Archived Postings

The deadlines have passed for the following listings, orthey 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, February 15, 2021

The Legacies of Exchange by 19th-Century Black Women

Society for the Study of American Women Writers
Triennial Conference November 4-7 2021, Baltimore, Maryland

We propose a panel for the SSAWW Triennial Conference “American Women Writers: Ecologies, Survival, Change” in Baltimore, Maryland, November 4-7, 2021:

This panel highlights forms of representation and exchange by black women that look beyond narratives of enslavement. We welcome papers that explore how nineteenth-century black women built networks of kinship and support through forms of correspondence (letters, periodicals, allusions) and materials that illustrate artistic intimacies (albums, scrapbooks, autograph books, marginalia, ephemera). Building on the work of scholars like Nazera Sadiq Wright and Jasmine Nichole Cobb, we ask: what ecologies and networks are illuminated when we look at these items? We are especially interested in discussions of archival resources, recovery work, sentimentality, citizenship, and writing as care-taking.

By February 15th, please send your abstract (250-300 words), institutional affiliation, contact information, and a brief bio (no more than 50-60 words) to Victoria Baugh at vlb57@cornell.edu or Charline Jao (cj422@cornell.edu).

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Call for Papers: 

Fragmented, Evolving, Precious: Scholarly Writing across Life Contexts 

500-word proposals with 50-word bios due 15 February 2021

Scholarly writing can be a scattered process, with research and composing time eked out in fits and starts as teaching, administrative, and familial responsibilities can overwhelm even the most dedicated scholars’ best intentions for scheduled writing time. Writing and research processes also change over time as circumstances change–as graduate student life morphs into tenure-track or adjunct life; as single life morphs into partnered life, or vice versa; as faculty have children who require different intensities of attention at different stages; as bodies are or become differently dis/abled; and/or as administrative roles replace writing time with back-to-back meetings. This collection seeks to examine, explain, and even exult in how writing processes change over time by exhibiting what is both lost and gained through successive rounds of transformation and adaptation. How do writers, in their own words, respond to significant disruptions of their established processes? How do they develop “writing workflows” (Lockridge and Van Ittersum) to meet new demands, or that are capable of responding to unstable conditions? How do they understand the variables that prompt changes and what resources do they draw on to meet that change?

This kairotic moment finds many scholars newly challenged to develop different writing processes as they wrestle with new ways to teach, administrate, parent, and navigate the world. As various researchers (Boice, Tulley) have demonstrated, scholars successfully produce scholarship even when their focus and time are fragmented. Boice recommends that faculty writers ensure their writing success in part by arranging “external situations to ensure regular writing productivity.” Boice’s advice articulates well with the “environmental-selecting and structuring practices (ESSPs)” Paul Prior and Jody Shipka describe in their study of scholarly writers’ processes. What this collection takes up in part is the current context in which many scholars are, due to pandemic restrictions such as school and library closures, unable now to “arrange external situations to ensure regular writing productivity” as they have in the past. These same pressures also call scholars to respond to the neoliberal demands of limitlessly increasing personal productivity.

Drawing inspiration from Jessica Restaino’s pledge to “determine anew [her] use value” as a scholar (137) after a devastating personal loss, this collection seeks to determine anew the use value of scholarly writing and the processes that produce it, both within and beyond the context of losses, constraints, and adaptations associated with Covid. We want to explore how scholars have navigated various workflow changes throughout various phases of their lives and careers. The pandemic context provides an opportunity to examine how writing processes can be adapted. When the most reasonable “normal” writing advice may be impossible to follow and writing is necessarily slowed and further fragmented, might writing activity be also deepened and made more precious?

We seek both personal and scholarly contributions that examine the advantages and possibilities as well as the frustrations concomitant with evolving scholarly writing processes. We invite proposals for chapters that take up, challenge, or augment questions such as these:

  • How have you reinvented your writing process(es) at one or more stages of your scholarly career or for different types of projects?
  • What resources or tools have you adopted for that reinvention? What was your affective experience before, during, and after?
  • How does your personal engagement with writing processes shape your engagement with process scholarship or writing studies writ large, or vice versa?
  • How does your teaching of writing shape your own writing processes?
  • How does your scholarly writing occur within your home, work, and community context?
  • How is your scholarly writing process affected by gendered, raced, and/or classed work-life expectations?
  • What are the possibilities and challenges associated with your scholarly writing process?
  • How could past examples of ideal and/or problematic scholarly writing processes speak to the present? How do you relate to your past processes?
  • What do you see as the challenges of creating or sticking to a productive process, and/or how do you push back against a culture that over-values speed and “productivity”?

Submit 500-word proposals and 50-word bios no later than 15 February 2021. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 March 2021. Full chapter drafts (6000-8000 words including Works Cited) will be due 1 July 2021. Requested revisions will be due 1 October 2021. Please send queries and proposals to: fragmented.writing@gmail.com.

Kim Hensley Owens

Derek Van Ittersum

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Deadline for Submissions, 15 February, 2021

Contemporary South Slavic Victimhood Narratives and Performances in Arts and Cultures

Founding myths of South Slavic nation-states have been centred around victimhood narratives since the emancipatory struggles within several occupying empires. Rarely have those narratives been stand-alone founding myths – they were interwoven with narratives of the heroic and the oppressed. Notions of being ‘a historic victim’ (or a victim of history) can be found among all South Slavs, not only in the post-Yugoslav region. The political function of such founding myths in in the construction of collective identities has been a research focus of South Slavic and South Eastern European Studies for quite some time already. The instrumentalization of victimhood narratives in the process of South Slavic nation-state formations, also in the context of Yugoslavia’s breakup and the Yugoslav Wars, has been explored, yet less attention has been given to victimhood narratives and performances in the very current South Slavic regions and contexts.

We are interested in narratives and performances of South Slavic victimhood in arts (literature, theatre, performance, film, music and art), in media and in places and performances of remembrance (memorial days, memory in public space, museums and memorials). Therefore, we are inviting scholars from different fields (South Slavic Studies, Film and Media Studies, Theatre and Performance Studies, Art History, Cultural and Memory Studies and other closely related disciplines) to contribute to the edited volume “Contemporary South Slavic Victimhood Narratives and Performances”.

Proposals for research articles will be peer reviewed for an edited book to be published by a reputed publisher in 2022.

Original and unpublished texts are invited (but not restricted to) the following areas and research questions:

  • How have already established victimhood narratives changed after the end of the Yugoslav Wars?
  • What new victimhood narratives have emerged in the 2000s until today?
  • How are South Slavic victimhood narratives intertwined and are they mutually dependent?
  • Are new narratives and performances of victimhood changing former constructions of collective identities?
  • Who are perpetrators and victims in new victimhood narratives in arts and culture and what is the role of the spectator (bystander)?
  • What are the aesthetic strategies in various art forms to de-construct and question those narratives?
  • What are the roles of South Slavic victimhood discourses in the diaspora?

Proposals consist of a short abstract (250-300 words, including 3-4 keywords) and a short bio note of the author. Last date of submission of abstracts to the editors is February 15th 2021, to be sent to: senad.halilbasic@univie.ac.at and miranda.jakisa@univie.ac.at

The authors will be notified within 4 weeks

The first draft of selected contributions is due in August 2021 (length: 5.000-7.000 words)
Contact Email:  senad.halilbasic@univie.ac.at URL:  https://suedslawistik.univie.ac.at/

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CFP: Promising Journeys, Perilous Roads: Women’s Journey Narratives in Neoliberal India (Edited Collection)

Deadline for Submissions: February 10, 2021

Call for chapter proposals (With a strong publishing interest from Lexington Books, USA)

Traditionally, men have had more access than woman to Indian public spaces, especially the cities, roads, and streets. Not surprisingly, then, the presence of women in patriarchal public spaces such as roads poses a threat to traditional spatial associations of the home and the woman that in turn are significant in the construction of Indian femininity. More important, women on Indian roads have felt threatened and experienced numerous and unbelievable instances of violence, some of which in the recent past have been globally and vocally condemned. Curiously, if narratives of traveling, self-sufficient women and their outdoor experiences remain scarce, what is rarer are theoretical and critical discourses surrounding and analyzing women’s predicaments on the road. Stressing this, academicians such as Manish Madan and Mahesh K. Nalla in their study tilted “Sexual Harassment in Public Spaces: Examining Gender Differences in Perceived Seriousness and Victimization” (2016) note that while a considerable amount of research has been done on  domestic violence in India, which mostly occurs indoors in private spaces, “the treatment of women in the public sphere, particularly with regard to sexual harassment (one of the most pervasive forms of violence against women)” (1) has only received public attention post the notorious Nirbhaya rape case (2012) due to media coverage and international outcry. Likewise, keeping mainly the Nirbhaya rape case and the gang rape of a young photo-journalist in Mumbai (2013) as a contextual backdrop, Shilpa Phadke in her article “Unfriendly Bodies, Hostile Cities Reflections on Loitering and Gendered Public Space” argues that the “overarching narrative appears to be that [Indian] cities are violent spaces that women are better off not accessing at all” (50). Arguably, while empirical and data driven research has to some extent taken into account the issue of women’s travel experiences, theoretical research dealing with fictionalized representations of women’s road journeys in millennial India is palpably missing. The present edited collection attempts to bridge this unfortunate gap in scholarship.

Where international research is concerned, the issue of women’s safety within public spaces such as the road has been a central problematic for space theorists and feminist geographers such as Linda McDowell, Gillian Rose, and Doreen Massey who declare that spaces are governed by patriarchal power relations which exclude women. Doreen Massey, for instance, in Space, Place, and Gender (1994) claims that “spatial control, whether enforced through the power of convention or symbolism, or through the straightforward threat of violence, can be a fundamental element in the constitution of gender” (180). According to feminist geographers therefore public spaces such as roads are inherently gendered and exclude women with the threat of sexual violence. In a deeply patriarchal society such as India, spatial politics along with explicit and implicit threats of violence plague millions of women who try to accesses public spaces, beginning with the roads.

In neoliberal India, especially after Nirbhaya rape case, one encounters a growing engagement with women’s travel narratives most significantly on several OTT (over-the-top) digital platforms including Netflix and Amazon Prime Videos. Many fictionalized series telecast on these platforms have presented the problem of female vulnerability within public spaces to expose physical, mental, sexual, and epistemic violence that traveling women face. Here Richie Mehta’s Delhi Crime proves to be a powerful case in point. Likewise, mainstream Hindi films such as Chhapaak (2020) in the recent past have also exposed how women are extremely vulnerable to the male gaze and to patriarchal violence, especially on the roads. Literature, too, has responded to this vexed issue and writers such as Janhavi Acharekar and Namita Gokhale have attempted to reveal how structural violence mars the outdoorsy experiences of many Indian women. Other fictionalized narratives that underscore women’s promising albeit perilous road journeys include films such as Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor (2006), Leena Yadav’s Parched (2015), Aniruddha Roy Chowdhury’s Pink (2016), Ashtar Sayed’s Maatr (2017), Ravi Udyawar’s Mom (2017), and Gopi Puthran’s Mardaani 2 (2019). In addition, there are also well-received web series such as The Good Girl Show (2017) and She (2020) which unravel the regressive rape myths, stigma, victim-blaming, and misogyny that are entrenched in Indian society and channeled against women exploring the world outside their homes.

The present volume entitled Promising Journeys, Perilous Roads: Women’s Journey Narratives in Neoliberal India hopes to inaugurate a much-needed scholarly discussion on women and their experiences on the road in the present times. By focusing on the complex negotiations that women make with the challenges posed by the gendered space of the road, this edited collection hopes to bring together critical and scholarly voices that together address a deep rooted and pressing problem fettering Indian women’s mobility today. It invites essays that attempt critically informed analyses of literature, graphic novels, films, web series, and other popular cultural representations of Indian women’s experiences on the road, and ultimately initiate localized feminist interventions against gendered violence.

Themes addressed may include, but are not limited to:
•    Literary representations of Indian women’s vulnerability on the road
•    Graphic narratives of female road journeys
•    Films, web series, television, popular culture vis-à-vis violence and spatial politics
•    Sororities and female bonding in the face of violent road journeys
•    Wandering mothers: women, violence, and caregiving on the road
•    Women’s aging, destitution, and violence of the road
•    Rape myths, stigma, and sexual offences
•    Intrusive male gaze and objectified female bodies
•    Class, caste, female oppression, and violent roads
•    Female fortitude, resistance, and survival on gendered roads

Lexington Books, USA has expressed a strong interest in publishing this edited collection. Please submit an abstract of 750 words and a short CV by February 10, 2021 to Swathi Krishna S. swathi@iitrpr.ac.in and Srirupa Chatterjee srirupa@la.iith.ac.in The final articles will be 6000-7000 words in the latest MLA Handbook format and will be due by August 31, 2021.

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Deadline for Submissions–Feb. 5, 2021

The Register & Visitors’ Book in Historical Scholarship: A Virtual Colloquium, June 1, 2021

The value of the institutional guest book/register as a source has become evident in recent historical scholarship. Studies have engaged registers from a broad range of approaches and interests, including the histories of travel and tourism, book history, historical geography, literary tourism, and legal history.

The form, legal status, and uses of these books varied markedly by site and jurisdiction: in some, their completion was required by law. In others, the ‘visitors’ book’ was a site of whimsical inscription, filled with prose, verse, and illustration. The material affordances of the books, and the regimes of surveillance enacted over them, also varied widely. In many cases, institutions maintained both the legally compulsory register and a voluntary book for guests’ inscriptions.

As scholars have unearthed these books in local, regional, and national archives, explored the legal, economic, social, and cultural contexts in which they were used—as tools of surveillance, as business records, as tableaux for leisure travellers—and used them extensively as sources in historical scholarship, they have developed fruitful intellectual exchanges. Beyond places of accommodation, research has encompassed books that were at other institutions and sites—stately homes, museums, universities, and places associated with the lives of famous authors, for instance—in the early modern and modern periods.

On Tuesday 1 June 2021 a workshop will bring together scholars using these books as evidence in diverse historical research programmes. We invite participation (through pre-circulated papers to be discussed in the virtual event) from scholars working on a range of projects that employ these sources in historical research, including (but not limited to):

  • Hotel guest books and registers as legal and social instruments
  • Guest books and registers as sources for the study of mobility and tourism markets
  • Institutional visitors’ books and practices of inscription and reading
  • Cultures of travel illuminated by guest books
  • Practices of travel illustration as revealed in guest books and related sources
  • Transnational vs national dimensions of guest book use
  • Early modern forms of the institutional guest book

Please submit a title and 250-word proposal, as well as a one-page résumé, by Friday 5 February 2021 to Kevin James at kjames@uoguelph.ca, to whom any enquiries may also be directed.

Contact Info:

Professor Kevin James

Scottish Studies Foundation Chair and Professor of History

University of Guelph

Guelph, ON N1G 2W1

Canada

Contact Email:

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General Call for Papers

Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas
Irene Maria F. Blayer and Dulce Maria Scott

ISSN: 2378-0975
www.peterlang.com/view/serial/ISD

Interdisciplinary Studies in Diasporas opens a discursive space in diaspora scholarship in all fields of the humanities and social sciences. The volumes published in this series comprise studies that explore and contribute to an understanding of diasporas from a broad spectrum of cultural, literary, linguistic, anthropological, historical, political, and socioeconomic perspectives, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches. The series welcomes original submissions from individually and collaboratively authored books and monographs as well as edited collections of essays. All proposals and manuscripts are peer reviewed.

For more information, or if you’d like to discuss a proposal, please contact: :
Dr Irene Blayer, Series Editor, iblayer@brocku.c
Dr Dulce Scott, Series Editor, dmscott@anderson.edu
Dr Philip Dunshea, Acquisitions Editor , p.dunshea@peterlang.com.

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Deadline for Submissions, February 1, 2021

Biographers International Organization (BIO)

is pleased to announce the inauguration of the

Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship

$2000 for an Exceptional Biography-in-Progress

about an African American Subject

Named for the first African American biographer, the Frances “Frank” Rollin Fellowship awards $2,000 to an author working on a biographical work about an African American figure or figures whose story provides a significant contribution to our understanding of the Black experience. This fellowship also provides the recipient with a year’s membership in BIO, registration to the annual BIO conference, and publicity through BIO’s marketing channels.

The Rollin Fellowship aims to remediate the disproportionate scarcity and even suppression of Black lives and voices in the broad catalog of published biography. This fellowship reflects not only BIO’s commitment to supporting working biographers but to encouraging diversity in the field.

Deadline for applications: February 1, 2021.

To apply, go to https://biographersinternational.org/award/the-frances-frank-rollin-fellowship/#apply

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Deadline for Submissions, Feb. 1, 2021

Female Narratives of Protest: Literary and Cultural Representations from South Asia
deadline for submissions:
February 1, 2021
full name / name of organization:
Nabanita Sengupta
contact email:
nabanita.sengupta@gmail.com

Contemporary regimes of protest in South Asia are informed and injuncted by its ever shifting geopolitical modalities. With the rise of globalisation, neoliberalism and multiculturalism, South Asian geopolitics comprise a quest for redefinition of biopower and subjectivity formations. As hegemonies of Western  dominance are toppled, South Asian geopolitics are evolving as a complex assemblage of biopolitics, citizenship ethics and human rights concerns. In this evolving engagement with global politics, South Asia is fast emerging as a contending power itself with competent human and capital resources. An important consequence of this is the appearance of newer axes of fault lines in terms of polity, economy, religion, culture, art, and gender. This has transpired into multiple geopolitical fissures, one glaring example of which is the CAA, a politically manipulated definition of citizenship and the politics of belonging in the Indian subcontinent. South Asian non-unitary subjectivities dwell within the vectors of diverse vocabularies of protest that are social and political in nature.
In the light of this, protest narratives originate in a space of power conflict as a means to combat the exploitation of the weak by the strong –  as a means of survival for the unempowered and unprivileged. Therefore a longing for empowerment, a desire to topple the authoritarian and a quest towards a just society is embedded within any protest narrative. The journey of struggle gets recorded in such narratives and irrespective of the outcome, the cultural productions of the movements become important. Archiving of protest narratives is a significant task because such narratives dare to break away from the dominant cultural representations and present the voices of the marginalised. It critically enquires the heteronormative world of binaries bringing into limelight the fault lines in the dominant normative exclusivist discourses. An interesting hermeneutics of protest literature is its very fluid nature and multiple connotations. An important aspect is the moral and ethical relationship between aesthetics and political message informing the content of protest narratives. Protest as an agentive politics on one hand is hinged upon the philosophical question of individuality and the dynamics of social structure, while on the other, gains impetus from political issues. These political issues might be embedded within one’s location and therefore protest narratives are also deeply shaped by one’s embeddedness in specific geospatialities

Historically, gender has been identified as one such location of the genesis of protest narratives. Female voices have always been marginalised in a patriarchal social system.

Patriarchal politics of sexuality and gender identities have been conventionally partial to the heteronormative male voice. Females, both as a sexual identity as well as a gender construct have been involved in a long and tedious battle which still continues. Within the South Asian region too females have a long history of struggle, the trajectory of which can be traced to the emergence of the female Bhakti poets in the 16th century in the Indian subcontinent. While any form of protest poetry invites penalty in some form from the authority, when it comes to the female voices, discourses invading the body and sexuality further problematises the issue. In the South Asian context, these struggle narratives are various and multi-layered. They have different rationales of origin, varied historiographies andsocio-political consequences, depending on their geopolitical locations but they all together can be brought under the umbrella of intersectional feminist discourses. Whether it be the landais from Afghanistan, miya women writing from Assam, Dalit women’s narratives or narratives of queer women across the region, the modes of protest are against the dominant, monolithic, universalist ideology. The culminating point would be the ethical and humanitarian cartographies of protest narratives leading to formation of closely knit female communities of shared sufferings and solidarities resulting in a positive biopolitical production premised on affective frameworks of care, cooperation and collective political actions.
Within such a theoretical framework, the proposed anthology is interested in exploring the reconfiguration of female voices of protest in contemporary literature and popular culture and invites abstracts on but not limited to the following topics

Exploring various genres of narratives by women, focus may also be
on mixed genre interpretations
Need for such narratives
Socio-political consequences
Feminism and protest/ resistance narratives
Feminist postcolonialist perspectives
Protest, gender and the era of post truth
Queer narratives of protest
Protest shaped by the politics of location
Protest and the politics of belonging
Protest and Biopolitics
Protest and Necropolitics
Protest Memory
Protest and Citizenship Rights
Protest and Life-writings
Protest and Illness narratives/narrative medicine
Protest and Disability Studies
Protest in the age of electronic media
Cultural Representations of Protest (In films)

Submit your abstract of not more than 350 words to protestnarratives@gmail.com by 1st February 2021.
The edited anthology will be published by a reputed international publisher.

Editors

Dr. Nabanita Sengupta
Assistant Professor of English
Sarsuna College
(Affiliated to University of Calcutta)
Kolkata
West Bengal
India

Samrita Sengupta Sinha
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Sophia College for Women (Autonomous)
Mumbai
Maharashtra
India

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Deadline for Submissions, Feb. 1, 2021
Call for Papers

Comic Lives
A special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
37.2 Spring 2022
www.tandfonline.com/raut

Deadline for Submissions–Feb. 1, 2021

Guest Editors: Laurie McNeill and John David Zuern

Stand-up comics, comedians, and humor writers routinely draw material from their personal lives and play it for laughs. For this special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, we invite contributors to explore the personal, cultural, political, and ethical ramifications of this practice.
We seek essays examining all forms of comedic self-representation, from live stand-up performances to essay collections and memoirs, and we also encourage authors to reflect on the theoretical and methodological challenges auto/biographical comedy presents to scholars in life writing studies. We aim for a broad international scope and welcome projects that take a comparative approach to comic lives in different cultural contexts, and we particularly invite submissions that take up issues of diversity and inclusion in comedy. Studies of the work of specific comics are also welcome.

Essays should focus on the intersection of the comedic and the auto/biographic in these texts—in other words, on the role of comedians’ personal experiences in their performances and/or writing, and they should situate this work in the particular contexts in which audiences receive it. In many countries, comedians have come to play influential roles as cultural and political commentators, positioning themselves within national debates and taking sides in partisan politics. In doing so, how are they deploying comedy to reinforce or challenge their audiences’ opinions on key issues, and how are they constructing their own personas as models of informed and engaged citizenship?

We hope this special issue will also provide an opportunity for some authors to reflect on the public role of comedy in the Covid-19 pandemic, which has radically altered the conventional formats for live performances. In the United States, for example, social distancing has compelled comedians with popular television programs such as Samantha Bee, Stephen Colbert, and Trevor Noah to broadcast from home, which in turn has compelled them to incorporate aspects of their everyday private lives into their comedy. What are the implications of this fusion of comic performance and life in lockdown for their audiences’ own experience of social distancing and their sense of responsibility for protecting the health of others?

Other topics might include the following:

Comedy and identity: How do identity categories such as race, gender, sexuality, disability, nationality, and citizenship status figure in comedians’ work? How do they use their own alignment with or resistance to these categories to critique prejudice and advocate for inclusivity?

Comedy and trauma: How do comedians use their performances to represent and work through traumatic experiences? How does humor factor into recovery? How does comedy serve as a form of witness and testimony?

Comedy as labor: How do comedians represent the economic dimension of their work? Can comedy be understood as a form of affective labor?

The comic Künstlerroman: How do comedians who have produced memoirs describe the discovery and development of their comedic talent? How do they recount how being funny became an aspect of their self-conceptions?

Career comics: How do older comedians reflect on the course of their professional lives? How do they incorporate the aging process into their material? How have they negotiated their celebrity over time? How have they rebranded themselves in response to criticism and/or shifting social mores?

Comedy and truth: Do the same criteria for truth-telling in other forms of life writing apply to auto/biographical comedy? How (and why) might we identify and assess fiction, faction, fictiveness, and falsification when life stories are played for laughs?

Comedy, relationality, and ethics: How do comedians use their personal relationships with family members, friends, and fellow comedians as material? What are the ethical implications of this practice?

Genres of auto/biographical comedy: How do the affordances of particular modes and media such as live stand-up routines, comedy specials, television programs, YouTube and other social media, graphic memoirs, and books shape comedic self-representation? How do comedians working in various formats inhabit or depart from narrative? What challenges to genre theory does comedy present?

Please submit complete essays up to 7000 words in length—including notes and Works Cited, in Chicago Manual of Style 17 —by February 1, 2021 to both editors: laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca and zuern@hawaii.edu. Please also submit a brief abstract, keywords, and biographical statement with your submission.

Essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, may be considered general submissions and may be selected for publication. In order to ensure a confidential peer review, remove any identifying information from the essay, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person.

We welcome the inclusion of images and there are no charges to reprint in color. All images should be submitted as 300dpi tifs. Please submit images both pasted in the body of the essay with captions and submitted as separate files labeled with author last name and figure number. It is the responsibility of the author to procure all image reprint rights prior to publication. We are also able to link to accompanying digital materials from our website and encourage inclusion of these ancillary materials when appropriate.

Please note that acceptance of an essay by the guest editors does not guarantee publication. All submissions will undergo double blind peer review once completed articles are submitted.

About the editors:
Dr. Laurie McNeill is a Professor of Teaching in the Department of English Language and Literatures at the University of British Columbia, studies the production and reception of life narratives in digital and archival spaces. Her recent publications include Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of the journal Biography, co-edited with John David Zuern (2015),  Teaching Lives: Contemporary Pedagogies of Life Narratives, co-edited with Kate Douglas (Routledge, 2017), “Assumed Identity: Writing and Reading Testimony through and as Anne Frank” (Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization, Routledge, 2019), and “Reading Digital Lives Generously,” co-authored with John David Zuern, in Research Methods for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge, 2019).

John David Zuern is a Professor in the Department of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where he teaches courses in fiction, life writing, and research methods in literary studies. He is a co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly and coordinates the journal’s annual “International Year in Review” feature. His recent publications include Online Lives 2.0, a special issue of the journal Biography, co-edited with Laurie McNeill (2015), “Remedial Materialism: What Can Comparative Literature and Electronic Literature Learn from Each Other?” in Comparative Literature (September 2018), and “Reading Digital Lives Generously,” in Research Methods for Auto/Biography Studies (Routledge 2019), co-authored with Laurie McNeill.

John David Zuern
Professor, Department of English
1733 Donaghho Road
University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Honolulu, HI 96822
808-551-7627
fax: 808-956-3083
Pronouns: he, him, his

Deadline for Submissions, January 31, 2021

contact email:

22, 23 & 24 June 2021 (Le Mans University, France)

WAR MEMORIES (2020/21) – Sharing War Memories – From the Military to the Civilian

International Conference initiated by Professor Renée Dickason (Université Rennes 2), Professor  Stéphanie Bélanger (Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario) and Professor Delphine Letort (Le Mans Université)

“War Memories 2020/21” is delighted to welcome Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Professor Doctor Denis Mukwege as a Guest of Honour.

https://warmem2020.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/CFP_warmem_2020_EN.pdf

War narratives are subject to emphases, orientations and points of view that give a particular flavour to wars fought by populations (anonymously, individually and/or hidden in an organisation, secret or not)  and by the military (from high command to the ‘unknown soldier’). Such accounts evolve with the benefit of hindsight, the writing of history textbooks and the constant (re)interpretations of archives (new or not) and the official version a country wishes to put forward according to its political agendas and visions of patriotism, citizenship and human rights, or its diplomatic or international policy objectives. The narratives of wars vary with the context and the need for men and women to express their inner feelings when faced with the torments and human atrocities of war; they also reflect the place of individuals within a group and the implications of group cohesion within the larger community.

Civilians’ knowledge of the war effort and the involvement of the military is informed by two types of documents: primary sources (letters, emails, photographs, videos, testimonies, trench gazettes, blogs, etc.) provide direct information about the war experienced at an individual level, whereas secondary sources mediate these artefacts by incorporating them into another narrative.

The artefacts of war become the original materials which museums and memorials turn into places of memory, while feature films provide a less direct approach as they often (re)mediate the original accounts of first-hand witnesses through documentary, ethno-fiction, docudrama or more generally through fiction. These documents show a possible encounter between the military and civilian spheres, especially when the two are separated either in time or space.

Civilians learn about past and distant wars through the narratives built on them and through the images produced either by the military themselves, by news reporters embedded with them or following in their footsteps, or by historians. Journalistic records often frame the understanding of war by shining light on events hidden from the public gaze, by illuminating the conflicts or the complicity between civilian witnesses and members of the military. Whether intended to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the indigenous populations or to denigrate the enemy by reductive stereotyping, military strategies condition how armed forces regard the ‘Other’. Humanitarian groups approach war with a different goal in mind; their representations of war emphasize the dangers for civilian populations trapped by an ongoing conflict and reintroduce human concerns where war technology erases them. The case of civilian hostages is of particular relevance in this context.

This conference aims to explore zones of contact between the military and the civilian worlds – be they real or virtual. Zones of contact extend beyond the battlefields to civilian areas, where the enemy is sometimes conflated with undeclared combatants (especially in the age of terrorism). Soldiers may also find respite in the civilian life that wars disrupt but cannot completely annihilate. The contacts between the military and the civilians are often channeled by professional relationships. Doctors, nurses, drivers, journalists, artists… provide a link between two worlds that outsourcing has brought closer together in the contemporary era.

Both volunteers and conscripts undergo a change of status when they join the armed forces. The transition from the civilian to the military world may be a life-changing event, but it may also become part and parcel of one’s daily rhythm as war can increasingly be pursued without even leaving the home country (for example, with the development of drone technology). How do the military manage to attract civilians into donning the uniform? How do the veterans reintegrate into civilian life and overcome the trauma of waging war, especially when serious injury makes them unfit for further service.

The study of the relationships between the civilian and the military implies research into the artefacts of war, conveying the perception of combat by the military themselves or by the civilians observing them. This relationship is founded on a variety of objects aiming at boosting admiration for war heroes or condemnation of war criminals.

Reality turns into fiction as it becomes a political or romanticized narrative in film and on television, in literature and in the arts – and this transformation illuminates the civilians’ perception of war as well as soldiers’ perception of themselves.

In 2021, to mark the tenth year anniversary of the active and fruitful collaboration on the theme of war memories, our research groups – ACE (Rennes), the Royal Military College of Canada (Kingston, Ontario) and 3L.AM (Le Mans) – would like to offer researchers and members of civil society the opportunity to participate in workshop discussions on the subject of sexual violence and abuse perpetuated as a weapon of war, and on the fate of children in wartime, in addition to the themes in the non-exhaustive list given below.

Other possible workshops:
–  Remembering, transmitting war (commemorations, textbooks (paper or e-learning), museums…) and narrating war (children’s literature, graphic novels, essays, short stories, drama, poetry…)
– Drawing, photographing or filming war (documentaries, docu-fictions, ethno-fiction)
– Medialization of war (news bulletins, news reports, blogs, social media, websites…)
– War and the human dimension: testimonies of trauma and the management of emotions (from military to civilian points of view)
–  Childhood in wartime: mobilization of children in armed conflicts; staging children characters in, fictional and non-fictional, war narratives; writing or representing war for a young public
– Women civilians and the military in war; women as war weapons and victims

With keynote speeches by:
Jonathan Bignell (Professor of Television and Film, Reading University, United Kingdom)
Keynote provisional  title: Television and Ephemerality: Remembering and Forgetting War

Daniel Palmieri (Historian, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, Switzerland)
Keynote provisional title: “Now, the World without me”.
Humanitarians and Sexual Violence in Time of War

Stéphanie Bélanger (Professor, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario)
Keynote provisional title: Voice or Loyalty? Dealing with Memories in the Armed Forces

Terence McSWEENEY (Southampton/London, UK)
Keynote provisional title: Film as Cultural Battleground: War, Conflict and Human Rights in Contemporary Global Cinema

SUBMISSION DEADLINE : 30 JANUARY 2021

All submissions will be considered after the deadline of 30 January 2021.

Please send your abstract (350 words) and biography (200 words) directly to the conference website. You will need to create an account in the Submission section before filling up the fields required and uploading your document (see information on the conference website).

We will not be able to give you any news concerning the acceptance of your work before 30 January 2021.

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Deadline for Submissions, Jan. 30, 2021

Making a Murderer: True Crime in Contemporary American Popular Culture

Crime Fiction Studies

“Everybody’s fascinated with the notion that there is a cause and effect,” claims notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, quoted in the Netflix original, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) – that we can “put our finger on it,” and reassuringly rationalise the genesis of the uniquely modern phenomenon of the American serial killer. But when there is “absolutely nothing” in the background of a serial murderer that would lead one to believe they were “capable of committing murder,” how do we begin to acclimatise ourselves to this violent defect of contemporary history? More challengingly, how do we bring depth to our collective portrait of what constitutes a murderer, so that we may then self-exempt our compulsion to look more closely at these perversely familiar figures?

Over the last 50 years, a plethora of books, magazines, film and television adaptations on the subject of true crime has captured – and held – the public imagination in a vice-like grip, ultimately achieving cult status in postwar-American society while furthermore granting the white male serial killer the kind of cultural capital usually awarded only to celebrities. With the enormous popularity of such series as Making a Murderer (2015) and Mindhunter (2017), however, it seems like now, more than ever, the uneasy question of why we continue to glorify killers by inserting them into mainstream media – and what exactly the appeal of this enduring genre and its mythologization of ultraviolent masculinities tells us about ‘who we are’ and the nature of American society itself – has acquired a new level of urgency, which, in turn, requires new depths of understanding. Likewise, with the growing Netflixisation of true crime, and the narrativization of true crime more broadly, now is the time to establish a study that evaluates the politics of the ever-increasing fine line between actual crime documentaries versus fictional shows that reference true crime.

Following the University of Edinburgh’s popular ‘True Crime’ workshop series, organised by Harriet Stilley and Victoria Madden and funded by the British Association for American Studies, we are delighted to announce the call for papers for ‘Making a Murderer: True Crime in Contemporary American Popular Culture.’ This special issue of the Edinburgh University Press Crime Fiction Studies journal capitalises on a recent swell of public interest in true crime narratives, offering informed analyses of the styles of violence, intimacy, sociality, and belief that constitute the abnormal normality of the world of true crime in the American cultural imagination. Specifically, this collection of essays will explore and evaluate the multiple, contested social and/or psychological significances of murderous crime in a range of discourses from the early twenty-first century, including – but not restricted to – film and television. In doing so, we seek to address a host of difficult moral, ethical, and social questions surrounding the study of true crime – questions that force us to confront both the cultural machinery of the genre as well as our role as consumers within this framework and yet, paradoxically, are often too easily ignored. We are thus asking for abstracts for this special issue that consider the correlations between recent true crime narratives and the broader culture within which they have become gravely significant in order to shed some more light on this important but often neglected area of study.

Possible topics for this special issue may include, but are in no way limited to:

  • True Crime and Neflix (the narrativisation of true crime more broadly)
  • True Crime as Contemporary Gothic Horror
  • The Legacy of the White Male Serial Killer
  • True Crime and Celebrity Culture
  • Hypermasculine Violence and Female ‘Victimhood’
  • The Female ‘Monster’ versus the Male ‘Icon’ (and the gender implications of this more broadly)
  • Abnormality versus Normality (and conceptions of the American family)
  • True Crime and Representations of Race

Abstracts of 400 words are due by 31st January 2021 and finished articles of 6500 words will be due in July 2021. This issue will be published in March 2022.

Please send abstracts and a biographical statement of 150 words to the editors Harriet Stilley and Victoria Madden at makingamurderercfs@gmail.com. We welcome all questions and inquiries.

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Wednesday 20 January 7:00 pm GMT

 Zoom Registration page link: Webinar Registration – Zoom

 This Spring Term, the Royal Drawing School’s Online Lecture Series hosts Creative Conversations; dialogues between artists, curators and writers, live on Wednesday evenings. The series is curated by Dr Claudia Tobin, lectures are held at 7pm live on Zoom.
Artist and activist Bobby Baker will be in-conversation with artist and writer Dr Sarah Lightman about a life of drawing. They will talk about how we have claimed time and space to make work, as women and mothers.
Bobby Baker studied painting at Saint Martins School of Art (now Central Saint Martins) between 1968-72, but felt disillusioned by the elitist and chauvinist culture of the art world, where she saw very few visible women artists. “Then I had this sudden and exciting idea – to make art out of cake. It was so funny, so rebellious, so interesting in its newness. And so liberating to discover my own language to make work about what it was to be a young woman in the modern world. In those days it was so normal to be patronised and underestimated as a woman that I found the only way to deal with it was by using humour and subversion in my work.”She became a performance artist but retained her huge love of the visual arts, and drawing in particular. She has made drawings in many places and on many surfaces throughout her career: on walls as part of installations, story boards for films, sketch books, and has made many diaries of drawings about her daily life – drawing wherever she is – at home, on holiday, in waiting rooms and on tour. Last year COVID propelled her into borrowing money to build a studio in her garden to finally have the space to focus on drawing, entirely. Baker’s feminist practice champions intersectionality and expressly aims to focus on the undervalued and stigmatised aspects of women’s daily lives. In a career spanning four decades, Baker has been widely commissioned, including by WOW – Women of the World Festival; LIFT; and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. Her highly acclaimed exhibition, Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, premiered at the Wellcome Collection, London, in 2009 and continues to tours globally. The accompanying book of the same name won the MIND Book of the Year 2011. Baker’s most recent projects include the major commission Great & Tiny War for the 14-18 NOW arts programme for the First World War centenary. This site-specific work took over an entire house in Newcastle at the end of 2018, and in 2019, won Best Event Tyneside at the Journal Culture Awards. In 2019, La Casa Encendida in Madrid held a retrospective of Baker’s work, Tarros de Chutney. As part of this, Baker launched her new and on-going project: EPIC DOMESTIC – a Domestic Revolutionary Party fit for the Twenty First Century.
Baker’s most recent projects include the major commission Great & Tiny War for the 14-18 NOW arts programme for the First World War centenary. This site-specific work took over an entire house in Newcastle at the end of 2018, and in 2019, won Best Event Tyneside at the Journal Culture Awards. In 2019, La Casa Encendida in Madrid held a retrospective of Baker’s work, Tarros de Chutney. As part of this, Baker launched her new and on-going project: EPIC DOMESTIC – a Domestic Revolutionary Party fit for the Twenty First Century.
Dr. Sarah Lightman (b.1975) is a London-based artist and writer, and Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London. For the last 20 years her research and artwork has focussed on women’s visual memoirs. She studied at Central St Martin’s, The Slade School of Fine Art and the University of Glasgow. Her publications include Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (McFarland 2014), and her autobiographical graphic novel, The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions and Penn State University Press 2019). Over the last 12 years, she has published her writings on Bobby Baker’s work in books and journals, and in 2019 she was commissioned by The Wellcome Trust and Daily Life Ltd. to write the catalogue essay Great & Tiny War. She teaches Graphic Narratives at the Royal Drawing School.
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Deadline for Submissions, January 16, 2020

The Howard University Graduate English Student Association’s 5th Annual Conference

Forging Identities: Agency, Voice, and Representation in African American Literature and Beyond

Deadline for Submissions: January 16, 2021

Conference Date: March 26, 2021

Conference Location: Zoom

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Keith D. Leonard, Author of Fettered Genius

In her 1993 Nobel Lecture, the late Toni Morrison said, “Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names. Language alone is meditation.” Throughout the history of the African diaspora, Black people have demonstrated the power of language and cultural narratives to (re)envision, (re)imagine, and (re)articulate notions of identity. To interrogate and investigate the complex relationship between narratives of artistic production and identity formation, The Graduate English Student Association invites presentations, panels, and roundtables for its fifth annual conference on the theme Forging Identities: Agency, Voice, and Representation in African American Literature and Beyond.

We ask participants to consider how art and language both mediate the imposition of identity and continually birth new forms of identifying. How do literature and cultural creations aid in the crafting of multilayered, complex identities that represent Blackness beyond binaries and monoliths? How do Black artists both confront their oppression and envision their liberation? This conference, then, invites interrogation of cultural production from the Black Diaspora (e.g., music, drama, visual art, literature, and so on) as it conveys discourse on notions of identity (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, and so on).

Papers from a variety of disciplines and interdisciplinary approaches will be considered. Possible fields of study include literature, including African, African Amerian, and Caribbean literatures; history, performance studies, women and gender studies, and so forth. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following: identity formation in a transnational context; expressions of intersectionality within artistic practice; rhetorics of identity, including digital rhetoric; performing identity in virtual spaces; interrogating diversity, identity, and color blindness in “post”-racial America; identifying through speech acts, articulations, and spoken word; controlling images and misrepresentation; social media and autobiographical writing; navigating the intersections: race, gender, and sexuality; diversity and education, including literacy.

Send a 250-word abstract and a short bio to gesasecretary@gmail.com by the January 16, 2021.

Deadline for Submissions, January 15, 2020

Women of the Harlem Renaissance

Society for the Study of American Women Writers

Triennial Conference, Baltimore, Nov. 4-7, 2021

This panel will explore the multiple ways women participated in the Harlem Renaissance, a period during which women writers were particularly prominent. Paper proposals are welcome on women writing in any genre—novels, stories, poetry, journalism, drama, memoir, letters—as well as across genres. Possible topics include:

  • women’s networks during the Harlem Renaissance
  • the urban and the rural
  • Harlem and the nation
  • ecocritical perspectives on the Harlem Renaissance
  • women’s visibility and invisibility
  • lesser known women of the Harlem Renaissance
  • the Harlem Renaissance in the archives
  • teaching texts from the Harlem Renaissance
  • literature and other arts
  • abilities and disabilities in the Harlem Renaissance

Please send proposals to Lynn Domina at ldomina@nmu.edu.

Deadline: Jan. 15, 2021

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Deadline for Submissions, January 15, 2021

What do we talk about when we talk about queer death? Call for short contributions (Whatever Journal, issue 4))

Whatever. A Transdisciplinary Journal of Queer Theories and Studies (https://whatever.cirque.unipi.it/) is inviting submissions for short contributions (500-2000 words) to be collected in a multi-authored article entitled “What do we talk about when we talk about queer death?”. The article will introduce the themed section Queer thanatologies (edited by A.C. Corradino, C. Dell’Aversano, R. Langhi and M. Petricola) that will appear in Whatever’s next issue in summer 2021.

Queer death studies has recently emerged as a transdisciplinary field of inquiry investigating the cultural performances related to death, dying, grief, and disposal from the perspective of queer theory, defined as a hermeneutical stance whose premises could be summed up as follows: «queer states that any construction of identity (including LGBT ones) is a performance constituting a subject which does not “exist” prior to it, and encourages to bring into being (both as objects of desire, of fantasy and of theoretical reflection and as concrete existential and political possibilities) alternative modes of performance» (Dell’Aversano 2010: 74-75). Driven by the will to «reconceptualis[e] death, dying and mourning in relentlessly norm-critical ways» (Radomska, Mehrabi, and Lykke 2020: 82), the field of queer death studies is developing and expanding in a number of directions. Some center on an «overall attention to necropolitics and necropowers» (ibidem: 85); some focus on peripheral, non-normative, and anti-normative identities, among which are those falling within the LGBT+ spectrum; some devote to non-humans as both subjects and objects of grief; some explore the construction of corpses as objects of desire in literature and the arts, as well as their position in spiritual and other kinds of political activism; some are grounded in category theory and the social sciences and aimed at the theoretical deconstruction of the life/death polarity itself, considered as one of the most fundamental constructs for the development of every human culture; some critically-affirmatively take a posthuman and/or decolonial point of departure in life/death, considered as a spiritual-material continuum, encouraging an ecophilosophical focus on the vibrancies of all non/living matter beyond the dualisms (mind-soul/body, culture/nature, human/non-human), cherished by Western modernity.

We encourage scholars, activists, thanatologists, and other queer death friends working in any field to contribute to the ongoing development of queer death studies by answering the question “what do we talk about when we talk about queer death?” in a bite-sized format. Your theoretical reflections, case studies, notes, and thoughts are invaluable for mapping this ever-expanding field.

Short contributions should be sent to Mattia Petricola (mattia.petricola@gmail.com) by January 15, 2021. For any question or information, for expressing your interest in this publication or discussing your contribution, do not hesitate to get in touch.

References

Dell’Aversano, Carmen. 2010. ‘The Love Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken: Queering the Human-Animal Bond’. Journal for Critical Animal Studies VIII (1/2): 73–125.

http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/JCAS-Vol-VIII-Issue-I-and-II-2010-Full-Issue1.pdf.

Radomska, Marietta, Tara Mehrabi, and Nina Lykke. 2020. ‘Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective’. Australian Feminist Studies 35 (104): 81–100.

https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2020.1811952.

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Deadline for Submissions: January 15, 2021

Call for Papers: Virtual Conference

HIDDEN HISTORIES: WOMEN AND SCIENCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Organizers:

Dr Amelia Bonea (University of Heidelberg) & Dr Irina Nastasă-Matei (University of Bucharest)

7-8 May 2021

Submission deadline: 15 January 2021

The twentieth century has often been hailed as a period when women became important in science, but their participation in scientific inquiry and practice often remains buried, quite literally, in the footnotes of specialist publications and studies of the history of science. Even today, national statistics about women in science are not always easily available. The data that does exist suggests there is significant regional and cultural variation in how women engage with science globally. Recent UNESCO surveys, for example, point to a contrast between the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where almost half of the researchers employed in science are female, and East, South and West Asia, where that proportion drops significantly to 23 percent or less. Similarly, in Eastern European countries female researchers tend to be better represented in science fields than their Western European counterparts. Perhaps ironically, that relationship is reversed when we turn our attention to studies of the history of science in the twentieth century: the scientific pursuits of women in Western contexts have consistently enjoyed more visibility than those in regions like Africa, Asia or Eastern Europe. The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science (2000) is emblematic of these trends, listing as it does a mere 17 scientists from India, China and Japan, as opposed to more than 500 from Great Britain, and featuring entries up to the 1950s, a period that roughly overlaps with decolonization in Asia.

This two-day virtual conference, accompanied by a roundtable discussion, brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to address two main, interrelated questions:

  • How did women contribute to the making and communication of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century?
  • How do we study the history of women in science during this period?

We begin from the premise that encounters with science happened in a multitude of settings and that statistical data, while essential, provides only a superficial insight into the myriad experiences of women in science and, indeed, what science itself meant in different regional and cultural contexts. Our aim is to move beyond the popular ‘heroine’ model to investigate the many hidden figures who worked not only as professional scientists, but also at the periphery and even outside of scientific communities as lab technicians, amateur scientists, school teachers, librarians, journalists or science writers. In so doing, we hope to raise new questions and formulate new methods for writing the history of women in science. What, for example, do textbooks, forgotten footnotes in scientific papers, conversations about female colleagues in male scientists’ correspondence or photographs of Indian women toiling at archaeological sites teach us about the history of women in science?

Possible topics include:

  • Gender and the historiography of science: theories, methods and archives
  • Pedagogy of science: government policies around science and education, women in tertiary education, science clubs, science in the home, science education in religious institutions
  • Cultures of scientific practice: laboratories, fieldwork, secondary school teaching, scientific instruments, relationship between professional and amateur science
  • Scientific communication: scientific periodicals, mass media and science journalism, museum work, popular science writing, photography, the arts
  • Representations of women and gender in science
  • Women and scientific networks: personal and professional networks, associational culture

Keynote speakers: Prof Mariko Ogawa (Mie University) & Prof Andrea Pető (CEU)

We welcome contributions from both experienced and early career scholars. We encourage especially scholars working in/on countries and regions that are less represented to apply, in order to promote a global dialogue on this matter. Please send your proposals for 20-minute papers (abstracts of max. 300 words), along with a brief biographical note, to womeninscience2021@gmail.com by the deadline of 15 January 2021. Successful applicants will be notified by 15 February 2021. The conference will be held virtually via Zoom or heiCONF and participants will have the option of presenting their papers live or in pre-recorded format. For queries please do not hesitate to contact the organizers at the above email address.

Contact Info:

Dr Amelia Bonea (University of Heidelberg) & Dr Irina Nastasă-Matei (University of Bucharest)

womeninscience2021@gmail.com

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Deadline for Submissions January 10, 2021

Call for Papers

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture (ISSN: 2393-8013)

January, 2021 issue (online)

Special number on Life Writing

Life Writing in its conceptual, creative or hands-on versions articulates very intriguing reconfigurations. Writing about one’s own life/lives, writing about the lives of others- real or imagined, the living vs the not so much alive or the non-living has been loaded with the complexities of agency, perspective and cultural currency. The politics of non-human narratives in the age of the Anthropocene has evolved into an entire discipline. One has also to be mindful about the word writing and what sort of rhetoric and knowledge it entails and presupposes respectively. Lives ‘written’ through art, music, sometimes through graffiti or word of mouth has repopulated the significations of textuality.

Whose are these lives that are being presented? Why? By whom? And what facets of these lives swim to the surface? These questions have never been satisfactorily answered. And neither should they be. Because Life and the many meanings it has acquired does not allow one to settle for answers. Rather, the questions present interesting possibilities regarding the matrices and impulses that govern the world over time. The need to chronicle, to confess, profess, clarify, edify or to preserve for posterity, the possibilities, motives, methods are limitless, leading Life Writing to draw from diverse disciplines and speaks many dialects of knowledge.

This edition of Samyukta: A Journal of Gender and Culture looks at the possibilities that Life Writing presents- as an elastic genre, as an ongoing conversation between the agencies governing human interaction, as power, as knowledge and other associated slants and angles.

We are interested in critical examinations of how Life Writing evolved over time from being read as a clutch of diaries to the intense revelation of cultural and historic connects between philosophies, religions, languages and selves. Exclusionary politics and the subtle art of self- censorship are concerns that draw greater attention to glaring absences. These concerns also establish delicate bridges with the many positions that truths occupy -personally, philosophically, ethically and theologically. Intersections between the global, the local and the Anglophone and the issues of economic viability, visibility and contemporary geopolitics govern who gets written and read. The agency presented by social media to narrate lives and the issues of digital divide add yet another angle to the discourse. The way that Life Writing places people, the politics of gender and power, the stories of movements, nationhood and social systems through the accounts of the self and the times throws the spotlight on the many modernities that we experience and live through today.

Possible topics could include but are not limited to:

The archeology of Life Writing

The teleological, narrative and spatial politics of Life Writing

The many Subjectivities of Life Writing

The nuances of Text and Writing in Life Writing

Decoding ‘Life’ in Life Writing

Gender and Life Writing

Writing Lives, Writing History

Reading Social Movements through Life Writing

Reading Ideologies through Life Writing

Writing Life through Art: Performing Lives.

Survivor narratives

Writing the non-human

Life Writing and Social Media

Translating Vernacular Lives: Who gets Translated and Why?

Biopics as Life Writing

An abstract of 200 words should be sent to samyuktainfo@gmail.com by 10 January 2021

Selected abstracts will be intimated by 15 January 2021.

The full paper must be sent to samyuktainfo@gmail.com by 25 January 2021.

The paper must be between 3000-5000 words, in Times New Roman size 12 and must comply with the stipulations of the MLA Handbook (8th edition).

Guest Editor for the issue is Kukku Xavier, Assistant Professor, Department of English, All Saints’ College, Thiruvananthapuram.

Samyukta: A Journal of Gender & Culture is a bi-annual, peer-reviewed, academic journal published from Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India, since January 2001. Through incisive questioning of entrenched stances and deep biases, the journal has by now emerged as a leading publication from India in the field of Gender and Cultural Studies. Acknowledging the fact that our thinking, language and actions are defined by culture, papers published in Samyukta have consistently examined the cultural dimensions that impact gender roles. More recently the journal has foregrounded  the ethics of sexual difference in its papers as a matter of policy. A galaxy of scholars from India and abroad, Margot Badran, Uma Chakravarti, Imrana Qadeer, Sneja Gunew, Ritu Menon, Ilina Sen to name a few, have acted as Guest Editors for the journal.

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Deadline for Submissions, Jan. 8, 2021

The Art of Forgetting: Memory, Loss, and Revision

Department of English, Fourteenth Graduate Student Conference,

University of Ottawa, March 5-7, 2021

(1/8/2021; 3/5-7/2021)

The loss of memory can extend from the deeply personal to broader social and collective experiences. The art of ‘forgetting,’ or ars oblivionalis, allows us to reflect on how we memorialize this loss through both private and public monuments to our memories and shared pasts. Umberto Eco believed an ars oblivionalis was impossible: he maintained that deliberate forgetting couldn’t be achieved and that any framework erected to understand such an art would, paradoxically, forestall the natural processes of oblivion. For Nietzsche, ‘active’ forgetting could only be practiced as selective remembering. Nevertheless, many writers and theorists have examined forgetting in diverse and productive ways. In Forgetful Remembrance (2018), Guy Beiner has argued that forgetting is feasible, but Eco was not entirely wrong: forgetting exercises do not result in total obliteration of memory, but in its diminution. Forgetting therefore gives expression to the ethical responsibility memorializing confers on us in the present.

Forgetting exerts a considerable influence on storytelling. Writing about the holocaust, Paul Ricoeur has cautioned that forgetting will “kill the victims twice,” but remembering can “prevent life stories from becoming banal” (Figuring The Sacred 290). M. NourbeSe Philip sees significance in the “residue of memory” which remains after we forget, and draws an essential analogy between loss, what is left, and “the attempted erasure of the memories of the Africans brought as slaves to the New World”  (“A Long-Memoried Woman” 146-147). Dionne Brand, by contrast, narrates the conflict arising from deliberately forgetting trauma in her novel In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Forgetting in Yoko Ogawa’s novel The Memory Police (1994) creates possibilities for exploring the power of memory and the trauma of loss. These areas of inquiry prompt us to ask what further possibilities the art of forgetting generates.

For this year’s conference we hope to consider the ethical responsibility for remembrance and to probe the relationship between memory and forgetting generally. Broadly, we ask what is the textual relationship between cultural memory and forgetting? Do approaches to understanding ‘forgetting’ change when we examine collective remembrance rather than individual memory? Why do different groups of people interpret the same events differently—even when the facts are not disputed? What is the utility in exploring trauma and violence when we risk the activation of painful memories? What remembrance do we owe people we have lost and how is that reflected in the monuments we create to commemorate them? How does forgetting shape history, our stories, and narrative?

Potential topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • “Forgetting” as an aspect of memory
  • Collective Memory and Social Forgetting
  • Loss of Identity, Culture, and Geographical or Historical space, e.g. diaspora studies
  • Nationalism and Propaganda
  • Monuments, Commemoration, and Remembrance
  • Holocaust / Shoah
  • “Fake news” and Rumour
  • Narratology and the unreliable narrator
  • Vernacular/Alternative Historiography
  • Performance and Oral Histories
  • Uncovering untold histories (queer & BIPOC narratives, etc.)
  • Erasure
  • Archival studies
  • “Forgotten” stories, “Lost” narratives and experiences, e.g. disability studies
  • Memoir Studies
  • Trauma Theory, Psychoanalysis
  • Dementia and mental health narratives
  • Episodic memory/Misremembering
  • Sites of Oblivion
  • Literature of Memory / Mnemotechnic literature
  • Active Forgetting
  • Testimony Literature
  • Time & temporality

The EGSA invites proposals from graduate students and emerging and established academics working in any discipline, period, and geographical region to consider the art of forgetting in its various formulations. Please send 250-word abstracts and a short bio by 8 January 2021 to uottawa.conference@gmail.com.

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Deadline for Submissions, January 6, 2021

CFP: 2021 Popular Culture Association Annual (PCA) Conference–Biographies Area: Boston, MA, June 2-5, 2021: Submission Deadline Extension (1/6/21)

The Biographies Area is soliciting papers that examine the connections between biography and popular culture. Papers and full panel presentations regarding any aspect of popular culture and biography are encouraged. Potential topics might include:

– Biography and entertainment, art, music, theater
– Biography and film
– Biography and criminal justice
– Television programs about biography
– Biography and urban legends
– Biography and folklore
– Biography and literature
– Scholarly Biography
– Controversial Biography
– Psychoanalysis and Biography
– Historical Biography
– Political Biography
– Autobiography

Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 6, 2021.

The Popular Culture Association is committed to holding the conference in June 2021. Given recent events, there will likely be a hybrid/virtual component.

To submit an abstract, please visit:
https://pcaaca.org/conference/submitting-paper-proposal-pca-conference

Submissions will only be accepted through the PCA website. Individuals must be current, paid members to submit to the conference.

Please direct any queries to the Biographies Area Chair:

Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
Las Vegas, NV 89154
susie.skarl@unlv.edu OR susieskarl@gmail.com

Contact Info:

Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
4505 S. Maryland Pkway. MS 7014
Las Vegas, NV 89154

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions, December 30, 2020

Dissident self-narratives: radical and queer life writing

A Special Issue of Synthesis Journal   (12/30/2020)

Life writing is often considered to endorse a universalist liberal humanist ethics that encompasses a broad spectrum that goes from a neoliberal emphasis on self-sufficiency to theories of care that highlight our common vulnerability and interdependence. This universalist humanist ethics, even in its most progressive forms, may blunt life writing’s radical edge and even participate in the silencing and oppression of subaltern beings that fall outside its scope. Thus, diseased, displaced, dissenting, dis-integrated autobiographical voices and life-writing’s dissident potential and radical, queer promises need to be reassessed and reclaimed.

This special issue aims to examine critical and anti-normative explorations of the self as they become manifest in contemporary but also older forms of life writing that have challenged hegemonic discourses shaping human subjectivity, the sexual order and the political status quo. For instance, Marguerite Yourcenar’s ecological decentering of the human race and deconstruction of heteronormativity might outweigh the more traditional elements in her autobiographical triptych. In order to yield its full radical and oppositional possibilities, life writing often embraces public and private chaos and shuns the poise of hindsight. For instance, Louis MacNeice or Klaus Mann write their autobiographies during the Second World War, to foreground, rather than resolve, trauma, madness and the death-drive. Marginality, diseased bodies and ubiquitous death are pervading themes in the autobiographical works of Hervé Guibert, Derek Jarman, David B. Feinberg and Guillaume Dustan, whose writings stand on the threshold between testimony and political activism. As they try to survive AIDS, while also facing the social stigma associated with queer sexualities, they take to task liberal, compassionate readers, and construct a subaltern counter-public of queer alter egos.  Earlier, Claude Cahun’s fragmented Disavowals or René Crevel’s “inner panoramas” have wreaked havoc in “the old logical-realistic attic” and challenged not only the confessional tradition but also the binary structure of rational discourse. Another form of critical and anti-normative exploration of the self can be found in the way Roland Barthes keeps at bay psychological narratives of healing and mourning. More recently, in his account of his F to M transition through rogue self-medication, Paul B. Preciado bypasses psychology in order to foreground the biopolitical dimension of subjects shaped and invented by media images and pharmaceutical molecules, but also to map out possibilities of micro-resistance. In the different context of North-American structural racism, John Wideman’s “black rage” and multi-layered writing eschew a personal linear narrative of self-made success and integration.

While foregrounding certain writers standing at the margins of the current academic literary canon, this special issue also draws attention to the more highly profiled writers who can also be read as voices of dissent that oppose the tenets of liberal humanism. We invite submissions that examine life writing that disrupts canonical autobiographical paradigms that are informed by the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, which has often centered on a socially integrated narrator who looks back with retrospective wisdom, pride, regret or nostalgia, consolidating thereby an identity grounded in dominant conceptions of what a life, a self and a reading public should be like. We welcome contributions that discuss the ways by which life writing challenges hegemonic paradigms of self-knowledge, subjectivity and reader reception, by radically questioning gender, racial and class norms.

–Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Aude Haffen at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr andsynthesisjournal2008@gmail.com by 20 December 2020.

–Notification of acceptance will be delivered by 11 January 2021.

–Accepted articles are to be submitted by 30 June 2021.

–Final articles should be 6,000-9,000 words long and include an abstract of no more than 300 words.

Contact Info:

All enquiries regarding this issue should be sent to the guest editor, Aude Haffen, at marie-aude.haffen@univ-montp3.fr.

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Deadline for Submissions: 15 December 2020.

World Literature and the Minor: Figuration, Circulation, Translation” (12/15/2020; 5/6-7/2021) University of Leuven, Belgium (Online)

Conference website
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/world-literature-and-the-minor-figuration-circulation-translation

Call for papers (abridged version)
The conference “World Literature and the Minor: Figuration, Circulation, Translation” will explore the multifaceted meanings of the minor from different disciplinary perspectives—as it is represented in literary texts (figuration), as it inflects patterns of mobility and reception (circulation), and as it marks processes of linguistic and cultural transfer (translation). The conference will work towards a critical, more inclusive understanding of the minor, both conceptually and methodologically.

Deadline for abstract submission: 15 December 2020. Please send your proposal to minorliterature@kuleuven.be

Keynote speakers
Michael Cronin (Trinity College Dublin)
B. Venkat Mani (UW-Madison)
Francesca Orsini (SOAS)
Lyndsey Stonebridge (Birmingham)

Online format
In order to stimulate as much interaction as possible, the conference panels will consist of small working groups based on pre-circulated papers. The participants will have 5 minutes to summarize their paper. The presentations will be followed by a short response and a general discussion.

We plan to publish a selection of the papers in a thematic special journal issue and a book. The aim of the discussions is to establish common threads between the different topics and to work towards expanded versions of the papers suitable for publication.

Important dates
15 December 2020: deadline for abstract submission
15 January 2021: notification of acceptance
1 March 2021: deadline for online registration
20 April 2021: deadline for paper submission
6-7 May 2021: conference

Contact email: nuria.codina@kuleuven.be

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Deadline for Submissions: 15 December 2020

Narrative Knowing in Heritage and Travel Online Conference

December 15, 2020 / May 27, 2021

Plymouth

Subject Fields:
Architecture and Architectural History, French History / Studies, Geography, German History / Studies, Literature

Writers such as W G Sebald and Sven Lindqvist employed literary travel writing to emotionally and psychologically translate their fieldwork experiences into their writings about place, while Walter Benjamin combined ideas of narrative knowing with practices that offer public engagement and impact for his ideas. This conference explores how methods of contemporary literary travel writing can be brought into the work of academic researchers, writers and professionals in the fields of cultural heritage interpretation.

