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 4th 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
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:
*
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:
*
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 1st 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
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.ed) by 5:00 p.m. ET on Monday, August 21.
*
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
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvf-6przItH9UWfNyu2pA-C_sng1zIsFf9
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
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://bham-ac-uk.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvf-6przItH9UWfNyu2pA-C_sng1zIsFf9
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
26th-28th 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 7th 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:
-
- Individual Papers: Presentations should be 15-20 minutes long.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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
-
- Time: 60 minutes
-
- Location: Tables in the conference area
-
- Format: Corrugated display board—trifolds opens to roughly 36” x 48” or rollable posters of similar size
-
- 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:
*
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:
*
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 17th 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 20th 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.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1975, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Éd. De Minuit.
Michel Foucault 1966, “Classer”, 137-176, in Id, Les mots et le choses, Paris, Gallimard.
Nathalie Frogneux, “Une phénoménologie de la vie mensongère”, in Le Phénomène humain. Revue Philosophique de Louvain 118(4), 2021, 573-591. doi: 10.2143/RPL.118.4.3290142.
André Gide 1997, Journal 1926-1950, Paris, Gallimard, vol. II.
Carlo Ginzburg 2006), Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto, Feltrinelli, Milano.
Louis Hjelmslev 1975, Résumé of a Theory of Language. Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague, vol. XVI. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag.
– (2009), Teoria del linguaggio. Résumé, = TLR, Vicenza, Terra Ferma, Vicenza.
Antonio Gramsci 1975, Quaderni del carcere, 3, Quaderni 12-29, critical edition of the Istituto Gramsci by Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi.
Georges Lakoff, Mark Johnson, 2003 [1980], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press.
Philippe Lejeune 1975, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil.
– “Je ne suis pas une source”, Entretien de Ph. Artières, 115-137, in Id., Signes de vie – Le pacte autobiographique 2, 2, Seuil 2005.
Ronan Le Roux, « De quoi jouit l’archiviste ? Méditation certalienne sur le ‘vol d’âme’ », in Elodie Belkorchia, Georges Cuer, Françoise Hiraux (dir.), Du matériel à l’immatériel, La Gazette des archives n°262 (2021-2).
Jurij M. Lotman 1985, “Il diritto alla biografia”, in Id., La semiosfera-L’asimmetria e il dialogo nelle strutture pensanti, edited and translated from the Russian by Simonetta Salvestroni, Venezia, Marsilio.
Claudio Magris 1989, Lontano da Dove, Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale, Torino Einaudi.
Paula Sibilia 2008, O show do eu: a intimidade como espetáculo, Rio de Janeiro, Nova
Fronteira.
Verónica Sierra Blas 2016, Cartas presas. La correspondencia carcelaria en la Guerra Civil y el
Franquismo, Madrid, Marcial Pons.
Jean Starobinski 1961, “Le voile de Poppée”, 7-27, in Id, L’oeil vivant, Gallimard, 1961.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
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/
Deadline for Submissions July 7, 2023
International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific Conference 2023
26th-28th 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 7th 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:
-
- Individual Papers: Presentations should be 15-20 minutes long.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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
-
- Time: 60 minutes
-
- Location: Tables in the conference area
-
- Format: Corrugated display board—trifolds opens to roughly 36” x 48” or rollable posters of similar size
-
- 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:
*
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:
*
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 17th 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 20th 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.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari 1975, Kafka. Pour une littérature mineure, Paris, Éd. De Minuit.
Michel Foucault 1966, “Classer”, 137-176, in Id, Les mots et le choses, Paris, Gallimard.
Nathalie Frogneux, “Une phénoménologie de la vie mensongère”, in Le Phénomène humain. Revue Philosophique de Louvain 118(4), 2021, 573-591. doi: 10.2143/RPL.118.4.3290142.
André Gide 1997, Journal 1926-1950, Paris, Gallimard, vol. II.
Carlo Ginzburg 2006), Il filo e le tracce. Vero falso finto, Feltrinelli, Milano.
Louis Hjelmslev 1975, Résumé of a Theory of Language. Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague, vol. XVI. Copenhague: Nordisk Sprog- og Kulturforlag.
– (2009), Teoria del linguaggio. Résumé, = TLR, Vicenza, Terra Ferma, Vicenza.
Antonio Gramsci 1975, Quaderni del carcere, 3, Quaderni 12-29, critical edition of the Istituto Gramsci by Valentino Gerratana, Torino, Einaudi.
Georges Lakoff, Mark Johnson, 2003 [1980], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press.
Philippe Lejeune 1975, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil.
– “Je ne suis pas une source”, Entretien de Ph. Artières, 115-137, in Id., Signes de vie – Le pacte autobiographique 2, 2, Seuil 2005.
Ronan Le Roux, « De quoi jouit l’archiviste ? Méditation certalienne sur le ‘vol d’âme’ », in Elodie Belkorchia, Georges Cuer, Françoise Hiraux (dir.), Du matériel à l’immatériel, La Gazette des archives n°262 (2021-2).
Jurij M. Lotman 1985, “Il diritto alla biografia”, in Id., La semiosfera-L’asimmetria e il dialogo nelle strutture pensanti, edited and translated from the Russian by Simonetta Salvestroni, Venezia, Marsilio.
Claudio Magris 1989, Lontano da Dove, Joseph Roth e la tradizione ebraico-orientale, Torino Einaudi.
Paula Sibilia 2008, O show do eu: a intimidade como espetáculo, Rio de Janeiro, Nova
Fronteira.
Verónica Sierra Blas 2016, Cartas presas. La correspondencia carcelaria en la Guerra Civil y el
Franquismo, Madrid, Marcial Pons.
Jean Starobinski 1961, “Le voile de Poppée”, 7-27, in Id, L’oeil vivant, Gallimard, 1961.
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstruction. Trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988.
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/
*
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 for the MSA opens soon! Additional details below:
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/
*
The Visual Politics of Borders, Migration and Human Rights in Comics and Graphic Narratives
deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2023
Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association
Thursday, October 26 through Sunday, October 29, 2023, Portland, Oregon USA
This panel aims to explore the ways in which borders intersect with human rights in graphic narratives, whether in fiction or non-fiction. One of the theoretical frameworks for examining borders could be through the lens of border aesthetics, which considers borders as linguistic, cultural, social, political, and spatial entities that can both enable and exclude. The panel will examine how graphic narratives denaturalize and politicize the current global border regime and bordering practices that invariably reproduce the colonial binaries as well as stereotypes about migrants/refugees. The focus will also be on how graphic narratives may reinforce the exclusionary function of borders or reduce the migrants/refugees into mere abject modes of being. The panel is concerned with how these frictions and changes become manifested in graphic narratives and aims to bring together comics studies on migration and human rights. The panel invites submissions that examine any aspect of human rights violations occurring in or enabled by borders, which are understood as both positive interactions and exclusionary practices.
Submissions are welcome on any of the following aspects of comics studies and human rights, as well as broader interpretations of the themes that provide a more detailed understanding of border and migration studies:
-
- Comics form and human rights
-
- Graphic representations of survival
-
- Visual-verbal medium and cultural silencing of migrants/refugees
-
- Narrative mediation and narrative violence in graphic representations
-
- Borders, experiential lives and embodied frames
-
- Gender and Child Rights
-
- Queer and Trans migrations in graphic novels
-
- War zones and the politics of violence
-
- Ethics and politics of representing human rights violations in comics and graphic narratives
-
- Comics, affect and the immigrant
-
- Displacement, disability, dystopia in graphic memoirs
-
- Border aesthetics, frames of recognition and empathy
Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words along with a brief bio (not more than 100 words) via the online submission form available on the PAMLA website. You will have to go to https://pamla.ballastacademic.com to login or create an account first. The deadline to submit abstract proposals is June 30, 2023. The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18807.
For any queries, please reach out to:
Leenu Sugathan – leenusugathan@gwu.edu
Mohit Abrol – mohitabrol463@gmail.com
Important Dates:
PAMLA Membership Payment Deadline: Friday, July 1
Abstract Proposal Deadline: Wednesday, June 30, 2023
Late Conference Payment Fee Period: August 21-September 15
(After September 1, those who haven’t paid their membership fees will be removed from the program; after September 15, those who haven’t paid their conference fees will be removed from the program)
The Conference (at last!): Thursday, October 26 through Sunday, October 29, 2023
*
Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2023
Diaries in the 20th Century: Testimony, Memory, and Self-Construction
University College Dublin, 8-9 December 2023
The diary proved an important form of writing during the 20th century, particularly for its engagement with self-definition and memory. In the early decades of the century, it enabled a new exploration of individual personality influenced by late-nineteenth-centurypsychology and philosophy. It can thus be read as an introspective prism displaying the author’s psychological, moral, and physical evolution in a different light from what would have been conceivable before. Around mid-century, it offered diarists a powerful tool to document and elaborate the trauma of the two wars, the self-threatening policies of totalitarian regimes, and the very physical threat of genocide. This kind of diary is a testimonial object of and against war. In the final decades of the century, diaries were written in an individualistic and expressivist society which increasingly blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction. They could thus become the chosen medium for postmodernist literary experimentation and invite a form of self-construction which is a precursor of (but remains very different from) the instantly public self-accounts of present-day blogs and vlogs.
This two-day conference aims to observe these and other evolutions of the twentieth-century diary, exploring their interplay with traditional assumptions about the diary as a repository of memories, an outlet for feelings, as an embodiment of the self, and a concrete means for its preservation. To this end, we invite scholars working from a wide range of disciplines on diaristic writing from different perspectives, with a particular preference for transnational and comparative approaches. Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:
-
- Theoretical or historical perspectives on diaristic writing during the 20th century
-
- Previously unknown/unpublished twentieth-century diaries
-
- Diaries as documents or as literary works
-
- Diary as a writing genre: real vs. fictional
-
- Diary and affects
-
- The body in the diary
-
- Diaries as chronicles of introspection/self-talk
-
- The diary between personal and collective memory
-
- Self-analysis, self-questioning, self-discovery, self-awareness in diaristic writing
-
- Communities and mutual influence among diary-writers
-
- Comparative studies of twentieth-century diaries
-
- Diaries and Cognitive Studies
-
- Writing diaries during war periods
-
- The diary and the Holocaust
-
- The diary as gender writing
The conference will be held in person at UCD to facilitate interaction among panelists, and streamed online to allow for a wider attendance. Four travel grants will be offered for PhD, early-career, and independent researchers who cannot rely on institutional funds.
Please send your title, abstract for a 20-minute paper (max 250 words), and short bio (max 100 words) to ucdiaries2023@gmail.com, valeria.taddei@ucd.ie, or m.josi1993@gmail.com, by 30 June. Let us know in your email if you would need to be considered for the travel grant.
For any further information please do not hesitate to contact us!
All the best,
Valeria Taddei and Mara Josi
Dr Valeria Taddei (she/her)
IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow
School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics
University College Dublin
Belfield D04 F6X4
Ireland
Dr Mara Josi (she/her), Ph.D (Cantab)
Lecturer in Italian
School of Languages, Arts and Cultures, University of Manchester, UK
Oxford Rd. | M13 9PL
*
The Life Story in Oral History Practice
In-person event at the British Library, London, UK
Fri 30 June and Sat 1 July, 2023
Bookings are now open for the exciting International Symposium: the Life Story in Oral History Practice at the British Library on Fri 30 June and Sat 1 July. Booking link and full programme here:
https://www.bl.uk/events/the-life-story-in-oral-history-practice-a-two-day-international-symposium.
Attendance for the whole event is £45, with day passes available too.
We promise innovative speakers from across the globe who will reflect on all aspects of life story interviewing, including Alexander Freund, Indira Chowdhury, Alistair Thomson, Doug Boyd, Wendy Rickard, Rob Perks and Don Ritchie. Our special guest on Saturday 1 July is celebrated artist and curator Lubaina Himid, to discuss her life story recording for Artists’ Lives.
Join us for cutting edge debate on oral history practice, research and the impact of new technology, lively discussion and the launch of the exciting new website based on oral history: ‘Discovering Science’. The event is open to all, from newcomers to oral history to the most experienced life story practitioners, historians, writers, archivists and curators. We hope to see you there!
Mary Stewart
Lead Curator, Oral History
Director, National Life Stories
The British Library
96 Euston Road
London NW1 2DB
Mary.stewart@bl.uk
www.bl.uk/oralhistory
www.ohs.org.uk
Follow us! @BL_OralHistory
*
Deadline for submissions: June 19, 2023
Graphic Psychiatry – Exploring Visual Narratives of Mental Health
contact email:
Call for Papers, panel@ SAMLA 95, taking place on November 9-11, 2023, in Atlanta, GA
Graphic Psychiatry–Exploring Visual Narratives of Mental Health
The “Age of Insecurity” (samla.net/) made mental health a public health concern. From barriers to access to a provider shortage, from soaring suicide rates to supply chain issues that affect the availabilty of ADHD drugs, mental healthcare has become a pervasive topic that affects higher education as well. In this context, the special session sets out to rethink our approaches to ubiquitous visual narratives and iconographies of mental health. For this purpose, we will focus on “Graphic Psychiatry” which here describes a prolific subsection of Graphic Medicine: The term denotes the role that comics/graphic novels can play in healthcare; it is also a shorthand for this area of study and practice. Graphic “Medicine” (“as in the bottled panacea rather than the profession,” I. Williams) is meant to suggest therapeutic potential, both for creators and readers. Comics have been discussed in connection to the history of psychiatry, their graphic pathography or their demonization of psychiatrists, etc. By contrast, graphic novels offer additional types of knowledge. They are book-length narratives, often autobiographical “quest narratives” (A.W. Frank), that depict mental illness, suffering, trauma in their own right. Often, they provide critical insights into treatment, practices, systems and institutions. The first was a wordless novel, Lynd Ward’s The Madman’s Drum, published in 1930, but there has been a proliferation of graphic novels on mental health in the past decade. Examples include Marbles, Rx, Tangles, Lighter Than My Shadow, to name but a few.
This special interdisciplinary session invites papers that explore “Graphic Psychiatry” and how it goes beyond “psychiatry as a spectacle” by discussing illness narratives, lived experiences, systemic criticism, as well as pathologies. Additionally, we welcome pedagogy papers on teaching visual narratives of mental health. By June 15, 2023, please submit an abstract of 500 words or less, a brief bio, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Ronja Tripp-Bodola, LSUHSC New Orleans, at rbodol@lsuhsc.edu.
Ronja R. Bodola, Ph.D., M.A.
Assistant Professor – Research/Health Humanities
Director of Faculty Development, Education and Scholarly Activity
Department of Psychiatry
School of Medicine, LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans
2021 Perdido St
Room 6218
New Orleans, LA 70112
(504) 568 2544
Travel and Tourism Studies (Mid-Atlantic Popular/American Culture Assn)
CONFERENCE TO BE HELD November 9-11, 2023 in Philadelphia, PA, USA
deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2023
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
***VIRTURAL Travel and Tourism! How has lockdown 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, ’23.
Students (both undergraduate and graduate) and independent scholars are encouraged to apply. Please feel free to send questions to Jennifer Erica Sweda
*
CALL FOR PAPERS
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
Imprisoned ‘Self’: Narratives of Loss, Guilt, Transformation
Guest Editor: Ayan Chakraborty (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Deadline for Submissions: June 30, 2023
Prison narratives have, quite recently, emerged as an exciting genre of literary studies in academia. While the concept of imprisonment has always invited a substantial focus within sociological studies, it had marginally to do either with the deeper exploration of the ‘imprisoned self’ or the ‘narratology’ (the logic of the narrative) about the experiences recorded by the prisoner. With life in the prison succeeding in drawing interest from literary critics, different approaches have been proposed to study language and experiences (in terms of wording) to look at the representation of the self and the various expressions of pain, agony, guilt, transformation, and even liberation. Some of them consider looking at these narratives from a more political understanding of the ‘imprisoned self’ about society and power, while a few others explore how language mediates between the author’s ‘reflection’/ ‘realization’ of their self through deeply intense drives like those of melancholia, loss, and suffering or glimpses of transcendental joy that creates a deeper understanding of the ethereal and the personal.
The model of the prison has changed over the centuries. While in the European continent, prisons were directly an expression of the ‘will’ of the monarch, it had much to do with the relations of sovereignty and law. However, it is interesting to note that, as Thomas S Freeman points out in his “The Rise of Prison Literature,” prisons of the middle ages and early modernity were structural edifices that symbolized an offense against the divine through a violation of the ‘law’ of the monarch itself (the monarch being a representative of divinity on earth). The prisoner was, therefore, equivalent to the status of a heretic. Similar ideas can be found within Southern and Central Asiatic regions as well. With the rise of the liberal state, the prisoner was depicted as an ‘outlaw,’ an embodiment of violence and violation of the generic social imagination and to ‘social contract’ in particular. Michel Foucault, in his seminal The Birth of the Prison, delineates how the system of control and incarceration shifted in its objective and technique from the body and the ‘spectacle’ to the ‘mind’ and the need for ‘secrecy.’ Through a system, the prisoner’s self is inevitably a part of political interpellation, marginality, and social gaze. These ideas, though sociological, become an integral part of the prisoner’s self in their understanding of society and their relation to it. Hence, the prisoner, in all personal experiences, is a political being.
As much as narratives from political prisoners, revolutionaries, and victims of racial, sexual, colonial, and economic conflicts have recorded intense moments which look at the ‘dissolution’ of the self under psychological crisis, there are instances that constructed a metaphysical idea of the ego of the prisoner that almost absorbed the world into a supernatural unity. These narratives, in their structure and intention, vary radically across symbols and semantics. This issue calls for papers that engage with language, experience, and the self (of the prisoner), study nuances of intention and expression, and explore the relation between a private subject under political scrutiny through prison narratives.
To contribute to this special issue, please submit the full manuscript of your article (no less than 4,000 words) with a short author’s bio to the guest editor Ayan Chakraborty at cayan2595@gmail.com, with a copy to jclaindia@gmail.com. You are welcome to ask any questions about submission or the topic you will select.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 30 June 2023;
Decision of acceptance: 31 July 2023;
Publication of the issue: Autumn 2023/ Winter 2023.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Comparative_Literature_and_Aesthetics
The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN: 0252-8169) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, India, since 1977. The Institute was founded by Prof. Ananta Charan Sukla (1942-2020) on 22 August 1977, coinciding with the birth centenary of renowned philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) to promote interdisciplinary studies and research in comparative literature, literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, art history, criticism of the arts, and history of ideas. (Vishvanatha Kaviraja, most widely known for his masterpiece in aesthetics, Sahityadarpana, or the “Mirror of Composition,” was a prolific 14th-century Indian poet, scholar, aesthetician, and rhetorician.)
The Journal is committed to comparative and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, and conceptual analysis of art. It publishes current research papers, review essays, and special issues of critical interest and contemporary relevance.
The Journal has published the finest of essays by authors of global renown like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, John Hospers, John Fisher, Murray Krieger, Martin Bocco, Remo Ceserani, J.B. Vickery, Menachem Brinker, Milton Snoeyenbos, Mary Wiseman, Ronald Roblin, T.R. Martland, S.C. Sengupta, K.R.S. Iyengar, Charles Altieri, Martin Jay, Jonathan Culler, Richard Shusterman, Robert Kraut, Terry Diffey, T.R. Quigley, R.B. Palmer, Keith Keating, and many others.
JCLA is indexed and abstracted in the MLA International Bibliography, Master List of Periodicals (USA), Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals, ERIH PLUS, The Philosopher’s Index (Philosopher’s Information Center), EBSCO, ProQuest (Arts Premium Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Collection, Arts & Humanities Database, Literature Online – Full Text Journals, ProQuest Central, ProQuest Central Essentials), Abstracts of English Studies, WorldCat Directory, ACLA, India Database, Gale (Cengage Learning), Bibliography History of Art (BHA), ArtBibliographies Modern (ABM), Literature Online (LION), Academic Resource Index, Book Review Index Plus, OCLC, Periodicals Index Online (PIO), Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, CNKI, PhilPapers, Google Scholar, Expanded Academic ASAP, Indian Documentation Service, Publication Forum (JuFo), Summon, J-Gate, United States Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and the British Library. The journal is also indexed in numerous university (central) libraries, state, and public libraries, and scholarly organizations/ learned societies databases.
Celebrated scholars of the time like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, Mircea Eliade, Monroe Beardsley, John Hospers, John Fisher, Meyer Abrams, John Boulton, and many renowned foreign and Indian scholars were Members of its Editorial Board.
Founding Editor: Ananta Charan Sukla,Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India
Email: jclaindia@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jclasukla
Contact Info:
Viraj Shukla
Publishing Assistant
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Call for Papers
‘Dieu et mon droit (God and my right)’: representations of the British royal family in popular culture
deadline for submissions:
June 30, 2023
PopCRN (the UNE Popular Culture Network) are exploring the concept of royalty with a virtual symposium focused on the representations of the British royal family in popular culture to be held online on Thursday 28th & Friday 29th September 2023.
The British monarchy has played a leading role in various ways over the last millennium of world history and as such have been frequently depicted in popular culture from the plays of Shakespeare to the extensive coverage in popular magazines.
We welcome papers from researchers across the academic spectrum, and encourage papers from postgraduate researchers and early career researchers. Presenters will have the opportunity to publish a refereed book chapter in a book published in 2024.
Topics can include, but are not restricted to:
-
- We are not amused – Royal reactions to popular events
-
- In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis – The intersections of the private and public lives of royalty
-
- I do not want a husband who honours me as a queen, if he does not love me as a woman – Love and British royalty
-
- I’d like to be queen of people’s hearts – The rhetorical power of royal themes
-
- The king is dead, Long live the king – British royals past, present and future
-
- I think the relations between the monarchy and the press is very much a two-way street. Anthony Holden – Reporting the royals
-
- Spencer – Diana and the gothic
-
- Diana, The peoples’ princess – Royalty and celebrity
-
- The real intelligence in the royal family comes through my parents to Prince Philip and the children. (Lord Mountbatten) – Celebrity royal children
-
- The Crown – Royal representations in film and television
-
- Princess for a day – Royal wedding dresses and royal wedding culture
-
- I myself prefer my New Zealand eggs for breakfast (Queen Elizabeth II) Royal food and wine
-
- Fashioning a Queen – Royal fashion, then and now
-
- Men fight wars. Women win them – The powerful Queen in the patriarchal institution
-
- I know what my job was; it was to go out and meet the people and love them. (Princess Diana) – The working royal
-
- The important thing is not what they think of me, but what I think of them – Royal views of the general public
-
- I know I have but the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart of a king, and of a king of England, too – Representations of royal gender
-
- A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse – Shakespearian depictions of royalty
-
- All my birds have flown – The ridiculed royal
-
- I have as much privacy as a goldfish in a bowl. (Princess Margaret) – The public gaze and celebrity
-
- Let not poor Nelly starve – Royal mistresses
-
- Alvanley, who’s your fat friend? – Royalty and friends
-
- Was ‘arold, with eyeful of arrow, On ‘is ‘orse, with ‘is ‘awk in ‘is ‘and – Representations of royalty in folktales
-
- You have sent me a Flanders mare – Royal marriages of convenience in popular culture
-
- I find doing speeches nerve wrecking (Kate Middleton) – Performing royalty
-
- I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love – The reluctant royal
-
- When I am dead and opened, you shall find ‘Calais’ lying in my heart – Royal concerns of conquest and loss
-
- Camelot – The American fixation with the British Royals
-
- It is as Queen of Canada that I am here. Queen of Canada and all Canadians, not just one or two ancestral strains (Queen Elizabeth II) – The Royals in the colonies
-
- You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings it did not replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that. (Prince Charles) – The Royals and war
-
- For Portraits to Pop – Queen Elizabeth as a cultural icon
-
- Value for money – The Royals and the British economy
-
- Royal fever – The Royals and consumer culture
-
- They’re changing guards at Buckingham Place – The Royals in children’s literature
-
- For a time during the 1980s the Royal Family were not just the most influential family in Britain but probably in Europe and Prince Charles specifically was very much like a defacto Cabinet member and what he said actually had impact on public policy (Andrew Morton) – The Royals and No. 10
-
- I should like to be a horse (Queen Elizabeth II) – British royals and animals
-
- One day I’m going up in a helicopter and it’ll just blow up. M15 will do away with me. (Princess Diana). Royal conspiracies
-
- The state is nothing but an instrument of oppression of one class by another – no less so in a democratic republic than in a monarchy. (Friedrich Engels) – The royals and the British class system
Please email abstracts (200 words) to popcrn@une.edu.au by 31/6/23. Please include your name, affiliation, email address, title of paper and a short biography (100 words). Registration is free.
*
Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2023
CFP–Global Crises Cultures: Representing Refugees in the 21st Century
eds. Dr Katie Brown (Exteter) and Dr Peter Sloane (Buckingham)
Although it is only since 2015 that the phenomena of mass forced displacement has warranted the term ‘crisis’, the pre-existing social, cultural, economic, and military conditions for that were exacerbated by the US led War on Terror which begin in 2001, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. A 2020 report by Brown University’s Cost of War Project estimated ‘that at least 37 million people have fled their homes in the eight most violent wars the U.S. military has launched or participated in since 2001’ (Vine et al. 2020, 1). During the same period, rising instability in Central and South America (notably the Northern Triangle and Venezuela) has led to record numbers of internally and externally displaced persons, while ongoing conflicts in Africa have created over 30 million refugees. Encouraged by the sheer number of people (almost 1% of global population), Guy S. Goodwin-Gill argues that ‘the refugee problem cannot be considered apart from the field of human rights as a whole’ (2014, 43). Indeed, stripped of the legal protections afforded by a nation state, the refugee represents the limit case for human rights precisely because, as Hannah Arendt has it, a refugee is a person who has ‘lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they [are] still human’ (1979, 299). The surging volume of displaced persons and their treatment by possible host nations provokes equally vital questions about how human beings conceive of themselves as part of a common humanity, a sense of species as opposed to polity belongingness. Claude Levi-Strauss observedhalf a century ago that‘the notion of humanity, which includes without distinction of race or civilization all the forms of the human species, appeared very late and in a limited way’ (1976, 329). These limitations become starkly apparent in refugee fictions, poetry, film, literary journalism, and life writing of the 21st century, which capture not simply the predictable brutalities of despotic regimes, but the overt border violence and inhumanity of the democratic states which they imagine as places of sanctuary.
During the past decade, several important anthologies have addressed the issue of refugeehood in the present. Agnes Woolley’s wonderful Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees in the Twenty-First Century (Palgrave, 2014), Lava Asaad’s edited collection, Literature with A White Helmet: The Textual-Corporeality of Being, Becoming, and Representing Refugees (Routledge, 2019), as well as Mike Classon Frangos and Sheila Ghose’s Refugee Genres: Essays on the Culture of Flight and Refuge (Palgrave, 2022) have drawn attention to cultures of crises in the contemporary period. Working within this context while expanding and advancing the discussions instigated in these works, Cultures of Crises will bring together both established scholars and new critical voices working across the humanities to produce a truly global study of the current period of mass migrations, with essays on movements in Ukraine, Southern and Central America, through the Middle East and Sudan, to Myanmar. While the stories themselves are of key concern, the collection will be formally wide-ranging, exploring refugee’s experiences across fiction, life writing, creative non-fiction, film, poetry, and the visual arts more broadly. Of particular interest are studies that explore multiple texts, multiple themes, and multiple locations, as opposed to single text or single author studies. Given the proliferation of prose fiction studies, preference may also be given to those essays which focus on other forms. The proposed book will be divided into three parts: Prose Fiction and Poetry; Life Writing; Visual Arts.
This CFP invites abstracts of 300 words accompanied by a short biography to be submitted to culturesofcrises@gmail.com by July 1st 2023. Final essays of 6-8000 words will be due by September 30th 2024.
Eds:
Dr Katie Brown is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at the University of Exeter. She is the author of Writing and the Revolution: Venezuelan Metafiction 2004-2012 (2019), and co-editor of Crude Words: Contemporary Writing from Venezuela (2016) and Escribir afuera: Cuentos de intemperies y querencias (2021).
Dr Peter Sloane is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Buckingham, UK. He is the author of Narrative Displacement: Refugees in 21st Century Fiction and Life Writing (Liverpool University Press, 2025), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Gestural Poetics (Bloomsbury, 2021), David Foster Wallace and the Body (Routledge, 2019), and editor of ReFocus: The Films of Claire Denis (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and (with K. Shaw) Kazuo Ishiguro: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Manchester University Press, 2023).
*
Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2023
Call for Papers
VERSIONS OF THE AFTERLIFE
7th December 2023
Online Conference
Between Matthew’s description of heaven as a wedding (22 1-14) – most memorably delivered by Jesus in Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ – and Jean Paul Sartre’s verdict that “hell is other people,” there is not only a gap of centuries but also cultures and religions.[1] Despite their disparity, however, both conceptualizations render the fundamental human anxiety related to the weighty question of “what comes next?” They point to the necessity of envisaging the unfamiliar through the familiar, thereby taming the terrifying void.
Versions of the afterlife, therefore, are not only related to the need to imagine the hereafter in the sense of Heaven, Hell and Purgatory (for the Catholics), but also to the contemporary notions of “post-theory”, such as post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, post-colonialism and post-nationalism.
The aim of this conference organized by the Faculty of English at Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznan, Poland – and co-hosted with the Faculty of Philosophy, AMU, and the Poznań Chapter of the Agder Academy of Social Sciences and Letters – is to explore and discuss the literal, the literary and the metaphorical meanings of the notion of “the afterlife”. We welcome papers representing the humanities in their conceptualizations and literary reifications of the religious, medical and political “hereafters”.
Literature (in English) / Art
-
- Literary narratives on the hereafter across cultures and religions
-
- Saints’ lives and visions
-
- Theatre and the drama of/on the hereafter
-
- Gothic literature and the visions of the afterlife
-
- Literary visions and versions of post-apocalyptic reality
-
- Artistic representations of the afterlife: Imaging the hereafter
-
- The afterlives of theory: post-humanism and the ideas of postmodernism, post-feminism, etc.
-
- The afterlives of ideologies, doctrines, political systems as represented in literary works (post-nationalism, post-colonialism, etc.)
-
- The afterlives of literary texts and their authors: adaptations, rewritings, etc.
Medical Humanities / Social Sciences (in literary texts in English)
-
- The moment of passing
-
- The mystery of one’s body shutting down
-
- Marketing death and the life after death
-
- Out-of-body experience
-
- End-of life dreams and visions versus science
Theology / Ethics (in literary texts in English)
-
- Versions of the afterlife from the earliest records to contemporary times across cultures and religions
-
- Ars moriendi (good endings vs bad endings)
-
- Secular / atheist alternatives for life after death
300-400 word abstracts should be sent to BOTH afterlifewaconference@gmail.com and kbronkk@amu.edu.pl by 1st July 2023. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of August 2023. There will be no fees for conference participation, but active and passive participants need to register in advance.
“Narratives of Displacement” International Conference
28-29 October 2023 – London/Online
organised by
London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
Deadline for Submissions 15 June 2023
The conference seeks to explore the narratives of displacement and to demonstrate the validity of a cross-disciplinary approach which brings together the historical, cultural, social and literary expertise in the handling of text. The conference will particularly focus on time and space representations and on treatment of the theme of cultural ambivalence and identity conflict. The subject of displacement will be regarded as both a migration, voluntary or forced, and a sense of being socially or culturally “out of place”.
Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
-
- migrations and deportations (expatriation, expulsion, exile, etc.)
-
- journeys, pilgrimages, missions
-
- mobility and place
-
- rootlessness and taking root
-
- foreignness and indigeneity
-
- (re)settlement and (non)residence
-
- nomadism and place attachment
-
- hotels, guesthouses, shelters
-
- multiculturalism, interculturalism, transculturalism
-
- strangerhood and neo-cosmopolitanism
Submissions may be proposed in various formats, including:
-
- Individually submitted papers (organised into panels by the committee)
-
- Panels (3-4 individual papers)
-
- Posters
The conference aims to bring together scholars from different fields. We invite proposals from various disciplines including history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, culture studies, media studies, political science, law, architecture, tourism, religious studies, literature, linguistics, psychology, etc.
Proposals up to 250 words should be sent by 15 June 2023 to: displacement@lcir.co.uk. Download Paper proposal form.
Registration fee (online participation) – 90 GBP
Registration fee (physical participation) – 150 GBP
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck College, University of London
*
Deadline for submissions: June 15, 2023
Imaginative kin-making. Narrating alternative forms of kinship in survival literature and fiction.
XXXI AIA Conference
Rende, Cosenza, 13-16 September 2023
Associazione Italiana di Anglistica
Call for proposals for panel
Convenors: R. Ciocca (Università di Napoli L’Orientale) and Marta Cariello (Università degli Studi della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli)
In Making Kin in the Chthulucene: Reproducing Multispecies Justice (2018), Donna Haraway engaged in the thorny question of survival for a planet already fast travelling towards its demographic and environmental collapse. She addressed the question from a critical post-human and post-anthropocentric stance, affirming the need to reintroduce the practice of caring for the earth at every scale, and to fight against the current mass extinction of species, from the complex perspective of both ‘the Born and the Disappeared’. She meant, by this, not to disjoint the (apparently opposed) necessities of guaranteeing reproductive justice and safety for peoples subjected to genocides, forced sterilizations, missing generations, and at the same time of finding ways to reverse the general population growth. Since the intersection between reproduction justice and environmental concerns is intimately connected to the human capacity to reverse spoliative policies of natural resources and habitats, in a pro-active sense, the feminist philosopher posed the personal and theoretical question of how to lighten our species footprint by creating innovative and enduring relationships without necessarily ‘making more babies’.
Taking the cue from this need to engage scary demographic perspectives, we’d like to explore narrations in which the idea of survival is connected to new forms of ‘becoming-with’, of ‘symbiotic assemblages’, or, also, of making kin, making new families as something other/more than entities tied by genealogy or biological bonds, together with the possibilities of lateral, transversal and exogenous adoption practices. We are especially interested in inviting submissions tackling the role of these alter-families and alter-communities in coping with forced migrancy, ethnic or racial cleansing and climate change induced crises. Proposals are welcome from a number of different genre languages which include, but are not limited to, novels, poetry, drama, personal essays, memoirs, film, tv series, and other storytelling practices.
Some References
Rosi Braidotti and Simone Bignall ,(eds.) Posthuman Ecologies. Complexity and Process after Deleuze, New York, London, Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination, Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 2005.
Adele E. Clarke and Donna Haraway (eds), Making Kin Not Population, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018.
Lidia Curti (a cura di) Femminismi futuri. Teorie/Poetiche/Fabulazioni. Roma, Iacobelli, 2019.
María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Donna J. Haraway, The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness, Chicago, Prickly Paradigm, 2003.
Marco Malvestio, Raccontare la fine del mondo: Fantascienza e Antropocene. Milano, Nottetempo, 2021.
Rob Nixon, Slow violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge (MA), Harvard University Press, 2011.
Sara Upstone and Peter Ely (eds.), Community in Contemporary British Fiction. From Blair to Brexit London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2022.
Deadline for proposals: 15 June 2023
Send abstracts and bio to: rcio
*
Borders and Crossings: an interdisciplinary conference on travel writing
5-7 July 2023, Łódź, Poland
Deadline for Submissions: May 31, 2023
Due to unforeseen circumstances outside of the organiser’s control, Borders and Crossings 2023 has additional room for presenters and the call for papers has been reopened to allow maximum participation from across the Arts and Humanities.
The 2023 edition of Borders and Crossings takes place in the unique context of Łódź: a post-industrial city situated in the wider European political and economic context, and which epitomises ‘borders and crossings’ in several ways. First, Łódź was called ‘the city of four cultures’ and until WWII was inhabited by people of Polish, Jewish, German, and Russian origin, as well as minorities, with their respective languages, religions, processes of assimilation or cultural isolation, and inward and outward migrations. Second, the city’s industrial history and built environment is founded on forms of travel: migration for industrial employment; the movement of ideas, technologies, and capital within trans-European and trans-Atlantic industrial networks; and movements for social change. Third, the city’s dynamic expansion in the 19th century converged with its occupation by foreign powers, engaging discussion on imperialism, shifting borders, political change, and identity.
With this in mind, we invite proposals related to the contexts mentioned above, but also, as is customary at Borders and Crossings, contributions concerning other theoretical and practical aspects of travel writing. Proposals can reflect on, but are by no means limited to, the following themes:
● Travel writing and the industrial city
● Representations of travel to/from/around Poland
● Central Europe or Eastern Europe? Geographical and cultural identities in travel writing
● East-West interactions
● Imperialism and travel; indigenous voices ‘writing back’ and decolonisation
● Travel writing and the self/other
● Travel and conflict
● Representations of space and place in travel writing
● Travel and translation
● Travel and class/gender/sexuality
● Travel writing and eco-criticism/nature writing
● Theories of travel and travel writing
● The history of travel and/versus tourism
● The craft and practice of travel writing
● Travel journalism, guidebooks, digital media, social media
● Travel writing and other media (film, photography, illustrations, etc.)
● Non-places and spaces of transit
● Travel rest and stopovers
● Modes of transport and points of view
● Travel and pandemics/disease
This event is open to academics, postgraduate researchers, and practitioners (inside and outside of academia) interested in travel writing from a broad range of perspectives. The aim of this conference is to showcase the interdisciplinarity of travel writing studies and the event welcomes proposals from but not restricted to literary studies, mobility and tourism studies, history, geography, creative writing, environmental studies, translation theory and practice, among others. Proposals are not restricted to any period of time or geographical context. Further information on the Borders and Crossings conference series can be found at https://bordersandcrossings23.wordpress.com/.
Although we wish for all participants to be able to attend the conference in Łódź, the conference is hybrid so that participants unable to travel can still present their paper. The conference fee is 60 euro for regular participants and 45 euro for PhD researchers.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers and 60-minute panels of three speakers. Proposals of approximately 250 words (up to 500 words for a panel), accompanied by a short biographical note, should be sent to: bordersandcrossings23@gmail.com.
Deadline for proposals: 31 May 2023
Organising committee: Joanna Kruczkowska (University of Łódź) and Ross Cameron (University of Glasgow/University of Strathclyde).
Contact Email:
bordersandcrossings23@gmail.com
URL:
https://bordersandcrossings23.wordpress.com/
*
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS JUNE 5
Dear IABA List Members,
We are working on Biography’s annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical works on life writing, the most extensive reference of its kind, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.
If last year (from January to December 2022) you published, edited, or coedited a book; wrote an article for a journal or an essay for an edited collection; or completed your doctoral dissertation, we would appreciate having that information, so that we can incorporate it into the list. (We may have already included it, but this will make sure your work is noted.) We are also interested in lifewriting-focused podcasts or other media, excluding individual presentations or talks.
We would request the following information:
· Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted according to MLA 9 style
· A one-sentence annotation per text
We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you could provide an annotation in English, however, that would be helpful.
We would appreciate getting the information by Monday, June 5. Please send your information to Caroline Zuckerman (gabiog@hawaii.edu).
Thanks in advance. This bibliography usually has between 1,400 and 1,500 entries, and represents the most extensive annual critical survey of the field. We want to make sure your work appears within it.
—
Caroline Zuckerman
Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor
The Center for Biographical Research
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1960 East-West Road
Biomed B104
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-3774
Email: gabiog@hawaii.edu
*
*
Call for Papers for an Edited Volume (eds. Poonam Bala and Russel Viljoen)
Travel Writings and Medical Encounters in the Colonial World
Deadline for Abstracts–May 31, 2023
While several European naturalists, doctors travelled to tropical colonies to discover indigenous flora and fauna of medicinal value, their movement also enabled the formation of medical nexuses through various trade routes; the latter provided a cogent medium through which the collected knowledge could be re-located within the European metropoles. Placed in the context of medical humanities, these movements have opened an array of possibilities to study, analyse and recover the medical pasts of indigenous and colonial societies. The genre of travel writing preceded by the production and proliferation of travel texts by literate individuals saw the accumulation of data gathered by travellers during the 18th and 19th centuries. These writings, no doubt, revealed ideas of colonial and expansionist policies as well as imperial prowess which could vindicate colonial expansion and territorial acquisitions.
Travel writings in the form of various handwritten notes, descriptions, reference to indigenous healers and sketches depicting medical encounters as written texts included reference to indigenous medical practice, cures, medicines, disease and illnesses and various interpretations of indigenous medicine, healers vis-à-vis their western counterpart. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular, these explicated the rhetoric of colonialism and its expanse in the colonised communities. Travel narratives of physicians also reveal their first hand experience with slaves, slavery and the process of enslavement including encounters, resistance, medical inspections, illness, while also including medical treatment provided thereof. The creation of a new discourse on racism and inequality also opened up issues of power over the discourse of slavery and slave narratives.
The proposed volume will examine modalities of disease causation, explanation and their trajectory as a result of interaction with colonial communities in colonized settings around the world. As trained doctors, these male individuals, of European descent often engaged indigenous communities via interpreters or as observers, in order to obtain information about indigenous medical practices, treatment of disease, the relationship between disease and death, sin and sicknesses. We, therefore, seek to produce a collection that traces the “hidden” medical histories of colonized communities derived and gleaned from travel texts, which will enable an understanding of the trajectory of indigenous medical pasts and how they were shaped and re-defined as a result. Understanding the contributions of African and European doctors in the creation of a pharmaceutical industry, natural history and surgical enhancements is an important aspect of this trajectory.
Chapter contributions will focus on the following themes, but not limited to these:
Historiography, travel writing, medicine and disease studies
Travelogues and the social (re)construction of medical pasts
Travel scientists, doctors and biographies
Indigenous medicine and healing practices in Travelogues
Medical travel expeditions
Women writers, gender and medicine
Travel texts, epidemics/disease and indigenous communities
Scientific institutions as sponsors of colonial expeditions
Slave narratives and black travel writing
Medicine and knowledge in the slave trade
Interested scholars may please send an abstract of 250 words with relevant keywords, institutional affiliation and brief biography to Prof. Poonam Bala (p.bala@csuohio.edu) and Prof. Russel Viljoen (viljors@unisa.ac.za) by 31 May 2023. Completed draft chapter submissions of 7500 words should be submitted latest by 31 October 2023.
Contact Info:
Prof. Poonam Bala, Professor Extraordinarius, UNISA (South Africa) and Visiting Scholar, Clevelad State University (Ohio)
*
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH)
26-27 September 2023
Life Narrative and the Digital: An Interdisciplinary Conference and Workshop
- In what ways can digital methods and technologies aid the study and analysis of biographical data?
- How can the digital help us devise innovative pathways to the representation of historical individuals’ lives? (e.g. digital platforms)
- To what extent do digital formats of life narration tie in with new trends in auto/biographical scholarship and practice? (e.g. metabiography, relational biography, persona studies, group biography, object biography, etc.)
- How do we deal with uncertainty and the issue of data quality in the digital representation of biographical data?
The event will feature both a workshop and a conference track. The workshop (26 September) will be dedicated to short presentations of work-in-progress, with a strong focus on tools, technologies, software, and methods, and with an emphasis on feedback and exchange. The conference (27 September) follows a conventional format, with a mix of research papers and panel discussions, and will be open to the public. Participation in both formats is free of charge.
We invite proposals of max. 500 words via OpenReview (https://bit.ly/digital-bio-2023) for 15-minute (workshop) OR 20-minute (conference) contributions by 26 May 2023.
For more information, please consult our conference website, or contact us at amp@oeaw.ac.at.
Timo Frühwirth, Dimitra Grigoriou, Sandra Mayer
*
Deadline for submissions: May 31, 2023
PAMLA Veterans Studies Panel
contact email:
Veterans Studies is a growing field of research that addresses the significant impact of military personnel transitioning from active duty to civilian life with an emphasis on the veteran experience. This panel invites papers that explore various aspects of military service and/or the veteran experience, including those that reflect the conference theme of “Shifting Perspectives.” This session invites papers that explore the many facets of military life exhibited in literature, theater, film, and poetry written about or by military veterans as well as scholarly explorations of the veteran experience.
Some topics of particular interest include but are not limited to:
· Transition from military service
· Perceptions or conceptualizations of veteran identity
· Reintegration
· Systems and experiences which shape veterans’ post-military experiences
· Interdisciplinary approaches to veterans studies
· Commemoration, memorialization, memory
The conference will take place from Thursday, October 26 through Sunday, October 29, 2023 in Portland, Oregon. Potential presenters should submit abstract proposals using the online submission form (you will have to go to https://pamla.ballastacademic.com to login or create an account first). The deadline to submit presentation proposals is May 31, 2023.
For more information about the PAMLA conference, please go to https://www.pamla.org/conference/.
*
Call for Papers for Special Focus Section (January 2025)
Refugee Voices in Contemporary Literature
Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2023
This special focus section of Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature highlights the ways refugee authors tell stories of displacement, while engaging with issues of representation, authenticity, voice, the politics of refuge and humanitarianism, and the paradigms of victimhood and rescue. In response to the “problem-oriented approach to refugees,” the growing interdisciplinary field of critical refugee studies (CRS) aims to highlight the resilience and creativity of refugee communities: “a humane and ethical site of inquiry that re-conceptualizes refugee lifeworlds not as a problem to be solved by global elites but as a site of social, political and historical critiques that, when carefully traced, make transparent processes of colonization, war, and displacement” (https://criticalrefugeestudies.com/). This framework and others reframe analyses of literature of displacement: to complicate traditional paradigms of victimhood and rescue (critique of humanitarianism), present nontraditional figures of refugee affect (e.g. the “ungrateful refugee,” Dina Nayeri), excavate additional knowledge of refugee experiences, and shift focal points from suffering to resilience. Considering the continued relevance of refugees as those who are both “invisible and hypervisible” (Nguyen 15), this special issue seeks to remedy the imposed “condition of voicelessness” of those who have been displaced by highlighting their narratives (Soguk 294). The contributions to this issue should engage with critical frameworks that center the creative work of refugee authors and artists, while acknowledging the complexity of what it means to be displaced in the contemporary era.
The editors welcome articles that explore topics and concepts related to the opening of critical refugee studies in German Studies as well as in Francophone and Hispanic cultural production, and comparative studies.
Themes for contributions may include, but are not limited to:
- figures of displacement and placelessness
- intertwined histories of flight, colonialism, and imperialism
- gratitude and the “ungrateful refugee” (Dina Nayeri)
- the “good” refugee
- concepts of livability
- refugee refusal
- technology and flight
- the place of the camp
- statelessness, human rights and refugee rights in literature
- forced displacement and intersections of Indigenous studies and refugee studies
Please submit an abstract of 350-500 words along with a brief biography to Kathryn Sederberg (ksederbe@kzoo.edu) and Rebekah Slodounik (ras073@bucknell.edu) by June 1, 2023. Notifications of acceptance can be expected by June 15, and complete manuscripts of 6,000-8,000 words, formatted in MLA style (see formatting guidelines), will be due by October 1, 2023. Founded in 1976, the journal Studies in 20th and 20st Century Literature became open access in 2014, and charges authors no fees.
Guest Editors:
Kathryn Sederberg, Lucinda Hinsdale Stone Assistant Professor of German Studies, Kalamazoo College
Rebekah Slodounik, Assistant Professor of German Studies, Bucknell University
Works Cited
Espiritu, Yên Lê, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, and Nigel Hatton. Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies. Oakland: U of California P, 2022.
Nayeri, Dina. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. New York: Catapult, 2019.
Nguyen, Viet Thanh, ed. “Introduction.” The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives. New York: Abrams Press, 2018, pp. 11-22.
Soguk, Nevgat. “Border’s Capture: Insurrectional Politics, Border-Crossing Humans, and the New Political.” In Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge, edited by Prem Kumar Rajaram and Carl Grundy-Warr, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007, pp. 283-308.
Contact Info:
guest editors: Kathryn Sederberg (ksederbe@kzoo.edu) and Rebekah Slodounik (ras073@bucknell.edu)
general inquiries about the journal: Laura Kanost, editor (lakanost@ksu.edu)
Contact Email:
URL:
https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/
*
Dear colleagues,
Please find below the call for 4 PhD positions within the framework of the Horizon-Europe-Project “United in Narrative Diversity? Cultural (Ex-)Change and Mutual Perceptions in Eastern and Western Europe at the threshold of the digital age“ (NARDIV).
