The deadlines have passed for the following listings, or they are notices of new issues of life writing journals. We provide this information here for points of reference for scholars interested in trends in the field.

Deadline for Submissions September 11, 2023

Call for Chapter Contributors—Cambridge Companion to U.S. First Ladies Book Project

We are seeking chapter contributors for an edited book titled Cambridge Companion to U.S. First Ladies. According to the series editor, the Cambridge Companion books offer “introductions/overviews to particular themes/events/figures. The books usually consist of 12-15 essays and they present the latest ideas/research/scholarship in a comprehensive and accessible manner. Students make up a portion of the readership for these books, but they are also read by general readers and individual scholars who are interested in the topic. When done correctly, the books not only provide an overview, but also make an important intervention into the study of the particular topic at hand.”

Cambridge Companion to U.S. First Ladies will explore the social, cultural, and political influence of the first lady institution and the women who’ve held the position. We already have contributors covering the following subjects: first ladies as political assets/liabilities, first ladies in wartime, first ladies and slavery/civil rights, first ladies’ role in international diplomacy, first ladies as trendsetters, first ladies as Mourners-in-Chief, first ladies’ use of media, and representations of first ladies in film. But there’s still a lot of ground to cover, so we’re looking for additional authors to contribute chapters on topics such as:

First ladies as model of American womanhood/Impact of gender norms on first ladies
First ladies as social advocates
Legacy, memorialization, and public memory of first ladies
First ladies and illness

We’re also open to other chapter themes, particularly those covering first ladies and/or topics that are underrepresented in previous works. We’re looking to recruit authors from diverse research and professional perspectives including history, political communication, public address, museum studies, political science, and media studies.

Final chapters will be 8,000 – 10,000 words, including endnotes, using Chicago Manual of Style, 17-th edition Notes-Bibliography formatting. The project timeline is as follows:

September 11: Call for contributors – letters of interest due
Late September: Contributors selected & begin first drafts
April 2024: First drafts due
May/June 2024: Edited chapters returned
July/August 2024: Revisions due
August/September 2024: Final edits
October 2024: Submission of completed manuscript to press

If you’d like to contribute to this project, please submit the following to editors Lisa Burns (Lisa.Burns@quinnipiac.edu) and Teri Finneman (finnemte@gmail.com) by noon ET on Monday, September 11-th: a short blurb explaining your interest in the project, a brief abstract/chapter sketch (150 – 300 words) on the topic you want to cover, and a short bio (about 75 words) detailing your related research experience. Authors selected to participate will be notified by September 22nd.

Contact Information
Lisa Burns (Quinnipiac University) and Teri Finneman (University of Kansas)
Contact Email
Lisa.Burns@quinnipiac.edu

Call for Papers: Dear Liz

(edited by Órla Meadhbh Murray & Maria Tamboukou)

Abstract deadline: 4th September 2023

Edited book proposal intended for Routledge’s Literary Studies in the Social Sciences (series editor Maria Tamboukou)

Calling any scholars who use Liz Stanley’s work. This edited collection will showcase how different scholars have been inspired or influenced by Liz Stanley’s work. We are looking for chapters of around 6000 words discussing your own work in relation to an aspect of Liz’s work. This could be focused on new research, reflecting on previous work, or even pedagogical reflections and all chapters will start with a short letter entitled ‘Dear Liz’, which will be the central title of the book. Chapters can be solo- or co-authored.

Please send an abstract (up to 300 words) and a short bio (up to 100 words) via email to: orla.m.murray@durham.ac.uk AND m.tamboukou@uel.ac.uk by 4^th September 2023. Full chapters will be due by end of June 2024.

Thanks,

Órla

Dr. Órla Meadhbh Murray (she/her)
Lecturer in Sociology, Durham University

Co-founder Institutional Ethnography Network

Literature and Life Writing
Midwest Regional Meeting of the Conference on Christianity and Literature
October 23-24, 2023
Wheaton College

deadline for submissions:

September 7, 2023

This conference brings together scholars of Christianity and literature with contemporary writers of spiritual memoir to celebrate religious life writing and consider the forms, features, and thematic possibilities within the range of associated genres. How do literary works and forms shape portrayals of spiritual life? What might literature accomplish in the spiritual life within writer and reader? How might the literary space of religiously inflected life writing offer particular theological content?

This conference will involve traditional panels, creative readings, and student panels, as well as a scholarly keynote. Attendees will also have the opportunity to attend readings and large public talks by several contemporary spiritual memoir writers, including Esau McCaulley, author of the forthcoming memoir How Far to the Promised Land? and Daniel Nayeri, award-winning author of Everything Sad is Untrue, who will be on campus that week.

The scholarly keynote will be given by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Ph.D., Marquette University), professor of theology at Wheaton College, editor of The Coleridge Bulletin, and a writer on British Romanticism, religion and literature, and the history of Christian thought. He is the author or editor of numerous books, including The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion(2021) and Religion in Romantic England: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2018).

Possible topics include the following:

problems in genre: spiritual memoir/spiritual autobiography/spiritual life writing
periodization of religious life writing
traditions/inheritance in spiritual life writing
trends in contemporary spiritual life writing
portrayal of the divine in spiritual life writing
children’s literature and/as spiritual life writing
confession, failure, hamartiology in spiritual life writing
social media (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Substack) and spiritual life writing
celebrity/publicity/the public square and spiritual life writing
race and spiritual life writing
the morphology of conversion (or deconversion) in spiritual life writing
private writings/unpublished autobiographical material
fictional spiritual life writing
politics of religious life writing
religious life writing as theory/theology
poetic genres and spiritual life writing
gender within spiritual life writing
literary epigraphs and allusions within spiritual life writing
biblical form and language in religious life writing
emplottedness within religious life writing
development and decline in religious life writing
“deconstruction” (or deconstruction!) and spiritual life writing
visions, transcendence, and the miraculous within spiritual life writing
sentiment and emotion in spiritual life writing
narratives of enslavement and/as spiritual life writing
rhetorics of spiritual autobiography
ethical pitfalls within spiritual life writing
portraying others’ lives/portraying one’s own life in spiritual life writing
the individual and the church/community of faith in spiritual life writing

As always, the Midwest CCL is open to other proposals concerning the relationship of Christianity and literature, including panel proposals. Undergraduate students must submit their entire paper for consideration; eligible undergraduate papers will be entered into the national CCL Undergraduate Writing Contest for a cash prize and publication on the CCL website.

Send abstracts (200-400 words) via email to cclconference@wheaton.edu by Sept. 7 2023. Panel proposals welcome. Accepted abstracts/panels will be notified promptly. Participants in the conference must be members of the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Questions may be sent to tiffany.kriner@wheaton.edu.

Deadline for Submissions, August 31, 2023

CFP–“Animal Subjects” (8/31/2023; 2/14-17/2024) College Art Association Conference, Chicago, USA

The emergence of animal studies as a distinct field in the last twenty years has led to increased interest in treating animals as subjects. While we can never fully grasp the entirety of an animal’s experience and world, as famously argued by Thomas Nagel, animal subjectivity has been taken up in contemporary art and scholarship in part to examine consider how we can cultivate positive multispecies entanglements that respect animal agency. On the other hand, animal experiences in historical contexts like bestiaries and cabinets of curiosities, circuses and freakshows, zoos and menageries are slowly being recentered to recognize how animals regularly had to navigate the systems of colonialism, capitalism, and bio-politics. The supposedly inferior status of animals in the Enlightened hierarchy of being was used to justify the subjugation of colonial subjects, whether through visual and linguistic rhetoric or through physical proximity, while pets and exotic animals in menageries served as extensions of their human owners, reflecting the latter’s power and status. How can we talk about animals meaningfully without falling prey to the binary of human vs non? This panel invites papers that explore animal histories in relation to systems of power, both past and present. Its goal is to recenter animal subjecthood and to ask what it means to write animal narratives, whether this is a form of speaking-for or if doing so is to conduct a critical intervention into the humanist approach to art history.

