The Transformative Power of the Arts in Victorian and Edwardian Culture and Society
Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, France, 2-3 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 31 October 2017
The SFEVE Conference, organised by EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone)
In collaboration with the “Écrans britanniques” festival in Nîmes.
Victorian and Edwardian times were a period when the arts were thriving: Victorians and Edwardians were avid readers of the novel; the short-lived but highly influential Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood inspired many painters, sculptors and poets; the nineteenth and the early twentieth century was also a period which saw the emergence of new art forms (photography, cinema) following the discovery of new techniques, such as the calotype.
This conference means to address the way in which these various arts impacted Victorian and Edwardian society, economy and technology as well as the other art forms within that society. Analysing the transformative power of the arts in Victorian and Edwardian times would highlight the social as well as the intermedial dynamics of arts and give a renewed vision of the period.
Here are some of the questions that can be addressed (but the list is not exhaustive):
- If the arts interact with society, through the representation of its various facets (authority, domesticity, respectability, gender, animals, nature, empire, poverty, illness, war, etc.), what sort of transformative power do these exert? In what ways were the arts instrumental in transforming Victorian and Edwardian social reality and society: through architectural design and the building of garden cities; industry, technology and technique; the Arts and Crafts movement; representations of social issues, of gender, of the other, etc.
- At a time when new art forms were emerging, processes of hybridization and cross-fertilization were at work, the arts interacted with each other, modifying and transforming each other, renewing the old forms and creating new ones. The transformative power of intermediality will be explored. All arts are eligible for discussion: how photography transforms the novel, how photography and sculpture or painting interact, or the interface of word and image. The transformative power of arts may also be understood as the malleability of the work of art in its various subsequent adaptations: how art was transformed into industry or industry into art, how poetry was turned into painting, how a book illustration or engraving could influence the framing of a shot, how novels were turned into plays which were subsequently turned into films, etc.
Proposals in English of about 300 words should be sent to luc.bouvard@univ-montp3.fr and christine.reynier@univ-montp3.fr by 31 October 2017.
Selected papers will be published in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens http://cve.revues.org/
Organizing committee: Luc Bouvard, Aude Haffen, Virginie Iché, Christine Reynier.
(posted 26 June 2017)
Urban Walking – The Flâneur as an Icon of Metropolitan Culture in Literature and Other Media
Jena, Germany, 9-10 March 2018
Deadline for propsals: 15 October 2018
Since Walter Benjamin’s ground-breaking investigation into the Parisian flâneur of the nineteenth century, the practises of the peripatetic observer of city life have informed literary, cultural, and sociological studies of urban life. As a seismograph of the metropolis, walking through the city, observing and describing the urban environment, the flâneur reflects the dynamics and effects of modern city life, such as the encounter with anonymous crowds and modern mass culture or the significance of evanescent impressions and perceptions in a fashion that has eschewed a theoretical consensus so far.
Based on the critical premises of flânerie as a quintessential phenomenon of urban life, pervading almost all areas of intellectual, social, and artistic production, and of the flâneur as an ever-evolving figure, this conference seeks a re-evaluation of the flâneur’s dual role as an agent and a subject within metropolitan environments beyond Benjamin’s constrictions concerning gender, suitable settings, and social roles. Proposals for papers are welcome from all disciplines, including literary studies, art history, film studies, philosophy, sociology, and urban studies.
Possible topics may include but are not limited to:
- The flâneur and other characteristic figures of city culture, e.g. the detective, the dandy, the man-about-town, or the tramp
- The emergence and development of the controversial female flâneur
- Different forms of locomotion and flânerie, for instance bicycling, motorcycling, or car-driving
- Flânerie and the periodical press
- The flâneur beyond western culture
- Flânerie in the visual arts
- Poetics, praxeology, and metaphoric flânerie
- The mutability of flânerie across genres in literature and / or other media
Please send your abstract of no more than 300 words and a short biographical note to Oliver Bock (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, oliver.bock@uni-jena.de) by 15 October 2017. More information will be made available at flaneurconferencejena2018.wordpress.com
(posted 20 August 2017)
I International Conference on Research in Multilingualism: Innovation and New Challenges
Oviedo, Spain, 14-16 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 30 September 2017
Organized by members of ALCE (Applied Linguistics in Language and Culture Acquisition) at the University of Oviedo, this multilingual international conference (English, Spanish, German, and French) connects the world of actual teaching in the classroom to that of educational design and linguistic policy, and all of them to the empirical research in the learning and acquisition of one or several languages and cultures in linguistic immersion contexts. For this reason, the congress is of interest to those who are in contact with any aspect of learning one or several foreign languages in any educational level, or those who wish to do so in a near future.
