Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in April 2020

IDEA 2020: 14th International IDEA Conference
Trabzon, Turkey, 1-3 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2019

Abstract proposals for 20-minute papers are invited from Turkish and foreign scholars for the 14th International IDEA Conference, 01-03 April 2020, Trabzon, Turkey, to be hosted jointly by the Department of English Language and Literature and the School of Foreign Languages, Karadeniz Technical University, in collaboration with the English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey (IDEA). The academic fields that make up the framework of the conference are English Literature (including literatures in English), British and Comparative Cultural Studies, Linguistics and English Language Teaching (ELT), and Translation Studies. So proposals are expected to focus on topics related to these fields. Each proposal should be accompanied by a brief CV summary. The deadline for the submission of proposals is 30 November 2019.

After sending your abstract, you will receive a confirmation email as regards the receipt of your proposal. The peer review process for all the proposals received by the deadline will be finalized as soon as possible, and a letter of acceptance will duly be sent for each proposal accepted. The papers selected through a process of peer review will be published as the Conference proceedings. The deadlines for the full-text submission is 30 May 2020 (for the e-book) and 30 October 2020 (for the book print).

If you are considering attendance, please send your proposal (200-250 words) to idea2020trabzon@gmail.com with the author(s)’ name, affiliation, abstract title, email address, a brief CV summary and 5 keywords pertaining to topic.

Once you have received the acceptance letter, please finalize your registration in time http://www.ktu.edu.tr/idea2020-registrationform

(posted 28 October 2019)

Rewriting War and Peace in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries: Contemporary British and American Literature
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 2-3 April 2020
New extended deadline for proposals: 30 September 2019

The research group “Rewriting War: The Paradigms of Contemporary War Fiction in English” is pleased to announce its first conference, “Rewriting War and Peace in the Twentieth and Twenty- First Centuries: Contemporary British and American Literature”, to be held at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona from Thursday 02 April to Friday 03 April 2020.

The major wars and conflicts of recent times (the two world wars, the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil war, the Vietnam War, the Korean War, the Falkland Islands War, the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, among others) have affected the lives and writings of second-and third-generation witnesses in contexts widely separated from the wars themselves. The conference aims to explore whether contemporary literature can effectively establish adequate representational spaces for approaching and reconsidering these past wars. Bearing in mind the need to approach the experience of war with extreme caution to avoid either the anxiety involved in the representation of conflict or the comforting reassurance of relying on “grand (war) narratives,” our conference will critically reconsider both the issue of “authenticity” in the use of historical sources and the need to access and interpret the past from contemporary settings.

We aim to shed light on the ethical dimensions of war writing and on the possibilities of closure, resolution or consolation in contemporary British and American literature, and to assess whether literature can be of use in the politics of peace-making and conflict resolution, contributing to the formation of fairer, more egalitarian societies.

The keynote lectures will be given by:

  • Professor Jay Winter (Yale University): “Silences of the Great War: All the things we cannot hear”
  • Professor Kate McLoughlin (Oxford University): “Mesopotamia: Writing the Wars in Iraq?”
  • The novelist Rachel Seiffert: “Why do we write about war?”

We invite scholars of all career stages and representing various academic disciplines, including literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, memory studies, peace studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, and other.

Three forms of presentation are encouraged: 20-minute conference papers, 60-minute roundtables consisting of 3-4 speakers (for which we will post instructions on our website) and 5-minute pecha kucha—lightning talks—for postgraduate participants to highlight their research.

Topics will be grouped around two main areas: (a) post-memory and (b) aesthetic articulations of war. The first is defined by attempts to recapture the immediacy of traumatic events that are not personally experienced but, instead, are socially apprehended through imaginative creativity; and the second severs links from the event’s participants or witnesses, though often imagining proxy figures to transmit authentification.