Field(s) of Study:
Time Period: Modern (1800-present) (**will also consider abstracts for papers focusing on the 18th century**)
Topics: Social History
Topics: Animal Studies
Topics: Environmental Art

Key dates

August 31: Deadline to submit proposals.

September 18: Session chair deadline to finalize sessions, inform participants via email invitation. Accepted submitters will receive an email to access their own SC after September 25.

October: Conference registration opens, and full conference schedule is posted.

How to submit

Instructions for submission are provided here
You can submit your abstract through the link available on the CFP official page

Prior to submission, ensure the following steps are completed

Create a CAA account. Membership is not mandatory at this stage. If you are not a member, you can create an account at the provided link. Skip the payment and joining process for now.
Prepare your presentation title and abstract, adhering to the 250-word limit.
Prepare a condensed CV, approximately 2 pages in length.
(Optional) Gather relevant images or documentation. Please limit this section to five images that support your proposal.

Contact Information

Margaryta Golovchenko

Ph.D. candidate (she/her/hers)

History of Art and Architecture Department

University of Oregon

Contact Email

mgolovch@uoregon.edu

URL

https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/Session12941.html

Makeshift Historiographies: Case Studies in HIV/AIDS Cultural Archives

College Art Association Annual Conference, February 14–17, 2024, Hilton Chicago.

deadline for submissions:

August 31, 2023

For hundreds of artists who died of AIDS-related causes, only scant traces of their work—if any at all—exist in institutional archival repositories. Therefore, art-historical work revolving around the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic has often called for inventive archival methods that blend traditional forms of research with community work and emotional labor. Over the last fifteen years, scholars and activists have contended with the gaps and erasures in such archives as well as the geographic, racial, and gender biases that have characterized many historical projects. In so doing, many have necessarily drawn on and even created community-based repositories, personal collections, and oral history initiatives. The precarity and preciousness of such archives are central topics in recent scholarship, including Marika Cifor’s, Viral Cultures: Activist Archiving in the Age of AIDS (2022), Jarrett Earnest’s Devotion: Today’s Future Becomes Tomorrow’s Archive (2022), and Alexandra Juhasz and Theodore Kerr’s We Are Having This Conversation Now: The Times of AIDS Cultural Production (2022).

Indebted to these texts, our panel calls for papers focused on case studies elaborating on archival methods related to art histories of HIV/AIDS. Seeking to acknowledge the efforts of scholars, curators, and archivists who have worked to complicate this emergent canon and reimagine the terrain of AIDS cultural production, we welcome papers that reintroduce artists or their legacies into public and scholarly discourse, detailing the journey from discovery, inquiry, analysis, and sharing. We are especially interested in papers offering methodological reflections that might be of use to individuals engaged in parallel projects.

This CFP is for a panel at the College Art Association’s 112th Annual Conference, February 14–17, 2024 at the Hilton Chicago. This is an in-person panel.

You are invited to submit your presentation proposals before August 31. More information about how to submit can be found here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2024/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html

Kyle Croft and Jackson Davidow @ College Art Association

contact email:

kcroft@visualaids.org

Personal documents and ephemera as sources for interdisciplinary Holocaust scholarship

CFP for a special issue of Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History

Deadline for Submissions, August 31, 2023

Edited by Hannah Holtschneider (University of Edinburgh) and Amy Simon (Michigan State University)

Since the 1970s, and proliferating in the 1980s, works of life-writing and of academic scholarship have sought to reconstruct the experience of individuals during persecution, and as refugees in different parts of the world. In the past decade micro-historical research has drawn increasingly on personal documents from the Holocaust. Branching out from works on Holocaust testimony and memoirs, literary scholars have engaged with diaries, letters and other ego-documents, and sociologists, linguists and ethnographers have shown interest in personal archives of families affected by the Holocaust. At the same time, the past two decades have seen a rise in publications of memoirs and other forms of life writing that engages specifically with such sources. Typically, such works proceed from one disciplinary perspective and rarely engage with scholarship working on similar sources but with a different scholarly method. Yet, a conversation of scholars in different disciplines working on the same documentary evidence is still lacking. Volumes such as The Diary: The Epic of Everyday Life models a different approach by bringing together literary and cultural scholars with historians in the exploration of diary writing.

The proposed special issue seeks to facilitate a similar conversation and bring together scholarship on personal documents from the Holocaust. The aim is to develop and test multi- and interdisciplinary work regarding the value of different ways of approaching and interrogating these sources. We expect historians, literary scholars, linguists and translation scholars, historical anthropologists and sociologists among others to contribute to this special issue. We also encourage those working on documents from hitherto unexplored archival collections of Jewish refugees to majority-world locations, to propose contributions.

To this end we are inviting proposals for research articles of 7,000-12,000 words (incl. references and bibliography), annotated translations and research notes. We expect to host two gatherings during the writing process to engage in productive conversation about the links between topics and cross-disciplinary approaches. The finished articles should act both as stand-alone research papers and model a methodological conversation across the entire special issue suggesting new directions for research in this field.

Possible themes engaging personal documents and ephemera from the Holocaust could include, but are by no means limited to:

Multiple approaches to the same sources to explore gains of multidisciplinary research and opportunities for interdisciplinary work
The role of emotions for writing about personal archives
The relevance of materiality
Space and place in personal documents
Gender as an analytical category
Connecting micro- with macro-history
Language, translation and genre
The value of engaging one collection of documents or a single diary
The value of working across a number of collections or different sources
Ethical considerations of writing about the lives of ‘private’ individuals
Sociological, anthropological, historical, literary theory arising from engagement with personal documents

Timeline:

300 word proposal with 100 word bio by 31 August 2023. Please send this to h.holtschneider@ed.ac.uk and simonamy@msu.edu.
Notification to submit full article by 30 September 2023.
Publication is envisaged by the end of 2025.

Contact Info:

Dr Hannah Holtschneider, University of Edinburgh, UK

Contact Email:

h.holtschneider@ed

CFP for Palgrave Handbook on Parenthood in Popular Culture,

Deadline for abstracts: 31 August 2023

Edited by Elizabeth Podnieks (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Helena Wahlström Henriksson (Centre for Gender Research at Uppsala University)

As editors of the Palgrave Handbook on Parenthood in Popular Culture, which is under contract and has 15 commissioned chapters, we seek approximately 25 additional chapters (6,500-7,500 words) on topics related to parenthood in popular culture. We aim to foreground Indigenous, racialized, LGBTQ+ and non-normative experiences, in contributions that explore popular cultural representations of parental identities from intersectional perspectives, and from diverse cultural and geopolitical locations. Chapters may focus on either mothers/mothering/motherhood or fathers/fathering/fatherhood, or interrogate parents/parenting/parenthood as more comprehensive terms, across genders and in non-binary contexts. We also welcome contributions focusing on non-motherhood/non-fatherhood.

