Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in June 2019

Stonewall at 50 and Beyond: Interrogating the Legacy and Memory of the 1969 Riots
Paris, France, 3-5 June 2019
New exended deadline for proposals: 1 December 2018

A conference organised by:
Paris-Dauphine University (Paris-Sciences-et-Lettres) / IRISSO (UMR 7170-1427)

The original announcement of the conference was followed by well-founded criticism regarding the organizing committee’s and scientific committee’s lack of inclusiveness. The composition of these two committees was consequently modified. The call for papers below was revised by the new organizing committee. The composition of the scientific committee and bibliographical indications are available on the conference website
https://stonewallat50.sciencesconf.org/

The Stonewall riots are fraught with a conflictual memory. A standard narrative might read as follows: In the night of June 27, 1969, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar on Christopher Street in New York, refuse to endure yet another occurrence of the police harassment they routinely faced. For five days and nights, the neighborhood was the scene of a confrontation between rioters and the police. In the following weeks and months, this upsurge reinforced emerging liberation movements that coalesced into a diverse political force. The events were celebrated the following year and have since generally been presented as “the birth of the gay liberation movement” that is commemorated in today’s yearly LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) pride marches.

On the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall, this conference aims to shed critical light on this major event and its possible effects on the development of LGBTQ mobilizations around the world. It seeks to investigate the processes of memorialization, as well as the political legacy and the cultural and activist representations of Stonewall.

The various ways in which the history of the event has been written reveal lasting tensions within LGBTQ movements. While among the rioters were lesbians, sex workers, drag queens, transgender and gender non-conforming people and people of color, such as Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, post-Stonewall movements have produced narratives that invisibilize these protagonists and their multiple sexual, gender, and racial identities. In what ways have these tensions been exacerbated or reshuffled by the memorial conflicts that Stonewall crystallizes?

Paradoxically, while Stonewall was an act of disobedience and insubordination to state power, it has been reclaimed as the starting point of an assimilationist politics of respectability by the more mainstream LGBTQ organizations in the United States. And LGBTQ pride marches have gradually turned into entertaining parades or commodified festivals. How, concretely, has the understanding of riots driven by the rejection of policing and social control gradually shifted toward a narrative in support of homonormativity, state security, and neoliberalism? How does this shift affect working-class LGBTQ people and LGBTQ people of color? Through what processes has this history been re-appropriated in official discourses sanctioning more or less subtle forms of racism, sexism, and homonationalism? Correlatively, what enduring role do commercial venues (bars, clubs, etc.) play in the construction and politicization of sexual and gender minority identities and communities?

Stonewall is indeed also mythic because its fame has exceeded US national borders. The conference aims to look beyond this particular case in order to address the reception and influence of Stonewall in other national contexts, and the circulation, translation, importation, reappropriations, and sometimes rejection of LGBTQ communitarian practices and cultural models that originate in the United States. How has the memory of the riots crossed borders? Does Stonewall’s notoriety “colonize” the memory of movements born outside the United States? Does it invisibilize or even destabilize different forms of identification and resistance? How does the Stonewall myth participate in the globalization of sexual and gender identities?

We invite submissions from scholars in all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, as well as activists and movement collectives. Submissions based on empirical data (archives, interviews, ethnographies, cultural productions in literature, cinema, TV series, comics, songs, etc.) and with a comparative or intersectional approach will be especially welcome.

Submissions may reflect one or several of the following sets of issues:

• Narrating Stonewall: the diverse and conflicted memories and histories of Stonewall;
• From riots to respectability: investigating assimilation and normalization strategies in the “LGBTQ movement”;
• Beyond Christopher Street: transnational and transhistorical perspectives on queer liberation;
• Circulating sexual identities and struggles in an imbalanced world: homonationalism, transnational solidarity, and the homogenization of identities and modes of resistance;
• “Out of the bars and into the streets”? Political uses of commercial venues;
• Resisting police harassment before and after Stonewall: facing state control.

When and how to submit:
Paper submissions in French or English (c. 500 words) with an explicit presentation of the methodology and data, and a brief biographical note (5 lines) should be uploaded by December 1st, 2018, at: https://stonewallat50.sciencesconf.org.
Selected speakers will be notified by January 15th, 2019.

Organization:
The conference will take place at the universities of Paris-Est Créteil and Paris-Dauphine, France, on June 3rd–5th, 2019.

Organizing committee: Catherine Achin (Paris-Dauphine), Emmanuel Beaubatie (IRIS-EHESS, INED), Hugo Bouvard (Paris-Dauphine), Guillaume Marche (Paris-Est Créteil), Lucie Prauthois (Paris-Dauphine), Antoine Servel (Paris-Est Créteil), Damien Trawale (URMIS).

Contact and information: stonewallat50@gmail.com.

(posted 23 June 2018, updated 3 November 2018)

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Transnational Radical Film Cultures: An International Conference on Film, Aesthetics and Politics (Radical Film Network Conference 2019)
University of Nottingham (University Park Campus), UK, 3-5 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2019

This conference aims to bring together the political and aesthetic avant-gardes, with a particular focus on the transnational nature of contemporary radical film cultures. By looking at how radical films are produced, circulated and engaged with in different parts of the world, the conference hopes to shed light on the transnational nature of film cultures and the intersecting relationship between political struggle and aesthetic innovation. Bringing together filmmakers and researchers, the conference hopes to create new and consolidate existing connections and networks, facilitate transnational and cross-cultural dialogues, and forge global solidarity among radical filmmakers around the world.

Contributions may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Radical aesthetics and politics;
• Political filmmaking and ethical issues;
• Class and radical films;
• Forms of radical film activism and political agitation;
• Programming, distribution and exhibition;
• Radical film festivals and audiences;
• Radical film history across national borders;
• (Self)-Representation, identity and privacy in radical film cultures;
• Collaborative and participatory practices in radical film cultures;
• Partnerships between radical filmmakers and institutions;
• Issues of inclusion/exclusion in radical film cultures;
• Radical film cultures, memory, the archive and preservation;
• Creativity and innovation in radical film cultures;
• Radical films and the proliferation of digital technologies;
• Radical film cultures in the Global South;
• Radical film cultures and future direction(s)

Interested participants are invited to submit proposals for one of the following formats:

1. a 20-minute presentation
2. a 1.5-hour panel (with 3-4 panellists)
3. a 1-1.5-hour workshop on any aspect of radical film cultures

Proposals to a maximum of 300 words (presentation) or two-pages (panel or workshop) should be sent to: Trfc2019conference@gmail.com

Deadline for submission of abstracts: Thursday 31 January 2019

For more information, please visit:

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-arts/clas/transnational-radical-film-cultures/index.aspx

(posted 7 December 2018)

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Women Who Made History: 3^rd International Conference on Arts and Humanities
Nicosia, Cyprus, 4-7 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2019

The 3^rd International Conference on Arts and Humanities is an event organized by the International Centre for Studies of Arts and Humanities (ICSAH) and the Dante Alighieri Society Nicosia that aims to explore the topic of women who made history. The conference will be held on 4-7 June 2019 at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.

We warmly welcome all papers broadly relevant to the subject without predefining chronological and territorial limitations, as the major goal of the conference is to address questions that involve more than one research field and promote multidisciplinary dialogue and cooperation. The papers will be published online and in a dedicated volume of Conference Proceedings.

We invite proposals which study all aspects of women in literature, art, history and philosophy in order to highlight the variations, similarities and particularities of the figure of the woman in different cultural and disciplinary contexts. We encourage also papers that accentuate the conception, meaning and symbolism of the woman as an icon and a force that transcends the barriers of time, and embraces the very essence of the human being.

About ICSAH. The International Centre for Studies of Arts and Humanities is a nonprofit, interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the research, study and education in a vast range of disciplines in the fields of Arts and Humanities. The mission of the organization is to:

1. Promote the worldwide understanding, study and teaching across a range of disciplines of the Arts and Humanities.
2. Provide additional forums for the exchange of ideas regarding Arts and Humanities in schools, Universities, libraries, museums and other contexts.
3. Support the interchange of research and the scholarships of knowledge, teaching and service in the Humanities through conferences, publications and relative activities.

Submission rules: To submit a proposal for a paper of approximately 20 minutes, please send an abstract of 350 words or less to icsahcy1@gmail.com by April 30th, 2019. The proposed contributions should not have been previously published or accepted for publication elsewhere. Abstracts should include a title, a summary of the presentation, name of the author/s, institutional affiliation, email, and the language of presentation.

Conference languages: English, French, Italian

Venue : University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Avenue, Engomi, Nicosia 2414, Cyprus

For further information about the conference, please see our website at:  http://icsah.eu

Please address any further enquiries to: icsahcy1@gmail.com and icsah.eu@gmail.com

(posted 19 June 2018)

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Struggle for Recognition: identity-formation and subjectivation: 8th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture
Brest, France, 6-7 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 25 March 2019

 We are honoured to announce the 8th International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture “Struggle for recognition: identity-formation and subjectivation” organized jointly by Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France) and Çankaya University (Ankara, Turkey) on June 6-7, 2019. This International Conference is an annual, peer-reviewed academic event and comprehensive venue for the free exchange and dissemination of ideas on language, translation, literary and cultural studies, and aims to bring together scholars and graduates researching the intersections of these fields in the welcoming atmosphere of Université de Bretagne Occidentale in France.

The struggle of recognition has emerged, in the recent years, as a powerful paradigm. The theme of struggle for recognition is at the intersection of different areas of the human sciences: philosophy, gender studies, critical theory, discourse analysis, literature, etc. It is widely associated with the works of Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Charles Taylor, Paul Ricoeur, to name just a few prominent figureheads. According to Axel Honneth, the core of any public sphere is always a struggle for recognition. Nancy Frazer goes as far as talking about a recognition theoretical turn to describe a tendency to tackle many pressing real-life issues –such as discrimination, exclusion, social justice, political equality, gender equality– in terms of struggle for recognition and against all forms of disrespect.

At the core of the struggle for recognition paradigm, we find the question of identity formation, self-realization and subjectivation. Those engaged in a struggle for recognition are always of course struggling against institutionalized patterns of value that sustain and reinforce various mechanisms of exclusion. They are also struggling against those institutionalized patterns of value because they strip them of their dignity and subordinate them out of existence. Therefore, when they engage in struggles for recognition, they seek to redress injustices as much as to step out of invisibility and to claim their ethical capacity as full right subjects. The struggle for recognition may take different forms, which can be classified into two categories: argumentation or violence. Obviously enough, these two forms are exclusive; we can come across many examples when the struggle for recognition is both argumentative and violent. Some struggles for recognition seek reconciliation and a viable consensus, while others may refuse the idea of consensus and seek instead to perpetuate an agonistic confrontation.

Focusing on the aspects of language, literature and culture in any or all possible contexts, and employing interdisciplinary approach to address the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines, “International Conference on Language, Literature & Culture” welcomes papers that deal with the question of identity- construction and subjectivation through the prism of the struggle for recognition paradigm and intends to blur the limits of conventional discourses and approaches. You may participate as panel organizer, presenter of one paper, or observer. Submissions are open for 30-minute slots (20-minute talks + 10 minutes for discussion). All submissions to the conference will be reviewed by at least two independent peers for technical merit and content. The papers presented at the conference will be published in a volume.

A 300-word abstract and 5 keywords should be submitted as an email attachment to LLC2019Conference@gmail.com by March 25, 2019. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of the paper, abstract, 5 keywords and a brief bio data.

