Calls for papers – Conferences taking place in September 2022

Touring Travel Writing II: Anglophone travel writing on the Portuguese-speaking world – Lusophone travel writing on the Anglophone World – Travelling to write…
CETAPS – NOVA University of Lisbon, Lisbon. 8-9 September 2022.
Paper submission until 31 July 2022

Name

Touring Travel Writing II

Topic of the current edition

Anglophone travel writing on the Portuguese-speaking world
Lusophone travel writing on the Anglophone World
Travelling to write… 

Organiser(s)

CETAPS – NOVA University of Lisbon

Venue

Lisbon – Colégio Almada Negreiros – Campus de Campolide NOVA FCSH

Dates

8-9 September 2022 

Deadlines

Paper submission until 31 July 2022

Description
(Include keynote speakers if necessary)

As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the second in a series focused on travel writing studies. The first one, which took place in 2019, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its literary legacy. This second edition will celebrate the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses (1922), which chronicles the itinerary of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day.

Keynote speakers: Carl Thompson and Maria de Fátima Outeirinho

Website

https://touringtravelwriting.wordpress.com/

Contact details

Maria Zulmira Castanheira – mzc@fcsh.unl.pt
Cristina Carinhas – cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt

(Posted 19 July 2022)


Experimental Writing in English (1945-2000): The Anti-Canon
Brussels, Belgium, 15-16 September 2022
Deadline for proposals: 2 May 2022

International Conference
Experimental Writing in English (1945-2000): The Anti-Canon
15-16 September 2022 – Brussels, Belgium

Keynote speakers:

Anthony Reed, Associate Professor of English, Vanderbilt University
(2nd keynote speaker TBC)

Call for Papers

This conference aims to focus on experimental writing in English from the second half of the twentieth century which is less well known, has been positioned outside of the literary mainstream or is simply deserving of more attention. It particularly invites proposals on experimental writing by women, queer authors, people of colour and working-class writers.

Much research in recent years has been concerned with nuancing accounts of post-WWII literature which either largely ignored experimental writing in the wake of the war and/or only paid attention to certain canonical postmodernist texts when experimentation was considered. In Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction (1989), Ellen Friedman and Miriam Fuchs proposed that twentieth-century experimentation by women might be the missing link in the crucial intersection between feminism and modernity as literature and feminism share a “profound quarrel with established, patriarchal forms, but also a sense of identification with what has been muted by these forms” (xii). Since their groundbreaking work and especially in recent years, several anthologies and critical studies have contributed to the ongoing project of rectifying the critical neglect of women’s experimental writing of the second half of the twentieth century. The absence of contributions by writers of colour, queer authors and working-class writers to most conversations about experimental literature is similarly striking and problematic. Thus, Anthony Reed, in Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (2014), has suggested that the “abstractness” of black experimental writing and its resistance to “preemptive understandings of black life” has resulted in the exclusion of experimental writing in standard genealogies of African American literature (7).

This conference then adopts the term “anti-canon” as a provocative invitation to reflect on the ways in which experimental literature in English in general – but writing by certain authors in particular– has regularly been neglected or sidelined in overviews of the literary landscape in the second half of the twentieth century. By adopting the term, we also acknowledge and invite reflections on Ellen Friedman’s suggestion that if canonical novels are strategic constructs to reinforce a society’s values, then works which undermine those values might be thought of as “anticanonical.”[1] More recently, Tyler Bradway has connected the “affective agency” of formal innovation to a specifically queer tradition in literature in Queer Experimental Literature: The Affective Politics of Bad Reading, suggesting this agency reveals “literary form’s capacity to work on and through the bodies of readers, immanently restructuring our felt relations to the aesthetic object” (viii).

Following on from this recent research on the topic, this conference invites reflections on the following questions: To what extent can the notion of anti-canon represent a shared condition for the politics of experimentation? In what ways does it engage with, and perhaps suggest a move beyond, certain categories – such as that of “women’s writing” – as the “other side” of dominant literary form? How might anti-canonical works of literature subvert established ways of looking at the world and at society?

As this Call for Papers makes clear, at the heart of this conference is a flexible understanding of both the terms “anti-canon” as well as “experimental literature,” which we use as an umbrella term to investigate, analyse, and celebrate the more formally innovative end of the wide spectrum of writing in English during the period 1945-2000. In addition to reflections on the above questions, the organisers invite papers on a range of topics and authors, including, but not limited to:

  • Experimental prose, poetry, drama, life writing, non-fiction and art writing by women, queer authors, people of colour and working-class writers.
  • Experimental writers who have received relatively little sustained critical attention in the past or to date, such as Kathy Acker, Renata Adler, Gloria Anzaldúa, Russell Atkins, Amiri Baraka, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maxine Chernoff, Eva Figes, Nikki Giovanni, Renee Gladman, Barbara Guest, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Anna Kavan, Bernadette Mayer, Naomi Mitchison, Haryette Mullen, Eileen Myles, Suniti Namjoshi, Alice Notley, Ann Quin, Oliver Pitcher, Michèle Roberts, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Denis Williams and others.
  • The meanings, definitions and employment of “experiment” in the second half of the 20th century.
  • Theorisations regarding the anti-canon and what it might mean to read experimental texts in this framework.
  • Interconnections and overlaps between eras and movements, including but not limited to relationships between post-war experimental literature, modernism, “late modernism” and/or postmodernism.
  • Transnational connections and experimental writing in English which questions (Western) borders, categories and assumptions.
  • The categorisation and theorisation of experimental writing in the post-WWII era.
  • The question of how experimental writing by women, queer authors, people of colour and working-class writers was/is received.
  • The idea of the “death of the novel” and the troubling of different literary categorizations.
  • The role and influence of publishing networks in relation to experimental writing.
  • The employment and function of “experimental” techniques within “realist” works.
  • Formal experimentations in the context of trauma, grief and/or radical vulnerability.
  • Multimodal literature.
  • Affects at work in experimental literature.

Proposals (ca. 300 words), together with a biographical note, should be sent to Hannah Van Hove (havhove@vub.be) and Tessel Veneboer (Tessel.veneboer@ugent.be) by 2 May 2022. Proposals for panels of three interlinked papers are also welcome, as are experimental and/or creative-critical approaches to papers.

This conference is planned as an on-site event to be held in Brussels.

Organised by Hannah Van Hove (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) and Tessel Veneboer (Universiteit Gent), in association with the research groups CLIC (Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings), SEL (Studiecentrum Experimentele Literatuur) and 20cc (Twentieth-Century Crossroads).

CfP – The Anti-Canon (Sept 2022)

(Posted 30 March 2022)


9th BICLCE: Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English 2022
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, 15-17 September 2022
Deadline for proposals: 31 December 2021

We are pleased to announce that the 9th Biennial International Conference on the Linguistics of Contemporary English (BICLCE) will be held from 15 to 17 September 2022 in Slovenia, at the University of Ljubljana. An in-person conference is currently envisaged, with the possibility of moving the event online in case travel proves difficult.

Over the last two decades, the BICLCE conference has become a platform for various theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of English and its varieties. As such, it has also become a point of reference for interdisciplinary cross-pollination. With a focus on the holistic presentation of current linguistic research, the BICLCE conference traditionally accommodates papers, presentations and workshops on the syntax, morphology, phonology, sociolinguistics, semantics and pragmatics of contemporary English.

In keeping with this tradition, we invite abstracts addressing every aspect of contemporary English, and especially encourage proposals that engage with variation in English, second language acquisition and development, learner corpora, discourse analysis and metadiscourse, constructions, metaphor, politeness, formulaic language, academic writing, language contact, corpus-based studies and statistical models.

Please note that any proposals on historical and contrastive topics should be related to the study of present-day English.

Invited Speakers

We are delighted to announce the following plenary speakers:

  • Paul Baker
  • Susan Conrad
  • Gaëtanelle Gilquin
  • Manfred Krug

Abstract Submission

At this stage, abstract submissions for individual papers and poster presentations are invited but proposals for thematic workshops featuring up to 6 individual papers are still accepted.

Please submit your proposals via https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=biclce2022 by 31 December 2021. Please specify the type of submission and make sure that the abstracts do not exceed 300 words and contain no names of the authors. All enquiries about the conference should be sent to 9biclce @ guest.arnes.si.

Workshops

The conference will include a number of workshops/panels centred around topical issues in English linguistics. Some workshops are open (potential contributors should contact the convenors before submitting their abstract), while others are already full but individual papers on related topics can be scheduled in a follow-up session.

This workshop is full

This workshop is full

This workshop is open – please contact the convenors Sofia Rüdiger (sofia.ruediger@uni-bayreuth.de), Jakob Leimgruber (jakob.leimgruber@unibas.ch) and Sven Leuckert (sven.leuckert@tu-dresden.de)

This workshop is open – please contact the convenors Andrej Stopar (andrej.stopar@ff.uni-lj.si) and Ivo Fabijanić (ivo.fabijanic@unizd.hr)

We look forward to welcoming you in Ljubljana!

9th BICLCE organizing team

(Posted 1st October 2021)


The 12th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism
The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia, 15-17 September 2022
New extended deadline for proposals: 10 January 2022

The 12th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism will be held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia, on September 15-17, 2022. For the first time, the conference will be preceded by a doctoral workshop on September 14, 2022.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Danuta Gabryś-Barker, University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland)
Jason Rothman, University of Tromsø (Norway) & Universidad Nebrija (Spain)
Lidija Cvikić, University of Zagreb (Croatia)

CALL FOR PAPERS
The call for papers opens on November 2, 2021, and closes on December 5, 2021.