By “popular culture,” we signal an expansive term that includes, but is not limited to, the following mediated texts and expressions: literature, TV, film, magazines, journalism/news, social media and technology, music, performance/theatre, advertising, sports, politics, video games and virtual reality, comics/graphics, tattoo art, fine art, public art/graffiti, exhibitions, and fashion. With this Handbook we aim to showcase contemporary representations of parents, parenting, and parenthood in twenty-first-century popular culture, critically assessing how these representations help to shape, respond to, and redefine notions of families and parents, as well as popular culture genres, in the new millennium.

As described on its website, “Palgrave Handbooks are high-quality, original reference works that bring together specially-commissioned chapters, cutting-edge research, and the latest review articles in their fields. Our Handbooks provide an unparalleled overview of a specific field of research, while also setting the agenda for future directions of the discipline.” (https://www.palgrave.com/gp/palgrave-handbooks).

Schedule:
31 August 2023: Abstract (approx. 250-350 words) due to both editors:

lpodniek@torontomu.ca; helena.henriksson@gender.uu.se

1 October Acceptance of Abstracts from Editors
15 January 1^st draft of chapter due
15 March Revisions feedback from Editors
1 May 2024: final version of chapters due
Fall 2024: editors submit final book manuscript to press

If you have any questions, please send queries to both editors: lpodniek@torontomu.ca; helena.henriksson@gender.uu.se

Deadline for Submissions Aug. 25, 2023

“Metafiction, Autofiction, and Other Metanarrative Forms of Storytelling”

Dear members,

I am leading a seminar on “Metafiction, Autofiction, and Other Metanarrative Forms of Storytelling” at the MSA conference with invited speakers Brian McHale and Josh Toth. Please consider participating.

Registration has commenced and will end on August 25. If you are interested in participating, all you need to do is sign up now. You do not submit an abstract at this point. Five- to seven-page papers are due about a five weeks prior to the conference. More information about MSA seminars can be found here: https://msa.press.jhu.edu/conferences/msa2023/seminarOverview.html

Modern Studies Association Conference, New York, October 26-29, 2023

Leader:

Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis, Associate Professor, New York Institute of Technology

Invited Participants:

Josh Toth, Professor, MacEwan University,
Brian McHale, Emeritus, Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor, Ohio State University

Metafiction, Autofiction, and Other Metanarrative Forms of Storytelling

With three recent publications on metafiction in the last two years—Truth and Metafiction by Josh Toth (2021), Metafiction and the Postwar Novel: Foes, Ghosts, and Faces in the Water by Andrew Dean (2021) and Metafiction by Yaël Schlick (2022)—there is a resurgence of interest in the theory and practice of this literary form, which had fallen from favor after reaching its pinnacle in the eighties. This seminar seeks to explore the various metanarrative facades of fiction, while also expanding perspectives on metanarrative commentary outside verbal storytelling from modernism to postmodernism and beyond. The seminar will attempt to address the following questions.

What are the theoretical frameworks that shape metafiction, and what do recent renditions (works by Salvador Plascencia, Hernan Diaz, Susan Choi to name a few) indicate about its development? Is metafiction a self-enclosed hermeneutics, or does it also foreground issues of class, gender, sexuality, or race as seen in novels such as Mat Jason’s Pym? If metafiction is favored by male authorship–as some claim–how do women writers like Margaret Atwood, Clarice Lispector, Amanda Michalopoulou, Rachael Cusk, and others fit in?

How is metafiction manifested and what purposes does it serve in specific genres: graphic novels, children’s and young adult fiction, autobiography/memoire/life-writing, poetry, film, or other forms of visual and verbal storytelling? What is the role of metanarrative commentary in popular culture in general? At a time when commercials, documentaries (Netflix: Adams Knows Everything), cartoons (Netflix: A Tale Dark & Grimm), and puppet shows (The Immortal Jellyfish Girl) employ metanarration, it is imperative that we reexamine meta-references across genres.

Presenters will have the opportunity to submit their work in a companion on Metafiction, edited by Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis and Josh Toth, currently under contract with Routledge.

Regards,

Lissi Athanasiou-Krikelis, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English

Director, Interdisciplinary Studies

New York Institute of Technology

16 West 61st Street, Room #608

New York, NY 10023

website: https://lissiathanasioukrikelis.com/

“Death in Public” /// C19 ’24 Panel Proposal (8/21/2023; 3/14-16/2024) Pasadena USA.

deadline for submissions:

August 21, 2023

Please consider submitting an abstract for the following panel proposal for The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists’ (C19’s) 2024 conference in Pasadena. Feel free to reach out with any questions.

Death in Public

In “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner urged us to consider how sex—something seemingly private—is indeed “mediated by publics.” Similar to Berlant and Warner, we investigate how the concept of death, broadly defined, was determined, imagined, augmented, and regulated as a public spectacle throughout the nineteenth century.

Although our contemporary image of a good death is often one of relatives and loved ones gathered around a hospital bed in hushed silence, or the calm stillness of the hospice room, the American public is simultaneously entranced by the idea of spectacular death. Years into a resurgence of the popularity of true crime, it remains the most widely listened-to podcast genre in the United States. On social media platforms such as TikTok, interest in natural burials, morbid curiosities, serial killers, and the paranormal has been used to scam viewers into buying apps, supplements, and home security devices. Offline, the COVID-19 pandemic has politicized and publicized death and sickness on a national and global scale, in a way perhaps last seen during the 1917 flu epidemic. In one age of public interest in death, we look back to another.

Biological, social, and political deaths became increasingly public in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, both as a result of highly visible, recognizable violence, such as chattel slavery, the Civil War, and presidential assassinations, as well as more insidious cultural and institutional phenomena, such as the rise of Native American residential schools, tenement housing, and asylums in the second half of the century. These events inspired interests in mesmerism and esoteric death rituals at the time, such as spirit photography and séances, that permeated contemporary religious and literary imaginations. In the twenty-first century, humanities scholars continue to respond to these events, nuancing their understandings of death and dying and revealing how the increasingly public nature of these phenomena enable them to enter new contexts and adopt new meanings.

This panel seeks projects that investigate death and the public imagination throughout the nineteenth century, including but not limited to those that consider:

- Infectious diseases and epidemics (smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, measles, malaria, etc.)

- Public displays of grief and mourning

- Imaginations of the “good” and “bad” death

- Eugenics

- Social or political death, imprisonment, or institutionalization

- Chronic illness, terminal illness, and/or disability

- Ghosts and hauntings, mediums and mesmerism

- “The little death”

- Public deaths (murders, assassinations, executions, etc.)

- Death in/and/of the Archive

- Queer temporalities, queer deaths

If you would like to be considered for this panel, please email a 250-word abstract as well as a brief biography to Lucy Wallitsch (lucy.wallitsch@emory.edu) and Alex Anderson (ande1204@purdue.edu) by 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday, August 21.

Thirteenth Biennial MESEA Conference, June 12-14, 2024, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu –

Moving Cultures, Moving Ethnicities

Open Period for Submissions: August 15, 2023 – November 15, 2023

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

- John McLeod (University of Leeds)

- Anna-Leena Toivanen (University of Eastern Finland)

- Atlantic Studies Lecture TBC

Those of us who are “world”-travelers have the distinct experience of being different in different “worlds” and of having the capacity to remember other “worlds” and ourselves in them.