Proposals for papers are invited from researchers and from heritage and tourism practitioners that explore narrative non-fiction as a literary form or as professional practice for writing about place. Established academics and postgraduate or doctoral researchers are encouraged to submit their proposals. Further, pedagogic approaches to teaching interpretative and writing practices for these fields are also encouraged.

We are delighted to announce our Keynote speaker, literary travel writer and pyschogeographer Gareth E Rees, author of Unofficial Britain: Journeys through Unexpected Places (2020), Carpark Life (2019) and the Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares on the edge of London (2013).
We expect to publish an edited collection of presented papers.
Deadline for Proposals is midnight UTC on December 15, 2020.

Proposals must include the title of the paper, author’s name, email and affiliation. Please include a description of the paper in up to 300 words plus two or three indicative bibliographic references.

Please email proposals to: Dr Charlie Mansfield, Co-Director, Cornerstone Heritage Research Centre, University of Plymouth. Email charlie.mansfield@plymouth.ac.uk
In addition, the conference plans to display posters digitally, in A0-size, single-slide landscape format in PowerPoint, for delegates to download and view offline. Please propose these by email in a Word document with the title of the poster, name, email and affiliation and brief description of the work plus two indicative bibliographic references.

Conference language: English. Zoom will be used.

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Announcement: Call-for-Papers

Deadline: December 15, 2020

This call is for submissions for an international edited collection entitled Taking Control: the critical and creative uses of digital tools in the now, the foreseeable future, and beyond, in screen, literature, and the visual arts.

Taking Control seeks to examine the current uses, and the potential for expansion and extension, and possible future uses of AI in relation to screen and literature and visual culture texts and narratives; as well as the little explored angle of cultural criticism and cultural meaning in those human-AI assisted productions.

Suggestions for potential contributions to Taking Control are: how the use of AI in these productions may sharpen, and ask for answers to, big questions that intersect with our society and environment and worlds; encourage further research that opens new possibilities as well as an open-mindedness in the quest for a deeper understanding; create platforms that cross cultures and borders, to become inter- and multidisciplinary; provide immediate access to resources that we can trust to provide accurate information, and that is enriching and productive; and bring to the table a common “language” that can create a shared experience, with the potential to cross borders into other disciplines, and sustain our cultural heritage. The aim of Taking Control is to highlight the human-AI blend in creativity as a vibrant multidisciplinary thematic area where we urgently need better understanding and clear parameters to judge success and failure.

Technology can be misused, yet in the human-AI blend humans have the power to intervene. In these interactions, there is the potential to take things to a different level. The power of the human, the ability to think differently, and critically and creatively, together with the technical abilities of the immediate computer for holding, sorting, and providing masses of big data, hold out the possibility of expanded human creativity. When you choose and use information fairly, it makes the outcome compelling and accurate. AI affects what people look for; what they enter, and how they respond, and what that reveals and changes about the people, can affect our societies and cultures. Wherever you add questions about our environment, for instance, AI it sharpens it so we can relate to it.  Thus, how it relates to the human experience, to our world, and human society, much depends on how we manage it, where we take it and what we do with it.

Questions remain: In what ways can human-AI assisted screen, literature and visual culture texts and narratives expand, grow, and bring deeper understanding of ourselves, our worlds, our environment, our culture and society, and bring about change?  How do these works address cultural criticism, and social and cultural meanings, and add to our understanding of our cultures and society? What is the potential for exploring human experience and that connect to our world, and the possible import of these productions for the future? Admittedly, there are differing views and opinions on the future of AI. Some think an Artificial General Intelligence  can exist and others think not. What does all this mean for our future society and culture?
At this initial stage, in lieu of “chapters,” this proposed work, Taking Control, calls for extended abstracts for consideration for inclusion in the book.
Submission instructions:

  1. The extended abstracts must be more than 1,000 and less than 1,500 words.

(Full-length chapters of 6,000 – 7,000words each (including notes but excluding references lists, title of work, and key words) will be solicited from these abstracts.)

  1. Please keep in mind that your essay-chapter will be written from your extended abstract. Your abstract will carry the same title as your essay-chapter.
  2. To be considered, abstracts must be written in English, and submitted as a Word document.
  3. When writing your abstract use Times New Roman point 12,and 1.15 spacing.
  4. At the beginning of your extended abstract, immediately after the title of your work and your name, add 5 to 8 keywords that best relate to your work.
  5. Use the Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition.
  6. Since this work is for Palgrave Macmillan UK, please use English spelling not American English spelling.
  7. Use endnotes not footnotes, use counting numbers not Roman numerals, and keep the endnotes to a bare minimum, working the information into the text where possible.
  8. Do cite all your work in your extended abstract as you would in a full chapter.

a) in the body of the abstract, add parenthetical in-text citations (family name of author and year, and page number/s) (e.g. Smith 2019, 230);
b) fully reference all in-text citations in alphabetical order, in the References list at the end of your abstract.

  1. Please send your abstract and your documents as attachments to an email. At the same time as submitting your extended abstract, in separate documents please send the following:
  • Your covering letter, giving your academic title/s, affiliation, your position, and your home and telephone, and email contact details;
  • A short bio of no more than 200 words;
  • Your C.V., giving your publications to date, and the publishing details and dates.

Papers should be forwarded to:
Jo Parnell Jo.Parnell@newcastle.edu.au  alternatively annette.parnell@newcastle.edu.au  or joandbobparnell@bigpond.com

Deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2020.

Editor:
Dr Jo Parnell,
Conjoint Research Fellow,
Faculty of Education and Arts,
School of Humanities and Social Science,
University of Newcastle, Australia.

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Deadline for Registration, Dec. 1, 2020

Unhinging the National Framework: Platform for the Study of Transnational Life Writing
Fifth Annual Symposium
Friday 4 December 2020 9.00 – 17.00

Location: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam Main Building 5A00 + online via Zoom Webinar

Free of charge, but please register before 1 December. How to register: https://clue.vu.nl/en/news-agenda/news-archive/2020/okt-dec/201204-unhinging.aspx

Program
Keynote speakers:
Prof. dr. Halleh Ghorashi, Professor of Diversity and Integration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr. Anna Poletti, Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Utrecht University
Prof. dr. Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita, Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University

Speakers:
Dr. Vera Alexander, Senior Lecturer in European Cultures and Literatures, Groningen University
Prof. dr. Susan Legêne, Professor of Political History, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Dr. Vilan van de Loo, independent writer and researcher.
Prof. dr. Giles Scott-Smith, Professor of Diplomatic History, Leiden University

Speakers and abstracts (in order of appearance)

Anna Poletti, Associate Professor Comparative Literature, Utrecht University
Autobiography, mediation and transnationalism: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains
Behrouz Boochani’s award-winning No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison is a hybrid work of life writing, composed on illicit mobile phones and secretly transmitted to a team of translators and supporters via WhatsApp. Documenting and theorizing the violence of Australia’s indefinite mandatory detention in camps on remote Pacific nations of people seeking asylum, No Friend But the Mountains is a uniquely transnational intellectual and aesthetic project. Its composition was enabled by digitally networked technologies that were able to evade the blanket of censorship imposed on Australia’s offshore detention centres by Government policies that limited access to the prisons by journalists, human rights organizations, and international monitors. The book’s title—a Kurdish saying that refers to the powerful connection between the Kurdish people and the mountains of their homelands—signals that the writing and thinking of the book is imbedded in and enabled by Boochani’s identity as a Kurdish journalist forced to flee Iran. At the same time, No Friend But the Mountains is a work of theory and life writing that is profoundly transnational; it responds to and seeks to understand the logics of the nation state, citizenship and border policing as techniques of power that produce new forms of violence which transcend national boundaries and jurisdictions, creating complex networks of implication, responsibility, and hierarchies.
Drawing on my arguments about autobiography and mediation in my recent book (Stories of the Self (NYU Press, 2020)), a forthcoming collection of essays I commissioned on No Friend But the Mountains for Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and my experience teaching the book in an international classroom in the Netherlands, I will examine No Friend But the Mountains as a work that exemplifies the role of media technologies in the act of living—and the emergence of—transnational life.

Vera Alexander, Senior Lecturer in European Cultures and Literatures, Groningen University

Figures of Mobility and the Crisis of Connection
In this presentation I locate life stories of mobility in an ongoing crisis of connection and connectivity. I read figures of mobility such as the visitor, the tourist and the refugee as ambivalent signifiers of place and belonging that problematise any simple dichotomy of Self versus Other and Here versus There. Making reference to contemporary  poetic travel writings by Warsan Shire and Kapka Kassabova as well as photography and other media, I argue that the relational nature of life narratives needs to be considered not only in binary terms of social connections between human beings, but as a triad that embraces the precarious relationship that connects human beings to place as well as notions of time and duration. Place relations are subject to utopian idealisation and polarised affective projections as they are constitutive of identity construction. Since these are subject to constant change and reconfiguration, the notion of mobility and its obverse, stagnation, need to be reconceptualised as fundamental dynamic aspects of belonging.

Giles Scott-Smith, Professor of Diplomatic History, Leiden University

Between Colonial and Post-Colonial? Ivan Kats and the Perils of Cultural Diplomacy in Cold War Indonesia

Is it possible to overcome colonial legacies if you promote post-independence cultural autonomy? Ivan Kats was a Flemish/American cultural entrepreneur who developed a profound interest in Indonesia and the development of its national cultural identity. From the 1960s to the 1990s he pursued a book publishing project through his Obor Foundation, that looked to bridge the ethical gap between the resources of Western cultural imperialism and the poverty of the post-colonial culture industry. This presentation places Kats as a ‘double personage’ (Bourdieu) between different worlds, to explore both his projects and motivations.

Gloria Wekker, Professor Emerita, Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University
Families navigating Empire
In my presentation I will present excerpts from recent, autobiographical work, which emphatically is work – in – progress. These excerpts will eventually become part of a mixed genre work, based on historical and anthropological knowledge, on non- fiction and fiction. This type of work is currently understood under several different headings, among which “critical fabulation” is prominent. It is a term used by Saidiya Hartman, signifying a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. Central in my presentation will be different migrations within my multi-ethnic Surinamese family, which encompasses enslaved people, Jewish plantation owners, Native Surinamese. I will talk about transnational, geographical migrations but also about migrations of the heart, where individuals overstepped ethnic boundaries which had long been understood as foundational to empire, to plural societies, which needed to be governed as if the boundaries around different ethnic groups were “natural”. Concretely I will read prose and poetry and reflect on the nature of “critical fabulation”.

Dr. Vilan van de Loo, independent writer and researcher
Exploring the New Political Correct: Colonial Violence in Aceh
Central in my presentation is the possibility of creating a transnational understanding of heroism. To answer this question I will focus on the military Aceh expedition of 1904.
Nowadays the Dutch East Indies seems to be reduced to a narrative of military violence during the process of decolonisation, although there is an awareness of the tradition of colonial violence as well, especially in Aceh. The framing of both histories of violence is the same: the officers of the KNIL were more or less war criminals, and the Acehnese were helpless victims. This leads to a postcolonial self-image of superiority among the Dutch: ‘look how good we are to be able to see how bad we have been’. With the exploration of contemporary sources and with the use of a specific military view, the original framing is now fading. My presentation will focus on a new way of looking at the history of the military Aceh expedition of 1904, commanded by Frits van Daalen (1863-1930). I will place this new approach in the context of the early twentieth century’s national need for colonial heroes—from which the Acehnese were excluded. I will also discuss how this related to the making of a civil servant (Van Daalen became governor of Aceh) and take a look at the vulnerable position of Van Daalen. As the highest-ranking Indo-European officer he stood out. What do we see, if we look at the expedition through his eyes, and what does that mean in the way the colonial past is judged? Would it be possible to create a transnational understanding of heroism during this expedition?

Halleh Ghorashi, Professor of Diversity and Integration, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
BLM: A transnational movement that changed the Dutch landscape
In this lecture I will discuss how Black Lives Matter, as a transnational movement, has changed the Dutch landscape regarding the existence of institutional racism and cross-racial solidarities. In the last 25 years, I have been engaging with the life experiences of refugee and migrant women (through various forms of narratives methodology). In these studies these women narrate a strong presence of exclusionary mechanisms (both blatant and subtle) within the Dutch context.  Yet, until recently, the existing implicit and growing explicit forms of racism in the Dutch public space had not led to a public recognition of the existence of structural forms of racism in the Netherlands. In an earlier work, I showed the historical and societal reasons behind the denial of racism in the Dutch context despite the fact that racist acts and statements in the public space had gained a strong presence. I argued that this was partly based on the historically rooted idea of the superiority of Dutch culture in the Dutch migration discourse (which Wekker conceptualized as cultural archive) and its link to the categorical framing of migrants as ‘a problem’ in Dutch society. This history together with a positive self-image of the Dutch as progressive had made it almost impossible for people to accept the notion that racism was part of the Dutch self-image. But something shifted with the arrival of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the Netherlands. I argue that Dutch society can take advantage of this momentum to transform its non-reflective progressive image into critical self-reflection and actions aimed at the inclusion of diverse groups by addressing institutional racism beyond “good intentions”.

Deadline for Submission: December 1st, 2020. 

Austrian Travel Writing (12/1/2020; 6/17-19/2021) Maynooth University, Ireland

Organisers: Florian Krobb, School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Maynooth University

Caitriona Leahy, Department of German, Trinity College Dublin

On 24 February 1879, Empress Elizabeth of Austria (‘Sisi’), participating in a stag hunt out of Summerhill House, residence of the Viscounts of Langfort in Kilcock, County Meath, breached the walls of neighbouring St. Patrick’s College Maynooth. She was greeted by Acting President, Dr William Walsh, a future Archbishop of Dublin. On returning to Ireland one year later, she presented the College with a statue of St George, somewhat unfortunately the patron saint of England. Sisi’s visit – after all the visit of a Catholic monarch from a ‘dual’ monarchy – was otherwise welcomed by Irish nationalists as a potent statement of solidarity. The empress, perhaps contritely, later endowed the College with a set of vestments of gold cloth, decorated with gold and green shamrocks and the coats of arms of Austria, Hungary and Bavaria. The less welcome statue was promptly stolen.

Sisi’s visit to Maynooth highlights some of the aspects that make travel such a rewarding subject of academic investigation: the purpose, perception, political implications, symbolism and discourse that attend the actual activity of travelling form a potent, intriguing, often contradictory blend, sometimes in their own time, sometimes later.

The aim of the conference is to explore Austrian travel writing in the broadest sense, incorporating all German writing originating from Austria and the Habsburg lands from the Middle Ages to the present day. Travel writing is understood as any text, in fiction or non-fiction, that deals explicitly and substantively with journeys (understood as physical movement through space, not primarily in a figurative or metaphorical sense) and uses an itinerary as a prominent structuring device. As regards purpose, length or destination of the journey, however, engagement with all varieties of travel writing are welcome – internal and external travel, tourism and exploration, ‘discovery’ of the more remote parts of the Habsburg Empire and the core regions of the truncated Austrian republics, as well as regions further afield.

We welcome a plurality of methodological and theoretical approaches. We welcome engagement with a variety of genres from pilgrims’ or journeymen’s narratives, accounts of diplomatic or military travel, reports of ‘scientific’ travel (Novara expedition, Payer/Weyprecht Arctic expedition of 1872-74) and accounts of Afrikareisende such as Oscar Baumann, to genres such as travel journalism / reportage and travel poetry. Journeys undertaken in search of refuge and other kinds of migrations might also have found expression in forms of travel writing. We welcome engagement with noteworthy individuals such as Ida Pfeiffer, travel writing on specific destinations with specific agendas (e.g. Felix Salten’s evaluation of Jewish settlement in Palestine 20 years after Herzl’s Altneuland), fresh studies of classics and modern classics by (e.g.) Roth, Bachmann, Handke, Ransmayr, and of more recent postcolonial treatments of historical journeys in the works of (e.g.) Thomas Stangl and Franzobel. We wonder if contemporary attention to the anthropocene across the humanities is also making its mark on the writing of travel literature and on our ways of reading it…? The Coronavirus experience, too, might have opened up new perspectives on travel writing and travel discourse.

Conference languages are English and German. A selection of the English papers will be published as vol. 31 (2023) of the MHRA yearbook Austrian Studies. The publication of a selection of the German papers is also envisaged. Both publications will be fully peer-reviewed.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short bio-blurb (both in the same document) in your chosen language to florian.krobb@mu.ie and cleahy@tcd.ie by 1 December 2020. Attempts will be made to secure some support for early career scholars / non-tenured colleagues, but no promises can be made with regard to funding. However, there will be no conference fee.

If public health considerations prevent us from going ahead on the dates indicated above, we will reschedule rather than cancel. In the meantime, we would encourage interested colleagues to submit proposals inevitable uncertainties notwithstanding.

Contact Info:

Prof. Florian Krobb, School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures, Maynooth University / National University of Ireland Maynooth

Maynooth, County Kildare, Republic of Ireland

Contact Email:

Deadline for Submission: December 1st, 2020. 

CFP: Special Issue on Life Writing – Ilha do Desterro

Ilha do Desterro, one of the longest-running Brazilian journals devoted to English studies, is currently accepting submissions for a special issue on Life Writing to be published in May 2021. Even though the first recorded uses of “life writing” in English are found in the 17th century as rather straightforward translations of “bios” and “graphein”, we owe much of our current understanding of life writing to Virginia Woolf and her use of the concept in “A Sketch of the Past”. Differently from this earlier use, which simply meant “biography,” after not only Woolf and Lytton Strachey in Britain, but also in American literature with Gertrude Stein and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as Edmund Gosse and W.B. Yeats in Ireland, to name a few, life writing in English has come to encompass an array of genres and forms, across many media, that seek to represent a single life or multiple lives. According to Margaretta Jolly, the concept has gained “wide academic acceptance since the 1980s” because of “its openness and inclusiveness across genre, and because it encompasses the writing of one’s own or another’s life” (ix).

In this special issue of Ilha do Desterro, we intend to take a broad and inclusive approach to the concept of life writing and consider articles that cover a range of broadly conceived texts: auto/biographies, letters, memoirs, journals, and diaries all make relevant corpora for study. We are also interested in texts that may not have been published contemporaneously or circulated widely, as this opens “the way for the study, in particular, of a range of women’s writings from earlier periods and for a recognition of the significance of ‘personal’ or ‘private’ writing, including family memoirs, diaries, and journals” (Marcus, 2019, p. 2). This trans- and multidisciplinary issue of Ilha thus invites articles dealing with literary, intermedia, and intermodal genres and forms of life writing, in English speaking contexts or from comparative approaches, including:

• Life writing and ethics: truth-telling, mediation, pact-making

• Collaborative projects in life writing

• Life writing in diasporic movements, migration, and dislocation

• “Lives of the obscure,” no more: representation and intersectionality in disability studies, critical race studies, queer studies, and the writing of women’s lives

• Writing nonhuman lives: nature, animal, land, objects and life writing

• Wandering subjects in life and travel writing

• Historical, theoretical, and comparative approaches to life writing

• The aesthetics and rhetoric of life writing

• The role of the archive in life writing

• New platforms for life writing in the 21st, including social media

Reviews are also considered for books published in 2019-2021, under the scope of this literature issue. The journal’s scope is literatures in English—the geopolitical study of works and authors of Anglophone literatures in the light of contemporary critical theories; theoretical and cultural intersections, with a focus on the study of literatures, other arts and media, as well as their interrelations and/or theoretical and cultural specificities.

Deadline for Submission: December 1st, 2020.

More information: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/announcement/view/1599

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Newsletter Biography Institute

November 2020

New series Biography Studies started successfully
In the new series Biography Studies (Brill) two first volumes have been published. Hans Renders and David Veltman edited the volume Different Lives. Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies, whereas Maarten Zwiers and Jelte Olthof were responsible for the publication of Profiles in Power. Personality, Persona, and the U.S. President. On Biografieportaal.nl and in The Biographer’s Craft reviews were published in praise of Different Lives. Both parts are now available in the bookshops.
From the cover of Different Lives
Internationally acclaimed biographies are almost always written by British or American biographers. But what is the state of the art of biography in other parts of the world? Introduced by Richard Holmes, the volume Different Lives offers a global perspective: seventeen scholars vividly describe the biographical tradition in their countries of interest. They show how biography functions as a public genre, featuring specific societal issues and opinion-making. Indeed, the volume aims to answer the question: how can biography contribute to a better understanding of differences between societies and cultures? Special attention is given to the US, China and the Netherlands. Other contributions are on Australia, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Iceland, Iran, Italy, New Zealand, Spain, and South Africa.

Hubert van den Berg hosts workshop at Biography Institute
Professor Hubert van den Berg (Palacky university, Czech Republic) will provide a workshop at the Biography Institute on Thursday 19 November, 13-16 hrs. via Zoom. During this workshop, he will discuss ways to avoid trodden paths in archival research. Van den Berg wrote extensively on the historical avant-garde in the Netherlands, Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. In 2017, his book Dada, een geschiedenis appeared at Vantilt publishers. People that are interested to attend the workshop online, can send a mail to the Biography Institute.

David Veltman publishes article on Les Plats Pays.com
The francophone website Les Plats Pays.com now features an article by David Veltman, PhD student at the Biography Institute, on the friendship between the Flemish painter, Felix de Boeck and the Walloon poet Maurice Carême.

More information can be found on the website www.biografieinstituut.nl.
For subscribing to and unsubscribing from this newsletter, please email biografie.instituut@rug.nl

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Subject: Teaching Life Writing Conference Dec 10-11: Registration is Open

Dear Colleagues,
Registration for the December 10-11 Teaching Life Writing (virtual) Conference is now open! Register Here: https://subline.ualberta.ca/Registration/Create/57?eventItemDef=476

If your paper or round-table presentation has been accepted, please register now. The cost is $5 CD. Do you just want to attend the conference? You can! Register, pay the fee and you will have access to the whole conference.

The program is almost ready. When we release it, we will give you instructions about attending the conference in the Round the World format.

Promote the conference in your networks! Like us on our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/lwconf), follow us on Twitter (@lifewritingconf) and check the main conference page (https://subline.ualberta.ca/portals/57) for updates about the conference. We are looking forward to welcoming you soon!

The Teaching Life Writing Conference Team
(Orly Lael Netzer, Julie Rak, Amanda Spallacci)
email: lwconf@ualberta.ca

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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.

So if during the last year (from December 2019 to December 2020) you have published, edited, or co-edited a book, written 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. (There is of course a very good chance that we have already included it—we work on this all year!—but this will make sure your work is noted.)

We would request the following information:

·      Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted as per MLA 8 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 Friday, December 4. Please send your information to Zoë Sprott (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.
—

Paige Rasmussen
Managing Editor
The Center for Biographical Research

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1960 East-West Road
Biomed B104
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-3774
Find us on Facebook and Twitter!

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Dear IABA-L Members

The Center for Biographical Research at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa has been holding a weekly seminar series since 1987–this week’s talk will be session number 761.

COVID-19 has forced us online, but the upside is that the seminars can now be attended virtually from virtually anywhere, so we thought that especially for those in somewhat congenial time zones, and with an interest in the Pacific–though the topics range beyond that–it would make sense to tell when the seminars are, and also that they will be posted on the Center’s YouTube channel in a permanent archive.

Hope to “see” you, if something catches your interest.

Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research
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BROWN BAG BIOGRAPHY
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
THURSDAYS, 12:00 NOON–1:15 PM Hawaiian Standard Time • ONLINE VIA ZOOM
DISCUSSIONS OF LIFE WRITING BY & FOR TOWN & GOWN
All are welcome to attend. For more information about the weekly events, please visit the Center for Biographical Research’s website http://blog.hawaii.edu/cbrhawaii/

FALL 2020 SCHEDULE

October 22: “Roots and Routes along Keaukaha’s Seashore: Tidalectic Repertoires of Place”

Halena Kapuni-Reynolds, Doctoral Candidate, Department of American Studies, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by the Departments of History, Political Science, and Anthropology, the Museum Studies Program, and Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 954 2305 5123
Password: EDV55r

October 29: “A Biography of Haunting: Crafting Historical Fiction Set in Post-Annexation Hawai`i”

Kristiana Kahakauwila, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 914 7320 9610
Password: 3KRqBF

November 5: “‘The Depth of Darkness’: Genealogies of Race and Sovereignty in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiian Literature”

Joyce Pualani Warren, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 939 8234 2880
Password: 001PS8

November 12: “James Macrae and the Voyage of HMS Blonde”

Brian Richardson, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by the Departments of History and Political Science, and Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 920 6909 2145
Password: VYh10D

November 19: “​Materializing Queer Genealogies at Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill”
Dr. Emily West, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by the Department of History and Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 954 9489 9581
Password:  kZYY3y

November 24 (TUESDAY):​ “​Nationalism and the Transformation of Land into Sovereign Territory”

Nandita Sharma, ​Professor of Sociology and Co-Director of the International Cultural Studies Program, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by the Departments of History, Political Science, and Anthropology, the Center for South Asian Studies, and Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: ​945 6312 3936
Password: 385314

December 3: “George Birdwood Before He Was ‘Sir George Birdwood’: The Bombay Years, 1854–1868”

Peter H. Hoffenberg, Associate Professor of History, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

Cosponsored by the Department of History, the Center for South Asian Studies, and Hamilton Library

Meeting ID: 965 3776 2074
Password: 354W83
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XII IABA TURKU: postponement & updates

Dear IABA-World Conference Participants,

We would like to update you on plans for the IABA World conference, postponed from June 2020.

As you know, we had hoped to welcome you to Turku in June 2021, but as the global pandemic is still effecting every corner of the world and there is so much uncertainty, we have discussed the situation both with our Turku team and the international IABA group. We have made the extremely difficult decision to reschedule the World-conference to June 2022. As travelling will still be difficult next Spring and changing the conference to an entirely virtual form would require many changes in the programme and other practical difficulties, we think this is the only solution at the moment. However, the IABA-group is planning to offer platforms for area chapters to organise smaller scale virtual events next year – and you will be hearing about them soon.

We are planning to have the CFP open again next summer, and, at that time, you can confirm or update your abstract, propose a new paper, or withdraw your participation. Please wait for this follow-up information, as we cannot answer all individual emails right now.

We will update the website https://iabaturku2021.net/, and remember to follow us in Facebook and Twitter as well!

Regarding the registration and payment practicalities, our congress services Aboa (info@aboaservices.fi) will be in contact with you by the end of October.

Warm wishes,

Maarit and the whole IABA team from SELMA

@iabaturku2021
#iaba2021

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Deadline for Proposals, November 29, 2020

From Combat to Commemoration. Veteran Politics and Memory: A Global Perspective (11/29/2020; 4/16-17/2021) United Kingdom

Department of History, University of Warwick
16th and 17th April 2021

From the fields of Gettysburg to the beaches of Normandy, the participation and presence of former soldiers has been an integral part of the memorial culture of many conflicts. As survivors of war, veterans are often portrayed a group imbued with a unique knowledge whose experiences should not be forgotten. Yet while public commemorations have sought to establish consensus about the meaning of the past, veterans’ memories have also been a source of conflict and contestation, engaged in struggles over rights, recognition, and the authority to remember the past and speak for the future.

In a recent article in War & History,Grace Huxford et al. note that the historically unprecedented number of veterans across the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has ensured not just that veterans ‘occupy a significant place in modern history but that they are also a vital lens through which to analyse the changing relationship between war and society’. Veterans, however, are from being a modern phenomenon –estimates suggest that a larger proportion of the English population fought in the Civil Wars of the mid-seventeenth century than in World War One. Moreover, though veteran studies has become a rich field of interdisciplinary enquiry, studies tend to be embedded in their own geographic and historical contexts: the transtemporal and transnational study of veterans remains in its infancy.

This conference seeks to bring together scholars from across time and space to explore the experience of veterans, and particularly the politics of veteran memory and commemoration, from a global, comparative perspective. We hope to publish the resulting papers in an edited collection that will approach veteran memory from a range of different disciplinary, temporal, and geographic perspectives.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers that discuss any aspect of veteran politics and memory, from the ancient world to the present. Complete panel proposals are also very welcome (panels/papers which seek to explore different conflicts/countries/periods are especially encouraged). Possible themes include, but are by no means limited to:

  • Commemoration and memory
  • Veteran social movements and associations
  • Veteran cultural contributions (documentary evidence, art, etc.)
  • Political power of veterans
  • Veteran trauma, health and emotions
  • Veteran protest and dissent
  • (Inter)national veteran networks
  • Family and intergenerational memory
  • Monuments, statues, and re-enactments
  • Travel and battlefield tourism
  • Museums and heritage

Please submit paper abstracts (max. 300 words) and brief bio(s) to both imogen.peck@warwick.ac.uk and timo.schrader@warwick.ac.uk by 29th November 2020. Participants will be notified of decisions by the end of December 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions, November 16, 2020

VIRTUAL IDENTITIES AND SELF-PROMOTING

Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference

June 2-5, 2021

Boston Marriott Copley Place 110 Huntington Avenue

Boston, MA 02116, US

Virtual Identities and Self Promotion seeks to examine, explore and critically engage with the issues surrounding creating a sense of self in online environments.   Undoubtedly, our experience of the web is changing and has changed our identity both on and offline. Many people have used online environments to explore the fluidity of self-expression as an “identity laboratory.” Almost everyone in today’s age has experienced some kind of online identity play, whether through playing an online game, participating in social networking sites, writing a blog, creating a website, commenting on an article, or contributing to updates on twitter. Many users present an idealized “me,” specifically shaped for various audiences. These new technologies have changed the way we think and how we have constructed our identities and consequently have informed our relationships and interactions within both online and offline arenas.

We invite submissions investigating and exploring virtual identity creation and self-promotion, including but not limited to the ways in which users:

  • Use social media to create identity professionally, personally, socially, academically
  • Socially construct (gender, race, sex, etc…) their identity in online environments including social media, and other online communities
  • Use online technology in order to study language, communication, and identity construction
  • Construct and reconstruct themselves in arenas promoting user-generated content, such as YouTube
  • Create digital artifacts as a way of self-discovery and identity construction
  • Negotiate online identity with physical identity socially,  professionally, and academically
  • Use online interactions for validation of self, emotionally and/or intellectually

Submission Information:

Please Submit:

  • the Title of Individual Paper
  • an Abstract of 250 words which describes the main concepts to be addressed by presentation
  • Please include, name, institutional affiliation, e-mail, and telephone
  • For guidelines on proposing a panel please contact the Chair of the session or visit the PCA/ACA website.

Abstracts Due:  November 16, 2020

Submission Portal:  https://pcaaca.org/

Submissions will only be accepted through the PCA website.

Individuals must be current, paid members to submit to the conference.

All presenters must be current, paid members of the PCA and fully registered for the conference.

Contact Info:

Monica S. Gallamore, Ph.D.

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Proposals, November 16, 2020

CFP: Popular Culture Association Annual (PCA) Conference–Biographies Area: June (11/16/2020; 6/2-5/2021) Boston, MA,

The Biographies Area is soliciting papers that examine the connections between biography and popular culture. Papers and full panel presentations regarding any aspect of popular culture and biography are encouraged. Potential topics might include:

– Biography and entertainment, art, music, theater
– Biography and film
– Biography and criminal justice
– Television programs about biography
– Biography and urban legends
– Biography and folklore
– Biography and literature
– Scholarly Biography
– Controversial Biography
– Psychoanalysis and Biography
– Historical Biography
– Political Biography
– Autobiography

Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The deadline is November 16, 2020.

To submit an abstract, please visit:
https://pcaaca.org/conference/submitting-paper-proposal-pca-conference

Submissions will only be accepted through the PCA website. Individuals must be current, paid members to submit to the conference.

Please direct any queries to the Biographies Area Chair:

Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
Las Vegas, NV 89154
susie.skarl@unlv.edu OR susieskarl@gmail.com

Contact Info:

Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
Las Vegas, NV 89154
susie.skarl@unlv.edu OR susieskarl@gmail.com

Contact Email:

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Family and Conflict in Graphic Narratives

Special Issue for Studies in Comics

Call for Articles, Interviews, and Comics

Deadline–Nov. 15, 2020 (Final Notice)

Even though family relationships are at the heart of many graphic narratives, particularly relationships between parents and children (one can think of examples like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus), few studies have examined how the family is used as a trope in graphic narratives.

Considering the role of family is important, as Anne McClintock reminds us, since the trope of the family ‘offers a “natural” figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests’ (63, original emphasis). In a similar vein, Sarah Harwood has argued the family has become ‘a primary way of organising and understanding [material] reality across all cultural forms’ (3).

Moreover, in discussing how popular literature depicts conflict, specifically the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Toine van Teeffelen has suggested that popular literature ‘tends to metaphorically understand political and social life through the experiences of persons and small groups’ (390).

This special issue asks how the trope of the family is used to understand and organise conflict, including how it functions as a way to illustrate material realities and ideologies.

Articles might address, but are not limited to, the following questions:

  • How is the family used as an allegory for the nation?
  • How is the trope of the family used to reflect wider concerns in relation to conflict, including the possibility of a resolution of the conflict?
  • How does the family work to make conflict accessible to outsiders?
  • To what extent are different family members used to illustrate contrasting (political) positions?
  • How is an emphasis on family used to counteract fears about change and fragmentation that are heightened during conflict?

Please submit

  • Either: an article of 4,000 – 8,000 words (including all quotes, footnotes, references and bibliography)
  • Or: an interview of 2,000- 3,000 words (including all quotes, footnotes, references and bibliography)
  • Or: 4 pages of comics (colour or black and white) 300dpi.
  1. The landscape-oriented format is 20x15cm (landscape) . It is not necessary to completely fill the white space if the images don’t perfectly correspond to those dimensions.
  2. The portrait-oriented images either presented alone or alongside one another – they will only be printed at a maximum of 15cm tall.
  • AND a separate document with the following metadata (labelled as ‘Title of your article’ metadata)
  1. Article title
  2. Author’s name
  3. Author’s postal and email address (the postal address is needed for your contributor’s copy)
  4. Author’s biography and affiliation (50-100 words)
  5. Abstract (200-300 words)
  6. Keywords (listed one per line, in lower case where applicable)
  7. Wordcount  (not necessary for comics contributions)

by 15th November 2020 to the special issue editors – Please send your submission to the appropriate editor:

Articles

Dr Isabelle Hesse, isabelle.hesse@sydney.edu.au

Lecturer, Department of English, The University of Sydney

The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism, and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)

Comics

Dr Sarah Lightman, sarahlightman@yahoo.com

Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London

The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions, Penn State University Press 2019)

The editors will provide initial feedback by 15th January 2021. Revised articles and comics will be due by 1 May 2021 and will then be sent out for double blind peer-review by Studies in Comics.

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Deadline for Submissions, Nov. 13, 2020

CFP: Stardom and Fandom: Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference (11/13/20; 2/22–27/2021) USA

For the 2021 Conference, SWPACA is going virtual! Due to concerns regarding COVID-19, we will be holding our annual conference completely online this year. We hope you will join us for exciting papers, discussions, and the experience you’ve come to expect from Southwest.

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 42nd 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 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

Fans, Stans, Antis 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/

Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.

SWPACA will offer registration reimbursement awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2021. SWPACA will also offer registration reimbursement awards for select undergraduate and graduate students in place of our traditional travel awards. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/. Registration for the conference will be open and available in late fall. Watch your email for details!

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.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Contact Info:

Lynn Zubernis PhD

Professor, West Chester University

Area Chair, Stardom and Fandom

Contact Email:
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Dear IABA List Members

We have a new research initiative on Life Writing launching at University College Cork next week and I’d be delighted if members of the IABA list could be alerted to it. A silver lining of the pandemic is the ease with which research events are accessible wherever we are in the world, so I’m hoping some IABA members might think of attending.

With all best wishes
Caitríona Ní Dhúill

Launch of new research cluster on Life Writing

Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC), University College Cork

Thursday 5 November 2020, 4-6 pm

Virtual launch on MS Teams: email d.fitzgibbon@ucc.ie for access

The Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures at University College Cork is delighted to announce the launch of a new Life Writing research cluster, dedicated to exploring life writing in all its forms. The Life Writing cluster focuses on the inscription of ‘selves’ and ‘others’ and the recording of memories and experiences in auto/biography, autofiction and memoir, diaries, letters, new media and the visual arts. The launch will feature papers by Rebecca Braun (Lancaster University) and Helen Finch (University of Leeds), followed by a roundtable discussion. Researchers from all disciplines and career stages with an interest in Life Writing are warmly invited to attend.

Paper 1: The Past, Present and Future of Life Writing

Rebecca Braun, Lancaster University

This talk explores the different ways in which societies construct attitudes towards authors and authors construct attitudes towards society, both in literary texts and in the many interpersonal relationships beyond them. Drawing on the case-study of post-war Germany (particularly in the 1960s and 1970s), I outline four dominant modes of authorship that underpin these constructions on both sides: celebratory, commemorative, satirical and utopian. I then consider how the foundation of the modern European novel is driven by articulating ways of orienting ourselves in the world that make us better actors, individually and collectively, in the present and with a clear view to the future – authors of our own stories, as it were. This idea is explored through discussion of the genesis of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615). Analysing life, writing, chronology and resilience alongside one another like this allows us to trace shared core values and ethical blind spots that go well beyond an individual’s biography or a particular literary text and into the very fabric of society.

Paper 2: Life writing in the aftermath of the Shoah: an undisciplined genre?

Helen Finch, University of Leeds

What is a ‘life’ in the aftermath of severe trauma? What form might the writing of this life take? What uncomfortable links might life writing make between a time of extreme violence and the time of writing? This paper investigates the works of German-speaking survivors of the Shoah Fred Wander, Edgar Hilsenrath and Ruth Klüger to argue that life writing after the Shoah intertwines transgressive political criticism of the postwar world with the shadow of trauma. The world that the three Jewish survivors bear witness to after 1945 is structured by disturbing parallels, in their accounts, to the one they saw slip into catastrophe in the 1930s. At the same time, the survivors are constantly negotiating a shattering of selfhood in the wake of extreme violence. The person of the survivor-author is a haunted, elusive figure, and the survivors’ writing struggles to find a coherent standpoint from which to narrate a ‘life’.

Contact r.magshamhrain@ucc.ie for further information and d.fitzgibbon@ucc.ie to register for the launch.

Professor Caitríona Ní Dhúill
Department of German
School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures
O’Rahilly Building
University College Cork
Ireland
+353 21 490 2077
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Submission Deadline Nov. 1, 2020

Call for Papers
Domestic Politics: Women’s Private Lives and Public Writing in the Mid-Century.
Co-Editors: Melissa Dinsman, Megan Faragher, and Ravenel Richardson.

Deadline for Proposals, November 1

The mid-twentieth century saw seismic shifts for British women, including those living under British rule in the colonies, in the public and private spheres. These years are often imagined as a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the Front. But this narrative needs  reexamining. This book aims to revivify studies of the female writers living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.

We are looking for essays that explore how women represented the transformation of the quotidian, including the home, employment, family life, religious participation, etc. Specifically, we seek contributions that examine how women writers addressed political and wartime upheaval in the 1930s and 1940s along with the substantial shifts that occurred as war-torn countries attempted to adjust to a fraught peacetime in the 1950s, which also saw domesticity reconceptualized as a form of public duty.
We seek contributions to this volume that engage with a variety of fields including (but not limited to) journalism, photojournalism, fiction, archival discoveries, life writing, poetry, and film. We welcome abstracts that focus on single author or comparative, transnational approaches on the following topics:
  • How politics shaped, limited, and/or expanded women’s domestic experiences in the mid-century
  • The interactions between women and the public sphere, including industry, medicine, education, and politics
  • Transnational writing: travel writing, journalism, ex-patriate accounts
  • The intersectional politics of race, class, and gender in the domestic and public spheres
  • Reconceptualizing the public/private divide in the mid-century
  • Colonial and Commonwealth perspectives
If interested, please send a short bio and an abstract of 300 words to Melissa Dinsman (mdinsman@york.cuny.edu), Megan Faragher (megan.faragher@wright.edu), and Ravenel Richardson (mrr82@case.edu) by November 1, 2020. Final chapters of 6000-7500 words will be requested by August 15, 2021.
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Submission Deadline Nov. 1, 2020

Angelaki

Special Issue on Witnessing After the Human

Volume 27, Issue 2 (2022)
Deadline for indications of interest–Nov. 1, 2020.

Guest Editors

  1. Michael Richardson

Michael.Richardson@unsw.edu.au

Senior Research Fellow (ARC DECRA)

University of New South Wales

  1. Magdalena Zolkos

Zolkos@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Humboldt Research Fellow

Goethe University Frankfurt

Special Issue Description
Until recently, scholarship on testimonial practice in literature, media and culture has assumed that witnessing applies primarily to a human subject. This is evident in the evolution of the meaning of the word ‘witness’ in public discourses and scholarly literature alike: from representative of a persecuted minority who addresses a community of nations to testify to their plight, to the survivor of atrocity, to the figure of an empathetic humanitarian activist or social media user, who is proximate to mass violence, though not its direct target. In politics, law, religion and science, it has been taken for granted that bearing witness is a human capacity, often imagined as a verbal act of narrativization of violence. For some, that act included production of evidence and demonstration of truth; for others, it implied a proximity to catastrophic events, and had ethical implications of making demands on the listeners. Recently, witnessing has been extended to non-human subjects, such as plants, animals and artificial intelligences; re-imagined through diverse scientific and technological vistas; as well as applied to inanimate entities, such as cultural productions, geological items, or, as in the ‘forensic aesthetics’ approach, to human remains. This extension of the status of the witness and practices of witnessing to the nonhuman has profound implications for witnessing theory.

With this Special Issue of Angelakiwe seek to create a platform for articulating and exploring the meanings of witnessing ‘after the human’ from diverse disciplinary perspectives. We ask about the epistemological, aesthetic, political and ethical effects of extending the practice of witnessing from the human subject to diverse categories of non-human beings, such as animals, plants, cyborgs, machines, and inanimate objects, as endowed with a capacity akin to ‘testimonial affordance’ and as potential producers of testimonial knowledge. We explore the possibilities within contemporary theorizing of testimony to reveal and to work beyond the limits of the humanist imaginary of the witness as a historical agent, often in tandem with thinking from feminist, queer, Indigenous, disability, critical race and whiteness studies that has done so much to expose the limitations and violences inherent to ‘the human’ as a framework for subjectivity.  Finally, we seek to uncouple the association between witnessing and speech, or verbal articulation, through attention to the role of senses, silence, affect, gesture, code, materiality and other communicative modes in testimonial practice. From the perspective of witnessing ‘after the human’, testimony appears as a prosthetic practice, both because of the importance of technological and machinic mediations of testimony today, and, more generally, as an example of prosthetikos:the process of adding onto the body.

Possible Topics For Submissions 

We invite cross-disciplinary contributions, focusing on the practices, processes and subjects of witnessing from the angle of (broadly defined) post-humanities. We are interested in philosophic, literary, cultural, sociological, political, ethnographic, and other, engagements with the question of witnessing ‘after the human’. The topics for submissions include, but are not limited to:

  1. Animals and witnessing;
  2. Plants and witnessing;
  3. Inanimate witnessing, including ‘memory objects’ and ‘trauma objects’;
  4. Machines and witnessing; cyborg testimony;
  5. Environmental witnessing; climate change testimony, including ‘planetary grief’ and solastalgic perspectives on witnessing;
  6. Critical epistemology of witnessing; testimonial credibility and truth;
  7. The time of witnessing; non-/post-human testimonial temporalities;
  8. Testimonial aesthetics and poetics of the post-human;
  9. ‘Decolonizing witnessing’; critical race perspectives on testimony;
  10. Queering testimony;
  11. Sensorial perspectives on witnessing; non-occulocentric witnessing, testimony and listening, testimony and touch;
  12. Silence and witnessing; gestural witnessing;
  13. Imaginal testimony;
  14. Neuroscience and witnessing;
  15. Technology and witnessing;
  16. Science and witnessing; algorithmic witnessing; witnessing through data;
  17. Social media technologies and witnessing.

Time-line for Submissions

  • Indications of interest are invited by November 01, 2020. The indications of interest should include a title and ca. 500-words-long abstract.
  • The editors will communicate to the authors whether the abstracts have been accepted by December 01, 2020.
  • The authors are requested to submit their articles by June 01, 2021.
  • The editorial and blind peer-review process will take place after June 01, with final manuscripts to be completed by October 01, 20201.
Contact Info:

Magdalena Zolkos

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Deadline for Proposals, October 31, 2020

We are excited to announce a new call for papers on life writing and race.

See details below!

IAP 

CALL FOR CHAPTERS 

Racial Dimensions of Life Writing Research

Edited by:

Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University and KaaVonia Hinton, Old Dominion University

A volume in the Research in Life Writing and Education Series

Overview 

This call for chapters focuses on the racial dimensions of life writing in education, writ large. We welcome chapters that bring racial analysis and theorizing to bear on life writing research in all its forms (biography, oral history, narrative inquiries, testimonios, portraiture, auto/ethnographies, family inquiries, creative life histories) and in varied teaching and learning spaces (e.g. schools, homeschooling, playgrounds, digital environments, prisons, bookstores, museums, anti-racist protests).

Just as racialized laws, practices, and discourses have profoundly shaped educational institutions and the lives of people who move within them (e.g. Haney-Lopez, 2006), race can also profoundly shape research dynamics (e.g. Sefa Dei & Singh Johal, 2005; Winddance-Twine & Warren, 2000). Whether researchers are conducting an inquiry on an anti-racist activist teacher historically or engaging in a collaborative autoethnography on learning outside of traditional school spaces, those contributing to this collection should bring racial analysis or theorizing to bear on how they conceptualized, carried out, interpreted, and/or represented their life writing project. Both innovative and traditional approaches are welcome as we seek to capture the complexity of the methodological terrain of contemporary life writing.

Possible Themes and Approaches 

We are soliciting chapters (5000–7000 words, including references) that puzzle through racial dynamics, concepts, theorizing, insights, and experiences in carrying out life writing research. Chapters might focus on:

Educational Lives

  • Analyses of the racial contours and methodological dimensions of life-writing projects focused on educators, activists, and leaders;
  • Exploring complexities and creativity of life-writing research focused on lives with racial lessons to “teach,” whether leaders, elders, students, or community activists.

Methodological/Inquiry Innovations and Dynamics

  • Analyzing how race and its intersections shape the life-writing inquiry process, whether through research focus, researcher-participant relations, and/or contextual dynamics;
  • Innovative methodological approaches to engaging with projects concerning race and its intersections;
  • The contours and triumphs of carrying out research on under-represented educational actors historically in diverse contexts;

Theoretical Engagements

  • Racial theorizing or analysis of lives and life writing using (but not limited to) such theories as intersectionality (Crenshaw; Hill Collins; Nash) women of color theorizing (Keating, 2012), critical race theories, indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, LatinX theories, critical whiteness studies, or postcoloniality.

Writing and Representation

  • Diverse approaches and decision making processes in writing up (Wolcott) and (re)presenting life writing research.

Proposals Due: October 31, 2020 

Tentative Submission and Publishing Timeline 

  • Notification of Proposal Acceptance: November 15, 2020
  • Submission of Chapter Drafts: (by) January 31, 2021
  • Peer-Review Feedback to Authors: February 28, 2021
  • Submission of Revised Chapters: April 15, 2021
  • Anticipated Date for Publication: Late Summer, Fall 2021.

Please submit abstract to Lucy.bailey@okstate.edu and khintonj@odu.edu, using the subject line, “racial dimensions of life writing” in the email.

  • A single Word file using American Psychological Association, 7th Edition;
  • An abstract of approximately 500 words, with a working title, proposed components of the chapter, methodological approach, racial dimensions of the research, potential significance, a working bibliography of 5–10 sources; and a
  • Brief biographical note or 1 page CV from author(s).
Lucy E. Bailey, Ph.D.
Social Foundations and Qualitative Inquiry
Director of Gender and Women’s Studies
Oklahoma State University
215 Willard Hall
Stillwater, OK 74074
lucy.bailey@okstate.edu

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Deadline for Proposals, October 31, 2020

Call for Book Chapters for edited volume: Mountains and Memoir

deadline for submissions:
October 31, 2020
full name / name of organization:
Jenny Hall and Martin Hall

Mountaineering and Climbing have become extraordinarily popular lifestyle sports. More generally, mountain-going has been one of the fastest growing leisure activities of the past thirty years where an estimated, ‘10 million Americans go mountaineering annually’ (Macfarlane, 2004: 17) and In the United Kingdom 2.48 million people participate in recreational rock climbing and mountaineering (Mintel, 2018). The American Alpine Club, in their annual State of Climbing Report noted that in 2018 there were ‘7.7 million’ American climbers (2019: 6), ‘2,500 licenced USA climbing athletes’ (2019: 10) and that in 2017, ‘climbing as a whole contributed $12,450,000,000 to the economy’ (2019: 13), where in the UK, the British Mountaineering Council (BMC) membership currently stands at 76,000 individuals and 320 clubs.

Dr Jenny Hall and Dr Martin Hall are editing a volume exploring the relationships between mountains and mountaineering, literature, media, film and popular culture. At current, the edited volume which is being proposed focusses on mountains and memory in popular culture, particularly looking at the literary memoir and its closeness and association with film and other media forms. The mountaineering memoir has a long and rich tradition. Extreme adventure memoirs are the stuff of legend and Hollywood movies. In Memoir: A History, Ben Yagoda makes the salient point that, ‘Memoir has become the central form of the culture’ and it this centrality and significance which drives the call for this book. Yet there is a paucity of scholarship that explores the mountaineering memoir as a powerful social influence these texts have had on our understanding of how mountains are constructed, reproduced and performed.

Dianne Chisolm described the distinguished Lynn Hill’s 2002 book, Climbing Free as ‘the first history of free climbing and one of the first climbing histories ever to be presented from a woman’s perspective’ and mountaineers such as the eminently well-known Chris Bonington speak of a ‘boost in income from newspaper rights and the sudden rush of lectures’ (2017: 98) when as a result of his climbs, ‘every national newspaper ran a banner headline’ (2017: 97). Two central themes are covered, firstly, this book intends to interrogate is the relationship between these feats and the attention given them throughout the media and in the documented accounts by the climbers themselves. Secondly, we ask, to what extent do mountaineering texts create, rather than mirror reality, and how sustainable is this genre? Climbing and mountaineering texts from memoirs to documentaries are direct influencers for the ecological consciousness of athletes, authors, filmmakers and crucially their audiences. If more of these texts were as successful as Alex Honould’s Academy and BAFTA awarding winning film, Free Solo, the ramifications of influence could be enormous. Sustainability is a central theme of this book and concerns the body in the context of mountain spaces and places and as such considers the histographic influences of the sublime, and how and why this is embodied in living memory and performance through texts and films. The aim is to proliferate the powerful message that these books and films expound and problematize the neoliberal commercialisation of these highly sensitive mountain spaces and places through textual sources. Given that the UN Climate Change Summit is due to take place in Glasgow, United Kingdom in November 2020 this book will challenge the dominant narrative of consumption in these leisure and tourism spaces and how we engage with sensitive mountain environments and the communities.

Through a broadly interdisciplinary approach which calls for scholarship across philosophy, geography, social psychology, sport, literature, film studies and wider scope, the editors are looking for chapters which interrogate and elucidate upon the representation and prominence of mountaineering, in its widest meaning, in the memoir and its associated paratexts through film and television.

Concepts may include but are not limited to:

  • Gender
  • Sexuality
  • Race
  • Disability
  • Sustainability/Environment
  • Education
  • Fitness
  • Wellbeing/Mental Health
  • Widening Participation
  • Travel/Borders/Transnationalism
  • Genre
  • Reality/Truth/Authenticity
  • Reification of the mountaineering hero
  • Deviant leisure
  • Globalism/localism/Covid-ism
  • Spirituality/Sublime
  • Haptics/Sensuality
  • Emotion
  • Politics/Governance
  • Subversion
  • Elitism/Exclusivity
  • Femininity/Masculinity
  • Death/Risk/Exposure

Please submit a 300-word extract and a 200-word bio to mountainmemoirproject@gmail.com by October 31st

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Deadline for Proposals, October 30, 2020

Life Writing as World Literature, ACLA April 8-11, 2021 (Virtual)

deadline for submissions: October 30, 2020.

 This panel brings the fields of world literature and life writing together to explore social, economic and ideological contexts informing the circulation, translation and reading of auto/biographical texts. Redefinitions of world literature highlight the “effective life” of works “within a literary system beyond that of its original culture” (Damrosch 2003) or underscore that literature now “is unmistakably a planetary system” (Moretti 2000).

Similarly, scholars in life writing emphasize the role of narrated lives for “contemporary imaginaries” (Smith 2011), challenge the national and monolingual categorization of autobiographical texts, reveal the pitfalls of worldwide circulation (Whitlock 2007), the imbrications between autobiographical practices and markets (Rak 2013), the role of personal narratives in human rights (Smith & Schaffer 2004, Jolly 2014), and the relevance of life narratives as forms of testimonial acts (Gilmore 2017).

Participants are encouraged to explore: autobiographical works as they move in translation between national and global contexts and as they travel across media; forms of “minor transnationalism” that life writing enables; new perspectives gained from texts outside the Western and European canons; new understandings revealed through postcolonial and decolonial readings; life writing in the curriculum, its pedagogical role in transnational contexts; life writing and digital humanities, and large-scale paradigms of distant reading.

ACLA’s annual meeting will take place virtually between April 08 – 11, 2021. Please submit your paper proposal (350 words) and short bio (150 words) via ACLA’s online portal by October 30, 2020.

https://acla.secure-platform.com/a/

For queries, please contact the organizers Helga Lenart-Cheng hl4@stmarys-ca.edu and Ioana Luca ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw

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Deadline for Proposals, October 18, 2020

Call for Proposals: “Biographies and Politics. The Involvement of Jews and People of Jewish Origin in the Leftist Movements in the 19th and 20th Century Poland” a special issue of Jewish History Quarterly (10/18/2020)

Guest editor: Michał Trębacz (POLIN: Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Center for Jewish Studies Univeristy of Łódź)

Editor in Chief: Jan Doktór (Jewish Historical Institute)

This special issue seeks to evaluate to outline the actual involvement of Jews and activists of Jewish origin in the leftist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries from the perspective of individual motivations, ideological choices and personal biographies.

To explore the different paths which led Jewish individuals to engage in leftist parties and organizations, we suggest approaching the topic from a biographical perspective. We thus invite scholars to present their findings on the formation of Jewish political identities based on biographical sources, especially ego-documents like diaries, personal letters, memoirs or oral testimonies.

Possible questions to be addressed might be:

  • Was being Jewish an important factor in choosing a specific political path?
  • Which other factors led Jews and people of Jewish origin to affiliate with a particular political group?
  • How did their leftist involvement influence their attitude towards imperial settings, occupying powers, internationalist movements, as well as Poland and Polish identity?
  • How did they assess their leftist engagement later in their lives?

Please send a 250-word abstract of your proposed paper to mtrebacz@polin.pl by October 18, 2020. Decisions will be made in October 2020. If accepted, papers will be due in for peer review.

All email correspondence should be sent to mtrebacz@polin.pl

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Proposals, October 15, 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS FOR AN EDITED COLLECTION:

Writing HerStories: Women’s Rock Memoirs (Provisional title)

Editors: Cristina Garrigós (National University of Distance Education, UNED, Spain) and Marika Ahonen (University of Turku, Finland).

The last ten years have seen a significant rise in the number of published memoirs by female rock musicians. Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010) came out in the same year that Kristin Hersch’s Rat Girl (2010) appeared, and others soon followed: Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage. A Chicana Punk Story (2011), Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band (2015), Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Made Me a Modern Girl (2016), Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless (2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales’s The Spitboy Rule. Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (2016), Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art, Sex, Music (2017), and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2016). More recently, there are Debbie Harry’s Face It (2019), Liz Phair’s Horror Stories. A Memoir (2019), and Kathy Valentine’s All I Ever Wanted (2020). These examples – all from the U.S. and the U.K. – suggest that there is a growing interest in, and room for, women’s rock memoirs.

The commercial success of these memoirs attests to the rise of a new genre in which women’s voices have acquired a new significance. Aware that their public persona had previously been structured mostly through not only their music, but perhaps mainly through interviews and images, now they take up their pens – or computer keyboards – to deliver first-person narratives of their vision of themselves. In this volume, we ask how female rock musicians, or female-identified rock musicians, narrate and remember their experiences in memoir, and what type of knowledge these books offer.

Academic attention to musical memoirs has been growing of late, as the publication of Music, Memory, and Memoir (Bloomsbury, 2019) demonstrates. However, no attention has been paid specifically to the writing of women in rock music. The rise of studies of popular culture, autobiography studies, and cultural history, together with a gender perspective, are therefore fertile academic soil for works such as the one we are presenting here. As musical memoirs are fragmented and interdisciplinary, in this volume we specifically focus on female-identified rock musicians by emphasizing an intersectional understanding of the topic. Gender apart, we also want to consider how other factors, including ethnicity and socioeconomics, shape the authors’/musicians’ experiences and influence the remembrance and narration of their lives in memoirs. The tension between the public persona and the private, remembering and forgetting, telling and not telling, thus structures many of these works and deserves further exploration.

Possible subjects to be addressed include, but are not restricted to:

•       Memory and Forgetting.
•       Creation: reflections on musical and literary production.
•       Narrative strategies of life-writing in a memoir.
•       Being a woman in the music world.
•       Aging: the perspective of a mature woman looking back and considering the present.
•       Role models and cultural influences.
•       Maternity: wanted and unwanted maternity. Abortion. Children. Adoption…
•       Sex: Narrating sexual experiences and verbalizing sexual abuse.
•       Mental issues: eating disorders, depression, anxiety, etc.
•       Affect theory and the female musical autobiography.
•       Defense of or resistance to feminist ideas.
•       Punk/Rock aesthetics and politics.
•       Re-writing their stories: challenges of previous representations (reports, interviews, videoclips, pictures, …)
•       Life writing as performance.
•       The female memoir as a genre: topoi, tropes, traditions…
•       Ethics of storytelling in a memoir
•       The limitations and the politics of remembering
•       The therapeutics of writing a memoir

We are seeking English-language contributions that address female rock memoirs published in the past decade. We encourage contributors to think about the topic broadly, in the frames of the somewhat vaguely-defined “rock genre”. Although the examples mentioned above are all U.S. and U.K.-based, works written outside these frames are warmly welcome.

Please submit proposals (300 words) and a brief bio (100 words) by 15 October 2020 to Cristina Garrigós cgarrigos@flog.uned.es or Marika Ahonen mjahon@utu.fi
For accepted proposals, final essays between 5,000-7,000 words (inclusive of notes and bibliography) will be due 30 September 2021.

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Deadline for Submissions, October 2, 2020

The (Im)Possibilities of Bearing Witness:

The Intrinsic Value and Healing Power of Autobiographic Narratives
(10/2/2020; 7/5-9/2021) Warsaw, Poland

The Witnessing Working Group of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) is organizing a roundtable during the forthcoming MSA annual conference in Warsaw, Poland, July 5-9, 2021. Due to Covid-19, virtual participation will be possible. This roundtable will discuss the role of the researcher and the ways in which his/her testimony with traumatic experiences influences the course of research, but also the way in which the individual traumatic experiences of the researcher affect his/her trauma research methodology and narratives produced. Besides that, we would like to explore ways through which witness testimonies can influence researchers and ordinary readers and if (and to what extent) such testimonies may help post-trauma healing and recovery.

According to the psychiatrist Dori Laub, a victim needs the presence of  a witness (an empathetic listener or reader), to confront the darkness of painful memories and to organize and process traumatic experiences. “‘Arousers’ of memories” helped Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1990) describe the horrors of Auschwitz and discover meaning in writing and literature. For him, the true witness is the one who does not survive. Hence the survivor bears the responsibility to speak for those who cannot speak, or to serve as a “moral witness,” to testify with a “moral purpose” (Margalit, 2002, 149). Often researchers are put in the position of the (moral) witness while investigating the impact of traumatic events. How does such implied moral purpose influence the scholarly endeavors? And how does the arousal of the scholar’s own memories in the process of witnessing shape the course of the research conducted? Can a researcher turn into “a witness to himself”/herself (Laub, 1991, 58), potentially working through his/her own traumatic past while witnessing the trauma of others? And how can such self-reflections and self-explorations—of the survivor and/or researcher—be productively integrated into scholarly writings, possibly exploring paths of healing, which reach a wider audience than the ivory tower of academia?

This roundtable is meant as a forum for researchers from various academic fields (including but not limited to anthropology, history, psychology as well as literary, film and media studies). We seek papers of 10 minutes length allowing for an extended discussion. Please submit a paper proposal (not exceeding 250 words) in addition to a short bio (no longer than 200 words including pertinent publications) via e-mail to Alma Jeftic (alma.jeftic@gmail.com) and Stefanie Hofer (hofer@vt.edu) by October 2, 2020. Please note that we aim to submit panels to the organising committee of the Memory Studies Association by October 15, 2020 and the final decision will depend on this committee. As in previous years, all presenters have to be members of MSA.

