The Child and the Book Conference: Making, Building, Mending: Creativity and Craftsmanship in Children’s Literature and Culture.
University of Rouen Normandy (Campus Pasteur), France. 2-4 May 2024.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 31 October 2023
Event organised by Virginie DOUGLAS
Presentation of the event
In the past, bookish children have often been contrasted – sometimes fairly crudely – with their more practically-oriented counterparts, as if an interest in language, literature, and the world of fiction was necessarily incompatible with the ability and inclination to use one’s hands in order to “make” things.
Yet children’s ability to find and collect various materials and use them for all kinds of creative projects has been observed in past centuries and used for diverse educational purposes. Children’s literature itself abounds with representations/celebrations of various types of crafts, showing child characters inventing and making things, or recycling old or discarded objects. Building huts or other forms of shelter, for instance, is a fairly common theme. But young protagonists may also engage in fabricating toys, in quilting or sewing, in drawing or writing. In some cases, adult figures can also be shown to invent and make wonderful things, such as a child could imagine them, going through the process of identifying suitable materials, collecting and recycling them, and designing uses for the newly fabricated objects.
Creativity and craftsmanship are notions that may also be applied to the publishing/making of the book itself, both in a concrete, materialistic way and in a more abstract conceptual sense. The child reader may be invited to manipulate the book in order to make sense of it. (S)he may be invited to interact with its contents, thus developing different scenarios, or recreating new works on the basis of existing ones.
This is particularly in evidence in video games or digital narrations, but even in older and more traditional formats, references to the various fabrication processes mentioned earlier (cooking, building, sewing, drawing, etc.) often operate as metaphors of childhood (with children as characters “in the making”, and fiction as a means to explore various would-be personae), as well as of the process of writing children’s literature itself (making new stories out of “old” adult material, piecing parts of a story together…).
Thus, creativity often – always? – involves some degree of recycling. Familiar works of art can be reproduced in different styles; old tales can be retold, sometimes with a twist, challenging old assumptions and offering new interpretations of well-known stories. Re-using old materials – be they stories, objects, tools, toys, etc. – gives them a new lease of life. While concerns with mending and repairing have acquired new relevance in the current eco-anxious context, they also resonate metaphorically with the need to be reassured that human beings, too, can be made whole again, or at least overcome whatever pains they may have had to go through. The healing dimension of engaging in craft and literature will therefore also need to be addressed by the conference.
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):
- Representations of craftsmanship and creativity in children’s literature and culture
- Figures of childlike or child creators in children’s literature and culture
- Mending objects or people: figures of child healers
- The creative, experimental potential of childhood: children as artists
- Arts and crafts as expressions of the child’s or young adult’s agency and empowerment
- The healing, reconstructive function of children’s books and objects
- Figures of the child or young adult as constructs (cyborgs, hybrid beings, etc.)
- Metaphors of artistic and literary creation, and the metafictive dimension of recycling old materials into new creations
- Writing, illustrating, translating children’s books as fabrication
- Exploring and showcasing the materiality of children’s books (especially in picture books, including sticker-books, pop-up books, leporellos or kamishibai)
- The child as (co-)maker/(co-)author of the book
- Constructing the child through the making/writing of the book
The conference “Making, Building, Mending: Creativity and Craftsmanship in Children’s Literature and Culture” will reflect academic diversity and host studies from across different fields of research, academic methods and cultural backgrounds. We welcome proposals for individual papers as well as panels. We particularly encourage graduate students and other early-career scholars to apply.
Please send an abstract of 500 words and a short biography (100 words) as 2 attached Word documents to cbc2024@univ-rouen.fr before 31 October 2023.
The conference will be held in person.
Panel proposals
Panel proposals should consist of 4 papers that focus on one aspect related to the main theme of the conference. The panel organiser should invite participants and evaluate each paper in the panel, but the panel as a whole and its individual papers will also be reviewed by external evaluators. For a panel proposal, the panel organisers should submit a short overview statement of the panel theme (about 500 words), a list of participants and the abstracts of their papers.
Abstracts
They should include the following information:
- author(s) with affiliation(s)
- title and text of proposal
- selected bibliography with 3-5 academic references
- 5 keywords
Timeline
- Deadline for submission: 31 October 2023.
- Notification of acceptance: December 2023.
Notes
- All submissions are blind reviewed by the members of the Reading Committee.
