The postings below are all still active, and organized by deadline. Once the deadline has passed, they will be moved to the IABA Posting Archive, on the CBR Website

 

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Travel and Tourism (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Assn)

Conference will be held November 7-9, 2024, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, USA

Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2024

Travel and Tourism Studies as a discipline continues to gain popularity in academia, in part because of its inter-disciplinary nature. The Travel and Tourism area seeks papers that discuss and explore any aspect of travel and/or tourism. Topics for this area include, but are not limited to, the following:-

– travel and gender/race/class
– travel and religion
– travel and war
– personal travel narratives
– heritage tourism
– material culture and tourism
– virtual travel and tourism: How has COVID affected travel around the globe?

Please feel free to consider a wide range of materials, texts and experiences. Applicants are encouraged to consider multi-media (or other alternative format) presentations if those formats would better suit their topics, and may also propose 3- or 4-person panels and roundtables. Submit a brief (300 words) abstract at mapaca.net by JUNE 30, 2024.

Students (both undergraduate and graduate) and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. Please feel free to send questions to Chair Jennifer Erica Sweda traveltourismmapaca@ymail.com

https://mapaca.net/help/conference/submitting-abstracts-conference

 For general information: mapaca.net

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Autobiography within the Paratext:

Fiction and Nonfiction Challenged by Autobiographical Paratexts

7 & 8 November 2024 (University of Pau)

Organizers : Pr. Sophie Vallas (Aix-Marseille Université, LERMA),

Pr. Arnaud Schmitt (University of Pau, ALTER)

Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2024

Definition

First defined by Gérard Genette in Seuils (1987), and divided by him into epitext and peritext, the paratext designates an eminently liminal space: it is perhaps in the peritext, “around the text, in the space of the same volume, like the title or preface, and sometimes inserted in the interstices of the text, like the chapter headings or certain notes” (Genette, 11, our translation) that the paratext is the most fixed, but it can nevertheless evolve, for example, in the case of a reprint or a generic switch ; in the epitext, that unstable, public zone outside the author’s purview, where the expression is often beyond authorial control, the paratext is deployed in “all messages that are, at least initially, outside the book: generally on a media support (interviews, talks…), or under the cover of private communication (correspondence, diaries…)” (10-11). According to Genette, therefore, the paratext is a “fringe” (“une frange”, 8) which, in the words of Philippe Gasparini, “frequently exerts a prior influence on the reader’s horizon of expectation, or a posteriori influence on their understanding of the work” (Est-il je?, 62).

Playing with the paratext

            Numerous authors have taken advantage of this singular space to guide the reading of their texts, or simply for the pleasure of playing in the margins or with their readers. For Philip Roth, paratextual games were confined to the peritextual space: in the epitextual space, the author adopted a much wiser, official posture, granting interviews only to serious newspapers, and renouncing his extratextual persona, which he reserved for his writings. In his strange autofiction entitled Operation Shylock (1993), Roth indeed included a notorious palinody: while the book features the subtitle “A Confession” on its cover, a term the preface goes on to justify, Roth then retracts this in the final note to the reader, stating bluntly “This book is a work of fiction.” Bret Easton Ellis is another case in point: ahead of the release of Lunar Park (2005), he went so far as to set up a website to corroborate the existence of his ultimately fictional characters and events. In the paperback edition of his autobiographical text, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), Dave Eggers inserted peritextual fantasies which were not present in the first hardback edition. The paperback features numerous changes and, above all, a much more substantial body of paratext: the reader need only turn the book over to discover an extension of the text, a new section soberly entitled “Mistakes We Knew We Were Making – Notes, Corrections, Clarifications, Apologies, Addenda,” in which Eggers quotes readers’ comments on several occasions, thus integrating into the work material that is usually excluded from it.

A Publishing Adventure

If autofiction is, according to Philippe Gasparini, a “linguistic adventure,” the paratext clearly is a publishing adventure involving the multiple possibilities of actual publication. The primary function of the paratext is to specify the genre of the text, an essential operation in the case of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical texts. Dorrit Cohn points out two different ways of distinguishing a memoir from a novel: “One is to give explicit notice, paratextually (by way of title, subtitle, or prefatory statement) or textually. The other is to provide the narrator’s name: its distinction from the author’s name conveys fictional intentionality, its identity with the author’s name autobiographical intentionality” (The Distinction of Fiction, 59). But the paratext also represents for the author an opportunity to introduce autobiographical elements in a text, or more precisely around a text in which there are none, for example by mentioning, in a preface or during an interview, the context of the work’s creation. A TV interview will be considered as a “performance,” requiring the author to embody their work, which will make body language an integral part of the paratext. We should bear in mind that for Genette, the paratext is both a “zone of transition” and of “transaction” (8). Despite the fact that Genette was reluctant to explore this “zone of transition,” eminently more phenomenological than narratological, narrative elements of the author’s life are to be found in this paratextual space as Georg Stanitzek (2005) or Dorothee Birke et Birte Christ (2013) have demonstrated.

The Flesh-and-blood Author

In “The Other Kind of Film Frames: A Research Report on Paratexts in Film” (2015), Cornelia Klecker describes the paratext as a “place to influence reception” (402). But how fascinating it is to watch authors on TV, on the Internet or their Instagram accounts trying to exert this influence through word and manner and, more often than not failing, or at least struggling, to do so. Autobiography is there, in the paratext, with or without the author’s knowledge, between the lines of a literally ill-intentioned preface, or between the words of an awkward audio-visual performance. The autobiography is the paratextual clumsiness. On the subject of authors promoting their books on TV, one is reminded of Philippe Lejeune’s famous analysis of the French literary show “Apostrophes” in Moi aussi (1986): “It is on TV that this impression is the strongest, we think we are watching the author behaving naturally and tend to forget that speaking on TV or on the radio implies a form of role-playing dictated by circumstance […]. Any author invited to ‘Apostrophes’ must simultaneously present their book (summarizing content, stating intentions) and physically represent it. This inevitably wrenches a novelist in two opposite directions” (91-93). It is in the representation, designated by Alain Brunn as “the authorial ethos,” that autobiography intrudes.

            Thus, autobiography is everywhere, and, more particularly, everywhere in the paratext. In this symposium, our aim is to study its multiple manifestations: “In our current culture autobiography appears all about us. It surfaces in books (whether formally autobiographies or not), on television talk shows, in interviews and therapeutic sessions, and in our daily conversation. In these and myriad other instances persons seize the chance to tell their personal histories and hence to present themselves as they would like to be or to be seen” (Rockwell Gray, “Autobiography Now,” 31).

            Proposals can focus indiscriminately on works of fiction or non-fiction as long as the paratext involved is autobiographical.

• Please submit an abstract of approx. 400 words and a short bionote to sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr and (arnaud.schmitt@univ-pauf.fr)  by 30 June, 2024 at the latest.

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CFP Life Writing (6/30/2024; 11/15-17/2024) South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference, Jacksonville, Florida USA
 
Studies of life writing attend to how we read and engage self-representationality, the capaciousness of lives and literatures turned textual, while demanding that readers attend to histories, languages, and experiences that are unfamiliar or different from their own. This panel welcomes presentations on any aspect of life writing; projects related to the conference theme, “Seen/Unseen,” are especially welcome. The production of identities and subjectivities across histories, from genres like narratives of enslavement and captivity, auto/biographies, cookbooks, and commonplace books, to contemporary iterations in memoir, social media, and documentaries, challenge expectations for how lives can be documented and shared.
 
In the SAMLA Newsletter, SAMLA 96 President Lisa Nalbone asks: “How often do we ‘witness,’ ‘observe,’ ‘contextualize,’ ‘seek to,’ name that which ‘illuminates’ or ‘illustrates,’ discuss what’s in our ‘view’: in essence, claiming that space or confronting that periphery?” The focus of this panel–life writing–centers Nalbone’s questions as writers of self-representational texts routinely confront and work to narrativize or textualize that which is often invisibilized and rendered peripheral. As we read and analyze life writing, we bear witness to the witness; we examine how life writers understand and represent selfhood; we consider the types of boundaries or barriers these life writers encounter–including those that are cultural, temporal, linguistic, spatial, geographic, political, and sexual; and we negotiate the ethics of life writing, in particular, as we address inherent implications of reading stories of others’ lives. Because self-representational texts arguably move beyond the representation of an autonomous autobiographical self to the relational subject as they consider historical events and people that construct and contextualize identity, a panel focused on life writing studies pays particular attention to how authors (re)present themselves, their worlds, and their lives, in ways seen and unseen.

By June 30, please submit an abstract of 250 words, along with presenter’s academic affiliation, contact information, and A/V requirements, to Nicole Stamant, Agnes Scott College, at nstamant@agnesscott.edu.

https://samla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/19139

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Call for Papers Hybridity and Women’s Writing in Eighteenth-century Britain

Guest Editors: Francesca Blanch-Serrat and Paula Yurss Lasanta (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona)

deadline for submissions: 

June 30, 2024

In the last four decades, hybridity has become an umbrella term encompassing a variety of disciplines, including biology, linguistics, postcolonial studies, media studies, and cultural studies. Particularly within literary studies, genre hybridity refers to the blending of themes, forms, and other elements from different genres—a practice with a long and fruitful history as old as literature itself. As a hybrid field itself, literature cannot be extricated from “extraneous elements”1 such as the sociopolitical context, class, age, or gender. According to Behling’s formulation2, the hybrid genre exists as a site for identity negotiation and resistance. In this sense, the hybrid genre allows for the assertion, reconsideration, and articulation of women’s identities. In women’s writing, it becomes a strategy and a vehicle for intellectual contemplation and expression.

Indebted to the hybridity of genre in the early modern period, the eighteenth century saw a blossoming of hybrid texts fostered by new forms of circulation and the growing literary market. Authors “experimented with hybrid combinations to a degree previously unrecognized”3, and women writers in particular, often excluded from intellectual debates because of their gender, not only experimented with blending different genres but also challenged conventional notions of authorship and literary authority to navigate the constraints imposed on them. Examples of hybridity can be found in the blending of biography and fiction in Romantic novels by Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Shelley4, as well as in genres such as the travelogue, the sentimental periodical, the agricultural tour, the cookery book, or the memoir, and other examples of life writing.

By examining eighteenth-century women’s writing through the lens of hybridity, Hybridity and Women’s Writing in Eighteenth-Century Britain seeks to illuminate new pathways for understanding and appreciating the complexities of women’s literary production during this era. Located in the intersections of gender, genre, and hybridity, the editors of this volume seek contributions that explore the various ways in which women writers asserted, reconsidered, and articulated their literary identities within the socio-cultural milieu of the eighteenth century through hybrid texts. Special attention will be given to lesser-known case studies and we extend our invitation to submissions that engage with a wide range of hybrid genres, including but not limited to the novel, autobiography, periodical essay, travelogue and poetic forms. We welcome interdisciplinary approaches that enrich our understanding of literary studies, such as history, philosophy and other relevant disciplines.

Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:

➢ Life writing across genres.

➢ Hybrid identities: queer identities, ethnicity, interfaith relations, women and the

empire, etc.

➢ Hybrid genres: the agricultural tour, the travelogue, etc.

➢ Women’s literary authority and the hybrid form.

➢ Genre hybridity in women’s scientific writing: botany, astronomy…

➢ Memory and narrative truth (Intersection between fact and fiction).

➢ Genre and political discourse (The political function of literary genres).

➢ Cultural purity and hybridity in historical contexts.

Proposals for articles (in the form of an abstract of about 250 words) must be submitted before 30 June 2024. The selected proposals will be announced by late July. Please submit your proposals to: Francesca.Blanch@uab.cat and Paula.Yurss@uab.cat.

Completed articles with a maximum length of 8,000 words, including footnotes, must be submitted by November 31, 2024. Articles will include a short biography, an abstract (80-130 words) and 5–10 keywords. Contributors should follow the Brepol Guidelines for Authors. Papers will be published in Hybridity and Women’s Writing i Eighteenth-century Britain (Autumn 2025), as part of the book series Early Modern Women Writers in Europe: Texts, Debates, and Genealogies of Knowledge, published by Brepols Publishers. Please note that the essay submission date and publication schedule are tentative and subject to change, depending on the peer reviewing progress.

4 Cook, Daniel, and Amy Culley. Women’s Life Writing, 1700-1850: Gender, Genre and Authorship. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016: 5.

3 Ingrassia, Catherine. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Women’s Writing in Britain, 1660–1789. Ed. Catherine Ingrassia. Cambridge University Press, 2015: 12.

2 Behling, Laura L. “‘Generic’ Multiculturalism: Hybrid Texts, Cultural Contexts.” College English, vol. 65, no. 4, 2003: 415.

1 Saïd, Edward. “Figures, Configurations, Transfigurations.” From Commonwealth to Post-C

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The Textual Self: Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary Self-Narration

*21st-22nd November, 2024*

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2024

English Department / LMU Munich

contact email: 

textualselfconference@gmail.com

*Keynotes*

• Kirsty Bell (Author of The Undercurrents, Berlin)
• Claire Squires (Stirling)
• Corinna Norrick-Rühl (Münster)
• Alexandra Effe (Oslo)
• Julia  Lajta-Novak (Vienna)
• Sabine Erbrich (Editor, Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin)

Over ten years have passed since Oasis front man Noel Gallagher wrote fiction off as a “waste of time” and his then provocative opinion seems only to have grown in popularity. As the display tables of any major British bookstore will confirm, the book market has since been flooded by texts dealing, to borrow Gallagher’s words again, with “things that have actually happened” – in most cases to their author (see Bury 2013). Already in 2001, in their manual on Reading Autobiography, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson offered an open-ended list of circa sixty genres within the permeable boundaries of life writing alone. The list has only grown, culminating recently in the Nobel Prize being awarded, two years in a row, to writers of autofiction, widely regarded as “the hottest literary trend of the last decade” (Folarin 2020). Many see these modes as responding to a dissatisfaction with the conventions of novel writing, newly perceived – as per Rachel Cusk’s much-cited dismissal – as “fake and embarrassing”, or radically mismatched with the complexity and crises of the contemporary world (see Kellaway 2014).