Most interesting for life writing scholars is PhD position 2:
Université Aix-Marseille / University of Amsterdam “East-West Perception in Life Narratives of Women in Post-Communist Europe”.
Feel free to circulate this advertisement to your network of colleagues and MA students to identify potential candidates.
__
University of Amsterdam
Faculty of Humanities
Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies
dr. M.J.M. Rensen
Senior Lecturer in Modern European Literature
Bushuis/Oost-Indisch Huis | kamer D2.08B
(Post) PO Box 1619 | 1000 BP Amsterdam
(Visit) Kloveniersburgwal 48 | 1012 CX AmsterdamT +31.20.525.2198
New publications : Edited volume AUP: Networks, Narratives and Nations: https://www.aup.nl/en/book/9789463720755/networks-narratives-and-nations
Redacteur Armada. Tijdschrift voor wereldliteratuur.
*
Call for application
In the framework of the Horizon-Europe-Project “United in Narrative Diversity? Cultural (Ex-)Change and Mutual Perceptions in Eastern and Western Europe at the threshold of the digital age“ (NARDIV) are four PhD-positions available
NARDIV
Europe experiences a relaunch of cultural and national stereotypes triggered by the migration crisis, Covid-19, democratic backslides and war against Ukraine. Four decades after the fall of the war, Eastern and Western Europe seem increasingly alienated, each having different perceptions on Europe, the EU and its principles. These trends manifest themselves in an alienation between Eastern and Western Europe, as well as in the perception of Europe in general. Intermittently they are, as we suggest, expressions of resilient post-colonial relationships within Europe. With a focus on the (clichéd binary) East-West confrontation, this project explores the future possibilities of building and managing transnational relationships in the fields of culture and heritage, one of the mainstays of customary cultural diplomacy. Taking six European countries as the basis of our exploration – France, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Romania – we critically examine mutual perceptions in Eastern and Western Europe through the prism of intercultural exchange. In the framework of the project, scholars, practitioners from culture-exchange institutes, artists and creative industries players join forces to scrutinise current difficulties, from diverging historical developments, emotional investments, to challenges of the digital media revolution. The objective is to develop new strategies to conceptualise and revitalise cultural encounters and exchange between East and West to discuss mutual perceptions and ideas. The findings of this collaboration aim at a) boosting the culture-diplomacy / exchange sector by strengthening their role as mediators of transnational European values; b) lay bare best and worst practices in order to develop recommendations for new approaches and (media) strategies. Thus, fostering a more inclusive concept of cultural diplomacy to counter populist, identity-based discourses and to promote the European narrative across different cultural heritages.
Coordinator: Aix-Marseille Université (Nicole Colin, Catherine Teissier)
Partner: Protisvalor Mediterranee SAS FR, Uniwersytet Wroclawski PL, Hochschule für angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg DE, Universitatea Din Bucuresti RO, Uniwersytet Szczecinski PL, Stichting Duitsland Instituut bij de Universiteit van Amsterdam NL, Romanian Cultural Institute RO, Goethe-Institut DE, Institut français de Roumanie RO, Universiteit van Amsterdam NL, EUFRAK-EuroConsults Berlin GmbH DE, GLOBESEC SK
PhD position 1: HAW Hamburg / Universiteit van Amsterdam
“Inclusive Cultural Policy: Social Media and Hybrid Community Building in European East-West Transfer”
– Funding: 3 years
– Start: 1 June 2023 (or later)
– Employer: HAW Hamburg
– PhD-inscription: Universiteit van Amsterdam
– Application deadline: 15 May 2023
In the Work Package “Cultural Policy Dialogue in Social Media”, which is coordinated by the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW Hamburg) in cooperation with the Duitsland Institute of the Universiteit van Amsterdam and the Goethe-Institut Bucharest, new forms of cultural transfer with the help of social media and hybrid event formats as well as a participatory self-image of cultural diplomacy and educational institutions are to be developed. The focus is particularly on cultural exchange and community building in contexts that have often been neglected so far, such as work in rural regions or cooperation with young people. Based on existing research results in the field of cultural communication (e.g. for museums), innovative strategies will be developed, especially in the field of social media, but also hybrid formats for cultural events and workshops for institutions of foreign cultural policy.
Your profile
– Completed Master’s degree in communication, media, cultural studies or a similar discipline
– Interest and initial practical experience in the field of social media and digital communication
– Interest in applied research
– Knowledge of qualitative and quantitative methods such as guided interviews, text and content analysis and field research
– Knowledge of cultural communication, cultural transfer and cultural diplomacy
– Ability to work independently and systematically and to work in a team
– Good knowledge of German, English and Romanian
Your tasks
– Writing a scientific dissertation
– Field research in Amsterdam and Bucharest (6 months each)
– Development of communication strategies for social media using the example of the Goethe-Institut Bucharest and the Duitsland Instituuts Amsterdam.
– Development of hybrid formats in foreign cultural policy, especially for the intensification of cultural transfer between young people.
– Collaboration in the NARDIV project team
– Participation in workshops, conferences and cultural events in the framework of the project NARDIV
Further information and application: Prof. Dr. Hanna Klimpe (hanna.klimpe@haw-hamburg.de)
PhD position 2: Université Aix-Marseille / Universiteit van Amsterdam
“East-West Perception in Life Narratives of Women in Post-Communist Europe”
– Funding: 3 years
– Start: 1 September 2023
– Employer: Aix-Marseille Université
– PhD-inscription: Joint PhD Aix-Marseille Université / Universiteit van Amsterdam
– Application deadline: 15 June 2023
In the Work Package “Perceptions of East/West in women’s life narratives in post-communist Europe”, coordinated by the Université d’Aix-Marseille (AMU) in cooperation with the University of Amsterdam, the East-West perception in life narratives of women writers will be investigated within the framework of a dissertation. For this purpose, a corpus will be selected, especially from texts of the genre of life narratives, which can include, for examples, fictional texts, autofictions, autosociobiographical writings, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries as well as hybrid forms. Among other things, images, emotions, embodied experiences and affects are to be examined in the texts, which not only represent the different realities of life, weltanschauung and styles in East and West, but also actively influence mutual perceptions. The Phd project can, for example, focus on female authors from the GDR or East Germany from different generations, female authors with migration or exile experience, and female authors from German-speaking minorities in Eastern and Central Europe.
Your profile
– Master’s degree in German studies, (comparative) literature or cultural studies, European studies, gender studies or a similar discipline
– Interest in intercultural questions, cultural transfer, literary circulation
– Interest in qualitative methods of social research such as semi-structured interviews and field research in cultural contexts
– Knowledge of the East-West debate in Germany and Europe
– Ability to work independently and systematically and to work in a team
– Very good knowledge of German, French and English
Your tasks
– Writing a scientific dissertation
– Field research (in Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, etc.): Interviews with authors
– Transcription and analysis of interviews
– Support in the creation of short video films
– Participation in the NARDIV project team
– Participation in workshops, conferences and cultural events in the framework of the NARDIV project
Further information and application: Dr. Catherine Teissier (catherine.teissier@univ-amu.fr), Dr. Marleen Rensen (m.j.m.rensen@uva.nl)
PhD position 3: Université Aix-Marseille / Universitatea din București
“The Impact of Cultural Diplomacy as Soft Power in Times of Crises I”
– Start: 1 September 2023
– Funding: 3 years
– Employer: Aix-Marseille Université
– PhD-inscription: Joint PhD Aix-Marseille Université / University of Bucharest
– Application deadline: 15 June 2023
As part of the Work Package “Shaping perceptions by cultural diplomacy as soft power”, coordinated by the Universitatea din București and the University of Aix-Marseille in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut Bucharest, this PhD will investigate the activities and programmes of German-speaking institutions and their influence on Romanian society and its cultural actors between 1968 and 2007.
Your profile
– Master’s degree in German studies, cultural studies, history, political science, cultural sociology or a similar discipline
– Interest in cultural diplomacy and theories of cultural transfer
– Interest in Romanian and German cultural history and the exchange between the two countries
– Interest in field research in France and Romania
– Ability to work independently and systematically and to work in a team
– Very good knowledge of German and Romanian, good knowledge of English, knowledge of French
Your tasks
– Writing a scientific dissertation in German
– Archival research to identify the strategies of the Goethe-Institut and other German-speaking institutions in Romania during the last two decades of communism and in the period between the fall of Ceaușescu and Romania’s accession to the European Union
– Analysis of the impact of these strategies on cultural and academic actors and their networks, as well as on civil society
– Field research: interviews with cultural and academic actors in Romania, Germany, Austria, etc.
– Transcription and analysis of the interviews
– Work in the team of the NARDIV project, in particular in cooperation with the PhD student of the Universitatea din București (PhD position 4)
– Participation in research workshops, conferences and cultural events organised in the framework of the NARDIV project
Further information and application: Prof. Dr. Nicole Colin (nicole.colin-umlauf@univ-amu.fr), Prof. Dr. Horatiu Decuble (horatiu.decuble@lls.unibuc.ro)
PhD position 4: Universitatea din București / Université Aix-Marseille
“The Impact of Cultural Diplomacy as Soft Power in Times of Crises II”
– Funding: 3 years
– Start: 1 September 2023
– Employer: Universitatea din București
– PhD-inscription: Joint PhD Universitatea din București / Aix-Marseille Université
– Applications review and selection of candidates: 1-15 September 2023, Universitatea din București
As part of the Work Package “Shaping perceptions by cultural diplomacy as soft power”, coordinated by the Universitatea din București in collaboration with the University of Aix-Marseille and the Institut Français de Bucarest, this PhD will investigate the activities and programmes of the Institut Français de Roumanie and their impact on Romanian society and its cultural actors between 1968 and 2007.
Your profile
– Master’s degree in political science, history, Romance studies, international relations, sociology of culture or a comparable discipline
– Interest in the history of cultural diplomacy and theories of cultural transfer
– Knowledge of Romanian and French cultural history and the exchange relations between the two countries
– Interest in field research in France and Romania
– Ability to work independently and systematically and to work in a team
– Very good knowledge of Romanian and French as well as good knowledge of English required; knowledge of German desirable
Your tasks
– Writing a scientific dissertation in French
– Archival research to identify the strategies of the Institut français during the last two decades of communism and in the period between the fall of Ceaușescu and Romania’s accession to the European Union
– Analysis of the impact of these strategies on cultural and academic actors and their networks, as well as on civil society
– Field research: interviews with cultural, cultural policy and academic actors in Romania, France, etc.
– Transcription and analysis of the interviews
– Work in the team of the NARDIV project, especially with the PhD student of the Université d’Aix-Marseille (PhD position 3)
– Participation in research workshops, conferences and cultural events organised in the framework of the NARDIV project
Further information: Prof. Dr. Cristian Preda (cristian.preda@unibuc.ro), Prof. Dr. Nicole Colin (nicole.colin-umlauf@univ-amu.fr)
How to apply?
We look forward to receiving your online application with the usual application documents (letter of motivation, curriculum vitae, diplomas, recommendations) in one PDF file to the contact persons indicated.
Application deadline: see the respective offer
*
CfP. Decolonizing the Self: How Do We Perceive Others When We Practice Autotheory?
Special Issue (winter 2024) of The February Journal,
edited by Shura Dogadaeva and Andrei Zavadski
Deadline for Submissions: May 15, 2023
Andrei: So much is currently being said about decolonization. The term is being used—and, as we currently see in Eastern Europe—also abused a lot. But what does decolonization mean in practice? How does one engage in decolonizing the self? In the next special issue of The February Journal, I would like to focus on approaches to practical self-decolonization.
Shura: I agree. But when I think about this, I cannot help but wonder whether I have the right to engage in a self-decolonizing practice. Shouldn’t I, a citizen of Russia and, in one way or another, a product of its imperialist culture, shut up and listen? Shouldn’t I limit my own agency in this regard?
Andrei: Decolonizing the self is, in my opinion, one of those tasks that require our immediate and active attention. As somebody who was born and grew up in Belarus, I ‘belong’ to both the colonized and—in a way, especially if we consider Lukashenka’s current politics—the colonizing sides, I think we consciously have to challenge this ‘belonging.’ Ultimately, such work should result in redefining our own subjectivity and thus altering the way we perceive others. It is our primary task, I feel.
Shura: But how does one deconstruct one’s ‘belonging’? It is a very abstract term. Belonging to something often means substituting my own experience with a ‘collective,’ ‘universal’ one. Unless you are a white heterosexual male, which is likely to make your personal experience close to ‘the universal one.’ But does it mean, then, that closely listening to myself might lead to a change in how I relate to others?
Andrei: If we consider belonging—but also theory, knowledge, and so on—to be a construct imposed by a historical white-male-heterosexual instance and by—more-often-than-not imperialist—thinking, then it is exactly what colonizes, corrupts us, resulting in a colonizing gaze (as well as discourse and behavior) that we exercise upon others. By decolonizing the self—for instance, by dissecting our own experience—we question our belonging and other similar constructs, challenge and deconstruct them, and thus decolonize our relationship to others.
Shura: Personal experience allows one to think outside the box, giving this idiomatic cliché a literal meaning. If ‘culture,’ ‘knowledge,’ et cetera are constructs, they confine us within boxed realities. Reflecting on your own experience makes you realize that this box has walls, but they are not as strong as it might seem and can in fact be brought down. Utilizing one’s personal experience for this purpose might seem like a narcissistic trap, but I don’t think it is. Rather, it is about the fact that any personal experience is always much more than ‘universal,’ ‘universalized’ experience. I think autotheory (Fournier 2022; Vaneycken 2020; Wiegman 2020) is a great method to free the self from such imposed colonizing constructs.
Andrei: How do you understand autotheory? For me, it is not simply about reflecting on your personal experience and sharing it with others: this would make one part of the identity politics discourse. Moreover, a person engaging in an autotheoretical practice of self-decolonization might, as our editor Isabel Bredenbröker points out, have to resist negative identity politics, that is, outside efforts to keep this person within the confines of one prescribed identity.
Shura: Definitely. You know, I love this phrase from Preciado (2021), who writes in Can the Monster Speak? that ‘[t]o be branded with an identity means simply that one does not have the power to designate one’s identity as universal.’ Authotheory isn’t about branding oneself with an identity, it is about deconstructing the ‘universal,’ of which Preciado speaks.
Andrei: So, autotheory is about relating your personal experience to the one declared as ‘universal,’ but not with the aim of making the former fit in, but rather, of loosening and shattering the very structure of the universal. Once these epistemological structures are in ruins, voices and experiences that did not fit in become much more audible. By decolonizing the self we are able to listen, hear, and perceive others and their unique experiences. I think my own practice of decolonizing the self started when I realized, some time ago, that I was queer. Luckily, this realization did not make me doubt my own sanity (which sadly happens to a lot of LGBTQIA+ people), but prompted closer attention to my personal experience. Analyzing it against the ‘universal norm’ into which I was supposed to fit, I grew skeptical of ‘the universal’ rather than my own experience. Which, in line with intersectionality thinking, made me more attentive to other marginalized voices around me.
Shura: My practice originates in reading groups that I conducted with young adults at a Moscow museum. We read texts on Stalinisim, genocide, World War Two, and similar topics. I soon realized that my pupils did not have the language to talk about traumatic past events. I understood this as a consequence of the (post-)Soviet education system, which saw little transformation, if at all. It made me reevaluate my own education and reexamine, among other things, historical science as a practice of colonization. I started listening to these kids very carefully, and this act of listening made them try hard to formulate their own thoughts, rather than simply reproduce school-taught narratives.
Andrei: This reminds me of how Maggie Nelson’s (2015) The Argonauts opens. On the novel’s very first page, she invokes Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained, albeit inexpressibly, within the expressed. By listening to what your students express you are able to get a sense of what they cannot express.
Shura: Yes, listening is actually an essential practice for a teacher: it allows her to challenge constructions like ‘knowledge’ or ‘belonging,’ which, in turn, challenges and transforms the types of relationships with others that are imposed by these constructions.
Andrei: So, it would be interesting to learn how individuals engage in self-decolonizing autotheoretical practices and what manifestations these practices acquire in artistic, pedagogical, activist, academic, and other fields of life.
Shura: Yes! And not only discursive practices: we need to consider what is beyond discourse. (Even though Judith Butler would crucify us for suggesting there is anything non-discursive.) Perhaps there are artistic, performative practices out there that work with affects, emotions, and bodies, aiming at self-decolonization. The question here is: What would this inquiry add to what we know about decolonization already?
Andrei: Ana Fabíola Maurício (2023), in her chapter in the book on silence that was reviewed in The February Journal’s Issue 01–02 (Veselov 2023), critiques the discourse of postcolonialism and postcolonial theory for imposing on an individual from an oppressed group a kind of responsibility to be that group’s voice and representative. In other words, the individual’s personal experience is seen as secondary to the collective experience of the group. I believe that engaging in autotheoretical self-decolonizing practices would be a way to emphasize individual experiences and challenge established theoretical approaches.
Shura: It would be great to invite authors who are developing autotheoretical self-decolonizing practices in their academic, artistic, activist, pedagogical, and other activities. It would also be great to receive submissions that use different genres and forms of presentation, as well as ones that stem from different geographical, epistemological, and other contexts.
References
-
- Fournier L (2022) Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
-
- Maurício AF (2023) Un-silencing bodies, un-silencing lives: Artistic (self-)decoloniality and artistic (self-) empowerment. In: Santos L (ed), Cultures of Silence: The Power of Untold Narratives. London and New York, Routledge: 9–27.
-
- Nelson M (2015) The Argonauts. Minneapolis, MN, Graywolf Press.
-
- Preciado P (2021) Can the Monster Speak. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.
-
- Vaneycken A (2020) Collectiveness as a form of autotheory. Parse, 12, https://parsejournal.com/article/collectiveness-as-a-form-of-autotheory/ (03/04/23).
-
- Veselov A (2023) Book review. Santos L (ed) (2023) Cultures of Silence: The Power of Untold Narratives. London and New York, Routledge. The February Journal, 01–02: 161–170.
-
- Wiegman R (2020) Introduction: Autotheory theory. Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory, 1(76): 1–14.
To submit a proposal, please provide the following information in English:
• contribution type (e.g., article, visual essay, reflexive essay, data essay, etc.);
• language of contribution;
• title of contribution;
• abstract (300 words);
• keywords that indicate the focus of the contribution;
• biographical information, including a short biographical statement of maximum 100 words stating research interests and relevant professional experience.
Proposals for contributions are due on May 15, 2023. Send all the information requested above—as a single PDF document—to the info@thefebruaryjournal.org.
The February Journal is an independent interdisciplinary journal at intersections of academic, art, and activist practices. A project of Tabor Collective, February produces special issues on strategic themes that currently include migration, displacement, statelessness, and exile in the context of war, violence, and aggression. The journal publishes empirical, theoretical, and speculative research that uses de-centering, queer, feminist, decolonial, and autotheoretical methodologies. It welcomes research in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation. Peer-reviewed and available in open access, The February Journal provides a sourcebook of ideas for an international audience.
Contact Info:
Andrei Zavadski
Contact Email:
URL:
https://thefebruaryjournal.org/en/announcements/call-for-submissions/25
*
13th Annual BIO Conference
May 19-21, 2023
New York, NY
Along with the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Biographers International Organization (BIO) will co-host a three day conference both in person and online at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. General admission is $345 in person ($295 for members); and $99 for streaming only ($49 for members). Note that a year’s membership is just $60 for most people, $30 for students. Click here to join.
Addressing both the state of the world and the state of biography, the James Atlas Plenary on Saturday morning will feature a conversation on “Biography in Times of Conflict and War” between Blanche Wiesen Cook, the esteemed biographer of Eleanor Roosevelt, and Beverly Gage, whose recent highly acclaimed biography of J. Edgar Hoover, is on BIO’s short list for the Plutarch Award.
The 2023 BIO Award winner, Kitty Kelley, will deliver the keynote address on Saturday afternoon. She is the undisputed first-name in unauthorized biography, captivating readers with her best-selling biographies of Jackie Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, Oprah, the Bush family, and the British royal family.
Panels on biography basics, craft, publishing, and promotion—along with sessions on issues of race, transnationalism, and other subjects—will take place on Saturday. Offerings range from “The Art of the Interview” to “Complicated Icons,” the latter featuring noted biographers Stacy Schiff (on Samuel Adams), David Maraniss (on Jim Thorpe) and Tamara Payne (on Malcolm X). There are ample opportunities for meeting fellow biographers throughout the weekend.
*
Epistolary Time / Time in Letters
4th Epistolary Research Network (TERN) Online Symposium
5/5/2023; 10/6-7/2023)
The clock is ticking. Schedules, delays, deadlines, queues worry our lives. Letters are often considered in terms of space and geographical distance. In 2023, TERN proposes to revisit themes surrounding temporality, be it in reference to material form or technology, delivery, calendar time or epistolary contents and conventions.
Has a delayed letter ever changed a historical event? How do letter writers, consciously or unconsciously, use specific epistolary tenses to collapse or manipulate time, and for what reasons? Why are letters dated to one time period
embedded in other dated media like newspapers, manuals or scrapbooks? What of the future of this form of writing?
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to:
-
- anachronisms
-
- letters written or delivered under temporal constraints (war, illness, incarceration, difficulty finding carriers)
-
- epistolary tenses, time expressions and dating conventions
-
- time spent letter writing vs email, societal expectations
-
- undated letters, letters removed from calendar time
-
- periods when letter writing gained or lost popularity and the social context
-
- open letters, letters written for later time periods or no specific time period
-
- epistolary conventions concerning letter or letter archive dating
-
- best time to write and reply to letters
-
- mail art that addresses the concept of time
-
- causes and consequences of postponements, delays and other non-delivery
-
- letters used to date events in history or the lives of people
-
- chronology of letter collections, gap between date letters composed and published
TERN welcomes 250-word maximum proposals for 20-minute papers concerning any geographical location, discipline or historical period. Papers should approach the topic of time in letters in innovative ways that will impact our understanding of this important written form and the societies that have produced it. Please send submissions to ternetwork@hotmail.com by midnight (BST) on 5 May 2023. The conference language is English. Publication of selected papers will be arranged following the conference.
*
Call for papers – International Conference – Memory gaps: Tracks and Cracks
October 19-20, 2023
University of Strasbourg
Deadline for Submissions: May 1, 2023
We would like to examine the way in which the arts (theatre, cinema, literature, painting, sculpture, music) draw, trace and unfold the canvases and scores of individual, familiar and collective memory, from traces, cracks, flaws, interstices, lapses, oblivion, loss of memory, repression, from “the memory of what is forgotten”, shadowy areas, crypts, confiscated images and words, prevented, manipulated or forced memory, from “wounded memory” (Ricoeur), forgetting processes, silences, denials, blind spots, scattered fragments, superimposed and/or hybridized strata, from the power of memory and the power over memory.
This will also lead us to re-examine, in a comparative perspective, the forms of commitment and the culture and forms of commemoration – “orthopaedic memory, frozen in sterile commemorations”, the memory “on display”. Commitment and commemoration – two key words in the research programme of LES:TRACES (Laboratory for studies on: trauma, art, commemoration, engagement, sound).
Scientific committee: Isabelle Reck, Beat Föllmi
Director of CREAA: Alessandro Arbo
The Centre for Research and Experimentation on the Artistic Act (CREAA) aims to develop knowledge of the artistic act in interdisciplinary matter, by comparing the knowledge and methodologies of the humanities, social sciences and exact sciences.
Contact Info:
The research group LES:TRACES (Laboratory for studies on: trauma, art, commemoration, engagement, sound) organises in autumn 2023 its third conference with the following topic : Memory gaps: Tracks and Cracks (in arts, theatre, cinema, literature, and music)
International Conference, 19 and 20 October 2023, University of Strasbourg
Each speaker has 30 minutes of presentation, followed by a 15-minute discussion. The languages of the conference are French and English. The publication of the papers is planned.
Please send your proposal (title, short abstract and biography) at the latest by 1 May 2023 to: Beat Föllmi, University of Strasbourg, bfollmi@unistra.fr
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Deadline for Submissions, April 30, 2023
Translating Travel Writing in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
French/British Connections/Continuums
Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique (CELIS)
Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM)
Société d’étude de da Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone (SELVA
19th-20th October, 2023
Maison de Sciences de l’Homme
Clermont-Ferrand
France
Translators and travellers have largely been understood as similarly negotiating interstitial textual and geographic spaces and places. Tim Youngs’s conception of travellers and translators as “figures moving between cultures, not quite or wholly belonging to any one exclusively[1]”is particularly pertinent from this standpoint, as is Susan Pickford’s identification of both translation and travel writing as prime sites for “ideologically motivated textual manipulation”.[2] Thus, the study of the translation of travel texts may not be understood in what Jeff Morrison describes as “narrow, linear, national terms”.[3]
In histories of translation, theoretical and transnational stances have of course received sustained attention over the years (see Michael Cronin for example). Building on perspectives which Martin and Pickford have developed in their work[4], this conference will seek to consolidate their partial focus on cross-channel, British and French theoretical and operational approaches to the translation of travel texts relating to real or fictional journeying but also to treatises/pamphlets on the necessity, act and/or nature of travel itself.
How these travel text translations contributed to shaping international relations between the two countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how they participated in the linkages and connections forged by cultural transfers will be the focus of this conference. The relationships established between the travellers and their translators, if any; the identities and literary, scientific or professional credentials of each; how they approach their “translatorship”; how “translation flows”[5] speak to the equilibrium of cultural relations, are just some areas of interest. Other fruitful approaches might engage with how women progressively took up translation tasks. Alison E. Martin’s 2010 study of European women who “cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations”[6] of scientific travel writing at the end of the eighteenth century is just one extremely useful starting point for further enquiry into diverse types of travel writing, fictional, philological, exploration and/or mercantilist narrative, etc.
Book and reception history perspectives are also welcome, addressing the problematics of who published these translations, of how they were made available (circulating libraries, shilling parts, subscriptions), of who read them, and of how “Belles infidèles” traditions fared in terms of circulation and reception as reactions to them became rather more guarded.
Proposals from modern-day translators of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel texts would also be very welcome.
Plenary speakers: Ruth Menzies (Aix-Marseille Université) and Marius Warholm Haugen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
Deadline for submission of 250-word proposals for 25-minute papers: April 30th, 2023. Please send your proposals as well as a short biographical notice to the two conference organisers below.
Notification of acceptance: 31st May, 2023
Conference organisers
Sandhya Patel (UCA, IHRIM) : sandhya.patel@uca.fr
Anne Rouhette (UCA, CELIS) : anne.rouhette@uca.fr
Scientific committee
Gabor Gelleri, University of Aberystwyth
Pierre Lurbe, Université Paris Sorbonne
Susan Pickford, University of Geneva
Jean Viviès, Université Aix-Marseille
[1] Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p.10.
[2] Susan Pickford, “Travel Writing in Translation” in Barbara Schaff, Handbook of British Travel Writing, De Gruyter, 2020.
[3] Alison Martin and Susan Pickford, Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender, Routledge, 2012, p.51.
[4] See Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830, op. cit.; “Translating 18th and 19th-Century European Travel Writing,” InTRAlinea, 2013.
[5] See Christopher Rundle, The Routledge Handbook of Translation History, 2021.
[6] Alison E. Martin, “Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800, Annals of Science, 73, 2, 2016, p.1.
Contact Info:
Conference organisers
Sandhya Patel : sandhya.patel@uca.fr
Anne Rouhette : anne.rouhette@uca.fr
Contact Email:
From the List Manager–please excuse the ridiculous error in the subject heading of the last announcement regarding the location of the University of Strasbourg. (Although there is some history there . . . ) My apologies. CH
*Broadcast Date, April 21, 2023
The next episode of the webinar “Let’s Talk Books at NMU (Northern Michigan University)” hosted by Lynn Domina will be Friday, April 21 at 1:00 Eastern time. The speaker will be Tom Taylor, speaking about his recent book, Modern Travel in World History (Routledge, 2022). The book explores all sorts of travel by all sorts of people, moving around the world in all sorts of circumstances. Tom Taylor is an Associate Professor of History at Seattle University and has traveled extensively himself.
Registration is required but is free and easy, here: https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dnXEzUN8QMmJcIvo8AyMvw
*
Deadline for Submissions, April 28, 2023
Call for Papers – Oral History Network of Ireland 2023 Conference – ‘Oral History: Power and Resistance’
Ireland {Republic}
The Oral History Network of Ireland (OHNI) is pleased to announce its 2023 conference on the theme of ‘Oral History: Power and Resistance’. At every stage of the process, oral history projects may be impacted by and engage with issues of power and resistance. Oral histories offer unique insights into the operations of power and resistance in our societies in the past and present. This is not confined to issues of political power and resistance but can include everything from power dynamics within personal relationships, to understanding minority-majority group experiences. Who exercises power, how it is used and how it can be leveraged are key questions for oral historians. Similarly, what is resistance, what forms it takes and how it may or may not effect social change are questions that have been explored with the assistance of oral histories. Power and resistance are also considerations at every level in the creation of an oral history – whose stories are told, how they’re told, the power (or lack thereof) exercised by interviewees and interviewers, and the purpose of oral history itself. The conference will take place in person at Dooley’s Hotel, Waterford on Friday 16th and Saturday 17th June 2023.
We are delighted to welcome Graham Smith, Professor of Oral History at Newcastle University, as the keynote speaker. His research interests include public history and environmental oral history, with a particular focus on how people remember in groups, as well as the history of family and the history of medicine. He helped to establish the Oral History Unit and Collective at Newcastle in 2017. A long-time trade union activist, Graham is the joint editor of the Historians for History blog and the editor of the four-volume collection Oral History, published by Routledge in 2017 as part of their Critical Concepts in Historical Studies series.
Conference contributions are welcome in a range of formats:
-
- Standard conference papers (20 minutes)
-
- 10-minute presentations for our ‘Moments’ panels, focusing on outstanding or memorable individuals, experiences, and/or incidents that influenced or changed the way the presenter practices oral history. Contributions showcasing new projects on the conference theme at an early stage of development are also welcome here.
-
- Posters and visual presentations
We welcome proposals on any topic related to oral history, particularly those that take an imaginative approach to the conference theme of ‘Power and Resistance’. Potential topics could include (but are not limited to):
-
- Power dynamics in the interview
-
- Oral history and marginalised voices
-
- Elite oral histories
-
- Uncovering the operation of power in organisations and institutions
-
- Abuses of power
-
- Resistance and adaptation
-
- Power, resistance and trauma
-
- History from above and below
-
- Power, resistance and the archive
-
- Oral history and empowerment
To propose a paper, please submit an abstract (of not more than 250 words) along with your name, the name of your group, organisation or institution, and your email address to info@oralhistorynetworkireland.ie before Friday, 28 April 2023 at 5pm. All proposals must demonstrate a clear engagement with oral history and/or personal testimony and we actively encourage the use of audio or video clips. The conference committee’s decision on successful abstracts will be communicated to potential presenters in May 2023.
For further queries please contact us through info@oralhistorynetworkireland.ie.
Contact Email:
info@oralhistorynetworkireland.ie
URL:
https://oralhistorynetworkireland.ie/2023-conference
*
Deadline for Submissions, April 30, 2023
CFP–Travel Writing
Seeking proposals for presentations on travel writing in English from any period or country.
The 2023 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) convention will be held in Denver, CO from Oct. 12-14. Please submit a 200-word abstract by April 30, 2023
Alan Blackstock
*
Deadline for Submissions, April 30, 2023
Translating Travel Writing in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
French/British Connections/Continuums
Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique (CELIS)
Institut d’Histoire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités (IHRIM)
Société d’étude de da Littérature de Voyage du Monde Anglophone (SELVA
19th-20th October, 2023
Maison de Sciences de l’Homme
Clermont-Ferrand
France
Translators and travellers have largely been understood as similarly negotiating interstitial textual and geographic spaces and places. Tim Youngs’s conception of travellers and translators as “figures moving between cultures, not quite or wholly belonging to any one exclusively[1]”is particularly pertinent from this standpoint, as is Susan Pickford’s identification of both translation and travel writing as prime sites for “ideologically motivated textual manipulation”.[2] Thus, the study of the translation of travel texts may not be understood in what Jeff Morrison describes as “narrow, linear, national terms”.[3]
In histories of translation, theoretical and transnational stances have of course received sustained attention over the years (see Michael Cronin for example). Building on perspectives which Martin and Pickford have developed in their work[4], this conference will seek to consolidate their partial focus on cross-channel, British and French theoretical and operational approaches to the translation of travel texts relating to real or fictional journeying but also to treatises/pamphlets on the necessity, act and/or nature of travel itself.
How these travel text translations contributed to shaping international relations between the two countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how they participated in the linkages and connections forged by cultural transfers will be the focus of this conference. The relationships established between the travellers and their translators, if any; the identities and literary, scientific or professional credentials of each; how they approach their “translatorship”; how “translation flows”[5] speak to the equilibrium of cultural relations, are just some areas of interest. Other fruitful approaches might engage with how women progressively took up translation tasks. Alison E. Martin’s 2010 study of European women who “cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations”[6] of scientific travel writing at the end of the eighteenth century is just one extremely useful starting point for further enquiry into diverse types of travel writing, fictional, philological, exploration and/or mercantilist narrative, etc.
Book and reception history perspectives are also welcome, addressing the problematics of who published these translations, of how they were made available (circulating libraries, shilling parts, subscriptions), of who read them, and of how “Belles infidèles” traditions fared in terms of circulation and reception as reactions to them became rather more guarded.
Proposals from modern-day translators of eighteenth and nineteenth-century travel texts would also be very welcome.
Plenary speakers: Ruth Menzies (Aix-Marseille Université) and Marius Warholm Haugen (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
Deadline for submission of 250-word proposals for 25-minute papers: April 30th, 2023. Please send your proposals as well as a short biographical notice to the two conference organisers below.
Notification of acceptance: 31st May, 2023
Conference organisers
Sandhya Patel (UCA, IHRIM) : sandhya.patel@uca.fr
Anne Rouhette (UCA, CELIS) : anne.rouhette@uca.fr
Scientific committee
Gabor Gelleri, University of Aberystwyth
Pierre Lurbe, Université Paris Sorbonne
Susan Pickford, University of Geneva
Jean Viviès, Université Aix-Marseille
[1] Tim Youngs, The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p.10.
[2] Susan Pickford, “Travel Writing in Translation” in Barbara Schaff, Handbook of British Travel Writing, De Gruyter, 2020.
[3] Alison Martin and Susan Pickford, Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender, Routledge, 2012, p.51.
[4] See Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830, op. cit.; “Translating 18th and 19th-Century European Travel Writing,” InTRAlinea, 2013.
[5] See Christopher Rundle, The Routledge Handbook of Translation History, 2021.
[6] Alison E. Martin, “Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800, Annals of Science, 73, 2, 2016, p.1.
Contact Info:
Conference organisers
Sandhya Patel : sandhya.patel@uca.fr
Anne Rouhette : anne.rouhette@uca.fr
Contact Email:
*
From the List Manager–please excuse the ridiculous error in the subject heading of the last announcement regarding the location of the University of Stasbourg. (Although there is some history there . . . ) My apologies. C
Call for papers – International Conference – Memory gaps: Tracks and Cracks
October 19-20, 2023
University of Strasbourg
Deadline for Submissions: May 1, 2023
We would like to examine the way in which the arts (theatre, cinema, literature, painting, sculpture, music) draw, trace and unfold the canvases and scores of individual, familiar and collective memory, from traces, cracks, flaws, interstices, lapses, oblivion, loss of memory, repression, from “the memory of what is forgotten”, shadowy areas, crypts, confiscated images and words, prevented, manipulated or forced memory, from “wounded memory” (Ricoeur), forgetting processes, silences, denials, blind spots, scattered fragments, superimposed and/or hybridized strata, from the power of memory and the power over memory.
This will also lead us to re-examine, in a comparative perspective, the forms of commitment and the culture and forms of commemoration – “orthopaedic memory, frozen in sterile commemorations”, the memory “on display”. Commitment and commemoration – two key words in the research programme of LES:TRACES (Laboratory for studies on: trauma, art, commemoration, engagement, sound).
Scientific committee: Isabelle Reck, Beat Föllmi
Director of CREAA: Alessandro Arbo
The Centre for Research and Experimentation on the Artistic Act (CREAA) aims to develop knowledge of the artistic act in interdisciplinary matter, by comparing the knowledge and methodologies of the humanities, social sciences and exact sciences.
Contact Info:
The research group LES:TRACES (Laboratory for studies on: trauma, art, commemoration, engagement, sound) organises in autumn 2023 its third conference with the following topic : Memory gaps: Tracks and Cracks (in arts, theatre, cinema, literature, and music)
International Conference, 19 and 20 October 2023, University of Strasbourg
Each speaker has 30 minutes of presentation, followed by a 15-minute discussion. The languages of the conference are French and English. The publication of the papers is planned.
Please send your proposal (title, short abstract and biography) at the latest by 1 May 2023 to: Beat Föllmi, University of Strasbourg, bfollmi@unistra.fr
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Broadcast Date, April 21, 2023
The next episode of the webinar “Let’s Talk Books at NMU (Northern Michigan University)” hosted by Lynn Domina will be Friday, April 21 at 1:00 Eastern time. The speaker will be Tom Taylor, speaking about his recent book, Modern Travel in World History (Routledge, 2022). The book explores all sorts of travel by all sorts of people, moving around the world in all sorts of circumstances. Tom Taylor is an Associate Professor of History at Seattle University and has traveled extensively himself.
Registration is required but is free and easy, here: https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dnXEzUN8QMmJcIvo8AyMvw
CALL FOR PAPERS: Creativecritical Writing Now
A Special Issue of TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses
Deadline for Submissions: April 14, 2023
This Special Issue aims to explore forms of, and approaches to, creativecritical writing: writing which performs scholarly and creative functions simultaneously. Such blended approaches are no longer new—indeed, they are tracking distinct paths and uses in various contexts inside academia and beyond. As such, this Special Issue will take stock of the current nexus between the creative and the critical, as well as speculate on future conceptions of hybrid creative writing /scholarship.
The creativecritical mode has a long lineage across fictocritical, autotheoretical and ethnographic writing, as well as creative nonfiction and the essay form. Recently, creativecritical writing has gained popular currency, as evidenced by the work of Rebecca Solnit, Anne Carson, and Maggie Nelson. It is also attracting critical momentum, most noticeably at doctoral level, where, as Kylie Cardell and Kate Douglas note, ‘Many postgraduates [in Life Writing] are engaging in projects where the creative and critical/exegetical are an integrated text’ (207–208). In this Special Issue of TEXT, we invite articles (of roughly 6-8,000 words) that engage with the functions, processes, poetics and ethics of creativecritical writing in its many forms (creative nonfiction, fiction, academic writing, poetry/poetics, testimony and more). These engagements should constellate, in order to ask: Where are we now, and what is next for creativecritical writing? We hope to encourage a compiling of the essayistic, the fictocritical, life writing, the seamless, and more, to assess how the exegesis—and creative writing as research more broadly—might be conceived through a creativecritical lens.
Potential contributors might like to consider:
-
- What creativecritical writing approaches do within research? (And, what have they done, where are we now, and where we are going?)
-
- Creativecritical possibilities for the exegesis, and questions regarding what counts as scholarly output (E.g., what creative writing might do to shift the lexical possibilities of scholarly work; how it can work within institutions). Articulating the role of the exegesis, creative exegetical forms, teaching/doing exegetical writing.
-
- Creativecritical approaches as indicative/supportive of new vistas in representation, such as embodied thinking or non-dualistic approaches. (What kind of work is necessary at this juncture? How do thought/body/lived experience interact with scholarly forms? How can life writing operate as scholarship?)
-
- The critical power in creative work, and the inherent criticality of creative expression. (What is creative and what is critical? How can the ‘ancient quarrel’ (Brien and Webb 2012) between poetry and philosophy be re-visited? Is creative work possibly critical work?)
-
- The popular turn towards the creativecritical
-
- The difference,in creative writing scholarship, between explaining the work and the work being research
-
- The lineage of creativecritical forms: fictocriticism, art writing, autoethnography, essay
-
- The ethics of creativecritical writing
-
- Potential forms and approaches to writing that makes and considers/reflects/thinks
-
- Hybridity in academic writing
-
- The essay and essayism in scholarly contexts; Braided writing and blended forms
How to submit your expression of interest:
Please submit a 200-word Expression of Interest by email to StefanieMarkidis and Daniel Juckes with ‘Creativecritical Writing Now’ as the subject line. In your EOI please outline how your paper or work(s) explore(s) aspects of the creativecritical mode. Please also include the following information: your full name, institutional affiliation (if any), email address, title of paper/work, brief biography (50–100 words), and 3 to 5 keywords (at least 2 of which should clearly relate to the issue’s title). Deadline for EOIs: April 14, 2023. Deadline for finished works: June 30, 2023.
Enquiries: Daniel Juckes (daniel.juckes@uwa.edu.au) or Stefanie Markidis (stefanie.markidis@rmit.edu.au)
Dr Daniel Juckes (he/him/his)
Lecturer (Creative Writing)
Associate Editor, Westerly Magazine
English and Literary Studies, School of Humanities • M204, Perth WA 6009 Australia
T +61 8 6488 2066 • E daniel.juckes@uwa.edu.au
*
Call for Papers
Stardom & Fandom
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
SWPACA Summer Salon
June 8 & 9, 2023
Virtual Conference
Submissions open on March 18, 2023
Proposal submission deadline: April 15, 2023
Proposals for papers are now being accepted for the SWPACA Summer Salon. SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas in a variety of categories encompassing the following: Film, Television, Music, & Visual Media; Historic & Contemporary Cultures; Identities & Cultures; Language & Literature; Science Fiction & Fantasy; and Pedagogy & Popular Culture. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/
The Area Chair for Stardom and Fandom invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of stardom or fandom. The list of ideas below is limited, so if you have an idea that is not listed, please suggest the new topic. We are an interdisciplinary area and encourage submissions from multiple perspectives and disciplines.
Topics might include:
-
- Studies of individual celebrities and their fans
-
- Studies focused on specific fandoms
-
- The reciprocal relationship between stars and fans
-
- Impact of celebrity and fame on identity construction, reconstruction and sense of self
-
- Reality television and the changing definition of ‘stardom’
-
- The impact of social media on celebrity/fan interaction
-
- Celebrity/fame addiction as cultural change
-
- The intersection of stars and fans in virtual and physical spaces (Twitter, Tumblr, conventions)
-
- Celebrity and the construction of persona
-
- Pedagogical approaches to teaching stardom and fandom
-
- Anti-fans and ‘haters’
-
- Fan shame, wank, and fandom policing
-
- Gendered constructions of stars and fans
-
- Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction
All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca
For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/ Registration information for the conference will be available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/conference-registration-information/
Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.
If you have any questions about the Stardom & Fandom area, please contact its Area Chair, Dr. Lynn Zubernis, at lzubernis@wcupa.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@southwestpca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.
We look forward to receiving your submissions!
Contact Info:
Dr. Lynn Zubernis, Area Chair, Stardom and Fandom
Contact Email:
URL:
http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/
CALL FOR PAPERS
15th International Conference of the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature
Trauma and Healing: Storying Lives, Literary Engagements, Entangled Memories
University of Tartu, Estonia, June 8 to 9, 2023
The deadline for individual proposals has been extended to April 10, 2023. Acceptance notices will be sent by April 25, 2023.
The conceptual framework of trauma has played an immense role in critical inquiry and memory studies for many decades. Russian full-scale military aggression against Ukraine that started on February 24, 2022 that has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and has brought about the most extensive humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, forcibly displacing nearly half of the Ukrainian population, brings the notion of trauma into focus with particular urgency. Not only does it merit the revision of existing frameworks and approaches and weigh their applicability in the context of the massive impact of the war in Ukraine but it also calls forth the necessity of developing new frameworks and approaches of supporting coping and healing.
With a focus on both individual and collective memory, large-scale historical events as well as those concerning the commonplace contexts of everyday life, involving, for instance, domestic violence, sexual abuse and social marginalization, which are closely related to and depend on social and political regulations and cultural discourses, the development of trauma studies as a field of cultural enquiry has been shaped by a close affinity to the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and deconstruction. The universal applicability of such theoretical framework of has been called into doubt by scholars working on global, non-Western contexts who highlight the need to consider the ways in which cultural difference impacts the manner of mediating trauma. Among the current advancements within the more inclusive paradigm of trauma, approaches geared towards contributing to the process of healing from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) play an increasingly important role.
Sadly, traumatic experience continues to have devastating effect on the survivors and their family members and, in case of trauma brought about by large-scale historical events, the affected societies as a whole. The process of healing from PTSD and, in worse cases, c-PTSD (complex posttraumatic stress disorder) continues to be a long and complicated journey with high risk of trauma dominating the lives of the survivors if left unattended and passing on from generation to generation. For the conference, we welcome proposals attending to the possibilities of healing from and coping with traumatic experience with a focus on, but not limited to
Therapeutic mechanisms of literature and other modes of creative self-expression
Literary depictions of healing and recovery
Different modes and genres of storying life experience of traumatic nature
Cultural mediations of healing
Discursive constellations of trauma and memory
Postmemory and transgenerational trauma
Unattended trauma
The limits of representation and healing
Alternative vocabularies and discourses
A special section of the conference is dedicated to the war in Ukraine with a focus on representation of the experience of the war in literature, visual media and life writing.
The main working language is English, poster presentations are welcome also in Spanish, French or German.
Please send a proposal of 250-300 words and a short bio of about 100 words to evka2023korraldus@lists.ut.ee
Panel proposals are also welcome. The deadline for panel proposals is March 15, 2023. NB! The deadline for individual proposals has been extended to April 10, 2023. Acceptance notices will be sent by April 25, 2023.
There is no registration fee. The participants are kindly asked to arrange and cover their travel and accommodation. If necessary, conference organizers advise and assist in finding suitable arrangements.
On behalf of the organizing committee
Leena Kurvet-Käosaar
Associate Professor of Cultural Theory
Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu
The conference is supported by Baseline Funding Project for National Sciences nr PHVKU22922 22922 “Taking Shelter in Estonia. Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing form the War.”
*
July 13-15, 2023, University of Augsburg, Germany
Call for Papers – International Workshop: Relationality and More-Than-Human Storytelling
Deadline for Submissions: April 10, 2023
Over the last decade scholars in the Environmental Humanities, compelled by ever-accelerating climate crises, extreme weather events, toxic spills, and the unequal distribution of their disastrous consequences, have intensified their efforts in searching for meaningful ways to reflect the fundamental human impact on Earth’s geology and its ecosystems. Amid these debates, calls to re-think or challenge the seemingly inherent centrality of humans as a species have grown louder, as anthropocentric understandings of humans’ allegedly unique subject position have rightfully come under scrutiny. Some scholars of posthumanism have gone so far as to propose a non-hierarchical philosophy that integrates humans with living organisms as a whole, creating a flat ontology (DeLanda).
The human, in such conceptions, is to be fully decentered and agency is instead attached to phenomena that “‘emerge’” as a result of the “entangled agencies” among various agents (Barad). While such approaches lead to fascinating new perspectives, their insights obviously also trouble core aspects of storytelling: looking for the non-human/more-than-human in literature is anything but intuitive, given that the act of writing is itself ultimately a human one. Various research methodologies within the Environmental Humanities, such as New Materialism, Elemental Ecocriticism, and Object-Oriented Ontology have proliferated in recent years as scholars seek to find new ways of conceptualizing human existence in a more-than-human world. At the same time, proponents of bringing about not only ‘green’ but just transitions have good reason to caution against losing sight of inequalities among humans in these endeavors.
This workship aims to embrace these tensions through the lens of relationality as a potential means to decenter the human, while bearing in mind human injustices: Especially when thinking relationality not solely in terms of human-human relations, the human can arguably be placed in a wide and intricate network of what scholars such as Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour call ʻactants.’ Building on Erin James categorization of “narrative as a particular cognitive affordance by which humans write worlds” (2022), it is our goal to interrogate and explore various ways of how this plays out in literature and other ways of storytelling.
Potential topics should focus on some form of relationality, including, but not limited to:
-
- Narratological experiments that decenter the human
-
- Human-animal relationships
-
- Nonhuman fiction
-
- Plant studies
-
- Reconsiderations of human responsibilities (and place) in a more-than-human world
-
- New Materialism
-
- Elemental Ecocriticism
-
- Object-Oriented Ontology
-
- Genre in the context of more-than-human storytelling
-
- Ethics of decentering the human
Please send a 300-500 word abstract and a short bio to relationality2023@philhist.uni-augsburg.de by April 10, 2023.
