kampüs, 06790, Etimesgut, Ankara, Turkey

(posted 20 September 2016, updated 1 December 2016)

Sixth International Aldous Huxley Symposium 2017
University of Almería, Spain, 19 – 21 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2016

Conference warming on 18 April
Coach tour, possibly to Granada, on 22 April)
Convenors: University of Almería, represented by Prof Jesús Isaías Gómez López, and the International Aldous Huxley Society (AHS)
General theme: Aldous Huxley in Europe.
The general theme of the conference will naturally focus on Huxley’s activities in Europe, particularly in Italy, France and Spain, but there will certainly be room for a variety of other topics.

Huxley Forum: “Aldous Huxley and Self-Realization: his concept of Human Potentialities, his techniques for actualizing them, and his views of their social consequences”.
This forum is being organized by Prof Dana Sawyer (please send your proposals to dsawyer@meca.edu) and will be held in a similar fashion as at the last symposium in Oxford (see AHA 12/13).

Call for Papers: Please send your proposals for lectures (20 – 30 minutes, including discussion) by 30 April 2016 and your abstracts (20 -30 lines or 200 -300 words) by 30 September 2016 to Prof Bernfried Nugel (nugel@uni-muenster.de).
Registration and accommodation will in due course be organized by Prof Jesús Isaías Gómez López (jesuias@gmail.com).
For current information please visit the CAHS homepage at http://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Huxley/

(posted 9 February 2016)

New Perspectives in English and American Studies: 14th April Conference
Kraków, Poland, 20-22 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 20 January 2017

April Conference is a triennial international conference which has been organized by the Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University since 1978. The Conference is an opportunity to bring together scholars working in various fields of English and American Studies.

Speakers are kindly invited to submit papers on a variety of topics. In the forthcoming edition of the conference the usual General Sessions on British and American Literature, General and Applied Linguistics, Translation and Cultural Studies, Teaching of English as a Foreign Language will be accompanied by a selection of Thematic Sessions:

1. James Joyce
2. Medievalism in Literature
3. New Perspectives on the American South
4. Variation, Variety, Variable – Facets of English in the Contemporary World
5. Stylistics of Multimodality /Intermedial Texts and Discourses (Artistic and Applied)
6. Teaching English in Academia
7. Stance and Evaluation in Discourse
8. Digital Humanities
9. Audiovisual Translation
10. The Contemporary Historical Novel

Plenary lectures at AC 2017 will be delivered by the following speakers:

• Robert H. Brinkmeyer (University of South Carolina) Anne Fogarty (University College Dublin)
• Hartmut Haberland (Roskilde University) Carolyne Larrington (Oxford University) Adriaan Neele (Yale University)

Please submit an abstract of ca. 200 words to the following email addresses: ac.general.session@gmail.com for General Sessions and ac.thematic.sessions@gmail.com for Thematic Sessions. Paper proposals will be reviewed anonymously and the authors will be notified about their acceptance via email.

The deadline for paper proposals is 20th January 2017. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 31st January 2017. Early Conference registration and fee (available till 1st March 2017) is 600 PLN.

Doctoral students are eligible for a discount of 150 PLN.

AC 2017 website: http://www2.filg.uj.edu.pl/aprilconference.

Organizing Committee: dr hab. Zygmunt Mazur (Head), prof. dr hab. Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska, dr hab. Bożena Kucała, prof. dr hab. Elżbieta Mańczak-Wohlfeld, dr hab. Andrzej Pawelec, dr hab. Władysław Witalisz

Conference Office: dr Michał Choiński, dr Małgorzata Cierpisz
Institute of English Studies
Collegium Paderevianum
al. Mickiewicza 9A, 31-120 Kraków april.conference.uj@gmail.com

(posted 14 December 2016)

Cross-dressing in fact and fiction: norms, bodies, identities
University of Toulouse, France, 21 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2016

Guest speaker: Professor Ann Heilmann (University of Cardiff)

