Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in September 2020

Cosmopolitan Aspirations in English-Speaking Cinema and Television: 26th Annual SERCIA Conference
Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, 2-4 September 2020
New extended deadline for proposals: 1 May 2020

It has become almost mandatory to start any piece on cosmopolitanism with a reference to Diogenes the Cynic (412-323 BC) and his famous claim “I am a citizen of the world”. Alluring as the phrase may sound to our 21st century ears, when uttered by Diogenes, it was an invitation to be a social outsider: the allegiance to humanity as a whole implied becoming an exile from the comforts of one’s place of birth and social group (Nussbaum 1994). Two thousand years later, Immanuel Kant considered that the achievement of a cosmopolitan order was a must “if the human race was not to consume itself in wars between nations and if the power of nation-states was not to overwhelm the freedom of individual” (Fine and Cohen 2002). Kant’s ideals about a cosmopolitan world order, cosmopolitan law and cosmopolitan hospitality became the foundation on which moral cosmopolitanism, understood as a philosophical and political project aimed at the creation of cosmopolitan political institutions and the development of a cosmopolitan civil society, started to be theorised. This cosmopolitan tradition became especially appealing in the 1990s, a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of apartheid, among other epochal changes, as well as the widespread use of the Internet and the emergence of the so-called network society. Cosmopolitanism became then a framework  (or a “methodology” in Ulrich Beck’s words) to try to understand and deal with some of the challenges of globalization: the increased mobilities of people and goods, the proliferation of global risks, the redefinition of borders and the proliferation of global media and virtual communities, among others (Beck 2000).

The development of cinema in the late nineteenth century fed into cosmopolitan aspirations of modern city life and an increasing desire for travel. Films crossed national borders and opened up spaces for spectators’ mediated engagement with difference. The history of cinema abounds in examples of filmmakers that abandoned national contexts as their immediate frame of reference and created their work from and for a cosmopolitan imagination. Orson Welles, Jules Dassin, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang, Max Ophüls and, more recently, Michael Haneke, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Yorgos Lanthimos immediately come to mind, but the list of travelling filmmakers, past and present, is much longer, and it includes names much more closely associated with a particular national or local identity, from Jean Renoir to Wong Kar-wai – not to mention, of course, travelling actors contributing to foster cosmopolitan aspirations, from Maurice Chevalier to Marion Cotillard and Charlotte Gainsbourg, from Louise Brooks to Marlene Dietrich, from Jean Seberg to Kristen Stewart, from Ingrid Bergman to Max von Sydow, from Jackie Chan to Maggie Cheung, from Dolores del Río to Penélope Cruz, from Sophia Loren to, yes, Clint Eastwood. The development of communication technologies since the 1980s has also led to the development of “globally dispersed productions.” Filmmakers, actors and technicians from all over the world form networks of international professionals collaborating beyond national differences. The outcome of these constant border-crossings have been innumerable films that have complicated national identities and showcased hybridity, and have explored the dynamic between the familiar and the stranger in a myriad ways. Similarly, from its inception, television brought other cultures and ways of seeing the world into the domestic space of one’s home. Digital television and multimedia platforms can now create cosmopolitan communities on demand. Audiovisual media have always played and are still playing a crucial role in the process that Beck refers to as the “cosmopolitanization” of the world. Yet, when compared to the existing literature on the issue in other areas, cosmopolitanism still remains a largely underexplored subject in film and television studies.

This conference will explore the ways in which cosmopolitan aspirations (and “their enemies” in Ulrich Beck’s words) have made their way into English-speaking cinema and television across different time periods, nations, genres and media. Areas to be explored include but are not limited to:

  • onscreen representations and constructions of cosmopolitan identities
  • the places of the cosmopolitan: borders, borderlands and global cities
  • -he risk society: eco-cosmopolitanism
  • agents of cosmopolitanism onscreen: frequent travellers, tourists, migrants and refugees
  • cosmopolitanism and gender
  • cosmopolitan performances, performing cosmopolitanism
  • intimate encounters in a global context
  • visual and narrative articulations of the cosmopolitan
  • cosmopolitanism in film and television genres
  • cosmopolitan directors and stars. Celebrity cosmopolitanism
  • the limits and contradictions of onscreen cosmopolitanism
  • co-productions as cosmopolitan, global and/or transnational production strategies
  • cinematic and televisual representations of the global society
  • cosmopolitan film and television networks
  • globally-dispersed productions. Global industry, local labour
  • cosmopolitan communities and multimedia digital platforms
  • -film and TV reception around the world: local, global and/or cosmopolitan audiences
  • cosmopolitanism and multilingual films, the politics of dubbing, subtitling and double versions