*
Deadline for Submissions April 15, 2023
Wars, Carcerality and Colonial Prisons
(Hi)Story, Testimonies and Representations
International Conference
Third Edition
13 & 14 November 2023
Tlemcen, Algeria
(In-person)
This conference derives from the series of scientific events organized in 2015 on the theme of wars (1st event: Cries and Writings of Wars: When Story Gets Involved in History and 2nd event: Children of Wars: Memories, Testimonies and Representations). This year, LLC research lab is launching a third edition (November 2023) which will focus on Wars, Carcerality and Colonial Prisons. The conference will explore the memorial/testimonial experience and the representations of the penitentiary universe in the context of colonial wars and their impact on incarceration, internment, deportation, isolation and regroupment camps. This scientific event aspires to interweave reflections and research on this historical period (end of 19th and 20th centuries) in a multidisciplinary perspective: History, sociology, psychology, political sciences, law media, literature, plastic arts, etc., focusing on colonial wars and imprisonment.
Wars reality and magnitude shatter all human illusions. The crimes committed against humankind, the atrocities inflicted by the wars and the internal wounds that never heal make it impossible to forget. The spectre of war never ceased to haunt the places and memories of the human beings who experienced the barbarity, fury and woes of colonial rule. Thousands of people were killed, massacred, martyred or sent to prison as a result of anti-colonial riots, conflicts, revolutions and armed struggles.
Exported by the colonizer, the prison was used as an instrument for maintaining order under the colonial power, its mission being to subjugate the local populations and control the territories. Under the guise of civilizing the natives, the colonial administration used the prison to fight crime, affecting all social categories (men, women, adults, minors). Prisons were also an important source of income for the colonial economy.
A real penitentiary structure was built at the time: regroupment camps, detention camps, asylums, housing centres, prison farms, barracks, psychiatric hospitals, detention centres, in addition to colonial jails (Cayenne/Guyana, Île des Pins, Nouméa/New Caledonia, Tataouine/Tunisia, Nosy Lava, la Sentinelle de fer/Madagascar, Obock/Gabon, Poulo-Condore/Indochina, etc.). Colonial prisons were not only an instrument for controlling men and spaces, but also a place of exclusion and execution for all those who had challenged colonial hegemony (resistants, nationalists, rebels, opponents and independence fighters).
The aim of this conference is to examine a confused and controversial colonial past by focusing on the phenomenon of incarceration and the penitentiary universe; to give, in this case, a status to the memory, the testimonies and the representations of the surviving prisoners whose traces of internment haunt memories to this day. Indeed, war is summoned within detention, it is correlated with the phenomenon of incarceration; a colonial past jointly convened by imprisonment, isolation, exile, deprivation, confinement and deportation.
In this perspective, the emphasis during the two days of the conference will be on the colonial policy of repressive reform in the colonised countries, notably the question of regroupment camps, massive deportations, imposed exile and forced migration, which are still little-known tragic phenomena of the colonial penitentiary system.
The testimonial discourse and the memorial narrative of male and female prisoners of war who lived through the experience of imprisonment, torture and repression will be at the centre of this scientific event. A discourse that is able to tell and transmit the historical truth of the Algerian war of revolution, the revolutionary uprising in Indochina or Vietnam and other colonised territories that had suffered the same fate, such as South Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Cameroon, Nigeria, Vietnam etc.
When investigating the modes of representation of the war and the colonial prison, several questions arise: How can surviving prisoners testify to a carceral experience whose memory remains a gaping wound? What image will they be able to transmit of themselves and of their prison ordeal? What discursive and affective processes are employed in their testimonies? How will these prisoners of war or survivors of colonial prisons contribute to the re-construction of a historical memory based on colonial repression? What about the supervised education of minors inside prisons and children schooling in regroupment centers and camps? What representations of the penitentiary universe are conveyed by the media, fiction, cinema, painting, drawing and photography? Can words and images heal the inner wounds or erase the horrors that the prisoners had suffered within the walls of prisons?
Memory and testimony are indeed two fundamental vectors in writing History, but they are also paths that invite us to penetrate a dark universe destined for erasure and silence. We know, a priori, that carceral testimony traces the narrative course of a descent into hell in order to show how such an experience was lived before being overcome. Faced with their living conditions, prisoners testify or write about their carceral trajectory in order to denounce physical and moral abuse. This form of expression advocates the factual by resorting first and foremost to the testimonial narrative with the intention of depicting the penitentiary universe and all the traumatic scenes experienced by the prisoner of war or deportee in this space (the life of the prisoners, the functioning of the prisons and camps, the disciplinary sanctions and cell sentences inflicted on the prisoners, the guards and the supervision of the drudgery, the operations carried out by the tormentors and their methods of execution). It takes the form of a means to denounce such inhumane practices and to fight against all the forms in which they are carried out.
The prisoners’ accounts often equate the prison with a tomb where Man loses his dignity and finds himself cut off from his loved ones and the outside world. Such is the case of Algerian women who were unable to overcome an obscure carceral ordeal and were forced to keep silent about their internment since independence. Imprisoned by the French army (Aures/Algeria) and forced to undergo appalling interrogations, these women prisoners have buried the traumatic memory of their incarceration deep inside their bodies (tortures, humiliations, anguish, injuries, harassment, rape, suffering, etc).
In addition to the testimonies and representations of prisoners of war, the conference will also examine the places and networks of incarceration and confinement in the colonial situation. In this context, we can cite as examples some colonial prisons and penal colonies such as Lambèse (the Aurès), Nouméa (New Caledonia), the dry Guillotine (French Guyana), Poulo-Condore (Indochina), Serkadji/Barberousse (Algiers), Fresnes (Paris), les Baumettes (Marseille), Tifelfel (women prison/Aurès), Montluc (Lyon), Tataouine (Tunisia), Douera (Bône), Nosy Lava/la Sentinelle de fer (Madagascar), Paul-Cazelles (Djelfa), Coudiat Aty (Constantine), the red prison /Ferdjioua (Mila).
These places of memory recount the resistance, the descent into hell, and contribute to the restitution of little-known facts. The cartography of these penitentiary institutions or the punitive/carceral archipelago of the French army as an example (in North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar, Indochina and overseas) with their characteristics, their specificities, the categories of prisoners who passed through them, can be considered as a reference to know more about the concentration universe under the colonial empire.
Relying on facts to explain the prison reality, the witnesses feel obliged to involve scenes and facts that have been kept secret in order to bestow the value of a living memory upon the testimony. Unable to talk about their carceral experiences, these witnesses of the darkness or the surviving war prisoners often choose silence, solitude and withdrawal as a way of life.
In this respect, it seems fundamental to raise questions about what means to implement in order to reconstitute the History of colonial carcerality through the testimonies and the memories of surviving prisoners. How is the double project of the witness realised by revealing historical facts that have been hidden hitherto and restoring the voice of a traumatic prison past for the prisoners of war? How to render the prison experience in the context of the colonial wars? What were the living conditions of the detained (natives or opponents) in front of the punishments and harshness of colonial prisons? How to interpret the silences and the repressed memories of the surviving prisoners in order to carry on living?
Thus, this scientific meeting proposes to revisit the theme of colonial wars and their abuses by investigating the History, testimonies and literary and artistic representations of all forms of incarceration and imprisonment, including deportation and regroupment camps in the context of colonial wars and revolutions.
The reflection will focus on the following themes:
– The cartography of the concentration universe: colonial prisons, regroupment, internment or relegation camps, and penal policies;
– The carceral system in the colonies and its traces in the memorial trajectories of the prisoners of war;
– The penitentiary universe and the carceral economy in the prisoners’ testimonies: penal labour as an instrument of colonial economic exploitation (forced labour, drudgery, labour and production in the carceral environment);
– Itinerancy or the crossing of prisons, deportation, exile, transfer of prisoners, repression and forced migration between imagination and reality
– Testimonies: the rewriting of the colonial past and the rehabilitation of the History of prisons;
– Women fighters, women prisoners: incarceration, torture and feminine resistance
– Memories of prison: the carceral journey of male and female prisoners of war (prisoners’ accounts, personal diaries, epistolary accounts, drawings, wall caricatures, photos, poetry, etc);
– The contribution of surviving witnesses/prisoners to the memorial Narrative: the colonial prison between individual and collective memory;
– Colonial prisons and repression in the media, documentaries and cinema;
– The penitentiary question and the testimonial, literary, media or film productions of the prisoners of war: aesthetics (stylistic, narratological, discursive, iconographic processes, linguistic registers, affective processes) mobilized by the witnesses in the staging of the carceral experience;
– The supervised education of minor prisoners and the schooling of children in regroupment camps;
– Public/private archives, holdings, colonial legacies or the legacy of colonial prison: what is left of the carceral/colonial heritage?
How to participate:
The languages of the conference are French, English and Arabic.
Papers proposals of about 300 words including a title and an abstract, five keywords and a short bio-bibliographical note should be sent before 15 April 2023 to the following addresses: colloqueguerre@gmail.com // labolanguesllc@gmail.com
The proposals will be examined by the scientific committee of the conference. The participants are to specify the axis in which they will place their communication project. The final programme will be decided on 30 September 2023. At the end of the conference, the scientific committee will select the papers that will be published.
Participation Form:
Full Name:
University/Institution:
Telephone:
E-mail:
Thesis Director (if you are a doctoral student):
Title of the communication:
Abstract (300 words):
Keywords (5)/Axis:
Bibliographic references:
Bio-bibliographic record:
Important dates:
• Deadline for sending proposals: 15April 2023;
• Results of the scientific evaluation of the proposals: 15 May 2023;
• Final conference program: 30 September 2023;
• Sending of the communication: 25 October 2023;
• Date of the conference: 13-14 November 2023.
Registration fees: 5000 DA for teachers-researchers and 3000 DA for doctoral students (Algerians).
70 € for teachers-researchers and 50 € for doctoral students (outside Algeria).
The call for papers can be accessed here: https://llc.univ-tlemcen.dz/en
Conference coordinator: Prof. Latifa SARI M.
LLC Research Lab:https://llc.univ-tlemcen.dz/en
Abou Bakr Belkaïd University -Tlemcen: https://www.univ-tlemcen.dz/en
Contact Info:
University Abou Bakr Belkaïd-Tlemcen
Faculty of Letters and Languages
LLC Research Lab
Contact Email:
URL:
https://llc.univ-tlemcen.dz/en
*
“Navigating Cultural Crossroads: Exploring the Experiences of Transnational Travelers in the Americas”
“Journeying (the) Americas: The Paradoxes of Travel (and) Narratives”
11th IASA World Congress 2023 (ASA) University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland, Sept. 7-10, 2023.
deadline for submissions:
April 14, 2023
Travel is an intimate part of human existence that involves cultural exchange through observation and interaction. It requires us to recognize that, beyond our allegiance to our own nation, we are also bound together by our shared humanity and the global community. To truly understand our own selves, we must adopt an inclusive perspective towards life, where cultures merge and combine to form a constructive relationship. In today’s globalized world, the practice of travel, mobility, and cross-cultural contact challenges the politics of difference and the homogenizing perspectives of the world state. This ‘openness to the world’[1] enables us to appreciate the diverse cultures around us and discover our own identities in relation to others and their ethnolinguistic backgrounds. By engaging with difference, we can forge cultural connections that transcend time and space, and bring subjectivity into dialogue.
International travelers have been flocking to the Americas for centuries, drawn by its diverse cultures, natural beauty, and rich history. From the ancient Incan ruins of Machu Picchu to the bustling streets of New York City, the Americas offer a wide range of experiences for travelers to explore. One of the most popular destinations for international travelers is the United States. With its vast size and cultural diversity, the US offers something for everyone, from the beaches of California to the forests of Maine. Visitors can experience the excitement of Times Square in New York City, the natural beauty of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, or the historical significance of Washington, D.C. Another popular destination for international travelers is Canada, a country that boasts some of the most stunning natural landscapes in the world, from the Rocky Mountains to the vast expanses of the Canadian Shield. Central and South America also offer a wealth of experiences for international travelers. In Central America, visitors can explore the ancient ruins of Tikal in Guatemala, relax on the beaches of Costa Rica, or experience the vibrant culture of Mexico City. South America is home to some of the world’s most iconic destinations, including the Amazon rainforest, the Galapagos Islands, and the Andes Mountains. The Americas are rich in symbolism appreciated by international travelers. Examples include the bald eagle, the Statue of Liberty, the Mayan pyramids, Niagara Falls, the Hollywood Sign, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Rio Carnival.
We invite scholars and researchers to submit papers for presentations (ca. 15 mins.) exploring the theme of transnational travel writing to (and in) the Americas. This interdisciplinary panel aims to examine the ways in which international travel writers from all parts of the world have represented and engaged with the Americas as a destination of traveling as well as a place of longing. We encourage papers that examine the diverse and complex intersections of travel writing with issues such as race, gender, class, imperialism, globalization, and transnationalism.
Potential topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Travel writing as a site of cultural exchange and encounter
– Representations of the self and the other in American travel writing
– Travel writing as a form of political and social critique
– Travel writing and imperialism
– Gendered perspectives on American travel writing
– The role of technology and transportation in shaping American travel writing
– The impact of globalization on American travel writing
– The ethics of representing other cultures in American travel writing
– The role of translation and multilingualism in transnational American travel writing
We welcome submissions from scholars across disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, history, geography, anthropology, and beyond.
Please submit abstracts of 300-500 words to Stefan Brandt (stefan.brandt@uni-graz.at) and Saptarshi Mallick (saptarshieng@gmail.com) by Friday, April 14, 2023.
******************************
Prof. Dr. Stefan Brandt
University of Graz
Department of American Studies
(Research Area for American Literary and Cultural History with a Focus on (Trans-) Nationality and Space)
Heinrichstr. 18/I
A-8010 Graz
Dr. Saptarshi Mallick
Assistant Professor in English
Sukanta Mahavidyalaya, Jalpaiguri
University of North Bengal
*
Exile at State U: Stories from the Outer Edges of Academe
Deadline for Submissions–EXTENDED DEADLINE April 1, 2023
Seeking abstracts for an edited collection of essays about life on the tenure track, especially for those working in the humanities and social sciences at non-R1 colleges and universities.
Because full-time, tenure-track jobs in the humanities and social sciences are hard to come by, we are often told to be grateful and to be quiet. And indeed, there is much to be grateful for and relatively little to shout about. But there are still important stories to be told, and relatively little nonfiction has been written about the subtle but life-changing personal and professional vicissitudes of a career spent in the academic hinterlands of branch state campuses and non-elite private colleges. Especially for those from highly rated grad programs, often in metropolitan locales, a career in a rural area or small town is an eye-opening and life-altering experience.
The goal of the collection is to tell it like it is, warts and all. Essays should be autobiographical, not scholarly, and can be focused on a particular career episode (and thus relatively short) or broader in scope and longer in length. The most important thing is to be compelling, or at least interesting. Humor is more than welcome. Writers are welcome to publish under a pseudonym, or anonymously.
Possible topics or areas of focus
–job application process: interview and campus visit stories; first impressions; deciding whether to take the job
–on the tenure track: the challenges (or lack thereof) of meeting tenure and promotion requirements; interactions with other faculty, administrators, community members; networking and conferences; deciding to stay or leave
–community in exile: relationships with colleagues; relations with neighbors; location details
–after tenure/the middle years: career evolution; putting down roots, professionally and personally; non-academic pursuits; changing jobs
–toward retirement: taking stock; successes and regrets
Please email 1-2 pp. abstracts and a short bio or CV to douglash@usca.edu by April 1, 2023.
Contact Info:
Douglas Higbee
Department of English
University of South Carolina, Aiken
Contact Email:
Contact Info:
Douglas Higbee
Professor of English
University of South Carolina, Aiken
Contact Email:
*
SPECIAL ISSUE
Imprisoned ‘Self’: Narratives of Loss, Guilt, Transformation
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (JCLA)
Guest Editor: Ayan Chakraborty (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India)
Prison narratives have, quite recently, emerged as an exciting genre of literary studies in academia. While the concept of imprisonment has always invited a substantial focus within sociological studies, it had marginally to do either with the deeper exploration of the ‘imprisoned self’ or the ‘narratology’ (the logic of the narrative) about the experiences recorded by the prisoner. With life in the prison succeeding in drawing interest from literary critics, different approaches have been proposed to study language and experiences (in terms of wording) to look at the representation of the self and the various expressions of pain, agony, guilt, transformation, and even liberation. Some of them consider looking at these narratives from a more political understanding of the ‘imprisoned self’ about society and power, while a few others explore how language mediates between the author’s ‘reflection’/ ‘realization’ of their self through deeply intense drives like those of melancholia, loss, and suffering or glimpses of transcendental joy that creates a deeper understanding of the ethereal and the personal.
The model of the prison has changed over the centuries. While in the European continent, prisons were directly an expression of the ‘will’ of the monarch, it had much to do with the relations of sovereignty and law. However, it is interesting to note that, as Thomas S Freeman points out in his “The Rise of Prison Literature,” prisons of the middle ages and early modernity were structural edifices that symbolized an offense against the divine through a violation of the ‘law’ of the monarch itself (the monarch being a representative of divinity on earth). The prisoner was, therefore, equivalent to the status of a heretic. Similar ideas can be found within Southern and Central Asiatic regions as well. With the rise of the liberal state, the prisoner was depicted as an ‘outlaw,’ an embodiment of violence and violation of the generic social imagination and to ‘social contract’ in particular. Michel Foucault, in his seminal The Birth of the Prison, delineates how the system of control and incarceration shifted in its objective and technique from the body and the ‘spectacle’ to the ‘mind’ and the need for ‘secrecy.’ Through a system, the prisoner’s self is inevitably a part of political interpellation, marginality, and social gaze. These ideas, though sociological, become an integral part of the prisoner’s self in their understanding of society and their relation to it. Hence, the prisoner, in all personal experiences, is a political being.
As much as narratives from political prisoners, revolutionaries, and victims of racial, sexual, colonial, and economic conflicts have recorded intense moments which look at the ‘dissolution’ of the self under psychological crisis, there are instances that constructed a metaphysical idea of the ego of the prisoner that almost absorbed the world into a supernatural unity. These narratives, in their structure and intention, vary radically across symbols and semantics. This issue calls for papers that engage with language, experience, and the self (of the prisoner), study nuances of intention and expression, and explore the relation between a private subject under political scrutiny through prison narratives.
To contribute to this special issue, please submit the full manuscript of your article (no less than 4,000 words) with a short author’s bio to the guest editor Ayan Chakraborty at cayan2595@gmail.com, with a copy to jclaindia@gmail.com. You are welcome to ask any questions about submission or the topic you will select.
Important Dates:
Submission deadline: 31st March 2023;
Decision of acceptance: 30th April 2023;
Publication of the issue: Autumn 2023/ Winter 2023.
ABOUT THE JOURNAL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Comparative_Literature_and_Aest…
The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN: 0252-8169) is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, India, since 1977. The Institute was founded by Prof. Ananta Charan Sukla (1942-2020) on 22 August 1977, coinciding with the birth centenary of renowned philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947) to promote interdisciplinary studies and research in comparative literature, literary theory and criticism, aesthetics, philosophy, art history, criticism of the arts, and history of ideas. (Vishvanatha Kaviraja, most widely known for his masterpiece in aesthetics, Sahityadarpana, or the “Mirror of Composition,” was a prolific 14th-century Indian poet, scholar, aesthetician, and rhetorician.)
The Journal is committed to comparative and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, and conceptual analysis of art. It publishes current research papers, review essays, and special issues of critical interest and contemporary relevance.
The Journal has published the finest of essays by authors of global renown like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, John Hospers, John Fisher, Murray Krieger, Martin Bocco, Remo Ceserani, J.B. Vickery, Menachem Brinker, Milton Snoeyenbos, Mary Wiseman, Ronald Roblin, T.R. Martland, S.C. Sengupta, K.R.S. Iyengar, Charles Altieri, Martin Jay, Jonathan Culler, Richard Shusterman, Robert Kraut, Terry Diffey, T.R. Quigley, R.B. Palmer, Keith Keating, and many others.
JCLA is indexed and abstracted in the MLA International Bibliography, Master List of Periodicals (USA), Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals, ERIH PLUS, The Philosopher’s Index (Philosopher’s Information Center), EBSCO, ProQuest (Arts Premium Collection, Art, Design & Architecture Collection, Arts & Humanities Database, Literature Online – Full Text Journals, ProQuest Central, ProQuest Central Essentials), Abstracts of English Studies, WorldCat Directory, ACLA, India Database, Gale (Cengage Learning), Bibliography History of Art (BHA), ArtBibliographies Modern (ABM), Literature Online (LION), Academic Resource Index, Book Review Index Plus, OCLC, Periodicals Index Online (PIO), Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, CNKI, PhilPapers, Google Scholar, Expanded Academic ASAP, Indian Documentation Service, Publication Forum (JuFo), Summon, J-Gate, United States Library of Congress, New York Public Library, and the British Library. The journal is also indexed in numerous university (central) libraries, state, and public libraries, and scholarly organizations/ learned societies databases.
Celebrated scholars of the time like René Wellek, Harold Osborne, Mircea Eliade, Monroe Beardsley, John Hospers, John Fisher, Meyer Abrams, John Boulton, and many renowned foreign and Indian scholars were Members of its Editorial Board.
Founding Editor: Ananta Charan Sukla,Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute, India
Email: jclaindia@gmail.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/jclasukla
*
Call for Papers
Black Lives under Nazism
Jacob and Yetta Gelman International Research Workshop,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.
June 7–16, 2023
Applications due 3/31/23
The Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum invites applications for the 2023 Jacob and Yetta Gelman International Research Workshop entitled Black Lives under Nazism. The Mandel Center will co-convene this workshop with Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Department of Anthropology, Hunter College, and Sarah Phillips Casteel, Department of English, Carleton University. The workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, June 7 through Friday, June 16, 2023, and will take place at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
This workshop advances research on the neglected history of the African diaspora in wartime Europe and the experiences of Black people caught up in the genocidal campaign of the Nazis and their collaborators. This small yet diverse population included Black Europeans, African and Caribbean colonial subjects, African-American expatriates, and soldiers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States. Among the expatriates were a number of American jazz musicians, such as pianist Freddy Johnson and trumpeter Valaida Snow, who chose to stay in Europe when the war broke out rather than return to the segregated society they had sought to escape. Colonial soldiers, such as the Senegalese writer and statesman Léopold Senghor, and children of German colonial subjects, such as journalist and memoirist Theodor Wonja Michael, also found themselves in the clutches of the Nazi regime. Josef Nassy, an artist of African and Sephardic Jewish descent from the Dutch Caribbean colony of Suriname, was imprisoned as an enemy national in internment camps where he painted the most substantial known visual record of Black prisoners in the Nazi camp system. Their experiences of persecution—which ranged from social and legal ostracization, sterilization, forced labor, and imprisonment in camps to murder—are reflected in a diverse body of archival sources, testimonies, and artistic and literary work that offers us a window onto the wartime experiences of African diaspora people.
The workshop will focus on these sources in order to address a variety of questions about Black experiences during this period. How did the treatment of Black people by the Nazis vary according to their citizenship, gender, and military or civilian status? What kinds of strategies did they develop to navigate Nazi rule and Nazi occupation? How did their creative work (music, visual art, literature) help them to survive the war years, both spiritually and materially? How did they understand Nazism in relation to other manifestations and systems of racial violence, particularly colonial racism in the Caribbean and Africa and the “Jim Crow” laws that codified segregation in the United States? How has postwar African diaspora writing, art, and film sought to reconstruct and draw attention to this neglected wartime history?
This workshop will stimulate new research directions in the field by contributing to both the colonial turn in Holocaust studies and to the burgeoning fields of Black German and Black European studies. By bringing together Holocaust studies and Black studies—two fields not normally connected—it will challenge the compartmentalization of academic knowledge that has rendered the experiences of Black people under the Nazis largely invisible. Moreover, it will draw attention to the role of the creative arts in recovering occluded histories. Finally, the workshop will enhance our understanding of the intersectionality of histories of racial oppression by identifying complexities of identity that were flattened by Nazi racial classification and by revealing unrecognized connections between wartime Europe and global African diaspora communities.
The workshop will consist of presentations and discussions led by participants along three thematic tracks: 1) comparative and relational methods and frameworks for addressing the contemporaneous histories of Nazism, colonial racism, and Jim Crow, 2) modes and strategies of survival in the face of racial persecution, and 3) artistic expression and performance as a response to the Nazi regime or conditions of internment and other forms of incarceration and persecution.
Daily sessions of the workshop will be comprised of presentations and discussions led by participants, as well as discussions with Museum staff and research in the Museum’s collections. The workshop will be conducted in English.
We welcome proposals that address the study of this neglected chapter of wartime history and its aftermath from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Participants will have access to both the Museum’s downtown campus and the David and Fela Shapell Family Collections, Conservation and Research Center.
Museum Resources
The Museum’s David M. Rubinstein National Institute for Holocaust Documentation houses an unparalleled repository of Holocaust evidence that documents the fate of victims, survivors, rescuers, liberators, and others. The Museum’s comprehensive collection contains millions of documents, artifacts, photos, films, books, and testimonies. The Museum’s Database of Holocaust Survivor and Victim Names contains records on people persecuted during World War II under the Nazi regime. In addition, the Museum possesses the holdings of the International Tracing Service (ITS), which contains more than 200 million digitized pages with information on the fates of 17.5 million people who were subject to incarceration, forced labor, and displacement as a result of World War II. Many of these records have not been examined by scholars, offering unprecedented opportunities to advance the field of Holocaust and genocide studies.
The Museum’s related collections include:
-
- Oral histories of Afro-Germans, Black expatriates, and African and African-American soldiers and their children, such as Dominique Mendy, Theodor Wonja Michael, Hans Hauck, Hans Massaquoi, Wilfred Fisher, and Roslyn B. Kraus, among others
-
- The Josef Nassy Collection of paintings and drawings from the Laufen and Tittmoning internment camps
-
- Photos from internment camps
-
- Photos from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean
-
- Oral histories of African-American soldiers
-
- Records of the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, which placed European refugees at Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the US
To search the Museum’s collections, please visit collections.ushmm.org/search.
To Apply
Applications are welcome from scholars affiliated with universities, research institutions, or memorial sites and in any relevant academic discipline, including anthropology, African studies, African-American/Africana studies, archeology, art history, Black studies, Caribbean studies, genocide studies, geography, history, Jewish studies, Latin American studies, law, literature, philosophy, political science, psychology, sociology, religion, Romani studies, and others. Applications will be accepted from scholars at all levels of their careers, from Ph.D. candidates to senior faculty. Scholars working at universities and research institutions in Africa and the Caribbean, as well as scholars from historically excluded backgrounds in the field, are particularly encouraged to apply.
The Mandel Center will reimburse the costs of round-trip economy-class air tickets to/from the Washington, D.C. metro area, and related incidental expenses, up to a maximum reimbursable amount calculated by home institution location, which will be distributed within 6-8 weeks of the workshop’s conclusion. The Mandel Center will also provide hotel accommodation for the duration of the workshop. Participants are required to attend the full duration of the workshop.
The deadline for receipt of applications is March 31, 2023. Applications must include an abstract of no more than 300 words outlining the specific project that the applicant plans to research and present in the workshop, and a short bio in English. All application materials must be submitted in English online at ushmm.org/research-workshops.
Questions should be directed to Krista Hegburg, Ph.D., Senior Program Officer, International Academic Programs Division, Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, at khegburg@ushmm.org.
URL:
http://www.ushmm.org/research-workshops
*
Call for Papers
Urban Lives: Amsterdam Diaries and Other Stories of the Self
Conference held at the University of Amsterdam, 26 – 28 October 2023
Deadline for Submissions April 1, 2023
In October 2025, Amsterdam will celebrate its 750th anniversary. In light of this upcoming celebration, two of the city’s institutes of higher education, the University of Amsterdam and the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, are inviting academics, artists, and others to share their research and knowledge on one particular topic: Amsterdam diaries and other stories of the self. We are in particular focusing on Amsterdam-based self-narratives across the centuries, told by ‘ordinary individuals’, such as diaries and memoirs. We want to examine what it was like to live in the city, to study, work and go out, engage with other people, find places where one belongs (or perhaps feels excluded), and to move through its streets. Given the city ́s long history of migration, the conference seeks to account for the life stories of people with diverse backgrounds in order to study, for example, how migrants have narrated their experiences in this city: how do they tell stories of the place of arrival, their first impressions, chances, challenges and restrictions of this new environment?
Through the theme of Amsterdam life stories, we will further explore the various ways in which the city is manifest in self-representations, whether as a socio-economic space, a cultural environment, a historical setting or otherwise. How do people engage with the city’s history and geography; with texts, imagery and discourses about Amsterdam; with its architecture; and with the life stories of citizens from the past, such as Rembrandt, Spinoza, Anne Frank, Anton de Kom? How does their street and neighborhood relate to forms of self-fashioning and identity-construction? And how do people narrate changes in the city, caused by war, crisis, or environmental conditions, that affect their everyday lives and life-trajectories?
It is our goal to explore the life stories which can be found in diaries, letters, memoirs, graphics, sound recordings, or stories told to relatives and researchers. Jointly, we aim to discuss what these stories (and their interpretations) can tell us about the way individuals and groups have perceived and experienced the city of Amsterdam throughout the centuries – and which modes and forms of self-expression are practiced. In that sense, we will explore how the collection of such personal stories can construct a new and diverse ‘biography’ of the city.
We further want to bring together experts from life writing studies and urban history. Both fields of study have gained prominence in the humanities and social sciences in recent decades, but their crossovers are still under-explored in scholarly research. It is our aim to stimulate dialogue and open up new avenues for studying how the city shapes the self, and how life stories and self-constructions shape the city.
The conference encourages dialogues across boundaries of theory, methodology, genre, place, and time. Possible themes the speakers can focus on are:
• Coming of age in Amsterdam
• Feelings of (non-)belonging
• Places of arrival
• Intercultural encounters and connections
• Experiences of particular places, such as the harbour, Central Station, parks, and markets
• Cultural traditions and practices of self-narration (in for example Christian and Muslim cultures)
• Collective rituals and commemorations
• Visual and textual expressions of city life
• The uses of self-narratives in secondary and higher education; in museums
• Amsterdam-based scientists: their personal experiences in the city and in public debates
• Policies and practices of making the city’s collection of diaries more inclusive and diverse?
• Notions of home and home-making practices in life writing
• The potential of Digital Humanities to store and map historical information about diaries and diarists in its spatial and temporal context
• Theoretical approaches to the intersections of life writing and (urban) life narratives
• Diaries and their (lack of) references to daily urban life
• The collection of urban life narratives and issues of in- and exclusivity
The conference will feature panel sessions, a round-table session, keynote presentations, and possibly performances, a city excursion, and a museum visit.
The conference languages are English and Dutch.
All presenters must submit a max. 300-word abstract and a 150-word bio. The abstract and bio may be written in English or Dutch.
Presentations which are (almost) ready to be published shortly after the conference may be selected for a volume to appear during the festivities of October 2025.
Please submit your abstract before Wednesday, 1 April 2023 using the following mail address:
AmsterdamUrbanLivesConference@gmail.com
Organizing committee:
Babs Boter, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Barbara Henkes, Guest researcher at the University of Groningen
Ernestine Hoegen, Independent researcher
Marleen Rensen, University of Amsterdam
Leonieke Vermeer, University of Groningen
*
Deadline for Submissions April 1, 2023
International Research in Children’s Literature:
Special issue: Children at War: From Representation to Life Narrative
Editors Maciej Wróblewski (Nicolaus Copernicus University, Poland)
Kate Douglas (Flinders University, Australia)
The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have been characterized by war and military conflict, from the Great War, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, through to the War in Afghanistan, Somali Civil War, Yugoslav Wars, War in Rwanda, Iraq War, Syrian Civil War, Russia-Ukraine war. These events have resulted in an overwhelming loss of lives.
According to UNICEF, children are routinely affected more seriously than adults during wartime:
From widespread killing, maiming, abduction and sexual violence to recruitment into armed groups and strikes on schools and hospitals, as well as essential water facilities – children living in conflict zones around the world continue to come under attack at a shocking scale. Today, one in four children live in a country affected by conflict or disaster. . . 1
In the media, and in film and literature, the child has become a complex emblem for the futility of war and military conflict. The child is also the catalyst for intervention – for instance, as adults deploy cultural representations to draw attention to injustices affecting children.
There have been many fictional representations of children’s experiences of war, particularly in film, children’s book and in YA literatures. In such instances, adult authors come to speak, feel, and dream on behalf of young people. Here, we see a literary field created for young people by adult writers. The Western tradition of children’s literature, directly linked to education and teaching systems and values, directs the patterns of children’s literatures.
However, historically, children have been significant first-person witnesses during wartime. Non-fictional or life narrative genres such as diaries, letters, and more recently social media, have shown a plethora of child and youth-authored texts to show us something of young people’s experiences of war and conflict across the globe. Prominent examples include Anne Frank (and many other young diarists from World War II whose writing has been anthologized; for instance, see Zapruder, Wróblewski); child soldier memoirists of the 2000s; and most recently child activists Malala Yousafzai, writing about conflict in Pakistan, and Bana Al Abed, whose frontline Twitter narrative offers eyewitness testimony on Syrian war (Douglas; Douglas and Poletti). Our understanding of, and increased attention to, child and youth-authored texts about war reflects more general cultural shifts in the notion of childhood and the importance of children as social actors whose experiences and narratives must be heard and recorded in history (Douglas and Poletti; Gilmore and Marshall). This special issue of International Research in Children’s Literature invites papers that explore the diverse ways in which children and youth are represented, or represent their own experiences, of war and military conflict (broadly conceived). Possible topics for discussion include, but are not limited to:
• Discussions or case studies representing particular young authors or texts of war/military conflict.
• The life narrative forms and genres that young authors use in order to narrate their experiences of war.
• The role of social or digital media in creating new spaces for young authors to witness war and military conflict.
• How do children/youth negotiate or represent trauma in writing about war/military conflict?
• The role of controversy and hoax in the representation of war and military conflict.
• The representation of adults by young authors.
• Methods for reading life narrative texts of war/military conflict authored by children and youth.
• Representations of war/military conflict in children’s literatures written by adults.
• Representations of war/military conflict in film and television texts about or for children.
Please send a 300 word abstract to Maciej Wróblewski (matej@umk.pl), Kate Douglas (kate.douglas@flinders.edu.au), and Roxanne Harde (rharde@ ualberta.ca) by 1 April 2023. Complete manuscripts (7000 words) will be due 1 August 2023.
1. https://www.unicef.org/stories/children-under-attack-six-grave-violations-againstchildren-times-war 372
—————————-
Kate Douglas (she/her) Professor of English College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences +61 402440223 www.flinders.edu.au/people/kate.douglas |
CFP André Gide and 20th-Century Autobiography
MLA Philadelphia (1/4-7/2024)
deadline for submissions:
March 17, 2023
For the centennial of Si le grain ne meurt we welcome papers on Gide’s autobiographical writings, potentially alongside works by his contemporaries (Colette, Proust…). 250-300-word proposals in French or English to curtisi@kenyon.edu by 17 March 2023.
This session is organized by the Association des Amis d’André Gide at the Modern Language Association Convention (4-7 January 2024, Philadelphia)
*
In Her Own Hand: Media of Female Agency in the Long 18th Century
Call for Papers for a special session
The 91st annual Association for German Studies (AGS) in Great Britain and Ireland Conference at Trinity College Dublin, Tue 29–Thu 31 August 2023.
Deadline for Submissions: March 31, 2023
In the long eighteenth century, women found new ways to engage with a male-dominated public sphere and to express their agency in textual media. One famous example would be Sophia de La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771) or her Frauenzeitschrift Pomona (1783/84). Due to many digitisation efforts, manuscripts, letters and other paraphernalia from that time period have become available for analysis for the first time. Particularly writing in the margins, deleted parts, and drafts deemed unfit for publication can form the basis of a re-examination of the polyvalent agency of female authors such as Bettina von Arnim, Caroline von Günderrode or Caroline Pichler. This panel therefore asks how women put their hard-worn textual agency into practice: what were the media of female agency in the long 18th century and how did women writers understand their own writing?
Please send your proposals of ca. 250 words and a brief bio (100 words max.) in either English or German by 31 March 2023 to Helga Müllneritsch (helga.muellneritsch@ucd.ie) and Dennis Schäfer (dennis.schaefer@princeton.edu).
Contact Info:
Helga Müllneritsch (helga.muellneritsch@ucd.ie)
Dennis Schäfer (dennis.schaefer@princeton.edu)
*
Calls for Papers: Modern Language Association Life Writing Forum (for 2024 MLA Conference between Jan. 4 and 7 in Philadelphia, PA, USA—conference theme is “Joys and Sorrows”)
Deadlines are listed below. One more CFP will be forthcoming from us, too.
Sounding a Life: How does American popular music—specifically through an album’s sounds, lyrics and, in some cases, visuals—allow for the expression of a life with all its inevitable joys and sorrows? Submit 300-word abstracts & short bios by 3/1/23. Contact email: Kimberly Mack, kimberly.mack@utoledo.edu
Dialogic Life Writing: How does auto/biography emerge through conversation, whether scholarly dialogue (e.g., bell hooks & Stuart Hall), institutional oral histories (e.g. WPA) or personal interviews (e.g., Malcolm X & Alex Haley)? 300-word abstracts, short bios by 3/1/23. Contact email: Angela Ards, ardsa@bc.edu
Teaching Life Writing: A Roundtable: What are the joys and sorrows of teaching life writing in a changing world? This roundtable discussion welcomes proposals on pedagogical approaches to the challenges of the auto/biography classroom. 300-word abstracts, short bios by 3/15/2023. Contact email: Megan Brown, megan.brown@drake.edu
Dr. Megan Brown
Professor of English
Director of Writing
Associate Dean, John Dee Bright College
Faculty Athletics Representative
Drake University
*
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY STUDY GROUP SUMMER CONFERENCE 2023 ‘NEW BEGINNINGS’:
July 14–16, 2023
Wolfson College, Oxford
The call for papers is now open and we welcome papers and presentations that respond to the concept of ‘new beginnings’ substantively, theoretically, methodologically and creatively. This year we are also including presentations of ‘installation pieces’ which might include a poster, creative artefact(s) or a short video or other. The keynote will be given by Professor David Brown, Cardiff School of Sport and Health Sciences, Cardiff Metropolitan University. David’s talk is entitled ‘Auto/Biography and Second Generation Practice Theory’.
We invite abstract submissions (250 words) for 30-minute oral presentations followed by discussion and for installation pieces (there will be space in the programme for viewing and discussion of these). We are pleased to invite papers from across the broadest range of auto/biographical work, including ‘work-in-progress’ and those testing out innovative approaches, and welcome colleagues and friends from in and outside of the academy at all career stages.
Please submit your abstract to https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/bsa-autobiography-summer-conference-2023/. The abstract submission deadline is 15th March at 5pm and abstracts received after this date will not be considered. As before, if you have any queries relating to abstract submission please email events@britsoc.org.uk. Please contact gayle.letherby@plymouth.ac.uk and/or SEERYA@tcd.ie for further detail about the conference.
MARCH SEMINAR: This is a final reminder to register for our seminar on Thursday 2nd March at 1700-1800: ‘The roar at the end of years of silence: feminist voices through educating geeta’ by Geeta Ludhra (Brunel University London): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-the-roar-at-the-end-of-years-of-silence-feminist-voices-through-educating-geeta-by-geeta-ludhra-brunel-university-london-1/ The Zoom link and joining details will be sent out next Thursday morning. If you have any questions about registration please email events@britsoc.org.uk and colleagues will help you.
MAY SEMINAR: Registration is also open for the seminar (online) on Thursday 4th May 2023 at 1700-1800: ‘Can children narrate memoirs? Celebrating experimental narratives’ by Amanda-Marie Kale (University of Nottingham): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-can-children-narrate-memoirs-celebrating-experimental-narratives-by-amanda-marie-kale-university-of-nottingham/
Please share the information with your colleagues and networks.
Best wishes
Anne Chappell and Carly Stewart
Auto/Biography Study Group Convenors
Email: anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk and cstewart@bournemouth.ac.uk
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group on Twitter: @AutoBiographySG
Join the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/join-us/
Register with the Auto/Biography Study Group: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/BSA-AUTO-BIOGRAPHY-GROUP
Submit to our open access online journal ‘Auto/Biography Review’: https://autobiographyreview.com/index.php/abrev
*
GSA 2023 Panel: “Autobiographical and Autofictional Writing in the Works of Günter Grass”
Deadline for Paper Submissions: March 15, 2023
The 47th Annual German Studies Association (GSA) Conference, 5-8 October, 2023, Montréal, Quebec
Günter Grass’s reservations towards the genre of autobiography are well documented. In a 2003 interview with Der Spiegel, Grass stated: “Wenn ich eine Möglichkeit sähe, mich gewissermaßen in Variation zu erzählen – das wäre vielleicht reizvoll. Aber eigentlich mag ich Autobiographisches in der verschlüsselten Form der Fiktion, des Romans, lieber.” (Doerry und Hage 2003, 144) Despite (or maybe because of) this skepticism, the autobiographical and autofictional are ever present in his works, not just in the so-called ‚Autobiographical Trilogy‘ (Grimms Wörter, Die Box and Beim Häuten der Zwiebel) and in Die Blechtrommel, but also in texts like Das Treffen in Telgte, Im Krebsgang, Mein Jahrhundert and others.
This panel aims to engage with recent developments in autobiographical theory, particularly the discourse surrounding the concept of autofictional as a mode of writing rather than a distinct genre: in their recently published volume, Alexandra Effe und Hannie Lawlor (2022, 4) explore the concept’s widespread attraction, defining it as “a combination of real and invented elements; onomastic correspondence between author and character or narrator; and stylistic or linguistic experimentation.” How do these and similar characteristics manifest in the writing of Günter Grass? What insights into his works can be gained from the engagement with new developments in autobiographical and autofictional theory? And what, in turn, can Günter Grass’s texts contribute to better understand the complex and intriguing concept of the autofictional as well as its relation to autobiographical writing?
If you are interested in participating in this panel at the 47. Annual Conference of the German Studies Association in Montréal, Canada,
please send your abstract 350-500 words together with a short biographical note as well as any questions to Christian Baier (cbaier@snu.ac.kr). Submission deadline is March 15th, 2023.
Contact Email:
*
Deadline for Submissions Mar. 15, 2023
Call for Abstracts: War Diaries: Ecologies of Post-war Reconstructions
Dr. Elisa Dainese (Georgia Tech) and Dr. Aleksandar Staničić (TU Delft)
DATES AND SUBMISSION DETAILS:
Submission opens: December 15, 2022.
Submission deadline: March 1, 2023.
Pre-selection: March 15, 2023.
Tentative Workshop date: April 2023
The destruction of buildings and artifacts has shaped not only the physical attributes of the built environment but also societies, cultures, and entire civilizations across the globe—arguably, with zeal equal to their creative production. Modern-day annihilations of Aleppo and Homs, in Syria, and more recently Mariupol, Volnovakha, and many other towns, in Ukraine, illustrate the weaponization of art and architecture and connect it with a growing number of physical assaults and aggressions against entire populations, their cultural heritage, and spatial landmarks. The need to understand how cities, environments, and societies can recover efficiently and sustainably from such violence is dire.
When it comes to the impact of postwar reconstructions, however, existing research focuses mostly on specific and isolated fields, such as urbicide, military urbanism, semiotics of destruction, displacement and migrations, war economies, memorial studies, etc. In the first volume of War Diaries, subtitled Design after the Destruction of Art and Architectureand published in 2022 by the University of Virginia Press (https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5408/), we focused on the role of artistic and architectural design and the field work of designers in the context of postwar reconstruction. Discussions following the publication of the book challenged ongoing debates on post-war rebuilding. They focused on the broader ecological impact of reconstruction and the interrelation between physical, social, and economic settings during recovery and renewal.
To address the gap, this call explores the rarely considered but complex ecologies and ecological entanglements emerging after violence and destruction. Ecological intricacies are understood as both richness and diversity of postwar reconstruction approaches, and include investigations on the environmental impact of human actions and the socio-spatial predicament in which different actors operate during recovery. More specifically, in the edited volume that will result from this call, we want to broaden the picture of postwar reconstruction and link the multiple settings and approaches in which rebuilding after violence operates. Future authors of War Diaries: Ecologies of Post-war Reconstructions are invited to investigate complex systems involving design recovery after the war and how they simultaneously address diverse factors, scales, milieus, and resources. The emphasis goes on the relational quality of reconstruction which connects environmental, social, and/or technological settings. Understood in its entirety, the book will consider the built environment as a canvas of various power-plays as well as the arena in which relationships combine to translate into complex postwar realities. Our long-term goal with this project is to test existing and create new urban development scenarios able to recover post-conflict contexts.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
-
- the relation between environment, territory, and community, including the complexity of landscapes of destruction and extraction, border tensions in territory formations, and the entanglement of ecologies of resistance;
-
- the intricacies between social, environmental, and economic milieus, including the frictions between professional expertise and forms of (re)construction labor, the linkages between the environmental inequality of rebuilding and social tolerance, and the crisis emerging from the clash of ecological processes of renewal and (geo)political histories;
-
- the connection between body and environment, the violent confrontation of embodied knowledge and damaged landscapes, the biopolitics of recovery, the emergence of ecological tensions in recovered interiors;
-
- the predicament of technology and media, their limitations, potential, and broader impact in conducting, researching and designing post-war ecologies of reconstruction.
We would like to invite authors to submit extended abstracts (between 500 and 1000 words). Proposals should be submitted no later than March 1, 2023, via the following email addresses: elisa.dainese@design.gatech.edu and A.Stanicic@tudelft.nl . By March 15, 2023, the co-editors will inform the authors if their proposal is selected.
After abstracts are selected, authors will be invited to participate in an extended conversation on the book project which will set the base for a publication on ecologies of postwar reconstruction. This will be the third event that the authors have organized to promote the topic: the first event was in The Netherlands, at Delft Institute of Technology (June 20, 2022), the second event took place in Atlanta (USA), at the Georgia Institute of Technology (September 23, 2022).
Authors will be asked to prepare a 5 to 10-minute presentation on the main ideas of their proposal. Presentations will be followed by a group brainstorming session in which we will define more precisely the outline of the book. During the workshop, we will actively engage our authors in a conversation on the book project. We will also discuss a timeframe for publication of the entire manuscript. The modality of the meeting will be hybrid (virtual on zoom and in person; location tbd). Authors will work on the final papers for publication after the event and according to the feedback received.
Contact Info:
Dr. Elisa Dainese (Georgia Tech, elisa.dainese@design.gatech.edu) and Dr. Aleksandar Staničić (TU Delft, A.Stanicic@tudelft.nl)
Contact Email:
elisa.dainese@design.gatech.edu
*
CALL FOR PAPERS
Trauma and Healing: Storying Lives, Literary Engagements, Entangled Memories
University of Tartu, Estonia, June 8 to 9, 2023
15th International Conference of the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature
Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2023
The conceptual framework of trauma has played an immense role in critical inquiry and memory studies for many decades. Russian full-scale military aggression against Ukraine that started on February 24, 2022 that has claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and has brought about the most extensive humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, forcibly displacing nearly half of the Ukrainian population, brings the notion of trauma into focus with particular urgency. Not only does it merit the revision of existing frameworks and approaches and weigh their applicability in the context of the massive impact of the war in Ukraine but it also calls forth the necessity of developing new frameworks and approaches of supporting coping and healing.
With a focus on both individual and collective memory, large-scale historical events as well as those concerning the commonplace contexts of everyday life, involving, for instance, domestic violence, sexual abuse and social marginalization, which are closely related to and depend on social and political regulations and cultural discourses, the development of trauma studies as a field of cultural enquiry has been shaped by a close affinity to the theoretical frameworks of psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and deconstruction. The universal applicability of such theoretical framework of has been called into doubt by scholars working on global, non-Western contexts who highlight the need to consider the ways in which cultural difference impacts the manner of mediating trauma. Among the current advancements within the more inclusive paradigm of trauma, approaches geared towards contributing to the process of healing from posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) play an increasingly important role.
