Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in September 2019

Secrets: 22nd International Colloquium of American Studies
Faculty of Arts, Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic, 12-14 September 2019
Extended deadline for proposals: 20 June 2019

Plenary speakers:
Philip McGowan (Queen’s University Belfast),
Brian Ward (Northumbria University)

Secrets in American Literature, Film, Media, History

  • The Importance of Keeping Secrets
  • Secrets, Secrecy and Transparency
  • Privacy and Secrets
  • Public and State Secrets in the Post-Truth Age
  • Secret Agencies and Secret Societies
  • Female and Male Secretaries
  • Secret Identities and Secret Agents
  • Secret Places and Spaces
  • Skeletons in the Closet
  • The Perils of Having Secrets

Extended deadline for paper proposals (300 words) and short professional bios of max. 150 words: June 29, 2019

Email: colloquium.olomouc@upol.cz
Web: http://colloquium2019.upol.cz/

Deadline for full papers: September 5, 2019

Selected papers will be published in the peer-reviewed academic journal the Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, published by Palacký University Press in Olomouc.

See https://moravianjournal.upol.cz/

Registration Fee:
CSAAS members: 30 EUR (early registration); 40 EUR (late registration)
Non-members: 50 EUR (early registration); 60 EUR (late registration)

Organizing committee:
Elizabeth Woock, Lukáš Merz, Kamila Večeřová
Scientific committee:
Michal Peprník (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic), Chair of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies
Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Prešov, Slovak Republic, Vice-Chair of the Czech and Slovak Association for American Studies
Marcel Arbeit (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic)
Josef Jařab (Palacký University Olomouc, Czech Republic)
Šárka Bubíková (University of Pardubice, Czech Republic)

Palacký University Olomouc is the second-oldest university in Czechia, educating scholars since the 16th century.  See https://www.upol.cz/en/
The city of Olomouc is also the place of one of the richest national heritage sites, second only to Prague.
Olomouc is easily accessible from all of the following airports by train, bus or car.
Prague: Vaclav Havel Airport, Czech Republic (270km) – 2,5 hours
Brno: Turany Airport, Czech Republic (80 km) – 1,5 hour
Ostrava: Leos Janacek Airport, Czech Republic (80 km) – 1,5 hour

(posted 11 June 2019)

Music and memory in anglophone literature
Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France, 19-20 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 March 2019

Organizers : Chantal Schütz, Claire Guéron

“That song tonight will not go from my mind” (Othello, 4.3.29) – when Shakespeare had Desdemona speak these words, he set up the scene for an involuntary musical recollection generated by a parallel situation. While the ars memoriaea pproach of the Renaissance, inspired by classical rhetoric, relied on carefully crafted visual mnemotechnics, memories set off by aural stimuli occur in a manner both fortuitous and unexpected. This is a situation that recurs again and again in literature, culminating in Proust’s elaboration of the “petite phrase de Vinteuil”, the musical strain that crystallizes memories of past ecstasy and pain. The symposium we are organizing will focus on the various modalities in which this sound-based recollection can be staged, across literary genres, cultures and periods. Our aim is to confront the different manners in which authors set up the involuntary re-emergence of past events or feelings as caused by a string of events or a specific configuration, but also the efforts that often backfire to recollect a forgotten tune or song. The canonic Proustian configuration is the reminiscence of past events linked to a melodic fragment or even to some snatches of text attached to it, thanks to a serendipitous hearing – many years after these events, that have long been forgotten. However this pattern has existed throughout the history of literature, and is even the self-referential topic of many songs.

In the light of the work of Oliver Sachs (Musicophilia, 2007), we would like to examine the relationship between musical reminiscences and artistic creation, especially in literary works, but also in film and other media. Take the famous sentence « Play it again, Sam », which has become the pop-cultural version of the words « play it, Sam » spoken on several occasions in the 1942 film Casablanca: it conjures up the “remembrance of things past” in the main characters’ love story, but also the cinematic tradition of using aural leitmotivs, often coupled with images or flash-back sequences supposed to reinforce the power of the recollection. However sometimes the deviation from this conventional pattern of signaling the return of an emotion or an experience, or even of a traumatic event, can, in turn, bring about a form of subversion, a jarring sound that would trouble the deceptive harmony of the past event, or on the contrary reveal its deeply traumatic dimension.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome from all disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • the role of music in the representation of nostalgia, of loss and trauma in anglophone literature.
  • the contrast between music and the visual arts in the triggering of memories as represented in literature. One example would be a comparison between the context of Desdemona’s song in Othello and that of the « miniatures » of Claudius and « Old Hamlet » inHamlet.
  • the use of songs or musical allusions as a narrative thread.
  • songs as an expression of collective memory in anglophone literature and film.
  • the way music makes it possible to plant a scene in viewers’ minds, both in film and stage productions.
  • the representation of music(al) history in anglophone literature.
  • the way a musical style can symbolize a historical moment or period ( jazz in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,ragtime E.L.Doctorow’s eponymous novel and Milos Forman’s 1981 film).
  • The suggestion of a musical style through writing, as in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

This symposium proposes a cross-disciplinary approach and hopes to bring together specialists of different domains connected to the anglophone sphere. All theoretical angles are welcome, including cognitive, historical, anthropological, musicological, semiotic, stylistic and psychoanalytic ones. 

