Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in March 2019

Shapes of Futures: Third interdisciplinary conference
University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland, 1-2 March 2019
Deadline for proposlas: 10 January 2019

Organised by the Institute of Modern Languages

What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.
Jacques Lacan

The past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.
Stephen Hawking

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence. And it is fragile.
Bernard Beckett

Confirmed keynote speakers: Ziauddin Sardar and Rafał Matyja

For the nineteenth-century man, the future was “a simple combination of already known things” that could be calculated on the basis of given probabilities. For the twentieth-century man, the concept of the future was entirely different. As Paul Valery observes, writing about his epoch:

[T]he rules of the game are changed at every throw. No calculation of probabilities is possible. … Why? Because the … modern world is assuming the shape of man’s mind. […] If … we imprint the form of our mind on the human world, the world becomes all the more unforeseeable and assumes the mind’s [own] disorder.

But, perhaps, disorder is not the last word that humanity has to say about its understanding of the future. Liquid modernity has melted into postmodernity and, after almost two decades of the twenty-first century have passed, one may ask about the contemporary visions and conceptions of the future. Is the future, as Hawkins asserts categorically just “a spectrum of possibilities”? Or, maybe, in Derrida’s words, “the ineluctable world of the future […] proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure of knowledge.” Do we follow Lacan’s view of the future as an inescapable dimension of our ongoing efforts to maintain any sort of coherent subjectivity? Are there multiple futures ahead of us, as scholars of the science-fiction literature sometimes suggest? Or is there a future that sociological statistics, economical planning or causal layered analysis can anticipate?

Whatever perspective one would like to embrace – despite Hawkins’ rather categorical assertions – the future is very much present today in a number of ways. It is precisely this openness to conceptualisations and indefiniteness of the future, combined with its inevitability, that seems to have made it an ever-provoking object of research. Apart from the thriving future studies, it is contemporary sociology’s investigation into the development of the cultural trends which subsequent generations embrace, history’s projection of bygone patterns on the present to model what might happen tomorrow, as well as literary studies’ increased fascination with the visions of the future(s) surfacing both in works of fiction and non-fiction, that make it a theme expressly worth pursuing. Our conference addresses the need for such research. Therefore, we cordially invite sociologists, psychologists, philologists, historians, and scholars of other academic fields to discuss various aspects and roles of the future(s) in contemporary discourses. Among the themes that might be discussed in twenty-minute long presentations are the following (the list is by no means exhaustive):

• conceptualisations/images of the future and their dynamics
• the futurists and future(s) studies
• functions of the future
• the future shaping processes (trendsetting, simulation, modelling, forecasting, planning)
• the politics of time / the temporality of politics
• the relationships between the present, the past and the future (Zeitgeist and the future, the future as an active aspect of the present, the future borrowed from the past)
• the future and the narrative (narratives and metaphors of the future, science and speculative fiction as catalysts in future studies, future history)
• the future as a promise, the future as a threat (dystopia, utopia and anti-utopia)
• indefinite and uncertain versus definite and certain futures
• normative, preferred, alternative futures

We welcome scholars from various academic fields to submit their proposals by 10 January 2019. Abstracts of 300 words in English should be sent to shapesoffutures@gmail.com. Please include your name, email address, academic affiliation and a short biography.

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 15 January 2019.

The conference fee is 280 PLN (70 euro), and 230 PLN (60 euro) for students. The fee includes lunch, coffee breaks and conference materials.

A selection of papers will be published. Details of publication will be announced during the conference.

Conference organisers: Maria Korusiewicz, Anita Jarczok, Alicja Bemben, Sławomir Konkol

Find us on: https://www.facebook.com/ShapesofFutures
https://shapesoffutures.wordpress.com/
Contact us at: shapesoffutures@gmail.com

(posted 11 September 2018, updated 21 September 2018)

Gender and Power: International Conference on Gender Studies
London, UK, 2 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 10 December 2018

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

The conference seeks to explore the past and current status of gender identity around the world, to examine the ways in which society is shaped by gender and to situate gender in relation to the full scope of human affairs.