– Maria Lugones, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” (1987)

We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.

– Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing (2016)

The MESEA 2024 conference invites contributions that address the diverse layers, definitions, and ‘pathways’ of mobility, including the mobility of people from one place to another, crossings and intersections of cultures, and the formation of hybrid cultural forms. At the same time, mobility, border-crossings, and migration move people emotionally, either directly or through a wide range of cultural representations, and generate various emotional responses ranging from joy and relief to fear, loss and frustration. Affecting both those who travel, those who stay, and those encountered when journeying, such experiences are personal and collective, local and global, theoretical and empirical, and reveal the perplexing nature of mobility, whether this is voluntarily or involuntarily ventured.

This conference aims to look into the pluriform contact zones that form with regard to global mobility, and to further explore the ways migration affects experience in diverse ethnic and postcolonial contexts. We seek to examine questions such as:

- How does mobility from the perspective of affect and lived experience shed light on the variety of modes and genres of (post-)migrant experiences?

- How are the experiences of displacement, forced migration, and other conditions of unfreedom represented in narrative?

- How are narratives of mobility and migration formed and articulated historically?

- To what degree do narratives of mobility contribute to the formation of transnational and translocal communities, and which narratives in various affective registers circulate within them?

- In what ways are individual and collective memories of mobility (re)framed emotionally, for instance through expressions of melancholy, dissociation, grief, or vulnerability?

- How is the crossing of cultural borders and transculturation articulated in world literature, film, and performance art?

- What kind of emergent and/or alternative cultural practices are connected with mobility? How do they challenge dominant notions of identity and belonging?

The 2024 MESEA Conference seeks to explore the diversity of the phenomenon in the nexus of culture, history, borders, and geopolitics. Potential paper and panel submissions can address but are not limited to topics such as follows:

- nostalgia and narratives of return

- narratives of forced migration, human trafficking, deportation, and transportation

- trauma, displacement, and emplacement

- Gothic journeys and uncanny spaces

- tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and other genres of migration narratives

- mourning, melancholia, and migration

- activism, solidarity, consciousness raising

- autobiography and memory

- transforming and hybridizing cultural practices and texts

- cosmopolitanisms

- climate migration/mobility

- home(-making) in migration

- border communities

- rebordering and debordering

- gendered perspectives on mobility

- the ethics and economics of migration

- migration as an opportunity

Abstracts should be submitted to our website at https://mesea.org/ between August 15 and November 15, 2023. Submitters will receive notification of acceptance by January 10, 2024.

The conference will be arranged as an onsite conference at UEF Joensuu Campus.
Preference will be given to complete panel proposals with an inter/transdisciplinary and/or transnational focus. Panels may not include more than 2 participants from the same institution. Presenters are expected to be members of the association in 2024.
Previous MESEA Conferences have led to high quality publications (https://mesea.org/publications/). As in previous years, MESEA will award at least one Young Scholars Excellence Award.

For more information please visit: http://www.mesea.org

Contact Email
ludmila_martan@yahoo.com
URL
https://mesea.org/joensuu-2024/

“Death in Public” /// C19 ’24 Panel Proposal (8/21/2023; 3/14-16/2024) Pasadena USA.

deadline for submissions:

August 21, 2023

Death in Public

This panel seeks projects that investigate death and the public imagination throughout the nineteenth century, including but not limited to those that consider:

- Infectious diseases and epidemics (smallpox, cholera, yellow fever, measles, malaria, etc.)

- Public displays of grief and mourning

- Imaginations of the “good” and “bad” death

- Eugenics

- Social or political death, imprisonment, or institutionalization

- Chronic illness, terminal illness, and/or disability

- Ghosts and hauntings, mediums and mesmerism

- “The little death”

- Public deaths (murders, assassinations, executions, etc.)

- Death in/and/of the Archive

- Queer temporalities, queer deaths

Call for Papers

“Wildness and Wilderness in American Travel Writing”

The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing (SSATW) at the American Literature Association Fall Symposium

Oct. 26-28, 2023.
Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

Deadline for Submissions: August 10, 2023

The Society for the Study of American Travel Writing (SSATW) seeks proposals for a panel on “Wildness and Wilderness in American Travel Writing” at the American Literature Association’s Fall Symposium (October 26-28, 2023, in Santa Fe, New Mexico). Scholarship on any region or era of American Travel Writing is welcome.

The unfamiliar, unexplored, and unsettled places have long captivated the American literary imagination and travel writing. Whether we think of wilderness as sacred, shrinking, imagined, or simulated, how has the spectacle of wildness, in unsettled or settled spaces, impinged upon representations of the American scene by travelers? Proposals might consider how travel writers have metaphorically linked subject matter and creative practice in renditions of confronting geograpies of wilderness and wildness. They might also think about the impact that the wild or the wildernss has had on individual writers, ideas of nation, or constructions of genre.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 300 words no later than August 10, 2023, to Susan Roberson (susan.roberson@retiree.tamuk.edu). Early submissions are welcome.

Contact Info:

Susan Roberson

Contact Email:

susan.roberson@retiree.tamuk.edu

Women and the Sea in the Early Modern World

University of Plymouth UK, Sept. 6 and 7, 2023

Deadline for Submission August 6, 2023

In-Person Online Hybrid

We invite submissions for 20-minute papers from PhD students, early career researchers and established researchers from across the world. The symposium will run in a hybrid and in-person format.

Call for papers
The call for papers is now open. Proposals may cover topics that includes but are not limited to the themes listed below. Please email your abstract of 200–300 words and a short biography/CV to elaine.murphy@plymouth.ac.uk. The closing date for abstracts is Sunday 6 August 2023.

Themes that will be covered include

- Experiences of women at sea

- Women living and working in maritime communities (dockyards, port towns, fishing)

- Women and the Navy

- Women and piracy

- Women and migration

- Enslaved women and the sea

- Indigenous women and the sea

- Women and private companies (EIC, VOC etc)

- Material culture of women at sea

- Lives ashore – separation from sailor husbands/family members

- Gender and the sea

Organisers

- Dr Anna Maria Forssberg, Vasa Museum

- Dr Deborah Hamer, New Netherlands Institute

- Dr Elaine Murphy, University of Plymouth

This event is free to attend. Registration is required and will be available soon. Please contact elaine.murphy@plymouth.ac.uk with any queries.

URL

https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/whats-on/women-and-the-se

Call for Book Chapters: Memory Studies: An Anthology of Perspectives

Chapter proposals are invited for a volume on contemporary memory and literary studies edited by Dr. D. Sudha Rani ( VNRVJIET ), Dr. Rachel Irdaya Raj ( VNRVJIET ), Dr.Shashibhusan Nayak (GP Nayagarh).

Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2023
Abstract selection notification: 30 August 2023
Complete Paper Submission: 30 October 2023

Memory studies is an increasingly diverse, interdisciplinary, and dynamic field of knowledge that spans multiple disciplines. Sociologists, psychologists, literary critics, media, cultural studies scholars, and natural and applied scientists have been exploring the concepts and application of memory to evolve a theoretical, conceptual, and methodological framework to investigate this emerging field of study. Memory—personal, collective, cultural—is crucial to the formation, conservation, and preservation of the identity of an individual, community, society, and nation. The act of remembering involves narration, and storytelling is a form of storing. As narration moves from oral, written, and visual forms to the digital, it becomes imperative to understand the interface between and among the human and the non-human, digital and analog, and its impact on memory and its narrativization.