Papers may answer one or more of the following questions or address the following topics of interest for submission:

• What identity is the object of the struggle for recognition?
• Who leads this struggle and in the name of who?
• On what moral, ethical, political foundations is the struggle for recognition based?
• Are the disrespect and contempt experiences presented in personal or collective terms?
• Who refuses recognition and in name of what?
• How subjectivities transformed during the struggle for recognition?
• What argumentative strategies are used in the struggle for recognition?
• How does literature depict the struggle for recognition?
• Critical race theory and cultural identity
• Culture and the social construct of identity
• Diasporic literature
• Intersectionality and identity politics
• Intersections of the translations and cultural studies in literary reception
• Language, identity and culture
• Language, power and ideology
• Place and belonging, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities
• Nation and nationality
• Overlapping culture-areas
• Policies of diversity

Organizing Committee
Mohamed Saki (English Department, University of West Brittany, Brest)
Mustafa Kırca (Foreign Languages Department, Çankaya University, Ankara) Radia Hannachi (French Department, University of South Brittany, Lorient) Gaëlle le Corre (English Department, University of West Brittany, Brest)
Ertuğrul Koç (Translation and Interpreting Studies Department, Çankaya University, Ankara) Gülden Taner (Translation and Interpreting Studies Department, Çankaya University, Ankara)

Scientific Committee
Prof Marie-Christine Michaud (Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of South Brittany, Lorient)
Prof Michael Rinn (Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, University of West Brittany, Brest)
Prof Nathalie Garric (Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, University of Nantes, France)
Prof Joanna Thornborrow (Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, University of West Brittany, Brest)

Important dates

• Deadline for submission: March 25, 2019
• Notification of acceptance: April 8, 2019
• Registration: April 23, 2019 Conference fees (non-refundable):
• 50€ (70€ for late submissions after April 23, 2019)
• 25€ for graduate students (35€ for late submissions after April 23, 2019)

This International Conference is an annual academic event organized by Cankaya University in Ankara in collaboration with a different university each year, and it attracts scholars from around the world as well as around the hosting country. This year the conference will be organized jointly by Université de Bretagne Occidentale (Brest, France) and Cankaya University (Ankara, Turkey); and it will be hosted by Université de Bretagne Occidentale in Brest on June 6-7, 2019. The conference covers a wide range of subjects in language, translation, literary and cultural studies, and welcomes presentations dealing with new interdisciplinary perspectives on these fields and other areas of investigation. Each year we choose the conference theme from among a large variety of topics that include comparative literature, literary theory, translation studies, interdisciplinary studies, English language teaching, and language education. This year the theme of the conference is “Struggle for recognition: identity-formation and subjectivation”. We aim to bring together scholars and graduates researching the intersections of linguistics, cultural and literary studies with a particular focus on identity discourses, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, diaspora and diasporic discourses, cultural images and imagology, and various ways of struggling for recognition and subjectivation.
For further information, please visit the conference page at http://www.elts.cankaya.edu.tr

(posted 22 October 2018)

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Vladimir Nabokov : History and Geography
Paris, Sorbonne University / University of Cergy-Pontoise, France, 6-8 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2018

• Historical and geographical sources in Nabokov’s work
• Referentiality and fictionalization of historical and geographical reality
• Poetic treatment and metamorphoses of history and geography
• Rereadings and rewritings of historical events, political regimes, ideologies and philosophies of history
• Reinvention and recreation of history and geography
• Imaginary worlds
• Writing about exploration, writing as exploration
• Travels, journeys, exploration, movement and displacement
• Nabokovian spaces and times in translation
• The critical reception of Nabokov’s texts in relation with history and geography

(posted 9 October 2018)

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40th APEAA Meeting
Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto, Portugal, 6-8 June 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 28 February 2019

The Department of Anglo-American Studies of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto is pleased to announce the 40th Conference of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies, which will take place between 6 and 8 June 2019.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Alex Houen (Cambridge University)
• Sarah Hentges (University of Maine at Augusta / University of Southern Denmark)
• Isabel Fernandes (Universidade de Lisboa)

Papers, panels and roundtables proposals are welcomed on any subject that falls under the remit of the two academic areas (including literary studies, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, performance, film and theatre studies, gender and sexuality studies, translation studies, linguistics, language teaching and methodology). Proposals for panels, put together around a common theme or research domain are welcome. We also welcome papers and panels on Canadian, Irish, Scottish and other (Anglophone) Studies.

Although the conference programme will accommodate the whole range of topics pertaining to the field of Anglo-American Studies, the many anniversaries celebrated in 2019 may provide the foundations for panels and individual papers:

• the centenary of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919
• the 90th anniversary of the 1929 New York Crash
• the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the Second World War in 1939
• the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO in 1949
• the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989
• the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe in 1719

Book Presentations: APEAA members are also invited to present their own recently published academic books and/or translations (2017-2019).

Submissions and queries should be sent by e-mail to apeaa2019@letras.up.pt

Please include the following information with your proposal:

• the full title of your paper / panel / roundtable;
• a 250-300 word description of your paper / panel / roundtable;
• your name, postal address and e-mail address;
• your institutional affiliation and position;
• a short bionote;
• AV requirements (if any)

Working languages: English and Portuguese.

Conference webpage: http://apeaa.pt/cfp

Important dates:

• New extended deadline for submissions: 28 February 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2019
• Deadline for registration: 3 May 2019

Registration fee:

• Registration Fee (APEAA and SAAS members): 60 Euros
• Registration Fee (non-members): 90 Euros
• Student fee (APEAA and SAAS members): 30 EurosStudent fee (non-members): 45 Euros

Scientific and Organizing Committee:
Carlos Azevedo | Rui Carvalho Homem | Fátima Vieira | Maria Teresa Castilho | Jorge Bastos da Silva

(posted 17 December 2018, updated 11 February 2019)

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Trauma, Narrative, Responsibility: AICED-21
University of Bucharest, Romania, 6-8 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 March 2019

The English Department of the University of Bucharest invites proposals for the Literature and Cultural Studies section of its 21^st Annual International Conference

Venue: The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Str. Pitar Mos 7–13, Bucharest, Romania

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Prof. Sean Cotter (University of Texas at Dallas)
• Prof. Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza)
• Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)

In recent years, since Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), trauma studies has developed continuously as a field of research. This follows primarily the increasing recognition of the Holocaust and its intergenerational aftermath, as well as of the victims of genocide, mass persecution, war and terror (see especially Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2012 and Astrid Erll, “Generation in Literary History,” 2014). In Eastern Europe after 1989, the need to rewrite history in a “truthful” way, free from the ideological contamination of left-wing dictatorships, has foregrounded the importance of remembering, unveiling, narrating and repairing the collective and individual traumas embedded in the memory of the contemporary world (see Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind and Julie Fedor’s Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, 2013; Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer’s Memory Games, 2013).

Narratives of and discourses on trauma – as a result of, for example, abuse, accident, illness, oppression, war – have become pervasive in global culture and they circulate in a wide variety of forms including blogs, films, videos, social media postings, legal testimonies, print articles and books. They often evoke strong emotions and provoke action, as perhaps best reflected in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw’s edited collection Extremities. Trauma, Testimony and Community (2002). Many scholars have especially developed these directions of research by conducting analyses of the representations of trauma in literary and media culture (see especially Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture, 2005 and Anne Rothe’s Popular Trauma Culture, 2011). Furthermore, Leigh Gilmore (“‘What Was I?’ Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive,” 2011; Tainted Witness, 2017) has focused on how literary narratives of trauma contribute to legal and human rights discourses of trauma with genre-specific and gender-specific alternative forms of witnessing and agency. Such scholarly concerns give rise to significant questions that AICED 2019 will address: how should those involved in the analysis of both past and present factual and fictional narrative and discourse, as cultural and literary critics, historians and scholars, understand and analyze them in ways that are both sensitive to the experiences narrated and discussed, and intellectually and ethically responsible?

Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• narrating collective trauma, mass repression and genocide
• parallel histories of collective trauma: the Holocaust, African American slavery, communist repression responsible responses to trauma and forms of exclusion (race, gender, ethnicity, religion)
• personal trauma as reflected on the human psyche
• the impact of individual trauma upon family and community
• repressed trauma – a generator of inadequacy and suffering
• trauma, memory and recovery
• narrative as reparation of trauma
• genres of narrative and trauma (specifics of literary, visual, legal, oral, human rights narratives)
• reflections of trauma in the visual and performing arts
• physical, emotional and spiritual reverberations of trauma
• individual, collective and institutionalized accounts of trauma
• the ethics of representing personal and collective trauma
• the affective dimension of trauma representation and reception
• the transcultural, transnational and transgenerational transmission of trauma narratives and discourses
• the representation of perpetrators and perpetrator trauma
• the politics of trauma, narrative and responsibility in a globalized world
• the trauma of exile and its impact over generations

Conference presentations should be in English, and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words. Proposals should be in .doc or .docx format, and should also include (within the same document) name and institutional affiliation, a short bio (no more than 100 words), and e-mail address. Proposals for panel discussions (to be organized by the participant) will also be considered.

We look forward in particular to hosting a panel organized by the Romanian Studies Association of America, applying a Romanian Studies perspective to aspects of the conference theme.

A selection of papers from the conference will be published in University of Bucharest Review (ISSN 2069–8658; listed on Scopus, EBSCO (Literary Reference Centre Plus), CEEOL, and Ulrichsweb; CNCS category B). See the guidelines for contributors at https://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/ .

Deadline for proposals: 30 March 2019
Please send proposals (and enquiries) to conf.eng.litcult@lls.unibuc.ro

The conference fee of 50 euro (or 200 lei if paid in Romanian currency) is payable in cash on registration, and covers lunches and refreshments during the conference, but not evening meals.

For further details and updates, see: https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/conferinte/ .
(Enquiries regarding the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics section of the conference, which will be running at the same time, should be sent to bucharest.aiced21@gmail.com.)

We look forward to welcoming you in Bucharest,

The Organizing Committee: Dr Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Alexandra Bacalu, Dr Alina Bottez, Dr James Brown, Antonia Gîrmacea, Dr Eliana Ionoaia, Dr Dragoș Manea, Prof. Mădălina Nicolaescu, Dr Cristian Vîjea, Dr Ioana Zirra

Advisory Board: Dr Nazmi Ağıl (Koç University, Istanbul), Prof. Bart Eeckhout (University of Antwerp), Prof. José Manuel Estévez-Saá (University of A Coruña), Dr Felicity Hand (Autonomous University of Barcelona), Prof. Michael Hattaway (New York University, London), Prof. Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), Prof. Thomas Leitch (University of Delaware), Dr Chris Louttit (Radboud University, Nijmegen), Prof. Domnica Rădulescu (Washington and Lee University, Lexington), Prof. Kerstin Shands (Södertörn University), Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)

(posted 25 January 2019)

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The “Cross-Inter-Multi-Trans” disciplinarit(ies) of English Studies: 5th ASSE conference on British and American Studies
Vlora, Albania, 6-8 June 2019
Deadline for submissions: 31 March 2019

In today’s world when the exchange of information, the means of communication, the advance of technology, the organization of our daily routine have become so multifaceted, the study of various phenomena surrounding us also calls for a complexity of ways to their solutions or answers. Researchers and scholars quite often resort to mixture of approaches and methods for the understanding of the problems around us and for providing answers to them or attempting to solve them. Quite often these solutions come from the integration and interaction of various disciplines that could address these research questions. Thus one and the same problem can be looked into from a single disciplinary perspective or, instead, from multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary perspectives. Attempts are often made to distinguish one from the other but one cannot deny the rising tendency to study things or research problems from a comprehensive integrated perspective that goes across disciplines.

In this regard, English Studies, as a distinct discipline that integrates in itself several others are not immune to research methodologies that combine such perspectives. In this conference, we invite scholars to challenge their perceptions of English Studies by engaging themselves in a reflection about the nature of English Studies themselves with the purpose to discover the “CROSS-INTER-MULTI-TRANS-“ disciplinarit(ies) of English Studies.