•  gender equality
•  women’s rights and women’s history
•  gender and education
•  women and leadership
•  women’s and men’s health
•  gender and sexuality
•  gender and religion
•  gender and literature

(posted 22 October 2018)

Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time
London, UK, 9 March 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 15 January 2019

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Since ancient times, mirrors have been viewed as place where the dual worlds of soul and self merge. In ancient Mexico, polished obsidian mirrors were viewed as magical portals through which sorcerers traveled to reach the world of the gods. The fictitious mirror of 18th-century author, Oliver Goldsmith, revealed the inner workings of the mind rather than the surface. In the 21st century, our reflections may obscure rather than uncover the truths we once searched for. Through technology, we can recreate ourselves and the world around us. We see our altered, perfected reflections in our photos, on our web cams, and in advertising. Images may come to show not necessarily our realities, but visions of the world that we prefer. Indeed, altered visions and the falsehoods they purvey may serve as instruments for political gain, for the accumulation of personal wealth, and as a means of repression. This conference explores how our virtual concepts and reconstructed worlds impact humanity, the arts, and nature in the age of rising anthropocentrism.

Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:

• llusion and the ancient world-mirrors and other artifacts and their elite metaphysical uses
• Specific cultural beliefs related to mirrors, truth, soul, and self
• Physical science: knowledge and beliefs relating to mirrors both ancient and modern
• Studies of writers, artists, and others who emphasize reality and illusion in their creative works (Lewis Carrol, Oliver Goldsmith, and others)
• Trompe l’oeil (Early and Modern Visual Art)
• Truth, illusion, and delusion in the age of the Internet–You Tube and other Media
• The reinvented self: modern or historical
• The dangers of deception (social and environmental concerns)
• Specific perspectives on truth and illusion as symbolized or addressed in the visual arts, creative writing, new historical narratives, architecture, and other media
• How altered vision can have far reaching impacts on culture, society, and the environment

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 January 2019 (new extended deadline) to: mirror@lcir.co.uk. Please download paper proposal form from the official website: http://mirror.lcir.co.uk

Registration fee – 100 GBP

Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, London

(posted 8 September 2018, updated 17 December 2018)

Phraseology and Stylistics of Literary Language
Friedrich Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, Erlangen, Germany, 13-15 March 2019
Deadine for the submission of abstracts: 30 September 2018

An international conference organised as part of the Franco-German ANR-DFG research project PhraseoRom

This international conference, which is devoted to the phraseology and stylistics of literary language, will be organised as part of the Franco-German research project PhraseoRom (https://phraseorom.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr) funded jointly by the ANR and the DFG. It seeks to provide a platform for discussing innovative approaches to the phraseology of literary language. The main focus of the conference is on the linguistic and discursive analysis of statistically significant multi-word expressions in literary texts, statistical genre analysis and literary stylistics.

The main focus of the conference is on the linguistic and discursive analysis of statistically significant multi-word expressions in literary texts, statistical genre analysis and literary stylistics. Submissions should primarily but not exclusively deal with novels in German, English and French published since 1950. However, papers focusing on literary works from other periods will also be welcome.

The conference will have three thematic strands:

1. linguistic, stylistic and discourse-analytical studies of multi-word units in literary texts (collocations, colligations, motifs)
2. the application of statistical and corpus-linguistic methods to literary texts
3. the quantitative stylistics of literary genres, focusing either on one of the languages of the conference or adopting a contrastive perspective (German/English/French)

Submissions which cut across thematic areas or provide a connection between them are also welcome.

The conference will have two sections:
Section 1 : statistical research methods and their application to large corpora of fiction
Section 2 : linguistic and stylistic analyses of literary genres (corpus stylistics)  The conference languages are German, English and French. A selection of articles will be published in a volume of conference proceedings. An academic committee will be responsible for the selection process.  Please submit an abstract of one page max. (including bibliographic references) in German, English or French to the following address (DOC and PDF) by September 30^th 2018: conference-phraseorom@fau.de. 

Important dates:
Deadline for the submission of abstracts: 30 September 2018.
Notification of acceptance: 31 October 2018
The conference will take place from 13-15 March 2019.

Registration fee:
60 € (20 € for PhD students)

Conference venue:
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Institut für Romanistik, Bismarckstraße 1, 91054 Erlangen, Germany

Speakers
Michaela Mahlberg (University of Birmingham)
Dan McIntyre (University of Huddersfield)
Christoph Schöch (Universität Trier)
Kathrin Steyer (Institut für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim)

Organisation and contacts
Ludwig Fesenmeier (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
Stefan Koch (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg)
E-Mail: conference-phraseorom@fau.de

Submission of abstracts:
Further information and full CfP on: https://www.romanistik.phil.fau.de/phraseorom/

(posted 23 June 2018)

Health and Healing in Culture and Literature: International Başkent Conference
Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 13-15 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 November 2018