Please email a 250-word abstract and short biography to Chantal Schütz (chantal.schutz@polytechnique.edu) and Claire Guéron (claire.gueron@u-bourgogne.fr ) 

Deadline: 30th March 2019
Notification will be sent before 1 May 2019.

Confirmed speakers and/or members of the scientific committe:
Sophie Aymes-Stokes (Université de Bourgogne), David Bousquet (Université de Bourgogne), Damien Colas (IREMUS – CNRS), Pierre Degott (UFR Arts, Lettres et Langues – Metz, Université de Lorraine), Emily Eells (Centre de Recherches Anglophones (CREA), Université Paris Nanterre), Claire Guéron (Université de Bourgogne), Pierre Iselin (Professeur émérite, université Paris-Sorbonne), Chantal Schütz (EA Prismes, Université Paris 3 / Ecole Polytechnique), Jean Szlamowicz (Université de Bourgogne), Pierre Iselin (Professeur émérite, université Paris-Sorbonne), Chantal Schütz (EA Prismes, Université Paris 3 / Ecole Polytechnique), Jean Szlamowicz (Université de Bourgogne).

(posted 15 February 2019)

Modern Mythologies Conference
Loughborough University, London Campus, UK, 19-21 September 2019
Deadline for submission: May 30, 2019

The Arts in the Public Sphere research group comprises academics working across a range of disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences, including literary studies, history, drama, linguistics, semiotics, fine art, graphics, and sociology. It aims to explore from an interdisciplinary perspective the historical and contemporary relation between the artist-as-producer to a variety of public spheres, to investigate how contemporary social groups understand matters of ‘public interest’, and to assess how the idea of the ‘common good’ is approached and represented in the arts, humanities, and the social sciences.

The conference has arisen in response to growing questions about the relationship between cultural mythologies and the Public Sphere. Some of the main issues to be investigated (but not limited to) include traditional and emerging theories of the public sphere, literature and drama as a public art, the politics and language of creativity, the public sphere as a form of narrative, the place and role of religion in a multicultural society, the role of the university in promoting cultural production, and technology’s role in promoting (or prohibiting) the ‘public good’. Participants drawn from a wide international constituency of academics and community partners will debate these questions as well as advise on possible strategies to help ensure the future of contemporary cultural practices that address how to keep the Public Sphere ‘public.’ Discussions will take place in a variety of formats, including panels, workshops, exhibitions, poster presentations, and Q&As.

The conference seeks to create ongoing networks of researchers, practitioners, and professionals in fields related to the question of modern mythologies and the Public Sphere. The conference will offer two opportunities for publication. Contributors may submit material for consideration to a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal CounterText : “Literature in the Pubic Sphere – Now” (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/count), and a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal Humanities on “The Public Place of Drama in Britain, 1968 to the Present Day” (http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/Drama).

We invite you to submit proposals for panels, workshops, or posters. We particularly welcome submissions from postgraduate students. 300 word proposals should be submitted simultaneously to the organizing chair, Professor Nigel Wood: n.p.wood@lboro.ac.uk and the conference administrator: Tina Harvey: aed.research@lboro.ac.uk on or before May 30, 2019. Suggestions for panels would be welcome and should be indicated before January 10, 2019.

This conference is supported by the Arts in the Public Sphere Research Group, Loughborough University (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/aed/staff-research/research-groups/artsinthepublicsphere/).

(posted 5 June 2018)

A Hundred Years, A Thousand Meanings: 5th SDAŠ Conference
Faculty of Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 19-21 September 2019
New extended deadline fo proposals: 25 March 2019

To mark the centennial jubilee of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, the Faculty of Arts and the Slovene Association for the Study of English are organizing an international conference. Entitled A Hundred Years, A Thousand Meanings, the 5th SDAŠ conference will take place from 19th to 21st September 2019 at the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana.

As the title suggests, the conference welcomes a critical discussion on the topics related to the development of anglophone studies over the last century, their place in the globalized societies of today, as well as the directions they may take in the future.

Proposals for papers are invited in the fields of literatures in English, linguistics, translation/interpreting, English language teaching, English for specific purposes, and cultural studies. Interdisciplinary research is strongly encouraged to convey as broad a range of insights as possible.