Fashion, the sociology of dress and the semiology of clothing have been the object of much attention since Roland Barthes’s The Fashion System (Système de la mode, 1967). Closer to us, contemporary critics, such as Joanne Entwistle, remind us that dressing of all kind is cultural knowledge, acquired thorough training (Entwistle, The Fashioned Body: fashion, dress and modern social theory, Polity 2000). If dress is one of the most significant markers of class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, as well as of cultural and professional identity, then what kind of political and aesthetic transgressions does cross-dressing constitute / enable? What forms does it take? How is it performed and experienced? What are its effects? What kind of new possibilities does it open up? And what kind of empowerment or knowledge does it yield? A crucially disruptive act, cross-dressing fundamentally challenges binary categories, introducing, as Marjorie Garber contends, a “category crisis”. What Garber calls “the extraordinary power of transvestism” resides in its capacity to expose “cultural or aesthetic dissonances and to undermine the very notion of an ‘original’ or a ‘stable’ identity” (Garber, Vested Interests, Routledge 1992). This one-day conference will explore the various representations, aesthetics and epistemologies of cross-dressing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century history, literature, painting, photography and film in English-speaking countries.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Female-to-male or male-to-female cross-dressing and the constructedness of gender categories
• Cross-dressing and sexuality
• The figure of the cross-dresser; historical examples of cross-dressers
• The Dandy, the New Woman etc.
• -Cross-dressing and racial passing / colonial cross-dressing
• Social cross-dressing
• Cross-dressing detectives / spies, soldiers, etc.
• Cross-dressing vs. androgyny
• Cross-dressing and the law / criminality
• Theatrical cross-dressing; music hall cross-dressing acts
• Challenges to normative dress codes through fashion movements, magazines etc.
• Narrative, generic or aesthetic cross-dressing

Please send proposals to catherine.delyfer@univ-tlse2.fr before November 15th, 2016. A selection of papers will be considered for publication.

(posted 24 October 2016)

Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English
Instituto de Ciencias de la Educación. Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, 26-28 April 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 1 February 2017

Conference organisers: Dr Jessica Aliaga Lavrijsen and Dr José M. Yebra
Pertusa, on behalf of the “Contemporary Narratives in English” Research Group.
[http://cne.literatureresearch.net].
In collaboration with the Department of English and German Philology of the
University of Zaragoza and the University Centre of Defence Zaragoza (Spain).
Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Prof. Rosa María Rodríguez Magda
(Institució Alfons el Magnànim); Dr. David Alderson (University of
Manchester); Dr. Sara Dillon (University of Cambridge); and John Burnside (St
Andrew’s University).

“Transmodern Perspectives on Contemporary Literatures in English” is a three-day conference, to he held at the University of Zaragoza. It aims at exploring the traces of what has been called “transmodernity” in contemporary literatures in English, as there is a need to rethink our context from a different perspective or cultural paradigm. In order to achieve this aim, we propose to engage in a dialogue with contemporary literary texts, literary theory and cultural studies meant to test the applicability of this concept and its utility as a tool to better understand contemporary trends in literature.
The concept of “transmodernity” has been used by thinkers belonging in different fields. The philosopher Enrique Dussel, for example, describes as transmodern those theories from Third-World cultures that have incorporated the subaltern other. Philosophers of Law such as Marc Luyckx, Ziauddin Sardar or Etienne Le Roy have used the concept to describe those societies that attempt to reconcile progress with respect for cultural differences. And, in the field of architecture, Marcos Novak has used the term to define the liquid architectures existing in cyberspace. The feminist writer and philosopher Rosa María Rodríguez-Magda has used the term transmodernity to refer to the dialectical synthesis of modernity and postmodernity that would describe a globalized, rhizomatic, technological society arising in the countries of the First World, characterized by the opposition to otherness while at the same time penetrating and assuming it, trying to transcend the surrounding hyperreal and relativistic closure.
Moreover, our contemporary glocalised context makes the necessity to harmonise the concept with the current emphasis on local, ethic, sexual and other group and individual differences an imperative. According to this new paradigm, postmodernity would be the conclusion or culmination of modernity, and transmodernity would entail a criticism of the two earlier periods from the material, social, and spiritual viewpoints. In a sense, transmodernity becomes almost an umbrella term that comprehends all that is virtual, transnational, trans-ethnically cosmopolitan, connective, glocal, strategic and transubiquitous, among other things, and such generality might require for a reconceptualization
of the term.
These precedents justify our aim of refining the definition of transmodernity and of employing the transcultural as a provisional research perspective to analyse contemporary works of art.
We invite contributions that either engage with the various ways in which contemporary literatures in English address, employ or show transmodern perspectives and elements, or contribute to developing new critical trends and theoretical approaches to contemporary literature. Possible topics include, but are not restricted to:

• Literary theory and the transmodern.
• The glocal in contemporary literature.
• The transmodern in ecological writings and/or readings.
• Feminism, family, queerness and transmodern relationships.
• Transnational literatures, literature of exile and the postcolonial.
• The virtual world, transhumanism, science, technology and literature.
• Speculative fiction: imagining other worlds, other futures.
• Consciousness, spirituality and literature.
• New directions in literature and critical approaches since 2000.
• Terrorism, politics and transmodern literature.
• The psychology of the transpersonal in literature.
• Ethics, social consciousness and literature.
• Transcultural memory and literature.
• The form of transmodern literary texts.
• The transmodern palimpsest.

Abstracts between 400-500 words should be sent to [email] by 1st February 2017 (new extended deadline). Author information is to be provided on a separate sheet, including name, affiliation, contact address, paper title and author’s bio-note.
Please direct any other queries to: transmodern.conference2017@gmail.com

(posted 18 July 2016, updated 18 January 2017)

The challenge of change in English language and literature: 2017 SAUTE Conference
University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 28-29 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2017

The 2017 SAUTE conference will take place at the University of Neuchâtel on April 28-29, 2017. We invite abstracts for 20-minute presentations on literary and linguistic issues that relate to the conference topic “The challenge of change in English language and literature”.

Deadline for abstracts: January 15 2017
Submit to: sauteconference2017@gmail.com
Abstracts should have no more than 500 words (excluding references) and should be sent as a PDF or MS Word document. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by February 1 2017.

Conference website: https://www2.unine.ch/anglais/saute_conference

Change is a powerful idea which inspires hope and fear, excitement and dread. From the panta rhei of Heraclitus to Darwinian evolutionary theory, nobel laureate Bob Dylan’s The times they are a-changin’, the Obama campaign slogan Change we can believe in, and the current advertising mantra ‘change is good’, it recurs as a challenge to the status quo. We have chosen change as the topic for the 2017 SAUTE conference not only for these reasons, but also because it is equally of interest in many different ways to the study of literature and linguistics.

In literature, the field has itself gone through a period of rapid change, which looks set to continue, notably with the development of digital methods of research. If this in itself calls for reflection, the question of change has long been of interest, especially for those who take the currently dominant contextual approach to literature. The focus of enquiry is then how a literary form – or the very idea of literature – responds to the various pressures of the environment – not only socio-political or economic change, but also changes in the media of production. How does this response find expression? Is change promoted or on the contrary resisted? Such questions may be asked of an individual text or of a set of texts – those that belong to a genre for instance, or an authorial canon. And, of course, there are many ways that the idea of change may itself be more or less directly thematised — as good, bad, necessary or fatal.

In linguistics, change is the notion that connects fields of study such as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, and language contact. Whereas reactions to language change in the public domain tend to be coloured by cultural pessimism (Will emojis destroy the English language?), linguistic research has led to insights into how language change works, and here the social underpinnings of change play a considerable role.

Keynote Speakers:

• Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (USA, University of Notre Dame), a cultural historian who has written an acclaimed book on our topic, provides a historian’s perspective on cultural change, re-examining the idea of evolution, as applied to human history.
• David Simpson (USA, UC Davis), a distinguished scholar in Romanticism and literary theory has done relevant work on situatedness and commemoration as well as on terror.
• Terttu Nevalainen (Finland, University of Helsinki) has carried out foundational research in corpus-based historical sociolinguistics, with a special focus on Early Modern English.
• Ewan Fernie (UK, Shakespeare Institute Birmingham), an avant-garde Shakespeare scholar is working on Shakespeare and political change.