Some of the proposed topics for this conference include:

• Integrating linguistics, literature, translation and cultural studies
• English Studies approached from today’s research perspectives
• Crosscultural, intercultural, transcultural, multicultural, pluricultural, what else?
• Language disciplines and their interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary nature
• Intercultural communication as interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary
• Literary theory as interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary
• The influence of technology in the multidimensional nature of language, literary and cultural studies today
• Current trends in semiotics
• The multimodality of language studies today
• Language in culture, culture in language
• Language teaching and learning as the integration of various approaches, methods and technologies
• Interdisiplinary collaboration in ELT
• Multidisciplinary approaches to ESP
• Intersemiosis: From translation to transduction
• Cultural Studies and Applied Linguistics
• Translation, Linguistics and Culture
• The influence of technology in the study of literature, culture and language
• Representations of culture in social media

Papers are welcomed from but are not limited to:

• British and Commonwealth Literature
• American Literature
• Literary Theory
• Literary Criticism
• Cultural Studies
• Intercultural Communication
• Communication Studies
• Media Studies
• Discourse Analysis
• Pragmatics
• Linguistics
• Semiotics
• Translation Studies
• Applied Linguistics
• ESP

The conference language is English. Please send your abstracts (about 250 words) for papers (20 min) as an MS word attachment to the following email address by 31 March 2019: asse2019@assenglish.org

For more information, please check the conference website: http://www.assenglish.org/cimt/

A selection of papers will be published in the journal in esse: English Studies in Albania, Vol. 11, No. 1 and in esse: English Studies in Albania, Vol. 11, No. 2. (http://www.assenglish.org/publications/)

(posted 15 February 2019)

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Nonviolence and Intercultural Dialogue
London, UK, 8-9 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2019

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

“We may never be strong enough to be entirely nonviolent in thought, word and deed, but we must keep nonviolence as our goal and make strong progress towards it” – Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi

The principle of nonviolence, also known as nonviolent resistance, rejects the use of physical violence to achieve social or political change. History shows that the success of peaceful social transformation depends largely on individuals who are charismatic, knowledgeable, skilled in the strategies and methods of nonviolence (Tolstoy, Gandhi, King, Chavez, Walesa, Dalai Lama, Louise Patterson, Menchu and others). Gene Sharp coined the term revolutionary nonviolence in the 20th century and transformed the meaning of the nonviolence from the passive to an active agent as a framework for creating peace.

This conference seeks to explore, analyse and discuss the complex concept of nonviolence as a strategy toward peace and progress. It will apply an interdisciplinary approach to various manifestations of nonviolence and will also act as an academic space to explore solutions for creating peace.

Conference presentations will be related, but not limited, to:

• Theories of nonviolence
• History of nonviolence
• Nonviolence and religion
• Nonviolence and philosophy
• Nonviolence and peace studies
• Nonviolence and literature
• Nonviolence and media
• Nonviolence and art
• Nonviolence and culture
• Nonviolence and activism
• Nonviolence and politics
• Icons of nonviolence
• Teaching nonviolence

The conference will bring together scholars from different fields including philosophy, religion, sociology, international relations, history, literature, art, peace studies, cultural studies, political studies and others.

Submissions may propose various formats, including:

• Individually submitted papers (organised into panels by committee)
• Panels (3-4 individual papers)
• Roundtable discussions (led by one of the presenters)
• Posters

Proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 1 February, 2019 to: violence.society@lcir.co.uk. Download Paper proposal form.

Standard registration fee – 220 GBP
Student registration fee – 180 GBP

Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London, WC1E 7HX, UK

(posted 8 September 2018)

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Reenchanting Urban Wildness: To Perceive, Think and Live With Nature in its Urban Environment
Perpignan, France, 11-14 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2018

An international Conference under the aegis of the CRESEM, UPVD

Guest Writers

• Belinda Cannone, French writer, sponsor of the PUP (Presses Universitaires de Perpignan), author of S’émerveiller, 2017.
• Nathanael Johnson, American journalist and writer, expert in nature in cities and environmental issues, author of Unseen City The Majesty of Pigeons, the Discreet Charm of Snails & Other Wonders of the Urban Wilderness, 2016

Keynote Speakers

• Nathalie Blanc, Geographer, French CNRS Supervisor, urban nature expert
• Serenella Iovino, University of Torino, Italy. Ecophilosopher, New Materialism and Environmental Humanities expert
• Anne Simon, CNRS Research Director, Head of the Animots program, zoopoetics expert

This international conference comes as an offshoot of a previous ecopoetics conference on “Dwellings of Enchantment: Writing and Reenchanting the Earth,” which took place in Perpignan in June 2016 (with three collective volumes on their way to being published). While this first event successfully brought together many academics and writers from various backgrounds, countries and disciplinary fields, it appeared that the call for papers attracted studies mostly concerned with dwellings of enchantment outside of cities. From there sprouted the notion that, while humans’ intra-connections with their natural environments outside of densely populated areas were indeed of essential concern, it may be just as necessary and urgent to reconsider the many entanglements between human and non-human naturecultures within urban and suburban milieus. For, as opposed to what modernity has often wrongly entailed, nature does not evolve solely starting on the outskirts of our urban dwellings, but has instead become an integral part of the daily lives of a majority of humans, living in densely populated areas. As over half of humanity now resides in urban places––a tendency that has been predicted to keep growing on the increase––, nonhuman life forms have simultaneously been coevolving with us in environments that can no longer be conceived of as antagonistic to the notion of nature. In more or less visible ways, vegetal, animal, elemental, and microbial agencies have followed the roads we have paved, adapting to and, in turn, shaping our shared urban habitats, sometimes even encroaching upon the more intimate dwelling places of our bodies.

If so-called moderns seek shelter in the notion of a civilized dwelling place keeping wilderness at bay, such an anthropocentric vision remains blind to the hardly controllable coexistence of myriad life forms within our gridded, sometimes walled or gated, shared, urban and suburban pluriverses. Suffice it to mention the pullulating of coyotes in North American suburbs, of spotted hyenas in Ethiopian cities, of foxes in all European metropoles, of raccoons in Parisian forests, of parakeets vividly coloring the sky in Brussels, of Geckos nesting on the walls of our homes in Spain and India––or in Perpignan for that matter––and the less glamorous domestic intrusions of cockroaches, ants, or other insects in our urban ecosystems to heal from the delusional idea of a dichotomy separating humans and cities from nonhumans and natural environments. Moreover, while some of these feral animals tend to first be considered as a pestilence or jeopardy, in many cases local communities have been finding ways to reconsider the potential intra-actions between various populations – whether they be part of the vegetal, animal or human worlds – in ways forcing humans to adapt to nonhuman agencies, and reciprocally. As for plants, the wild proliferation of weeds, the cultivation of city parks, balconies, greenways, gardens etc. has made these vegetal populations ever-present in our quotidian commutes, walks, leisure, workplaces, etc.

With a one-day conference held in Perpignan in May 2017 and exclusively devoted to “Vegetal Life in its Urban Milieu,” this new international event builds further on previous research, seeking to extend the enterprise of re-enchanting the complex, often invisible relationships between humans and non-humans that germinate from specifically urban worldings.

If the organizers themselves mostly specialize in ecocriticism and ecopoetics, we would like to encourage transdisciplinary dialogues, and therefore invite academics and artists across a wide range of disciplines to come together and advance current research and thinking on the hidden wonders of urban ecosystems (urban planning, biology, anthropology, ecology, botany, geography, sociology, entomology and ornithology, history, philosophy, visual arts, and academics of the inherently transdisciplinary fields of ecocriticism, ecopoetics, zoopoetics, ecopsychology). The scientific committee will particularly, yet not exclusively, welcome papers addressing some of the following issues:

• Magical realism as an artistic mode particularly apt to reveal urban wonders
• Postmodernism and the rewriting of myths about urban culture
• How material ecocriticism or new materialism have been sowing seeds for new ecopoetic paradigms to envision the products of our naturecultures as co-produced songs
• The role of urban planning in re-enchanting humans’ conception of nature in cities
• The enchantments of old cities compared with those of newer cities
• Community and grassroots initiatives to reweave naturecultural fabrics
• Ecofeminist practices, rituals and thought in urban settings
• Ecospsychology as a way of repairing human connections with their environments
• The latest developments in ecosophy and what light it sheds on an ontology of urban co-dwelling
• Postcolonial urban populations and their relationships to urban wildness
• Multicultural cities’ melting pots and plants
• Waste theory and production in urban areas
• Plant communication in urban ecosystems
• What biosemiotics teaches us about urban wonders
• Urban sources of food (Ava Chin, the New York Times“urban foraging” blogger and the author of a book called Eating Wildly)
• Health issues and urban nature
• The conceptual implications of the word “feral”––referring simply to that which has broken free from human domestication, a term that was applied first to animals and now to plants as well––with no exact translation in other European languages such as French or Dutch (George Monbiot, Feral, 2013)
• Education about nature in urban settings
• Urban naturecultural art forms (graph, dance, music, etc)

Scientific coordinator: Bénédicte Meillon, University of Perpignan

Organizing committee: Margot Lauwers, University of Perpignan, France; Bénédicte Meillon, University of Perpignan, France; Claire Perrin, University of Perpignan, France; Caroline Durand-Rous, University of Perpignan, France

Scientific committee: Pascale Amiot, University of Perpignan (Irish Studies and Ecopoetics), Anne-Laure Bonvalot, University of Montpellier (Hispanic and Portuguese-language Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism), Françoise Besson, University of Toulouse (Anglophone ecopoetics), Marie Blaise, University of Montpellier (Francophone Ecocriticism), Anne-Lise Blanc, University of Perpignan (Francophone Ecopoetics), Nathalie Blanc, CNRS, Paris (Urban Geography, Environmental Humanities), Clara Breteau, (CNRS UK, University of Leeds, Environmental Humanities), Isabelle Cases, University of Perpignan (British History and Culture), Joanne Clavel, Danse Researcher, University Paris 8, Doctor in scientific ecology, Nathalie Cochoy, University of Toulouse (Anglophone ecopoetics), Aurélie Delage, University of Perpignan (City planning and Urbanism), Jocelyn Dupont, University of Perpignan (American Literature and Cinematographic culture), François Gavillon, University of Bretagne Occidentale (Anglophone Ecopoetics), Bertrand Guest, University of Angers (French Ecocriticism), Daniel Finch-Race, Durham University (Francophone ecocriticism and ecopoetics), Karen Houle, Guelph University, Canada (Philosophy, ecocriticism, ecopoetics, ecopoetry), Thibault Honoré, University of Bretagne Occidentale (Fine Arts), Serenella Iovino, University of Torino, Italy (Ecophilosophy, New materialism), Edith Liégey, National Museum of Natural History (Ecology and contemporary arts sciences), Margot Lauwers, University of Perpignan (Ecofeminism, anglophone feminist ecocriticism), Bénédicte Meillon, University of Perpignan (Anglophone ecocriticism and ecopoetics, American Short Story, Magical Realism), Serpil Opperman, Hacettepe University, Turkey (Ecocriticism, New materialism, ecofeminism), Stéphanie Posthumus, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec (Francophone ecocriticism and ecopoetics), Jonathan Pollock, University of Perpignan (Ecopoetics, ecophilosophy, Shakespearean wild), Thomas Pughe, University of Orléans (Anglophone ecocriticism and ecopoetics), Sylvain Rode, University of Perpignan (City planning and urbanization), Anne Simon, CNRS Research Director, Head of the Animots program, zoopoetics expert, Scott Slovic, Idaho University, USA (Ecocriticism), François Specq, ENS Lyon (Anglophone ecocriticism)

The conference will take place in English and French. Communication proposals are to be sent as abstracts (300-400 words), with a brief bio-biblio note (5-6 lines) to ecopoeticsperpignan2018@gmail.com, before October 1st, 2018. Feedback from the scientific committee will get sent by mid November 2018.