The explosion of technology allows us to know what we need to know and preserve what we want our future generations to know. To study and document certain forms of knowledge that are crucial to defining who we are, this interdisciplinary edited collection aims to bring together researchers, academics, technologists, corporates, and students to discuss, debate, and understand the various storytelling strategies adopted by different communities, regions, and nations to record and preserve their identities and collective memories. Since technology has assumed a crucial role in this endeavor, it is necessary to assess the impact of technology on both the content and form of memory and its narration. The edited collection attempts to understand how the past, present, and future are formed, framed, mediated, and remediated through various forms of storytelling. Drawing on the theoretical and methodological approaches offered by literary, cultural, and media studies, history, sociology, psychology, as well as science and technology, this edited collection hopes to investigate the cultural representations of languages, communities, regions, and nations in oral histories, life writings, testimonies, and fictional and nonfictional narratives. The edited collection would examine issues related to memory, identity, representation, and narrativization and the impact of digital technology on memory studies and storytelling.

The edited collection invites papers on the following themes but is not limited to:
•          Memory studies—theories and praxis
•          Modes and methods of storytelling—of languages, communities, nations, and   regions
•          Impact of digital technologies on memory and memory studies
•          Language, literature, and memory
•          Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality of memory and memory studies.
•          Memory and oral history
•          Memory and life writing
•          Memory and archive
•          Memory and erasure
•          Memory and marginality
•          Memory and textuality
•          Memory, cognition, and critical theory
•          Memory and the Medium of fiction
•          Memory and (mis)representation
•          Memory and production of identities
Submissions
Abstracts of about 200 words, along with up to six keywords, a 50-word bio-note, institutional affiliation, and contact details, should be emailed by 30 July 2023 to shashienglish@gmail.com as a single MS Word document attachment.

Chapter requirements: A chapter should be max. Eight thousand words, including footnotes and bibliography adhering to the MLA 9th edition.

Important Dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: 30 July 2023
Abstract selection notification: 30 August 2023
Complete Paper Submission: 30 October 2023

Exploring the Nexus of Healing, Stories, and Illness in the Nineteenth Century and Today

“The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal” IN-CSA Conference (Durham University in Durham, UK from July 10 – July 12, 2024).

deadline for submissions: August 1, 2023

Call for Papers, “Exploring the Nexus of Healing, Stories, and Illness in the Nineteenth Century and Today” for “The Nineteenth Century Today: Interdisciplinary, International, Intertemporal” IN-CSA Conference (Durham University in Durham, UK from July 10 – July 12, 2024).

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 2-page CV by August 1, 2023 to Melissa Rampelli at mrampelli@holyfamily.edu

The nineteenth century witnessed profound transformations in medical practices, literary expressions, and societal attitudes toward health and illness. This panel aims to shed light on the intricate relationship between healing, storytelling, and illness (broadly conceived) during this pivotal period. In light of the IN-CSA’s interdisciplinary, international, and intertemporal theme, papers exploring the legacies–either across time, disciplines, or cultures–of the dynamic between nineteenth-century narrative, illness, and healing are particularly welcome.

Fans, Fandoms, and Celebrity Studies – Northeast PCA Hybrid Fall Conference 2023

deadline for submissions:

August 1, 2023

The Northeast Popular/American Culture Association (NEPCA) Fans, Fandoms, and Celebrity Studies Area invites presentation submissions for NEPCA’s hybrid conference to be held October 12 – October 14, 2023 in-person at Nichols College and virtually, via the Zoom platform.

This area encourages submissions that focus on interrogating the ideas and the ideals of fans and fandoms, and why we idolize celebrities. We welcome submissions from all theoretical and philosophical perspectives. We are open to submissions in any area of fan and celebrity studies including but not limited to:

- Creation and authenticity of fandoms

- Fandoms, diversity and inclusion

- Celebrity marketing, advertising, and public relations

- Social media use and celebrity status

- Defining fandoms

- Fandoms and politics

- Celebrities and illness

- Sport fandoms and celebrities

- Issues of fame and what it means to be famous in our culture

- Fandom comparisons between cultures

- Trust and value of celebrity

- An individual celebrity

The deadline for the submission of abstracts is August 1, 2023. Please use this form to submit your abstract: https://bit.ly/NEPCA23CFP

If you have questions about this Area/the NEPCA Conference please see: https://nepca.blog/2023-annual-conference/ or feel free to reach out to NEPCA’S Fans, Fandoms, and Celebrity Studies Area Chair: Dr. Shelly Jones at jonesmc@delhi.edu

The Centre for Modernist Cultures at the University of Birmingham is delighted to mark the formation of the Modern Letters Editing Network (MoLE) with a virtual workshop:

Working with Modern Letters: Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf

on Monday, 17 July, 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm

The discussion will be led by:

Professor Claire Davison, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Professor Sara Haslam, Open University

And moderated by Professor Max Saunders, University of Birmingham

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.

When: Jul 17, 2023 02:00 PM London

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining.

Max Saunders

Ford Madox Ford | Reaktion Books

Major new centenary exhibition of paintings and drawings by Alfred Cohen has gone online:

Works – Alfred Cohen | Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

with accompanying fully-illustrated book:

https://www.accartbooks.com/uk/store/pv/9780900157691/alfred-cohen/max-saunders-sarah-macdougall/

Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/imagined-futures-9780198829454?q=saunders&lang=en&cc=gb#

The Centre for Modernist Cultures at the University of Birmingham is delighted to mark the formation of the Modern Letters Editing Network (MoLE) with a virtual workshop:

Working with Modern Letters: Ford Madox Ford, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf

on Monday, 17 July, 2.00 pm to 4.00 pm

The discussion will be led by:

Professor Claire Davison, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3

Professor Sara Haslam, Open University

And moderated by Professor Max Saunders, University of Birmingham

You are invited to a Zoom meeting.

When: Jul 17, 2023 02:00 PM London

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining.

Max Saunders

Ford Madox Ford | Reaktion Books

Major new centenary exhibition of paintings and drawings by Alfred Cohen has gone online:

Works – Alfred Cohen | Ben Uri Gallery and Museum

with accompanying fully-illustrated book:

https://www.accartbooks.com/uk/store/pv/9780900157691/alfred-cohen/max-saunders-sarah-macdougall/

Imagined Futures: Writing, Science, and Modernity in the To-Day and To-Morrow Book Series, 1923-31

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/imagined-futures-9780198829454?q=saunders&lang=en&cc=gb#

Deadline for Submissions July 7, 2023

International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific Conference 2023

26^th-28^th Sept 2023 (online conference)

“Life Narrative in Unprecedented Times: Writing the Unexpected, Narrating the Future”.

The pandemic has functioned as a reminder of the importance of life storying and testimony as records of experience, as information sharing, or as creative engagement. This conference explores the ways momentous events shape life narration in the past, now, and for the future, for instance, the role of journalism in circulating personal stories, understanding of the impacts of mental health, and a renewed engagement in family and community histories. Each of these themes has been particularly notable during COVID-19. We invite proposals that address life narratives at unprecedented times, but also how life narrative is located by recent histories in diverse contexts and temporality.