For more information please consult MSA webpage:

https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/warsaw-conference-2021-cfp/

Proposals not limited to the following topics are invited:

  • How can traumatic narratives in scholarship be represented to adequately reflect the suffering of the victim?
  • (Im)possibilities of bearing witness and how to be addressed in qualitative research?
  • Witnessing and the dangers of appropriation
  • The overwhelming nature of autobiographical narratives
  • The healing power of trauma narratives
  • Cultural representations of trauma and recovery as catharses
  • (Moral) witnessing and activism
  • Postcolonial witnessing and non-Western healing paradigms

References:

Laub, D. (1992). Bearing Witness, or the Vicissitudes of Listening. In S. Felman and D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (pp. 57-74). New York: Routledge.

Levi, P. (1990). The Sixth Day and Other Tales. London: Simon & Schuster.

Margalit, A. (2002). The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Contact Info:

Alma Jeftic (alma.jeftic@gmail.com), Research Fellow, Peace Research Institute – International Christian University, Japan

Stefanie Hofer (hofer@vt.edu), Associate Professor, Virginia Tech, USA

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Sessions held on October 1, 2020

The International Society for Educational Biography (ISEB) presents
Professional Development Webinars–

Life Writing Methodologies in 2020: Writing and Sharing our Lived Experiences

The International Society for Educational Biography (ISEB) invites members new and current to its methodological, blended-format webinar.  Those who engage in life writing in all its forms (biography, auto/biography or memoir, ethnography or duoethnography, autoethnography or autotheory, life history or life narrative, oral history or family history, testimonio, collective biography or prosopography) are warmly welcomed to participate.

CONFERENCE INFORMATION:

Theme:  The year 2020 has proven to be incredibly tumultuous: we live in times which will be written about in historical accounts, archival and biographical.  Those who engage in life writing in all its forms are attentive to the impact of current events on all domains of human lives. The International Society of Educational Biography seeks to create a space for those who engage in life writing in all its forms to come together and begin to process the present.

Dates:  Methodological papers/presentations will be available for asynchronous review prior to the conference.  Two highly interactive synchronous sessions will take place Thursday, October 1 with a virtual social event held after.  Please note: attendees may choose to attend any or all of the three sessions as their schedules permit.

Schedule of Synchronous Sessions:
3:30-3:40: Welcome/introduction from ISEB President
3:45-5:15: Session I: Methodological Approaches to Life Writing in the Present:  Authors of methodological pieces will be available for synchronous conversation(s) regarding their work.
5:15 – 5:30: Break
5:30 – 7:00: Session II: Life Writing in 2020:  Attendees will come together in a moderated conversation regarding methodological issues during this time.  Attendees will be asked to prepare any brief statements or questions to be shared with the group at large and, when possible shared/posted in advance.
7:15 – ?: Optional Session:  Virtual Social Hour/Meetup:  Attendees are welcome to attend a virtual happy hour co-hosted by the ISEB President and President-Elect.

Cost:  Attendance is free to all members of ISEB.  All attendees must be members of the society by the time of the synchronous session to participate in these.  Annual membership is $95 and includes a one-year subscription to the ISEB journal Vitae Scholasticae.

Registration:  To register for the conference, click to please join or renew your membership.  You can also visit http://isebio.com/our/membership.html

Information:  For further questions or concerns please contact Dr. Edward Janak, Edward.janak@utoledo.edu

Technology/host:  The webinar will be hosted by the Department of Educational Studies, Judith Herb College of Education, University of Toledo.

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Deadline for Submissions, Sept. 30, 2020

Writing Our Wombs (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) NEMLA, Philadelphia, USA

full name / name of organization:
Rachelann Lopp Copland/Northeastern Modern Language Association

Abstract:  Our literal and figurative wombs have been targeted, misunderstood, misrepresented, and used against us. The Oxford denotation itself seems to pin our bodies to one use–reproduction: “the organ in the lower body of a woman or female mammal where offspring are conceived and in which they gestate before birth; the uterus.” Here, language fails us; society’s synecdoche makes us walking uteruses. This session calls for submissions that reclaim womb with individual uniqueness, yet lend themselves to a collective voice of the womb.

This session calls for women and members of the LGBTQ community to submit work related to the function of their wombs and how the womb creates/destroys/changes identity. Ironically, the rhetoric we often use for the art of writing overlaps with the discourse associated with the womb.

By creatively exploring our histories of meaning associated with womb, this creative session aims to contribute to NeMLA’s 2021 convention theme, “Tradition and Innovation: Changing Worlds Through the Humanities,” by sharing unique writing experiences that challenge the traditional meanings associated with wombs and present new ways of looking at the literal and figurative womb.

Shortened Description:

This session calls for women and members of the LGBTQ community to submit work related to the function of their wombs and how the womb creates/destroys/changes identity. By creatively exploring our histories of meaning associated with womb, this creative session aims to contribute to NeMLA’s 2021 convention theme, “Tradition and Innovation: Changing Worlds Through the Humanities,” by sharing unique writing experiences that challenge the traditional meanings associated with wombs and present new ways of looking at the literal and figurative womb.

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Deadline for Submissions, Sept. 30, 2020

Call for Chapters: The Lived Religious Lives of Women in 21st Century Britain. (9/30/2020)

 

Little is written about the lived religious lives of women in 21st century Britain. I am describing the term, lived religion, as the ways in which people practice religion in their everyday lives. This may or may not include worship in a religious setting and can be formal or informal.

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals that look at this topic across religions and religious denominations. This may include subjects such as:

  • Food
  • Clothing
  • Prayer
  • Female Ordination
  • Navigating the patriarchy in conservative religious denominations
  • Ritual
  • Women only religious spaces
  • Solidarity and support through religion
  • Family worship and religious observation

Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words. The proposal should also include a short biographical note. Complete chapter lengths should be between 6000-8000 words.

All submissions to Yvonne Bennett at yhb64a@gmail.com by September 30th, 2020

Contact Info:

Yvonne Bennett: yhb64a@gmail.com

William Whitehead: william.whitehead@vernonpress.com

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions, Sept. 30, 2020

In Their Own Words: Voices of Kashmir (9/30/2020; 3/11-4/2021) NEMLA, Philadelphia, USA

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2020
full name / name of organization:
Zachary Bordas/ Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) 2021
contact email:

This heuristic panel seeks to examine the lived reality and creative representation of the political and ecological crisis in Kashmir. Spotlighting the voices of Kashmiri writers will continue the long and delicate process of shedding light on the current human rights crisis happening in Kashmir, as well as its global significance. This panel, therefore, solicits academic research that brings the persecuted voices of Kashmiri writers out of isolation (respecting anonymity on an individual basis) and into humanist discussions. The purpose of this panel involves both understanding the description of the Kashmiri lived reality, as well as providing space for hearing the specific tenants of their calls for change. As a scholarly body who believes in the praxis of the Humanities, I invite research that empirically focuses on the current situation in Kashmir as delineated in non-fiction prose; resources might include newspaper articles, pamphlets, blog postings, interviews, municipal and census records, and similar. Equivalently, I call for papers concentrated on creative works published by Kashmiri authors that might include novels, graphic arts, poetry, film, and alike. The objective of this panel centers on connecting the threads between demonstratable facts and their artistic representation, which as humanist scholars may better inform our understanding, reaction, and pedagogical practices on how we teach our students about the gaps and absences of the marginalized Kashmiri voice.

With the revoke of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir on 8 August 2019, most communication from inside their borders has become increasingly difficult to access thus leaving many speculations and concerns about the daily reality of those living inside the lockdown. Grassroots projects such as Video Volunteers provides a space where marginalized voices may “tell their stories and create change campaigns,” which as one of the organization’s volunteers states, “When no voice is too small or unimportant to be heard, only then, can we be a democracy in the true sense of the word.” Therefore, this session leans toward opening a rhetorical space to discuss the writings coming from Kashmir; specifically focusing on the appeals for social justice and global underrepresentation. This panel first and foremost concentrates on listening to the words of Kashmiri writers so as to let them speak in their own terms. This panel, therefore, welcomes papers from researchers around the world and writers living within Kashmir who, perhaps unable to obtain a passport or travel visa, may submit their paper (or short creative piece) that will be read by a stand-in on their behalf––maintaining anonymity per request.

This panel focuses on the crisis in Kashmir as understood empirically and represented creatively. How might empirical data inform our reading of creative texts coming from Kashmir, and vice-versa? What innovative practices are Kashmiri writers employing in making the voices of the marginalized heard? What are the dangers of assigning an author the burden of representation, how might multiple narratives intertwine so as to offer a borderer representation of the Kashmiri crisis, and most of all, how might we best let Kashmiri writers speak for themselves?

Direct link to this panel: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18685

Please submit abstracts online via the NeMLA portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/18685

Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

Our planning team at the University of Alberta is happy to announce that the abstract submission portal for the Teaching Life Writing Conference is open! Please consider submitting an abstract to our virtual conference.

Access the portal, and detailed information about the conference, here: https://subline.ualberta.ca/portals/57

The abstract and bio submission deadline is September 30, 2020 at 12:00 noon Mountain Standard Time.

Registration will open mid-October.

Questions? Please write to lwconf@ualberta.ca . We are looking forward
to reading your abstracts!

Regards,

Orly Lael-Netzer, Julie Rak, Amanda Spallacci
Planning Team, Teaching Life Writing Conference (virtual)
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Julie Rak
Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
Humanities Centre 3-5
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6, Canada
ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Treaty 6/Region 4 Métis Nation

Website: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home

Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’ (Creative Panel)

NeMLA 2021  March 11-14, Buffalo N.Y.
contact email:

Addressing ‘The Memoir Problem’: Blocked Memories, Documentary Traces, and Hybrid Forms (Creative Panel)

As memoir continues to be a wildly popular genre in our world today, there are many challenges to writing memory and many stakes to publishing a memoir. In many ways, writing a memoir may be a kind of mythical beast for emerging voices. How does one finish a memoir and what marks its timeliness and closure? This forum seeks to interrogate the expectation of a memoir to follow a traditional narrative arc, to expand genre definitions and to highlight cross-genre work. If memory is object-oriented, why do we expect memoir to be plot-driven? How may object or image centric work take a different approach to scene and narrative-telling? Contemporary innovations in creative nonfiction craft, comics, short forms and documentary poetics may reveal how cross-genre work offers a fruitful place to challenge readers’ expectations and incorporate other disciplines in writing. Many established and emerging voices, leading this work and creating new platforms for writers, are reclaiming their stories through traumas and against injustices and discriminations. As a space for writers to read their work and share in Q&A, a diversity of voices & styles are sought. Submissions of auto-fiction & auto-theory, somehow “memoir-esque,” are also encouraged.

Creative genres may include but are not limited to:

  • Memoir, Memoir-esque, Memoir Plus
  • Creative Nonfiction, Including Creative Nonfiction Comics & Diary Comics
  • Autobiography & Life-Writing
  • Poetry & Experimental/Hybrid Forms
  • Personal Essay
  • Auto-Theory
  • Auto-Fiction

Please submit an abstract of 200 to 250 words describing your proposed creative reading by September 30th, 2020, to the submission page: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18874

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Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

The Writer as Sociopath (9/30/2020; 3/11-4/2021) NEMLA, Philadelphia, USA

full name / name of organization:
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
contact email:

This panel will consider the cases of writers who have used their platforms to create fictions of self—to misrepresent, self-justify, even blatantly lie about their own lives and realities. The panel is open to considering any act of writing sociopathy, from memoir (e.g., M.E. Thomas’s 2013 Confessions of a Sociopath or Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal) to fictional works that inhabit the minds of sociopaths (e.g., A Clockwork Orange, Gone Girl) to literary fakers (e.g., James Frey, Danny Santiago, JT LeRoy, Caroline Calloway). Is writing in itself an act of misrepresentation bordering on psychopathy? This panel is asked to investigate such issues as literary hoaxes, memoir and identity, and question of whether writing is inherently a form of the “long con.”

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Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

Call for Chapters: The Lived Religious Lives of Women in 21st Century Britain. (9/30/2020)

 

Little is written about the lived religious lives of women in 21st century Britain. I am describing the term, lived religion, as the ways in which people practice religion in their everyday lives. This may or may not include worship in a religious setting and can be formal or informal.

Vernon Press invites chapter proposals that look at this topic across religions and religious denominations. This may include subjects such as:

  • Food
  • Clothing
  • Prayer
  • Female Ordination
  • Navigating the patriarchy in conservative religious denominations
  • Ritual
  • Women only religious spaces
  • Solidarity and support through religion
  • Family worship and religious observation

Please submit an abstract no longer than 500 words. The proposal should also include a short biographical note. Complete chapter lengths should be between 6000-8000 words.

All submissions to Yvonne Bennett at yhb64a@gmail.com by September 30th, 2020

Contact Info:

Yvonne Bennett: yhb64a@gmail.com

William Whitehead: william.whitehead@vernonpress.com

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

Becoming the Obamas: Critical Approaches to Barack & Michelle Obama’s Memoirs

deadline for submissions:
September 30, 2020
Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)
Convention in Buffalo, New York, Mar. 11–14, 2021
contact email:

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father (1995). Praised by Toni Morrison and Philip Roth, Obama’s memoir explores his life up to his admission to Harvard Law School in 1988. More recently, 2018 saw the publication of Michelle Obama’s best-selling memoir Becoming, which is the story of her life up through the end of her tenure as first lady. This panel seeks papers that critically explore the major prose works by Barack and Michelle Obama: Becoming, Dreams From My Father, and The Audacity of Hope.

Questions to consider include, but are not limited to:

How do the Obamas tell their story? What literary devices and/or rhetorical strategies do they employ in their respective works?

How are their memoirs rooted in the African American literary tradition? Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man clearly influenced Barack Obama’s Dreams, yet who else did Obama invoke in telling his story? Who, if any, are Michelle Obama’s literary influences in Becoming?

How do the Obamas extend or complicate the specific category of Black Autobiography? How do their texts compare/contrast with other memoirs – either contemporary or canonical texts?

How does Becoming compare/contrast with Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father?

How do the Obamas depict race/racism and/or intersectionality in their texts?

How can we teach Becoming, Dreams From My Father, and/or The Audacity of Hope to our twenty-first century students?

All submissions that explore the life writings of Barack and/or Michelle Obama will be considered. They do not need to be comparative in scope, though they can be. To submit to this panel, please upload your 250 word abstract to NEMLA’s submission portal
at https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/Login.

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Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

On behalf of the conference team, I am VERY pleased to announce the Call for Papers for the Teaching Life Writing conference. The CFP is pasted below and attached as a pdf. The conference is virtual in a Round the World format and organized around many opportunities for sharing and discussion. You can sign up to observe or you can participate.

Presenters from the IABA World conference which would have been in Finland are particularly welcome to repurpose their papers for this conference. We are excited to give you the opportunity to present your work, hear our amazing keynotes and talk together. The submission/registration portal opens in about two weeks, but we thought you’d like to start thinking about the conference now.  If you havequestions or need more information, please email lwconf@ualberta.ca . Weare looking forward to hosting you!

Regards, the Teaching Life Writing Conference Team

Julie Rak, Orly Lael-Netzer, Amanda Spallacci
University of Alberta, Canada

Teaching Life Writing: a conference on nonfiction and pedagogy

*Organizers: *Julie Rak, Orly Lael Netzer, Amanda Spallacci (University of Alberta, Canada)

*Dates:*December 10-11, 2020

*Keynotes*

**

Maarit Leskelä-Kärki

University of Turku

Joycelyn Moodie

University of Texas at San

Antonio

Anna Poletti

University of Utrecht

**

*Fee: $5 CD for all participants*

*Description*

Recently, life writing researchers in Canada, the United Kingdom,
Europe, the United States and Australia have been publishing handbooks, collections and special issues of journals on the teaching of life writing, including the collections Kate Douglas and Laurie McNeill’s /Teaching Lives /(2018), Desiree Henderson’s /How to Read a Diary/ (2019), and Dennis Kersten and Anne-Marie Mreijen’s essay cluster for the /European Journal of Life Writing /called “Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe” (2015).Pedagogical issues in life writing studies have been important at least since Miriam Fuchs’ and Craig Howes’ landmark collection /Teaching Life Writing Texts /(2008). Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s /Reading Autobiography /(2010) has an emphasis on pedagogical strategies. In fields beyond life writing, nonfiction and other forms of personal narrative have begun to attract interest as part of teaching, including in education, reading studies, history, and social work. But there has yet to be a conference devoted specifically to thinking about life writing and the work of teaching. It is high time that life writing scholars and those in associated fields come together to think about the developments in the teaching of nonfiction, both from theoretical perspectives and from the practical experiences in the classroom. This conference is an opportunity to do precisely that — to ask what does
life writing pedagogy look like now?

In a year of dramatic global events — from the COVID 19 pandemic and the many changes it has brought to our teaching and learning lives, to social and politicalupheavals taking place around the world — it is imperative that life writing scholars come together to think about teaching and pedagogy in a variety of registers. /Teaching Life Writing/ aims to provide that opportunity in an online “Round the World” conference format that will allow learning, reflection and thinking together across many time zones, over two days.

*Abstract/Bio Submission Date*

September 30, 2020

*Submission Format*

/Two formats/: regular panels with 8 minute papers, loosely keyed to one of the four themes below (you can refer to the subtopics or make your own) OR you can sign up for a roundtable discussion based on one of the four themes (3 minute presentations and then a conversation). You cannot present in both formats.

/Submission: /100 word abstract and 50 word bio for the 8 minute paper option; 50 word abstract and 50 word bio for the roundtable option. Indicate the theme you wish to be part of in your abstract.

/Submission and Registration Portal: /The portal will open August 31, 2020 for registration and submission.

*Conference Themes:*

1.Methodology: teaching life writing strategies in the 21st century

●Archives, translation, documentary,interviews, data, life history,
autoethnography

●Online or remote teaching environments: challenges

●Teaching diaries, letters and oral history

●Teaching biography

●Neurodiverse teaching and pedagogy for disabled students

●New and classic life writing methods

2.Theory (connected to teaching)

●narrative and structure

●politics

●ethics

●pedagogy

●state of the field past/present

●witnessing

●genre

●ephemera

●medium

●new developments

3.Fields of Knowledge

●Life writing in history, sociology, Indigenous studies, political science

●Creative writing: teaching students how to create an autobiography, biography, or a diary

●New media: teaching digital topics

●Teaching graphic medicine and life writing in the medical humanities

●Graphic medicine

4.Life writing, teaching, social change

●Teaching trauma in life writing

●Life writing and marginalized communities

●Social justice, activism and personal narrative

●Teaching about COVID 19

*Round the World Format*

The conference will be online-only, but keyed to different time zones. You can participate in the conference in your chosen time zone, or just go to as much as you like. There will be gathering opportunities throughout the conference, so that you can meet each other and discuss ideas.

*Contact the Organizers*

If you need more information, please contact *lwconf@ualberta.ca*
<mailto:lwconf@ualberta.ca>

**

*Sponsors*

HM Tory Chair program, University of Alberta

Faculty of Arts, University of Alberta

Kule Institute for Advanced Studies (KIAS)

Julie Rak
Henry Marshall Tory Chair
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
Humanities Centre 3-5
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6, Canada
ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Treaty 6/Region 4 Métis Nation

Website: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home
Board Member, Critical Gambling Studies:
https://www.criticalgamblingstudies.com/index.php/cgs

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Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives

deadline for submissions: 
September 30, 2020

The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, currently under contract with Routledge, presents a transnational and interdisciplinary study of refugee narratives. In response to the oversaturation of sociological, governmental, and journalistic narratives about refugees, this anthology features academic essays that examine the narratives refugees tell to, for, and about themselves. Engaging a rich variety of genres—fiction, autobiography, prose, poetry, graphic novels, film, photography, performance, social media—the chapters will analyze how conditions of forced displacement and encounters with different asylum regimes shape, but do not circumscribe, the form and content of refugee cultural productions. Chapters will tentatively be organized around three key forms—storytelling, testimony, (auto)ethnography—and four key themes—memory (and forgetting), human rights (and its limitations), border-crossing (and nation-states), and cartographies (of displacement and diaspora).

This handbook aims to provide a comprehensive introduction to the range and overarching concerns of refugee narratives. We are seeking chapters that speak to wider issues and problematics, as opposed to an analysis of a single work. We envision chapters that discuss multiple texts, drawing out the themes that thread through or may resonate with different historical, national, and social contexts. This anthology will be of interest to researchers, teachers, students, and practitioners. As such, we encourage contributors to also touch on pedagogical issues that surround the teaching and reception of these narratives.

This handbook conceives of narrative broadly and encompasses a range of critical approaches, methodologies, and genres. We are particularly interested in chapters that address one or more of the following:

  • ●  Narratives that trouble the category or definition of “refugee,” including its intersections with migrancy, Indigeneity, exile, and citizenship
  • ●  Intersections between refugee flight and Black fugitivity
  • ●  Feminist and queer theory analyses of gender and sexuality
  • ●  Engagements with ecocriticism, posthumanism, food studies, and/or critical theory
  • ●  Questions of health, disability, and embodiment as they pertain to refugee migration
  • ●  Struggles with, and organizing against, detention, deportation, forced repatriation, andrefoulement
  • ●  The role of religion in refugee narratives
  • ●  The role of memory and forgetting in refugee narratives
  • ●  Histories of empire, colonialism, postcolonialism, settler colonialism, and/or slavery
  • ●  Refugee migrations within the Global South, including South-South trajectories
  • ●  Narrative representations of boat refugees, particularly in and around the Mediterraneanregion
  • ●  Historical and contemporary refugee migrations from and through East and South Asia,including but not limited to Tibetian, Rohingya, Kashmiri, and Pakistani refugees
  • ●  Historical and contemporary refugee migrations from and through the Middle East North Africa (MENA) region, including but not limited to Syrian, Iranian, Kurdish, Palestinian, Yemeni, and Afghani refugees
  • ●  Historical and contemporary refugee migrations from and through the African continent, including but not limited to Sudanese, Somali, and Eritrean refugees
  • ●  Jewish refugees and the Holocaust
  • ●  Refugee narratives on social media and in new media, such as video games, virtualreality, podcasts, selfies, TikTok and YouTube videos
  • ●  Refugee art, including music or visual art, such as paintings, sculptures, and installations
  • ●  Refugee life narratives, including memoirs, oral histories, and ethnographies
  • ●  Refugee performances, both theatrical/dramatic and experimental/activist
  • ●  Refugee literature, including novels, short stories, poetry, graphic novels, and comics

Final chapters will be approximately 7,500 words including endnotes and bibliography. Citations will follow the Chicago Manual of Style.

If interested, please send a short abstract (250 words) to Dr. Vinh Nguyen (vinh.nguyen@uwaterloo.ca) and Dr. Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi (elegandhi@ucla.edu) by September 30, 2020. We look forward to reading your submissions!

*
Deadline for Submissions, September 30, 2020

British Travels to the Americas During the Long 19th Century (9/30/2020; 3/11-14/2021) Philadelphia–NEMLA

This panel seeks to investigate cross-cultural and intercultural exchanges in British literature produced by men and women who traveled to and from the Americas (North, Central, and South) during the long 19th century (1750-1900). It provides a critical examination of the ideological underpinnings and socio-political reasoning for the production of British travel narratives as well as the effects they had on the construction of identity, race, and gender in American and British territories during this period. In doing so, we hope to challenge established academic disciplinary boundaries and provide new insights into the intricate relationships between transatlantic literature, identity, and politics. Proposed essays may focus but are not limited to the following topics: the construction of the “I” and the “Other(s); gendered bodies and empires; British and US-American conflicts and expansions; representations of Amerindian, Afro-American, and mixed culture(s); interactions and negotiations between indigenous peoples and imperial powers; the economy and politics of slavery; and demonstrations of acceptance and resistance by newly-independent and/or formed nations.

We are particularly interested in papers that are interdisciplinary in nature, and that employ theoretical modes such as critical race studies, gender studies, transatlantic studies, and theories of empire-building.

Direct link to this panel: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18950

Please submit abstracts online via the NeMLA portal by September 30, 2020: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact Dr. Jose Lara, Chair of this panel, at j1lara@bridgew.edu

Contact Info:
José I. Lara, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Bridgewater State University
Department of Global Languages & Literatures
Bridgewater MA 02325
Contact Email:

*

*

The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are absolutely delighted to welcome Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle to our editorial team. She will be serving as our new Book Reviews Editor. Lisa is a longtime member of the auto/biography studies communities with interests in Latinx and Latin American life narratives. She is currently working on projects in autoethnographic research and academic narratives.
Lisa welcomes information regarding new theoretical texts on auto/biography, life narrative, and identity studies in any language. Please feel free to reach out to her at ortiz@tcnj.edu. Review copies may be sent to her institutional address: Professor Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, Department of English, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing, New Jersey 08628, USA.
Congratulations, Lisa, and welcome aboard!
We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to our outgoing Book Reviews Editor, Tanya Kam. Thank you for your organization, enthusiasm, and many kindnesses, Tanya! We’ll miss you!
—
Professor Ricia Anne Chansky, Ph.D.
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Research Affiliate, York University CERLAC
Fulbright Specialist in US Studies – Literature

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2021 PhD Scholarships Available in English and Creative Writing at James Cook University, Australia

Interesting in undertaking a PhD or MPhil in English or Creative Writing?

Applications for JCU Research Scholarships for 2021 are open for submissions now! See https://www.jcu.edu.au/graduate-research-school/how-to-apply

We’ve listed some potential topics below, but we are interested in discussing a range of projects with prospective applicants. Students who want to study externally are encouraged to apply.

  • Fairy tale and gothic narrative, especially Beauty and the Beast and related tales; retellings and adaptations of fairy tale in film, literature  and new media (talk with A/Prof Allison Craven allison.craven@jcu.ecu.au)
  • Australian Gothic film and literature – landscapes and monsters, colonial and contemporary (talk with A/Prof Allison Craven allison.craven@jcu.ecu.au)
  • Australian cinema, its histories and regional connections in the Asia-Pacific (talk with A/Prof Allison Craven allison.craven@jcu.ecu.au)
  • Teaching and/or performing Shakespeare in Australia (talk with Dr Claire Hansen claire.hansen3@jcu.edu.au)
  • Exploring the power of place in literature/drama through a framework of ecocriticism and the blue humanities (talk with Dr Claire Hansen claire.hansen3@jcu.edu.au)
  • How literature improves our wellbeing – linking the health humanities and literary studies (talk with Dr Claire Hansen claire.hansen3@jcu.edu.au)
  • Exploring zines and archives through a lens of self-representation (talk with Dr Emma Maguire emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au)
  • Digital life narratives of girls and women (talk with Dr Emma Maguire emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au)
  • Writing fiction, creative nonfiction, auto/biography or memoir (talk with Dr Emma Maguire emma.maguire@jcu.edu.au)
  • Exploring the relationships between authorship, editing, publishing, and reading of novels and short stories – Australian, British, American literature (talk with Dr Roger Osborne roger.osborne@jcu.edu.au)
  • Representation of cultural heritage texts in print and digital media – Australian, British, American literature (talk with Dr Roger Osborne roger.osborne@jcu.edu.au)
  • Grief or trauma literature and memoir (talk with Dr Victoria Kuttainen  victoria.kuttainen@jcu.edu.au)
  • Postcolonial approaches to literature (talk with Dr Victoria Kuttainen victoria.kuttainen@jcu.edu.au)
  • Early twentieth century 1914-1950 literature and/ or new media (magazines, photography, cinema) (talk with Dr Victoria Kuttainen  victoria.kuttainen@jcu.edu.au)

Information on PhD entry requirements, application procedures and scholarships is available from the JCU Graduate Research School website: https://www.jcu.edu.au/graduate-research-school

For general enquiries please contact Professor Sean Ulm, (Associate Dean of Research Education) at sean.ulm@jcu.edu.au

*

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Deadline for Submissions, September 15, 2020

Beyond Biofiction: Writers and Writing in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Guest Editors: Armelle Parey and Charlotte Wadoux

2021/22 Special Issue of Neo-Victorian Studies (http://neovictorianstudies.com)

Despite the death of the author famously announced by Roland Barthes in 1967, real-life writers as characters, sometimes intermingling with their own creations, feature prominently in neo-Victorian fiction and other media. Besides reprising historical writers’ careers and exposing their secret, sometimes disreputable lives, these neo-Victorian biofictions also engage, self-consciously or implicitly, with changes in writing modes, genres, and narrative conventions over time and with the theorisation of both creative practice and life-writing. The same holds true of depictions of wholly imaginary, professional or aspiring literary scribes without specific historical antecedents. Simultaneously, neo-Victorian portrayals of writers highlight dubious inequalities between celebrity and marginalised literary figures, implicated in perpetuating biased canons as well as selective forms of cultural commemoration, often privileging the same, predominantly white male writers (Charles Dickens, Henry James, Alfred Lord Tennyson) as the most suitable subjects for rewrites, with even the Brontë sisters suffering from tokenism in comparison and writers of other races going almost entirely unrepresented. This special issue aims to explore neo-Victorian representations of writers and writing in biofiction and beyond from new and innovative angles. We are particularly interested in contributions that pursue the following enquiries: Which actual nineteenth-century writers and their works are reimagined, which are not, and what accounts for such policies of differential remembrance and forgetting? How are writers deliberately misrepresented, and what present-day agendas does such misremembering serve? What accounts for the persistent fascination with the writer figure, real or imagined, in an increasingly digital age, where the book almost seems destined to relegation to the museum and the realm of virtual objects? How do neo-Victorian concerns with writing engage metafictionally with neo-Victorianism’s own processes of writing – and reading – the Victorians today? What new approaches to and techniques of intertextuality can be discerned in neo-Victorian depictions of authorship? Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to, the following:

  • rethinking and reworking the ‘cultural capital’ of nineteenth-century writers
  • innovations in neo-Victorian biofictions of writers: new orientations
  • the differential canonisation and depreciation of author figures (in terms of race, ethnicity, class, (trans)gender, sexual orientation, able-bodiedness, etc.)
  • neo-Victorian metafictional engagements with processes of writerly production, reception, and consumption
  • immersive neo-Victorian encounters with author figures: writing, empathy and affect
  • engagements with theory and its contestation in neo-Victorian writer fictions

We especially invite contributions on neo-Victorian fictions and biofictions featuring Victorian writers that have not yet attracted significant critical attention, as well as on texts featuring period scenes of non-Western writers and writing.

Please address enquiries and expressions of interest to the guest editors Armelle Parey (armelle.parey@unicaen.fr) and Charlotte Wadoux (cwadoux@gmail.com). Abstracts/proposals of 250-300 words, with accompanying brief bio note, will be due by 15 September 2020. Completed articles will be due by 1 March 2021. Abstracts and articles in Word document format should be sent via email to both guest editors, with a copy to neovictorianstudies@swansea.ac.uk. Please consult the NVS website (‘Submission Guidelines’) for further guidance.

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Deadline for Submissions, September 15, 2020

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

ILLNESS, NARRATED

ON_CULTURE: THE OPEN JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF CULTURE

ISSUE 11 (SUMMER 2021)

In response to debates considering the relationship between illness and narrative, and the extent to which these concepts can be seen as mutually constitutive, this issue of On_Culture seeks to gather new approaches and critical perspectives to the intricate relationship between narrative and illness. We welcome (inter)disciplinary contributions addressing the concepts’ entanglement on an individual, societal, and global level.

Already in 1963, Michel Foucault linked (illness) narration to its discursive conditions in The Birth of the Clinic. Moving away from the politicized view on what narrative does, medical humanities today stresses the importance, and even healing aspect of telling an illness story. In this positive view on the redeeming aspects of illness narration, identity and narrative are understood as inextricably linked. Rita Charon asserts that narrative is a central instance of good medical practice, since “without narrative acts, the patient cannot himself or herself grasp what the events of illness mean” (Charon 2006, Narrative Medicine, 13). In this broad formulation, ‘narrative’ uncritically refers to the act of self-expression as such, without taking into account the conditions that set the parameters for it.

The scope of narrative has been a central concern of critical approaches to the medical humanities. Scholars like Angela Woods, in taking up Galen Strawson (2004, “Against Narrativity”), criticize the emphasis on narrative in the medical humanities, stating that “it has never been innocent” (Woods 2011, “The Limits of Narrative”, 75). Woods warns against understanding “a person’s narrative or story […] to be coextensive with their subjective experience, their psychological health and indeed their very humanity” (73). According to Brian Schiff, the focus on narrative reifies a Western, “arguably middle and upper class concept as a universal mode of shaping and articulating experience” (Schiff 2006, “The Promise”, 21). Moreover, historians of colonial and global history showed how those narratives were challenged and contradicted, leading to other conceptions of medical knowledge (e.g. Arnold 1993, Colonizing the Body). Other approaches broaden the concept of narrative, show how stories of illness might “reject the comforts of narrative” (McKechnie 2014, “Anxieties of Communication”, 121), yet still demand to be met with narrative engagement.

Beyond the immediate focus on narrative as illness mediation, the turn to affect in critical theory can prove productive in addressing the autonomy of the body. For the (critical) medical humanities, this opens up space with which to think of the bodily experience beyond narrative and to ask if this is even possible. Furthermore, expanding the scope of narrative beyond literary texts, internet culture, online media, and the increasing use of digital and technological innovations in healthcare can be seen to mediate both health and illness in different ways.

In response to these ongoing debates, we welcome innovative and interdisciplinary approaches in the (critical) medical humanities, narrative medicine, history of medicine, disability studies, narratology, literary studies, historiography, empirical social science, media, television and film studies, and other related disciplines that address how narrative is interlinked with illness experience and medical practice.

We welcome submissions including, but not restricted to, the following topics:

  • Illness/Narrative and self-expression
  • Narrative as mediation of bodily experience
  • Differences in discussing physical and mental illness
  • Narrating about vs. narrating with illness
  • Disease classification/taxonomy/nosology
  • Illness as metaphor
  • Subversive illness narration (e.g. chaos narratives)
  • Illness narratives in gender, queer and trans studies
  • Non-Western conceptualizations and narratives of illness
  • Illness narratives in different media (literature, newspapers, magazines, advertising, television (series), film, games, etc.)
  • Online support groups, blogging, confession stories, memes, fora (e.g. Spoonies and Spoon Theory)
  • Interfaces of the digital and medical realm (algorithms, digital data, and self-tracking apps)

If you are interest in having a peer reviewed academic article featured in this issue of On_Culture, please submit an abstract of 300 words with the article title, 5-6 keywords, and a short biographical note to content@on-culture.org (subject line “Abstract Submission Issue 11”) no later than September 15, 2020. You will be notified by September 30, 2020 whether your paper proposal has been accepted. The final date for full papaper submissions is January 15, 2021.

Please note: On_Culture also features a section devoted to shorter, creative pieces pertaining to each issue topic. These can be interviews, essays, opinion pieces, reviews of exhibitions, analyses of cultural artifacts and events, photo galleries, videos, works of art … and more! These contributions are uploaded on a rolling basis, also to previous issues. Interested in contributing? Send your idea to content@on-culture.org

View CfA online https://www.on-culture.org/submission/cfa-issue-11/

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Deadline for Submissions, September 15, 2020

CFP for Comparative Cinema: Biopic vs biopic: Cinematographic life as a place for comparison

deadline for submissions:
September 15, 2020
full name / name of organization:
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
contact email:

Over the last ten years, the biopic has been carried out by many relevant filmmakers —within and beyond the mainstream— and it has become a key genre in contemporary cinema. This fact is attested by titles like ‘Carlos’ (Olivier Assayas, 2010), ‘J. Edgar’ (Clint Eastwood, 2011), ‘Hannah Arendt’ (Margarethe von Trotta, 2012), ‘Camille Claudel 1915’ (Bruno Dumont, 2013), ‘Saint Laurent’ (Bertrand Bonello, 2014), ‘Steve Jobs’ (Danny Boyle, 2015), ‘Neruda’ (Pablo Larraín, 2016), ‘Snowden’ (Oliver Stone, 2016), ‘First Man’ (Damien Chazelle, 2018), ‘Loro: International Cut’ (Paolo Sorrentino, 2018), ‘At Eternity’s Gate’ (Julian Schnabel, 2018), ‘Bohemian Rapsody’ (Brian Synger, 2018), ‘The Traitor’ (Marco Bellocchio, 2019), ‘Judy’ (Rupert Goold, 2019), ‘Rocketman’ (Dexter Fletcher, 2019) and ‘A Hidden Life’ (Terrence Malick, 2019). At the same time, documentary biopics have increased, as in the case of ‘George Harrison: Living in the Material World’ (Martin Scorsese, 2011), ‘The Salt of the Earth’ (Wim Wenders and Juliano Ribeiro Salgado, 2014), ‘Amy’ (Asif Kapadia, 2015), ‘Diego Maradona’ (Asif Kapadia, 2019) and ‘Pavarotti’ (Ron Howard, 2019).

The diversity among these titles is proof of Belén Vidal’s statement in the prologue to the volume ‘The Biopic in Contemporary Film Culture’ (Belén Vidal and Tom Brown, eds., 2014): the term biopic —usually undervalued as a synonym of narrative restrictions and aesthetic conservatism— is also used to name a space that is open to formal experiments. That is the reason why, in the past decade, this genre has also received renewed attention in the academic world, with volumes like ‘Whose Lives Are They Anyway? The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre’ (Dennis Bingham, 2010), ‘Biopic: de la réalité à la fiction’ (Rémi Fontanel, ed., 2011) and ‘Invented Lives, Invented Communities: The Biopic and American National Identity’ (William H. Epstein and R. Barton Palmer, eds., 2016).

In this issue of ‘Comparative Cinema’, we want to approach the biopic from the specific perspective of comparative cinema. How much does the story of a lifetime allow to compare aesthetic and narrative differences between two separate works? Which biopic elements are especially relevant for a comparison? Rather than discovering what the comparison between two biopics reveals us, we are interested in how such comparison can be articulated and in finding out which of its elements can be the most fruitful. Some lines of work are suggested:

Biopic and life: biopics privilege certain moments of a trajectory. Which of the life chapters are the most revealing of narrative and aesthetic differences? Between the personal and the professional life, which one of them has a greater impact on the comparison between different biopics?

Biopic and film time: by its very definition, the biopic is developed throughout a long, well delimited period. How can the length of the portrayed period, the length of the film and the time dedicated to each event be compared between different works?

Biopic and star studies: biopics entail professional challenges for performers because they can strengthen or renew their star persona. How can a biopic be compared to other performances by the same actor? How can the real character and the previous roles of the performer be compared through specific gestures?

Biopic and authorship: some filmmakers have transformed the biopic into a sign of identity. Is it possible to find common elements between different biopics directed by the same author? How much do the author’s other films —not biopics— influence these biopics?

Biopic and documentary film: many characters have been biographed both in documentaries and fiction films. Moreover, the fiction biopic can sometimes include real images. How can comparison between a documentary biopic and a fiction biopic be articulated? How much does the biopic allow to approach methodologies about documentary film?

Priority shall be given to papers focused on cinema from the 2000-2020 period (or papers containing, at least, one film from this period in their comparison). Papers must be between 5000 and 6000 words long, including footnotes. The texts (in a Word format) and the images accompanying them must be sent through the RACO platform, available on the website of the journal.

This special issue is also open for publishing interviews that have been previously agreed with the editors. Suggestions can be sent to comparativecinema@upf.edu.

The time limit for receiving papers is the 15th of September 2020.

https://www.raco.cat/index.php/Comparativecinema/announcement/view/79

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Deadline for Submissions, August  30, 2020

Prose Studies is Seeking an Editor

About the Role

Prose Studies provides a forum for discussion of the history, theory and criticism of non-fictional prose of all periods. As the study of non-fiction prose transforms, Routledge are seeking to appoint a new Editor, or pair of Co-Editors, with suitable academic background as well as the passion to drive the journal forward. The journal and Routledge are dedicated to diversity, inclusion and fair process, and we therefore welcome scholars from all backgrounds and creeds to apply.

The successful candidate(s) will be responsible for editorial oversight and decision-making on submissions, using the Prose Studies Editorial Manager site. They will have authority to accept articles following peer review and will ensure that reviewers, authors and Editorial Board members adhere to the journal’s Code of Publishing Ethics. The new Editor(s) would initially work with the current Editor, Clare Simmons (Ohio State University) through an agreed handover period to ensure seamless transition. The new Editor(s) would be free to choose a team to support them and update the journal’s policies as relevant.

Routledge will provide training on systems and processes used as well as remuneration for the role to cover any journal-related expenses. Routledge will also be able to supply annual reports reflecting on the performance of the journal to support ongoing development.

Becoming the Editor of a journal is a rewarding and fulfilling experience where you will build your own networks, promote the research that you are passionate about, and be recognised as a leading figure within the research community.

Submitting your Application

Interested in applying? Here are the skills and attributes we would be looking for in a successful applicant:

  • Active within a relevant research community (including but not limited to literature, languages, rhetoric, media studies, communication and journalism);
  • Experience of/in academic publishing (special issues, peer review, edited collections, etc.);
  • Confidence to engage with authors and researchers to attract the highest quality submissions;
  • Strong organisational skills to ensure that submissions are handled in a timely manner;
  • Excellent communication skills and the ability to foster positive working relationships with colleagues such as reviewers, Editorial Board members, authors and Routledge contacts;
  • Time to devote to the journal’s development and act as an ambassador for the journal.

Submitting your Expression of Interest

If you are interested in the role, please send your CV(s) and a short vision statement to Becky Guest, Routledge, (rebecca.guest@tandf.co.uk) by 31st August 2020. Potential co-editors should express their interest jointly.

Your vision statement should be no longer than 600 words and should cover:

  • Where you believe the study of non-fiction prose is going, and the journal’s place within it;
  • What opportunities for development you see, and ideas for how you would enact these;
  • How you would maintain and increase the quality and diversity of submissions in a virtual environment.

Following receipt, suitable candidates will be selected to discuss the role in more detail.

Formal appointment and a transition timeline will then be mutually agreed with Routledge and the outgoing Editor.

If you have any questions about the role or application process, please contact the current Editor simmons.9@osu.edu and rebecca.guest@tandf.co.uk.

For more information

https://think.taylorandfrancis.com/fprs-callforeditor/

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CFP Autobiography Before Autobiography (1400-1700) (8/15/2020; 11/13-14/2020) Berlin, Germany

International Online Workshop at the Freie Universität, Berlin

Oranizer: Nicolae Virastau, PhD (Columbia University), Postdoctoral Fellow of the Dahlem Humanities Center, Freie Universität, Berlin

13 November and 14 November 2020

Jacob Burckhardt famously placed the birth of autobiography during the Renaissance in the context of the discovery of the individual, and the awakening of the self. Few scholars today would fully embrace this master narrative. Medievalists posit the existence of a sense of individual selfhood much earlier, in the High Middle Ages, while many literary theorists of autobiography employ a narrow definition of autobiography focusing on personal development and reflexive subjectivity. Thus, literary theory effectively excludes from the history of autobiography most of what was written before the eighteenth century. Conversely, more recent cultural historians and historians of private life have sought to recover neglected forms of self-writing that do not fit modern definitions of the literary genre of autobiography: account books, semiliterate diaries, or astrological almanacs. They proposed neologisms such as life-writing, egodocuments, and self-testimonies to avoid the teleological implications of the Burckhardtian grand narrative, and to include texts that have been neglected by the traditional literary history of autobiography.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together historians and literary scholars working on a wide range of late-medieval and early-modern self-writing forms that challenge the more common, postromantic ideas about autobiography, such as: family books, books of reason, almanacs, artisan autobiographies, but also prefaces and marginalia. Papers that can address the relation of these types of self-writing to the better-known genres of the vitae, commentarii, memoirs, confessions, essays, poetic autobiographies, etc. are especially welcome.

Papers should be given in English or French, and should not exceed 30 minutes. Please send an abstract (300 words max.) and a brief CV (2 pages max.) at NAV2110@COLUMBIA.EDU.

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, the conference will take place online. The submission deadline has been extended to August 15, 2020.

Contact Info:

*

Deadline for Submissions August 15, 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS

Heroines of the Holocaust: Frameworks of Resistance

Wagner College Holocaust Center

June 2-3, 2021

“Nobody taught us how to fight or to perform our duties. We learned by ourselves not only how to clean and use a gun, but how to conduct ourselves in combat and battle, how to blow up a bridge or a train, how to cut communication lines and how to stand on guard.”

—Sara Ginaite, partisan, March 8, 1944 (International Woman’s Day)

The activities of women during the Holocaust have often been forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or intentionally distorted. Jewish women and those of all faiths fought with dignity, compassion and courage to save others from the murderous Nazi regime in over 30 nations. Often overlooked, women as well as men played critical roles in uprisings against the Nazis in over 50 ghettos, 18 forced labor camps and 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Women were critical to the Jewish underground and other resistance networks both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false papers. Women played essential roles operating educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives. In other genocides, women also faced horrendous atrocities, yet distinguished themselves with resilience and acts of moral courage. This symposium hopes to create a new narrative around agency in the Shoah and other genocides, which may inspire transformative activism today.

From the groundbreaking 1983 conference on “Women and the Holocaust” at Stern College to the 2018 symposium on “Women, the Holocaust and Genocide” at Seton Hill University, research on gender issues has grown exponentially. Innumerable books, conferences, panels, films, journal special issues, and groups such as Remember the Women Institute, now document the inspiring lives of female participants. Yet, there remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pistol or pen. The leadership strategies, networks of defiance and testimony of better-known activists, such as Vitka Kempner-Kovner, Zivia Lubetkin, Vladka Meed, Sara Fortis, Gisi Fleishman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Nadezhda Popova, Haviva Reik, Edith Bruck, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Roza Robota, among others, still merit far more attention; their lives, too, should become part of the canon of Holocaust study. How is our understanding of the Shoah– and the central question of how it happened– impacted and re-conceptualized by knowing about the activities of female resisters and rescuers?  This symposium will bring together international scholars working on this topic to share new approaches, projects and information on well-known women, as well as those whose stories remain shrouded in obscurity.

We seek papers exploring women as rescuers and resisters of the Holocaust and genocide. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Leadership Lessons of Women in Resistance Networks

Women and Resistance in the Concentration Camps

Women Rescuers and Resisters in the Ghettos

Female Partisans in World War II

The Psychology of Rescue and Resistance

Women Doctors, Nurses and Social Workers

Female Artists as Resisters

The Power of a Photo of Women Resisters

The Role of Women in Zionist and other youth groups

Women as Resisters and Rescuers in Genocide

Resilient Bonds: Mother/Sister/Aunt/Daughter/Grandmother

Beyond Anne Frank: Women’s Journals, Memoirs and Archives

Films and Music of Women and Human Rights

Limits and Possibilities of Collection of Women’s Oral Testimony and Archives

Post-Holocaust Life of Female Resisters and Rescuers

Historiography of Jewish and non-Jewish Resisters and Rescuers

Illiberal Memory Politics and Selective Forgetting of Women

Teaching about Women, Resistance and Rescue

Please submit abstracts of 300 to 500 words outlining the focus and approach of your paper. Abstracts must include full name and title, institutional affiliation and email address. Please also attach a copy of your CV.

Subject line should be: LAST NAME Abstract Heroines

Submit to both Conference Organizers:

Laura Morowitz, Professor of Art History, Wagner College lmorowit@wagner.edu

And Lori Weintrob, Professor of History and Director, Wagner College Holocaust Center holocaust.center@wagner.edu.

Important Dates:

August 15, 2020: Deadline for submission of Abstracts

October 1, 2020: Notification of Acceptance

The two-day symposium on the campus of Wagner College, in Staten Island, New York, is sponsored by the Wagner College Holocaust Center. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan will host a private visit for participants. Details on accommodations and travel will be sent following acceptance of paper. We will open up the conference on the second day to NY/NJ teachers and a general audience ensuring an even greater circulation of these ideas.

Contact Info:

Professor Laura Morowitz, Wagner College

Professor Lori Weintrob, Wagner College

Contact Email:

*

Deadline for Submissions August 15, 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS

Heroines of the Holocaust: Frameworks of Resistance

Wagner College Holocaust Center

June 2-3, 2021

Deadline for Submissions, August 15, 2020
“Nobody taught us how to fight or to perform our duties. We learned by ourselves not only how to clean and use a gun, but how to conduct ourselves in combat and battle, how to blow up a bridge or a train, how to cut communication lines and how to stand on guard.”

—Sara Ginaite, partisan, March 8, 1944 (International Woman’s Day)

The activities of women during the Holocaust have often been forgotten, erased, misunderstood, or intentionally distorted. Jewish women and those of all faiths fought with dignity, compassion and courage to save others from the murderous Nazi regime in over 30 nations. Often overlooked, women as well as men played critical roles in uprisings against the Nazis in over 50 ghettos, 18 forced labor camps and 5 concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Women were critical to the Jewish underground and other resistance networks both as armed fighters and as strategists and couriers of intelligence and false papers. Women played essential roles operating educational, cultural and humanitarian initiatives. In other genocides, women also faced horrendous atrocities, yet distinguished themselves with resilience and acts of moral courage. This symposium hopes to create a new narrative around agency in the Shoah and other genocides, which may inspire transformative activism today.

From the groundbreaking 1983 conference on “Women and the Holocaust” at Stern College to the 2018 symposium on “Women, the Holocaust and Genocide” at Seton Hill University, research on gender issues has grown exponentially. Innumerable books, conferences, panels, films, journal special issues, and groups such as Remember the Women Institute, now document the inspiring lives of female participants. Yet, there remain many untold stories of women fighting back against the Nazis with pistol or pen. The leadership strategies, networks of defiance and testimony of better-known activists, such as Vitka Kempner-Kovner, Zivia Lubetkin, Vladka Meed, Sara Fortis, Gisi Fleishman, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, Nadezhda Popova, Haviva Reik, Edith Bruck, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis and Roza Robota, among others, still merit far more attention; their lives, too, should become part of the canon of Holocaust study. How is our understanding of the Shoah– and the central question of how it happened– impacted and re-conceptualized by knowing about the activities of female resisters and rescuers?  This symposium will bring together international scholars working on this topic to share new approaches, projects and information on well-known women, as well as those whose stories remain shrouded in obscurity.

We seek papers exploring women as rescuers and resisters of the Holocaust and genocide. Topics include, but are not limited to:

Leadership Lessons of Women in Resistance Networks

Women and Resistance in the Concentration Camps

Women Rescuers and Resisters in the Ghettos

Female Partisans in World War II

The Psychology of Rescue and Resistance

Women Doctors, Nurses and Social Workers

Female Artists as Resisters

The Power of a Photo of Women Resisters

The Role of Women in Zionist and other youth groups

Women as Resisters and Rescuers in Genocide

Resilient Bonds: Mother/Sister/Aunt/Daughter/Grandmother

Beyond Anne Frank: Women’s Journals, Memoirs and Archives

Films and Music of Women and Human Rights

Limits and Possibilities of Collection of Women’s Oral Testimony and Archives

Post-Holocaust Life of Female Resisters and Rescuers

Historiography of Jewish and non-Jewish Resisters and Rescuers

Illiberal Memory Politics and Selective Forgetting of Women

Teaching about Women, Resistance and Rescue

Please submit abstracts of 300 to 500 words outlining the focus and approach of your paper. Abstracts must include full name and title, institutional affiliation and email address. Please also attach a copy of your CV.

Subject line should be: LAST NAME Abstract Heroines

Submit to both Conference Organizers:

Laura Morowitz, Professor of Art History, Wagner College lmorowit@wagner.edu

And Lori Weintrob, Professor of History and Director, Wagner College Holocaust Center holocaust.center@wagner.edu.

Important Dates:

August 15, 2020: Deadline for submission of Abstracts

October 1, 2020: Notification of Acceptance

The two-day symposium on the campus of Wagner College, in Staten Island, New York, is sponsored by the Wagner College Holocaust Center. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan will host a private visit for participants. Details on accommodations and travel will be sent following acceptance of paper. We will open up the conference on the second day to NY/NJ teachers and a general audience ensuring an even greater circulation of these ideas.

Contact Info:

Professor Laura Morowitz, Wagner College

Professor Lori Weintrob, Wagner College

Contact Email:

*

Deadline for Submissions August 15, 2020

CFP for Special Issue about African American Biofiction

for the journal African American Review

                Biofiction is literature that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, and it has become a dominant aesthetic form since the late 1980s, resulting in stellar works from global luminaries as varied like Gabriel García Márquez, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Joyce Carol Oates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Peter Carey, Olga Tokarczuk, and Hilary Mantel, just to mention a notable few. Studies about biofiction have surged over the last ten years, but what scholars have not yet noted is the African American contribution to the evolution, rise, and legitimization of biofiction.

There were some important biofictions published in the nineteenth century, such as Herman Melville’s Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1874) and “Herodias” (1877), Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), and Oscar Wilde’s “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889). But the first real boom occurred in the 1930s, with influential publications from authors like Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Irving Stone, and Robert Graves. Worth noting is that Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder) and Zora Neale Hurston (Moses, Man of the Mountain) published two of the more impressive biofictions from the decade.

But it would be two novels about African Americans in the second half of the twentieth century that would contribute significantly to the most important boom in biofiction, which is still underway. In 1967, William Styron published the hugely controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, while in 1979, Barbara Chase-Riboud published Sally Hemings, a work that sold more than a million copies and led, in part, Eugene A. Foster to carry out DNA testing, which confirmed that Hemings’s descendants are related to Jefferson.

African Americans, either as authors or protagonists, are of crucial importance in some of the most impactful biofictions, including Chase-Riboud’s The President’s Daughter (Jefferson’s daughter Harriet Hemings) and Hottentot Venus (Sarah Baartman), Charles Johnson’s Dreamer (Martin Luther King, Jr.), Louis Edwards’s Oscar Wilde Discovers America, Caryl Phillips’s Dancing in the Dark (Bert Williams), Chika Unigwe’s De Zwarte Messias (Olaudah Equiano), and Colum McCann’s TransAtlantic (Frederick Douglass), just to name a few. It is for this reason that the African American Review is soliciting essays for a special issue about African American biofiction, by which is meant either biofiction by or about African Americans.

We welcome essays about the history of the aesthetic form in relation to African American literature and culture, African American innovations within the form, the role of African Americans within biofiction, studies about individual texts, and the recovery of lost historical figures through biofiction. More speculative essays are also welcome. For instance, we know that Toni Morrison encouraged Chase-Riboud to write Sally Hemings. Given the huge success of that 1979 novel, why did Morrison change the name of her protagonist in Beloved? How would Beloved signify differently had Morrison written it as a biographical novel? How would Sally Hemings function and signify differently had Chase-Riboud changed the protagonist’s name? Such contrastive and comparative studies could illuminate individual novels as well as African American biofiction more generally.

Essays will be due on August 15th, 2021.

For information about this special issue, contact Michael Lackey (lacke010@morris.umn.edu)

—

Michael Lackey

Distinguished McKnight University Professor

University of Minnesota, Morris

104 Humanities Building

600 East 4th Street

Morris, MN 56267-2132
320-589-6263

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Date for Submissions August 14, 2020

Women in Higher Education: A Compilation of Feminist Historiographies – CALL FOR BOOK CHAPTERS – Book proposal (8/14/2020)

We are pleased to invite chapters for an upcoming book proposal entitled, Women in Higher Education: A Compilation of Feminist Historiographies. The focus of the book will be on women who have significantly influenced higher education in the United States during the mid-19th to mid-20th centuries.

Nineteenth century women academics faced numerous tensions in their pursuit of higher education. Their persistence was scoffed at by contemporaries. Women of this time period influenced gender equity, however their contributions to the field of higher education have remained largely unrecognized. Their journeys and leadership strategies may be relevant to women seeking and securing educational roles.

The absence of women leaders in higher education has been noted by various scholars. An analysis of their leadership skills is needed within the current academic landscape. As female graduate students continue to enter into the field of higher education in increasing numbers, there is an urgency to revisit the experiences and contributions of female academics to avoid continuation of the grand narrative. Their lived experiences and educational contributions provide foundations and principles which can influence future women leaders in higher education. By bringing these women to the forefront, there is a possibility of diversifying and advancing the field of leadership in higher education.

Examining women’s contributions to the field of higher education is ethical and responsible and works toward affirming how past female leaders and the strategies they employed can inform current practices of leaders in higher education.

We recognize that there remain countless untold stories of their work that have remained unnoticed or disregarded. We welcome feminist historiographies highlighting

women from a wide range of national, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds to share the legacies of these female educational pioneers. If accepted, the final book chapters must document the subject’s relevant biography, her contribution to higher education and demonstrate an in-depth intersectionality of narratives between author and historical female figure.

This work is being advanced by doctoral students in a class on Women in Higher Education at the University of Hartford. We particularly invite graduate students to participate in this project. We have written feminist historiographies on five women who had a positive impact on the field of higher education prior to the 1950s. The five women are: Annie Howes Barus, Harriette J. Cooke, Alice Hamilton, Frances Willard and Sara Josephine Baker.

Submission Details:

Please send a two-page PDF summary of your proposed book chapter of a feminist historiography that includes the details outlined above. Please also denote a chapter title and include the affiliation(s) and degree(s) of the author(s).

After notification of acceptance of summaries, final book chapter submissions should be approximately 10 pages (double-spaced). Final book chapters must adhere to the guidelines within the 7th edition of the APA Publication Manual.

The timeline is as follows:

Submission deadline for summaries: August 14, 2020

Notification of acceptance of summaries: September 30, 2020

Submission deadline for full book chapters: January 8, 2020

Final submission of revised book chapters: March 1, 2021

Proposed Publication Date: Fall 2022

Proposals and submissions should be emailed to the Main Editor: Karen Case at kcase@hartford.edu

Contact Info:

Karen Case, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Administration and Supervision

University of Hartford, Department of Education

200 Bloomfield Avenue, Auerbach 223C

West Hartford, CT 06117

Phone: (860) 508-4397

Email: kcase@hartford.edu

Contact Email:

kcase@hartford.edu

Contact Info:

Karen Case, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Administration and Supervision

University of Hartford, Department of Education

200 Bloomfield Avenue, Auerbach 223C

West Hartford, CT 06117

Phone: (860) 508-4397

Contact Email:

*

Deadline for Submissions, August 7, 2020

CFP: Celebrity Studies Special Edition, “CHILDREN AND CELEBRITIES.” Deadline: August 7, 2020.

The entertainment industries create the most widely circulated popular images of children and childhood, and yet the role of children in celebrity studies warrants further study. As John Mercer and Jane O’Connor (2017) point out, the intersection between Childhood Studies and Celebrity Studies has been gaining traction in recent years, highlighting a tension between the dominant discourses of innocence surrounding children, and the highly competitive commercial imperatives of celebrity culture.

New participatory entertainment ecologies have created new opportunities for child performers, leading to the rise of new kinds of child celebrities and surrounding reception cultures. For instance, on YouTube, the world’s most popular user-generated video streaming service, some of the most successful celebrities are children: eight year old Ryan Kaji – a North American child who reviews toys for the channel ‘Ryan’s World’ (formerly ‘Ryan ToysReview’) – was the highest-earning YouTube personality of the year in both 2018 (Statista, 2019) and 2019 (Berg, 2019).

The child on screen, the child viewer, and the child star continue to be influenced by concepts of childhood that first emerged in the 19th century, eliciting discourses of harm and protection and attracting waves of moral panic in different eras. These public debates most often reveal more about adult sensibilities around often nostalgic notions of childhood than they do about children themselves. As Karen Lury puts it, “the essential understanding of the child here is the child as being rather than becoming”(2005: 314), a subject lacking agency, which leads Hugh Cunningham to caution “we need to distinguish between children as human beings and childhood as a shifting set of ideas” (2005: 1). In the current cultural moment and in prior eras, the categories of child and adult are mutually reinforcing ideals that are articulated and reflected in a range of distinctive ways through celebrity culture. For example, since the world went into lockdown, the family home has taken centre stage for live broadcasts and social media feeds, and as a result viewers have been inundated with images of celebrities in isolation with their children.

There is more cultural evidence around childhood as a cultural concept than the lived experiences of children, a distinction which becomes key when considering children as fans of child and adult celebrities. In the field of Fandom Studies, Kyra Hunting notes the tendency to examine adolescent and teen media fans at the expense of children. She suggests this is partly due to practical, methodological reasons around collecting data, but argues it also reveals a resistance to framing children’s participatory media engagement as a form of fandom. This is despite the fact that “the playing child” functions as a “model for fandom” studies (Hills, 2002: 9). As such, we need to be mindful of how the child audience is addressed by star vehicles and paratexts, compared with what children actually do as fans, even (or particularly) if this does not accord with teen and adult models of fandom, and what intergenerational modes might be in play.

We seek original essays of 6-8000 words that address children and celebrities through an interdisciplinary approach, across a range of media forms and eras, for a special issue of Celebrity Studies (prospective publication 2023, pending the journal’s review of abstracts).

We will be looking for internationalisation, a range of scholarly experiences, gender balance, and that each of the abstracts tackles their topic or research question through broad and dynamic celebrity intersections.