The Department of American Culture and Literature at Başkent University is pleased to host the forthcoming international conference on “Health and Healing in Culture and Literature,” to be held between 13 and 15 March 2019 at the Bağlıca Campus as part of the festivities of the 25th anniversary of the foundation of Başkent University. Both topically and thematically, health and healing have been a recurrent concern in literary writings and cultural representations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson aphoristically stressed, “the first wealth is health.” He theorized that a perfect balance of one’s physical and spiritual selves was the essence of good health, noting that the love of nature had a healing and moderating effect: “The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other.” Similarly, Henry David Thoreau reiterated Emerson’s idea in a humorous and instructive way: “What is the pill which will keep us well, serene, contented? Not my or thy great-grandfather’s, but our great-grandmother Nature’s universal, vegetable, botanic medicines, by which she has kept herself young always.” Kurt Vonnegut saw the essence of good health in one’s love of humanity and one’s allegiance to human values when he stated: “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

As scholars in the humanities, we also play a role in addressing the maladies of the inner person. Through aesthetic experience, through the practice of narrative, poetic expression and artistic performance, we work toward the disclosure and examination of humane ideas. For example, Susana Onega and Jean-Michel Ganteau’s edited collection of essays, The Wounded Hero in Contemporary Fiction: A Paradoxical Quest (2018), addresses wounded characters in contemporary literary works and their ways of coping with their health problems. Also, studies in popular culture such as Medicine’s Moving Picture: Medicine, Health, and Bodies in American Film and Television (2007) and Medical Visions: Producing the Patient through Film, Television, and Imagining Technologies (2013) offer rich representations of health, medicine, and the human body in American film and TV. Studies of the media, advertising and work within the social sciences can fortify and deepen our examination of these discourses on health. Such viewpoints may open a new horizon for the investigation of the ways health and healing are conceived in contemporary ylife. Our upcoming conference offers a forum for the consideration of healing practices from various cultural traditions as they are depicted in literary and cultural products, and on the broader discourses governing health and healing. We hope that intercultural, comparative and trans-disciplinary approaches will open important new aspects to our inquiry.

As such, we invite submissions on a broad range of themes and sub-topics, including but not limited to:

• Literature as therapy, literature as pharmakon, the arts as a means of healing
• Creative writing by healers and medical practitioners
• Health in popular culture, film studies, media studies, visual arts, and music
• Holistic healing, body-mind-spirit, healing rituals, faith healing, root doctors, conjure women, medicine men and shamans, spiritual healing, yoga, meditation, seclusion
• Healing the body politic: treating conditions caused by migration, environmental stressors, terrorism, radicalism, war, political oppression, abuse, public health and politics, coping mechanisms
• Conceptions of the body and its healing capacity, allegory of human anatomy, body image: bulimia, anorexia, obesity, dysmorphophobia
• Memoirs of illness and restoration
• Healing power of nature, healing in nature
• Self-help and self-healing
• Communal healing
• Sacred nature of mother- sister- daughterhood
• Health and gender: the construction of femininity, masculinity
• Eating and healing, food as medicine, nutrition, back to the land, homegrown, organic agriculture movements
• Post-crisis rehabilitation through story-telling, healing physical trauma, healing spiritual trauma
• Medicine as metaphor, allegories of healing, metaphorical healing

200-word abstracts for 20-minute individual papers are welcome, together with a short biographical note (written in the third person) including institutional affiliation, address, e-mail and telephone numbers.

Please send abstracts and the required information, by November 1, 2018, to both Dr. Jeffrey W. Howlett, jwhowlett@baskent.edu.tr and Dr. Gözde Kılıç, gozdekilic@baskent.edu.tr, Department of American Culture and Literature, Faculty of Science and Letters, Başkent University, Ankara, Turkey.

(posted 19 September 2018)

Sapphic Vibes: Lesbians in Literature from the Renaissance to the Present
Université de Haute-Alsace, France, 14-15 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 October 2018

http://www.ille.uha.fr/category/colloques/appels-a-communications/

(posted 23 March 2018)

XXII SELGYC Symposium
Universidad de Granada, Granada, Spain, 14-16 March 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 15 October 2018

SELGYC – Sociedad Española de Literatura General y Comparada

The Spanish Society of General and Comparative Literature (SELGYC) is pleased to announce the XXII SELGYC Symposium, which will take place at the Universidad de Granada (Granada – Spain), during the 14^th, 15^th and 16^th of March 2019.