Sadly, traumatic experience continues to have devastating effect on the survivors and their family members and, in case of trauma brought about by large-scale historical events, the affected societies as a whole. The process of healing from PTSD and, in worse cases, c-PTSD (complex posttraumatic stress disorder) continues to be a long and complicated journey with high risk of trauma dominating the lives of the survivors if left unattended and passing on from generation to generation. For the conference, we welcome proposals attending to the possibilities of healing from and coping with traumatic experience with a focus on, but not limited to
Therapeutic mechanisms of literature and other modes of creative self-expression
Literary depictions of healing and recovery
Different modes and genres of storying life experience of traumatic nature
Cultural mediations of healing
Discursive constellations of trauma and memory
Postmemory and transgenerational trauma
Unattended trauma
The limits of representation and healing
Alternative vocabularies and discourses
A special section of the conference is dedicated to the war in Ukraine with a focus on representation of the experience of the war in literature, visual media and life writing.
The main working language is English, poster presentations are welcome also in Spanish, French or German.
Please send a proposal of 250-300 words and a short bio of about 100 words to evka2023korraldus@lists.ut.ee
Panel proposals are also welcome. The deadline for panel proposals is March 15, 2023 and individual proposals March 25, 2023. Acceptance notices will be sent by April 10, 2023.
There is no registration fee. The participants are kindly asked to arrange and cover their travel and accommodation. If necessary, conference organizers advise and assist in finding suitable arrangements.
On behalf of the organizing committee
Leena Kurvet-Käosaar
Associate Professor of Cultural Theory
Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu
The conference is supported by Baseline Funding Project for National Sciences nr PHVKU22922 22922 “Taking Shelter in Estonia. Stories of Ukrainians Fleeing form the War.”
*
Autotheory and Its Others
deadline for submissions:
March 15, 2023
Edited Collection
Autotheory, an emergent discourse with historic precedents, lacks a stable definition. Recently, Lauren Fournier defined the term as “a self-conscious way of engaging with theory—as a discourse, frame, or mode of thinking and practice—alongside lived experience and subjective embodiment . . .” (Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism). Yet there are as many approaches to autotheory as there are autotheorists. From a recognizable aesthetic in artistic practices to a more scholarly methodology, autotheory remains a shapeshifter.
Autotheory can be understood as a methodology rather than as a final result or a specific aesthetic. It is first and foremost an opportunity for a maker (i.e., a writer, a researcher, or an artist) to make sense of reality through a profound, embodied, and possibly speculative processing of theory and art in order to better open up past, present, and future worlds. An acknowledgement of those fields implies an acceptance of others, their realities, and their sense-making attempts. Thus, autotheory is not the act of pinning a loose reference to theory on one’s chest like an honorary medal. Instead, it needs the tangible, sizable presence of the other/s to confront, expand, and contextualize the auto-, and vice versa.
We can also approach autotheory as a scholarly genre itself, mixing one’s lived experience with a thoroughgoing engagement with and reflection on theory and art in all its iterations. Although autotheory is an example of what Michel Foucault called “technologies of the self”—a discursive practice, an exercise in shaping one’s life, and a form of pedagogy in the same way that Roland Barthes understood his lecture courses at the Collège de France as a form of paideia, “an introduction to living, a guide to life” (The Neutral)—it is best understood as a practice in which theory and art are not used as a reassuring mirror, a form of self-fashioning, but rather as a catalyst in a project of unlearning and undoing, of becoming other. Such a practice can be found not only in current manifestations of autotheory but also in its predecessors, i.e., in traditions such as romanticism, decadent aestheticism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and surrealism: currents that tried to understand and galvanize everyday experiences by exploring other ways of doing, feeling, and thinking.
The preceding offers a framework for a multi-author collection tentatively entitled Autotheory and Its Others. Punctum Books has expressed early interest in the proposed collection. With editors working from both sides of the Atlantic—Eric Daffron and Becky McLaughlin from the U.S. and Maria Gil Ulldemolins and Kris Pint from Europe—this collection will serve as a testing ground for those definitions while providing space for work that expands and even challenges them. We invite practicing autotheorists to plot its different manifestations and roots. Different realities will require different encounters. What do the latter entail? Who is invited? How does the very definition of the self change depending on context? How does the understanding of the other/s change in different contexts? How do the less academic forms of knowledge, the more local, vernacular, and folkloric branches of culture, appear in autotheoretical practices? What can we learn from these engagements? We seek texts of all sorts—scholarly, creative, theoretical, and pedagogical—that pose and/or reflect on these questions in order to widen the understanding of not only what autotheory is but also what it can do. And, considering the rich legacy of autotheory’s predecessors, biographical, historical, and critical studies of figures whose artistic, pedagogical, and theoretical practices might now be retroactively regarded as autotheory are also welcome.
Possible topics include but are not limited to the following:
Autotheory and its others:
Autotheory in the classroom
Autotheory and collaboration
Autotheory and its predecessors
Autotheory and the self as an/other
Autotheory and self-experimentation/transformation
Autotheory and its discontents:
Autotheory and confession
Autotheory and alienation
Autotheory and authenticity
Autotheory and solipsism
Autotheory and ego discourse
Autotheory and its genres and modes:
Autotheory and life-writing
Autotheory and autofiction
Autotheory and the lyric essay
Autotheory and performance
Autotheory and visual art
Autotheory and its preoccupations:
Autotheory and sexuality
Autotheory and race
Autotheory and trauma
Autotheory and human rights
Autotheory and climate crisis
Autotheory and its practitioners:
Autotheory and Roland Barthes
Autotheory and Hélène Cixous
Autotheory and Michel Foucault
Autotheory and Gloria Anzaldúa
Autotheory and bell hooks
Please send proposals of 500 words and a brief CV to Becky McLaughlin at the University of South Alabama (bmclaugh@southalabama.edu) with “Autotheory” as the subject line. Deadline for receipt of proposals is March 15, 2023. Accepted papers will typically run between 6,000 and 8,000 words, but the editors will entertain somewhat shorter pieces on a case-by-case basis. We especially invite persons from underrepresented groups to contribute to this collection.
*
Call for Contributions: [Auto]biographical Writing, Fan Fiction and Education
Edited Collection
Abstracts Due March 1, 2023
German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey noted the educational value of [auto]biographical writing as a means of understanding life, bound up in hermeneutic knowing: an intuitive route to understanding based on our situated human-ness, rather than on knowledge based on certainty or probability (Friesen, 2020). Certainly, Dilthey was not the first to note this enduring pedagogical quality of the autobiography as, in the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin had already offered his autobiography as a model of a life “fit to be imitated” (cited in Jacobson, 2018). Although mimetic modelling and hermeneutic knowing cannot be easily reconciled, it is clear that both rely on a degree of introspection and introjection.
Fan fiction, on the other hand, is a fictional novum, which is closely linked to the genre of [auto]biographical writing. Amateur writers feel strongly linked to already established characters, placing them into new situations and, via their own understanding of the world, they write about the characters’ lives, loves and experiences in a speculative way. There is introspection here, in terms of the hermeneutic endeavour of interpreting the character via one’s own context and experience; and there is introjection as the writers seek to model the persona of the fictional character in their own writing.
In this proposed publication, we are seeking chapters which address the relationship between [auto]biographical writing and fan fiction, and both of these in relation to education. Suggestions for contributions include (but are not limited to):
-
- Pedagogical uses of autobiography/fan fiction
-
- Autobiography/fan fiction as pedagogical reduction
-
- Self-reflection in autobiographical writing/fan fiction
-
- Representation of identities/intersectional identities
-
- Hermeneutic knowing and writing in autobiography/fan fiction
Although this work will consider autobiographical and fan fiction from an educational slant, contributions are not limited to scholarship in the field of education. Ideas from across disciplines are encouraged. Papers can be theoretical or empirical in scope.
If you are interested in contributing a chapter, please submit a 500 word abstract by March 1st 2023 to:
Nicola Robertson n.robertson@strath.ac.uk
Yueling Chen yueling.chen.2018@strath.ac.uk
*
CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference: Women’s narratives and European integration history
University of Luxembourg/C2DH 20-21 April 2023
Deadline for abstracts: 1 March 2023
The question of women’s role in international relations has given rise to a growing body of research since the mid-1970s. Topics have included pacifist activism during World War Two (Gottlieb & Johnson, 2022; Goedde, 2019; Bell 2015), the feminist movement, human rights issues (Briatte, 2020; Kaplan, 2014; Offen, 2000) and gender issues in international relations theory, as well as other subjects within the fields of gender studies and intersectionality studies (Carver & Lyddon, 2022; Hancock, 2016; Steans, 2013). Female leadership in international relations and post-war diplomacy has also been explored (Müller & Tömmel, 2022; Owens & Rietzler, 2021; Aggestam & Towns, 2018; Sluga & James, 2016).
At European level, too, there has been increasing interest in this area. In policy terms, however, although the Treaty of Rome introduced a European gender equality policy in 1957, it was only from 1975 that a common policy on women’s economic and social rights began to be developed. Research has ranged from parity issues (Bereni & Reveillard, 2007; Deshormes, 1991) to women’s participation in the exercise of political power (Woodward, 2004; Union interparlementaire, 1995), the concept of gender mainstreaming as a cross-sector approach (Abels & Mushaben, 2012; Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2004) and female networks and gender issues in European integration (Hertner, 2021; Briatte, Gubin & Thébaud, 2019). But notwithstanding these efforts, in general the presence and influence of women, whether formal or informal, in power relations (Gaspard 2009), institutions (Carbonell, 2019; Dénéchère, 2016), international relations and diplomacy (Badel, 2021; Doré-Audibert, 2002; Seidel, 2023) has received scant attention.
The history of European integration and Europeanisation has developed into a varied field that has moved on from an initial focus on the vision and achievements of the founding fathers. However, even though women played a vital part in the European project launched after the Second World War (intellectuals, experts and technocrats, those with menial but essential jobs, parliamentarians, trade unionists, diplomats, activists for the European cause, etc.), their role has yet to be fully explored. Women tended to remain in the background until they began to be more readily accepted as political leaders, particularly following the first European elections by direct universal suffrage in 1979 and the appointment of the first female European Commissioner in 1989. Against this backdrop, “adding a gender perspective to European memory” and history (Milosevic, 2018) seems essential.
This conference, which focuses on the period after World War Two, aims to spark discussion on topics that can inform the following issues:
-
- From a “his-storical” to a “her-storical” narrative: is there a female narrative in the European integration process? Specific historiographical traditions, theories, methodologies and approaches related to the history of women in Europe in the 20th and 21st centuries;
-
- Biographical perspectives: individual women in the development and implementation of the European project;
-
- The “female lobby”: how different organisations, groups of thinkers, activists and networks organised themselves to develop their influence, political presence and visibility in Europe (at trans-European/international level, within the EU and in individual Member States)
-
- Women in East-West dialogue and the EU’s enlargement
-
- Anti-europeanism: women and Euroscepticism
-
- Gendered perspectives and issues related to European democracy, rights, policies, institutions and actors
-
- Digital storytelling in developing new knowledge of the past: norms and practices in gathering, preserving, sharing and disseminating the memory of women who have played an active role on the European stage (oral history, text mining, network analysis, etc.)
These are intended to serve as broad categories; the conference will be open to a variety of approaches.
The conference will take place on 20-21 April 2023 at the University of Luxembourg/Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) in connection with the project “The role of women in European and international relations in Luxembourg (after the Second World War)”, developed by the University of Luxembourg, C2DH and Europe Direct at the University of Luxembourg.
Eligibility and how to apply:
PhD students, early career researchers and experienced researchers are invited to submit proposals. Applicants should submit an abstract of no more than 500 words outlining their proposal and a short CV by 1 March in writing to François Klein (francois.klein@uni.lu) with the subject heading “Women’s narrative conference application”.
Selected applicants will be informed by 10 March 2023.
Scientific committee:
Dr Elena Danescu (University of Luxembourg/C2DH), Dr Katja Seidel (University of Westminster, School of Humanities), Dr Dieter Schlenker (Historical Archives of the European Union); Prof. Sonja Kmec (University of Luxembourg, Institute for History), François Klein (University of Luxembourg/C2DH).
Contact Info:
Dr Francois Klein
Dr Elena Danescu
Contact Email:
URL:
*
direct your questions to Dr. Yuan Shu (yuan.shu@ttu.edu). The deadline for submission is February 18, 2023. You may choose either on-site or on-line format (cannot be switched).
Personal Writing and Textual Practices in the British Empire, C19th-20th
One-day conference, University of Leicester
Generously supported by the Leicester Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS)
CFP
In person, 14 April 2023,
10am-5pm GMT
Deadline for Proposals: February 17, 2023
Social drinks to follow
Co-convenors:
Dr Ipshita Nath (Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Saskatchewan)
Ellen Smith (AHRC Midlands4Cities PhD Researcher, School of History, Politics & International Relations)
We invite submissions of abstracts for individual papers (20 minutes) or whole panels (x3 individual 20-minute papers) for the LIAS-funded one-day conference on Personal Writing and Textual Practices in the British Empire, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conference will explore the experiences of individuals as constructed and represented through various forms of writing, specifically personal in nature. We are interested in generating new insights and methodologies to study epistolary writing and textual cultures of the empire. The scope is decidedly broad to allow for the widest possible engagement with our key enquiry, which will examine the relationship between personal writing and the ways British imperialism was conceived and has since been remembered to the present day.
We are interested in proposals that address genres in personal writings, including private correspondence, journals, memoirs, diaries, scrapbooks, ethnographical accounts, etc. We aim to create discussions around aspects of the colonial and postcolonial experience that these forms recorded, such as relationships, domestic subjectivities, travel, colonial service or labour, warfare, everyday life, political action, personal reflection and expressions of identity.
Proposals for papers or panels that are interdisciplinary in scope are particularly encouraged. We envisage productive links to be made with methodological approaches to writing from disciplines and fields such as history, literary studies, art history, sociology and psychology, and media and communication studies, for instance.
Proposals might wish to address the following topics, but not limited to:
-
- Letter writing and communication in colonial and global contexts; formal or official communication networks.
-
- Diary writing, journal reporting and documenting the ‘Self’.
-
- Subaltern life writing and modes of resistance.
-
- Life writing, memoirs and remembrance or memory studies of empire.
-
- Writing in familial, personal and domestic spheres.
-
- Travel writing, migration, emigration, and writing on the move.
-
- The ‘female gaze’ on the empire.
-
- Adventure and exploration tales.
-
- Missionary writing.
-
- Processes, techniques and genres of writing; the material aspects and culture of writing.
-
- Artistic representations of writing, or writing supplemented with visual and textual practices, such as interactions of text and photographs/sketching/art/watercolours.
-
- Erasure and silencing; editing and destruction.
-
- Broader archival practices and the material traces or remnants of writing and text.
-
- Private/personal writing as modes of historiography.
-
- Problems of authenticity e.g., biases, prejudices, and ideological motivations.
-
- Ephemera and textual assemblages e.g., scrapbooks and albums.
-
- Literature and fictional responses to empire in personal contexts.
-
- Writing and everyday life.
Instructions: For individual papers, please send 250-word abstracts, paper titles, and short biographies to ecss3@leicester.ac.uk (primary conference contact). For panels, please include abstracts and bios for each speaker, as well as a title/short summary of the panel theme and purpose. We ask that proposals and all elements of these are sent in a single word or pdf file. PowerPoint presentations and visual aids are encouraged and the venue will facilitate this.
Deadline for proposals: 17 February 2023. All submissions will receive confirmation of entry and decisions will be communicated no later than 22 February 2023.
Additional details: the conference is free to attend but registration will be essential as spaces are limited. Lunch and tea and coffee will be provided throughout the day. Registration links and updates will be announced via @LeicsIAS and the LIAS blog: https://www.leicias.le.ac.uk/
*We plan to publish the findings from the conference as an edited collection and speakers will be invited to submit their papers for inclusion in the volume by the end of May.
Contact Info:
Ellen Smith: ecss3@leicester.ac.uk
Contact Email:
*
Deadline for Submissions, February 14, 2023
“The ‘Portfolio’ from Every Angle.
Archiving and Preserving Working Documents (1680s-1820s)”
Call for Proposals for the International Conference
organised at the University Côte d’Azur, CMMC-MSH Sud-Est,
on 21-22 March 2024 by Simon Dolet
The storage of digital data has been at the heart of our concerns for the past 60 years. Technologies come and go – floppy disk, CD-Rom, USB stick, external hard drive, cloud computing – with greater storage capacity to meet the exponential growth in digital data production. The new ‘digital industry’ also has to respond to the growing fear of data loss as old storage formats become obsolete. However, the issue is older and deserves to be put into a longer perspective. In particular, there seems to have been an inflection in the 18th century, when the quantity of documents preserved and therefore available, compared to previous centuries, recorded an unprecedented growth.
The “portefeuille” (or “porte-feuille”) is an example of this concern for the conservation of documents. Used since the 16th century according to the French Academy, in 1718 this term still referred to a “cardboard box folded in two, covered with skin or some other material, & used to carry papers”. While its use in the French language expanded over the course of the century, the term did not enter foreign dictionaries until the beginning of the 19th century, with literal translations of “porte-feuille”: brieftasche (German), portfolio (English), portafolio (Spanish) or portafoglio (Italian). It is in the European space and its worldwide extensions that the portfolio will be considered here as a support for storing and filing personal documents, documents known or not by its contemporaries, published or not.
With the rise of the concept of literacy, the ‘writing life’ (Bertrand, 2015) has animated recent historical studies. The portfolio could add to this historiographical renewal a tool used in all sectors of society – the portfolios of a minister, a merchant, an artist, a craftsman, a man of letters, a scholar, etc. – which contains documents that allow us to identify the life of a person. This is a collection of documents that allow us to get closer to the daily life of the actors. Drafts (Ferrand, 2012), notebooks (Blair, 2010), letters (Chapron, Boutier, 2013), printed matter and so on are ‘living writings’ (Bertrand, 2015) offering the possibility of writing a material, cultural, social and political history.
Three main axes have been selected for this scientific meeting in order to consider the role taken by portfolios in society as well as the inflection of uses and practices between the 1680s and the 1820s. The focus will be on case studies, not only of portfolios of famous figures but also of more modest and lesser-known actors.
1. The formation of portfolios
If a material approach connects the historian with the archives, it is necessary to understand the uses and sensitivity of the actors to their portfolio(s): purchase, creation, insertion of papers, momentary or definitive extraction, filing, loss, destruction.
2. Within and outside portfolios
This section will focus on the documents contained in the portfolios, which are associated with both the successes and failures of their owners.
3. Governing and existing through portfolios
The focus here will be on portfolios in relation to the organs of power, without forgetting the power granted to the individual outside of institutions.
For an extended version and/or in French : https://www.fabula.org/actualites/112339/le-portefeuille-sous-toutes-ses-coutures-archiver-et-conserver-ses.html
Submission
Proposals in French or English, the languages of this international conference, should be between 1 and 3,000 characters in length and accompanied by a bio-biographical presentation. They should be sent before 30 September 2023 by email to dolet.simon@gmail.com.
This international conference will be published.
Scientific commitee
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire-Hernandez (Université Côte d’Azur)
Jean Boutier (EHESS)
Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (EHESS, Université Paris Cité)
Isabelle Laboulais (Université de Strasbourg)
Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Università Ca’ Foscari)
Contact Info:
Simon Dolet
Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine
Côte d’Azur University, Nice, France
PhD Candidate
Contact Email:
*
Saints and Mystics in Legend and Tradition
September 2, 2023 to September 3, 2023
Surrey, UK
Where is the spring that rose where St. Alban’s blood fell? Who cares for Cuddy Ducks? Can we see Enoch and Elijah? When the Virgin fell in labour, was Romani St. Sarah at her side? How did St. Sebastian become a gay icon? Who were the Twin Saints, the Three Pure Ones, the Four Friends and the Five Major Prophets? What goes into a Dumb Cake for St. Agnes’ Eve? Does a wet St. Swithun’s day really foretell forty days of rain? Do girls still appeal to St. Andrew of the fishermen for a good catch in marriage? Can we still hear Old Clem at the hammer and the thunders of St. Barbara? Whether you weave a cross of reeds for Lá Féile Bríde, wear a daff for Dewi Sant, or bear a rose for St. George, come and join our day or we may have to call on St. Jude, patron saint of lost causes.
A two-day conference on Saints and Mystics in Legend and Tradition will be held on Saturday 2nd (St. Justus of Lyons) and Sunday 3rd (St. Gregory the Great) September 2023 at the Chapter House, St. Albans Cathedral. Anyone can join us – scholars, storytellers, hermits and hagiographers. We invite proposals about any saint, mystic, martyr or prophet. Presentations, which should be 20 minutes long, can take the form of talks, performances, or film. For more information, see https://folklore-society.com/events.
The conference fee is £35 for speakers, £70 for others attending.
Contact Info:
Jeremy Harte, Bourne Hall, Spring Street, Ewell, Surrey KT17 1UF. Telephone: 020 8394 1734
Contact Email:
URL:
*
The 2023 TTU Symposium on “Pandemic, Environment, and Life Writing”
April 21-22, 2023
deadline for submissions:
February 18, 2023
The Comparative Literature Program at Texas Tech University will host the 2023 symposium on “Pandemic, Environment, and Life Writing” on campus on April 21-22, 2023.
Keynote Speakers:
Dr. Jennifer Ho, Eaton Professor of Ethnic Studies and Director of the Center for
Humanities & the Arts, University of Colorado at Boulder
Dr. Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of
California at Irvine
Dr. Muhsin al-Musawi, Professor of Classic and Modern Arabic Literature and of
Comparative and Cultural Studies, Columbia University
Dr. Aretha Phiri, Associate Professor of English, University of Rhodes, South Africa
Dr. Jacqueline Kolosov, Professor of Creative Writing, Texas Tech University
Since the Covid-19 pandemic started in spring 2020, millions of people around the globe have perished, suffered from loss of health and loved ones, and struggled for survival on a day-to-day basis. As humanity exposes vulnerability before unpredictable natural and built environments, hate crime and anti-Asian racism have been on a dramatic rise. The situation has been exacerbated by the emergence of right-wing extremist groups around the globe from dictators in totalitarian regimes to elected nationalist leaders of Western democracies. Moreover, with the escalation of the tech war between the US and China into Cold War 2.0 and the on-going war between Russia and Ukraine, we are facing a possible apocalyptic scenario of nuclear devastation and World War III.
In front of these multifarious threats and divisions, what is our common humanity? What role has life writing played in articulating and negotiating our humanity at different moments of crises across time and space? What kind of healing power can life writing generate? Why and how are telling and sharing of personal life narratives critical to our human survival and planetary future? This symposium not only looks for papers that explore life narratives in different aesthetic forms and representational modes from autobiography to autoethnography, from auto-graphics to biopic, but it also encourages presentations that critically historicize and investigate life writing in relation to geopolitics, ethics of science, trauma theories, racial formation analyses, gender performance discourses, and environmental and ecocritical studies. We also welcome readings in creative writing.
Please send your 250-word abstract and 2-page C.V. and
The Joys and Challenges of Teaching Biographies
Deadline for Submissions: February 15
Dates of Conference: January 4, 2024 to January 7, 2024
We are seeking two additional panelists to join us for a roundtable session at the 2024 American Historical Association conference in San Francisco, entitled, “The Joys and Challenges of Teaching Biographies.” The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2023.
History and biography are inextricably linked and yet many instructors of introductory undergraduate and advanced high school courses resist including them in their reading lists and overall course pedagogy. The session will examine the ways in which biographies are and are not used in classrooms at both the college and high school levels. We will focus on the benefits and limitations of the genre with an eye for including a variety of perspectives. We seek to address questions such as, “Why do biographies appeal to students?” “Why don’t more classes utilize them?” “How can instructors compensate for periods with limited source materials?” “How can we manage the bias of hagiography?”
We (Dr. Nancy S. Kollmann of Stanford University, Dr. M.A. Claussen of the University of San Francisco and Derek Dwight Anderson of Marin Academy) are especially interested in the ideas and expereinces of historians teaching at all levels. Those interested in participating as a panelist should contact Derek soon.
Contact Info:
Derek Dwight Anderson, Marin Academy
Contact Email:
*
Deadline for Submissions, February 14, 2023
“The ‘Portfolio’ from Every Angle.
Archiving and Preserving Working Documents (1680s-1820s)”
Call for Proposals for the International Conference
organised at the University Côte d’Azur, CMMC-MSH Sud-Est,
on 21-22 March 2024 by Simon Dolet
The storage of digital data has been at the heart of our concerns for the past 60 years. Technologies come and go – floppy disk, CD-Rom, USB stick, external hard drive, cloud computing – with greater storage capacity to meet the exponential growth in digital data production. The new ‘digital industry’ also has to respond to the growing fear of data loss as old storage formats become obsolete. However, the issue is older and deserves to be put into a longer perspective. In particular, there seems to have been an inflection in the 18th century, when the quantity of documents preserved and therefore available, compared to previous centuries, recorded an unprecedented growth.
The “portefeuille” (or “porte-feuille”) is an example of this concern for the conservation of documents. Used since the 16th century according to the French Academy, in 1718 this term still referred to a “cardboard box folded in two, covered with skin or some other material, & used to carry papers”. While its use in the French language expanded over the course of the century, the term did not enter foreign dictionaries until the beginning of the 19th century, with literal translations of “porte-feuille”: brieftasche (German), portfolio (English), portafolio (Spanish) or portafoglio (Italian). It is in the European space and its worldwide extensions that the portfolio will be considered here as a support for storing and filing personal documents, documents known or not by its contemporaries, published or not.
With the rise of the concept of literacy, the ‘writing life’ (Bertrand, 2015) has animated recent historical studies. The portfolio could add to this historiographical renewal a tool used in all sectors of society – the portfolios of a minister, a merchant, an artist, a craftsman, a man of letters, a scholar, etc. – which contains documents that allow us to identify the life of a person. This is a collection of documents that allow us to get closer to the daily life of the actors. Drafts (Ferrand, 2012), notebooks (Blair, 2010), letters (Chapron, Boutier, 2013), printed matter and so on are ‘living writings’ (Bertrand, 2015) offering the possibility of writing a material, cultural, social and political history.
Three main axes have been selected for this scientific meeting in order to consider the role taken by portfolios in society as well as the inflection of uses and practices between the 1680s and the 1820s. The focus will be on case studies, not only of portfolios of famous figures but also of more modest and lesser-known actors.
1. The formation of portfolios
If a material approach connects the historian with the archives, it is necessary to understand the uses and sensitivity of the actors to their portfolio(s): purchase, creation, insertion of papers, momentary or definitive extraction, filing, loss, destruction.
2. Within and outside portfolios
This section will focus on the documents contained in the portfolios, which are associated with both the successes and failures of their owners.
3. Governing and existing through portfolios
The focus here will be on portfolios in relation to the organs of power, without forgetting the power granted to the individual outside of institutions.
For an extended version and/or in French : https://www.fabula.org/actualites/112339/le-portefeuille-sous-toutes-ses-coutures-archiver-et-conserver-ses.html
Submission
Proposals in French or English, the languages of this international conference, should be between 1 and 3,000 characters in length and accompanied by a bio-biographical presentation. They should be sent before 30 September 2023 by email to dolet.simon@gmail.com.
This international conference will be published.
Scientific commitee
Pierre-Yves Beaurepaire-Hernandez (Université Côte d’Azur)
Jean Boutier (EHESS)
Liliane Hilaire-Pérez (EHESS, Université Paris Cité)
Isabelle Laboulais (Université de Strasbourg)
Pietro Daniel Omodeo (Università Ca’ Foscari)
Contact Info:
Simon Dolet
Centre de la Méditerranée Moderne et Contemporaine
Côte d’Azur University, Nice, France
PhD Candidate
Contact Email:
*
CFP
From Wine Moms to QAnon: The Violence at the Heart of White Women’s Lifestyle Culture
Deadline for Abstracts–February 15, 2023
Co-editors Anna Mae Duane, University of Connecticut & Elizabeth Marshall, Simon Fraser University
This proposed edited collection historicizes the harms leveled by the white middle class’s appropriation of Audre Lorde’s investment in self-care. More specifically, we consider how the aspirational empowerment and self-improvement industry has emerged as a force that obscures the violence embedded in individualism, neglects collective trauma, and negates the possibility of collective solutions. Inspired by Kyla Schuller’s observation that white women’s culture often “presents capitalism as the deliverer of equality” and thus obscures how how “capitalism is actually a chief engine of social harm,” we seek essays that explore how the white self- care/wellness industry—broadly defined from the eighteenth century to the present day—exerts a discipline that narrows the radical possibilities of what carework could mean, either for oneself, one’s family, or for one’s community.
Questions that guide the collection include:
· What historical lineages does white women’s wellness culture draw upon? How do these histories contextualize current iterations of white women’s wellness culture?
· Through what cultural apparatuses are the links between and among white women, wellness and violence produced?
· How is white, privileged motherhood deployed within a capitalist framework to reassert domesticity/martyrdom?
· How does the category of white, privileged motherhood enable the cultural work of white supremacy?
· In what ways does the individualized work of wellness hide the violence of capitalism and resultant harms between and among women?
It is our goal to send a complete manuscript to a publisher in the fall of 2023.
Please send abstracts of between 250-500 words by Feb. 15th, 2023 to Elizabeth_marshall@sfu.ca & anna.duane@uconn.edu. A full draft (approximately 6,000 words) would be due by July 15th 2023.
*
Call for Papers: Teaching the American Essay
Deadline for Proposals: February 15, 2023
This call for papers invites proposals for a volume in the MLA Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching the American Essay, edited by Stephanie Redekop.
Teaching the American Essay seeks to provide undergraduate literature instructors with a range of classroom approaches, exercises, and assignments for teaching American essays as literary texts. It will complement existing volumes on using essays as compositional models in the writing classroom by collating strategies for teaching essays in American literature survey courses and special-topics seminars or in literature courses on nonfiction.
Essays today are hard to ignore: Rebecca Solnit has called ours an “essayistic age”; Christy Wampole has argued in the New York Times for the “essayification of everything”; Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley suggest that the essay is currently “experiencing something of a renaissance.” Indeed, interest in the essay genre is building among literary scholars, as illustrated by several important new volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (2022), The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), On Essays (2020), and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Essay. What does it mean to read essays as literary texts, using methods of literary theory, history, or criticism? How do essays relate to or participate in broader trends in American literature, culture, and history? Alongside the wide range of dynamic approaches to these questions in literary scholarship, this volume will demonstrate ways that they can be framed and addressed in the literature classroom.
Essays have long been valuable teaching texts, with essayists like Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, Joan Didion, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Barry Lopez, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, Susan Sontag, Henry David Thoreau, and David Walker frequently appearing on American literature syllabi. This volume will offer strategies that help support the use of essays as literary teaching texts, while also seeking to expand and diversify what Lynn Z. Bloom has identified as the classroom “essay canon.” Suggested topics include:
Formal and Generic Approaches to the Essay
-
- Teaching subgenres such as the personal essay, nature essay, protest essay, travel essay, literary journalism, etc.
-
- Using essays to explore definitions of fact, fiction, and creative nonfiction, or the boundaries of “the literary”
-
- Reading “secondary sources” as literature; examining the genre of literary-critical or theoretical essays in the classroom
Teaching Essays and Essayists in Context
-
- Essays’ relation to historical, literary, or theoretical trends in American literature; strategies for incorporating essays into courses, units, or lessons on specific historic moments or literary movements in the United States
-
- Historicized or contextualized framings of specific essays or essayists
-
- Studies of American essays’ cultural work for specific periods or publics
Classroom Methods and Assignments
-
- Book history or media studies approaches to teaching essays in their print or publication contexts (e.g., in periodicals, anthologies, or online)
-
- Assignments that allow students to consider how studying essays as a literary genre can shape their own writing; “essays on the essay”
Abstract proposals (300–500 words) and a short bio or CV should be e-mailed to Stephanie Redekop (stephanie.redekop@mail.utoronto.ca) by 15 February 2023. Authors will be notified of initial acceptance by 30 April 2023. Pending peer review of the prospectus, completed essays of approximately 4,000 words will be due by 1 November 2023.
*
The next episode of the webinar “Let’s Talk Books at NMU (Northern Michigan University)” hosted by Lynn Dominawill be Friday, Feb. 17 at 1:00 Eastern time. The speaker will be Shelley Puhak discussing her recent book, The Dark Queens: The Bloody Rivalry That Forged the Medieval World. Shelley Puhak is a critically acclaimed poet and writer whose work has appeared in the Atlantic, Smithsonian, Time, Lapham’s Quarterly, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other publications. She is the author of three books of poetry, including the Anthony Hecht Prize-winning Guinevere in Baltimore and Harbinger, a National Poetry Series selection. The Dark Queens is her nonfiction debut. She lives in Maryland.
Registration is required but is free and easy, here: https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dnXEzUN8QMmJcIvo8AyMvw
*
Oxford project aims to preserve WW2 memories and objects
A project led by the Faculty of English at the University of Oxford is looking for contributions to a free online archive of family stories, anecdotes, memories and digitized objects relating to people’s experiences of the Second World War. Their Finest Hour, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, aims to digitally collect stories and materials related to Britain’s and the Commonwealth’s role in the Second World War in order to preserve them and make them freely available to the public.
Led by Dr Stuart Lee of the Faculty of English, the project team will:
-
- Run a series of ‘Digital Collection Days’ at major museums, libraries and heritage centres across the UK and encourage people to bring war-related stories and materials – letters, photos, diaries, memorabilia, or just stories handed down from family members – for digitization
-
- Train an army of volunteers and support them in running their own collection events in village halls, community centres, faith centres, schools, colleges and elsewhere
-
- Capture people’s thoughts and reactions to the way the war is remembered today
-
- Offer an online archive to allow people to upload their objects and/or stories and memories remotely
-
- Preserve all the collected stories and objects in a free-to-use online archive that will be launched on 6 June 2024, the 80th anniversary of D-Day
Dr Stuart Lee said, “We’re delighted to be able to create this archive with memories of the Second World War. We know from previous projects that people have so many wonderful objects, photos, and anecdotes which have been passed down from family members which are at risk of getting lost or being forgotten. Our aim is to empower local communities to digitally preserve these stories and objects before they are lost to posterity.”
If you have stories or objects that you would like to contribute to the Their Finest Hour archive, you can upload them now. There will be a series of collection events taking place throughout the UK in 2023; keep an eye on the website for dates and details. You can also follow the project’s progress on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
Dr Matthew Kidd, Project Manager
Contact Email: theirfinesthour@ell.ox.ac.uk
URL: http://theirfinesthour.english.ox.ac.uk
*
Dear Friends
Happy New Year! We hope you have enjoyed the festive period and had a good start to 2023.
JANUARY SEMINAR: A reminder to register for our first 2023 online Seminar on 12th January at 1700-1800 (free to members – see below). We are looking forward to ‘The Magic of Social Life: A Self-Other Study of Conjuring’ by Brian Rappert (University of Exeter). Please register on the BSA website: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-the-magic-of-social-life-a-self-other-study-of-conjuring-by-brian-rappert-university-of-exeter/. The Zoom link and joining details will be sent approximately 24 hours before the event. If you have any difficulties or questions about registering please email events@britsoc.org.uk and colleagues will be able to help.
OTHER DIARY DATES 2023: The programme of events for 2023 is below. Seminars are free to Auto/Biography Group and BSA members: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/events/. There is a £10 charge for non-members.
Seminar (online) on 2nd February 2023 at 1700-1800: ‘Celebration of Longevity’ by Terry Martin (University of Southampton): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-celebration-of-longevity-by-terry-martin-university-of-southampton/
Seminar (online) on 2nd March 2023 at 1700-1800: ‘The roar at the end of years of silence: feminist voices through educating geeta’ by Geeta Ludhra (Brunel University London): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-the-roar-at-the-end-of-years-of-silence-feminist-voices-through-educating-geeta-by-geeta-ludhra-brunel-university-london-1/
Seminar (online) on 4th May 2023 at 1700-1800: ‘Can children narrate memoirs? Celebrating experimental narratives’ by Amanda-Marie Kale (University of Nottingham): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-can-children-narrate-memoirs-celebrating-experimental-narratives-by-amanda-marie-kale-university-of-nottingham/
Auto/Biography Study Group Summer Conference 2023 ‘New Beginnings’ on Wednesday 12th July-Friday 14th July at Wolfson College, Oxford. Keynote: Professor David Brown (Cardiff Metropolitan University). The call for papers will be sent out early in 2023 and further details and registration information will follow.
Seminar (online) on 5th October 2023 at 1700-1800: ‘Celebration of student research and creativity activity: An autobiographical journey’ by Amanda Norman (University of Winchester): https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/autobiography-study-group-seminar-online-celebration-of-student-research-and-creativity-activity-an-autobiographical-journey-by-amanda-norman-university-of-winchester/
Seminar (online) November at 1700-1800: date, details and registration to follow.
Auto/Biography Study Group Christmas Conference 2023 on 8th December at Friends House, Euston. Theme, details and registration to follow.
MEMBERSHIP: ‘Join us’ information is available here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/join-us/. As a paid member of the Auto/Biography Study Group you will benefit from a free seminar series (see below and https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/events/), reductions on conference costs and publications, free publication in the group’s open access online journal (non-members pay £30 per submission). You will also be registered on the JISCmail list: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=BSA-AUTO-BIOGRAPHY-GROUP. The annual payment categories for the 2023 calendar year are £30 for members of the BSA £30 and £40 for non-members. Payment may be made via PayPal by logging in or by debit/credit card and choosing to pay as a guest: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/autobiography-membership/. We are a charity and non-profit group and all proceeds from group subscriptions help to fund our publications and group events.
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY REVIEW: For more information about our open access journal and the call for papers see Auto/Biography Review information (https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/autobiography-review/) and the journal (website (https://autobiographyreview.com/index.php/abrev) .
Please share the information with your networks, including doctoral researchers – we continue to be fully committed to supporting early career researchers.
Anne Chappell and Carly Stewart
Auto/Biography Study Group ConvenorsEmail: anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk and cstewart@bournemouth.ac.uk
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/
Find the Auto/Biography Study Group on Twitter: @AutoBiographySG
Join the Auto/Biography Study Group: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/groups/study-groups/autobiography-study-group/join-us/
Register with the Auto/Biography Study Group: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/BSA-AUTO-BIOGRAPHY-GROUP
Submit to our open access online journal ‘Auto/Biography Review’: https://autobiographyreview.com/index.php/abrev
*
*
Call for Papers: Autobiography
deadline for submissions: February 1, 2023
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies
Guest Editors:
Yalçın Armağan (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul)
Zeynep Zengin (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul)
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies’ fourth issue is dedicated to the exploration of “autobiography,” a literary genre that stands between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, individualism and collectivism, and narrative and history. Having gained a central stage in the literary theories that emerged after the 1960s, autobiography is often informed by genre, text and cross-genre breedings, as it concerns itself with the experience, temporality, memory, remembrance and testimony. The issue aims to highlight all these concepts, which are explored by various theoretical schools and disciplines, in relation to autobiographical writing.
Against this background, the issue accepts submissions of articles, research notes, critical essays and book reviews written in English or Turkish until February 1st, 2023. The issue also welcomes translated articles (from Turkish into English and vice versa). All submissions should be done through the electronic submission page on the website https://nesirdergisi.com/
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
-
- Autobiography as a literary genre
-
- The question of cross-genre influences in autobiographies
-
- The limits of I/life-narratives
-
- Theories on autobiography
-
- “Fictional selves” in autobiographical texts
-
- Fiction in autobiography, autobiography in fiction
-
- Representations of memory in autobiography
-
- Experience, remembrance and testimony in autobiography
-
- The literature of autobiography in Turkey
-
- Autobiographic items in Ottoman literature (mecmuas, tezkires etc.)
-
- Autobiograhy in modern Turkish literature
-
- Comparative autobiography studies in world literature
-
- Women’s experiences in autobiographies
-
- Autobiography as a reading/textual contract
-
- The crisis of subjectivity vs. objectivity in autobiographies
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES All submissions should be done through the electronic submission page on the website https://nesirdergisi.com/ Format/ Font: MS Word in Times New Roman 12 point (Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition). All the papers must be original, unpublished and written within 3,000-7,500 words. An abstract in 75-150 words and 5-8 keywords should be embedded within the paper. Each paper should include a cover letter suggesting the name of the author, along with a brief bio, not exceeding 50 words. The name of the author and co-author (if any) must not be written or suggested anywhere except the cover letter. The paper should be original and must have a proper bibliography and work cited section. An acknowledgement shall be sent upon receipt. Any suggested revisions by the editor and peer reviewers must be returned in two weeks without delay. Simultaneous submissions are not allowed.
For more information: https://nesirdergisi.com
Contact Info:
Contact Email:
URL:
*
CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Ethics and Expressions of Third-Generation Holocaust Storytelling’.
Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics
Presently, the Holocaust dwindles on the edge of living memory. As the last Holocaust witnesses pass away, there is a sense of urgency and gravity for the third generation – that is, grandchildren of witnesses or people who are otherwise at a three-generation remove – who seek to preserve and share these stories, and who are the new custodians of this representative responsibility. Jilovsky defines the third generation as ‘the bridging generation … connecting lived memories of the past with people of the future, born after the last eyewitness has passed away’ (2015, p. 94). The ethical complexity surrounding the representation of Holocaust stories, the building of this figurative bridge between past and future, cannot be overstated.
The new millennium has seen a surge in literature by grandchildren of survivors, who are grappling with the residual lines of trauma, history and memory in their own lives and consciousness. Aarons writes that ‘This is a generation approaching the Holocaust from a position that is precariously balanced between proximity and distance, a position that characterizes this generation, this literature, the discourse about this literature, and the disposition of our time’ (2016, p. xvii). With each passing year the Holocaust recedes further into history, its memory and preservation increasingly vulnerable to denialism, mythology, and forgetfulness.
As a response to this climate of ethical precarity, misrepresentation and shaky ground we find ourselves in, this special issue of Ethical Space seeks to interrogate the ‘Ethics and expressions of third-generation Holocaust storytelling.’
Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:
-
- Identifiable themes, techniques, or trends in third-generation texts
-
- The Holocaust in contemporary culture and memory
-
- The ethics of writing or engaging with survivor trauma
-
- Artefacts and places as sites of third-generation understanding
-
- Expressions of the Holocaust in life writing, poetry and/or fiction
-
- Experiments in Holocaust writing
-
- The role of postmemory and imagination in third-generation texts
-
- The ethics of representing the dead
-
- Technology and innovation in Holocaust story preservation
-
- Reflections on third-generation identity and purpose
We welcome abstracts of 250 words for scholarly articles and essays that explore the ethics and intentions of third-generation Holocaust storytelling, as crucial contributions to the global debate around preservation of traumatic histories.
Submit abstracts by 1 February 2023
Full papers submitted by 1 September 2023. Papers should be 6000-7000 words in length.
Please send abstracts and any queries to tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au. We look forward to reading all submissions!
Tess Scholfield-Peters
University of Technology Sydney
Contact Info:
tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au
Contact Email:
tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au
URL:
http://www.abramis.co.uk/ethical-space/
*
POSTMEMORY AND THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD – 4th International Interdisciplinary Conference (Online)
deadline for submissions: February 5, 2023
Conference online (via Zoom): 23-24 February 2023
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
CFP:
Coined by Marianne Hirsch in the 1990s, the term postmemory by now entered various disciplines who search to understand how memory form our identity and how we position, articulate or just make sense of our place in the society and our relations with it. The term postmemory problematizes the concept of memory by bringing attention to the memories that are not exactly personal but that keep on shaping one’s life and one’s way of seeing the world.
During our conference we would like to concentrate on the phenomenon of postmemory and how it keeps on shaping the contemporary world.
We are interested in all aspects of postmemory: in its individual and collective dimensions, in the past and in the present-day world, and in its potential to direct the future. Whose memory is postmemory: that of generations, communities, nations or families? How is it maintained and passed on? What is the role of imagination in its creation? What is remembered and what is forgotten? Is it always the memory of traumatic experience? How can it be taught and studied? These are some of the questions that inspired the idea of the conference.
We would like to explore the phenomenon of postmemory in its multifarious manifestations: psychological, social, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, economic, political, and many others. As usual, we also want to devote considerable attention to how these phenomena appears in artistic practices: literature, film, theatre or visual arts. That is why we invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: anthropology, history, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, law, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, cognitive sciences, and urban studies, to name a few.
Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical inquiries, problem-oriented arguments or comparative analyses.
We will be happy to hear from both experienced scholars and young academics at the start of their careers, as well as doctoral and graduate students.
We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without giving a presentation.
Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not restricted to:
I. Individual experiences:
-
- Postmemory and trauma
-
- Postmemory and recovery
-
- Postmemory and imagination
-
- Postmemory and artefacts
-
- Postmemory and personal memories
II. Collective experiences
-
- Postmemory and its sources
-
- Postmemory and mythology
-
- Generational postmemory
-
- Postmemory and social non-acceptance
-
- Postmemory and solidarity
-
- Postmemory and territory
III. Remembering and Forgetting
-
- Postmemory and forced forgetting
-
- Postmemory and forced remembering
-
- Teaching postmemory
-
- Negotiating postmemory
-
- Studying postmemory
-
- Forgetting/remembering for recovery
-
- Postmemory and its purpose
-
- Postmemory and allegiances
IV. Representations
-
- Testimonies and memories
-
- Genres of Postmemory
-
- Postmemory in literature
-
- Postmemory in film
-
- Postmemory in theatre
-
- Postmemory in visual arts
-
- Creating as experience
-
- Postmemory and urban planning
-
- Postmemory and urban art
-
- Rural Postmemory
-
- Postmemory in the nature
-
- Materialism of postmemory
-
- Nonhuman postmemory
V. Feelings and Practices
-
- Sadness of postmemory
-
- Fear of postmemory
-
- Postmemory and nostalgia
-
- Postmemory and grief
-
- Postmemory and loneliness
-
- Postmemory and change
-
- Living postmemory
-
- Rituals of postmemory
VI. Institutionalization
-
- Postmemory and nation-state
-
- Postmemory and identity politics
-
- Postmemory and ideology
-
- Postmemory and religion
-
- Postmemory and punishment systems
-
- Postmemory and army
-
- Postmemory and school
-
- Postmemory and museums
-
- Monuments of postmemory
-
- Sites and cities of postmemory
-
- Economy of postmemory
-
- Language of postmemory
VII. The Contemporary World
-
- Postmemory and postcomunism
-
- Postcolonialism, decolonization and postmemory
-
- Neoliberalism and postmemory
-
- Postmemory and migration
-
- Postmemory and globalization
-
- Postmemory and nationalism
-
- Postmemory and new media
-
- Postmemory and political correctness
-
- Postmemory and natural disasters
Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, by 5 February 2023 to: conferencememory@gmail.com
For all details please visit our website: https://www.inmindsupport.com/postmemory-conference
*
Call for Papers:
“Disembodied Communications: Vulnerable Identities and Caring Connections in Literary Texts”
York EGSA Conference 2023 – May 12th, 2023
Deadline: February 3rd, 2023, 11:59 pm EST
Disembodiment is widespread in literature. In literary texts around the world, identities may lack physical forms, formerly embodied beings may abandon their bodies, body parts may be lost, disease or technology may invade the body, and organic property may transcend to a nonmaterial world. While being embodied may imply tangibility, visibility, familiarity and security, being disembodied can aptly imply other sides to these discussions: incorporeality, covertness, and vulnerability. More than this, (dis)embodied beings may lose grasp of or be made to feel like strangers in their own bodies, without autonomy or agency. Such feelings may result from oppression due to gender notions, racism, speciesism, ageism, classism, ableism, and various cultures of violence. The “dis” in “disembodiment” hints at the ways in which disparate physical forms and frames of mind can exist simultaneously. Concerns regarding feelings of (dis)embodiment can also call into question vulnerable identities. This conference seeks presentations that explore this interrelation between (dis)embodied communications and vulnerable identities, and what a presence or lack of care can suggest about these connections. Nel Noddings argues that caring connections would be “interested in maintaining and enhancing caring relations—attending to those we encounter, listening to their expressed needs, and responding positively if possible” (13). When considering how exposure to such physical/mental disembodiments affect one’s sense of self and one’s voice, a humane response would evaluate how we can form caring connections with the vulnerable.