Venue: City of Oviedo Conference and Exhibition Centre
Keynote speakers:
- Ute Smit (Universität Wien, Austria)
- Emma Dafouz (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
- Ana Ruiz (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
We welcome original papers (20 minutes in length, followed by 10 minutes for questions and discussion), and posters (these will be presented on a single session) on any of the subjects that come within the list of conference topics below:
- Studies on bilingual education and multilingualism
- Linguistic policies in the European Framework for Higher Education
- Reconceptualization of methodological models
- (e)-Teacher training
- Innovation experiences in Foreign Language Didactics
- (e)-innovation in the European Framework for Higher Education
- Intercultural research
Proposals can be sent before 30th September 2017 via the on-line form in the conference website https://multilingualism2018.wordpress.com or multiling.oviedo@gmail.com, with notification of acceptance before 31st October.
Further information can be found in the CFP attached, the conference website, or by e-mailing us.
(posted 30 July 2017)
American Dramaturgies for the 21st Century: Engaging with the new millennium on stage
Université Paris-Sorbonne, France, 15-16 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 30 June 2017
This international conference aims to offer a dynamic snapshot and overview of 21st-century dramaturgies in the United States.
The end of the American theatrical avant-garde was heralded by Richard Schechner who, as soon as 1981, saw artists as left ‘picking up seeds in the dust’ – yet the new millennium has been ripe with artistic and political events mirroring one another, calling for a reevaluation of such pessimistic assessments. From the new world order brought on by the fall of the Twin Towers to Donald Trump’s intention to scrap funding to the NEA and NEH, the theater community in the United States has been confronted, on a local and on a global scale, with social and political evolutions that make their way into their work in more or less obvious fashions. A hundred years after the initial ascension of American drama to world prominence, it is worth pausing to consider the current weight of its legacy, the cultural influence of its evolving models, and the persistence of its capacity for innovation.
Investigating theatrical theory as well as theatrical practice, this conference aims to evaluate the impact of 21st-century mutations in shaping the most contemporary dramaturgies across the United States, retracing the lines of friction, fracture and continuity. Taken in a broad sense, the term ‘dramaturgy’ may include strands of performance work in the mold of the ‘theatre of images’ or musical theater as well as more conventional text-based approaches – for in an age of formal innovation and general blurring of boundaries, the place of the ‘straight play’ begs inquiry. The primary focus of the conference will be on the aesthetic production of theatrical work, all the while foregrounding the collaborative, economic and political factors or constraints that lie behind dramaturgical choices.
Possible topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- American identity, within and across the United States and the Americas
- defining features of ‘the American play’ today
- who are the new playwrights (institutionalization of playwriting courses, connection/tension with screenwriting)
- the development process and the genetics of a play
- close readings of plays and overviews of individual playwrights’ work
- institutional support for dramatic creation (public, private, academic)
- 21st-century reception and new ways to interact with audiences
- dramatic criticism in the age of social media
- production spaces: geographical and dramatic evolutions and their interactions
- interpretations, appropriations and productions of American work in a global context
- modes of analysis and methodologies for new dramaturgies
Please send a 300-word abstract and a short bio to marie.pecorari@paris-sorbonne.fr and julie.vatain@paris-sorbonne.fr by June 30th, 2017.