UPDATE: The deadline has been extended until January 10, 2022.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent before February 10, 2022.
Please see the new call for papers for more details.

REGISTRATION AND FEES
The registration for IAML3 2022 will open in January 2022.

The Croatian organizing team is looking forward to welcoming you in Zagreb on the new dates of 14-17 September 2022.  In the meantime, please contact us at iaml3conference2020@ffzg.hr with any specific questions that you might have.

Stay healthy and productive!
Best regards,
Stela, Marina, Jasenka, Renata & Mateusz
Organizing Board of the 12th International Conference on Third Language Acquisition and Multilingualism

Our website: https://iaml3conference.ffzg.unizg.hr

You can find us on Twitter as well!

(posted 17 December 2021)


Dis/Orientations and Dis/Entanglements in Contemporary Literature and Culture: An International Conference
University of Málaga (Spain), 21-23 September, 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 22 April 2022

Under the auspices of the project ‘Orientation’: A Dynamic Perspective of Contemporary Fiction and Culture  (1990-onwards) (Ref. FFI2017-86417-P), this Conference explores how the concept of ‘orientation’ can  offer a renewed perspective on literary texts and cultural products alike. By positioning ‘orientation’ in close  relation to (multiple) temporalities (or “polytemporality”, following Victoria Browne), space, and recognition  of the ‘other’, this Conference (and the project) addresses the dynamic and fluid nature of today’s fiction  and culture in English. As Sara Ahmed points out, “[o]rientations are about the direction we take that puts  some things and not others in our reach” (56). In this sense, we pose the following: what directions do  contemporary texts tend towards? How are these directions configured? How do we make sense of the  “things” that are within our reach? And, interestingly, in what ways do we unlock an “affective orientation”  (Felski 18) in the act of reading? 

To answer these questions, we actively engage with different critical perspectives that intersect with various  fields such as phenomenology, affect studies, illness and ageing studies, or gender studies. Both  ‘orientation’ and ‘recognition’ prove to be useful lenses to explore narratives of illness, for example. Also,  ‘orientation’ is mobilised in the interlocked relationships between past and present (and future), since we  argue that temporal ‘orientation’ in contemporary fiction and culture is multidirectional, encompassing past,  present, and even future: the past is understood as “a call to action in the present, and the present is  envisaged as the history of the future” (Mitchell and Parsons 14-15). In addition, ‘orientation’ can be employed to address questions of mobility and movement in spatial studies, bearing in mind that, in  phenomenological terms, the individuals experience the world through mutuality and interaction, an  interweaving of self and the world through the senses. In so doing, we propose movement, relationality, and fluidity as ways of understanding our current entangled world. Lastly, we claim that, as a mode of  thinking, this dynamic relationality brings about timely questions about “the interpersonal and social  dimensions of disorientation” (Ratcliffe 463) in the face of the sanitary crisis caused by covid-19 and its  variants.  

We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers that address the following topics (but not limited to): 

  • Theoretical approaches and conceptualisations of ‘orientation’, ‘recognition’, and ‘entanglement’ – Dis/re/orientations towards the past, present and future in literature and culture; (multiple) temporality;  polytemporality 
  • Embodied situatedness, phenomenology and the senses 
  • Dynamic orientation and recognition of the ‘Other’ 
  • Spatial orientations: spatial conceptions, dynamic spaces, geographical fluid orientations and routes – Object-relations ontology, things, new materialisms, the material turn 
  • Queer and gender orientations 
  • Orientation and recognition as useful lenses in health humanities, ageing and illness narratives – Global orientations and entanglements in the Anthropocene
  • Dis/orientation in the face of the sanitary crisis 
  • Dis/entanglements and human vs. nonhuman relationships 
  • New orientations and entanglements between the humanities and other disciplines 

Works Cited 

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. 
Browne, Victoria. Feminism, Time, and Nonlinear History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Blackwell, 2008. 
Mitchell, Kate and Nicola Parsons. “Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the  Present”. Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past. Ed. Kate Mitchell and  Nicola Parsons. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 1-18. 
Ratcliffe, Matthew. “Disorientation, Distrust and the Pandemic”. Global Discourse 11.3 (2021): 463-66. 

We are very happy to confirm the following keynote speakers: 

  • Professor Alberto Lázaro Lafuente (Universidad de Alcalá) 
  • Professor Patricia Pulham (University of Surrey) 
  • Professor Jean-Michel Ganteau (Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3) 
  • Dr. Victoria Browne (Oxford Brookes University) 

Please send a 250-word abstract to orientationliterature@gmail.com by April, 22nd 2022 (extended  deadline). Abstracts should include a short biographical note. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. 