While much life writing presupposes the authenticity and sincerity of the text, along the lines of Philippe Lejeune’s “autobiographical pact” (1975), autofiction is based on a freer understanding of the truthfulness of the narrated events. The autofictional author replaces honesty with sincerity: they may well lie, “but in an attempt to reflect the world with justice” (Ferreira-Meyers in Dix 2018). Leaving the reader unsure of the confines between truth and fiction, thus stoking their curiosity, autofiction eschews at once prurient promises of authenticity and the phoniness of novel-writing decried by Cusk and Shields alike.

Taking literally that venerable mantra of creative writing workshops, ‘write what you know’, writers of life writing and autofiction produce – in their mode-specific ways – allegedly ‘immediate’ (see Kornbluh 2023) records of personal experience. The concurrent de-aestheticisation of literature – whose value is increasingly located more in the what of the story than the how of its telling – can be framed as a form of artistic renewal and expression of a cultural ideal of sincerity (see Voelz 2016), particularly in response to the ‘post-truth’ political climate. Autofictional representations of the world are frequently centred around the Romantic image of the singular (traumatised/suffering) author as a creative subject; yet in contrast to the Romantic notion of the solitary genius, these subjects are now intended as ‘relatable’ to ordinary readers (see Reckwitz 2012; Mead 2014). Stylistic simplicity and essayistic forms of writing are hallmarks of a new cultural ideal of witnessing, of telling stories that are anchored in authentic experience.

In these new forms and formats of writing, authors regain primary importance as a key link between their stories and their lives, as well as the lives of their readers. As witnesses to their own experiences (e.g., of social marginalisation), authors can testify to the singularity or universality of these experiences, just as they can – quite literally – embody particular identities. At the same time, the burden of representation, proportionate to the degree of intersectional marginalisation of the speaking voice, is not negotiated in a vacuum. On the contrary, works included in the commodification processes of cultural industry production reckon with, and often thematise, the imperative to speak from the core of one’s lived experience. This serves to at once legitimise the author’s right to speak – about certain experiences and themes – and to maximise the commercial appeal (the ‘marketability’) of the works themselves (see Brouillette 2020). Complicity with, and/or critique of, these broader cultural industry dynamics and their calls for authentic material are another crucial aspect of contemporary life writing, particularly in Anglophone contexts (see Nicol 2018). 

Despite these works’ refusal of fiction-making, their narrative artistry is based on strategies of authentication, which in turn draw on established patterns and tropes of literary fiction, on creative forms of citation and world-representation developed in the history of the novel (hence: auto-fiction). In the book market, autofiction and its aesthetics of relatability are one example of the persistence of “subject-centric authorship models” (Maitra 2020, 116). However, these dominant practices of personal, or personalised, literary authorship are being challenged by the digital revolution, making technological innovation powered by vast resources, including the spread of generative AI, an important context to reckon with.

This conference explores trends in contemporary Anglophone life writing and autofiction against the background of the social, institutional, and political conditions of making selves and others. With a focus on the aesthetics and politics of textual self-formation, as well as their interaction, we invite papers addressing a range of topics including but not limited to:

• new forms and formats of (literary) subjectivity and self-formation
• connections between publishing and writing, access to writing/publishing
• autotheory and the essay
• long-form novel vs. shorter vignettes
• life writing/autofiction across media (graphic novels, film, drama, TV series, etc.)
• new realism(s)
• genre and privilege: the ‘right to fiction’, and racialised, gendered, classed biases in critical reception
• life writing as feminist/intersectional adaption/adoption
• life writing and cultural industries
• style and politics
• postcolonial/global-majority autofiction and life writing

*Please send 300 words abstract and 150 words bio by 1st July 2024, to textualselfconference@gmail.com*

Notification of selection will be no later than 1st August.

*Conference Organization*

Prof. Dr. Ingo Berensmeyer (LMU Munich)

Dr. Lianna Mark (LMU Munich)

Sonja Trurnit (LMU Munich)

Works Cited

Brouillette, Sarah. 2020. “Sally Rooney’s Couple Form.” Post 45.

Bury, Liz. 2013. “Noel Gallagher Says Reading Fiction ‘A Waste of Fucking Time'”. The Guardian, 18 Oct. 18.

Dix, Hywel, Hg.2018. Autofiction in English. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Kellaway, Kate. 2014. “Rachel Cusk: ‘Aftermath was Creative Death. I Was Heading into Total Silence.” The Guardian, Aug. 24.

Kornbluh, Anna. 2023. Immediacy or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism. London: Verso.

Lejeune, Philippe. 1975. Le pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil.

—. 2009. On Diary. Hg. Jeremy D. Popkin, Julie Rak. Übers. Katherine Durnin. Manoa: University of Hawai’i Press.

Maitra, Julian. 2020. “Shakespeare’s Verified Facebook Page: How Authorship Patterns Survive and Thrive in the Digital Sphere”. Kodex. Jahrbuch der Internationalen Buchwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft. Vol. 10. Im digitalen Jenseits der Literatur. Towards the Digital Beyond of Literature.Ed. Vincent Kaufmann. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. 111–128.

Mead, Rebecca. 2014. “The Scourge of Relatability”. The New Yorker, August 1. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/scourge-relatability.

Nicol, Bran. 2018. “Eye to I: American Autofiction and Its Contexts from Jerzy Kosinski to Dave Eggers.” In H. Dix, ed., Autofiction in English. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 255–274.

Reckwitz, Andreas. 2012. Die Erfindung der Kreativität. Zum Prozess gesellschaftlicher Ästhetisierung. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Voelz, Johannes. 2016. “The New Sincerity as Literary Hospitality”. Security and Hospitality in Literature and Culture: Modern and Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Jeffrey Clapp and Emily Ridge. New York: Routledge. 209–226.

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Call for Papers: Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

Special Issue: ‘Queer Celebrities: Fashion, Style and Influence in Popular Culture’

Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2025

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/fashion-style-popular-culture#call-for-papers

Fashion, Style & Popular Culture invites scholars, critics and artists to submit papers for a Special Issue exploring the intersection of queerness, celebrity culture, fashion and style. How are queer celebrities influencing, shaping and transforming popular culture through their fashion and stylistic choices? We are interested in contributions that critically engage with the roles of queer celebrities in fashion as agents of change, as symbols of resistance, and as architects of a more inclusive and diverse cultural landscape.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Iconography and Symbolism: Symbols, motifs in queer celebrities’ fashion choices.

Fashion and Activism: Queer celebrities using fashion for activism, advocacy, social change.

Queer Aesthetics and Design: Queer aesthetics in celebrity fashion designers and stylists.

Media Representation: Queer celebrity portrayals in film, tv, music videos, digital media.

Queer Influencers: Tension between self-commodification and contributing to queer culture.

Fan Culture and Imitation: Queer celebrity fashion in imitation, cosplay, fan communities.

Queer Celebrity Fashion Brand Collaborations: Impact on brand and consumer behaviour.

Body Politics and Gender Fluidity: How queer celebrities challenge conventional body. norms and gender binaries through fashion, including impact on societal norms.

Queer Celebrities and the Fashion Industry: Impact on fashion industry’s sizing, fit, gender neutrality.

Identity: Queer celebrity fashion and identity formation, self-expression.

Intersectionality and Global Perspectives: Global influence of queer celebrities on fashion and diverse expressions of queerness in different cultural contexts.

Queer or Queer baiting? Exploitation of the queer market through queer fashion and style.

Each topic invites contributors to delve into the multifaceted relationship between queer celebrities and the world of fashion. We encourage submissions that offer unique, including non-western, perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies.

The deadline for manuscripts of 5000–7000 words (using Intellect House Style) is 1 July 2025.

Please visit the journal website for Notes for Contributors:

https://www.intellectbooks.com/fashion-style-popular-culture#call-for-papers

Please submit full manuscripts for double blind peer-review to Dirk Reynders at dirk_reynders@hotmail.com.

Questions regarding journal standards and submissions should be sent to Hilde Van den Buck at hdv26@drexel.edu.

General questions regarding the journal can be sent to Joseph H. Hancock, II at joseph.hancockii@gmail.com.

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Whether you have been involved in oral history for a month, a year, a decade or more, the Oral History Society in partnership with National Life Stories at the British Library extends a warm invitation to join us for a day of reflection, listening, conversation and networking being held on Saturday 6 July 2024 from 09.30-18.00 in the Knowledge Centre, British Library, London NW1 2DB 

This exciting new approach is taking the OHS back to its roots and trialling different ways of bringing people together to participate and collaborate with other oral historians.  The programme and abstracts are here for your information and really hope you can join us.  Attendees at the Festival will have a rare chance to spend a day exploring a diverse range of ideas and experiences within oral history and memory work. Everyone will have the opportunity to reflect on their own practice in discussion with others, to network and – hopefully – to gain new perspectives and insights into oral history that they can apply to their work. 

Festival Fees (including lunch and refreshments):

• £75 Standard
• £50 Oral History Society and British Library Members
• £50 Concessions

To book your place please visit https://www.ohs.org.uk/events/oral-history-festival/.  Advance booking is recommended to secure your place and booking by Friday 28th June is appreciated, although bookings will remain open until Friday 5th July.  

I hope you are able to join us next weekend and we encourage you to circulate the details to your networks, colleagues and friends.

If you have any queries please don’t hesitate to get in touch and do keep an eye out for other Oral History Festival events running online throughout 2024. Visit https://www.ohs.org.uk/upcoming-events/ for more information.

Best wishes

Polly 

On behalf of the festival organising group

—

Polly Owen

Events & Finance Manager, Oral History Society

polly.owen@ohs.org.uk

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MANAGING EDITOR POSITION, CENTER FOR BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH, UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII AT MANOA (7/9/2024)

Description

Title: Editor
 Position Number: 0080851
 Hiring Unit: C OF ARTS, LANGUAGES & LETTERS, CTR FOR BIOGRAPHICAL RESEARCH,
 Location: UH at Manoa
 Date Posted: 06/21/2024
 Closing Date: 07/09/2024
 Band: B
 Salary: salary schedules and placement information
 Full Time/Part Time: Full-time
 Month: 11-month
 Temporary/Permanent: Permanent

Duties and Responsibilities:

• *Serve as managing editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly;
• *Support activities of journal coeditors, staff, University of Hawai‘i Press (UH Press) personnel, and contributors, and vendors relating to journal organization, format, content, scheduling, development, production, and distribution, including but not limited to the following activities: reception, distribution, evaluation, tracking, and disposition of submissions for double-anonymous peer review; obtaining books for review, and working with the reviews editor on finding reviewers;
• *Copyedit or coordinate the copyediting of all journal content; preparing copyedited content for author review and approval; creating journal content as needed, including tables of contents and the annual bibliography;
• *Obtain, prepare, and create graphics material for use in the journal; design and typesetting for the journal in InDesign; prepare journal page proofs for author review; proofread the journal; make any necessary corrections to proofs in InDesign;
• *Ensure all permissions and rights are cleared for any journal content; obtain signed consent forms from all authors; advise authors on permissions process; facilitate the payment of any permissions fees; and ensure that all permissions agreements and any associated acknowledgments are finalized before transmittal;
• *Prepare the journal for transmittal to the UH Press; facilitate the distribution of complimentary copies; develop and maintain journal style guide; prepare annual budgets in conjunction with coeditors and UH Press personnel;
• *Fulfill journal fiscal requirements and maintain records in keeping with university and state practices, policies, and laws; process reprint requests and exchanges with other publishers; other duties as assigned by coeditors.
• *Manage Biography Monograph series.
• *Support activities of director, staff, UH Press personnel, and authors, and vendors relating to the Monograph series, performing comparable editorial functions as for the journal.
• *Manage Center facilities, programs, and activities, including but not limited to fulfilling Center fiscal requirements and maintaining records in keeping with university and state practices, policies, and laws;
• *Fulfill Center personnel requirements as needed, including supervising the work of student assistants, volunteers, or staff as needed; coordinating office assignments and university access for Visiting Scholars and Students;
• *Coordinate lecturers, conferences, and workshops, including Biography workshops for special issues; make arrangements for travel, lodging, food, and reimbursements; and coordinate programming and other logistics with guest coeditors and contributors traveling nationally or internationally to attend the workshop; prepare print, digital, and audiovisual materials for these events, which requires working after normal business hours including weekends and/or holidays;
• Oversee the Center’s website and social media; making any necessary updates and coordination with Center staff to maintain content and publicize all publications and activities of the Center;
• *Organize, administer, and publicize Center activities, such as the Biography Prize and Brown Bag Biography lecture series; maintain archive of Brown Bag series; support the preparation of Center proposals, and administration of grants, awards, and donations;
• *Schedule, monitor the use, and oversee the acquisition and maintenance of Center facilities, equipment, and supplies; serve as the Center contact and information source for students, faculty, and general public;
• Attend national and international academic conferences, as necessary.
• Other duties as assigned.