Topics that the articles may address include, but are not limited to:

  • Examination of specific child stars or celebrities
  • Fandom around child stars, among children and/or adults
  • Child fans of adult stars
  • On and off-screen dynamics between child stars and their co-stars
  • Child celebrities and their online persona
  • ‘Fur babies’: celebrity companion animals as ‘children’
  • Intersectional explorations of gender, race, and/or sexuality around child stars, fromtheir youth through to adulthood
  • Nostalgia around child stars of the past
  • Intergenerational spectatorship and child celebrities
  • Public discourses around child star breakdowns
  • Acting and screen performance
  • Ageing child stars
  • Children on reality TV
  • The child actor industry
  • Child actors in adult film and television
  • Celebrity families in music, film, television and social media cultures
  • Child labour and consent
  • Child stars and stalkers
  • Children of celebrities
  • Children, celebrity culture, and moral panic
  • Child stars and merchandising
  • Children, celebrities and genre
  • Adult stars who feature in children’s film and televisionPlease send proposals of 300 words and a 50 word author bio to Djoymi Baker djoymi.baker@rmit.edu.au, Jessica Balanzategui jbalanzategui@swin.edu.au, or Diana Sandars sandars@unimelb.edu.au by 7 August 2020.Djoymi Baker is a Lecturer in Media and Cinema Studies at RMIT University, Australia. She is a prize-winning writer on topics such as genre studies, fandom and myth in popular culture. Djoymi is the author of To Boldly Go: Marketing the Myth of Star Trek (I. B. Tauris, 2018) and the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Epic Films (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). Her current research examines children’s film and television history.Jessica Balanzategui is a Lecturer in Cinema and Screen Studies at Swinburne University of Technology and a Chief Investigator at the Centre for Transformative Media Technologies. Her research examines screen genres across film, television and digital media for and about children, and the impact of technological and industrial change on entertainment cultures. Jessica is the author of The Uncanny Child in Transnational Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), and the founding editor of Amsterdam University Press’s book series, Horror and Gothic Media Cultures. Jessica is also an editor of Refractory: A Journal of Entertainment Media.Diana Sandars is a Lecturer in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, Australia, where she teaches courses in Screen, Gender, Digital Cultures, Social Justice and Cultural Studies. Diana has a research focus on the child in, and subject of,

screen media. Diana is the author of What A Feeling: The Hollywood Musical After MTV (Intellect, forthcoming).

References

Berg, M, 2019, “The highest paid YouTube stars of 2019.” Forbes 18 December. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2019/12/18/the-highest-paid-yout… stars-of-2019-the-kids-are-killing-it/#446f8a3338cd (accessed 19 December 2019).

Cunningham, Hugh, 2005, Children and childhood in western society since 1500, New York: Routledge.

Hills, Matt, 2002, Fan Cultures, London: Routledge.
Hunting, Kyra, 2019, “Finding the child fan: A case for studying children in fandom studies,”

Journal of Fandom Studies, Vol.7, No. 2, pp. 93-111.
Lury, Karen, 2005, “The Child in Film and Television,” Screen, Vol. 46, No. 3, Autumn, pp.

307-314.
Mercer, John, and Jane O’Connor, 2017, Childhood and Celebrity, London: Routledge. Statista, 2019, “Most popular YouTube channels as of September 2019, ranked by number of

subscribers (in millions).” Available at:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/277758/most-popular-youtube-channels… by-subscribers/ (accessed 01 December 2019).

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Deadline for Submissions August 1, 2020

“Living with loss: bereavement, grief, loneliness, and resilience”–call for papers for the special issue for the British Journal of Guidance & Counselling (8/1/2020)

The contemporary poet David Whyte invites his audiences to wonder with him why humans are almost solely focused on achievement and success and are frequently shocked by any ending to a relationship, job, or loved-one’s life. He proposes we would do well to “apprentice ourselves to loss” as much as we do to gain. This begs questions like: what do we already know about well-being and resilience, what essential questions do we need to ask to facilitate our learning in this area, and what new research is being done or should be done to improve guidance and counselling practice in this context?
This special issue invites perspectives on the range of reactions people have when faced with loss and change, and the potential for more healthful responses. It is also aimed at articulating ways in which we might serve those we support when they confront specific human challenges related to bereavement, grief, and loneliness.
Bereavement
Bereavement refers to the loss of a loved one and the sadness, struggle, and adjustment this profound change requires. In counselling and guidance theory and practice, we maintain that humans are innately relational: when someone we love dies (or we are faced with the bereavement of those we serve), we are reminded that our attachments provide security, safety, consistency, and even shape our identity. With the secularisation of society, many rituals for coping well with bereavement and providing comfort have disappeared and the onus is frequently on the individual to make meaning. This may be done through psychological, creative or spiritual approaches, and social support remains an essential element of being well when faced with the death of those closest to us. The Covid-19 epidemic poses additional issues for the bereaved; not only because of the complications of burials and the impossibility of visiting those who are seriously ill, but also the disturbance of cultural rituals that appease the living and ‘do right by the dead’ as part of meaning-oriented practices. We are interested in learning more about innovations, theories, new research, and perspectives on bereavement within the context of guidance and counselling.
Grief
“Grieving represents a form of psychosocial and perhaps spiritual transition from the initial onset of a life-altering loss through a period of frequently tumultuous adjustment to a point of relative stability beyond the period of acute bereavement” (Neimeyer & Cacciatore, 2016, p. 3).
We will all face grief, we will see our clients and students face grief, and we will see loss in all areas of human life, not just as it relates to the death of loved ones. We will likely all be confronted with one or more of the following losses: job loss, loss of relationships or connection, even loss of our freedom (e.g. through illness; the current pandemic; lack of autonomy at work). Facing grief demands of us that we adapt, make meaning, and respond to the changes that challenge our sense of safety and identity.
Loneliness
Loneliness is said to have the same “impact on mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, making it even more dangerous than obesity,” writes researcher Douglas Nemecek (Tate, 2018). He and his colleagues found in their 2018 national survey in USA, that loneliness is correlated with social anxiety and self-reported overuse of social media. Findings in their study indicate that in order to reduce loneliness, guidance and counselling professionals should focus on, “improving social support, decreasing social anxiety, and promoting healthy daily behaviors” among their clients (Bruce, Lustig, Russell, & Nemecek, 2018). This is, of course, complicated by consistent findings that “lonelier people are more likely to have poor social skills, have difficulty in forming relationships, and hold negative or hostile opinions of other people” (Bevinn, 2011). In the current pandemic, which involves self-isolating and social distancing, there are additional causes of loneliness. We are interested in finding out more about loneliness in the context of bereavement and the range of other non-death losses, including Covid-19 related losses.
Resilience
In the context of bereavement, a surprising 68% of people show resilience; however, a minority does suffer from prolonged and complicated grief (Bonanno, 2009). Resilience is generally perceived as the ability to respond quickly and adaptively to difficult change. Most scholars agree that it is a combination of aptitude, attitude, and social connection. We are resilient to the degree to which we can ask for and receive the support of others, are able to honour our emotions and let them do their adaptive work, and have (or can develop) the ability to reorder our lives. We may even learn and transform through painful change through a phenomenon called benefit finding (Hall, 2014). Researchers have come to understand that our response to change in life is dependent on biological, personal, dyadic, and cultural forces (for a full overview see Neimeyer, Klass & Dennis, 2014).
For this special issue of the British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, we are looking for scholarly articles on the following topics:

  • Innovative perspectives and theories on bereavement, grief, loneliness, and resilience
  • Loneliness research, policy and practice
  • Theoretical and practical perspectives on resilience
  • Interdisciplinary research in relation to the theme(s) of this special issue
  • Psychology of bereavement/grief, loneliness and/or resilience
  • Cultural factors in bereavement/grief, loneliness and/or resilience
  • Loss, trauma, and counselling and beneficial approaches
  • Community factors in resilience
  • Creative methods in response to grief and loneliness (e.g. narrative therapies, life writing and creative writing, counselling, poetry therapy, embodied methods for learning through difficulty)
  • Bereavement, grief, loneliness, and resilience in the time of COVID-19

Submission Instructions

  • Proposals of no more than 500 words and list of authors, including contact details for the corresponding author can be submitted to the Special Issue Editor(s) Dr. Robert Neimeyer, Portland Institute for Loss and Transition neimeyer@portlandinstitute.org and Dr. Katrin Den Elzen, Curtin University, Perth, Australia katrin.denelzen@curtin.edu.au for feedback by August 1, 2020.
  • Full papers can (also) be submitted into the system without a proposal.
  • When submitting, please choose “Living with Loss” from drop-down tab when asked if you are submitting for a special or symposium issue
  • Please see general BJGC guidelines on word counts and referencing styles before submitting

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Deadline for Submissions August 1, 2020

Call for papers

7th international symposium of the Finnish Oral History Network FOHN 

Power, Authority, and Voice: Critical Reflections in/on Oral History

26–27 November 2020
Helsinki, Finland

The notions of power, authority, and voice have been at the center of oral history research and practice from its inception. Oral history research is emblematically distinguished by its preoccupation with the voices from ‘the below’, having dedicated itself to the recording, collection, and analysis of memories, personal narratives, and histories of individuals and groups that would not have been heard otherwise. The concept of voice has implicitly referred to the nature of oral histories as recorded interviews, but more importantly, to issues of subjectivity, representation, and authority. In addition to recorded interviews, there has been increasing interest in various forms of life writings, as well as other forms of vernacular mnemonic practices online and offline. Even though the dialogic nature of data and knowledge production has been emphasized, analyzed, and celebrated, we still need to ask who holds the power to decide which pasts and perspectives are recognized, and whose voices – and what kind of voices – are listened to and analyzed, how and why? Moreover, we need to critically reflect on the structures of power and authority that practices and methods of oral history research foster. 

The seventh international symposium of the Finnish Oral History Network FOHN will focus on the notions of power, authority, and voice in the context of oral history from critical contemporary perspective. The keynote speakers are Urvashi Butalia (Delhi, India), Erin Jessee (University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK), Jonna Katto (Ghent University, Belgium), and Riikka Taavetti (University of Helsinki, Finland).

We wish to invite contributions focusing on methodological and ethical questions as well as on case studies. Proposals may be submitted for individual papers or panels and they can address but are not limited to the following themes and issues:

  • Critical reflections on voices and silences
  • Authorities of knowledge production in oral history
  • Culturally dependent aesthetics of oral history and life writing
  • Ideologies and politics of oral history and life writing
  • Issues related to the nature of oral history as a social movement, form of activism, and academic practice
  • Materiality and medium of the ‘voice’ (i.e. sound, writing, image)
  • Dominance of the ‘tragic’, ‘traumatic’, and ‘devastating’ experiences
  • Oral history and other disciplines
  • Critical reflections on the geographies of oral history

Submissions of individual papers require a title and a maximum of 250-word abstract. Panel proposals should include a maximum of 250-word description of the panel and max 250-word abstracts of each individual papers. The conference language will be English. 

Please e-mail your proposal to fohn-symposium@helsinki.fi. The deadline for the proposals has been extended to 1 August 2020. The acceptance or rejection of proposals will be announced by 15 August 2020 and the registration will be opened in September 2020. The conference fee will be 70 euros (standard) / 35 euros (concession: students, unwaged).

The Finnish Oral History Network FOHN is still very much hoping that the symposium will be organised as originally planned, but participants will be kept posted on any possible changes.

Enquiries: fohn-symposium@helsinki.fi

Ulla Savolainen

Chair, FOHN

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI                                           

Further information on the symposium:https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/7th-international-symposium-of-the-finnish-oral-history-network-fohn

FOHN’s webpage: http://www.finlit.fi/fi/fohn-en

Facebook: Finnish Oral History Network

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Ulla Savolainen, PhD, title of docent

Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher

Department of Cultures

Topelia, Room C214, P.O. Box 59,

00014 University of Helsinki, Finland

The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are delighted to announce that Margaretta Jolly is the recipient of The 2019 Hogan Prize for her essay “Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly,” which was published in the special issue, “Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Nature-Culture Web” (34.3, Autumn 2019). Congratulations to Margaretta, and thank you to our guest judge, Gillian Whitlock! Please find the full judge’s statement below.

The 2019 Hogan Prize Announcement

The editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies are very pleased to award the fifth annual Hogan Prize. This award is presented annually to a scholar in recognition of an outstanding essay published in the journal. Essays selected for this prize are carefully chosen by an independent judge. The 2019 judge is Gillian Whitlock, Emeritus Professor in the School of Communication and Arts at The University of Queensland. The prize includes publication in the journal and an award of $750. This award is generously supported by Routledge Journals.

The prize was named in honor of two of the journal’s founding editors, Rebecca and Joseph Hogan, who worked tirelessly and creatively to expand the field of auto/biography studies. This award, therefore, recognizes ingenuity in scholarly research and supports critical work that advances the field.

2019 Judge’s Statement
by Gillian Whitlock

This year contenders for the Hogan Prize share a common theme: Donna Haraway’s scholarship. To read them as a collection is to be reminded again of the extraordinary impact of Haraway’s writing on life narrative. The essays draw on diverse locations, conversations and concepts to capture Haraway’s constant return to relationality, to sympoetic action and thinking. These essays are to be read together, for they nurture each other, collectively, including Margaretta Jolly’s ‘Survival Writing: Autobiography versus Primatology in the Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly’.
This is an arresting essay right from the start, as we move from ‘Haraway’ and ‘Jolly’ to the intimacy of ‘Donna previously wrote about Mum…..’.  Alison Jolly, who features in Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science, was one of a generation of female primatologists that transformed this science, and the pre-eminent researcher of the lemurs of Madagascar. This essay is matriography: a tribute to Alison Jolly as a scientist and mother by the daughter who inherited her diaries following her death in 2014, later published as Thank You, Madagascar: The Conservation Diaries of Alison Jolly.  Grief and loss remain palpable on the page as Jolly ‘tangles’ with her mother’s legacy, as her daughter and literary executor, and her academic successor. Here, matriography enables private mourning to engage with issues which are now more than ever of critical importance: species survival, environmental politics, and what life narrative can bring to our thinking on these issues. It also enables Margaretta Jolly, as literary executor and literary critic, to engage with the ethics and cultural politics of publishing diaries now, in a life-narrative market where the preference for ‘first contact’ story endures.
By returning to topics and texts that inspired thinking on posthuman lives a decade ago ‘Survival Writing’ suggests how far this project has travelled now, in the ‘late writing’ of both Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble  and Alison Jolly’s Thank You, Madagascar.  Anthropomorphism, for example the ‘first contact’ of primatologist to primate trope, is displaced ‘by relishing many contacts, hands and gazes’ in the diaries (478).  Here, Margaretta Jolly argues, her mother becomes part of a movement of life narrators who respond to environmental crisis by recognising the worlds of other species, without simply extending human modes of personhood. In this ‘late writing’ Jolly finds consolation, a possibility of ‘more respons-able living and dying …in times yet to come (482).  As with other memorable essays in life narrative scholarship, we pause to admire the craft of both critical and creative writing here: layers of historical, cultural and intellectual interpretation, the memory and emotion that animates it, and its final powerful turn to the solace of Haraway’s vision of multispecies survival in the Chthulucene.

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Deadline for Submissions July 31, 2020

Call for Participation – Fourth version of “YoVeo” (“I see”), The Festival Of Word And Image In First Person (7/31/2020; 8/28/2020) Colombia

Dear colleagues,

I hope this message finds both you and your loved ones in good health.

I bring good news to you: this year, with the support of the Edumedia-3 Research Group and Seedbed, we will celebrate the fourth version of  “YoVeo (“I see”), The Festival Of Word And Image In First Person.”

This is an event in which we pay tribute to the different ways of representing and relating the Self, as an exercise and practice of freedom of expression with the purpose of generating a space for reflective exchange in relation to subjectivity, singularity and individualism.

The festival began in 2010 in Pereira (Colombia), a city in which we have gotten to fill four exhibition rooms of the Colombian-American Center, the Colombian-French Alliance, the University Foundation of the Andean Area and Comfamiliar Risaralda (the local family compensation office) with the support of Pereira’s Institute of Culture and Promotion of Tourism (today Secretary-of-Culture’s Office).

In this ten-year-long trajectory and in the three previous versions, artists, cartoonists, videographers, journalists, researchers, students, teachers and citizens in general from El Salvador, Guatemala City, Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro have taken part.

This year we have already opened the reception of works and with them we will make the exhibition, online this time, from August 28. We would like to have your participation in one or several activities that we describe below.

The way to do this may be either one of the ones listed below or in anuy other way that you consider pertinent. So, if you feel encouraged to join us, do let us know about your intention by responding to this email.

Participation:

– In a virtual chat on Facebook Live before August 28 on our page @LaFiestaYoVeo with a duration of between 30 and 60 minutes.
– With a video of a conference that you have already produced or that you would like to produce related to the ways of representing and relating the Self, to be published before August 28.

– With a short article (500 words approx.) about the Self to be published on the website www.edumedia3.co

– As a jury in charge of selecting among the preselected works the three best by category: Images of the Self, Words of the Self, Scenes of the Self, Objects of the Self and Other forms of the Self.

– With a work or paper on the Self: portrait, self-portrait, biography, autobiography, personal memory or life story in one of the four categories whose examples are given below.

– With the promotion of this call among your contacts from your personal, work and research networks of, as one of the peers joining us or through the organization or institution that you represent and that we will be involving through the logo and the media we have access to.

“Images Of the Self” Category: it can be any of these: selfie, photography, painting, drawing, caricature, plasticine, video, cinema. “Words of the Self” Category: poetry, chronicle, newspaper, memory, song, testimony, interview. “Scenes of the Self” Category: monologue, performance, choreography. “Objects Of the Self” Category: photo album, exlibris, t-shirt. “Other forms of the Self” Category: blog, body map, tattoo …

The organization will certify your participation, publish the preselected works digitally and on our media: website, YouTube channel and other social networks giving participants the due credits, as well as in media at the local, national and international levels.

We hope to be able to count on your valuable contribution and are already looking forward to your kind response.

If you decide to help us forward this call, please attach this information for those who wish to participate:

Prior to registration we must know something about the work or paper that will be evaluated by the selection committee and then by the jury of the event, for which we request the sending of a photograph or video (1 minute is enough) if you will participate in Images Of The Self, Scenes of the Self, Objects of the Self or Other Forms of the Self, or an audio (1 minute is enough), if you will participate in Words of the Self.

You must send the image, video or audio to fiestayoveo@gmail.com before July 31, 2020. We will reply as soon as possible with the instructions and conditions for participation in case you are pre-selected.

Thank you very much for your help and have a good day,

Best regards,

—

Diego Leandro Marín Ossa
Docente Titular e Investigador Asociado

Área de medios y educación

Escuela de español y comunicación audiovisual
Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación
Director del grupo y semillero de investigación
Ext: 7234 / Edificio Nº 7A (primer piso)

El contenido de este mensaje y sus anexos son únicamente para el uso del destinatario y pueden contener información  clasificada o reservada. Si usted no es el destinatario intencional, absténgase de cualquier uso, difusión, distribución o copia de esta comunicación.

Deadline for Submissions, July 15, 2020

118th Annual Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association Conference, Las Vegas, NV

Thursday, November 12, 2020 to Sunday, November 15, 2020
Sahara Las Vegas Hotel
Hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas

*** Given concerns about the COVID-19 virus, organizers will be monitoring the situation as we continue planning for our conference in November.

Deadline for Submissions, July 15, 2020

PAMLA’s Autobiography panel is currently accepting submissions!

We are open to a wide range of paper topics dealing with subjectivity, authorship, auto-fiction, and identity, but are particularly interested in papers that take new interdisciplinary approaches to Autobiography. As such, papers that draw on cognitive science, psychology, phenomenology, critical race theory, gender theory, or intersectionality in their analyses of Autobiography are particularly welcome. Possible topics could include, but are not limited to: collective autobiography; techniques of self-narration; self-fashioning; neuroaesthetics; intersectional subjectivity; philosophy of race. We are also interested in papers attuned to some facet of the conference theme, “City of God, City of Destruction.”

Submit an abstract directly through the Autobiography panel submission page, or search the PAMLA comprehensive Call for Papers. Contact Emily Travis (etravis@ucsc.edu) with any questions.

About PAMLA and this year’s theme:

The Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association is a scholarly association designed for those teaching or conducting research in a diverse range of literary, linguistic, and cultural interests, both ancient and modern, in the United States and abroad. PAMLA members include faculty and students in language and literature departments in colleges and universities, as well as interdisciplinary scholars from other disciplines and independent scholars.

This year’s theme, “City of God, City of Destruction,” seeks to take the “form analysis” of Las Vegas in a religious direction, considering this shimmering city in the desert as both celestial emblem and den of sin. More broadly, the 2020 PAMLA conference, while welcoming paper proposals on a wide variety of topics, invites meditation on the connections between ideas of the city and the forms of fiction, and the way both may be informed by a religious poetics.

Contact Info:

Emily Travis

Contact Email:
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Deadline for Submissions, July 15, 2020

Women, Life Writing, and Scandals of Self-Revelation

Women in French Panel at SAMLA Conference (7/15/2020; 11/13-15/2020) Jacksonville, Florida, USA

This panel is one of five Women in French sessions at the 2020 South Atlantic Modern Language Association annual conference, taking place this year in Jacksonville, Florida from November 13-15.

Presenters must be current members of Women in French and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

As life writing exposes purported truths about personal experience and identity, self-revelations in these accounts position these texts as potential objects of controversy as authors test the limits of telling all. Many authors have turned to life-writing practices to speak about intimate loss, family secrets, stolen childhoods, and physical, psychological, or historical trauma. In this way, autobiography, autofiction, and memoir, remain potentially perilous terrains especially regarding the implications of others on which such self-accounts unavoidably depend. This panel seeks to explore the scandals behind or beyond such self-revelation. How has scandal served as impetus for textual creation? In what ways has the publication of “scandalous” texts implicated others whether in accusation, in solidarity, or by engaging in broader controversies or social discontent? How have such texts responded to scandal? What role do legal proceedings play in (self)censoring self-accounts? Proposals on examples of women engaged with or implicated in scandalous self-revelations in literature, film, theatre, and other modes of representation from all time periods and all areas of Francophone literature are welcome. Please send 250-word proposals in English or French along with presenter’s name, academic affiliation, and email to Adrienne Angelo (ama0002@auburn.edu) by July 15, 2020.

Chair: Adrienne Angelo, Auburn University, <ama0002@auburn.edu>

Deadline for Submissions July 1, 2020

Self/Culture/Writing: Autoethnography in the 21st Century –
Special Issue of Life Writing

Deadline: July 1st, 2020
contact: Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle, The College of New Jersey – ortiz@tcnj.edu

This special edition seeks to offer 21st century perspectives on the intersections of autobiographical and anthropological writing around the globe at this historical moment. It aims to examine autoethnography as both process and product of evocative, interpretive, analytic, interactive, performative, experiential, and embodied forms of writing self/culture.
Proposals are invited for critical essays and autoethnographic prose of between 7-8,000 words of original, previously unpublished work related (but not limited) to the following topics:

·       Creative nonfiction and fictionalized insider ethnography
·       Poetics of Autoethnography
·       Autoethnographic memoir
·       Connections between travel literature and autoethnography
.       Writing immigrant transnational, and diasporic lives
·       Embodied autoethnography
·       Duo-ethnographic and collaborative ethnographies of self
·       Indigenous representations of self/other and self as other
·       Digital humanities and autoethnographic modalities
·       Visual media and autoethnography
·       Autoethnography of queer and trans cultures
·       Oral storytelling traditions
·       Intersections of autobiographical and ethnographic memory
·       Ethics and Politics of autoethnographic method
·       Literary, performance, and journalistic ethnographies of self
·       Autoethnographic narrative in historical perspective
·       Autoethnographies of academia
·       Autoethnography as social-justice genre for vulnerable lives
·       Writing gendered self/culture
·       Racial identity and autoethnography
·       Autoethnography as a de/colonizing method

Special interest in meta-narrative approaches that push boundaries and rethink paradigms.

Procedure for Submission – Proposals of up to 500 words should be sent to ortiz@tcnj.edu by 1 July, 2020. Please include a brief biographical note of 50 words or less, institutional affiliation and 4-5 keywords. Full-length papers will be solicited from these proposals by 15 July, 2020 with final essays due 1 November, 2020. Final revisions due, 1 March, 2021.

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Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

Professor

Department of English

The College of New Jersey
(609) 771-3231

Fax (609) 637-5112

PO Box 7718

Ewing, NJ 08628-0718

Deadline for Submissions, June 30, 2020

Scandal in Autobiography (6/30/2020; 11/13-15/2020) SAMLA Virtual Conference

Autobiographies establish the author’s own individual voice and the ability of that voice to display a social scandal or provoke a scandal. In so doing, authors aim to understand the social space around them, and in particular, their personal experience to provoke others within their narrative from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

How do we use autobiographical texts to examine the crossroads of public and private spaces? Phillippe Lejeune outlines a pact between writers and their readers, testified by the use of the author’s name as both protagonist and narrator. Autobiography has in this way been for centuries one of the most widespread prolific expressions and can be related to the larger tradition of the genre in terms of self-depiction in literary history. This panel therefore explores the impact of scandal in autobiographies of the nineteenth-twenty-first centuries.  Scandal as a social phenomenon examines speech acts. At times, scandal comes from the outside, in which a writer reflects upon an experience; scandal can also take the form of provocation. We encourage papers from a broad range of disciplines, and possible topics might include:

  • Scandal in Popular Culture
  • Autobiography in the Romantic Era
  • Politics and Scandal
  • Love, Heartbreak, and Sensual Writing
  • Scandal and Communication Studies
  • Global Female Testimonies

Please send abstracts of 250 words to Dr. Petra M. Schweitzer (pschweit@su.edu) and to Dr. Casey Eriksen (ceriksen@su.edu) by June 30, 2020.

Contact Info:

Dr. Petra M. Schweitzer, pschweit@su.edu

Dr. Casey R. Eriksen, ceriksen@su.edu

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Deadline for Submissions, June 30, 2020

Comparative American Studies: An International Journal Special Issue: Elizabeth Wurtzel (6/30/2020)

contact email:

Elizabeth Wurtzel (1967-2020) is most famous for her controversial bestselling autobiographies, Prozac Nation (1994) and More, Now, Again (2001). These works are often cited as seminal in the ‘memoir boom’ of the late 1990s and early 2000s and established Wurtzel as a cult classic and an icon of her generation. Her writing spans across almost 40 years and includes journalism, personal essays (most notably Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women (1998)), and other non-fiction. In the aftermath of Wurtzel’s passing in January 2020, a reappraisal of her literary career seems both timely and a mark of tribute. We welcome articles exploring the following aspects:

– Reassessments of the impact of Wurtzel’s writing in the context of American literature and culture in the late 1990s-early 2000s

– Analyses of Wurtzel’s influence on contemporary confessional/autobiographical writing, especially by women

– Analyses of gender, sexuality, mental health and illness in Wurtzel’s work

– Situating Wurtzel as a Jewish woman writer, or a Generation X writer

– Wurtzel’s non-fiction, such as her music and online journalism

– Wurtzel’s literary influences

– Analyses of the systemic critiques of late 20th/ early 21st century America in Wurtzel’s writing

– Wurtzel and the cult of the individual

Articles which take a comparative focus (comparing Wurtzel to other writers and cultures, for example) are especially encouraged.

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Deadline for proposals 20 June 2020

AUTOFICTION AND HUMOUR

Special Issue of Life Writing (Autumn 2021)
Deadline for proposals 20 June 2020

One of the main features of autofictional literature is its so-called ability to “sit on the fence” (Lejeune) and be simultaneously fictional and referential. Throughout the theoretical discussions on autofiction this has overshadowed some of its other features. This special issue explores one of them, namely the as-of-yet rarely addressed humorous dimension of autofictional writing, including the aesthetic, narrative and social function(s) of humour in autofictional literature. In 1996, Marie Darrieussecq, a French scholar who almost overnight became a literary celebrity with the publication of Pig Tales (Truismes), published an article entitled “Autofiction, a non-serious Genre” (“L’Autofiction, un genre pas sérieux”) in which she ironically lauded autobiography only to better support autofiction’s creativity and its noncommittal attitude toward reality. Even if Darrieussecq meant “non-serious” to denote a less respected, frowned-upon subcategory of autobiographical discourse, now almost 50 years after Doubrovsky first coined the term, it’s worth considering if indeed autofiction is a non-serious mode of writing, although along a different understanding of the non-serious than Darrieusecq’s.

Freud defined humour as a defence mechanism, a way of keeping reality at bay while still focusing on it. This could also describe the way autofiction relates to autobiographical practices and their attempt to describe somebody’s reality. Judging for example by the grandiloquent buffoonery of Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park, the wry self-deprecating tone of Ben Lerner’s 10:04, and by how J.M. Coetzee pokes fun at his alter-ego in Scenes from Provincial Life, at times verging on self-parody, it seems high time to consider autofiction’s humorous dimension.

One of the comic features of autofiction lies in its capacity to mock the seriousness of the genre it seemingly belongs to and, taking Darrieussecq’s rhetorical twist as a perfect example, seems to sneer at autobiography’s desperate dependence on facts and memory knowing that both have been shown to be fluctuating and labile (see for instance Mark Rowlands’s Memory and the Self: Phenomenology, Science and Autobiography, 2017). Even if a writer such as Mary Karr scathingly pointed out in The Art of Memoir (2015) that this aspect has often been regarded as carte blanche by some memoirists to publish blatant lies, she also rightfully reminded us that this inherent fallibility of our memory doesn’t call into question the validity of autobiography as long as it’s aware of this flaw. Another comic feature stems from an amused, sometimes ironic outlook on life and on those who try to put it on paper. In other words, autofiction often generates “ironic signals with regard to the reality of reported facts” (“signaux ironiques quant à la réalité des faits rapportés,” Colonna). Of course, this doesn’t imply that autofictional literature foregoes all claims to narrate any form of reality, but it frequently does so through tongue-in-cheek humour. As noted by Yves Baudelle, even in more serious autofictions such as Chloé Delaume’s or Camille Laurens’s, often conjuring up ghosts and the general theme of Thanatos, this “phantasmagoria is only tolerated in a humorous mode, which bestows upon it both its specificity and its function” (“cette fantasmagorie n’est tolérée que sur le mode humoristique, ce qui lui confère à la fois sa spécificité et sa fonction”). Thus, autofiction’s very referential logic could be described as “apotropaic.” In Ariadne’s Thread, J. Hillis Miller, focusing on realistic fiction’s essential flaw, wonders why “this dissolution of its own fundamental fiction [is] as constant a feature of realistic fiction as the creation of the fiction of character in the first place,” suggesting that “the function is apotropaic. It is a throwing away of what is already thrown away in order to save it.” Is autofiction trying to save autobiography and simultaneously make a joke out of it? This might be the very core of its ironical nature.

We encourage cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches and papers discussing primary texts in any language. Proposed articles may consider the humorous dimension(s) of autofictional literature through themes like, but not limited to, those listed above.

Practicalities and schedule:

Deadline for proposals (300 words): 20 June 2020

Authors will be notified if their proposal can be accepted for peer review by the end of July.

Deadline for sending in first drafts of papers: 1 November 2020

Peer-review process and corrections: January-March 2021

Final publication: Autumn 2021

All submissions need to be sent with a brief bio, which includes title, institutional affiliation and e-mail address.
Below is the link to the journal’s instructions for authors:
https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?show=instructions&journalCode=rlwr20

Please submit to: Alexandra Effe (alexandra.effe@wolfson.ox.ac.uk), Marie Lindskov Hansen (marie.lindskov.hansen@fu-berlin.de), Arnaud Schmitt (arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr)

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Deadline for Submissions June 15, 2020

Call for Articles: Travel Narratives and Real-Life Fiction, The Lincoln Humanities Journal (6/15/2020)

The Lincoln Humanities Journal (ISSN 2474-7726) is requesting article submissions for its 8th special issue, to be published in December 2020, on the topic of Travel Narratives and Real-Life Fiction. Contributors are invited to examine specifically (a) the evolving forms of life-writings (biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, blogs, etc.) as they pertain to travel; (b) the intersection of fictional and factual travel narratives, and (c) the emotional, economic, socio-political, environmental, physiological, and literary aspects of travel (in reality and in fiction; by land, sea and air; on earth and in outer space). We welcome approaches across a broad range of disciplines such as literature, history, political science, anthropology, religion, popular culture, philosophy, visual arts, and social media. Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • The concept of travel: historical and philosophical perspectives
  • Travel writing, Life-writing as genre
  • Biofiction, biography, autobiography
  • Travel journalism
  • Travel in film, theater, literature, and television
  • The Internet of places: Pictures and videos of other places, cultures, etc.
  • Modern tourism
  • Adventure  and exploration
  • Travel for business, pleasure, family reunion, aid work
  • Travel for education (study abroad, etc.)
  • Pilgrimage & religious travel
  • Modes of transportation
  • Environmental  impact of travel
  • Travel to the moon and beyond; The sci-fi connection and influence
  • Tourism in international relations (migration, spying, etc.)
  • Temporary living and/or working abroad (mission, etc.)

Important Dates & Deadlines

  • Deadline for Full Article Submissions:    June 15, 2020
  • Acceptance Notification:                       60 days after submission
  • Projected Date of Publication:               December 2020

Submission Guidelines

  1. Include an abstract of 200-400 words (in MS Word)
  2. Include a biographical note of 50-250 words (in MS Word)
  3. The article should be 4000-6000 words, including the abstract, the footnotes and the works cited
  4. Include the following statement in the cover e-mail: “I solemnly confirm that the attached manuscript has never been published elsewhere, under this, or another title.”
  5. Include name, professional affiliation, phone number, and email address in the cover e-mail.

Formatting Guidelines

  1. Manuscripts should conform to MLA-style guidelines as detailed in recent editions of MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing. For an MLA Style Works Cited format overview, please check the following web resource: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formattin…
  2. Use font Georgia # 12. The entire article, including the abstract and the indented quotations, should be double-spaced, and in MS Word.
  3. The final submission must comply with other formatting guidelines, to be communicated upon notification of acceptance.

Submission & Review Process

  1. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor, Abbes Maazaoui (maazaoui@lincoln.edu)
  2. Articles undergo a double blind review and their publication depends on the peer-review process.

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Deadline for Submissions June 20, 2020

Representations of Refugee, Migrant, and Displaced Motherhood in a Global Context (6/20/2020)

Seeking abstracts or unpublished chapters looking at literary accounts of Latina and/or Indigenous motherhood experiences in the context of migration and displacement to fill a gap in scholarly edited collection. 

Please submit a 250-400 word abstract of your chapter and a 50-word bio by June 20, 2020.

Accepted and complete chapters due 15 August 2020 (6,000 words maximum with MLA format and references)

Contributions are invited for a scholarly edited collection that aims to explore literary accounts of migrant, refugee, and displaced motherhood in a global context. The collection will look primarily at contemporary writings about migrant motherhood. In a world marked by forced migrations, climate change, and wars, the collection aims to examine writings about the displacement of mothers at the American borders, in the Syrian conflict, and beyond.

This book seeks to examine writings by and about the displaced mother in both fiction and non-fiction.  Refugees and migrants are often unseen, or worse seen as an inconvenience or imposition.  Migrant mothers in particular are often overlooked, with their experiences, their needs, and their lives nearly erased. Vu Tran says that “for those who can never quite accept her, a refugee is like a ghost” (p. 154).  This collection is particularly interested in analysis of first-hand accounts of migrant motherhood, while also recognizing that the migrant mother is often silent. Therefore, analysis of both fictional and non-fiction accounts may be of importance as the collection pieces together the fragmented lives of migrant mothers.

Dina Nayeri has examined the refugee experience in both her fictional and non-fiction works, Refuge and The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. In the latter, her non-fiction account, Nayeri talks about how her own mother made the brave decision to take her small children and leave home to ultimately settle in America.  Nayeri says of the refugee, “A tortured mind, terror of a wasted future, is what enables you to abandon home; it’s a prerequisite for stepping into a dingy, for braving militarized mountains” (p. 8).

The journey of the migrant woman is made evermore complex by her status as a mother, a child-bearer, and a woman at-risk. The borders of motherhood to be examined in this collection can be linguistic, political, and geographical, along with the complex physicality of moving through liminal and transitory spaces. Chapters may explore a range of topics from the mother figure in refugee children’s literature to ethnographic studies of migrant mothers in detention facilities.

I am in talks with several highly reputable academic publishers that are interested in the collection.

Possible topics might look critically at (but not limited to):

  • Narratives about or by migrant or refugee mothers
  • Fictionalized accounts of migrant motherhood
  • Reproduction and migration
  • Rhetoric of migrant motherhood
  • Family separation
  • Family resettlement
  • Research and qualitative studies on women’s experiences as migrant or refugee mothers
  • Refugee children’s literature and the mother figure

References

Tran, Vu. “A Refugee Again” In The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Edited by

Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abrams, NY, NY, 2018

Nayeri, Dina. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. Catapult, NY, 2019.

Refuge, Riverhead, NY, 2017.

Timeline

1 December 2020: Deadline for submitting 250-400 word abstract of your chapter and a 50-word bio.

1 April 2020: Accepted and complete chapters due (6,000 words maximum with MLA format and references)

Submissions and questions should be sent

to maria.lombard@northwestern.edu

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Deadline for Submissions June 5, 2020

Speculating Identities and Defying Stereotypes: South Asian Women Writers and Idealistic Mobilities (6/5/2020) Special Issue, Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

deadline for submissions:
June 5, 2020
full name / name of organization:
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (JCLA)
contact email:

The issue intends to bring to the fore the writings of women from colonial and postcolonial era of South Asia, particularly exploring how these women writers addresses the issues of violence, speculating identity and belongingness while defying stereotypes in primarily male literary traditions as a focal point. Moreover, the proposed issue considers how different literary genres ranging from novels, poetry, novellas, short stories, memoirs to autobiographies by South Asian women writers present an exclusive and inimitable insight into varied understandings of pre-constructed gender roles and relations in the context of south Asian society and culture. Their works bear testimony to their personal as well as socio-political experiences struggling with the boundaries of centre and periphery, negotiating their identities and ideologies across different spatial and temporal domains.
This special issue, therefore, attempts to look into the literary tradition of South Asian Women writers and how it has developed into an alternative literary canon significantly upholding the (Her)stories, previously unacknowledged by the male writers. The issue is focused on identifying the narrative politics of the literary texts composed by the South Asian women writers, and how over the years their works have collectively shown a steady development of an emerging category of female writers struggling with the issues of identity, class, caste, gender, economic disparity and so on within an oppressive heteronormative social frame.
The issue intends to focus on the following sub-themes, but authors are also encouraged to explore other wide-ranging relevant and related critical writings.

The sub themes are:
1. Constructing nation through gender
2. South Asian Women’s narratives across continents
3. Interplay of tradition and modernity in South Asian Women’s narratives
4. Understanding class and caste in South Asian Women’s writing
5. Gender plurality in South Asian Women’s texts

Guest Editors: Raeesa Usmani and Ritushree Sengupta

Submission Guidelines:
1. Original scholarly and unpublished research papers of 5000-6000 words are invited.
2. A short author(s) bio-note (100 words) mentioning address of institution, email id, phone number and email address must be submitted along.
3. An abstract of 250-300 words will have to be submitted on or before 5th June, 2020 to email id: papers.jcla@gmail.com.
4. Once the author is notified about the selection of the abstracts, the full paper must be submitted by 1st October, 2020 to papers.jcla@gmail.com. Authors are requested to strictly abide by the deadlines and submission guidelines.
5. Authors must follow referencing style MLA 8th edition. Font: Times New Roman, Font Size: 12, Line Spacing: 1.5, Margin: 1 inch all sides, Page: A4
6. All papers will go through rigorous editing process and plagiarism scanning through Turnitin. Only 10% similarity will be accepted.
7. Should you have any query or confusion, please feel free to reach out to us on papers.jcla@gmail.com

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics (ISSN: 0252-8169) is a half-yearly journal published by the Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, India since 1977. The Institute was founded on August 22, 1977 coinciding with the birth centenary of legendary philosopher, aesthetician, and historian of Indian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877-1947).

The Journal is committed to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural issues in literary understanding and interpretation, aesthetic theories, conceptual analysis of art, literature, philosophy, religion, mythology, history of ideas, literary theory, history, and criticism.

The Journal has already published legends like Rene 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, V.K. Chari, Charles Altieri, Martin Jay, Jonathan Culler, Richard Shusterman, Robert Kraut, T.J. Diffey, T.R. Quigley, R.B. Palmer, Keith Keating, and many renowned scholars.

JCLA is indexed and abstracted in the MLA International Bibliography, Master List of Periodicals (USA), Ulrich’s Directory of Periodicals, Philosopher’s Index, EBSCO, ProQuest, and Gale.

Celebrated scholars of the time like Rene 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.

Deadline for Submissions June 1, 2020
Call for Book Chapters: The Other #MeToos

Chapter proposal submission deadline: 01 June 2020

Since the inception of #MeToo, conversations have largely centered on the movement’s development in the United States. This edited collection focuses on the reception, translation, and adaptation of #MeToo in non-Western, indigenous, and/or postcolonial contexts; it aims to explore how #MeToo, a popularly Western-centric feminist movement, translates to politically, culturally, religiously, geographically, and academically Othered places and Othered genders and sexes.

This edited collection aims to explore the following ideas: (i) #MeToo has become a transnational feminist movement (ii) #MeToo works effectively through revisions rather than replication (iii) #MeToo assumes a different face in non-Western, non-White, postcolonial, transnational, and indigenous feminisms (iv) These other #MeToos require different theoretical approaches that need to be closely connected with feminist praxis and (v) #MeToo works in alliance with local progressive political forces.

We look for chapter contributions that, via eclectic, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches, bring together personal and academic experiences of and responses to #MeToo in diverse sociopolitical cultures and academic locations. Please submit a 250 word chapter proposal, 50-150 word long bio, and a CV at TheOtherMeToos@gmail.com by 01 June 2020.

Editor: Iqra Shagufta Cheema | University of North Texas

Contact information: TheOtherMeToos@gmail.com

Submission: Chapter title + chapter abstract (250 words) + bio (100 words) + CV

Submission Deadline: 01 June 2020

Acceptance Notification: 10 June 2020

Complete Chapters Due: 01 October 2020

Should you have any questions, please feel free to email me at the address given above.

Deadline for Submissions June 1, 2020

SAMLA 92: THE GENRES OF CELEBRITY SCANDAL (6/1/2020; 11/13-15/2020) Florida, USA, SAMLA

Given the evident command of the celebrity in 20th- and 21st-century media cultures and following modern trends toward trans-medial and inter-generic production, this traditional session calls for papers that explore the relationships between celebrity and generic scandals. How have filmmakers, television writers, tabloid/entertainment journalists, novelists, essayists, biographers, memoirists, and other cultural creators depicted celebrity scandal while pushing the limits of their given genre or medium? While the 20th and 21st centuries are the focus of this call, media and literary scholars of all periods are welcomed to apply. History-bending is happily encouraged alongside genre-bending. Scandals could involve:

  • Addiction/alcoholism
  • Mental illness and “nervous breakdowns”
  • Sexual controversy: sex tapes, infidelity, coming out, consent, rape, assault, doxing, incest, public sex, etc.
  • Censorship and privacy
  • Body image (fatness, thinness)
  • Crime (shoplifting, violence, DUIs)
  • Health spectacles: disease, cancer, HIV/AIDS, etc.
  • Slander
  • Cults

Potential topics/methods could include:

  • Documentary films or TV series that record a star’s scandal, or fictions that recreate such scandals
  • The biography of celebrity scandals, or autobiographies or memoirs written by scandalous celebrities
  • The relationships between identity and celebrity and/or identity and genre: age, religion, class, language, ability, race, sex, gender, nationality, geography, and intersectional approaches
  • The influence of contemporary “factual entertainment” (e.g. reality TV, talk shows) on genres of celebrity (A-list, D-list, elitist, populist, etc.)
  • Paparazzi and tabloid cultures
  • Historical approaches to “celebrity genres”
  • Celebrity scandal explored through genres of confession, witness, testimony, evidence, etc.
  • Political celebrity and election media
  • Celebrity affects, generic affects

Please send a 300-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Blake Beaver at blake.beaver@duke.edu by June 1, 2020.

CFP Link: https://samla.memberclicks.net/calls-for-papers#filmstudies

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Deadline for Submissions June 1, 2020

The Transformative Experience of the Journey via Recollection and Reflection (6/1/2020; 11/12-15/2020) Las Vegas, USA–PAMLA

contact email:

The travel memoir offers an opportunity to examine a number of issues in terms of creative non-fiction. Travel stories focus on individuals who become strangers to themselves when they exile themselves from the environmental and cultural factors that have defined them thus far in service of self-discovery. They link up with the grand Odysseus-like impulse of traditional and modern literature that can profoundly alter identity when they travel and write about their experiences. Topics to consider would include a discussion of three particular aspects of this kind of storytelling. First, we must discuss the idea of fiction vs. fact and try to decide how much of each is essential in terms of crafting biographical material. Sometimes fiction can reveal truths more clearly than facts and so it could be said that truth lies in the interplay between these two critical aspects of storytelling. Further the idea of the diary as self-revealing and as an essential part of the transformative process journeying is meant to promote is a critical discussion as well. Experience is not fully integrated by writers and certainly not experienced by readers until it is written down and shared. This then leads to an analysis of the powerful draw travelogues’ mythological aspects have to audiences that, by in large, never travel but are rabidly addicted to this kind of story because these travel tales are vehicles for self-evaluation via contact with what we can call “others” (other cultures, other uncomfortable places, and travelers vs. nontravelers).

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Deadline for Submissions May 31, 2020

Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s) (5/31/2020; 7/26-8/2/2020–
UPDATED AND ADJUSTED FORMAT

Call for Traces

July 26–August 2, 2020

Location: World Wide Web/Local initiatives

The Nordic Summer University 2020 will take place in an adjusted format because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Invitation and Theme:
‘Written on the Body: Narrative (Re)constructions of Violence(s)’ was meant to be a week-long symposium organised by the study circle ‘Narrative and Violence’. Following the discussions on how to make sense of violence in the digital age, which took place last February at the University of Gdańsk, this was to be the second symposium of our Study Circle’s. However, due to the pandemic of Covid-19, the Nordic Summer University Summer Session 2020 will not be able to take place as a physical gathering, but will instead take place in distant and dispersed formats of encounter, sharing and connection. The participants are invited to create a trace (please see below for a more detailed description). Taking the advantage of the current environment, rather than collapsing under its restrictions, NSU is thus opening a space for traditional and unconventional collaborations, experiments, unusual meet-ups, creative interventions and other innovative approaches. In all this, documentation, accessibility and shareability aspects are crucial.

We therefore invite scholars, students, practitioners and activists from all disciplines to submit proposals for traces that will address how bodies becomes subjects and objects of violence and how, by simply ‘being’, they narrate their traumatic experience. But how do bodies narrate violence(s)? Our understanding of a body is purposefully broad and includes the human and nonhuman, the organic and inorganic, and their diverse material or corporeal forms. We are therefore engaging with bodies that are human, animal, vegetal, natural and technological; that are both singular and collective (i.e. the social body); that are situated in both the physical and virtual space; and that express naturecultural entanglements (Haraway 2003). To consider the materiality of violence implies attending to its trans-corporeal intersections and therefore addressing its inseparability from the ‘environment’—a network of relations (human and nonhuman), phenomena and space (e.g. the home, the neighbourhood, the city) that foster, produce, perform, and ultimately bear witness to violence. Hence, inspired by Catriona Sandilands (2019), we envisage the entangled forms of violence done to human and nonhuman bodies as metonymic and intersectional. Our ambition is to engage with the imaginative (re)constructions of (human/nonhuman/social/natural/technological) bodies that perform or experience violence; with how they reproduce the intertwining of gender, power, agency and heteropatriarchal capitalism; and with their contribution to ethics, aesthetics, and politics. Finally, in addressing how bodies narrate violence we wish to reflect on the implications and effects of such (embodied) practices—whether positive or negative—and on the possible strategies to counter-act or counter-story them.

We invite contributions exploring various practices of storying violence on bodies, and attending to ‘the wounds of the world’. Suggested themes relate to narratives addressing human and nonhuman bodies, within non-digital and digital realities, fictional or factual, and their multiple intersections. They include but are not limited to:

  • Self-inflicted violence (e.g. self-harm, eating disorders, suicide, etc.)
  • Other-directed violence (abuse, harassment, murder, genocide, etc.)
  • Technological representations/forms of bodily violence (e.g. social media, videogames, drones, etc.)
  • Aesthetic representations of bodily violence (e.g. art, literature, film, etc.)
  • (Neo)colonial labour and slavery
  • Appropriation of indigenous knowledge
  • Environmental violence and its effects on communities (e.g. natural catastrophes and their aftermaths, exploitation of indigenous/ancestral lands, etc.)
  • Entanglements of misogynist and anti-ecological violence
  • Micro- and macro-political violences
  • Governmental policing and rationalization of (public) spaces
  • Reconstructions of war-crimes (e.g. forensic architecture)
  • The effects of field-work violence: researchers, practitioners, activists, NGOs workers

The framework of the Study Circle is intersectional and open to multiple approaches and methodologies in humanities, social sciences and from the practicing field. The overarching intention of our three-year Study Circle is to contribute in particular to the fields of digital and environmental violence.

What is a trace?

A trace is defined as the outcome of our Study Circle’s activities in the Summer Session 2020. A trace is documented and can be archived or presented as a form of evidence. A trace can have a variety of formats: it can be an article written or co-written by you or a discussion held among our Circle’s members; it can be a virtual meet-up or a localised interdisciplinary micro meet-up between members of different circles in a form that is permitted; an online podcast or interviews. The format is not restricted in any way. As the Cricle’s coordinators we will evaluate the potential outcome, creative and academic contribution, quality and shareability of the proposed traces.

The Board of NSU has defined the following guidelines for the shortlisting of the proposed Traces:

  • produced by a single individual or group of participants;
  • sharable and open to all during the Summer Session time frame;
  • fitting to NSU’s overall goals, aims and vision;
  • related to the Circle’s theme;
  • created in its main language English or a Scandinavian or Baltic language;
  • those who make a trace must be members of NSU (pay membership fee) & participate in the democratic forum of NSU (may become a delegate for the General Assembly meeting);
  • the team or the individual creating a trace needs to provide some promotion material considered as an INVITATION to the trace, before the Summer Session with an image & description of 200-500 words;
  • those who make a trace need to provide a brief report of the trace to their coordinator (form to be provided by NSU, including number of participants, goals, etc.) after the trace has been produced.

As always, NSU is particularly interested in supporting people who are at the outskirts of the Nordic region – the Baltic and West-Nordic communities as well as those with special needs. So please inform us if your application for a Trace grant falls under the regional support or if the pandemic has had particular financial consequences to you.

Please send proposals for traces (200-500 words and an image, if appropriate) with a title and a short biographical statement (100 words) to narrativeandviolence@gmail.com by 31st May 2020. This is also the deadline for the application for grants of up to 7000.00 DKK per trace. Authors of accepted traces will be contacted after 15th June 2020.

More information about NSU can be found by following this link: http://nordic.university.

Contact Info:

Marta-Laura Cenedese

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions May 31, 2020

Travel Writing/Writing Travel Session  (5/31/2020; 11/3-5/2020) Midwest Modern Language Association Convention, Milwaukee USA

Travel is a vehicle for which to explore the condition of living, how our relationships to place shape us and our experiences, how our identities and political histories inform place, how power structures inform how we migrate (or don’t) and how that affects the places we pass through. –Bani Amor, “Getting Real About Decolonizing Travel Culture” (2017)

In this spirit of this year’s theme, “Cultures of Collectivity,” the Travel Writing/Writing Travel permanent session invites essays that interrogate the relationship between culture, community, and narratives of travel. This session seeks to explore the multiple ways in which travel, broadly conceived, has a profound impact on place, society, and the formation of global networks of exchange and communication. Critical and creative submissions will be considered. Papers that explore a broad spectrum of genres, disciplines, time periods, and geographic regions in relation to the conference theme are welcome.

Potential topics and themes may include (but are not limited to):

  • Travel and travel writing as a collaborative act
  • The politics of travel and travel writing
  • Travel and literary genre
  • The impact of tourism on local communities
  • Travel and the promotion of solidarity between communities
  • Contact zones and the relationship between travelers and travelees
  • Histories of travel/Decolonizing travel
  • Transnational and global forms of cultural exchange
  • Travelling locally
  • Constitutions of “self” and “other” in travel writing
  • Travel and constructions of race, class, and/or gender

Please send abstracts of approximately 200-300 words and a brief bio to Shannon Derby at MMLATravelWriting@gmail.com by May 31st.

Deadline for Submissions May 30, 2020

Designing the Self

deadline for submissions: 
May 30, 2020
full name / name of organization: 
Humanities Graduate Student Association, York University
contact email:

Humans navigate personal and social relationships in the world through self-definition. Human nature is a capacious concept; one that has been challenged by diverse cultural revolutions in history. Today, as we stand at the crossroads of the human and the digital, technologies force us to reflect on how we view, create, and alter our selves through multiple media. As we enter the age of new media, and algorithms, the interpretations, perceptions, and representations of the self are continuously altered, while our identities become more fragile multiple and fluid.

Identities may be founded on varied cultural, biological, and physiological markers, but are also a source and product of social engagement, shared ideas, ideologies, and biases. Identities are both personal and social and are in the eternal process of construction. Our gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, disability, religion, nation, and age consistently intersect and interrupt our process of identity construction in media including print, broadcast, and social media.

How does the forging of multi-layered, complex identities materialize in traditional and new media? How does the cultural production of the self occur in literature, television, music, blogs, or digital technologies? How does the self break out of its essential boundaries through various practices of writing, and how does it come to be represented? How does it traverse the binaries of gender construction using technology? How does it penetrate barriers towards an intersectional identity building? How are bodies constructed differently in different media? How do masculinity and femininity as concepts of gender identity manifest on platforms? How does individual and collective identity building occur, and how does identity construction enable the use of various media for community development and social activism for communities?

Humanities as a discipline is always deeply reflective of the changing world order and is consistently tasked with redefining the notions of the self. We are keen to address this humanities framework in relation to identity politics, representation, and embodiment of the self on various media. To interrogate and investigate the complex relationships between narratives of self-production, and identity formation in media, The Department of Humanities invites abstract submissions for its annual conference on the theme Designing the Self. We invite proposals for papers from a variety of fields and perspectives that engage with issues including, but not limited to:

  • How does cultural production of the self occur in various forms of media?
  • How does (dis)embodiment occur on social media?
  • How do representations of gender, masculinity, or femininity occur in media?
  • How is intersectional identity constructed, and how does gender intersect with class, race, disability, religion, nation, and age as other factors if identity building?
  • How can we rethink diversity, intersectionality, and identity politics in the age of technology?
  • How does identity construction vary in different cultures and historical traditions?

Our two-day conference will address these and related topics. It will be held virtually due to the COVID-19 situation. We welcome proposals for 15-minute paper presentations. Those interested are invited to submit an abstract of 250 words to  hugsaconf2020@gmail.com by 30 May 2020. Submissions must include the title of the paper, the author’s name, affiliation, and contact information. Applications must be accompanied by a short biography of 150 words.

For questions and inquiries, contact Nanditha Narayanamoorthy at nanditha@yorku.ca.

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Deadline for Submissions May 30, 2020

CFP for Oct 2021 symposium on Constructing Presidential Legacies: Critical Perspectives on American Presidential Libraries and Museums (5/30/2020; 10/8-9/2020)

We invite a wide range of scholars interested in any aspects of US Presidential Libraries and Museum’s to submit ~500-word abstracts by May 30, 2020, for a symposium to be held October 8-9, 2021, followed by an edited publication in early 2022. Presidential Libraries and Museums’ function as “memorials to individuals” and “memorials of their times” and over time have given rise to many questions across a variety of fields. Beyond the buildings, the exhibitions and narratives also contribute to the shaping, presentation and reinterpretation of presidential legacies.  Any critique of the thirteen existing libraries from Hoover to George W. Bush and future libraries (Obama and Trump) are welcomed. We also encourage potential participants to contact us prior to submitting to discuss possible subjects in order to achieve a wide range of paper topics and approaches.

Marie-Alice L’Heureux, Professor, Arc/D, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS malheur@ku.edu

Kapila Silva, Associate Professor, Arc/D, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS kapilads@ku.edu

December 2019: Call for abstracts
May 30, 2020: Abstracts due
June 30, 2020: Notifications of acceptance
January 25, 2021: First drafts of papers due and revisions circulated
May 31, 2021: Presentation drafts due
October 8-9, 2021: Conference and discussion.
January 31, 2022: Final revised papers due for publication.

Contact Info:

Marie-Alice L’Heureux

Contact Email:
A question from a list member

Greetings

I would like know if IABA members are aware of memoirs/biographies written in more than one voice. Two examples are Doris Brett’s Eating the Underworld: A Memoir in Three Voices, and Brian Matthews Louisa, a biography of Louisa Lawson.
I would be extremely grateful for this; please send personal responses to r.luckie@bigpond.com
Kind regards

(Dr) Rae Luckie

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NEW SERIES TITLE: Palgrave Studies in Mediating Kinship, Representation, and Difference

SERIES EDITOR/S: May Friedman, Ryerson University (Canada); Silvia Schultermandl, University of Graz (Austria)

This book series brings together analyses of familial and kin relationships with emerging and new technologies which allow for the creation, maintenance and expansion of family. We use the term “family” as a working truth with a wide range of meanings in an attempt to address the feelings of family belonging across all aspects of social location: ability, age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, gender identity, body size, social class and beyond. This book series aims to explore phenomena located at the intersection of technologies including those which allow for family creation, migration, communication, reunion and the family as a site of difference. The individual volumes in this series will offer insightful analyses of the representations of these phenomena in media, social media, literature, popular culture and corporeal settings.

Possible book topics include:

• the use of technology and migration and family composition and disjunction; the ways that technologies may both push and pull kin together/apart

• the range of technology use across literal and figurative space including intersections of geography, age, poverty, gender and beyond

• the impact of technological absence: the ways that technologies may be taken for granted in particular environments (privileged nations; privileged subject positions) and may be denied or inaccessible in other spaces or places

• technologies of family creation and maintenance: the use of alternate reproductive technologies; the use of communication technologies to share information;

• queer family creation and representation through technology; making queer family visible through traditional, popular and social media; alternate family connections including nonnormative parenting arrangements (more than two parents, multiple different shades of parenting); “new” family through donor sibling relationships;

• technologies of class mobility, including the impact of smartphone technology on mediating/curtailing aspects of the digital divide; shifting family relationships through generational moves in class status;

• fat family: the ways that narratives of obesity have had impacts on the creation and representation of family (for example: obese women who are denied reproductive technologies or access to international adoption); the ways these rhetorics have shifted differently in different jurisdictions; representation of fat family; intersection of fat and working class identities in popular culture;

• trans families: both in terms of gender identity but also in terms of other families that “confound”—families that do not “match” one another, or that otherwise transgress normative models;

• technologies of disability: the use of technology to enhance or bolster independence, the ways that disabled people are seen as incapable of parenting; on the other hand, the technologies which come into play around parenting children with disability, both prenatally and once children are born; representation of disability and family (fetishization and the perceived martyrdom of parents)

Please send inquiries to may.friedman@ryerson.ca AND silvia.schultermandl@uni-graz.at

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Deadline for Submissions May 29. 2020

CFVP Virtual Video Symposium – Poetic Justice: Narrating Personhood, Solidarity, and Citizenship (5/29/2020) Utrecht, Netherlands

deadline for submissions:
May 29, 2020
full name / name of organization:
Anne Kustritz / Utrecht University
contact email:

Poetic Justice: Narrating Personhood, Solidarity, and Citizenship

This one-day digital symposium brings together international colleagues for an interdisciplinary conversation on the use of narratives to make claims about (or foreclose the possibility of) social justice in both formal and informal political situations, for example in art, memoir, social media, protest movements, and legal documents.  As such, the event unpacks the vital role of storytelling within contemporary political struggles, including, for example, in films about restorative justice, in newspaper representations of the Dutch farmers’ strike, and ethnography regarding labor organization in the digital media industry.  Only by better understanding how stories shape who is included and excluded from social institutions may we thoughtfully narrate a more open and inclusive society, since policy and politics begin with an act of imagination.  Please feel free to interpret the theme liberally.

Talks can be between 5 and 30 minutes and must be submitted in digital video form.  The format is flexible and may consist of a recorded live reading, slides with an audio track, audio only, or something more creative or conceptual like montage or remix.  The symposium takes place on the 19th, meaning participants are encouraged to comment on each other’s presentations that day, and the event will end with a closing zoom call.  In these complicated times, we hope to offer a sense of connection between colleagues and an opportunity to remotely support each other’s research.  To present RSVP with your intent to Anne Kustritz at a.m.kustritz@uu.nl by 29 May.  The deadline to submit a video is the 16th of June.  To participate as a viewer and commenter RSVP by 18 June (a.m.kustritz@uu.nl).

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Deadline for Submissions, May 22, 2020

International Symposium

on

Digital Expressions of the Self

Organized by the Department of Humanities & Social Sciences

National Institute of Technology Silchar

7-8 December 2020

Pre-Symposium Workshop: 5-6 December 2020

This symposium engages with the digital forms of expressions of the self. We invite papers that explore the ways in which, for instance, digital techniques now allow the construction of selves that often rely more on algorithms than any ‘original’ referent. Consider, for example, how algorithms simulate images, voices etc. and have become the basis for facial recognition, biometrics and similar datafication concerning the self. This shift is indicative of what we might term posthuman condition. Along these lines,  we are interested in papers that engage with how expressions enhanced by algorithms produce multiple, fractured selves. Following Deleuze, we invite papers that engage with how the  in-dividual has become ‘dividual’ in societies of post-control vis-a-vis the introduction of digital technologies. Finally we are interested in how people experiment with creative expressions of the self. Constructing the self in the digital sphere may involve processes of experimentation that in turn allow one to experience the self in multiple ways. This is mediated of course by the apparatus of the digital-codes and algorithms. Digital self-expression occurs both consciously and explicitly, and subconsciously and indirectly. Taking this as a point of departure, this symposium examines the broad range of digital expressions of the self. The symposium will pivot around, but not be limited to, these concerns:

  • What, in the digital context, defines the self and its boundaries? How is the self articulated in digital culture and cultures of everyday life especially in relation to Web 2.0? When articulated digitally, where do we locate its forms and ontology?
  • How is the digital expression of the self different from its analogue counterpart? What affordances of the digital, if at all, reconfigure the self? Consider, certain digital expressions can be evidential (eg: the selfie), viral, emotive or even tactile. How do the materialities of the specific platforms (eg: Instagram, MySpace.com, TikTok videos, Soundcloud, Tinder etc.) then impact the digital self or its expression?
  • These platforms have become not only media of self-expression but also experimentation. How do users, especially youngsters, leverage these platforms to experiment with their gender, bodies, sexualities and identities, creating self-representations that often challenge normativity?
  • How (im)proximate, in terms of referentiality, is the digital self to the so-called ‘real’ self? What does the digital expression entail epistemologically? How does it speak to the question of referentiality? In other words, to what extent, if at all, can these expressions be perceived as simulacrum? What is the nature of the human-algorithm interaction involved here?
  • How does the notion of the (in)dividual play out while articulating one’s self in the context of digitality, when the (post)human can be prosthetically ‘engineered’, Artificial Intelligence can govern societies, and robots can acquire personhood (or even citizenship)?