The conference welcomes critical and creative responses including, but not limited to, the themes outlined below:

*narrating ‘the new normal’

*disrupted/stalled futures

*national/ regional/ local life narratives

*narrating isolation/ lockdown

*non-human and post-human lives, particularly connections during COVID/isolation

*illness narratives

*stories of grief and loss

*ageing and storytelling

*life narrative as record-keeping

*memorabilia, materials and objects

*social media / the rise of TikTok

*children and youth as life narrators

*Reality television, trends and shifts

*non-fiction podcasts

*travel narratives/post-COVID

*genre shifts (journalism, the essay)

*narratives of work and employment

Papers will be 10-15 minutes in length.

Proposals of 300 words + bios of 50 words should be sent to iaba.asiapacific@flinders.edu.au by 7^th July 2023.

—————————-

Kate Douglas (she/her) Professor of English
College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
+61 402440223
www.flinders.edu.au/people/kate.douglas

Call for Proposals: The 39 I.S.E.B. Conference

Life Stories Across Times and Spaces

Courtyard Marriott in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

(Conference site on Webpage: https://isebio.com/index.html)

Conference Date: October 5-7, 2023

Submission Deadline: June 15, 2023

The International Society for Educational Biography (I.S.E.B.) invites proposals for its annual conference, to be held in partnership with The Society of Philosophy and History of Education

(S.O.P.H.E.), October 5-7, 2023, at the Courtyard by Marriott Oklahoma City Downtown in

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

CONFERENCE THEME: This year’s conference theme is Life Stories Across Times and Spaces. Through the lens of time and space, we offer a robust conference space to examine the diverse forms of life writing characterizing the contemporary field. The genres of life writing include biographies such as Plato’s dialogues to St. Augustine’s Confessions, from 1-minute TikTok clips to the voluminous biographies of Winston Churchill, from Anne Frank’s diary to Princess Diana in The Crown. We invite proposals with a special focus on the temporal and spatial dimensions of life writing and lives as they unfold as well as their writing and reception. This theme recognizes we are living in historic times that demand rigorous scrutiny and This theme recognizes we are living in historic times that demand rigorous scrutiny and discussion of the boundaries of the past and the present and between here and there. We welcome studies at any stage about biographies of all sorts, lengths, modes, and purposes, with the belief that they illuminate facets of humanity and education. Papers and presentations may include, but are not limited to, one or more of the following topics:

1. Educational biographies: constructions of self, learners, educators, agents, and communities

2. Life writing in academic discourses and spaces

3. Life recordings on social media: TikTok, Podcast, and Biopics

4. From the personal to the political: diaries, biographies, autobiographies, and beyond

5. Amplifying minoritized and subaltern voices in life writing

6. Reminiscing about the past and envisioning the future: work, family, and life

7. Conceptions of memory and time: how personal time, social events, national crises, and historical epochs framing our memories

8. Theories and practices of life writing: genres, recordings, and reconstructions

9. Perspectives and genres: autoethnography, testimonio, biography, ethnography, memoir, etc.

10. Fictionalizing historical figures in books, films, science-fiction

11. Geographic and spatial tellings: the influence of space and place in life writing

SUBMISSION POLICIES:

- Participants: Submissions are welcome from ISEB members, non-members, and independent scholars both inside and outside the US. Graduate students and international scholars are particularly welcome to submit proposals. Please note that non-members whose proposals are accepted are expected to become members when registering for the conference, in order to be included in the program.

- In-Person and Virtual Participation: This conference is primarily an in-person space with opportunities for virtual presentation as well. Virtual presentations can only be offered to individual papers and panel presentations. Speakers of virtual presentations should send 15-minute video clips of their presentations no later than Monday, October 2, to ensure a smooth rendition. The speakers should be available on Zoom during the panel sessions to respond to questions. The speakers should be available on Zoom during the panel sessions to respond to questions. If the entire panel will be virtual, all presenters must designate the same participation mode. Virtual presenters pay the same conference fee as in-person participants. While we will do our best to make the presentation process as seamless as possible, technological glitches are always a risk.

- Format: Submissions should fall into one of four formats—individual papers, panels, roundtable discussions, and poster sessions. See below for more details.

- Abstract link: Participants must submit a title and an abstract (no more than 300 words) by June 15, 2023. Please submit your abstract here.

PRESENTATION TYPES:

1. Individual Papers: Presentations should be 15-20 minutes long.

1. Panels: This category is for a 90-minute session comprised of three or four presentations on a common topic. Each panel should have an organizer responsible for submitting the panel proposal. The proposal must include 1) a title for the panel and titles of individual presentations, and 2) an abstract (up to 500 words) for the panel.

1. Roundtable Discussion: This category facilitates interactive discussions of issues pertinent to biographies of all types. Each roundtable lasts for 90 minutes; the panel may have up to seven members. The panelists should take no more than 45 minutes to present their views and leave the remaining time for interaction with the audience. The panel organizer should also serve as the moderator. The proposal must include 1) a title for the roundtable, and 2) a summary (up to 500 words) describing the perspectives and attitudes panelists have toward the topic.

1. Poster Sessions: We invite submissions for this popular form of presentation posters, where the presenter displays visually a topic relevant to the conference theme and responds to audience’s questions on the spot. Guidelines are

1. Time: 60 minutes

1. Location: Tables in the conference area

1. Format: Corrugated display board—trifolds opens to roughly 36” x 48” or rollable posters of similar size

1. Additional Media (optional): Laptops to share photos and brief videos

FURTHER INFORMATION: For more information, please email smou@depauw.edu or visit https://isebio.com/index.html

Contact Info:

Dr. Sherry Mou

DePauw University

Contact Email:

smou@depauw.edu

Representations of Ethnic Deportations from Eastern and Central Europe to the Soviet Union During and After World War I

Deadline: July 15, 2023

Call for Papers

We are seeking contributors to a special issue or edited volume on representations of ethnic deportations from Eastern and Central Europe to the Soviet Union (1930-during and after WWII) favoring representations from ethnic minority groups. Articles are not limited to but can focus on:

- first and second generation memory, postmemory (Hirsch) as expressed in life-writing, literary representations of all genres, art of all genres

- on “portable monuments” (Rigney), narratives/stories/histories that could be re-written, appropriated, and transformed in new contexts

- cultural memory and translation, the circulation of memory between places and languages

- analyses of varied forms of curating memory (online exhibits, traveling exhibits, museums, monuments, installations, performance, anniversaries and commemorations, film, documentaries)

- how, in the absence of a crystallized, hard memory, the historical documents and the representations analyzed serve as viable examples of soft memory that succeed in memorializing the forced labor camps experience in its collective and individual forms (‘Soft’ and ‘hard’ memory of deportation (Etkind) in collective and individual forms)

- new English translations of works (poems, songs, diary entrances, letters, postcards, notes, etc.) by ethnic deportees, if they are subject of analysis or commentary and relate to the cluster and do not exceed 5 pages.

Please send up to 1,000-word proposals by July 15, 2023.

