Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in May 2017

International James Baldwin Conference
Ankara, Turkey, 4-5 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2016

The Department of American Culture and Literature, Başkent University, Ankara, is pleased to announce its International James Baldwin Conference, the third in a series of international biennial conferences organized by the Department on American writers. As a novelist, short fiction writer, essayist, playwright, poet, social/literary critic, and political activist, Baldwin continues to inspire many readers, critics, and artists today. Having lived as an expatriate in several countries, including Turkey, Baldwin left a literary, cultural, and intellectual legacy that extends well beyond the United States. It is hoped that during the conference Baldwin will be discussed through multiple, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary approaches. Suggested topics for papers include but are not limited to:

  • Baldwin the American
  • Baldwin the Expatriate
  • Baldwin and Identity
  • Baldwin and Race
  • Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement
  • Baldwin and African American Culture
  • Baldwin on Stage and Screen
  • Baldwin and Sexuality
  • Baldwin and Literary Criticism
  • Baldwin and Literary Journalism
  • Baldwin and His Contemporaries
  • Baldwin and Music
  • Baldwin and the Arts
  • Baldwin and Religion
  • Baldwin: Sources and Influences
  • International Reception of Baldwin
  • Baldwin in Translation

Please visit the conference website http://jamesbaldwinconference2017.baskent.edu.tr to submit an abstract of maximum 250 words for a twenty-minute oral presentation, and also a short biographical note of maximum 100 words.  The deadline for the submission of abstracts is 01 November 2016. You will be notified by 15 December 2016 whether or not your paper has been accepted for presentation at the Conference. Further information concerning plenary speakers, travel, accommodation, conference program and other details will be available on the conference website in due course. Should you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact us at jamesbaldwinconference2017@baskent.edu.tr.

(posted 29 July 2016)

Alphonse Legros in France and in Britain : A Tale of Two Countries
University of Burgundy and Museum of Fine Arts, Dijon, France, 4-5 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 1 January 2017

Keynote Speakers
Elizabeth Prettejohn, University of York
Stephen Bann, University of Bristol

Conference convenors :
Sophie Aymes, University of Burgundy
Bénédicte Coste, University of Burgundy
Bertrand Tillier, University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne

Although he was born and possibly taught in Dijon, Alphonse Legros spent most of his life in Britain where he was appointed professor at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1876. Legros held the position until 1893, introducing etching and, later, sculpture to the syllabus. In 1880, he was one of the six founding members of the Society of Painter-Etchers which was to play an influential role in the late Victorian revival of printing. He was also instrumental in the modern revival of the cast portrait medal. When he died in 1911, Legros was a British citizen and a distinguished artist. The Tate Gallery organized the largest-ever retrospective of his works. However Legros did not forget France, nor did France forget him: a one-man show was held at Samuel Bing’s L’Art Nouveau gallery in 1898, and a large retrospective exhibition was curated by Léonce Bénédite at the Musée du Luxembourg in 1900. In Dijon, the Musée des Beaux-Arts set up an exhibition in 1987 and recent smaller events in France testify to an enduring interest for this transnational and transmedia artist.

The conference organized at the University of Burgundy (Dijon) in May 2017 by the Centre Interlangues (Texte-Image-Langage) and the Musée des Beaux-Arts will revisit Legros’s work and role as well as his legacy and reception in the 20th and 21st centuries.

We invite art historians, specialists of Victorian visual culture and aesthetics, curators, collectors and art school teachers to send proposals for 20-minute papers that explore the following themes in this non exhaustive list:

  • Legros and the visual culture of his time in relation to Aestheticism, pre-Modernist aesthetics and the revival of the graphic arts;
  • Legros, a multi-media artist with an experimental legacy: techniques (etching, lithography, painting, drawing, medal making) and transmediality;
  • Legros in France: the ‘Société des Trois’; the creation of the Société des Aquafortistes, and its first portfolio in 1862; Legros’s later career in France;
  • Legros and illustration: his own illustrations (to Edgar Poe’s stories for instance); his influence on contemporary illustrators;
  • Legros and British artists: acquaintanceships, avant-garde, networks of sociability and influence (D. G. Rossetti and F. Watts for instance);
  • Art school teaching: Legros’s teaching method and influence as professor of etching at the South Kensington School of Art and as Slade Professor; changes to the curriculum, Legros in the history of the teaching of fine arts and draughtsmanship;
  • Legros’s influence on younger artists (H. S. Tuke, Charles Furse, and William Strang, Philip Rothenstein, Charles Shannon, Augustus John);
  • France and England: cross-fertilisation and artistic transfers, recognition and/or neglect;
  • The history of the reception of his work: connoisseurship, tradition and transmission; building up collections in the UK and in the US; Legros on the contemporary market both in Britain and in 
France.

Please send a 300-word abstract and a short biography before 1st January 2017 to:
Sophie Aymes: sophie.aymes@u-bourgogne.fr

Bénédicte Coste: benedicte.coste@u-bourgogne.fr

Bertrand Tillier: bertrand.tillier@univ-paris1.fr 


Notification of acceptance: 15th January 2017.

(posted 2 December 2016)

Women and Popular Culture(s) in the Anglophone Worlds (1945-2015)
University of La Rochelle, France, 4-5 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2017

Keynote speakers:

  • Kim Akass (Senior Lecturer, Film and Television Studies, coordinator of the Media Research Group, University of Hertfordshire)
  • Janet McCabe (Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, co-director of the Centre for Media and Creative Practice, Birkbeck College, University of London)

The interdisciplinary two-day conference “Women and Popular Culture(s) in the Anglophone Worlds: 1945-2015” proposes to review the present state of knowledge on such elastic notions as those of “woman” and “popular culture” and to underline their permanence and evolution at a time when the influence of Gender and Cultural Studies seems undisputed in both academic and social fields. The conference addresses the issue of how, through popular culture and cultural industries, women have been involved in social, cultural, and economic sectors they were previously barred from and what means and channels they have used to invest and invent specific places, spaces, and cultural milieu from the middle of the 20th century the present time.

The term “popular culture” will be central. From Matthew Arnold’s book (Culture and Anarchy) to the more recent works, it is open to debate: it is not the “high culture” of the Leavis’s nor folk culture. It is not what Christopher Lasch coined as “mass culture” either (Mass Culture or Popular Culture?). Situated at the crossroads between the unique and the expected, and between high, folk and mass cultures, popular culture is everything that they are not. The issue is even more complex if we take into consideration the multiple examples of hybridization between these forms of culture. How have women taken advantage of this lack of consensus?

Since the middle of the 20th century, the presence of women has become increasingly visible in all fields of popular culture and in cultural industries (cinema, music, visual and performing arts, etc.). But the last decades, which have been at the origin of multiple women’s culture(s), produced exclusively by women and for women have also proved that stereotypical and archetypal figures associated with femininity are still rife (i. e. the all-pervasive mother-figure). Is “feminine culture,” as Georg Simmel coined it in “Philosophy of Love,” still subjected to male prerogative or has it become a dominant, not to say global culture which is part and parcel of the contemporary popular culture(s)? What parts have ecofeminist theory and practices and literary women dealing with womens’ “naturecultures” (Donna Harraway) played? Papers are welcome that will look, for instance, at the influence of ecofeminist critics and writers over the representations and discourses concerning women, nature, and culture.

