Cultural Representations of the Region in Transnational Contexts, c. 1840-1940
Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. 11-13 January 2023
Deadline for abstracts: 6 May 2022
The nineteenth century witnessed an upsurge of representations of the region across Europe and North America, in media ranging from literary fiction to the illustrated periodical and from visual arts to architecture. The rise of regionalism has often been linked to nationalism and nation-building. As such, the transnational dimensions of regionalism—in its themes as well as publication and circulation—are frequently overlooked. These transnational aspects are the focus of the Dutch Research Council-funded project Redefining the Region at Radboud University, which considers representations of the region in literature and illustrated periodicals during the long nineteenth century. Media representing the region circulated across borders: literary depictions were translated, illustrations of regions were reprinted in different national contexts, and regional culture received attention at several World Exhibitions between 1851 and 1913. This conference therefore seeks to address cultural representations of the region in transnational contexts, which reflected and shaped the way regions were perceived and understood.
We invite contributors to engage with this topic from a variety of disciplines, and across all expressive media. The focus of this conference is specifically on the way regions were represented in cultural media in transnational contexts: the emphasis is therefore not on political or geographic dimensions or definitions of regionalism, but rather on its cultural imagination and conceptualisations.
The period between 1840 and 1940 includes the peaks of regionalist cultural production in various European countries and the United States. It witnessed the rise of new media such as the illustrated press and photography, and improved technologies of print and circulation. It therefore allows for a wide range of perspectives from different historical contexts and disciplines.
Themes that could be explored include, but are not limited to:
- representations of the region in different media
- circulation of regional representations
- cross-border cultural or natural regions
- regionalism in tourism and travel writing
- translating the region (across languages or media)
- archive and memory
- representing (foreign) language and dialect
- environmentalism across borders
- regionalism and anthropology
- theorising the region
- regionalism and religion
- urban and rural regions
- identity and community
- provincial exoticism
- regionalism and minorities
Proposals for papers (max. 300 words) and panels (max. 3 papers) should be submitted to region@ru.nl by 6 May 2022. Please include a 100-word biographical note. Notification of acceptance or rejection will be sent by mid-July. A selection of contributions from the conference will be published in an open access peer-reviewed collection (Radboud University Press) in 2024.
During the conference, there will be the opportunity to visit the world-renowned Kröller-Müller Museum, which is located in the beautiful Hoge Veluwe national park and boasts the world’s second-largest collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh.
Confirmed keynote speakers
- Prof June Howard (University of Michigan)
- Dr Stephanie C. Palmer (Nottingham Trent University)
- Prof Noel Salazar (KU Leuven)
- Dr Eric Storm (Leiden University)
CFP
(Posted 24 March 2022)
Bookscapes in the Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Anglo-American World – SEAA XVII-XVIII Conference
Université de Strasbourg, 13-14 January 2023
Deadline for proposals: 15 September 2022
Considering, on the one hand, that the development of printing and the spread of the printed word across the Western world contributed to shaping representations of the known and unknown world, and secondly, that geographical metaphors structure discursive thought (Baron), this conference open to all the research fields represented in SEAA XVII-XVIII (Société d’Études Anglo-Américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles) aims to reflect on the interactions between discourses in various book forms (treatises, travelogues, drawings, literary works, works of art…) and the territories and landscapes they evoke. In full expansion at that time, the English-speaking world was also being reinvented. In many respects, the 17th and 18th centuries were a pivotal period; whether we see it as a change of episteme at the archaeological level (Foucault), or as the passage from one ontology to another at the anthropological level (Descola), it could well be seen as the time of a ‘great divide’ when an operation of fundamental redistribution between subject and object (Latour), and between culture and nature, is taking place–embodied for instance in the unprecedented development of landscape painting. But it is the book that will be the focus of investigation here.
The following topics may be studied:
- the narration and historiography of the discovery of new regions and cultures of the world (cf. Claval 1992) by Anglo-Saxon travellers and explorers (the ‘legenda’, cf. Foucault, or the work of Alain Corbin and his use of literary texts); narratives of contact between cultures, in the fantastical manner of John Donne (‘O my America! my new-found land’, [‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’]) or in the more reasoned manner of St Jean de Crèvecœur or Gilbert Imlay (The Emigrants, 1793), and the way of giving voice to the Other (subaltern studies); the delineation of future ‘places of memory’ (Nora); in short, the different forms of territorialization, as well as deterritorialization which they sometimes entail, among others, from the point of view of exile or the exiled.