Contact Info:

Anca Luca Holden, aholden@amherst.edu

Oana Popescu Sandu opopescusa@usi.edu

Contact Email:

ancaholden@yahoo.com

Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2022

Hegemony and peripherality in autobiographical writings:
texts, contexts, visibility
***
XXII Symposium of the Osservatorio scientifico
della memoria autobiografica scritta, orale e iconografica

Academia Belgica, Via Omero 8
ROMA
5, 6, 7 December 2023

Promoted and organized by:
Mediapolis.Europa ass. cult.
http://mediapoliseuropa.com/

and by

Grupo de Investigación “Lectura, Escritura, Alfabetización” (LEA), Universidad de Alcalá
Seminario Interdisciplinar de Estudios sobre Cultura Escrita (SIECE), Universidad de Alcalá

Nowadays, great store is set on autobiographical – and more generally private – documentation. In the past decades, archives for the preservation of documents have multiplied, while it seems to us that studies aimed at examining their forms remain less satisfactory. However, the latter represent an essential aspect that helps us to understand not just the content of a document but the way of forging it, of forging a testimony, and how documents were made transmissible and comparable.
Some questions arise in this regard:
– Can the texts of authors and writers be subjected to the same methods of formal analysis?
– In what way does the concept of hegemony transpire in an autobiographical text?
– How can memory be safeguarded and given value?
– Can contemporary society be observed through a clear distinction between social classes? What kind of terminology should be adopted to classify them?
– How do the works of authors and writers interact?
– To what extent has the digital revolution expanded autobiographical practice and how does it transform it?

Submitting the various bodies of work to the same methodological criteria regardless of designation by content or social background appears to be a reasonable intent. The history of culture and science teaches us how the move from listing to classification in the 17^th century, as illustrated by Foucault (1966: 137-176), made it possible to make scientific data comparable.
What follows are some points aimed at suggesting some of the possible outlines around which a line of research can be developed.
1. Recognizing oneself within a minority culture. The issue of hegemonies was addressed by Antonio Gramsci (1975). The observation whereby those who exercise hegemony tend to give conformity to language and every form of expression, therefore making them cohesive and comparable, contrasts with the plurality of minority cultures, which are less inscribable into formal constants. There is a vast body of documentation – illustrated and discussed by Antonio Castillo Gómez (2022), among others – on the many archival initiatives that developed especially at the beginning of the 20^th century to preserve these sources, and on their now widely acknowledged importance. It is precisely the spurious origins of these sources that make a formal classification of the texts more difficult, at least at first glance.
Unlike authors, writers do not aim to pursue a style, as Barthes points out (1996: 153). Writers should not necessarily be understood as ordinary people. Leonardo da Vinci regarded himself as a writer and not as an author, “not a literary man,” as he defined himself writing to Ludovico il Moro in 1482. He did not know Latin very well, and for this reason he was not regarded as a man of letters.
The book Kafka. Toward a Minor Literature (G. Deleuze-F. Guattari, 1975) leads to foundational reflections on this issue, which should constitute a new alphabet for the very conception of the term ‘culture’. In this text Deleuze and Guattari highlight how being without roots, being de-territorialized, leads not to an impoverishment of thought and expressions, but rather to exploring from the margins, from the borders: a distancing that makes it possible to glimpse new lexical, conceptual forms that are open to exchange. Every minority culture (which today have multiplied thanks to the many languages that are circulating, to the multiple forms of coexistence that are necessary in a world in motion) can constitute the instrument required to prevent culture from being ossified into apparatuses.
Minority culture develops languages and a conception of space that is labyrinthine, de-confined, thereby suggesting new perspectives.
So, who feels legitimized to write? How can experiences that do not come from a canonical style be made well-rounded, rich? In this view, the archives and the written testimonies of ordinary people should not be regarded as mere hunting grounds, but as texts in the strict sense of the term. Chasse aux archives [hunting the archives] is the expression used by Philippe Lejeune to define the voracity for texts from minority and testimonial cultures: “The idea that, within some generations, your texts are tampered with in order to gain information on any subject, without knowing what they are about […] would be disgusting. In order to avoid these misunderstandings, I would strongly emphasize that ‘Hunting is prohibited’”. (Ph. Lejeune 2005: 120-121. The translation is mine).

2. Far from where?
In the case of autobiographical writing, it is possible to glimpse a feeling of being or not being part of a hegemonical entity in the position assumed by the subject as it shows itself to be or not be an integral part of a centre or of a periphery. This is not just about a marginality based on social grounds, but more cogently based on a vision of the subject’s own language and culture in their potential to be relevant within a context (Fabio Dei 2018).
How does an individual conceive of his or her centrality? Where, when, and how is it possible to circumscribe the position of a writer relaying his or her own life? How does the assumption of a certain stance define an autobiographical narration, legitimise it, structure it also in view of an external glance, of a real, imagined or searched visibility? How does the narrating ‘I’ adopt a perspective of introjection or of extimité, centripetal or centrifugal?
Lontano da dove is the title of a book by Claudio Magris (1989). It deals with the drama of thousands of people, their conditions at the time of the crumbling of the powerful Hapsburg Empire. It is a metaphor for the conception of centre and periphery, of hegemony and marginality, of exile as an essential condition. An idea that, starting from a political-cultural analysis, grows into a lexicon, into cultural models, it delineates individual destiny.
Magris’s Lontano da dove highlights the difficulty encountered by an individual who, not being part of the hegemonic culture, is observed/observes him/herself and is positioned/positions him/herself as a marginal body.

3. The semantics of the autobiographical text
The narrating ‘I’ manifests itself through expressions that testify to its sociocultural and topographical position, and that inscribe it into certain spatial-temporal categories.
As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson write (2004 [1980]) in their study Metaphors we live by (see the paragraph “The Me-First Orientation”), our way of narrating is modelled on modi pensandi. A whole cultural conception governs these forms of expression, in which the individual modulates self-narration and relates to the world around him or her.
Word order was studied by William Cooper & John Robert Ross (1975). Even the choice of the mother’s or the other’s language and its modelling are cues to the posture of the ‘I’, just as photographs and the ever-widespread selfies signal how self-representation is intended.
In other words, in adopting a written or audio-visual register, the ‘l’ allows us to understand how and where it positions itself. Photographic and video images define its autography.
Like every form of expression, language is a system composed of relations. In order to understand its meaning, a mapping is necessary, which can be delineated through contents or voids: analysing the use of languages proves to be a tool for outlining not just established but potential relations (L. Hjelmslev 2009). Iconographic expressions such as selfies and those found on the Internet (P. Sibilia 2008) follow the same pattern: showing or not showing reveals a willingness to not just self-narrate in the present but to envision what one would like to be. In the same passage, Hjelmslev argues that language forms itself into a tangle of empty places founded on a veritable difference in potential.

4. The position of the ‘I’ and the language referred to the body
An example: in psychiatric patients – who are quintessentially marginal – oral, written and graphic expressions are still closely anchored to the body, to physical actions.
Binswanger, a psychiatrist with long-time experience of dialogue with patients, writes:
“Out of the blue”, “being in seventh heaven” are expressions of our Dasein, our being. And even though myths and poetry allow us, though a universalizing metaphorical language, to share sensations, feelings and psychic experiences, the “I nonetheless remains the original subject of what raises or falls” (L. Binswanger 2012: 42. The translation is mine). Binswanger, who had inscribed his vision into Heidegger’s philosophy for a long time, gradually distanced himself from his ontological conception to immerse it into concrete cases. An entire vocabulary places the acts of the patient’s Dasein into space: vertiginous height, ascension, altitude, infinity, etc. (L. Binswanger 1971: 237-245). It is possible to suppose that the desire to evade, to disengage, in psychiatric patients determines its lexicon.
More generally, in autobiographical writings reference to the body as a vehicle of experiences that crossed it appears to be important.