(posted 29 May 2017)
Diachronic dimensions in specialised varieties of English: implications in communications, didactics and translation studies. 9th International GERAS Conference
University of Mons, Belgium, 15-17 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 10 January 2018
Website of the Conference: http://portail.umons.ac.be/FR/UNIVERSITE/ADMIN/CERP/CONGRES_COLLOQUES/Pages/15-17mars2018-39%C3%A8meColloqueInternationalduGERAS.aspx
Website of GERAS: http://www.geras.fr/
As a rule, practitioners of English for Specific Purposes show little interest in diachrony and, particularly, in the past of specialised languages. Their main motivation stems from learners’ needs, and needs analyses generally place them in the present or near future rather than in the past. Conversely, a growing number of researchers in continental Europe regard specialised languages as enduring linguistic objects – e.g. specialised varieties of English (SVEs) such as medical or legal English – and exploring these SVEs’ diachronic dimensions plays an increasing part in their scientific interests. This conference invites researchers to examine the diachronic dimensions of specialised English and to explore their various facets.
One first group of questions may bear on the communicational stakes of the subject. Languages aptly serve specialised communication in synchronic conditions, but what are the impacts of diachronic distantiation on comprehension and interpretation? Learners frequently engage in documentary research and they consult texts that may belong in temporal settings lying outside their immediate learning time sphere. Do they have to be made aware of the evolutions in terms, discourse, genres, institutional reference, and of the influence of history on their specialised communities? These questions expand further if the history of SVEs comes into consideration and if we wonder about their origins. Training learners to become erudite in specialised languages is clearly not an option; yet, totally ignoring the diachronic dimension of SVEs may not be an adequate posture when it comes to training qualified teachers of English irrespective of their specialised domains.
A second set of questions flows from answers given to the first. If some scientific investment in diachrony makes sense for some SVEs, how can we design learning/teaching strategies that meet the requirements of the “didactic transposition” put forward by Yves Chevallard (1985: 20)? The aim of the didactic transposition is to produce “knowledge for learners” from “scholars’ knowledge” and the challenge here is to introduce the diachronic dimension into the process. Motivation concerns are also a major issue if learners are invited to devote some time and effort to long-term aspects instead of engaging fully in hic and nunc language priorities.
The third group of interrogations concerns translation issues. Culture has long been a major object of research in translation studies (often contrasting “natural” with “exotic” translations), but diachrony seems to have attracted limited interest. Yet, translators are often challenged by source elements that have changed in the course of time such as terminological evolutions like neologisms or changes in nomenclature; modifications in phraseology resulting from usage or imposed by competent authorities; or paradigmatic changes in the truth conditions of the world, as when one scientific theory is proved wrong and is replaced by another.
In translation studies, source-oriented translation and target-oriented translation only meet part of the translators’ dilemmas when they are confronted with diachrony. The source-oriented translator would simply keep the past elements of the source text and include them in the target text while the target-oriented translator would aim at adapting past elements to make them fit the present.
Functionalist translation theories offer better strategies in these cases. Following the skopos theory, every translation has a purpose. The source text has to be translated so as to make sense for addressees, their knowledge and their needs, in the target circumstances.
In this theoretical framework, diachrony-dependent translation decisions are subject to the function of the target text. In that respect, Christiane Nord (1997) stresses that translators have to compare source texts and target texts in terms of addressees and of the medium employed, but also in terms of the place and time of reception. By comparing, translators may make translation decisions which largely determine the target text.
Functionalists have duly addressed the issue of time difference between source and target texts, but diachrony is a transversal phenomenon in translation because it is inherent in linguistic evolutions, whether in languages for general or specialised purposes. In that context, it would be of interest to study the evolutions in the translation of neologisms, of theory-constitutive metaphorical terms – their evolutions are often marked by scientific discoveries in the course of time. Other relevant prospective questions may include the translation of specialised phraseologies where parallel corpus analyses highlight diachronic markers.
References
Chevallard, Yves. 1985. La transposition didactique : du savoir savant au savoir enseigné. Grenoble: La Pensée Sauvage.
Nord, Christiane. 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity: Functionalist Approaches Explained. Manchester, UK: St Jerome.