The conference is also interested in the interactions between literature, comparative studies and popular culture, and in defining who the “learned” women of today are (politicians, scholars, noted authors and artists, patrons, etc.). Have new categories emerged among literary women and have women’s writings been catalysts to new literary and artistic genres? Is social background still a determining factor? What recognition have women been given and how have they been perceived and represented? Is the line separating popular culture and “high culture” still perceptible? We will pay special attention to multi-talented, versatile women whose production signals a blurring of the boundaries between “popular” and “high” cultures, between the masculine and the feminine, and reflects the overlapping of literary genres and academic subjects.

In the economic field, we shall consider the place of women in the workplace and delimit the economic networks of the feminine, the way they have developed and have been dismantled over time. What is the place of women in cultural industries? Do women’s economic networks necessarily reflect women’s economic and purchasing power? We encourage proposals that highlight the specificity of female economy, but we also welcome papers that approach women’s merchandising in the media and visual culture as well as the close relationship between capitalism and sexism: women as actors vs. objects of bargaining, the working woman vs. the whore, women as consumers vs. commodities.

The real and symbolic spaces associated with women should not be overlooked. In what ways and with which tools can we define and delimit them? Are the traditional categories based on ethnicity, geography, social background, and gender still valuable standards when considering popular representations? Current arguments about intersectionality lead us to question the epistemological value of traditional concepts in the mapping of the feminine, and to discuss the place of the body and of its uses in the building of new feminine spaces.

Special attention will also be paid to the use of the Internet and digital technology thanks to which “celebrities” 2.0, influenced by post-feminist criticism, present themselves as the spokespersons for gender equality. What can be said about the omnipresence of feminine figures on social media and about their “practice” of freedom and equality? Is popularization synonymous with politicization and do “feminine culture” and feminism(s) necessarily go hand in hand? If the core gender identity has regularly been attacked, feminism and its ramifications seem to be engulfed to the extent that the appropriateness of the concept of a feminist “wave” is becoming more and more controversial, which is all the more obvious as multiple feminist groups, trends and labels coexist (radical, eco-, post-feminism, …). Where do feminisms stand today? What is the consequence of their cultural assimilation? Dissemination or dissolution? Autonomy or fragmentation?

The conference theme can be approached through several, non-exclusive angles, among which:

  • Cultures of women
  • Feminine and/vs. feminist culture
  • Learned and/vs. “popular” women
  • Culture and acculturation of feminism(s)
  • The economy of the feminine/female economy
  • Cartographies and geographies of the feminine
  • The representations of women in popular culture
  • Women’s consumer behavior/practices and the merchandising of women
  • Feminism and capitalism
  • Women and culture 2.0

Despite its title, the conference is not restricted to feminist and gender studies. Spanning the Anglophone worlds over 70 years, it encourages the sharing of contrasting points of view in order to enhance how certain women, from all social, ethnic, economic, and geographic backgrounds and with different sexual orientations, have been playing down and playing with popular culture and gender stereotypes. The conference thus aims to explore the means and channels women have been using according to the milieu or group to which they belong, and the ways these tools and channels have been coopted, subverted and recycled. In this perspective, we would like to bring together specialists from various disciplines, such as sociologists, historians, geographers, economists as well as scholars in (comparative) literature, art and visual arts, music, and costume/fashion history.

Abstracts (approximately 350 words) and a short bio should be sent to: elodie.chazalon@univ-lr.fr before January 15, 2017. Papers will be selected for publication.

(posted 2 December 2016)

Translation and Philosophy
University of Liège, Belgium, 4-6 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 31 July 2016

The present conference, co-organized by the Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches en traduction et en interprétation (CIRTI) and the philosophy department at the University of Liège, aims at exploring recent research on connections between philosophy and translation. Two approaches will be developed.
Translating philosophy
As a rule, a first requirement when translating philosophical texts is to adequately convey the various underlying concepts. In this respect each translation or retranslation offers its interpretation of the theories and notions used by the translated philosopher. How can translation choices (conditioned by the nature of the respective languages?) change the way a given work is perceived? Can misunderstandings (or plain mistranslations) open the door to new interpretations of the translated work in the target language? More generally, what is the impact of translations and retranslations of philosophical texts on the development of both philosophical and translatological theory? Is the approach of a translating philosopher in any way different from that of a translator without any philosophical training? Is there a specific branch of translation studies devoted to the translation of philosophical works?

The philosophy of translating
The second approach that will be developed is related to philosophical issues involved in translating. Is translating an act of violence, a form of cannibalism or does it provide a way of overcoming violence? Is not translation also a heuristic concept that provides a map of the mental and cultural networks that structure each culture at a given time as well as an epistemological tool that brings up issues emerging at the crossroads of areas such as philosophy of language, sociology, or indeed environmental studies?
In this context what is the function of untranslatability? Is it an obstacle to the universal project inherent in translation or is it the very condition that makes it possible? Does it reflect the fundamental instability of meaning? Does not translation open onto new perspectives on both language and otherness? Cannot the emergence of “translation ecology” (Michael Cronin, Translation and Globalization) help us to redefine and renegotiate the bond between humankind and its own diversity, and beyond, to its environment and to the world?

We have only sketched some possible avenues on affinities between translation and philosophy.
Papers will be delivered in English or in French and will not exceed 20 minutes.
A short abstract of no more than 500 words will be sent to Valérie Bada vbada@ulg.ac.be and Bernard Smette b.smette@ulg.ac.be by 31 July 2016.

(posted 12 July 2016)

Short Fiction: Co-texts and Contexts. 3rd ENSFR Conference
University of Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium, 4-6 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 January 2017

Since the emergence of the modern short story as a distinct literary form in the second half of the nineteenth century, many critics and writers have sought to decide what it is exactly that distinguishes the short story from longer fiction, such as the novella or the novel – Is it length? Conciseness? A specific thematic concern? Or a particular stylistic feature? The matter has not yet been settled. Perhaps we need to look to more circumstantial, material elements for a pragmatic answer to that question. Indeed, one could argue that one of the discerning features of the short story is that it is rarely if ever published separately. Instead, it appears as one text among others, whether in a newspaper or magazine, an anthology or collection, a short story cycle or sequence, on a website or in a twitter feed. Precisely these different formats and contexts of publication have also been instrumental in the birth and development of the modern short story as we know it today. As several critics have argued, the short story rose to fame as a new and fashionable literary form in the 19th century thanks to the boom in the periodical press. Similarly, its decline in popularity in the second half of the 20th century correlates with the decimation of magazines willing to publish short fiction. And one could argue that the renewed interest in short fiction today is related to the proliferation of new publishing opportunities through digital media.
This necessary co-textuality of the short story or the different contexts in which it is published and read are slowly receiving more critical attention. Dean Baldwin’s Art and Commerce in the British Short Story: 1880-1950  documents the rise and fall of British short fiction through a study of its modes of publication. Other studies address the processes of unification and collection that go into the making of short story cycles, anthologies or collections, while the interactions between short fiction and new (digital) media formed the topic of the previous ENSFR conference.
This third annual ENSFR conference wants to further explore the many different ways in which short fiction interacts with its co-texts and contexts in different literary traditions. Questions we would like to address are:

  • How have the publication formats of short fiction changed over the centuries?
    How is the development of the short story bound up with the printing and publishing context of a particular time and space?
  • To what extent have the publication contexts of the short story influenced its perception as an avant-garde or popular genre, or as highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow literary form?
  • What are the new publishing formats emerging today and how do they influence the short story?
  • What is the interaction between short fiction and other media (e.g. illustrations, typography, photographs) in such multimedial publishing formats as the magazine or the website?
  • What is the importance of the book trade and its marketing strategies on the writing and publishing of short stories?
  • How is the co-textual nature of a single-author collection different from that of an anthology or from a short story cycle? How does this context influence our reading of a given short story, as it moves, for instance, from a magazine, to a collection and on to an anthology or syllabus?
  • How does a short story take on new meaning throughout its migration across different publishing contexts? What metamorphoses can be observed from a story’s initial publication to later, revised versions?
  • What connections might be made within an author’s complete oeuvre? For example, do authors sometimes return to initial stories or storyworlds later in his/her career, creating connections that extend beyond the temporal frame of an initial publication, but also beyond the material boundaries of a single collection?
  • In what way do stories interact with the socio-political context of the time and place they reflect? How do they evoke that larger context within a restricted frame?

In other words, possible topics can include, but are not limited to, the following themes:

  • The short story cycle
  • The anthology
  • The collection
  • The story as part of an author’s oeuvre
  • Short fiction in magazines
  • Short fiction and other media
  • The short story and the book trade
  • The short story and prize culture
  • The short story and its socio-political contexts
  • Interpreting the short story

We welcome papers (in both English and French) that address these questions and topics either through individual case studies or more theoretical or historical explorations as well as in different literary traditions. Proposals for three-paper panels are also welcome.
300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers should be sent to Elke D’hoker (elke.dhoker@kuleuven.be) and Bart Van den Bossche (Bart.vandenbossche@kuleuven.be) by the 15th of January 2017. Contributors should also send a short biographical note indicating institutional affiliation.
Further information about the conference will be posted on the conference website http://www.shortfiction.be. Further information about the ENSFR can be found on http://ensfr.hypotheses.org/. The conference will take place in the Leuven Irish college (http://www.leuveninstitute.eu/site/index.php).

(posted 4 October 2016)

Building Resilience: Dialogue, Collaboration and Partnerships across Our Differences: WCWS 2017: 3rd World Conference on Women’s Studies 2017
Colombo, Sri Lanka, 4-6 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 9 february 2017

http://www.womenstudies.co

We are pleased to announce the 3rd World Conference on Women’s Studies held on 4th – 6th May, 2017 in Sri Lanka & hosted by Bridgewater State University.

Hosting Partner: Bridgewater State University, USA.
Academic Partners: Rikkyo University, Japan, Nepal Center for Contemporary Research and Centre of Excellence for Women’s Studies – University of Karachi, Pakistan.

WCWS 2017 cordially invite reaserchers to take part in the 03rd World Conference on Women’s Studies. WCWS 2017, dedicated to the theme Building Resilience: Dialogue, Collaboration and Partnerships across Our Differences, will deliberate on related issues, praxis and solutions that suggest to build women’s movements that are truly global in character.

Researchers are invited to send abstracts for all modes of Oral, Poster and Virtual Presentations. Research areas suitable for paper submission include the following fields, but not limited to;

We are pleased to announce the 3rd World Conference on Women’s Studies held on 4th – 6th May, 2017 in Sri Lanka & hosted by Bridgewater State University.

Hosting Partner: Bridgewater State University, USA.
Academic Partners: Rikkyo University, Japan, Nepal Center for Contemporary Research and Centre of Excellence for Women’s Studies – University of Karachi, Pakistan.

WCWS 2017 cordially invite reaserchers to take part in the 03rd World Conference on Women’s Studies. WCWS 2017, dedicated to the theme Building Resilience: Dialogue, Collaboration and Partnerships across Our Differences, will deliberate on related issues, praxis and solutions that suggest to build women’s movements that are truly global in character.

Researchers are invited to send abstracts for all modes of Oral, Poster and Virtual Presentations. Research areas suitable for paper submission include the following fields, but not limited to:

  • Gender, Race and Class
  • Women in Cross-Cultural Perspective
  • Underrepresented Women Groups – GLBTI
  • Feminist Pedagogies
  • Women in Literature
  • Feminist Science Studies
  • Sociology of Gender
  • Psychology of Women
  • Women in European | American | Asian | History
  • Women in World History
  • Women and Peace in South Asia
  • Women and Migration Patterns
  • Women and the Environment
  • Women’s Movements and Activism
  • Gender, Culture and Representation
  • Women, Relationships and Social Policy
  • Women, Violence and Victimization
  • Processes for Women’s Networking and Organizing
  • Women Empowerment and Agency
  • Sex, Race and Popular Culture
  • Gender, Science and Technology
  • Women and Work
  • Women, Development and Global Economy
  • Gender and Development
  • Gender and Transnational Economies
  • Women, Law and Policy
  • Sex, Power and Politics
  • Reproductive Rights and Justice
  • Rhetoric and Women’s Rights
  • Women and Violence

Due recognition will be granted to the Best Oral and Poster presentations of each session, and the overall bests will also be awarded in addition. Students’ awards also are available for the top performers at presentations.
Abstract submission deadline : 9th February 2017
Submit Your Abstract at abstract@womenstudies.co

Publication Oppertunity
All accepted abstracts will be published in the conference abstract book with ISBN and manuscripts will be published electronically with ISSN in proceedings with a DOI number. Selected manuscripts will be published in conference supporting journals for free of charge. All full papers will be under double-blind.

Free Journal Publication:
Journal of International Women’s Studies
ISSN 1539-8706
Executive Editors: Prof: Diana Fox & Prof: Cami Sanderson

Conference Chair
Diana J. Fox, PhD
Professor and Chairperson, Department of Anthropology, Journal of International Women’s Studies,
Bridgewater, USA

We look forward for your responses and kindly request from you to disseminate this mail among your colleagues.
Thank you and see you in Sri Lanka!