Suggested topics include but are not restricted to:

  • The Narration of War: Representational anxieties. Grey Areas: Authentic vs. fake narratives; literature vs history. From Modern to Postmodern Wars. The Narrative Quality of Historical Facts: Historiographic
  • Gender and War: Destabilization of gender relations by war. Gender Opposition to War. Gender and the Impact of War. Gender
  • The Aftermath of War: Demobilisation and social integration. Memory, Memorialization and Reconciliation. The Healing Power of Nostalgia. Post-traumatic Testimonies of Conflict.
  • Representation of “Home” in the Aftermath of War. Haunted Spaces and Places. Gendered Spaces: Tension between domestic sphere and public
  • Post-memory: “Familial” and “affiliative” aspects. Official vs. Unofficial “War-After Writings.” Post-memory and Representational
  • New Definitions of War and Peace. Conflict Transformation: If warfare is an extension of politics, is politics then an extension of warfare? Have civil liberties in peacetime been reduced as if we were at war?

Conference paper, roundtable and pecha kucha proposals should be no longer than 300 words in length and be accompanied by a short bio-note. Contributions will be peer evaluated, according to the significance of the topic, the importance of the contribution, and originality. Selected full manuscripts will appear in the conference proceedings to be published by the research group after the event.

The extended deadline for ALL proposal submissions is Monday 30 September 2019.

Please submit proposals, indicating type of presentation, to rewritingwar2020@gmail.com by Sunday 01 September 2019.

Although the working language of the conference is English, we welcome discussion of issues outside the English-speaking world.

(posted 9 March 2019, updated 24 August 2019)

Women’s Resistance to Feminism(s) in the United States since the 19th century
Aix-Marseille University, France, 3-4 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 October 2019

“The frivolous objections some women made to our appeals were as exasperating as they were ridiculous.”
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More

From the 1911 National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage to Phyllis Schlafly’s “STOP-ERA” campaign in the 1980s and governor Kay Ivey’s recent signing into law of House Bill 314 criminalizing abortion in Alabama, women have played a prominent role in opposing feminism in the US. Yet these visible forms of anti feminism are but the tips of a much larger iceberg of women’s resistance to feminism that this two-day conference, organized by the “Women and the F-Word” team (https://wfw.hypotheses.org), proposes to explore.

The notion of women’s resistance to feminism includes—but is not reduced to—organized antifeminism, a countermovement which has been the object of pioneering work (A. Dworkin, Right Wing Women, 1983, T. Jablonsky, The Home, Heaven, and Mother Party, 1994, S. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood, 1997). Resistance is understood as a broad set of negative reactions experienced and/or expressed by women or groups of women when they are faced with self-styled feminist behaviors, ideas or actions. As feminism is conceived as a flexible and evolving ideology, which the plural “feminisms” more adequately reflects, the modes and mechanisms of resistance will be examined from a diachronic and dialogical perspective that always takes into account the particular historical moment.

This interdisciplinary conference means to bring together contributions shedding light on the specific features of women’s resistance to feminisms in the United States since the 19th century.

Papers addressing the following issues will be welcome:

  • How did/do women perceive the first women’s rights advocates?
  • What precise term initially triggers resistance?: Rights? Suffragism?  Feminism? Modern/Radical feminism? White? Elite? Abortion? Etc..
  • How do women (de)construct their own (non) feminism through those terms?
  • What sort of discourses/actions did/do they produce or perform and how did/do they spread them?
  • How did/do women evolve from a position of “feminist” to “anti “or “non feminist”?
  • How did/do they (re)negotiate their identification to womanhood?
  • How important are the binaries feminism/femininity, feminism/individualism ?
  • How does intersectionality shape resistance and how, in turn, does resistance strengthen intersectional identities?
  • How did/do women contest the boundaries of mainstream feminism?
  • How does globalization affect the mechanisms of resistance?
  • Are there cases of transnational resistance?
  • How has resistance evolved over the centuries? (persistence and change)
  • How does women’s resistance impact feminism?
  • Can indifference be considered a form of resistance?

Please send a 300- word abstract and a brief bio to: claire.sorin@univ-amu.fr,  marc.calvini-lefebvre@univ-amu.fr and nicolas.boileau@univ-amu.fr

Deadline: October 15, 2019.