*Denotes essential functions

Minimum Qualifications

1. Possession of a baccalaureate degree in Liberal Arts or related field and 3 year(s) of progressively responsible professional experience with responsibilities for a scholarly journal or in publishing; or any equivalent combination of education and/or professional work experience which provides the required education, knowledge, skills and abilities as indicated.
2. Considerable working knowledge of principles, practices, and techniques in the area of publishing as demonstrated by broad knowledge of the full range of pertinent standard and evolving concepts, principles, and methodologies.
3. Considerable working knowledge and understanding of applicable federal and state laws, rules, regulations, and theories and systems associated with publishing.
4. Demonstrated ability to resolve wide ranging complex problems through the use of creative reasoning and logic to accurately determine the cause of the problems and the resolution of the problems in an effective, innovative, and timely manner.
5. Demonstrated ability to interpret and present information and ideas clearly and accurately in writing, verbally, and by preparation of reports and other materials.
6. Demonstrated ability to establish and maintain effective working relationships with internal and external organizations, groups, team leaders and members, and individuals.
7. Demonstrated ability to operate a personal computer and apply word processing software, and desktop publishing software such as InDesign.
8. If applicable, for supervisory work, demonstrated ability to lead subordinates, manage work priorities and projects, and manage employee relations.
9. Demonstrated project management skills, including the ability to manage multiple publishing projects and budgets.
10. Ability to work with minimal supervision and to exercise independent professional judgment.
11. Ability to supervise and coordinate the work of others.
12. Ability to work during evenings, weekends, and/or holidays.
13. Ability to travel to national and international locations in a timely manner.

Desirable Qualifications

1. Possession of a graduate degree in a related field.
2. Subject area knowledge pertinent to life writing.
3. Editorial experience at a university press or similar organization.
4. Experience with developmental editing, copyediting, production editing, proofreading, and/or typesetting.
5. Demonstrated commitment to continuous learning.
6. Ability to keep abreast of new technology in the field.
7. Ability to create and prepare images for print, display, and electronic distribution with consideration for permissions, fair use, and other legal issues.
8. Ability to engage in digital publishing and to develop and maintain social media and WordPress website.
9. Familiarity with Adobe Acrobat, and Photoshop.
10. Proficiency with appropriate style guides, such as the MLA Handbook (9th edition) and Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition).
11. Knowledge of applicable federal and state laws, rules, and regulations associated with publishing scholarly journals or other academic publishing; familiarity with copyright issues and rights and permissions processes in publishing.

To Apply:
Click on the “Apply” button on the top right corner of the screen to complete an application and upload required documents. Submit (1) cover letter indicating how you satisfy the minimum and desirable qualifications; (2) resume; (3) the names and contact information of at least three professional references; and (4) transcripts showing degree and coursework to date appropriate to the position (original official transcripts will be required at the time of hire.)

Note: If you have not applied for a position before using NeoGov, you will need to create an account.

For inquiries please contact Craig Howes at craighow@hawaii.edu.
Apply here: https://www.schooljobs.com/careers/hawaiiedu/jobs/4554040/editor-pos-80851

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Call for Applications – “Imperial Biographies – Individuals in Empires and Postimperial Spaces” (Freiburg, Germany)

Deadline for Submissions: July 15, 2024

The interdisciplinary autumn school of the RTG 2571 Empires at the University of Freiburg will explore Imperial and Postimperial biographies through different disciplines and is now open for applications by graduate students.

The autumn school will feature a diverse set of workshops moderated by supervisors and professors of the University of Freiburg and other universities. As of now this includes Sitta von Reden (Ancient History, Freiburg), Jürgen Osterhammel (Global History, Konstanz), Manuela Boatcă (Sociology, Freiburg), Andreas Mehler (Political Science, Freiburg), Barbara Korte (English Literature, Freiburg) and Benjamin Schenk (Eastern European History, Basel). The school will also provide participants with opportunities to discuss their own project in regards to the opportunities and pitfalls of (post)imperial biographies and biographic approaches. The autumn school is targeted towards graduate students from the Humanities and Social Sciences who either already work with (post)imperial biographies or are interested to include biographical approaches in their project in the field of Empire studies. 

Please consult the Call for Applications for further informations: https://www.grk2571.uni-freiburg.de/events/summer-schools/autumn-school-2024/autumn-school-2024
Applicants are invited to send a letter of motivation and a short CV to simon.suttmann@grk2571.uni-freiburg.de by 15/07/2024. Invitations will be sent out in August and the selected participants will be asked to provide an abstract of their project.
Travel expenses, accomodation and meals will be covered by the RTG. 

Contact Information

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
DFG Graduiertenkolleg 2571 „Imperien”
Platz der Universität 3
79085 Freiburg im Breisgau

Contact Email

simon.suttmann@grk2571.uni-freiburg.de

URL

https://www.grk2571.uni-freiburg.de/events/summer-schools/autumn-school-2024?se…

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Deadline for Submissions: July 30, 2024

The melancholy of knowing

Autobiography under the sign of Saturn
                                                            
XXIII International Symposium of the Scientific Observatory
for Written, Oral and Iconographic Autobiographical Memory   
 
ROME (It) 3-4-5, December, 2024
Palazzo Mattei di Giove
Via Caetani 32-00186
 

Promoted and organized by:
Mediapolis.Europa ass. cult.
http://mediapoliseuropa.com/
and by
Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea
                               
Mnemosyne o la costruzione del senso
Presses universitaires de Louvain-Université catholique de Louvain
https://ojs.uclouvain.be/index.php/Mnemosyne
A journal devoted to the study of autobiography
 
 
Scientific Committee
Beatrice Barbalato (Mediapolis.europa – Mnemosyne PUL)
Fabio Caffarena (Università di Genova)
Antonio Castillo Gómez (Universidad de Alcalá)
May Chehab (University of Chypre)
Fabio Cismondi (Fusion for Energy,  European Commission)
Nathalie Frogneux (UCLouvain)
Laurence Pieropan (Université di Mons)
Edgar Radtke (Universität Heidelberg)
 
Organisation
Irene Meliciani (managing director Mediapolis.Europa)
 
 
Melancholy, exacerbated self-awareness
Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu être triste pour entreprendre de ressusciter Carthage.
Gustave Flaubert
Letter to Ernest Feydeau, 28 November 1859
 

This call for papers invites one to reflect upon melancholy, particularly the melancholy of knowing.  This is a feeling that, as we will see, emerges after the Renaissance, a period in which, with reference to classical antiquity, melancholy is not seen as a pathology but as an extreme and exacerbated self-perception. The main figures of reference are two: Democritus and Heraclitus. The former embodied melancholy with laughing, the latter with crying.
Hippocrates, who, according to tradition, had paid a visit to Democritus bringing hellebore (the herb that was administered to people with mental ailments), ultimately acknowledges him as the wisest of all for being able to impart an ironic judgment on the world, his contemporaries, and himself. Melancholy as profound awareness, the meaning and hallmark of existence itself.

The Renaissance abandons the equation sloth = sin postulated in the Middle Ages. Dante places the slothful in Hell, in ice. Petrarch’s Secretum (1342-1343) marks a moment of passage between the Middle Ages and Humanism. Despite the apparent contradiction of feeling himself a sinner before Truth, Petrarch maintains that he can handle the melancholy of knowing with full awareness, and it is not by chance that he turns to Saint Augustine, his phantom confessor, citing himself. Thus, he makes use of accusation to achieve self-praise (Barbalato. B. 2006).
 
To essentialize the argumentation on this theme, we can say that, on one side we find Aristotle, Ficino, Milton, and Kant, and on the other side, Freud, Binswanger, Lacan, Tellenbach, and other professionals of the psyche. Melancholy has been studied from different angles and with interpretations that have varied over time.
In the psychoanalytic and psychiatric fields, melancholy has been observed and treated primarily as a pathology, omitting its creative components. It is regarded by Freud as a bereavement without object, which is expressed through forms of self-denigration and lack of self-esteem. Freud (1917), Lacan (1966), Binswanger (1960), Tellenbach (1961-1983) identify in melancholy the pain caused by an unidentifiable loss. Binswanger explains melancholy with the passage of the subject from the primordial status, in which the being was indistinct, an unus, to the act of expulsion or acceptance of elements that led him/her to recognize a reality external to him/herself. The question is whether melancholy is an ordinary psychosis (which can therefore be analysed in itself) or it is the background to any psychosis (Lacan J. 2005: 149-150).
Binswanger talks about the style of our own mode of experience (style is a word that he repeats several times), thus indicating the melancholic person’s particular propensity to forge, globally absorb every act of living (Binswanger L. 1987 French edition: 51-54 [1960]). The locution is important because, beyond the fact that Binswanger, a psychiatrist, studies and treats melancholy, he acknowledges how it is not a trauma that can be isolated, nor an intermittent pathological manifestation, but a hallmark of some individuals and their Weltanschauung.  
 
Having here touched on the types of intellectual commitment of different natures, that is, philosophy and history of literature and art on one side, and psychiatry/psychoanalysis on the other, the conclusions are not consequently associable. However, some pathways can be established. 
Marsilio Ficino and Jean Starobinski, men of letters and physicians, place themselves in this entre-deux. 
Jean Starobinski, a physician and a man of letters, investigated the various facets of this theme through a vast study. L’encre de la mélancolie. La mélancolie, un mal nécessaire? Paris, Seuil, 2012 (in this book, Starobinski brings together reflections preceding 2012) is a title that leads one to reflect upon the pairing writing/melancholy, and, as the subheading suggests, melancholy seems to be indispensable to giving consistency to thought. 
 
       Praise of melancholy
On this theme, Aristotle had followers especially during the Renaissance. In Problemata XXX, I, he regarded melancholy as a natural mood whose excess was not necessarily harmful but could rather be the condition of poetic or philosophic genius.
Following ancient thought, and Aristotle’s, Marsilio Ficino, a physician and a humanist, in the first of his three books on life (De vita libri tres, published in 1489) devotes several reflections to melancholy. Illa heroica, Melancholia generosa, is defined by men of letters, by Musarum sacerdotes, that is, an intellectual force, a sign of man’s dignity, to refer to the title of a work by Pico della Mirandola (1485-1486). (See the chapter “Melancholia generosa”, Klibansky, R.; Panofsky E.; Saxl, F. 1989 French edition: 389-432-chapter II, II [1964]).
Ficino suggests treatments, places body and soul in constant relation, so that the disquiet and the tension of a melancholic conscience can be lightened. He himself is under the sign of Saturn. For Ficino, the soul of the melancholic person withdraws from outside inwards as though converging to the central point of a circumference, and while it is thus concentrated upon speculation, it remains firmly there, and, to say it more exactly, at the very centre of man. (Ch. IV, book I. Ficino 2000: 29, French edition). Finally, melancholy is a centripetal force that leads everything to be led towards a centre, to strengthen the perception of one’s self. For Ficino, melancholy is emblem and firm pact of man with himself. It is said that he had had the figures of Democritus and Heraclitus painted on a wall.
In his pastoral poems (1645-1646) L’Allegro and Il Pensieroso, he gives a positive and spiritual value to the melancholic mood: “which essentially corresponds to an exacerbation of self-awareness”, write Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl about Milton (1989: 375 [1964]).
  Almost with the same words, about two centuries after Ficino and a century after Milton, Kant, in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Ch. II, 40-41 [1764]), will once again underscore the convergence, in the melancholic person, of every perception and experience towards a central nucleus of the self. Kant maintains that the melancholic person does not care about other people’s opinions but depends exclusively on his/her own judgment. In other words, melancholy constitutes an act of concentration on one’s own conscience.
 
  As several scholars have observed (including Ágnes Heller and Eugenio Garin, the authors of works on the Renaissance man: Heller 1967, Garin 1998, and much earlier Jacob Burckhardt, 1860), the Renaissance is “the epoch of great autobiographies, actually, the era of autobiographies”, Garin affirms (Garin  E. 1998: 11), because, he maintains, modern man was a man in the making, was aware of this, and recounted it. It is possible to underline how this period saw a flourishing of apologies, of autobiographical narrations that justify their own actions and intend to explain them (compare various self-apologies: Ficino, Lorenzaccio, Cardano). In this great Promethean forge, melancholy, as Ficino’s book well illustrates, is recognized as a factor intrinsic to genius, and as man’s great leap towards knowledge of himself and the means he constructed for knowledge. The pessimistic vision of melancholy continues to exist, but in a position of very little dominance in this period of the Renaissance.
 
           The melancholy of knowing
  The theme that we are proposing refers to a post-medieval, post-Renaissance conception of melancholy that also invests our contemporary culture: the melancholy of knowing regarded as one of the expressions of the Baroque, and that should perhaps be framed more within Mannerism. As Daniel Arasse explains, Mannerism is introspective, it is the involution of movement, while the Baroque opens towards the outside (Arasse D. 2004: 202).
  The melancholy of knowing takes shape in written and figurative works from an autobiographical perspective, especially beginning from Mannerism, and the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In the period following the Renaissance, the era called modern, man develops a vision of himself that has much to do with the material instruments and the techniques with which he has been equipping himself. Dürer’s angel – a figure regarded by many scholars as the artist’s self-representation – is doubtful of the thousand instruments available to him. Astronomy and astrology are already seen as chimeras. Even though the interpretations of a work do not all converge, there is no doubt that Dürer stages the reflection upon the importance of the knowledge of not knowing and non-accessibility to metaphysics. He does so by putting at the top all the symbols that in the past had designated melancholy, observes them with perplexity, but does not look away from the future. “This limit is not a source of despair for the artist, while knowledge of not knowing is for him supreme knowledge” (Schuster P.-K. 2005: 94). Schuster reminds us that this etching has been regarded as Dürer’s spiritual self-portrait, and the representation of the melancholic angel as a personification of the artist (Ibid.: 101). The Renaissance artist, a demiurge, extremely confident in his own faculties, begins to critically reflect upon the instruments he has created and to challenge Humanism’s optimistic vision that placed man at the centre of the cosmos.
 