(posted 23 January 2017)

New Stage Idioms: South African Drama, Theatre and Performance in the Twenty-first Century
Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Belgium, 11-13 May 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 26 September 2016

In the years that followed the end of Apartheid, South African drama, theatre and performance were characterized by a remarkable productivity, which entailed a process of constant aesthetic reinvention. In the post-apartheid period, South African playwrights and theatre makers sought to come to terms with the traumatic legacy of the pre-democratic past. Witness thereof are performance works documenting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings. After 1994, the “protest” theatre template of the apartheid years morphed into increasingly more diverse forms of stage expressions, detectable in the works of Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Zakes Mda, Lara Foot, Paul Grootboom, Omphile Molusi, Fatima Dike, Nadia Davids, Aubrey Sekhabi, Magnet Theatre, Yael Farber, and Neil Coppen to name only a few. This conference will seek to document the various ways in which the “rainbow” nation has forged these new stage idioms, inviting contributions about different forms of performance modes. In order to foreground theatre, the keynote speakers will be active figures from the contemporary post-apartheid stage: Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Greg Homann, Nadia Davids, and Omphile Molusi. Here is a list of potential topics for consideration:

  • Contemporary theatre makers working in English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and/or other African languages. How can Indigenous playwriting be defined?
  • New thematic and aesthetic trends in playwriting.
  • Impact of globalization on South African playwriting and stage practices.
  • Theatre making from marginalised voices (expressing gender, social or ethnic differences; LBGT voices on the stage; playwriting by women) and other issues of identity representation.
  • Contemporary township and community theatre.
  • Reinterpretations of European classics for the South African stage;
  • How are of issues of trauma, violence and cultural memory/amnesia enacted on the contemporary stage?
  • New forms of political theatre.
  • Alternative dramaturgies (installation art, site-specific performance, contemporary dance).
  • The politics of festivals; politics of funding.

A selection of conference presentations will be considered for publication. Prospective participants should send a short proposal and a brief vita to the convenor, Professor Marc Maufort, Université Libre de Bruxelles, by the extended deadline of September 26, 2016 (mmaufort@ulb.ac.be). Notifications of acceptance will be sent in late October 2016.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Mike van Graan, Craig Higginson, Greg Homann, Nadia Davids, and Omphile Molusi.

An evening of readings from these playwrights’ and theatre practitioners’ works will be held during the conference.

(posted 4 September 2016)

Gendering the Urban Imaginary: Fantasy, Affect, Transgression
Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, 12-13 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 6 February 2017                                                                              

Keynote speaker: John McLeod, University of Leeds, UK

Organisers:

Ágnes Györke, Senior Lecturer, Department of British Studies

Imola Bülgözdi, Senior Lecturer, North American Department

The Gender, Translocality and the City Research Group at the University of Debrecen is pleased to announce its second annual conference, which is going to explore the role of gender, fantasy, and emotion in the production of urban space. Papers focusing on urban fantasy in twentieth- and twenty-first-century anglophone literary, visual and cultural studies are invited for presentation, and we also encourage submissions relying on psychogeographical approaches to explore the (post)modern imaginary of city life. Papers investigating the modern(ist) city, postmodern labyrinths, art and the aestheticization of urban space, the playable city, uncanny metropolises, paranormal urban worlds, suburban and subterranean space, spectral cities and fantasy scapes, for instance, are welcome. Presentations addressing “the mutually defining relation between bodies and cities” (Elizabeth Grosz) will be considered as well, especially if focusing on the “atmosphere” (Teresa Brennan) or “sense of place” (Jon Anderson) as the articulation of affective traces which define subjectivities in relation to specific environments. We also encourage submissions on topics such as transgressions, fear, and the city; metamorphoses, enjoyment, and urban space; emapthy and the city; and so on.Theoretical contributions investigating the intersections between affect theory and city studies, including, but not limited to, the works of Sarah Ahmed, Elspeth Probyn, Carolyn Pedwell, for instance, and Michel De Certeau, Elizabeth Wilson, Elizabeth Grosz, etc., are also within our scope of interest.

We particularly welcome submissions exploring gendered readings of the following themes:

  • The imaginary of everyday life
  • Fantasies of corporeality
  • Street art and the aestheticization of urban space
  • The city and empathy
  • The femme fatale and the urban imaginary
  • The ideal city and fantastic dystopias
  • Metamorphoses, enjoyment, and the city
  • Compassion, forgiveness, and the city
  • Nightmare and the city
  • Shame, shaming, and the city
  • Fear, vulnerability, and the city
  • Transgression, terror, and urban space
  • Embodied placemaking and fantasy
  • Virtual geographies: embodiment and affect in cyberspace
  • Urban identities, rootedness and the “sense of place”

Please send 300-400-word abstracts to urbanimaginary@gmail.com before 6 February 2017.

Advanced MA and PhD students are warmly encouraged to submit abstracts to present papers in regular sessions, and the conference also aims to provide an opportunity for them to discuss their research projects related to the theme of the call (dissertation proposals, chapters, articles, etc.). Graduate students are invited to organise 60-minute or 90-minute roundtable discussions and workshops with 3-4 participants. Please submit a 400-word proposal about the issues to be discussed, including the format you would prefer, and a 300-word summary of the role of each student in your group (for instance, moderator, respondent, etc.).
Final year BA students are invited to showcase their research findings related to the theme of the conference in a poster session. Please submit 200-250-word abstracts outlining the topic to be presented before 6 February. A Q & A session will be organised during the conference to discuss posters.

Deadline: 6 February 2017.
Notification of acceptance: 15 February 2017.

Selected papers will be published in a thematic issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, a peer-reviewed journal listed by the MLA and available on ProQuest and JSTOR.

Registration fee : 30 EUR (normal); 20 EUR (students); 14 EUR (poster presentation and participation)
Partial registration fee waivers are available to participants from low and middle income countries, please apply before 28 February 2017.
Facebook event
Facebook page

(posted 9 January 2017)

Engendering Difference: Sexism, Power and Politics
Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia, 12-13 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 10 March 2017

Equality—sought through many movements throughout the 20th century, and still elusive in the 21st—demands the address of what it seeks to eliminate: difference. Although multiple forms of difference complicate the ideal level playing field in human endeavors, gender difference remains a stubbornly salient construct.
Our conference aims to open exploration of the issues of gender and the difference it creates in human lives, inviting research on both its historical and contemporary effects. Whether in the post-socialist climate of central and eastern Europe, in the historical movements of first-, second- and third-wave feminism, or in cultural expressions such as literature, film and art, constructs of gender underlie our social, political and linguistic assumptions. If a gender imbalance persists (and the issue is open for debate), then redressing it requires an interdisciplinary approach.
To this end, scholars (including graduate students) are invited to submit papers for a presentation of their research on topics including the following:

  • Sexism, Violence and Victimization;
  • Women’s Movements and Activism;
  • Gender Constructs in Literature, Language, and Translation;
  • Aging and Gender: Ageism and Sexism;
  • Gender and Discourse Analysis;
  • Descriptive Aspects of Gender (In)equality: Biology, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology;
  • Normative Aspects of Gender (In)equality: Ethics, Politics and Law;
  • Women in Academia;
  • Gender (In)equality in the Workplace;
  • Or other related topics.

The conference will take place on 12-13 May 2017 at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, Slovenia.
Official languages of the conference will be English and Slovenian. Abstracts of between 150 and 200 words in either of the two languages should be submitted via the conference website. The due date for the submission of abstracts is 10 March 2017. Authors will be notified about the acceptance of their proposal by 31 March 2017.
Please visit the conference website for more information.