Venuef the conference: Aix-Marseille University, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, 13621 Aix-en-Provence, France

Keynote Address : Dr Ronnee Schreiber (San Diego State University), author of Righting Feminism: Conservative Women and American Politics (OUP, 2008)

(posted 10 July 2019, updated 14 Septembe 2019)

Forms of Dissent in England 1300-1700: Contra Imperium, First International Colloquium
University of Insubria, Como, Italy, 6-7 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 24 November 2019

Committee: Paola Baseotto (Insubria University), Omar Khalaf (Insubria University), Marie-Christine Munoz-Levy (Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3)

Confirmed keynote speakers: Andrew Hadfield (University of Sussex) – Alessandra Petrina (University of Padova)

The purpose of this colloquium is to investigate various forms of dissent in England from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. Our aim is to establish a network of researchers investigating the cultural, social and political dimensions of polemical texts. This first colloquium, which focuses on the language of dissent in England 1300-1700, will be followed by workshops at Insubria University and elsewhere on other relevant aspects of polemical writing.

And for dissension, who preferreth peace More than I do?—except I be provoked.
Henry VI, III, 1, 32-33

Civil dissension is a viperous worm That gnaws the bowels of the commonwealth.
Henry VI, III, 1, 73-74

The period 1300-1700 marked a turning point in the history of Western Europe. Social and political interactions were often characterized by feelings of intolerance towards some forms of civil and ecclesiastical authority. The publication in the early years of the sixteenth century of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, Thomas More’s Utopia and the writings of great Protestant Reformers such as Luther, Karlstadt, Melanchthon, Zwingli and Calvin shook cultural and institutional pillars. England played a major role by challenging Papal hegemony through Henry VIII’s Act of Supremacy and the establishment of an independent Church of England. Henry VIII’s policies, however, especially the dissolution of monasteries, were disputed by a group of fervent Roman Catholics gathering under the so-called Pilgrimage of Grace (1536-7). These events paved the way for successive waves of criticism.

Literary giants such as Shakespeare and Milton (the first in his historical tragedies, the other in his pamphlets) gave expressive voice to dissent. The first decades of the seventeenth century saw the flourishing of polemical writings gradually infiltrating the foundations of the State. The English Civil War (1642-51) stemmed from demands for a renewal of the political status quo.

Earlier forms of dissent are no less worthy of attention in themselves and as patterns for later articulations: the works of Margery Kempe (who suffered civil and religious persecution) and John Wyclif (a stern critic of the distance of the Church from evangelical poverty), are representative examples of a wider spirit of criticism that characterized the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

This first colloquium focuses on voices and expressions of dissent and opposition to power (whether political, religious, cultural, or social) in England 1300-1700.

Proposals for 20-minute papers are welcome on:

  • forms of dissent (in literary/non-literary texts)
  • the language and rhetoric of dissent
  • the addressees and circulation of polemical texts

Select contributions will be published in a peer-reviewed edited volume.

Proposals for a 20-minute presentation in the form of a brief abstract (200-250 words) and a short biographical note should be emailed by 24th November 2019 as pdf/word files to contraimperium@uninsubria.it
Notification of proposal acceptance: 10th December 2019

Registration opens in January 2020.
Early bird registration (€ 60) is available until 14th February, 2020, the full fee is € 70.
The registration fee includes a book of abstracts, coffee break and lunch on Monday 6th April and Tuesday 7th April 2020.

(posted 4 September 2019)

Colors and Cultures
Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse (France), possibly also Basel (Switzerland), 14-16 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 Novembe 2019

Seeing colors is a sensory experience that goes beyond ocular perception. Color directly affects our mood, our communication, and our wellbeing. Color, in short, shapes our understanding of reality. Color can provoke unexpected behavior. When the Dutch football team played in Bern at the European championships in 2008, for example, the Oranje fans performed a new routine when crossing the city streets.  They would wait patiently at the curb and then burst into cheers to express their enthusiasm when the light changed from red to orange—their home team’s color![1]

While color has a profound influence on our lives, it has all kinds of cultural variations, which may go back to specific geographical origins based on regional vegetation, different qualities of light, environmental experience, etc. Even the mimetic principle of colors as a way to represent reality, while universal, differs from culture to culture. At some point, these differences may even become direct cultural contradictions—as we find, for example, in the symbolism of the color white as purity for European cultures, but as mourning for Chinese and other Asian cultures.