(posted 24 October 2016, updated 29 October 2016)

Letters
Interhotel Cherno More, Varna, Bulgaria, 27-29 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 16 January 2017

An international and interdisciplinary academic conference organized by:
The Bulgarian Society for British Studies (BSBS)
and
The Bulgarian American Studies Association (BASA)

Advisory Committee: Ludmilla Kostova (University of Veliko Turnovo), Zelma Catalan (University of Sofia), Vitana Kostadinova (University of Plovdiv), Andrei Andreev (New Bulgarian University). Irina Perianova (University of National and World Economy), Kostadin Grozev (University of Sofia), Madeleine Danova (University of Sofia).

LETTERS can be written characters representing sounds, written messages, epistles, certified documents granting rights. “LETTERS” can mean “learning” or “literary culture.”
This conference aims at bringing together scholars, both established and emergent, working within one or more of the research areas studying LETTERS. Topics include, but are not restricted to:

• letters and/in systems of writing;
• sound/letter correlations;
• letters and literacies;
• letter symbolism;
• written letters vs spoken words;
• epistolary communication from a historical perspective;
• epistolarities old and new;
• from love letters to hate mail;
• letters and the politics of travel ;
• pseudo-letters and the politics of authorship;
• representations of epistolary communication in literature and other arts;
• methods of studying letters and epistolarity;
• letters and historical research;
• editing letters;
• belles-lettres;
• the Republic of Letters and other networks.

Abstracts (ca 300 words) and short bios are to be emailed to conferencevarna17@gmail.com by 16 January 2017.

(posted 15 September 2017)

US Presidential Elections in Publis History, Popular Imagination and Scholarly Debates
Interhotel Cherno More, Varna, Bulgaria, 27-29 April 2017
Deadline for proposals 16 January 2017

A specialized seminar organized by The Bulgarian American Studies Association (BASA)
Alma Mater Center of Excellence

Seminar topics include but are not restricted to:

• The Constitutional Framework and Political Practices in US Presidential Elections;
• The Great Campaigns: Their Heroes and Villains;
• Electoral Behaviour and Mass Political Perceptions;
• Continuity and Change in the US Electoral Process;
• Modern Day Campaigning: From Print and Electronic Media to the Digital Era of Social Networks;
• The Political Establishment and the Anti-Systematic Forces in US Politics;
• The US Presidential Elections in Literature, Film and Drama;
• The Language of Politics: Public History and Modern Types of Communication;
• Social Upheavals and Mythologizing in Past and Present Campaigns;
• The Challenges of Presidential Candidates’ Messages in the Harsh Realities of Current Politics;
• Multi or Single-Track Approaches  in the Foreign Policy  Platforms of the US Presidential Elections: Between Pragmatism and Idealism;
• The Cold War as a Factor in US Presidential Elections;
• From Lincoln to Obama: Racial and Social Perspectives of US Presidential Campaigns.

As part of the seminar, there will be a meeting of the BASA members to elect a new executive board and discuss organizational matters.

Abstracts (ca 200 words) and short bios are to be submitted by 16 January 2017.

Enquiries and proposals should be sent to rmaslarska@uni-sofia.bg or to the Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, 15 Tsar Osvoboditel Blvd., Sofia 1504, Bulgaria.

 (posted 15 September 2016)

Across Borders: Cultures in dialogue
Tartu, Estonia, 27-29 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 20 December 2016

• Center of Excellence for Estonian Studies, Estonian Literary Museum, Tartu, Estonia
• Stanisław Pigoń State College in Krosno, Poland
• Jagiellonian University, Faculty of Philology, Krakow, Poland

• minority cultures and literature, migration and narration, the Other, autobiography and identity
• communication styles, pragmatics of intercultural communication, communication in institutions, folkloric communication, ethnolinguistics
• humour and irony in cultural context
• cross- cultural aspects of translation and (language) teaching, English as an international lingua franca, language contacts, culture and the teaching of languages, global learning, innovation in education
• contemporary culture and media, transnational / transmedial cultural texts, cultural and linguistic globalization / localization

(posted 17 October 2016)

38^th APEAA Conference
Universidade do Minho, Braga, Portugal, 27-29 April 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 31 January 2017

The University of Minho, through its Department of English and North-American Studies (DEINA), is pleased to announce the 38^th Conference of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, which will take place in Braga, between 27 and 29 April 2017. Following the format that was introduced in 2016, it is now opening its call for papers and panels in a range of subjects in Anglo-American studies.