(posted 11 January 2017, updated 16 January 2017)

Border Crossings: Rethinking “Trans-” in Literature, Language, and Media
Spiru Haret University, Bucharest, Romania, 17-18 May 2017
Deadline for full papers: 19 May 2017

Few words have been as much in the center of attention in recent years as the unassuming prefix ‘trans’: from translation to transnationalism to transsexuality, we seem to be living in the epoch of ‘trans’.

From a Latin term meaning ‘beyond’ or ‘on the other side’ – the equivalent of Greek ‘meta’ – ‘trans’ connotes any movement across a border, whether geographical (trans rhenum, ‘across the Rhine’), linguistic (‘translation’), political (‘transnational’), social or sexual (‘transsexual’), and not least in relation to diaspora, migration, and exile (refugees as transnationals).

These are just a few of the contexts in which we rely on ‘trans’ to describe phenomena that don’t fit neatly into set borders or distinctions. Closely related are the dynamics of minority cultures, which question the logic of borders from within. In this conference, participants are invited to explore any aspect of ‘trans’ in literature, language, media, or culture.

  • Where and how do phenomena cross borders or mix domains?
  • What forms of diversity do ‘trans-processes’ allow or foment?
  • Do ‘trans-phenomena’ transcend [!] borders? Or establish new ones?
  • And why is ‘trans’ so much in the public eye today?

Presentations that describe, analyze, or also critique discourses of ‘trans’ will be essential to this endeavor. By exploring the universal phenomenon of crossing borders, this conference strives to shed new light on the prevalence of ‘trans’ in today’s culture. Papers are invited from all academic disciplines, including literary studies, linguistics, philology, cultural and media studies, international studies, philosophy.

Topic Proposals:

  • Translation across languages, media, sign-systems
  • Multilingualism in literature, media, and in communication
  • Multilingual nation states
  • Cultures and processes of migration and exile
  • The cultural dynamics of refugees and asylum
  • Transgressive identities (sexual, cultural, national)
  • Representations of deviant identities in film, media, literature
  • Minority cultures
  • Multimediality in film, music, theatre, literature
  • Crossing borders in film and other media
  • Translation and empire; translatio imperii
  • Hybridity in language, culture, media
  • Representations of transcendence
  • Metaphor (Latin: translatio) and metonymy in language, culture, media

Plenary Sessions:

  • BA-Candidate Elif San (University of Vienna)
  • Christiane Frey (New York University)
  • David Martyn (Macalester College)
  • Prof. Dr. Antonia Enache (Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies)

Calendar:

Conference Fee: 30 Euro

(posted 15 March 2017)

27th BAS Conference on British and American Studies
Timişoara, Romania, 18-20 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 15 February 20

The English Department of the Faculty of Letters, University of Timişoara, is pleased to announce its 27th international conference on British and American Studies, which will be held in May 18-20, 2017.

Confirmed plenary speakers:
Professor Alexander Onysko, Alpen-Adria University of Klagenfurt
Professor Mircea Mihăieș, West University of Timișoara

Presentations (20 min) and workshops (60 min) are invited in the following sections:

  • Language Studies
  • Translation Studies
  • Semiotics
  • British and Commonwealth Literature
  • American Literature
  • Cultural Studies
  • Gender Studies
  • English Language Teaching

Abstract submission
Please submit 60‑word abstracts, which will be included in the conference programme:

Deadline: 15 February 2017

Conference fee
The early conference registration fee is EUR 100, to be paid by March 15; the late registration fee is Euro 120.
For RSEAS members, the early registration fee is lei 300; the late registration fee is lei 350.

Conference website:http://www.litere.uvt.ro/conferinte/BAS/index.htm

vent website: http://litere.uvt.ro/cs-events/27th-conference-on-british-and-american-studies/

For additional information, please contact:
Luminiţa Frenţiu, frentiuluminita@yahoo.com; luminita.frentiu@e-uvt.ro, tel + 40 744792238;
Loredana Pungă, loredana.punga@yahoo.ro; loredana.punga@e-uvt.ro, tel + 40 763691704

(posted 4 October 2016)

The meanings of dialects in British poetry – from late 19th century to early 21st century
Lille 3 University, France, 19 May 2016
Deadline for proposals: 11 February 2017

Keynote speakers:

Tom Burton (University of Adelaide, Australia)

Jane Hodson (University of Sheffield, UK)

Despite the fact that, quite recently, and ironically, The Guardian headline read “Regional dialects are Dying Out – It’s Enough to get you Blarting” (May, 30th 2016), dialects have always been – and continue to be – present in poetry.

From The Canterbury Tales, where Chaucer already parodied dialect poetry, to the intrusion, within a poem otherwise written in standard English, of dialect lines (as for instance with Thomas Hardy or Simon Armitage), to a type of poetry whose prosody partly depends on the accent picked when read aloud (Cockney in Keats’s poetry for instance or the Dorset dialect in William Barnes), there are countless cases of using dialect. Today poets like Tony Harrison, Simon Armitage, Steve Ely, or Helen Mort, to name but a few, still use some form of dialect in their poems.

How is a dialect introduced in poetry, on the page and orally? What are the tools (syntactic, semantic, prosodic, poetic, spelling, etc.) used by the poet to make his / her accent heard? One may then wonder if these dialects are eye dialects or even ear dialects. Are these traces of dialect, stanzas or even full poems in dialect, directly voiced by the poet or by a mask? Are they placed at the core of the poem or literally marginalised in an epigraph? Are these poetic dialects limited to literary usage or are they also spoken outside poetry, at home, during interviews or in letters (as Pound and Eliot would do)? And are there any groups of poets who, according to their region, use the same dialects?

The presence of dialect raises the question of the implicit reader and listener, and his / her capacity to spot the dialect traces and to relate these textual nodes to a specific British area (or, possibly, an area of the former British Empire, as in David Morley’s Anglo-Romani). It also, quite significantly, addresses the understanding of the poem. For instance, William Hazlitt declared that he had a hard time understanding Wordsworth’s “mixture of clear gushing accents in his voice, [his] deep guttural intonation, and [his] strong tincture of the northern burr, like the crust on wine”. To what extent have recording and broadcasting technology (from the gramophone to podcasts) changed the understanding of dialect in poetry?

The presence of dialect in poetry also raises the question of its poetic value: poetry has traditionally been considered as a genre of and for the elite, while dialects have been seen as the language of lower social classes. To what extent can a poet reconcile dialects with poetry?

One may consequently wonder why poets use dialects in their poetry: is it to make oral transmission easier? Does it derive from a real concern to gather material on a region and its inhabitants? Is it a way to give a voice to those who are marginalized from the poetic tradition, that is those whose accents are considered if not barbarous at least unfit for the lyricism too often equated with what poetry should and can be? Does dialect poetry necessarily belong to “minor literature” as theorized by Deleuze and Guattari?

Behind the question of the presence of dialect in poetry is that of the very definition of poetry.

Our purpose is to start a discussion around all these issues. This requires a combination of various methodologies, that of poetry specialists with that of phoneticians, linguists and experts in the history of the English language.