Submission format
Languages: French or English
Number of words: 300
Deadline: 10 January 2018
Forward to: christine.michaux@umons.ac.be and m.memet@orange.fr
(posted 17 July 2017, updated 12 December 2017)
Contemporary Victoriana: Victorian literature and Popular and Material cultures
Centre universitaire de Troyes, University of Reims, France, 16 March 2018
New extended deadline for proposals: 20 October 2017
A conference organized by CIRLEP (EA4299)
Convenors: Yannick Bellenger-Morvan and Xavier Giudicelli.
“For most of us, the odour of defunct Victoriana is so unpleasant […] that we are content to leave the past where we find it.” (Ezra Pound, 1918).
“It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” (Walter Benjamin).
The aim of this one-day conference is to examine the persistence of Victorian culture and literature in our contemporary society. We shall obviously focus on the reinterpretation of Victorian works now deemed “canonical” in popular culture, in such media as comics and graphic novels, fan fictions, films, TV series, video games, and pop music. But our objective is also to work on the recycling of Victorian cultural practices and artefacts in our society: the success of the serial form, a contemporary adaptation—or recreation—of Victorian serialised narratives, also the influence of Victorian culture on today’s fashion industry, on alternative cultures, architecture, and interior decoration.
This one-day conference will encourage interdisciplinary approaches. It is part of the on-going research conducted in the “popular cultures” seminar (hosted by Sylvie Mikowski and Yann Philippe) of the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Thought and Language (University of Reims). It will enable us to discuss the notion of “canon,” and to work on topics which, until recently, were of little interest in French academia. We hope to shed light on the notion of “epistemological rupture,” as well as to contribute to a redefinition of academic “discursive practices.”
Beyond the idea of a taste for retro, that of a paralysing backward-looking glance—the binary opposition between nostalgia and critical engagement—, our purpose is to show what the persistence of things Victorian tells us about us, about our contemporary society and ethos, and to highlight the complexity of our relationship to the Victorian past.
Possible topics:
- Graphic novels and comics (for example, Alan Moore’s From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen…)
- TV series and films (for example, Penny Dreadful, Ripper Street…)
- Video games
- Pop music, musical ( Sweeney Todd, for example)
- Fan fiction
- Steampunk fantasy
- Goths, alternative culturesFashion, tattoos, body art
- Furniture, interior decorationArts and crafts
Languages: French and English
Submission for papers including an abstract (300 words maximum) and a short biographical notice should be sent to both Yannick Bellenger-Morvan (yannick.bellenger@univ-reims.
Extended deadline : October 20th, 2017.
(posted 4 October 2017)
A diachronic approach to Ian McEwan’s fiction: from sensationalism to ethical writing
Université de Caen Normandie, France, 16-17 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 18 September 2017
We are pleased to announce a CFP for submissions to a two-day conference dedicated to the work of Ian McEwan, in the presence of the author.
Ian McEwan is a prolific writer with a diversified oeuvre (short-stories, novels, screenplays ….). From the enfant terrible’s early works that earned him the nickname of Ian Macabre to the author of the daring Nutshell via the respected recipient of the Booker Prize in 1998 for Amsterdam and many others for Atonement, he has repeatedly reinvented himself and experimented with narrative codes.
This symposium will focus on McEwan’s fiction (early and more recent, novels and short-stories, studied individually or together). It proposes to examine, for example,
- McEwan’s engagement with memory, trauma and the past (Atonement, Black Dogs…) as well as with contemporary issues (such as euthanasia in Amsterdam, the Iraq war in Saturday….) and his engagement with the sciences,
- the varied narrative strategies he has adopted,
- the ways in which he has depicted individuals facing difficult choices and dilemmas (as in Enduring Love…),
- how he has been influenced by particular writers or genres (Sweet Tooth and the spy novel for example) and has reappropriated and rewritten them,
- the reception of his work,
- how his work has influenced the younger generation of writers.
Proposals on screen adaptations of Ian McEwan’s work will be considered too.
Proposals (200 words) and a short biography to be sent by September 18th, 2017 to armelle.parey@unicaen.fr AND isabelle.roblin@univ-littoral.fr. Notification will be sent by mid-October.