Keynote Speakers:

Juan Suárez (Universidad de Murcia)

Deborah Shaw (University of Portsmouth)

Scientific Committee:

María del Mar Azcona, Julia Echeverría, Pablo Gómez, Celestino Deleyto, David Roche, Nolwenn Mingant, Juan Suárez, Deborah Shaw.

Submission:

Please submit a 300-500 word abstract and short bio (120 words) in English by 1st May 2020 (new extended deadline) to the conference website: http://eventos.unizar.es/43243/upload/cosmopolitan-aspirations-in-english-speaking-cinema-and-television.html

A select bibliography is available on the Conference website: http://eventos.unizar.es/43243/section/22374/cosmopolitan-aspirations-in-english-speaking-cinema-and-television.html

(posted 9 December 2019, updated 17 March 2020)


Bounded languages… Unbounded: COMELA 2020
The American University, Athens, Greece, 2-5 September 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 November 2019

Politics of identity are central to language change. Here, linguistic boundaries rise and fall, motivating the ephemeral characteristics of language communities. The Mediterranean and European region is one replete with histories, with power struggles, uniquely demarcating nation, ethnicity, and community. For this, cultural and political identities, language ideologies, as well as the languages themselves, have sought boundedness, dynamics of which have indeed sought change over eons, through demographic movements, through geopolitics, through technological innovation. In a current era of technological advancement, transnational fluidity, intellectual power, capitalism, and new sexualities, then, we question, once again, the boundedness of language and identity, and ways in which to unbound languages and ideologies. More than before, we now increasingly pursue anthropological toil, so to innovate ways to locate these ideologies and their fluid boundaries, actively. We now need to increasingly unbind these languages, and their ideologies, so to arrive at progressive realizations, and to rectify, or at least see and move past, the segregations of old.

The COMELA 2020 theme, “Bounded languages… Unbounded”, encapsulates the ongoing struggle throughout Mediterranean and European regions. As the continuous tension between demarcation, and the concurrent legitimization, of languages, language ideologies, and language identities, enters an era where new modes of interactivity require language communities to take on roles super-ordinate to the past, flexible citizenship now operates within, and not only across, language communities, to unbind languages, and to create new boundaries, unlike those ever seen throughout history.

The COMELA 2020 invites work which addresses the shifting boundedness of Language Communities of the Mediterranean and Europe. Papers and posters should acknowledge and decribe processes of language shape, change, and ideology, pertinent to social, cultural, political histories, and futures of Mediterranean and European regions, and by those working in Mediterranean and European regions.

Speaker: Jan Blommaert, Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg University, The Netherlands. Jan Blommaert is Professor of Language, Culture and Globalization, and Director of the Babylon Center at Tilburg University, the Netherlands. He is of the world’s most prominent Sociolinguists and Linguistic Anthropologists, and has contributed substantially to sociolinguistic globalization theory, focusing on historical as well as contemporary patterns of language and literacy, and on lasting and new forms of inequality emerging from globalization processes.

Strands:

  • Anthropological Linguistics
  • Applied Sociolinguistics
  • Buddhist studies and discourses
  • Cognitive Anthropology and Language
  • Critical Linguistic Anthropology
  • Ethnographical Language Work
  • Ethnography of Communication
  • General Sociolinguistics
  • Islamic Studies and discourses
  • Language, Community, Ethnicity
  • Language Contact and Change
  • Language, Dialect, Sociolect, Genre
  • Language Documentation
  • Language, Gender, Sexuality
  • Language Ideologie
  • Language Minorities and Majorities
  • Language Revitalization
  • Language in Real and Virtual Spaces
  • Language Socialization
  • Language and Spatiotemporal Frames
  • Multifunctionality
  • Narrative and Metanarrative
  • Nonverbal Semiotics
  • Oral heritage
  • Poetics
  • Post-Structuralism and Language
  • Semiotics and Semiology
  • Social Psychology of Language
  • Textualization, Contextualization, Entextualization