Main organisers: Professor Rosario Arias (University of Málaga), Dr. Marta Cerezo-Moreno (UNED), Dr.  Laura Monrós-Gaspar (Universitat de València) 

Email: orientationliterature@gmail.com
Twitter handle: @orientationlit
Web: https://orionfiction.org/

CFP

(Posted 6 April 2022)


Victorian Resurrections
University of Vienna, 22-24 Sept. 2022
Deadline for proposals: 15 May 2022

VICTORIAN RESURRECTIONS
International Conference 22nd-24th Sep 2022 (University of Vienna)
Deadline for proposals: 15th May 2022

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

  • Ann Heilmann (University of Cardiff)
  • Patricia Duncker (University of Manchester)

Death and resurrection as well as the fears, fantasies and fads that surround them, pervade Victorian literature and culture in a myriad of ways. From literary representations of the dead coming back to life, to cultural practices of mourning and memorialising the dead, the Victorian era betrays a striking concern with how to cope with one’s mortality. Working-class literature such as penny dreadfuls fictionalised concerns about the illegal trade in corpses led by resurrection men, or body-snatchers, who exhumed corpses to sell them to medical men, most specifically, to anatomists. Gothic texts throughout the 19th century often featured reanimated corpses or the living dead. The rise of spiritualism and the popularity of mediums and séances in the second half of the century complemented upper- and upper-middle-class practices of mourning, while the working-class was confronted with the (financial) impossibility to memorialise their lost ones in what was thought ‘the proper way’. Queen Victoria herself mourned Prince Albert for over four decades, famously making her servants lay out his clothes in the morning and bring hot water for his shaving, as if he were about to come back.

Twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary, cultural, and material practices are guided by a wide range of agendas – revisionist, political, nostalgic, commercial, aesthetically experimental – in their manifold recurrences to the Victorian Age. At the same time, the manifold recurrences of the Victorian age in twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary, cultural, and material practices have preserved an interest in the idea of resurrection(s) and its implications. As a cultural phenomenon neo-Victorianism, for instance, could be described as one giant resurrectionist enterprise geared towards a reimagining of the Victorian Age through a wide range of different media and genres. Driven by a desire to fill historiographical gaps, retell the lives of iconic figures or uncover the stories of side-lined,
obscure or marginalized individuals, neo-Victorian appropriations are what Kate Mitchell calls “memory texts”. As such, they simultaneously reflect and shape our perceptions of the Victorian Age by creating specific versions of that past; by selecting which stories are being (re)told and whose voices are being recovered or made heard. These acts of remembrance often serve our need to constitute or reaffirm our social and cultural identities through the idea of a shared past and a common set of values. Neo-Victorian recoveries and (re)assessments of the 19th century are hardly ever ‘innocent’. Instead, they are ideologically charged and reflect the concerns of our present, how we position ourselves with regard to the past, and how our meaning-making activates texts selectively. Neo-Victorian texts and practices participate in the project of producing and consolidating but also revising our cultural memory of the 19th century, contributing to the rich spectrum of Victorian after-lives and after-images in our society.

Topics for papers may touch on but are not limited to:

• the Gothic (the undead, re-awakened mummies etc.)
• resurrection men and body-snatching practices
• Victorian cultural practices surrounding death (spiritualism, séances, mediums)
• Victorian memorial cultures
• neo-Victorian literature’s resurrective practices
• the Empire, ancient cultures & translatio imperii (Egypt; Assyria; Greece; Rome)
• 20th/21st century costume drama
• 20th/21st century re-imaginings of Queen Victoria and other iconic Victorian figures
• critical revivals (e.g. the fin-de-siècle Scottish Revival)
• the re-discovery and/or re-evaluation of forgotten Victorian texts
• the re-discovery and/or re-evaluation of forgotten or marginalized Victorian figures
• resurrection of forgotten Victorian traditions and/or social movements
• dark tourism (or thanatourism) in connection with the Victorian era
• (neo-)Victorian literature and biofiction
• Religion/spirituality in (neo-)Victorian literature and biofiction
• neo-Victorianism and cultural memory
• Victorian life writing / writing Victorian lives
• Victorian and neo-Victorian resurrective practices and fame/obscurity
• Victorian afterlives and reputations

Those interested in contributing should send 300-word abstracts for 20-minute papers in English by 15th May 2022 to Sandra Mayer (Sandra.Mayer@oeaw.ac.at) and Sylvia Mieszkowski (sylvia.mieszkowski@univie.ac.at), and include a short bio-bibliographical note (approx. 100 words).

Conference Warming: 22nd Sep Conference Dinner: 23rd Sep Conference Fees:

• full fee: 60 Euros
• reduced fee (PhD students): 30 Euros

For practical and organisational information about VICTORIAN RESURRECTIONS please check from mid-May 2022 onwards: http://anglistik.univie.ac.at/victorian-resurrections/

References:

Böhm-Schnitker, Nadine, and Susanne Gruss. Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations. London: Routledge, 2014.
Heilmann, Ann, and Mark Llewellyn. Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the Twenty-First Century, 1999-2009. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Hotz, Mary Elizabeth. Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009.
Kucich, John, and Dianne F. Sadoff, eds. Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth Century. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000.
Lutz, Deborah. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge: CUP, 2017.
Matthews, Samantha. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: OUP, 2004.
Mitchell, Kate. History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Mole, Tom. What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History. New Haven: Princeton UP, 2017.