In a world of globalized development and technological innovations of color, questions arise about how colors are perceived due to transcultural contact and technological adaptation. Though its organizers are mainly literary scholars, this conference is interested in sharing interdisciplinary perspectives from a variety of angles that analyze differences in color perception, reception, and production. We also invite comparative diachronic analyses that trace changes in understandings of color across time (e.g., development, commerce, educational influences), as well as synchronic assessments that primarily focus on diatopic differences.

Here is a list of possible issues to be considered:

  • salient new issues in color studies?
  • the history of color studies, via Newton and Goethe?
  • the function of color in literature?
  • colors in Indigenous story-telling?
  • color and orality?
  • the experiential origins of color symbolism?
  • culturally specific colors in a globalized world?
  • reasons for changing traditional color symbolism?
  • traditional colors and trade?
  • the impact of technological changes (i.e., communication, or new paint, new materials, digital art, etc)?
  • “authenticity” and traditional colors?
  • sacred/focal colors in different cultures?
  • colors and language – the Sapir-Whorf theory?
  • Englishization and color terms?
  • colors as connected to form or shapes?
  • color in non-figurative contexts and in non-figurative art?
  • color and health?
  • color and the mind?
  • reductive/effective Indian “blue/green” color terminology?
  • color in architecture? In car design, etc.?
  • colors and dress-code across time?
  • color photography? color film?
  •  the physics of color?
  • physiology and the perception of color?
  • color universalism?
  •  etc.

Keynotes:

  • Jaycee NAHOHAI, potter & painter, Zuni Nation
  • Jens HAUSER, Dept. of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen
  • Hertha Sweet WONG, English Department, University of California, Berkeley
  • Rizvanah BRADLEY, African American Studies, Yale University
  • Frédérique TOUDOIRE-SURLAPIERRE, PU Lettres, Université de Limoges

Steering committee: Sämi LUDWIG, PU Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse; Charlaine OSTMANN, doctorante Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse; Jennifer KAY DICK, MCF Université de Haute Alsace, Mulhouse; Hertha Sweet WONG, English Department, University of California, Berkeley; Dr. Dominique GRISARD, Zentrum Gender Studies, Universität Basel

Language: English/French

Deadline for proposals: Please send a proposal of 250 to 350 words to samuel.ludwig@uha.fr before 30th November 2019. Proposals will be accepted/rejected before Christmas.

(posted 13 October 2019)

Aldous Huxley in France: The Experience of Exile. Seventh International Aldous Huxley Symposium 2020
University of Toulon, Bandol, France, 15-17 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2019

Conference warming on 14 April evening; colloquy at Bandol and visit to Sanary and Bandol on 18 April; departure day: 19 April

Convenors: The University of Toulon, represented by Profs Alice Cheylan & Alain Morello (alicecheylan@yahoo.fr; morelloaa@yahoo.fr), and the International Aldous Huxley Society (AHS). The colloquy at Bandol will be organized by Gilles Iltis, M.A., Sanary contact@sanary.com.

The general theme of the conference will naturally focus on Huxley’s activities in France, particularly on the experience of exile that Huxley and other writers underwent in Sanary and Bandol between the wars, but there will certainly be room for a variety of other topics.

Huxley Forum: “Aldous Huxley’s Controversial Philosophical Theories”. This forum, which will discuss the intellectual ‘exile’ that Huxley’s ideas were at times exposed to, is being organized by Prof Dana Sawyer (please send your proposals to <dsawyer@meca.edu). It will be held in a similar fashion as at the previous symposia in Oxford (2013) and Almería (2017)[see https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Huxley/ahs_conferences.html].

Please send your proposals for lectures (20 minutes, plus 10 minutes discussion) as soon as possible and your abstracts (20-30 lines or 200-300 words) by 30 September 2019 to Prof Bernfried Nugel (nugel@uni-muenster.de).

Registration and accommodation will in due course be organized by Profs Cheylan and Morello.

For current information please visit the CAHS homepage at https://www.uni-muenster.de/Anglistik/Huxley.

(posted 4 February 2019)

Pain and Pleasure
English Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Sousse, Tunisia, 16-17 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 25 February 2020

Conference Venue: Adonis Room.

                  “I want to know whether any one of us would consent to live, having wisdom and mind and knowledge and memory of all things, but having no sense of pleasure or pain, either more or less, and wholly unaffected by these and the like feelings?”