All the information about the conference can be found at https://comela2020.comela.me

(posted 26 July 2019)


A New Poetics of Space: Literary Walks in times of Pandemics and Climate Change
Mid Sweden University, Sundsvall, Sweden Online conference: 7 December 2020
Deadline for proposals: 1 Octobe 2020

Keynote Speakers: Professor Anne D. Wallace (University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and Professor Jon Hegglund (Washington State University)

Organisers: Dr Lucy Jeffery & Professor Vicky Angelaki

In the Exeter Book (c. 975), the speaker in an Anglo-Saxon lament entitled ‘The Wanderer’ elegises over the plight of a ‘lone-dweller’ who, ‘weary of hardships’ and ‘the death of kinsmen’, ‘longs for relief’ as he follows ‘paths of exile’ in search of ‘the Almighty’s mercy’.[1] As the verse explores the nature of wandering, the reader (or listener) contemplates how the speaker’s journey has informed his ethical and geographical path. The idea of walking is – as it would also be for later writers and thinkers as diverse as Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mahatma Gandhi, and W. G. Sebald – a source of creative inspiration and a call to political activity. Today, as we face a global pandemic that has made the citizens of over two hundred countries wary of stepping into the great outdoors, walking has acquired added significance.

Depending on one’s geographic and/or economic situation, walking has become salvation, hobby, danger, and protest. In some areas, the sanctioned restrictions on people’s movement meant that the physical and cognitive freedoms at the disposal of the wanderer were removed. Similarly, the compulsory closure of shops, bars, theatres, and museums has rendered the flâneur’s stroll through crowded streets that burgeon with the spoils of capitalism impossible. One can no longer, as Walter Benjamin observed of Baudelaire’s flâneur, ‘go about the city’ in a state of ‘anamnestic intoxication’ and ‘[feed] on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes’.[2] Conversely, 2020 has seen a rise in protest marches concerned with social and racial equality, rendering the walk representative of political agency and activism. Moreover, as the act of walking has become an enactment of the freedoms that remain during quarantine, it is understood in contrast to our increasingly familiar state of Beckettian seclusion.

As we have become more mindful of our day-to-day comings and goings, our engagement with literature that either extolls the virtues of walking or warns against the perils of the journey has both heightened and changed. Furthermore, as our experience of confinement and self-isolation has reshaped our everyday lives, we may recontextualise our examination of literature in relation to a politics of space and place. This online conference, hosted by the Department of English at Mid Sweden University, will explore what the act of walking stands for and what it signifies today in various textual forms. The one-day event aims to reflect the various ways in which walking, in its manifold possibilities and contexts, informs our understanding of the ways in which our experience of confinement has impacted our understanding of society and reading of literature.

With this in mind, we would like to take stock of the scholarship concerning walking and interrogate how our new politicised landscape is reshaping our understanding of literary landscapes across a range of genres and periods. We aim to explore: what narratives of walking reveal about our understanding of the politics of space, health, and the environment (both urban and rural); and, more broadly, how people are responding creatively to the question of space and confinement today. The project seeks to re-evaluate how we respond to and understand the tradition of the literary walk in light of the twenty-first century’s technological developments, societal shifts, environmental challenges, and political situation.

We welcome interdisciplinary perspectives and encourage analyses that explore walking through, but not limited to, the following lines of inquiry:

  • Cartographic narration
  • Ecocriticism
  • Exile
  • Freedom and confinement
  • Literary topology
  • Medical humanities
  • Mobility studies
  • Music
  • Performance
  • Peripatetic liminality
  • Pilgrimage
  • Political marches / protests
  • Private and public spaces
  • Slowness
  • Solitude / self-isolation
  • Technology
  • The pastoral
  • The urban flâneur
  • Transcendentalism
  • Visual arts

We are keen to investigate the concept of walking in fictive and non-fictive texts and accounts. Any chosen critical, theoretical, methodological, or disciplinary perspective is therefore welcome. We hope that this conference will provide researchers interested in interdisciplinary (especially environment, health, politics) approaches to literature with rigorous and engaging discussions concerning creative and/or theoretical approaches to the theme of walking.