Internet site and contact information
Ecopoeticsperpignan.com page dedicated to the event: http://ecopoeticsperpignan.com/conference-2019
Contact email address : ecopoeticsperpignan2018@gmail.com(

(posted 12 February 2018)

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‘Because of Her?’: Women and the Shaping of Canada
Bordeaux, France, 12-14 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 20 June 2018

Keynote speaker: Lori Saint Martin, UQAM, Institut de Recherches et d’Études Féministes

The Interuniversity Center for Canadian Studies in Bordeaux (CECIB) will host the annual conference and symposium of the French Association for Canadian Studies (AFEC) from June 12 to June 14, 2019 in Bordeaux, to the role of women in the construction of Canada.

While Canada is adopting a ‘feminist international assistance policy’ to advance gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls in order ‘to reduce poverty and build a more inclusive, peaceful and prosperous world,’ time is ripe to examine facts and issues related to women and their (somewhat underscored?) contribution to the construction of Canada. Borrowing from the ‘Women’s History Month in Canada’ hashtag #Because of Her (with the addition of a question mark to interrogate the statement) the conference will address the multifaceted role played by women themselves in Canada’s past, present and future history, their evolving status over time as well as what women and the femine have inspired in the collective and individual imaginary. The approach will be diachronic, dealing with the lands encompassing present-day Canada through the ages, and transnational, exploring the interrelations between Canada and women from within and without, including Native women, settlers, migrant women and travellers, whatever their nationalities or origins, provided their connection with what is known today as Canada can be evidenced.

We invite papers exploring: demography, migrations, matrimony, family life, education, work, health, ageing, spirituality, artistic creation, sports, Indigenous women, Canadian feminism as activism or theory (among others). Experts in women’s studies and gender studies are welcome as well as academics in all fields of studies such as history, geography, sociology, anthropology, psychology, health studies, philosophy, religion, cultural studies, environmental studies, law, economy, political science, literature and the arts.

Proposals may be submitted individually or as a panel (group of 4 papers on a common theme), in English or in French. A Word file containing an abstract of 400 words and a short biographical note of 100 words should be sent by June 20, 2018 to Marie-Lise Paoli (Équipe de Recherche Créativité et Imaginaire des Femmes-ERCIF, E.A. CLARE, Université Bordeaux Montaigne): Marie-Lise.Paoli@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr

(posted 26 March 2018)

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Speaking in Tongues: Celebrating Walt Whitman in Translation
Université Paris-Est Créteil, France, 13-14 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2018

When Rubén Darío published his sonnet entitled “Walt Whitman”[1], in 1888, he started a tradition that has been continuing for over a hundred years and that—witness Laurent Galley’s recent “Ode à Walt Whitman”[2]—is still going strong in the twenty-first century. From García Lorca’s “Oda a Walt Whitman” to Jean Sénac’s “Paroles avec Walt Whitman,” from Pessoa’s unfinished “Saudação a Walt Whitman” to B. Alkvit-Blum’s “Dayne grozn,” Whitman, more than any other English-language poet before or after him, may be said to have attracted a considerable number of direct responses from poets not writing in English. The editors of the seminal Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song analyze Whitman’s attraction to English-language poets as follows: “Most of the poets who address Whitman do so to satisfy a gnawing urge to talk things out with him, to relieve the itching of his words at their ears.”[3] For those not using English, however, their fascination with Whitman’s verse seems in great measure to have resulted from more or less accurate perceptions of his representativeness as an American, his claim to be read as an advocate of political and artistic internationalism, his innovative poetics, and, for a sizeable number of them, his ground-breaking queerness. Appearing to take at face value Whitman’s only partially-realized “absorption” of his poetry by his country[4], they have frequently invoked him as America made flesh, appearing in so doing to equate the flesh-and-blood author of Leaves of Grass with the ubiquitous “rough” present in many poems.

Just as Whitman’s verse has been drawing poetic responses from around the world for over 160 years, foreign translations of his poetry started to be published relatively early in his lifetime, first in reviews appearing in literary journals, then in book form. The former practice started in France, with a text by Louis Étienne appearing in 1861 in La Revue européenne. Étienne counterbalanced his indictment of Whitman with a generous selection of lines translated into French. Germany toed the line with Ferdinand Freiligrath’s contribution to the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, in 1869, and Italy, somewhat later, in 1879, with Enrico Nencioni’s piece in Fanfulla della domenica. These paved the way for book-length translations of all or part of Leaves of Grass, usually in its final, so-called “Deathbed” version. The publication history of these translations—continuing to this day—has been complexified by the publication of competing versions, along with the translation of once-neglected earlier editions of Leaves of Grass. On the other hand, this history reflects the upheavals in linguistic geopolitics, with translations into the major European languages gradually cohabiting with translations into the Asian and African languages they had once eclipsed in the countries their speakers had colonized[5].

This conference would like to celebrate the bicentennial of Whitman’s birth in truly plurilingual fashion and give maximum space to his poetry in languages other than English, while, for the sake of communication, speakers will be expected to give their papers in English. Among the many issues which could be addressed, separately or jointly, the following will be of particular interest:

• the practice of writing poems addressed to or dealing with Whitman in languages other than English, and their dialogue with their literary and cultural environments;
• the role played by translations in the reception of Whitman’s work in specific countries and cultures;
• the impact of Whitman’s poetry (in English or in translation) on the development of non-English speaking poetry;
• the possible interaction between Whitman translations in different languages;
• the practice of retranslation;
• the dissemination and teaching of Whitman in academic environments outside English-speaking countries;
• research on Whitman in non-English speaking countries.

Speakers willing to take part in this conference are invited to send a two-hundred word abstract by September 15, 2018, to Éric Athenot (athenot.eric@orange.fr) and Graciela Villanueva (graciela.villanueva1@wanadoo.fr)

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[1] Rubén Darío, “Medallones”, III, in Azul [1888], Madrid: Biblioteca Edaf 276, 2003, pp. 199-200.

[2] https://blogs.mediapart.fr/laurent-galley/blog/310313/ode-walt-whitman

[3] Jim Perlman, Ed Folsomn and Dan Campion (eds.) Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song, Duluth: Holy Cow! Press, 1998, p. 23.

[4] The 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass famously concludes with the idea that:” The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.” (Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition, Leaves of Grass, Sculley Bradley & Harold W. Blodgett, eds. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, p. 731).

[5] A complete translation of Leaves of Grass into Arabic was published in Baghdad in 1976 (cf. https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/resources). For translations into Farsi, Malay, Kurdish, Khmer, and a few other languages, see the Walt Whitman Archive (https://iwp.uiowa.edu/whitmanweb/en/writings/song-of-myself/about).

(posted 16 March 2018)

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Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Competitive Advantage for Global Employability 2019 (ICCAGE 2019)
MIAS School of Business, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic, 13-14 June 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 23 April 2019

To safely navigate the ever-changing waters of 21^st century education, teachers and experts across academic disciplines face an acute need to develop and implement innovative pedagogies and technologies which would allow them to anchor the existing practices and routines in modern pedagogical terrain. This call is particularly relevant to higher education, where innovative approaches seem to offer the only viable response to the challenges introduced by diverse and often conflicting phenomena such as linguistic and extra-linguistic communication barriers, digital literacy, cultural diversities, globalisation and glocalisation, and identity conflicts which compound the lack of skills to interact successfully.

Following up on the successful ICCAGE 2017 international conference held in Prague, ICCAGE 2019 aims to bring together educators and experts in the fields of language teaching/learning, personal development, and soft skills training to discuss both new and traditional approaches to global education, share experience, and set the future trends in higher education. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• technologies/pedagogies for global students
• perspectives on learner autonomy
• pedagogies of interdisciplinarity
• educating future leaders: pedagogies of (global) employability
• intercultural communicative competence
• teaching in/through 21^st century skills
• business English and English for special purposes
• critical and creative thinking and metacognitive skills

Submit abstracts for 20-minute presentations (120 words maximum) including a short academic bio via the following link: https://goo.gl/forms/KF0o1p5RaGabKwjF2
Selected conference papers will be published in a reviewed collection of essays and/or offered to be reviewed by an independent academic journal.

Conference Fee: 50€

For more details about the conference, including past events, please see:
http://www.mias.cvut.cz/668-iccage-conference

Contact: mias-iccage@cvut.cz

Venue: MIAS School of Business, Czech Technical University in Prague, Kolejní 2a, Prague 6.

(posted 11 January 2019, updated 6 March 2019, updated 5 April 2019)

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Place and Placelessness in Postcolonial Short Fiction
Montpellier, France, 13-15 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 September 2018

An International Conference organized by Etudes Montpellieraines du Monde Anglophone (EMMA), Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 and LCE, Université Lumière Lyon 2

Venue: Site St Charles, Université Montpellier 3

The unprecedented development of the short story in the literatures that emerged in the former colonies of the British Empire has by now become a well-researched literary fact. Postcolonial critics have teased out the relationships between a genre long regarded as a minor one (at least before its Modernist canonization) and the marginal positions of writers who came to the short story as a creative terrain to experiment with spatial compression and the startling insights it affords, from Joyce’s “scrupulous meanness” to Gordimer’s “flash of fireflies.” In postcolonial literatures – using the plural is the least one can do to call attention to the multiple realities the field comprises – the short story seemed a genre well suited to the expression of minor voices. The perspectives of the disenfranchised (all the more so when they were women, children or marginal individuals) came to embody different forms of subjugation in spaces striated by the political and geographical lines inherited from the colonial past. In the context of the colonial appropriation of indigenous places, the short story has also been claimed as a privileged site where to question the erasure of toponyms, nomadic routes, sacred grounds and the sense of place that pre-colonial forms of spatiality sustained. An interest in the archaeology of place is thus recurrent in postcolonial short fiction, where it meets with an interest in the successive forms of displacement and replacement that put a strain on the articulation between space and place in postcolonial contexts.

What becomes of these aspects when set in relation to the transformations postcolonial studies are now undergoing as a field of investigation disrupted by dynamics that conjugate the global and the local, challenging national and regional borders as well as the identity formations they buttress? Bruce King, after a life-long engagement in the field, recently published From New National to World Literature: Essays and Reviews (2016) in a collection that places the “emphasis on contesting definitions of ‘diasporic’ or ‘postcolonial’ writing, ‘transnational’ or ‘transcultural’ literatures and ‘world’ literature as used by writers, critics and thinkers,” thus inviting a “reconsideration of the boundaries that divide and the intersections that link these related fields.” King’s volume nevertheless sticks to a geographical grouping in sections (African literature, West Indies, Internationalizing British Literature […] Muslims and Pakistan) that grow increasingly porous while drawing attention to the mobilities that transform place, make it “portable,” as it were, as is the case in the latter category where Islam features as a form of emplacement in its everyday rituals, even in extra-territorial contexts.

Against the encroaching development of “non-places” (as described, famously, by Marc Augé), the short story can be regarded as a site of resistance with its particular ability to inscribe places, but also a space in-between where language relates place through the specialization of a common, international language. English as a world language can then become reinvented as place-specific through subtle forms of localisation that enable recognition and territorialisation. But the desire to reclaim place may also actively involve placelessness rather than reject it. Placelessness is then not to be conceived as the negation of place, but as a disruptive force that challenges the fiction of stability and property (“qui piétine les semblants du propre” in the words of Michel de Certeau) – a “making it strange” of place that posits it as the product of constantly shifting relations and exposes the fiction according to which place could be disengaged from its inscription in a signifying process. Placelessness thus reinstates the possibility of a becoming of place, place as event, not least through the mapping of a place of enunciation.