(posted 11 April 2017, updated 19 June 2017)
7th New Perspectives in Science Education Conference
Florence, Italy, 22-23 March 2018
New extended deadline for proposals: 15 January 2018
The 7th edition of the New Perspectives in Science Education Conference will take place in Florence, Italy, on 22 – 23 March 2018.
The objective of the New Perspectives in Science Education Conference is to promote transnational cooperation and share good practice in the field of innovation for science education. The New Perspectives in Science Education Conference is also an excellent opportunity for the presentation of previous and current projects in the science field.
The Call for Papers, within the New Perspective in Science Education Conference, is addressed to teachers, researchers and experts in the field of science education as well as to coordinators of science and training projects.
Experts in the field of science teaching and learning are therefore invited to submit an abstract of a paper to be presented during the New Perspective in Science Education international conference. The abstract should be written in English and submitted no later than 19 December 2017 (extended deadline). In order to submit an abstract please visit our website: http://conference.pixel-online.net/NPSE/abssubmission.php.
Important dates:
- 15 January 2018: Extended Deadline for submitting abstracts
- 19 January 2018: Notification of Acceptance / Rejection for Abstracts (Deadline 15 January)
- 22 January 2018: Deadline for final submission of papers
- 22-23 March 2018: Dates of the conference
There will be three presentation modalities: oral, poster and virtual presentations.
All accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by LibreriaUniversitaria with ISBN and ISSN codes. This publication will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in SCOPUS (https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus). Papers will also be included in ACADEMIA.EDU (https://www.academia.edu/) and Google Scholar.
For further information, please contact us at the following address: science@pixel-online.net or visit the New Perspectives in Science Education conference website: http://conference.pixel-online.net/NPSE/index.php
(posted 20 June 2017, updated 27 November 2017, updated 2 January 2018)
The Hidden Faces of the Americas
Université Bretagne Sud, Lorient, France, 22-23 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 6 September 2017
Co-organized by HCTI (UBS), 3L.AM (Le Mans) and MIMMOC (Poitiers), France
In his renowned short story, The Purloined letter, Edgar Allen Poe suggests that the finest strategy to hide an object is perhaps to put it in a conspicuous place where one would never expect to locate it. Questioning the hidden faces of the Americas is all but a conspirationist approach. The aim of our research is to focus on phenomena that are either little known, underestimated, forgotten or unexpected. In the US, the black writer Ralph Ellison published a novel entitled, The Invisible Man in 1952, to tackle the issue of the exclusion of African-Americans. Notwithstanding the genuine edge of this novel, it investigates a hidden side at the heart of the American society.
While researching in the field of poverty back in the early 1960s, in his study on the poor, Michael Harrington spoke about The Other America. Harrington unveils to his fellow Americans the concealed side of their country. The excluded and the marginalized do in fact constitute one of the obvious hidden faces of the Americas. In addition, studying the issue of inequality is also a way of revealing one of the hidden faces of media coverage which has a national agenda setting function. With the recent election of the iconoclast Donald Trump, a candidate largely known, even among his fellow Republicans, for his lack of government experience, the US has chosen to make a leap into the unknown. This major political event highlights the shadowy, or even obscurantist sides of the US, the consequences of which are all but predictable. The concealed face of the American electoral process which deprives an increasing number of citizens of their right to vote, opens the door to “hidden” or obscure sources of campaign financing. This phenomenon allows a system of direct and indirect lobbying to thrive “legally” outside the federal regulatory framework. All that constitutes other relevant venues of research.
In the same vein, and in the economic, anthropological and social fields, studies on the fate of the Amazon Indians or those of Peru, the privatization of public companies, subcontracting, mergers and work flexibilization policies, as well as the repression taking place in Colombia in spite of the widespread idea that the country “is better off”, are interesting areas of research. We could also focus on the hidden side of major world sports events like the organization of the Football World Cup or of the Olympic games in Brazil where the military police expelled the inhabitants of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro to build sport facilities and finance the International Football Federation (FIFA) or the International Olympic Committee (IOC). Still in Latin America, we could also examine the removal of a democratically elected president, in a very questionable way, by hardly democratic forces which are far from being exempt of political corruption – the whole episode amounting to a “legal” coup d’état.