Plato, Philebus

Traditionally, pain and pleasure have been studied separately and divided into physical and mental types, thus widening the gulf and obscuring the intersection zone between the two precepts. Modern studies and researches, however, have stressed the intricate and close relationship between the pleasurable and the painful. Paradoxically, the experience of pain can generate pleasure and suffering can bring about liberation and ecstasy, thus paving the path for the birth of copious contemporary studies that overcome this chasm in human sensations.

From classicism to postmodernism, the universal human experiences of pain and pleasure are investigated in literature, science, history, linguistics and cultural studies either as two separate or two indistinguishable concepts.

In this context, the steering committee welcomes individual and panel proposals to investigate alternative reflections on the themes of pain and pleasure.

Potential topics of exploration may include but are not necessarily limited to:

  • Pain, pleasure and the human body.
  • Pain, pleasure and Love/ desire / sexuality.
  • Pain, pleasure and masochism / sadism
  • Pain, pleasure and torture/capital punishment.
  • Pain, pleasure and censorship.
  • Pain, pleasure in literature and literary genres.
  • Pain, pleasure in Media.
  • Pain, pleasure in discourse/ rhetoric.
  • Pain, pleasure and politics/ power.
  • Pain, pleasure and religion/mortification
  • Pain, pleasure and psychoanalysis.
  • Pain, pleasure and Empathy/sympathy/pity.
  • Pain, pleasure and catharsis.
  • Pain, pleasure and identity.
  • Pain, pleasure and/in writing
  • Pain, pleasure and mythology.
  • Pain, Pleasure in/and theories.
  • Pain, pleasure in/ and teaching and learning
  • Pain, pleasure in/¨and language
  • Pain, pleasure and philosophy (Utilitarianism)
  • Pain, pleasure and aesthetics
  • Pain, pleasure in celebrations

Abstract Submission:

The Conference Steering Committee is delighted to invite contributors to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words and a short bio-note to the following email address: soussepainpleasure@yahoo.com
The deadline for submission of proposals is February 25th 2020.

Notification of acceptance/rejection will be communicated by February 15. Contributors will have the possibility to have their articles published in Conference proceedings.

(posted 7 February 2020)

It was fifty years ago today – An Academic Tribute to The Beatles.
Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal, 16-18 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2019

Conference website: https://beatlesinlisbon.wordpress.com

Half a century after the Beatles’ break-up (1970) and forty years since John Lennon’s murder in New York (Dec. 1980), the ‘Fab Four’s popularity remains a global phenomenon, bridging up generations across spatial, linguistic, social and cultural boundaries. However, with a few notable exceptions, Academia as a whole has hitherto failed to pay critical attention to the Liverpool band and its manifold contributions to contemporary pop music (both then and now), and the “ways of life” emerging in Britain, Europe and the United States since the 1950s. This International Conference seeks to fill in this academic gap, by approaching, reassessing and reframing John, Paul, George and Ringo through a broad range of disciplines, themes and topics, such as:

  1. The Beatles: influences, heritages and legacies;
  2. The Beatles and contemporary Britain;
  3. The Beatles, The British Sixties and “Swinging London”;
  4. The Beatles, the British Invasion and the American rock scene: Them and US;
  5. The Beatles and the emergence of (a) common culture(s);
  6. The Beatles and the emergence of (a) youth culture(s);
  7. The Beatles in the classroom;
  8. The Beatles in literature;
  9. The Beatles and contemporary pop/rock artists and bands;
  10. The Beatles’ lives, loves and biographies;
  11. The Beatles’ controversies;
  12. The Beatles: peace and love;
  13. The Beatles: sex and drugs and rock and roll;
  14. The Beatles: power, politics and religion;
  15. The Beatles and/in the media;
  16. The Beatles’ performances: stage, screen and studio;
  17. The Beatles’ discography and the record industry;
  18. The Beatles’ songs: lyrics and/or music;
  19. The Beatles’ filmography;
  20. The Beatles’ iconography;
  21. The Beatles and/in the visual arts;
  22. The Beatles’ memorabilia and merchandising;
  23. The Beatles and/in fashion;
  24. The Beatles and the English language;
  25. The Beatles in Europe;
  26. The Beatles in Portugal;
  27. Beyond the 20th century: Beatles Fo(u)r Ever;
  28. Beatlemania: fandoms and revivalisms;
  29. Other