Victorian Resurrections CfP

(Published 25 February 2022)


Naturing Cultures/ Culturing Natures: Humans and the Environment in Cultural Practices.
Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń/online, 22-23 September 2022.
Abstracts submission deadline: 15 June 2022.

Naturing Cultures/ Culturing Natures: Humans and the  Environment in Cultural Practices
Department of Anglophone Literature, Culture and Comparative Studies Institute of Literary Studies, Nicolaus Copernicus University
22-23 September 2022
(Toruń/online) 

The word is made flesh in mortal naturecultures
(Donna Haraway, 2003) 

The climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of the imagination
(Amitav Ghosh, 2016) 

The conference is dedicated to an investigation of the relations between humans and the  environment and their representation in cultural texts and practices. Its title – Naturing Cultures/  Culturing Natures – refers to the concept of natureculture, developed by Donna Haraway,  which stresses the inseparability of nature and culture and points to the various ways in which  “[f]lesh and signifier, bodies and words, stories and worlds” are joined. The degree of  dependence and connectedness between natures and cultures has been exposed recently in a  series of crises with which the 21st century began, with the climate crisis being the most  significant one. Responding to Amitav Ghosh’s claim that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of  culture, and thus of the imagination” (2016: 9), this conference aims at exploring the various  ways in which the awareness of this crisis has influenced contemporary cultural texts, starting  from post-apocalyptic dystopias and ending with solarpunk utopias. We are interested in  discussing experiments in art, media, and literature that offer new ways of looking at and  thinking about the relationship between humans and the environment, both animate and  inanimate; evolution of literary genres and development of new forms and modes of writing  influenced by ecocriticism; and the role of new media in ecological discourses and  practices. We want to focus on new ways of thinking and creating that move beyond the  anthropocentric perspective, such as posthumanism, new materialism, material feminism, or  object-oriented ontology. We would also like to consider complex affective responses to  environmental crises, such as eco-anxiety, trauma and grief, solastalgia and eritalgia, and their  representations in recent literature, film and art. In addition to these questions, we wish to reflect  on how the coronavirus pandemic has impacted environmental awareness and climate anxiety  and what new visions and scenarios emerged from this experience. The main aim of the  conference is to create space for scholars coming from various disciplines to discuss  contemporary cultural practices and critical and philosophical responses to the threats posed by  human activity in the Anthropocene.

Suggested themes include but are not limited to: 

  • Climate fiction: genres, criticism; 
  • Anthropocene fictions; 
  • From post-apocalyptic dystopias to solarpunk utopias; 
  • New materialisms; object-oriented ontology; 
  • Posthumanism; the human and the non-human; 
  • Semiotic materiality; narrativity, creativity, and matter; counter-narrations Ecofeminism, feminist materialism; 
  • Deep ecology; 
  • Zoocriticism/animal studies; 
  • Environmental ethics: ecocentric and partnership ethics, post-anthropocentric ethics; Climate change and the environment in visual arts; 
  • The Urbanocene, urban ecology, guerilla gardening, eco-hooligans; 
  • Land art, site-specific art, eco-specific art, environmental art; 
  • Soundscape/acoustic ecology; 
  • Loss, mourning and ecological grief; eco-anxiety, solastalgia, eritalgia; Sustainability; eco-ability; 
  • Postcolonial ecocriticism; ecocriticism and indigenous studies; 
  • Critique of Enlightenment narratives of progress and science; degrowth; The COVID-19 pandemic and the environmental crisis. 

Our keynote speakers

Prof. dr hab. Ewa Bińczyk (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń)
Prof. Stef Craps (Ghent University) 

Decisions concerning the format of the conference (online or hybrid) will be made closer to  the conference date, depending on the current epidemiological situation. 

Abstracts of 150-200 words, containing the title of the presentation and the author’s name and  affiliation, accompanied by a short biographical note, should be sent to the following address:  naturingcultures@gmail.com

  • Abstracts submission deadline: 15 June 2022 
  • Notification of acceptance: 1 July 2022 
  • Conference fee: 100 EUR (onsite); 50 EUR (online) 
  • For more information, see the conference website:  
  • https://naturingculturesconference.wordpress.com/ 

Organising committee 

Katarzyna Więckowska
Edyta Lorek-Jezińska
Nelly Strehlau
Joanna Antoniak
Grzegorz Koneczniak
Mohammad Rokib

cfp naturing-final 2

(Posted 6 April 2022)


LUCAS Conference ‘Practices in Comparative Medievalism’
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). 23 September 2022
Deadline for abstracts: 19 August 2022.