Theoretical papers and papers dealing with British poetry from the late 19th century to today are welcome. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Case studies of a particular poet who uses dialect
  • Poetic devices used to create dialect on the page
  • Diachronic use of a particular dialect in poetry
  • Close readings of specific poetic texts
  • Comparison between the dialect on the page and the dialect in performance
  • Relationship between dialect(s) and Standard English within the poem
  • Intralingual translation
  • Reception of and debates around the use of dialect in poetry
  • Literary usage and misuse of literature

Please send a 300-word abstract for 20-minute presentations in English, and a short bio to Elise Brault-Dreux (elise.brault@univ-valenciennes.fr), Claire Hélie (claire.helie@univ-lille3.fr) and Emilie Loriaux (emy.loriaux@yahoo.fr).

Deadline for proposals : February 11th, 2017.

(posted 20 December 2016)

6th International Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture: “Traces of Multiculturalism”
Kaunas, Lithuania, 19-20 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 25 March 2017

This International Conference is an annual academic event organized by Cankaya University in Ankara. This year the conference will be organized jointly by Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania), Suleyman Demirel University (Isparta, Turkey) and Cankaya University (Ankara, Turkey); and it will be hosted by Vytautas Magnus University.

In the last decades, the impact of globalization and global capitalism has caused great changes in the texture of cultural practices. Global shifts in the movement of people have especially provided critical spaces for the deconstruction of both essentialist and traditional binary frameworks of ethnicity, race, nation and identity encapsulated in essentialist metanarratives. As a response to the inclusion of many cultures in one homogeneous group, the term multiculturalism has been widely quoted to explain and study the transnational networks and cultural changes on the global scale. Cultural encounters and shocks have increased, and the need for international collaboration is more urgent now than ever because of the global challenges we are all facing. Multiculturalism puts emphasis on diversity and cohesiveness by recognizing that the previous understanding of assimilation or absorption of differences in a melting pot not only distorted but also in many ways served to destroy individuality. Thus, with its varying implications and applications, “multiculturalism” is a contested term in the Humanities which includes those who fall outside the “mainstream” of categories such as gender, sexual orientation, religion, race, geographic origin, ethnicity, and language.

“International Conference on Language, Literature, and Culture- Traces of multiculturalism” intends to blur the limits of conventional discourses and approaches, and features densely theoretical and analytical writing that focuses on the aspects of English language and literature in any or all possible contexts, employing interdisciplinary approach to address / approach the research problems with methods of and insights borrowed from multiple disciplines.

The aim of the conference is to bring together researchers, scholars and students from all areas of language, literature, culture and other related disciplines. You may participate as panel organizer, presenter of one paper, chair a session, or observer.

All submissions to the conference will be reviewed by at least two independent peers for technical merit and content. Selected papers will be published in a volume.

Topics of interest for submission include, but are not limited to:

  • (im)mobility
  • Trauma literature
  • Multicultural past and present
  • Transculturalism
  • Nation and Nationality
  • Multicultural Poetry and Prose
  • Memory, place and belonging, ethnic, cultural and religious minorities
  • Policies of diversity
  • Minority issues, peace and conflict, multicultural education
  • Drama and Dramaturgy
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Media
  • Classical Literature
  • Medieval and Renaissance Literature
  • Literature and History
  • Language, Power and Ideology
  • Language Varieties
  • Literary Criticism
  • Critical Race Theory
  • Language, Identity and Culture
  • Language and Popular Culture
  • Literature and Film
  • Language and Power
  • Language and Gender
  • Language and the New Media
  • Language, Culture and Translation
  • Teaching of Language and Literature
  • Teaching and Learning of English as a Foreign/ Second Language
  • Effective Teaching Methodologies in Language and Literature Classrooms
  • Interdisciplinarity in Language Teaching and Learning
  • Social, Cultural, and Political Contexts of Language Teacher Education
  • Collaborations in Language Teacher Education
  • Practices of Language Teacher Education
  • The transformative nature of the role of language and communication in human cognition
  • The analysis of language and language use as providing a window into non-linguistic cognitive processes and structures
  • Language, linguistic and speech resource development
    Evaluation methods and user studies
  • Text analysis, understanding, summarization and generation
  • Text mining and information extraction, summarization and retrieval
  • Text entailment and paraphrasing

Important dates/information:

A 300-word abstract for a 20-minute paper should be submitted as an email attachment to LLC2017conference@gmail.com or suleozun@sdu.edu.tr by March 25, 2017. In your email, please include your name, affiliation, email address, phone number, title of the paper, and a brief bio data.

All participants are requested to complete the registration form and return it via electronic mail to LLC2017conference@gmail.com or suleozun@sdu.edu.tr until April 15, 2017.

The participation fee of the conference should be transferred to the following international bank account under the specific code (LLC 2017 Conference) by April 15, 2017. The fee does not cover accommodation and travel expenses. It covers only the conference pack and refreshments at intervals:

Registration fee (participants making presentations) : €65

Registration fee (students and doctoral students)      : €50

SEB Bank
Account no     : LT 04 7044 0600 0284 8625
SWIFT Code    : CBVILT2X

Should you need further information, please contact the organizers at LLC2017conference@gmail.com

Organizational Committee

  • Ingrida-Egle Zindziuviene, Vytautas Magnus University (Chair of Organizational Committee)
  • Mustafa Kirca, Çankaya University
  • Sule Okuroglu Özün, Süleyman Demirel University
  • Ertuğrul Koç, Çankaya University

(posted 14 December 2016)

The Past is Back on Stage – Medieval and Early Modern England on the Contemporary Stage
University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, 19-20 May, 2017
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2017

Keynote speaker: David Edgar, playwright.

From the 1960s when Robert Bolt wrote A Man for All Seasons first for BBC radio, then for television and finally for the stage, to the 2010s when Hilary Mantel’s successful novel Wolf Hall was adapted to the stage and then for television, the past several decades have witnessed a renewed interest in medieval and early modern England among contemporary writers and audiences.

The extended period from the Protestant Reformation to the Glorious Revolution provides novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters with material through which to engage pressing current issues, and the success of their works among diverse socio-economic, ethnic, and generational groups indicates a popular phenomenon that reaches beyond academic and artistic communities.

This international conference, organized by EMMA at University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France, aims to understand why contemporary playwrights find this particular past appealing. More precisely, it aims to shed light on the political and cultural significance of medieval and early modern England for twentieth- and twenty-first century writers and audiences.

Centring on contemporary theatre in the English-speaking world, it invites scholars of medieval, early modern, and contemporary drama, performance, and culture to submit papers on any of the following topics:

  • History Plays: what do playwrights deem useful about the past in the creation of politically-committed theatre? Could such a distant period be considered as a valid mirror image of our contemporary world? How are the uses of the past today comparable to the way it was used by medieval and early modern dramatic writers?
  • Medieval Exceptionality: why is this particular period of English history seen as a cultural reference which is understood and appropriated world-wide?
  • The Place of Diversity: how do women, racial and ethnic minorities, writers from nations and national traditions outside England, respond to and use the medieval English past?
  • Rewriting History: what is the cultural, historical and political bias of contemporary writers and audiences?
  • Recreation and Entertainment: the choice of certain historical figures as new heroes may be discussed, as well as the way those historical figures may be depicted as endearing champions of the Good, or loathsome villains, for the entertainment of audiences today.
  • Canonicity and Beyond: to what extent and in what ways do contemporary playwrights allude to, adapt, endorse, expand on and/or critique the canon?
  • Adapting Elizabethan Theatre: how do contemporary playwrights, stage-directors or theatre companies rewrite and renew Elizabethan plays for contemporary audiences? How can they use the assets of site-specific performance?

