Emigration/emigrations in the English-speaking world since the 18th century.
Location and date: Université Côte d’Azur (France). 13 March 2025.
Deadline for submissions: 1 June 2024.
Through the democratic values and freedom of conscience they uphold and through the reach of their cultures, along with the better life prospects which they reportedly offer, North America (the USA and Canada) and the United Kingdom have attracted immigrants for centuries. The nature of these population movements as well as the transformations they have entailed within these economies and societies constitute a very popular research topic, so much so that emigration from those countries is almost never explored.
It is certainly far less numerically significant than immigration. In December 2022, the figure for the United Kingdom was: 557,000 emigrants, including not just British citizens, but also EU and non-EU ones (see Office for National Statistics: Long-term international migration, provisional: year ending December 2022), while in the United States, where federal institutions keep no formal record of emigration, the most recent estimate (2018) is 4.8 million people (see Federal Voting Assistance Program, 2020 Overseas Citizen Population Analysis Report, September 2021). However, like immigration, emigration is an old and complex reality.
The conference will give participants the opportunity to deal with:
[1] the concrete aspects of emigration
- the reasons forcing people to emigrate, or, on the contrary, the reasons why they leave of their own volition, which may be political and/or religious (e.g. the emigration of British subjects to their colonies in the Pacific), humanitarian, personal (family reasons, the desire to adopt a new lifestyle), or economic (e.g. choosing to live in a country where the cost of living is lower), especially within the multi-faceted context of globalisation (e.g. globalisation of the labour market, of teaching, etc.), or all of the above (e.g. emigration from the Highlands of Scotland or Ireland to North America);
- the practical realities of the relocation and its implications – organisation, places of departure (e.g. British ports in the 19th century) and arrival, means of transportation, risks involved, getting to know the “Other”;
and
[2] how emigration was perceived from an exogenous or endogenous viewpoint, i.e. the various forms of narratives about emigration (from the advice given to emigrants in the form of handbooks, to log-books, press articles, novels, and so on), in other words the real or fictitious stories about/by the emigrants, which can thus be analysed through different axes – either a “civilisation studies”-based one (e.g. the way the North-American press saw the Irish who were crossing the Atlantic during the Great Famine, the emigration of Loyalists in the wake of the American War of independence, that of Afro-Americans, or that of slave-owners), or a purely literary approach (e.g. those novelists who have migrated towards another language, such as Nancy Huston, who has written many texts in French, her second language, or playwright Samuel Beckett), or both (e.g. the American poets and writers who chose to come to Europe during the inter-war years).
Abstract proposals (maximum 300 words) should be sent by 1 June 2024 to :
A selection of articles will be published in a special issue of Cycnos.
For further details, see the original CFP below.
Call-for-papers-Emigration-emigrations(Posted 23 April 2024)
What Matters in Contemporary Anglophones Cultures.
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France. 13-14 March. 2025.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 8 November 2024.
Organisers: Jean-Michel Ganteau, Marc Lenormand, Sandrine Sorlin.
Presentation
We are looking for papers in linguistic, literary, dramatic, historical, sociological, political, film and serial studies and, more broadly, cultural studies.
Papers may address the following issues (non-exhaustive list):
- the logics of making lives, individuals and groups, and experiences visible or invisible, and therefore also the political and artistic forms of struggle aimed at ensuring that voices are recognised as counting;
- the mechanisms, operations, devices, bodies and authorities that select, differentiate, prioritise and discriminate between what counts and what does not;
- the conditions and contexts that enable the very question “What matters” to emerge; the frameworks of perception and intelligibility of what is or is not audible, visible, touchable, etc.; attention and its modalities;
- the power of language to change the world, to obscure one part of it and/or expose another; the power of narrative to redress injustices and render accounts; the role of sources and archives and that of literary counter-archives;
- the ethical issues involved in questioning “What matters”, and in the attention to otherness, singularity and vulnerability; the interdependencies and relationality of subjects, including observers, witnesses and researchers; the temporal and contextual/particular dimensions of “What matters” questioning and the way in which it challenges our categories of thought and research activity.