Plenary Speakers

We are honoured to confirm the following plenary speakers:

  • Michael Ashby, University College London, United Kingdom
  • Patricia Ashby, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
  • Lieven Buysee, KU Leuven, Belgium
  • Alberto Lázaro, University of Alcalá, Spain

Proposal Submission

You are welcome to submit a proposal for a 20-minute presentation addressing the above topics. Abstracts of between 200 and 300 words can be submitted using Easychair. The due date for the submission of abstracts is 25th February 2019. Authors will be notified about the acceptance of their proposal by 1st June 2019. A selection of (reworked and expanded) papers presented at the conference will be published in the academic journal ELOPE.

Conference fee

  • EUR 120: regular
  • EUR 60: student (please email a copy of student ID)
  • EUR 100: regular, SDAŠ members
  • EUR 50: student, SDAŠ members (please email a copy of student ID)
  • EUR 40: late registration fee (to be added to all registration fees after 15 July 2019)
  • EUR 50: single day registration (non-participating visitors only)
  • EUR 40: single day registration for members of the University of Ljubljana Alumni Clubs Association

Any enquiries can be addressed to sdas@ff.uni-lj.si.

(posted 14 January 2019, updated 9 March 2019)

31st Conference of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature (SELIM 31)
University of Valladolid, Spain, 19-21 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2019

The Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature, and the local Organising Committee, cordially invite members of the Society and all scholars interested in the field to send their contributions for its 31st International Conference, which will be held at the University of Valladolid, Spain, on 19-21 September 2019.

The organisers welcome individual paper proposals dealing with any aspect of

  • Old and Middle English language and literature
  • the medieval history the British Isles
  • the transmission of their cultural legacy
  • the theories and methods to address them.

The following plenary speakers have confirmed their participation in the conference

  • Prof Susan Irvine (University College London)
  • Prof Richard Sharpe (University of Oxford)
  • Prof María José López-Couso (U of Santiago de Compostela)
  • Prof Eva von Contzen (University of Freiburg)

Send your proposals via e-mail to selim31@uva.es, following the submisison guidelines at the conference website (https://sites.google.com/prod/view/selim31uva). The final deadline is Tuesday 30 April 2019.

For further information and updates, please visit our website or keep in touch through @SELIMconf2019.
Address your enquiries to the Conference Organising Committee at selim31@uva.es.
We truly look forward to welcoming you to Valladolid.
The Organising Committee of SELIM 31

(posted 22 January 2019)

Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies
University of Leeds, UK, Thursday 19th (15:00) – Saturday 21st September 2019 (17:00)
Deadline for proposals 31 May 2019

Hosted by the Workshop Theatre in the School of English at the University of Leeds, Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies is open to scholars and practitioners from any discipline.  This international, interdisciplinary conference on Harold Pinter offers a forum to celebrate the late writer, but also to consider new empirical findings and new ways of engaging with Pinter’s life and work. The lapse in time since Pinter’s death can enable a more critical engagement with a figure who has long been a fixture among the twentieth- and twenty-first-century artistic elite, not just in Britain but globally.

We welcome proposals for individual, 20-minute presentations concerned with any of Pinter’s varied professional roles and his work for and relationship to the broad range of media he worked in and engaged with. We invite all proposals to focus upon and respond creatively to the keywords in the conference title – Histories and Legacies – and offer the following list of possible topics:

  • Production genetics – the legacies that significant productions of Pinter’s plays leave for subsequent practitioners and approaches to Pinter’s work.
  • Pinter at the Pinter – how has the recent season of Pinter’s one-act plays contributed to the public perception of the artist or appreciation of individual works or collections of work?
  • Reputation – how has the construction of Pinter’s celebrity interfered or participated in the reception of his work?
  • Compositional strategies – how do the evident stages of composition of Pinter’s plays and screenplays expose his relationship with those texts as they are formulated?
  • Thoughts from the archive – what is there to learn of Pinter’s professional practice from the manuscripts and correspondence available in the Harold Pinter Archive at the British Library, and associated holdings elsewhere?
  • Exporting Pinter – the nature and impact of British productions of Pinter’s work abroad.
  • Pinter on the fringes – the prevalence of Pinter’s plays in amateur and student theatre.
  • Pinter and the Royal Shakespeare Company – the significance of Pinter’s association with the RSC in the 1960s, for the organisation and for his development as an artist.
  • Pinter at the National Theatre – the role of Pinter as Associate Director of the NT and his relationship with other artists and the institution.
  • #metoo and Pinter – has the representation of gender and gender conflict evolved in representations of Pinter’s work on stage?
  • Political praxis – the explicit and implicit contribution made by Pinter himself or by his work in national and international affairs.
  • Pinter and broadcasting – how the media of radio and TV helped to build the writer’s profile and impact in the UK and further afield.
  • Pinter in history and theory – how a focus on the writer’s work can reorient or challenge methodologies, analytical discourses or theoretical assumptions.

