Conference: Intimacy and the Right to Privacy in the English-Speaking World.
Venue and dates: Université Jean Moulin Lyon 3 (Lyon, France). 10-11 October 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 3 April 2024.
Organisers
- Dr Eglantine Zatout,
- Dr Irène Delcourt,
- Dr Marie Moreau.
Presentation
In this conference, we would like to explore the unstable boundaries between the private and the public spheres, from ethical, legal, political, economic and social standpoints. This invites us to ponder over how the legal definition of the right to privacy is delineated in English-speaking societies, and over the identities of the people whose privacy can “legitimately” be invaded and/or scrutinized. On the other hand, staging one’s privacy can be used as a way to gain political or economic power: it can be part of the activist toolbox to destigmatize a conduct in order to gain rights or as a commodity to establish a political campaign. It can also be a business and as such become commodified through social media companies who pay content creators to reveal their private lives to their audiences. The way intimacy is staged on such a public platform is worthy of inquiry as well as the impact of such staging on the audience. Ultimately, is the personal always bound to be political?
Among the possible avenues of inquiry, we will consider papers that fall under the following themes: institutions, justice and intimacy; privacy and surveillance; intimacy and activism; staging intimacy; intimacy as a commodity; intimacy and medical power.
Website address
Contact details
CFP
Read more in the original CFP below.
CFP-Intimacy_EN(Posted 9 March 2024)
Conference: Mobility of Forms – Irish Studies Conference.
Venue and dates: Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland; 11-12 October 2024.
Extended submission deadline: 21 July 2024.
Organisers
Institute of English Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków
Polish Association for Irish Studies
with support from St Mary’s College, Queens University Belfast
Keynote speakers
Professor Eve Patten, Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Alice Lyons, poet, novelist and lecturer at the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design & Architecture at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) Sligo
H.E. Ambassador of Ireland to Poland Patrick Haughey
Evelyn Conlon, novelist, short story writer, and essayist
Presentation
We welcome papers that will reflect on mobility from the angle of various disciplines engaged with Irish Studies, including literary and cultural studies, translation studies, theatre, film and visual studies, history, political, economic and social sciences. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ireland and the Irish beyond borders: mobility and migrations, restrictions and regulations of mobility
- visible, invisible, fixed or mutable borders
- Irish studies as a site of transborder encounters and cultural importations/exportations
- displacement, dislocation, dispersion, diaspora
- mobility and stasis, adaptability and rigidness
- Ireland, technology and mobility
- history of transport, traffic, mobility, and tourism
- social mobility, cultural mobility, student mobility
- mobility, mutability, and changeableness of forms in Irish literature, music, and the arts
- literature and mobility: translations of Irish literature, translation in Ireland
- Irish and Central-European literary, theatrical and cultural exchanges
Abstracts should be submitted by 21 July 2024. to the following e-mail address: irish.studies.conference@uj.edu.pl
Proposals for panels and round table discussions are also welcome.
Website address: http://conference.pais.edu.pl/
CFP
Further details in the original CFP inserted below.
(Posted 4 April 2024. Updated 21 June 2024)
SEAC International Conference: The (neo-)historical in British literature and visual arts (20th-21st centuries).
Venue and dates: Université de Caen Normandie, France; 17-18 October 2024.
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2024.
Special guest: Lucy Caldwell, winner of the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction.
Confirmed keynote speakers: Jerome de Groot (University of Manchester) and Diana Wallace (University of South Wales).
This conference will be convened by Armelle Parey. It will be held at the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaines, Université de Caen Normandie, on October 17th and 18th, 2024.
Proposals of 300 words, together with a short biographical note, should be sent to Armelle Parey (armelle.parey@unicaen.fr) by 30 April 2024. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 1 June 2024.
A selection of peer-reviewed papers will be published in the SEAC’s journal Études britanniques contemporaines: https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/
In his overview of the historical novel 1980-2018, Jerome de Groot states: ‘It could be argued that the British historical novel is the most important, influential and enduring literary genre of the last thirty-five years’ (de Groot 2019, 169) – seemingly forever attracting more writers as is the case with Zadie Smith and her latest The Fraud (2023) advertised by Penguin as her first historical novel. The genre also enjoys large visibility in popular culture: as pointed out by Leigh Wilson, historical fiction now ‘wins literary prizes, is the primary choice of book clubs, dominates bestseller lists and is snapped up for film and TV adaptations’ (Leigh Wilson 145). Indeed, besides the Walter Scott Prize created in 2009 and dedicated to historical fiction, the list of Booker prizewinners since the 1990s clearly reflects this prevailing interest in the past. Commercially successful, contemporary historical fiction, whether it considers historical events or focuses on social history, is regularly adapted for the screen where it features along with no less popular period drama.