  Talking about melancholy means involving a very vast bibliography. The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton constitutes a summation of what had been written up to 1600. Burton has his own portrait represented on the cover under the name Democritus Junior. He writes in the first person and explains that he made use of other people’s thoughts one step at a time, in a vertigo of references.
The Baroque multiplies the reflections/mirror images on melancholy (see, amongst others, the recent Aurelio Musi, Malinconia barocca, 2023). After the demiurge-man of the Renaissance, the following period plunges into experimentation, in the investigation of matter and of forms. Man reckons with extraordinary scientific and artistic achievements – Galileo, Copernicus, Bernini, and many other thinkers – and also with his own ghosts (see the work of Athanasius Kircher 1602-1680); taking all Renaissance knowledge to extremes, he begins to perceive the gap between his aspirations, the ever-advanced means available to him, and the results, which, albeit extraordinary, do not fully harmonize with his own self. Already a century earlier, (Ch. 2, book I) Ficino had warned against excessive abstraction: when man no longer directly takes care of the instruments he uses, but only theorizes, melancholy becomes a discomfort of knowing.
  Thus, we witness the passage from the idea of melancholy as a deficit in acting, to the melancholy of knowing, that is, to suffering due to excess of activism.
  The relationship with instruments and techniques is crucial. Already the Prince at his apogee had felt the need to make his public life coexist with his private life, finding shelter and meditating in his study, a small, windowless space in which he preserved what was subjectively closest to his heart, ancient works and finds (see Arasse D. 2004: 133). That is, objects become increasingly important, intended as external supports to the indefatigable search for dialogue with the world of experience (Meliciani A., television programme in 25 episodes, Rai-Radiotelevisione italiana, 1995).
 
         A Faustian theme?
A Faustian discomfort? Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl also refer to Faust and the melancholy of knowing in several passages in their extraordinary work Saturn and Melancholy mentioned earlier (see Part 3, Ch. 1. French edition: 384).
  Faust, a son of the Reformation, of the ethics of capitalism, strives to obtain every instrument of knowledge, selling his soul to the devil.  “[…] when [Faust] – writes Jean Clair – in Marlowe’s text, to increase his wealth, orders Satan to search the oceans to find the pearls of the East or to scour every corner of the New World or to fly to India to look for gold, he does no other than prolonging the accumulating frenzy of the Princes of this world. But when he begins to want to experiment with and transform the materials he has gathered, the study of the man of letters turns into a forge in which a Promethean fire burns. The metamorphosis of the theme is decisive, making us move from a theological era to a technological one” (Clair J. 2005: 2004. Italics is mine). The inauguration of the technological era would produce a melancholy that is due to the perception of the disproportion between man and the means that make him fall behind, and to the abandonment of theology.
  The second aspect of melancholy is connected to Cronus, which is identified with Saturn, the planet of melancholic people. The pressure of time, intensive exploitation of knowledge generates discomfort and leads man to question his own efficiency. This is a theme that becomes dominant with the Reformation, the Protestant ethic, capitalism. Saturn-Cronus has always been represented as the protector of riches (and of avarice). Dürer himself explains, in his etching Melencolia I, that the key means power, the bag wealth (Klibansky R.; Panofsky E.; Saxl F.: Ch. II 1: 447 of the French edition). These are symbologies that derive from antiquity, which nonetheless Dürer recontextualizes in the atmosphere of dawning Protestant reformism.
In the seventeenth letter on modern literature (1759), Lessing refers to a German Faust that has come into his hands. The speed race that takes place between seven devils is won by the two who proclaim, one to have the speed of human thought, and the other man’s speed to pass from good to evil. (Lessing G. E. 1876: 35 French edition [1759-1765]). Speed, duration, thus time. The great chimera of which Faust becomes the interpreter is that, by advancing, time corresponds to progress. But he himself will be crushed by it and will need external aid.  
The extreme activism postulated by Protestantism/capitalism also brings about awareness of limits. The Protestant Reformation of 1517 and Dürer’s Melencolia I of 1514: the reformist spirit was spreading. Dürer’s Angel is depicted amidst many instruments but, as Walter Benjamin observes, seems to no longer know how to use them! On Dürer’s Melencolia I, on the autobiographical aspect, we once again refer to the previously mentioned text by Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl. Already from the dawn of capitalism, a willingness to act, to collect, to exceed takes hold, and at the same time the discomfort of accumulation is perceived.
“Melencolia I – writes Jean Clair – marks this very brief and singular moment of Western thought when the artist, the homo artifex, believes to have become a multi-mathematician, mathematician, engineer, surveyor, botanist and physician, capable of acquiring the knowledge and measure of all things, numero et pondere, while he discovers, captured, that no mathesis universalis is capable of reorganizing and bringing together the desjecta membra of the real” (Clair J. 2005: 206).
Dürer’s Angel (1514) is surrounded by instruments that could be those in the Prince’s study: ink, compass, sphere, scale, bell, athanor – the alchemic furnace; he is sombre, irked, but not depressed, he rather has a gaze that would like to see far away. On the left is the word ‘Melencolia’ held by a bat, the mammal that appears at dusk, the moment in which this feeling comes forth. The dog, endowed with perseverance and a fine sense of smell, symbolizes the indefatigable researcher, Benjamin points out (Benjamin W. 1985: 166 French edition [1925]). However, the angel is clearly in the grip of much perplexity. Jean Clair contrasts this image, which is not defeatist but troubled, with the image of a pensive, melancholic old man by Leonardo, (pen drawing, London, Windsor Castle, ca. 1513): “Where Dürer’s angel, with his gaze lost into nothingness, seems to have relinquished the hard work of geometry and architecture, Leonardo’s old man seems to be absorbed by a precise observation. It is the nature of physical phenomena that he questions, and not the metaphysical sense of an infinite universe. Where Dürer’s angel is a disciple of Plato, who practises an ideal geometry by means of instruments ‒ rulers and compass ‒ that do not demonstrate it, Leonardo’s old man establishes himself as a disciple of Aristotle, who investigates a scientia experimentalis. He observes rather than contemplates. Even though Leonardo is fully aware of death and of transformation. Dürer and Leonardo were fascinated by deluges, by catastrophes. Leonardo’s old man blends into a wisdom made of resignation and respect” (Ibid.: 207).
 Leonardo’s old man, like Dürer’s angel, rests his head on a hand, an icon that we find in many figurative works. More precisely, on a fist in Dürer. This is an ancient motif that is present in Egyptian sarcophagi, a sign of sorrow that could indicate tiredness or creative reflection, as it is suggested in the work Saturn and Melancholy (Ch. I, b: 450, French edition).
Incidentally, it should be noted: the oscillating state between a creative vision and a destructive one accompanies many paintings. Amongst them, the one by De Chirico, Mistero e malinconia di una strada (1914, private collection). A girl playing with the hoop heads towards a shaded area. De Chirico adopts a perspective for the right-hand side of the painting, the one in darkness, which moves downwards, and another one for the bright left-hand side, which moves upwards, perhaps proposing once again the dual vision of the melancholic person’s possible moods.
 
Without proposing forced parallels, we can nonetheless affirm that some elements of discomfort which emerged from the post-Renaissance period that inaugurates the modern era can today be tracked down in various autobiographies by men of science: the pressure of time, the handling of instruments, accumulation, the relationship with the object, the techniques that can operate outside their creator’s control. 
What is of interest to this call for papers is to investigate how the subject recognises itself in the melancholy of knowledge, in a relationship with science, which is certainly complex and discontinuous, as Foucault illustrates in the text Archéologie du savoir (1969).
Charles Darwin, Enrico Fermi, Ettore Majorana, Nikola Tesla, Robert Oppenheimer, Rita Levi Montalcini, in their autobiographical writings have expressed the melancholy of knowing, and in our contemporaneity more than ever has the relationship between man and the object of his creations proved to be fatal. Darwin regrets to have atrophied the brain towards the perception of aesthetics by continuing to work like a machine for grinding (The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, 1887).
This call for papers invites one to consider works of self-reflection on this topic, particularly by scholars of the mathematical and natural sciences, without excluding a priori those by ordinary people, men of letters, and artists. We will accept proposals that aim to illustrate in what way a style, a semantic modality marks a life narration informed by the melancholy of knowing.
 
Bibliography
Daniel, Arasse, “Pour une brève histoire du maniérisme”, 188-202, “La règle du jeu”, 125-138, in id., Histoires de peintures, Paris, Editions Denoël, 2004.
 
Beatrice Barbalato, “Il pirronismo del Petrarca, ovvero il Secretum come aporia”, 99-115, in Mariapia Lamberti (ed.), Atti del convegno: Petrarca y el petrarquismo en Europa y América, UNAM, Universidad Nacional Autónoma  de Mexico (18-23 Octobere 2004), Mexico City, UNAM, 2006.
 
Walter Benjamin, Origine du dramme baroque allemand, transl. by Sybille Muller with André Hirt, Paris, Flammarion, 1985 [1925].
Ludwig Binswanger, Mélancolie et manie, transl. from the German by Jean-Michel Azorin and Yves Totoyan, revised by Arthur Tatossian, PUF, 1987 [1960].
 
Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.
 
Jean-Marc Chatelain (ed.), Baudelaire. La modernité mélancolique, BnF Éditions, 2021.
 
Jean Clair, “La mélancolie du savoir”, 220-208, ed. by Id., Mélancolie, génie et folie en Occident, Paris, Gallimard, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2005.
 
Marsilio Ficino (French edition): Marsile Ficin, Les trois livres de la vie, transl. by Guy Le Fevre de la Boderie, Paris, Fayard, 2000, [new edition of the 1582 text. Original in Latin De vita libri tres, 1489].  
 
Jon Fosse, Melancholia, transl. by Cristina Falcinella from nynorsk, new Norwegian, Roma, Fandango, 2009 [1995]. 
 
 Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard, “Bibliothèque des sciences humaines”, 1969.
 
Sigmund Freud, Trauer und Melancholie, 1917.
 
Eugenio Garin, L’uomo nel Rinascimento, Bari-Roma, Laterza, 1998.
 
Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen, 1764, [Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime].
 
Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, Fritz Saxl, Saturne et la Mélancolie, transl. from the English and other languages by Fabienne Durand-Bogaert and Louis Évrand, Paris, Gallimard, 1989 [1964]. The French edition is referred to in this call for papers.
 
Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, livre xxiii, Le symptôme, Paris, Seuil, 2005.
 
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Dix-septième lettre. Gottsched considéré comme réformateur du théatre allemande”, 31-37, in Id., Lettres sur la littérature moderne, et sur l’art ancien. Estratti tradotti da G. Cottler, Paris, Librairie Hachette, 1876. [Literaturbriefe, 1759-1765].
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k28071t/f46.image.r=lessing%20lettres
 
Alessandro Meliciani, La Stanza del Principe, 25 TV episodes, RAI-RadioTelevisione Italiana, 1995.
 
Aurelio Musi, Malinconia Barocca, Vicenza, Neri Pozza, 2023.
Peter-Klaus Schuster, “Melencolia I. Durer et sa postérité”, 90-110, trnsl. from the German by Jeanne Étoré-Lortholary, in Jean Clair, Mélancolie, génie et folie en Occident, Paris, Gallimard, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2005.
 
Jean Starobinski, L’encre de la mélancolie. La mélancolie, un mal nécessaire?, Paris, Seuil, 2012.
 
Hubertus Tellenbach, Melancolia: storia del problema, endogenicità, tipologia, patogenesi, clinica, edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, intr. by Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, translation and translations of supplementary texts edited by Lorenzo Ciavatta, Roma, Il pensiero scientifico, 2015 [1961].

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Suggestions for sending proposals 
The languages admitted for submission are: Italian, Spanish, French, English. Everyone is allowed to write in one of these languages. There will be no simultaneous translation. A passive understanding of these languages is desirable.
 
A) Deadline for submission: 30 July 2024. The abstract will be composed of 250 words (max), with citation of two reference sources, and a brief CV (max: 100 words), with possible mention of two of one’s own publications, be they articles, books, or videos.
The judging panel will read and select every proposal, which is to be sent to
beatrice.barbalato@gmail.com, irenemeliciani@gmail.com
The authors of the accepted proposals will be notified by 31 August  2024.
 
B) Regarding enrolment in the colloquium, once the proposals are accepted the fees are:
Before 30 September 2024: 160.00€
From 1 to 30 October 2024:  190.00€
Enrolment fee cannot be accepted in loco
 
For graduate students:
Before 30 September 2024:  100.00€
From 1to 30 October 2024:   110.00€
Enrolment fee cannot be accepted in loco
 
Once the programme is established, no change is allowed.
 
For information on the symposia organized in previous years by the Osservatorio della memoria autobiografica  scritta, orale e iconografica, visit the site:
http://mediapoliseuropa.com

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Call for contributions:

Proposal for a symposium at the 11th ESHS Conference, Barcelona 4-7 September 2024. Science, Technology, Humanity and the Earth.