Our plenary speaker will be British playwright and writer David Edgar, who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world. Edgar has repeatedly looked to other periods and other writers to engage the stage and screen as media for political activism. Most recently, in Written on the Heart, which was produced in 2011 by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Edgar exposed the historical situatedness and composite composition of this “authoritative” text of scripture.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English and a brief CV indicating your institutional affiliation to Marianne Drugeon (marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr) by January 31, 2017. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 15, 2017.

(posted 7 January 2017)

Language, Literature and Technology
Alfa BK University, Belgrade, Serbia, 19-20 May 2017
New extended deadline for proposals: 15 April 2017

The Faculty of Foreign Languages (Alfa BK University in Belgrade) is glad to announce its Sixth International Conference on Language and Literary Studies, which will be held on 19–20 May, 2017.
For the sixth issue of our annual conference, we hope to gather scholars, teachers and professionals whose scientific research focuses on the study of   Language, Literature and Technology
Within the scope of this topic and with your presence and collaboration, we shall attempt to address and analyze from various perspectives issues such as:

  • Impact of technology on changes in communication paradigms
  • Importance and impact of technology in corpus and cognitive linguistics, sociolinguistics and other areas of the science of language
  • Application of digital technologies in teaching language and literature
  • Areas of encounter of literature, science and technology
  • Development of new technologies in the field of translation and publishing
  • Application of new technologies in scientific research practice

Your proposals for a fifteen-minute presentation (followed by a short discussion) should be sent by e-mail to fsj.conference@alfa.edu.rs by 15 April 2017 (new extended deadline). The proposals should contain your name, affiliation and e-mail address, title of the presentation and an abstract of 200 to 250 words, together with up to 10 keywords. Proposals should be submitted in the language in which the presentation will be delivered: English or Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian.

Conference fee is 50 EUR.

(posted 28 February 2017, updated 3 April 2017)

Representations of Hostile Spaces in Literature and the Arts: Images and Metaphors
School of Languages and Literatures. Complutense University, Madrid, Spain, 22-25 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 24 February 2017

The International Conference “Representations of Hostile Spaces in Literature and the Arts: Images and Metaphors” sets out to study works of literature, cinema, music and the visual arts related to hostile spaces and the images and metaphors derived from them in literature and the arts.

This interdisciplinary conference intends to be a meeting point for specialists in literature and different arts in order to foster debate around the artistic representations of hostile spaces in the modern world. Thus, we propose new approaches to a subject that has great impact on the cultural sphere with a special emphasis on literature, the arts and architecture.

The conference is organised by the Doctoral Program and the Master’s Program in Literary Studies at Complutense University of Madrid together with the research group GILAVE and in association with the Instituto de Investigaciones Feministas (Institute for Feminist Studies). This conference is addressed to researches in the fields of literature and the visual arts, journalists, architects, philosophers and other specialists in human or social sciences. We also encourage postgraduate researchers to join us.

We welcome proposals that explore any of the following issues:

  • The urban space as a hostile environment.
  • Nature as a hostile space.
  • Degrees of hostility in fantastic spaces.
  • Hostility in digital spaces: open areas.
  • Women in hostile spaces.

Deadlines:
24th February 2017. Deadline to submit proposals. Titles and abstracts (300 words max.) and a short bio (200 words) either in English or in Spanish should be submitted in Word format to: congresoespaciohostil@gmail.com
Check our website https://congresoespaciohostil.wordpress.comhttps://congresoespaciohostil.wordpress.com for further information.

(posted 9 February 2017)

Explorations of Space in Literature: Constructing and Deconstructing the Boundaries
Ankara, Turkey, 25-27 May 2017
New extended deadline for abstracts: 20 February 2017

Literary works are full of real and fictional as well as political and social spaces, and space does not necessarily appear as a fixed geographical place but may exist as a corporeal, social and psychological notion whose borders are constructed and deconstructed through technology, politics, power and culture. Thus, space is an important component of literary works and enhances the meaning of the text. While combining many political, social and cultural issues, it opens the text to diverse interpretations under the guidance of space theories developed by Michel Foucault, Mikhail Bakhtin, Gilles Deleuze and many others.

  • Imperialism and Colonialism
  • Postcolonialism
  • Urbanization
  • Globalization
  • Gender and Sexuality
  • Digital Technologies
  • Ecocriticism
  • Posthumanism

20-minute papers on English literature are invited for presentation; the selected papers will be published in an edited book after the conference. Please note that the new extended deadline for 150-200 word abstract submission is 20 February 2017, and the abstracts will be submitted to Res. Asst. Kübra Kangüleç Coşkun or Res. Asst. Rahime Çokay Nebioğlu: kubrakangulec@gazi.edu.tr  rahimecokay@gazi.edu.tr

Conference Venue: Gazi University, Faculty of Letters
Registration Fee: €70 / 250 TL (Regular); €50 / 180 TL (Graduate Students)
For more information, please visit us at: http://esl-cdb.gazi.edu.tr/
Download the Conference Poster.

(posted 20 December 2016, updated 14 February 2017)

Disbelief from the Renaissance to Romanticism
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, 25-7 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 20 February 2017

Email: disbelief2017@gmail.com
Website: http://disbelief2017.wixsite.com/emerg

Keynote speakers:

  • Péter Dávidházi (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
  • Nicholas Halmi (The University of Oxford, UK)
  • Ágnes Péter (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
  • Tzachi Zamir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)

We call for papers that address the issue of disbelief between “the Renaissance” (the Early Modern English period) and the end of “Romanticism”, both terms taken in the broadest possible sense. By choosing the negative, rather than the positive attitude as the pivotal notion of our conference, we would like to direct attention to the inner tensions and struggles that have so often characterised processes in which human beings are able to accept that somebody or something is true or real and to have faith in somebody or something. We encourage participants to track down the historical, political, religious, ethical, metaphysical, and aesthetic implications of disbelief as they filter through literary and cultural production in the above period. What are the consequences of disbelief for the real, the  imaginary, the fictional,  the ordinary, the extraordinary, the uncanny – for what it means to be human?

Conference presentations should take 30 minutes, followed by a  10 minute-long slot for discussions. The language of the conference is English and abstracts sent in through the application menu of this website should not exceed 200 words.

After double-blind peer review, a selection of the papers will be published.

More information on registration will be coming soon.

Applicatio deadline: 20 February 2017

(posted 12 December 2016)

The Past is Back on Stage – Medieval and Early Modern England on the Contemporary Stage
EMMA, University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, 26-27 May, 2017
Deadline for proposals: 31 January 2017

From the 1960s when Robert Bolt wrote A Man for All Seasons first for BBC radio, then for television and finally for the stage, to the 2010s when Hilary Mantel’s successful novel Wolf Hall was adapted to the stage and then for television, the past several decades have witnessed a renewed interest in medieval and early modern England among contemporary writers and audiences.