Languages: English and/or Portuguese.
Obs.: Speakers should prepare for a 20 minute presentation (MAX.), followed by 10 mins. debate.
Abstracts: Up to 250-300 words (MAX).
Obs: Please select from the list above the most appropriate number to describe your paper (If 29, please specify).
Audiovisual requirements, if any (please specify).
Bionote/Affiliation/Institutional e-mail: 150 words (MAX).
Deadline: 30th Nov. 2019.
Send your proposal(s) to the following e-mails: (please, use both…)
beatleslisbon@gmail.com
cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt

Venue: Universidade Nova de Lisbo, Portugal

Organizers: CETAPS, Centre for English Translation and Anglo-Portuguse Studies.

(posted 20 September 2019)

The Affect & The Corporeal: Third International Conference
Department of Languages, École Normale, University of Tunis, Tunisia, 20-21 April 2020
New extendd deadline for proposals: 20 February 2020

From Baruch Spinoza to Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, affect has become a new theoretical framework to  see and describe the world.  For Spinoza, philosophy is to inspect the multiple potentials of the body,   as “[n]obody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do.” Spinoza is concerned with the encounters between different bodies, their power to affect and be affected .Today the affect is seen not just as relating to the human world but also to all elements in nature, hence the Deleuzian conception of the world as made up of machinic assemblages.

Raymond Williams argues in “Structures of feeling” that counter-acting the presentation of cultural objects as finished/fixed products is possible when in one’s  experience the quality of such objects as process (not product)  is subjectively instantiated. Much of the scholarly investigation of the affect in the area of culture studies and literary criticism has been expanding upon Williams’ insights about the contribution of the affective to the promotion of an approach to cultural questions from the angle of their “subjective instantiation”

Affect studies seem to be an area that cuts across disciplines as much as it continuously  strives to determine its what and how . “This is a field,”  Devika Sharma and Frederik Tygstrup insist, “where there are already many neighbouring notions, but once we dig into these, they fan out: feelings and emotions, moods and drives, propensities and longings, dreams and visions.”

The rise and renewed interest in the affect and the corporeal tends to be framed by the debate around the possibility of Liberal Humanism,  whether it has been dethroned by post-Humanism, or rather reinvigorated by the development of affect studies. Affect studies have also been urging a rethinking of the boundary between private and public spaces; between ‘personal’ and social experience. A renewed interest in exploring the scope of the affect has been expanding on the insights Deleuze developed through his interpretation of Spinoza.

According to Sara Ahmed, the “circulation of signs and objects”, which she describes as “affective economies” and within which emotions become a sort of capital that plays a role in the “surfacing of individual and collective bodies” . In affective economies, Ahmed argues, emotions “align bodily space with social space”  Affectivity is that which is accumulated over time as an effect of the circulation between objects and signs.

The binding of the affect to the bodily/corporeal  has often unveiled challenging questions related to the feasibility of representation. Indeed, there is a widely shared assumption among critics that the affect shapes part of our bodily experiences and bodily encounters, and that such shaping often challenges the representational processes of cultural and literary discourses alike. Accordingly,

Even in a field as patchy and open-ended as affect studies, we can identify… something like a consensual and persistent debate; namely the debate over the subjective versus objective status of feelings and affects. Do the various affective sensations I experience, consciously or otherwise, belong to me, in the sense that they unfold somewhere in an inner realm, their privacy betrayed only by my body’s way of representing them?  (Sharma and  Tygstrup 7)

This conference invites contributions that explore facets of the interaction between the affect and the bodily/corporeal

Thematic axes that can be explored may include (but are not limited to):

  • Articulations of the affective and the bodily in literature
  • Affective versus cognitive resources in language learning/teaching
  • Affective interpellation in media discourse
  • Affect and the corporeal in/and the culture of images
  • Affect and the literary imagination, and in the interpretation of literature and art
  • The role of affect and empathy in enhancing social or political activism
  • The corporeal as the site and mirror of affect
  • The affect and public space/institutions
  • The affect and the “elusive” sense of the present/presence
  • The affect, the corporeal and/in the performative and visual arts
  • The affect, the corporeal, and the move towards post-Humanism
  • The affect in political and religious discourse.