Abstract Submission

To apply to present at the symposium, please submit an abstract of about 400 words and a bio-note (150 words) using this link <https://forms.gle/UwQkdJdkxxuE4jFM7>. Abstracts will be considered on a rolling basis until May 22, 2020. For those accepted, unpublished draft papers (~4,000 words) have to be submitted by August 15, 2020. Final decisions on acceptance, based on the draft papers, will be communicated by August 28, 2020. Those who would require to travel from relatively far are requested to submit their abstracts earlier than the deadline for the organizers to be able to get back within a shorter turnaround time. This way, you will have a greater window to arrange your travel logistics.

Pre-Symposium Workshop

The symposium will be preceded by a workshop scheduled during December 5-6, 2020. This is targeted mainly at postgrad students and research scholars, whose projects bear resonance with the symposium theme and, broadly speaking, concern Digital Humanities. Participants will be selected from the pool of symposium participants. During the workshop, experts will reflect on the state-of-the-art affairs in the field and advise informally on the students’ projects. If you wish to participate in the workshop — either as a scholar or as an expert, please express your intent during the abstract submission.

Financial Support

Limited subsidy to offset travel costs may be made available for a small number of participants. This is typically meant for postgraduate students, early-career and un(der)employed academics. Details about the travel bursaries will be communicated upon receipt of the draft papers.

Miscellaneous

Participants from outside the conventional Humanities & Social Sciences disciplines — for example, scientists who work on AI, image processing, biometrics etc., gamers, game-designers, coders — are encouraged to apply. Attendance at the symposium and the workshop will also be open to a limited number of non-presenters. There is no registration fee for participating or attending.

This event is a part of a SPARC (Scheme for Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration) project funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD), with additional support from the UK-India Education and Research Initiative (UKIERI). The pre-symposium workshop is sponsored by the Northeast India Company (Silchar).

This event overlaps with the famous Hornbill Festival in Nagaland, relatively close to Silchar. Nagaland and Silchar are connected by rail route, but might require a transit at Lumding.

Contact Us

For questions and clarifications, write to <selfie2021@gmail.com>.

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Deadline for Submissions May 20, 2020

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GLOBAL CRISES: STATE SURVEILLANCE, SOLIDARITY AND EVERYDAY LIFE May 20, 2020 at The American University of Paris, is a virtual conference and free of charge. You can participate from wherever you are. Full details below:

https://www.aup.edu/psychology-global-crises

The current global Covid-19 crisis is unprecedented in many ways. Yet, crisis” as a phenomenon is everything but new. In the past years, we have been in the middle of the so-called “refugee crisis” the European sovereign debt crisis, the subprime mortgage crisis and the 2007-2008 global financial crisis. Some attest to a more general crisis of liberal democracy, an eventual crisis of capitalism, or a “population change crisis.” Climate change is typically identified as a central factor in the emergence of future global crises. Beyond economically driven crises, we experience crises on the social and cultural levels: the Occupy movement, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, the global surveillance disclosures, etc. On a smaller scale, we witness crises of various academic disciplines, famous among them perhaps the replication crisis in psychology. Some go further and argue that the social sciences are in a state of perpetual crisis at least since the beginnings of the 20th century. Last not least, psychologists identify and treat crises on an individual level: loss of workplace, loneliness, depression. Every crisis phenomenon maps its territory and calls for its experts and expert discourses, measures and publicly communicated courses of action. Sparked by current developments, the theme of this conference is “crisis” in all its varieties. Who is speaking to the current crisis and with what advice? Which voices are heard? What can the social sciences contribute to understand crises, the current global situation and expectations for the future? How can we critically examine the concept of “crisis.” Who defines a situation as a crisis? Who benefits from and who is negatively affected by crises? How do crises change local communities? How do they affect the individual agency and the relationship of citizens to one another? In times of crisis, let us come together in the virtual world and discuss the phenomena at hand.

The conference organizers hope you will be able to participate and help spread the word too.

With best wishes,

Ana

http://www.unav.es/

Ana Belén Martínez García
PhD Assistant Professor
ISSA School of Management Assistants
Edificio Amigos. Despacho 5090
Tel.: 948 425600 (802814)

Deadline for Submissions May 17, 2020

Life Writing as Political Voice

PAMLA Pacific, Asian, and Modern Language Association

Los Vegas 11/12-15, 2020

contact email:

City dwellers have a unique opportunity to see and engage in group political activities that those in more rural areas do not. Their everyday lives can be impacted by political demonstrations whether they are actively participating or not. The perspectives that we usually get are from the government, press, or political leaders. These accounts miss how people actually experience and understand the protests they see and/or participate in. As such, examining the life writing of those who participated or observed city protests can be intriguing and add a personal element to group politics. This panel will focus on the experiences of those who planned, participated, and/or observed protests in various cities. Ideas to be examined include personal vs. public perception, the individual vs. government, and political activities as community building among others. For example, reading the personal accounts of British suffragists during the Black Friday protest highlights the very real danger the women encountered and the gendered opposition they faced through both physical and sexual assault. Entries can be historical or contemporary and involve any large metropolitan area. While memoirs could be useful in this discussion, pieces can come from online publications, articles as well as diaries and less public life writing.

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Family and Conflict in Graphic Narratives – a Special Issue for Studies in Comics (5/15/2020)
Even though family relationships are at the heart of many graphic narratives, particularly relationships between parents and children (one can think of examples like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Art Spiegelman’s Maus), few studies have examined how the family is used as a trope in graphic narratives.
Considering the role of family is important, as Anne McClintock reminds us, since the trope of the family ‘offers a “natural” figure for sanctioning social hierarchy within a putative organic unity of interests’ (63, original emphasis). In a similar vein, Sarah Harwood has argued the family has become ‘a primary way of organising and understanding [material] reality across all cultural forms’ (3).
Moreover, in discussing how popular literature depicts conflict, specifically the conflict in Israel/Palestine, Toine van Teeffelen has suggested that popular literature ‘tends to metaphorically understand political and social life through the experiences of persons and small groups’ (390).
This special issue asks how the trope of the family is used to understand and organise conflict, including how it functions as a way to illustrate material realities and ideologies.
Articles might address, but are not limited to, the following questions:
• How is the family used as an allegory for the nation?
• How is the trope of the family used to reflect wider concerns in relation to conflict, including the possibility of a resolution of the
        conflict?
• How does the family work to make conflict accessible to outsiders?
• To what extent are different family members used to illustrate contrasting (political) positions?
• How is an emphasis on family used to counteract fears about change and fragmentation that are heightened during conflict?
Please send submissions by 15th November 2020  to the appropriate editor.
The editors will provide initial feedback by 15th January 2021.
Revised articles and comics will be due by 1 May 2021 and will then be sent out for double blind peer-review by Studies in Comics.
Please see attached CFP for more details about submissions.
Articles
Dr Isabelle Hesse, isabelle.hesse@sydney.edu.au
Lecturer, Department of English, The University of Sydney
The Politics of Jewishness in Contemporary World Literature: The Holocaust, Zionism, and Colonialism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016)
Comics
Dr Sarah Lightman, sarahlightman@yahoo.com
Honorary Research Fellow, Birkbeck, University of London
The Book of Sarah (Myriad Editions, Penn State University Press 2019)
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Deadline for Submissions May 15, 2020
Call for papers

7th international symposium of the Finnish Oral History Network FOHN

Power, Authority, and Voice: Critical Reflections in/on Oral History

26–27 November 2020
Helsinki, Finland

The notions of power, authority, and voice have been at the center of oral history research and practice from its inception. Oral history research is emblematically distinguished by its preoccupation with the voices from ‘the below’, having dedicated itself to the recording, collection, and analysis of memories, personal narratives, and histories of individuals and groups that would not have been heard otherwise. The concept of voice has implicitly referred to the nature of oral histories as recorded interviews, but more importantly, to issues of subjectivity, representation, and authority. In addition to recorded interviews, there has been increasing interest in various forms of life writings, as well as other forms of vernacular mnemonic practices online and offline. Even though the dialogic nature of data and knowledge production has been emphasized, analyzed, and celebrated, we still need to ask who holds the power to decide which pasts and perspectives are recognized, and whose voices – and what kind of voices – are listened to and analyzed, how and why? Moreover, we need to critically reflect on the structures of power and authority that practices and methods of oral history research foster.

The seventh international symposium of the Finnish Oral History Network FOHN will focus on the notions of power, authority, and voice in the context of oral history from critical contemporary perspective. The keynote speakers are Urvashi Butalia (Delhi, India), Erin Jessee (University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK), Jonna Katto (Ghent University, Belgium), and Riikka Taavetti (University of Helsinki, Finland).

We wish to invite contributions focusing on methodological and ethical questions as well as on case studies. Proposals may be submitted for individual papers or panels and they can address but are not limited to the following themes and issues:

  • Critical reflections on voices and silences
  • Authorities of knowledge production in oral history
  • Culturally dependent aesthetics of oral history and life writing
  • Ideologies and politics of oral history and life writing
  • Issues related to the nature of oral history as a social movement, form of activism, and academic practice
  • Materiality and medium of the ‘voice’ (i.e. sound, writing, image)
  • Dominance of the ‘tragic’, ‘traumatic’, and ‘devastating’ experiences
  • Oral history and other disciplines
  • Critical reflections on the geographies of oral history Submissions of individual papers require a title and a maximum of 250-word abstract. Panel proposals should include a maximum of 250-word description of the panel and max 250-word abstracts of each individual papers. The conference language will be English. Please e-mail your proposal to fohn-symposium@helsinki.fi. The deadline for the proposal is 15 May 2020. The acceptance or rejection of proposals will be announced in mid-June 2020. The conference fee will be 70 euros (standard) / 35 euros (concession: students, unwaged).Enquiries: fohn-symposium@helsinki.fi

Ulla Savolainen

Chair, FOHN

UNIVERSITY OF HELSINKI                                          

Further information on the symposium: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/conferences/7th-international-symposium-of-the-finnish-oral-history-network-fohn

FOHN’s webpage: http://www.finlit.fi/fi/fohn-en

Facebook: Finnish Oral History Network

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Ulla Savolainen, PhD, title of docent

Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher

Department of Cultures

Topelia, Room C214, P.O. Box 59,

00014 University of Helsinki, Finland

https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/ulla-savolainen

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Deadline for Submissions May 10, 2020

“Narrating Lives”–International Conference on Storytelling, (Auto)Biography and (Auto)Ethnography (5/10/2020; 8/28-29) Malta

organised by London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research

Life-history approach occupies the central place in conducting and producing  (auto)biographical and (auto)ethnographic studies through the understanding of self, other, and culture. We construct and develop conceptions and practices by engaging with memory through narrative, in order to negotiate ambivalences and uncertainties of the world and to represent (often traumatic) experiences.

The “Narrating Lives” conference will focus on reading and interpreting (auto)biographical texts and methods across the humanities, social sciences, and visual and performing arts. It will analyse theoretical and practical approaches to life writing and the components of (auto)biographical acts, including memory, experience, identity, embodiment, space, and agency. We will attempt to identify key concerns and considerations that led to the development of the methods and to outline the purposes and ethics of (auto)biographical and (auto)ethnographic research.

We aim to explore a variety of techniques for gathering data on the self-from diaries to interviews to social media and to promote understanding of multicultural others, qualitative inquiry, and narrative writing.

Conference panels will be related, but not limited, to:

  • Life Narrative in Historical Perspective
  • Qualitative Research Methods
  • Oral History, Memory and Written Tradition
  • Journalism and Literary Studies
  • Creative Writing and Performing Arts
  • (Auto)Biographical Element in Film Studies, Media and Communication
  • Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
  • Storytelling in Education
  • Ethics and Politics of Research

Submissions may be proposed in various formats, including:

  • Individually submitted papers (organised into panels by the committee)
  • Panels (3-4 individual papers)
  • Posters

Proposals should be sent by 10 May 2020 to: life-history@lcir.co.uk. Please download Paper proposal form.

Standard registration fee – 160 GBP

Student registration fee – 140 GBP

Conference venue: University of Malta, Valletta Campus, St Paul Street, Valletta VLT1216, Malta

Deadline for Submissions May 1, 2020

The Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography

is organising the

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ENCYCLOPEDISTICS 2020 – ACHIEVEMENTS AND CHALLENGES

On the occasion of its 70th founding anniversary, the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography is organising the international conference Encyclopedistics 2020 – Achievements and Challenges, which will be held from 15 to 17 October in Zagreb.

The 70th anniversary of the Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography, founded in 1950 on the centuries-old tradition of Croatian encyclopedistics and lexicography, has prompted us to consider the achievements, current state, and (un)predictable future of encyclopedistics in Croatia, Europe, and the world. Bringing together experts, not only in encyclopedistics and lexicography, but also in other academic fields, we wish to discuss topics that we have divided into three broad groups, regarding the state and possibilities of digital encyclopedistics, individual fields and terminology, and the encyclopedistic treatment of biographies (these topics are guidelines rather than fixed categories).

The topics of the conference are as follows:

  1. a)  Digital encyclopedias and knowledge networking: • Online encyclopedias and other reference works • Thematic portals
    • Digitisation and linking digital sources
    • Multimedia and interactive content• The role of digital reference works in science and education
    • Organisation, networking, and dissemination of knowledge
    • Encyclopedias in the age of greater accessibility of information • Digital lexicography and digital humanities
  2. b)  Fields and terminology in encyclopedistics and lexicography • Theoretical fundamentals (methods, approaches, specificities) • Concepts and production of professional encyclopedias
    • Treatment of specific fields in general/national encyclopedias • Selected topics from specific fields• Mircropedic and macropedic approach
    • Terminology between description and prescription • Terminology between internationalism and purism • Terminology in a diachronic perspective

enciklopedika 2020 – dosezi i izazovi encyclopedistics 2020 – achievements and challenges

c) Biography in encyclopedias

LEKSIKOGRAFSKI ZAVOD MIROSLAV KRLEŽA Frankopanska 26 Zagreb Hrvatska

• Conceptions of biographic encyclopedias and lexicons
• Biographies in professional, national, and general encyclopedias • Biographies in regard to specific fields
• Problems regarding biographic research and presentation
• Bibliography

The abstract (1000 to 1500 characters), in Croatian and English (the organiser shall secure translation into Croatian for foreign applicants), together with a short biography (400 to 600 characters) should be sent to the secretary of the Organising Committee, Iva Klobučar Srbić (iva.klobucar@lzmk.hr; enciklopedika2020@lzmk.hr).
The application deadline is 1 May 2020. The applicants will be informed whether their abstracts have been accepted by 1 June 2020, and the accepted abstracts will be published in a separate booklet.

Presentations should be in Croatian or English and up to 15 minutes long. Papers based on these presentations that are submitted by 1 March 2021 will be published, following the peer review process, in a thematic issue of the lexicography and encyclopedistics journal Studia lexicographica (http://studialexicographica.lzmk.hr/sl).

There is no participation fee, but applicants are expected to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses.

All information and notifications about the conference can be found on the webpage: http://www.lzmk.hr/ enciklopedika-2020.

Organising Committee: Ivana Crljenko, Vlatka Dugački, Filip Hameršak, Zdenko Jecić, Nataša Jermen, Iva Klobučar Srbić, Bruno Kragić

Programme Committee: Petra Bago, Vlaho Bogišić, Damir Boras, Irina Deretić, Peter Jordan, Stipe Kutleša, Janko Lozar, Nives Mikelić Preradović, Željko Pavić, Slaven Ravlić, Krešimir Regan, Hrvoje Stančić, Goran Sunajko, Domagoj Vidović, Antun Vujić

Contact: enciklopedika2020@lzmk.hr; iva.klobucar@lzmk.hr

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Deadline for Submissions May 1, 2020

“Autotheory”– Special Issue of ASAP/Journal (5/1/2020)

ASAP/Journal seeks critical and creative contributions for a guest-edited special issue on “autotheory.” Fusing self-representation with philosophy and critical theory, autotheory moves between the worlds of “theory” and “practice,” often exceeding disciplinary boundaries, genres, and forms. This special issue embarks on a rigorous investigation of the autotheoretical impulse as it moves across medial, disciplinary, and national borders from the 1960s to the present. In dialogue with scholars, artists, and activists, this issue will broach the central question: What are autotheory’s conditions of possibility, and what are the political, aesthetic, and cultural effects of this theoretical turn in contemporary cultural production? What are the underlying assumptions and implications of understanding autotheory as a genre, framework, performance, or practice? What kinds of reading might it invite or preclude? This issue is especially concerned with BIPOC, feminist, queer, trans and gender non-conforming, and anti-colonial and de-colonial approaches to autotheory, and the politics and ethics therein. From social media technologies and the publishing industry to the academic industrial complex and its varied, often ambivalent alternatives, autotheory’s escalating ubiquity serves as a critical provocation: why “autotheory” and why now?

Considering the rapid rise of popular and scholarly interest in works like Paul B. Preciado’s Testo Yonqui (Testo Junkie) (2008), Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014), Moyra Davey’s Les Goddesses (2011), and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), and renewed interest in Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva (1973), Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1997), autotheory’s recent popularization suggests a pressing need for analogous critical discourse. Some have considered autotheory from transmedial perspectives, from Mieke Bal’s work on documentary filmmaking to Lauren Fournier’s work on conceptualism and video art. This special issue seeks to bring together leading articles that approach autotheory transmedially and transnationally, reflecting on its evolution and circulation as a way of bringing theory to life and life to theory. We seek contributions from artists, curators, filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, activists, performers, composers, and other culture workers relating to the global contemporary arts in any medium. Autotheoretical approaches to writing are encouraged. Rather than entrench a single definition or approach, we aim to facilitate dialogue that parses autotheory from diverse critical perspectives and geographical contexts. ASAP/Journal invites 6,000-8,000 word articles exploring autotheory in ways that may include but are not limited to:

•Alternative modes of historicizing “autotheory”
•Alternative approaches to defining “autotheory”
•Indigenous autotheory and decolonial possibilities
•Autotheory in non-Western practices and contexts
•Trans, queer, feminist, and BIPOC autotheory
•Autotheory, ideology, and neoliberalisms
•Autotheory, accessibility, and questions of access
•Autotheory, canons, and anti-canonization
•Autotheory and pedagogy
•Autotheory and translation
•Autotheory and disciplinary boundaries and genres
•Autotheory’s theoretical legacies
•Autotheory and adaptation
•Autotheory and autofiction
•Autotheory and art criticism
•The ethical issues of autotheory
•The politics and aesthetics of narcissism
•Autotheory and identity politics
•Ideas of anti-memoir

Completed essays due by May 1, 2020. Please send queries or abstracts via email to the ASAP/Journal editor, Jonathan P. Eburne, at editors_asap@press.jhu.edu

Completed articles should be submitted to the journal’s online submission site at http://journals.psu.edu/asap/index.php/testJournal/announcement 

Full-length essay submissions of 6000-8000 words (including notes but excluding translations, which should accompany foreign-language quotations) in Microsoft Word should be prepared in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style. All content in the journal is anonymously peer reviewed by at least two referees. If the contribution includes any materials (e.g., quotations that exceed fair use, illustrations, charts, other graphics) that have been taken from another source, the author must obtain written permission to reproduce them in print and electronic formats and assume all reprinting costs.Manuscripts in languages other than English (including Cree, French, Spanish, Portuguese) are accepted for review but must be accompanied by a detailed summary in English (generally of 1,000–1,500 words) and must be translated into English if they are recommended for publication. Essays in experimental or unusual formats are encouraged.

Authors’ names should not appear on manuscripts; when submitting manuscripts, authors should remove identifying information by clicking on “File”/“Properties” in Microsoft Word and removing identifying tags for the piece. Authors should not refer to themselves in the first person in the submitted text or notes if such references would identify them.

For additional submission guidelines, please see: https://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/asap_journal/guidelines.html.

Lauren Fournier is a writer, curator, filmmaker, and SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto. She is currently writing a monograph on autotheory as an artist’s practice, historicizing the autotheoretical impulse in relation to post-1960s feminist art, performance, and criticism. www.laurenfournier.net 

Alex Brostoff is a writer, teacher, and Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation investigates how relations between human and textual bodies are autotheorized across the Americas, both within and against the contemporary identity studies from which they emerge.

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Deadline for Submissions April 30, 2020

Call for Papers, Abstracts, and Panel Proposals: Celebrity & Stardom Area

Chair: Scott Owen Chappuis (scott.chappuis@cuaa.edu)

Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference

Friday-Sunday, October 2-4, 2020

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Dear Celebrity and Stardom Scholars:

You are invited to submit to the Midwest Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual meetings being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the Westin Minneapolis, from Friday-Sunday, October 2-4, 2020. More details about the conference, membership, travel matters, and the conference hotel and its rates can be found at the MPCA/ACA website http://www.mpcaaca.org/. Everything is explained here: https://mpcaaca.org/minn-2020/2020-cfp/

The Area Chair for the Celebrity and Stardom Area invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of celebrity and stardom. A list of ideas below is limited, so if you have an idea that is not listed, go for it! We are an interdisciplinary area and encourage submissions from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Topics might include:
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 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

Gendered constructions of stars and fans

Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction

The deadline for submissions is April 30, 2020 – no exceptions, no bending of the deadline. Submissions are to be uploaded at http://submissions.mpcaaca.org/. This is the ONLY way to submit to the conference. Accepted panelists will be notified by me within two weeks of the submission deadline.

We look forward to seeing you in Minneapolis in October!

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions, April 15, 2020

Biofiction as World Literature/ La biofiction comme littérature mondiale (4/15/2020; 10/29-31/2020)  – Leuven, Belgium

Biofiction (literature that takes a real biography as its point of departure) is powered by what Colm Tóibín has recently called “the anchored imagination”, which grants the fictional narrative a certain ambiguous (almost duplicitous) credibility. But what do biographical novels mean as world-making vehicles? Is the recent boom in stories that rely on the real past, yet project contemporary visions upon it, only a sign that we are trying to build a coherent world-image of centuries past, or is it also an attempt to bring into being a new way of seeing and/or being in the present? Furthermore, does it foster new visions and teach new lessons for the future?
In the light of theories of World Literature proposed by David Damrosch, Theo D’haen, and others, and using T. O. Beebee’s method of starting from particular areas (in this case, a genre) in our exploration of transnational dynamics, we propose several complementary angles for conceptualizing Biofiction as World Literature: biofiction’s capacity of cross-cultural representation (manifested in novels likeHassan Najmi’s Gertrude, where a writer portrays a famous figure from another cultural area), its world-shaping imagery (detectable in biofictions of explorers, translators, and other cosmopolitan figures), its strong link with cultural memory (which can be traced back to the interwar versions of the roman à clef, to Woolf’s and Schwob’s experiments, and even further back into the mid-nineteenth century), its protean adaptability (seen in its mixture of modernist and postmodernist elements), its appeal to large audiences (sometimes in the form of biopics), its power to address social and political issues (in the works of Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, and many others) or shifting gender norms (in fictions by Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), its parallel developments across wide spaces and far beyond the West (with the work of Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), and its ability to fuel international theoretical debates. These are just some of the aspects that recommend this genre as a lens for analyzing world-spanning literary developments.
If you are interested in more details about our approach and/or you would like to contribute to the dialogue, please consult our website for the full-length version of the Call for Papers: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers
You can send 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers or proposals for 90-minute panels (including a 300-word cover statement and three 300-word abstracts) to the following email address: biofiction@kuleuven.be. Please include a brief bio note for each speaker (around 150 words).
The deadline for submissions is April 15, 2020.
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Si elle relève en première instance de la littérature, la biofiction prend pour point de départ une biographie réelle. Elle est sous-tendue par ce que Colm Tóibín a récemment appelé « l’imagination ancrée », qui confère au récit fictionnel une crédibilité ambiguë touchant parfois à la duplicité. Mais que signifie ce genre en tant que vecteur de fabrication de mondes ? Ce boom des récits qui rejouent un passé réel, projetant sur lui un regard contemporain, est-il seulement un signe que nous cherchons à élaborer une image cohérente du monde des siècles passés ou s’agit-il plutôt d’une tentative de donner forme à une nouvelle manière de voir et/ou de se situer dans le présent ? Davantage, favorise-t-il de nouvelles conceptions et enseigne-t-il de nouvelles leçons pour l’avenir ?
A la lumière des théories relatives à la littérature mondiale développées par David Damrosch, Theo D’haen et d’autres, et utilisant la méthode de T. O. Beebee consistant dans une exploration de dynamiques transnationales à partir d’un domaine déterminé (en l’occurrence, un genre), nous proposons plusieurs perspectives complémentaires dans l’examen de la Biofiction comme Littérature mondiale : sa capacité de représentation trans-culturelle (manifeste dans des romans commeGertrude de Hassan Najmi, dans lequel l’auteur portraiture une figure célèbre d’une autre aire culturelle), ses liens forts avec la mémoire culturelle (qui apparaît dans les romans à clefs de l’entre-deux-guerres, dans les expérimentations de Woolf et Schwob et plus loin encore au XIXe siècle), son adaptabilité protéenne (dont témoigne son mélange d’éléments modernistes et post-modernistes), son attrait pour le grand public (parfois sous la forme de biopics), sa faculté à toucher des enjeux sociaux et politiques (dans les oeuvres de Javier Cercas, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee, Mario Vargas Llosa, et de nombreux autres) ou à affecter les normes touchant au genre (dans les fictions de Anna Banti, Margaret Atwood, Annabel Abbs, Janice Galloway, etc.), ses développements dans des espaces étrangers à l’Occident (avec les œuvres de Anchee Min, Amin Maalouf, Bensalem Himmich, etc.), et sa capacité à nourrir les débats internationaux. Il s’agit là de quelques-uns des traits par lesquels ce genre témoigne des évolutions littéraires à l’échelle mondiale. 
Pour découvrir plus de détails sur notre approche et/ ou pour participer au dialogue, veuillez consulter notre site web pour la version complète de l’argumentaire :
Nous accueillons des propositions de communications de 20 minutes (300 mots), ainsi que des propositions de sessions de 90 minutes (300 mots pour le descriptif général, tout comme pour chacun des trois exposés inclus).
Les résumés, accompagnés d’une note biographique d’environ 150 mots pour chaque participant, seront à envoyer à biofiction@kuleuven.be.
La date limite pour la remise des propositions est le 15 avril 2020.
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Deadline for Submissions, April 7, 2020

Cinematic Representations of Women in Modern Celebrity Culture (1900-1950) (edited collection) (4/7/2020)

We invite proposals for contributions to an edited collection on cinematic representations of women in works of art, poetry, fiction, theater and criticism of the avant-garde. The popularization of film stars such as Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo and Brigitte Helm shaped the cultural imaginary of modernity to such an extent that they influenced the creative activity of artists and writers in the years 1900-1950. Questions centering on feminine stardom will set the background of this collection of essays examining the intersections of vanguardism with popular culture, publicity and performance. How are images of femininity circulated and consumed by the spectators of the cinematic medium? What position do the so-called high and low art forms take with regards to the presence of women in cinema celebrity culture? To what extent do stereotypical conceptions of feminine beauty reflect male ways of seeing, interpreting and writing?  We are interested in expanding the conversation to aesthetic, political, historical and cultural analyses from a perspective that integrates the written word and the animated image into constructions of femininity. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Filmic types and stereotypes of femininity

Critical approaches to the male gaze

Fetishism and idolatry of women in cinema culture

Fashion, modernity and the commodification of feminine cinematography

The muse versus the male artist

Gender performativity, mass media and promotional value

Women stars in Hollywood and the independent film industry

Ekphrasis, iconology and iconography of feminine acting

Intersections of verbal and cinematic images of power, gender identity and race

Feminist theory and aesthetics of motion pictures

Abstracts of 300-500 words along with a 150-word bio should be emailed to María Cristina C. Mabrey (Professor Emerita, University of South Carolina) at rriopar@gmail.com and Leticia Pérez Alonso (Assistant Professor, Jackson State University) at leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu no later than April 7th, 2020. We will notify authors of the acceptance by April 13th, 2020. Chapters (approximately 6,000-7,000 words, including notes and bibliography) will be due by September 18th, 2020.

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Deadline for Proposals April 5, 2020

Propose a 2021 Special issue of Ennen ja nyt: Historian tietosanomat (Before and Now: History Journal) (April 5, 2020) Finland

Propose a theme issue for 2021!

Ennen ja nyt: Historian tietosanomat (translated as Before and Now: History journal) was founded in 2001 as a non-profit history journal that publishes papers of high scholarly merit in three categories: research papers, reflections and essays, and reviews. The official languages of the publication are Finnish and English, but other languages are taken into consideration as well. The publication follows new and emerging research themes in the field of history and neighboring fields.

Publishing in the journal and reading it is completely free of charge, and there is no embargo in place.
The journal is currently looking for theme issues to be published in 2021. Any history-related theme will be considered. These are just some of the previously published issues:

Multidimensional Europe
Historical cinema
The study of digital history
History of France in Finland at the beginning of 2000

A theme issue consists of at least six articles of which some are refereed. These also include reflections and essays as well as book reviews.

A theme issue can be proposed in two ways:

A writer (who will later act as a visiting editor in chief of the theme issue) drafts a theme for an issue and invites other writers to contribute to the issue.

A theme can be proposed to editor in chief Lauri Keskinen after which a Call for papers will be released in order to find writers interested in the theme.

In both cases: Draft an idea paper (maximum length: 1 page) of the theme and mention if there are already writers who have expressed interest in writing to the issue. Send the idea paper to editor in chief Lauri Keskinen (lokesk@utu.fi) at the latest on 5.4.2020.

Issues released before 2020 can be found at www.ennenjanyt.net

Best,

Anna-Leena Perämäki
Cultural History
University of Turku
Finland

Deadline for Submissions,  April 3, 2020

Call for papers for proposed panel on “The World of the Visual Artist in Biofiction”  (4/3/2020; 10/29-31/2020) Leuven, Belgium

Venue:  Biofiction as World Literature Conference (Leuven, Belgium 29-31 October, 2020)

Website: https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers
Proposed Panel Topic: 

Historical visual artists have been popular protagonists of biographical fiction dating back to Irving Stone’s 1934 novel Lust for Life (on Vincent Van Gogh), and Anna Banti’s 1947 Artemisia (on Artemisia Gentileschi). Recent decades have seen a virtual explosion of biographical novels about artists as varied as Michelangelo, Camille Claudel, Georgia O’Keefe, Caravaggio, Sofonisba Anguissola, Frida Kahlo, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, May Alcott Nieriker, Pablo Picasso, and so many more.

This proposed panel, in keeping with the conference theme, seeks papers that consider biofiction about visual artists from an internationalizing perspective. For example:

·         How have particular artists been characterized in biofiction as international/intercultural explorers, agents, and/or witnesses?
·         What artists seem to be particularly adaptable to biofiction published across languages, and why?
·         How do biofiction authors treat issues of transnational identities?
·         How do biofiction authors treat cultural “otherness,” whether in terms of description, language, characterization, etc.?
·         What broader international publishing trends can be detected in relation to biofiction about visual artists, and what might be prompting them?

Please send:  300 word (max) abstract for a 20 minute paper, and 150 word brief bio by April 3, 2020 to  Julia Dabbs (dabbsj@morris.umn.edu).

Graduate students, as well as scholars at other stages in their careers, are encouraged to apply.
This CFP is part of a broader effort to identify scholars working on the topic of biofiction and visual artists, with the eventual goal of publishing a collection of essays.
Thank you for considering this, and/or for passing it along to others!

Julia Dabbs

Julia K. Dabbs, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Art History | http://www.morris.umn.edu/academics/arthistory/
Division of Humanities, 600 East 4th Street, Morris, MN  56267
University of Minnesota, Morris | morris.umn.edu
dabbsj@morris.umn.edu | 320-589-6232

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Deadline for Submissions April 1, 2020

Narrative, Medicine and Disability PNSI The 2020 Project Narrative Summer Institute: (4/1/2020; 6/22-7/2/2020)

Institute Co-Directors: James Phelan, University Distinguished Professor of English, and Amy Shuman, Professor of English

The 2020 Project Narrative Summer Institute: Narrative, Medicine and Disability PNSI is a two-week workshop on the campus of Ohio State University that offers faculty and advanced graduate students in any discipline the opportunity for an intensive study of core concepts and issues in narrative theory. The focus for summer 2020 will be Narrative, Medicine and Disability, and the co-directors will ground their approach in the principle of dialogue.  More specifically, we will explore the connections and tensions among a range of objects of study—the three objects named in the Institute’s subtitle– and of discourses about them:  narrative theory, narrative medicine, and disability studies. Sample dialogues: What can narrative theory and narratives about illness do for each other? What can narrative medicine and narratives of disability do for each other? What can narrative theory, narrative medicine, and disability studies do for each other? What are the limitations of efforts to find synergies among these objects of study and discourses about them? We’ll take up these questions in relation to the readings listed below, and in relation to the specific interests and projects of the participants.

PNSI 2020 Description and Syllabus

To Apply:
Applicants should send a current CV, a short description of the proposed project (no longer than a single-spaced page), and one letter of recommendation to Project Narrative by April 1, 2020. Applications will be reviewed promptly after the deadline. If, in order to meet funding deadlines, applicants need an earlier decision, the co-directors will consider special requests for early action.
Applications can be emailed to projectnarrative@osu.edu or sent by post to the following address:
421 Denney Hall Attn: Project Narrative 164 Annie and John Glenn Avenue Columbus, OH 43210
Please email projectnarrative@osu.edu with any questions about applying.

Fees and Housing:
Tuition for the 2020 Project Narrative Summer Institute is $1,800. This does not include housing, but the Project Narrative staff will assist participants in finding affordable housing options according to individual needs. Project Narrative cannot provide financial aid, but the co-directors will gladly write in support of participants’ applications for funding from home institutions.

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Deadline for Submissions, April 1, 2020

CALL FOR PAPERS: AN IABA ASIA PACIFIC AFFILIATED CONFERENCE

Transnationalism, Life Writing and Migration

in Australia and the Asia Pacific

September 20-23, 2020

Confirmed Keynote Speaker:

Ricia Chansky, University of Puerto Rico

The University of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia

in collaboration with the University of Adelaide and Flinders University

This conference forms part of an Australian Research Council funded Discovery Project on Transnational Narratives of Migration to Australia (Natalie Edwards and Christopher Hogarth, DP190102863). It will explore the literature of migration and otherness in the wide contexts of Australia and the Asia Pacific region.

Transnationalism is an increasingly popular scholarly phenomenon, reflecting and responding to the heightened interconnectivity between people and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation states. In “Australian Literature-International Contexts,” Robert Dixon calls “a transnational practice of Australian literary criticism” (Dixon 2007, 19). Dixon encourages biographical research into transnational Australian writers and research into the influence of multicultural backgrounds on literature. He finds that it is now time to move beyond cultural nationalism to “explore and elaborate the many ways in which the national literature has always been connected to the world” (20). Two years later, Michael Jacklin, discerning a “transnational turn” in Australian literary studies, commented “I wonder why, in this transnational turn, multicultural literatures have not been accorded more significance” (Jacklin 2009, 1). As scholars have responded to this line of enquiry, new approaches to examining Australian literature have appeared, including studies of literature written in Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese and Italian, for example (Jacklin, Huang and Omundsen; Yuanfang; Gatt-Rutter).

This conference aims to build upon this scholarship by rethinking transnational writing in the context of Australia and the Asia Pacific region. We seek papers that explore how these themes are represented specifically in life narratives. By discussing writers’ visions of the surrounding Asia Pacific region, including in a variety of languages, it aims to expand the boundaries of Australasian literary studies.

Proposed papers may consider themes such as:

  • Narrating and imagining the migrant experience in Australia and/or the Asia Pacific region,
  • Refugee and asylum seeker narratives
  • Narratives in languages other than English
  • Translation and translingual narratives
  • Coming of Age narratives in Australia and/or the Asia Pacific region
  • Childhood life writing
  • Ethics of storytelling
  • Activist narratives
  • Cultural memory of this region
  • Autobiographies, letters and diaries of the Australia and/or the Asia Pacific experience
  • Life narratives in popular culture (music, film, theatre, games)
  • Visual life narratives (photography, graphics, social and digital media, visual arts etc.)
  • The histories and futures of life writing studies across disciplinary boundaries
  • Methods, genres, and definitions in life-writing/autobiographical/life story/ego-document research

Submissions:

We invite both 20 minute individual presentations and 90 minute full panel, roundtable, or workshop sessions. We encourage interdisciplinary submissions that foster dialogues across theory, methodology, genre, place, and time. We invite not only traditional conference papers and panels, but also innovative presentation formats and creative sessions.

All presenters must submit a max. 300 word abstract and a 150 word bio to Dr. Christopher Hogarth at iabaadelaide2020@gmail.com by 1 April.

Organising Committee: Associate Professor Natalie Edwards, Dr. Christopher Hogarth, Dr. Kylie Cardell, Professor Kate Douglas

Dr. Christopher Hogarth,

Lecturer of Comparative Literary Studies/French,

School of Creative Industries
Co-Chief Investigator: “Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia” (ARC DP190102863)
Vice-President, Australian Society for French Studies  https://australiansocietyforfrenchstudies.com/
University of South Australia,Magill Campus
Office: B1-12
ex 24354
Recently published:
Chapter in Volume on Post-Migratory Cultures in Postcolonial France https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/products/108138
Chapter in Volume on Rethinking the French Classroom https://www.routledge.com/Rethinking-the-French-Classroom-New-Approaches-to-Teaching-Contemporary/Meyer-Johnston/p/book/9781138369931

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Deadline for Submissions, March 31, 2020

Narratology Panel

deadline for submissions:
Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Conference. Rocky Mountain MLA, October 10-12 2019, Hotel Paso del Norte, El Paso, Texas

Narratology. Marshall Johnson, English Dept./0098, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557; marshalljohnson@unr.edu.

Description: This session invites proposals on narrative theory as it relates to pedagogy and writing/composition studies or literary studies, particularly those including, but not limited to, multimodal learning, WPA curricula, the quest narrative, student efficacy, research writing, new and interesting approaches to canonical texts, comparative and contemporary literature, the graphic novel, genre studies, and memoir studies.

Narratology. Marshall Johnson, English Dept./0098, University of Nevada, Reno, NV 89557; marshalljohnson@unr.edu.

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Deadline for Submissions, March 31, 2020

CFP: Fandom and Controversy

Special issue of American Behavioral Scientist edited by Rebecca Williams and Lucy Bennett

In 2005, American Behavioral Scientist published a special issue on Fandom, which contained articles that continue to resonate and influence the field today. This proposed special issue seeks to offer a follow-up to that foundational issue, offering new perspectives on fan cultures which respond to the changes that have happened in the fifteen years since its publication and acknowledging the complex cultural, social and political landscape that we currently occupy. The issue seeks to showcase voices from both established and emerging scholars, offering work that addresses these key concerns from a range of perspectives. Its focus is on the relationship between fandom and moments of fissure or controversy, including how this intersects with the current political and cultural moment.

Although fandom can very often involve admiration and pleasure towards a person or text, there are also moments where disappointment, shame, and displeasure occur (Jones 2018). In the past decade accusations of sexual harassment and assault surrounding celebrities such as Michael Jackson, R, Kelly, and the spread of the #metoo hashtag, have caused some fans to re-evaluate their attachments to famous figures and celebrities, challenging how we conceive of concepts such as ‘anti-fandom’ (Gray 2003), so-called ‘cancel culture’, or the spread of forms  of ‘toxic fandom’ (Proctor and Kies 2018) or ‘reactionary fandom’ (Stanfill 2019). However, other fans have sought to maintain their fandom for these celebrities, offering justifications and solidarity to their object of fandom in the face of these controversial moments.

Indeed, the wider current social and political landscape offers a set of unique challenges that has a clear impact on how we understand the discourses and practices of fandom. As the United Kingdom deals with the consequences of Brexit and leaving the European Union, as Europe itself negotiates its future, and as the United States faces a series of new challenges under the Trump Presidency, the political and the personal intersect like never before. Meanwhile protests in Hong Kong have captured the world’s attention as fannish modes of communication including memes are appropriated for political and cultural purposes (Teixeira 2019). The issue thus encourages scholars from a range of national perspectives, especially those from non-Western countries and those outside of the Global North.

The emerging overlaps between fandom, controversy and the political moment can be seen in the use of fannish language to describe key politicians such as those who support the UK Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn as Corbynistas (see Hills 2017, Sandvoss 2017, Dean 2017), fans of the previous Leader Ed Miliband which led to the so-called Milifandom (see Hills 2015, Wahl-Jorgensen 2019, Sandvoss 2015), or the emergence of young female fans of former UK Prime Minister Theresa May, referred to as Mayllenialls (Smith 2017). The approaches of Fan Studies have been employed to understand loyal supporters of President Donald Trump (Wahl-Jorgensen 2019), whilst the tools of online fandoms such as forums, social media, memes and hashtags have been employed by a range of groups with varying political viewpoints and agendas (Sandvoss 2013, Booth et al 2018, Wilson 2018). The increasing celebrification of politics has perhaps reached its nadir in the star status of Barack Obama (Sandvoss 2012) and the election of Donald Trump to the office of President (see Negra 2016) but the blurring of boundaries between the political and the famous continues as rumours swirl about the intentions of famous figures as diverse as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Disney CEO Bob Iger to run for office.

Meanwhile, existing fandoms continue to mobilise both political and activist efforts (Jenkins 2012, Hinck 2019) to combat human rights violations and respond to natural disasters (e.g. the efforts of the Supernatural fandom in raising money for relief for victims of Hurricane Harvey in Texas). Other fan groups often find themselves thrown into unforeseen controversial political moments, as in the juncture of singer Ariana Grande fans with narratives around international terrorism after the bombing of her concert in Manchester, or the co-option of Taylor Swift by members of the alt-right.

Given these intertwining threads, this issue focuses on the confluence of fandom and controversy. Seeking contributions from a range of disciplines including media and cultural studies, fan studies, politics, celebrity studies and beyond, contributors are invited to submit proposals on any of the above examples, the following topics, or any other aspect of the linkages between fandom, controversy and politics (in all its forms):

  • Celebrity/fan connections
  • Discourses of “superfandom”
  • Disappointment and shame within fandom
  • Links between fandom, controversy and the public sphere (e.g. fandom of certain figures or political parties, fannish resistance to political readings of texts)
  • Fandom as citizenship/fans as citizens
  • Forms of anti-fandom or non-fandom
  • The intersections between celebrity, fandom and political culture
  • Fan activism
  • The use of social media and its language (e.g. memes, hashtags, GIFs)
  • Affect and emotion
  • The importance of places and spaces, both physical and virtual
  • The creation of transformative works (e.g. fanfiction, fan videos) that address these issues
  • Material cultures
  • The ethics of studying these forms of participatory culture and fandom
  • Stan culture
  • Fandom and cancel culture
  • Toxic fandom

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words in length, plus a short author biography to Dr Rebecca Williams at Rebecca.williams@southwales.ac.uk and Dr Lucy Bennett at BennettL@cardiff.ac.uk by 31st March 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 30th April 2020.

Please note than acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee publication. All submissions will undergo double blind peer review once completed articles are submitted.

References

Booth, Paul, Amber Davisson, Aaron Hess and Ashley Hinck (2018) Poaching Politics: Online Communication During the 2016 US Presidential Election, Peter Lang.

Dean, Jonathan (2017) ‘Politicising Fandom’, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19 (2) 408–424.

Gray, Jonathan (2003) ‘New audiences, new textualities: anti-fans and non-fans’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6 (1): 64-81.

Hills, Matt (2015) ‘The ‘most unlikely’ or ‘most deserved cult’: citizen-fans and the authenticity of Milifandom’, Election Analysis 2015, http://www.electionanalysis.uk/uk-election-analysis-2015/section-7-popular-culture/the-most-unlikely-or-most-deserved-cult-citizen-fans-and-the-authenticity-of-milifandom/

Hills, Matt (2017) ‘It’s the stans wot (nearly) won it’, Election Analysis, http://www.electionanalysis.uk/uk-election-analysis-2017/section-8-personality-politics-and-popular-culture/its-the-stans-wot-nearly-won-it/

Hinck, Ashley (2019) Politics For the Love of Fandom: Fan-Based Citizenship in a Digital World, LSU Press.

Jenkins H (2012) ‘Cultural acupuncture’: Fan activism and the Harry Potter Alliance. Transformative Works and Cultures 10. Available at: http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/305/259

Jones, Bethan (2018) ‘Navigating Grief and Disgust in Lostprophet’s Fandom’. In: Williams, R. ed. Everybody Hurts: Transitions, Endings, and Resurrections in Fan Cultures. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, pp. 43-60.

Negra, Diane (2016) ‘The Reality Celebrity of Donald Trump’, Television and New Media, 17 (7).Show all authorsDiane Negra

Sandvoss, Cornel (2012) ‘Enthusiasm, Trust, and its Erosion in Mediated Politics: On Fans of Obama and the Liberal Democrats’. European Journal of Communication, 27(1): 68-81.

Sandvoss C (2013) Toward an understanding of political enthusiasm as media fandom: Blogging, fan productivity and affect in American politics. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies 10(1):252–296.

Sandvoss, Cornel (2015) ‘It’s the neutrosemy, stupid!: fans, texts and partisanship in the 2015 General Election’, Election Analysis, http://www.electionanalysis.uk/uk-election-analysis-2015/section-7-popular-culture/its-the-neutrosemy-stupid-fans-texts-and-partisanship-in-the-2015-general-election/

Sandvoss, Cornel (2017) ‘Corbyn and his fans: post-truth, myth and Labour’s hollow defeat’’, Election Analysis, http://www.electionanalysis.uk/uk-election-analysis-2017/section-8-personality-politics-and-popular-culture/corbyn-and-his-fans-post-truth-myth-and-labours-hollow-defeat/

Smith, Patrick (2017) ‘The “Mayllennials” Are Young Women Who Love Theresa May And It’s The Most Unlikely Fandom Of 2017’, Buzzfeed News, 10 May 2017  https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/the-maylennials-are-young-women-who-love-theresa-may-and

Stanfill, Mel (2019) ‘Introduction: The Reactionary in the Fan and the Fan in the Reactionary’, Television & New Media, Online First, pp. 1 – 12. DOI: 10.1177/1527476419879912

Teixeira, Lauren (2019) ‘China Is Sending Keyboard Warriors Over the Firewall’, Foreign Policy, 26 August 2019, https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/26/china-is-sending-keyboard-warriors-over-the-firewall/

Wahl-Jorgensen, Karin (2019) Emotions, Media & Politics, Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Deadline for Expressions of Interest 3/29/2020

Games and Persona – Persona Studies Journal Theme Issue

Editors: Christopher Moore and Katja Lee (3/29/2020)

Games have provided players with many opportunities to experiment with identity in ways that have fundamentally shaped social media platforms. As Apperley and Clemens (2017) have argued, networked digital media have embraced the avatar as the predominant form for the presentation of the public self online. Games also have a vibrant role in the performance of the self that is affectively charged. Because of this, games and persona interconnect beyond the virtual self of the avatar, through esports, cosplay, wikis, criticism and review and many other mediated forms of expression. The interaction between games and persona represent agency in the negotiation of complex personal, public and intimate selves which collapse the remnant distinctions between the online and off. Game developers, for example, from mainstream legends to ‘indie’ heroes and aspiring innovators, like most workers in the creative industries, must maintain online personas as part of their professional lives. The demand for such personas results in complex interactions and micro-publics between peers, colleagues, fans and consumers that are now routine to the firmament of participatory culture, with serious potential for success and controversy.

We are inviting authors and scholars to contribute to this themed issue of Persona Studies on games and persona. The issue is seeking interdisciplinary papers that consider the conceptual and theoretical dimensions of games and persona and the broader phenomenological experiences and ontological implications of games and play for persona studies. The following list is a general, and non-definitive guide to topics that we consider would be a valuable addition to exploring the relations between games and persona:

  • Avatars and identity
  • Developer and designer persona
  • Participatory persona
  • Player performances: live streaming, criticism and review, esports, cosplay and beyond
  • Player communities and micro-publics
  • Game platforms and personas: Steam, Itch.io and others
  • Persona as celebrity/micro-celebrity
  • The persona of game franchises
  • Persona in the advertising and marketing of games
  • Emerging technologies in games and the performance of the self
  • Object/subject relations: virtual and physical personas
  • Memorabilia, merchandise, collections – presentation of a passionate persona
  • Affect and agency

Apperley, Thomas and Clemens, Justin. 2017. ‘Flipping out: avatars and identity’. Boundaries of self and reality online: implications of digitally constructed realities. Jayne Gackenbach and Johnathan Bown eds. Elsevier, London. pp.41-56, doi: 10.1016/B978-0-12-804157-4.00003-7.

Key Dates

EOI: March 29

ABSTRACTS AND/PAPERS: June 15

FULL PAPERS: September 1

PUBLICATION: November 30

Please send expressions of interest and abstracts of 150-200 words to: katja.lee@uwa.edu.au or chrism@uow.edu.au

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Deadline for Submissions, March 27, 2020

Call for papers — Extended Deadline to March 27, 2020

As part of the conference Biofiction as World Literature Conference (Leuven, Belgium 29-31 October, 2020), I will convene a panel on

“Gendering Biofiction as World Literature”,

for which I am seeking contributions.

Biofiction is a genre that focuses on individual historical figures but often projects and negotiates larger social or political issues through the individual life. This panel, in keeping with the conference theme, proposes to examine the capacity of biofiction to reflect and, perhaps, to shift perceptions of gender. It asks how particular biofictions can be related to large-scale movements and systems of thought, such as second or third-wave feminism, intersectionality, gender performativity, or more traditional conceptions of gender that operate(d) across national boundaries. Transnational or transcultural biofictions (where the author takes on a subject from another culture or where the subject’s life crossed national boundaries or is thought to have transnational significance) will be of particular interest in this context.

Papers will be 20 minutes long.

The full call for papers for the conference can be found at
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper, and a brief bio note (150w) to Julia.Novak@univie.ac.at, by 27 March 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions, March 10 or 15, depending on panel

The MLA Genre Studies Forum in Life Writing welcomes abstracts for the following sessions at the MLA Convention in Toronto (January 7-10, 2021). 
Assembled Lives
How are auto/biographical texts materially and/or socially “assembled”? How do archives, social media platforms, databases, social movements, and other collections offer resources for life stories? How do we theorize assembled lives? 300-word abstract and bio by March 10, 2020, to John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu).
#resistance
How do life narratives chart or embody resistance, in their choice of stories, subjects, or forms, and to what effects? Which stories of resistance will circulate, with what reception? 300-word abstract and bio by March 10, 2020, to Laurie McNeill (laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca).
Lives In/Between Language
How does the persistence, loss, or recovery of a language inflect life narratives emerging from diasporic and/or indigenous communities? 300-word abstract and bio by March 15,2020,  to Rebecca Dingo (rebecca.dingo@gmail.com) and John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu).
#community
Communities encompass physical spaces and the people who inhabit them. How do we memorialize lives in/as community, cultivating real and imagined geographies to resist displacement and envision alternate futures? 250-word abstracts by March 15 to Ricia Anne Chansky (ricia.chansky@upr.edu) and Angela Ards (ardsa@bc.edu).
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Deadline for Proposals: March 15, 2020

Dear colleagues,

We invite you to submit article proposals for a special issue in Poetics Today, titled “Engaging Narrative Theory: Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom”, please see the CFP below, and the same here:

https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/cfps/

The deadline for proposals is March 15.

Call for PapersSpecial issue of Poetics Today 2022Guest Editors: Maria Mäkelä & Hanna Meretoja

Engaging Narrative Theory: Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom

“Narratives are everywhere” was once the triumphant slogan of narrative scholars, but now we are starting to realize that this might in fact be a problem. In contemporary social media induced narrative environments, stories of personal change and disruptive experience often end up dominating over systematic data or scientific knowledge. As argued by researcher of social politics Sujatha Fernandes (2017), the contemporary storytelling boom is, in essence, inseparable from the neoliberal doctrine highlighting the upward mobility of an individual, while downplaying supra-individual societal structures and processes. Moreover, compelling stories are extremely difficult to challenge and falsify, regardless of their purpose and consequences. Narrative has, indeed, a unique capacity to capture and convey human experience – what it feels like to be this particular person living through these particular events. This doctrine is now being widely popularized across spheres of life; storytelling consultancy thrives, economists talk about “narrative economics” (Shiller 2019), and practices ranging from personal branding (see Salmon 2010) to socio-political activism (see Polletta 2006, Fernandes 2017) increasingly draw from a narrative repertoire. An insufficiently researched area are all the possible downsides of these engaging narratives that everyone should allegedly be crafting in today’s story economy. While Western literary and philosophical traditions have their own strong story-critical currents, contemporary practices of storytelling are permeated by a strong story-positivity that ought to be challenged by narratologists as well as philosophically, sociologically, and psychologically oriented narrative scholars.

Many contemporary researchers in literary studies, psychology and philosophy like to claim that engaging with narratives enhances our mind-reading ability, or cognitive empathy, which plays a crucial role in social interaction and moral development. It is no wonder, then, that narrative is being touted as the miracle cure for a wide variety of individual and social ills. Many narrative studies approaches lend generous support to the instrumentalization of narrative form, and storytelling consultants and manuals are eagerly repeating more or less streamlined versions of recent studies on narrative and empathy. 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 large-scale consequences that were neither intended nor anticipated. Experientiality may come at the cost of informativeness, while the narrative form as such tends to complicate the distinction between fact and fiction. Self-fashioning through cultural narratives adopted from self-help literature is not without its risks either. Furthermore, while narratives are ideally suited to conveying human experiences, they may simplify and misrepresent – or simply fail to depict – complex social interactions or material processes, such as climate change. Consequently, one pertinent task for contemporary narrative scholars is to highlight not only the affordances but also the epistemic, cognitive, and ethical limitations of narrative forms and easily shareable masterplots (Mäkelä 2018, Mäkelä forthcoming).

Both academic and popular discourse on the moral and cognitive benefits of literature can be seen as closely related to the general storytelling boom. Today, narrative fiction is instrumentalized and even medicalized in the service of wellbeing and self-help industry; overly simplifying popularizations of, for example, empirical research on reading produce simplistic advice (see e.g. “For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov”, Belluck 2013, The New York Times). In critical discussion of the storytelling boom, however, it is worth looking at how fiction itself has critically engaged with narrative. Particularly since the crisis of storytelling in modernism and postmodernism Western fiction has problematized narrative as a form of representation – questioning it from ontological, epistemological and ethical perspectives and thematizing the risks and potential of narrative in nuanced ways that manifest metanarrativity, self-aware reflection on the role of cultural narratives in our lives (Meretoja 2014). Drawing on the complexity with which narrative fiction has explored this issue, narrative scholars have recently sought to provide nuanced models for evaluating the risks and benefits of different kinds of narrative practices (Schiff et al. [ed.] 2017; Meretoja 2018).

The Poetics Today special issue Engaging Narrative Theory: Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom seeks to redefine the role of narrative theorists and analysts in the contemporary storytelling boom. If research on the benefits of storytelling has caught on in the public imagination and various professional practices, we should be in a position to disseminate critical practices for the analysis of the forms and contexts of storytelling as well. We invite narrative scholars across disciplines to critically address the following (and related) issues:

  • discourse on well-being and cognitive benefits of literature, “literature makes us better people”, empathy·           
  • sociological criticism of curated storytelling (Fernandes 2017) and the critique of empathy (Shuman 2005)
  • narrative and post-truth
  • storytelling boom and its relation to late capitalism, “narrative economics” (Shiller 2018, Beckert 2016)
  • the story-critical potential of fiction
  • literary industry affected by the storytelling boom
  • narrative consultancy business; storytelling self-help and manuals
  • story-critical reading in narrative studies? story-critical tools for audiences?
  • “narrative” as a slogan and poor instrumental use of terms like “narrative” and “storytelling” across disciplines and spheres of life
  • popularizing narrative theory
  • social life of narratives vs. analysis of individual texts
  • uses and risks of viral storytellingPlease send a proposal of max. 300 words and a short biographical statement to Maria Mäkelä (maria.makela@tuni.fi) and Hanna Meretoja (hanna.meretoja@utu.fi) by March 15, 2020. References

Beckert, Jens 2016. Imagined Futures. Fictional Expectations and Capitalist Dynamics. Cambrige, MA: Harvard University Press.

Fernandes, Sujatha 2017. Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mäkelä, Maria 2018. “Lessons from the Dangers of Narrative Project: Toward a Story-Critical Narratology.” Tekstualia 2018:4, 175–186. Open access.

Mäkelä, Maria forthcoming 2020. “Through the Cracks in the Safety Net: Narratives of Personal Experience in Social Media and Human Interest Journalism.” In Marianne Wolff Lundholt & Klarissa Lueg (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives. New York & London: Routledge.

Meretoja, Hanna 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Meretoja, Hanna 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Polletta, Francesca 2006. It Was Like a Fever. Storytelling in Protest and Politics. London: University of Chicago Press.

Salmon, Christian 2010. Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, transl. by David Macey. London and New York: Verso.

Schiff, Brian; A. Elizabeth McKim & Sylvie Patron (eds.) 2017. Life and Narrative: The Risks and Responsibilities of Storying Experience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shiller, Robert J. 2019. Narrative Economics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Shuman, Amy 2005. Other People’s Stories: Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

———————-
Hanna Meretoja

Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku, Finland
Visiting Fellow, Exeter College and Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (Wolfson College), University of Oxford

Tel. +358 50 329 1783

Co-organizers Melba Cuddy-Keane (University of Toronto) and Brian Richardson (University of Maryland) invite paper proposals for the guaranteed ISSN panel at MLA 2021 in Toronto, Canada, from January 7th – 10th. 
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Deadline for Proposals: March 15, 2020

Narrative beyond Stories: Telling Life Differently
A guaranteed panel for the International Society for the Study of Narrative session at MLA 2021

Despite the continuing hold on the critical imagination of Peter Brooks’s “reading for the plot,” a significant strand of narrative rejects, as its primary driver, the forward progressive impulsion of linear events. Modernist novelists in particular wrote against the Victorian plot, citing its disconnection from lived experience, the falsity of its Bildungsroman construction of achievement as stable identity, its masculinist assumptions about outward markers of success. Writers, in the early 20th century, experienced life differently.

The modernist over-riding of monologic linear plot has been well plumbed, as has its later postmodernist manifestations (Brian Richardson 2006; 2015); the present panel seeks to understand the more recent resistance, in contemporary fiction and film, to telling life through “stories.”  Has non-linearity seeped from modernist and postmodernist texts into mainstream 21st-century consciousness, and what new forms of meaning emerge in such “updating”? Has a feeling of being betrayed by action plots with their inscriptions of human agency occasioned a new determinism as when, in Joon-Ho Bong’s film Parasite (2019), Ki-taek says to his son, “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. . . . Because life cannot be planned,” adding that once the chaotic chain of events takes over and there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you are not responsible. Or do we find instead what Brian Ott and Greg Dickinson identify as “rhetoric’s materiality,” focusing on sensations of “presence” rather than linguistic constructions of “meaning,” and shifting agency from the humanist subject to the physical world in ecological and post-humanist ways (“Redefining Rhetoric: Why Matter Matters,” 2019, and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015)? Or is skepticism about progressive plots shifting narrative from action to listening and conversation, adjusting our expectations of, and attitudes toward, human relationships (Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma (2018)?  Alternatively, what underlies mammoth efforts to “fit everything in,” as in in Olga Neuwirth’s trans-gender, trans-genre, “Mxd” media opera Orlando (2019)?  But can we truly escape the dialectic between storied and non-storied minds, encapsulated in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy (2014; 2017; 2018) when the narrator’s interlocutor states, “I discovered that a life with no story was not, in the end, a life that I could live,” and the narrator responds, “I said that, on the contrary, I had come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living a life as unmarked by self-will as possible.”

Papers are invited addressing any of the above questions, from any theoretical position, and analyzing narrative in any media. While we are interested in new forms such as weak narrativity (McHale 2001), we invoke the Proteus Principle (Sternberg 1982) that the same form can have different meanings in different contexts and times and so seek discussions relating form to such contemporary issues as:
·      Escalating challenges (economic and environmental) to a belief in possible futures
·      Refocusing of the human-centered to the ecologically informed
·      Feminist disillusionments with the popular “you can turn your life around” plot
·      Increasing complexity in digital platforms, global interactions, cognitive structures
We hope to stimulate audience discussion of the question: given the emphasis today on the value of constructing positive progressive narratives in everything from therapy to governing to marketing, why might we still have a need to tell life differently?