Symposium: The “Other” Genius: A Historical Approach to Genius, Giftedness, and Gender

The figure of “the genius” has been traditionally defined in terms of the masculine Romantic ideal – a heroic individual who battles against all odds to achieve significant artistic, political, and scientific accomplishments. Historically, however, what constituted “genius” and who was labelled as such was (and remains) a question with multiple answers that did not always align with the traditional Romantic ideal. Be it a question of gender, age, race, or even madness and disability, different categories have been mobilized over time to understand exceptional talent and define genius and similar concepts (e.g. giftedness) in the history of science and medicine. In this panel, we wish to explore alternative representations of genius throughout modernity and reflect on the multiple social, cultural, scientific, and political contexts that inform this phenomenon beyond its present ideal.

We welcome presentations from the fields of the history of psychology, medicine, psychiatry, anthropology, and pedagogy dealing with topics such as (but not limited to):

– Genius and madness

– Genius and gender in medicine and psychology

– Genius and politics

– Hermaphroditism, androgyny, and genius

– Child genius: child prodigies and gifted children

– Genius, talent, and disability

– Savant syndrome

– Literary, visual and scientific representations of genius

– Genius and emotions

Contact Information

Dr. Victoria Molinari

Marie Sklodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher

History of Science Group

Spanish National Research Council – Institut Milà i Fontanals

Carrer Egipcíaques 15

08001-Barcelona 

Spain

Contact Email

victoria.molinari16@gmail.com

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CFP–“Travelers of the Early Modern Era (16th-18th centuries) on European Routes. (7/31/2024; 10/17-18/2024) Wroclaw Poland

             We are pleased to announce that on October 17-18, 2024, the Historical Institute of the University of Wrocław will hold the Conference “Travelers of the Early Modern Era (16th-18th centuries) on European Routes”. 

The travels of the social elites were an important part of the cultural practice from the mid-16th century to the end of the 18th century. The development of this activity was encouraged by several reasons. Above all, there were favorable circumstances that allowed for greater mobility, such as the improvement of roads or thedevelopment of the postal service, and a constant thirst for knowledge about the world. The subject of early modern travel has drawn the attention of scholars for a long time. They pointed out the various social and cultural implications of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, there are still great opportunities related to this aspect of historical reflection. Hence, during the Conference, we would like to focus on the analysis of individual experiences, traces of which are preserved in reports about journey, which we recommend to consider as a kind of egodocument. As a historical source, the egodocuments provide insight into the experiences of individuals. Therefore, this research enables a deeper understanding of the daily life, mentality and personal experiences of people of the past. Owing to the analysis of the egodocuments, researchers can gain an insight into the subjective aspects of history.The study of egodocuments were initiated by historians working on microhistory and social history,and one of the pioneers in this field was Dutch historian Jacob Presser. Nowadays, the study of egodocuments is an indispensable part of many branches of the humanities, including history, sociology, anthropology and literary studies.

Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:

• documents produced by travelers as a kind of egodocuments,
• the new methodological approach to travel diariesand travel letters as an egodocumentary source,
• personal travel experiences,
• travelers’ subjective opinions about the space they saw, the cultures and people they met,
• daily life on the road,
• motivations for travel.

Submission

Please send an abstract of up to 1000 characters in Polish or English to aleksandra.ziober@uwr.edu.pl by 31 July 2024. The organizers reserve the right to reject proposals. The conference fee is 100 EUR. The conference organizers will provide participants with accommodation (2 nights), refreshments (lunch, coffee breaks) and an opportunity of publication (like Brill etc.).Preferred language for papers is English. Detailed organizational information about the accommodation and the bank account number to which the fee should be paid will be available at a later date.

Organizing committee:

Dr hab. Filip Wolański prof. UWr

Dr Aleksandra Ziober (Secretary of the conference)

Mgr Emilia Hruszowiec

Contact Information

Dr Aleksandra Ziober (Secretary of the conference): aleksandra.ziober@uwr.edu.pl

Contact Email

aleksandra.ziober@uwr.edu.pl

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20036652/conference-travelers-early-modern-era-16th-18th-centuries-european

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Real-Time History: Engaging with Living Archives and Temporal Multiplicities

March 19-21, 2025, German Historical Institute Washington, DC, USA

Deadline for submissions is August 15, 2024.

Institute Washington (GHI) in collaboration with the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM), Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, NFDI4Memory, and Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe. The conference will focus on the theme of “living archives” and their significance in contemporary history. Submissions are encouraged to address the value of living archives for real-time history, reflect on access and stewardship issues, provide examples for analyzing living archives, and explore the history and technology behind them.

Conference Theme

The Seventh Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History will revolve around the concept of living archives and its relevance for contemporary history. The digital transformation has challenged scholars and memory workers to define their engagement with historical temporalities, with the past, present and future, in new ways. Digital technologies can be used effectively to support the development, analysis, and preservation of collections, projects, and tools that feature diverse temporal perspectives, including multifaceted, dynamic, relational, and cyclical conceptions of time. Such approaches can challenge, or even disrupt, prevalent linear conceptions of the progression of historical time. While this opens many possibilities for historical projects, it also presents new challenges. For example, historians and memory workers who have used digital technologies to document history in (almost) real time must now address new, unfamiliar, and often uncomfortable ethical and legal questions associated with “documenting the now.” Similarly, while taking advantage of the ability of new methodologies to collect large sets of data in a short period of time, we are repeatedly confronted with the fragility of digital objects and systems, and the challenges and costs of digital preservation, with the futures of the past in a digital era ranging between abundance and scarcity as astutely predicted by Roy Rosenzweig over two decades ago.   

Our conference will provide a forum to discuss these and other questions related to making history in real time. A particular focus will be on the increasing number of initiatives designed to capture history by creating “living archives” supported by digital technology. Originally, the concept of “living archives” goes back to the oral history movement during the 1970s and 1980s, when historians set out to capture people’s life experiences and memories while facilitating the transmission of generational memories embodied by living individuals. With the evolution of digital technologies, conceptions have broadened in recent decades to include a variety of collections and archives capturing events as they occur and in their immediate aftermath. This includes pioneering rapid response digital collecting projects like the September 11 Digital Archive and the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, as well as the countless recent projects documenting people’s experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic such as A Journal of the Plague Year in the United States or Covidmemory in Europe. It also includes collections and archives utilizing social media to document the Black Lives Matter movement, the Arab Spring, the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, and archives and art installations created as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, to mention a few. Participatory documentation and archiving projects have also empowered migrants of all ages to document and preserve their migration experiences. Most recently, several projects and collections are documenting wartime experiences such as in Ukraine through social media. These approaches conceive of archives and collections as discursive, dynamic, and open-ended processes that actively contribute to present events and developments, which, in turn, shape the development of living archives and public history. 

Submission Guidelines

For this three-day conference, we invite colleagues to submit proposals by August 15, 2024, for:

(a) workshops for (hands-on) presentations of projects, tools, or skills (90 minutes),

(b) or individual presentations (20 minutes)

that:

(1) Discuss the value of living archives for doing real-time history. By emphasizing the contingency and open-ended character of historical developments, “living archives” confront scholars and memory workers with fundamental questions regarding their roles and responsibilities in the present. How can living archives support ongoing dialogues about cycles of violence and oppression in the past, present, and future? What are the epistemological implications for the thinking, doing, and narrating of history when scholars are actively engaged in the creation, stewardship, and analysis of sources through living archives? Do living archives contribute to the democratization of historical storytelling by promoting multi-vocality and “shared authority” in digital public history?

(2) Reflect on access to and stewardship of living archives. What are some of the ethical and technical implications of “documenting the now,” including documenting the experiences of historically marginalized people and communities? How can individuals and groups be empowered to manage digital collections and archives outside of established repositories and in the post-custodial tradition throughout the life cycle of projects and records? How can living archives be maintained in an environment that is dominated by large for-profit companies driving rapid technical developments and media obsolescence? How can living archives balance the epistemological virtues of open access and respect for informational self-determination and privacy? What might ethical and professional long-term stewardship and research data management of these projects look like? 

(3) Provide examples for analyzing living archives. What methodological strategies and frameworks exist to analyze collections of data that continue to evolve over time? What does it mean if archival responsibility shifts from preserving the past for the future to documenting a multiplicity of pasts, presents, and futures? Are there best practices for the documentation of the building, managing, and maintaining of living archives aiming at promoting transparency and traceability of data? What practices can avoid creating indexical regimes that (re)produce biases or representational inequalities?

(4) Explore the history and technology of living archives. What insights can the long history of living archives offer for scholars and memory workers creating and maintaining such archives today? What are the origins of the idea of living archives? What is the specific “archival performativity” of living archives and memory banks, and do they activate historical records in a different way than other forms of archives? How have advancements in technology influenced the development, design, and public use of living archives? How did new “mnemotechnologies” shape the documentary impulses of people and how did this affect historical imagination? Has the digital era paved the way for a new “snapshot culture” making “everyone their own historian”? 

The conference will offer a dynamic, inclusive international forum to discuss these and other questions. Building on the established format of past GHI conferences on Digital History and Digital Humanities, we invite submissions of traditional analytical papers, reports reflecting on past and present projects, and workshops. We specifically encourage archivists to apply. While reflections about “living archives” will be an important component of the conference, we also invite presentations drawing on other experiences and analyses of time – and temporal multiplicities – in the digital environment. 

Registration and Contact Information

Although we favor in-person attendance of participants and presenters, facilities for hybrid participation will be provided with the aim of making the event as inclusive as possible. Please submit a short CV and paper abstract of no more than 500 words to our conference platform by August 15, 2024. Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel is available upon request (for one presenter per paper or workshop) for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Jana Keck, keck@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

Group Bibliography

• https://www.zotero.org/groups/5420323/living-archives-dh-conference-2025/library

Conference Committee

• Daniel Burckhardt, GHI Washington
• Andreas Fickers, Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH)
• Peter Haslinger, Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe
• Katharina Hering, GHI Washington
• Torsten Hiltmann, Chair for Digital History at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
• Jana Keck, GHI Washington
• Simone Lässig, GHI Washington
• Lincoln Mullen, Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM)
• Atiba Pertilla, GHI Washington

Contact Information

For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Jana Keck, keck@ghi-dc.org. For questions about logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter, hofstetter-phelps@ghi-dc.org.

URL

https://www.ghi-dc.org/events/event/date/real-time-history-engaging-with-living…

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CFP 2025 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (8/15/2024; 2/28-3/2/2025)

2025 International Symposium on Autoethnography and Narrative (ISAN)

The 2025 ISAN (February 28-March 2, 2025) will provide scholars and practitioners of all experience levels an opportunity to present their autoethnographic and personal narrative projects and to participate in dialogue and sociability with scholars across a variety of disciplines. The format will be similar to the past ISANs (see “Past Symposia and Events” page).

The symposium will occur via Zoom. February 28 will feature sessions in Polish, Spanish, and Japanese; March 1-2 will feature sessions in English. Eastern Standard Time (EST) will be used for all symposium activities.

We invite proposals for INDIVIDUAL/CO-AUTHORED PROJECTS to be considered for presentation. Creative and innovative approaches to autoethnography and personal narrative are encouraged. Submissions should: a) use autoethnography and/or narrative to engage social, political, cultural, and personal issues; b) address theoretical or methodological aspects of autoethnography and narrative; and/or c) interrogate or advance autoethnographic and narrative practices. Proposals should take the form of an extended abstract (250-500 words). If a proposal is accepted for presentation, submitters must create a 5-8 minute audio/video recording of their project and submit a link of the recording by January 10, 2025. The link will be included in the 2025 ISAN program. 

We also invite proposals for LIVE DISCUSSION PANELS about a particular topic/theme related to autoethnography and narrative inquiry. If you would like to propose a discussion panel, submit an extended abstract (500+ words) with the following information: a) title and description of the panel and b) a brief biography of at least 4 panelists who have agreed to participate. At the live Symposium, panelists should prepare brief (2-3 minute) introductory remarks about the panel topic/theme and then moderate a conversation among panelists and attendees about the topic/theme. 

Even though the symposium is online, we still have restrictions on time and (Zoom) space. As such, for the 2025 ISAN, we are limiting participants to ONE SUBMISSION (includes co-authored submissions and/or serving on a discussion panel). 

The deadline to submit a proposal is AUGUST 15, 2024.

Click here to submit a proposal inENGLISH.

Haga clic aquí para enviar una propuesta en ESPAÑOL.

Kliknij tutaj, aby złożyć wniosek w języku POLSKIM

日本語で提案を提出するには、ここをクリックしてください

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• All proposals will be peer reviewed. 

• Registration will open November 1, 2024. To be included in the final program, all participants must register for the Symposium. Early registration (November 1, 2024-January 15, 2025) is $60 (USD) for students, part-time faculty, guests, and independent scholars and $80 (USD) for full-time faculty and professionals. After January 15, registration is $80 (USD) for students, part-time faculty, guests, and independent scholars and $100 (USD) for full-time faculty and professionals. All paid registrants will receive a one-year subscription to the Journal of Autoethnography. 

• Proposal acceptances will be sent by November 1, 2024.

• After a proposal is accepted, submitters will have until January 10, 2025 to create a 5-8 minute audio/video recording of their presentation. Submitters should upload the video to YouTube (preferred) or Vimeo, OneDrive, Dropbox, or Google Drive and then submit a link of the recording for symposium attendees to view. More information about creating and submitting the video will be included with proposal acceptances (November 2024). 