200-250 word abstracts: to be sent by 20 February 2020 (new extended deadline) to the conference organizers (salouakaroui2@gmail.com and fekir64@gmail.com). Notification of acceptance: 10  February 2020

The Conference Venue: Ecole Normale Supérieure, 08 Place des Chevaux, ElGorjani, TUNIS

Web site : www.ens.rnu.tn

(posted 23 December 2019, updated 12 February 2020)

(Re)thinking Earth: from representations of nature to climate change fiction
National Library of Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal, 22-23 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 March 2020

The first Earth Day, celebrated in the United States on April 22, 1970 by   millions of people and now mobilizing citizens and communities worldwide, represented the first massive expression of public concern with the ecological sustainability of our planet, launching the modern global environmentalist movement. As the world signals its 50th anniversary in 2020, the Symposium (Re)thinking Earth: From Representations of Nature to Climate Change Fiction, aims to bring together an intersection of plural perspectives and representations of the tropes of threatened nature and climate crisis, spread over time, place, formats and aesthetic models, under the collaborative interdisciplinary model of the environmental humanities.

We invite papers on a range of topics that may include:

  • Nature writing over time and space
  • Global voices in ecopoetics
  • Affect and ecocriticism
  • Climate change in contemporary Fiction
  • Reimagined pastoral landscapes
  • Space and scale in environmental writing
  • Agroecological storytelling
  • Thinking the anthropocene
  • Representations of environmental science in literature and film
  • The climate change crisis in visual culture
  • Ecomedia and the communication of environmental science
  • Climate change in utopian and dystopian literature
  • Post-colonial and indigenous representations of environmental collapses
  • Science Fiction, fantasy and environmental crises
  • Film and the televisual representations of climate change
  • Environmental ethics
  • Environmental education and literacy

This conference is organized by the Strand American Intersections of CETAPS, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, Nova University of Lisbon.

Participants should submit a 250 word abstract in English or Portuguese by March 15, 2020. accompanied by a brief bio-note. Letters of acceptance will be sent no later than March 30th, 2020.

Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Professor Stef Craps, Ghent University, convener of the project Climate Change. Fiction,  Memory, and the Anthropocene.

Inquiries should be emailed to Teresa Botelho (tdbs@fcsh.unl.pt) and to Isabel Oliveira Martins (iom@netcabo.pt).

Go to https://rethinkingearth.wordpress.com/ for more information and submission of abstracts.

Registration fees for participants presenting papers: 40 Euros (full fee), 20 Euros (student fee)

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Organizing committee: Teresa Botelho, Rogério Miguel Puga , Isabel Oliveira Martins, Maria Teresa Castilho, Ana Gonçalves Matos

(posted 1 December 2019)

English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality: 15th April Conference
Krakow, Poland, 23-25 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2020

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

  • British and American Literature,
  • General and Applied Linguistics,
  • Translation and Cultural Studies,
  • Teaching English as a Second Language.

Plenary lectures at AC 15 will be delivered by the following speakers:

  • Susan Hunston (University of Birmingham)
  • Kenneth P. Minkema (Yale University)
  • Virginia Pulcini (Università degli studi di Torino)
  • Nancy Lusignan Schultz (Salem State University)
  • Tiffany Stern (The Shakespeare Institute)

For this anniversary edition of April Conference, the organizing committee will be pleased to accept proposals of papers on a wide variety of topics. Preference will be given to presentations which fit into the thematic sessions listed below, but other papers will also be considered. We also welcome session proposals with three or six papers connected thematically.

Thematic Sessions: 

  • Colonial America and Religious History
  • Digital Humanities and Literary History
  • Gender Studies, Masculinities Studies and Feminist Perspectives in Literature and Culture
  • Southern Studies
  • Medieval Studies and Medievalism
  • Milton Studies in Central and Eastern Europe: The State of the Art
  • Alternative Romanticisms
  • Transfusions of Joyce
  • Language Contact
  • Contemporary Trends in Sociolinguistics
  • Stance and Evaluation in Discourse
  • Foreign Language Education: Tradition and New Perspectives
  • Translating Worldviews and Alternative Realities

Papers are scheduled to take 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Speakers are invited to submit an abstract of ca. 200 words via the on-line system under PAPER PROPOSALS on the conference website https://april.confer.uj.edu.pl. If you would like to submit a session proposal, please send an email to april-conference@uj.edu.pl. Paper proposals will be reviewed anonymously and the authors will be notified about their acceptance via email. The deadline for paper proposals is January 15, 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2020.