We hereby invite all those who are interested in participating to send an abstract of their paper proposal (maximum 300 words) and a short bio-note, before the 15^th of October 2018 (new extended deadline), to the email address xxiisimposio.selgyc@gmail.com. The Symposium’s scientific committee will carry out the revision and selection of the proposals received, and the results will be notified to the authors before the 15^th of October 2018. During the selection process of the articles, factors such as originality, composition, method and adjustment to the topics proposed for the XXII Symposium will be taken into account.

SYMPOSIUM’S GENERAL TOPICS:

1. Transcomparatism: Gender and Genres: Feminism and sexuality in comparative literature.

• Literature and feminism/s.
• Literature and homosexuality and/or divergent sexualities.
• Literature and transsexuality or transgenderism.
• Film, literature and genre.
• The Eastern and Western Classical World and its use for non-heteronormative sexuality in literature and the performing arts.
• Alternative literary genres and formats: the experience of self as part of the fictional narration.
• The cento as a form of gender subversion and discourse.
• Comic and graphic novel: popular products that receive an illustrated discourse.
• Gender in literary genres.

2. Beyond Literature: Other formats for comparatism (art, internet, popular culture, etc.).

• Comparatism, Intermediacy and Communication Technologies.
• New expression and comparatism forms.
• Internet culture.
• Popular culture versions in different languages.
• New forms of popular culture on the Internet.
• Comparatism in art and literature. Comparatism and communication technologies.

3. Chinese Literature: Chinese Literature, Arts and Culture in the World.

• Chinese literature in the letters of the world.
• Representations of other languages and cultures in Chinese literary tradition.
• Chinese poetry, painting, theatre and opera.
• The arts in China and the world: architecture, graphic arts, painting, decorative arts and furniture, gardening, etc.
• Relations between China, Spain and the Hispanic world. Hispanic Orientalism and Chinese Hispanism, etc.

Papers will be presented in different sessions, as will be announced in the final program. Each author will have 15 minutes for presentation and at the end of each session there will be 10 minutes for debate.

Additional information regarding the Symposium and supplying further details relative to transport and accommodation will be published shortly (http://www.selgyc.com/index.php/es/simposios-selgyc/xxii-simposio-de-la-selgyc-2019). For more information please contact us at: xxiisimposio.selgyc@gmail.com.

(posted 9 September 2018, updated 4 October 2018)

New Perspectives in Science Education International Conference, 8th edition
Florence, Italy, 21-22 March 2019
New extended deadline for proposals: 14 January 2018

The 8^th edition of the New Perspectives in Science Education Conference will take place in Florence, Italy, on 21 – 22 March 2019.

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 conference.

Important dates (updated):

• 14 January 2019: Last Extended Deadline for submitting abstracts
• 18 January 2019: Notification of abstracts’ acceptance / rejection
• 21 January 2019: Deadline for papers’ submission
• 21-22 March 2019: Conference days

There will be three presentation modalities: oral, poster and virtual presentations.

All accepted papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings published by Filodiritto Editore with ISBN and ISSN codes. This publication will be sent to be reviewed for inclusion in SCOPUS

(https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus) and Thomson Reuters.

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

(posted 30 July 2018, updated 3 November 2018, updated 25 November 2018, updated 28 December 2018)

Ethics and specialised domains: the place, functions and forms of ethical considerations in specialised varieties of English: GERAS 40th International Conference
Université Panthéon-Assas-Paris 2, Paris, France, 21-23 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2018

Specialised varieties of English have already been approached by researchers from a number of angles, but it seems that ethical considerations, and their place, functions and forms in the discourse of specialised communities have been under-investigated. Yet, a great many members of disciplinary or professional milieus ask themselves ethical questions about the organisation they work for, their responsibilities, their positioning or their relationships with society at large: whatever they do, they must be able to account for their decisions (Rawls 1987). Examples of such preoccupations are quite common today in such fields as legal ethics and the codes of conduct of the legal professions, ethical finance, business ethics, management ethics with the emergence of Chief Ethics Officers in the corporate world, in addition to journalistic, political and environmental ethics — not to mention medical ethics, bioethics, and ethics in science and the new technologies; as a result, ethics and deontology are often associated.