Some questions that this conference aims to address are as follows:
How do practices in disembodied communications contribute to feelings of vulnerability?
How can we consider feelings of and treatment towards autonomy, agency, and subjectivity of vulnerable, (dis)embodied beings?
How are such feelings addressed in literary texts?
How do literary texts demonstrate care toward the vulnerable?
How does a lack of care elicit feelings of compassion, action, and solidarity?
Various disciplines and practices have inscribed disembodiment and literary texts with particular interpretations, such as mind-body dualism; when each perspective is considered in isolation, such interpretations can be limited and imbalanced. Disembodied communications are manifested and easily interpreted in many fields of inquiry. Acknowledging these multiple interactions between (dis)embodiment and narrative, this conference invites papers in any genre, period, or geographical space. Furthermore, (dis)embodiment presents itself in a diverse range of mediums. As such, a literary text, for the purpose of this conference, takes shape in many different forms: novels, graphic novels, short stories, poetry, film/television, nonfiction, theoretical works, memoirs and life writing, journalism, digital narratives, and other multimedia works.
Topics in literary texts that may be addressed include, but are not limited to, the following:
Discussions of human/nonhuman language in relation to (dis)embodiment
Discussions of race, gender, age, sexuality, disability, class, and/or species and how they create meaning regarding disembodiment and vulnerability
Virtual/digital communications, spaces, and realities
Prioritization of body language and other nonverbal communications
Posthuman/transhuman bodies
Transgenics, bodily modifications, and de-extinction
Narratives of absence, and how such marginalization can lead to (dis)embodiment
Ghost stories/narratives of hauntings
Communications within sonic communities
Dystopian control, apocalyptic oppression, and survivalism
Object-oriented approaches to disembodiment
Environmental narratives and rhizomatic communities
Representations of reproduction and children
Representations of cyborg/AI communications
Representations and discourses of monstrosity
Representations of pandemic-era narratives
Representations of “out-of-body” experiences
Representations of gaslighting and abuse in relation to feelings of (dis)embodiment
Representations of sensory and aesthetic (dis)embodiment
Details:
This conference is presented by the York University English Graduate Student Association. It will be in person, with a social event planned to take place following the conference, circumstances permitting. There is a possibility, however, that we will be able to accommodate remote presenters and encourage anyone who is interested to apply. If you can only present remotely, we please ask that you specify this with your submission.
This conference welcomes submissions not only from graduate students/early-career researchers in English Literature but other related disciplines. Accordingly, our conference emphasizes inclusivity and respectful dialogue.
Abstracts between 200 – 350 words should be sent to yorkegsacolloquium2023@gmail.com by 11:59 pm EST on Friday, February 3rd, 2023. Please include a 50 – 100 word biographical note.
Visit http://twitter.com/EGSAconference to stay up to date with details of the conference.
*
Call for Papers: Autobiography
deadline for submissions: February 1, 2023
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies
Guest Editors:
Yalçın Armağan (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul)
Zeynep Zengin (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul)
Nesir: Journal of Literary Studies’ fourth issue is dedicated to the exploration of “autobiography,” a literary genre that stands between fiction and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, individualism and collectivism, and narrative and history. Having gained a central stage in the literary theories that emerged after the 1960s, autobiography is often informed by genre, text and cross-genre breedings, as it concerns itself with the experience, temporality, memory, remembrance and testimony. The issue aims to highlight all these concepts, which are explored by various theoretical schools and disciplines, in relation to autobiographical writing.
Against this background, the issue accepts submissions of articles, research notes, critical essays and book reviews written in English or Turkish until February 1st, 2023. The issue also welcomes translated articles (from Turkish into English and vice versa). All submissions should be done through the electronic submission page on the website https://nesirdergisi.com/
Potential topics include but are not limited to:
-
- Autobiography as a literary genre
-
- The question of cross-genre influences in autobiographies
-
- The limits of I/life-narratives
-
- Theories on autobiography
-
- “Fictional selves” in autobiographical texts
-
- Fiction in autobiography, autobiography in fiction
-
- Representations of memory in autobiography
-
- Experience, remembrance and testimony in autobiography
-
- The literature of autobiography in Turkey
-
- Autobiographic items in Ottoman literature (mecmuas, tezkires etc.)
-
- Autobiograhy in modern Turkish literature
-
- Comparative autobiography studies in world literature
-
- Women’s experiences in autobiographies
-
- Autobiography as a reading/textual contract
-
- The crisis of subjectivity vs. objectivity in autobiographies
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES All submissions should be done through the electronic submission page on the website https://nesirdergisi.com/ Format/ Font: MS Word in Times New Roman 12 point (Chicago Manual of Style 17th Edition). All the papers must be original, unpublished and written within 3,000-7,500 words. An abstract in 75-150 words and 5-8 keywords should be embedded within the paper. Each paper should include a cover letter suggesting the name of the author, along with a brief bio, not exceeding 50 words. The name of the author and co-author (if any) must not be written or suggested anywhere except the cover letter. The paper should be original and must have a proper bibliography and work cited section. An acknowledgement shall be sent upon receipt. Any suggested revisions by the editor and peer reviewers must be returned in two weeks without delay. Simultaneous submissions are not allowed.
For more information: https://nesirdergisi.com
Contact Info:
Contact Email:
URL:
*
CALL FOR PAPERS: ‘Ethics and Expressions of Third-Generation Holocaust Storytelling’.
Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics
Presently, the Holocaust dwindles on the edge of living memory. As the last Holocaust witnesses pass away, there is a sense of urgency and gravity for the third generation – that is, grandchildren of witnesses or people who are otherwise at a three-generation remove – who seek to preserve and share these stories, and who are the new custodians of this representative responsibility. Jilovsky defines the third generation as ‘the bridging generation … connecting lived memories of the past with people of the future, born after the last eyewitness has passed away’ (2015, p. 94). The ethical complexity surrounding the representation of Holocaust stories, the building of this figurative bridge between past and future, cannot be overstated.
The new millennium has seen a surge in literature by grandchildren of survivors, who are grappling with the residual lines of trauma, history and memory in their own lives and consciousness. Aarons writes that ‘This is a generation approaching the Holocaust from a position that is precariously balanced between proximity and distance, a position that characterizes this generation, this literature, the discourse about this literature, and the disposition of our time’ (2016, p. xvii). With each passing year the Holocaust recedes further into history, its memory and preservation increasingly vulnerable to denialism, mythology, and forgetfulness.
As a response to this climate of ethical precarity, misrepresentation and shaky ground we find ourselves in, this special issue of Ethical Space seeks to interrogate the ‘Ethics and expressions of third-generation Holocaust storytelling.’
Possible topics include but are by no means limited to:
-
- Identifiable themes, techniques, or trends in third-generation texts
-
- The Holocaust in contemporary culture and memory
-
- The ethics of writing or engaging with survivor trauma
-
- Artefacts and places as sites of third-generation understanding
-
- Expressions of the Holocaust in life writing, poetry and/or fiction
-
- Experiments in Holocaust writing
-
- The role of postmemory and imagination in third-generation texts
-
- The ethics of representing the dead
-
- Technology and innovation in Holocaust story preservation
-
- Reflections on third-generation identity and purpose
We welcome abstracts of 250 words for scholarly articles and essays that explore the ethics and intentions of third-generation Holocaust storytelling, as crucial contributions to the global debate around preservation of traumatic histories.
Submit abstracts by 1 February 2023
Full papers submitted by 1 September 2023. Papers should be 6000-7000 words in length.
Please send abstracts and any queries to tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au. We look forward to reading all submissions!
Tess Scholfield-Peters
University of Technology Sydney
Contact Info:
tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au
Contact Email:
tess.scholfield-peters@uts.edu.au
URL:
http://www.abramis.co.uk/ethical-space/
*
*
Exploring Conflict and Political Violence through the Woman’s Lens
Abstract Deadline–January 31, 2023
The peer-reviewed academic journal Acta Universitatis Carolinea – Studia Territorialia invites authors to submit articles for a special issue titled “Exploring Conflict and Political Violence through the Woman’s Lens: Victims, Mediators, and Resisters.”
Although both past and current armed conflicts have had deleterious consequences for women, this topic is still under-explored in academia. As Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf pointed out in 2002, “The situation of women in armed conflict has been systematically neglected.” This lacuna persists even though the experience of women during and after conflict is widespread. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the latest women-led uprising in Iran reinforce the urgency of engaging with women’s experiences during conflicts and post-conflict. The painful past of women affected by armed conflict and political violence is frequently overlooked in official memory and in the history of states for a variety of reasons.
Often, women’s voices and the memory of their ordeals during conflicts and in oppressive regimes are subsumed in a grand narrative of the suffering of the “whole nation,” which stifles the voices, testimonies, and claims of women victims, resisters, survivors, care givers, fighters, and mediators. Though men inarguably suffer greatly from the violence of political repression and armed conflict, women and girls are much more affected by sexual and psychological violence because they are regarded as repositories of ethnic and cultural identity. Moreover, women are exposed to manifold, intersecting forms of exclusion. Thus, women’s “aftermath” of conflict, as well as the burden of displacement, are experienced considerably differently than that of men. Although women are exposed to double or even triple jeopardy during and after conflicts and mass violence, their experiences nevertheless should not be exclusively viewed through a lens of victimhood. In that vein, we are looking for contributions that address all the dimensions of women’s victimhood but also their resistance to conflict and mass violence.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Women soldiers
– Women heroes and resisters
– Women as caregivers during and after conflicts
– Women, anti-war protests, and peace movements
– Women as victims of political repression
– Wars, armed conflicts, and gender-based violence
– Gender-based violence as an occasion for solidarity across space and time
– Women perpetrators and collaborators in mass violence
– Women’s role in conflict mediation and post-conflict societies
– Womanism, feminism, and quiet diplomacy in post-conflict situations
– Gendered memories of refugees
– Feminism and societal body politics
– Feminism and international relations
– Feminist geopolitics of war
– Feminism in peace and conflict studies
Submitted articles should be in English and should ideally be 6,000 to 9,000 words long (excluding footnotes and abstract). Submissions should be sent to the journal’s editorial team at stuter@fsv.cuni.cz or uploaded via the Studia Territorialia journal management system. Authors should consult the submission guidelines on the journal’s website for further instructions and preferred style. All contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review.
Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2023.
Notification of status and next steps: February 10, 2023.
Article submission deadline: April 15, 2023.
Acta Universitatis Carolinea – Studia Territorialia is a leading Czech peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on area studies. It covers the history and the social, political, and cultural affairs of the nations of North America, Europe, and post-Soviet Eurasia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal is published by the Institute of International Studies of Charles University, Prague. It is indexed in the SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, DOAJ, and CEEOL databases and others.
Please feel free to direct all inquiries to the editors.
Contact Info:
Lucie Filipova, Studia Territorialia executive editor
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Call For Papers: Envisioning Queer Black and Indigenous Self-Representations within the Digital Literary Sphere
AMLit – American Literatures: Special Issue October 2023
Deadline for Submissions: January 30, 2023
Guest Editors: Oluwadunni Talabi & Corina Wieser-Cox
In their book on Queer Indigenous Studies (2011), Qwo-Li Driskill, Chris Finely, Brian Joseph Gilley and Scott Lauria Morgensen ask: “What does a queer decolonization of our homelands, bodies and psyches look like?” (219). Their question is critical when understanding the complex realities of Indigenous and Black queer individuals in the settler-colonial states of both Canada and the US, as well as in the central and southern states of “Latin” America. The queer Indigenous and Black body – especially when it is trans* or gender nonconforming – is often the site of violence and misrepresentation, yet it is also a site of destabilization and decolonization when reimagined and reified in digital media and literary forms. Through online self-representations facilitated by digital infrastructure, the queer Black and Indigenous heterogenous consciousness is made accessible. Queer Black and Indigenous creators and writers, given to existing at the most periphery of inter and intra discourse and imposed upon by the limits of Western gendered vocabulary in Queer discourse, are at the forefront of rethinking queerness. Returning to the past, pulling references that point to liberation and juxtaposing it in the context of the future, they are producing alternate realities and showing a relationship between times, while staying rooted in African and Indigenous world consciousness, inadvertently pushing for queer imaginings beyond Eurocentric epistemological limits. The intersectional shifts and visual aesthetics that arise from the everyday digital sphere of literary and cultural media goes beyond the liberational idea of, ‘if you can imagine it, you can create it’ to the idea of, ‘that it is not your norm does not mean it does not/did not previously exist.’
The digital sphere and its ability to provide an avenue for self-representation, has already been explored by Shola Adenekan in his recently published book African Literature in the Digital Age (2021) in which he showcases how digitalization has enabled African writers to transcend the power relations of traditional publishing and scholarship. In order to discover an unlimited range of non- heteronormative representation and complexity, one must turn to the digital sphere, where queer Black and Indigenous artists from the Americas are leading conversations on the repercussions of colonial modern epistemes and are using an amalgam of their lived reality, historical narratives and fiction to create new epistemes of encompassing futures.
Two main questions arise concerning the digital sphere and queer Black and Indigenous selfrepresentations: First, how do digital literary/cultural forms produced by queer Black and Indigenous creatives engender a monumental paradigm shift in queer self-representation and selffashioning? Second, how do the literatures and cultures produced in the digital sphere mediate how the queer body is constructed, viewed, represented, and delineated within a diasporic and settlercolonial context of the Americas? This special issue of AmLit invites papers that analyze queer literary works within the digital sphere, specifically pertaining to queer Indigenous and Black peoples residing in the Americas, i.e., Turtle Island, Mesoamerica, Abya Yala, etc, that might include some of the following topics:
• the digitization and archiving of zines: e.g., the People of Color Zine Project (POCZP) and the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)
• Audience engagements with texts/counterpublics
• Disruption of the “heteronormativity of settler colonialism” (Smith) through digitization
• Visual and literary aesthetics of the “sovereign erotic” (Rifkin)
• Two-Spirit epistemologies & digital literatures
• Black/Afrofuturist queer futures
• The aesthetics of survivance
• The aesthetics of metaphysics
• New vs. old forms of aesthetics within digital literary media
• Digital violence and counterdiscourses
• Racism and homophobia online
• Misogynoir and reimagining the world through digital resistance
• Communal and relational aspects of the digital sphere
• Discourses of resistance and survivance
• Imaginations created from cultural archives
Submission Information
Full essays should be between 5,000 and 10,000 words (including notes and bibliography) and be submitted by January 16th, 2023. The deadline has been extended to January 30th, 2023! Notification of acceptance for the articles will follow shortly after the deadline in January. The first round of edits is planned for March 2023 and publication is set to be October 2023. The article should be preceded by a short abstract (180 – 200 words). Bibliographical references and general presentation should follow the current MLA style sheet. If you have any questions before submission, feel free to email the guest editors at digitalselfrepresentations@gmail.com
Please send completed articles to the email (digitalselfrepresentations@gmail.com), along with any questions you might have concerning the publication.
Guest Editors:
Corina Wieser-Cox – University of Bremen
Oluwadunni Talabi – University of Bremen
Works Cited
Adenekan, Shola. African Literature in the Digital Age: Class and Sexual Politics in New Writing from Nigeria and Kenya. Boydell & Brewer, 2021.
Driskill, Qwo-Li, et al., editors. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. University of Arizona Press, 2011.
Contact Info:
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Deadline for Submissions January 30, 2023
CfP: Imperial Lives Conference
Date: 30.-31.3.2023
Place: Online/Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum Cologne (RJM).
For reasons of greater accessibility and sustainability, the conference will be held completely online.
After years of struggle, deflection, and hesitation, ethnographic museums are increasingly accepting the need for decolonization. Often, this is framed in terms of diversity and empowerment and with a special focus on creator communities and their diaspora. We agree: the victims of imperial violence and their descendants need to be at the centre of any fruitful decolonization process.
However, this leaves a momentous gap: what about the creators of the museum, the collectors who often violently amassed the collections, as well as those who are implicated in their legacy today? Whose acts of perpetration, violence, transgression, betrayal, superiority, exploitation, and misunderstanding lie at the foundation of the museum? When it comes to the actors in question and their agency, what prevails is often absence or a retreat into abstraction, both in academia and the museum.
The “Imperial Lives” conference wants to widen this perspective and offer a complementary approach: it aims at exploring ways of overcoming this colonial aphasia by focussing on the concrete, often messy biographies behind the institution “ethnographic museum”. We propose that the encounter with the personified past of empire – the biographies of imperial collectors – creates a space of unsettlement in which the personal implication of all members of a post-imperial democratic society can be explored and collective memory transformed.
Ethnographic museums, as one of the most visible sites of imperial continuity, offer an exemplary field for the exploration of imperial perpetration and implication that goes beyond the bounds of anthropology – especially when it comes to the interaction with broader audiences. This is why the conference will focus on both research and narration, inviting transdisciplinary perspectives from history, cultural, and literary studies as well as artistic, journalistic and activist practices.
We call for contributions addressing issues of biographic knowledge generation and representation, including questions such as:
-
- How can biographic approaches to the legacy of empire contribute to the decolonisation of ethnographic museums?
-
- What may be the archival foundation for biographic approaches to the imperial past? How can imperial personas be portrayed if the only archival material available was produced by themselves? What is the role of ethnographic collections as archives?
-
- What kind of biographies are suited for such decolonial biographic research?
-
- Who should be doing this research? How does the personal situatedness of the researcher affect the outcome?
-
- What forms of representation, what narrative strategies should be used to depict imperial biographies?
-
- With museums as the sites of a society’s collective memory: Which narrative approaches are fruitful contributions to the “work of remembrance”?
-
- What is the relationship between historical factuality and biographic fiction, especially concerning the archival inequalities of empire?
-
- In how far can artistic research and practice enrich modes of biographic display?
Conference language: English
There will be a recording of all papers, keynotes, and panels.
We are inviting scholars from the fields of:
ethnography, anthropology, literary studies, historical science, cultural studies, museology, art history, arts (e.g. fine arts, film, literature etc.), provenance research, journalism.
CfP:
Please hand in your abstract of max. 500 words (in English, + short bio) until 2023/01/30 via:
https://tinyurl.com/abstract-imperiallives2023
For any questions, feel free to get in touch via mail@imperiallives.com
Research project “Wilhelm Joest and the Intimacies of Colonial Collecting” (Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, 2019-2023):
www.museenkoeln.de/rautenstrauch-joest-museum/Wer-ist-Joest
Cooperation: Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology, University of Köln; trandisciplinary platform Contemporary&
*
TRAVELLING, TRANSMISSION AND TRANSGRESSION – 3rd International Interdisciplinary Conference
February 16, 2023 to February 17, 2023
Poland
Deadliine for Submissions: January 31, 2023
Conference Online (via Zoom platform)
Scientific Committee:
Professor Wojciech Owczarski – University of Gdańsk, Poland
Professor Polina Golovátina-Mora – NTNU, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
ABOUT CONFERENCE:
Experiencing one’s life as a perpetual change rather than something constant has become more and more frequent in the contemporary world. Travelling has gained new dimensions – it is no longer associated merely with tourism, but it often turns out to be a way of life or even a figure of human condition. The homo viator of our times intentionally moves from country to country, rents apartments and does not posses one, changes his or her occupations and work places, meets still new people and is generally well trained in being flexible, mobile, and open to metamorphoses. Travelling, in its both literal and metaphorical meaning, has much to do with transmission and transgression as it enables crossing the geographical, physical, cultural, social, and psychological borders. During our conference, we would like to discuss all these – and many other – aspects of travelling and transgressive experiences.
We want to describe those phenomena in their multifarious aspects: psychological, social, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, political, and many others. We also want to devote considerable attention to how they appear in artistic practices: literature, film, theatre, or visual arts. That is why we invite researchers representing various academic disciplines, such as anthropology, history, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, philosophy, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, memory studies, gender studies, and postcolonial studies.
Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical investigations, problem-oriented arguments, and comparative analyses.
We will be happy to hear from both experienced scholars and young academics at the beginning of their careers as well as doctoral and graduate students. We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without giving a presentation.
We hope that due to its interdisciplinary nature, the conference will bring many interesting observations on and discussions about the role of travelling, transmission, and transgression in the past and in the present-day world.
Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not restricted to:
I. Individual experiences
-
- Travelling as a distraction
-
- Travelling and tourism
-
- Travelling as a way of life
-
- Living in between
-
- Liminal spaces
-
- Limit situations
-
- Transgressive experiences
-
- Borderline personality
-
- Travelling and cognition
-
- Travelling and education
-
- Travelling and spiritual growth
-
- Solo travelling
-
- Travelling and family life
II. Collective experiences
-
- Travelling and multiculturalism
-
- Transmission of cultural values
-
- Travelling and tolerance
-
- Travelling and xenophobia
-
- Transgressive identity of societies
-
- Travelling and migration
-
- Forced travelling
-
- Travelling and economy
-
- Travelling and job market
III. Pandemic experiences
-
- Travelling in the time of COVID-19
-
- Isolation
-
- Social distance
-
- Motionlessness
-
- Transmission of the virus
IV. Past experiences
-
- History of travelling and tourism
-
- Known travellers
-
- Travelling and geographical discoveries
-
- Travelling and colonialism
-
- Travelling and time
V. Artistic experiences
-
- Travel diaries
-
- Travel as a literary motif
-
- Travelling in Bildungsroman
-
- Road movies
-
- Travelling in the media
-
- Travelling artists
-
- Touring theatres
-
- Touring exhibitions
-
- Travel guidebooks
Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, by 31 January 2023 to: travellingconference@gmail.com
Contact Info:
Conference Office
Contact Email:
travellingconference@gmail.com
URL:
Exploring Conflict and Political Violence through the Woman’s Lens
Abstract Deadline–January 31, 2023
The peer-reviewed academic journal Acta Universitatis Carolinea – Studia Territorialia invites authors to submit articles for a special issue titled “Exploring Conflict and Political Violence through the Woman’s Lens: Victims, Mediators, and Resisters.”
Although both past and current armed conflicts have had deleterious consequences for women, this topic is still under-explored in academia. As Rehn and Johnson Sirleaf pointed out in 2002, “The situation of women in armed conflict has been systematically neglected.” This lacuna persists even though the experience of women during and after conflict is widespread. Russia’s war on Ukraine and the latest women-led uprising in Iran reinforce the urgency of engaging with women’s experiences during conflicts and post-conflict. The painful past of women affected by armed conflict and political violence is frequently overlooked in official memory and in the history of states for a variety of reasons.
Often, women’s voices and the memory of their ordeals during conflicts and in oppressive regimes are subsumed in a grand narrative of the suffering of the “whole nation,” which stifles the voices, testimonies, and claims of women victims, resisters, survivors, care givers, fighters, and mediators. Though men inarguably suffer greatly from the violence of political repression and armed conflict, women and girls are much more affected by sexual and psychological violence because they are regarded as repositories of ethnic and cultural identity. Moreover, women are exposed to manifold, intersecting forms of exclusion. Thus, women’s “aftermath” of conflict, as well as the burden of displacement, are experienced considerably differently than that of men. Although women are exposed to double or even triple jeopardy during and after conflicts and mass violence, their experiences nevertheless should not be exclusively viewed through a lens of victimhood. In that vein, we are looking for contributions that address all the dimensions of women’s victimhood but also their resistance to conflict and mass violence.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Women soldiers
– Women heroes and resisters
– Women as caregivers during and after conflicts
– Women, anti-war protests, and peace movements
– Women as victims of political repression
– Wars, armed conflicts, and gender-based violence
– Gender-based violence as an occasion for solidarity across space and time
– Women perpetrators and collaborators in mass violence
– Women’s role in conflict mediation and post-conflict societies
– Womanism, feminism, and quiet diplomacy in post-conflict situations
– Gendered memories of refugees
– Feminism and societal body politics
– Feminism and international relations
– Feminist geopolitics of war
– Feminism in peace and conflict studies
Submitted articles should be in English and should ideally be 6,000 to 9,000 words long (excluding footnotes and abstract). Submissions should be sent to the journal’s editorial team at stuter@fsv.cuni.cz or uploaded via the Studia Territorialia journal management system. Authors should consult the submission guidelines on the journal’s website for further instructions and preferred style. All contributions will be subject to double-blind peer review.
Abstract submission deadline: January 31, 2023.
Notification of status and next steps: February 10, 2023.
Article submission deadline: April 15, 2023.
Acta Universitatis Carolinea – Studia Territorialia is a leading Czech peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on area studies. It covers the history and the social, political, and cultural affairs of the nations of North America, Europe, and post-Soviet Eurasia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The journal is published by the Institute of International Studies of Charles University, Prague. It is indexed in the SCOPUS, ERIH PLUS, EBSCO, DOAJ, and CEEOL databases and others.
Please feel free to direct all inquiries to the editors.
Contact Info:
Lucie Filipova, Studia Territorialia executive editor
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Biography Lab 2023: An Online Forum on Craft
BIO is excited to announce Biography Lab, which will be held via Zoom on January 21, 2023, from 10:30 am – 5 pm New York time. BIO invites participants at all levels of interest and experience in the craft of biography to participate in three sequential 90-minute forums led by prize-winning biographers. A social hour concludes the day.
The distinguished plenary speaker will be Hermione Lee, who will give a talk entitled “Biographical Choices.” The three widely celebrated forum leaders are Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer-Prize winner for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder; T.J. Stiles, a double Pulitzer-Prize winner, most recently for Custer’s Trial: A Life on the Frontiers of a New America; and Eric K. Washington, winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for New York history for his recent Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal.
Registration:
Free to BIO members and students; $60 for nonmembers (fee includes a year’s BIO membership). Register here.
What to Expect:
Forum leaders will present on a specific issue of craft followed by questions and discussion with participants. Forums will not be recorded to protect the privacy of participants about their own works-in-progress.
For more information about Biography Lab 2023, click here. To register, click here.
Linda Leavell
President, Biographers International Organization
president@biographersinternational.org
biographersinternational.org
Linda Leavell President, Biographers International Organization president@biographersinternational.org biographersinternational.org |
*
CFA: 2023 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives Fellowship Program
Deadline for Applications: January 23, 2023
by Isabelle Rohr
The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives is pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for its 2023 fellowship program. In 2023, three to six fellowships will be awarded to senior scholars, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and independent researchers to conduct research in the JDC Archives, either in New York or in Jerusalem. The fellowship program is open to scholars pursuing biographical research. Topics in the fields of twentieth century Jewish history, modern history, social welfare, migration, and humanitarian assistance will be considered, as well as other areas of academic research covered in the JDC archival collections. Our finding aids can be consulted to identify relevant areas. The fellowship awards are $2,500 and the deadline for submission is January 23, 2023.
Fellows are expected to make a remote public presentation on their research upon conclusion of their fellowships.
The areas of research and lectures of previously awarded recipients can be viewed here.
he GRACEH (Graduate Conference in European History) series was launched in Budapest in 2007 and is co-organized since 2010 by Central European University, the European University Institute, University of Vienna, and the University of Oxford. The conference is hosted annually by one of these institutions, and in 2023 its 17th edition will be hosted by Central European University in Vienna. The theme of GRACEH 2023 is:
“Voices Heard and Unheard: Authority, Truth, and Silence in Historical Perspective,” 17-19 April 2023, Central European University
The past—mediated through written, visual, or material sources—is filled with empty spaces. Incomplete versions of what happened have been taken at face value, passed through time as representing the “real,” and validating particular kinds of the historical understanding devoid of (un)documented actors, practices, and processes.
Over the past few decades, scholars have been increasingly interested in voices from “underneath”, lending their ear to, for example, oral histories, messages between the lines, hints, clues, symbols, humor, satires, gestures, or objects to unearth that which has been doomed to non-existence or silence. This approach to historical sources could be labeled as relying on “weak evidence,” for even though it breaks the silence, it escapes clear-cut explanations. How can we retrieve voices from the past? When is “weak evidence” evidence enough to challenge or even replace dominant and established historical interpretations and narratives? To what kind of evidence do we grant higher authority over the other and why? How is authority attached to a piece of evidence? What is the purpose of establishing authority? Is it to state that something actually happened? Or to create an authentic world that looks as veridic as possible? How can a source be used to represent or construct truth?
We invite graduate students working on any topic or period in European history and/or Europe in global perspective to delve into these questions and consider the multiple layers conveyed by the notion of historical authority and its implicit elements in historical perspective.
We welcome submissions dealing with oral history, popular history, history of science, material history, intellectual history, history of ideas, book history, literary history, art history, social history, political history, legal history, historical anthropology, history in public sphere, archeology, museum studies, media history, and gender history.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
-
- Voices and truth from below: voices of minorities, marginalized, oppressed/suppressed groups (on the basis of race, class, gender, religion and many more);
-
- Establishing and identifying authority and truth in written, visual, material sources: expressing agency, creating authenticity, authorial practices and authorship, self-fashioning;
-
- Whose authority? Whose truth?: Practices, regimes and actors of authority, crafting official scientific and historical discourses, forms of erasure, violence, (un)truth, and (in)justice;
-
- Mediality and materiality: displaying authority, emblems/signifiers of authority, objects as tokens of authority and truth, “making history” through objects, fakes, distortions, and reproductions;
-
- Historical truth in/and literary evidence: the status of historical fiction, the power of myths, propaganda, literature as a historical source, reimagining history across genres (fiction, non-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, drama, poetry, folktale, and so on);
-
- What happened? What is said to have happened?: Layers of authority, “meta” methodological approaches to history writing, critically engaging with historical narratives and historiography, the issue of objective past, “making history” and institutions (institutes, archives, museums, and so forth).
Keynote speakers are:
Clio Doyle (Queen Mary University of London)
James Kapaló (University College Cork)
This conference is open to all graduate students. We particularly encourage submissions from those who have not presented their work at conferences before or are from underrepresented regions and/or institutions. We hope to be able to support travel and/or accommodation for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.
Please send abstracts up to 300 words and a brief biography (max 100 words) to graceh2023@ceu.edu by 17 January 2023. Participants will receive a notification of acceptance by 17 February 2023. Final papers (up to 2000 words) should be submitted by 17 March 2023 for pre-circulation. More information can be found at https://graceh2023.wordpress.com/
Contact Info:
On behalf of the GRACEH 2023 Organizing Committee: Olga Petrova petrova_olga@phd.ceu.edu
Contact Email:
URL:
*
*
British Women Writers Conference: Liberties
May 25–28 2023
University of Virginia
deadline for submissions:
January 15, 2023
contact email:
The organizers of the 2023 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of ‘Liberties’ in global and transatlantic British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. We ask participants to consider ‘liberties’ not only as a political abstraction but also as part of material and experiential subjectivity. Interpreted broadly, liberties include (but are not limited to) legal rights and freedoms, liberty of the person and bodily autonomy, liberties of creative and artistic expression, liberty of profession and vocation, freedom of movement both physical and social, and self-determination in the private and public spheres. How far did these liberties extend to women at different historical moments? Were liberties granted by the state and other institutions or taken despite them? How were they imagined and realized differently by women across categories of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, age, ability? We invite presenters to contextualize ‘liberties’ in terms of both its capacities and practices as well as its limits and exclusions.
British history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poses conflicting and contradictory narratives of liberty. The abolition of the slave trade did not end indentured labor in the colonies. The expansion of the franchise through legislation did not extend the vote to women and the poor. Free trade and market liberalism increased Britain’s wealth but also aggravated socioeconomic inequalities. The rhetorics of emancipation at home contrasted with the realities of imperial rule abroad. How can we make sense of these partial and conditional liberties using literary history? Whose liberty is centered in literary, historical, and political narratives? How is liberty represented in women’s writing — as aspiration, transgression, fantasy, lack? We welcome scholarship that puts the construct of liberty under critical scrutiny and interrogates its relationship to ongoing and incomplete struggles for liberation. We also welcome presentations and panel proposals on pedagogy. How can we draw connections in our teaching between literary history and the liberationist movements of the present? Short talks on pedagogical methodology, classroom practices, use of digital and other media tools, or collective and community-facing projects are highly encouraged.
Possible topics for papers and panels include:
Political liberties
Women and nationhood, women’s civic participation, women and human rights, anti-slavery and abolition, empire and anti-colonialism, suffrage and women’s liberation
Social liberties
Women’s education, women’s work and the professions, women travelers and migration, women’s associations and societies, liberty and domesticity
Liberties of the body
Reproductive liberties, sex and sexuality, desire and consent, queer bodies, women’s physical cultures, women and disability
Liberties of expression
Gender and performance, women’s self-fashioning, women’s art and aesthetics, women and publicity, women and print culture, women’s intellectual histories
Please visit the conference website for more details and to submit your abstracts: http://bwwc23.com/
REMINDER
IABA Europe 2023
Life-Writing in Times of Crisis
5–8 July 2023
University of Warsaw, Poland
We are pleased to announce that the next IABA Europe Conference will be held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 5th to July 8th 2023. The conference will be held on-site only. The theme of the conference, Life-Writing in Times of Crisis, relates to the challenges we have had to face in Europe and all around the world in recent years. A lot has changed since the 2019 IABA Europe conference in Madrid. The accelerating climate crisis, the COVID–19 pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine have significantly influenced not only our perception of the world, but also the ways in which we record autobiographical experiences (the practice of writing about one’s own life). A crucial component of the difficult situation in Europe and other parts of the world is the refugee crisis. In recent years, inhabitants of countries affected by wars and terrible conflicts – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or African states – have been seeking peace among European communities. Today, millions of Ukrainians are in the same situation.
Contemporary crises may take place on a collective scale and concern events such as war, extermination, the pandemic or economic troubles (rising inflation, unemployment, difficult housing markets), but they can also happen on an individual (personal) scale: illness, the passing of loved ones, imprisonment, forced confinement, hunger, houselessness, unemployment, or changing one’s place of residence… Circumstances of unwanted change, sudden rupture, and discontinuity, which could be described as a sense of living in a previously unknown, utterly changed world, often mark the experience of crisis. In all of these situations, different practices of life-writing emerge – and all of them will interest us. How do dynamic sociopolitical processes shape the stories we tell about our everyday lives? What is the relation between the fragmentation or consolidation of entire social systems and the experimental modes of autobiographical narratives put forward by individuals?
Since our conference will be organised in Warsaw, we would like to refer to historical and academic experiences that are specific to Polish and Central European contexts, such as the surprisingly rich tradition of memoir competitions organised in Poland since the 1920s (a total of about 1,500 different competitions were held, with millions of memoirs and diaries collected). Another example would be the tradition of collecting autobiographical documents during the war and the Holocaust, which resulted in the creation of the monumental Ringelblum Archive,
among others.
Overall, we aim to examine the relationship between crisis situations and writing one’s life. How and why does autobiographical writing happen during crises, when the established order of the world suddenly collapses and everyday life becomes strange, unpredictable, and threatening? How do we talk about our lives, how and why do we record our experiences in difficult conditions?
We invite proposals focused on archival records or material records in general (diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs), as well as various electronic, virtual life-writing practices that may be performed or kept on-line, on various websites or social media platforms. The theme of the conference may also be analysed from the perspective of life-writing in visual forms (photography, drawings, comics, films and video recordings, among others). Finally, participants may discuss records/reports about the experience of crisis created at the request of journalists or researchers, reporters, sociologists, psychologists, and historians (audiovisual, spoken, written accounts, important oral history tradition). All of the above-mentioned ways of “recording” life in a crisis situation are of great interest to us.
During the IABA Warsaw Conference we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Life Writing.
Submissions:
We welcome 20-minute individual presentations and 90-minute panel sessions (preferably interdisciplinary and international).
The conference will be held in English.
Abstracts should not be longer than 300 words; bios should not be longer than 150 words.
Practicalities and schedule:
Conference website: https://iabawarsaw2023.eu
Conference e-mail: iabawarsaw2023@uw.edu.pl
Online submissions will open on October 15, 2022
Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2022
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by January 31, 2023
Registration and conference fees: February 1–March 31, 2023
Preliminary programme: May 1, 2023
Detailed programme: June 1, 2023
Conference Fees:
Participants
220 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)
The participation of 5 researchers from Ukraine, free of charge
*
Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400-present
June 27, 2023 to June 28, 2023
Deadline for Submissions–Dec. 31, 2022
United Kingdom
From the muniments rooms of country estates to scrapbooks, photo albums, and boxes of papers and ephemera stored under the bed: our homes are sites of intergenerational collection and curation. We act as archivists, deciding which materials to keep, both for ourselves and for future generations who will, in time, face the same question. In the early modern period, anxieties over the loss of precious family paperwork were widespread. The sixteenth-century yeoman Robert Furse implored his son to ‘keep sure your wrytynges’, and the resolution of many an eighteenth-century novel – including Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and a whole host of gothic fiction – turned on the adequate preservation (or otherwise) of family papers and the secrets contained therein.
Documents were kept in special vessels (initialled chests, boxes tied up with a loved one’s hair), they were bequeathed in wills, and, as public repositories became more widespread, some collectors attempted to imitate the practices of institutional archives in their own homes – or fought to get their materials included in (or excluded from) these collections. Today, we have the capacity to store an almost infinite quantity of material online – but many of us continue to prize the physical artefact, and books and readymade albums that purport to help us create and store our family archives are widely available.
Though in recent years the ‘archival turn’ has led to a renewed interest in the collections compiled by states and institutions, we know rather less about the materials accumulated by families and households. In the absence of the apparent hallmarks of modern archival practice – catalogues, indexes, and, perhaps most pertinently, professional authentication of their historical value – family papers are rarely approached as ‘archives’ – but, when they are transferred into local and national record offices, these same collections go on to form a significant part of our archival heritage. This conference seeks to bring together academics, archivists, and family historians to explore the family archive, in all its forms, from the medieval to the modern period.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
-
- Approaches to the family archive: definitions, challenges, opportunities
-
- The contents and curation of specific family collections
-
- Access, circulation, and the ‘social life’ of archives
-
- Muniments and legal papers
-
- Exclusion and absence in the archive
-
- Archives and emotions
-
- The matriarchive and women as archivists
-
- Arrangement and organisation: cataloguing, inventories, storage, furniture
-
- Objects in/and the archive
-
- Visual and literary representations of family collections
-
- The relationship between family and institutional archives, including bequests, loans, and donations to local and national collections
-
- Destruction and dispersal
Please send a title, short bio, and abstract (c. 200-300 words) to: familyarchivesconference@gmail.com.
The deadline for submissions is 30 December 2022. We would be grateful if you could also let us know if you have any access requirements (e.g. online/hybrid attendance).
All papers will be considered for inclusion in an edited collection, estimated date of submission for chapters December 2023. Please make it clear on your submission if you do not wish your paper to be considered.
This conference is part of the ‘Family Archives in Early Modern England’ project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Visit us at www.family-archives.co.uk.
Contact Info:
Please send a title, short bio, and abstract (c. 200-300 words) to: familyarchivesconference@gmail.com.
Contact Email:
familyarchivesconference@gmail.com
*
READING WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING: A Critical Appraisal
In her book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), the late Carolyn Heilbrun expressed the need for original scripts for women to live by; stories that press beyond the convention and closure of the marriage plot. Men have always had narrative stories, such as the quest motif and the warrior exemplar, on which to base their lives and within which to tell their life stories. But, Heilbrun argues, such stories of action and accomplishment have been denied to women; the behavior praised by these stories has always been branded “unwomanly”. What we need to do is to move outside that male-centered, binary logic altogether. We need to ask not how Woman is different from Man. We need to know how women have come to be who they are through history, which is the history of their oppression by men and male-designed institutions. Only through an analysis of the power relationships between men and women, and practices based on that analysis, will we put an end to our oppression-and only then will we discover what women are or can be. Only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives. Women poets of one generation—those born between 1923 and 1932—can now be seen to have transformed the autobiographies of women’s lives, to have expressed, and suffered for expressing, what women had not earlier been allowed to say.
Please send your papers at drsunitasinha@gmail.com.The deadline is 30th December, 2022. The Wordlimit is between 3500 to 5000 words. The book shall be published by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors New Delhi.
Prof.Sunita Sinha
Email: drsunitasinha@gmail.com
Website: www.sunitasinha.com
*
Deadline for Submissions December 31, 2022
University of Warsaw, Poland
5–8 July 2023
Life-Writing in Times of Crisis
IABA Europe 2023
We are pleased to announce that the next IABA Europe Conference will be held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 5th to July 8th 2023. The conference will be held on-site only. The theme of the conference, Life-Writing in Times of Crisis, relates to the challenges we have had to face in Europe and all around the world in recent years. A lot has changed since the 2019 IABA Europe conference in Madrid. The accelerating climate crisis, the COVID–19 pandemic, and then the war in Ukrainehave significantly influenced not only our perception of the world, but also the ways in which we record autobiographical experiences (the practice of writing about one’s own life). A crucial component of the difficult situation in Europe and other parts of the world is the refugee crisis. In recent years, inhabitants of countries affected by wars and terrible conflicts – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or African states – have been seeking peace among European communities. Today, millions of Ukrainians are in the same situation.
Contemporary crises may take place on a collective scale and concern events such as war, extermination, the pandemic or economic troubles (rising inflation, unemployment, difficult housing markets), but they can also happen on an individual (personal) scale: illness, the passing of loved ones, imprisonment, forced confinement, hunger, houselessness, unemployment, or changing one’s place ofresidence. Circumstances of unwanted change, sudden rupture, and discontinuity, which could be described as a sense of living in a previously unknown, utterly changed world, often mark the experience of crisis. In all of these situations, different practices of life-writing emerge – and all of them will interest us. How do dynamic sociopolitical processes shape the stories we tell about our everyday lives? What is the relation between the fragmentation or consolidation of entire social systems and the experimental modes of autobiographical narratives putforward by individuals?
Since our conference will be organised in Warsaw, we would like to refer to historical and academic experiences that are specific to Polish and Central European contexts, such as the surprisingly rich tradition of memoir competitions organised in Poland since the 1920s (a total of about 1,500 different competitions were held, with millions of memoirs and diaries collected). Another example would be the tradition of collecting autobiographical documents during the war and the Holocaust, which resulted in the creation of the monumental Ringelblum Archive, among others.
Overall, we aim to examine the relationship between crisis situations and writing one’s life. How and why does autobiographical writing happen during crises, when the established order of the world suddenly collapses and everyday life becomes strange, unpredictable, and threatening? How do we talk about our lives, how and why do we record our experiences in difficult conditions?
We invite proposals focused on archival records or material records in general (diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs), as well as various electronic, virtual life-writing practices that may be performed or kept on-line, on various websites or social media platforms. The theme of the conference may also be analysed from the perspective of life-writing in visual forms (photography, drawings, comics, films and video recordings, among others). Finally, participants may discuss records/reports about the experience of crisis created at the request of journalists or researchers, reporters, sociologists, psychologists, and historians (audiovisual, spoken, written accounts, important oral history tradition). All of the above-mentioned ways of “recording” life in a crisis situation are of great interest to us.
During the IABA Warsaw Conference we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Life Writing.
Submissions:
We welcome 20-minute individual presentations and 90-minute panel sessions (preferably interdisciplinary and international).
The conference will be held in English.
Abstracts should not be longer than 300 words; bios should not be longer than 150 words.
Practicalities and schedule:
Conference website: https://iabawarsaw2023.eu
Conference e-mail: iabawarsaw2023@uw.edu.pl
Online submissions will open on October 15, 2022
Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2022
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by January 31, 2023
Registration and conference fees: February 1–March 31, 2023
Preliminary programme: May 1, 2023
Detailed programme: June 1, 2023
Conference Fees:
Participants
220 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)
The participation of 5 researchers from Ukraine, free of charge
PhD student participants
170 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)
The participation of 5 PhD students from Ukraine, free of charge
IABA Warsaw 2023 Organising Committee
Teresa Bruś
Marcin Gołąb
Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj
Artur Hellich
Maciej Libich
Lucyna Marzec
Joanna Piechura
Paweł Rodak
Agnieszka Sobolewska
Honorata Sroka
*
Exile at State U: Stories from the Outer Edges of Academe
deadline for submissions:
December 31, 2022
Douglas Higbee/University of South Carolina, Aiken
contact email:
Seeking abstracts for an edited collection of essays about life on the tenure track, especially for those working in the humanities and social sciences at non-R1 colleges and universities.
Because full-time, tenure-track jobs in the humanities and social sciences are hard to come by, we are often told to be grateful and to be quiet. And indeed, there is much to be grateful for and relatively little to shout about. But there are still important stories to be told, and relatively little nonfiction has been written about the subtle but life-changing personal and professional vicissitudes of a career spent in the academic hinterlands of branch state campuses and non-elite private colleges. Especially for those from highly rated grad programs, often in metropolitan locales, a career in a rural area or small town is an eye-opening and life-altering experience.
The goal of the collection is to tell it like it is, warts and all. Essays should be autobiographical, not scholarly, and can be focused on a particular career episode (and thus relatively short) or broader in scope and longer in length. The most important thing is to be compelling, or at least interesting. Humor is more than welcome. Writers are welcome to publish under a pseudonym, or anonymously.
Possible topics or areas of focus
–job application process: interview and campus visit stories; first impressions; deciding whether to take the job
–on the tenure track: the challenges (or lack thereof) of meeting tenure and promotion requirements; interactions with other faculty, administrators, community members; networking and conferences; deciding to stay or leave
–community in exile: relationships with colleagues; relations with neighbors; location details
–after tenure/the middle years: career evolution; putting down roots, professionally and personally; non-academic pursuits; changing jobs
–toward retirement: taking stock; successes and regrets
Please email 1-2 pp. abstracts and a short bio or CV to douglash@usca.edu by Dec. 31, 2022.
Douglas Higbee
University of South Carolina, Aiken
Deadline for Submissions December 15, 2022
Colonial Letters and the Contact of Knowledges: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Colonial Correspondences
April 11, 2023 to April 14, 2023
University of Bayreuth, Germany
Written correspondence (e.g. letters, diaries, telegrams, etc.) were one of the major means of communication during the 19th – 20th Century British colonialism of Africa. Through them, the instructions, intensions, decisions, complaints, justifications and agenda of resident British colonial officers, local colonial administrators and collaborators, colonial officials in Britain and colonised subjects (individuals, villages) were transmitted across time and space. These letters offer extraordinary access to the mindset and overall agenda of the entities producing them. The ways of life of these entities, their patterns of social order, repertoires and constellations of knowledges, linguistic voices, world views and cosmologies are projected, both directly and indirectly, in these letters. In themselves, these letters embody the contact zone of colonial-precolonial structures, coloniser-colonised entities, indigenous-foreign knowledges, cultural and linguistic practices, etc.
Letters written during British colonialism of Southern Cameroons were the object of study of the research project “Colonial Letters and the Contact of Knowledges” funded by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany (https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Projects/Knowledges/Knowledges_Colonial-letters/index.php). The aim of the conference is to present the major findings of the project. We also invite perspectives on British (and other) colonial correspondences in other territories and periods.
Call for papers
We invite submissions that describe, from multidisciplinary perspectives (within the humanities and social sciences, especially linguistics, history, literature, communication studies, anthropology and sociology), the instantiations of colonial contacts, conflicts, contestations and eventual coalescence, co-habitations and or hybridisations of ‘knowledges’ during colonialism that are embodied in, and transmitted through, letters written during British colonisation of Southern Cameroons (1916-1961) and beyond. Other colonisations, especially in Africa, form part of the focus of the conference. Several lines of investigation fall within the scope of the conference including, but not limited to:
-
- Colonial correspondences and the construction of multiple identities
-
- Colonial correspondences and the discursive enactment of (social, religious, political, hereditary) power
-
- Colonial correspondences and the coalescence, cohabitation and hybridisation of colonial and precolonial social norms (interaction, hierarchy, respect forms, kinship affiliation)
-
- Colonial correspondences and the contact of languages
-
- Colonial correspondences and patterns of language stratification: official, native, local, dialect, etc. languages
-
- Colonial correspondences and the production, consolidation and contestation of ‘knowledges’
-
- Colonial correspondences and the role of letter writing agencies
-
- Colonial correspondences and the concealment of, and access to, knowledge, information and rights
-
- Colonial correspondences and colonial social and power structures of stratification
-
- etc.
What patterns of knowledge production are adopted in colonial correspondences? How are these different in letters written by colonial administrators and those written by colonised subjects? What repertoires of knowledges drive their production, rejection and perhaps co-construction? To answer these questions, we invite submissions that adopt multidisciplinary, trans-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary approaches.