The genre has however undergone many changes and variations since its early instances in the 18th and 19thcenturies and now takes on a great variety of guises. Robert Eaglestone thus points out “the ever more diverse and contradictory array of modes by which the past is represented, forms which far exceed the historical novel as usually conceived” (2019, 312). This renewal of interest in the past and in ways of telling it is not only obvious in the significant number of scholarly studies published in the 2000s but also in the advent of neo-Victorian fiction whose early proponents may be considered to be Jean Rhys and John Fowles but which has developed more extensively since the 1990s, notably with A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990). For Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn, what is remarkable in this trend is, at least at first, its self-conscious reconstruction of memory expressed in the “neo” prefix: ‘texts (literary, filmic, audio/visual) must in some respect be self-consciously engaged with the act of (re)interpretation, (re)discovery and (re)vision concerning the Victorians’ (2010, p. 4, emphasis in the original). It is this very “self-analytic drive”, this interrogation of the past that Elodie Rousselot offered to discuss in novels portraying other eras, coining the composite word ‘neo-historical’ for what she sees as a ‘sub-genre of contemporary historical fiction […] characterized by its similar creative and critical engagement with the cultural mores of the period it revisits” (Rousselot 2).
If the early neo-Victorian works were historiographic metafictions, some of its later instances, like neo-historical works, can be considered as post-postmodern insofar as they retain a form of self-consciousness from postmodernism but nevertheless “strive[s] for a high degree of accuracy” (Rousselot 4) in their representations. Similarly, Peter Boxall points to a return to ‘a fresh commitment to what we might call the reality of history’ (Boxall 41) in contemporary representations of the past marked by the ‘struggle towards a historical realism that remains beyond the grasp of a narrative that is alive to its own limitations’ (Boxall 64). As Katherine Harris puts it, “The neo-historical aesthetic acknowledges the inevitable failure of narratives about the past but […] simultaneously and contradictorily works to create coherent stories about it that recognize their own limitations even as they attempt to overcome them” (Harris 194). The contradiction between the novelty suggested by “neo” and the past in “historical” (Rousselot 3) conveys this paradox of the neo-historical. Yet, just as the neo-Victorian abandoned the self-conscious dimension to become, for instance in Sarah Waters’ Affinity (1999), what Kate Mitchell calls “faux-Victorian fiction; novels written in the Victorian tradition that refuse to self-reflexively mark their difference from it in the characteristically parodic mode of historiographic metafiction” (Mitchell 117), the neo-historical tones down its disruptive manner when problematizing historical representation. In Carmen Perez Riu’s words, it still “revises history but avoids experimentation and other radical or postmodern formal gestures” (Perez Riu 187) – to the extent that “critical engagement with that past may appear to be absent, while it is in fact seamlessly embedded in the text (Rousselot 5). On the other hand, some contemporary representations of history do “use more radical disruptions of narrative realism […] to offer an authentic critique of Britain’s past” (Bentley 107): examples can be found in works by Kate Atkinson, David Pearce and Jan Carson. In the first case, when the new approach is seamless, the term “neo-historical”, with its prefix that implies difference from what existed previously, may be problematic.
Neo-historical fictions, according to Rousselot, enable a re-appraisal of cultural events, themes and characters, and they do so by “push[ing] beyond what we know or think is ‘true’ about the past in order to invent new histories” (Harris 197). In doing so, they grant visibility to previously ignored aspects, such as herstory, but also address concerns of our times. This may translate into what Harris considers a key-characteristic of neo-historical fiction: “conspicuous use of anachronisms: language, politics and images that are manifestly the product of the period in which the novels are written” (Harris 194), when “a word, phrase or image that is demonstrably incongruent in its setting […] has a particular meaning in the present that is relevant to the moment of writing rather than the past in which the novel is set” (Harris 199). These words and images are thus a marker of the presence of the present in the narrative of the past. Paradoxically, anachronism may convey authenticity in the sense that it goes against the traditional record of the era with the aim of giving a broader picture of a period when including or focusing on, for instance, homosexuals or servants. For Harris, however, drawing on Marie-Luise Kohlke’s work, “anachronistically imposing present-day ideologies onto the past positions the present as superior to the past” (Harris 208) and neo-historical fiction ultimately “permits a self-congratulatory politics about history in general” (Harris 210).