• The actual symposium (February 28-March 2, 2025) will consist of sessions devoted to the pre-recorded presentations. Each session will have a moderator who will keep time, start and end the session, and monitor that each panelist has an opportunity to talk briefly about their presentation. Participants will NOT present during the live symposium session; they will have already presented via the prerecorded presentation. Instead, the live sessions will be interactive, providing a space for panelists to meet and talk to other panelists, for audience members to ask questions and make comments, and for the moderator to offer brief comments, if desired. To encourage participation and stimulate discussion, we suggest that each panelist provide a brief (2-3 minute) summary of their presentation at the start of the (live) session at the symposium.

• By February 1, 2025, the first draft of the symposium program will be available to all registrants. Registrants will have at least one month to view the prerecorded presentations. If a registrant is interested in a particular presentation, they should watch the video before the (live) symposium begins. 

We look forward to working with everyone virtually! 

Please direct all inquiries to Tony Adams at tony.e.adams@gmail.com

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Call for Nominations

2025 IAANI Awards

We invite nominations for the following 2025 awards:

• Outstanding Article
• Outstanding Book Chapter
• Early Career Award
• Bochner and Ellis Resonance Award
• Goodall and Trujillo “It’s a Way of Life” Award in Narrative Ethnography

For more information about these awards, including how to submit a nomination, visit www.iaani.org/awards. Award submissions are due August 15, 2024. We will honor award recipients at the 2025 ISAN.

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Call For Interviews

World Biofictionalists in Translation: Literature as Existential Map

Bloomsbury’s Biofiction Studies series

Michael Lackey

Deadline for Submissions: August 15, 2024

There have been two volumes of interviews with prominent biofictionalists, and while they have proven to be immensely valuable to scholars, they are limited in that they focus primarily on writers from English-speaking countries. In short, there is a need for a volume of interviews with famous biofictionalists who write in a language other than English. To address this need, we are soliciting interviews with famous biofictionalists from 20 to 25 countries. Those interviews should be conducted in the author’s native language but then translated into English. The interviews should be between 5000 and 7500 words. They are due by August 15, 2025. All submissions should be sent to Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu).

Criteria for Acceptance and Instructions

1) Biofiction Focus: Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after a real person. Only interviews that are explicitly about biofiction will be considered.

2) Error Free: When interviewers and authors engage in a conversation, errors of all kinds inevitably occur. Interviews should be recorded and then transcribed. But after the work has been transcribed, the interviewer and the author should edit the work. Eliminating needless comments and errors is crucial.

3) Smooth Flowing: In addition to eliminating all kinds of errors, the work should be organized in such a way that it flows smoothly and has a maximum impact on readers. Here it is important to keep your audience in mind. All questions and answers should be comprehensible to everyday readers, so make sure that readers are given sufficient information to understand and appreciate the conversation.

4) Substantive Contribution: The interview needs to contain something that makes it a worthwhile contribution to biofiction studies. Therefore, the interviewer must have a commanding grasp of biofiction scholarship and be able to clarify how the interview contributes to the existing scholarship.

5) High-Profile Authors: We are specifically looking for prominent writers from countries where English is not the primary language. If the biofictionalist is unknown, the odds of acceptance will decline considerably.

My Role as Editor

I will be available to work with scholars throughout the whole process. If you would like help becoming conversant in biofiction scholarship or generating interview questions, please feel free to contact me. A team of biofiction scholars will help me determine which interviews to include. After the interviews are selected, I will work with the interviewers on editing them, which will consist mainly of correcting grammar, eliminating errors, cutting fluff, organizing the conversation, sharpening the focus, and polishing the English. I will also write the introduction to the volume.

My Method

To date, I have interviewed more than 30 biofictionalists. For your benefit, here is a description of my method. After reading all the author’s biofictions a couple times and doing research about the actual historical figures, I start composing a list of approximately ten questions. One week before the interview, I send the questions to the author. I give the author the freedom to reject or revise any question. I then meet the author in order to conduct a one-hour interview, which I record. Immediately after the interview, I send the recording to my research assistant, who transcribes it. It is best to have a full transcription within a couple weeks, so that the interview is still fresh in the minds of the interviewer and the author as the two edit the work. After receiving the transcription, I then edit the document by eliminating garbled sentences and incoherent thoughts, correcting errors of fact, polishing the language, and reorganizing the interview into a coherent narrative. Then I send it to the author, who is given carte blanche freedom to edit as he/she/they will. Sometimes there is only one exchange, and then the interview is ready to go. Other times there are multiple exchanges, which can last for a week or more. The most important thing is that the author has the freedom to express his/her/their ideas exactly as he/she/they wants. This is my method, and it has worked. But you might have a different or better method, so you should do what works best for you.

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CFP–Forgotten Journalists: Lived experiences and professional identities in the past.

Various Belgian partners organise in June 6-7, 2025 an international academic conference on the lived experiences and professional identities of forgotten journalists. The deadline to submit an abstract is 30 August 2024. 

The conference aims to reconstruct the careers and lived experiences of a mass of anonymous news workers. Three groups of forgotten media professionals stand out (amongst others): war correspondents and foreign correspondents, female journalists, and those who founded and shaped professional journalists’ associations and trade unions behind the scenes. Thanks to the ever-increasing amount of digitised historical news media, the digitisation of genealogical sources and the growing access to the archives of professional journalists, the lives and works of forgotten journalists have become easier to trace. By focusing on lived experiences and professional identities from a historical and decentered perspective, we want to make visible those whose work has been underestimated, or whose journalistic (or partly journalistic) careers have been neglected.

Contact Information

Liberas

Kramersplein 23

9000 Ghent

Belgium

christoph.despiegeleer@liberas.eu

Contact Email

christoph.despiegeleer@liberas.eu

URL

Call for papers: Colloquium Forgotten Journalists (2025)

The URL provides a pdf with a much more detailed description.

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CFP Safundi Special Issue Proposals

August 31, 2024

Safundi is currently accepting proposals for thematic special issues. Founded 25 years ago in 1999 as a journal of comparative studies of the United States and South Africa, Safundi is today a quarterly journal of history, literature, politics, and ideas with attention to southern Africa and its transnational connections to the wider world. The name Safundi draws from the isiXhosa and Nguni verb – funda, which translates as “to read” and “to learn,” with fundi referring to someone who is an expert and passionate about a subject.  Past contributors to Safundi include noted writers and intellectuals like Chris Abani, Pumla Dineo Gqola, Ato Quayson, Bhekizizwe Peterson, Nadia Davids, Ntongela Masilela, Terence Ranger, Emily Apter, Noam Chomsky, and Abdulrazak Gurnah, recipient of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Themes for special issues should be in keeping with the mission of the journal. We are especially interested in special issues that address the following approaches and themes:

• Individual writers, intellectuals, artists, and/or activists, living or deceased, who have had distinguished careers and merit attention through a special issue
• The question of national and post-national literatures in Africa
• Present-day social justice movements, their historical origins, and their transnational connections between the Global North and the Global South. Such movements can include labor activism, First Peoples/Indigenous struggles, feminist movements, student activism, and LGBTQ+ histories and perspectives.
• African and/or Global South environmental humanities
• Settler colonialism and its legacies in Africa – South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, and Algeria – and their connections with other parts of the world, especially in the southern hemisphere, like Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina
• Indian Ocean histories and humanities
• Interdisciplinary Indigenous knowledge systems in Africa
• Southern African, African, and/or the Global South concepts and methodologies
• Literary genres – speculative fiction, crime fiction, autofiction, et cetera – and their re/invention in Africa and the Global South 
• Visual histories and cinema cultures in southern Africa, Africa, and the African Diaspora
• Formations of race and racial capitalism in Africa, the African Diaspora, and the Global South
• Archival questions and subjugated knowledges in southern Africa, Africa, and the African Diaspora
• Pan-Africanism, Afro-Asianism, Third Worldism, and transnational histories of global liberation struggles
• Social and cultural histories of Africa-China and Africa-Asia connections
• New approaches to urban cultures/studies in southern Africa, Africa, and the Global South

Other themes and approaches are also possible and welcome. Special issues are anticipated to be at least 60,000 to 80,000 words in length – 6 to 10 research articles, plus an introduction by the guest editor/s. Other submissions like interviews, visual essays, and review essays are also welcome in consultation with Safundi’s editorial team.

Proposals for special issues will be peer reviewed by the Safundi editorial team. Proposals should consist of a single document, no more than 3 pages in length, and include the following:

• Name/s, institutional affiliation/s, contact detail/s, and publication record/s (brief c.v.) of the issue editor/s.
• A two-paragraph description of the special issue, the importance of its topic, and how the topic relates to the mission of Safundi.
• A tentative table of contents including the titles of the submissions, names of contributors, institutional affiliations, contact details, and a 100-word abstract for each submission.
• A proposed deadline for submission of all completed materials.

Special issue editors are responsible for soliciting articles, corresponding with authors, editing submissions, and meeting deadlines. All contributions will undergo thorough peer review. Funding for publication is not available.

Timing of publication is dependent on the submission of materials. The earliest publication date would be the second half of 2025, though 2026 and beyond is more likely.

Please send proposals with the email subject heading “Safundi Special Issue Proposal” to: safundi.journal@gmail.com

Submission deadline: August 31, 2024.

 

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CALL FOR PAPERS- SPECIAL ISSUE OF ASIAN DIASPORIC VISUAL CULTURES AND THE AMERICAS
Portrait of the Contemporary Artist: Process, Identity, and Social Construction in the Asian Diaspora
Deadline for Drafts August 31, 2024

The genre of self-portraiture can be practiced and interpreted in a myriad of ways. From the more traditional format of a figural painting of the artist to installations presenting indexical marks of an artist’s experiences, contemporary diaspora artists use self-portraiture to process different aspects of their diasporic experience. Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso created several sketches of himself in his Daily Doodle series (2018-present). For decades, Gyatso’s work in exile grappled with buddha images and pop-culture references, but few self-portraits. The more recent presence of these intimate images seemingly marks a shift to interior spaces and selfreflection. The installations of contemporary Tibetan artist Sonam Dolma Brauen that address the passing of her parents–My Father’s Death and Sehnsucht–activate materials as a means to not only collapse time but to include stories of her community that seem to belie the confines of language. As a record of her family’s past and her own life, the installations present the rarelyacknowledged tactile, object-based experience of displaced people forced to choose what can be taken and what must be left behind. This special issue of Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, scheduled to be published in Spring 2025, asks the following questions: in what ways do Asian diaspora artists grapple with issues of process, identity, or social construction through self-portraiture? How does technology and social media factor into these images? What can we gain by examining and re-examining self-portraiture through the lens of the diaspora experience? We welcome papers which examine conventional notions of selfportraiture as well as those that expand the boundaries of what might be considered a selfportrait. We welcome submissions for consideration in the format of scholarly articles, artist pages or curated artist pages, or artist statements.

 
For more information on author guidelines, see:
https://brill.com/view/journals/adva/adva-overview.xml?language=en&contents=artsub 
Please submit a draft by August 30, 2024. We will inform you within 1-2 weeks of our tentative issue contributors. 
Full submissions are expected by September 20, 2024. Please submit to the guest editors. All submissions should be addressed to Sarah Magnatta (sarahmagnatta@gmail.com) and Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline) Kyo (yiyimon.kyo@gmail.com). Please also direct any questions to these email addresses.
Contact Information
Yi Yi Mon (Rosaline) Kyo 
ykyo@ucsc.edu
Sarah Magnatta 
sarahmagnatta@gmail.com
 
Contact Email
ykyo@ucsc.edu
 
URL
https://brill.com/view/journals/adva/adva-overview.xml?language=en

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Deadline for Submissions 31 August 2024

Call for Submissions
The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship
Call for papers: Special Collection—Graphic Biographical Fiction
Special Collection Editors: Nancy Pedri (Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada) and Maria Juko (Independent Researcher)

Potential publication date: late 2024 or early 2025.

Scholars have only recently turned a critical eye towards the fictionalization of real people despite biofiction’s popularity on the literary market since the 1980s. Unlike autobiographies or biographies, rather than a truthful account of the person’s life story, biofiction centres on a creative interpretation of a real person’s life in which they become a character.

Following David Lodge, who emphasized that the biographical novel “takes a real person and their real history as the subject matter for imaginative exploration” (Lodge, 2007:8), Michael Lackey emphasizes that “the biographical novel is, first and foremost, fiction” (Lackey, 2016: 5). Further refining his definition of this literary form, Lackey explains how “the author of biofiction fictionalizes a historical person’s life in order to project into existence his or her own vision of life and the world” (Lackey, 2022: 13). Despite its growing popularity in life writing studies (Lackey, Latham, Layne), there has been a lack of research in graphic narratives that dramatize the lives of real people across words and images.

In calling for submissions for this Special Collection, we take our cue from Paul Franssen and Ton Hoenselaars, who wished to “locate this genre in the field of literary production” (1999:18), to locate it in the field of comics studies. As such, this Special Collection seeks to fill an important gap in exploring the tensions and productive relationships between biofiction and the graphic medium. Graphic biographical fiction asks us to reflect on several questions about storytelling, reading, and consumption and marketing patterns.
These include, but are not limited to:

– What is the relationship between graphic biographical fiction from graphic biography, historical fiction, or portraiture?
– How does graphic biographical fiction impact our understanding of biographical fiction?
– How does graphic biographical fiction address identity or the fact/fiction divide?
– What questions about authorship does graphic biographical fiction raise?
– What implications for character does graphic biographical fiction’s fictionalized treatment of a real person have?
– How do graphic biographical fictions navigate the dangers of imposture, falsification, or sensationalism?
– How does the visual aspect of graphic biographical fiction contribute to the dramatization of a real person and a real life?
– To what extent are readers encouraged to merge the real-life person with their work/ creative output?
– Which real-life people are represented in graphic biographic fiction, and what makes them a suitable choice for authors?
– Why do graphic biographical novels from European countries often focus on British or American subjects?
– How is this genre promoted and why?
– What readership does this genre attract and why?