Short fiction, with its “limited” scope, does not only steer clear of the totalizing temptation of narrative, but often builds itself around an event, something that “takes place” and yet cannot necessarily be traced, circumscribed or fixed. Compression and formal tightness also challenge realistic protocols and question the illusion of verisimilitude that fiction may yield. This opens cracks, fissures in the referential process, or interstices between well-bounded territories where meaning is allowed to circulate. Whether we connect this with differance and dissemination (Jacques Derrida, Homi Bhabha) or with indifference (Jacques Rancière), placelessness is at the heart of a process of reconfiguration or reinvention that is made all the easier by the plasticity of short fiction and a “lack” of definition that turns it into a privileged field of experimentation. As it asserts the need to revisit places, the postcolonial short story can be seen as claiming the inevitability of place (place as incontournable in the words of Edouard Glissant) whilst preventing it from becoming a territory – a fine example of what Glissant calls “an open island”.

We invite submissions in English for papers that will not exceed 30 minutes in length, allowing time for discussion. Your proposals (giving the title of the paper, a 300-400 word abstract and short bio-bibliographical profile) should be sent no later than 1^st September 2018, preferably by email, to Claire Omhovère (claire.omhovere@univ-montp3.fr) and Pascale Tollance (pascale.tollance@univ-lyon2.fr). The participants will receive notification of the acceptance of their papers by 30th October 2018.

The conference organisers: Claire Omhovère (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3/EMMA), Pascale Tollance (Université Lumière Lyon 2/LCE)

(posted 16 March 2018)

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Male (Un)Bonding: Men, Masculinities, and Homosocial Troubles: A Research Development Workshop and Interdisciplinary Networking Event
Bush House, King’s College London, UK, 13-15 June 2019
Deadline for EOIs (Exprssions Of Interest): 22 April 2019

Homosociality and all of its troubles (and attractions) demand urgent interrogation in light of ongoing and developing understandings of masculinity. More frequently than not, the acts, relations, and performances of male bonding function to reify patriarchal power, shoring up formal and informal regimes of control and domination. We see many sites that demand intervention including the formation and amplification of highly destructive forms of racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic in-grouping, the very structures that support, protect, and encourage abuse by individuals in positions of power and fame, as well as broader concerns of ‘toxic masculinity.’ At the same time and not entirely disentangled from problems of homosociality, there may be forms of masculine bonding that hold strong attractions in contemporary culture, with male intimacy and allyship suggested as a correctives to patriarchal competition, isolation, and exclusion.

Male (Un)Bonding is a three-day workshop and networking event bringing together a group for researchers working on the study of contemporary and historical masculinities from multiple disciplines and scholarly backgrounds to consider the urgent question of the relationality of masculinities. How might we build on the foundational work on the topic to further theorize masculinity beyond identity and to think through the homosocial relations that produce and resist reactionary positions? How might destructive forms of masculinity be interrogated and dismantled at formative sites of masculine performance? Can we identify forms of homosocial interrelations in and beyond cis/trans and hetero/homosexual spectrums and binaries, and how might these forms model new ways of being together and social configurations?

Over the course of three days, researchers will take part in round-table discussions, project and funding workshops with experienced grant writers, and other activities, as well as having sustained and focused time to work on a piece of writing. The event will conclude with a half-day symposium of work-in-progress. Those who are beginning, developing, or in the midst of researching manuscript-length or other large-scale projects are particularly encouraged to apply as are those who have recently completed such work. The workshop organizers seek to include a diversity of disciplines ranging from the arts and humanities to the the social sciences to STEM and encompassing literary, qualitative, quantitative, and artistic methodologies. Selected participants will be offered £300 (GBP) towards their travel and accommodation costs, and all meals over the course of three days will be provided.

Dr. Broderick Chow (Arts and Humanities, Brunel University London) and Dr. Eero Laine (Theatre and Dance, University at Buffalo, State University of New York) will lead and facilitate the workshop, which will also launch their new collaborative research project, Bros: Obvious Masculinity and Homosocial Performance.

Male (Un)Bonding is funded by Brunel University London’s Global Lives Research Centre.

Calls for Expressions of Interest

In order to apply, please submit an expression of interest letter of no more than two pages along with a current CV. In the letter, please note your current and future research interests and how these intersect with the theme of the workshop; what disciplinary expertise you might bring to the study of masculinities and relationality; and what potential interdisciplinary connections you might wish to make.

Please send EOIs to Workshop Leaders at broderick.chow@brunel.ac.uk and eerolain@buffalo.edu by Monday, 22 April 2019. All applicants will be informed by 3 May 2019.

(posted 30 March 2019)

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Pilgrimages and Tourism
Cambridge, UK, 15-16 June, 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 February 2019

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Pilgrimages are ancient practices of humankind and are associated with a great variety of religious, spiritual and secular traditions. In today’s world the number of visits to sacred sites such as Santiago de Compostela (Spain), La Virgen de Guadalupe (Mexico), Matka Boska Czetochowska (Poland), secular places  such as Graceland, home of Elvis Presley, Eifel Tower in Paris, Hiroshima Peace Museum and virtual pilgrimages, facilitated by video and satellite links is growing. With them, tourism both individual and in groups has been steadily increasing and changing.

This conference seeks to explore, analyse and discuss the complex concepts of pilgrimages and tourism. What is a pilgrimage? Do pilgrimages contribute to the sense of community and belonging? Is tourism a transformative experience?  How do souvenirs, memorabilia and travelogues facilitate imagination of other people and places?

Conference presentations will be related, but not limited, to:

• History of pilgrimages and tourism
• Geography of pilgrimage and tourism
• Pilgrimages, tourism and religion
• Pilgrimages and theology
• Pilgrimages, tourism and philosophy
• Pilgrimages, tourism and literature
• Pilgrimages, tourism and media
• Pilgrimages, tourism and art
• Pilgrimages, tourism and economy
• Pilgrimages, tourism and politics
• Pilgrimages, tourism and culture
• Teaching tourism and pilgrimages

The conference will bring together scholars from different fields including philosophy, religion, theology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, art, economy, geography, cultural studies, political studies and others.

Submissions may propose various formats, including:
*Individually submitted papers (organised into panels by committee)
* Panels (3-4 individual papers)
* Roundtable discussions (led by one of the presenters)
* Posters

Proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 February, 2019 to: tourism@lcir.co.uk

Download Paper proposal form.

Selected papers will be published in the post-conference volume.

Standard registration fee – 220 GBP
Student registration fee – 180 GBP

Conference venue:
Lucy Cavendish College – University of Cambridge
Lady Margaret Road, Cambridge CB3 OBU, UK

(posted 23 October 2019)

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Short Forms and Adolescence
University of Angers, France, 19-21 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2019

Organizers: Karima Thomas and François Hugonnier

Guest speaker: Michael Cart (USA). Michael Cart is a writer, lecturer, consultant, and an expert in Young Adult literature. In 2008, he became the first recipient of the YALSA/Greenwood Publishing Group Service to Young Adults Achievement Award, and in 2000, he received the Grolier Foundation Award for his contribution to the stimulation and guidance of reading by young people.

The concept of adolescence, which emerged in a 19th-century occidental context, has evolved towards the birth of “the teenage group as a specific age in life” (C. Cannard, 2012). Several research projects have dealt with the cultural landscape of adolescents (a broader term than “teenager”, both of which are worth exploring), yet the specific articulations of adolescence and short forms have mostly remained uncharted. Moreover, while academic research on short forms and childhood has been carried out, these forms have rarely been addressed in the context of young adulthood.From the vantage point of various fields, including literature, visual arts, history, sociology and psychology, adolescents will be envisioned not only as consumers, producers and innovators of short forms, but also as objects of representation in a large corpus.
The conference sets out to explore whether specific links bind adolescence to short forms. Because of their density, especially by use of intersemiotic references, short forms echo the double constraint of the spoken and the unspoken that defines the in-betweenness of adolescence. The semantic and poetic compactness typical of the short form’s economy resonates with the questioning of adolescents seeking cognitive and emotional resources that provide both challenges and comfort. Finally, the short form is a laboratory for astounding experiments which potentially meet the creative needs of adolescents.

Abstracts may address the following aspects, among others:

1. The poetics of the short form

• Short forms in the adolescent group, both new and old (as some manifestations can be traced back to the Middle Ages).
• Graffiti, traces on walls, inscriptions in penitentiaries, stand-up, happenings, rap, hip-hop, slam, slogans (May 1968), one-line poems, beat poetry.- Rock songs, poems and other counter-culture outputs aimed at a specific teenage audience since the 1950s.
• Short story collections and cycles aimed at ─ or featuring as protagonists ─ teenagers (Joyce Carol Oats, Small Avalanches; Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women; James Joyce’s Dubliners; Rudyard Kipling, Mowgli Stories; John Steinbeck, The Red Pony, Nadine Gordimer, Jump).
• Literary classics (Poe, Dickens, Shelley, Shakespeare, Wilde, Brontë) adapted for a teenage audience (Sarah K. Herz & Donald R. Gallo, From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges Between Young Adult Literature and The Classics, 2005).
• Multimodal outputs and adaptations (films, series, comics).
  – The advent of new technologies (hyperliterature, blogs, tweets, etc.).

2. Reception/production of short forms by teenagers

• Social networks and fan fiction, chronicles.
• Collaborative reception/production practices on the internet.
• The blurring of the frontier between reception and production by adolescents (see Convergence Culture. Where old and New Media Collide, 2006).
• Self-publication of literary short forms on line, self-production and diffusion of short films and songs, user-friendly tutorials enabling fast access to video games.
• The pedagogical and didactic use of short forms in teaching, especially languages: traditional short forms (morceaux choisis) as well as contemporary ones.

3. Some thematic aspects

• Identity construction: identity might be assessed based on narrative, graphic, musical or theatrical productions. Among its dominant manifestations are traces of the quest for identity (inscriptions on a wall, journal, names and nicknames, pseudos, signatures by rappers, youtubers, graffiti artists).
• Metamorphosis and mutation: the physical, psychological and moral changes of adolescents are recurrent themes in literature and the arts. These changes include phases of initiation, transformation and coming of age (Margaret Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples); the development of sexual, ethnic and political awareness (Sherwood Anderson’s I Want to Know Why; the TV series 13 Reasons Why); issues of integration/exclusion and marginality; the questioning of authority (Roberta S. Trite, Disturbing the Universe. Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, 2012).
• Trauma: the expression and representation of trauma might be studied through various angles: psychological, historical, sociological, literary and artistic.

Authors from diverse backgrounds are invited to submit 300-word abstracts (in English or French) and brief 50-word biographies to Karima Thomas (karima.thomas@univ-angers.fr) and François Hugonnier (francois.hugonnier@univ-angers.fr) by January 31, 2019.

Scientific committee : Elke d’Hoker (University of Leuven), Emily Eells (University of Paris-Nanterre), Margo Lanagan (Australian author), Simonetta Valenti (University of Parma), Martine Hennard Duteil de La Rochère (University of Lausanne), Shannon Wells-Lassagne (University of Bourgogne), Cécile Meynard (University of Angers), Manuelle Peloille (University of Angers), Raúl Caplán (University Grenoble-Alpes), Emmanuel Vernadakis (University of Angers), Anne-Laure Fortin-Tournès (University of Le Mans), Eric Pierre (University of Angers), Aubeline Vinay (University of Angers)

The full programme of the Conference can now be downloaded.