We look forward to receiving paper and panel proposals in the academic areas which are currently part of Anglo-American Studies, including (but not restricted to): Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Post-colonial Studies, Performance, Film and Theatre studies, Gender and Sexuality studies, Translation Studies, Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Language teaching and methodology, Multilingualism. Proposals for panels, put together around a common theme or research domain, are particularly welcome. We also welcome papers and panels on other Anglophone studies, such as Canadian, Irish, Scottish, etc.

If you are interested in any of the following thematic panels, we invite you to send your proposals mentioning the panel you would like to be included in:

• “Outcasting in a digital world: Cultural and linguistic constructions of exclusion in Internet discourse” (coord. Isabel Ermida, UMinho, and Iolanda Ramos, UNova)
• “Romanticism, 200 Years Later”: Debating the Romantics in the 21st Century (coord. Paula Guimarães)
• “A labour of some kind of love”: The dynamics of translation in and between cultures (coord. Fernando F. Alves, Filomena Louro and Amélia Carvalho, UMinho)
• Adapting the Classics: Film, TV and other screen adaptations (coord. Margarida Esteves Pereira)
• Getting away with the unsaid: The pragmatics of allusion and implicature in newspaper and advertising discourse (coord. Isabel Ermida, UMinho, and Elsa Simões, UFP)
• Henry D. Thoreau and Ecocriticism in 19^th and 20^th centuries (coord. Jaime Costa, UMinho and Carlos Azevedo, FLUP)
• Hidden Irish Histories: Alternative or marginalized histories of women, protestants, gay and lesbian, tinkers, migrants. Celebration, denigration and erasure (coord. Filomena Louro, UMinho e Adriana Bebiano, FLUC)
• Philanthropy in the Long Nineteenth Century (coord. Joanne Paisana, UMinho)
• Queer crossings: transgressing boundaries of sexuality, gender and ethnicity (coord. Francesca Rayner, UMinho, and Ana Carvalho, UMinho)
• Transnational Feminism, Gender and the Arts (coord. Ana Gabriela Macedo, UMinho)

Abstracts of 250 words in English or in Portuguese should include name of the speaker institutional affiliation and position, full title of paper, format and a short biographical note and contact details should be sent to the conference email: apeaa2017@ilch.uminho.pt

Website of the event: http://cehum.ilch.uminho.pt/apeaa

IMPORTANT DATES:
Deadline for panel, workshops, individual papers and graduate roundtables and posters sessions: 31 January 2017 (new extended deadline)
Acceptance confirmation by 15 February 2017

Registration Fee:

Early Bird – 30 March
APEAA members – 40 euros
Non-members – 90 euros

Late Registration
APEAA members – 60 euros
Non-members – 110 euros

APEAA student members (undergraduate, MA and PhD): 15 Euros

ORGANIZING COMMITTEE: Margarida Esteves Pereira, Ana Gabriela Macedo, Maria Filomena Louro, Jaime Costa, Joanne Paisana, João Jorge Coelho, Francesca Rayner, Isabel Ermida, Paula Guimarães

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Margarida Esteves Pereira, Ana Gabriela Macedo, Maria Filomena Louro, Teresa Botelho, Jaime Costa, Joanne Paisana, João Jorge Coelho, Francesca Rayner, Isabel Ermida, Paula Guimarães

(posted 14 November 2016, updated 3 January 2017)

Interpreting Migration: An International Multidisciplinary Conference
Technical University of Liberec, Liberec, Czech Republic, 28-30 April, 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 12 March 2017

At a time when refugees as well as those migrating for better work and study opportunities or a more democratic life make headline news, thematize presidential debates and EU membership referendums, when national identity is increasingly defined against the free movement of people, the issue of migration could not be more topical as a focus of rigorous intellectual debate. Thus, our conference aims to bring together experts from all disciplines of the humanities and social and political sciences to discuss the phenomenon of migration, in all of its complexity, taking into account both its challenges and potential dangers to migrant and society, and its potential to be positive and enriching. Without any pre-conceived agenda or claim, we invite open-minded scholars with a belief in the fertilizing and liberating power of academic debate from the whole range of the political spectrum.