Keynote speakers:
- Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University)
- Sandra Laugier (Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne)
- Fiona McCann (Université de Lille)
Website address
Contact details
For further details, see the original CFP below.
(Posted 18 May 2024)
New Perspectives on Walking Women in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures – An International Conference.
Warburg-Haus, Hamburg, Germany. 28 and 29 March 2025.
Deadline for submissions: 7 October 2024.
Confirmed Keynote Speaker: Dr Kerri Andrews
Although women have always walked and written about their manifold experiences as pedestrians, they were largely neglected in the historiography of walking of the twentieth century. As Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner noted in 2012, it had been common practice in cultural and literary histories of walking to present women “as an ‘exception’ to an unstated norm, represented by a single chapter in a book or even a footnote” (225). Following the publication of Lauren Elkin’s Flâneuse: Women Walk the Streets of Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London (2016), research on walking women has expanded and diversified significantly in recent years. Kerri Andrews’s Wanderers: A History of Women Walking (2020) and Way Makers: An Anthology of Women’s Writing about Walking (2023) and Annabel Abbs’s Windswept: Why Women Walk (2022), for example, focus exclusively on the writings and representations of women walkers. Critics have begun to develop new approaches to reading, documenting, and theorising women’s pedestrian mobilities, employing practice-based approaches (e.g. Heddon and Myers 2020) and taking into account archival material (e.g. Bredar 2022) and perspectives from material ecocriticism (e.g. Hamilton 2018). Rather than examining representations of women’s walking according to masculine paradigms like Romantic wandering, flânerie, or psychogeography, critics now increasingly examine woman walkers on their own terms.
This conference brings together scholars from the humanities and social sciences (e.g. from literary studies, cultural studies, film, TV and theatre studies, art, history, sociology, anthropology, geography etc.) who are working on roles and representations of walking women in Anglophone literatures and cultures from the early modern period to the immediate present. The aim of the conference is to assess current trends in scholarship on walking women, to identify its blind spots, and to develop new perspectives on women walkers by deliberately looking at forms, contexts, media, and periods that have received less or no attention so far.
Potential topics for 20-minute papers could include but are not limited to:
- New theoretical and methodological approaches to women’s walking between 1500 and the present
- Walking women in neglected literary forms and genres, e.g. drama, poetry, non-fiction, autofiction, and the periodical press
- Women walkers in art history, film & TV, photography, social media, and podcasts
- Representations of woman walkers in works by less canonised authors, directors, and artists and in newly acquired archival material
- New readings of women walkers in canonical literature
- Beyond the white Western norm: representations of woman walkers of colour; women’s walking in the Anglophone Global South and (post)colonial contexts
- Beyond the able norm: women walkers with disabilities; health, illness and walking
- Beyond the heterosexual norm: queer women walkers
- Women’s walking in settings and areas beyond the established urban/rural binary
- Women’s walking in the contexts of migration and war
- Women’s collective pedestrian practices, e.g. women’s marches and walking clubs
- Women’s walking and political activism
- Women’s walking in the Anthropocene; women walkers and environmentalism
- Material culture and consumerism: walking clothes and gear
- Walking mothers; walking with children
- Women’s walking and gendered violence
- Pedestrian mobilities related to walking, e.g. running and mountaineering
- Women’s walking as work or part of work; economic dimensions of women’s walking
The conference conceives of women as anyone who identifies as female, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. Contributions on non-binary and genderqueer walkers are welcome as well. Selected papers from the conference will be published in a special issue of a journal.
The conference will take place on 28 and 29 March 2025 in the stunning historic reading room of Hamburg’s Warburg Haus. Thanks to generous funding from the Daimler and Benz Foundation, travel bursaries are available for confirmed speakers and there will be no conference fee.
Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief bio (max. 100 words) to Sandra Dinter, the conference organiser, by 7 October 2024: sandra.dinter@uni-hamburg.de. Applicants will receive notification of acceptance in late October 2024.
For further details please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 13 July 2024)