- the interactions between landscape and literature, for example from an ecocritical perspective (cf. the influence of Wordsworth on the creation of the Lake District); the ways in which a country or a landscape can be read: through walking (Gros, Le Breton), topographical / loco-descriptive poetry, and thus descriptions of countryside, townscapes or skyscapes, in literature (London in Moll Flanders, Bath in Humphry Clinker…) and in aesthetic treatises (in the manner of Gilpin’s writing on the picturesque); the poetics of toponyms, ekphrasis, literary stylisation as the metaphorical equivalent of the work done by the anamorphic map of a territory; treatises on art, the art of landscape gardening, and in general geopoetics and the artialisation of the world (Roger), insofar as poetising a landscape and putting it into discourse means interpreting it.
- the space of the book itself, open to typographic and illustrative experiments (Herbert, Sterne, Blake…); the genetics of texts, which offer a topographical metaphor for the palimpsest of a text; anchoring, inking or even ‘æncrage’ (to use Bernard Magné’s neologism for Pérec’s Espèces d’espaces); the places where books are produced (Raven), in short, the different forms of ‘literary spaces’ (Blanchot);
- the circulation of books, in all its forms, which contributes to the shaping of space, whether it be their use as pieces of furniture (Jeffrey Todd Knight), their economic inscription in urban spaces (James Raven), or the impact of their content on the ways in which the world is conceived and travelled.
Proposals should be sent to Jean-Jacques Chardin (chardin@unistra.fr), Hélène Ibata (hibata@unistra.fr) and Yann Tholoniat (Yann.Tholoniat@univ-lorraine.fr) by September 15th2022.
CFP
(Posted 6 July 2022)
CBDA-7 Conference,
Online, January 2023 (Friday 13, 20 and 27)
Deadline for abstracts – 15 June 2022
The Colloque Bisannuel de la Diachronie de l’Anglais (CBDA) is a regular conference that takes place every other year (usually in summer) in France, devoted to the diachrony of English at all stages of its development and to theoretical questions in the field of historical linguistics. After a hiatus caused by the Covid pandemic, we plan to organise the next edition, the seventh in the series, in January 2023.
Given the still uncertain sanitary context, CBDA-7 will take the form of an online symposium, spread over three non-consecutive days in January 2023 (Friday 13, 20 and 27).
We invite contributors to submit session papers on all topics concerned with change and variation in the history of English (syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, language contact, lexicology, etc.), on all periods in the history of English, and even on other languages directly relevant to the study of the evolution of English. Each contribution will be allotted 30 minutes, including 10 minutes for discussion. If you would like to present a paper, please submit an abstract (approximately 300 – 400 words) in pdf format using the EasyAbs system at http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/CBDA7
Abstracts should reach us no later than June 15th, 2022. All submissions will be reviewed anonymously by two referees. Notification of acceptance will be sent as of July 7th, 2022.
Registration and conference fee
There will be no registration fee. Participation is free. However, participants will be required to register. Registration information to follow on the conference website.
Website
http://www.cbdaconference.org/
CFP
(Posted 18 March 2022)
16th Biennial HUSSE Conference
University of Miskolc, Hungary. 26-28 January 2023
Submission of abstracts: 28 October 2022
Organiser(s)
The Hungarian Society for the Study of English and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Miskolc, Hungary
Deadlines
- 28 October 2022: submission of 250-word abstracts with keywords
- 7 November 2022: notification of acceptance
- 20 December 2022: early bird registration closes
- 15 January 2023: registration closes
Presentation
HUSSE and the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Miskolc invite participants to submit 250-word proposals for panels, workshops and 20-minute presentations in all areas of English Studies.
The working language of the conference is English. Panelists are responsible for organising their own panel or workshop. Special academic events will include plenary lectures, roundtables and panels, Országh Award, Book Awards and Book Presentations, and social events will include an opening reception and the conference dinner.
The confirmed plenary speakers are:
- Dr. habil. Kinga Földváry (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary),
- Dr. Tom Hubbard, FCLIP (Honorary Visiting Fellow, University of Edinburgh, UK),
- Professor dr. habil. Marianne Nikolov, D.Sc. (University of Pécs, Hungary), and
- Dr. habil. László B. Sári (University of Pécs, Hungary)
Abstract submission and registration online, via the conference website:
https://husse2023.uni-miskolc.hu/registration
Website
https://husse2023.uni-miskolc.hu/
Contact details
(Posted 18 October 2022)