Medievalism is the area of academic study that investigates the reception and reconstruction of the medieval past since the Middle Ages came to an end.

This one-day conference, organised by the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), invites you to share your research ideas and results in practices of comparative medievalism in arts and culture. We therefore invite contributions of papers that analyse cultural representations of the Middle Ages from the Early Modern period until the present.

This conference is organised to provide an environment for students, researchers, and enthusiasts to discuss ideas and foster contributions in the area of comparative medievalism. The event will take place at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Leiden is a beautiful city with a fascinating medieval heritage of its own.

We welcome abstracts of 300 words in the areas covered by LUCAS and its connected research centres, including cultural studies, literary studies, film studies, art history, theatre and performance, architecture, and expressions of popular culture. The conference is open to all academics and interested participants, and we specifically encourage students and early-career researchers to submit proposals for presentations (15 minutes) on a topic of their choice relating to the conference theme.

The full programme will be made available in the first half of September but will include Dr. Thijs Porck, Leiden University’s specialist in medievalism, as one of the main speakers.

Submissions

Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by 19 August 2022 to the organisers, Daný van Dam and Fernanda Korovsky Moura. Attach the abstract as an MS Word file to your email. Please ensure your name and contact email are in the document.

For questions, please contact the organisers at the email addresses listed above.

We encourage you to invite colleagues to participate in the conference.

Abstracts and presentations should be in English.

(Posted 28 June 2022)


Virginia Woolf & Simone de Beauvoir: Intersections and Resonances
Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle, 29th-30th September 2022
Deadline for proposals: 20 June 2022

Virginia Woolf & Simone de Beauvoir: Intersections and Resonances
Université Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle
29th-30th September 2022
Salle Claude Simon, Maison de la Recherche
4 Rue des Irlandais, 75005 Paris

Although Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir are often mentioned in one and the same breath, only little scholarship so far has investigated the intersections between the two authors. Helen Southworth has dedicated some five pages to the connections between Woolf and Beauvoir (Southworth 2004: 126-131) but has only done so to tie them in with Colette, who is, along with Woolf, the ‘real’ subject of her monograph. Pierre-Éric Villeneuve (2002) has drawn attention to how Beauvoir described and instrumentalised Woolf’s oeuvre during her lecture tour in Japan in the 1960s, thereby suggesting that the French intellectual had a more interesting and materialist take on Woolf than most critics in France at the time. Suzanne Bellamy has recently drawn attention to the legacy of Woolf’s Three Guineas within the context of the “Post-War Left”, especially in Beauvoir’s and Arendt’s work (Bellamy 2020). Maggie Humm, in her recent chapter, explores the similarities between the writing of Woolf, that of Beauvoir, and the cinematic experimentalism of Swedish film director Mai Zetterling (Humm 2021). Outside of the academic context, Rachel Cusk’s Guardian article explored the meaning of ‘women’s writing’ in the wake of Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier’s newly published English translation of Le Deuxième Sexe in 2009 (Cusk 2009). However, in the most authoritative collections of essays on Woolf, Beauvoir is hardly mentioned (Snaith 2007; Randall & Goldman 2012; Berman 2016); equally, Woolf is only mentioned in passing when referring to Beauvoir in an Anglophone context, but no attention has been paid to her in Beauvoir scholarship (Simons 2006; Hengehold & Bauer 2017; Kirkpatrick 2019). Interestingly, Toril Moi’s work has functioned as a watershed both in Woolf studies (Moi 1985) and in Beauvoir scholarship (Moi 1994), but her references to both authors have tended to be quite limited. All these existing contributions, albeit clearly limited in number, already reveal that the two authors offer more room for further exploration.

In feminist circles, the notion of intersectionality has become foundational for feminist movements and feminist theory alike: after Crenshaw’s seminal article (Crenshaw 1989), more and more attention has been paid to Black, queer, radical, decolonial, anti-capitalist feminisms that insist on the interrelatedness of these liberation struggles. Some critics have found the two ‘mothers’ of second-wave feminisms lacking in those regards or have devised ways to reinterpret their work in the light of recent contributions to the field (e.g. Walker 1972, Marcus 2004, Coleman 2014 for Woolf; Simons 2002, Gines 2014, Altman 2020 for Beauvoir). While Southworth (2004) and Villeneuve (2002) have shed light on the intersection between Woolf and Beauvoir in terms of reception, none of the existing contributions have attempted to create a communication channel between the two feminist authors through the lens of intersectionality.

Recently, the concept of resonance has gained wider currency in the humanities and in literary studies more specifically (Dimock 1997; Toop 2010; Rosa 2016; Napolin 2020). Although this flexible, often somewhat nebulous term has been found to be wanting in terms of academic rigour, it has often been pointed out how beneficial this could be for scholars who are interested in the reverberations between textual voices and echoes, readerships, and the slow rippling out of ideas beyond a purely diachronic understanding of influence. By focusing on the resonances between Woolf, Beauvoir, and possibly other authors and thinkers, this conference intends to bring together a varied ensemble of scholars to collaborate in order to piece together a version of literature, philosophy, and culture that exceeds all sorts of boundaries – disciplinary, geographical, linguistic, and textual.