Please submit abstracts of 300 words max. and a biography of 100 words max. by 31 May 2019 to: engbaech@leeds.ac.uk (Include any special requirements you may have regarding access, space and equipment.)

Keynote speaker: Vivienne Jabri, Professor of International Politics, Kings College London
Special guest: Jamie Andrews, Head of Culture and Learning, British Library

  • In-conversation sessions with leading Pinter practitioners including Jamie Lloyd, Samuel West and Douglas Hodge. (Speakers’ appearance subject to scheduling.)
  • A practical workshop by Harry Burton.
  • A performance by Jeremy Goldstein: Truth to Power Café on 19 September.
  • The Harold Pinter: Histories and Legacies database launch on 21 September.

Registration for the conference will open in June. There will be reduced rates for PGR students and for those who attended previous conferences arranged by the Pinter: Histories and Legacies project. Also, a limited number of subsidised spaces have been made available at the University nursery for the Friday. Please contact us if you think you might wish to make use of this facility.

We look forward to seeing you in Leeds,

Conference Organisers and Hosts: Mark Taylor-Batty and Basil Chiasson

Supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Leeds

(posted 18 March 2019)

More than Meets the Ear: Sound & Short Fiction
University of Vienna, Austria, 19-21 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 June 2019

Sound is being celebrated as a source of insight in the humanities. Foregrounding the sense condemned to play second fiddle by Plato, scholars are tapping into sonic, auditive and aural phenomena and their technological reproduction, mapping practices of sound production, exploring soundscapes of different periods, compiling cultures and histories of hearing and listening. Some publications in this vibrant field focus on voice/s, others explore the theorisation, representation and political (re-) evaluation of noise/s or investigate how hearing may interact with vision, touch, taste and smell. Cultural theorists have been providing new concepts and (re-) conceptualizing old ones to facilitate critical takes on sound, the ear, auscultation and alternative forms of auditory perception, the invocatory drive, the vociferated object, the object voice, philosophies and practices of listening and acoustic territories. Volumes such as The Auditory Culture Reader (2003/2015),
The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (2012) and, most recently, The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018) testify to the continuing productivity of this field. Literary studies, too, have been making their contribution, analysing the representation of sound in texts as well as the sound of texts and contributing to the narratological vocabulary. Drama, poetry and the long narrative form have given rise to investigations of literary representation of sound on all levels, yet so far no study has been produced that focuses exclusively on short, short short, very short and flash fiction.
As a first step towards closing this gap, this ENSFR-affiliated conference invites contributors to turn their attention to sound & short fiction. Who knows? Someone might even put the ‘tweet’ in twitterature…. Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • musical, mechanical, digital, natural sounds, tones, notes
  • voice/s of human or nonhuman origin
  • noise/s, cacophony, pandemonium
  • noise pollution and the Anthropocene
  • harmony
  • vibration, resonance
  • auscultation, aural perception, bone conduction, neuroprosthetic hearing
  • sound as signal, warning, weapon
  • sound as enigma/riddle (delayed decoding)
  • acoustic spacesecho, whispering gallery, auditory hallucination
  • media of sound recording
  • media of sound reproduction
  • sound & subject formation
  • sound in psychoanalysis
  • sound & desire
  • sound & affect
  • sound & emotion
  • sound & knowledge production
  • rhymes (sound as syntax)
  • sound & imagination
  • absence of sound
  • sound in dream spheres
  • sounds of the future/modernity/postmodernity
  • sounds of the past/history
  • metaphysical sound (the voice/s of God/angels/ghosts/the dead/demons)
  • imaginary/fictional musical instruments
  • material marks of sound
  • sounds of peace & sounds of war
  • the social (class) life of sound
  • sounds at work
  • sounds & food
  • sounds of death/dying
  • sounds of leisure
  • the cultural (codes, conventions,…) life of sound
  • gendered sound
  • deafness/Deafness
  • muteness
  • silence/silences/silencing
  • tinnitus and other phantom sounds
  • listening/not listening
  • sound & the other senses
  • synaesthesia
  • visualisations of sound
  • sound and madness/sanity
  • mechanical/non-mechanical transmission of sound
  • poetics of sound
  • sound & narratology
  • sound & genre

Keynote: 19th Sep, 6 pm
Confirmed keynote speaker: Dr. Jorge Sacido Romero (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Conference fee: 50 Euros / 30 Euros for PhD students
Conference dinner (cost covered): 20th Sep
Those interested in contributing should send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers in English by the 15th June 2019 to Michela Borzaga (michela.borzaga@univie.ac.at) and Sylvia Mieszkowski (sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at), and include short bio bibliographical notes (approx. 100 words).
For practical and organisational information about MORE THAN MEETS THE EAR please check http://anglistik.univie.ac.at/more-than-meets-the-ear/
For further information about the European Network for Short Fiction Research see: http://ensfr.univ-angers.fr/
For inspirational reading:

Attali, Jacques, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis &London: U of Minnesota P, 2003 [1985].
Bijsterveld, Karin, Cleophas, Eefje, Krebs, Stefan, Mom, Gijs, Sound and Safe: a History of Listening behind the Wheel, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014.
Birdsall, Caroline, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space 1933-1945, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2012.
Bull, Michael and Back, Les (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford & New York: Berg Publishing, 2003, (2nd edition London & New York: Bloomsbury: 2015).
Cuddy-Keane, Melba, “Virginia Woolf, Sound Technologies and the New Aurality”, in: Canghie, Pamela L. (ed.), Virginia Woolf and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York & London: Garland Publishing, 2000, 69-96.
Cuddy-Keane, Melba, “Modernist Soundscapes and the Intelligent Ear: An Approach to Narrative Through Auditory Perception”, in: Phelon, James and Rabinowitz, Peter (eds.), A Companion to Narrative Theory, Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, 382-398.
Derrida, Jacques, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, Lincoln & London: U of Nebraska P, 1985 [1982].
Derrida, Jacques, Die Stimme und das Phänomen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2003 [1967].
Dolar, Mladen, A Voice and Nothing More, Cambridge/MA.: The MIT P, 2006.
Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, New York: Zone Books, 2010.
Felderer, Brigitte, Phonorama: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Stimme als Medium, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2004.
Folkerth, Wes, The Sound of Shakespeare, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.
Goodman, Steve, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge/MA: The MIT Press, 2010.
Hendy, David, Noise: A Human History of Listening and Sound, London: Profile Books, 2013
Ihde, Don, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, Albany: State U of New York P, 2007.
Kahn, Douglas, Noise – Water – Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge/MA: The MIT P, 1999.
Keizer, Garrett, The Unwanted Sound of Everything We Want: A Book about Noise, New York: Public Affairs, 2010.
Kolesch, Doris, Krämer, Sybille (eds.), Stimme: Annäherung an ein Phänomen, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2006.
Labelle, Brandon, Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, London & New Delhi & New York & Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2010.
Labelle, Brandon, Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance, London: Goldsmiths P, 2017.
Lacan, Jacques, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, Cambridge: polity, 2004.
Mieszkowski, Sylvia, Nieberle, Sigrid (eds.), Unlaute: Noise/Geräusch in Kultur, Medien und Wissenschaften seit 1900, Bielefeld: [transcript], 2017.
Mieszkowski, Sylvia, Resonant Alterities: Sound, Desire and Anxiety in Non-Realist Fiction, Bielefeld: [transcript], 2014.
Morris, Adelaide (ed.), Sound states: innovative poetics and acoustical technologies, Chapel Hill & London: U of North Carolina P, 1997.
Nancy, Jean-Luc, Listening, New York: Fordham UP, 2007 [2002].
O’Callaghan, Casey, Sounds: a Philosophical Theory, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007.
Ong, Walter, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World, London & New York: Routledge, 1990 [1982].
Picker, John M., Victorian Soundscapes, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.
Pinch, Trevor, Bijsterveld, Karin (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
Ross, Alex, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New York: Picador, 2007.
Sacido-Romero, Jorge, Mieszkowski, Sylvia (eds.), Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction, Leiden: Brill|Rodopi,
2015.
Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Rochester: Destiny Books,
1994 [1977].
Smith, Bruce R., The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor, U of Chicago P, 1999.
Smith, Mark M. (ed.), Hearing History: A Reader, Athens & London: The U of Georgia P, 2004.
Sterne, Jonathan, “Medicine’s Acoustic Culture: Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope and the ‘Autopsy’ of the
Living”, in: Bull/Back (eds.), The Auditory Culture Reader, Oxford & New York: Berg Publishing, 2003, 191-217.
Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, Durham & London: Duke UP, 2003.
Sterne, Jonathan (ed.), The Sound Studies Reader, London & New York: Routledge, 2012.
Stewart, Garrett, Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Berkeley & LA & Oxford: U of California P, 1990.
Straumann, Barbara, Female Performers in British and American Fiction, Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter, 2018.