- All abstracts and papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English.
- Papers will be 20 minutes maximum followed by a 10-minute discussion.
Website
https://cbc2024.sciencesconf.org/
Contact details
(Posted 19 October 2023)
5th Seminar in English Studies (SEING) “English Studies Today: Research in Times of Change”.
University of Zaragoza (Spain). Friday, 3 May 2024.
Deadline for submission of proposals: 30 January 2024.
Event organised by the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza
Presentation of the event
This seminar is intended for doctoral students in English Studies who wish to present their current research in any area related to the discipline (linguistics, literature, film studies, translation, etc). Like previous editions corroborate, this event allows students to get in contact with peers who share similar concerns and face similar challenges throughout their research years. During this seminar, PhD students will be accompanied by early-career researchers and postgraduates, as well as senior lecturers and experts in English Studies research.
Papers will be organized into four parallel sessions, revolving around the fields of literature, film studies, linguistics and translation. Two plenary lectures will be delivered by Dr. Rosa Lorés (Universidad de Zaragoza) and Dr. Katarzyna Paszkiewicz (Universitat de les Illes Balears). Additionally, recent postgraduates will share their PhD experiences and tips in a roundtable session.
Please find more information in the CFP (attached) or website (inserted below).
Timeline
- January 30th 2024: Deadline for abstract submission
- March 4th 2024: Notification of acceptance
- May 3rd 2024: SEING V
Website
https://filologiainglesa.unizar.es/programa-de-doctorado/seing-v-2024
Contact details: Twitter account (@SeingUnizar).
Original CFP
CFP-SEING-V(Posted 2 December 2023)
Crossing Boundaries: Literary and Linguistic Intersections in Modernist Studies.
Roma Tre University, Roma (Italy). 22-23-24 May 2024.
Deadline for abstract submission extended to 31 October 2023.
Confirmed Keynote Speakers
- Václav Paris (City University of New York)
- Enrico Terrinoni (Università per Stranieri di Perugia)
In the last few years, revaluations of modernism(s) – from Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making it New in New Media (2021) to Mao’s The New Modernist Studies (2021), or Rabaté and Spiropoulou’s Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics (2022) – have considerably developed, showing a marked “expansive tendency” (Mao and Walkovitz 2008: 737). The claims of recent revisionist studies concerning a variety of modernisms (diversely defined as “global”, “transnational”, or “postcolonial”) encourage reflection on both canonical and present forms of modernist poetics and works in cultural, linguistic, and media terms. As Latham and Rogers have also remarked, consistently with an ongoing and retroactive consideration of the canon, locating modernism in an “alternative historical model where technology and aesthetics intertwine” allows modernist studies to “become radiant, expansive, and pervasive” (2021: 296), which also implies detecting a persistence of modernist impulses towards renovation into both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (Perloff 2002; Mathias and D’Arcy 2015), in terms of theory as well as practice.
Far from merely re-examining canonical works or expanding the canon, what is most centrally new in the new modernist studies, Friedman (2009) reminds us, is its openness to views associated with other studies’ approaches, be these gender, race, media, or popular culture studies. Moreover, the new modernist studies’ widening of its range of primary interests has been inextricable from an effort to enlarge the toolkit of methods and perspectives through which these new modernisms could be investigated. In line with this view is also Pressman’s suggestion that modernism is a “creative strategy” – rather than just “a temporal period or movement” – which is “centrally about media” (2021: 298-99). It is mainly for this reason that modernism’s broad and transitional nature, together with its experimental and (inter)medial turn, have highly prompted new theoretical and methodological approaches. Crucially, critics have illustrated how scholarship in different areas continues to furnish new paradigms and lenses, reflecting explicitly on boundary crossings and cross-field interchanges. They have also emphasized how other disciplines – such as linguistics, stylistics (e.g. Balossi 2014), or translation studies (e.g. Bosseaux 2007; Parks 2014) – may intersect at, as well as with, literary and cultural studies, thus demonstrating the continuing productivity of modernist studies’ porousness.
In accordance with claims that modernism’s original pursuit of interdisciplinarity should be revived and intensified, this conference aims to provide a venue for an extensive exploration of literary and linguistic intersections in (the new) modernist studies. It therefore proposes to bring together academics and practitioners from the areas of both linguistics and literary criticism, so as to rethink and discuss new trends in approaching the early twentieth century. Research which investigates either of the areas (literary studies and linguistics) is welcome, but we would especially appreciate any kind of criss-crossing or interdisciplinary approach integrating the two domains.