The aim is thus to bring together Woolf scholars and Beauvoir scholars to rethink the intersections and resonances between the two ‘mothers’ of second-wave feminisms, both within and beyond their respective literary and philosophical productions. Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

  • The reception of Woolf and/or Beauvoir in feminist circles, past and present;
  • Intersectional feminism in and beyond Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Sound and resonance in the works of Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Literature and philosophy, literary theory between Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Pacifism, fascism and war in Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Corporeality, embodiment, and the body between Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Life-writing and autobiography in Woolf and Beauvoir;
  • Resonances of Woolf and/or Beauvoir in other authors, either their contemporaries or ours (e.g. Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Franz Kafka, Violette Leduc, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Jeannette Winterson, etc.);
  • Woolf, Beauvoir, and translation;
  • Woolf, Beauvoir, and the philosophical tradition (e.g. phenomenology, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy, queer theory, decolonial thought).

This hybrid international conference intends to be markedly horizontal: there will be no keynote speaker; rather, the two communities of scholars are meant to collaborate and exchange ideas about Woolf and Beauvoir. No prior engagement with both authors is expected, and we would like to encourage every participant to be generous and generative in their approach to others.

The conference will take the form of several thematically linked panels on Woolf and Beauvoir. Proposals can be for single papers or for group papers or panels, as long as Woolf academics and Beauvoir scholars are involved in every panel. We also welcome proposals of roundtables around a specific subject or book that brings Woolf and Beauvoir together. A publication project will ensue.

Registration fees for the conference are €20 for senior academics (lecturers, professors), but no fees are required for students and PhD candidates. The languages of the conference are English and French, preferably with a concise summary and a presentation in the other language in order to make your contribution accessible to all.

Proposals should be sent to woolfbeauvoir22@gmail.com by the 20th June 2022. For 20-minute papers, proposals should be of no more than 300 words and should be accompanied by four keywords and a short bio (200 words), along with an expressed preference for attending the conference in person or online. For roundtables, proposals should be of no more than 400 words and should include a short bio of every person involved in the roundtable (no more than 4 people, with a 200-word bio for each speaker). Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 30th June 2022.

Works cited

  • Altman, Meryl. 2020. Beauvoir in Time. Brill.
  • Bellamy, Suzanne. 2020. ‘Woolf and the Post-War Left: Simone de Beauvoir, Hanna Arendt, Legacies and Resonances of Three Guineas’. In Conversas com Virginia Woolf, edited by David Pinho, Maria A. de Oliveira, Nícea Nogueira. Ape’Ku. 262-273.
  • Berman, Jessica, ed. 2016. A Companion to Virginia Woolf. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Coleman, Lisa. 2014. ‘Woolf’s Troubled and Troubling Relationship to Race. The Long Reach of the White Arm of Imperialism’. In Virginia Woolf and the Common(wealth) Reader, edited by Helen Wussow and Mary Ann Gillies, Liverpool University Press.
  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1989. ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics’, University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (8), pp. 139-167.
  • Cusk, Rachel. 2009. ‘Shakespeare’s Daughters’. The Guardian, 12 December 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/rachel-cusk-women-writing-review [last accessed 19/10/2021 10.55].
  • Dimock, Wai Chee. 1997. ‘A Theory of Resonance’, PMLA 112 (5), pp. 1060-1071.
  • Gines, Kathryn T. [Kathryn Sophia Belle]. ‘Comparative and Competing Frameworks of Oppression in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex’, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 1-2, 2014, pp. 251-273.
  • Hengehold, Laura, and Nancy Bauer, eds. 2017. A Companion to Simone de Beauvoir. Wiley-Blackwell.
  • Humm, Maggie. 2021. ‘Realms of Resemblance: Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir and Maï Zetterling’. In Women Writers and Experimental Narratives: Early Modern to Contemporary, edited by Kate Aughterson and Deborah Philips, Palgrave Macmillan, 125–37.
  • Kirkpatrick, Kate. 2019. Becoming Beauvoir: A Life. Bloomsbury.
  • Marcus, Jane. 2004. Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race. Rutgers University Press.
  • Moi, Toril. 1985. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. Methuen.
  • Moi, Toril. 1994. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford University Press.
  • Napolin, Julie Beth. 2020. The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form. Fordham University Press.
  • Randall, Bryony, and Jane Goldman, eds. 2012. Virginia Woolf in Context. Literature in Context. Cambridge University Press.
  • Rosa, Hartmut. 2016. Resonanz: Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung. Suhrkamp. Translated into English by James Wagner, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Polity. 2019.
  • Simons, Margaret A. 2002. ‘Beauvoir and the Problem of Racism’. In Philosophers on Race: Critical Issues, edited by Julie K. Ward and Tommy L. Lott, Blackwell.
  • Simons, Margaret A., ed. 2006. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Critical Essays, Indiana University Press.
  • Snaith, A., ed. 2007. Palgrave Advances in Virginia Woolf Studies. Palgrave Macmillan. 
  • Southworth, Helen. 2004. The Intersecting Realities and Fictions of Virginia Woolf and Colette. The Ohio State University Press.
  • Toop, David. 2010. Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. Continuum.
  • Villeneuve, Pierre-Éric. 2002. ‘Virginia Woolf among Writers and Critics: The French Intellectual Scene’. In The Reception of Virginia Woolf in Europe, edited by Mary Ann Caws and Nicola Luckhurst, Continuum, pp. 19-38.
  • Walker, Alice. 1972. ‘In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens’. In Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Duke University Press, 1994.
  • Scientific committee: Isabelle Alfandary (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Marie Allègre (Birmingham), Rossana Bonadei (Bergamo), Claire Davison (Sorbonne Nouvelle), Valérie Favre (Lyon 2), Michela Gardini (Bergamo), Jean-Louis Jeannelle (Sorbonne), Jessica Passos (Northwestern-Sorbonne Nouvelle), Luca Pinelli (Bergamo-Sorbonne Nouvelle), Bryony Randall (Glasgow), Marine Rouch (Toulouse 2).