(posted 27 October 2018, updated 24 May 2019))

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Mass Communication in the Context of Contemporary Forms of Propaganda: “Fake news”, “Alternative facts” and post-truth
Baia Mare, Romania, 20-23 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 February 2019

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, North University Centre of Baia Mare, Romani and Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue, Canada invite you to take part in the 4th International Conference of Cultural Studies “Multiculturalism and the Need for Recognition”

The present call for communications intends to encourage the participation of different researchers from different fields (linguistics, philology, discourse analysis, cultural studies, social work, sociology, philosophy, psychology, education, politics, etc.) to reflect upon the value of information in our globalised societies. When it comes to “fake news”, “alternative facts” and post-truth, we should first and foremost understand, analyze and ask questions about these means of mass communication, in what ways they contribute to the general confusion we are constantly facing. At the same time, we should see how and why they keep on spreading, what they are talking about, and who they are addressed to. As successful fictions, their goal can be ideological, political, technical, scientific or even community oriented. One should look at and analyze them critically, as well as develop a research direction to construct meaning and literacy.

Fake or inaccurate statements, junk news, and lies are used to misinform people through conventional mass media, digital platforms and social networks. Their huge number signifies an excessive amount of information which is sometimes ignored by some of our citizens (immune to it). Brocas and Marcineau[1] underline the fact that at the beginning of Donald Trump’s mandate, the American press finally began to count the 2000 so-called fake news, 40 a week. However, that did not come as a surprise. Biased fake news, renewed and amplified, usually leads to a crisis of confidence towards politicians and institutions. Alternative facts reassure convictions , bring opponents into disrepute, question truthfulness and shock the individuals that notice fraud. The result of this is a lack of legitimacy in mass communication which develops into a complete lack of trust.

Are we naive to believe that truth means more than a simple opinion when we accept that advertisements might be presented as both acceptable and agreeable lies? Should we tolerate biased and hypocritical editorial decisions even though they are opposed to and denounced by some of our citizens? On the other hand, according to Venturini[2], the more denounced the news is, the faster it spreads and becomes viral, thus amplifying the problems of false public communication. So, should we rather talk about the “pollution” of public debate? The author mentioned above believes that virality, rather than falsity, should be the “signature of fake news”. Most people love to talk without reasoning as to whether the facts presented are “true” or “false”. Shall we thus take these simulacra of communication for granted, as “alternative facts”?

Nowadays, we are wondering whether the truthfulness or falsity of facts should be situated on a second position in relation to the very context people live in and which, nevertheless, has direct consequences on their feelings, hard feelings, emotions and experiences. Is this shaping of reality less pertinent than the difficulty of experiencing the everyday life in which all differences are exacerbated and the reference points have vanished? Does this confusion support and justify the right or left identity obsession which seems to prevail as traces of credibility? Is this a civic conscience crisis or the citizens’ desperate outcry in response to the uprooting of a world that is brutally transforming despite their will? Or, maybe both of them?

Thus, while being subjected to “fake news” and “alternative facts”, most of us have no alternative but to accept them. What logic would support the adherence to this type of public message, especially when this is obviously absurd or hilarious? What type of communicator chooses to insert this kind of message in the construction of his/her social vision thus deceiving all the other members of society, beyond any dignity or personal integrity? Why does one’s own ideological, political or scientific narrative have that cohesive vector which represents the answer to most of the citizens’ expectations and uneasiness? It is exactly our capacity to reflect and judge that is at stake here. Is this actually diminishing now? The creation of parallel truths founded on “fake news” and “alternative facts” casts a dim light on the truthfulness of facts and our democratic experience. In 2004, the American writer Ralph Keyes[3] invented the term post-truth to describe a media related situation in which people are more likely to accept an argument based on their emotions and beliefs, rather than one based on facts. Can we thus speak of an alternative media system?

Does this type of communication apply to our naivety, our ignorance or our dreams about a world ready to address all our needs? We no longer check who says what and the legitimacy of the source. In addition to this, the overwhelming amount of information and escalating sources make this task a very difficult one. Ellul[4] identifies the psychological need of the isolated, alone individual, lacking in resources, to get effects and repercussions in his/her own life. According to this author, this person lives immersed in the technological context of mass society, being trapped in a vicious circle: the more false satisfactions he is offered for his false needs, the more isolated, alone and resource-less he becomes, relying on the media to get those surrogates that comfort him.

But what are the causes of this world crisis of communication? How did we get to the present context of public communication?

***

The abstracts are to be sent no later than February 15, 2019. They will not exceed 4000 characters (including spaces and the title). They should be written in Romanian, French or English and sent to the following address: ligiatomoiaga@gmail.com, anamariafelecan@gmail.com.

The abstracts will be anonymously assessed by the scientific committee of the conference and they should be accompanied by a short bibliography of the author. The evaluation criteria are the following:

• Pertinence to the general topic and objectives of the conference;
• Explicitness of the research context or practice;
• Explicitness of the theoretical and methodological bases that endorse the research or field experience.

The papers will be grouped according to their topic so as to be presented in different workshops. The presentations won’t exceed 20 minutes, being followed by 10 minutes of discussions.
For additional information do not hesitate to contact us (see the above mentioned e-mail addresses).
The participants will be notified of their proposal’s acceptance/rejection towards the beginning of March, 2019.

The participants will be offered the possibility to visit the historical county of Maramures, a region in the Northern part of Transylvania which still preserves its traditions and the unspoiled beauty of nature.

[1] Brocas, A. and Marcineau A. (2018, november). Infox, mensonges et vidéos. La vérité est ailleurs. Les menteurs (p 30-33).
[2] Venturini, T. (2018). Sur l’étude des sujets populaires ou les confessions d’un spécialiste des fausses nouvelles. Dans Sauvageau F. et al (dir.), Les fausses nouvelles : nouveaux visages, nouveaux défis, p.23. Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval.
[3] According to the Oxford dictionary, cited by La Presse. http://www.lapresse.ca/international/201611/16/01-5041850-post-verite-le-mot-de-lannee-selon-le-dictionnaire-oxford.php
[4] Ellul, J. (1967). Histoire de la propagande. Paris : PUF.

(posted 4 February 2019)

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The Place of Memory and Memory of Place
St Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK, 22-23 June 2019
Deadline: 1 February 2019

International confeence organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Memory is a major theme in contemporary life, a key to personal, social and cultural identity. Scholars have studied the concept from different perspectives and within different disciplines: philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, architecture, urban design, and the interdisciplinary “place studies”. According to Pierre Nora, places of memory or lieux de mémoire refer to those places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself”; the places where the exhausted capital of collective memory condenses and is expressed. To be considered as such, these sites must be definable in the three senses of the word: material, symbolical and functional, all in different degrees but always present. What makes them a memory site is the interplay of memory and history, the interaction of both factors, which allows their reciprocal over-determination.

“The Place of Memory and Memory of Place” International Conference aims to spark new conversations across the field of memory and place studies. Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• monuments and sites of trauma
• childhood homes
• city space and sightseeing
• burial places (graves, cementaries, necropoleis)
• ruins and forgotten places
• heterotopias and heterochronies
• toponymy and topoanalysis
• cartography and mapmaking

The conference will bring together scholars from different fields including philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, literature, linguistics, architecture, geography and others.

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 1 February, 2019 to: memory@lcir.co.uk.
Download paper proposal form.
Standard registration fee – 220 GBP     Student registration fee – 180 GBP
http://memory.lcir.co.uk/

(posted 1 October 2018)

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Powerful Literary Fiction Texts: a Stylistic, Empirical and Performance-based Approach
Brighton, UK, 19-21 June 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 20 January 2019

Not only poetry, but also works of fiction include pieces of writing that are prone to provide both emotional and cognitive pleasure because they are made of “language at its most distilled and most powerful” (Rita Dove). Yet these passages too often escape an analysis that combines reading aloud, close reading and a study of the text’s potential effects on readers. This international conference series invites contributors to select and explore prose extracts through such a mixed approach. Any kind of literary fiction may be considered, irrespective of subgenre, literary tradition, or intended audience.

Each excerpt – be it a set of phrases or sentences, a paragraph or a longer extract – will be examined as a textual composition likely to elicit specific responses on the reader’s part. How does the text capture the reader’s attention or interest? How does it provide aesthetic appeal and trigger powerful positive, negative or mixed emotions? In other words, how do specific stylistic features shape reader’s responses?

The compelling effect and pleasure such pieces of text provide are usually due to:

• The relationship between the part and the whole: the way the selected excerpt articulates with the rest of the narrative it is taken from, its specific function and purport within the respective work of fiction.
• The chosen piece of text itself: although the powerful effect produced in a reader is partly due to his or her subjectivity, we assume it also results from the way the author’s language organises and conveys the cognitive realities of real or fictitious experience.

The presentation format thus involves four successive stages:

1. A brief introductory presentation of the chosen piece of writing and its relationship to the rest of the work.
2. The reading aloud of the extract, so that it can be experienced by the audience as ‘living’ material embodied through human voice.
3. A close reading aiming to discover the text’s mechanisms. If all linguistic choices are potentially meaningful (Leech & Short 2007: 27), which are the ‘powerful’ ones, responsible for the audience’s reactions? Tools pertaining to the field of literary linguistics may be helpful to identify the effectual stylistic features: lexical choices and coinages; syntactic choices, including tense and aspect; figures of speech and other stylistic devices, such as ellipses, rhythm, sounds, et cetera.
4. The explicit highlighting of the hypothesised connection between the identified linguistic features and the effects they have on readers.

Contributors are especially welcome to present empirical research on reader perception of specific textual phenomena or stylistic features, but testable hypotheses are also suitable.

This conference has been conceived as a convivial event, aiming to foster interaction between attendees: there will be only one talk at a time and lunches will be provided, as well as an opening reception on the first evening of the conference.

Submission guidelines
Presentation time for each paper will be 20-25 minutes, followed by a 5-10 minutes discussion.
Please submit a short bio (not longer than 50 words) including your name and institutional affiliation, and a completely anonymised file consisting of the abstract (up to 300 words, excluding references; unpublished work) and the literary excerpt(s) under study.
If the selected excerpts are not in English, we kindly ask contributors to base their presentation on an English translation (preferably a professional one) that allows following the argument of the paper.
Please send the two files to the following e-mail address: plit.conference@gmail.com
The deadline for submission is 20^th January 2019 (new extended deadline)

Keynote speakers

• Nigel McLoughlin, Professor at the University of Gloucestershire, Northern Irish poet and editor.
• Michael Toolan, Professor at the University of Birmingham, chair of the Poetics and Linguistics Association (PALA) and editor.

Organisersl

• Mariane Utudji, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 (France)
• Victoria Pöhls, Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (Frankfurt, Germany)
• Dr Craig Jordan-Baker, University of Brighton (United Kingdom)

(posted 27 October 2018, updated 29 December 2018)

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Anticipation in Consecutive and Simultaneous Cognitive Tasks
Košice, Slovakia, 20- 22 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2019

Conference organized by

• the Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts,
• Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia and the Slovak Association for the Study of English, Linguistics, Languages and Speech Research Unit 1339 (LILPA) of University of Strasbourg (France)
• the Chair of French Culture and Language of University of Opole (Poland)

Deadlines:

• Submission of abstracts: 15 March 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 29 March 2019
• Registration begins on 30 March 2019

Registration fees:

• Standard registration fee to be paid before 30 April 2019: 100 EUR
• Registration fee for PhD students and accompanying persons to be paid before 30 April 2019: 50 EUR
• Registration of MA and BA students: free of charge

Authors of presented papers will be invited to extend their papers for publication in electronic or print format with ISBN.