Please send 300-word abstracts plus short bio by Sunday, March 15, 2020, to Professors Cuddy-Keane and Richardson at m.cuddy.keane@utoronto.ca and richb@umd.edu. 
All best,
Melba and Brian
Melba Cuddy-Keane
Emerita Professor
Department of English
Jackman Humanities Bldg.
University of Toronto
170 St. George St., 6th floor
Toronto, ON M5R 2M8

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MLA Roundtable Special Session: What’s Next? Naming Post-Immigrant Diaspora Literature (3/15/2020; 1/7-10/2021) Toronto

On December 30, 2019, Cesar Miguel (@cesarmvm) tweeted “Diaspora is almost becoming as useless a term as immigrant.” The thread continued by distinguishing between the experiences of refugees and those who gained easier access to documentation and residence because it “benefited American/European geopolitical interests; those who make six figures in highly trained fields and those who earn way below the poverty line.” Min Hyoung Song echoed Cesar Miguel’s thoughts but with relation to terms further associated with migration, noting that we need to reconceptualize the language of migration, and Viet Thanh Nguyen chimed in to note that – as per Paul Gilroy – most terms inevitably require clarification and adjectival distinction.

They key emphases of these claims – the heterogeneous experiences of diasporic people who migrate to the US and the need for new terms to describe new circumstances – constitute the focus of this roundtable. Participants will investigate the ways in which we name, talk about, and categorize US literature by migrants, (im)migrants, refugees and/or that which we have called transnational literature, literature of the diaspora, and multiethnic literature. When and why are these terms less effective than they used to be? What use value does their historicity still offer – if any? What forms do/might these alternately named literatures take? What other terms can we propose?

Topics of particular interest include: labor and migration; climate change and migration; considerations of shifting ethno-racial constructions; explorations of different genres and forms (i.e., novel vs. poetry vs. memoir); comparative perspectives (i.e., between sending and receiving countries); generative proposals for new terminology

Please submit abstracts of 250 words to Diana Filar, dfilar@brandeis.edu by March 15, 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2020

British Travels to Germany

deadline for submissions: 
March 15, 2020
NB–notice did not give dates for conference–please contact the organizers.

For centuries, the close ties between Britain and Germany have found expression not least on the level of personal travel. Travellers came from Britain to Germany for a host of occasions and with the most diverse aims, expectations, and preconceptions. This conference explores the reports produced about their experiences in German lands by travellers from England, Scotland, and Ireland since the Middle Ages.

Travel accounts of this sort are not merely ‘about’ travel and its circumstances, but they construct images of Germany and ‘the’ Germans. Whether – and to what extent – Germany even existed as an entity and object of observation is a matter of specific historical circumstance, of course. However, travel writing is a particularly salient medium for communicating observed geographical, political or cultural units. The mere fact that a ‘German’ space should be perceived – whether as destination, transit space, or neighbouring borderland – offers productive insight into a period’s British image of Germany. Travellers make first-hand experiences that will often precipitate the revision of stereotypical preconceptions or prejudices. Travel accounts will enter into a dialogue with such images of the other, (re-)producing or transforming them. Thus, travel writing must be seen as an agent within the network of cultural relations between Britain and Germany. It can be fruitfully studied for its representation of Germany and Germans encountered by British travellers – including social, political, cultural and ethnographic aspects as much as representations and constructions of ‘natural’ sites and spaces. Next to specific occasions and contexts for travel, the intended readership of travel accounts needs to be taken into account.

Similarly, the form of individual accounts rewards attention. Travel writing is inevitably suspended between fact and fiction. Surely, a diplomat’s code message serves a different function than the unreliable narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915), or a BBC programme on a royal visit to Germany. Even when an account is clearly marked as fiction (such as that of Victor Frankenstein’s Rhine valley sojourn), its representation of Germany may create discursively powerful ‘facts’. Contributions might inquire into the formal – i.e., generic, textual, (tele-)visual, musical, or intermedial – nature of travel accounts and how they employ historically contingent ‘form-knowledge’ in order to bestow authority on the knowledge about Germany and Germans they communicate.

The conference aims to examine the history of this inter- and, potentially, transnational phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. We invite proposals for twenty-minute papers from the fields of history, literary and cultural studies, art history, the history of science, and related fields on British, English, Scottish, and Irish travellers to Germany from the Middle Ages to the present day. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

–       reasons for, and aims of, travels to Germany

–       conditions of travel (e.g., economic, cultural, logistical)

–       forms and genres of travel writing

–       political systems and their representation

–       economic, technological, and scientific exchange

–       the experience of conflict, war and reconciliation

–       the negotiation of regional, national and transnational identities

Abstracts of around 300 words, along with a brief biographical note, should be submitted by March 15 to Dr Florian Klaeger, Universität Bayreuth (klaeger [at] uni-bayreuth.de).

As host, the Prinz-Albert-Gesellschaft will cover travel expenses for contributors. The conference proceedings will be published in the Prinz-Albert-Studien / Prince Albert Studies (PAS) series (with Duncker & Humblot, under the general editorship of Frank-Lothar Kroll).

Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2020

Age and Aging in Texts by Goethe and His Contemporaries (5/15/2020; 1/7-10/2021) Modern Language Association, Toronto, Canada

Panel sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America

Annual Conference of the Modern Language Association

January 7-10, 2021, Toronto, ON

Organizers: Christine Lehleiter and Elisa Leonzio

Goethe was one of the relatively few of his generation who enjoyed an extended life span and it comes as no surprise that reflections on age and the aging process are frequent in his work. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister undoubtedly had significant impact on the establishment of an ideological context in which the young bourgeois individual was expected to leave the parents’ house in order to become an autonomous being and, at the same time, a productive member of society (cf. Franco Moretti, Andrea Charise). Considering this framework, the elderly person that might suffer diminished economic productivity and lose autonomy when returning to the family or other support networks might seem a failure. However, while the Meister novel follows a young hero, in Goethe’s Elective Affinities the narrator takes a more critical position vis-a-vis Eduard’s enthusiasm for everything that is young and new while older individuals like the gardener highlight the values of maturity and duration. In other texts by Goethe, old age offers alternative perspectives from which modernity can be challenged. At the end of Faust II, Philemon and Baucis in their old age are strong reminders of the victims of the colonizing project driven by an ideology of progress. Even in those places where aging is depicted explicitly as a burden and obstacle (The Man of Fifty Years) new happiness is found once age is accepted and endorsed.

Against the backdrop of recent scholarship in historical and literary studies on old age in Western Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries (cf. Andrea Charise, Karen Chase, Susannah Ottaway), this panel seeks to explore presentations and conceptualizations of age and aging in texts by Goethe and his contemporaries. We welcome proposals from a wide range of texts and we are particularly interested in contributions that explore the topic at the intersection of literature and medicine. Beyond our overarching question of how age and aging were experienced, represented, and conceptualized in texts by Goethe and his contemporaries, topics may include (but are not limited to): What kind of values are associated with old age? How do these values inform social (in particular intergenerational) interactions (respect, stigmatization, care)? How are the categories of age, class, and gender connected (the widow, the alms receiver, the old sage)? What kind of strategies are employed in order to deal with old age or to postpone its onset (cosmetics, diet, exercise)? Is there an aesthetics of old age? What ideal of health, and what “welfare system,” emerges from the texts, and what kind of power and power discourses are implied? How do the authors deal with the pain and deterioration usually associated with aging? What are the connections between medical and literary texts regarding the conceptualization of old age?

This panel is sponsored by the Goethe Society of North America.

Please send an abstract of no more than 350 words to Christine Lehleiter (christine.lehleiter@utoronto.ca) and Elisa Leonzio (elisa.leonzio@unito.it) by March 15th, 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2020

Call for Book Chapters: The Other #MeToos

Chapter proposal submission deadline: 15 March 2020

Since the inception of #MeToo, conversations have largely centered on the movement’s development in the United States. This edited collection focuses on the reception, translation, and adaptation of #MeToo in non-Western, indigenous, and/or postcolonial contexts; it aims to explore how #MeToo, a popularly Western-centric feminist movement, translates to politically, culturally, religiously, geographically, and academically Othered places and Othered genders.

This edited collection aims to explore the following ideas: (i) #MeToo has become a transnational feminist movement (ii) #MeToo works effectively through revisions rather than replication (iii) #MeToo assumes a different face in non-Western, non-White, postcolonial, transnational, and indigenous feminisms (iv) These other #MeToos require different theoretical approaches that need to be closely connected with feminist praxis and (v) #MeToo works in alliance with local progressive political forces.

We look for chapter contributions that, via eclectic, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches, bring together personal and academic experiences of and responses to #MeToo in diverse sociopolitical cultures and academic locations. Please submit a 250-word chapter proposal, 50-150 word long bio, and a CV at TheOtherMeToos@gmail.com by 15 March 2020.

Contact information: TheOtherMeToos@gmail.com

Submission: Chapter title + chapter abstract (250 words) + bio (100 words) + CV

Submission Deadline: 15 March 2020

Acceptance Notification: 20 April 2020

Should you have any questions, please feel free to email me at the address given above.

Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2020

Autobiography: excess, self-expenditure

19th International Meeting of the Scientific Observatory of Autobiographical Memory in Written, Oral and Iconographic Form
23-24-25 June 2020

organised by the cultural association Mediapolis.Europa http://mediapoliseuropa.com/
in collaboration with

L’Istituto Centrale per i Beni Sonori ed Audiovisivi [Central Institute for Audio and Audio-visual Assets]

and

la Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea [Modern and Contemporary History Library]

Palazzo Mattei di Giove
Via Michelangelo Caetani 32 – 00186 Rome

“Although an entire intellectual tradition sees the flight of the soul out of its material bonds to be a positive good, another learned tradition that also goes back to ancient sources appeals to a different sense of the word ‘excess’ to designate that which goes beyond the correct proportions in the material order itself.” (Starobinski J. 2008, p. 75).

Breaking boundaries and excess constitute the prime movers of different narrations in the first person. How are these behaviours delineated in self-narration? In what way do they construct a person’s identity? With which arguments and in which relationship with the idea of Power?
With this call for papers we intend to invite proposals that consider self-expenditure and excess in autobiographical writings. That is, autobiographies by both ordinary people and recognised individuals, which are not supported, legitimated, by ideological plaudit, be it political, religious, etc.

Every culture sets ethical boundaries with which every individual confronts oneself. Crossing boundaries is allowed in certain liberating situations such as bacchanals or carnivals, but these are circumscribed in terms of time and space.
The unlimited and the infinite correspond to conceptions with different nuances: it is possible to go beyond recognised forms or to act in an infinite motus while denying the existence of boundaries. Current parlance translates the idea of boundary using a vocabulary borrowed from geometry: measure, the right way, to be square, to be conclusive (that is, to remain within a circumscribed topic or area of action), etc.

Nicomachean Ethics, a posthumous publication by Aristotle (who lived from 384 or 383 to 322 BC), places at the centre of its reasoning endoxa, the common opinions of both ordinary and learned people. These endoxa are the boundaries that derive from society’s orientation. Aristotle does not necessarily share current opinions but appropriates them as the basis of social bonding. They appear as a behavioural diktat and have a pragmatic value. In Book II of Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle writes that virtue develops pragmatically: one learns how to build by building, how to play cithara by playing it, etc.

How is ethics conceived of? “this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean. […] Virtue, therefore is a mean state in the sense that it is able

In medio stat virtus situates virtue in space. It is a locution of medieval scholastic philosophy that appropriated Aristotle’s conception.

to hit the mean. […] so this is another reason why excess and deficiency are a mark of vice, and observance of the mean a mark of virtue (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II, 6).

As Jean Starobinski reminds us (Starobinski J., 2008, p. 76), the term ‘excess’ in the Bible refers to the exit of life, excessus vitae. An excess that does not recognise boundaries is a serious threat to the social system. “The myth of Dom Juan came about at a moment in European history when the subject of the inconstancy of the human heart and the related subject of its various drives—feeling, knowing, dominating (libido sentienti, libido sciendi, libido dominandi)—were intensely debated by the moralists of the day” (Ibidem).

The two great myths of modernity, Faust and Don Giovanni, are condemned due to two excesses: libido sciendi and libido sentiendi. Already the Middle Ages deplored sapiens mundi. Ulysses in Dante’s Inferno is an example of this.
In fact, excess practised ad libitum aims at laying claim to an eternalisation of one’s own behaviour, a transcendentality, replacing another power.

The exhibition held at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of de Sade’s death (2014), which was organised on the basis of de Sade’s various epistolary evidence, was entitled Attaquer le soleil: that is, aspiring to deprive the universe of the vital star, using it to burn the universe itself. (Le Brun A., 2014, p. 19).

Many autobiographical narrations in Romanticism (relating to dandyism, satanism, alcoholism, and others) would make excess the centre of their own existential narration.
In “Être comme excès”, Rocco Ronchi writes: “what opens to me the immensity in which I lose myself is the being as excess, a being deprived of material reality, throbbing, rhythmical – a being which has in itself an integral transcendence, a being that is uncontainable in the shape of identity and exceeds the space that reveals apophantic judgement. This being is not immobile, its manner of being – its essence in the verbal sense – rightly resides in the fact of transcending, of rotating outside of itself (I am borrowing this sentence from Marc Bloch), of getting lost and challenging oneself” (Ronchi R., 2000, p. 8).

The term ‘self-expenditure,’ therefore, has a particular role and different significant values. In sport, self-expenditure can be identified with what is at stake, the challenge, the individual risk outside of the great apparatuses.
“The Notion of Expenditure” by Georges Bataille

. It is the principle of loss, that is, of unconditioned expenditure (Ibid., p.169). Societies in general, and the Western one due to their economic structure, do not want to squander the essence of their own assets and regard the person as an asset, a capital.
Acting in itself must not be in the service of any return or recompense. These are arguments to which Bataille returns in various writings (e.g. On Nietzsche, 1945). Concepts such as useful/useless, gratuitous/interested, arbitrary/imposed, are involved.
Is this a form of revolt? According to Camus, revolt embodies the very identity of the individual, his cogito (Camus A., 1951). The rebel does not recognise impositions: he is not a revolutionary and does not conceive of systems (revolution meaning strategic and preconceived acting aimed at achieving an ideal that overturns the status quo). The rebel fights against any ideological barrier and cage. Camus evokes the figures of Cain, de Sade, Saint-Just, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Bakunin, Nietzsche.

Different autobiographies embody a willingness to go beyond the recognised and shared

boundaries.

It is possible to establish a certain distinction between the behaviour whereby a boundary is recognised and overcome, and the practice of excess as complete rejection of the boundary, such as a way of acting ad infinitum.

(1933) examines how society imposes

productivity in its entire spectrum. Society recognises the right to acquire, conserve or consume

rationally, but it excludes the principle of unproductive expenditure (Bataille G., 1985, p.137)

The idea of anti-utilitarianism is ennobling. Self-expenditure without concatenations is in many

respects a chimera. A grade-zero behaviour, without residues, cannot exist.

Nevertheless, taking shelter in the necessity of being productive (in every sense) may in turn constitute a form of power. Being losers may mean annihilating the power that the Other exerts on ourselves (Lippi 2008, p. 62).

Years ago, in an article published in Il Tempo (Pasolini P. P., 1973), Pasolini reviewed the autobiography of a Russian pilgrim, associating him with Lazarillo de Tormes. The pilgrim about whom Pasolini writes (who we understand from the text was 33 years of age in 1859) wanders with the prayer book Philokalia (love of the beautiful) and recounts his wanderings to a spiritual father. Pasolini writes that the pilgrim and Lazarillo remain invincible in their resigned nature that annihilates the very idea of power due to excess of passivity: “There is nothing that proves power wrong so much as Resignation, which is actually a refusal of power in any form (that is, it makes it what it actually is, namely an illusion)”.

With this call for papers we intend to investigate the relationship between autobiographical narration as an expression of going beyond, as a pursuit of the extreme in relation to the concept of boundary, or as a practice of excess, understanding how, stated or implied, these components constitute the framework of the argument of the writing examined.

Some biographical references

ANONYMOUS, T

ARISTOTLE, Nicomachean Ethics, translated by H. Rackham, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1934. [Fourth century BC].

Georges BATAILLE, “The Notion of Expenditure” in Visions of Excess: selected writings, 1927– 1939, edited by Allan Stoekl, translated by Allan Stoekl with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 1985 (Originally published in La part Maudite, Paris, Points, 1933). http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/bhobbs/Bataille-the-Notion-of-Expenditure.pdf

Albert CAMUS, The Rebel, translated by Anthony Bower, London, Penguin Books, 2000.

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k1118599/f4.image

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k314854/f1.image vv. I- Thomas DE QUINCEY, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2040/2040-h/2040-h.htm

Annie LE BRUN, SADE-Attaquer le soleil, Paris, Musée d’Orsay-Gallimard, 2014.

The implications of self-expenditure and the practice of excess are manifold, as you can see.

he Way of a Pilgrim: Candid Tales of a Wanderer to His Spiritual Father, translated

by Anna Zaranko with an introduction by Andrew Louth, Penguin Books, 2017.

Benvenuto CELLINI, Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, edited by Orazio Bacci, Firenze, Sansoni, 1901.

(Written between 1558 and November1562).

CASANOVA, Histoire de ma vie, Paris, Livre de Poche, 2004.

Mémoires de J. Casanova de Seingalt, écrits par lui-même, written in French, between 1789 and

1798, published posthumously in1825.

Silvia LIPPI, “De la dépense improductive à la jouissance « bavarde»”, in Transgressions. Bataille,

Lacan, edited by S. LIPPI , Toulouse, ERES, “Point Hors Ligne”, 2008, pp. 62-71.

URL: https://www.cairn.info/transgressions–9782749209753-page-62.htm Marie José MONDZAIN, De l’excès, Théatre/Public 178.

P. P. PASOLINI, “‘Come pregare?’ ‘Come mangiare?’ Esperienze di un Prete e di un Letterato”, in Il Tempo, 11 February1973.

Jean STAROBINSKI, “Registers of Excess,” in Enchantment: The Seductress in Opera, translated by C. Jon Delogu, New York, Columbia University Press, 2008. (Originally published as Les enchantresses, Paris, Seuil, 2005).

Lionel TERRAY, Les conquérants de l’inutile: des Alpes à l’Annapurna, Paris, Gallimard, 1961. Autobiography: excess, self-expenditure

23-24-25 June 2020 – Roma, Palazzo Mattei di Giove

LANGUAGES ADMITTED FOR THE INTERVENTIONS: English, French, Italian, Spanish. Every speaker will speak in their chosen language; there will be no simultaneous translation. A rough passive understanding would be desirable.

A) The deadline for the submission of papers is 15 March 2020. Candidates are asked to present an abstract of up to 250 words, with citation of two reference texts, and a brief curriculum vitae of up to 100 words, with possible mention of two publications, be they articles or books. These must be submitted online on the conference registration page of the http://mediapoliseuropa.com/ Website.

The scientific committee will read and select every proposal that will be sent to the conference registration page of the http://mediapoliseuropa.com/ Website. For any information, please contact the following: beatrice.barbalato@gmail.com, irenemeliciani@gmail.com,
Notification of the accepted proposals will be given by 30 March 2020.

B) In regard to enrolment in the colloquium, once the proposal is accepted the fees are the following:
Before 10 April 2020: 110,00€
From 11 April to 10 May 2020: 130,00€

Enrolment cannot be accepted in loco.

Ph.D. students:
Before 10 April 2020: 75,00€
From 11 April to 10 Mai 2020: 90,00€ Enrolment cannot be accepted in loco.

C) For information on registration fees, past symposia, the association’s activities, and the organising and scientific teams, please refer to our Website:

http://mediapoliseuropa.com/

The association Mediapolis.Europa contributes to the publication of the journal Mnemosyne, o la costruzionedel senso, Presses universitaires de Louvain, www.i6doc.com,
Indexed a scientific journal in:

Rocco RONCHI, “Une ontologie de l’excès”,Lignes, 2000/1 (n° 1), pp. 107-124. DOI :

Scientific Committee

Beatrice BARBALATO, Mediapolis.Europa

May CHEHAB, Université de Chypre

Fabio CISMONDI, Euro Fusion
Antonio CASTILLO GÓMEZ, univ. Alcala de Henares (Madrid) Albert MINGELGRÜN, Universite Libre de Bruxelles
Giulia PELILLO-HESTERMEYER, Universitat Heidelberg
Anna TYLUSIŃSKA-KOWALSKA, Uniwersytet Warszawski

Management

Irene MELICIANI, managing director Mediapolis.Europa

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Deadline for Submissions March 10, 2020

Living with Disabilities in New England, 1600-1900

(3/10/2020; 6/19/21/2020) Deerfield, USA

The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife (founded 1976) is pleased to announce the subject of this year’s conference, Living with Disabilities in New England, 1600–1900, to be held in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in June 2020. The purpose of the Dublin Seminar is to serve as a meeting place where scholars, students, and committed avocational researchers who share an interest in a specific subject can pool their knowledge and exchange ideas and methods.

The Dublin Seminar is now accepting proposals for papers and presentations that address the history of people living with disabilities in New England and adjacent areas of New York and Canada from 1600 to 1900. The principal topic examined by this conference is how children and adults with disabilities experienced disability in everyday life.

Proposals might address the following questions:

  • How was disability defined during this period?
  • How did gender, race, and class intersect with the experience and meaning of disability?
  • What was the relationship between the law and disability?
  • How did people with disabilities interact with institutions ranging from religious organizations to state-sponsored hospitals to schools?
  • What is the history of disability within the context of military or industrial settings?
  • How did people with disabilities interact with material culture and technology, including but not limited to assistive technologies such as artificial limbs and hearing aids; clothing; landscapes and buildings; and service animals?
  • What is the relationship between medical history and disability history?

The Seminar encourages papers that reflect interdisciplinary approaches and original research, especially those based on material culture, archaeological artifacts, letters and diaries, vital records, federal and state censuses, as well as newspapers, visual culture, business records, recollections, autobiographies, and public history practice or advocacy at museums, archives, and elsewhere.

Living with Disabilities in New England, 1600–1900, will be held in Deerfield, Massachusetts, on the weekend of June 19-21, 2020, and will consist of approximately seventeen lectures of twenty minutes each. Professional development points will be available for public school teachers. Selected papers will appear as the 2020 Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar to be published about eighteen months after the conference.

The Dublin Seminar will be held in the Deerfield Community Center (DCC), Historic Deerfield’s public lecture facility. The DCC is wheelchair accessible via a ramp and has an accessible restroom. For information or questions regarding accessibility and/or the program or requests concerning other forms of accommodation, call Julie Orvis, Special Events Coordinator, (413) 775-7179 or email jorvis@historic-deerfield.org.

To submit a paper proposal for this conference, please submit (as a single email attachment, in Word or as a pdf) a one-page prospectus that describes the paper and its sources and a one-page vita or biography by March 10, 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions March 8, 2020

Storytelling and Identity through Digital Media–Special Issue of Storytelling, Self, Society Journal (3/8/2020)

Digital media has drastically altered the way ordinary folk and professional users develop, tell, and share stories of culture. It challenges notions of authenticity and truth and the ethics of who has the privilege to tell a story. This special issue of Storytelling, Self, Society will investigate the way digital media has specifically altered practices such as narrative, character/identity, culture, story creation, and dissemination. Research questions might include: How do public and private users develop cultural media? What are the effects of insider and outside digital storytelling practices on identity formation? What constitutes authenticity and truthfulness in digital storytelling practices? Who has the right to tell a story online and from which perspectives? How can digital storytelling practices reframe identity and culture narratives for ordinary folk? How do people work within the limits of the media to tell narratives of identity and culture? What is the futurity of cultural digital media narrative artifacts? What is the impact of cultural digital narratives on travel and tourism? Are there differences between digital narratives and those told in person? What creative digital media projects are currently being employed to discuss narratives of identity and culture? What dissemination practices reach audiences most effectively? How do diverse audiences respond to or reflect the impact of digital stories of identity and narrative?

List of potential topics:

● Authenticity and truthfulness

● Ethics of identity shaping

● Social media

● Augmented/Virtual Reality

● Video games

● Video storytelling and Vlogs

● Character creation

● Gamer identity

● Identity groups (ex. LGBTQ+, Latinx)

● Avatars

● Public vs. personal identities

● Public History

Please submit articles of approx. 6000-9000 words/25-30 pages (Times New Roman 12pt. double-spaced) to Amanda Hill, Ph.D. at ahill5@stmarytx.edu.

Deadline for Submissions March 7, 2020

Call for papers

As part of the conference Biofiction as World Literature Conference (Leuven, Belgium 29-31 October, 2020), I will convene a panel on

“Gendering Biofiction as World Literature”

for which I am seeking contributions.

Biofiction is a genre that focuses on individual historical figures but often projects and negotiates larger social or political issues through the individual life. This panel, in keeping with the conference theme, proposes to examine the capacity of biofiction to reflect and, perhaps, to shift perceptions of gender. It asks how particular biofictions can be related to large-scale movements and systems of thought, such as second or third-wave feminism, intersectionality, gender performativity, or more traditional conceptions of gender that operate(d) across national boundaries. Transnational or transcultural biofictions (where the author takes on a subject from another culture or where the subject’s life crossed national boundaries or is thought to have transnational significance) will be of particular interest in this context.

Papers will be 20 minutes long.

The full call for papers for the conference can be found at
https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/biofiction-as-world-literature/call-for-papers

Please send an abstract of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper, and a brief bio note (150w) to Julia.Novak@univie.ac.at, by 7 March 2020.

Deadline for Submissions March 1, 2020
Trauma, Narratives, Institutions: Transdisciplinary Dialogues

A Special Issue of the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation

Deadline for Submissions March 1 2020

Special Issue Guest Editors: Michael Salter, PhD & Iro Filippaki, PhD

SPECIAL ISSUE: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS AND PEER-REVIEWERS

This special issue of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation aims at bringing together socio-historical, anthropological, psychological, and cultural theorizations of institutional roles and narratives and the ways that they impact the lives of traumatized individuals.

Narratives and Institutions: Virtually all institutions are sustained through production of narratives (Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory). These narratives reflect the power relations and ideologies of institutions and reveal the politics of the larger structures that govern them. In light of ongoing global forced migrations, socio-political negotiations of gender and trauma, and persistent urban inequalities worldwide, institutional presence is ubiquitous but insidious in its workings. While it is well recognized that institutional betrayal can revictimize trauma survivors through shaming or victim-blaming narratives (Smith and Freyd 2014), neither the narratives on which institutions rely nor the narratives that they produce are systematically explored within trauma studies.

Unanswered Questions:  How are institutions positioned to manage psychic and bodily trauma and how does trauma manifest and develop under institutional narratives of power? How can the narrative representation of trauma through literature, history, and art shed light on current institutional practices, and conversely, what kinds of representations are produced under institutional influence? What are the experiences of trauma caused, for example, by living under racist rhetoric and structures? How is the experience of trauma changed when it is enacted by social institutions, and when it has institutional power behind it? And, importantly, what kind of a narrative is trauma itself, and how does it shape the content and methodology of different disciplines?

The co-editors will consider theoretical and conceptual manuscripts, position papers, clinical conceptualizations, and comprehensive literature reviews. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to military sexual trauma, medicine, race, and gender, literature and institutional representations, urban conflict, total war, and PTSD, institutional secondary traumatic stress disorder, institutional memory and discourse, artistic representations of institutional trauma, individual identity and institutional narratives, forced migration and institutional practices, institutional betrayal, systemic trauma and history.

Please email submissions directly to the co-editors: trauma.narratives.institutions@gmail.com

Deadline for full manuscript or abstract with a proposed date of submission: March 1, 2020

All submitted manuscripts that meet the requirements for this special issue will undergo peer review. Final selection of manuscripts will be based on relevance and potential impact, methodological rigor, scientific and/or clinical value, implications for application, and available space. Final acceptance will be based on approval by the special issue guest editors and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation.

See the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation website for more information about the submission requirements:https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/jtd/

Manuscripts should be 1500-5500 words. For more instructions, see Submission Instructions for Authors at https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/jtd/instructions.html

Authors are welcome (but not required) to submit abstracts for feedback regarding appropriateness for this issue to trauma.narratives.institutions@gmail.com

Interested in peer reviewing for this special issue? Email us at trauma.narratives.institutions@gmail.com

For more information about the Journal of Trauma & Dissociation, see: https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/jtd/.

Link to cfp: https://dynamic.uoregon.edu/jjf/jtd/trauma.narratives.html

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Deadline for Submissions March 1, 2020
Hazel Rowley Prize for First-Time Biographers
Biographers International Organization (BIO) is now accepting applications for its Hazel Rowley Prize for First-Time Biographers. The Rowley prize offers $2,000 for the best book proposal from a first-time biographer, plus a careful reading by an established agent. Submissions due March 1. Guidelines and entry forms are available on the BIO website: http://biographersinternational.org/rowley-prize
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Deadline for Submissions March 1, 2020

death | text | resonance
Simone Weil and Writing To(wards) Death

July 1st – July 4th, 2020

Max-Weber-Kolleg Erfurt
diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie Berlin

Confronted with situations of imminent extinction, prominent and philosophers and readers, ranging from Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Martin Heidegger, Joan Didion, Virginia Woolf, Alejandra Pizarnik and many others, have articulated death in manifold ways: as the other night, the impossibility of ending, being-toward-death, experience of loss and grieving, existential premise of modernist melancholia, and poetics of silence and nothingness. In this context, Simone Weil (1909‒1943) has become particularly significant. Through her philosophical writing and political activism, Weil radicalized the instant of death as a focal point through which the vulnerable beauty of human existence asks to be considered in a new light. Weil’s handwritten notebooks document literary practices between excess and deprivation, producing visual assemblages of decreation, anorexia, and various forms of textual kenosis.

In discussing the possible ways to articulate the ungraspable from different disciplinary backgrounds and theoretical traditions, our workshop will discuss literary, philosophical and theological forms of writing to(wards) death.

Together with Simone Kotva (University of Cambridge) and Hartmut Rosa (University of Jena/Max-Weber-Kolleg), we will trace the movements of textual experiments that search for and attempt to approach that which we cannot understand but sometimes experience, that is, the infinite, the numinous, and the ineffable. Simone Weil’s texts will provide our workshop with a constant reference point, amid participants’ differing approaches of writing (to)wards death, darkness and existential uncertainty. Join us in our efforts to forge ahead on this errand on the edge.
Against this backdrop, we will confront and challenge contemporary questions raised by scholars in philosophy, sociology, economics and psychology about the nature of the proverbial “good life.” We will do this by entering into a transdisciplinary dialogue with Hartmut Rosa’s ‘Sociology of Our Relationship to the World,’ which raises questions about how far it is possible to ‘resonate’ with death and what particular functions literary practices assume in this context. In addition, we will attend to the role of the attention and will in such endeavors, aided by Simone Kotva’s work on ‘Effort and Grace.’

We invite submissions from all fields of study, including, but not limited to, literary studies, theology, philosophy, critical theory, religious studies and political science.

Papers may address one or more of the following topics:

  •  Reading and writing mystical experiences
  •  Decreation and self-annihilation
  •  Performativity and ritualization
  •  Asceticism, anorexia, disciplining
  •  Unspeakability, withdrawal, unavailability
  •  Fetish, trauma, desire
  •  Melancholia and jouissance
  •  Resonance and questions of the good life
  •  End of the world, eschatology and apocalypticism

The submission deadline is on March 1st, 2020. Please send abstract proposals of up to 300 words to Thomas Sojer (thomas.sojer@uni-graz.at). The working language is English, and notification of submission results will be communicated by April 1st, 2020.
Each participant is asked to submit selected passages by Simone Weil and/or other writers (15 pages maximum) prior to June 1st, 2020. These passages will be collected and distributed among participants two weeks in advance. At the workshop we will ask you to provide a short introduction to your text selection (10-15 minutes). We don’t expect finished presentations, though we prefer participants to arrive with a tentative thesis to aid our common discussion and reading.

death | earth
[Wednesday | July 1st, 2020]: The first evening is dedicated to an artistic open-air reading and the collective experience of textual performativity.

death | text
[Thursday | July 2nd, 2020]: The second day focuses on the presenters’ close readings of the selected passages and subsequent in-depth discussions within the group: after a brief contextualization, the presenters will guide the group through their reading of the text [along the question of writing to(wards) death] followed by a group discussion.

death | resonance
[Friday | July 3rd, 2020]: The first half of the day focuses on resonance, death, and the capacity of attention in a dialogue between Simone Kotva and Hartmut Rosa followed by a plenary discussion. The second half of the day is filled by the common transfer to Berlin and completed by a joint evening in Germany’s capital.

trans | disziplin
[Saturday | July 4th, 2020]: The fourth day aims at linking the thought of Simone Weil with other thinkers and is, by its nature, experimental: the choice of location – diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie [The Centre of Theoretical Periphery] in Berlin – resonates with the denʞkollektiv’s central commitment to open dialogue and pushing existing boundaries. This final day invites all participants to a reflection on the basic ideas of the denʞkollektiv and envisions its future collaborations and projects.

The conference will cover lodging expenses in Erfurt for the conference presenters, who are encouraged to seek coverage of transportation costs from their home institutions or other sources.

| organization:

trans | diziplin Simone Weil denʞkollektiv

[Martina Bengert, Thomas Sojer, Max Walther]

| partners:

Max-Weber-Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies

diffrakt | zentrum für theoretische peripherie

Contact Info:

trans | diziplin Simone Weil denʞkollektiv [Martina Bengert, Thomas Sojer, Max Walther]

Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions February 29, 2020

Travel Literature and Transatlantic Encounters: “The Iberian Peninsula as seen from North America (1850-1950)” (2/29/2020)

contact email:

This conference is part of the research project “Exotic Spain: American Travel Literature about Spain (1900-1950)” (ATLAS) funded by the Research and Knowledge Transfer Office of Alicante University (GRE18-14 A). The project focuses on the study of a corpus of American authors who traveled to Spain in the first half of the twentieth century, especially on those texts that look beyond the vision of Spain related to the experience of the Spanish Civil War.

ATLAS addresses, from an interdisciplinary perspective, a variety of literary texts and analyzes how the vision of Spain has been constructedand how the uses and customs of the chroniclers—as opposed to local uses— influenced their writing and their representation of the territory. Following Mieke Bal, who in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002) invites us “to explore the intellectual excitement of interdisciplinary cultural analysis”, ATLAS plays with the boundaries between literature, linguistics, history, geography, visual arts and philosophy to explore the perception of Spain within a particular historical context, which deserves further critical attention. The project also traces the routes drawn in the different travelogues to construct the authors’ literary cartographies with an informative and pedagogical purpose in mind.

This conference aims to be not only a discussion forum on the project itself, but also an opportunity to further explore both the physical and intellectual journey that these traveling experiences involved. For this purpose, we welcome paper and round-table proposals that deal with the presence of writers, intellectuals and American travelers in the Iberian Peninsula between 1850 and 1950 including, but not restricted to, the following topics:

  • Literary creations—fictional and non-fictional—based on traveling.
  • Testimonial and autobiographical writing, literary chronicles, travel writing.
  • Contrastive studies on travel writing.
  • Traveling and chronicles in times of war and postwar.
  • Travel experiences and their correlation with visual arts.
  • Philosophical approaches towards travel experiences.
  • The “Self” and the “Other” in travel experiences.
  • Traveling and travel experiences from a gender-based perspective.
  • Spatial criticism, representations of rural and urban spaces.
  • Artistic and architectural tourism.
  • Studies on corpus linguistics and travel literature.
  • Traveling and travel experiences from an ecocritical perspective.
  • Traveling and geography: geocriticism and geolocalization; literature and cartography and study of the territory.
  • Approaches towards travel experiences within a historical framework.
  • Sociological, anthropological, ethnographic approaches towards travel experiences.
  • Travel literature and digital humanities.

The following plenary speakers have been confirmed:

Dr. Pere Gifra Adoher (Pompeu Fabra University)

Dr. Eulalia Piñero Gil (Autonomous University of Madrid)

Please, submit your proposals in English or Spanish (250-300 words and 3-5 keywords) to alicante.atlas@ua.es by February 29, 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions February 25, 2021

Prison Voices: Literature from Inside the Walls (2/25/2020; 1/7-10/2021) MLA Toronto
This panel will examine modern literary production emerging from US prisons since the post-Attica prison-building boom and the growth of mass incarceration.  It will center incarcerated voices, their ideologies, and pedagogical possibilities for college and university teachers.  There is special interest in discussion of censorship and conditions of production.  Scope includes single or multiple authors, ex-prisoners and currently incarcerated, and all genres – poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, autobiography, drama, erotica, and more.  Send 250-300 word abstracts and a short bio to Joe.Lockard@asu.edu before February 25, 2020.

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Deadline for Contributions February 20, 2020

Call for Contributors for Women Who Changed the World

We are seeking contributors to Women Who Changed the World, to be published by ABC-CLIO. This ambitious, 4-volume reference work will contain essays on approximately 250 women from world history, from ancient times to the twenty-first century, from Bella Abzug to Empress Zauditu. The collection will feature essays that not only provide biographical profiles of women from all parts of the world, but also will address the contexts in which they encountered challenges and persevered to change the worlds into which they were born. We welcome proposed contributions from scholars from all world regions and across all career stages, including early career historians and advanced graduate students.

This world history project will explore the variety of gendered experiences and constructed identities on every continent, as well as the impact and influence of individual (and some groups of) women, both positive and negative. The essays will include the significance of individual life experiences (how they “changed” their worlds) and the specific historical and cultural contexts in which each woman lived and struggled. The common format of the entries is meant to be a rough guide, given the global scope of the project, by keeping the contributions open to historical and comparative critical thinking. The writing style should be accessible to the general reader, since the volumes will be marketed to libraries and schools, as well as colleges and universities.

Contributors will receive access to the completed work, in addition to the standard byline as the author. Essays will be peer-reviewed. Submissions should be 4000-6000 words. Deadlines are somewhat negotiable, with the preferred due date prior to February 20, 2020.

For a full list of entries available for assignment or any further questions, we invite you to contact the General Editor:  Dr. Candice Goucher, cgoucher@wsu.edu. Please include WWCW in the subject line and provide your areas of expertise and a brief cv with your inquiry.

Contact Info:

Contact Info: 

Dr. Candice Goucher, Washington State University

Contact Email: 

cgoucher@wsu.edu

Contact Email:

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Hello Everyone,

Danielle Fuller, a professor at the University of Alberta and a specialist in reading studies (as well as a presenter at the upcoming IABA World in Finland), has a request for you about a research project about reading practices that she is doing with Dr. DeNel Rehberg-Sedo of Mount St Vincent University.  They want to hear from as many people as possible about reading, and they want to hear about genre issues too.

Thanks for viewing and responding to this request. Circulate widely!

Regards, Julie Rak

University of Alberta

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Dear Colleagues

We are writing to invite you to participate in our latest research
project on reading practices. This time around we are looking to get a snapshot of what you are reading, how much you’re reading, how you find out about books to read, and about where you share what you’re reading.

Please help us. The survey will take no longer than 10 minutes to
complete, and you’d be helping out a great deal. As a token of our
appreciation, you can put your name into a draw for a bookseller gift certificate.

Here is a link to the survey:
https://redcap.ualberta.ca/surveys/?s=DEDMAJJETM

Your responses are completely anonymous. At the end of the survey, there’ll be a link to put your name into a draw for a CD$100 (CDN) bookseller gift certificate, but your email address and your survey responses are completely separate from one another.

Thank you very much for taking our survey. Please forward this to your friends and family.

Sincerely,

Danielle and DeNel

—
Danielle Fuller
Professor, Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
Humanities Centre 3-5
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6, Canada
ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Treaty 6/Métis Territory

Twitter: @DrDFuller

Julie Rak
Henry Marshall Tory Chair
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
Humanities Centre 3-5
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6, Canada
ᐊᒥᐢᑿᒌᐚᐢᑲᐦᐃᑲᐣ (Amiskwacîwâskahikan), Treaty 6/Region 4 Métis Nation

Website: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home

Deadline for Submissions February 7, 2020

Cinematic Representations of Women in Modern Celebrity Culture (1900-1950) (edited collection)

We invite proposals for contributions to an edited collection on cinematic representations of women in works of art, poetry, fiction, theater and criticism of the avant-garde. The popularization of film stars such as Blanche Sweet, Mae Marsh, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo and Brigitte Helm shaped the cultural imaginary of modernity to such an extent that they influenced the creative activity of artists and writers in the years 1900-1950. Questions centering on feminine stardom will set the background of this collection of essays examining the intersections of vanguardism with popular culture, publicity and performance. How are images of femininity circulated and consumed by the spectators of the cinematic medium? What position do the so-called high and low art forms take with regards to the presence of women in cinema celebrity culture? To what extent do stereotypical conceptions of feminine beauty reflect male ways of seeing, interpreting and writing?  We are interested in expanding the conversation to aesthetic, political, historical and cultural analyses from a perspective that integrates the written word and the animated image into constructions of femininity. Potential topics include but are not limited to:

Filmic types and stereotypes of femininity

Critical approaches to the male gaze

Fetishism and idolatry of women in cinema culture

Fashion, modernity and the commodification of feminine cinematography

The muse versus the male artist

Gender performativity, mass media and promotional value

Women stars in Hollywood and the independent film industry

Ekphrasis, iconology and iconography of feminine acting

Intersections of verbal and cinematic images of power, gender identity and race

Feminist theory and aesthetics of motion pictures

Abstracts of 300-500 words along with a 150-word bio should be emailed to María Cristina C. Mabrey (University of South Carolina) at rriopar@gmail.com and Leticia Pérez Alonso (Jackson State University) at leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu no later than February 7th, 2020. We will notify authors of the acceptance by February 13th, 2020. Chapters (approximately 6,000-7,000 words, including notes and bibliography) will be due by August 7th, 2020.

Contact Info:

María Cristina C. Mabrey, University of South Carolina (rriopar@gmail.com)

Leticia Pérez Alonso, Jackson State University (leticia.p.alonso@jsums.edu)

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Deadline for Submissions February 1, 2020

MEDIA HISTORY STUDY DAY 2020: MEDIA LIVES (2/1/2020; 3/18/2020) UK

Call for Papers

Media History Study Day 2020 is an opportunity for postgraduate students (PGRs) and early career researchers (ECRs) working on any aspect of media studies to share and discuss their work in a collegial, multidisciplinary environment. ECRs/PGRs working on media from any time period, social/cultural context, or perspective are invited to participate, including, but not limited to, those examining book history, broadcast media, electronic media, ephemera, film, journalism, media theory, newspapers, periodicals, or print culture.

MEDIA HISTORY STUDY DAY 2020: MEDIA LIVES

DATE: Wednesday, March 18, 2020       TIME: TBD–19:30

LOCATION: Birkbeck, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London

KEYNOTE: Dr. Rebecca Roach, University of Birmingham, 18:00–19:30

The Study Day’s theme, “MEDIA LIVES,”broadly considers the concept of life in the media, embracing everything from interviews, influencers, and self-representation to the lives and lifecycles of old and new media. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Agency
  • AI and the Lives of Machines
  • Autobiography/Biography/Diaries/Media Identities/Self-Representation/Life-writing/Subjectivity
  • Blogging/Microblogging/Bots
  • Celebrity
  • Collaboration
  • Data-driven Subjects/Dividuals/Black-boxing
  • Dis/ability
  • Gaming lives
  • Influencers
  • Interfaces
  • Interviews
  • Invisible labour or participants
  • Lifespans of media and technologies
  • Lives in the media archive
  • Long Runs/Short Runs of newspapers, periodicals, serials, or series

While PGRs/ECRs are encouraged to share work that resonates with the theme, submissions on all media-related subjects are welcome. Participants will give 10-minute presentations on their works-in-progress followed by a 5-minute discussion of a question/problem related to their research. Research posters or presentations in alternative formats will also be considered.

The Study Day is free. It will include a workshop on the ethical implications of conducting research in digital environments/on digital topics facilitated by Dr. Rebecca Roach from the University of Birmingham. Coffee, tea, and lunch will be provided by the Study Day’s sponsors. Participants are responsible for their own travel costs.

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ABSTRACT DEADLINE: Early career researchers and postgraduate students interested in participating in Media History Study Day 2020 should submit a 100-word abstract and 40-word bio to Media.History.Study.Day@gmail.com before midnight on February 1, 2020. If you would like to share a poster or use an alternative presentation format, please include details along with your abstract.

For more information, please visit https://mediahistoryseminar.wordpress.com or contact Ann M. Hale, Media.History.Study.Day@gmail.com.

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Media History Study Day 2020 is sponsored by Media History, an interdisciplinary journal that focuses on media and society from the fifteenth century to the present; the Media History Seminar, a London-based interdisciplinary group working on a range of media including print, radio, film, and digital communications technologies from various time periods; Queen Mary University of London; the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies; the Institute of English Studies; and the Institute of Historical Research.

Deadline for Submissions February 1, 2020
Call for Papers: “Un/Bound”
Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
36.3 Autumn 2021
www.tandfonline.com/rautSubmissions Deadline: February 1, 2020Memoirs and other auto/biographical genres that describe selfhoods at, on, or over borders have long been a subject of scholarly interest but have recently acquired greater urgency. Border crossings and unbindings—the movements of bodies in space inside and across boundaries of all kinds—are at the center not just of the news but also of current discussions in life writing studies.Since 2016, every volume of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies has included essays or clusters dedicated to lives written in spaces between bounded ground or that exist in crossings between such places. Biography’s recent issue includes Marc Lamont Hill’s “From Ferguson to Palestine: Reimagining Transnational Solidarity Through Difference” as well as Gillian Maris Jones’ “Black Lives Abroad: Encounters of Diasporic Solidarity in Brazil.” Books on the subject, such as Routledge’s After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism (Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera, 2019) and UNC-Chapel Hill’s Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the US-Mexico Borderlands (Miroslava Chávez-García, 2018) have proliferated, as have short-form treatments across more than 100 journals in disciplines as disparate as those represented by the Journal of Literacy Research, African and Black Diaspora, and Culture, Medicine, and Psychology.Textual lives in/of migration are clearly the focus of intensive critical attention currently. As the necessity of migration and its divisive politics intensifies, life writing about lives bound and unbound by movement in and between spaces becomes more valuable in fighting stereotypical projections and in complicating and deepening our understanding of the link between place, movement, and identity.The guest editors of this special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies seek essays investigating how borders and boundaries function in the telling of life narratives—the sense in which lines and liminality may bind people in place, in which crossing boundaries is definitional in life writing as a genre, and in which crossed boundaries become meaningful in their own creation and in the creation of a life-as-text. This issue seeks to address such life writing from a global perspective, asking us to think about what binds or frees human beings, what constitutes a border or a margin on which a self might be or escape its definition.Proposed essays may address, but certainly should not be limited to, the following topics:

  • Border crossing and border enforcement, immigration, and refugee experiences in life narratives
  • Life in the borderlands, life in immigrant communities/families
  • Depictions and/or constructions of transnational or postcolonial identity, hybridity, international interaction
  • Issues of language and dialect
  • Effects of changing, shifting, or disputed borders and government policies on individuals and communities
  • Concepts of, and responses to, border (in)security
  • Narrative forms used to represent borders and borderlands
  • Mapping and cultural geographies in borderlands narratives
  • Methodologies used to support border research
  • Pedagogical approaches to border narratives
  • Genre and narrating lives on the move

Send original articles of 6,000-7,000 words (including works cited and notes), including keywords, an abstract, and a brief biographical statement to Helga Lénárt-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Megan Brown (megan.brown@drake.edu). The guest editors welcome essays that include images and are able to print in color without author fees. a/b also publishes ancillary digital and multimedia texts on the journal’s Routledge website. Inquiries welcome.

All essays must follow the format of Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). Essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, may be considered general submissions and may be selected for publication. In order to ensure a confidential peer review, remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve your anonymity in the reading process. Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint. Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tiff files with captions. Please indicate placement of images in the text.

This CFP stems from a call for papers originally posted for the 2020 Modern Language Association convention.
Helga Lénárt-Cheng is Associate Professor in World Languages and Cultures and Global and Regional Studies at Saint Mary’s College of California. She is co-author of a book on Alexander Lenard (Wanderer of Worlds, 2016) and of numerous articles. Her research focuses on autobiography, immigration, digital trends in life writing, and theories of subjectivity and community.
Megan Brown is Professor of English at Drake University and the author of two books: American Autobiography After 9/11 (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017) and The Cultural Work of Corporations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Her work has also appeared in Biography, Assay, Women’s Studies Quarterly, College Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, and Cultural Studies. She teaches courses in memoir and autobiography, personal essay, and American literature.

Deadline for Submissions 27 January 2020

GSA Seminar 2020 “The Nazi Legacy: Reconstruction Efforts and Memory Projects since 1945” (1/27/2020; 10/1-4/2020) Washington D.C.

The conveners of “The Nazi Legacy: Reconstruction Efforts and Memory Projects since 1945” invite applicants to apply to enroll in our seminar at the German Studies Association Conference from October 1-4, 2020 in Washington DC.

Abstract:

Over the last several decades, colleagues in Europe, the UK, and North America have produced a rich and varied body of scholarship concerning recovery and remembering after Nazism. Their approaches have included studies on judicial-administrative dimensions of denazification and (re)establishment of democratic institutions, the experience of POWs, tensions between traditional gender roles and new possibilities for women, immigration and ethnicity, cultural critique, innovation in the arts, the evolution of memory culture across generations, and examination of different aspects of everyday life.

This trans-disciplinary seminar provides a setting in which to build on these themes, and to interrogate the spaces in between them. We welcome scholars at all professional levels and in all disciplines working on recovery, reorientation, and memory in Germany, Austria, or Nazi-occupied areas after 1945. Of particular interest are projects that use multidisciplinary approaches and challenge traditional interpretations. Seminar discussion will revolve around three common themes: “political cleansing”; “reshaping society after fascism”; and “memory and forgetting.” Through shared readings and discussion of ongoing or newly initiated projects, seminar participants will explore the complex, often fraught relationship between punitive vs rehabilitative actions, collective vs individual accountability, and private vs. public expression or concealment. We will also consider political, economic, social, cultural, and emotional perspectives on legacies of Nazi dictatorship and wartime occupation. Possible topics include the function/effects of denazification; law and justice; reeducation; guilt/accountability; economic development; cultural forms; memory culture; race; gender and sexuality.

Format

The seminar will employ discrete daily themes—“political cleansing”; “reshaping society after fascism”; “memory/forgetting”—to explore a common reading, assigned beforehand, followed by short work-in-progress presentations by participants. Sessions will conclude with feedback on methods and sources.

Contact Info:

Matthew Berg, John Carroll University, Department of History, mberg@jcu.edu

Mikkel Dack, Rowan University, Department of History, dack@rowan.edu

Contact Email:

Deadline for Submissions 27 January 2020

CFP: GSA seminar “Genealogies of Self-Reflection: Writing in the Wake of Trauma” (1/27/2020; 10/1-4/2020) Washington D.C. USA

Call for Papers for 2020 German Studies Association Seminar  Genealogies of Self-Reflection: Writing in the Wake of Trauma

Building on the “Private Matters: Writing Outside the Margins of the Lebenslauf” seminar (GSA 2018) on memoire and academic writing, this seminar explores forms of critical reflection practiced by colleagues whose family genealogies, sites of origin, and identities have laid the groundwork for their scholarly writing on trauma. We will frame the seminar based on the concept of the “wake” as described in Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being in contrast to Angelika Bammer’s notion of reckoning as enacted in Born After: Reckoning with the German Past (2019).  Bammer recalls how she overcame the “reckoning with her German past,” by taking Adorno’s advice to heart that only “critical reflection” provides a path through the impasse of weighted history and memory. A tour de force of self-reflection and rigorous readings of cultural production, this book offers a point of departure for exploring the trope of critical self-reflection in German studies in order to acknowledge the hidden genealogies that haunt our scholarly texts.

Building on pre-submitted writing samples by participants, who are engaged in work that crosses the boundaries of academic and narrative prose, this seminar will be a writing workshop, in which participants respond to one another’s papers. Having prepared for the seminar by reading the books by Sharpe and Bammer, participants will structure their writing samples around the following guiding questions: What are the forms critical self-reflection might take when one interweaves family histories into one’s academic writing? What form might prose take when collective histories and subjective memories merge? What forms of writing emerge in the wake of discrimination, classification, and exclusion, experienced by colleagues, whose life trajectories are deemed or felt to be non-normative?

This seminar will provide a forum for a diverse range of participants whose “reckoning” with their pasts may be quite distinct from the usual paradigms of transgenerational transmission within “German” pasts and instead encompass multiple genealogies of (family) identities, heritages, and indigeneities.

The seminar will require participants to submit 12-15-page writing excerpts in advance and will focus on workshopping these pieces within the framework of the guiding questions listed in the seminar goals. We welcome participants who would like to share their work at all stages of the writing process.

Please apply by JANUARY 27 on the GSA portal https://www.xcdsystem.com/gsa/member/index.cfm

Conveners:

Leslie Morris (University of Minnesota) morri074@umn.edu

Karen Remmler (My Holyoke College) kremmler@mtholyoke.edu

Contact Info:

Leslie Morris

Contact Email:
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Deadline for Submissions January 24, 2020

Experiencing Prison
7th Global Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Friday 3rd July to Saturday 4th July 2020
Bratislava, Slovakia

Prison is used world-wide as a form of punishment or detention for men, women and children, within a functioning criminal justice system, and its use can be traced back to the rise of the earliest forms of state or social organisation in which humans have lived. Prisons are variously known as jails, gaols, penitentiaries, detention centres, correctional centres, and remand centres. They can be used as a tool of political repression, or a means of detaining large groups of civilians during times of war.

Incarceration has a long history, and despite its core commonality, as an experience it has varied historically, and continues to vary, in different societies all over the world. Although imprisonment is most commonly in a building, often purpose-built, it has variously taken place on ships, in camps, on islands, and in castles, fortresses, penal colonies, quarries, sewers, cages and dungeons. Imprisonment has become the dominant form of punishment in most societies across the world, and may occur prior to trial or as a result of sentencing by a properly constituted court. Imprisonment without trial or due process occurs in various forms in most societies across the world, mostly sanctioned by the state itself, sometimes used as a political strategy by military, ideological, political or religious groups within a state, or by groups desirous of becoming a state.

The prison has become a formidable employer, sometimes the dominant employer in neighbourhoods or towns. Over time, it has also been the site of creativity: prison labour, prison art and prison literature (including poetry, drama and autobiography) have contributed hugely to our understanding both of the phenomenon of imprisonment and of the impact it has on lives. It can therefore be approached from a variety of experiential perspectives – that of prisoner, visitor, employee, volunteer, writer, artist, analyst or researcher.

The prison is a powerful metaphor as well, with the capacity to describe a challenging or difficult situation for an individual, a family or a community that seemingly presents no way out, and which presses down upon the human psyche in often unbearable ways. It has been an effective trope within literature, art, poetry and drama.

Key Topics
We welcome contributions about the prison from a wide range of perspectives, including legal, architectural, criminological, historical, geographical, fictional, psychotherapeutic, artistic, phenomenological, biographical and autobiographical points of view.

Contributions are particularly welcomed from former prisoners, detainees, incarcerated asylum seekers, former prisoners of war, political prisoners or those detained because of nationalist, religious or other convictions, those who have been to prison and have written about the experience; those who have fictionalised the prison experience in art and literature; those who have done paid or voluntary work in prison; and those who have researched the prison of the past and of the present. Additionally, we hope to hear from those involved with the architecture and design of prisons, those who are directly or indirectly involved with the delivery of incarceration,and those involved with any prisoners’ rights groups or with those who seek to ameliorate incarceration by providing therapeutic drama, literacy, education, counselling, religious support, death row support, and other services.

All genres and media will be considered, in order to examine the widest possible range of representations, past and contemporary, which inform us about the strange phenomenon of the prison with a view to forming a selective innovative interdisciplinary publication to engender further research and collaboration. We particularly welcome creative responses to the subject, such as poetry/prose, short film screenings/original drama, installations, and alternative presentation styles that engage the audience and foster debate.

Topics for discussion include, but are not restricted to:

Prisoners and the Prison Experience

  • ~ Types of Prisoners: political dissidents, prisoners of war, violent offenders, non-violent offenders, white collar criminals, innocent/wrongly accused, asylum seekers
  • ~ The female experience in prison
  • ~ Transgendered people in prison
  • ~ Relationships in prison: motherhood, sex, friendship and bonding, relationships with people ‘outside’
  • ~ Rape, assault and other acts of violence
  • ~ Torture in prison
  • ~ Death and dying in prison
  • ~ Social structures within the prison environment
  • ~ Prisoner interactions with guards and administrators
  • ~ Historical perspectives on the prison experience
  • ~ Race, racism and prison
  • ~ Poverty, class and prison
  • ~ Writing, art and other creative practices in prison
  • ~ Representing the prison experience in literature, theatre, TV, film, video games, music and art
  • ~ mental health in prison
  • ~ addictions, self-harm and suicide
  • ~ medical ethics and care in prison

Life After Prison

  • ~ Challenges of reintegration
  • ~ Rehabilitation and education
  • ~ Discrimination against former inmates
  • ~ Family and friends coping with the release of loved ones
  • ~ Community service and volunteerism

Prison As Institution

  • ~Prison as workplace: experiences of guards, administrators and institutional officials
  • ~ Prison spaces: architectural design in theory and practice, boot camps, work camps, open air prisons, etc.
  • ~ Technologies of incarceration
  • ~ Teaching and learning in prison
  • ~ Spirituality and religion in prison
  • ~ Counselling and other clinical experiences with prisoners
  • ~ (In)Famous prisons and their legacy (Auschwitz, Guantanamo Bay, Alcatraz, Newgate Gaol, etc.)
  • ~ Prisons and dark tourism
  • ~ Prison conditions around the globe
  • ~ Economics of incarceration: politics of awarding contracts, private vs public management, impact of prison location on local communities, etc.

Prisons in Law and Policy

  • ~ Theories and practices in rehabilitation and humane containment
  • ~ Balancing punishment and human rights
  • ~ Prison reform initiatives
  • ~ Innovative approaches to incarceration
  • ~ Relationship between justice system and corrections system
  • ~ Race, class, sex and other forms of discrimination in sentencing
  • ~ Correctional services as public policy: governmental/civil service perspectives
  • ~ National and international legal provisions around prison conditions and prisoners’ rights
  • ~ NGOs and charities working in the area of prison reform
  • ~ Social attitudes toward prison and prisoners

What To Send
The aim of this inclusive interdisciplinary conference and collaborative networking event is to bring people together and encourage creative conversations in the context of a variety of formats: papers, seminars, workshops, storytelling, performances, poster presentations, problem-solving sessions, case studies, panels, q&a’s, round-tables etc. Creative responses to the subject, such as poetry/prose, short film screenings/original drama, installations and alternative presentation styles that engage the audience and foster debate are particularly encouraged. Please feel free to put forward proposals that you think will get the message across, in whatever form.

At the end of the conference we will be exploring ways in which we can develop the discussions and dialogues in new and sustainable inclusive interdisciplinary directions, including research, workshops, publications, public interest days, associations, developing courses etc which will help us make sense of the topics discussed during the meeting. There is an intention, subject to the discussions which emerge during the course of the meeting, to form a selective innovative interdisciplinary publication to engender further research and collaboration.

300 word proposals, presentations, abstracts and other forms of contribution and participation should be submitted by Friday 10th January 2020. Other forms of participation should be discussed in advance with the Organising Chairs.

All submissions will be at least double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team, The Development Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 24th January 2020.

If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 1st May 2020.

Abstracts and proposals may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in the programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) type of proposal e.g. paper presentation, workshop, panel, film, performance, etc, f) body of proposal, g) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: Experiencing Prison Submission

Where To Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chairs and the Project Administrator:

Diana Medlicott: diana@progressiveconnexions.net
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): bratislavaprison@progressiveconnexions.net

Please direct all enquiries to: bratislavaprison@progressiveconnexions.net

For further details and information please visit the conference web page: http://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/human-rights/experiencing-prison/conferences/

Contact Info:

Diana Medlicott: diana@progressiveconnexions.net
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): bratislavaprison@progressiveconnexions.net

Deadline for Submissions January 20, 2020

24, 25 & 26 June 2020 (Le Mans University, France)
WAR MEMORIES (2020)
Sharing War Memories – From the Military to the Civilian

International Conference initiated by  Professor Renée Dickason (Université Rennes 2), Professor  Stéphanie Bélanger (Canadian Institute for Military and Veteran Health Research, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario) and Professor Delphine Letort (Le Mans Université)

https://warmem2020.sciencesconf.org/data/pages/CFP_warmem_2020_EN.pdf

War narratives are subject to emphases, orientations and points of view that give a particular flavour to wars fought by populations (anonymously, individually and/or hidden in an organisation, secret or not)  and by the military (from high command to the ‘unknown soldier’). Such accounts evolve with the benefit of hindsight, the writing of history textbooks and the constant (re)interpretations of archives (new or not) and the official version a country wishes to put forward according to its political agendas and visions of patriotism, citizenship and human rights, or its diplomatic or international policy objectives. The narratives of wars vary with the context and the need for men and women to express their inner feelings when faced with the torments and human atrocities of war; they also reflect the place of individuals within a group and the implications of group cohesion within the larger community.

Civilians’ knowledge of the war effort and the involvement of the military is informed by two types of documents: primary sources (letters, emails, photographs, videos, testimonies, trench gazettes, blogs, etc.) provide direct information about the war experienced at an individual level, whereas secondary sources mediate these artefacts by incorporating them into another narrative.

The artefacts of war become the original materials which museums and memorials turn into places of memory, while feature films provide a less direct approach as they often (re)mediate the original accounts of first-hand witnesses through documentary, ethno-fiction, docudrama or more generally through fiction. These documents show a possible encounter between the military and civilian spheres, especially when the two are separated either in time or space.