It is true that the current use of the word ‘ethics’ tends to stray from its original meaning, which may be regretted: it increasingly refers to professional or applied ethics (Badiou 1993). Nowadays the distinction between Aristotle’s ethics, with its teleological dimension (telos), and Kant’s moral theory, with its focus on duty(deon), has been blurred; still, some people do feel the need to distinguish between ethics — pertaining to individual rules that have been self-imposed after much questioning and meditating on what “aGood Life” really means — and morals, which are imposed from the outside and can be defined as the obligation to respect norms, heed constraints and play by the rules (Ricœur 1999). The mere idea that ‘morals’ might have a negative connotation linked with the notions of ‘requirement’ and ‘duty’ no doubt accounts for today’s preference for the term ‘ethics’: hence the confusion between individual,disciplinary, and professional ethics.

Specialised discourse can yield a wealth of information for researchers since its analysis requires taking into consideration the communities that produce it, their own specific constraints and communicative purpose, in addition to the cultural, social, historical contexts in which discourse is produced. This conference will be an opportunity for researchers interested in discourse analysis to draw on specialised corpora in order to identify the linguistic or syntactic forms underpinning ethical considerations, or the preferred rhetorical tools used for  conveying the appropriate message and reaching the desired goals. Linguists will be able to seek specific markers likely to determine whether the current interest for what is ‘ethically correct’ runs parallel with ‘politically correct’ concerns or even ‘greenwashing’ practices. Some claims about ethics may well be superficial. If so, what linguistic devices are used to support suchdeceptive attitudes, and how can they be detected in the discourse of specialised milieus? Special attention can also be paid to genre analysis: codes of conduct, charters and other documents meant to assert values, or define norms and rules will surely be of interest, and their specificity can be highlighted. For those interested in metaphors, the question of the potential impact of these tropes can be raised, in so far as the worldview they convey can influence the reader or targeted public. The choice of a metaphor is never innocent, in that it can guide people’s reactions and attitudes. As Christian Walter (2012) — when commenting on mathematical models in finance — insists, any metaphorical choice is potentially an ethical one.

The theme of the conference will also enable specialists of terminology to study the conceptual fuzziness of the term ‘ethics’ in specialised contexts, paying special attention to neighbouring concepts such as value, virtue, norm, morals, code, etc. in a given specialised field or sub-field, either on the synchronic or the diachronic axis. Studying conceptual networks, possible shifts in meaning, or neology-in-the-making, may also help researchers apprehend specialised milieus’ efforts to meet the requirements of society as far as ethics is concerned.

For translators of specialised discourse, the issue of ethics may be approached from a different angle, that of the consequences of the choices they make when translating a text, when trying to convey the original message without betraying its author’s intention, or failing to meet the requirements of their client. They may also reflect upon the amount of freedom translators can afford: how to combine such freedom with the duty to make sure that the targeted public has all the necessary tools and information to understand the message the original author meant to convey?

Researchers interested in the didactics of specialised varieties of English (SVEs)—and in sensitising would-be teachers and researchers to the specific culture of the relevant domains — are invited to choose among a number of questions pertaining to their strand of research with respect to the theme of the conference (RPPLSP/Cahiers de l’APLIUT 2013). For example, they may wonder about the legitimacy and efficiency of their teaching methodology, or explore the relationships between ethics, epistemology and pragmatics, from the perspective of either action or reflection (Le Moigne 2005). The theme can also be approached from the perspective of the ethical competency with which teachers should endow their students in the various branches of activities for which the latter have chosen to prepare. Another question worth investigating is the ethical problem raised when conducting action-research projects in terms of the researcher’s positioning: failure to take the right distance from one’s resultsmight invalidate one’s research, not to mention situations when the research includes other researchers’ data (Macaire 2007). Whatever the domain or the approach, researchers in specialised varieties of English will find food for thought in the unifying theme of this conference, reflecting on the place, functions and forms of ethical considerations in specialised discourse, cultures, and communities. It is to be hoped that the various suggestions mentioned here, to which many more may be added, will attract the interest of many researchers, inspire a rich array of approaches, and feed enriching debates.

Submission Guidelines
Paper proposals should be sent via the EasyChair website (another email will be sent when the link is available) before November 15 2018 and should include a title, a 300-word abstract and the names, affiliation and contact details of the speaker(s).

(posted 21 August 2018)

NEWstories: Faces of Crisis in 20th- and 21st- century prose, A Student-Doctoral Conference
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, 23 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 31 December 2018

“It is curious how, at eavery crisis, some phrase which does not fit insists upon coming to the rescue – the penalty of living in an old civilization with a notebook” (Virginia Woolf, The Waves)

The 1st NEWstories Conference, which will be held on 23 March 2019 at the Institute of English Studies of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland), aims to bring together both undergraduate and postgraduate literary scholars to share their experience and research results on all aspects of crisis in 20th- and 21st-century prose. It also provides an interdisciplinary platform for those interested in politics, ecology and psychology. Participants are invited to present and discuss significant innovations, trends as well as challenges related to the issue of crisis.