This international and transdisciplinary conference is a follow up of two transdisciplinary meetings held in Strasbourg on the theme of anticipation, consecutivity and simultaneity. The first one, “Anticipation”, was organized in 2000 and the second one, “Consecutivity and Simultaneity in Linguistics, Languages and Speech”, in 2015. It is intended to bring together researchers from various disciplines of cognitive sciences, theory of translation and interpretation, linguistic sciences, including didactics of languages, robotics, biology, neurophysiology, psychology, psychomotricity, philosophy, history (this list not being exhaustive). It will explore various aspects of anticipation as a universal feature of perception-based mental activity making use of various anticipatory strategies enabling to recognize the correct trajectory sense /responsive reaction.

Thematic strands:

• Consecutivity and simultaneity in cognition/phenomenology as a task-based process
• Anticipatory phenomena, such as protention, co-production, synchronisation, anaphora and cataphora, etc.
• Production-based versus process-based approaches to anticipation
• Multi-level redundancy (co-occurrence of anticipation prompts) and probability of anticipation of the correct trajectory sense
• Anticipation in interpretation (simultaneous and consecutive)
• Anticipation in translation
• Anticipation in language didactics

Keynote speakers:

• Univ.-Prof. Dr. Pius ten Hacken, Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck, Austria: How productivity facilitates anticipation
• Dr. Ing. Stanislav Ondáš, Technical University of Košice, Slovak Republic: Human-machine spoken interaction and linguistics
• Professor Bernard Harmegnies and Professor Myriam Piccaluga, University of MONS, Belgium: Title of talk: forthcoming
• Assoc. Prof. Dr. Renáta Gregová, P. J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovak Republic: Anticipation, Simultaneity/Consecutivity and Distinctive Features in Phonology

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers relating to the Conference’s main topic and its thematic strands as outlined above. Submissions will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Abstracts of papers (2 pages max.) clearly defining the topic and the objectives pursued in the paper should be submitted by e-mail as WORD attachments to: anticipation.conference.kaa@gmail.com by 15 March 2019.

Conference website: http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk

(posted 1 March 2019)

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Place and Placelessness: The 15th International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference
Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, France, 25-29 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 January 2019

“…A hired limousine drove us to Toulouse, careening around the grey block
of Carcassonne and through the long unpopulated planes of the Cote d’Argent.
The Hotel Tivollier, though ornate, had fallen into disuse…”
Zelda Fitzgerald, “Show Mr. and Mrs. F—to Number—”

When studying sites in France where F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald resided, the southwest of France is often left out in favor of more renowned locales like Paris, Lyon, and the Riviera. Only a few biographers mention their stay in Salies de Béarn, a spa resort in the Pyrenees, in January 1926. According to Zelda, their hotel room was “flush with thin sun rolled down from the Pyrenees,” but both were bored and, after a few weeks there where Zelda took a cure for colitis and Scott wrote two short stories and an essay, they moved on to the Riviera, passing through Toulouse and Carcassonne on the way.

Considering the more peripheral role held by this region in Scott’s and Zelda’s lives and writings, the theme for the conference is “PLACE AND PLACELESSNESS.” As Fitzgerald wrote in the 1930 story “One Trip Abroad,” “Every place is the same…. The only thing that matters is who’s there…. The place itself really never matters.” The topic and quote remind us that the Fitzgeralds never owned a place of their own and conjure up the distinctive motifs of expatriation and exile, moorings vs. wanderings, rootedness vs. aimlessness, location vs. dislocation. Since place can be considered as space invested with personal or collective meaning, its referent is paradoxically bound to be subjective and volatile. The conference theme is also an invitation to explore the role of in-between places in the Fitzgeralds’ works, especially fixed places of transit like hotels, bars, harbors, airports, clinics, as well as mobile spaces like taxis, cars, liners or planes.

This 2019 conference will also be an opportunity to focus on I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories, a collection of texts that were never published in Fitzgerald’s lifetime nor in later posthumous collections, but which must now find their place within the Fitzgerald canon. France’s long-lasting interest in Fitzgerald’s works led to the quasi-immediate release of a translation of this volume (Je me tuerais pour vous et autres nouvelles inédites, translated by Marc Amfreville. Paris: Bernard Grasset/Fayard, 2017). Because translation is by definition an experience of displacement, often leaving the translator hovering between several texts, alert to the difficulty to pinpoint meaning, the papers focusing on the translation of the Fitzgeralds’ works in various languages will be welcome.

The above suggestions are neither exhaustive as regards the conference theme nor exclusive, as proposals on all aspects of the Fitzgeralds’ lives and works will be considered. As always, we welcome papers on The Great Gatsby (1925) and other classics, but we are also interested in Fitzgerald’s overlooked expatriate stories, such as “Not in the Guidebook” (1924), as well as comparisons/contrasts to other expatriate writers who depicted the Pyrenees.

Our keynote speakers will be Marc Amfreville (Professor at Sorbonne-Université) and Véronique Beghain (Professor at Université Bordeaux Montaigne).

Please send your 250-500 word proposal (noting any audio/visual requests) along with a brief C.V. or biographical statement to our official conference email, fitzgeraldintoulouse@gmail.com. THE DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS IS JANUARY 1, 2019. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by February 1, 2019.

The conference director is Pascal Bardet (Jean Jaurès University, Toulouse), while co-program chairs are Elisabeth Bouzonviller (Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Etienne) and Marie-Agnès Gay (Université Jean Moulin – Lyon 3).

PLEASE NOTE: Interested attendees have an option to gather in Paris on June 23 for a special “Babylon Revisited” /Tender Is the Night walking tour.

For more information, please visit www.fscottfitzgeraldsociety.org (which will include a link to the new website by mid-November).

 (posted 9 November 2018)

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6th International Symposium on History of English Lexicography and Lexicology (HEL-LEX.6)
University of Milan, Italy, 26-29 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 17 February 2019

Venue : Palazzo Feltrinelli, the University of Milan’s conference centre in Gargnano on Lake Garda, Italy

Organized by the Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere of the University of Milan in association with the Helsinki Society for Historical Lexicography, the Symposium will focus, as its monograph strand, on the history of English specialized lexicography (i.e., scientific and technical glossaries and dictionaries, pronouncing dictionaries, dictionary of phraseology, slang and cant dictionaries, etc.), but it will also deal with any topic related to the history of English lexicography, historical semantics and lexicology.
A number of first-class experts in the field – among them, Michael Adams, John Considine, Sarah Ogilvie, and Rod McConchie – will contribute to the Symposium programme. A collection of selected papers will be published: please note that a call for submission will allow only about four months after the Symposium to revise and complete papers for publication.
The programme committee invites submissions of one-page abstracts that should be emailed as an attachment (docx or rtf formats) to giovanni.iamartino@unimi.it and hel-lex.6@unimi.it by 17 February 2019. Please, be sure to include your professional affiliation, address, phone number, and email address.
Information on registration, local arrangements and conference activities will soon be available at https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hellex-society.

(posted 25 January 2019)

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The Future of Education, 9th edition
Florence, Italy, 27-28 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 4 March 2019

The objective of the Future of Education Conference is to promote transnational cooperation and share good practice in the field of education. The Future of Education conference is also an excellent opportunity for the presentation of previous and current education projects and initiatives. The Call for Papers is addressed to teachers, researchers and experts in the field of education as well as to coordinators of teaching and training projects.

Experts in the field of education are therefore invited to submit an abstract of a paper to be presented in the conference.

Important dates:

• 4 March 2019: Deadline for submitting Abstracts
• 18 March 2019: Notification of Acceptance / Rejection for Abstracts
• 2 May 2018: Deadline for final submission of Papers
• 27 – 28 June 2018: Conference days

There will be three presentation modalities: oral, poster and virtual presentations.

All accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by Filodiritto Editore with ISBN and ISSN (2384-9509) codes. This publication will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in SCOPUS (https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus) and Thomson Reuters. Papers will also be included in ACADEMIA.EDU(https://www.academia.edu/) and Google Scholar.

For further information, please contact us at the following address: foe@pixel-online.net or visit the Future of Education conference website: http://conference.pixel-online.net/FOE/

(posted 19 November 2018)

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Recycling Woolf
Université de Lorraine, Nancy, France, 27-29 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2018

An international conference organised by IDEA, with the collaboration of : Institut des Textes et de Manuscrits Modernes, The Italian Virginia Woolf Society, Société d’Etudes Woolfiennes

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:
Prof. Brenda Silver (Dartmouth College, USA)
Jean-Pierre Criqui (Centre Pompidou, France)

Invited artists:
Kabe Wilson
Anne-James Chaton

Has Virginia Woolf become, just like Shakespeare, one of those literary icons that pervade popular culture, alongside Marilyn Monroe or Lady Di? Monographs such as Brenda Silver’s Virginia Woolf Icon or recent fictional productions such as Anne-James Chaton’s surprising novel Elle regarde passer les gens (adapted for the stage under the title Icônes) seem to suggest so.

Woolf’s transformation into an icon, object, and by-product leads us to acknowledge the shift in her status as a writer: she no longer embodies just a national writer, but transcends geographical borders and has become a figure from a little-known past that people imagine and reimagine without necessarily reading her works. In this process of iconisation, the authorial figure is recycled and begins new lives in new referential spaces, as it is appropriated by popular culture, marketed and commercialised. The contemporary biofictions that use the figure of Virginia Woolf and turn her into a character are a perfect example of this practice. Participants could start by discussing the notion of recycling an authorial figure, by defining and analysing its features, and establishing whether it is a culturally grounded notion, that is to say whether it varies according to the cultural environments in which it takes place. Participants could further point out the specificity of recycling the figure of Virginia Woolf, compared to other literary figures who have undergone the same process of iconisation, or, on the contrary, who have not been assimilated by popular culture.

The process of recycling an authorial figure not only alters his or her cultural status but inevitably impacts his or her oeuvre and the way we read it. On the one hand, it raises questions about how these transformations modify the reception of an author’s work. In what ways does such a revision of the status of the author imply a fresh rereading of his or her œuvre? On the other hand, it questions the manner in which an author’s oeuvre is appropriated. Does the notion of recycling apply to an author’s work just as it applies to authors themselves as cultural products? And if so, how is it different from rewriting, adaptation or transposition? Could we therefore apply the notion of recycling to Woolf’s oeuvre? And how does high culture react to the fact that Woolf is being recycled in today’s popular culture? Participants are invited to address the contemporary transformations of Woolf’s oeuvre within their specific epistemological contexts.

The notion of recycling is intrinsically linked to our contemporaneity, but also to Woolf’s practice in her own time of dealing with various discarded literary scraps. As a journalist and an essay writer, Woolf was interested in the “waste” of literature, in “minor” writers left out from the literary canon, or in “Bad Writers”, as the title of one of her essays attests. Could we thus envisage Woolf as a recycler?

Here are a few indicative potential approaches that could be considered:

• How can we theoretically define literary recycling? What gestures, logic, intertextual and hypertextual practices does the notion of recycling involve (as compared to rewriting, adaptation and transposition)? Does recycling cover forms of reusing and misusing that are typically contemporary? Is recycling only a cultural notion or could it also become a useful tool for critical theory? Is there a particularity to the recycling of Woolf’s oeuvre compared to that of other modernists or other iconic literary figures?
• How is Woolf’s oeuvre recycled on the stage and on the screen today? How is Woolf’s authorial figure resurrected, renewed, re-imagined, used or represented in biographies, biofictions and biopics? What are the cultural and literary stakes of recycling the figure of the author? How is the author’s oeuvre also transformed in the process of authorial recycling?
• Could recycling (of Woolf’s authorial figure and her oeuvre) result in creating cultural and media by-products? Does the process of transforming Woolf into a cultural icon involve perpetuating stereotypes or recycling her myth over and over in the contemporary imagination? From this perspective, is recycling a matter of popular culture or “cultural vulgarity”? In a globalised cultural context, is the Woolfian oeuvre and her authorial figure doomed to be recycled?
• What characterises and motivates Woolf’s gesture of recycling literary “waste” and authors rejected from the literary canon? How can this gesture allow critics to define, specify or displace the notion of literary recycling?
• Finally, the participants could approach the notion of recycling Woolf’s oeuvre from a genetic and editorial perspective and question the production and reproduction of her work. Do her preparatory notes and drafts also pertain to the logic of recycling? How does Woolf recycle her own avant-texte?  Why, when, and how do publishing houses, with their specific editorial policies and marketing strategies, decide to recycle outdated editions and reissue new editions of Woolf’s work? Are these initiatives guided by commercial impulses or sound scholarly initiatives, and do they reflect the readers’ needs?