We warmly welcome postgraduates, ECRs, and senior academics interested in how the global climate and epidemiological challenges we currently face inform our understanding of literature that engages with ecocritical issues and notions of confinement. Please send abstracts (200-250 words), including a title and short bio (100 words) to lucy.jeffery@miun.se by 1 October 2020. Papers must be between 15 – 20 minutes in length. We aim to respond to all applicants with a decision on their submission by 9 October 2020. Please note that as this conference will take place online, there is no conference fee.

If you are interested in attending this online event, but do not wish to present a paper, please contact us directly via email. The conference programme will be posted on the Mid Sweden University English Department webpage https://www.miun.se/online-conference

in due course. Please address any questions you may have to lucy.jeffery@miun.se

We look forward to hearing from you,

Dr Lucy Jeffery and Professor Vicky Angelaki.

[1] ‘The Wanderer’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Middle Ages Volume A, 9th edition, eds. Stephen Greenblatt, James Simpson, and Alfred David (New York; London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012), 117-120, 118.

[2] Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 417.

(posted 1 September 2020)


Intercultural Communicative Competence: A Competitive Advantage for Global Employability 2020 (ICCAGE III) – Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, Critical Thinking
Prague, Czech Republic, 7-8 September 2020
Deadline for submissions: 30 May 2020

Reflecting on the current discussions on the framework of the “four Cs” – communication, collaboration, creativity, critical thinking – the third ICCAGE international conference invites teachers and experts across all academic disciplines to share experience, best practice, and research in this area. Following up on the successful ICCAGE 2019 international conference held in Prague, we invite papers on the following topics:

  • 4Cs-based approaches to ELT
  • teaching social and/or communicative skills
  • critical and creative thinking
  • intercultural communicative competence
  • transversal skills through ELT
  • CLIL in higher education
  • autonomous learning
  • telecollaboration

Submit abstracts for a 20-minute presentation (120 words maximum) including a short academic bio via the following link: https://forms.gle/hYReuo82i2wq1TWA6

For more details and updates visit: https://business.vscht.cz/668-iccage-conference

Selected conference papers will be published in a reviewed collection of essays and/or offered to be reviewed by an independent academic journal.

Deadline for submissions: May 30, 2020

Conference Fee: 60€

Contact: Hedvika Páleníková at business.admission@vscht.cz

Venue: Campus Dejvice, Prague 6

Depending on the Corona virus situation, the organisers will consider holding the event as an online conference.

(posted 20 May 2020, updated 22 May 2020)


Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Media
2021/22 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 20202

Guest Editors: Armelle Parey and Charlotte Wadoux

Neo-Victorian Studies (http://neovictorianstudies.com)

Despite the death of the author famously announced by Roland Barthes in 1967, real-life writers as characters, sometimes intermingling with their own creations, feature prominently in neo-Victorian fiction and other media. Besides reprising historical writers’ careers and exposing their secret, sometimes disreputable lives, these neo-Victorian biofictions also engage, self-consciously or implicitly, with changes in writing modes, genres, and narrative conventions over time and with the theorisation of both creative practice and life-writing. The same holds true of depictions of wholly imaginary, professional or aspiring literary scribes without specific historical antecedents. Simultaneously, neo-Victorian portrayals of writers highlight dubious inequalities between celebrity and marginalised literary figures, implicated in perpetuating biased canons as well as selective forms of cultural commemoration, often privileging the same, predominantly white male writers (Charles Dickens, Henry James, Alfred Lord Tennyson) as the most suitable subjects for rewrites, with even the Brontë sisters suffering from tokenism in comparison and writers of other races going almost entirely unrepresented. This special issue aims to explore neo-Victorian representations of writers and writing in biofiction and beyond from new and innovative angles. We are particularly interested in contributions that pursue the following enquiries: Which actual nineteenth-century writers and their works are reimagined, which are not, and what accounts for such policies of differential remembrance and forgetting? How are writers deliberately misrepresented, and what present-day agendas does such misremembering serve? What accounts for the persistent fascination with the writer figure, real or imagined, in an increasingly digital age, where the book almost seems destined to relegation to the museum and the realm of virtual objects? How do neo-Victorian concerns with writing engage metafictionally with neo-Victorianism’s own processes of writing – and reading – the Victorians today? What new approaches to and techniques of intertextuality can be discerned in neo-Victorian depictions of authorship? Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to, the following:

  • rethinking and reworking the ‘cultural capital’ of nineteenth-century writers
  • innovations in neo-Victorian biofictions of writers: new orientations
  • the differential canonisation and depreciation of author figures (in terms of race, ethnicity, class, (trans)gender, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness, etc.)
  • neo-Victorian metafictional engagements with processes of writerly production, reception, and consumption
  • immersive neo-Victorian encounters with author figures: writing, empathy and affect
  • engagements with theory and its contestation in neo-Victorian writer fictions

We especially invite contributions on neo-Victorian fictions and biofictions featuring Victorian writers that have not yet attracted significant critical attention, as well as on texts featuring period scenes of non-Western writers and writing.

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Armelle Parey (armelle.parey@unicaen.fr) and Charlotte Wadoux (cwadoux@gmail.com). Abstracts/proposals of 250-300 words, with accompanying brief bio note, will be due by 15 September 2020. Completed articles will be due by 1 March 2021. Abstracts and articles in Word document format should be sent via email to both guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (‘Submission Guidelines’) for further guidance.

(posted 11 August 2020)


Evil in literature and cinema
University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland, 17-18 September 2020
Deadline for proposals: 31 March 2020

Although some literary periods and the leading aesthetics associated with them (for example French Classicism) saw literature as the expression of good, beauty and truth, many writers and thinkers were and still are fascinated by evil. The best known apologists of evil include de Sade, Baudelaire and Bataille, among others. Ostensibly, evil seems to have infected literature and cinema.

Certain genres of popular literature are inextricably connected with evil. Horror fiction and cinema are dominated by its various forms, ranging from spaces filled with horror (the motifs of an evil place, a haunted house), through malevolent characters (vampires, demons), to evil-related motifs (curse, paganism, satanism, cannibalism). In classic texts (Mérimée, Maupassant, Stoker, Blackwood, Lovecraft), as well as in contemporary fiction (King, Masterton, Herbert), evil always triumphs at the end. However, the new fantastic (Andrevon) reverses well-known codes and shows humans as the incarnation of evil, destroying the planet, whereas nature takes revenge for all the harm done (end of the Anthropocene). Gore cinema is an apotheosis of evil, which is visible in its varieties, such as “torture gore porn” or “splat-pack.”

Evil constitutes an inseparable element of the opposition with good, and the clash of these two powers determines many fantasy stories – mainly epic or heroic – as well as similar, more canonical texts, for example the struggle of Beowulf resisting the monster Grendel and his mother. Such opposition is the driving force of classic fantasy, as in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, but also of contemporary popular literature and cinema, like Harry Potter. Therefore, while one can study the topic of the battle against evil and its implementation in fantasy, it seems even more interesting to examine how the boundaries between good and evil are blurred in such texts. In this context, how should one perceive such protagonists as Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melniboné, Stephen Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant or Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian? In what way should one interpret the ambiguous attitude of the characters of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones? The conflict between good and evil is more and more often presented with no clear boundaries, and the opposing sides have no obvious intentions. For this reason, not only the representations of the struggle between good and evil need to be examined in fantasy literature, but also grey areas, anti-heroes and motives of their wrongdoings.

As far as speculative fiction (littératures de l’imaginaire) is concerned, it is worthwhile to mention the images of evil in texts written by women about women, as more and more works that belong to fantasy, fantastic fiction or science fiction are created by female authors, talk about female characters and are written for female readers. One of the subgenres of speculative fiction most dominated by women is contemporary urban fantasy written both in English (Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, Patricia Briggs, Ilona Andrews, Darynda Jones), and in French (Léa Silhol, Cassandra O’Donnell). Its heroines, like typical fantasy heroes, have to face the evil of the outside world. Therefore, it seems interesting to analyse what roles they play in the fight against evil, how such a struggle changes them and whether they lose their femininity in the battle.