NB: Selected papers from the conference will be published in the series Africa Multiple: Studies of Africa and its Diasporas (Brill Academic Publishers).
Submission Guidelines
-
- Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 15 December 2022
-
- Feedback on abstracts: 31 December 2022
-
- Maximum abstract length: 500 words
-
- Submit abstracts to: colonial.letters@uni-bayreuth.de
Partial scholarships
We offer per diems of up to 300€ (i.e., 100€ per day) for participants whose abstracts are accepted.
More info at: https://colonial-letters.de/#
Contact Info:
Conference organisers
Eric A. Anchimbe (University of Bayreuth)
Glory Essien Otung (University of Bayreuth)
Contact Email:
colonial.letters@uni-bayreuth.de
URL:
https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/
Narrative Matters Conference 2023
Instrumental Narratives: Narrative Studies and the Storytelling Boom
Tampere University, Finland, 15–17 June 2023
https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/
CALL FOR PAPERS
NB! Deadline for proposals extended until the end of November 2022!
Welcome to the 11th Narrative Matters conference at Tampere!
The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?
Featured topics:
* storytelling boom and its social relevance
* novel ways of storytelling today
* emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies
The social events include a lake cruise to Viikinsaari island – dinner, sauna & swim!
TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION
– 2 hour train ride from the Helsinki airport
– direct flights to Tampere via 11 hubs
– strong hotel capacity in the campus area
Conference webpage / CFP and submission link: https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/call-for-papers/
CFP OPEN UNTIL NOVEMBER 30, 2022!
Conference fee EUR 220 (faculty) / EUR 120 (student)
Pre-conference workshops, hosted by Jens Brockmeier, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Stefan Iversen & Ann Phoenix, will take place on Wednesday, June 14th.
NB! Narrative Matters 2023 is an on-site conference with no hybrid sessions and no recording of presentations. We will however include two online sessions in the programme, one early in the morning and another late in the evening (Helsinki time). The conference fee for online participants, who will only have access to these two online sessions, will pay a reduced conference fee of EUR 150 / 100 (students).
Main organizers:
Maria Mäkelä, Matti Hyvärinen & Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Narrare)
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, SELMA)
Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki)
The Academy of Finland Consortium Project Instrumental Narratives https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com
Full CFP:
The eleventh Narrative Matters conference is hosted by Tampere University (Finland) and co-organized by the Instrumental Narratives consortium project, SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies. The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?
The conference will provide a platform for scholars to both seek new applications that might appeal to diverse audiences and to critically reflect on the instrumentalization of narrative studies. Most narrative scholars agree on the rich affordances of storytelling: narrative is a compact and intuitive form for sharing detailed, personal experiences as well as collective, community-forming ideas and outlooks. Thus narrative studies approaches lend generous support to the instrumentalization and commercialization of narrative form in business, politics, media, and personal development. Yet narrative may just as well be put to uses that are dubious if not dangerous. The widespread, uncritical use of narratives of personal experience in journalism and social media may have unintended and unanticipated consequences. Experientiality may come at the cost of informativeness. Furthermore, while narratives are ideally suited to conveying the complexity of human experience, the complexity of large social interactions or material processes, such as climate change, easily exceeds the capacity of storytelling. Now that the benefits of storytelling have caught the public imagination and are recognized in various professional practices, narrative scholarship is in a good position to disseminate critical practices for the analysis of the forms and contexts of storytelling as well.
We should also look into future narrative possibilities. The 21st century will no doubt be the era of social media and shared personal narratives, and therefore we should look for productive ways of connecting the personal with the political. How, for example, to bridge the gap between individual particularity and supra-individual concerns at the limits of narrative, such as the climate crisis and global inequality? How to conceptualize and control the afterlife of narratives determined by digital forms of narrative agency? Will new forms of narrative speculation direct our actions as citizens, consumers, and collectives? Which roles will be allotted to specific artistic, digital, and quotidian genres of storytelling? Are these new narrative genres and practices changing the ways people share their experience and use stories in the everyday? Are new affordances for narrative meaning making evolving?
We invite narrative scholars across disciplines to address the following (and related) issues:
* storytelling boom and its social relevance
* novel ways of storytelling today
* emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies
* sociological analysis of curated storytelling
* the study of storytelling rights and privileges; re-thinking of empathy
* narrative and post-truth
* narrative consultancy business; storytelling self-help and manuals
* story-critical reading in narrative studies; story-critical tools for audiences
* popularizing narrative theory and practices
* social life of narratives vs. analysis of individual texts
* narrative and action: political narratives, positioning and counter-narratives
* professional narratives and narratives of professions refigured
* the limits and affordances of narrative in making sense of illness and health
* the limits and affordances of narrative in addressing the environmental crisis
* uses and risks of viral storytelling and social media sharing
* discourse on well-being and cognitive benefits of literature
* the potential of fiction in analysing and resisting the narrative boom
Please send your paper and panel proposals by November 30, 2022! The abstract for an individual paper should be 250-300 words. A panel proposal (in the case of a traditional research panel, 3-4 speakers) should be approx. 600 words, including a brief general description + short abstracts of each paper. In addition to the proposal text, please include a 100 word biographical statement for every speaker. If you only wish to present in either of the online sessions, please indicate this in your proposal. Here is the link to the submission form.
Narrative Matters 2023 is an on-site conference with no hybrid sessions and no recording of presentations. We will however include two online sessions in the programme, one early in the morning and another late in the evening (Helsinki time). The conference fee for online participants, who will only have access to these two online sessions, will pay a reduced conference fee of EUR 150 / 100 (students).
Dr. Maria Mäkelä
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Tampere University, Finland
+358 40 8325635
https://www.tuni.fi/en/maria-makela
*
The Ecocritical First Person
American Society for the Study of Literature
This CFP is for a guaranteed panel sponsored by the Thoreau Society
2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon
deadline for submissions:
December 1, 2022
What is the role of the personal voice in contemporary ecocritical scholarship? As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, conceptualizing climate change demands an awareness of both personal and planetary scales of transformation, yet traditional academic discourse has tended to discourage the use of personal history, anecdote, and the first-person voice. Our roundtable asks what’s at stake in the personal turn and a more intimate mode of literary-critical address. For this roundtable, we seek both excerpts from ecocritical writing in the personal voice and reflective/critical proposals that might trace the historical genealogy of the personal; consider the politics of voice vis-à-vis race and ethnicity, class, gender, and region; discuss marginalized efforts to bear witness; or offer reflexive meditations on our ties to the university and what more informal scholarship has to offer “lay” audiences.
This panel has a guaranteed slot on the conference program. Proposals (maximum 200 words) for either/both creative or critical presentations and short CVs due by December 1st to Deanna Kreisel at deekaykay@icloud.com.
Travel and Wonder, 1450-1750
Conference 27-28 April 2023 to be held at the University of York
deadline for submissions:
November 20, 2022
Call for Papers
We invite proposals for conference papers on wonder in early-modern travel writing. Papers are welcome to discuss any geographical area. They may explore (but are not restricted to) the following questions: how did early-modern travellers express wonder? What is the role of the senses in descriptions of wonder? Did travellers doubt their own senses? How did they address the problem of credibility and readers’ doubts when describing wondrous phenomena in their writing? How does wonder in early-modern travel writing relate to scholarly themes such as race, gender, colonialism, material culture, religion, knowledge or scientific discourse?
Keynote speakers are Joan-Pau Rubiés (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) and Lauren Working (University of York).
While preferring in-person presentations, we welcome a limited number of online papers. Please indicate in your proposal whether you plan to present in-person or online.
Please submit a brief CV and proposal of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers to Dr Jaska Kainulainen, Docent of history at the University of Helsinki and a research associate at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (CREMS) at the University of York, at jaska.kainulainen@helsinki.fi by 20 November 2022.
The conference is generously supported by the KONE FOUNDATION in association with CREMS, University of York.
*
Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative
Southwest Popular and American Culture Association
February 22-25, 2023, Albuquerque, New Mexico
deadline for submissions:
November 14, 2022
Melinda McBee / mcbee58@verizon.net
Paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative are welcome. Literary papers as well as creative works will be accepted. Send a 500 word abstract by November 14, 2022, to to conference’s database at
Directions: Once you have accessed the above web site, you will have to create an account. After creating you account, on the web site choose Conference, then from the drop-down menu click Call for Papers/Submit Proposal. Scroll down to the Language and Literature section to Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative. Click the + sign under the Biography area, then choose Submit Proposal.
*
As some of you know, I host a monthly webinar series, “Let’s Talk Books at NMU” (Northern Michigan University). On November’s episode, I’ll be talking with Etta M. Madden about her book, Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. The webinar will occur on Friday, Nov. 18, at 1:00 Eastern time. Registration is required but easy, and can be found here:
https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dnXEzUN8QMmJcIvo8AyMvw
Please join us if you’re free, and also feel free to forward this announcement widely.
Thanks,
Lynn Domina
Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022
The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Travel and Literature for our 52nd annual conference, March 30-April 1, 2023, in San Antonio, Texas. Submit your 250-500 word abstract at https://www.conftool.pro/cea2023.
The Travel and Literature area at CEA is seeking submissions on any aspect of travel and literature, including but not limited to travelogues; travel and ecocriticism; regionalism; travel and identity; intercultural perspectives; etc. Theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers concerning various genres and historical periods of literature. Of particular interest will be presentations that actualize the conference theme, Confluence, as it applies to travelers across America, around the world, and through time and space. How do writers explore, engage, and articulate Confluence within the places, spaces, experiences, texts, and selves of their travels?
Conference Theme: CONFLUENCE
CEA welcomes proposals for presentations that move to the general conference theme: Confluence. The conference will be held in San Antonio, a city that itself is a kind of confluence: it has been the home of multiple cultures; it has seen the rise and fall of famous missions and military presidios; and it honors in its daily life today its Hispanic heritage and cowboy culture alike. It is no wonder, then, that it is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
General Call for Papers
CEA also welcomes proposals for presentations in any of the areas English departments typically encompass, including literature criticism and scholarship, creative writing, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film. We also welcome papers on areas that influence our work as academics, including student demographics, student/instructor accountability and assessment, student advising, academic leadership in departments and programs, and the place of the English department in the university.
Panels and Roundtable Sessions are also welcome. If submitting a pre-formed panel, please create a user ID for each participant, and identify the panel in the submission. Roundtables will feature presentations and discussion of 500-word essays, an opportunity to engage with other scholars, discover other resources, or begin imagining the next steps towards developing ideas into longer, more typical conference papers or articles.
Abstract Submissions Accepted until November 1, 2022
For more information on how to submit, please see the full CFP at www.cea-web.org.
Format
Presentations must be made in person at the conference venue. Neither proxy nor “virtual” (Skyping, etc.) presentations are permitted. Presentations will be limited to 15 minutes.
Membership
All presenters at the 2023 CEA conference must become members of CEA by January 1, 2023. To join CEA, please go to www.cea-web.org.
Other questions? Please email cea.english@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
Katrina J. Quinn, Ph.D.
Special Topics Chair, Travel and Literature
(724) 738-2430 | katrina.quinn@sru.edu
*
Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022
Call for Proposals – Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau
The editors of the proposed Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau seek proposals for essays on any aspect of Thoreau’s works, life, or reception that significantly reframe an aspect of his scholarly, political, or popular legacy. For more than a century, the dominant image of Thoreau was that of a solitary figure who happily turned his back on social ties and political matters to head off into the woods. In both public and scholarly writing, Thoreau was held up as an exemplar of a certain type of white, able-bodied masculinity: one where wilderness was preferable to domestic and social spaces, and where independence and communion with the self in nature superseded other forms of relationality, community, and solidarity. In recent years, scholarly work on Thoreau, including a major biography and several bicentennial volumes, has challenged these long-held critical perceptions with consideration of his work in relation to gender and sexuality, abolition, indigeneity, race, environmental justice, and other issues.
We aim to collect and expand these new directions in Thoreau studies in a comprehensive volume designed to inform the next generation of Thoreau scholarship. We seek contributions from disciplines, traditions, and perspectives that have been previously excluded from or that have been marginalized within Thoreau studies. We are particularly interested in writings that engage with a range of traditions, including anti-racist work and prison abolition; disability justice, LGBTQ+ activism; climate justice; radical politics; as well as experimental or innovative approaches to Thoreau’s life, writings, and legacies.
Please send abstracts of 300 words or fewer to kristen.case@maine.edu and james.finley@tamusa.edu by November 1, 2022. In addition, we welcome queries and would be happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.
Contact Info:
Kristen Case, Professor of English, University of Maine Farmington, kristen.case@maine.edu
James Finley, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University – San Antonio, james.finley@tamusa.edu
Contact Email:
*
Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022
Call for Papers
Out of the USSR: Travelling Women, Travelling Memories
2–3.2.2023 University of Turku, Finland
Travelling has always been connected with fundamental social and political changes taking place in societies. Throughout history, one of the countries that people have chosen to leave, move away or have been expelled from, but also a country which they have been going back to, is Russia/the Soviet Union. There is an obvious link between the large transformations that have taken place in Russia since the time of perestroika in the 1990s until the ongoing war in Ukraine and the restrictions of civil rights such as freedom of speech, and the increased mobility out of Russia.
The conference takes these transformations as starting points in examining how individuals reflect on and recall the Soviet/Russian home country in literary presentations, addressing the history of mobility, emigration, family, gender, ethnic or religious background in face of their collective memory in their new place of residence. The meeting points for the proposals are the concepts of travelling/mobility/exile and (post-, trans-/cross-cultural) memory. The focus is on women’s fictional texts and memories from the 1980s until today that allow the presentations to address and to acknowledge [e]migrating women writers as mediators of ideas and memories in trans-/cross-cultural contexts. The aim of the conference is to focus on gender in the process of the transformation of cultures through ideas that travel, and to pay special attention to women’s contribution to the cultural transfer and mobility of ideas and memories which have not been sufficiently studied and documented. We expect presentations addressing published fictional texts by women who have moved from the Soviet and Russian territories into new areas, and by writing they have created and processed memories of moving and of resettling in a new country/location of residence. We are especially interested in memories of women emigrants and travellers to the Nordic countries, Germany, Great Britain, the US, France and Israel.
The organizers plan to publish an edited collection of papers presented at the conference.
We invite researchers to a two-day conference that provides a platform to reflect upon the themes that address the following issues and more:
● What is recalled, and how the history of leaving/migration is experienced, recalled and narrated?
● Ideas, ideologies and memories (e.g. national myths) which women carry along to their new country/location of residence, and how they change in regard to the home country vis-à-vis thenew country?
● The creation and production of post-memorial recollection of family history
● Motives for leaving and emigration
● The constitution of matrilinear narratives and transformation of individual, family- and collective memory through travelling
● Carriers, media, contents, practices and forms of travelling memory
● Recollection of Soviet terror (e.g. Stalinist genocide and Holodomor) in the face of the prevalence of Holocaust memory in the new site of residence
● The understanding of one’s “own” culture, its possible changes, and the kind of presentation / narrative forms the change of location / culture /context produces
● Narratives of lived experiences in the new location
● The form that the social and cultural background (age, profession, gender identity, family background, etc.) takes in the texts
● Cultural memories (family, generation, gendered, etc.) that are carried along and created in the new country of residence, and what is their relation to the new location of residence?
● Narration of the journey, departure and arrival at the new location of residence
● Sites of memory in transition
Keynote speakers are:
Eva Hausbacher, Professor of Slavic Literature und Culture at the University of Salzburg, Department of Slavic Studies.
“Close distances: Narratives of the Soviet Past in Russian-German Women’s Writings”
Simona Mitroiu, PhD, Senior Researcher at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences
“Generations of Memory in Women’s Narratives: Literary (re)workings of Transnational
Disruptions, Intersections, and Transformations”
Please submit your abstract (title, ca. 250 words, names and affiliations of the presenters) by 1. November 2022 to Viola Parente-Čapková (viocap@utu.fi) and Arja Rosenholm (arja.rosenholm@tuni.fi).
Acceptance letters and the final programme will be sent by the end of November 2022.
The conference has its background in the research project Texts on the Move
https://tekstitliikkeessa.com/, examining how Russian women’s texts and ideas have been travelling and moving across the border to Finland in 1840–2020.
Organizer:
Texts on the Move: Reception of Women’s Writing in Finland and Russia 1840–2020 (Emil Aaltonen Foundation), and University of Turku, and Tampere University
*
Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022
Women Writing Women’s Lives Kathy Chamberlain Research Awards
Women Writing Women’s Lives (WWWL), a women’s group dedicated to the writing of women’s lives, is pleased to offer five research awards to women who are furthering the group’s mission. The awards are funded by a generous gift from Edith Penty, a veteran activist in the civil rights and women’s movement, who wished to express her gratitude for the work of WWWL and to honor Kathy Chamberlain. A long-time WWWL member and author of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, Kathy Chamberlain served as WWWL steering committee chair for ten years.
Each recipient will be awarded five hundred dollars ($500) to help defray expenses incurred while working on a memoir or biography of a woman, in print or other media, such as film, podcast, bibliography, database, or website. Awardees will also receive a one-year membership in WWWL (including dues). Awards must be used between February 1, 2023 and February 1, 2024.
Awards may be used to fund:
● Travel to archives or relevant research locations
● Copying or digitizing materials
● Purchase of books for research
● Computers, software, or other technology needed for the project
Eligibility:
We welcome submissions from women who are current masters and doctoral students; adjunct and/or unaffiliated scholars who received their PhD in the last six years; assistant professors working towards tenure; and independent researchers. WWWL members are not eligible.
How to Apply:
Send an email to ChamberlainAward@gmail.com with the subject line “Chamberlain Award Application.” Attach the application, which consists of one PDF document. The document must include the four items below:
Name the document with your last name, first name [LAST NAME, FIRST NAME].
1. Contact Information: Your name, telephone number, permanent address and e-mail, current employer or academic affiliation, and title of project.
2. Proposal: A 500-word proposal describing the project and how it advances the WWWL mission (see below).
3. Budget: List how the funds will be used.
4. Curriculum Vitae: Provide a 1-page Curriculum Vitae.
Due Date:
Applications will be accepted from September 6 to November 1, 2022 by 11:59 pm. Email the application, which should consist of one PDF attachment to: ChamberlainAward@gmail.com.
Please do not include the application in the body of the email. It must be just one attachment. Award recipients will be notified by February 1, 2023.
Email or call Allysha A. Leonard, Chamberlain Award Administrative Assistant, if you need assistance: ChamberlainAward@gmail.com (831) 345-9849.
Women Writing Women’s Lives Mission Statement
The places, cultures, and communities in which women live their lives change, as do women’s roles, status, interests, and opportunities. Our purpose as a group is to identify these changes, understand their impact, and explain and portray the complex realities of women’s lives. In biographies and memoirs of women, created in writing or other media, we hope to call attention to the reciprocal dynamics between our subjects and society, to find new ways of looking at and presenting women’s stories, and ultimately to influence the way women’s stories are perceived and written.
*
Seminar Title: Reimagining 21st Century Realisms
American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago (March 16-19, 2023)
Organizer: Jenny Rademacher, Professor, Babson College (vrademacher@babson.edu)
Paper proposals can be submitted at this link from Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 2022 at this link: https://www.acla.org/reimagining-21st-century-realisms
How are we rethinking genres that grapple with the increasingly ambivalent boundaries among truth, fact, and invention? The past three decades have produced myriad efforts to name the wide range of forms that aim for greater veracity and anchoring to documented realities, while simultaneously equivocating—metamodernism, post-irony, new sincerity, auto/biofictions, and the awkwardly phrased post-post modernism, to name only a few. While the field is still very much in play, there is a common shift away from purely ironic approaches toward the connectedness of language, humans, and reality, and a newly dominant engagement with the capacity of literature and other forms of creative expression to reshape how we live and create. If postmodernism’s perception of language as a self-referential game has played itself to exhaustion, neither are we witnessing a return to literature that naively observes and strives to mimetically represent external reality. Rather than a mirror, contemporary realisms extend beyond materiality to expose the complex and often vexing realness of emotions, perceptions, and ethical obligations to one another and the world we inhabit. In so doing, such speculative realisms experiment with derivative identities and claims to truth, incorporating uncertainty while still trying to speak meaningfully to the realness of human experience. With attention to their contradictions and confluences, this seminar explores the patterns of reimagined realisms in contemporary narrative— what forms they may be taking, how they are reconfiguring what we may understand as realism, and why. Considering the interaction among these diverse modes and how their growing popularity speaks to the experience of contemporary life, possible topics include (but are not limited to):
-
- What is the nature and function of new realisms in shaping what comes after postmodernism?
-
- How can fiction be used to experiment with the real and to create alternative ways of seeing and being in the world?
-
- If realism has become more speculative, how does it challenge post-truth? How might these forms reveal a common thread for fostering an ethical relationship with truth?
-
- How do auto/biofictions explore uncertainties among biographical, fictional, and authorial subjectivities that we navigate in real life and not only in these texts?
-
- What do fictions that tread the borders between situated realities and invention provide us that neither non-fiction nor fiction alone might?
-
- How do changing concepts of technology impact technique and form, providing thresholds for re-examining what we think we know?
-
- Why have these new realisms become so popular with writers and readers?
-
- How can a specific writer’s work illuminate important features of contemporary realisms?
-
- In what ways do the varied forms of new realisms share a common zeitgeist that extends across multiple geographies (or how do they differ)?
Virginia Newhall Rademacher, PhD
Professor, Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies
Babson College
Babson Park, MA 02457
vrademacher@babson.edu
WebEx personal room: https://babson.webex.com/meet/vrademacher
Author Page: Derivative Lives (Bloomsbury, 2022)
*
American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago (March 16-19, 2023)
Seminar Title: Literary Biography
Co-organizers: Sara Kippur (Trinity College, CT) and Julia Elsky (Loyola University Chicago, jelsky@luc.edu)
Paper proposals can be submitted at this link from Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 2022: https://www.acla.org/literary-biography
This panel seeks to explore the topic of literary biography as both theory and practice. Literary studies since the New Critics have long registered a suspicion of biographical approaches to criticism, yet our contemporary moment–in which scholars and students seem to agree that there are ethical and political stakes to recognizing an author’s lived experiences and actions–pushes us to revisit the terms and stakes of biography in scholarship and in the classroom. To what extent should biography be centered in literary studies and in the comparative literature classroom? How has the form and practice of literary biography evolved? How might we, as practitioners, responsibly take on the task of writing literary biographies? These are some of the questions that motivate our panel and that we hope to address from a range of perspectives.
Recent publications suggest the expansiveness of literary biography as a genre: it encompasses, of course, the biography of a person; the biography of a novel, such as Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Stranger about Camus’s text or Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel about Henry James’s novel; and dual biographies that feature multiple figures, such as Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. This seminar seeks participants who will discuss the form of literary biography in a theoretical framework as well as those who will present the frameworks of the literary biographies they are in the process of writing.
The seminar will also be a forum for discussion of how biographers write for general and academic audiences. How do approaches and forms change when looking to publish with an academic press, including those that aim at a broader readership, or a trade publisher? The wide range of approaches, as well as the interest in publishing biographies of women, are evinced by recent publications such as Ann Jefferson’s biography of Natalie Sarraute (Princeton, 2000), Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess (Penguin, 2018), and Ruth Franklin’s biography of Shirley Jackson (Norton, 2016), among others. We would welcome scholars and critics who have or are currently considering writing for a more general audience. We also plan to invite an editor who straddles academic and trade audiences and who could discuss norms in their area of publishing.
Julia Elsky, PhD
Associate Professor of French
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Loyola University Chicago
*
Call for Papers
STARDOM AND FANDOM
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)
44th Annual Conference, February 22-25, 2023
Marriott Albuquerque
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Submissions open on August 15, 2022
Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2022
Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 44th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels. For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/
The Area Chair for Stardom and Fandom invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of stardom or fandom. The list of ideas below is limited, so if you have an idea that is not listed, please suggest the new topic. We are an interdisciplinary area and encourage submissions from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Topics might include:
Studies of individual celebrities and their fans, both current and historical
Studies focused on specific fandoms – films, television programs, books, bands, etc.
Fandom and loss – how fans cope when beloved things come to an end
The reciprocal relationship between stars and fans
Impact of celebrity and fame on identity construction, reconstruction and sense of self
Reality television, YouTube celebrities, Influencers and the changing definition of ‘stardom’
The impact of social media and various platforms on celebrity/fan interaction
Celebrity/fame addiction as cultural change
The intersection of stars and fans in virtual and physical spaces (Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, conventions)
Celebrity and the construction of persona
Pedagogical approaches to teaching stardom and fandom
Fans, Stans, Antis and ‘haters’
Fan shame, wank, fandom policing, and purity culture in fandom spaces
Gendered constructions of stars and fans
Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction
All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca
For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/
Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.
For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.
The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2022.
SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2023. SWPACA also offers travel fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/
Registration and travel information for the conference will be available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/conference-registration-information/.
For 2023, we are excited to be at a new venue, the Marriott Albuquerque (2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque NM 87110), which boasts free parking and close proximity to dining, shopping and other delights. In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at http://journaldialogue.org/
If you have any questions about the Stardom and Fandom area, please contact its Area Chair, Dr. Lynn Zubernis, Professor, West Chester University, at lzubernis@wcupa.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@southwestpca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.
We look forward to receiving your submissions!
Contact Info:
Lynn Zubernis, PhD
Professor, West Chester University
1160 McDermott Drive, Ste 102
West Chester PA 19380
Contact Email:
URL:
*
Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2022
“Virginia Woolf: For a Poetics & Politics of Intimacy”
Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France
Organised by ECLLA (Études du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues, Arts)
with the support of the French Society of Woolfian Studies and of CORPUS (UR-UPJV 4295)
Thursday, 11th of May 2023 and Friday, 12th of May 2023
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Elsa Högberg, Uppsala University and
Christine Reynier, Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University
“They’ve just sent the second batch of proofs [of Passenger to Teheran] which I have swallowed at a gulp. […] I kept saying ‘How I should like to know that woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do’, and then ‘No, I don’t– not altogether the woman who writes this.’ I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties […]. Indeed it is odd that now, having read this, I have picked up a good many things I had missed in private life. What are they, I wonder, the very intimate things, one says in print? There’s a whole family of them. Its [sic] the proof to me, of being a writer, that one expresses them in print only […].” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 290-291)
This excerpt from a letter written to Vita Sackville-West on the 15th of September 1926, while Virginia Woolf was proof-reading her intimate friend’s account of journeying through Persia prior to its publication by the Hogarth Press, is a telling illustration of the rich entanglement between intimacy and writing opening onto the numerous ways in which Woolf explores this question. She expresses here the fundamental difficulty of knowing the other (even when the other is an intimate friend), which is also at the core of her reflection upon characterization, and the necessity of turning to the written word both to express one’s own mind and to grasp the subtleties of the human mind. The paradoxical necessity of going public in order to express one’s private thoughts explains Woolf’s reticence to commit herself to autobiography: “Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye – afraid of autobiography.” (The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, 141). Yet at the same time, intimacy is defined as being beyond words; intimacy is “knowledge” says Lily Briscoe as she conjures up the figure of Mrs Ramsay while resting her head on the woman’s lap, “but nothing that could be written in any language known to men.” (To the Lighthouse, 305). Yet again, that type of knowledge proves to be equally fallacious: “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy? This is knowledge?” (To the Lighthouse, 390).
Expressing life, the mind (her own and the others’) is indissociable from Woolf’s modernist project to reshape the novel and injunction to both the reader of modernist fiction and the writers of her own spiritual generation to “look within.” In her effort to define “the proper stuff of fiction” she claims that the spirit of life should be conveyed with “as little mixture of the alien and external as possible,” (“Modern Fiction” Essays 4, 160) enjoining her contemporaries to stress the inward life of their characters, in keeping with the etymology of the adjective “intimate” (which stems from the Latin “interior” and from the superlative “intimus”, the most interior or the inmost.)
It is precisely with this injunction in mind that we propose to analyse intimacy and its political and ethical ramifications in Woolf’s oeuvre. For intimacy is as central to Woolf’s essays as it is to her fiction, and particularly her feminist essays. Both genres work through the political fabric of the intimate and in this respect might be seen to produce an original form of materialist feminism. Woolf’s radical endeavours flourished when she also had to navigate the atmosphere of “fear and suspicion” (VW in Marshik 3) that prevailed until the late 1920s, when censors and moralists still held a strong power over authors, printers and publishers as well as the general public (see Pease, Potter, Marshik & Pease). The literary strategies Woolf developed to circumvent censorship affect her representation of an embodied intimacy, turning the expression of the personal into an inevitably political gesture.
In A Room of One’s Own she voices women’s experiences and concerns by adopting the guise of a persona, a certain Mary Beton, giving her a woman’s body in direct contact with the issues she seeks to theorise. It is also obvious that the privacy of the room of one’s own is in fact spurious as the outside world keeps impinging upon it, just as the letter written in answer to a middle-aged educated man in Three Guineas is in fact a very public kind of address. The frontier between inside and outside, confidentiality and publicity is very porous indeed, and Woolf’s political commitment is deeply rooted in her own personal experience as an educated man’s daughter.
The question of intimacy has been central to Woolf studies and to modernist studies since the late 20th century (Bagguley and Seymour, Berlant, Frost, Illouz, Minow-Pinkney among others), but it seems to have gained momentum in recent years with the emergence of the field of affect studies, with publications ranging from Jessica Berman’s 2004 article, to Elsa Högberg’s 2020 Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy, to Jane Goldman’s 2021 chapter in Högberg’s Modernist Intimacies. Focusing primarily on four of Woolf’s modernist novels, Högberg’s 2020 study compellingly shows that the writing of intimacy and interiority is “configured as an aesthetic, but also ethical process.” In the wake of this thinking, arguing that Woolf “places intimacy at the centre of public and political as well as private relations”, we propose to examine how Woolf’s conception of intimacy, of human relations and of the self informs not only her fiction, but also her essays, auto/ biographies, diaries and correspondence. Woolf’s texts convey an ethical and a political stance which is inseparable from her poetics foregrounding introspection in a complex nexus of tensions and paradoxes which may be expressed in terms of the Woolfian concept of “vacillation” between within and without, secrecy and revelation, concealment and disclosure, the private and the public, the personal and the impersonal, the self and the other. These questions might equally be extended to consider the reception of Woolf’s work in France and the nature of the imprint of the intimate in the French response to Woolf, as it meets contemporary feminist thinking anachronistically (see Favre, Gérard, Jones, Lasserre, Meyer)
This conference intends to bring together Woolf scholars ready to engage with the subject of intimacy from diverse theoretical standpoints. We therefore invite papers on the literary, aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical and more broadly cultural aspects of Woolf’s œuvre, its origins, conception and reception both then and now.
Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:
*Following the first definition one finds in the OED of the word “intimacy” as “the state of being personally intimate, intimate friendship or acquaintance, familiar intercourse, close familiarity”: relationship between Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury; an ethics of intimacy. Influence of George Moore’s Principia Ethica, the “Memoir Club contributions”, the Bloomsbury group founded on the idea of friendship and truth telling. Thursday evenings as a catalyst for the group’s politics of style. In connection with the new domesticity invented by Bloomsbury, one could also look at real or imaginary places of intimacy, Hyde Park Gate, Monk’s House, Charleston, etc.
Virginia Woolf and friends/family: emulation and influence of Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, etc. Role played by Leonard Woolf in her literary career, in furthering her fame even posthumously (the way he shaped her diaries in A Writer’s Diary, how he represented her in his own lengthy autobiography). The Hogarth Press and its impact on Woolf’s work.
*Life-writing and autobiography: how to represent the other’s/one’s own intimacy. How Woolf’s conception of intimacy led her to revolutionize biography: the New Biography and her poetics of the individual. Diary writing vs letter writing: confessional aspect of these laboratories of the self and of her fiction.
Role played by the editors of her correspondence/diaries, by her biographers, in shaping an “intimate” Woolf. The way her papers were published (trimmed and censored or published in their entirety), the way we are given access to Woolf’s innermost thoughts and what different literary critical periods have made of them, what these editorial processes say about Woolf, but also about our own reception of her texts/images and about our own era.
*The fascination exerted by Woolf’s intimacy in recent works “recycling” her: her madness, her same-sex friendships are presented as a filter through which we are invited to read her fiction and essays. The way novelists have used her life as an inspiration; the modernist icon revisited (cf. The White Garden, a Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron, The Hours by Peter Cunningham or the recent movie Vita and Virginia, which, although they give a fictional, warped, partial and possibly erroneous version of Woolf, nevertheless add a complementary touch to the way Woolf is seen as part of the canon).
*Woolf’s photographic practice and conception of photography: Reticence towards self-portrayal and intimacy but photography as a necessary means to record private daily life. Visual apprehension of the self/of the other, role of her albums in her creation of a family romance. Link with Julia Margaret Cameron, role of her father’s Mausoleum Book in creating a visual genealogy redefining familiarity.
*Woolf’s aesthetic experiments and post-impressionism: towards an embodied formalism.
*Corporeality, body and mind, the question of “incarnation”: how intimacy, love, the body are represented, or transcended, negated or circumvented but always fundamental in her oeuvre as sensory experience is seen as necessary to artistic creation. The imprint of the intimate in contemporary readings of Woolf and feminist responses to Woolf.
*Woolf’s feminism as deriving from her ethics of intimacy, link between political space and private space. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas: the narrator is embodied, telling her story rather than his story, the personal is political: gender and sex, the androgynous mind as the naturally creative mind. Giving voice to women’s private experiences.
*Literature and psychoanalysis: relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis, simultaneous development of modern psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and literary modernism. Resonances with Lacan’s concept of “extimité.” Woolf’s fiction as exploration of the unconscious (cf. “Modern Fiction” in which she claims that her generation should explore “the dark places of psychology.” (Essays 4, 162). Links with Kristeva’s definition of intimacy as a “continuous copresence between the sensible and the intelligible – a true continuity, beyond division.” (Intimate Revolt, 47)
*Intimacy also means “closeness of observation, knowledge or the like” (cf. OED definition 1c) which may trigger reflections upon the intimacy between reader and writer: the reader’s affective investment in the novel’s content, link with the theory of reception. Intersection between the reader’s quest for meaning and the narrator’s quest for character. How reading and writing as intimate acts are possibly conducive to politically subversive acts of revolt. Woolf’s own practice as a reader, reviewer, and its effects on her writing.
*Modernizing characterization: “Life and the Novelist” or how to express the character’s interiority, how to cope with the unknowability of the other in a creative way. Woolf’s “tunnelling process” and her “digging out beautiful caves.” (Diary 2, 272, 263).
*Intimacy and modernism: looking within, expressing the modernist inward strand. The stylistic revolution of the stream of consciousness in promoting interiority, introspection and free indirect speech as a mode of intimate story-telling and in the twenties circumventing censorship.
We welcome proposals for papers preferably in English on the above-mentioned topics or any other topic which you may find relevant to the theme of the conference.
Please send abstracts of about 300 words together with a short biographical notice to woolfintimacy@gmail.com by 31st October 2022.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15th December 2022.
Contact :
Floriane Reviron-Piégay floriane.reviron.piegay@univ-st-etienne.fr
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio annemarie.dibiasio@gmail.com
Scientific committee:
Elizabeth Abel (University of California, Berkeley)
Anne Béchart-Léauté (Jean Monnet, St Etienne)
Catherine Bernard (Paris-Cité)
Anne Besnault (Rouen)
Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Adèle Cassigneul (Toulouse)
Rémi Digonnet (Jean Monnet, St Etienne)
Claire Davison (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Chantal Delourme (Paris-Nanterre)
Nadia Fusini (La Sapienza, Rome)
Maggie Humm (East London)
Mark Hussey (Pace University-New York)
Catherine Lanone (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Marie Laniel (Picardie, Jules Verne)
Frédéric Regard (Paris-Sorbonne)
Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Jean Monnet, St Etienne)
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (Institut Catholique de Paris)
*
Deadline for Submissions Oct. 31, 2022
Call for Papers
Narrative Matters Conference 2023
Instrumental Narratives: Narrative Studies and the Storytelling Boom
Tampere University, Finland, 15–17 June 2023
https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/
Welcome to the 11th Narrative Matters conference at Tampere!
The eleventh Narrative Matters conference is hosted by Tampere University (Finland) and co-organized by the Instrumental Narratives consortium project, SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies.
The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?
The conference will provide a platform for scholars to both seek new applications that might appeal to diverse audiences and to critically reflect on the instrumentalization of narrative studies. Most narrative scholars agree on the rich affordances of storytelling: narrative is a compact and intuitive form for sharing detailed, personal experiences as well as collective, community-forming ideas and outlooks. Thus narrative studies approaches lend generous support to the instrumentalization and commercialization of narrative form in business, politics, media, and personal development. Yet narrative may just as well be put to uses that are dubious if not dangerous. The widespread, uncritical use of narratives of personal experience in journalism and social media may have unintended and unanticipated consequences. Experientiality may come at the cost of informativeness. Furthermore, while narratives are ideally suited to conveying the complexity of human experience, the complexity of large social interactions or material processes, such as climate change, easily exceeds the capacity of storytelling. Now that the benefits of storytelling have caught the public imagination and are recognized in various professional practices, narrative scholarship is in a good position to disseminate critical practices for the analysis of the forms and contexts of storytelling as well.
We should also look into future narrative possibilities. The 21st century will no doubt be the era of social media and shared personal narratives, and therefore we should look for productive ways of connecting the personal with the political. How, for example, to bridge the gap between individual particularity and supra-individual concerns at the limits of narrative, such as the climate crisis and global inequality? How to conceptualize and control the afterlife of narratives determined by digital forms of narrative agency? Will new forms of narrative speculation direct our actions as citizens, consumers, and collectives? Which roles will be allotted to specific artistic, digital, and quotidian genres of storytelling? Are these new narrative genres and practices changing the ways people share their experience and use stories in the everyday? Are new affordances for narrative meaning making evolving?
We invite narrative scholars across disciplines to address the following (and related) issues:
* storytelling boom and its social relevance
* novel ways of storytelling today
* emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies
* sociological analysis of curated storytelling
* the study of storytelling rights and privileges; re-thinking of empathy
* narrative and post-truth
* narrative consultancy business; storytelling self-help and manuals
* story-critical reading in narrative studies; story-critical tools for audiences
* popularizing narrative theory and practices
* social life of narratives vs. analysis of individual texts
* narrative and action: political narratives, positioning and counter-narratives
* professional narratives and narratives of professions refigured
* the limits and affordances of narrative in making sense of illness and health
* the limits and affordances of narrative in addressing the environmental crisis
* uses and risks of viral storytelling and social media sharing
* discourse on well-being and cognitive benefits of literature
* the potential of fiction in analysing and resisting the narrative boom
The social events include a lake cruise to Viikinsaari island – dinner, sauna & swim!
TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION
– 2 hour train ride from the Helsinki airport
– direct flights to Tampere via 11 hubs
– strong hotel capacity in the campus area
Conference webpage / CFP and submission link: https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/call-for-papers/
CFP OPEN UNTIL OCTOBER 31, 2022!
Conference fee EUR 220 (faculty) / EUR 120 (student)
Pre-conference workshops, hosted by Jens Brockmeier, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Stefan Iversen & Ann Phoenix, will take place on Wednesday, June 14th. More information on registration and participation will be available by the end of September 2022!
Main organizers:
Maria Mäkelä, Matti Hyvärinen & Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Narrare)
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, SELMA)
Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki)
The Academy of Finland Consortium Project Instrumental Narratives https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/
Please send your paper and panel proposals by October 31, 2022! Here is the link to the submission form<https://www.lyyti.in/narrativematters2023cfp>
On behalf of the organizing team,
Hanna Meretoja
———————-
Hanna Meretoja
Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku, Finland
MAE (Member of Academia Europaea)
Tel. +358 50 329 1783
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ethics-of-storytelling-9780190649364?lang=en&cc=us
Call for Papers: “Am I Invisible?” Voices Society Silences
deadlines for submissions:
October 15, 2022 (Pre-Submission Ideas, Proposals, and Abstracts Deadline)
November 15, 2022 (Deadline for Drafts)
contact email:
SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com
In this special issue of _Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine_ (Vol. 8, slated for publication 2023; full schedule below), we ask students, educators, caregivers, victims/survivors, advocates, first responders, and all others who feel they are invisible to bring light to their experiences for others to see.
In an era of “me first” and social media filters that make snapshots seem like a perfect life–it is easy for people to feel and question if they are invisible in their pain. It is easy for people to feel the weight of society silencing your cries for help, and the increasing burden making the air too heavy to breathe. We seek to provide a microphone for those who wish to lighten their weight by acknowledging their experiences, to help others feel validated in knowing they are not alone, and to help folks know they are not invisible.
In this project, we are inspired by the work of the What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Survivor podcast (available at https://menaspeacemakers.podbean.com/), whose mission is to empower survivors/victims, and help people know they are not alone in what they are going through. The types of traumas discussed on the podcast are not limited to any specific type of trauma.
Contributors might explore these questions and other questions of their own:
-
- What would I say if the world would listen?
-
- What would I share if I didn’t fear the shame of ____?
-
- What would I say to those who are starting the journey, I am healing from?
-
- What is my story from trauma to healing?
-
- How might my journey have gone if people would have helped me when I needed it?
-
- What makes me feel invisible while in plain sight?
-
- What lies beneath the mask I feel obliged to wear?
-
- What is it society silences me from saying about___?
-
- How can I help others who are enduring what I have?
-
- How can we help others from experiencing the trauma I am?
-
- What has healing been like for me?
-
- How does my trauma weigh me down still?
-
- What they don’t tell you about being a survivor?
We especially would like to hear from people who have/are experiencing trauma (please note: authors can use a pseudonym). The truth is that the majority of us have or will experience trauma; the unfortunate truth is also that people tell us our trauma is not actually trauma. Trauma is trauma, and we want to help folks know they are not invisible, that we see you and you are not alone. We also want to give hope to others through sharing the journey of healing. Providing validation for those who might be hearing “It’s in the past move on.” or something else that minimizes their experience(s). Not asking folks to reopen wounds, but rather name them and share how the trauma has impacted your life. We encourage folks to share the ups and downs of their personal story on surviving and thriving.
SUBMISSION DEADLINE
-October 15, 2022: Deadline for Ideas, Proposals, and Abstracts. Authors who submit by October 15 will receive early feedback to help them grow, expand and develop ideas.
Submit to: SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com and to dbeard@d.umn.edu
-November 15th, 2022: Deadline for Completed Work. You do not need to have submitted an abstract to submit work on this deadline.
Submit to: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/
Summer 2023: Projected Publication
SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS
“Submissions” may include text (poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, scholarly argument) video, audio, or image files that express the aims and scope of the journal. Submissions cannot have been previously published.
A FEW SUGGESTED READINGS, in alphabetical order:
-
- A Road Accident
-
- A Road Accident
-
- A Buoy and a Lifehouse
-
- A Buoy and a Lifehouse
-
- Am I Invisible?
-
- Am I Invisible?
-
- After Trauma: Survivor Stories
-
- After Trauma: Survivor Stories
-
- Blog Stories: Our Wave
-
- Blog Stories: Our Wave
-
- Inmates learning and dealing with their own childhood trauma
-
- Inmates learning and dealing with their own childhood trauma
-
- Podcast: What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Survivor
-
- Podcast: What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Survivor
-
- Poems About Abuse
-
- Poems About Abuse
-
- Virtual Exhibit: Capturing My Healing
-
- Virtual Exhibit: Capturing My Healing
ABOUT SURVIVE AND THRIVE: A JOURNAL FOR MEDICAL HUMANITIES AND NARRATIVE AS MEDICINE
Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine aims to provide opportunities for sharing research, artistic work, pedagogical dialogue, and the practices of medical humanities and narrative as medicine. The journal serves a mission in education and the practice of humanities as they relate to illness, injury, and trauma. One of the primary aims of the journal is to bring medical humanities and narrative medicine to patients, survivors, and caregivers. Its emphasis, therefore, is on patients and survivors and their needs, and while aware of and supporting professional medical education, the journal is most concerned with an audience broader than an academic audience. We encourage physicians and others in the medical profession to practice Narrative as Medicine by submitting their work, especially when it encourages them to be artists – visual, performance, and literary.
Project co-edited by:
Laura Anderson, SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com
David Beard, DBeard@d.umn.edu
*
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2022
I am thrilled to announce that my fabulous colleague Tripthi Pillai and I are co-editing a new Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing (to be published in summer 2024). Please see the cfp below, consider sending us an abstract, and/or share widely with your networks!
Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing
Editors: Tripthi Pillai and Ina Seethaler
We invite abstracts for chapters of previously unpublished and original work to be included in the new Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing, which is under contract to be published in July 2024 as part of the Routledge Literature Companions series.
Covering both established and emerging topics and methodologies, The Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing equips readers with interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to women’s writing in the global context. Movements and experiences shaping the twenty-first century assert the urgent need for expanding and re-envisioning existing academic and social definitions as well as cultural perceptions of gender, location, and creative expression. In response to this growing need felt by diverse communities across the world, the collection forges new directions in and conceptualizations of identity, experience, and practice. Specifically, we welcome contributions that engage the three principle aspects informing the collection—“global,” “women,” and “writing”—in inclusive ways that not only broaden readers’ understanding of these key identities and concepts but also enable them to explore the underappreciated connections among them. Towards this end, the editors seek a multiplicity of voices from a variety of disciplines and geocultural landscapes. Similarly, we welcome with enthusiasm diverse perspectives, positionalities, and approaches, ranging from commentary on dominant/key debates to exploratory work on budding and innovative practices of global women’s writing.
Each section of the handbook offers a broad range of topics that are globally applicable and provide critical and creative access to the nexus of women’s writing.
Possible sections and topics include but are not limited to:
-
- Bodies:
-
- Disability and women’s self-expression
-
- Global perspectives on healthcare
-
- Spirituality, religion, and ritual
-
- Transgender poetics and politics
-
- Bodies:
-
- Locations:
-
- Language, borders, and migration
-
- Domesticity and negotiations of home
-
- Ecologies and environments
-
- Carceral experiences
-
- Locations:
-
- Media Landscapes:
-
- Body art as authorship and activism
-
- Graphic writings
-
- Women in gaming
-
- Social media and global communication
-
- Media Landscapes:
-
- Disruptive Canvases:
-
- Textiles as texts
-
- Storytelling through graffiti/murals/poster art
-
- Global foodways
-
- Artifacts and experiences of war
-
- Disruptive Canvases:
-
- Movements of Resistance:
-
- Global writing and #metoo
-
- Grassroots activism and movements
-
- Education and liberatory/oppressive practices
-
- Law, justice, and policy
-
- Movements of Resistance:
We are especially interested in contributions from authors at various stages of their careers who embrace interdisciplinary approaches and/or adopt practices of citational justice.
Please send an abstract of up to 350 words as well as a 200-word biography to tpillai@coastal.edu and iseethale@coastal.edu by October 15, 2022. Contributors will be notified by 15 November 2022 of their abstracts’ acceptance. Completed chapters of up to 6000 words will be expected by May 15, 2023. Some flexibility exists regarding word count, especially in the case of contributions that discuss non-dominant identities, geographies, and/or writing practices. Feel free to reach out to the editors with any queries.
Ina C. Seethaler, Ph.D. (she, her, hers)
Associate Professor/Director of Women’s and Gender Studies
HTC Honors College
Coastal Carolina University
Kearns 104B
PO Box 261954, Conway, SC 29528
iseethale@coastal.edu
843-349-6919
The land on which Coastal Carolina University stands is part of the traditional territory of the Waccamaw Indian People.