The exhibition of Chilean photographers which took place in April 2016, at La Maison de l’Amérique in Paris, entitled “Hidden faces: Chilean Photography, 1980-2015” presents photographers who are looking for phenomena that their society refuses to see, that faded away or disappeared. The works exhibited attempt to grasp the forbidden, the distant, the elusive, as well as the resistance to the established order and a profound attachment to those “invisible” communities who live in their country. Arts as specific symbolic systems which expand our capacities of perception and knowledge, could constitute a privileged source to deal with the hidden faces of the Americas.
The aim is also to focus on social, political and religious systems which call into question the very idea of the Promised Land, of the New World, that the Americas are supposed to embody. As lands of immigration, multiculturalism, and tolerance compared to countries of the Old World, the American nations are supposed to represent – in our collective consciousness – models of democracy and equal opportunities. However, faced with the reality, whether historical or contemporary, doesn’t the idea of New World hide a darker reality?
It is in this perspective – the study of the “other” America – that the conference, The Hidden Faces of the Americas, will attempt to shed light on the dark corners and forgotten sides, which are concealed but genuinely present. The conference will attempt to highlight the paradoxes, and the unexpected elements, that can lead to a better understanding of the Americas and to “reveal” its hidden faces in a variety of fields of social sciences as well as in literature, visual arts, philosophy or linguistics.
Please send your proposals to marie-christine.michaud@univ-ubs.fr, eliane.elmaleh@univ-lemans.fr and salah.oueslati@univ-poitiers.fr before September 6, 2017.
The conference accepts papers in French, English and Spanish. The papers selected after peer-review will be published in French or in English.
(posted 20 June 2017)
The Second Annual Early Modern Women Writers’ Colloquium (2018)
Nicosia, Cyprus, 25-27 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 22 December 2017
At the 6th Annual Othello’s Island Conference 2018, Centre for Visual Arts and Research, Nicosia, Cyprus,
Keynote lecture by: Professor David Norbrook
Full information at www.othellosisland.wixsite.com/emww
Lead Convenors:
Dr. Stella Achilleos (University of Cyprus) and Professor James Fitzmaurice, (Northern Arizona University)
About the Conference:
We are very pleased to announce that our keynote speaker at the Second Annual Early Modern Women Writers’ Colloquium in 2018 will be Professor David Norbrook who will deliver a lecture titled ‘Providence and Displacement: Writing Lucy Hutchinson’s Life’.
Dedicated to women writers from the period 1500 to 1700 (approximate dates), the Early Modern Women Writers’ Colloquium forms a strand within the annual interdisciplinary “Othello’s Island” conference on Byzantine, Medieval and Renaissance studies.
The strand was held informally at the fourth Othello’s Island conference in 2015, and became a formal feature in 2016 at the fifth Othello’s Island in 2016. This developing tradition continues at the sixth Othello’s Island Conference in 2018, where we will again welcome papers on women writers in all languages of the early modern period, with a particular emphasis on the writers Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn and their contemporaries.
The strand includes papers on women writers themselves, but also associated topics, such as the representation of women and women writers in work by male writers of the period, women publishers, and also the popular round table discussion, held outside under the olive trees, as a true academia, in the courtyard garden at CVAR.
If you would like to submit a paper to the Early Modern Women Writers strand of Othello’s Island, please follow the instructions below. If you have any questions, please do contact us.
Participants in the Early Modern Women Writers strand can, of course, attend all the other papers and events of the Othello’s Island Conference, and we encourage participants to do so.
The Early Modern Women Writers strand is held in association with the International Margaret Cavendish Society.
Full Papers (20 minutes plus questions)
If you are interested in giving a talk at the conference please submit a proposal for a paper. Standard papers are 20 minutes long, followed by 5 or 10 minutes for questions.
Proposals for papers should comprise a cover sheet showing:
1. Your title (eg. Mr, Ms, Dr, Prof. etc.) and full name
2. Your institutional affiliation (if any)
3. Your postal address, e’mail address and telephone number
4. The title of your proposed paper
With this you should send a proposal/abstract for your paper of no more than 300 words and a copy of your CV/resume to info@othellosisland.org with the subject line EMWW 2018.