(posted 20 May 2019)

3rd Student Conference of Anglophone Studies
University of Vienna, Austria, 26-27 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2019

The students’ union of the English Department of the University of Vienna is delighted to announce its third iteration of the Student Conference of Anglophone Studies which will take place from the 26 th to the 27 th of September 2019 at the department of English and American studies building in Vienna, Austria.
The conference’s aim is to provide a platform for students to present their topics and share their ideas and scientific approaches in a professional context and to engage in valuable discussions about various topics within Anglophone Studies with other students. We perceive Anglophone Studies as an interdisciplinary academic field studying the English language as well as literatures, cultures and media of English-speaking countries and therefore welcome any contributions from the areas of

  • English Linguistics
  • Anglophone Literary Studies
  • Anglophone Cultural and Media Studies

One conference day will be dedicated to each of those areas, the final schedule will be provided on the conference website https://scanglophonestudies.wordpress.com/
Application details:
For your application, please submit a PDF-file containing the following information in English:

    • (Preliminary) title of your presentation
    • Abstract (200-300 words)Research level/scope of your underlying research project (term paper/project, seminar paper, BA thesis, MA thesis, PhD thesis, personal research project)
    • Key references (which do not count towards the abstract’s word count)
    • Short biographical note

Your talk should be approx. 20 minutes long (10 minutes additionally for discussion) and should be given in English.
Please send an e-mail with your application in English to scanglophonestudies@gmail.com by May 31 st , 2019 . You will be informed by June 29 th , 2019 whether you have been selected to present your project at the conference. Please do not hesitate to get in contact if you have any further questions.
Conference details:
There will be no conference fee, our students’ conference can be attended by anyone free of charge.
Snacks and beverages will be provided during breaks. However, we cannot give any reimbursements on your travel or accommodation fees.

(posted 26 April 2019)

Shakespeare on Screen in the Digital Era: The Montpellier Congress
Montpellier, France, 26-28 September 2019
Deadline for Seminar and Panel proposals; 30 May 2019

Venue: Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, site Saint Charles, France

Conference coordinators: Sarah Hatchuel (GRIC, EA 4314, Université Le Havre Normandie) and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (IRCL, UMR5186, CNRS/ Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3)

Advisory board:
Sylvaine Bataille, Université de Rouen Normandie, France; Victoria Bladen, University of Queensland, Australia; Claire Cornillon, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, RIRRA21, France; Christy Desmet, University of Georgia, USA; José Ramón Díaz, University of Málaga, Spain; Patricia Dorval, IRCL, UMR5186, CNRS/Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France; Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia, USA; Pierre Kapitaniak, IRCL, UMR5186, CNRS/ Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France; Ronan Ludot-Vlasak, Université Lille 3, France

Plenary speakers:
Douglas Lanier, University of New Hampshire
Courtney Lehmann, University of the Pacific
Samuel Crowl, Ohio University;
Russell Jackson, University of Birmingham
Judith Buchanan, University of York
Poonam Trivedi, University of Delhi

120 years after the filming of King John by Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1899, which inscribed Shakespeare on celluloid for the first time; thirty years after the release of Kenneth Branagh’s Henry V(1989), which triggered the fin-de-siècle wave of screen adaptations; twenty years after the publication of Kenneth S. Rothwell’s seminal History of Shakespeare on Screen (CUP, 1999) and twenty years after The Centenary Shakespeare on Screen Conference organized by José Ramón Díaz at the University of Málaga in September 1999, which constituted “Shakespeare on Screen” scholars into an international academic community, time has come to gather together again to reflect on the evolutions of both our objects and methods of study.
The “Shakespeare on Screen in the Digital Era” International Conference invites scholars worldwide to explore the consequences of the digital revolution on the production, distribution, dissemination and study of Shakespeare on screen. Since the 1999 Málaga conference, the rise (and fall) of the DVD, the digitalization of sounds and images allowing us to experience and store films on our computers, the spreading of easy filming/editing tools, the live broadcasts of theatre performances in cinemas or on the Internet, the development of online video archives and social media, as well as the increasing globalisation of production and distribution (raising the question of technological availability worldwide), have changed the ways Shakespeare is (re)created, consumed, shared and examined. Shakespeare’s screen evanescence and his transfictional and transmediatic spectrality have blurred the boundaries between what Shakespeare is and is not, leading us to question our own position as scholars who keep spotting, constructing and projecting “Shakespeare” in audiovisual productions.
We invite seminar proposals (international pairs or trios of convenors are welcome) and panel proposals (featuring 3 short contributions) exploring the screen afterlives of Shakespeare’s works in the digital era all over the world, revisiting the Shakespearean “classics” as they have been re-released in various formats, examining how the technological and aesthetic issues intersect with questions of gender, class, ethnicity and ethics, and interrogating more theoretically what “is” and “is not” Shakespeare on screen. Seminar proposals (including a 400-word presentation and a short bio for each convenor) and panel proposals (including three 300-word abstracts and three short bios) should be sent by 30 May 2018 to Sarah Hatchuel (s_hatchuel@hotmail.com) and Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin (nathalie.vienne-guerrin@univ-montp3.fr)

(posted 26 January 2018)

Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE 2019)
University of Bamberg, Germany, 26-28 September 2019
Deadline for Proposals: 31 December 2018

https://www.uni-bamberg.de/en/eng-ling/biclce-2019/

We are pleased to announce that the 8th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE 2019) will be held from 26 to 28 September 2019 at the University of Bamberg, Germany.