Early conference registration fee (available until March 1, 2020): 700 PLN.
Regular conference fee (after March 2, 2020): 800 PLN.
Doctoral students are eligible for a 150 PLN discount. For more information, please see the conference website.

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

Conference Secretary

dr Małgorzata Cierpisz
Jagiellonian University
Institute of English Studies
Collegium Paderevianum
al. Mickiewicza 9A, 31-120 Kraków
april-conference@uj.edu.pl

(posted 14 December 2019)

Transfusions of Joyce: Joyce Panel at the 15th April Conference, Kraków
Kraków, Poland, 23-25 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2019

If the old dictum that “a picture says more than a thousand words” should be true, why is it that visual adaptations of literature are usually frowned upon as trivializations or as intrusions into the sacred realm of high art? This dismissive perspective has, of course, never stopped film makers, cartoonists, comic artists, or youtube clippers from their creative engagement with literary texts, be they popular or canonical, and James Joyce’s works are no exception to this rule. As of now, there are several movies, a seemingly endless series of sketches and cartoons, some of which grace the covers of the James Joyce Quarterly, and even some comics which each in their own style and method work on the stories and novels and seek to negotiate an intermedial transfer or re-visitation.

Our section, the fourth Joyce panel at a Krakow April Conference, will address such adaptations and explore the transformative potential of intermedial encounters with Joyce’s work. Papers may discuss single images or extensive adaptations for the screen or the graphic novel; they may compare different approaches or perform a close reading of visual experiments with individual chapters, episodes, passages or even sentences; they may suggest imaginative possibilities which could be realized in the near or distant future or they can turn back to projects that were dismissed in the past.

While the focus of the section will be on visualisations of Joyce, we are also interested in other transformative representations, re-imaginings, and recreations, including soundscapes, digital renderings, apocrypha, or alternative stories arising from Joyce’s oeuvre.

Please send an abstract of approximately 200 words with a short biographical note to Katarzyna Bazarnik (k.bazarnik@uj.edu.pl) and/or Dirk Vanderbeke (vanderbeke@t-online.de). The deadline for paper proposals is January 15, 2020. Paper proposals will be reviewed anonymously, and the authors will be notified about their acceptance via email. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by February 15, 2020.

For registration and further information, please consult the conference website at https://april.confer.uj.edu.pl/

(posted 1 December 2019)

Somewhere in Between: Borders and Borderlands
St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK, 25 April 2020
Deadline for proposals: 10 Novembe 2019

Conference website: https://borders.lcir.co.uk

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

In an ever changing world the problems of setting boundaries as well as the need to create meanings and establish understanding of diverse phenomena have always been of the utmost importance for humanity. Borders, boundaries, frontiers, and borderlands, naturally formed or man made, are grounded in various ethical traditions, and have always been associated with limits and restrictions. The ongoing process of globalisation is changing the role and stereotypes of borders, so that they are often seen as opportunities rather than constraints. However, in some cases they are still being militarized and conflicted.

The conference will seek to identify and analyse the processes of border-making and border permeability in contemporary societies through aesthetic forms. We seek to explore the historical origins of borders, their role in today’s global environment and define the notion of borders, which includes not only territorial, geographical, and political borders, but also cultural and metaphorical borders, imagined spaces where interests and ideologies overlap and compete.

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

  • border poetics
  • border-crossing
  • security versus openness of borders
  • cultural hybridization
  • cross‐border co‐operation
  • processes of de‐bordering
  • borders and refugees
  • social, cultural or language differences between communities

We invite proposals from various disciplines including political sciences, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, architecture, literature, linguistics, etc.

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 10 November 2019 to: borders@lcir.co.uk.
Please download the Paper proposal form from the Conference website.

Registration fee – 100 GBP

(posted 24 September 2019)