Thus, we welcome proposals for presentations tackling the issues of migration, diaspora, exile, persecution, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, and related issues from various perspectives offered by ethnography, anthropology, social geography, sociology, political science, history, philosophy, as well as literary, media and cultural studies. General presentations, case studies and specific analyses are equally welcome.

The primary aim of the conference is to discuss and exchange methodologies, research models and theoretical knowledge about issues of migration, minority status and border crossing. After the conference, one or more peer reviewed volumes are to be published with a selection of the best papers.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Professor Hamid Naficy, a leading authority in cultural studies of diaspora, exile, and postcolonial cinemas and media (Northwestern University, USA)
Bruce Barnhart, Associate Professor of American literature and co-director of the project Literature, Rights, and Imagined Communities, from the University of Oslo (Norway).

The conference is part of the research project “CZ09 7F16020 Migration: Sociopsychological and Cultural Factors” and is generously sponsored by the Czech-Norwegian Research Program.

Conference organizers:
Sándor Klapcsik, Ph.D., project leader, assistant professor
Mgr. Zénó Vernyik, Ph.D., assistant professor

Registration Fee: 20 EUR

Send your proposals of approximately 200 words along with a short bio-note of 100 words by March 12, 2017 (new extended deadline) to migration2017@outlook.com. Notification of acceptance is sent by March 12, 2017.

 (posted 30 January 2017, updated 4 March 2017)

Performing Fantastika: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Lancaster University, UK, 28-29 April 2017
Deadline for proposals: 1st March 2017

The 4^rd annual Fantastika conference will focus on performative bodies in fantastika. This includes performance in theatrical plays and films, as well as an examination of the body itself. How is the body performed and perceived in fantastika texts? How do fantastika texts and our interaction with fantastika texts modulate our understanding of performative bodies?

We are pleased to announce Catherine Spooner, Eddie Robson, and Tajinder Hayer as our keynote speakers. Dr. Spooner is a Reader in Literature and Culture. She has published widely on Gothic in literature, film and popular culture with a particular emphasis on fashion, including the books Fashioning Gothic Bodies, Contemporary Gothic and, most recently, Post-Millennial Gothic: Comedy, Romance and the Rise of Happy Gothic, out early this year. Robson is a scriptwriter, novelist, and journalist. In his first novel, Tomorrow Never Knows (2015), Robson creates a bohemian city that hangs in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Robson has also written for Doctor Who radio and comics and is a regular writer for 2000AD. Dr. Hayer is a lecturer in Creative Writing. His play North Country features a post-apocalyptic world set in Bradford. The play will be touring in 2017 and tickets can be purchased at:

http://www.freedomstudios.co.uk/projects/north-country/

We welcome abstracts for 20 minute papers on fantastika as they occur in any medium and form. Some suggested topics are:

• theatrical or staged performances
• performance in films and televisuals
• audience performance of the text through cosplay or fan fiction
• costuming, weapons, and other accoutrements to performance
• gender performativity
• the gendered body or the transgendered body
• disabled bodies
• performing identity, or identity as a mask

Due to the topic of “Performing Fantastika” we will also welcome proposals for creative-critical pieces provided that they are within the 20 minute time frame. We may also consider shorter pieces for poetry or short fiction readings.
Please submit a 300 word abstract to fantastikaconference@gmail.com along with a 50 word bionote by March 1^st, 2017. Please note we have extended the deadline. Also note the change in conference dates to April of this year.

Visit wwww.fantastikajournal.com

#fantastika2017

(posted 6 February 2017)