The plenary speakers are:

  • Tony McEnery (Lancaster University)
  • Anne O’Keeffe (Mary Immaculate College, Limerick)
  • Carita Paradis (Lund University)
  • Javier Pérez-Guerra and Elena Seoane (University of Vigo)
  • Benedikt Szmrecsanyi (Catholic University of Leuven)

The aim of the BICLCE conference is to encourage communication and academic cross-fertilization between researchers working on all aspects of contemporary English and using different theoretical and methodological frameworks. BICLCE provides a platform for work on contemporary varieties of English from various perspectives. Research papers and workshops may address topics in syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics, semantics and pragmatics, discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, as well as phonetics and phonology. Purely historical work is less suitable at this conference, but papers that draw upon diachronic evidence to support studies of present-day English are very welcome.

We invite abstracts on every aspect of the linguistics of contemporary English for

1.     Full papers (20 minutes),
2.     Poster presentations,
3.     Thematic workshops (featuring up to 6 individual papers).

Please submit your proposals for presentations and posters via http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/biclce2019. The submission deadline is 31 December 2018.

For workshop proposals, please get in touch with the organizers directly (biclce2019.eng-ling@uni-bamberg.de). The submission deadline is 15 December 2018.

The BICLCE 2019 organizing team: Manfred Krug (Chair of English Linguistics), Jenny Herzky, Gabriele Knappe, Katrin Landwehr, Heinrich Ramisch, Katharina Scheiner, Julia Schlüter, Ole Schützler, Lukas Sönning, Fabian Vetter, Valentin Werner

(posted 22 September 2018)

At the Crossroads of Doubt: Anthropology and Anglophone Travel Writing (XIXth-XXIth Centuries)
Paris, France, 27-28 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 29 September 2019

Conference organied by Sorbonne Université (VALE, EA 4085) & Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne (UMR 7041 – ARSCAN)

Convened by Horatiu Burcea, Anne-Florence Quaireau, Haris Procopiou & Frédéric Regard

Confirmed Keynote Speaker:
Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University

The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehoods, it has been killed by Science.
Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 1922.

L’objet premier de l’anthropologie est la relation entre l’un et l’autre, les uns et les autres. Elle se situe au confluent des histoires, au lieu des crises, au carrefour des doutes : la matière concrète du social et de l’individuel.
Antoine Spire, Le Monde de L’Education, 288-298, 2001.

In the first pages of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski declares the coming of an era where distorted portraits of otherness will no longer be tolerated, an era in which infantile caricatures of foreign peoples will have become obsolete. This announcement was less a matter of self-promotion or positivism than a determination to create a break with armchair anthropology and, to some extent, with travel narratives; after having represented an idealized symbiosis between science and literature, and a pragmatic necessity for anthropologists in terms of sources of information, the latter had decidedly become insufficiently trustworthy. From now on, the anthropologist also had to travel in order to write if he/she wanted to establish any authority.

The purpose of this interdisciplinary and international conference is to examine the causes, the manifestations and the potential reversal of this historical break between anthropological sciences and travel narratives in the anglophone context, while debating the extent of the separation between these different types of discourse on otherness, and examining their continuous interactions and mutual influences. It will also more generally involve a discussion of these (non-exhaustive) questions:

  • Authority: the ways in which the author-traveler and/or the anthropologist asserts his/her ethos through codified discourses, inventories of facts, knowledge, scientific terms and references, or a “pact” with the reader along with rhetorical promises of veracity. In this respect, we will encourage comparisons between the means of affirming authorial authority and markers of scientific legitimacy and rigor; we may also look at the reinterpretations of the modesty topos in these contexts along with the concept of falsifiability. Finally, the mise-en-scène of the traveler and/or the scientist, especially through the theatricalization of contact with the Other, can be considered in terms of equality or universality, or on the contrary as an opportunity for asymmetrical comparison and antagonism;
  • Reliability: the veracity of these portrayals, their foundations and their (critical) methods of verification, as well as the reception and use of travelogues in terms of “data” by anthropologists and other scientists; special attention could be given to travel narratives about peoples and cultures that are now inaccessible, and which are de facto the only usable corpus; we may also consider stories that have contributed to distorted views of certain populations, visions that were ultimately challenged by later studies or narratives; the question of artistic license can here be debated, as well as its potential conflicts with anthropological codes of ethics, for example the need to preserve the dignity and the safety of one’s informants, as well as the integrity of one’s observations and analyzes;
  • Identities: we may question authorial strategies of individuation, representation and selection, and compare them to epistemological debates about the concept of identity in the anthropological context; the question of the reification of the Other, reduced to static and essential qualities can be analyzed, as well as the tendency to idealize or demonize otherness; autobiographical travel writings may deserve special consideration here and be potentially linked to forms of (auto)ethnography; we may also focus on travel writers who, on the contrary, constantly seek to blur their tracks by representing their identity as elusive, evermoving, secret and/or polarized in order to test the critical sense of the reader and/or better reflect human nature’s contradictions, complexity and ineffability
  • Reflexivity : the idea that the representation of otherness always reflects the author’s self and identity, society and culture of origins; in the same way, we can compare this idea to the fact that the anthropologist most often simultaneously reflects (on) the Other, (on) his/her own culture and identity, and (on) anthropology in terms of methods and theory; in this context, we encourage the analysis of correlations between the implicit representation of the self and the explicit portrayal of the Other, between the description of the visited space and the comparison/suggestion of other territories, with particular attention to the lands of origin of the writers; one may also consider broader “reflections” transpiring from these sources, i.e. visions of the world, reflections on literature, science and the acts of transcribing, creating and interpreting