With its interdisciplinary focus, the conference invites contributions from researchers in linguistic, literary, cultural and translation studies, as well as from scholars in neighbouring disciplines with an interest in the modernist period. We therefore welcome original paper proposals that explore broad areas of intersection between linguistic and literary studies using a wide range of scholarly approaches and methodologies. Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
- Modernism’s aesthetic boundaries
- Renovation of genres
- Intertextuality/interdiscursivity/intermediality
- Modernist practices of boundary crossing (temporal/chronological, spatial/geographical, social, cultural, thematic, formal, linguistic)
- Modernism’s transnational turn and reception studies
- Cultural, literary and linguistic varieties of modernism(s)
- Remediating modernism: new technologies, new media
- Modernism high and low: intersections with mass media and popular culture
- Temporality, visuality, spatiality in modernist poetics and its relation to screen textuality in the contemporary networked age
- Imbrication of media, linguistic and stylistic approaches in modernist works
- Modernist literature/non-literary texts in translation
- Modernist authors and/in translation
- Translation theory and practice in the early twentieth century
- Transnational/transcultural/multilingual/multimodal approaches to early twentieth-century literary/non-literary texts
- Stylistic approaches to literary/non-literary texts
- Translational stylistics
- Historical pragmatics/stylistics
- (Critical) Discourse Analysis and (early twentieth-century) texts and genres
Submission Guidelines
Proposals of about 300 words (excluding references), accompanied by a short bio-bibliographical note (max. 150 words), may be submitted to both Annalisa Federici (annalisa.federici@uniroma3.it) and Savina Stevanato (savina.stevanato@uniroma3.it) by no later than 30 September 2023. Individual/joint papers will be allotted 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes for discussion at the end of each panel. The conference language will be English. Selected peer-reviewed papers will be published in ETS Anglica series – Studies and Texts (https://www.edizioniets.com/view-collana.asp?col=anglica).
Important Dates and Info
- Abstract submission extended to: 31 October 2023
- Notification of acceptance: 15 November 2023
- Registration fee for participants (including conference folder and coffee breaks): € 70
- Conference venue: Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere (https://lingueletteratureculturestraniere.uniroma3.it/).
Please check the attached CFP for the reference list and further details.
CFP
(Posted 19 June 2023. Updated 5 October 2023)
4th Biennial John Dos Passos Society Conference.
Bassano del Grappa, Italy, 23-25 May 2024.
Abstract submission deadline: 1 February 2024.
The John Dos Passos Society is proud to announce its 2024 biennial conference in Bassano del Grappa, Italy, at the stunning fifteenth-century Villa Cà Erizzo Luca, where Dos Passos was stationed as an American Red Cross ambulance driver in the winter of 1918.
All panels will take place in the beautiful Cappella Mares within the Villa’s grounds. It was from atop the Cappella’s bell tower that Dos Passos would often make landscape sketches, write in his diary, and compose lines of poetry (which were included in the “Nights at Bassano” section of his 1922 collection A Pushcart at the Curb). The Villa is also the home of the Hemingway and Great War Museum, which offers a number of fascinating displays detailing Hemingway’s ambulance assignment in nearby Schio.
We invite abstracts for twenty-minute presentations dealing with any aspect of John Dos Passos’s life, works, and/or professional relationships. Comparative approaches are also welcome. In keeping with the setting and venue, we especially encourage proposals that relate to Italy, World War I, or the relationship with Hemingway.
For consideration, please send an abstract of 250-300 words and a brief CV to conference organizers Aaron Shaheen and Rosa María Bautista-Cordero at Aaron-Shaheen@utc.edu and rosa.bautista@uam.es by February 1, 2024. The conference language is English.
Nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps, which saw some of the harshest fighting of World War I, Bassano del Grappa is an hour train ride from Venice’s Mestre rail hub. Most major cities in the United States and Europe offer daily flights to Venice’s Marco Polo International Airport. Everything in Bassano, including the Villa Cà Erizzo Luca, is accessible by foot. Enjoy meandering through the city’s winding medieval streets, visiting its twelfth-century church, or drinking grappa from its famous covered bridge spanning the Brenta River.