Participants are free to generate and answer their own set of questions related to the notion of recycling and Woolf’s work.

Please submit 300-word proposals for 20-minute presentations to Monica Latham, Caroline Marie and Anne-Laure Rigeade at recycling.woolf2019@gmail.com
Proposals for panels are also welcome.
Deadline: November 30^th 2018.

 (posted 4 May 2018)

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The Postmillennial Sensibility in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media II
Košice, Slovakia, 27-29 June 2019
New deadline for proposals: 10 March 2019

Conference organized by the Department of British and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia and the Slovak Association for the Study of English

Deadlines:

• Submission of abstracts: 10 March 2019
• Notification of acceptance: 15 March 2019
• Registration begins on 16 March 2019

Registration fees:

• Standard registration fee to be paid before 30 April 2019: 100 EUR
• Registration fee for PhD students and accompanying persons to be paid before 30 April 2019: 50 EUR
• Registration of MA and BA students: free of charge

Authors of presented papers will be invited to extend their papers for publication in electronic format with ISBN.

CONFIRMED PLENARY SPEAKERS:

• Prof. Dr. María José Coperías Aguilar, University of Valencia: Cultural identity in the global press era
  SPAINWeb profile: http://uv.academia.edu/Mar%C3%ADaJos%C3%A9Coper%C3%ADasAguilar
• Prof. Dr. Robert L. Davis, University of Oregon, USA: Interculturality: New sensibilities in the representation of culture in language learning
  Web profile: https://rl.uoregon.edu/profile/rldavis/Prof
• Prof. Dr. María Losada Friend, University of Pablo de Olavide, Seville, SPAIN: Comparing literatures, comparing sensibilities: challenges and benefits for the XXIst century
  Web profile: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5132-3796 Prof.
• Prof. Dr. José Igor Prieto Arranz, University of the Balearic Islands, SPAIN: Bitch or martyr? The problematic portrayals of Anne Boleyn in 21st century British historical fiction
  Web profile: http://www.uib.eu/personal/ABTE5MTA4/

CONFERENCE CALL FOR PAPERS
The Postmillennial Sensibility in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures and Media I Conference 2017 in Košice addressed the recent developments in the field of cultural studies that had created a broader consensus about the emergence of a postmillennial sensibility. More than 50 scholars from across the world drew on ideas by Jeffrey T. Nealon (post-postmodernism), Gilles Lipovetsky (hypermodernity), Alan Kirby (digimodernism), Robert Samuels (automodernity), Nicolas Bourriaud (altermodern), Raoul Eshelman (performatism) and Vermeulen and Akker (metamodernism) to explore the end of postmodernism and its replacement by a new cultural paradigm. Inspired by this fruitful event, the second edition of the conference is planned for 2019. It aims to create an ideal forum for discussions of postmillennial theoretical approaches to literary and media texts and for addressing the main challenges of contemporary literary, media, communication and cultural studies in their changing contexts.

Thematic strands:

• Identity discourses in contemporary literature, culture and media
• Popular culture in the new millennium
• Gender identities in 21^st century literature, culture and media
• Cultural heritage and the postmillennial cultural paradigm
• Cultural aspects of food representation in literature, culture and media
• Modernist tendencies in postmillennial literatures
• Global vs. local in contemporary regional literatures
• New trends in postmillennial fiction: metamodernism, performatism, neo-romanticism, post-irony, neo-realism, meta-metafiction, etc.

We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers relating to the Conference’s main topic and its thematic strands as outlined above. Submissions will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis.

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION
Abstracts of papers (500 words max.) clearly defining the topic and the objectives pursued in the paper should be submitted by e-mail as WORD attachments to:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Soňa Šnircová (sona.snircova@upjs.sk) by 10 March 2019.

Conference website: http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk

(posted 10 September 2018, updated 1 March 2019)

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On Potentialities: 6th ASYRAS conference
Department of Philology, University of Cantabria, Santander, Spain, 27-29 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 December 2018

The Department of Philology at the University of Cantabria is pleased to host the 6th ASYRAS conference that will take place in Santander from 27-29 June 2019. The conference, with the title “On Potentialities” sets up a forum where early- career specialists in English Studies can present the results of their research. The Conference will be honoured with three plenary speakers: Jimena Escudero Pérez (University of Oviedo), Barbara Franchi (University of Kent), and Ignacio Palacios Martínez (University of Santiago). We will also offer workshops and informative sessions for conference participants. Our goal is to foster a scientific meeting for the exchange of current research from a variety of perspectives.

The Conference will be arranged in thematic sessions and will consist of 20- minute paper presentations followed by a 10-minute discussion. Proposals will undergo peer review by specialists in the different fields. We will consider proposals from any field related to Anglophone Studies organised around Agamben’s notion of “the potential”, defined in “On Potentiality” as “to be one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality; and only in this way do they become potential. They can be because they are in relation to their own non- Being. In potentiality, sensation is in relation to anesthesia, knowledge to ignorance, vision to darkness” (Agamben 1999: 182).

“The potential” will be approached in relation, but not limited to, the following areas:

• Acquisition and teaching of First, Second and Foreign Languages
• Bilingualism and multilingualism
• Comparative literature
• Contrastive and translation studies
• Corpus linguistics
• Critical Theory
• Cultural studies
• Diachronic and    synchronic    linguistic     studies    (phonetics,    phonology; morphosyntax; semantics; lexis; ..)
• Digital Humanities
• Disabilities Studies
• Ecocriticism and Animal Humanities
• Gender Studies, Feminism, LGBTQi Studies
• Postcolonial Literature
• Sociolinguistics

We encourage anybody interested in linguistic and literary studies to participate with or without a paper, fostering in this way a fruitful exchange of ideas.
Abstract Submission – New Deadline! 15 December 2018
Abstracts between 250 and 300 words should be submitted through this form
Participants will be notified by mid-January 2019.

Conference Fees

ASYRAS Members:

• Until 15 February 2019, Early Bird registration: 40 Euros
• Until 15 June 2019, Standard Registration: 60 Euros

Non-ASYRAS Members:

• Until 15 February, Early Bird registration: 60 Euros
• Until 15 June 2019, standard Registration: 80 Euros

Further information about the registration process will be available on the conference website.

Should you have any queries, please contact: infoasyras@gmail.com or check our webpage: http://asyras.org/6th-asyras-conference/

(posted 19 November 2018)

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Performativity: Pasts, Presents, and Futures – Second CIRQUE (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer – Inter-University Center for Queer Research) conference
Pisa, Italy, 28-30 June 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2019

From Gender Trouble onwards, performativity has proved to be a crucial theoretical tool for queer theories and practices. The deontologization of categories, and their unmasking as mere iterations of performances, is at the heart not only of queer’s long-standing and productive antinormative focus, but also of a number of recent theoretical proposals, which question the centrality of antinormativity in queer theory.

The purpose of the conference is to open up a space for a reflection on performativity from a variety of angles and perspectives, and with a variety of aims.

One important aspect are the several possible genealogies of the concept. The canonical Austin-Derrida-Butler lineage is but one of the possible pasts of performativity; alternative ones could include the sociological concepts of “role”, “career”, and “dramaturgy”; Harvey Sacks’s “doing ‘being ordinary’”; the inter- and trans-disciplinary centrality of intersubjectivity; and of course many more.

Another issue we hope will prove of interest to participants is the variety and multiplicity of present contexts in which references to performativity are, or could prove to be, useful, pertinent and enlightening, both theoretically and politically. We would like “performativity” to be understood, and to work, as a meta-topic bridging gaps and suggesting connections between and among a multiplicity of queer concerns and issues.

A (far from exhaustive) list of well-established queer theories/queer studies areas which could benefit from highlighting the performative components of their topics of interest could include:

• Queer Embodiments
• Animal Queer
• Neuroqueer and Neurodiversity
• The Queer Politics of Migration
• Queer Legal Theory
• Queer Economies
• Queer Pedagogy
• Queer Genealogies: History, Memory, Identities
• Queering Categories of Race
• Queer Crip
• Transnational and Cross-Cultural Queerness
• Queer Pornographies
• Queer Kinship
• Queer and Posthuman
• Queer Heterosexualities
• Queer and Mainstream Culture
• Queer Temporalities
• Queer Spatialities
• Queer and Post-Queer
• Queer Ethics
• Queer Performativity
• Queer Feminism(s)
• Queer Activisms
• Queer Anarchism(s)
• Queer Hermeneutics
• Queer Cinema
• Queer Media

Prospective participants should note that only papers with an explicit and clearly motivated focus on the performative components, implications, or perspectives of the above-mentioned issues will be considered for acceptance.

The third prong of our call concerns the possible role of performativity in shaping the future of queer theories and studies, both by suggesting new areas of inquiry and political action, and by transforming existing epistemologies and practices.

As well as an opportunity for global, multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary reflections on performativity, defined in the broadest and most inclusive terms, the conference aims to queer the very modalities through which knowledge and cultural practices are articulated, shared, discussed and validated, within and beyond the academic environment. We welcome intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches and invite proposals for papers, panels, round-table sessions, thematic workshops, performances and other queerings of formats. Participants interested in proposing non-conventional activities should spell out their requirements for space, time and equipment clearly in their submission.

All presenters will subsequently have the option to submit a revised version of their papers to Whatever, the peer-reviewed, open access, international online journal of CIRQUE (the first issue is available here : https://whatever.cirque.unipi.it/index.php/journal The relevant issue of Whatever will be published by Spring 2020.

If you are interested in participating, please send a 300-word abstract (for papers) or a 2-page outline for other activity formats (round-tables, workshops, performances…), together with a brief bio (including contact details) to cirque2019conference@gmail.com.

The working language of the conference will be English; however, one of the parallel sessions will accommodate participants who would rather present their work in Italian; if this is your preference, please submit your abstract in Italian.

The deadline for abstracts submission is January, 31, 2019. Participants will be notified of acceptance by February, 28, 2019.

The time allotted for individual papers in parallel sessions will be 30 minutes. Time slots for other activity formats will be negotiated with the participants who submit proposals for panels, round tables, workshops , or performances.

Conference registration will be E150 for tenured faculty, E75 for everyone else; this will include coffee breaks.

All food at the conference will be vegan, not only because of the sizable intersection between queer and animal rights theorists and activists, but because this policy makes it possible to provide for a number of dietary requirements in the most practical way. If you have additional food issues we should be considering, please contact us and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Pisa airport is an international air travel hub, with most European low-cost companies flying there in the spring and summer at least several times a week; the city is also easy to reach by train from all over Europe. Like all popular tourist destinations, Pisa offers a wealth of budget accommodation options, from hostels to rooms in private homes. Early reservations are essential.

(posted 7 December 2018)

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Bicentinaries: The Liberal Revolutions of 1820 and their Impact on Literary Culture
University of Minho, Braga, Portugal, 29-30 June 2020
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2019

Please note that the correct address for this cfp is: https://essenglish.org/cfp/conf2006/#1820

(posted 17 June 2019)