The notion of crisis is at the core of any appraisal of the 20th and 21st centuries. The revolutionaries in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables proclaimed that “[…] the nineteenth century is great, but the twentieth century will be happy.” However, it was crisis, not joy, that shaped the 20th century, as it was marred by two World Wars, the Great Depression, genocide, the nuclear arms race, the AIDS epidemic and numerous other crises. The 21st century witnessed one of its defining crises in its first year when terrorists attacked World Trade Center, sparking off the war on terror and an economic crisis. Our conference sets out to examine the ways in which these crises are depicted in 20th- and 21st- century prose, as well as how literature itself changed throughout these tumultuous centuries, reflecting external crises. Moreover, the scope of interest of our conference includes ontological and epistemological crises, challenging preconceived notions connected with human existence and literature.

NEWstories annual conferences will be devoted to various aspects of 20th- and 21st- century literature. Postmodernism is more and more often claimed to be over, so it turns out that we are approaching a new literary epoch – as Pieter Vermeulen contends in Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel: Creature, Affect, Form, “contemporary fiction’s dramatization of the end of the novel conveys a sense that neither these modern forms of life nor the novel’s cultural power are quite what they used to be.” Yet we still struggle to find a convincing name for the time we happen to live in. From post- postmodernism, through metamodernism, to dismodernism, all the already suggested options refer to the present, but also seem to have their roots in the previous century. How can we know, then, what literature is today? And how do we interpret history and our inspirations? Aware of the questions that arise at the beginning of the new millennium, we invite literary scholars specializing in 20th- and 21st- century prose in all languages, hoping that the conferences will become a convenient forum to discuss current issues and doubts.

We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations in English by PhD, MA and BA students on 20th- and 21st- century prose texts dealing with the theme of crisis or exemplifying it, written in any language. Abstracts of about 150 words should be submitted to crisisconference2019@gmail.com by 31 December 2018. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 January 2019.

Possible topics include but are not limited to the following themes:

• literature and crisis (crisis of genre / form / style / authorship)
• political crises economic crises
• ecological crises
• nuclear crises
• migration crises
• crisis of values technological crisis
• existential crisis
• crisis of representation
• crisis of communication

There is no conference fee.

We are planning to publish selected papers presented at the conference.

Organizers: lic. Katarzyna Biela (UJ) | mgr Aleksandra Kamińska (UJ) | mgr Alicja Lasak (UJ) mgr Kinga Latała (UJ) | mgr Sabina Sosin (UJ)

http://www.crisisconference.wordpress.com

(posted 28 December 2018)

Brexit – Europe without the UK:  an International Conference on European Studies
London, UK, 30 March 2019
Deadline for proposals: 1 February 2019

Organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

On 23 June 2016 51.9% of the British population voted the withdrawal of the UK from the European Union. The referendum came as a shock not only to the Continent but to the whole world, and has divided the country and the nation. The Brexiteers argue in favour of autonomous economy, independent politics and sovereign society, forecasting ‘a very, very bright future’ for the reinvented country. However, Remainers advance the gloomy prospect of economic uncertainty, political instability and social unrest triggered by any of the strategies for dealing with the decision to leave the European Union. Either ‘soft Brexit’, ‘hard Brexit’ or ‘no Brexit’, the impact is still difficult to predict.

The conference is aimed to explore the national and regional effects and consequences of the UK’s disengagement from Europe and the European structures. It will also focus on the causes and conditions that led to Euroscepticism and the anti-European majority vote.

The main objective of the event is to bring together all those interested in examining the intersections between their professions and/or interests and some distinct aspects of Brexit, providing an integrated approach for the understanding of the process within the current European context.

Topics include but are not limited to several core issues:

• Challenges and opportunities
• Between nationalism and nativism
• Migration and immigration
• Politics and policy-making after 29 March 2019
• Trade, commerce and business
• Post-Brexit free movement
• The Irish border
• The European Union without the UK
• The role of London in Brexit
• Perceptions of Brexit in popular culture

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 1 February, 2019 to: europe@lcir.co.uk

Please download paper proposal form: http://europe.lcir.co.uk

Registration fee – 100 GBP

(posted 17 December 2018)