Looking at a similar return to the past in American letters, Ina Bergman notes that “new Historical fiction” bridges “the gap between supposedly serious and popular literatures” whereas until recently the historical novel “bore the stigma of genre fiction” (Bergmann 140). Genre is often associated with gender when considering representations of the past in fiction and visual arts. While analyses and accounts such as Georg Lukacs’s and Perry Anderson’s anchor and value historical fiction as a male genre starting with Walter Scott (see Sutherland 20), Kate Atkinson laments: “you do have to write about the war in order to be taken seriously” (Tolan 5). Both Diana Wallace and Kathlyn Sutherland have argued and showed that historical fiction existed before Scott and never disappeared – in fact, “From the 1920s to the 1970s, the historical novel flourished in Britain in the hands of women writers” (Sutherland 18) – but women’s novels were excluded from discussions of the genre until recently. Until Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel, historical fiction by women tended to be dismissed as historical romance as exemplified by Georgette Heyer’s works but for Diana Wallace, following in the footsteps of Alison Light, “As a form […] women’s historical fiction encompasses the radical and the conservative, popular and literary” (Wallace 2012, 208). Wallace’s plea for “ways of reading women’s historical fictions that will allow us to recognize their difference from what has traditionally been regarded as ‘proper history’ and the ‘classical historical novel’ and to value that difference rather than dismissing it as ‘tosh’” (Wallace 2012, 217) could be addressed in this conference.
Ten years after Rousselot’s use of the term “neo-historical” in her edited collection, this conference will give an opportunity to discuss and question aspects and limits of this sub-genre and figure out to what extent it addresses issues of the present, such as (sexual) identities or the environment. The theme of this conference also invites us to take the long view and consider earlier as well as alternative approaches to the past.
Possible topics or issues to explore (alone or combined) the field of the neo-historical include but are not limited to:
- Authenticity
- Biofictional narratives
- Ethics of representation
- Experimentalism
- Genre and gender
- Genre fiction
- Nostalgia
- Presentism and the role of anachronism
- The commodification of history
- Modernist and anti-Modernist precedents
Papers (in English only) will focus on British literature and visual arts of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
CFP
For further details and info, please check the original CFP attached below.
(Posted 30 October 2023)
Conference: The Olfactory Story of Perfume in Literature, Psychology, and the Art.
Venue and dates: Dunărea de Jos University of Galaţi (Romania) – online and onsite; 17-18 October 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 September 2024.
Organised by The Department Of English of the Faculty of Letters, together with The Department Of Theatre, Music And Fine Arts of the Faculty of Arts of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi (Romania)
Imagine your nostrils are taken by assault. Sweet musty, whiffing fresh or sweet sour smells or even syrupy fresh smells. In some ways, the olfactory sense is the most mysterious of all senses due to the rich, intangible, and indescribable nature of smell sensations. And perhaps the most ineffable of all the senses, the olfactory sense seems to be “the mute sense” (A Natural History of the Senses, Diane Ackerman, 1990: 5) as it lacks the words and it floats free from any objects, remaining a primitive sense in our sensory manifold.
Like any other emotion, the olfactory sense has different experiences associated with it. The sparkle of a happy mood, the weariness of a deep depression, the red hot glow of a sudden flush of anger, the melancholy of regret; all of these olfactory journeys can affect conscious experience profoundly and pervade and colour all of our conscious experiences while they last.
Found in various literary and artistic genres which use descriptive language to engage readers’ sense of smell and deepen their connection to the story, olfactory journeys in literature, psychology, and the arts imply the sensory experiences related to smell, touch, and even colour. Just like visual imagery or auditory descriptions, olfactory imagery in literature, psychology and the arts can evoke strong emotions and create vivid mental landscapes for readers.
Perfume, with its rich, diverse and multiple personality types, aka scents, Perfume has always played a significant role in human experiences, inspiring artists and psychologists to explore the sensory, emotional and psychological dimensions it brings to our lives.
From the first breath of air into this world, scents become an ever-present entity in our existence, taking up all the spaces that we inhabit, physically, emotionally, or mentally. The physical loci of perfume are marked (and driven) by social dynamics and pheromones (as it is a fact that certain scents can influence attraction and social interaction) and also by an ever-pervasive cultural symbolism (being associated with rituals, traditions, and rites of passage to evoke a particular era, place, or mood). Clearly, understanding olfactory stories and their psychological implications helps researchers and practitioners explore the intricate connections between the sense of smell, memory, emotion, and behavior, highlighting the potential for olfaction to be used in therapeutic interventions and the exploration of sensory experiences in various psychological contexts.
The emotional loci of perfume are embedded within our brain’s limbic system responsible for memory and emotion, able to trigger off the Proustian Phenomenon (a specific scent evokes powerful memories and emotions) or enhance moods (uplifting, reducing stress or helping relaxation).