The extended period from the Protestant Reformation to the Glorious Revolution provides novelists, playwrights, and screenwriters with material through which to engage pressing current issues, and the success of their works among diverse socio-economic, ethnic, and generational groups indicates a popular phenomenon that reaches beyond academic and artistic communities.

This international conference, organized by EMMA at University Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France, aims to understand why contemporary playwrights find this particular past appealing. More precisely, it aims to shed light on the political and cultural significance of medieval and early modern England for twentieth- and twenty-first century writers and audiences.

Centring on contemporary theatre in the English-speaking world, it invites scholars of medieval, early modern, and contemporary drama, performance, and culture to submit papers on any of the following topics:

  • History Plays: what do playwrights deem useful about the past in the creation of politically-committed theatre? Could such a distant period be considered as a valid mirror image of our contemporary world? How are the uses of the past today comparable to the way it was used by medieval and early modern dramatic writers?
  • Medieval Exceptionality: why is this particular period of English history seen as a cultural reference which is understood and appropriated world-wide
  • The Place of Diversity: how do women, racial and ethnic minorities, writers from nations and national traditions outside England, respond to and use the medieval English past?
  • Rewriting History: what is the cultural, historical and political bias of contemporary writers and audiences?
  • Recreation and Entertainment: the choice of certain historical figures as new heroes may be discussed, as well as the way those historical figures may be depicted as endearing champions of the Good, or loathsome villains, for the entertainment of audiences today.
  • Canonicity and Beyond: to what extent and in what ways do contemporary playwrights allude to, adapt, endorse, expand on and/or critique the canon?
  • Adapting Elizabethan Theatre: how do contemporary playwrights, stage-directors or theatre companies rewrite and renew Elizabethan plays for contemporary audiences? How can they use the assets of site-specific performance?

Our plenary speaker will be British playwright and writer David Edgar, who has had more than sixty of his plays published and performed on stage, radio and television around the world. Edgar has repeatedly looked to other periods and other writers to engage the stage and screen as media for political activism. Most recently, in Written on the Heart, which was produced in 2011 by the Royal Shakespeare Company on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, Edgar exposed the historical situatedness and composite composition of this “authoritative” text of scripture.

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in English and a brief CV indicating your institutional affiliation to Marianne Drugeon marianne.drugeon@univ-montp3.fr by January 31, 2017. Notification of acceptance will be sent by March 15, 2017.

(posted 24 October 2016)

International Conference on Poetry Studies
London, UK, 27 May 2017
Deadline for proposals: 31 March 2017

The Confererence is organised by Interdisciplinary Research Foundation

Poetry is a constant, being produced by all known civilizations from ancient to modern times. Throughout this extensive history, poetry has been made to address a vast array of subject matters, including love, war, social issues, the beauty of nature etc. As poetry is meant to invoke experiences, it emphasizes the role of the senses, calling to mind memories and feelings in stirring and sometimes turbulent ways.

Poetry inspires as well as instructs. It sweeps away human thoughts, soothes human suffering and feeds human emotion. It ennobles, enlightens and entertains. It enters into the very depth of the human soul and lights up the dark corridor of human nature. Poetry acts as a great force through the pleasure it gives, because the expressive boundaries of poetry are virtually unlimited.

The conference aims to bring together international poets and scholars from diverse contexts and interdisciplinary fields to share their work. We invite manuscripts, performances, poetry, and other forms of presentations.

Areas of investigation may include, but are not limited to:

  • form and genre
  • scale in poetry
  • brevity and length
  • poetic sequences
  • units of measurement in poetry
  • form, proportion and balance
  • the immeasurable and/or non-measurable in poetry
  • beginnings and ends
  • poetry and other art forms: music, visual arts and/or craft; ekphrasis
  • poetry and architecture
  • poetry and mathematics
  • language-centered poetics (including Language- and post-Language writing)
  • performance-based poetics
  • the political character of the aesthetic
  • (non-)originality/individuality/voice amidst technical innovation
  • subject-construction in poetry
  • ecopoetics
  • New Narrative
  • hybrid & cross-genre poetic modes
  • conceptual and post-conceptual poetry
  • poetic and poetic/artistic collaborations

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 31 March 2017 to: poetry@irf-network.org.

Registration fee – 100 GBP

Conference venue:  Monticello House, 45 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London, WC1B 4JP, UK

(posted 4 March 2017)

Phraseological Units in Specialised Corpora: CILC17 Conference
Paris, France, 31 May – 2 June 2017
Deadline for proposals: 30 November 2016

The Spanish association for corpus linguistics is holding the 9th annual international conference on corpus linguistics  in Paris May 31-June 2 2017.
https://cilc2017.sciencesconf.org/

As part of AELINCO’s on-going programme of research activities and annual conferences, the broad aim of the CILC conferences is to provide language researchers an opportunity to present and communicate their work from a variety of corpus analysis perspectives, that is to say any research which attempts to account for attested language phenomena on the basis of empirical textual data. For CILC17, it has been decided that particular attention will be paid to phraseological units in specialised corpora (whether monolingual or multilingual). The assumption which underpins this topic is Sinclair’s (1991) “Idiom Principle”, according to which language is made up of largely pre-fabricated elements which can most usefully be identified in text corpora through the use of statistical techniques. From this point of view, “Language” is seen primarily as a textual phenomenon, and as such is studied in terms of lexical co-occurrence, collocation, semantic preference, colligation, semantic prosody, and so on. More generally these terms can all be related to “Phraseology”, understood here as the regular patterns of language which underlie all types of discourse. The particular aim of CILC17 is thus to examine the means by which corpus linguistics attempts to detect and analyse these kinds of units, with the ultimate aim of better understanding how they function in discourse and the language system, as well as to examine how phraseological units can be useful to related disciplines, notably terminology, second and foreign-language learning, languages for specific purposes, lexicography, specialised or pragmatic translation.

Abstract submissions:

  • An extended abstract in English, French or Spanish, between 450-550 words, not counting Bibliography. Authors should present a main argument, aims, theoretical framework and some results. The abstract will be submitted to review and should be formatted in the following style:
    – Title, centred, bold, font /Times New Roman/ 14 pts,
    – Keywords, italics, font /Times New Roman/ 12 pts, below the title,
    – Main text, justified, font /Times New Roman/ 12 pts, linear interspacing 1,
    – No references to the author(s),
    – Bibliography.
  • A short summary in English, French or Spanish, between 150-200 words, no Bibliography, using the same guidelines as the extended abstract, PDF Formation.
  • The author(s) should assign the paper to one of the 9 specific topics mentioned above.
  • Submissions can be made using thelinkon the Conference website

Provisional Deadlines

  • 30  Nov 2016: Deadline for submissions
  • 15  Feb 2017: Notification of acceptance
  • 20 Feb  2017: Start of registration
  • 31 March 2017: End of registration

(posted 16 October 2016)