The fantastic, previously dominated by men, also seems to be more and more frequently explored by women. Writers who create the “female fantastic” focus not only on portraying the dark side of women, but also on presenting various aspects of evil that destroys their protagonists (Anne Duguël, Yvonne Escoula, Mélanie Fazi, Shirley Jackson).

Mainstream literature does not fall behind popular genres in the exploration of evil. As Georges Bataille noted, “if literature separates itself from evil, it quickly becomes boring.”  By crossing boundaries and causing anxiety in the reader, literature does not allow anyone to live in the ignorance of the cruellest aspects of human nature, and thus enables confrontation with evil and danger. Evil is always an expression of transgression, and the construction of an anti-hero often simultaneously fascinates and frightens the reader. In this context, one can reflect on the relationship between the oppressor and the victim, as in Ananda Devi’s Green Sari, on physical violence, as well as on some more “subtle” forms of abuse: financial, sexual or emotional. Evil is also associated with discrimination based on sex and race, which entails dehumanization and hate speech. This type of evil and its cultural determinants are visible in African women’s literature written in French, e.g. in the works of Fatou Diome or Ken Bugul. The interpretation of such texts also raises the question of the effects of evil in the characters’ lives (individual and collective traumas), as well as the therapeutic, cathartic role of writing in the healing process.

Evil often manifests itself in violence, which can take various, also less obvious, forms, such as: self-destruction – when the subject, as a result of past harm, mutilates their own body or mentally destroys themselves (e.g. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath); aggression against another, usually weaker, person – violence against women, children, animals (e.g. Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn), violence directed by one group against another (national, ethnic, racial or religious) – manifested in the form of war, genocide, terrorist attacks (e.g. the Algerian literary movement écriture de l’urgence from the 1990s, The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga).

We encourage you to reflect on these topics, as well as to explore any issues that have not been mentioned above, but are related to the given field of study.

Submissions with an abstract of a 20-minute paper and a bio-bibliographic note should be sent to: malevil2020.conference@gmail.com by March 31, 2020. The authors of the accepted proposals will be notified by April 15, 2020. The cost of participation in the conference is 100 euros (430 PLN for participants from Poland), plus 25 euros for those interested in participating in the banquet (100 PLN for participants from Poland). The conference fee of 100 euros covers the cost of publication (after obtaining a positive review), but does not include the cost of travel, meals and accommodation of participants. Payment details will be provided later. The conference will include the publication of a multi-author monograph in a publishing house from the list of indexed publishers – articles will be accepted until December 20, 2020.

The conference languages will be French, English and Polish.

The conference is organized at the Institute of Literary Studies, Faculty of Humanities at the University of Silesia in Katowice.

Organising committee: Katarzyna Gadomska (Assoc. Prof., Professor of the University of Silesia): chairwoman of the organising committee; Ewa Drab (PhD), Anna Swoboda (PhD): coordinators of the English-speaking section; Katarzyna Gadomska (Assoc. Prof., Professor of the University of Silesia): coordinator of the French-speaking section; Grażyna Starak (Assoc. Prof., Professor of the University of Silesia); Magdalena Malinowska (PhD): coordinators of the Polish-speaking section; Magdalena Perz (PhD): coordinator of the financial section

For more information, please contact us at malevil2020.conference@gmail.com

(posted 4 March 2020)


Poetry Between Creation and Interpretation
St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK, 19 September 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2020

An International Conference on Poetry Studiesorganised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Poetry is a constant, being produced by all known civilisations from ancient to modern times. Throughout its extensive history, the individual art of high emotions sublimated into perfect language has approached a vast array of subject matters, including love, war, social issues, the beauty of nature, etc. A particular exercise of the mind and soul, and a unique way of apprehending reality, poetry is a self-sufficient universe that intensifies and enlarges life experience. Pointing to inner knowledge rather than real circumstance, it activates different layers of perception, sweeps away human thoughts, feeds emotions and soothes suffering.

Poetry inspires as well as instructs, as it is an initiation into the concealed order of the world. Its intense gratification, unrivalled in authenticity and honesty, appeals to human nature and makes ultimate sense of the self, opening the individual to interaction and communication. Poetry ennobles, enlightens and entertains because its expressive boundaries are virtually unlimited. With the help of translation, it goes beyond strict localisation and cultural arbitrariness, generating a sense of spiritual compatibility and communion between the collective identities of the world.