The mental loci of perfume are rather associated with self-expression (signature scents) and specific gender identities as the choice of a certain fragrance may reflect one’s personality, style, and even mood but it may also be a form of gender identity and conformity to societal norms.
Through olfactory journeys (textual, visual, auditory), authors aim to enhance the reader’s immersion in the narrative, create atmosphere, and evoke a specific mood or response. By describing smells, authors enable readers to experience the story-world in a multi-sensory way, making the reading experience more sensory and immersive. The olfactory journey can be both enchanting and repulsive, as different smells can evoke a range of emotions and memories.
From Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, to Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, to Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie or to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the olfactory journey transports the protagonist in a certain moment in the past, in search of identity, creating a sense of place, or establishing a particular atmosphere.
To poets, novelists, playwrights, and musicians who compose works dedicated to the beauty and allure of scents, to painters, illustrators, graphic designers, and photographers who often explore the sensual and evocative nature of perfumes, capturing the essence of different scents through color, texture, and composition, to psychologists who look into the psychological and emotional impact of scents and the power of fragrance in shaping human experiences, or to therapists whose aim is to cure by immersing their patients in a complete olfactory experience, to all of them, perfume has always been a muse and its olfactory story in literature, psychology, and the arts is a testament to the power of scent in shaping human perception and emotion, an ultimate medium intended to explore beauty, desire, memory, and identity creating a sensory journey for audiences across different artistic expressions.
Indeed, the sense of smell can enhance storytelling by evoking memories and creating a rich sensory experience for the readers, becoming thus a bridge between the past and the present, allowing audiences to revisit moments long gone and experience a deep emotional connection making the work (textual/ visual) all the more impactful and memorable.
As such, we invite papers related to the conference theme and particularly encourage graduate students and other early-career scholars to apply.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations as well as 60-minute workshops/ panels in the following possible, non-restrictive areas of investigation.
- British and Commonwealth Literature
- American Literature
- Universal Literatures
- British Cultural Studies
- Translation Studies
- Discourse analysis.
- Semiotics
- Stylistics
- Psychology
- Film studies and other arts
Abstract submission:
Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio note as an attached Word document to: lidia.necula@ugal.ro.
Kindly indicate if you plan to attend the conference in person or online. Abstracts should include the following information:
- author(s) with affiliation(s)
- email address
- title and text of proposal
- five key words
- selected bibliography with 3-5 academic references
Panel / Workshop Proposals
Panel proposals should consist of three papers that focus on the main theme of the conference. The panel organizer 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 organizers should submit a short overview statement of the panel theme (300-500 words), a list of participants, and the abstracts of their papers.
Important dates
- Deadline for abstract submission: 15.09.2024
- Notification of acceptance: 30.09.2024
- All submissions are blind reviewed by the members of the Reading Committee
CFP
For further details, please check the original call inserted below.
(Posted 12 August 2024)
Conference: Imaginings and Visions of America.
Venue and dates: Yaşar University, Izmir (Turkey), 23-25 October 2024.
Extended submission deadline: 1 March 2024.
American Studies Association of Turkey (ASAT)
42nd International American Studies Conference
Hosted by:
Yaşar University
Department of English Language and Literature
Izmir, Turkey
October 23-25, 2024
The devastating earthquake that hit the southeastern cities of Turkey and affected tens of thousands of people brought us together, not only in sharing the trauma but also in the hope of re-constructing new lives, re-evaluating priorities, and re-imagining a new, less destructive future. In an era of such unprecedented challenges, it has become increasingly evident that the arts and humanities have a pivotal role in cultivating hope and resilience through creative solutions and in creating epistemic, ethical, and political strategies to form solidarity. With this aspiration, the theme of the 42nd ASAT conference, ‘Re-’ was formulated. As the prefix ‘Re-’ suggests, we hope to create a platform for vibrant discussion promoting resilience, renewal, rebirth and reconstruction.
‘Re-’ not only encapsulates new beginnings, but also retrospection and revision, forms of labor which require us to revisit and rework critical and cultural formations of the past in order to envision a new future. Bearing in mind both the prospective and retrospective aspects of the “Re,” the American Studies Association of Turkey asks presenters to reflect on re-imaginings and re-visions of America and invites the submission of individual abstracts, panels, workshops and roundtable proposals with respect to the United States.