All papers must be delivered in English and in person by the author of the paper. We cannot accommodate speakers wishing to present using Skype (or similar), or proxy presentations.
Deadline for submissions: 22 December 2017. Please visit our website at www.tiny.cc/emww2018 before submitting your proposal.
(posted 16 October 2017)
British Jewish Contemporary Cultures: An International Conference
Bangor University, Wales, UK, 26-27 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: to be announced
Keynote Speakers: Sarah Lightman (Glasgow) and Silvia Pellicer (Zaragoza)
We invite proposals for the first international British Academy funded conference on British Jewish Contemporary Cultures. Any topic which explores the study of contemporary British Jewish culture, widely defined, is welcomed. We are particularly interested in locating British Jewish contemporary cultures in global and comparative settings, as well as in terms of imperial, postcolonial and transnational narratives. The aim of the conference is to tease out the tension between a transcultural British Jewish Studies and the specificity of the Jewish experience in Britain with increasing theoretical and methodological complexity.
We welcome proposals for panel discussions as well as individual papers of 20 minutes. Please send an abstract of no more than 300 words and a brief biography to Jennifer Griffiths (j.c.griffiths@bangor.ac.uk) by 1st December 2017.
Suggested topics include but are by no means limited to:
- Writing British Jewishness
- Images of British Jewishness in film and television
- Gender, sexuality and Jewishness in contemporary culture
- Visual images (art, cartoons, graphic novels)
- British Jews and the media
- Shifting Identities: Transcultural contexts
- Performing Jewishness
- British Jewishness and the Holocaust
- Politics and Jewishness in contemporary Britain
- Locating British Jewishness: space and place
- The Jewish Gothic
- British Jews and Israel/Palestine
- Black and British Jewish Intersections
- Antisemitism
- Brexit and Contemporary British Jewish culture
Conference organisers: Professor Nathan Abrams (Bangor) and Dr. Ruth Gilbert (Winchester). The conference has been generously supported by the British Academy.
For more information on the British Jewish Contemporary Cultures Network, please visit: http://bjcc.bangor.ac.uk/ or contact j.c.griffiths@bangor.ac.uk
(posted 29 May 2017, updated 6 September 2017)
Resisting Tragedy: 32nd International D.H.Lawrence Conference
Centre de recherches Anglophones, Université Paris-Nanterre, France, 29-31 March 2018
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2017
The theme of this conference has been prompted by the first line of Lady Chatterley’s Lover: “Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.” The statement invites reflection on the literary means and devices that were adopted by Lawrence in order to resist tragedy, both here and elsewhere in his writings. The strategies of resistance include various arts of distanciation through which the tragic can be warded off. They can be linguistic, poetic, rhetorical, or can involve the interplay between a variety of perspectives, humour, satire, romance, poetic licence, the refusal of seriousness etc. The focus of the 2018 Conference should not be too explicitly on WW1 and its consequences. If the opening to Lady Chatterley’s Lover offers an explicit reference to the war and, in the second sentence, an explanation of its origin and a hypothesis regarding the responses that it arouses, “the cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes”, the focus of the conference is to be less on the specific nature of the “cataclysms” than on the nature and the substance of these “little habitats” and “little hopes”. The resistance to tragedy thus appears to be the condition or cost exacted of a society or of a social agent who is to survive or outlive the “cataclysm”, a “cataclysm” which is both historical, epochal, but also, perhaps, existential or anthropological. Lawrence asserts “Tragedy looks to me like man/ in love with his own defeat” (Pansies). We may then suggest further lines of reflection on the following themes: resistance or non-resistance to tragedy whether personal, social or political, heroism or escapism, the denunciation of Hamletizing, the temptation of oblivion, the refusal of sacrifice or self-annihilation, resilience and creative destruction. This list is of course not exhaustive.
Organizers: Cornelius Crowley, Ginette Roy
The deadline for proposals is 1 November 2017.
Please send a 200 word abstract to Ginette Roy ginette.katz.roy@gmail.com or roy@u-paris10.fr
(posted 24 May 2017)