The conference aims to bring together international poets, literary critics, translators and scholars from diverse contexts and interdisciplinary fields to share their work. As the 2019 edition is dedicated to issues related to poetry, poetics and translation, we invite papers, presentations, manuscripts, panels, roundtables, performances, and other forms of contributions relevant to the areas of investigation.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • from Aristotelian poetics to 21st century aesthetics
  • poiesis, mimesis, kinesis
  • (non-)originality/individuality/voice amidst technical innovation
  • subject-construction in poetry
  • gender and poetic imagination
  • tropes and schemes of the 21th century
  • hybrid & cross-genre poetic modes
  • the immeasurable and/or non-measurable in poetry
  • form, proportion and balance: long poems, poetic sequences
  • associations, juxtapositions and connections
  • ekphrasis and ideology
  • poetry and the arts: poetic and artistic collaborations
  • poetry and science
  • poetry and architecture
  • poetry and mathematics
  • language-centered poetics (including Language- and post-Language writing)
  • conceptual and post-conceptual poetry
  • urban poems and poetry
  • poetics and politics
  • poethics and theopoetics
  • ecopoetics and ecocriticism
  • performance or performative?
  • sound and silence
  • poetry between phrase and metaphrase
  • translation, inerpretation, adaptation
  • the translatability of metaphors
  • limits and limitations of the poetic discourse
  • the role(s) of the reader
  • poetry ages and generations
  • publishing poetry today

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 30 April 2020 to: poetry@lcir.co.uk.

Please download paper proposal form.

Registration fee – 100 GBP      

(posted 15 January 2020)


Mirror, Mirror: Perceptions, Deceptions, and Reflections in Time
St. Anne’s College, University of Oxford, UK, 19 September 2020
Deadline for proposals: 15 May 2020

International Conference 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:

  1. Illusion and the ancient world-mirrors and other artifacts and their elite metaphysical uses
  2. Specific cultural beliefs related to mirrors, truth, soul, and self
  3. Physical science: knowledge and beliefs relating to mirrors both ancient and modern
  4. Studies of writers, artists, and others who emphasize reality and illusion in their creative works (Lewis Carrol, Oliver Goldsmith, and others)
  5. Trompe l’oeil (Early and Modern Visual Art)
  6. Truth, illusion, and delusion in the age of the Internet–You Tube and other Media
  7. The reinvented self: modern or historical
  8. The dangers of deception (social and environmental concerns)
  9. Specific perspectives on truth and illusion as symbolized or addressed in the visual arts, creative writing, new historical narratives, architecture, and other media
  10. 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 May 2020 to: mirror@lcir.co.uk. Please download paper proposal form.

We also welcome poster proposals that will address the conference theme.

Registration fee – 100 GBP

(posted 15 January 2020)


Contact in Times of Globalization: Fifth International Conference on Language
Klagenfurt, Austria, 23-26 September 2020
Deadline for proposal: 15 January 2020

Conference website: https://www.aau.at/en/english/lctg5

After 4 inspiring meetings in Groningen (The Netherlands) and Greifswald (Germany), the ‘Fifth International Conference on Language Contact in Times of Globalization’ will be held at the University of Klagenfurt (Austria) from September 23rd – 26th, 2020, locally organized by the linguistics section of the English Department. As in the previous meetings, the conference language is English. The programme is open to contributions from all types of language constellations in which contact occurs. We warmly invite paper presentations from all areas of interest in language contact including the full range of socio-cultural and cognitive perspectives.

Klagenfurt, the conference venue, is located in Austria’s southernmost region of Carinthia which is linguistically characterized by its vicinity and interchange with Romance (Italian, Friulian) and Slavic languages, and is home to autochthonous Slovene speaking communities.

We look forward to seeing you in Klagenfurt.