This conference organized by Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne and Sorbonne Université is scheduled for September 27-28, 2019. It is open to researchers from all academic horizons. Literary perspectives as well as the anthropological and archaeological analyses are welcome, along with post-colonial approaches, Cultural Studies, gender studies, autobiographical studies, ecocriticism, and/or communications related to the history of science in its relations with the literary portraits of otherness.

Paper proposals (around 300 words) should be sent in French or (preferably) in English before April 29, 2019 to Frédéric Regard, flook@orange.fr, Haris Procopiou, haris.procopiou@univ-paris1.fr, Anne-Florence Quaireau, af.quaireau@gmail.com, and Horatiu Burcea, horatiu.burcea@gmail.com, along with a short biobibliography. An answer will be provided before May 15, 2019.

Download the selective bibliography.

The conference will involve the publication of a selection of articles in a peer-reviewed journal and/or a collective volume.

 (posted 11 February)

Models and Alternatives: International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols
London, UK, 28 September 2019
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2019

organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research 

Preliminary Programme

Humankind has always sought to explain its origins and the mysteries of life to map personal and collective boundaries, and to secure its sense of identity through the power of everyday events and occurrences. Exemplary accounts of imaginary happenings and supernatural creatures from a time beyond history and memory explain the genesis of the universe, the making of a living thing, the formation of an attitude or the inception of an institution. The essence of these traditional narratives reflects a certain system of values and code of self-conduct of a group of individuals bound together by social and cultural ties, and the cardinal virtues and vices of human nature captured in a conventional configuration.

Even though the time and place of performance and reception generate numerous variants and a multitude of interpretations, myths encode a universal sensibility and specificity, and propose generic yet unique models of humanity. They reveal a culture’s deepest understanding of its own beginnings, awareness of purpose and destiny, its position in the world, and meaning of existence and experience. A particular culture creates particular characters to embody its spirit and significant traits of personality, and particular images to convey its most representative attributes and attitudes.

The conference aims to explore the mode of organisation, the fundamental patterns and the paradigms of human memory that lie at the root of quintessential stories, tales and beings. It will also focus on the constants and variables of some particular components and their relationship with other fields of study, such as anthropology, arts, cultural history, literature, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, theology, etc.

The main objective of the event is to bring together all those interested in examining the intersections between their professions and/or interests and some distinct local, regional, national, or global aspects related to myths and mythology, archetypal characters, situations and symbols, providing an integrative approach to their perception and relevance in the 21st century.

Topics include but are not limited to several core issues:

  • from The Age of Fable to The Golden Bough and beyond
  • the functions and cultural impact of myths, archetypes and symbols
  • the locality and universality of myths, archetypes and symbols
  • monotheism, polytheism, pantheism
  • gods, demigods and heroes
  • myth, ritual and the sacred
  • holy books and early writings
  • myth-revision from antiquity to the 21st century
  • mythology and language
  • mythology and science
  • mythology and religion
  • mythology and visual arts
  • mythology and music
  • mass-media and myth creation
  • mythography and mythopesis
  • euhemerism – history and imagination
  • patterns, prototypes, stereotypes
  • ethos and eidos
  • Jungian archetypes
  • archetypal characters in literature and film
  • archetypal symbolism
  • archetypal psychology
  • archetypal pedagogy
  • symbols – context and meaning
  • major themes, motifs and symbols
  • the meaning and symbolism of colours
  • the meaning and symbolism of numbers
  • signs, emblems and icons
  • semiotics and symbolism

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 30 June 2019 to: myths@lcir.co.uk.

Please download paper proposal form.

Registration fee – 100 GBP      

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

(posted 10 June 2019)