We honor them and express our gratitude to the ancestors who lived here in the past,
the Waccamaw Indian People today, and the generations to come
*
Disobedient Lives, Disorderly Archives: Social Justice Agency in Archival Spaces and Arts
ROUND TABLE at the 54th Annual NEMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention, to be held March 23rd-26th in Niagara Falls, NY, US.
deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2022
contact email:
Abstract: This roundtable will bring together scholars interested in developing and studying archives that push the boundaries of what we consider the archive. At the roundtable, through our work, we will consider questions that arise within archival practices and arts, such as: what constitutes or counts as an archive, what kinds of archival delineations should be drawn, pushed back against, or ruptured, and, perhaps most importantly, what is or should be the role of the archive in combating systemic injustice and advancing social justice? The roundtable seeks to bring together scholars across disciplines and community activists and archivists who are interested in the relationship between social justice activism and the archive, those who are building archives or deconstructing archives or imagining new and different archives with the goal of helping communities and those whose lives have been hidden or suppressed or ignored completely within archives.Archivist-activists and scholars interested in the political and social role of the archive, especially those whose projects are geared toward utilizing the archive as mechanism or space for social justice activism are invited to submit proposals that demonstrate the connection between their social justice concerns and their archival work and interests. The roundtable will be geared toward scholars and activists engaging the archive, in both material, corporeal and immaterial, conceptual senses. It will allow archivists and scholar-activists alike to come together to share and make wisdom concerning the use of the archive as a space for shaping and advancing social change, and for changing the social and material conditions of communities that have been marginalized, historically.
LINK to CFP/to submit: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/1979
Contact: jlmason1@buffalo.edu
Organizers/Co-Chairs: Nicole Crevar and Jessica Lowell Mason
*
The Art of Non/Resilience for People with Disabilities
Northeast Modern Language Association Conference
March 23-26, 2023. Niagara Falls, NY
deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2022
contact email:
Submit abstract here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20018
What is resilience for people with disabilities? What is recovery?
Narratives of illness, trauma and disability are often framed to emphasize recovery. Reflecting on resiliency, constructed ideas of normalcy, and “crip time,” Ellen Samuels writes: “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” (2017).
In working with disabled performers, disability scholar and artist Petra Kuppers notes the connection between the material oppression experienced by people with disabilities and the performance space. She writes:
“Many of the performers’ physical experiences mirrored their silencing in, and exclusion from, representation. Some had no space for themselves, their bodies, their movements in the social and physical environment. They are excluded from life alone, from getting an apartment; conformed to a timetable of contact with medical practitioners, or the even more rigorous timetable of pills and injection. Their bodies can be invaded, as the law allows them to be drugged against their will and involuntarily hospitalized. Their physical and mental privacy is often under threat” (2005).
Kuppers suggests there may be an added level of invisibility for people with disabilities because of the likely invasion of privacy through the process of disclosure. In offering up this context, Kuppers raises many questions about the production and spectacle of arts by people with disabilities. How do we see disability? How can we understand the tension of disclosure and hypervisibility? How do we build safer and more comfortable spaces for people with disabilities to present their art? How do relationships change after disclosure, and/or how do we recognize the need to pivot in states of crisis and illness? How do we recognize the work of disability artists?
In his poem, “I am too pretty for some Ugly Laws,” Lateef McLeod speaks to these experiences of both invisibility, hypervisibility, and historical oppression. He says: “My mere presence//of erratic moving limbs//and drooling smile//used to be scrubbed off the public pavement” (2018).
Through writing, poetry, acting, and many other mediums, we have the opportunity to convert the disabled bodymind from being solely what disabled performer Catherine Cole calls a “performer in a script [they] did not write” (2003). We can engage further and sit, stand, walk, seize, lay, etc in these spaces of disability, and ask what resilience and recovery means. We can also ask not only how disabled bodyminds are resilient, but how they are not.
This is a call for creative submissions that explore representations of disability, resilience, and recovery. Submissions can include, but are not limited to: poetry, art, film etc. What is resilience? What is recovery?
*
Deadline for Submissions Sept. 30, 2022
Call for Chapter Contributions
Diaspora/Diasporas: Cross-cultural Ibero-Caribbean Texts and Context
Editors: Irene M. F. Blayer (PhD), Brock University; Jo-Anne Ferreira (PhD), UWI Trinidad and Tobago; Dulce M. S. Scott (PhD), Anderson University
We envision this edited collection to be interdisciplinary and multidimensional, thus incorporating a set of diasporic areas of research within the Ibero-Caribbean context. Chapters are double-blind peer refereed. An invitation to submit a paper in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; this is dependent on the review process. Unpublished and original papers, in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French are welcome. Proposals that treat other topics not included below but that are of thematic relevance are welcome.
-
- Storying the Ibero-Caribbean diaspora
-
- Cultural histories in the context of diasporas and globalization
-
- Place, history and collective memories /
-
- Textualized identity
-
- Testimonies, diaries, chronicles, letters, autobiographies
-
- Migration and identity: the role of geographical place
-
- The diasporic imaginary: Self in the textual narrative
-
- Interfacing literary dialogues
-
- Circulation and reception of diaspora literature
-
- Bilingualism and multilingualism
-
- Language and cultural identity
-
- Translation and the trials of identity
-
- Tradition and social change
-
- Material and non-material culture
-
- Sociology and psychology of the migrant experience
-
- Oral vs. written narratives
-
- Cross-generational narratives/ diaries, chronicles, letters
-
- The economics of language policy in immigration
-
- Language, dislocation, and exile
-
- Cross-generational narratives
-
- Ethnography of language
-
- Re-imagining Ibero-American Insular spaces/worlds
Submissions
The deadline for the receipt of abstracts (450-500 words) and a biographical note (300-350 words) is September 30, 2022. Those invited to submit full chapters will be notified by December 30th, 2022.
Complete chapter drafts should be approximately 4,500-6,500 words including endnotes and bibliography. Chapters must follow the MLA style rules, and will be due June 30, 2023.
Prospective contributors should email all inquiries and submissions to: ibero.caribbean.diaspora@gmail.com
*
Studies in Travel Writing is seeking an Editor-in-Chief.
Routledge–Taylor and Francis
Applications must be submitted by 30 September.
Think this could be you? Read more and apply today.
*
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2022
Call for Chapter Contributions
Diaspora/Diasporas: Cross-cultural Ibero-Caribbean Texts and Context
Editors: Irene M. F. Blayer (PhD), Brock University; Jo-Anne Ferreira (PhD), UWI Trinidad and Tobago; Dulce M. S. Scott (PhD), Anderson University
We envision this edited collection to be interdisciplinary and multidimensional, thus incorporating a set of diasporic areas of research within the Ibero-Caribbean context. Chapters are double-blind peer refereed. An invitation to submit a paper in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; this is dependent on the review process. Unpublished and original papers, in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French are welcome. Proposals that treat other topics not included below but that are of thematic relevance are welcome.
-
- Storying the Ibero-Caribbean diaspora
-
- Cultural histories in the context of diasporas and globalization
-
- Place, history and collective memories /
-
- Textualized identity
-
- Testimonies, diaries, chronicles, letters, autobiographies
-
- Migration and identity: the role of geographical place
-
- The diasporic imaginary: Self in the textual narrative
-
- Interfacing literary dialogues
-
- Circulation and reception of diaspora literature
-
- Bilingualism and multilingualism
-
- Language and cultural identity
-
- Translation and the trials of identity
-
- Tradition and social change
-
- Material and non-material culture
-
- Sociology and psychology of the migrant experience
-
- Oral vs. written narratives
-
- Cross-generational narratives/ diaries, chronicles, letters
-
- The economics of language policy in immigration
-
- Language, dislocation, and exile
-
- Cross-generational narratives
-
- Ethnography of language
-
- Re-imagining Ibero-American Insular spaces/worlds
Submissions
The deadline for the receipt of abstracts (450-500 words) and a biographical note (300-350 words) is September 30, 2022. Those invited to submit full chapters will be notified by December 30th, 2022.
Complete chapter drafts should be approximately 4,500-6,500 words including endnotes and bibliography. Chapters must follow the MLA style rules, and will be due June 30, 2023.
Prospective contributors should email all inquiries and submissions to: ibero.caribbean.diaspora@gmail.com
*
Resilient Bodies: Beyond the Margins of Life Writing
deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2022
Northeast Modern Language Association
contact email:
Recent discussions in autobiography studies have increasingly shifted their focus to non-conventional forms of self-expression. In broader terms, life writing, which aims to reveal the self in all of its complexity, has inevitably evolved from a highly conventional genre to an open and ever-expanding practice that connects writing with other modes of representation. Discussions on autobiography have progressively become inclusive of non-literary forms of expression, such as performance, body and endurance art.
The works of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Abel Azcona, Cindy Sherman, and Sophie Calle, just to name a few, experiment with various conventions of visual and live art to push self-expression beyond the margins of writing and into the public domain. Many of these artists, such as Marina Abramovic and Abel Azcona – in particular through their “endurance art” installations – deal with themes of physical and emotional resilience to address the question of personal identity. Similarly, the performance art installations of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle question the stereotypes of self-representation and test the limits of autobiography by experimenting with different identities in different social contexts.
This session encourages the study of French and Francophone performance artists who work in the autobiography field which is an area that has been explored very little to date. Its purpose is to stimulate an interdisciplinary research and exchange between scholars from different fields and to promote French and Francophone art and culture.
This session welcomes interdisciplinary research that examines various forms of self-expression from different fields of inquiry such as literature, the visual and fine arts. Proposals should be submitted in 250 words max.
*
Deadline for Submissions Sept. 30, 2022
Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France
Thursday, 11 of May 2023th and Friday, 12th of May 2023
“Virginia Woolf: For a Poetics & Politics of Intimacy”
International Conference – Société d’Études Woolfiennes
Call for Papers
Organised by ECLLA (Études du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues, Arts)
with the support of the SEW and of CORPUS (UR-UPJV 4295)
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Elsa Högberg, Uppsala University and
Christine Reynier, Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University
“They’ve just sent the second batch of proofs [of Passenger to Teheran] which I have swallowed at a gulp. […] I kept saying ‘How I should like to know that woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do’, and then ‘No, I don’t– not altogether the woman who writes this.’ I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties […]. Indeed it is odd that now, having read this, I have picked up a good many things I had missed in private life. What are they, I wonder, the very intimate things, one says in print? There’s a whole family of them. Its [sic] the proof to me, of being a writer, that one expresses them in print only […].” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 290-291)
This excerpt from a letter written to Vita Sackville-West on the 15th of September 1926, while Virginia Woolf was proof-reading her intimate friend’s account of journeying through Persia prior to its publication by the Hogarth Press, is a telling illustration of the rich entanglement between intimacy and writing opening onto the numerous ways in which Woolf explores this question. She expresses here the fundamental difficulty of knowing the other (even when the other is an intimate friend), which is also at the core of her reflection upon characterization, and the necessity of turning to the written word both to express one’s own mind and to grasp the subtleties of the human mind. The paradoxical necessity of going public in order to express one’s private thoughts explains Woolf’s reticence to commit herself to autobiography: “Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye – afraid of autobiography.” (TheDiary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, 141). Yet at the same time, intimacy is defined as being beyond words; intimacy is “knowledge” says Lily Briscoe as she conjures up the figure of Mrs Ramsay while resting her head on the woman’s lap, “but nothing that could be written in any language known to men.” (To the Lighthouse, 305). Yet again, that type of knowledge proves to be equally fallacious: “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy? This is knowledge?” (To the Lighthouse, 390).
Expressing life, the mind (her own and the others’) is indissociable from Woolf’s modernist project to reshape the novel and injunction to both the reader of modernist fiction and the writers of her own spiritual generation to “look within.” In her effort to define “the proper stuff of fiction” she claims that the spirit of life should be conveyed with “as little mixture of the alien and external as possible,” (“Modern Fiction” Essays 4, 160) enjoining her contemporaries to stress the inward life of their characters, in keeping with the etymology of the adjective “intimate” (which stems from the Latin “interior” and from the superlative “intimus”, the most interior or the inmost.)
It is precisely with this injunction in mind that we propose to analyse intimacy and its political and ethical ramifications in Woolf’s oeuvre. For intimacy is as central to Woolf’s essays as it is to her fiction, and particularly her feminist essays. Both genres work through the political fabric of the intimate and in this respect might be seen to produce an original form of materialist feminism. Woolf’s radical endeavours flourished when she also had to navigate the atmosphere of “fear and suspicion” (VW in Marshik 3) that prevailed until the late 1920s, when censors and moralists still held a strong power over authors, printers and publishers as well as the general public (see Pease, Potter, Marshik & Pease). The literary strategies Woolf developed to circumvent censorship affect her representation of an embodied intimacy, turning the expression of the personal into an inevitably political gesture.
In A Room of One’s Own she voices women’s experiences and concerns by adopting the guise of a persona, a certain Mary Beton, giving her a woman’s body in direct contact with the issues she seeks to theorise. It is also obvious that the privacy of the room of one’s own is in fact spurious as the outside world keeps impinging upon it, just as the letter written in answer to a middle-aged educated man in Three Guineas is in fact a very public kind of address. The frontier between inside and outside, confidentiality and publicity is very porous indeed, and Woolf’s political commitment is deeply rooted in her own personal experience as an educated man’s daughter.
The question of intimacy has been central to Woolf studies and to modernist studies since the late 20th century (Bagguley and Seymour, Berlant, Frost, Illouz, Minow-Pinkney among others), but it seems to have gained momentum in recent years with the emergence of the field of affect studies, with publications ranging from Jessica Berman’s 2004 article, to Elsa Högberg’s 2020 Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy, to Jane Goldman’s 2021 chapter in Högberg’s Modernist Intimacies. Focusing primarily on four of Woolf’s modernist novels, Högberg’s 2020 study compellingly shows that the writing of intimacy and interiority is “configured as an aesthetic, but also ethical process.” In the wake of this thinking, arguing that Woolf “places intimacy at the centre of public and political as well as private relations”, we propose to examine how Woolf’s conception of intimacy, of human relations and of the self informs not only her fiction, but also her essays, auto/ biographies, diaries and correspondence. Woolf’s texts convey an ethical and a political stance which is inseparable from her poetics foregrounding introspection in a complex nexus of tensions and paradoxes which may be expressed in terms of the Woolfian concept of “vacillation” between within and without, secrecy and revelation, concealment and disclosure, the private and the public, the personal and the impersonal, the self and the other. These questions might equally be extended to consider the reception of Woolf’s work in France and the nature of the imprint of the intimate in the French response to Woolf, as it meets contemporary feminist thinking anachronistically (see Favre, Gérard, Jones, Lasserre, Meyer)
This conference intends to bring together Woolf scholars ready to engage with the subject of intimacy from diverse theoretical standpoints. We therefore invite papers on the literary, aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical and more broadly cultural aspects of Woolf’s œuvre, its origins, conception and reception both then and now.
Topics of interest may include, but are not limited to:
*Following the first definition one finds in the OED of the word “intimacy” as “the state of being personally intimate, intimate friendship or acquaintance, familiar intercourse, close familiarity”: relationship between Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury; an ethics of intimacy. Influence of George Moore’s Principia Ethica, the “Memoir Club contributions”, the Bloomsbury group founded on the idea of friendship and truth telling. Thursday evenings as a catalyst for the group’s politics of style. In connection with the new domesticity invented by Bloomsbury, one could also look at real or imaginary places of intimacy, Hyde Park Gate, Monk’s House, Charleston, etc.
Virginia Woolf and friends/family: emulation and influence of Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, etc. Role played by Leonard Woolf in her literary career, in furthering her fame even posthumously (the way he shaped her diaries in A Writer’s Diary, how he represented her in his own lengthy autobiography). The Hogarth Press and its impact on Woolf’s work.
*Life-writing and autobiography: how to represent the other’s/one’s own intimacy. How Woolf’s conception of intimacy led her to revolutionize biography: the New Biography and her poetics of the individual. Diary writing vs letter writing: confessional aspect of these laboratories of the self and of her fiction.
Role played by the editors of her correspondence/diaries, by her biographers, in shaping an “intimate” Woolf. The way her papers were published (trimmed and censored or published in their entirety), the way we are given access to Woolf’s innermost thoughts and what different literary critical periods have made of them, what these editorial processes say about Woolf, but also about our own reception of her texts/images and about our own era.
*The fascination exerted by Woolf’s intimacy in recent works “recycling” her: her madness, her same-sex friendships are presented as a filter through which we are invited to read her fiction and essays. The way novelists have used her life as an inspiration; the modernist icon revisited (cf. The White Garden, a Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron, The Hours by Peter Cunningham or the recent movie Vita and Virginia, which, although they give a fictional, warped, partial and possibly erroneous version of Woolf, nevertheless add a complementary touch to the way Woolf is seen as part of the canon).
*Woolf’s photographic practice and conception of photography: Reticence towards self-portrayal and intimacy but photography as a necessary means to record private daily life. Visual apprehension of the self/of the other, role of her albums in her creation of a family romance. Link with Julia Margaret Cameron, role of her father’s Mausoleum Book in creating a visual genealogy redefining familiarity.
*Woolf’s aesthetic experiments and post-impressionism: towards an embodied formalism.
*Corporeality, body and mind, the question of “incarnation”: how intimacy, love, the body are represented, or transcended, negated or circumvented but always fundamental in her oeuvre as sensory experience is seen as necessary to artistic creation. The imprint of the intimate in contemporary readings of Woolf and feminist responses to Woolf.
*Woolf’s feminism as deriving from her ethics of intimacy, link between political space and private space. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas: the narrator is embodied, telling her story rather than his story, the personal is political: gender and sex, the androgynous mind as the naturally creative mind. Giving voice to women’s private experiences.
*Literature and psychoanalysis: relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis, simultaneous development of modern psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and literary modernism. Resonances with Lacan’s concept of “extimité.” Woolf’s fiction as exploration of the unconscious (cf. “Modern Fiction” in which she claims that her generation should explore “the dark places of psychology.” (Essays 4, 162). Links with Kristeva’s definition of intimacy as a “continuous copresence between the sensible and the intelligible – a true continuity, beyond division.” (Intimate Revolt, 47)
*Intimacy also means “closeness of observation, knowledge or the like” (cf. OED definition 1c) which may trigger reflections upon the intimacy between reader and writer: the reader’s affective investment in the novel’s content, link with the theory of reception. Intersection between the reader’s quest for meaning and the narrator’s quest for character. How reading and writing as intimate acts are possibly conducive to politically subversive acts of revolt. Woolf’s own practice as a reader, reviewer, and its effects on her writing.
*Modernizing characterization: “Life and the Novelist” or how to express the character’s interiority, how to cope with the unknowability of the other in a creative way. Woolf’s “tunnelling process” and her “digging out beautiful caves.” (Diary 2, 272, 263).
*Intimacy and modernism: looking within, expressing the modernist inward strand. The stylistic revolution of the stream of consciousness in promoting interiority, introspection and free indirect speech as a mode of intimate story-telling and in the twenties circumventing censorship.
We welcome proposals for papers preferably in English on the above-mentioned topics or any other topic which you may find relevant to the theme of the conference.
Please send abstracts of about 300 words together with a short biographical notice to woolfintimacy@gmail.com by 30th September 2022.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15th November 2022.
Contact :
Floriane Reviron-Piégay floriane.reviron.piegay@univ-st-etienne.fr
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio annemarie.dibiasio@gmail.com
Scientific committee:
Elizabeth Abel (University of California, Berkeley)
Catherine Bernard (Paris-Cité)
Anne Besnault (Rouen)
Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Adèle Cassigneul (Toulouse)
Claire Davison (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Chantal Delourme (Paris-Nanterre)
Nadia Fusini (La Sapienza, Rome)
Maggie Humm (East London)
Mark Hussey (Pace University-New York)
Catherine Lanone (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Marie Laniel (Picardie, Jules Verne)
Frédéric Regard (Paris-Sorbonne)
Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Jean Monnet, St Etienne)
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (Institut Catholique de Paris)
Works of reference:
BERLANT, Lauren. Intimacy. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2000.
BERMAN, Jessica. “Ethical Folds: Ethics; Aesthetics, Woolf,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, n°. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 151-72.
BERSANI, Leo & PHILLIPS, Adam. Intimacies. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2008.
DELOURME, Chantal. Et une phrase… Virginia Woolf, écrire dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Paris : ENS Éditions, 2021.
FAVRE, Valérie. Virginia Woolf et ses “petites sœurs” : Relire A Room of One’s Own au prisme de sa postérité littéraire, critique et féministe dans l’espace atlantique anglophone des années soixante à nos jours, PhD Dissertation, Lyon 2, 2021.
GÉRARD, Valérie. Les Formes du chaos : sur l’art politique de V. Woolf. MF Éditions, 2022.
GOLDMAN, Jane. “Burning Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Laboratory of Intimacy” in HÖGBERG, Elsa, ed., Modernist Intimacies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, pp. 52-73.
HÖGBERG, Elsa. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
—, ed. Modernist Intimacies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021.
HUMM, Maggie. Talland House: A Novel. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2020.
ILLOUZ, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity Press, 2007.
JONES, Clara. Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017.
KRISTEVA, Julia. Intimate Revolt. The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, 1997. Trans. HERMAN, Jeanine. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
LASSERRE, Audrey. Histoire d’une littérature en mouvement : textes, écrivaines et collectifs éditoriaux du Mouvement de libération des femmes en France (1970-1981), PhD Dissertation, Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, 2014.
LIGHT, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
MARSHIK, Celia. British Modernism and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
MARSHIK, C. & PEASE, A. Modernism, Sex, and Gender. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
MEYER, Suzel. Écrire l’histoire au féminin : autour de The Years de Virginia Woolf et des Années d’Annie Ernaux, PhD Dissertation, Strasbourg, 2020.
MINOW-PINKNEY, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers UP, 1987.
PEASE, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
POTTER, Rachel. Obscene Modernism. Literary Censorship & Experiment 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
REYNIER, Christine. Virginia Woolf’s “Good Housekeeping” Essays. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
SANGER, Tam & TAYLOR, Yvette, eds. Mapping Intimacies: Relations, Exchanges, Affects. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013.
SEYMOUR, Julie & BAGGULEY, Paul, eds. Relating Intimacies: Power and Resistance. London: Macmillan, 1999.
WOLFE, Jesse. Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.
(FWF-Project “Co-Producing and Using Identity Documents. Habsburg Monarchy/Austria ca. 1850-1938”)
The workshop deals with the co-production and use of identity documents from a historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Establishing the identity of persons was (and still is) fundamental for a variety of tasks and operations of the state. In the course of the last centuries, various forms of identification and registration became subject to ever more precise state regulations and were adapted or fully taken over by state authorities. Yet, at the same time, practices of identification, registration and categorization of individuals were never exclusively a matter of statehood and citizenship, subject to governmentality, bureaucracy, surveillance and migration control. Identity papers were not exclusively produced and used by or vis á vis state authorities. Historically, various parties could be (and remained) involved in practices of identification and registration, ranging from religious organizations, trade or occupational associations, employers, unions, political organisations, landlords, welfare organizations, companies, creditors, or recreation clubs. Such parties provided information, produced data, checked documents, or even issued their own papers. They fulfilled tasks assigned to them, while following or adopting regulations issued by authorities with (greater or lesser) enthusiasm or accuracy. At the same time, the parties involved in such tasks often pursued their own agendas, producing and using papers for their own purposes. Individuals – who in most cases are seen as wholly subjected to identification, surveillance, or control – contributed to the production of their official identities in a variety of ways: by complying with official directives and cooperating with authorities; by initiating administrative processes themselves, (co-)producing information, forging documents or dealing with missing or incoherent documents; and by avoiding or boycotting identification. It is not always apparent or conclusively established where in such entanglements state bureaucracy started or ended.
In order to investigate why certain forms of identification functioned historically as successful or failed, or were altered, or varied in an international context, the workshop will reflect on the diversity of contexts and constellations in which documents were produced and used and in which the parties involved interacted in consensus or conflict.
The workshop will take place from 22.9.to 23.9. 2022 at the University of Vienna (Main building, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna, TP, seminar room 1 and 4 in a hybrid format.
Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. To register, please send an email to sigrid.wadauer@univie.ac.at before 12.9.2022.
Program
22.9.2022 SR 1 | |
9:00–9:20 | Sigrid Wadauer (University of Vienna): Welcome and Introduction |
Documents – Local Authorities – Migration | |
Chair: Sigrid Wadauer (University of Vienna) | |
9:20–10:00 | Beate Althammer (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): Registering Migrants in Prussian Cities (ca. 1880 to 1914) |
10:00–10:40 | Anne Winter (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) / Hilde Greefs (University of Antwerp / Zoom): Identity Documents of Foreign Migrants Arriving in Antwerp (1850–1910) |
10:40–11:10 | Coffee Break |
Documents – Citizenship – Interactions | |
11:10–11:50 | Lida–Maria Dodou (University of Vienna / Austrian Archaeological Institute Athens): The Spectrum of Belonging: Austrian “de jure subjects”, “de facto subjects” and “protégés” in Fin–de–siècle Salonica |
11:50–13:30 | Lunch Break |
Chair: Jessica Richter (Institute of Rural History, St. Pölten) | |
13:30–14:10 | Darren Wan (Cornell University): Brokering Citizenship: Illiteracy and Illegibility in the Production of Malayan Identity Documents, 1957–1963 |
14:10–14:50 | Juanita Cox (University of London): Identification Documents: Practices and Perspectives from the Black British Caribbean Community |
14:50–15:10 | Coffee Break |
Documents and Categorization | |
15:10–15:50 | Michal Turski (Center for Historical Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Berlin): Meanders of Ethnic Registration and Categorization of Polish Germans in the Lodz Region during World War II. |
15:50–16:30 | Christiane Weber (Arolsen Archives/Germany): Who Decides Who is a DP? Post–World War II Identification Documents of Displaced Persons in the Arolsen Archives |
16:30–16:50 | Coffee Break |
16:50–17:30 | András László Pap (Centre for Social Sciences Institute for Legal Studies/Budapest / Zoom): Ethno-racial Identity in Documents: from Registration to Construction |
23.9.2022 SR 4 | |
Documents – Work, Control and Coercion | |
Chair: Beate Althammer (Humboldt University zu Berlin) | |
9:00–9:40 | Paolo Raspadori (University of Perugia): Demographic and Social Control Tool. Staff Papers of Industrial Companies as Identity Documents of Italian Workers (First Half of the Twentieth Century) |
9:40–10:20 | Bernard Kusena (University of Zimbabwe): Forced Labour Recruitment and the Political Economy of Identity Documents: Clandestine Migration and Other Everyday Forms of Resistance in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1980 |
10:20–10:40 | Coffee Break |
10:40–11:20 | Chris Holdridge (North–West University, Potchefstroom/South Africa): Convict Mobility and Emergent Regimes of Paperwork and Interpersonal Status in Port Cities of the Anglo World |
Illicit Uses and Forged Documents | |
Chair: Johanna Wassholm (Åbo Akademi, Finland) | |
11:20–12:00 | Cristina Diac (National Institute for the Study of Totalitarianism of the Romanian Academy): Navigating Multiple Identities. Romanian Communists and their Travels Abroad |
12:00–13:30 | Lunch Break |
13:30–14:10 | Burak Sayım (New York University Abu Dhabi / Zoom): Crossing the Frontier: The Comintern, Forged Passports, and the Making of Interwar Border Regimes |
14:10–14:30 | Conclusions |
With the kind support of:
FWF – Der Wissenschaftsfonds
Stadt Wien, MA 7 – Kultur, Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung
University of Vienna (FSP Global History, Department of Economic and Social History)
Contact Info:
PD Dr. Sigrid Wadauer
Department of Economic and Social History
University of Vienna
Universitätsring 1
1010 Vienna
Austria
https://www.sigridwadauer.com/
Contact Email:
*
Deadline for Submissions Sept. 10, 2022
Uppity Medieval Women Across the Globe
International Congress on Medieval Studies (Michigan USA hybrid), and other potential conferences
(9/10/2022; 5/11-13/2023)
In 1998, Vicki Leon published Uppity Women of Medieval Times, providing brief vignettes of primarily European medieval women fitting the description. As the field of Medieval Studies has been taking a global turn, this proposal seeks to put European uppity women into a deeper and more substantial conversation with their global sisters, such as the Japanese Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the Indian Nur Jahan, the Nigerian Queen Amina, and the Arabic Walladabint al-Mustakfi, to name a few. Uppity medieval women transgress their patriarchally assigned positions of immanence, often with the pen, the sword, and through sex. In an attempt to break new ground, we seek contributions that explore uppity medieval women––both historical and fictional–– from global perspectives. Comparative perspectives that trace similar experiences are highly encouraged. Reading the Middle Ages from a broader vantage point that illustrates how women worldwide were facing comparable experiences and challenges helps us understand the Middle Ages and feminism through a new lens.
Please email your 200-word abstract and a 100-word biography to Anita Obermeier (aobermei@unm.edu) and to Doaa Omran (Domran@unm.edu) by the 10th of September 2022.
We are having online and face-to-face sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS). Our two panels are titled “Assertive Medieval Women Across the Globe I” and “Assertive Medieval Women Across the Globe II (A Virtual Roundtable).” The deadline for abstract submission on the congress website is the 15th of September 2022. Here is the submission link: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2023/cfp.cgi
We are also considering organising panels at Leeds International Medieval Congress (IMC) https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2023/ and the Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP) https://www.medievalpacific.org/annual-conference/ .
Since we are trying to get a critical manuscript for an edited volume, we are proposing this session for several conferences, although in different formats.
*
Deadline for Submissions, Sept. 1, 2022
The Amsterdam School of Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity.
Postdoctoral researcher Amsterdam Diaries: Self-representation, Cultural Diversity, and Migration
Faculty/Services: Faculty of Humanities
Educational level: Promoted
Function type: Academic Staff
Closing date: 1 September 2022
Vacancy number: 9819
The Amsterdam School of Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity. Within this field the focus is on material and immaterial heritage, including digital Humanities and on Cultural Heritage and societal changes. ARTES is one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research.
What are you going to do
You will be part of an interdisciplinary research team that collects and analyzes diaries of ordinary people of the 19th and 20th centuries who wrote about their daily lives in Amsterdam. In the light of Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary in 2025, the team investigates what diaries can tell us about lived and narrated experiences of Amsterdam as a multicultural city. We will use a flexible conception of ‘diary’ in order to include other forms of self-representation, such as drawings or self-recorded stories on cassette tape.
First, you will help organize a diary donating campaign in cooperation with the Dutch Diary Archive and the Amsterdam Museum in order to collect new diaries. We will focus on migrant ego-documents because these are underrepresented in archives and scholarly research. The task is to involve local communities and gain support to help build a more inclusive and diverse diary-collection. Knowledge of the history of migrants, as well as relevant languages, will be an asset.
Second, you will study representations of self and the city in a selection of diaries from the newly gained materials as well as from archives such as the Dutch Diary Archive, Stadsarchief, Joods historisch Museum, Atria, Niod, Black Archives, IHLIA, and xpatarchive. The aim is to understand how individuals with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds express feelings of (non-)belonging, and in what ways they narrate their experiences of (intercultural) spaces, encounters and connections and their sense of what is familiar and foreign.
Third, you will help developing tools from Digital Humanities to store and map historical information about diaries and diarists in their spatial and temporal contexts. You will contribute to creating a digital resource, similar to (or as part of) the Amsterdam Time Machine, which will enable users to ‘travel back in time and navigate the city on the levels of neighborhoods, streets, houses and rooms’ (https://www.amsterdamtimemachine.nl/). Ideally, this will connect stories from multiple perspectives to particular places such as streets, parks, bars and buildings.
Your tasks and responsibilities:
-
- conducting research, presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences and publishing two single-authored, peer reviewed articles;
-
- participating in meetings of the project research group and developing a shared database;
-
- co-organising knowledge dissemination activities.
What do you have to offer
Your experience and profile:
-
- a PhD in the Humanities;
-
- excellent research skills demonstrated by a track record of publishing in high-ranking journals and/or with leading presses or a demonstrable capacity to develop such a record;
-
- a strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
-
- enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
-
- excellent command English.
What can we offer you
The Postdoc researcher will be appointed at the Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam and will conduct the research in ARTES. The employment contract will be for one year. Contingent on a positive performance evaluation the contract will be extended with one year. The employment contract is for 30,4-38 hours a week. Preferred starting date is 01 October 2022.
The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and relevant experience, ranges between € 3,974,00 to € 5,439,00. This sum does not include the 8% holiday allowance and the 8,3% year-end allowance. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.
What else do we offer
-
- excellent possibilities for further professional development and education, including participation in a dedicated Research Training group;
-
- an enthusiastic, inspiring and professional academic team;
-
- the opportunity to collaborate with leading researchers at research institutes that – partly as a result of their interdisciplinary approach – are world renowned.
About us
The University of Amsterdam is the Netherlands’ largest university, offering the widest range of academic programmes. At the UvA, 30,000 students, 6,000 staff members and 3,000 PhD candidates study and work in a diverse range of fields, connected by a culture of curiosity.
The Faculty of Humanities provides education and conducts research with a strong international profile in a large number of disciplines in de field of language and culture. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, the faculty maintains close ties with many cultural institutes in the capital city. Research and teaching staff focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and are active in several teaching programmes.
Want to know more about our organisation? Read more about working at the University of Amsterdam.
Questions
Do you have any questions or do you require additional information? Please contact:
Job application
If you feel the profile fits you, and you are interested in the job, we look forward to receiving your application. You can apply online via the link below. The deadline for applying for this vacancy is 01 September 2022.
Applications should include the following information (submitted in one pdf):
-
- A letter of motivation.
-
- A research proposal of 800-1000 words, explaining how you would approach the project thematically, conceptually and methodologically, within the timeline of the 2 years appointment.
-
- A full academic CV, including a list of publications.
-
- The names and contact details of two references who may be approached by the selection committee.
Only complete applications received within the response period via the link below will be considered.
The interviews will be held in the course of the first weeks of September 2022.
The UvA is an equal-opportunity employer. We prioritise diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for everyone. We value a spirit of enquiry and perseverance, provide the space to keep asking questions, and promote a culture of curiosity and creativity.
If you encounter Error GBB451, reach out to our HR Department directly. They will gladly help you continue your application.
No agencies please
*
Call for Contributors
Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 393 (Twenty-First Century Indigenous Fiction Writers in the United States and Canada), edited by Derek C. Maus (State University of New York at Potsdam, which sits on unceded Haudenosaunee territory)
deadline for submissions: August 1, 2022
I am seeking scholars – a range that includes doctoral students through emeritus/emerita faculty – interested in contributing to a new volume in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Upon its contracted publication in the summer of 2023, this resource will fill a massive gap in the biographical and bibliographic coverage of contemporary Indigenous authors of fiction living and working within the settler nations of the United States and Canada. It has been nearly a quarter-century since volume 175 of this series covered “Native American Writers of the United States” (1997) and although a handful of major figures from the latter half of the twentieth century have been covered in other DLB volumes, no comprehensive volume dedicated to a broad overview of post-“Native American Renaissance” Indigenous writing has yet been produced as part of this important reference source.
With the publication of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (ed. Joy Harjo, Leanne Howe, et al.) in 2020, Indigenous poetry received a major boost in mainstream visibility. Although the intent of that volume and the Dictionary of Literary Biography is somewhat different, my hope is that this volume can shine a similarly bright light on a broad sampling of Indigenous authors who have published works of fiction since 1997, the last time DLB published a volume exclusively focused on Indigenous writers.
I would especially like to use this volume to cover a number of emerging or otherwise lesser-known writers who have not received previous attention within this series. For this reason, the list of names for whom I am seeking bio-/bibliographic entries includes numerous authors whose published body of work to date includes only one or two book-length works, often ones that appeared in the last few years. It is absolutely essential to recognize and to recontextualize such eminent authors such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor, all of whom have all continued publishing fiction since their inclusion in vol. 175. However, no adequate overview of the full diversity of fiction published by Indigenous authors in the past two decades exists and this volume is well-positioned to fill that gap. Therefore, I have included more names of authors than can ultimately be covered in the volume, but I have done so with the hope of casting as wide a net as possible. If there are other authors who you believe merit coverage, please do not hesitate in suggesting them to me as there are surely gaps in my own experience of contemporary Indigenous fiction.
Alongside authors of fairly conventional “literary” fiction, I have also included some authors primarily known for “young adult” fiction as well as some whose work is primarily graphic fiction. I have also included a handful of figures (e.g., Tomson Highway) who are known far more for their work in other genres than fiction. The essays in this collection should focus only on their subject’s published works of fiction since 1997, though there obviously will be occasions for making reference to earlier works and/or works in other genres/media.
In recognition of the added logistical and mental/emotional complications brought on by the upheaval in academic working conditions, completed essays for the collection are due as e-mail attachments by August 1, 2022. The word-counts (which include bibliographic data) included for each entry in the linked spreadsheet are fairly firm, though they can be exceeded in some exceptional instances if negotiated in advance. Gale compensates authors in this series for entries at a rate of $40 per 1000 words (as listed in the spreadsheet); thus, a 3000-word entry earns $120, a 5000-word entry earns $200, etc. I sincerely wish this could be more, but I am grateful that any resources are being set aside to make this project a reality, because it is long overdue.
If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send me an email at mausdc@potsdam.edu and I will send you the current list of “unclaimed” authors. If you have the time, the inclination, and the mental energy to contribute to this project, I sincerely invite you to do so. I am happy to answer any additional questions about the book, the series, or any other aspect of the project via e-mail. Derek C. Maus, editor contact email: mausdc@potsdam.edu
Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”
The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
deadline for submissions:
July 10, 2022
lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz
The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.
Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:
– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons
The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture
Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).
The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022
*
Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2022
Call for Papers for proposed panel for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2022
November 11-13, 2022 in Jacksonville, FL
Autobiography: Changes in Form and Meaning
This interdisciplinary panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of change within life writing. With the proliferation of modes available for what Anna Poletti has termed “self-life-inscription,” and a concurrent rise in hybrid genres such as autofiction that challenge the assumed boundary between truth and fiction in autobiographical narrative, it is clear that the scope of what is considered autobiography is changing. This panel seeks to articulate these changes and explore how they are impacting our understanding of the meaning and significance of life writing. Papers might explore changes in the medium of autobiography, such as social media, photography, film, graphic narratives, material collections, or performance. Papers might also address changes within established forms such as confession, memoir, the personal essay, or the diary. Theoretical considerations of change, transformation, or conversion within autobiography would also be welcome. By July 15th, please submit an abstract of 250 words, a brief bio, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Kimberly Hall, Wofford College, at hallka@wofford.edu
The SAMLA Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront. For additional conference information, please see the SAMLA website: https://samla.memberclicks.net.
*
CFP: Out of Confinement: Creativity in Constraint
Women in French Studies Special Issue (2024)
July 15, 2022
contact email:
We invite article submissions for a special topics issue of Women in French Studies (2024) to explore work created by confined women and work that represents confined women, from the early modern period to the present-day. The special issue will explore how the confinement of women as depicted in fictional and non-fictional texts (in any media) informs, reflects and interrogates gendered conditions of existence. How have confined women been represented in literature, film and art? What kind of thinking or writing is produced by women out of conditions of confinement? What are the impacts of confinement on creative production? How does physical confinement change how we consume texts?
In March 2020, the word confinement suddenly became an unwelcome part of our everyday lexicon, as lockdown, quarantine, and stay-at-home orders were issued worldwide to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Within the household, mandatory confinement exacerbated women’s perennially uneven obligation to engage in invisible labor—whether middle-class women working from home, or working-class women compelled to risk their health so that others could abide by the imperative to stay in. Both within and outside the home, women were disproportionately tasked with “essential,” racialized and gendered, structurally invisible forms of labor, including childcare, cleaning, healthcare, food preparation, and eldercare.
Since the early modern period, accounts of women’s experiences in voluntary or forced confinement have been richly explored in works by French-language writers as diverse as Marie de France, Marguerite de Navarre, Assia Djebar, and Marie Darrieussecq, to name a few. On the one hand, representations of confinement can confirm that gender disparities are exacerbated when burdens are unequally shouldered by women during periods of confinement. On the other hand, representations of cloister or retreat that express the fantasy of liberatory or self-actualizing confinement, in explicitly repudiating familial or social obligations, can unsettle the caregiving roles traditionally assigned to women, as spouses, mothers, or daughters.
We invite proposals from all historic periods, genres, and geographic regions.
Suggested topics
- cloisters, convents
- imprisonment, incarceration
- internment
- segregated confinement (solitary confinement))/home confinement (house arrest)
- stay-at-home mothers (domestic confinement)
- the “hold” and conditions of enslavement
- COVID-19 “Stay-at-home” orders
- sanatoriums/illness/disease
- childbirth/bedrest
- anchorites and anchoresses
- hostage situations/kidnapping
- asylums
- disability, design and space
- bourgeois refuge, rural life, the “country house”
- artist studio, artist space, residency, retreat
Abstracts of 250-300 words, in French or in English should be sent to Youna Kwak (youna_kwak@redlands.edu) and Anne Brancky (anbrancky@vassar.edu) by July 15, 2022. Notification of acceptance will be made by September 1, 2022, with final drafts of selected articles due April 2023. Articles will be subject to peer review. Authors must be current members of Women in French at the time of publication.
*
Call for Papers
Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory
Edited by Karen McNally
Abstract Deadline: Friday 15 July 2022
Responses to the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial prompt numerous questions about the reception of Hollywood movie stardom as legal cases of abuse play out in the combined ages of television and social media. Moreover, the layered gender dynamics can be contextualized within a contemporary framework of exposure and resistance that includes the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein on rape and sexual assault charges, and the pay inequalities publicized by actresses including Michelle Williams and Octavia Spencer. Amplified by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, as well as by organizations and initiatives such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, issues of inequality and various forms of abuse have become central to our understanding of the female experience of contemporary Hollywood.
Yet these narratives are far from revelatory, hidden or limited to a contemporary context. The power imbalances and mistreatment that have partly defined women’s careers in the American film industry are as long-established as they are persistent, built into the structure of Hollywood and stretching across its entire history. From the euphemistically- termed ‘casting couch’ to the control of stars’ reproductive choices, and from the indirect expulsion of female directors (O’Hara, 2021), to male ownership of women’s work (McLean, 2022) and the multiple limitations placed upon women of colour, the professional experience in Hollywood for women has consistently been different from that of their male colleagues. These inequalities have at the same time been both enacted and challenged in plain sight. Backstudio pictures (Cohan, 2019) and stardom films (McNally, 2021) disturb their promotion of Hollywood mythology with characters who negotiate their professional lives around these gendered obstacles; historical films and TV dramas revisit and revise these myths with alternative histories; and biopics, documentaries, press articles, television interviews, biographies, autobiographies and social media become sites of disclosure, resistance and activism. These storied spaces convey the extent to which abuse and inequality has become an historically pervasive and recognized aspect of women’s experience in the film industry and of the structural fabric of Hollywood.
This volume seeks a range of original essays that explore film, television and other media narratives depicting inequality and abuse as part of women’s professional and personal lives in Hollywood. The book aims to address both fictional and non-fictional narratives and to explore historical and contemporary case studies.
Areas of interest might include but are not limited to:
- Conflict between Hollywood mythology and exposure of female experience in backstudio pictures and stardom films
- Narratives of stars and other actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, costume designers
- Implicit and explicit exposure in scandal magazines
- The use of autobiography by female stars to construct alternative narratives
- Screen narratives of Hollywood as activism
- Documentary and alternative histories of Hollywood
- Intersectional inequality in the experiences of women of colour
- The male saviour and a patriarchal system
- Sexual abuse as professional control
- Depictions of the impact of ageism on women’s careers
- Fact and fiction boundary crossing in the biopic
- Specific eras of inequality for women in Hollywood
- Narratives of individual and/or collective challenges to inequality
- Press narratives of abuse cases
- The impact of social media on narratives of inequality and abuse
- Narratives of disappearance from the screen due to inequality or abuse
- Exposing vs normalizing inequality and/or abuse through its depiction
- Studio controls over relationships and reproductive choices
- Hollywood narratives framed through historical context
- The careless mistreatment of women’s bodies in narratives of Hollywood
- Hollywood’s emotionally abusive relationship with women
- The impact of women writers, directors and producers on the exposure of inequality and narratives of resistance
Chapter proposals should be submitted as a 300-400 word abstract to the editor, Dr Karen McNally, at womenandhollywoodbook@gmail.com by Friday 15 July 2022. Please include an author biography of 100-150 words. Final chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words and due by Friday 16 December 2022. Please feel free to email with any queries prior to submission of abstracts. A leading publisher is being approached for publication.
Works Cited:
Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford: OUP, 2019)
Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022)
Karen McNally, The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)
Helen O’Hara, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021)
—————————————————————
Dr Karen McNally
Reader in American Film, Television and Cultural History
London Metropolitan University
Recent Publications:
American Television during a Television Presidency (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2022)
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/american-television-during-television-presidency
The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-stardom-film/9780231184014
*
Life Narratives: Self-referential Proclamations
Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Life Narratives
Guest edited by Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2022
American life writing has a long tradition starting with the diaries, journals, and captivity narratives kept by Pilgrims and Puritans such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).
In their seminal book Reading Autobiography (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out that “autobiography” refers to the traditional western mode of life writing that emerged during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Unfairly discrediting other life narrating forms, autobiography refers to the traditional representative self-writing of sovereign individuals. Thus, Smith and Watson prefer “life writing” or “life narratives” as an all inclusive umbrella term instead of “autobiography,” or the more flexible term “memoir.”
For postmodern and postcolonial critics, the “I” in self-representation is far from the coherent and unified essentialist individual of autobiographies. The self is a fragmented entity, created through the limitations of language and positioned in multiple discourses. In Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994), Leigh Gilmore observes the relationship between truth telling and agency as the core of all autobiographical narrations, complicated further by ideology, gender, identity, and authority. She views autobiographical acts as rooted in conventions and power relations by evoking Foucault’s conception of power, stating that self-referential narratives create “a cultural and discursive site of truth production in relation to the disciplinary boundary of punishment” (59).
In whatever form they may appear, life narratives are part of our lives in an increasing and overwhelming amount. The recent global (semi)forced pandemic lockdowns have augmented the sharing and observing of daily life. Trying out recipes, body training, playing instruments, singing, or demonstrating various hobbies on web-based platforms have become statements of existence or acts of self-assertion. In response to destabilized and unsafe public spheres, domestic enclosures have transformed into permanent sites of renewed interest in autobiographical acts.
With this renewed “autobiographical turn” in mind, the guest editor of this issue of JAST seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts on American life narratives, dealing with any period or subject. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Politics and poetics of American life writing
- Critical studies on American life narratives
- The limits, challenges, and possibilities of self-referential portrayals
- The role of memory, agency, and authority in life narratives
- Life writing in American poetry, novels or theater (fictionalized lives)
- Life narratives in performance and the visual arts (autobiographical videos, street performance, photography, exhibitions, etc.)
- Life narratives in TV series, movies, web-based channels, etc.
- Online lives (digital life stories, social media, dating apps, etc.)
- Genres of American life writing (apology, autofiction, autothanatography, biomythography, captivity narrative, diary, eco(auto)biography, gastrography, jockography, journal, letters, memoir, periautography, prison narratives, scriptotheraphy, slave narratives, spiritual narratives, travel narratives, witness narratives etc.)
- Popular culture and life writing
- American women’s life writing
- Immigrant and ethnic life narratives
- Family life-writing or collaborative life writing
- Public figures and celebrity life writing
- Graphic life narratives (autographics)
- Life writing and consciousness raising
- Activism and life writing
- Hybridity, diaspora, and (forced) displacement in life narratives
- Dis/ability and life writing
- The global pandemic and life narratives
- Teaching life narratives
Full-text manuscripts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words in MLA style (with parenthetical internal citations, a Works Cited page, minimal footnotes, and in Times New Roman 12-point font), should be emailed as Microsoft Word attachments to Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş (bilge.mutluay@gmail.com) by July 15, 2022. Please include an abstract (150 words), keywords, and a one-paragraph bio (150 words, written in the third-person) with all manuscripts. Topic inquiries are welcome prior to full-text submission.
Contact Info:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Guest Editor
Contact Info:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş
Contact Email:
URL:
http://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/jast/call-for-papers
*
Deadline for Submissions: July 30, 2022
Spaces/Places of Growing Up:
Mapping the Geographies of Childhood
International Phygital Conference organized by
The Department of English,
Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, Kolkata.
In collaboration with
The Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective
15th and 16th September 2022
deadline for submissions: July 30, 2022
‘Growing up’ or the long and often arduous journey of (trans)formation from a child to an adult necessarily happens not only through developmental milestones (like important examinations or birthdays) but through countless exposures and experiences in the social/public and the personal/private worlds inhabited by the child. While parts of this process have been traditionally or normatively defined by aspects of child-rearing, pedagogy and cognitive psychology, the many and varied physical and virtual sites of this transformative journey have not drawn much critical attention or generated a scholarly discourse, particularly in the context of childhoods across the Indian subcontinent.