The conference registration fee is 100 euros for full-time scholars and 50 euros for graduate students and the general public. The registration fee includes the following:
- One-year John Dos Passos Society membership;
- Lunch at the Villa on the first day of the conference;
- Admission to the Hemingway and Great War Museum on the Villa’s grounds;
- Guided tour of nearby Monte Grappa, the site of three battles between the Italian and Austrian armies;
- Certificate of participation.
The conference gala dinner, held in the Villa’s eighteenth-century dining hall, is not included in the conference fee but is offered at a discounted price of 70 euros.
There is no sponsoring hotel for the conference. Hotel accommodation in Bassano must be made separately by participants. All major travel websites list the city’s many lodging options.
Graduate students may apply for a travel grant by sending a short letter of motivation and their full paper to the conference organizers by April 15, 2024. Grants will be awarded to recipients after the conference.
Important dates
- Abstract Submission Deadline: February 1, 2024
- Notification of Acceptance: February 28, 2024
- Registration Fee Deadline: April 1, 2024
- Payment for Optional Gala Dinner (70 euros): April 1, 2024
- Graduate Student Travel Grant Deadline: April 15, 2024
Please also check the original CFP below.
CFP
(Posted 11 November 2023)
Literature at the Borders: Biofiction Studies Today.
Location and date: Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Sofia. 29-30 May 2024.
Deadline for submissions: 15th May 2024.
Event organised by:
- Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski
- Faculty of Classical and Modern Philology
- Department of English and American Studies
Ever since the first modern novels, such as Daniel Defoe’s, masquerading as autobiographies— as if an entirely fictional story did not deserve the audience’s attention—the writing of auto/ biographies has raised many questions as writers have always avoided the sharp distinction between biography and fiction. Many attempts have been made to bring order to this field, with various terms proposed to account for the wide variety of such texts, the most commonly used nowadays being fictionalized biography, biographical fiction or “biofiction”. The latter is not a new genre in literature, but recently it has been interpreted by critics as another form of the postmodern tendency to break genre boundaries and transcend them. All these attempts to define what is happening in the field of biography are related in one way or another to the question of the relationship between biography and history and where the borders of the factual end and the story-telling begins.
An even more interesting problem is posed by novels that, while not completely breaking genre boundaries, are nevertheless postmodern novels with famous characters from the real world that change the notion of history – private and public – and become part of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographical metafiction”. In fact, all these texts are eloquent examples of the way in which historical facts are selected and positioned in the postmodern narrative. Thus, one of the main questions in the contemporary debate about biography is whether this genre can still be seen as a stable genre untouched by postmodern hybridization, or as part of a liminal zone, a sort of “third space” that already shares the characteristics of both historiography and the fictional story-telling.
The international conference Literature at the Borders: Biofiction Studies Today which will take place on 29-30 May 2024 at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski, Bulgaria, aims to bring together scholars and researchers from different parts of the world working in the field of biofiction and border studies, enabling the exchange of ideas from different socio-cultural and scholarly contexts. Invited keynote speakers and participants will make it possible to ‘negotiate’ the literary processes in the biographical field as part of the postmodern storytelling, and the creation of fictional images that inhabit both the world of fact and the world of imagination. The conference will also contribute to the unfolding of the debate on the nature of postmodern writing and biography as situated in the border zones of hybridity and genre uncertainty, inhabiting the “third space” of ambivalence and subversion of the “grand narratives” of the past.
We invite submissions of abstracts for papers discussing various aspects of literature at the borders with a focus on biofiction but not limited to this area of research. We welcome proposals from both established literary scholars and aspiring young researchers, doctoral candidates and MA and BA students who work on interdisciplinary topics from their own literatures or from foreign ones that fall within the scope of the present call. A selection of the papers will be published after blind reviewing.
The languages of the conference are English, Bulgarian, and Russian.
The conference is planned to be in a hybrid format (in-person and online).
The deadline for proposals is 15th May 2024. The abstract should be 150-250 words, containing the title of the paper, the name of the participant, their affiliation, and contact details. Presentations will be approximately 15-20 minutes, including time for Q&A.
Please send your proposals to Kiril Hadzhikosev, khadzhikos@uni-sofia.bg
The submitted proposals will be reviewed and a note of acceptance/non-acceptance will be sent within three days of submission.
For further details, see the attached original CFP.
(Posted 21 April 2024)