Possible topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Re-appropriation and reclamation of cultural heritage
- Re-booting: dystopian and utopian visions
- Recycling: ecocriticism and environmental debates
- Revitalization of natural and urban landscapes
- Re-thinking humanity: alternative futures and visions of posthumanism
- Recollection and remembrance of cultural and historical memory
- Reconciliation, reparation, and healing in history, politics and society
- Recontextualization and re-examination of cultural artifacts and traditions
- Redemption and renewal in culture and society
- Reflexivity and self-reflection in art and literature
- Revolution and current activist movements
- Regeneration and rebirth
- Reorientation and redirection of cultural and political agendas
- Resistance and rebellion
- Revisionism and memory, retrospective or nostalgic representations of the past
- Revisions, reenactments, rewritings, and adaptations
Proposals should be sent to the American Studies Association of Turkey (info@asat-jast.org) and should consist of a 250-word abstract, five keywords, and a 200-word biography for each participant. The time allowance for presentations is 20 minutes. An additional 10 minutes will be provided for discussion.
We expect all participants to attend the entire conference out of professional courtesy. Please keep this in mind while submitting an abstract.
Submission deadline: 1 March 2024.
Selected papers will be included in a special issue of the Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST) based on the conference theme. More information will be posted on our website as it becomes available:
www.asat-jast.org
(Posted 27 October 2023. Updated 21 December 2023)
Workshop: Dystopian Narratives and Stories about Illness.
Venue and dates: University of Nicosia, Cyprus (in person and online). 24-25 October 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 15 August 2024.
Organisers. This workshop is part of the European Union-sponsored Horizon Europe project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe.” It is organised by the Languages Department of the University of Nicosia, Cyprus.
Presentation
In recent years, novels have increasingly explored themes of dystopia and illness. Examples include pandemics, e.g. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), in which most of the human population has been wiped out by a swine flu pandemic, or Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), a novel set in a mostly emptied post-pandemic world. Others focus on dystopian treatments for illness, for instance Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) or The Unit (2006) by Ninni Holmqvist. Others look at genetic engineering both of the human body and beyond, such as Paolo Baciglupi’s The Wind-Up Girl (2009) or Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2013). These novels arguably reflect societal anxieties, and offer critical insights into contemporary political, social and ethical issues. This workshop seeks to investigate how dystopian narratives about illness shape and are shaped by our understanding of the political, the social fabric and the human condition. We aim to explore the role of these narratives in exposing vulnerabilities, critiquing power structures and imagining alternative futures.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
- The role of dystopian narratives in critiquing contemporary political regimes
- Illness as a metaphor in dystopian literature
- The impact of dystopian and illness narratives on public perception of health and healthcare
- Representations of pandemics and their socio-political implications
- Narratives of mental illness and their portrayal in dystopian settings
- The intersection of environmental catastrophe and illness in dystopian works
- Biopolitics and the body in dystopian fiction
- Gender, race and disability in dystopian and illness narratives
- The ethical implications of medical advancements in dystopian stories
- The role of technology and surveillance in dystopian depictions of illness
- Resistance and resilience in narratives of dystopia and illness
Contact details
Please send your abstracts of approximately 300 words and a short bio-bibliographical note to:
(Posted 21 July 2024)
Conference: AI in Education / Disembodied interActions: The use of artificial intelligence in language courses and education in general.
Venue and dates: Université Paris Nanterre (Nanterre, France). 24-25 October 2024.
Deadline for proposal submissions: 5 April 2024.
Organisers
- Daniel Schug, Université Paris Nanterre (France)
- Hanane Sarnou, Abdelhamid Ibn Badis University of Mostaganem (Algeria)
with support from the Associazione Nazionale Insegnanti di Lingue Stranieri (ANILS – Italy)
Presentation
Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) are changing how languages are being taught and learned. Existing AI technologies can plan entire lessons for teachers and even provide realistic communication practice for learners; it is therefore important to analyze how these tools are being used and how they are shaping L2 learning experiences. Our aim is to bring together specialists in linguistics, language didactics, education, psychology, communications, and new technologies to discuss and reflect on how this technology is impacting language learning and education in general. We invite submissions on the following subthemes:
- Subtheme 1: AI & Language Teaching
- Subtheme 2: AI & Language Learning
- Subtheme 3: AI, Institutions & Policies
Keynote speakers
- Professor Marcel Pikhart of the University of Hradec Kralove (Czech Republic) and
- Professor Michael Thomas of the Liverpool John Moores University (United Kingdom).
Website address
https://ailanguagelearning.sciencesconf.org
Contact details
- Daniel Schug: dschug@parisnanterre.fr (English, French, Italian)
- Hanane Sarnou: hanane.sarnou@univ-mosta.dz (English, French, Arabic)
(Posted 21 February 2024)