Civilians learn about past and distant wars through the narratives built on them and through the images produced either by the military themselves, by news reporters embedded with them or following in their footsteps, or by historians. Journalistic records often frame the understanding of war by shining light on events hidden from the public gaze, by illuminating the conflicts or the complicity between civilian witnesses and members of the military. Whether intended to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the indigenous populations or to denigrate the enemy by reductive stereotyping, military strategies condition how armed forces regard the ‘Other’. Humanitarian groups approach war with a different goal in mind; their representations of war emphasize the dangers for civilian populations trapped by an ongoing conflict and reintroduce human concerns where war technology erases them. The case of civilian hostages is of particular relevance in this context.

This conference aims to explore zones of contact between the military and the civilian worlds – be they real or virtual. Zones of contact extend beyond the battlefields to civilian areas, where the enemy is sometimes conflated with undeclared combatants (especially in the age of terrorism). Soldiers may also find respite in the civilian life that wars disrupt but cannot completely annihilate. The contacts between the military and the civilians are often channeled by professional relationships. Doctors, nurses, drivers, journalists, artists… provide a link between two worlds that outsourcing has brought closer together in the contemporary era.

Both volunteers and conscripts undergo a change of status when they join the armed forces. The transition from the civilian to the military world may be a life-changing event, but it may also become part and parcel of one’s daily rhythm as war can increasingly be pursued without even leaving the home country (for example, with the development of drone technology). How do the military manage to attract civilians into donning the uniform? How do the veterans reintegrate into civilian life and overcome the trauma of waging war, especially when serious injury makes them unfit for further service.

The study of the relationships between the civilian and the military implies research into the artefacts of war, conveying the perception of combat by the military themselves or by the civilians observing them. This relationship is founded on a variety of objects aiming at boosting admiration for war heroes or condemnation of war criminals.

Reality turns into fiction as it becomes a political or romanticized narrative in film and on television, in literature and in the arts – and this transformation illuminates the civilians’ perception of war as well as soldiers’ perception of themselves.

In 2020, to mark the tenth year anniversary of the active and fruitful collaboration on the theme of war memories, our research groups – ACE (Rennes), the Royal Military College of Canada (Kingston, Ontario) and 3L.AM (Le Mans) – would like to offer researchers and members of civil society the opportunity to participate in workshop discussions on the subject of sexual violence and abuse perpetuated as a weapon of war, and on the fate of children in wartime, in addition to the themes in the non-exhaustive list given below.

Other possible workshops:
–  Remembering, transmitting war (commemorations, textbooks (paper or e-learning), museums…) and narrating war (children’s literature, graphic novels, essays, short stories, drama, poetry…)
– Drawing, photographing or filming war (documentaries, docu-fictions, ethno-fiction)
– Medialization of war (news bulletins, news reports, blogs, social media, websites…)
– War and the human dimension: testimonies of trauma and the management of emotions (from military to civilian points of view)
–  Childhood in wartime: mobilization of children in armed conflicts; staging children characters in, fictional and non-fictional, war narratives; writing or representing war for a young public
– Women civilians and the military in war; women as war weapons and victims

A vibrant homage will be delivered to Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Dr. Denis Mukewege and his fights in Democratic Republic of the Congo

With keynote speeches by:
Jonathan Bignell (Professor of Television and Film, Reading University, United Kingdom)
Keynote provisional  title: Television and Ephemerality: Remembering and Forgetting War

Daniel Palmieri (Historian, International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva, Switzerland)
Keynote provisional title: “Now, the World without me”.
Humanitarians and Sexual Violence in Time of War

Stéphanie Bélanger (Professor, Royal Military College of Canada, Kingston, Ontario)
Keynote provisional title: Voice or Loyalty? Dealing with Memories in the Armed Forces

SUBMISSION DEADLINE : 20th JANUARY 2020

All submissions will be considered after the deadline of 20th January 2020.

Please send your abstract (350 words) and biography (200 words) directly to the conference website. You will need to create an account in the Submission section before filling up the fields required and uploading your document (see information on the conference website).

We will not be able to give you any news concerning the acceptance of your work before 20th January 2020.

Submissions Deadline: January 15, 2020

Call for Papers: “Mapping Black Women’s Lives”
Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
36.2 Spring 2021
www.tandfonline.com/raut

For this special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, we seek papers that employ diverse and/or interdisciplinary methodologies to recover and situate (geographically and theoretically) Black female lives throughout the African diaspora. How do we write with and against archival silences and violences? What role does digitization play in making visible or further marginalizing Black women’s life writing? We are particularly interested in scholarly efforts that redefine, transform, or reform the spaces and places in which Black women’s cultural contributions were recorded (or not). Where and how do we map the lives of Black women? Topics include but are not limited to the following:
·         Cartography, maps, mapping, and journeys in Black women’s life narrative
·         Forced displacements
·         Dangerous moves
·         Middle passages as trans-historical consciousness
·         Relationships between faith systems, movement and racialized geographies
·         Examining Diaspora through Life Writing
·         Travel to and through archives
·         How geography shapes who and what we recover
·         Global perspectives on mapping Black women’s lives
·         Methodologies for locating and mapping Black women’s lives
·         Pedagogical approaches to mapping Black women’s lives and/or reading journeys in Black women’s life narratives
·         Autotheoretical approaches to mapping and/or studying Black women’s lives in transit

Send original articles of 6000-7000 words (including works cited and notes), including keywords, an abstract, and a brief biographical statement to Kimberly Blockett (kdb13@psu.edu). We welcome essays that include images and are able to print in color without author fees. a/b also publishes ancillary digital and multimedia texts on the journal’s Routledge website. Inquiries welcome.
All essays must follow the format of Chicago Manuel of Style (17th edition). Essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, may be considered general submissions and may be selected for publication. In order to ensure a confidential peer review, remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve your anonymity in the reading process. Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint. Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tiff files with captions. Please indicate placement of images in the text.

Guest Editor, Kimberly Blockett, Associate Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine, is a C19 literary historian. She uses archives and cultural geography to examine black female movement and subjectivity. Blockett’s publications include MELUS, Legacy, MLA Approaches to Teaching Hurston, and the Cambridge History of African American Literature. The archival work for her forthcoming monograph and annotated edition of Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs was funded by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Smithsonian, NEH, and Harvard Divinity School.

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Deadline, January 15, 2020

Society for the Study of American Travel Writing

American Literature Association 31st Annual Conference

May 21-24, 2020

Manchester Grand Hyatt, San Diego, CA

The SSATW (https://www.facebook.com/americantravelwriting/) invites abstracts of 250-300 words for presentations at the annual conference of the American Literature Association (http://americanliteratureassociation.org/).  The society will be hosting two thematically linked panels.

Ethical Encounters

From Twain’s ugly innocents abroad to Kinkaid’s warning that “the tourist is an ugly human being,” for over a century those who write about American travel and travelers have raised concerns about the potential impacts of travelers on communities, cultures, and ecosystems. The power dynamics of travel are complex, as are the ethical challenges of meaningfully and responsibly representing peoples, cultures, places, and even the self.

We invite papers that examine any aspect of ethics in relation to travel and travel writing. Time period and geographic region are open.

What is travel writing?

We often focus on questions of borders and border crossing in travel writing, but what delimits the borders of the genre itself? What makes a something “travel writing?” In the Best American Travel Writing 2017 Lauren Collins suggests that we might now understand travel writing “simply as writing about space and time,” conceiving of the genre in what are perhaps the broadest possible terms.  Questions abound. Must travel writing be “true” and what does this mean? Must it be primarily concerned with place? With movement? Arguably refugee resettlement narratives, voluntourism blogs, and memoirs of the Pacific Coast Trail all fit somewhere in the genre, but what doesn’t?  Where are the lines between advocacy, reporting, and travel writing? Between memoir and travel writing?

We invite papers that delve directly into these questions as well as those that implicitly trouble the boundaries of the genre of “travel writing” itself, delving into questions of space, time, mobility, emplacement and beyond.

Please send abstracts to Shealeen Meaney (meanes@sage.edu) by Wednesday, January 15, 2020.  Early submissions are welcome.

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Deadline for Submissions: January 15, 2020

Call for papers: Autofiction in the Age of the Self(ie)
Special Issue of English Studies in Canada

Deadline for abstracts: January 15, 2020
Deadline for final essays (6000-9000 words): August 15, 2020
Submit to: mbloom@glendon.yorku.ca

If the late nineties and early oughts witnessed what Leigh Gilmore has termed a ‘memoir boom’, the intervening years have seen the rise of a new genre: autofiction. Coined by Serge Doubrovsky in 1977 and initially associated with French writers, the term—and the self-fictionalizing practices it designates—have exploded into the international mainstream.

Although there is no critical consensus about what constitutes this genre–or whether it should even be considered a distinct genre–examples of works that blur the line between autobiography and fiction have increased wildly over the past several decades in the US, Canada, Scandinavia, Germany, and elsewhere. Both the corpus and the conversation are broadening to encompass a range of texts and approaches by writers whose work falls between and beyond traditional publishing industry categories such as autobiography, memoir, confession, essay, and fiction.  Some scholars are using this lens to trace lineages with earlier writers and genres such as the roman-à-clef.

Autofiction has been touted by some as a productive response to the commodification, digitization, and proliferation of the self in a contemporary culture that has called the very nature of ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ into question. Others – particularly racialized writers and women—have rejected the label, arguing that it overvalues or mischaracterizes the autobiographical dimension of their writing, further entrenching pernicious stereotypes. Is autofiction a reaction against the selfie, or simply another manifestation? Does the label refer to a new form of writing, or is it just a new way of describing metafictional techniques that have appeared in literature since The Canterbury Tales?

This special issue invites papers that consider these questions or any aspect of autofiction and its associated genres (autotheory, biofiction, creative nonfiction, etc.). Authors are welcome to discuss works that have been translated into English, and are particularly encouraged to focus on women, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, disabled, and otherwise marginalized writers.

Please submit abstracts of 500 words to Dr. Myra Bloom mbloom@glendon.yorku.ca by January 15, 2020. Final essays (6,000-9,000 words) are due August 15, 2020.

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Myra Bloom
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Glendon College, York University
2275 Bayview Avenue
Toronto,  ON M4N 3M6
Tel: 416-736-2100 (x88597)

Deadline for Submissions January 15, 2020
CALL FOR PAPERS
Conference: Comics, Migration, MinoritiesDATE: June 3–5, 2020
VENUE: School of History, Culture and Arts Studies at the University of Turku, Finland
SUBMISSIONS close by January 15, 2020; presenters will be notified by January 31, 2020The Comics, Migration, Minorities conference welcomes comics scholars, comics artists, educators, cultural workers, teachers, activists and other representatives of the comics field interested in the different ways in which comics, migration and minorities intermingle. There is currently an international boom in migration-themed comics, but migratory movement has had an effect on comics throughout the art form’s history.
In the last decade, comics have become an important forum for the depiction and discussion of various aspects of migration. Comics depict forced displacement, seeking refuge, asylum-seeking processes, detention policies, border control and violence, labor migration, international adoption, and studying abroad. Through their stories they explore and reflect diasporic and minority identities, the differences between immigrant generations, family histories, memories of former homelands, and the different experiences and emotional aspects of involuntary and voluntary migration.
Migration has become a prominent issue in comics of a whole range of genres, including both fictional and documentary comics. Comics autobiographies and biographies, journalism and historical narratives have recorded migration in different parts of the world and displayed personal histories and social analyses. Fictional stories for adults, young adults and children have highlighted the predicaments of refugees and others on the move. Comics are also an activist and educational medium in the fight for immigrant rights and against xenophobic and racist policies and sentiments.
Whose stories are told in comics, whose voices are heard in them, and who gets to tell graphic narratives are central questions when considering the narration of migration, as well as regarding the relationship between hegemonic majority groups and minority groups in societies at large and in comics fields in particular. Cross-border migration and the formation of immigrant communities are shaped by historical and current power relations and processes of colonialism and slavery, white supremacy, growing global neo-fascism and racialization, as well as formations such as Fortress Europe and border policing. Questions concerning representation and diversity in comics and the field of comics are not delimited to issues of migration, however. While the focus of the conference is on migration and comics, a broader discussion on diversity and the similarities and intersections of minority positions is encouraged.
We welcome proposals for individual presentations in the traditional academic format (20-minute presentations with a 10-minute discussion), but we also encourage proposals of alternative presentation forms (e.g., roundtables and workshops) on topics related, but not limited, to the following:

  • Migration and minorities in various comics genres
  • The representation of migrants and other minorities in comics
  • Displacement and seeking refuge in comics
  • Ethics of narrative and representation
  • Histories and memories of migration
  • Labor migration, studies abroad and international adoption in comics
  • Asylum-seeking processes, detention policies, and border control and violence in comics
  • Racism, xenophobia and stereotypes in comics
  • Activism and social justice initiatives
  • Comics and political discourses about migration and minorities
  • Comics as a tool for integration
  • Comics as a tool for education about migration and minorities
  • Comics in language education for migrant groups
  • Diversity in the comics field
  • Comics by migrant and minority creators and in minority languages

The conference’s invited plenary speakers are:

Please submit an abstract of your proposed presentation in English by January 15, 2020, as an attachment to the email address comics@utu.fi. The abstract should be no longer than 200 words. Please include your name, affiliation and contact information in the abstract document. Authors of submissions will be notified by January 31, 2020. For further information, please contact comics@utu.fi. In due time, information concerning the conference will be found on the conference web page at http://conference.migrationcomics.fi.
Should you be interested in combining attendance at the Comics, Migration, Minorities conference with another conference, the call for papers for the IABA World Turku 2020 – Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future conference (to be held in Turku, Finland, June 9–12, 2020) is open until October 15, 2019. More information can be found at the conference website: https://iabaturku2020.net/call-for-papers/.

The Comics, Migration, Minorities conference is organized by:

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Deadline for Submissions January 13, 2020

Call for papers : Identities: Understanding of Oneself, Others and the World

March 18, 2020 to March 20, 2020

Identities and discourses of alterity are, at all times and in all societies, an integral part of social, political, economic, cultural and territorial interactions. Our views of ourselves and others tend to be influenced by multiple factors, including discourses on individuals, groups and their environment, as well as various performances and materialities. The historiography of identities and alterities is now divided into several subfields. Concepts of plurality and the multitude are hence at the core of our understandings of self, others and the environment.

In view of this, the organizing committee is pleased to offer a platform for exchanges and reflections on the use and conceptualization of identities and alterities as well as their relations with the environment in which they exist and evolve. In what ways do they vary in time and space? How are they shaped? How are they institutionalized? How do alterities act as factors in identity construction? How do they confront and/or comfort each other? In what ways are they influenced by internal or external ideologies? By what means are they disseminated and shared? By what mechanisms are they made invisible? How do identity groups represent themselves, others and their backgrounds? Who is marginalized by these identities and what is their agency? What mechanisms explain these rejections and what are their consequences? Finally, in the context of scholarship, how do these concepts influence the work of researchers?

The committee seeks proposals for presentations of 15 to 20 minutes addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Movements related to identities and otherness or representations of others (concepts of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, language, religion, etc.)

• Representations related to the understanding of self, others or the comprehension of the world on a social, cultural, political, economic and geographical level.

• Issues related more broadly to identities (national, religious, gendered, sexual, linguistic, territorial, etc.)

Graduate students from any field of study whose work focuses on these themes are invited to participate in the XXVII International Interdisciplinary Colloquium of Graduate Students’ Association of the Department of History of the University of Montreal. Participation in this colloquium is an excellent opportunity to present your research, interact with fellow students and professors, and eventually publish your findings.

Contact Info:

Please submit your proposal in either English or French (250 words maximum) before January 13, 2020, at 6 p.m., to xxviicolloqueaeddhum@gmail.com with a copy to marly.tiburcio-carneiro@umontreal.ca. Applicants must also provide their first and last name, institutional affiliation and an estimate of travel costs if financial assistance is required.

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MLA Genre Studies Forum in Life Writing Annual Cocktail Party

Saturday, January 11, 2020

The Fairmont Olympic Hotel 8:30-10:30 pm

[Room # TBA on the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies  Facebook page]

ALL ARE WELCOME!

Deadline for Submissions January 10, 2020

Call for Papers:

Epistolary Forms in Film, Media and Visual Culture

Edited by Catherine Fowler and Teri Higgins

“We are living in a great epistolary age, even if no one much acknowledges it. Our phones, by obviating phoning, have reestablished the omnipresence of text. Think of the sheer profusion of messages … that we now send. “(Sally Rooney, 2019)

As Irish novelist Sally Rooney observes, despite the frequent assumption that technological advances provide constantly new forms of communication, these new forms: the email, the blog, the text message, the tweet, the update are actually haunted by old ‘epistolary’ forms: the letter and the diary. Both the letter and the diary have strong historical relationships to privacy, secrecy and intimacy, as well as to anonymity masquerade and deception, all notions that are both prevalent and highly contested in our current age. By focusing on the connection between a wide-range of media and these epistolary forms our aim is to consider their continuing significance for the mediation of self-expression and the building of relationships.

On the one hand, in mainstream cinema epistolary forms appear to produce storytelling that focuses on emotion rather than action, as such, they challenge the superficiality of post-feminist narratives centered on consumption and continue the melodramatic tradition, specifically the protagonist’s “desire to express all… [and] give voice to their deepest feelings” (Brooks, 1991) (See You’ve Got Mail [1998], Bridget Jones’s Diary [2001], Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants [2005], The Lake House [2006] P.S I Love You [2007], The Young Victoria [2009], Julie and Julia [2009], and most recently, I Love Dick [2016], Love, Simon [2018], and To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before [2018]). Several films also ask us to consider emotional masculinity; specifically the relationship between men, vulnerability, and letter writing ([Dear, John (2010], and Love, Simon 2018], and Charlie in The Perks of Being a Wallflower 2012]). On the other hand, we find masquerade and deceit as the counter to intimacy and emotional expression. These themes are increasingly prevalent as epistolary forms move online (A Cinderella Story [ 2004] as a digital take on a classic, Sierra Burgess Is a Big Loser, [2018], as the most recent re-telling of Cyrano de Bergerac, and in the omniscient narration of Gossip Girl [2007-2012]).

In less mainstream film and media letters, diaries, emails, and blogs have provided ways to play with the space of the personal and auto-biographical, providing intersections with the Essay Film genre. In this space epistolary forms offer genres of self-expression that adopt intimate, emotional, confessional tones; in contrast to the essayistic they are often characterised by a lack of reflection, as writers are too close to experiences, unable to make sense of them, writing them in the moment and/or caught up in the quotidian detail. Hamid Naficy finds epistolary forms particularly prevalent for expressions of exile ‘driven by distance, separation, absence and loss’ (Naficy, 1992: 101), (for example, Mona Hatoum’s Measures of Distance [1988] and Fernando Solanos Tangos: Exile of Gardel [1985]). Naficy’s words fit Indigenous collectives: the Chiapas media project (for Zapista communities in Mexico) who have created politicised videos that use ‘letters, interviews and testimonials’ (Davis et al, 2015: 54) and independents from Chantal Akerman and Jonas Mekas to Abbas Kiarostami (with Victor Erice).

Beyond cinema, in the art world and on other media, it is the themes of intimacy, privacy self-expression and masquerade raised by letters and diaries that we find most frequently addressed. Artist Hito Steyerl, writing about online scamming letters, has gone so far as to argue that: ‘[t]he strongest affective address of the digital happens in the epistolary mode. As a brush with words divorced from actual bodies.’(58) Meanwhile visual artists including Sophie Calle and Miranda July have created subversive melodramas from their use of letters and diaries.

The goal of this proposed collection is to embark on a deep engagement with epistolary forms and their presence in culture and on screen. We look forward to hearing from contributors working on all aspects of film, media and visual studies who share an interest in the many connections between the audio-visual and epistolary forms. Contributors may choose to focus on a specific film or media text or pursue an analysis that draws from a range of examples. As ‘epistolary forms’ we include letters, diaries, emails, blogs, texts, tweets and online social media.

Proposals may consider (but should not be limited to) the following themes and issues:

  • Histories of epistolary forms in film and media
  • Re-defining self-expression on screen
  • Implications for contemporary representations of intimacy
  • Relationships with gender & sexuality, especially masculinity
  • Intersectionality and epistolary forms
  • Centrality to cultures of confession,
  • Re-inventions of emotionality
  • Extending notions of masquerade
  • Relationships with genres (melodrama, romantic comedy, exile cinema, essay film)
  • World Cinema/race, ethnicity, the inter-cultural
  • Relation to other media forms (television; video games; social media)
  • The letter in the digital age (social media; scams)
  • Instagram and other social media platforms as diaristic forms

Proposals of up to 350 words, along with a short bio should be sent to the editors: Catherine.fowler@otago.ac.nz and theterihiggins@gmail.com by January 10th 2020. Final chapters will be due January 2021. Details regarding publication (publisher and timeline) will be sent when proposals are accepted.

References

Brooks, Peter. “The Melodramatic Imagination.” Imitations of Life: A Reader on Film and  Television Melodrama. Ed. Marcia Landy. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.  50-68.

Davis, Glyn, Kay Dickinson, Lisa Patti and Amy Villarejo. Film Studies – A Global Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2015.

Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/01/07/sally-rooney-gets-in-your-head

Steyerl, Hito. “Epistolary Affect and Romance Scams: Letter from an Unknown Woman.” October, Vol. 138, (Fall 2011), pp. 57-69.

Contact Info:

Associate Professor Catherine Fowler, University of Otago and Dr Teri Higgins, Independent Researcher, Montreal.

Posted January 4, 2020

That was is a beautiful tribute to Kay by Sid Smith. I remember Kay as a generous and enthusiastic life writing colleague, whose work on human rights in particular is still shaping the work of the next generation of scholars. When we ran the IABA Conference in Canada, Kay wrote to me frequently as she planned an epic car trip across the Canadian West to get to the conference. That’s what I remember about Kay–she was always up for an adventure. Rest in power.

Regards, Julie Rak
University of Alberta, Canada

POSTED JANUARY 3, 2020

Kay Schaffer 1945-2019

Many in the lifewriting community are saddened by the loss of Kay Schaffer, Professor Emerita in Gender Studies and Social Inquiry at the University of Adelaide. For more detailed information about her distinguished and influential career, go to

https://www.adelaide.edu.au/directory/kay.schaffer#

Sidonie Smith has also written a remembrance and a tribute to Kay that I’m posting below for the many people in our field who knew her, and who have benefited from her scholarship and enjoyed her company back to the very first IABA conference in Beijing in 1999.

Kay was a pioneering scholar of Australian women’s writing, post/colonial literary cultures, and life writing studies. Fearless feminist theorist. Tireless advocate of women’s studies curricula and programs. Educator of sometimes hostile colleagues. Dedicated mentor to young scholars and graduate students. Inspiring professor in the classroom. These were the roles Kay superbly inhabited throughout her career, and her enduring legacies. Brilliance, ambition, and confidence were her defining scholarly attributes. Sparkling beauty, warmth, and generosity were the animating features of her very being.

I was the beneficiary of Kay’s desire to share remarkable book projects, especially our 2004 book Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. She shared with me her family and her community of friends; her love of travel, especially to the IABA-World conferences; and her love of pleasure in living and in living well and fully. The memory of Kay’s voice, of her embodied habits, of her tensile energy, of her indomitable spirit, of her openness to grace, fills the hearts of those who knew her.  Vale Kay.

Sidonie Smith

Deadline for Submissions January 1, 2020

Storytelling and Identity through Digital Media

deadline for submissions: 
January 1, 2020
Storytelling, Self, Society
contact email: 

Digital media has drastically altered the way ordinary folk and professional users develop, tell, and share stories of culture. It challenges notions of authenticity and truth and the ethics of who has the privilege to tell a story. This special issue of Storytelling, Self, Society will investigate the way digital media has specifically altered practices such as narrative, character/identity, culture, story creation, and dissemination. Research questions might include: How do public and private users develop cultural media? What are the effects of insider and outside digital storytelling practices on identity formation? What constitutes authenticity and truthfulness in digital storytelling practices? Who has the right to tell a story online and from which perspectives? How can digital storytelling practices reframe identity and culture narratives for ordinary folk? How do people work within the limits of the media to tell narratives of identity and culture? What is the futurity of cultural digital media narrative artifacts? What is the impact of cultural digital narratives on travel and tourism? Are there differences between digital narratives and those told in person? What creative digital media projects are currently being employed to discuss narratives of identity and culture? What dissemination practices reach audiences most effectively? How do diverse audiences respond to or reflect the impact of digital stories of identity and narrative?

List of potential topics:

● Authenticity and truthfulness

● Ethics of identity shaping

● Social media

● Augmented/Virtual Reality

● Video games

● Video storytelling and Vlogs

● Character creation

● Gamer identity

● Identity groups (ex. LGBTQ+, Latinx)

● Avatars

● Public vs. personal identities

● Public History

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2020 New England Graphic Medicine Conference

Call for Papers 

MARCH 26-28, 2020
[Deadline: January 10, 2020]

Graphic Medicine is a genre, a field, a tool, a community, and a cause. It is large enough to accommodate all health and medical experiences, from that of the doctor to that of the patient – from that of a microbe to that of a planet.

Following the inaugural 2019 event organized by the National Network of Libraries of Medicine New England Region (NNLM NER), we are delighted to announce the 2020 New England Graphic Medicine Conference on the MCPHS University Boston campus. Paper, presentation, and panel proposals on Graphic Medicine in terms of the following topics are now being requested:

  • Artist health
  • Canonization
  • Climate crisis
  • Comics journalism
  • Data collection and privacy
  • Disability in the superhero genre
  • Healthcare business
  • Librarianship
  • Narratology and literary theory
  • Posthumanism
  • Religion and faith
  • Colorectal Cancer (March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month)
  • Epilepsy (March 26th is #PurpleDay for Epilepsy Awareness)
  • Historical illnesses (e.g. smallpox, malaria, Great Plague of London)
  • The Nib, The Annals of Graphic Medicine, and other online GM sources

Additional topics will also be considered. Proposals of no more than 200 words should be submitted as Word documents to a.lewis@mcphs.edu with the Subject line New England Graphic Medicine. Please also include a relevant 1-2 page CV for each potential speaker. Specify whether the proposal is part of a planned panel or is being offered for placement at the organizers’ discretion. Time blocks of 75 minutes (for full panels), 20 minutes (for individual papers), or 5 minutes (for “lightning talks”) will all be considered and should be noted in the proposal.

Creative workshops will be considered as well, and interested artists should submit portfolio links along with the other materials listed above. Exhibitor opportunities may be available: contact a.lewis@mcphs.edu for potential details.

Organized by the MCPHS Center of Health Humanities, the 2020 New England Graphic Medicine Conference is also supported by the MCPHS University Libraries, the School of Healthcare Business, and the School of Professional Studies. Additional guidance and resources are provided by the NNLM NER.

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Deadline for Submissions January 1, 2020

Call for Papers for an Edited Book on

The Future of Holocaust Testimonies:

Preserving, Researching, and Re-Presenting Survivor’s Voices

Boaz Cohen (WGC), Wolf Gruner (USC), Miriam Offer (WGC),
and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (ASU)

Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture. Even before the end of the Shoah, survivor historians in parts of Eastern Europe liberated from Nazi occupation collected testimonies and conducted interviews with fellow survivors. These practices constituted an integral part in rebuilding lives, coping with trauma, and shaping collective memories (Laura Jockusch). The 1960s trials of Nazi perpetrators, which were increasingly driven by Holocaust survivor-witnesses, laid the groundwork for the transformation of survivors into “survivors” in courtrooms from Jerusalem to Frankfurt/Main (Carolyn J. Dean). By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the beginning “era of the witness” (Annette Wieviorka), survivors and their testimonies were subject to further changes in increasingly transnational Holocaust memory cultures. Accompanying the rise of Holocaust Studies in North America and parts of Europe, survivors assumed often prominent positions in public discourse, frequently spoke in communities, schools, and universities, and—imbued with moral authority—conveyed a range of lessons about past and future genocides. During the 1990s, audio-visual projects, most noteworthy by the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation (now USC Shoah Foundation), recorded Holocaust survivor voices around the globe in unprecedented numbers, further elevating their standing and significance. At the same time, international Holocaust scholarship shifted from a preoccupation with perpetrator records to the voices and agency of persecuted Jewish populations that had already been at the center of the work of many Israeli scholars for decades.

At the end of the twenty-first century’s second decade, most adult survivors of the Holocaust are no longer with us and more and more child survivors – brought into sharp focus by the recent death of prominent survivor-activists like Eva Kor – are passing away. In the U.S. today, the number of survivors has shrunk by about half to under 70,000 in the span of the last decade. In Israel, the survivor population had fallen to less than 150,000 by 2015. Estimates for 2025 put this figure closer to 45,000. In response, various organizations have stepped up their efforts to record accounts from remaining survivors. The USC Shoah Foundation has introduced its “New Dimensions in Testimony” project that records three-dimensional, interactive testimonies of Holocaust survivors, which it is making available at museums throughout the United States.

With fewer and fewer survivors remaining among us, educators and researchers need to reconsider how and in what forms Holocaust scholarship and the memory of the Holocaust will continue. The main focus will certainly be the legacy that survivors leave behind in the forms of written, audio, and video testimonies. Holocaust testimonies have been studied in a myriad of ways. Many scholars have analyzed the devastating impact of the genocide on the survivors. They have focused on a range of factors from trauma to identity formation. Others have examined the transmission of survivor testimony to their children and grandchildren, who have their own stories to tell and are profoundly shaped by what some have conceptualized as “postmemory” (Marianne Hirsch). A different body of scholarship has shed light on survivors and their testimony in the broader societal contexts of Holocaust consciousness and memory. Still others, especially some cohorts of historians, have shifted the focus back to what these testimonies reveal about the actual events of the Shoah. A number of historians have proposed to take these sources at face value and dismissed approaching them with “cautious skepticism” (Jan Gross). Still others have compared larger bodies of testimonies, constructed “collected” and “core” memories (Christopher R. Browning), and used them as the main sources for monograph-length studies of the Shoah.

This edited volume sets out to reevaluate the study and role of Holocaust testimonies in the twenty-first century. The prospect of a world without Holocaust survivors poses profound challenges, precisely because their testimony has become so central to Holocaust memory, education, and research since the 1980s. Scholarly work on survivor testimony is done today in many academic disciplines. The rich and varied corpus of testimonies requires the collaborative efforts of researchers across disciplines to enable us to hear the voices of survivors articulated through their testimonies. This volume takes stock of the extensive work that has been accomplished, discusses the challenges, and explores new ways of preserving, analyzing, and re-presenting Holocaust survivor testimonies at this critical time.

In light of these objectives, we are welcoming contributions by scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from history and literary analysis to linguistics and genocide studies as well as from psychology and neuroscience to anthropology and memory studies. The editors encourage a broad variety of approaches from empirically oriented case studies to theoretical and methodological reflections. We also invite comparative work, contrasting testimony by Holocaust survivors with survivors of other genocides, and cross- and transnational studies. Lastly, we only accept work that has not already been published elsewhere.

The essays should address some of the following questions without being limited by them:

  • What are the meanings and conceptualizations of “Holocaust testimony”?
  • What are the key methodological and theoretical approaches in the study of Holocaust testimonies? What are these approaches’ accomplishments and shortcomings and how can we sharpen our readings of these invaluable sources?
  • How should Holocaust testimonies be classified and categorized?
  • What role do gender, occupation, age, place, and/or time play?
  • What are the insights and challenges of analyzing multiple testimonies given by the same survivors at different times after 1945?
  • How does video testimony differ from other forms of testimony (written, audio and the like)? What specific approaches does the study of these testimonies require?
  • How do the changing contexts (oral history, courtroom testimony, public presentation, conversation among survivors and the like) in which testimonies are given impact their form and outcome?
  • How have Holocaust testimonies shaped the construction of history and memory cultures? To what extent did the increasing significance of testimonies and their collection since the 1990s reflect a crisis in confidence in academic history and the work of professional historians and scholars of related disciplines? How do testimonies affect and/or change historical understanding and memorialization?
  • What insights do early Holocaust testimonies (of the 1940s and 1950s) convey? How do they differ from later testimonies (since the 1980s)? Is there a need for re-reading and re-interpretation and what forms would it take?
  • What are the challenges of a time in the not too distant future, when there will be no more Holocaust survivors to give testimony?
  • What is the role of second- and third-generation Holocaust testimony? What are the prospects and limits of concepts such as postmemory? What can we learn from studies of intergenerational transmission of trauma and resilience?
  • What are the prospects and limitations in the use of three-dimensional, interactive testimonies of Holocaust survivors such as the USC Shoah Foundation’s “New Dimensions in Testimony” project for Holocaust education, memory, and research?
  • What strategies have Holocaust deniers employed to undermine Holocaust testimonies? What is the role of survivor-witnesses and their testimonies in combatting Holocaust denial?

Please submit an abstract of up to 400 words (including title) and a 100-word bio to Boaz Cohen (BoazC@wgalil.ac.il), Wolf Gruner (gruner@dornsife.usc.edu), Miriam Offer (miriamoffer@gmail.com), and Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (thomaspegelowkaplan@appstate.edu) by Jan. 1, 2020.

Contact Info:

Dr. Boaz Cohen

Chair

Holocaust Studies Program

Western Galilee College, Akko

Western Galilee College

P.O. Box 2125

Akko  24121

Israel

Dr. Wolf Gruner

Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies Shapell-Guerin Chair in Jewish Studies

Founding Director of the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research

University of Southern California

Department of History

3502 Trousdale Parkway

Social Sciences Building (SOS) 262

Los Angeles, CA 90089-0034

USA

Dr. Miriam Offer

Holocaust Studies Program

Western Galilee College, Akko

Western Galilee College

P.O. Box 2125

Akko  24121

Israel

Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan

Leon Levine Distinguished Professor of Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
Director, Center for Judaic, Holocaust, and Peace Studies
Professor of History

Appalachian State University
P.O. Box 32146
Edwin Duncan Hall, Room 102B
Boone, NC 28608
USA

Contact Email:
thomaspegelowkaplan@appstate.edu
URL:
https://holocaust.appstate.edu/academics/faculty-research/current-research-projects
As 2019 draws to a close, here is a brief summary of the life-writing events coming up next term. We have a programme packed with the usual lectures and discussions, as well as the launch of our book, Lives of Houses, a new seminar series on Ancient Lives, and an exciting opportunity to study with us…
Study for a doctorate at OCLW
In 2020 we, in collaboration with the Department of Education and Human Story Theatre, will be awarding the first Derrill Allatt doctoral studentship.

Our student will make use of a range of participatory arts-based methods to study the lives of homeless women, exploring the relationship between their experiences in education, broadly defined, and their lives today.

More details, including how to apply, can be found here. The deadline is midday, on 24 January 2020.
Launching Lives of Houses
What can a house tell us about the person who lives there? Do we shape the buildings we live in, or are we formed by the places we call home? And why are we especially fascinated by the houses of the famous and often long-dead?

In Lives of Houses, edited by Kate Kennedy and Hermione Lee, a group of notable biographers, historians, critics, and poets explores these questions and more through fascinating essays on the houses of great writers, artists, composers, and politicians of the past.

During Hilary Term we will celebrate the publication of Lives of Houses with Princeton University Press on several occasions. The dates for your diary are 9 March in London, and 28 March at the Oxford Literary Festival.
Life-writing lectures and discussions
During the term we will welcome Zachary Leader on Ellmann’s Joyce; Benjamin Zephaniah in conversation with Elleke Boehmer and Malachi McIntosh; and Warhol biographer Blake Gopnik.

There will be discussion panels on royal biography and maternity, life-writing, and fiction, as well as colloquiums on writing queer lives, authorship and celebrity, and the work of Jenny Diski.

All the details are in our Hilary Term Card, and we will send out fortnightly notifications next term.
Life-Writing Research Forums
As always, please do join us in Seminar Room 2 from 1:15 – 2:30 every Tuesday in term for a programme of talks and workshops on life-writing. Topics for Hilary Term include biographical fiction, opera and life-writing, lives of orchestras, and trauma in life-writing. All the details are in our Hilary Term Card.
New Seminar Series on Ancient Lives
We’re delighted to launch a new seminar series on ancient lives, a collaboration between OCLW and the Ancient World Research Cluster at Wolfson College. These seminars will take place in the Leonard Wolfson Auditorium every other Wednesday at 5-30pm, starting on 29 January with a talk on life-writing in an ancient desert. Once again, full details are in the term card and will be in next term’s regular newsletters.

We wish you an enjoyable Christmas break, and look forward to seeing you at some of our many events next term.

Deadline for Submissions December 31, 2019

Self-Promotion and Self-Aggrandizement: Accelerating Literary Legacy through Nonfiction
South Central Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
February 7-8, 2020, Embassy Suites Hotel, St. Augustine, Florida

This year, Martin Scorsese started a debate about “good cinema” when he boldly asserted that all movies in the Marvel universe were not cinema because “cinema is an art form that brings the unexpected,” where superhero movies are formulaic, and nothing is at stake (New York Times 2019). Scorsese’s opinion piece inspired multiples of movie critics, other directors, actors, and moviegoers to respond, either agreeing or disagreeing with him. This debate also motivated questions about the definition of an “art form” and who is qualified to define that term. Specifically, a lot of people criticized the obvious self-serving nature of a film director (who had a movie coming out) attempting to define himself as a creator of an art form and his movies as “art.”

Likewise, in the eighteenth-century, writers constantly tried to define what “good literature” was in a way that included their own works or those of their friends and mentors. Beginning in the Restoration, long eighteenth-century writers engaged in pamphlet wars and wrote encomiums and invectives to one another through play dedications and satires—including mock epics and imitations. Writers also composed nonfiction genres such as literary criticism, biographies, collections of letters, and literary histories, wherein their attempted to situate themselves or their friends in a “Literary” framework (and by contrast, they attempted to situate their literary enemies outside this framework). We can trace a kind of adjudication of “Literature” through these genres in the eighteenth century.

This is a panel at the 2020 SCSECS Conference in St. Augustine, FL and is interested in the ways writers of the long eighteenth-century (American, British, or otherwise) used nonfiction genres such as life writing, literary criticism, literary history, pamphlets, author’s notes, etc. to create a literary legacy for themselves or members of their literary coterie. You may also discuss how writers of this period used these types of writings to create negative literary legacies for their competitors and enemies.

Please submit a brief paper proposal to Dr. Lindsay Emory Moore at LEMoore@collin.edu by December 31, 2019. Lindsay Emory Moore is a Professor of English at the Spring Creek campus of Collin College in Plano, TX.

For more information

http://scsecs.net/scsecs/2020/2020_panels.html

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Deadline for Submissions, December 31, 2019

INDIGENOUS

MOBILITIES

Travelers through the Heart(s) of Empire

Wednesday 17th –

Friday 19th June

2020

Reid Hall, Paris

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

–     David A. Chang (University of Minnesota)

–     Nika Collison (Haida Gwaii Museum)

–     Michael H. Crowe (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians)

In 2006, Anishinaabe artist Robert Houle (Sandy Bay First Nation) conceived Paris/Ojibwa during his residency at La Cité des Arts in Paris. Partly a commemoration of the 1845 visit of Maungwudaus and his troupe of performers, and partly a “reply” to the contemporary responses of French writers and artists the work reflects on the history and politics of encounter, and on disappearance. The piece recalls Indigenous ties to the land, while also alluding to the untimely deaths of members of Maungwudaus’s troupe and family while on tour. The resulting installation invited renewed encounter between Parisian publics and that Anishinaabe history, through a contemporary Anishinaabe presence in the city.

This conference, drawing on the work of the “Beyond the Spectacle: Native North American Presence in Britain” project, seeks to build on the growing body of work examining Indigenous travel across the Atlantic, broadening the scope of our present project from Britain to Europe more broadly, and from North American/transatlantic to global concerns. If Houle’s project is one example of the ways travel both creates and illuminates historical memory, while also offering the opportunity to examine and enliven ongoing connections between Indigenous and European spaces and communities, how else do these legacies of colonialism manifest on European soil? How do they critique and commemorate that past?

How do/can they transcend the colonial context? And what do they mean to contemporary communities, whether Indigenous or European? Maungwudaus and others left accounts of their experiences in Europe; what do those accounts, and contemporary reverberations such as Houle’s artwork, do to their public audiences’ understanding of the spaces they travelled through, as well as the places they came from? How do they inflect an Indigenous-centred understanding of the transnational turn; deflect or otherwise destroy the binary of Indigenous (local/static) and modern (global/mobile); or contribute to the exigencies of post-Imperial history and its implications in other fields? And finally, what practical, material change can the examination of these moments and modes of encounter, in spaces that invite collaboration between Indigenous and European participants, bring about for current practice in academia, museum studies, and the culture industry more broadly, particularly in regard to the relationships between institutional practitioners and communities?

We welcome the full range of traditional approaches—20 minute papers, panels, roundtables—and are very open to more innovative responses to subject matter—poster presentations, video presentations, performances, collaborative/interactive sessions, as well as to non-academic proposers.

Topics that may be covered include, but are not limited to:

–       Historic and contemporary journeys by both individuals and groups—their root causes and impacts, e.g.: Sport, military (esp. the First and Second World Wars), activism, commerce, diplomacy, captivity, and performance

–       Commemorations /reverberations of historical journeys

–       The legacies of travel to home communities (incl. artistic and literary responses)

–       The ‘residues’ of travel in destination communities (incl. artistic and literary responses)

–       ‘encounter’ between different groups of non-European travellers

–       How to make European archives more accessible to Indigenous scholars and communities

–       Decolonizing European archives and institutions

–       Fostering Indigenous-centred Indigenous Studies in Europe

–       What it means to be gathering in Paris (or any other major city of a colonising power)

–       Fostering mutual, ethical relations between IS practitioners in Europe and Indigenous communities

–       Reframing Centre and Periphery

–       Confronting/transcending the spectacle

Papers: please send 250 word abstracts and a short bio.

Panels: panel proposals of no more than 3 speakers should include a 100 word summary of the overall theme, plus 250 word abstracts per speaker. Please include short bios for all contributors, including chairs/respondents.

Roundtables: please outline the proposed discussion in roughly 250-300 words and include bios of all intended participants that make clear how they will contribute to the discussion.

All Other Formats: please describe the intended contribution in 250 words or so, include a brief bio, and a full list of any facilities (space dimensions, audio-visual, etc.) that would be required so that we can understand feasibility.

Please send all proposals to: beyondthespectacle@kent.ac.uk by 31 December 2019.

Deadline for Submissions December 30, 1019

Call for Papers

Life Writing in Translation (Conference)

King’s College London / Centre for Life-Writing Research / 27 May 2020

The Centre for Life-Writing Research is a pioneering group producing some of the most innovative work in the field. Established in 2007, and now part of the Arts & Humanities Research Institute, it enables experts and students to share, research and exchange ideas with a wider audience.
We work on all sorts of topics and periods covering a wide range of genres – biography, autobiography, autofiction, diaries and letters, memoirs, digital life writing including social media, blogs, audio and video, the visual arts (especially portraiture), poetry, and medical narratives. What connects us is an interest in the theory, history and practice of life writing.

It’s more that when it comes to writing and reading translations the question of what is wholly normal or truly plausible, of what was really said or written, gets suspended, slightly. The translator asks me to agree to its suspension. To suspend, or to suspend even further, my disbelief. /…/ Which is to say: before we’re even in the position to critique or worry over the decisions made by the translator, some provisional agreement has already been made. We have accepted the book in English. We have accepted that the book is now written in what appears to be English. (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)

As a one-day conference, Life Writing in Translation proposes to address such topics as:

  • Stylistic approaches to translating life writing: using style to translate mind, foregrounding, ambiguous translation, belle infidèle, the implied translatorA reader of translation will receive a sort of split message coming from two different addressers, both original although in two different senses: one originating from the author which is elaborated and mediated by the translator, and one (the language of the translation itself) originating directly from the translator. (Schiavi 1996)
  • Translating as re-writing: reconstructing the author’s image and lived experience, the translator’s impact, re-translationIn the case of translated autobiography, subtle variations of style may give rise to significant shifts in point of view that constructs a different persona of the autobiographer. (Xu Yun 2017)
  • Cross-cultural translation of life writing: translator as the producer of relations – is the I international?We receive these books newly made by the hands of translators, and the small contracts that those hands make, between translator and writer, reader and translator, language and language,

culture and culture, experience and experience are, as Edith Grossman puts it, as vital to our continued reading and writing, to the vitality of our language, our cultures and experiences as the books themselves. (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)

  • Becoming one: the translator’s melding with the author and its curious consequencesLike the ghostwriter, the translator must slip on a second skin. Sometimes this transition is gentle, unobtrusive, without violence. But sometimes the settling in is abrupt, loud, and even disagreeable. For me, “plunge deep” tactics that go beyond the mechanics of translation help: coaxing out references to reconstruct the author’s cultural touchstones (books, film, music); reading passages aloud, first in the original and then in translation, until hoarseness sets in; animating the author’s story through my senses, using my nose, my ears, my eyes, and my fingers; devouring every clue to imprint the range of the author’s voice (humor, anger, grief, detachment) on my translation. (Lara Vergnaud, The Paris Review)
  • The translator-reader contract: the tole of the ‘active’ readerI think of Renee Gladman, poet, novelist and translator, asking her interviewer in an interview: ‘When you’re reading translations, don’t you sometimes feel the racing heartbeat of the translator trying to get shit right?’ /…/ And the question is: Well, do you? Do I? Reading translations, is this the kind heat that you – or indeed I – want to feel? Or no, not really, not al all? (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)
  • Publishing perspectives: how publishers and booksellers tackle life writing in translation – the ‘three percent problem’We welcome academics, translators, poets, writers, booksellers and publishers and invite proposals for individual papers, dialogues/interviews, panels, round tables and creative or reflective submissions. Please send your proposals via email to pia.prezelj@kcl.ac.uk.Conference language: English Suggested formats:
  • −  Individual paper (15 minutes slot, abstract max. 300 words)
  • −  Dialogue/Interview (30 minutes slot, 2 participants, abstract max. 300 words)
  • −  Panel (60 minutes slot, 3 participants including chair, abstract max. 600 words)
  • −  Round Table (45 minutes slot, 3/4 participants, abstract max. 600 words)
  • −  Creative/Reflective Submission (15 minutes slot, fiction and non-fiction, proposal max. 300 words)
  • Deadline for proposals: 23 December 2019 Notification of acceptance: 27 January 2020
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Deadline for Submissions December 30, 1019

Special Issue on Post-millennial Indian Graphic Narratives (12/30/2019)

Guest Editors: E. Dawson Varughese, Sakshi Wason and Varsha Singh

The post-millennial years have witnessed significant developments in the field of popular visuality in South Asia and for India at least, a liberalised economy, advancements in digital technology, satellite television, urban beautification projects and a publishing boom have all shaped what we see, how we see it and why we see it. Within this post-millennial, economic, socio-cultural context Indian graphic narratives have taken their place and now, nearly twenty years into a sustained and successful period of their production, there is need to take stock of the field, reflecting on their creation, circulation, on artistic practice as well as domestic and global reception. Although the early years of the 2000s saw steady production and (in particular, domestic) circulation of Indian graphic narratives, research and scholarship has taken a little time to gain similar momentum but as the canon of creative work has grown, scholarship, particularly in the last seven to ten years has proved to be more sustained, more global and wider in its scope of enquiry. The field now enjoys some key academic texts in addition to many chapters and academic papers. The aim of this Special Issue is to publish a selection of academic papers that take stock of the field, reflecting on, exploring and presenting key themes, tropes and directions that the Indian graphic narratives scene has known over the last 15-20 years. Several invited, creative pieces will also appear in the Special Issue.

As editors, we are interested in examining the last twenty years of Indian graphic narratives production through the following (and other related) topics, keeping in mind the over-arching theme of ‘reflection’ and ‘taking stock’:

  • The post-millennial Indian publishing scene and Indian graphic narratives (global corporates, domestic, independent presses and story houses)
  • Theoretical approaches to post-millennial Indian graphic narratives (‘West and East’ notions of visuality, ‘reading’ graphic narratives and production as possible topics)
  • Graphic narratives of the early post-millennial years – Sarnath Banerjee, Orijit Sen, Vishwajyoti Ghosh as examples
  • Comics collectives in India and co-created/curated anthologies of graphic narrative work
  • Hindu epics, mythology, the dystopian in Indian graphic narratives (such as the works of Appupen, Amruta Patil as examples)
  • Biography-based Indian graphic narratives
  • Socially-engaged Indian graphic narratives
  • Graphic non-fiction (such as the First Hand volumes of work)
  • Indian graphic narrative artistic production and research (practice-based research papers are welcome)

We invite academic papers of around 5000-7000 words formatted according to T&F’s Reference Style of Chicago Author-Date [For full information on this style, see The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edn) or http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html (click on the tab marked author-date to ensure you are using the right style)]

Timeline

CfP in circulation: July to December 2019

Deadline for full papers: 30th December 2019

Decisions on papers between 31st January – 29th February 2020

Revisions on papers to be completed during March – May 2020

Preparation for Publication June 2020 – December 2020

Publication of Special Issue in 2021

For initial queries please email Dr E. Dawson Varughese: edawsonvarughese@gmail.com

Contact Info:

Primary Respondent: Emma Dawson Varughese, Independent Scholar UK and Snr Fellow at Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal, India

Fellow Respondents: Sakshi Wason, the University of Delhi, India, Varsha Singh, IIT Jammu, India

Contact Email:
edawsonvarughese@gmail.com

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Deadline for Submissions December 23, 2019
Desired Identities
New Technology-based Metamorphosis in Japan
April 29-30, 2020

Paris, France

This conference is organized by the ERC-funded research project ‘Emotional Machines: The Technological Transformation of Intimacy in Japan’ (EMTECH), in partnership with the Department of Research and Higher Education of the quai Branly museum – Jacques Chirac.
Description
In 2019, the population of Japan is at 124.9 million, but what if we include ‘character residents?’ As if to compensate for the declining birth-rate, characters proliferate. They welcome you in front of restaurants. They invite you for countryside tours. They smile on key holders, transportation cards, bags, screens and panels. Acting as interfaces between people, objects and spaces, they now invade social networks up to the point where a whole industry of character-camouflage is now prompting web users to merge with videogame-like creatures. How can we understand this phenomenon? What social changes does it contribute to shape and to mirror?In the course of an international conference, researchers from various disciplines are invited to share their experiences and outcomes concerning this phenomenon, in Japan (as well as in Korea or in similar research fields). This phenomenon has been termed
kyara-ka, ‘transforming into a character’ (Aihara Hiroyuki, 2007) and it is now giving birth to what Nozawa Shunsuke (2013) calls ‘an emerging art of self–fashioning.’ Based on elaborate disguise techniques, the kyara-ka phenomenon covers a variety of communication strategies and practices. The most famous is of course cosplay, which enables men and women to conceal their identity and to act as a character. Kigurumi, the radical version of cosplay, implies the making of a second skin, a helmet like head and, recently, a vocoder. As a matter of fact, kyara-ka has also generated a movement of people who record their voices using synthetic voice technology, in order to become what they call an utaloid (artificial singer). The phenomenon is also accountable for huge trends such as the use of image filters to upload TikTok viral videos, or the development of software applications that turn humans into animated avatars. Virtual-Tubers, who are real people with a digital manga-style appearance, are now becoming celebrities on YouTube. The most famous pretend to be Artificial Intelligences. Some of them may indeed be the equivalent of Virtual Idols (i.e. products designed by talent agencies) and their popularity is so high that they now become characters in Love Simulation Games. As nobody knows their real face, they may as well be purely fictitious persons.
Exploring all the aspects of this ‘thingification of humans’, the conference will reflect on how and why a growing number of people market themselves as characters. In contemporary societies, where individuals must compete (Pierre Bourdieu, 1979), the need to differentiate paradoxically results in the adoption of customized identities and normative e-bodies shared by media culture consumers. It would be easy of course to denounce this ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (Guy Debord, 1967) where branding yourself is a form of salvation, but such analysis would fail to acknowledge the specificity of these auto-commodification acts. The singular dimension of the kyara-ka phenomenon is the desire to be erased as a mortal being and to be reborn as a member of a collective fantasy. It is not only about role-playing or promoting your self, it is about seeing the world from a floating or spectral point of view, the point of view of someone (something?) which is inside the character shell. To what extent can we consider kyara-ka as part of the real digital revolution that Dominique Boullier (2016) describes in terms of an ‘immersive framework of thinking?’
The conference goal is to address the complexity of issues raised by these voluntary and, perhaps, ironical acts of obliteration. What is the profile of men and women who transform themselves into computer-graphic creatures? How do they deal with being loved only through their digital alter ego? How do they cope when the alter ego is not of the same gender? What image/voice-processing filters do they use, and in which contexts? What little or grand narratives are being produced alongside? Can we still deal with the phenomenon in terms of authenticity (original) versus artificiality (copy)? How does such a phenomenon affect networked sociability? What negotiations or refusals underly the use of characters as social masks?
For Social and Human Sciences, this rising phenomenon constitutes a strategic research object as it offers a particularly interesting vantage point on social phenomena such as the Construction of Digital Identities and the Business of Gamification.
Submission guidelines
Abstracts must be submitted BEFORE DECEMBER 23 2019, in English and sent by email to agnes.giard@fu-berlin.de in PDF format. The submissions (between two and three pages) must include a title, an abstract and a short biography of the author (including name and affiliation).
You can find the details in the attached file or on the following link.
Thank you for helping me disseminate this Call.
I am gladly waiting for  your proposals,
Agnès Giard
Contact Info:
Agnès GIARD
Postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin (European research Project “Emotional Machines: The Technological Transformation of Intimacy in Japan”)
Associate researcher University of Paris Nanterre (Sophiapol laboratory)
Contact Email:

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Deadline for Submissions December 23, 2019

Life Writing in Translation (12/23/2019; 5/27/2020) King’s College London / Centre for Life-Writing Research

As a one-day conference, Life Writing in Translation proposes to address such topics as:

• Stylistic approaches to translating life writing: using style to translate mind, foregrounding, ambiguous translation, belle infidèle, the implied translator

A reader of translation will receive a sort of split message coming from two different addressers, both original although in two different senses: one originating from the author which is elaborated and mediated by the translator, and one (the language of the translation itself) originating directly from the translator. (Schiavi 1996)

• Translating as re-writing: reconstructing the author’s image and lived experience, the translator’s impact, re-translation

In the case of translated autobiography, subtle variations of style may give rise to significant shifts in point of view that constructs a different persona of the autobiographer. (Xu Yun 2017)

• Cross-cultural translation of life writing: translator as the producer of relations – is the I international?

We receive these books newly made by the hands of translators, and the small contracts that those hands make, between translator and writer, reader and translator, language and language,
culture and culture, experience and experience are, as Edith Grossman puts it, as vital to our continued reading and writing, to the vitality of our language, our cultures and experiences as the books themselves. (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)

• Becoming one: the translator’s melding with the author and its curious consequences

Like the ghostwriter, the translator must slip on a second skin. Sometimes this transition is gentle, unobtrusive, without violence. But sometimes the settling in is abrupt, loud, and even disagreeable. For me, “plunge deep” tactics that go beyond the mechanics of translation help: coaxing out references to reconstruct the author’s cultural touchstones (books, film, music); reading passages aloud, first in the original and then in translation, until hoarseness sets in; animating the author’s story through my senses, using my nose, my ears, my eyes, and my fingers; devouring every clue to imprint the range of the author’s voice (humor, anger, grief, detachment) on my translation. (Lara Vergnaud, The Paris Review)

• The translator-reader contract: the tole of the ‘active’ reader

I think of Renee Gladman, poet, novelist and translator, asking her interviewer in an interview: ‘When you’re reading translations, don’t you sometimes feel the racing heartbeat of the translator trying to get shit right?’ /…/ And the question is: Well, do you? Do I? Reading translations, is this the kind heat that you – or indeed I – want to feel? Or no, not really, not al all? (Kate Briggs, This Little Art)

• Publishing perspectives: how publishers and booksellers tackle life writing in translation – the ‘three percent problem’

We welcome academics, translators, poets, writers, booksellers and publishers and invite proposals for individual papers, dialogues/interviews, panels, round tables and creative or reflective submissions. Please send your proposals via email to pia.prezelj@kcl.ac.uk.

Conference language: English Suggested formats: − Individual paper (15 minutes slot, abstract max. 300 words) − Dialogue/Interview (30 minutes slot, 2 participants, abstract max. 300 words) − Panel (60 minutes slot, 3 participants including chair, abstract max. 600 words) − Round Table (45 minutes slot, 3/4 participants, abstract max. 600 words) − Creative/Reflective Submission (15 minutes slot, fiction and non-fiction, proposal max. 300 words) Deadline for proposals: 23 December 2019 Notification of acceptance: 27 January 2020

Deadline for Submissions 12/20/2019

Oral History and the Media
OHS Annual Conference 2020
Bournemouth University
July 2020th and Saturday 4rdFriday 3

Oral history and the media have an important but complex relationship. The media has long been a significant producer of, and outlet for, oral history.  Classic radio and television productions like The Radio Ballads (1958-1964), Yesterday’s Witness (1969-1981), and The World at War (1973-4) pioneered the use of oral history in the media, giving voice to those who would otherwise have been excluded from both the media and the historical record. Since the 1980s, there has been growing use of oral history in TV and radio documentaries and storytelling, with oral histories now forming an important and popular dimension of history and factual programming and broadcasting. However, the methodological, aesthetic, narrative, and ethical decisions behind these productions – such as who to interview, what questions to ask, and what parts of the interviews end up on the “cutting room floor” – often remain hidden.

The relationship between oral history and the media can also be seen in how oral history has been used to explore the histories and experiences of the media itself, with oral history projects charting the development of media companies and organisation. This has coincided with an upsurge of interest in memory and nostalgia related to the experiences of media, such as memories of cinema, books and music.

Elsewhere, the advent of new media and social media has fuelled the growth of digital storytelling, interactive documentaries, as well as serialised audio podcasts which draw heavily on oral history testimony. Whilst these new technologies, formats and channels offer new ways of creating, disseminating and consuming oral history, they also raise vital questions about ethics, participation, expertise, audiences, and formats in oral history practice.

This conference aims to consider the relationship between oral history and the media, both historically and today, by exploring similarities, differences, opportunities and challenges between media practices and oral history practices, from interviewing to editing, audiences to ethics, covering topics such as:

  • The Use and Misuse of Oral History in the Media
  • Memories of (the) Media: Film, Books, TV, Radio, Theatre, Music.
  • The Influence of the Media on Memory: Mediated Memory and Prosthetic Memory
  • Oral History, Media and Editing: Soundbites, Vox-Pops and the ‘Cutting-Room Floor’
  • Oral History, Media and Interviewing: Intersubjectivity, Questions, and Emotion
  • Journalism, Crisis Oral History and Historical Distance
  • Oral Histories of the Media (professions, organisations and companies)
  • New Media, Social Media and Oral History
  • Changing Media and Formats and its implications for Oral History
  • Archiving, Preservation and Re-use of Oral Histories in the Media

PROPOSALS
The deadline for submission of proposals is 20th December 2019. Each proposal should include: a title, an abstract of between 250-300 words, your name (and the names of any copresenters, panellists, etc), your institution or organisation, your email address, and a note of any particular requirements. Most importantly your abstract should demonstrate the use of oral history or personal testimony and be directly related to the conference theme. Proposals that include audio playback are strongly encouraged. Proposals should be emailed to the ORAL HISTORY AND THE MEDIA Conference Manager, Polly Owen, at polly.owen@ohs.org.uk . They will be assessed anonymously by the conference organisers, and presenters will be contacted in January/February 2020

www.ohs.org.uk/conferences/conference-2020/

Date for Conference December 16-17, 2019

Herstory Re-Imagined

A Conference on Women’s Lives in Biographical Fiction and Film

16-17 December 2019
Centre for Life-Writing Research, King’s College London
Convenors: Julia Lajta-Novak (Vienna) and Caitríona Ní Dhúill (Durham)

How do the lives of historical women become the raw material of novelists and filmmakers? This conference addresses the current boom in biographical novels and biopics about women’s lives, encompassing a broad conception of ‘woman’ that includes queer and trans life narratives. Figures as diverse as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, poet Sylvia Plath, surgeon James Miranda Barry, painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and actress Jiang Qing are the subjects of fictions in various formats and degrees of literary ambition, while pilot Amelia Earhart, stateswoman Margaret Thatcher, blues singer Bessie Smith, and first lady Jackie Kennedy – to name just a very few – have been prominently re-imagined on the silver screen. This conference aims to bring studies of biofiction and biopics into close dialogue with gender-sensitive approaches to biography, so as to shed light on the interactions between life writing, fiction, and dynamics of gender.

Programme:
https://herstory-reimagined.net/programme/

Registration:
https://estore.kcl.ac.uk/conferences-and-events/academic-faculties/faculty-of-arts-humanities/arts-humanities-research-institute/herstory-reimagined-womens-lives-in-biographical-fiction-and-film

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Deadline for Submissions December 15, 2019

Edited Volume Call for Abstracts–#MeToo and Literary Studies: Reading, Writing, and Teaching about Sexual Assault and Rape Culture (12/15/2019)

Editors: Professors Heather Hewett and Mary Holland, SUNY New Paltz

REVISED deadline to submit abstracts: December 15

The #MeToo movement, created by activist Tarana Burke as a grassroots campaign ten years before it took off on social media, has unleashed a flood of pop culture books on misogyny, rape, rape culture, and sexual assault. Yet to date, no major work considers how the #MeToo movement might enrich our critical and pedagogical literary practices, or how literary and cultural studies might help feminist scholars better understand and marshal the powerful energies of #MeToo.