In accordance with the journal’s scope, we call for submissions that are professionally written and presented, incorporating high-quality images that authors discuss directly and in detail. We will consider submissions from affiliated senior or early career scholars, practitioners and independent researchers, as long as they fit the journal’s call for papers, scope and editorial guidelines.
We do not consider submissions on the basis of abstracts only; we only receive and consider full versions of submissions via our journal management system

We invite energetic writing that is theoretically and interpretively bold. While academic rigour, the inclusion and close discussion of images and citational correctness are important to us as a precondition, a key feature our editors and reviewers will consider is the argument, the discovery, the evidence-based eureka moments conveyed in economical, precise, and, ideally, subtle prose. We believe academic writing about comics should be as striking and immediate as the medium itself.

The Comics Grid encourages open science methods and advocates the value of reproducibility. Authors using datasets or code in their submissions are encouraged to cite and share them in their submissions using appropriate open-access repositories such as CORE, figshare or Zenodo.

In order to be considered for peer review all submissions require image files that should be directly referred to and discussed in the body of the submission and must closely follow our submission guidelines.

Deadline for full submissions: 31 August 2024
Potential publication date: late 2024 or early 2025.

For full submissions information, please go to https://www.comicsgrid.com/about/submissions/.

Though the journal cannot provide informal pre-submission advice, authors with questions about this Special Collection’s scope can contact the collection’s editors directly: Nancy Pedri npedri@mun.ca and Maria Juko mariajuko@gmail.com.

References
Franssen, P. and Hoenselaars T. 1999. “Introduction: The Author as Character. Defining a Genre.” In Granssen, P and Hoenselaars, T. editors. The Author as Character Representing History Writers in Western Literature. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, pp. 11-38.
Lackey, M. 2016. “Locating and Defining the Bio in Biofiction!, a/b: Auto/ Biography Studies 31:1, 3-10.
Lackey, M. 2022.  Biofiction. An Introduction. Routledge.
Latham, M. 2012. “Serv[Ing] Under Two Masters!, a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 27:2,
354-373.
Layne, B.  2022.  Biofiction and Writers’ Afterlives. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Lodge, D. 2007. The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel: With other Essays on the Genesis, Composition, and Reception of Literary Fiction. London: Penguin.

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The Journal of Popular Culture Special Issue Call for Papers

The Coming Freedom: Censoring Queer Lives, Bodies, and Books

Deadline for Abstracts: September 1, 2024

As attacks on LGBTQIA+ people, medical care, and books proliferate in the United States and beyond, this special issue of The Journal of Popular Culture explores the tragically many and varied ways in which queer lives, bodies, and books have been censored by law, policy, society, and the family through the lens of popular culture. We seek to both understand these challenges and memorialize those who have confronted and overcome them. As Foucault (1990) puts it in the History of Sexuality,“If sex is repressed … condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places themselves to a certain extent outside the reach of power; he upsets established law; he somehow anticipates the coming freedom” (6). 

This issue of The Journal of Popular Culture dedicated to the coming freedom will focus on LGBTQIA+ censorship in terms of its impact on writers, artists, directors, musicians, fans, and other creators who have fought, struggled, and otherwise reckoned with their identity through popular culture. The essays will go beyond traditional conceptions of censorship with the goal of drawing attention to those who have been overlooked, ignored, or otherwise left out of the scholarly conversation. Essays might also consider:

• Representation in literature, film, television, streaming, and other media
• Intersections of identity, class, race, disability, and other factors
• Relationships between culture and regulation, law, or policy 
• The role of nature, environment, or space in the regulation of rhetoric, bodies, etc.
• The Hays Code, the Comstock Act, library book bans, and anti-ALA bills
• How resistance to censorship encourages audiences and culture to create change
• How audiences, cultures, and others react to or critique boundary crossing
• Rhetorical or stylistic responses (e.g., queer coding) to censorship
• Dog whistles, violence, policing, and other anti-queer rhetoric or activity

We seek manuscripts fitting this issue’s theme from a broad array of disciplinary orientations, including (but not limited to) film and television studies, new media studies, the humanities, political economy, communication, cultural studies, sociology, and marketing. We are especially interested in the work of diverse and early career scholars and graduate students. 

Submissions Information

Please send abstracts (500 words) to kmilberg(at)kennesaw.edu and hsheare1(at)kenneasw.edu by September 1. Completed articles will be due January 15. Articles should be between 5,000 and 7,500 words in length and conform to The Journal of Popular Culture’s “Submission Guidelines” in terms of format and citation style. Articles will be vetted by the issue editors before completing the journal’s regular peer review process. Publication is expected in late 2025. 

Foucault, Michel. 1990. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.

Contact Information

Kurt Milberger and Hannah Shearer

Contact Email

kmilberg@kennesaw.edu

URL

https://shorturl.at/ea1TQ

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CfP: International Conference on The Role of Auschwitz in Holocaust Narratives

Toronto, ON, Canada – Conference Date: May 5, 2025

Deadline for Submissions – September 15, 2024

The Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program invites proposals that interpret the place of Auschwitz in shaping Holocaust survivor narratives and contribute to the interdisciplinary discussion on the role of Auschwitz in influencing collective memory of the Holocaust.

The conference marks the 80th year since the liberation of Auschwitz and coincides with the Toronto run of the travelling exhibition Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away. at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). A private pre-program event focusing on the exhibit will be held on Sunday May 4, 2025, featuring Dr. Naomi Azrieli, CEO and Publisher, and Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt, curator of the exhibit and keynote speaker.

Conference Overview:
Inspired by the memoirs program’s nearly two decades of dedicated work on survivor memoirs, this conference aims to critically examine the impact of Auschwitz on the narratives of Holocaust survivor experiences. This international conference, serving as both a commemoration and reflection, will provide a platform for interdisciplinary discussions that plumb the complexities surrounding Auschwitz as a place of atrocities, its symbolism and the narratives surrounding it.

Conference Themes:
Auschwitz occupies a unique place in history as the most infamous concentration camp and death camp within the Nazi camp system. The conference aims to explore and grapple with aspects of Auschwitz that have influenced survivor memoirs, short stories and poetry.
 

These aspects include but are not limited to:
•the role of Auschwitz as the most authentic representation of Holocaust experiences in the Nazi camp system
•survivor memoirs and storytelling; what is recounted or omitted, and how we reconcile memories that may conflict with the historical record
•memoir descriptions of ritual and Jewish agency; that is, how Jews responded to the conditions and treatment they endured
•collective memory, vocabulary, language and imagery surrounding Auschwitz 
the narrative significance of Auschwitz as the symbol of the Holocaust and its impact on shaping collective memory
•the voices of women, sexuality studies and the gendered lens
•the representation of a diverse range of experiences including those of non-Jews, Polish political prisoners, Roma, Catholic clergy and others
•representation of Auschwitz and survivors in works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and/or cultural productions
•the role of survivors of Auschwitz in remembering the atrocities in contrast to other camps and experiences

Submission Guidelines:
We invite submissions that contribute to the interdisciplinary discourse on the role of Auschwitz in Holocaust narratives. This conference is primarily aimed at literary, Jewish studies, humanities, cultural, and gender studies scholars as well as historians. Early career researchers/academics and PhD candidates are also encouraged to apply.

Submissions must demonstrate that at least one of the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs will be integrated into their final presentation. For a complete listing of memoirs please see https://memoirs.azrielifoundation.org/the-auschwitz-collection

Abstracts (max. 500 words) and a short CV must be submitted by September 15, 2024. Please submit as one combined PDF file including the presenter’s familial name in the following format: LASTNAME.AzrieliSem2025. All applicants will be notified by December 18, 2024. 
For inquiries and submissions, contact Carson Phillips, carson@azrielifoundation.org
 

Conference Details:
The conference will convene in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, May 5, 2025, with a pre-conference event on the evening of May 4, 2025. The program will include a keynote address and approximately twelve, 20-minute presentations.
 

Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered for successful applicants. Should a proposal be submitted jointly for co-authors to present, funding will be offered for one presenter only.
 

Proposal Review Committee:
Debórah Dwork, The Center for the Study of the Holocaust, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity, The Graduate Center – CUNY
Sara Horowitz, Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, York University
Carson Phillips, Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program, The Azrieli Foundation
 

Join us in Toronto for a thought-provoking exploration of the significance of Auschwitz in Holocaust narratives. Together, let us unravel the complexities of this landmark and contribute to a deeper understanding of its importance as part of the collective narrative of the Holocaust.

Contact Information

Carson Phillips, PhD
Manager of Academic Initiatives
Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program
The Azrieli Foundation

Contact Email

carson@azrielifoundation.org

URL

https://memoirs.azrielifoundation.org/the-auschwitz-collection

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CFP–GIRL, INTERRUPTED. Testimonies, Silences and Self-Censorship in Eastern European Women’s Life Writing.
 
September 20, 2024, Venue: “Babeș-Bolyai” University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
 

Send your title, abstract and bionote to the organiser, Dr. Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu at

andrada.pintilescu@ubbcluj.ro

andrada.pintilescu@gmail.com
 
You can also consult our recent publication on the topic, Récit de vie féminin dans l’Europe de l’Est et du Sud-Est/ Women’s Life Writing in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe here https://dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/ro/nr10.php 
 

Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu, PhD
Lecturer
Faculty of Letters
“Babeş-Bolyai” University,
Horea 7, Room 10
400174 Cluj-Napoca

http://ubbcluj.academia.edu/AndradaFatuTutoveanu

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Vernon Press invites book chapters for a forthcoming edited volume titled “Martyrs, Narratives, and Social Change in 20th-Century Mexico and Latin America”.

Deadline for Submissions: September 30, 2024

The book aims at revisiting the multiple ways in which (Christian) martyrdom remains at the center of social upheaval and political mobilization in Latin America. A basic notion underlying this book is that the differentiation between the religious and political spheres, a conspicuous feature of modernity can and should be further examined in order to shed light into the ways in which religious patterns inform contemporary social mobilization and remembrance. Even if religious and political beliefs and practices remain distinct domains in normative and analytical reasoning, the two “spheres” frequently overlap in social realities and present themselves intertwined in specific cases.

Scholars such as Arendt or Bauman have usually studied this overlap as the result of “destructive” forces unleashed by modern instrumental rationality while others, like Feher or Einsenstadt, have framed the issue as political religions that deviate from modern development. The latter is usually understood in terms of Max Weber’s rational-bureaucratic ideal type with the concomitant “disenchantment of the world”. 

This book, however, aims to look at martyrial narratives as part of non-deviant matrixes of meaning that infuse current political and social movements in the sub-continent.

Its main point of departure is that the overlap between political and religious beliefs and practices occurs in manners that are fully compatible with modern states and are implicated in the emergence of one more of the core characteristics of modernity: civil society. Therefore, martyrdom reveals itself as a fertile terrain within which to observe this apparent paradox. 

The present study aims to contribute to the understanding of the intersections between historical thinking, political sociology, and the sociology of religion and to advance the creation of trans-disciplinary interpretations rooted in sociological, anthropological, and historical thinking.  Martyrdom here will be understood as a narrative pattern similar to that of Christianity: persecution, violent death, a group of followers who assign meaning to the person´s suffering and memorialize them). 

From this narrative standpoint, martyrdom is indeed a paradoxical expression: antithetical concepts work together in a complex reshaping of religious and political concepts. Religion and politics are presented to us as complementary concepts; in martyrdom, the two create a set of meaningful actions. It is no wonder that death provides a terrain where religion and politics come together, sometimes conspicuously in the case of specific deaths.

But the mobilization produced around martyrs is also constructed around the social impossibility of neatly separating the two spheres. The two realms appear not only entwined but as emerging from one another. Differentiating them implies eroding the notion of martyrdom itself and making it illegible.

On the other hand, we must keep in mind the fact that many scholars have studied the apparently paradoxical ability of religious belief to serve both as an “opiate of the masses” and the “amphetamines of the people”. They have documented how different (and frequently opposing) interpretations of religion have provided social groups with ideological and organizational apparatuses.  This social malleability of religious beliefs and practices can be better seen through the study of martyrdom because it allows scholars to track transformations in meaning over time, and to draw comparisons with similar occurrences elsewhere while underlining the specifics of Latin American experiences.

The chapters in this book will inquire into the ways in which martyrdom legitimates social action and renders it meaningful, thus creating modes of remembrance and martyrial demands in several Latin American countries.

Some topics to cover:

• Martyrial accounts in secular settings: heroes, nationhood, and state
• Social mobilization and meaningful death
• Everyday forms of remembrance and memory patterns in contemporary forms of martyrdom
• Social networks and meaningful death
• Story-telling, creation, and contestation of martyrial accounts in Latin America
• Mnemonic devices: literature, museums, graphic novels, utilitarian objects, etc.

Chapters should be in English and 20-25 pages long.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2024.

Please send submissions to Marisol Lopez-Menendez: marisol.lopez@ibero.mx

URL

https://vernonpress.com/proposal/316/9f14b0e4c2432e14c82814f3c98e1dce

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Under Western Eyes. Central and Eastern Europe(ans) in North American Literature, Culture, and History

15-16 May 2025

University of Wrocław, Poland

Deadline for abstract submission:  October 31, 2024.