The conference wants to draw attention to and critically review the varied spaces and places, which the child inhabits during the years of growing up – areas which open up exposures and provide the experiences that are a crucial part of that complex and elusive process of moving towards adulthood. Broadly speaking, such sites include the physical and the material as well as the imaginative, the psychological and the liminal – in short, any sphere that is a part of childhood and affects the growing-up of the child. Pedagogy and leisure, nation and family, school and home, fantasy and trauma all engender spaces/places within which lessons and skills are learnt, rebellions and/or allegiances are enacted and socio-cultural identities are formed. Also interesting is the fact that in practice, the lived experiences of children within these spheres, at times overlap with the so-called ‘adult’ worlds and such cracks, seepages and contingencies also have significant roles to play in the journey to adulthood. The conference aims to review and critique these sites of growing-up, to assess their roles and impact in childhoods past and present. Papers can address (but are in no way limited to) any of the following physical, material, social and psychological spaces of childhoods:
Homes, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, classrooms, playgrounds, parks, orphanages, refugee colonies, neighbourhoods
Games, picnics, holidays, excursions, adventures, travel
Books, comics, film and media, advertisements, songs, digital-games
Fantasies, dreams, nightmares, trauma, illnesses,
Nation, Race, Family, Caste, Gender
While studies based on textual analysis are not excluded, we are looking forward to papers that are interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature. We welcome proposals from scholars, professors, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, authors and practitioners from fields as diverse as Culture Studies, Psychology, Law, Human Rights, History, Sociology, Literature, Education, Design, Architecture, Media and Publishing.
Please submit abstracts (300 words) for papers (15 minutes presentation time) along with a short bio-note (150 words) via email to conference@rksmvv.ac.in by 30th July 2022. The conference will have a segment devoted to student papers. Students are welcome to submit abstracts (300 words) for mini papers/poster presentations (not exceeding 10 minutes) along with a brief bio-note (150 words) via email to conference@rksmvv.ac.in by 30th July 2022. All presentations will be in English. In case of any queries prior to your submission please don’t hesitate to write to us.
Conference venue:
(For physical presentation)
Auditorium, Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan,
33, Sri Maa Sarada Sarani,
Kolkata – 700055
(For virtual presentations)
Zoom
Important Dates:
30th July 2022 – Last date for submission of abstracts
10th August 2022 – Notification for selected papers
30th August – Tentative schedule and details regarding conference registration, paid accommodation (if needed by participants) etc.
7th September 2022 – Submission of full papers (7000 words) and AV presentations
*
Deadline for Submissions, July 30, 2022
CALL FOR CHAPTERS ‘STARS AND FRANCHISES’ EDITED COLLECTION
Sarah Thomas (University of Liverpool, UK) and Mark McKenna (Staffordshire University, UK)
contact email:
This edited collection seeks to examine the intersections between two significant media systems: stardom and the franchise. It will explore the convergences, tensions and inter-dependences that star-driven texts and franchise cultures have constantly negotiated within the entertainment industry, on a global, historical and multiplatform scale. It aims to analyse franchise sites and strategies as significant nexus where an understanding of stars is created, managed and interpreted, and to analyse the place and value of the star to media franchise production.
Whilst not aiming to be exclusively contemporaneous in its outlook, the collection intervenes at a moment where Variety has argued that ‘IP, not actors, is the main attraction’ (Rubin & Lang 2021). A particularly Western-centric perspective, this statement is informed by – among other things – the increased dominance of Disney and the Marvel Universe and their pursuit of seemingly endless franchised, multiplatform entertainment that subsume countless Hollywood A-listers into those texts and contexts. From the digital de-ageing of established performers in the MCU, the rise of a young generation of stars (like Tom Holland) fluent in the fragmented media markets that often typify franchise cultures, to noteworthy conflicts around contract negotiations and image rights, and star ownership stakes in their franchise IP (Keanu Reeves and John Wick), significant shifts are occurring around star image, labour and agency in the midst of the asset value of media licensing and intellectual property.
The star-franchise intersection represents a tension between distinct forms of media marketing. Whilst these ‘two modes of product differentiation may converge [they] do not easily coalesce’ with contemporary stars ‘under pressure to support franchise world development, not supplant it’ (Lomax 2020: 188). In intellectual property networks like franchises, ‘stardom and celebrity persona take a back seat, replaced by character brands’ (Johnson 2008: 217). And yet star identities, where the actor-signifier is foregrounded over the character-signifier, have persisted across franchise texts, industries and cultures. In the contemporary era, stars like Harrison Ford and Jamie Lee Curtis stand as authenticating devices to anchor franchises, conveying ideas of legacy and nostalgia or as a means of negotiating digital aesthetics (see Knee and Fleming [2020] and Golding [2021]). The video game FIFA has integrated playable star ‘icons’ in its recent editions, like David Beckham and Dua Lipa. Hindi superstar Salman Khan stars in the popular Tiger franchise, while Shah Rukh Khan owns major stakes in international sports franchises. Historically, star-driven franchise properties include Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s ‘Road to’ series, Peter Sellers and The Pink Panther series, and Tom Mix’s films, comics and radio shows. Cultural icons like Mexico’s El Santo, the UK’s Norman Wisdom or Carry On stars, and Hong Kong’s Kwan Tak-hing are all associated with a variety of franchised entertainment. These brief examples show the different relationships that can exist between star and property that the volume wishes to examine, each revealing how repetition, remediation and re-interpretation of stars through franchise properties work to extend a star’s economic and cultural value.
The proposed edited collection will be submitted to Edinburgh University Press (EUP) as part of the ‘International Film Stars’ series. While the subject matter will undoubtedly attract scholars interested in exploring the increased dominance of franchise cinema as Hollywood’s primary mode of production, and this is something that we wholeheartedly encourage, we are also keen to hear from contributors interested in exploring franchises and stars that fall outside of the Anglo-American experience. If you would like to discuss your ideas, please feel free to get in touch.
Our collection seeks chapters that investigate the star-franchise intersection, including (but not limited to):
- Case studies of specific stars or franchise properties.
- Star-driven franchises.
- Franchises where the franchise IP exceeds that of the star(s).
- The paradoxical relationship between star identities and franchise texts where to support ongoing lives as multiplatform, historical entities, franchise properties often celebrate and dismiss the central star brands that exist within them.
- The impact of star persona and character creation over time where franchises provide a sustained environment to construct performance, image and identity through core texts, branded marketing content and other multiplatform extensions.
- Franchises in non-cinematic contexts
- Ideological and cultural readings of franchise stardom and star image.
- Absent or underdeveloped franchise stars and spaces, especially in terms of race, gender and sexuality
- Research that engages with questions of media industries and labour, thinking about what it means for star performers to work in a franchise environment.
- The impact of this on wider conceptions of star power and systemic entertainment infrastructures, economics, and legislations.
- Franchise stardom as product differentiation and marking/branding strategy, including promotional personae.
- The consideration of these (and other) issues within global, multimedia/multiplatform and historical contexts.
- Research that explores to what degree the contemporary Hollywood moment reflects broader uses and cultures in industries around the world and through different decades of production and cultural history.
Please send abstracts of 300 to 500 words and a brief biographical note of 150 words to s.k.thomas@liverpool.ac.uk
- Deadline for chapter proposals: 30 July 2022
- Notification of acceptance: 31 August 2022
- Full chapter submission: 31 June 2023
Further dates to be confirmed as the collection progresses.
Editor bios:
Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. She researches screen performance and industrial approaches to stardom, with a current focus on digital and immersive media and franchise production. She is the author of the monographs Peter Lorre – Face Maker (Berghahn 2012) and James Mason (BFI Bloomsbury 2018), and co-editor of Cult Film Stardom (Palgrave 2013).
Mark McKenna is Associate Professor of Film and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. His research focuses on media marketing and distribution, censorship and regulation and global media industries. He is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Branding of the Video Nasties (EUP 2020) and the forthcoming Snuff (Liverpool University Press), and co-editor of Horror Film Franchises (Routledge 2021).
References:
Fleming, David H. & Adam Knee. 2020. ‘The analogue strikes back: Star Wars, star authenticity, and cinematic anachronism’, Celebrity Studies 11:2: 205-220
Golding, Dan. 2021. ‘The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema’, Convergence, 27:4: 855–867
*
International Conference ‘Touring Travel Writing II: Between Fact and Fiction’
deadline for submissions:
July 31, 2022
full name / name of organization:
CETAPS (Nova University)
contact email:
touringtravelwriting@gmail.com
As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the second in a series focused on travel writing studies. The first one, which took place in 2019, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its literary legacy. This second edition will celebrate the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses (1922), which chronicles the itinerary of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day.
CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, Universidade Nova, Lisbon) and CELIS (Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique, Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand) once again join efforts and organise this international conference which aims to be a locus of debate on the many facets of travel writing, a research area that has emerged as a relevant topic of study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the last few decades.
Date: September 8-9, 2022
Papers on the following topics are welcome:
Anglophone travel writingon the Portuguese-speaking world
Lusophone travel writing on the Anglophone World
Travelling to write
Travel writing, the novel, poetry and drama
Travel writing as report
Travel and visual culture
Travel writing, Humanitiesand the Social Sciences
Travelwriting, gender and power
Travel writing, (post)colonial discourse and decoloniality
Travel writing and (forced) migration
Travel writing, imagined communities and imagology
Travel writing and tourist culture
Travelwriting and (in)tangible heritage
Travelwriting and exploration
Travelling as gentrification
Travel writing, censorship and surveillance
Travel writing and (auto)biography
Travel writing and Otherness
Travelwriting, politics and ideology
Travel writing and ethics
Travel writing, mobility and conviviality
Mapsas travel narratives
Travel,Fantasy, Children’s Literature and Young Adult Fiction
Sound/Food/Smell/Touch/Visual/Ecoscapes in Travel Writing
Travel writing in/as translation
Utopian and dystopian travel narratives
Science and travel writing
History of Travel Writing
Travel writing: theory and criticism
Intertextuality in travel writing
The rhetorics of travel writing
Teaching Travel Writing
Keynote speakers:
Carl Thompson (University of Surrey, UK)
Maria de Fátima Outeirinho (Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto)
Papers and pre-organized panels:
The conference languages are English, Spanish and Portuguese. Speakers should prepare for a 20-minute presentation. Please send a 300-word abstract, as well as a short biographical note (100 words), by July 31st, to:
touringtravelwriting@gmail.com
Proposals for papers and pre-organized panels (in this case, please also include a brief description of the panel) should include full title of the paper, name, institutional affiliation, contact details, a short bionote and AV requirements (if any).
Notification of abstract acceptance or rejection will take place by August 5, 2022.
Registration fees:
•Full fee: 80Euros
• Students: 40 Euros (ID required)
Payment must be made until August 20, 2022. After this date proposals will no longer be considered.
For further queries please contact:
cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt
or
touringtravelwriting@gmail.com
or
mzc@fcsh.unl.pt
Delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.The conference website will soon provide useful information.
Payment:
Payment by bank transfer
Payment by Pay Pal
Reference: CETAPS CONGRESSOS–610245
BIC:TOTAPTPL
IBAN: PT500018 000321419114020 13
Tax identification number: 501559094
This is additional data your bank may require:
Account Owner: FCSHUNL-Research Units
Bank: BANCO SANTANDERTOTTA S.A.
For PayPal payments, use the email: dgfc@fcsh.unl.pt
Identify your payment referring to:
CETAPS 610245 International Conference (TouringTravel WritingII).
Please add PayPal international taxes:
PT +EURO zone: 3,4% + 0,35€
Rest of the World: 4,90% + 0,35€
Full Fee: 83,07€ (PT & EURO zone)
83,92€ (Rest of the World)
Student Fee: 41,71€ (PT & EUROzone)
42,31€ (Rest of the World)
Please send a copy of your confirmed payment to: cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt
Event website:http://www.touringtravelwriting.wordpress.com
*
Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2022
Communist Biographies – New perspectives, sources and discussions
A Special Issue of Securitas Imperii: Journal for the Study of Modern Dictatorships
More than thirty years ago, the possibility of research on the history of the communist movement and regime opened up in Czechoslovakia as well in other former state-socialist countries. The few attempts to produce scholarly biographies of politicians and other personalities associated with communist ideology and practice stood somewhat apart from the multitude of topics, research areas, and methodological approaches. Rather, the period demand for “filling in the blanks” prompted the rapid publication of the “secrets” hidden in the archives on partial issues and cases. Biography, as a method attempting a comprehensive and at the same time essentially individualized treatment of a person’s life set in a broad political and social context, required long-term research, that was often at odds with the priorities of research institution and grant agencies. In the Czech milieu, moreover, priority was given to learning about the lives and fates of democratic and non-communist personalities who belonged among those famous “blanks”. However, the few biographies, which began to be published ten or more years after the political change of 1989, showed the exceptional potential of the biographical method in the study of communism as a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the 20th century. By taking the lives of individuals, whether political leaders or cultural and artistic figures, as examples, it was possible to address the deep internal contradictions and ambivalences that communism contained.
The aim of the thematic issue is to provide a space for the discussion of the results achieved so far in the field of biography within the study of communism, both in the Czech and international context. It also aims to contribute to the debate on methodological problems and the future direction of this genre. In order to comprehensively understand the phenomenon of communism as an internationalist movement making a universalist claim, it is necessary to link different research contexts. We would be pleased if the forthcoming issue contributes to this goal.
Editors welcome contributions from different fields of research: history, political science, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, gender studies or any other related areas of interest.
Topics may address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:
Biography as a method and genre of the history of communism
We welcome studies focusing on different aspects of the methodology of historical biographies, taking into account the context for the study of the communist movement in the national and international context. These aspects are in particular:
- implications of biographies for the study of the history of the communist movement and governance, including transnational perspective
- the limits and challenges of working with archival fonds and other types of sources such as personal papers, published diaries and memoirs or interviews
- trends, innovations and new impulses in the writing of historical biographies
- comparison of experiences and achievements in the field of biography in different national settings
- the development of professional and social demand for specialised biographies of communist figures in various countries of the former Western and Eastern worlds
Biographical studies focusing on various aspects of communism
We welcome biographical studies focusing on various aspects of belonging to the communist movement and identification with the communist ideology and its goals. These aspects are in particular:
- background, family and social origin
- biographies of the main personalities of the communist movement over time – their influence on the co-creation of personal history and the connection with the development of the movement
- shared identities and the relationship between them: nation, class, education, gender
- national, regional and local specifics in a universally defined movement; international experience of activity in the structures of the international communist movement
- motivation and context of involvement in the movement – the relationship between idealism and pragmatism, attitude to power and its use, the question of loyalty, conformity and party discipline and its limits
- devotion and willingness to self-sacrifice – experience of illegality, imprisonment and other forms of repression by anti-communist power
- experience of exile – political activity and living conditions of emigrants
- cases of apostasy, condemnation and party dissent – the experience of the victims of purges and repressions under Stalinism and further
We welcome both the elaboration of episodes and the evaluation of the overall life course for biographies of party leaders and top officials and communist intellectuals, artists and scientists, and ordinary rank-and-file.
Studies using collective biography and comparative biography methods are also welcome. Contact Info:
Adéla Rádková, Ph.D.
Editor-in-chief
Securitas Imperii: Journal for the Study of Modern Dictatorships
Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes
Czech Republic Contact Email: securitas.imperii@ustrcr.cz URL: https://securitas-imperii-journal.com/news/?lang=en
Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”
The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
deadline for submissions:
July 10, 2022
lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz
The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.
Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:
– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons
The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture
Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).
The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022.
*
Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2022
Call for Papers for proposed panel for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2022
November 11-13, 2022 in Jacksonville, FL
Autobiography: Changes in Form and Meaning
This interdisciplinary panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of change within life writing. With the proliferation of modes available for what Anna Poletti has termed “self-life-inscription,” and a concurrent rise in hybrid genres such as autofiction that challenge the assumed boundary between truth and fiction in autobiographical narrative, it is clear that the scope of what is considered autobiography is changing. This panel seeks to articulate these changes and explore how they are impacting our understanding of the meaning and significance of life writing. Papers might explore changes in the medium of autobiography, such as social media, photography, film, graphic narratives, material collections, or performance. Papers might also address changes within established forms such as confession, memoir, the personal essay, or the diary. Theoretical considerations of change, transformation, or conversion within autobiography would also be welcome. By July 15th, please submit an abstract of 250 words, a brief bio, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Kimberly Hall, Wofford College, at hallka@wofford.edu
The SAMLA Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront. For additional conference information, please see the SAMLA website: https://samla.memberclicks.net.
*
CFP: Out of Confinement: Creativity in Constraint
Women in French Studies Special Issue (2024)
July 15, 2022
contact email:
We invite article submissions for a special topics issue of Women in French Studies (2024) to explore work created by confined women and work that represents confined women, from the early modern period to the present-day. The special issue will explore how the confinement of women as depicted in fictional and non-fictional texts (in any media) informs, reflects and interrogates gendered conditions of existence. How have confined women been represented in literature, film and art? What kind of thinking or writing is produced by women out of conditions of confinement? What are the impacts of confinement on creative production? How does physical confinement change how we consume texts?
In March 2020, the word confinement suddenly became an unwelcome part of our everyday lexicon, as lockdown, quarantine, and stay-at-home orders were issued worldwide to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Within the household, mandatory confinement exacerbated women’s perennially uneven obligation to engage in invisible labor—whether middle-class women working from home, or working-class women compelled to risk their health so that others could abide by the imperative to stay in. Both within and outside the home, women were disproportionately tasked with “essential,” racialized and gendered, structurally invisible forms of labor, including childcare, cleaning, healthcare, food preparation, and eldercare.
Since the early modern period, accounts of women’s experiences in voluntary or forced confinement have been richly explored in works by French-language writers as diverse as Marie de France, Marguerite de Navarre, Assia Djebar, and Marie Darrieussecq, to name a few. On the one hand, representations of confinement can confirm that gender disparities are exacerbated when burdens are unequally shouldered by women during periods of confinement. On the other hand, representations of cloister or retreat that express the fantasy of liberatory or self-actualizing confinement, in explicitly repudiating familial or social obligations, can unsettle the caregiving roles traditionally assigned to women, as spouses, mothers, or daughters.
We invite proposals from all historic periods, genres, and geographic regions.
Suggested topics
- cloisters, convents
- imprisonment, incarceration
- internment
- segregated confinement (solitary confinement))/home confinement (house arrest)
- stay-at-home mothers (domestic confinement)
- the “hold” and conditions of enslavement
- COVID-19 “Stay-at-home” orders
- sanatoriums/illness/disease
- childbirth/bedrest
- anchorites and anchoresses
- hostage situations/kidnapping
- asylums
- disability, design and space
- bourgeois refuge, rural life, the “country house”
- artist studio, artist space, residency, retreat
Abstracts of 250-300 words, in French or in English should be sent to Youna Kwak (youna_kwak@redlands.edu) and Anne Brancky (anbrancky@vassar.edu) by July 15, 2022. Notification of acceptance will be made by September 1, 2022, with final drafts of selected articles due April 2023. Articles will be subject to peer review. Authors must be current members of Women in French at the time of publication.
*
Call for Papers
Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory
Edited by Karen McNally
Abstract Deadline: Friday 15 July 2022
Responses to the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial prompt numerous questions about the reception of Hollywood movie stardom as legal cases of abuse play out in the combined ages of television and social media. Moreover, the layered gender dynamics can be contextualized within a contemporary framework of exposure and resistance that includes the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein on rape and sexual assault charges, and the pay inequalities publicized by actresses including Michelle Williams and Octavia Spencer. Amplified by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, as well as by organizations and initiatives such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, issues of inequality and various forms of abuse have become central to our understanding of the female experience of contemporary Hollywood.
Yet these narratives are far from revelatory, hidden or limited to a contemporary context. The power imbalances and mistreatment that have partly defined women’s careers in the American film industry are as long-established as they are persistent, built into the structure of Hollywood and stretching across its entire history. From the euphemistically- termed ‘casting couch’ to the control of stars’ reproductive choices, and from the indirect expulsion of female directors (O’Hara, 2021), to male ownership of women’s work (McLean, 2022) and the multiple limitations placed upon women of colour, the professional experience in Hollywood for women has consistently been different from that of their male colleagues. These inequalities have at the same time been both enacted and challenged in plain sight. Backstudio pictures (Cohan, 2019) and stardom films (McNally, 2021) disturb their promotion of Hollywood mythology with characters who negotiate their professional lives around these gendered obstacles; historical films and TV dramas revisit and revise these myths with alternative histories; and biopics, documentaries, press articles, television interviews, biographies, autobiographies and social media become sites of disclosure, resistance and activism. These storied spaces convey the extent to which abuse and inequality has become an historically pervasive and recognized aspect of women’s experience in the film industry and of the structural fabric of Hollywood.
This volume seeks a range of original essays that explore film, television and other media narratives depicting inequality and abuse as part of women’s professional and personal lives in Hollywood. The book aims to address both fictional and non-fictional narratives and to explore historical and contemporary case studies.
Areas of interest might include but are not limited to:
- Conflict between Hollywood mythology and exposure of female experience in backstudio pictures and stardom films
- Narratives of stars and other actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, costume designers
- Implicit and explicit exposure in scandal magazines
- The use of autobiography by female stars to construct alternative narratives
- Screen narratives of Hollywood as activism
- Documentary and alternative histories of Hollywood
- Intersectional inequality in the experiences of women of colour
- The male saviour and a patriarchal system
- Sexual abuse as professional control
- Depictions of the impact of ageism on women’s careers
- Fact and fiction boundary crossing in the biopic
- Specific eras of inequality for women in Hollywood
- Narratives of individual and/or collective challenges to inequality
- Press narratives of abuse cases
- The impact of social media on narratives of inequality and abuse
- Narratives of disappearance from the screen due to inequality or abuse
- Exposing vs normalizing inequality and/or abuse through its depiction
- Studio controls over relationships and reproductive choices
- Hollywood narratives framed through historical context
- The careless mistreatment of women’s bodies in narratives of Hollywood
- Hollywood’s emotionally abusive relationship with women
- The impact of women writers, directors and producers on the exposure of inequality and narratives of resistance
Chapter proposals should be submitted as a 300-400 word abstract to the editor, Dr Karen McNally, at womenandhollywoodbook@gmail.com by Friday 15 July 2022. Please include an author biography of 100-150 words. Final chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words and due by Friday 16 December 2022. Please feel free to email with any queries prior to submission of abstracts. A leading publisher is being approached for publication.
Works Cited:
Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford: OUP, 2019)
Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022)
Karen McNally, The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)
Helen O’Hara, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021)
—————————————————————
Dr Karen McNally
Reader in American Film, Television and Cultural History
London Metropolitan University
Recent Publications:
American Television during a Television Presidency (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2022)
https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/american-television-during-television-presidency
The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-stardom-film/9780231184014
*
Life Narratives: Self-referential Proclamations
Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Life Narratives
Guest edited by Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey
Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2022
American life writing has a long tradition starting with the diaries, journals, and captivity narratives kept by Pilgrims and Puritans such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).
In their seminal book Reading Autobiography (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out that “autobiography” refers to the traditional western mode of life writing that emerged during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Unfairly discrediting other life narrating forms, autobiography refers to the traditional representative self-writing of sovereign individuals. Thus, Smith and Watson prefer “life writing” or “life narratives” as an all inclusive umbrella term instead of “autobiography,” or the more flexible term “memoir.”
For postmodern and postcolonial critics, the “I” in self-representation is far from the coherent and unified essentialist individual of autobiographies. The self is a fragmented entity, created through the limitations of language and positioned in multiple discourses. In Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994), Leigh Gilmore observes the relationship between truth telling and agency as the core of all autobiographical narrations, complicated further by ideology, gender, identity, and authority. She views autobiographical acts as rooted in conventions and power relations by evoking Foucault’s conception of power, stating that self-referential narratives create “a cultural and discursive site of truth production in relation to the disciplinary boundary of punishment” (59).
In whatever form they may appear, life narratives are part of our lives in an increasing and overwhelming amount. The recent global (semi)forced pandemic lockdowns have augmented the sharing and observing of daily life. Trying out recipes, body training, playing instruments, singing, or demonstrating various hobbies on web-based platforms have become statements of existence or acts of self-assertion. In response to destabilized and unsafe public spheres, domestic enclosures have transformed into permanent sites of renewed interest in autobiographical acts.
With this renewed “autobiographical turn” in mind, the guest editor of this issue of JAST seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts on American life narratives, dealing with any period or subject. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Politics and poetics of American life writing
- Critical studies on American life narratives
- The limits, challenges, and possibilities of self-referential portrayals
- The role of memory, agency, and authority in life narratives
- Life writing in American poetry, novels or theater (fictionalized lives)
- Life narratives in performance and the visual arts (autobiographical videos, street performance, photography, exhibitions, etc.)
- Life narratives in TV series, movies, web-based channels, etc.
- Online lives (digital life stories, social media, dating apps, etc.)
- Genres of American life writing (apology, autofiction, autothanatography, biomythography, captivity narrative, diary, eco(auto)biography, gastrography, jockography, journal, letters, memoir, periautography, prison narratives, scriptotheraphy, slave narratives, spiritual narratives, travel narratives, witness narratives etc.)
- Popular culture and life writing
- American women’s life writing
- Immigrant and ethnic life narratives
- Family life-writing or collaborative life writing
- Public figures and celebrity life writing
- Graphic life narratives (autographics)
- Life writing and consciousness raising
- Activism and life writing
- Hybridity, diaspora, and (forced) displacement in life narratives
- Dis/ability and life writing
- The global pandemic and life narratives
- Teaching life narratives
Full-text manuscripts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words in MLA style (with parenthetical internal citations, a Works Cited page, minimal footnotes, and in Times New Roman 12-point font), should be emailed as Microsoft Word attachments to Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş (bilge.mutluay@gmail.com) by July 15, 2022. Please include an abstract (150 words), keywords, and a one-paragraph bio (150 words, written in the third-person) with all manuscripts. Topic inquiries are welcome prior to full-text submission.
Contact Info:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Guest Editor
Contact Info:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş
Contact Email:
URL:
http://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/jast/call-for-papers
Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”
The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
deadline for submissions:
July 10, 2022
lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz
The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.
Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:
– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons
The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture
Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).
The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022.
Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Symposium, 5-6 August, 2022
Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter
contact email:
Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers
From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.
This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.
There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.
Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:
- Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
- Protest, resistance, and activism
- Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
- Purdah, privacy and public discourse
- Marriage, family, and domesticity
- Technology; social media; cybercrime
- Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
- ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
- Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
- Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
- Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism
We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.
Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.
*
On (Re)Shaping Identity: Self-Portraiture and the Quotidian
PAMLA 2022 – Los Angeles, CA (November 11-13, 2022 – entirely in-person
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Please contact presiding officer for this session, Ariana Lyriotakis, with any questions: lyriotaa@tcd.ie
Special Session – CFP
Persona and confessional poetry of the Postmodern period enact an undeniable relationship with the quotidian. But how do these poems explore a visual depiction and an expression of self-identity in ordinary life? This panel will explore the methods by which poets manipulate and reject aesthetic production in their poetry, while calling into question subjectivity and truthful composition.
This special session will explore poetic self-portraiture and the shaping of identity within the bounds of the quotidian. John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is perhaps one of the more notable examples from this era; as a poetry firmly situated within the intermediality of poetic textual images and art, he addresses “the enchant of self with self” through personal depiction and aesthetic production. But what is revealed to the reader in these moments of vulnerability and self-appraisal? How can the poet be both subject and object, while constructing a poetic likeness amongst the commonplace? This panel seeks poetry of self-encounter, whether banal or familiar, to interrogate an inward/outward representation of the self within these constructs.
Contributions are invited relating to any of the following aspects, as well as broader interpretations of the theme which may illuminate and elucidate in greater detail. Please be in touch if you have any questions or require further clarification.
- Depictions of the domestic and the visual
- Intermediality of poetic textual images and art
- Interrogations of the actual and the self
- Orality and performance in poetry
- Visuality of text and experimentation
- Mimesis and the composition of ordinary spaces
- Interdeterminacy and temporality
Abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA website only.
The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18564
All panel participants/presenters must join PAMLA by July 1, 2022.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com
CALL FOR PAPERS:
LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)
Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022
Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023
The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/
The proposed volume will be dedicated to life writing. We use “life writing” as a broad term encompassing a wide variety of personal narratives. We also recognize the capaciousness of the term “world literature” and the accompanying challenges. By putting life writing and world literature into dialogue, we seek to explore their rich shared history, as well as new areas of research.
Authors are encouraged to explore, among others
the intersecting histories of the two fields
debates in world literature concerning auto/biographical genres
autobiographical texts outside the Western canons (East Asia, Latin America, Northern Africa, Middle East)
autobiographical works as they move in translation through global contexts
autobiographical works as they move across time and media (remediation, intermediality, etc.)
the role of materiality in life writing
visual narratives, new media, affective networks, and the role of life writing in participatory democracy
autobiographical texts in “world literature” courses and in cultural diplomacy
the role of autobiographical texts in eco or medical humanities
the homogenizing effects of autobiographical technology and data bias
Please submit abstracts of 350 words, along with a short bio, to the Editors: Helga Lenart-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Ioana Luca (ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw) by July 1, 2022.
Helga Lenart-Cheng
Associate Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Honors Program, Director
Saint Mary’s College of California
Book office hours here
Forthcoming in 2022: Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age
*
Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter
contact email:
Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers
From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.
This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.
There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.
Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:
- Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
- Protest, resistance, and activism
- Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
- Purdah, privacy and public discourse
- Marriage, family, and domesticity
- Technology; social media; cybercrime
- Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
- ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
- Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
- Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
- Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism
We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.
Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.
*
Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2022
Reimagining #MeToo in South Asia And the Diaspora (Edited Collection of Essays)
Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava
contact email:
This edited volume seeks to examine how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in the context of but, more importantly, in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. We seek to understand how the feminist movement has radically diverged from the assimilationist discourse of the #MeToo Movement and, consequently, the Global North. The #MeToo movement has not made an impact at the grassroots level because it is hinged on the victim-survivor to speak up. In an era where the Global North has been a model for influencing change in the Global South, there has been an inconspicuous absence of recognition and impact of the #MeToo Movement. In addition, survivors’ testimonies lie at the center of the #MeToo movement, which demystifies victim-shaming and victim-blaming, legitimizing the survivor’s testimony as the unquestionable truth.
Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been successful in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The #MeToo has had a significant impact worldwide on how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US. However, this global women’s movement has had little reach in South Asia, where access to virtual platforms is limited, and hashtags are still unknown. The #MeToo Movement in South Asia and the Diaspora was taken up briefly by the media and entertainment industry but has failed to make a concrete impact in many ways. This can be attributed to multiple reasons – there are several regionally specific movements, such as the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign and 2011 #WhyLoiter campaign, that have been radically popular within the sub-continent.
In the South Asian context, such testimonies are still taboo, which leads to survivors refusing to share and relive their experiences/narratives even if they have the means and access. Therefore, our edited volume seeks to problematize the #MeToo movement in order to reimagine and contextualize it in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as a much-needed intervention to examine the implications of a transnational feminist movement. We wish to explore questions such as: how the #MeToo movement can move away from Hollywood/Bollywood/workplace and elitist exclusivity. How can it be more inclusive of non-white and marginalized voices?
In light of the ongoing and increasing gender-based violence occurring in South Asia and the diaspora, our edited volume will reflect on these questions as we seek to understand new ways of formulating complex and nuanced gendered subjectivities vis-à-vis the lens of post-colonial feminism and intersectionality. Our focus shifts away from the traditional approaches of victimization to generate dialogue and hopefully create a new platform to break the silence and encourage discomforting narratives to normalize conversations surrounding this pivotal issue.
Themes include but are not limited to the following:
- Pedagogy and Transformative Learning via #MeToo in the Classroom
- Queer/LGBTQI+ Spaces within #MeToo
- New Masculinities
- Contemporary Gender Movements and Resistances
- Caste, Gender, Class, and Social Spaces
- Problematization of #MeToo and ‘Speaking Up’
- New Modalities of Testimonies
- Resistance and Digital Feminist Interventions
- New Feminist Mediations
- Militarized Feminist Modernities
- Ageism
- Viral Videos
- Censorship, Cultural Production, and Minority Literature
- Mythologies, Legends, and Sexuality
We welcome informal queries, and potential contributors may submit a 500-750 word abstract and 2 page CV by July 1, 2022. Please direct queries to Dr Nidhi Shrivastava (Sacred Heart University), shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu, Dr Ruma Sinha (Syracuse University), rumas1@gmail.com, and Dr Billie T. Guarino (Jamia Milia Islamia), thoidingjam@gmail.com. Acceptance of the final articles is subject to double-blind peer review. The final deadline for submitting 5,000- 6,000-word articles will be November 15, 2022.
*
Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022
Representations of Border Crossings in Media, Literature, and the Arts
International Academic Conference:15-16 December 2022
MIDEX Centre, University of Central Lancashire
(Research Strand: Representations of Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Media, Literature, and Art)
CALL FOR PAPERS
Border crossings delineate movement from a place, nation, and culture, inter alia, to another. Border crossers, Jane Jackson (2014) writes, can move temporarily or permanently, and crossings can be forced or voluntary, successful or unsuccessful, contemporary or historical. They can lead to multicultural identity formations, or to experiences and feelings of exclusion and isolation (Martin and Nakayama 2008). Because they are embodied experiences, they are determined by race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion and gender, as well as by biopolitical and necropolitical practices, particularly, when deemed ‘irregular.’ Representations of border crossings play a key role in media, literature, visual, as well as performance arts. Historical and contemporary border crossings form a core segment of literary and artistic production as shown by the publication of literary and graphic migration narratives, museum exhibitions, installations in galleries and open public spaces, and via dance, music and theatre performances (Viljoen 2013). At the same time, representations of contemporary ‘irregular’ border crossings foreground the injurious implications of border control practices, as well as media responsibilities of a ‘crisis’ (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017).
For this conference, we invite papers that explore representations of border crossings in media, literature, and the arts. We seek to examine the kinds of narratives that can be told through media, artistic and literary attempts to speak about border-crossing subjects. We hope to determine the extent to which such representations cross borders themselves by being exposed to culturally different audiences (Friedman 2005). We further mean to investigate how border-crossing ‘selves’ and ‘others’, collective, or individual, become displayed in such representations and whether hegemonic, (neo-)colonial hierarchies become undone or reproduced through them. How can a person in the position of the ‘host,’ for instance, ‘imagine another without doing violence to [their] object of description’ (Black 2010: 1)? How can representations of liminal, border-crossing subjects disrupt narratives of modernity/coloniality (Schimanski and Wolfe 2013; Mignolo 2011)? Can such representations show ‘how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices’ (Wolfe 2014: 1; Schimanski and Wolfe 2007)? How do they illustrate that ‘as the border crosser crosses the border, new […] borders are created and crossed in the crosser’s own story, and in the story of the border itself’ (Schimanski 2006: 47)? What are the strategies that would enable nuanced interpretations of such representations (see Schimanski and Wolfe 2017)?
We call for researchers and practitioners to submit proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute presentations exploring border-crossings in literature, media and the arts. We also invite creative practitioners to submit performances, readings, (video) installations, and exhibitions, inter alia. The themes that can be explored include, but are not limited to:
• Exilic, diasporic, migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking border crossers
• Border-crossing, gender, and sexuality
• Decolonial and postcolonial border-crossings
• Border-crossing traumas
• Border-crossing memories
• Affective border-crossings
• Border-crossing as an opportunity
• Metaphorical, cultural, and linguistic border crossings
Please submit your proposals to bordercrossing@uclan.ac.uk by 30th of June, 2022.
References:
Black, S. (2010), Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late-Twentieth Century Fiction, New York : Columbia University Press.
Chouliaraki, L. and T. Stolic (2017), ‘Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee “Crisis:” A Visual Typology of European News’, Media, Culture & Society, 39(8):1162-77.
Friedman, S. S. (2005), ‘Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, 192-205, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.
Jackson, J. (2014), Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication, London: Routledge.
Martin, J.N. and Nakayama, T.K. (2008), Experiencing Intercultural Communication: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Mignolo, D. W. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, New York: Duke University Press.
Schimanski, J. (2006), ‘Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and Method’, Nordlit, 19: 41-63.
Schimanski, J. and S. Wolfe (2007), ‘Entry Points: An Introduction’ in J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics De-Limited, 9-26, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag.
____. (2013), ‘The Aesthetics of Borders’, in K. Aukrust (ed), Assigning Cultural Values, 235-250, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
____. eds. (2017), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, New York: Berghahn.
Viljoen, H., ed. (2013), Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Wolfe, S. (2014), ‘Border Aesthetics/Border Works’, Nordlit, 31:1-5.
*
“’My strength, my comfort, my intense delight’: Women, Art and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.”
Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference Oct 27-29, University of Toronto.
Deadline for abstracts: June 30.
Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the “West” in the early 1800s for the “Orient,” recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative “Western” narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.
Per standard practice, you need to join UAAC if your paper is accepted – but you don’t need to join to submit a proposal. Questions? creeve@ocadu.ca
Application process and full conference CFP here.
Charles Reeve
OCAD University
Chair, Liberal Studies
Faculty of Arts & Science
*
CALL FOR PAPERS
North-American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions
Aix-Marseilles University, 6/7 July 2023
Organizers: Sophie Vallas (Aix-Marseilles University, LERMA), Arnaud Schmitt (University of Bordeaux, CLIMAS)
Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022 Addressing the topic of autobiographical texts or memoirs published by novelists, what she calls “the literary writer’s autobiography,” Laura Marcus underlines that the reader’s awareness of the name and reputation of the author immediately confers a certain literary status on the autobiographical text: “Not all autobiographers are writers by profession, though there is a widespread assumption that the literary writer’s autobiography best defines the genre.” Far from the host of confessional memoirs, either by celebrities or unknown authors, a publishing phenomenon identified by Rockwell Gray as a “memoir boom” in his 1982 article “Autobiography Now,” and far from so-called autobiographical novels or autofictions which, according to Maurice Couturier, allowed many writers to “smuggle their own autobiographies,” this conference will focus on autobiographical texts—paratextually and unequivocally identified as such—published by American novelists, on “the literary writer’s autobiography” in other words, and on their influence on the perception of the overall work of their author. We will wonder how autobiographical acts happen, when they happen, in a career dominated by fiction, what their links with the fictional part of the work are or why they are often perceived as minor texts among a fictional body of major ones. Also, do they conjure up specific writing techniques, a separate creative space? The disruption caused by autobiographical texts in a literary work mostly devoted to the writing of fiction raises several questions concerning the artistic logic underlying them, the way they are embedded in the complete oeuvre of the author and the editorial and paratextual choices made for their publication.
It often seems logical that authors should turn to life writing at the end of their career, an introspective act embracing their whole life, revisiting their own work. Mark Twain, who published a few chapters of his autobiography in the years prior to his death, decided nevertheless that its publication would be a posthumous act, a hundred years after his death more precisely (The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 2010). Other texts, also published late in their authors’ life, focus on the death of a relative or a friend while offering authors the opportunity to reflect on their own life, inexorably drawing to a close: Joan Didion’s autobiographical diptych, The Year of the Magical Thinking in 2005 (simultaneously mourning the death and celebrating the life of her husband, John Dunne) and Blue Nights in 2011 (doing the same for Didion’s adopted daughter, Quintana, who died in 2005), belongs to this crepuscular tradition in which writing almost amounts to issuing legal, performative acts standing for marriage, adoption, death. Such is also the case for Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991). Conversely, some autobiographical texts herald the birth of an author: Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) delivered, in prose, the new voice of a poet and essayist who, from then on, would dedicate his career as a novelist to developing and fictionalizing many topics already present in this seminal memoir. Auster has gone on regularly publishing autobiographical narratives, each time revisiting his life from a different angle and adding new acts to the play of his life (The Red Notebook, 1995; Hand to Mouth, 1997; Winter Journal, 2012; Report from the Interior, 2013).
For other autobiographical texts, what is at stake is less the moment when they get written, either at the beginning or at the end of a career, than their capacity of exploring the very art of their authors. In that case, they tend to exist as so many comments on the fictional works which they occasionally revisit. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, has kept on analyzing the act of writing throughout the years ((Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, 1974; The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, 2003; A Widow’s Story. A Memoir, 2011; The Lost Landscape. A Writer’s Coming of Age, 2015). At the very opposite of Oates’ regular autobiographical practice, James Salter’s Burning the Days (1997) stands as a unique autobiographical text in a body of work otherwise entirely devoted to fiction, almost like a faulty act, even if the volume sounds like Salter’s powerful novels in terms of structure and voice, much to the delight of his readers. On the other hand, certain autobiographical texts, just like Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) for instance, can be seen as irreversible acts which eclipse the author’s fictional production.
Philippe Lejeune once regretted that “the dirty habit of publishing diaries has resulted into most people writing their privacy while decked out in their very best attire.” Is a novelist, and even more so an established one, not tempted, indeed, to write their autobiography in their best array, drifting away from spontaneous, supposedly authentic autobiographical acts which tend to be nowadays published on social networks? Autobiography indeed involves an element of risk and exposure since it may, whether purposefully or not, allow the reader to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of fiction, and thus disrupt the construction of the figure of the author. Proposals may address, among other issues, the following:
– The origin of the autobiographical act in a novelist’s career
– The minor works/major works dialectics.
– Stylistic specificities of autobiographical narratives versus fictional texts
– The balance in an author’s oeuvre, and more specifically the place occupied by the autobiographical texts in the overall work
– The reception of the autobiographical texts, often isolated or unknown
– The dialogue between fictional and non-fictional texts within a work (Laura Marcus: “The literary writer’s autobiography also bears on, and frequently comments upon, his or her other works”)
– The tools needed for analysis (similar, different?) to study the autobiographical texts
– The persistence of a distance between the narrator and the author, even in an autobiographical text, similar to that embodied by the concept of implied narrator whose presence Jim Phelan, for example, detects even in referential texts such as Joan Didion’s The Year of MagicalThinking.
- Please submit an abstract of approx. 400 words and a short bionote to sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr and arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr by 30 June, 2022 at the latest.
Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Symposium, 5-6 August, 2022
Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter
contact email:
Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers
From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.
This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.
There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.
Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:
- Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
- Protest, resistance, and activism
- Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
- Purdah, privacy and public discourse
- Marriage, family, and domesticity
- Technology; social media; cybercrime
- Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
- ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
- Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
- Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
- Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism
We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.
Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.
*
On (Re)Shaping Identity: Self-Portraiture and the Quotidian
PAMLA 2022 – Los Angeles, CA (November 11-13, 2022 – entirely in-person
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Please contact presiding officer for this session, Ariana Lyriotakis, with any questions: lyriotaa@tcd.ie
Special Session – CFP
Persona and confessional poetry of the Postmodern period enact an undeniable relationship with the quotidian. But how do these poems explore a visual depiction and an expression of self-identity in ordinary life? This panel will explore the methods by which poets manipulate and reject aesthetic production in their poetry, while calling into question subjectivity and truthful composition.
This special session will explore poetic self-portraiture and the shaping of identity within the bounds of the quotidian. John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is perhaps one of the more notable examples from this era; as a poetry firmly situated within the intermediality of poetic textual images and art, he addresses “the enchant of self with self” through personal depiction and aesthetic production. But what is revealed to the reader in these moments of vulnerability and self-appraisal? How can the poet be both subject and object, while constructing a poetic likeness amongst the commonplace? This panel seeks poetry of self-encounter, whether banal or familiar, to interrogate an inward/outward representation of the self within these constructs.
Contributions are invited relating to any of the following aspects, as well as broader interpretations of the theme which may illuminate and elucidate in greater detail. Please be in touch if you have any questions or require further clarification.
- Depictions of the domestic and the visual
- Intermediality of poetic textual images and art
- Interrogations of the actual and the self
- Orality and performance in poetry
- Visuality of text and experimentation
- Mimesis and the composition of ordinary spaces
- Interdeterminacy and temporality
Abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA website only.
The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18564
All panel participants/presenters must join PAMLA by July 1, 2022.
https://pamla.ballastacademic.com
CALL FOR PAPERS:
LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)
Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022
Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023
The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/
The proposed volume will be dedicated to life writing. We use “life writing” as a broad term encompassing a wide variety of personal narratives. We also recognize the capaciousness of the term “world literature” and the accompanying challenges. By putting life writing and world literature into dialogue, we seek to explore their rich shared history, as well as new areas of research.
Authors are encouraged to explore, among others
the intersecting histories of the two fields
debates in world literature concerning auto/biographical genres
autobiographical texts outside the Western canons (East Asia, Latin America, Northern Africa, Middle East)
autobiographical works as they move in translation through global contexts
autobiographical works as they move across time and media (remediation, intermediality, etc.)
the role of materiality in life writing
visual narratives, new media, affective networks, and the role of life writing in participatory democracy
autobiographical texts in “world literature” courses and in cultural diplomacy
the role of autobiographical texts in eco or medical humanities
the homogenizing effects of autobiographical technology and data bias
Please submit abstracts of 350 words, along with a short bio, to the Editors: Helga Lenart-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Ioana Luca (ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw) by July 1, 2022.
Helga Lenart-Cheng
Associate Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Honors Program, Director
Saint Mary’s College of California
Book office hours here
Forthcoming in 2022: Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age
*
Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’
deadline for submissions:
July 1, 2022
Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter
contact email:
Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers
From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.
This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.
There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.
Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:
- Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
- Protest, resistance, and activism
- Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
- Purdah, privacy and public discourse
- Marriage, family, and domesticity
- Technology; social media; cybercrime
- Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
- ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
- Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
- Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
- Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism
We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.
Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.
*
Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2022
Reimagining #MeToo in South Asia And the Diaspora (Edited Collection of Essays)
Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava
contact email:
This edited volume seeks to examine how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in the context of but, more importantly, in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. We seek to understand how the feminist movement has radically diverged from the assimilationist discourse of the #MeToo Movement and, consequently, the Global North. The #MeToo movement has not made an impact at the grassroots level because it is hinged on the victim-survivor to speak up. In an era where the Global North has been a model for influencing change in the Global South, there has been an inconspicuous absence of recognition and impact of the #MeToo Movement. In addition, survivors’ testimonies lie at the center of the #MeToo movement, which demystifies victim-shaming and victim-blaming, legitimizing the survivor’s testimony as the unquestionable truth.
Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been successful in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The #MeToo has had a significant impact worldwide on how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US. However, this global women’s movement has had little reach in South Asia, where access to virtual platforms is limited, and hashtags are still unknown. The #MeToo Movement in South Asia and the Diaspora was taken up briefly by the media and entertainment industry but has failed to make a concrete impact in many ways. This can be attributed to multiple reasons – there are several regionally specific movements, such as the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign and 2011 #WhyLoiter campaign, that have been radically popular within the sub-continent.
In the South Asian context, such testimonies are still taboo, which leads to survivors refusing to share and relive their experiences/narratives even if they have the means and access. Therefore, our edited volume seeks to problematize the #MeToo movement in order to reimagine and contextualize it in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as a much-needed intervention to examine the implications of a transnational feminist movement. We wish to explore questions such as: how the #MeToo movement can move away from Hollywood/Bollywood/workplace and elitist exclusivity. How can it be more inclusive of non-white and marginalized voices?
In light of the ongoing and increasing gender-based violence occurring in South Asia and the diaspora, our edited volume will reflect on these questions as we seek to understand new ways of formulating complex and nuanced gendered subjectivities vis-à-vis the lens of post-colonial feminism and intersectionality. Our focus shifts away from the traditional approaches of victimization to generate dialogue and hopefully create a new platform to break the silence and encourage discomforting narratives to normalize conversations surrounding this pivotal issue.
Themes include but are not limited to the following:
- Pedagogy and Transformative Learning via #MeToo in the Classroom
- Queer/LGBTQI+ Spaces within #MeToo
- New Masculinities
- Contemporary Gender Movements and Resistances
- Caste, Gender, Class, and Social Spaces
- Problematization of #MeToo and ‘Speaking Up’
- New Modalities of Testimonies
- Resistance and Digital Feminist Interventions
- New Feminist Mediations
- Militarized Feminist Modernities
- Ageism
- Viral Videos
- Censorship, Cultural Production, and Minority Literature
- Mythologies, Legends, and Sexuality