5. The ‘truth”: what the ‘I’ shows or conceals. Transparency and obstruction
The truth is the foundational theme of every autobiography. It can be granted by the pact that the writer makes with the reader. Philippe Lejeune’s work docet (Ph. Lejeune: 1975).
The theme of truth powerfully crosses autobiographical writing. Writing about oneself and claiming that it is true implies a pact with a whole series of confirmations and complex manoeuvres.
Autofictions intend to escape this criterion.
Rousseau’s Confessions, a classic of autobiographical writing, is born as a form of self-externalization that makes uncertainties public in order to justify actions that, within the framework of one’s way of recounting, should be justified. Starobinski calls this attitude ‘transparency and obstruction’. “Rousseau desired communication and transparency of the heart. But after pursuing this avenue and meeting with disappointment, he chose the opposite course, accepting – indeed provoking – obstructions, which enabled him to withdraw, certain of his innocence, into passive resignation.” (J. Starobinski 1971 : 1. The terms in italics are in the original text). Every kind of writing – and, a fortiori, autobiographical writing – exposes and conceals realities that can nonetheless be glimpsed. In sum, this is Poppea’s veil, which lets us see and not see, thereby raising, demanding more questions than certainties (J. Starobinski 1961).
Resolving and understanding the distinction between truth and falsehood requires the use of many coordinates (N. Frogneux 2021); it cannot be submitted to an automatic judgement, either in the historical or in the autobiographical field (see: Carlo Ginzburg, Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto 2015).
Even adopting a codified language (as Lotman and Bachtin note: see infra) can be a concealment, or an illusion that you can judge a book by its cover.
Often, a strong determination to show that the truth is being told is also realized through reference to realia, to what is visible and concrete. In many autobiographies, writers include registry documents. With utmost precision, they mention dates and places in order to make their testimony more believable (B. Barbalato 2009).

6. How writers conceive of hegemony by adopting certain codified forms
Lotman writes that a great man or a bandit must find a good reason for regarding himself as an individual who has the right to biography (J. Lotman 1985: 194). Writing life stories, both biographical and autobiographical, requires a formal choice. For this reason, Lotman asserts that a peasant’s opportunistic use of the language of the church or of bureaucracy allows him to inscribe himself into a legitimacy. Also, think of what Bachtin (103) says about unsophisticated culture, about the peasant who, living in an isolated context, believes that every language corresponds exactly to the reality that he wants to designate.
The same conviction is shared by André Gide, who asserts that often unsophisticated sources formally represent a copy of the copy (A. Gide 1997 [1926-1950]: 572). Gide dispels the misunderstanding of the authenticity of the document of ordinary people. No writing is spontaneous, let alone the authenticity of those who do not practise writing. The codes to which one resorts can be regarded as a passepartout for the legitimization of one’s own narration and conception of truth, which is thus validated (see A. Castillo Gómez 2016 and V. Sierra Blas 2018).
Another important observation by Bachtin concerns the diversity in conceiving and observing a life path today and in antiquity. In antiquity, public and private space was conceived of as one and the same thing. In self-representation there was no difference between an internal self and an external one. The topos was the agora (Ibid.: 279-282).

This call for papers invites proposals aimed at examining writers’ and authors’ ways, forms and goals of self-expression, and it intends to investigate mutual contaminations and interferences.
Besides what has already been said, particular attention is to be paid to how self-narration presents itself as opening towards the future, how it lets its expectations transpire. In writings there is a quid, a void whose contours, whose latencies are difficult to intercept but nonetheless exist. Wishes are not always openly expressed; often they can be glimpsed between the lines of a text. As Binswanger writes, writing about oneself is a way of letting the future come to oneself. (1971: 261). How can this aspect be interpreted, understood?

Michail Bachtin 1979 [1975- Mosca 1955]:1975], “La parola nella poesía e la parola nel romanzo”, 83-108, “La biografía e l’autobiografia antica”, 277-293, in Id., Estetica e romanzo, transl. by Clara Strada Janovic, Torino, Einaudi.
Beatrice Barbalato (2009), “L’ipersegnicità nelle testimonianze autobiografiche”, 387-400, in Silvia Bonacchi (ed.), Intr. Anna Tylusińska-Kowalska, Le récit du moi: forme, strutture, modello del racconto autobiografico, in Kwartalnik neofilologiczny, Polska Akademia Nauk, Warsaw 29-30 April 2008. editor: Franciszek Grucza.

B. Barbalato-Albert Mingelgrün (eds.) 2012, Télémaque, Archiver et interpréter les témoignages autobiographiques, Louvain-la Neuve, Presses Universitaires de Louvain.

Roland Barthes 1998 [“Tel Quel”, 1964], “Écrivains et écrivants”, in Essais critiques, Paris, Seuil.
Ludwig Binswanger 1971 [1947], “Le sens anthropologique de la présomption”, 237-245, in Id., Introduction à l’analyse existentielle, translated from the French by Jacqueline Verdeaux and Roland Kuhn, preface by R. Kuhn and Henri Maldiney, Paris, Éd. de Minuit.
– Rêve et existence 2012 [1930] translation and introduction Françoise Dastur, postface by E. Basso, Paris, Vrin.
Antonio Castillo Gómez 2022, “Voix subalternes. Archives et mémoire écrite des classes populaires”, 117-135, in S. Péquignot and Y. Potin (dir.), Les conflits d’archives, France, Espagne, Méditerranée, Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes.
Daniele Combierati 2010, Scrivere nella lingua dell’altro, Bruxelles, Peter Lang.

William Cooper & John Robert Ross 1975, “World order”, 63–111, in R. E. Grossman et al. (eds.), Papers from the parasession on functionalism, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Fabio Dei 2018, Cultura popolare in Italia da Gramsci all’Unesco, Bologna, il Mulino.

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Judging panel:
Beatrice Barbalato, Mediapolis.europa ass, cult., Université catholique de Louvain
Antonio Castillo Gómez, Universidad de Alcalá
Nathalie Frogneux, Université catholique de Louvain
Verónica Sierra Blas, Universidad de Alcalá

Symposium organized by:
Mediapolis.Europa (Irene Meliciani: managing director)
Mnemosyne o la costruzione del senso, Presses universitaires de Louvain

Grupo de Investigación “Lectura, Escritura, Alfabetización” (LEA), Universidad de Alcalá
Seminario Interdisciplinar de Estudios sobre Cultura Escrita (SIECE), Universidad de Alcalá

This symposium is part of the research project Vox populi. Espacios, prácticas y estrategias de visibilidad de las escrituras del margen en las épocas Moderna y Contemporánea (PID2019-107881GB-I00), financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación and by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Spain).

Suggestions for sending proposals

The languages admitted for submission are: Italian, Spanish, French, English, Portuguese. 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: 15 July 2023. 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, antonio.castillo@uah.es

For information:
beatrice.barbalato@gmail.com, antonio.castillo@uah.es, irenemeliciani@gmail.com
The authors of the accepted proposals will be notified by 30 July 2023.

B) Regarding enrolment in the colloquium, once the proposals are accepted the fees are:
Before 30 September 2023: 150.00€
From 1 to 30 October 2023: 180.00€
Enrolment fee cannot be accepted in loco

For graduate students:
Before 30 September 2023: 100.00€
From 1to 30 October 2023: 90.00€
Enrolment fee cannot be accepted in loco

Once the programme is established, no change is allowed.

For activities related to this topic at the University and cultural centers in Spain see the sites
http://www.siece.es/ http://grafosfera.blogspot.com/

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/