The notion of language contact captures multi-faceted phenomena and processes of language use that emerge from the interaction of speakers and their diverse linguistic repertoires. Dependent on socio-cultural conditions as well as the type and medium of interaction, manifestations of language contact have been a constant source of linguistic investigations. In current times of increased physical and virtual mobility and of dynamically shifting boundaries and identities, the notion of language contact is faced with concepts such as fluidity, dynamic systems, transculturality, multilingualism and the break-up of the one nation – one language ideology. This raises the question of how language contact as a theoretical notion and as a field of inquiry is able to capture these current developments.

We invite proposals for presentations (20-minutes + 10 minutes discussion) on current scenarios and aspects of language contact world-wide.

A limited amount of thematic sessions can also be accommodated in the programme. Applications for prospective theme sessions should consist of a general description (500 words max., excluding references) and provide a list of planned paper titles and presenters. Theme sessions should consist of a minimum of 4 and a maximum of 6 papers.

Papers addressing one of the following topics and approaches are particularly welcome:

  • globalization as a catalyst of language contact
  • (socio-)cognitive approaches to language contact
  • the dynamics of language contact: fluidity, hybridity, creativity, translingualism, codeswitching/codemixing
  • processes and linguistic manifestations of language contact
  • language contact in a multilingual world

Slots for paper presentation will be 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes for discussion. Please send your abstracts as doc or pdf files (300 words max., excluding references) to LCTG5 [at] aau [dot] at
Abstracts should be anonymous and preceded by a title sheet stating the author(s) contact details.
Please state “abstract submission LCTG5″ in the subject line of your e-mail.
Final date of abstract submission: January 15, 2020
Notification of acceptance: February 25, 2020

(posted 27 September 2019)


Models and Alternatives: International Conference on Myths, Archetypes and Symbols
London, UK, 26 September 2020
Deadline for proposals: 30 April 2020

A conference organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research 

Humankind has always sought to explain its origins and the mysteries of life to map personal and collective boundaries, and to secure its sense of identity through the power of everyday events and occurrences. Exemplary accounts of imaginary happenings and supernatural creatures from a time beyond history and memory explain the genesis of the universe, the making of a living thing, the formation of an attitude or the inception of an institution. The essence of these traditional narratives reflects a certain system of values and code of self-conduct of a group of individuals bound together by social and cultural ties, and the cardinal virtues and vices of human nature captured in a conventional configuration.

Even though the time and place of performance and reception generate numerous variants and a multitude of interpretations, myths encode a universal sensibility and specificity, and propose generic yet unique models of humanity. They reveal a culture’s deepest understanding of its own beginnings, awareness of purpose and destiny, its position in the world, and meaning of existence and experience. A particular culture creates particular characters to embody its spirit and significant traits of personality, and particular images to convey its most representative attributes and attitudes.

The conference aims to explore the mode of organisation, the fundamental patterns and the paradigms of human memory that lie at the root of quintessential stories, tales and beings. It will also focus on the constants and variables of some particular components and their relationship with other fields of study, such as anthropology, arts, cultural history, literature, literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, pedagogy, sociology, theology, etc.

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 local, regional, national, or global aspects related to myths and mythology, archetypal characters, situations and symbols, providing an integrative approach to their perception and relevance in the 21st century.

Topics include but are not limited to several core issues:

  • from The Age of Fable to The Golden Bough and beyond
  • the functions and cultural impact of myths, archetypes and symbols
  • the locality and universality of myths, archetypes and symbols
  • monotheism, polytheism, pantheism
  • gods, demigods and heroes
  • myth, ritual and the sacred
  • holy books and early writings
  • myth-revision from antiquity to the 21stcentury
  • mythology and language
  • mythology and science
  • mythology and religion
  • mythology and visual arts
  • mythology and music
  • mass-media and myth creation
  • mythography and mythopesis
  • euhemerism – history and imagination
  • patterns, prototypes, stereotypes
  • ethos and eidos
  • Jungian archetypes
  • archetypal characters in literature and film
  • archetypal symbolism
  • archetypal psychology
  • archetypal pedagogy
  • symbols – context and meaning
  • major themes, motifs and symbols
  • the meaning and symbolism of colours
  • the meaning and symbolism of numbers
  • signs, emblems and icons
  • semiotics and symbolism

Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 30 April 2020 to: myths@lcir.co.uk.

Please download paper proposal form.

Registration fee – 100 GBP   

Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

(posted 15 January 2020)