Scholars and activists agree that legal change is not enough to dismantle the misogyny and rape culture that make sexual assault invisible, pervasive, and normalized. Culture and its artifacts must change before society will start to reflect new norms that do not permit sexual violence. Feminist scholars such as Beth E. Richie (Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation, 2012), Sarah Deer (The Beginning and End of Rape: Confronting Sexual Violence in Native America, 2015), Doug Meyer, Violence against Queer People: Race, Class, Gender, and the Persistence of Anti-LGBT Discrimination (2015), Catharine MacKinnon (Butterfly Politics, 2017), Roxane Gay (Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, 2018), Kate Manne (Down Girl, 2018), and Tamsin Bradley (Global Perspectives on Violence against Women and Girls, forthcoming 2020) examine a range of ideologies and structures interconnected with sexual violence, including misogyny, racism, cis-heteronormativity, rape culture, settler colonialism, incarceration, and war, both in the U.S. and globally. These theoretical perspectives provide important frameworks for understanding #MeToo and sexual violence on a societal and transnational level, and the cultural artifacts that encourage or critique the culture that perpetuates that violence.

This volume aims to ignite a conversation about literature, culture, and sexual assault by gathering essays that bring these areas of inquiry and activism to bear on each other in three ways: 1. rethinking the critical practices we use to produce scholarship and theory about literature and culture in light of this movement; 2. producing rereadings of literature and authors whose participation in or critique of rape culture has yet to be made visible, or whose work can be revisited to shed light on the current moment; 3. proposing pedagogical practices designed to bring the problem of sexual assault and the voices that testify to it into the classroom. We hope this volume will be not only a valuable tool for critics and teachers looking to infuse their work with crucial contemporary issues and the energy surrounding them on social media and in the popular press, but also a tool for real change in the world.

We invite abstracts for papers concerning any of three aspects of literary and cultural studies:

  • Rethinking critical practices in light of #MeToo. Topics might include
    • Ways in which intersectional analyses of #MeToo narratives might provide another context for interpreting creative work, particularly texts that explore bodily violence, trauma, and survivorship;
    • How #MeToo, and social media more broadly, interacts with traditionally published life narratives and changes the possibilities of creating, sharing, and using personal narratives;
    • Ways in which sexual politics in the university or publishing world inhibit critical work that unmasks misogyny and sexual abuse;
    • Ways in which critics might silence themselves when writing about misogynistic texts or texts that support rape culture;
    • Implications of authorial accusations of sexual abuse for critical readings of authors’ work (eg, Daniel Handler (author of YA Lemony Snicket books), James Dashner (also a YA author), Junot Diaz, Sherman Alexie, Leon Wieseltier (literary critic/journalist/editor)).
  • Feminist rereadings of authors or specific texts whose misogyny, rape culture, and/or scenes of sexual harassment, abuse, or rape have yet to be identified and critiqued by critics, or of authors or specific texts whose inquiry into sexual violence can shed light on the current moment. Topics might include
    • Reconsiderations of canonical authors whose sexual politics have so far escaped scrutiny (eg, Coetzee, Updike; this list may include female authors);
    • Readings of lesser known texts that critique rape culture in effective ways;
    • Readings of work authored by black women, indigenous women, women of color, and colonized women (cis and trans) that provides a lens for understanding sexual violence and #MeToo;
    • Readings of work authored by queer and trans folk that provides a lens for understanding sexual violence and #MeToo;
    • How young adult literature treats sexual assault and rape culture (Erik Cleveland and Sybil Durand published on this topic in 2014);
    • How sexual assault is normalized even in otherwise female-empowering literature, film, or TV;
    • How depictions of sexual assault and rape culture in contemporary texts differ from those in earlier texts, because of changes in the law, cultural changes, political movements, etc;
    • Texts that draw parallels with the current political and social climate of backlash against women’s rights.
  • Expanding pedagogical practices to respond to implications of #MeToo, and to bring the topic of sexual assault into the classroom. Topics might include
    • Using literature that features or interrogates sexual assault as a way of educating college students about rape culture and the patriarchal structures that enable it;
      • for example, one might pair Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” with Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” to contrast the interrogation of rape culture in the former with its invisibility in the latter;
    • Exploring intersectional approaches to literature with sexual violence in ways that teach students to read with attention to the politics of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability (such as with Sapphire’s novel Push and Lee Daniels’s film Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire);
    • Contextualizing literature in the legal, social, cultural, and/or historical circumstances that enable us to read texts’ implications about sexual politics (as Davis, Jr. does for Tess and contemporary law);
    • Considering the arguments for or against bringing into the classroom the work of writers or performers publicly accused of sexual harassment, for example Louis CK, and Aziz Ansari;
    • Enlisting feminist and gender theory (for example, Susan Bordo, Patricia Hill Collins) to elucidate aspects of misogyny and rape culture, and to consider ways of moving out of them;
    • Pedagogical approaches to teaching survivor narratives and other literature that addresses sexual violence with #MeToo narratives;
    • Addressing questions related to presence and absence, privilege and power in the literature classroom—that is, whose stories get told? Whose stories do not get told? Whose stories get listened to, and whose do not? (For example, what about women who are accused of sexual violence? Trans and gender-nonconforming victims of sexual violence? Sexual abuse of people with disabilities?)

Please submit 500-750 word abstracts, brief c.v., and contact information to both volume editors (hewetth@newpaltz.edu and hollandm@newpaltz.edu) by December 15.

We have communicated with presses in general about this volume, but will approach particular ones once we have received abstracts and have a better sense of the final volume. Given recent publishing trends, we anticipate this project will be very appealing to publishers.

Deadline for Submissions, December 15, 2019

Call for Book Proposals for the Real Lives in Global Perspective Series

Call for book proposals for the series, Real Lives in Global Perspective. Published by Routledge, the purpose of this series is to teach key social, economic, political, and cultural developments in world history to first year university students using parallel biographies as a framework. The books will juxtapose figures facing similar situations in different geographical regions, with one book for each century, each containing four pairs of biographies. The authors should be experts in the appropriate time period willing to research a variety of geographic areas.

Deadline: December 15

Contact Info:

Rebecca Boone

Lamar University

Contact Email:
raboone@lamar.edu
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Fourth Annual Symposium Unhinging the National Framework: Transnational Life Writing
Friday, 6 December, 2019 Atrium, Medical Faculty Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Van der Boechorststraat 7 1081 BT Amsterdam

09.30 – 10.00       Welcome with coffee and tea

10.00 – 11.00       Opening Keynote Address + discussion
Prof. dr. Sonja Boon, author of What the Oceans Remember: Searching for Belonging and Home (2019), Department of Gender Studies, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada

Speculative Lives: Haunted Yearnings for Impossible Pasts

10.45 – 11.30       Dr. Esther Captain (KITLV) and Dr. Guno Jones (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Postcolonial Transnational (Family) Histories

11.30 – 12.00       Coffee break

12.00 – 12.30       Dr. Karin Willemse, Department of History, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, Rotterdam

Re-membering Those Who Left: Abandoned Houses as Archives of (In)Tangible Nubian Heritage

12.30 – 13.00       Interview with Dr. Lizzy van Leeuwen, independent scholar and biographer, by Yvette Kopijn (University of Amsterdam)

13.00 – 13.15       Discussion

13.15 – 14.00       Lunch

14.00 – 14.15       Research pitches Unhinging the National Framework

14.15 – 15.15       Keynote Address + discussion
Prof. dr. Elleke Boehmer, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, England, biographer and author of fiction

Unhinging the National Framework through Curricular Change

15.15 – 15.45       Coffee break

15.45 – 16.30       Dik van der Meulen, biographer

King William III. A Boundless Royal

Dr. Monica Soeting, European Journal of Life Writing

Queen Emma, the Sweetest Grandmother of Europe

16.30 – 17.00       Interview with Dr. Frank Dragtenstein, historian and Surinamist, by Prof.dr. Susan Legêne (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Dr. Babs Boter
Lecturer in American and English Literature , Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Faculty of Humanities
T +31 20 59 82814 | b.boter@vu.nl | WORKING DAYS: Mo, We, Th, Fr
MAILING AND VISITING ADDRESS: De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam
Disclaimer
Twitter: @VUamsterdam

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Deadline for Submissions December 2, 2019

Postdoctoral Fellowships at the University of Alberta tied to Life Writing Projects (12/2/2019)

Hello Life Writing People,

My institution has two types of postdoctoral fellowships available–both are open to Canadians and non-Canadian recent PhD graduates. I can sponsor one person each if you want to study a life writing topic in the Department of English and Film Studies. The University of Alberta is a large state-sponsored research-intensive university. We’ve got the second-best academic library in Canada. Edmonton is a liveable city (we’re far north, but not that expensive). If you come here, you can be part of two life writing projects: the Stories of Change research group (humanists and social scientists working together about stories and social change in music, visual art, sociology, cultural studies and literature studies) and the Life Writing Virtual Network and Virtual Conference that I’m building as part of my Tory Chair.

Deadline for all documents is December 2, 2019. If you are interested (or you know a PhD graduate who is), read the links below and contact me–I can sponsor one postdoc each–so I’ll be sponsoring first-come first served. Winning isn’t guaranteed, but there’s a reasonable chance of success right now, so think about it!

https://www.ualberta.ca/research/support/post-doctoral-office/awards-funding/u-of-a-fellowships
https://www.ualberta.ca/english-film-studies

Julie Rak
Henry Marshall Tory Chair
Department of English and Film Studies
University of Alberta
Humanities Centre 3-5
Edmonton, AB T6G 2E6, Canada

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Deadline for Submissions, December 1, 2019

Call for Abstracts: Refugee, Migrant, and Displaced Motherhood in America (12/1/2019)

Contributions are invited for a scholarly edited collection that aims to explore literary accounts of migrant, refugee, and displaced motherhood in America. Refugees and migrants are often unseen, or worse seen as an inconvenience or imposition.  Migrant mothers in particular are often overlooked, with their experiences, their needs, and their lives nearly erased. Vu Tran says that “for those who can never quite accept her, a refugee is like a ghost” (p. 154).  This book seeks to examine writings by and about the displaced mother that make her part of a collective imagination, memory, and mythology of the American conscience.

Just as we see today in stories from the US/Mexican border, America is a nation of immigrants that continues to see complicated migration and immigration.  Indigenous mothers traverse complex paths at our Northern borders, and refugee mothers seek to resettle their families from wars and other dangers.

This book will look primarily at contemporary writings about migrant and refugee mothers in America. This collection is particularly interested in analysis of first-hand accounts of migrant motherhood, while also recognizing that the migrant mother is often silent. Therefore, analysis of both fictional and non-fiction accounts may be of importance as the collection pieces together the fragmented lives of migrant mothers.

Dina Nayeri has examined the refugee experience in both her fictional and non-fiction works, Refuge and The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. In the latter, her non-fiction account, Nayeri talks about how her own mother made the brave decision to take her small children and leave home to ultimately settle in America.  Nayeri says of the refugee, “A tortured mind, terror of a wasted future, is what enables you to abandon home; it’s a prerequisite for stepping into a dingy, for braving militarized mountains” (p. 8).

The journey of the migrant woman is made evermore complex by her status as a mother, a child-bearer, and a woman at-risk. The borders of motherhood to be examined in this collection can be linguistic, political, and geographical, along with the complex physicality of moving through liminal and transitory spaces. Chapters may explore a range of topics from the mother figure in refugee children’s literature to ethnographic studies of migrant mothers in detention facilities.

I am in talks with several highly reputable academic publishers, including Bloomsbury, that are interested in the collection.

Possible topics might look critically at (but not limited to):

  • Narratives about or by migrant or refugee mothers
  • Fictionalized accounts of migrant motherhood
  • Reproduction and migration
  • Rhetoric of migrant motherhood
  • Family separation
  • Family resettlement
  • Research and qualitative studies on women’s experiences as migrant or refugee mothers
  • Refugee children’s literature and the mother figure

References
Tran, Vu. “A Refugee Again” In The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives, Edited by
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Abrams, NY, NY, 2018

Nayeri, Dina. The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You. Catapult, NY, 2019.
Refuge, Riverhead, NY, 2017.

Timeline
1 December 2019: Deadline for submitting 250-400 word abstract of your chapter and a 50-word bio.

1 April 2019: Accepted and complete chapters due (6,000 words maximum with MLA format and references)

Submissions and questions should be sent to maria.lombard@northwestern.edu
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Deadline for Submissions December 1, 2019

“I HAVE BEEN HER KIND.” HOW TO WRITE A WOMAN’S LIFE. THE ITALIAN PERSPECTIVE (12/1/2019; 3/26-28/2020) American Association for Italian Studies 2020, Tucson, Arizona

Carolyn Heilbrun thought there are four ways to write a woman’s life: the woman may do it as autobiography or as fiction; a biographer may tell her story or she may write her own life “in advance of living it, unconsciously, and without recognizing or naming the process.” This panel examines strategies of self-representation in (auto)biographies and novels by Italian women authors from the XX century to the present. We are particularly interested in the relationship between first and third person perspectives: What does it mean for a woman to write the life of another woman? We welcome papers that engage with literary theory (contemporary Italian feminism and queer studies, psychoanalysis) and comparative perspectives.

Please send a 150-200 word abstract and brief bio to the session organizer by December 1, 2019.

Organizer: Mattia Mossali, The Graduate Center – City University of New York, mmossali1@gradcenter.cuny.edu

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Deadline for Submissions December 1, 2019

Call for Papers: “Mapping Black Women’s Lives”
Special Issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
36.2 Spring 2021
www.tandfonline.com/rautSubmissions Deadline: December 1, 2019
For this special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, we seek papers that employ diverse and/or interdisciplinary methodologies to recover and situate (geographically and theoretically) Black female lives throughout the African diaspora. How do we write with and against archival silences and violences? What role does digitization play in making visible or further marginalizing Black women’s life writing? We are particularly interested in scholarly efforts that redefine, transform, or reform the spaces and places in which Black women’s cultural contributions were recorded (or not). Where and how do we map the lives of Black women? Topics include but are not limited to the following:

  • Cartography, maps, mapping, and journeys in Black women’s life narrative
  • Forced displacements
  • Dangerous moves
  • Middle passages as trans-historical consciousness
  • Relationships between faith systems, movement and racialized geographies
  • Examining Diaspora through Life Writing
  • Travel to and through archives
  • How geography shapes who and what we recover
  • Global perspectives on mapping Black women’s lives
  • Methodologies for locating and mapping Black women’s lives
  • Pedagogical approaches to mapping Black women’s lives and/or reading journeys in Black women’s life narratives
  • Autotheoretical approaches to mapping and/or studying Black women’s lives in transit

Send original articles of 6000-7000 words (including works cited and notes), including keywords, an abstract, and a brief biographical statement to Kimberly Blockett (kdb13@psu.edu). We welcome essays that include images and are able to print in color without author fees. a/b also publishes ancillary digital and multimedia texts on the journal’s Routledge website. Inquiries welcome.
All essays must follow the format of Chicago Manuel of Style (17th edition). Essays submitted for the special issue, but not selected, may be considered general submissions and may be selected for publication. In order to ensure a confidential peer review, remove any identifying information, including citations that refer to you as the author in the first person. Cite previous publications, etc. with your last name to preserve your anonymity in the reading process. Include your name, address, email, the title of your essay, and your affiliation in a cover letter or cover sheet for your essay. It is the author’s responsibility to secure any necessary copyright permissions and essays may not progress into the publication stage without written proof of right to reprint. Images with captions must be submitted in a separate file as 300 dpi (or higher) tiff files with captions. Please indicate placement of images in the text.
Guest Editor, Kimberly Blockett, Associate Professor of English at Penn State Brandywine, is a C19 literary historian. She uses archives and cultural geography to examine black female movement and subjectivity. Blockett’s publications include MELUS, Legacy, MLA Approaches to Teaching Hurston, and the Cambridge History of African American Literature. The archival work for her forthcoming monograph and annotated edition of Zilpha Elaw’s Memoirs was funded by fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Smithsonian, NEH, and Harvard Divinity School.

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Deadline for Submissions, November 30, 2019

Conference on “Restoration Epistolarity”

Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg

Erlangen, 27-28 March 2020

The changing media environment of the English Restoration brought forth a sizeable increase in various forms of literary culture, including the birth of large-scale periodical publishing and the ready availability of the letter resulting from the establishment of the Penny Post. Contrary to the widely held consensus that the letter promoted reliability, recent scholarship has stressed the form’s deconstructive potential, allowing both readers and writers to reflect on the mediated nature of writing and the tenuous relationship between sign and reality. At this conference, we will therefore discuss Restoration epistolary culture as intimately tied to media criticism, new forms of corporeality, and changing literary values. Papers on these and related aspects of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century forms of epistolarity are welcome!

Confirmed speakers:

Prof. Dr. Thomas Beebee (Penn State)

Prof. Dr. Helen Berry (Newcastle)

Prof. Dr. Markman Ellis (Queen Mary, U London)

Prof. Dr. Joe Bray (Sheffield)

Please send a 300-word proposal for a 30-minute presentation to both organizers, Jaroslaw Jasenowski (jaroslaw.jasenowski@fau.de) and Gerd Bayer (gerd.bayer@fau.de), by 30 November 2019.

Contact Email:
jaroslaw.jasenowski@fau.de
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Deadline for Submissions, November 30, 2019

NEW DEPARTURES IN BIOGRAPHY
Call for papers / Appel à contributions
BIOGRAPHY SOCIETY Workshops
60th SAES Conference / RenaissanceS
4-6 June 2020
Université de Tours

Renaissance individualism harbingered a generic new departure for biography, stemming out again from the Ancients — Plutarch, Suetonius, Laërtius — swerving off from the hagiographies and aristocratic genealogies of the previous age. Izaak Walton preceded John Aubrey, whom Ruth Scurr has recently resuscitated by a first-person biography, John Aubrey, My Own Life. Likewise, James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson invented both biography as a novelized genre and the figure of Dr Johnson in literary history. In the Hegelian days of Thomas Carlyle and his American epigone Ralph Waldo Emerson, the greatness of eminent individuals resided in the coincidence of their lives with the beginnings of new periods of history. In the 20th century these tables were toppled by the New Biographies (Virginia Woolf’s phrase), which Lytton Strachey’s epitomize. Like the history of the genre, most biographies are structured around destructuring catastrophes and catabases: existential hapaxes or recurring events compelling the subjects to new beginnings. Therefore, the most interesting lives are not so much determined by their past or rooted in the present of their milieu, but much rather as if pulled forward by their potential futures. So much so that life can be defined as an iterative, vortex-like process of new departures. It may be that the most remarkable biographies in English today are still written on the model of the New Biography in the sense that they are aiming to dislodge and challenge the received images of their subjects, in revisionist ways that entail new departures.

This workshop will welcome presentations on case studies, as well as theoretical or more general considerations on biography as a genre of writing. The cases and topics of application should be related to the English-speaking world, but with an absolute freedom to introduce other references to nourish the debates.

Proposals, consisting of a title and an abstract of 200 words, should be sent before 30 November 2019 to:
Jean-Charles Perquin: jean-charles.perquin@univ-lyon2.fr
& Joanny Moulin: joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr.

http://biographysociety.org/2019/09/24/new-departures/?fbclid=IwAR2lghblpxIZVHN0Q4tWw6vmqGxaev3WVyiRW0ni-WZdEJedUb77rIjt6kk

La Renaissance et l’individualisme naissant annoncèrent un nouveau départ de la biographie comme genre, repartant des anciens — Plutarque, Suétone, Laërce — se détournant des hagiographies et des généalogies aristocratiques de l’époque finissante. Isaac Walton précéda John Aubrey, que Ruth Scurr a récemment ressuscité par une biographie à la première personne, John Aubrey, My Own Life. De façon comparable, James Boswell par sa Vie de Samuel Johnson inventa du même coup la biographie comme genre romanisé et la figure du Dr Johnson dans l’histoire de la littérature. À l’époque hégélienne de Thomas Carlyle et de son épigone Ralph Waldo Emerson, la grandeur des individus éminents résidait dans la coïncidence de leurs vies avec le commencement de nouvelles époques de l’histoire. Au 20e siècle ces tables furent renversées par la Nouvelle Biographie, dont celles de Lytton Strachey sont les épitomés. Comme l’histoire du genre, la plupart des biographies sont structurées par des catastrophes ou catabases déstructurantes : hapax existentiels ou événements récurrents contraignant les sujets à des commencements. Ainsi, les vies les plus intéressantes ne le sont pas tant parce qu’elles seraient déterminées par leur passé, ou enracinées dans le présent de leur milieu, mais bien plutôt tirées de l’avant par leurs avenirs possibles. Tant et si bien que la vie peut se définir comme un vortex ou un processus itératif de départs. Il se peut que les biographies de langue anglaise les plus remarquables aujourd’hui soient encore écrites sur le modèle de la Nouvelle Biographie, en ce sens qu’elles visent à déloger et à mettre en question les images établies de leurs sujets, par des révisionnismes qui entraînent de nouveaux départs.

Cet atelier accueillera des présentations d’études de cas, aussi bien que des considérations plus générales ou théoriques sur la biographie comme genre d’écriture. Les cas et les thèmes d’application seront en rapport avec le monde anglophone, mais avec une liberté absolue d’introduire d’autres références pour nourrir les débats.

Les propositions consistant en un titre et un extrait de 200 mots, sont à envoyer avant le 30 novembre 2019 à
Jean-Charles Perquin: jean-charles.perquin@univ-lyon2.fr
& Joanny Moulin: joanny.moulin@univ-amu.fr.

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Deadline for Submissions, November 29, 2019

Art and Action: Literary Authorship, Politics, and Celebrity Culture (11/29/2019; 3/20-21/2020) Oxford UK
The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road, Oxford

Writers and writers’ organisations have a long history of using their public standing and cultural capital to promote causes that transcend the literary sphere, from abolition and gender equality to free expression, anti-war agitation, and environmental issues. This two-day conference explores the intersections of authorship, politics, activism, and literary celebrity across historical periods, literatures, and media. It examines the forms and impact of authorial field migrations between literature and politics and the ways in which they are situated within, and shaped by, structural frameworks that include academic institutions, prize-giving bodies, publishing industries, and literary celebrity culture.

Authors have at all times been fiercely outspoken campaigners for a wide range of socio-political causes. At the same time, debates have long revolved around literature as a form of political intervention in its own right, thus undermining the seemingly clear-cut distinction between politics and poetics. This conference hopes to foster such debates and address a wide range of questions: What are the strategies employed by writers in the construction and performance of their public personae as political office-holders, activists, and cultural critics? How do they negotiate the tension between ethics and aesthetics in their public interventions, the potential conflict between authorial and activist selves? How have writers’ literary/political border-crossings been perceived by their audiences and to what extent have they affected their (posthumous) reputations? What are the risks faced by the politically engaged and outspoken writer?
Interrogating the ideological dimension of literary celebrity and highlighting the fault-lines between public and private authorial selves, ‘pure’ art, political commitment, and marketplace imperatives, this conference joins current debates on authorship and literary value. It brings together writers, academics, literary activists, and industry stakeholders to explore the wider implications of authors’ political responsibilities and cultural authority in today’s heavily commodified literary marketplace and age of celebrity activism.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

·       Authors as political office-holders / activists / public intellectuals: forms, manifestations, agendas, challenges of, and responses to, literary/political ‘double acts’ across historical periods, literatures, and cultural contexts
·       Literary celebrity and identity politics: how are the intersections of literary celebrity and politics inflected by categories such as gender, class, and ethnicity? To what extent do they map onto different national and cultural spaces?
·      Writers’ organisations, cultural institutions, and their political agendas: how do writers’ organisations capitalise on the celebrity status of particular writers and what are the potential pitfalls of this practice? What is the relationship between individual and collective agency?
·     The politics of market activism: what is the role of industry stakeholders (e.g. publishers, agents, translators, literary festivals, etc.) in enabling or inhibiting authorial migrations between literature and politics?
·      Literary prizes and politics: literary prizes as cultural consecrating agencies; literary award ceremonies as platforms for political intervention; (celebrity) prize judges as gatekeepers; the impact of literary awards on the cultural capital of winning and shortlisted authors
·   Authors’ political interventions and the media: the impact of transformations in media cultures, industries, and technologies (e.g. digital media) on the articulation and dissemination of critical stances and ideas within the public sphere
·      Literary celebrity, politics, and life-writing: How is the interplay of literary celebrity and politics negotiated and articulated across different life-writing genres? In which ways does the genre (e.g. memoirs, lectures, interviews, broadcasts, social media posts) shape these interrelations and the construction of authorial personae?
·    Authorship and political responsibility: What is the author’s political responsibility and cultural authority in today’s celebrity-driven media society? Is there a need for writers to step outside the literary medium? How do they reconcile their activities with a view of literature as political intervention in its own right?

Keynote contributions:
–        Benjamin Zephaniah (performance poet, activist, Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing, Brunel University London)
–        Antjie Krog (writer and scholar activist, TORCH International Fellow)
–    PEN roundtable discussion with Jennifer Clement (PEN International President), Carles Torner (PEN International Executive Director), Margie Orford (former South African PEN President), Rachel Potter (University of East Anglia), Peter McDonald (University of Oxford)

Please send your proposal (no more than 250 words) for 20-minute papers along with a short biographical note to sandra.mayer@univie.ac.at by 29 November 2019; applicants will be notified by 20 December 2019.
Selected contributions will be considered for inclusion in a peer-reviewed collection or special journal issue.
For more information, and to register, please follow this link: https://www.torch.ox.ac.uk/article/call-for-papers-art-and-action-literary-authorship-politics-and-celebrity-culture
This conference is convened by Sandra Mayer (University of Vienna / Oxford Centre for Life-Writing) and Ruth Scobie (Mansfield College, Oxford) and supported by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) in collaboration with the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW).

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Deadline for Submissions November 25, 2019

European Society for Research on the Education of Adults – Life History and Biography Network Conference 2020

Activism in a troubled world:  auto/biographical and narrative perspectives on struggles for the good and beautiful.

Canterbury Cathedral Lodge

Thursday 27 February to Sunday 1 March

We are pleased to confirm a Second Call for Papers  and the deadline for submission of abstracts for papers and proposals for symposia/workshops is now Monday 25th November.

Details of the call and how to submit a proposal can be found at …

https://www.canterbury.ac.uk/education/conferences-events/2020/esrea-conference-2020.aspx

Very best wishes

Alan, Linden and Laura

Dr Alan Bainbridge CPsychol SFHEA

Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Education
Canterbury Christ Church University
North Holmes Road
Canterbury
Kent, CT1 1QU
UK

e-mail: a.bainbridge@canterbury.ac.uk
Telephone: 01227 782452
Twitter: @bainbridge­­_edu

The Journal of Epistolary Studies has just published its first issue. I
invite you to visit the website at
https://journals.tdl.org/jes/index.php/jes to view it. I hope everyone will
also consider contributing to a future issue!

Best,
Gary Schneider, Editor
Editor, JES

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Dear IABA List Members

This is obviously not a notice for an upcoming conference, or a publishing opportunity. But I thought that list members would be interested to know that Sidonie Smith is being honored on the eve of her retirement from University of Michigan by her colleagues and former and current students. And of course, despite all her contributions to the field over her remarkable career, all involved knew that the best way to acknowledge her continuing influence is to focus the discussion and celebration on the future.

Congratulations!

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The Future of Life Narrative Studies: A Celebration of the Distinguished Career of Sidonie Smith, the Lorna G. Goodison Distinguished University Professor of English and Women’s Studies. Friday, November 22, 2019, 3222 Angell Hall, University of Michigan.

  • 1:00- 1:45 PM:
    • Welcome and Introduction: June Howard (University of Michigan) and Valerie Traub (University of Michigan)
    • Talk: “Between Auto-Fiction and Counter-Fiction: Writing, Denouncing, Healing”
      • Presenter: Françoise Lionnet (Harvard University)
  • 1:45-2:45 PM:
    • Panel: “Current Research on Autobiographical Acts and Practices”
      • Panelists from the University of Michigan: Sofia Bento, Elise Nagy, Mallory Whiteduck, Rachel Wilson, Sunhay You
      • Moderator: Meg Sweeney (University of Michigan)
  • 2:45-3:00 PM: Break
  • 3:00-4:00 PM:
    • Round Table on the Future of Life Narrative Studies
      • Panelists: Keith Green (Rutgers University- Camden), Jina Kim (Smith College), Liz Rodrigues (Grinnell College)
      • Moderator: Yopie Prins (University of Michigan)
  • 4:00-4:45 PM:
    • Talk: “Collaborators or Co-conspirators? Three+  Decades in Autobiography Studies and the View from Here”
      • Presenter: Julia Watson (The Ohio State University)
      • Moderator: Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan)
  • 4:45-5:15 PM:
    • “Speaking of Sid…”
      • Anne Curzan (Michigan), Jane Johnson (Michigan), Susan Najita (Michigan), David Porter (Michigan), Sheri Sytsema-Geiger (Michigan)
  • 5:15-6:30 PM:
    • Reception in 3241 Haven Hall

Deadline for Submissions, November 15, 2019

EACLALS Triennial Conference 2020: Transcultural Mo(ve)ments: Memories, Writings, Embodiments

Date: May 18-22, 2020

Venue: Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales

Call for Papers

The influence of postcolonial thought has made it a commonplace to acknowledge the coexistence of multiple and plural forms of modernities that have led to great cultural, political, economic and technological shifts in the twentieth and twenty first centuries.

In the contemporary globalised world, patterns of migration are aided by technology so that movements and mobility are both physical and virtual: ‘hyper-mobility’ and ‘instantaneous communication’, the effects of which can be seen in the exchange of ideas, languages, and cultural and social forms. The influence of “post-national” transnationalism, characterised by a decentring and deterritorialization, can be seen not only in fully braided economies (EU), the internationalisation of wars (NATO), and global collective identities (ISIS) but is also visible in creative forms within circuits of exchange that reveal the blurring of national boundaries, the mixing of traditions, and the transformation of communities and aesthetics.

Transcultural Mo(ve)ments then includes issues of, and tracks shifts among borders, refugees, languages, genders, genres, cultures, and between all sorts of mobilities and interdisciplinarity, among many, many other possibilities. Since the transcultural is often associated with a post-national age, can we still talk of distinct cultures? How do we think of identity without collapsing it into an indistinct homogeny?

This call for papers invites responses that examine how these mo(ve)ments have emerged in postcolonial literary works: how are modes of narration influenced by these transcultural movements? As the very notion of transcultural presumes a decentring of national canons how do transnational narrative forms permeate, blend and destabilise origins? How do they forge new languages and create new forms of representation? Do they formulate a new ethics in a new heterogenous world? What is their relationship to those postcolonial works of literature or narratives that focus on binarities? How have transcultural narratives of migration blurred genres and identities in the postcolonial? What are the expressions of these mo(ve)ments that promote wider planetary approaches? How does the term “transcultural” reverberate in postcolonial Wales?

This conference invites papers that rethink, rejuvenate and regroup postcolonial studies from within a wide array of transcultural frames and do so from a variety of disciplinary approaches, theoretical perspectives, creative and ARTivist expressions.

Papers are invited on topics under the following headings:

  • Transcultural mo(ve)ments and expressions of the present, the patterns, migrations, subjectivities and imaginaries.
  • The production and reception of narrative forms in these transcultural mo(ve)ments.
  • The expressions of ethical lives in transcultural narratives.
  • Canonicity and transcultural literatures.
  • Transcultural and postcolonial.
  • Narrative modes and genres in transcultural literatures.
  • The linguistic turn in transcultural narratives.
  • Transcultural interventions in the postcolonial.
  • Postcolonial transcultural mo(ve)ments from Indigenous perspectives.
  • Transcultural mo(ve)ments of absence into presence.
  • Transcultural and gender.
  • Transcultural and embodiment.
  • Queer, transcultural and the postcolonial.
  • Transcultural and globalisation.
  • Postcolonial ARTivism within the transcultural mo(ve)ments.
  • ‘Hyper-mobility’ and ‘instantaneous communication’.
  • Transcultural memory.
  • Transcultural mo(ve)ments in postcolonial translation.
  • Transcultural and postcolonial cinema and/or the visual arts.
  • Transcultural and mobility.
  • Transcultural and postcolonial engagements.

 

Proposals Deadline Extended: November 15th

Notification of acceptance by December 6th

We invite contributions for 20-minute papers or 90-minute panels addressing the conference topic. Please send a 300-word abstract for individual papers or 450-word abstract for panels, accompanied by a short bionote of all speakers (100-150 words) and 5-6 keywords, to:

eaclals2020@cardiff.ac.uk

For more information please do not hesitate to contact the conveners of the conference:

Radhika Mohanram  mohanramr1@cardiff.ac.uk  and Luisa Pèrcopo percopol1@cardiff.ac.uk

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Deadline for Submissions, November 15, 2019

Stories We Live By: Narrative and Identity. (11/15/2019; 1/20-24/2020) University of Groningen, Netherlands

Dear friends and colleagues,
I would like to draw your attention to an upcoming Winter School, titled Stories to Live By: Narrative and Identity, organized at the University of Groningen. This Winter School should be of interest to graduate students (MA & PhD) and early career researchers with an interest in narrative, as well as artists, professionals, and teachers.
What: A week-long programme on narrative and identity in journalism, sociology, theology, literature, art and other fields and media.
Confirmed speakers: Alberto Godioli, Marina Grishakova, Barend van Heusden, Goffe Jensma, Warda el Kaddouri, Stefan Kjerkegaard, Liesbeth Korthals Altes, Tilman Lanz, Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar, Ronald Nikolsky, Rick Peters, Anneke Sools and Margaret Tali.

Where: University of Groningen, the Netherlands (2 hours by train from Amsterdam Airport)

When: 20-24 January 2020

Costs: €375 with or €325 without accomodation

Deadline: Before or on 15 November 2019

Applications: You can apply here

More information: see the flyer and programme attached, or visit our website
May I ask you to share this message with anyone you think might be interested in applying for the winter school?

Kind regards,

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenanda

Deadline for Submissions, November 15, 2019

Call for Papers: Workshop and Edited Volume, Mourning the Presidents (11/15/2019; 9/8/2020) Dallas, USA

On September 8, 2020, the Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History and the White House Historical Association will cohost a workshop on the topic of presidential mourning and legacy. The participants will share pre-circulated papers and workshop their submissions. That evening, the Center for Presidential History will host a public event for their supporters and the Dallas community. After the workshop, the participants will submit their revised chapters by November 1, 2020 in order to be published in an edited volume, Mourning the Presidents, the following year by an academic press.

The editors of the volume encourage creative proposals and methodological approaches, especially those exploring the deaths and legacies of lesser-known presidents and/or how underrepresented communities commemorate and remember the presidents. They also encourage public historians, museum professionals, independent scholars, and others to apply.

The workshop will take place in conjunction with the 2020 Presidential Sites Summit hosted by the White House Historical Association. The Summit is a biannual gathering of representatives from presidential libraries, historic homes, museums, and birthplaces to share innovative ideas, discuss best practices, and facilitate outreach for presidential history sites. Workshop attendees are encouraged to attend the summit!

Please send one-page proposals and a CV to Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky at LChervinsky@whha.org no later than November 15, 2019. Applicants will be notified by December 1, 2019. Travel, lodging, and an honorarium will be provided for the workshop and written contribution.

Contact Info:

Please contact Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky at the White House Historical Association with any questions.

Contact Email:
LChervinsky@whha.org
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Deadline for Submissions, November 15, 2019

CALL FOR PAPERS

After(Life) Narratives of #MeToo

A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly

Guest Editors: Rebecca Wanzo (Washington University in St. Louis) and Carol Stabile (University of Oregon)

Submit: Abstracts of 300–500 words in length by November 15, 2019 to metoolifenarratives@gmail.com.

Stories of sexual violence are shaped and constrained both by the unrepresentable nature of trauma and conventions of medium and genre (Judith Herman 1992; Leigh Gilmore 2001; Saidiya Hartman 2007; Ariella Azoulay 2008). Fictive and real accounts of sexual violence across time and media can also sometimes absorb discourses that decenter or undermine support for survivors and affirm identity-based, nationalist, and conservative discourses (Ida B. Wells 1892; Birth of a Nation; Central Park Five; Sarah Projansky 2001). While personally and politically vital, the politics of recognition that narrating stories of sexual violence enact are complicated by the ways they move across various political projects, locations, and media (S. Smith and K. Schaffer).
The #MeToo movement invites us to rethink the constraints of medium and genre in relationship to disclosures. #MeToo has sought to provide a platform for sharing survivor stories, using the quotidian nature of experiences of sexual violence (from harassment to rape) to force assailants and institutions to reckon with the impact of sexual violence. With limited characters, and in a medium notorious for an alleged lack of nuance, the stories of #MeToo gathered into a powerful collective story that moved beyond the platform, creating perhaps the most massive moment of feminist consciousness-raising since Anita Hill.
This special issue of Biography explores storytelling practices emerging after the the 2017 celebrity re-launch of Tarana Burke’s hashtag #MeToo in 2006, narratives shaped by constraints, but also hinting at possible new genres and disruptions: the elliptical disclosure; the power of the celebrity story and its erasures around race, class, and disability, and other identity categories; the tensions between queer and heteronormative narratives; and the difference national context makes. Most of all, we are interested in contributions that invite us to think about how the medium interacts with these disruptions and the extent to which medium may transform storytelling practices and ways of thinking about sexual violence.

We welcome pieces that engage questions such as:

  • How do fragmented narratives, solidarity narrative practices, generic conventions governed by social movements, legal concerns, silences that have historically been integral to disclosure, and shifts in listening practices change the nature of the story?
  • How do contemporary movements against sexual violence engage with previous traditions of nonfictional representations of sexual violence?
  • What difference do media—and mediation—make in telling and listening to stories of sexual violence—and to who gets to speak and who is heard?
  • Do projects like Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ #loveWITHaccountability challenge conventional wisdom about whose stories about sexual violence can be told alongside each other—both the injured and people who were silent in the face of the injury? How might restorative justice approaches be folded into media storytelling practices?
  • What roles do identities play in the presentation and reception of #MeToo? For example, how have the conventions of queer life narrative storytelling interacted with stories of sexual injury within the community? How have working-class women, like those at the Ford Motor plants in Chicago, been able to share their stories? How should we think about the difference between the kind of #MeToo story invited by Tarana Burke and the stories from predominately white women celebrities that made international headlines?
  • Do narratives of sexual violence linked across people, media, and time disrupt our understanding of single stories of individual injury?
  • How do we map the differences in transnational #MeToo storytelling, with convergences and divergences in #IAmNotAfraidtoSpeak, #BalanceTonPorc, #Cuentalo, #AnaKaman, #YoTambien, #Losha, #MosqueMeToo, or #QuellaVolteChe? Where do we begin to write the history of women’s struggles to form solidarity over histories of sexual violence? What are the challenges and obstacles women face in forging solidarities?
  • How might we historicize this kind of storytelling in relationship to work done either before #MeToo (#MeuAmigoSecreto, #WhyLoiter, et al.) or in the years before Twitter existed, when women used latrinalia and other forms of cultural expression to share the names of rapists and harassers among themselves? How do we place memoirs discussing sexual violence in conversation with these contemporary storytelling practices of disclosure?

We also welcome papers that use multiple media or modes of storytelling to generate new ways of thinking about global movements against sexual violence and their histories of solidarity and resistance. Multi-authored work, interviews, and collaborative projects are welcome.

Please submit 350–500-word abstracts to Rebecca Wanzo and Carol Stabile by November 15, 2019 to metoolifenarratives@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent on December 16, 2019. Articles of up to 10,000 words will be due on June 1, 2020. Biography will arrange for contributors to present papers in workshop format at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in Honolulu in August 2020.

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Deadline for Submissions, November 8, 2019

The Meaning of Life
An Inclusive Interdisciplinary Conference

Saturday 4th April 2020 – Sunday 5th April 2020
Lisbon, Portugal

We live in an age of global change, the culmination of a process that has been going on for more than two hundred and fifty years. Impressive technological, scientific and cultural achievements seem to have been accompanied by a deep erosion of the sense of meaning and the possibility of meaning. Along with economic well-being, enormous existential difficulties are revealed which are expressed in the demand for meaning. Along with the empowerment of and rights to the individual, there is an ongoing breakdown of communal life leading to loneliness and a crisis of meaning that has political and social implications.

After years of little interest, questions about the meaning of life and the forces that shape our perspectives on this issue are now receiving renewed interest in the academic, professional, practitioner, personal and other spheres. However, it seems that we are still far from understanding not only these questions and the answers to them, but also the tangible impact they have on the demands people have for meaningful life.

This conference recognises the value of interdisciplinary engagement as a basis for exploring the full range of questions about the meaning of life and the possibility of living a meaningful life. Accordingly, we invite anyone who has a research, professional, practical or personal interest in the topic to contribute to these interdisciplinary dialogues on critical issues around meaning and life with a view to forming an innovative interdisciplinary publication to engender further research and collaboration.

Key Topics
The conference offers a springboard for participants from diverse disciplines, professions, practices and walks of life to engage in interdisciplinary dialogues on topics that include, are not limited to:

~ spiritual/religious/philosophical perspectives: ethics, morality, faith and meaningful life (and afterlife)
~ beliefs about the meaning of life across historical periods and cultures
~ impact of suffering and fear on attitudes about the meaning of life
~ death, suicide and the limits of meaning in life
~ role of education in shaping beliefs about the meaning of life and how to live a meaningful life
~ the relationship between happiness and the meaning of life
~ strategies for finding meaning in life: activism, creativity, work-life balance, mediation, family, friends, etc.
~ health, wellness and the meaning of life
~ impact of film, television, social media, news, music, literature and the arts on meaning of life
~ the natural world and the meaning of life: nature and animals as source of meaning, impact of climate change/devastation on sense of meaning, etc.
~ best practice in occupations concerned with helping people live meaningful lives (clinicians, life coaches, therapists, clergy, ethicists, etc.)
~ material goods and the meaningful life
~ socio-political and economic influences on beliefs about life’s meaning and being able to lead a meaningful life
~ factors the limit our inclination or ability to question the meaning of life
~ relationship between cultural values and the meaning of life

What To Send
The aim of this inclusive interdisciplinary conference and collaborative networking event is to bring people together and encourage creative conversations in the context of a variety of formats: papers, seminars, workshops, storytelling, performances, poster presentations, panels, q&a’s, round-tables etc. Creative responses to the subject, such as poetry/prose, short film screenings/original drama, installations and alternative presentation styles that engage the audience and foster debate are particularly encouraged. Please feel free to put forward proposals that you think will get the message across, in whatever form.

At the end of the conference we will be exploring ways in which we can develop the discussions and dialogues in new and sustainable inclusive interdisciplinary directions, including research, workshops and publications which will help us make sense of the topics discussed during the meeting.

300 word proposals, presentations, abstracts and other forms of contribution and participation should be submitted by Friday 8th November 2019. Other forms of participation should be discussed in advance with the Organising Chairs.

All submissions will be at least double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Team, The Development Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.

You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 22nd November 2019.

If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 21st February 2020.

Abstracts and proposals may be in Word, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in the programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) type of proposal e.g. paper presentation, workshop, panel, film, performance, etc, f) body of proposal, g) up to 10 keywords.

E-mails should be entitled: Meaning of Life Submission

Where To Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chair and the Project Administrator:

Shimon Azulay: shimon.azulay@mail.huji.ac.il
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): lisbonmeaning@progressiveconnexions.net

What’s so Special About a Progressive Connexions Event?
A fresh, friendly, dynamic format – at Progressive Connexions we are dedicated to breaking away from the stuffy, old-fashion conference formats, where endless presentations are read aloud off PowerPoints. We work to bring you an interactive format, where exchange of experience and information is alternated with captivating workshops, engaging debates and round tables, time set aside for getting to know each other and for discussing common future projects and initiatives, all in a warm, relaxed, egalitarian atmosphere.

A chance to network with international professionals – the beauty of our interdisciplinary events is that they bring together professionals from all over the world and from various fields of activity, all joined together by a shared passion. Not only will the exchange of experience, knowledge and stories be extremely valuable in itself, but we seek to create lasting, ever-growing communities around our projects, which will become a valuable resource for those belonging to them.

A chance to be part of constructing change – There is only one thing we love as much as promoting knowledge: promoting real, lasting social change by encouraging our participants to take collective action, under whichever form is most suited to their needs and expertise (policy proposals, measuring instruments, research projects, educational materials, etc.) We will support all such actions in the aftermath of the event as well, providing a platform for further discussions, advice from the experts on our Project Advisory Team and various other tools and intellectual resources, as needed.

An opportunity to discuss things that matter to you – Our events are not only about discussing how things work in the respective field, but also about how people work in that field – what are the struggles, problems and solutions professionals have found in their line of work, what are the areas where better communication among specialists is needed and how the interdisciplinary approach can help bridge those gaps and help provide answers to questions from specific areas of activity.

An unforgettable experience – When participating in a Progressive Connexions event, there is a good chance you will make some long-time friends. Our group sizes are intimate, our venues are comfortable and relaxing and our event locations are suited to the history and culture of the event.

Ethos
Progressive Connexions believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract or proposal for presentation.

Please note: Progressive Connexions is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence, nor can we offer discounts off published rates and fees.

Please send all enquiries to: lisbonmeaning@progressiveconnexions.net

For further details and information please visit the conference web page: http://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/narratives-persons-communities/the-meaning-of-life/conferences/

Sponsored by: Progressive Connexions

Contact Info:

Shimon Azulay: shimon.azulay@mail.huji.ac.il
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): lisbonmeaning@progressiveconnexions.net

Contact Email:
shimon.azulay@mail.huji.ac.il
URL:
http://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/narratives-persons-communities/the-meaning-of-life/confe…

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Posted November 2, 2019

Hello all

Does anyone on the list know of work on the relationship between autobiography and periodicals in the nineteenth century? All suggestions gratefully received.

Please answer directly, to trev.broughton@york.ac.uk

Trev

—

Dr Trev Broughton

Reader in English and Related Literature,
Associate, Centre for Women’s Studies
University of York
Part-time (Mondays — Wednesdays)
Office:  Derwent  J 215 b
Co-editor, Journal of Victorian Culture https://academic.oup.com/jvc/pages/Editorial_Board

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Deadline for Submissions, November 4, 2019

Dear IABA List Members,

We are working on our annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical work on Life Writing, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.

So if during the last year (from November 2018 to December 2019) you have published, edited, or co-edited a book, written 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. (There is of course a very good chance that we have already included it—we work on this all year!—but this will make sure your work is noted.)

We would request the following information:

·      Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted as per MLA 8
·      A one-sentence annotation per text

We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you could provide a translation of the annotation, however, that would be helpful.

We would appreciate getting the information by Monday, November 4. Please send your information to Janet Graham (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!

—

Paige Rasmussen
Managing Editor

The Center for Biographical Research

Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1960 East-West Road
Biomed B104
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-3774
Find us on Facebook and Twitter!
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Deadline for Submissions, November 4, 2019

VETERAN IDENTITY, ADVOCACY, AND REPRESENTATION 5th Veterans in Society Conference: (11/4/2019; 3/22-24/20120) St. Louis, USA

contact email:
veteransstudies@gmail.com

We invite scholars at all levels—including students and those out of academia—to cross national, cultural, historical, and disciplinary boundaries to reflect on the theme of “Veteran Identity, Advocacy, and Representation.”

We encourage and are open to a variety of presentation styles, including but not limited to:

  • Individual Presentations: 75- to 100-word abstract, 250-word proposal
  • Panel Presentation, with 3 to 4 presenters: 150- to 200-word abstract, 750-word 
proposal including potential panelists
  • Poster Presentations, by individual or collaborative presenters (1 poster per 
submission): 150- to 200-word abstract
  • Roundtable Discussion, with 4 or more presenters: 150- to 200-word abstract, 500- 
word proposal
  • Works-in-Progress: back by popular demand, we have scheduled a workshop session specifically for sharing and refining early-stage research and/or engagement projects with kindred scholars and potential collaborators: 500-word proposal (works-in-progress submissions will not undergo peer review)

All submissions should conform to a widely accepted citation style that will be intelligible to an interdisciplinary audience (e.g., APA, MLA, Chicago). Unless otherwise noted (under session type), email proposals must include:

  1. a cover letter providing contact information for the author(s), title, and format of the proposed work,
  2. an abstract attached in a separate file (or sheet of paper).Please respect word counts for abstracts by desired session type. Abstracts must be formatted for blind review: no author names, affiliations, or other personally identifiable information.
  3. Email proposals to vis20@umsl.edu

Visit www.veteranology.org for more details about the conference and the Veterans Studies Association.

The  French Directors Project ‘Portraits de cinéastes’  is currently seeking scholars willing to offer biographical entries both literary and personal on  major French directors (1000 words maximum) for the remaining entries of our publication (see below).  If you are interested in contributing please email: frenchdirectorsproject@gmail.com

We look forward to hearing from you,

Dr Michael Abecassis

University of Oxford
Language Centre, 12 Woodstock Road Oxford OX2 6HT England
Marcel Achard

Jean-Jacques Annaud

Jacqueline Audry

Jacques Becker

Claude Berri

Guillaume Canet

Etienne Chatilliez

Patrice Chéreau

Eli Chouraqui

René Clément

Alain Corneau

Louis Delluc

Raymond Depardon

Bruno Dumont

Louis Feuillade

Francis Girod

Jean Grémillon

Robert Guédiguian

André Hunebelle

Benoît Jacquot

Christian-Jaque

Claude Lelouch

Marcel L’Herbier

Tonie Marshall

Claude Miller

Edouard Molinaro

Gérard Oury

Jean-Marie Poiré

Yves Robert

Georges Rouquier

Francis Veber

Ariel Zeitoun

Claude Zidi

Contact Info:

Dr Michael Abecassis

University of Oxford
Language Centre, 12 Woodstock Road Oxford OX2 6HT England

frenchdirectorsproject@gmail.com, michael.abecassis@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk

Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2019
 

American Elegy, Now

deadline for submissions:
November 1, 2019
full name / name of organization:
ALA American Poetry Symposium (Washington DC, February 20-22, 2020)
contact email:

Call for Papers:

If the English elegy consoles through aesthetic substitution (Sacks), and the modern elegy resists consolation and persists in melancholy or rage (Ramazani), then what forms of memory and mourning avail contemporary American elegists? In this moment of heightened division, instability, and violence, how might elegy answer—or fail—the exigencies of life and death in contemporary America?

We invite short talks on the poetry and poetics of mourning for a roundtable discussion, “American Elegy, Now,” at the 2020 ALA American Poetry Symposium. We encourage intersectional approaches, and we especially welcome talks that read American elegy in light of any of the following topics:

  • Environment: climate change; indigenous land rights; water and food chain contamination; anthropocentrism & animal studies

  • Race & Ethnicity: Native sovereignty & tribal recognition; structural racism; the New Jim Crow & the carceral state; public monuments and memorials

  • Gender & Sexuality: trans-, cis-gender, and non-binary women’s elegies; LGBTQIA+ approaches to elegy; disease, illness, mortality, and sex;  responses to the AIDS crisis

  • Disability Studies: mobility impairment; sensory impairment; chronic pain and/or illness; neurodiversity; posthumanism

  • Digital Media: memory and mourning through digital archives, social media, apps, and digital media and online fora

  • Visual Arts: painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, book art; hybrid materials and forms

  • Performance: music, dance, film, performance art

  • Architecture: public and private memorials; funerary statues

  • Fashion: customs of dress; sentimental & mourning jewelry

  • Food: industrial agriculture;  food insecurity

Guidelines:

Please send a 300-word abstract, a 100-word bio, curriculum vitae, and current contact information to Drs. Julie Phillips Brown (brownjp@vmi.edu) and Giffen Mare Maupin (maupin@hendrix.edu) no later than 1 November 2019. Accepted participants must submit complete talks (approximately 1500 words in length) by the end of January, 2020.

About the 2020 ALA Symposium on American Poetry: The Symposium will take place in Washington, DC, from February 20-22, 2020. Please note that the conference registration fee is $175 (the conference fee covers the costs of the conference, including one meal and three receptions). While ALA membership is not required to participate, all participants must register by February 2, 2020.

For more details on the Symposium, please visit:

https://americanliteratureassociation.org/ala-conferences/ala-symposia/american-poetry/

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Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2019

Call for Papers: 2020 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference—Biographies Area: Philadelphia, PA (April 15-18, 2020)

The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual conference will be held on Wednesday April 15 through Saturday April 18, 2020 at the Downtown Marriott Hotel on Market Street in Philadelphia, PA. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests.

The Biographies Area is soliciting papers that examine the connections between biography and popular culture. Papers and full panel presentations regarding any aspect of popular culture and biography are encouraged. Potential topics might include:

– Biography and entertainment, art, music, theater
– Biography and film
– Biography and criminal justice
– Television programs about biography
– Biography and urban legends
– Biography and folklore
– Biography and literature
– Scholarly Biography
– Controversial Biography
– Psychoanalysis and Biography
– Historical Biography
– Political Biography
– Autobiography

Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session.  Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The deadline is November 1, 2019.

Proposals must be submitted on the conference website.

Thank you for your interest!

Please direct any queries to the Biographies Area chair:
Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
Las Vegas, NV 89154

702.895.2141
susie.skarl@unlv.edu OR susieskarl@gmail.com

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Deadline for Submissions Nov. 1, 2019

Call for submissions–MLA Approaches to Teaching Volume on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (11/1/2019)

Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most frequently taught texts—it appears on syllabi for American literature, African American literature, American history, life writing, and gender or women’s studies courses. It is taught in high schools as well as in colleges and universities. Yet, very few resources are currently available for instructors.
Submission are invited, therefore, for a new volume in the MLA’s Approaches to Teaching series on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Proposed contributions should incorporate a clear pedagogical focus. Possible themes could include the literary, social, historical, political, ideological, and cultural contexts of the narrative, comparisons between Incidents and other texts, the reception and publication history of the narrative, the genre of slave narratives, violence and the threat of violence, editorial collaboration, and many others.Interested contributors should first complete the survey available on the MLA’s website:https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/HLVKXJV .Then submit a 500-word abstract as well as a brief c.v. to the editor, Lynn Domina, at ldomina@nmu.edu.Deadline for survey and abstracts: November 1, 2019.
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Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2019

Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative (10/31/2019; 2/19-22/2020) Southwest Popular/American Culture Association, Albuquerque, USA

contact email:
mcbee58@verizon.net

41st Anuual Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference

February 19-22, 2020

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative are welcome. Literary papers as well as creative works will be accepted.

For proposal submissions, visit https://southwestpca.org and select the Conference drop-down menu.

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Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2019

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND SELF-STUDY AS EDUCATION RESEARCH METHODS: CONTINUING DEBATES AND CONTEMPORARY AP

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY AND SELF-STUDY AS EDUCATION RESEARCH METHODS:

CONTINUING DEBATES AND CONTEMPORARY APPLICATIONS

 Edited by

Deborah L. Mulligan*, Emilio A. Anteliz# and Patrick Alan Danaher*,+,^

*University of Southern Queensland, Australia

#Central University of Venezuela, Venezuela

+Central Queensland University, Australia

^University of Helsinki, Finland

FOCUS AND RATIONALE

There is recurring and increasing scholarly interest in the ethical and methodological possibilities of autoethnography and self-study as research methods in education (understood broadly and inclusively as encompassing learning and/or teaching in diverse forms and ranging from formal and structured on the one hand to informal and incidental on the other hand). Against the backdrop of that scholarly interest, this proposed edited research book is centred on continuing debates and contemporary applications related to autoethnography and self-study. These continuing debates include the perceived legitimacy and rigour of focusing on the researcher as self, the relationship between that focus and wider conceptualisations of the self and possible opportunities for engaging productively with multiple manifestations of the other and of otherness. These contemporary applications encompass innovative strategies for building on the undoubted affordances of autoethnography and self-study while also addressing their perceived limitations, traversing different disciplines and paradigms, and mobilising inter- and trans-disciplinary and -paradigmatic approaches.

ORGANISING QUESTIONS

Across the range of issues traversed in the book, it is planned that the following organising questions will be addressed:

  1. What are the genealogical origins and the defining characteristics of autoethnography and self-study?
  2. What are the strengths and limitations of autoethnography and self-study as education research methods?
  3. What are innovative and novel strategies for maximising the strengths and minimising the limitations of autoethnography and self-study?
  4. How do debates about and applications of autoethnography and self-study generate new insights into the character and significance of education research methods?
  5. How do autoethnography and self-study resonate with broader advances in theorising and understanding contemporary life and society?
  6. How can autoethnography and self-study contribute to reconceptualising and reimagining the work and identities of current and future researchers?

CALL FOR CHAPTER ABSTRACTS

Abstracts of no more than 250 words are cordially invited as potential chapters for this proposed edited research book. The editors seek submissions that represent a diversity of geographical location, disciplinary focus, and theoretical and methodological approaches, united by a shared focus on the affordances, limitations and possibilities of autoethnography and self-study as productive and potentially transformative education research methods. Please email your abstract and a bionote of no more than 125 words for each chapter author to Deborah.Mulligan@usq.edu.au, emilio.anteliz@gmail.com or Patrick.Danaher@usq.edu.au

Feel free to contact by email with the book editors with any questions regarding the formation of your abstract.

Abstract deadline: 31 October 2019

EDITOR BIONOTES

  1. Deborah L. Mulligan has spoken at a number of academic symposiums in South East Queensland and has presented in state-wide webinars. Her primary research interest resides in the field of gerontology. Her PhD investigated the role of contributive needs when addressing older men and suicide ideation. Deborah has a strong interest in community capacity building as a means of transforming the lives of older adults and combating the negative stereotypes surrounding this demographic. She is also interested in the long-term effects of research on the participants and the ethical implications of investigating marginalised groups. Email: deborah.mulligan@usq.edu.au
  2. Emilio A. Anteliz is a hydrometeorological engineer who for many years coordinated the provision of learning extension programs, projects and courses by the Faculty of Engineering at the Central University of Venezuela in Caracas, Venezuela to professional engineers and related fields. His research interests include environmental movements, engineering education, informal and lifelong learning, and professional ethics. Email: emilio.anteliz@gmail.com
  3. Patrick Alan Danaher is Professor of Educational Research in the School of Education at the Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. He is also currently an Adjunct Professor in the School of Education and the Arts at Central Queensland University, Australia; and Docent in Social Justice and Education at the University of Helsinki, Finland. His research interests include the education of occupationally mobile communities; education research ethics, methods, politics and theories; and academics’, educators’ and researchers’ work and identities. Email: patrick.danaher@usq.edu.au https://staffprofile.usq.edu.au/profile/patrick-danaher
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Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2019

Stardom and Fandom ( (10/31/2019; 2/19-22/2020) Southwest Popular/American Culture Association Conference, New Mexico, USA

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 41st annual SWPACA conference.  One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.

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.

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 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

Fans, Stans, Antis and ‘haters’

Fan shame, wank, and fandom policing

Gendered constructions of stars and fans

Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction

Contact Info:

Dr. Lynn Zubernis, West Chester University

Contact Email:
lzubernis@wcupa.edu
URL:
http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/
Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2019

Call for Chapters: From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Contemporary Art and Self-Representation in the Social Media Age (10/31/2019)

Website: https://www.mdpi.com/books/pdfview/edition/1083

MDPI Books is currently running an edition entitled “From Self-Portrait to Selfie: Contemporary Art and Self-Representation in the Social Media Age”. 

Defined as a self-image made with a hand-held mobile device and shared via social media platforms, the selfie has facilitated self-imaging becoming a ubiquitous part of globally networked contemporary life. Beyond this selfies have facilitated a diversity of image making practices and enabled otherwise representationally marginalized constituencies to insert self-representations into visual culture. In the Western European and North American art-historical context, self-portraiture has been somewhat rigidly albeit obliquely defined, and selfies have facilitated a shift regarding who literally holds the power to self-image. Like self-portraits, not all selfies are inherently aesthetically or conceptually rigorous or avant-guard. But, –as this project aims to do address via a variety of interdisciplinary approaches– selfies have irreversibly impacted visual culture, contemporary art, and portraiture in particular. Selfies propose new modes of self-imaging, forward emerging aesthetics and challenge established methods, they prove that as scholars and image-makers it is necessary to adapt and innovate in order to contend with the most current form of self-representation to date. The essays gathered herein will reveal that in our current moment it is necessary and advantageous to consider the merits and interventions of selfies and self-portraiture in an expanded field of self-representations. We invite authors to take interdisciplinary global perspectives, to investigate various sub-genres, aesthetic practices, and lineages in which selfies intervene to enrich the discourse on self-representation in the expanded field today.

Ace Lehner, University of California – Santa Cruz (USA)
Editor

The submission deadline is 31.10.2019. You may send your manuscript now or up until the deadline. Submitted papers should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere. Their acceptance will be subject to our regular peer review processes. To check suitability, we encourage authors to send a short abstract or tentative title in advance to the Editorial Office (booksubmission@mdpi.com).

MDPI Books is fully open access. Open access (unlimited and free access by readers) increases publicity and promotes more frequent citations, as indicated by several studies. Open access is supported by the authors and their institutes. No Article Processing Charges (APC) apply for well-prepared manuscripts.

For further details on the submission process, please see the instructions for authors at our website (https://www.mdpi.com/books/publish_with_us).

Contact Info:

https://www.mdpi.com/books/contact

Contact Email:
wagner@mdpi.com

Deadline for Submissions, October 31, 2019

Travel in Arab Women’s Writings and/or Arab Women’s Travel Writings

I am editing a journal volume, of about six articles, on Arab Women’s Travel Writings, or Travel Writings by Arab Women.

I am seeking original  scholarly papers, not previously published, about travel writings by Arab women. I will also consider scholarly papers about travel, or the theme of travel, in Arab Women’s writings.

Please write to me if you have an idea for a paper on this topic.

Thank you.

Contact Info:

Dr. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley

Professor in Literary Theory and Gender and Women’s Studies

American University of Sharjah

Contact Email:
nhgolley@aus.edu