Organising committee: Luca Pinelli, Jessica Passos, Claire Davison.

For further information do not hesitate to contact us at woolfbeauvoir22@gmail.com or luca.pinelli@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr / luca.pinelli@unibg.it.

CFP

(Posted 25 May 2022)


II International Postgraduate Seminar in English Literature and Linguistics (IPSELL)
Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, University of Granada, Spain. September 30th, 2022
Extended deadline for abstracts: 29 July 2022 (included)

The II International Postgraduate Seminar in English Literature and Linguistics (IPSELL) organised by the Master’s in English Literature and Linguistics of the University of Granada aims to provide a forum where postgraduate students/researchers can present the results of their current research projects (preferably MA dissertation or early PhD work). This event intends to allow master’s and early career research students to share their research interests with national and international young scholars and get acquainted with the critical visions and methodological approaches that will be leading academic research in the years to come. IPSELL welcomes submissions reporting original research results related —though not restricted to— any of the following academic interests:

LITERATURE

  • Comparative Literature
  • Contemporary Literature
  • Cultural Studies
  • Ecocriticism
  • Gender Studies, Feminisms, Masculinities, LGTBQ+ Studies
  • Literary Translation
  • Disability Studies
  • Postcolonial Studies

LINGUISTICS

  • Adaptation Studies
  • Computational linguistics
  • Corpus Linguistics
  • Genre analysis
  • Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Second Language Acquisition
  • Sociolinguistics
  • Stylistics

IPSELL will be held face-to-face at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras of the University of Granada on September 30th, 2022. Please, it is advised to wear a mask in interior spaces for shared use, especially when safety distance cannot be guaranteed. We encourage the use of hand sanitizers available at our facilities. Ventilation will be ensured in premises and interior spaces. The presentations will be grouped into theme sessions based on the research field and they will be presented in parallel sessions. Each presenter will be given 10 minutes to present their work.

REGISTRATION AND FEES

Seminar fees: FREE for both presenters and attendees.
Registration: Both presenters and attendees must REGISTER HERE by September 10th, 2022.

ABSTRACT GUIDELINES AND SUBMISSION

All abstracts need to meet the following requirements: 300 words in English (excluding references), typeset in Times New Roman, 12pt, 1.15 spacing. Please use THIS TEMPLATE to ensure that all abstracts follow these requirements. Name the attachment “LING” or “LIT” according to your field, followed by the author’s initials. Abstracts should contain thesis statement, aims, critical approach, methodology, analysis, results, and conclusions. Abstracts must be uploaded HERE by July 15, 2022 (included). Participants will be notified during the second half of July, 2022.

If you have any queries, please contact us via the following email address:  ipsellugr@gmail.com

COMMITTEES

Organising Committee

  • Lucía Bennett-Ortega
  • Adrián Castro Cortés
  • Elena García-Guerrero
  • Carmen Hidalgo-Varo
  • Fernando Martín-Villena
  • Jorge Montaño Mojica

Scientific Committee

  • Carmen Aguilera-Carnerero
  • José Luis Arco Tirado
  • Margarita Carretero González
  • Mercedes Díaz Dueñas
  • Carlos Márquez Linares
  • María Elena Rodríguez Martín
  • Adelina Sánchez-Espinosa

For more information, updates and queries, do not hesitate to follow us on social media! @IPSELL_UGR

CFP

(Posted 22 June 2022)