Lisa Grekul, a Ukrainian Canadian scholar and writer, concludes her interesting and personal Introduction to Leaving Shadows with a famous statement: “Write your stories down, make your voices heard” (2005: xxiii, emphasis in the original). In this way, she calls for a systematic reflection on ethnic and diasporic writing by Central and Eastern Europeans in North American literary, cultural, and historical contexts. The importance of writing one’s own story – expressed by Grekul and many other North American authors of Central and Eastern European descent – is also a response to the long history of stereotypical and highly problematic depictions of the region in North American literature and (popular) culture. The conference will focus on studying the various depictions of broadly-understood Central and Eastern Europe in works produced by émigré and diasporic authors and creators, as well as its mainstream representations. We are also interested in the changing historical and socio-political discourses regarding the place of Central and Eastern Europeans in North America. We seek submissions which would address the representations of migration to North America and contextualize the diasporic experience of various groups through the lens of literature, variegated texts of culture, as well as from historical perspectives. Through the interrogation of the suggested themes as well as the ones listed below, the conference aims at bringing together scholars from different disciplines as well as working in two languages: Polish and English.
 
We would like to invite discussions on the following and related issues:

• Central and Eastern Europe in American and Canadian literature, including commercial fiction,

non-fiction, poetry, children’s and young adult literature, and comics;

• Anglophone and non-anglophone writing by émigré and diasporic authors;
• Central and Eastern Europe in (popular) culture (press, film, TV, internet, video games);
• History of immigration, including the relations of Central and Eastern Europeans with Indigenous

Peoples, and its representations in literature and culture;

• Representations of memory, identity, otherness, home, religion, war, and liminality;
• Whiteness and race in the context of Central and Eastern Europeans;
• Central and Eastern European Jewishness in North American literature and culture;
• Ethnic and gender stereotypes associated with Central and Eastern Europeans;
• Translations and reception of Central and Eastern European literature in North America.

 
Please send an abstract of 300 words maximum and a short biography of 100 words as a single Word document to: american@uwr.edu.pl::Please apply this subject line: Under Western Eyes 2025
 
Deadline for abstract submission:  October 31, 2024. Notification of acceptance:  December 15, 2024. Registration: January 7- February 28, 2025
 
All submissions are reviewed by the members of the Organizing Committee. All abstracts and papers accepted for and presented at the conference must be in English or Polish. Papers will be 20 minutes maximum, followed by 10 minutes of discussion.
 
Conference fee:
450 PLN/100 €
300 PLN/70  €  – reduced fee for graduate students and early career scholars
 
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Prof. Anastasia Ulanowicz (University of Florida)
Prof. dr hab. Janusz Pasterski (University of Rzeszów)
 
Organizing Committee:
Dr. habil. Mateusz Świetlicki (lead convenor) – Institute of English Studies (University of Wrocław)
Dr. habil. Dagmara Drewniak –  Faculty of English (Adam Mickiewicz University)
Dr. Sylwia Kamińska-Maciąg –  Institute of Slavic Studies (University of Wrocław)
Dr. Izabella Kimak – Institute of Linguistics and Literature (Maria Curie-Skłodowska University)
Anna Bartnicka, MA (secretary) – Institute of English Studies (University of Wrocław)
 
Patronage:
Fulbright Poland

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We invite proposals for contributions to Travellers in Ottoman Lands Seminar Three (TIOL3) Places forgotten, Places Remembered, to be held in Istanbul, Wednesday 9 – Saturday 12 April 2025.
Deadline for Proposals: November 15, 2025

Three days of presentation sessions in the historical neighbourhoods of Karaköy and Beyoğlu will be followed by one day of excursions.

 The Seminar is presented by Travellers in Ottoman Lands, in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of Sabancı University, The Netherlands Institute in Turkey (NIT), The British Institute at Ankara (BIAA), The Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE), and Cornucopia, The Magazine for Connoisseurs of Turkey. 

Topics to be considered include (but are not limited to) the following:
• Horticulture and botany
•Memorials, cemeteries, places of worship of various faiths
• Women travellers
• Cuisine
• Art and Culture
• Travel and exile
• Archaeology
• Explorers and photographers
• Modes of travel
• Famous travellers
• Architecture

Proposals may be submitted either for individual presentations of 25 minutes or for panels of 3–4speakers of 25 minutes each. Contributions for a panel about the Feriköy Protestant Cemetery of Istanbul are especially welcomed. Please include a biography of no more than 200 words, presentation title and a 300-word abstract. Proposals should be submitted to ottomanlandsastene@gmail.com by 15 November 2024 at the latest. All proposals will be subject to peer review and their acceptance will be announced by mid-January 2025. Registration will open on 31 January 2025 when the draft program will also be available. 

TIOL3 follows the successful Travellers in Ottoman Lands: The Botanical Legacy (TIOL1) held inEdinburgh in 2017 and Travellers in Ottoman Lands: The Balkans, Anatolia and Beyond (TIOL2) held in Sarajevo in 2022. Peer reviewed papers from TIOL1 have already been published and the papers from TIOL2 are currently in the process of publication.

 For enquiries about the seminar please send an email to Dr. Marloes Cornelissen marloes.cornelissen@sabanciuniv.edu or to ottomanlandsastene@gmail.com
 

Contact Information

For enquiries about the seminar please send an email to Dr. Marloes Cornelissen marloes.cornelissen@sabanciuniv.edu or to ottomanlandsastene@gmail.com 

Contact Email

ottomanlandsastene@gmail.com

URL

https://www.travellersinottomanlands.com

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Call for paper for a special issue: “Medical Objects in Illness Narratives”

Volume 30 of the European Journal of English Studies (2026)

Deadline for abstracts:  30 November 2024

This special issue will explore the depiction of medical objects (speculum, needles, scan machines, surgical instruments, wheelchairs, ventilators, hospital beds, etc.) in pathographies, that is illness narratives from patients’ perspectives. We will consider both life writing and fictional pathographies in this investigation, and will seek to include essays on literature, art and film. The special issue’s main aim will be to investigate the ways in which encounters with medical objects disrupt the narrative, and how they become a useful focal point through which authors negotiate issues such as the self as a subject and/or object, embodied experience in unfamiliar medical environments, or the patient’s confrontation with new technologies.

We anticipate three major areas of interest within this overarching focus. The first of these is the encounter narrative, in which patients are confronted by, build relationships with, incorporate, or otherwise portray medical objects in their stories. The second will emphasize object theory, looking at the objectification of the patient’s body, as the process of illness and treatment moves it from the category of subject to being a part of the hospital apparatus. The third strand will focus on the disruption of narrative caused by medical objects, thinking through a narratological lens.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• The affective potential of encounters with medical objects
• Re-imagined/re-purposed medical objects (e.g. as artefacts)
• What is gained/lost in the encounter with medical objects
• The patient’s body as a medical object
• Re-imagining the relationship of the doctor to the medical object
• Medical objects and femininity/masculinity
• Medical objects in the European context vs in other environments
• The historical circumstances medical objects invoke and how they are negotiated/challenged (e.g. the medical object as a symbol of colonialism in (post)colonial spaces)
• The medical object as a symbol of knowledge/power
• Material encounters with medical objects focusing on physical contact
• Analysis of patients’ attachments or sense of dependency on medical objects
• Medical objects as symbols of transience
• How futuristic medical objects are imagined in science fiction or narratives focused on AI

Submission Instructions

Full manuscript deadline: May 30, 2025.

Detailed proposals (up to 1,000 words) for full essays (7,500 or more words), or 500 words for shorter pieces (ca. 2-3,000 words) discussing a specific position as well as a short biography (max.100 words) should be sent to all of the editors by 30 November 2024:

Polina Mackay: mackay.p@unic.ac.cy

Cristina Hurtado-Botella: cristina.hurtado1@um.es

Joanne ‘Bob’ Whalley: b.whalley@arts.ac.uk

This issue will be part of volume 30 (2026). All inquiries regarding this issue can be sent to the three guest editors.

Warm regards,

The editors

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CFP Victorians and Victorian Literature Abroad (2/25/2025) Special Issue of Sun Yat-sen Journal of Humanities

Victorian globetrotters were of different shapes and types, be they men or women of letters, scientists (such as geologists and plant collectors), artists, photographers, diplomats, military officers or soldiers, merchants or traders, medics, missionaries, or simply leisure tourists. Diverse as they were, they crossed national boundaries and travelled to far-off places worldwide. Victorian writings recorded their footprints and grasp of the world outside their homeland also break the geographical and cultural barriers. Among the best-known are Charles Dickens’s American Notes and Pictures of Italy, John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice, Charles Darwin’s Voyages, R. L. Stevenson’s In the South Seas, Harriet Martineau’s Retrospect of Western Travel, Isabella L. Bird’s Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, just to name a few. Publishers such as John Murray, renowned for travel books, and periodicals such as Punch produced a prodigious amount of works related to other countries. Significantly, the many fictional narratives, personal diaries, travelogues, and journalistic publications have been inscribed with rich biographical and historical contexts, vigorous imaginativeness, and opportunities for cultural exchanges past and present. Readers are lured to travel to the “Victorian” world and to consider the numerous encounters with “abroad.” Meanwhile, Victorian Literature’s rich spatial and temporal distinctions also allow for extensions and afterlives in forms such as translation, adaptation and recreation in other countries or foreign languages. Victorian scholarship has thus attracted new critical focus in recent years. This special issue seeks contributions relating to the history and depictions of Victorian authors regarding travel, appraisals and revisiting from global perspectives, including how they are being received or taught outside the UK.

The Special Issue No. 59 of Sun Yat-Sen Journal of Humanities, to be published July 2025

(Submission  deadline  28  February  2025),  invites  scholarly essays  to  explore  Victorians  

and Victorian Literature Abroad. Topics may include but are not limited to:

Victorian Literary Writers who Travelled Abroad and their Writings

Victorians  Abroad  and  their  Writings  (Travelogues,  Tales,  Correspondences, Diaries, Memoirs)

 Travels and Travellers in the Victorian Novel

Travel Writings and Illustrations in Victorian Periodicals

 Victorian Women’s Travel Writings

Scientists, Medics, Missionaries, their Works, Reflections, and Impacts

Reception of Victorian Literature by Other Countries or Cultures Then/ After

Imperial Gaze, Cultural Interventions, Conflicts and Assimilations

Time Traveller, Armchair Traveller, Imaginative Traveller

Literary or Commercial Travel Writings

Teaching Victorian Literature Outside British Isles

Translations, Adaptations, Recreations in Other Countries or Foreign Languages.

New Critical or Theoretical Focus, Pedagogical Approaches, Virtual Reality

Manuscripts  should  be  between  7500—10,000  words  and  follow  The  MLA  Manual  of  Style.

Please  submit  one  electronic  copy,  a  500-word  abstract  (as  an  attachment  in  Word),  a  

short biography and contact information to sysjoh@mail.nsysu.edu.tw and cc to the guest editors:

Professor Shu-Fang Lai,

Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-Sen University, Taiwan;

sflai@mail.nsysu.edu.tw

Professor Fumie Tamai,

Faculty of Global Communications, Doshisha University, Japan; ftamai@mail.doshisha.ac.jp

For more details about the journal, see https://sysjoh-la.nsysu.edu.tw/

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Call for Papers: Fashion, Style & Popular Culture

Special Issue: ‘Queer Celebrities: Fashion, Style and Influence in Popular Culture’

Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2025

View the full call here>>

https://www.intellectbooks.com/fashion-style-popular-culture#call-for-papers

Fashion, Style & Popular Culture invites scholars, critics and artists to submit papers for a Special Issue exploring the intersection of queerness, celebrity culture, fashion and style. How are queer celebrities influencing, shaping and transforming popular culture through their fashion and stylistic choices? We are interested in contributions that critically engage with the roles of queer celebrities in fashion as agents of change, as symbols of resistance, and as architects of a more inclusive and diverse cultural landscape.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Iconography and Symbolism: Symbols, motifs in queer celebrities’ fashion choices.

Fashion and Activism: Queer celebrities using fashion for activism, advocacy, social change.

Queer Aesthetics and Design: Queer aesthetics in celebrity fashion designers and stylists.

Media Representation: Queer celebrity portrayals in film, tv, music videos, digital media.

Queer Influencers: Tension between self-commodification and contributing to queer culture.

Fan Culture and Imitation: Queer celebrity fashion in imitation, cosplay, fan communities.

Queer Celebrity Fashion Brand Collaborations: Impact on brand and consumer behaviour.

Body Politics and Gender Fluidity: How queer celebrities challenge conventional body. norms and gender binaries through fashion, including impact on societal norms.

Queer Celebrities and the Fashion Industry: Impact on fashion industry’s sizing, fit, gender neutrality.

Identity: Queer celebrity fashion and identity formation, self-expression.

Intersectionality and Global Perspectives: Global influence of queer celebrities on fashion and diverse expressions of queerness in different cultural contexts.

Queer or Queer baiting? Exploitation of the queer market through queer fashion and style.

Each topic invites contributors to delve into the multifaceted relationship between queer celebrities and the world of fashion. We encourage submissions that offer unique, including non-western, perspectives, interdisciplinary approaches and innovative methodologies.

The deadline for manuscripts of 5000–7000 words (using Intellect House Style) is 1 July 2025.

Please visit the journal website for Notes for Contributors:

https://www.intellectbooks.com/fashion-style-popular-culture#call-for-papers

Please submit full manuscripts for double blind peer-review to Dirk Reynders at dirk_reynders@hotmail.com.

Questions regarding journal standards and submissions should be sent to Hilde Van den Buck at hdv26@drexel.edu.

General questions regarding the journal can be sent to Joseph H. Hancock, II at joseph.hancockii@gmail.com.