The deadlines have passed for the following listings, or they are notices of new issues of life writing journals. We provide this information here for points of reference for scholars interested in trends in the field.
Deadline for Submissions, 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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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).
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 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,
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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
Ext: 7234 / Edificio Nº 7A (primer piso)
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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
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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Professor
Department of English
The College of New Jersey
(609) 771-3231
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.
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)
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)
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
- Include an abstract of 200-400 words (in MS Word)
- Include a biographical note of 50-250 words (in MS Word)
- The article should be 4000-6000 words, including the abstract, the footnotes and the works cited
- 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.”
- Include name, professional affiliation, phone number, and email address in the cover e-mail.
Formatting Guidelines
- 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…
- Use font Georgia # 12. The entire article, including the abstract and the indented quotations, should be double-spaced, and in MS Word.
- The final submission must comply with other formatting guidelines, to be communicated upon notification of acceptance.
Submission & Review Process
- Manuscripts should be sent to the editor, Abbes Maazaoui (maazaoui@lincoln.edu)
- Articles undergo a double blind review and their publication depends on the peer-review process.
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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
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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
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.
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
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).
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
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.
Marta-Laura Cenedese
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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
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.
Marie-Alice L’Heureux
Greetings
(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
CFVP Virtual Video Symposium – Poetic Justice: Narrating Personhood, Solidarity, and Citizenship (5/29/2020) Utrecht, Netherlands
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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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
Ana Belén Martínez García
PhD Assistant Professor
ISSA School of Management Assistants
Edificio Amigos. Despacho 5090
Tel.: 948 425600 (802814)
Life Writing as Political Voice
PAMLA Pacific, Asian, and Modern Language Association
Los Vegas 11/12-15, 2020
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.
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
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:
- 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 - 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!
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Biofiction as World Literature/ La biofiction comme littérature mondiale (4/15/2020; 10/29-31/2020) – Leuven, Belgium
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.
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
Associate Professor, Art History | http://www.morris.umn.edu/academics/arthistory/
University of Minnesota, Morris | morris.umn.edu
dabbsj@morris.umn.edu | 320-589-6232
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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,
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
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
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:
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
Tel. +358 50 329 1783
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?
Emerita Professor
Department of English
Jackman Humanities Bldg.
University of Toronto
170 St. George St., 6th floor
Toronto, ON M5R 2M8
*
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.
Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2020
British Travels to Germany
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.
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:
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 :
10.3917/lignes1.001.0107. URL: https://www.cairn.info/revue-lignes1-2000-1-page-107.htm9
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
*
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.
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.
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
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
trans | diziplin Simone Weil denʞkollektiv [Martina Bengert, Thomas Sojer, Max Walther]
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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)
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.
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.
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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
*
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.
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.
_______________
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.
_______________
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.
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.
Matthew Berg, John Carroll University, Department of History, mberg@jcu.edu
Mikkel Dack, Rowan University, Department of History, dack@rowan.edu
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
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
Leslie Morris
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/
Diana Medlicott: diana@progressiveconnexions.net
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): bratislavaprison@progressiveconnexions.net
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)
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:
- Amalia Alvarez (https://amaliaalvarez.wordpress.com/)
- Paula Bulling (http://paulabulling.net/)
- Dominic Davies (https://www.city.ac.uk/people/academics/dominic-davies)
- Golnar Nabizadeh (https://www.dundee.ac.uk/humanities/staff/details/golnar-nabizadeh.php).
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:
- Comics and Migration: Belonging, Narration, Activism project (https://migrationcomics.fi/) funded by the Kone Foundation (https://koneensaatio.fi/en/)
- Departments of Finnish Literature (https://www.utu.fi/en/university/faculty-of-humanities/finnish-literature) and Comparative Literature (https://www.utu.fi/en/university/faculty-of-humanities/comparative-literature), University of Turku
- SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku (https://selmacentre.wordpress.com/)
- Migration Institute of Finland (http://www.migrationinstitute.fi/en)
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Deadline for Submissions January 13, 2020
Call for papers : Identities: Understanding of Oneself, Others and the World
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.
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.
Associate Professor Catherine Fowler, University of Otago and Dr Teri Higgins, Independent Researcher, Montreal.
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
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
Storytelling and Identity through Digital Media
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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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.
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
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Deadline for Submissions December 31, 2019
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.
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
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
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
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New Technology-based Metamorphosis in Japan
Paris, France
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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
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/
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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?)
- 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;
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
Rebecca Boone
Lamar University
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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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
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
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.
*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.
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.
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
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)
- Panel: “Current Research on Autobiographical Acts and Practices”
- 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)
- Round Table on the Future of Life Narrative Studies
- 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)
- Talk: “Collaborators or Co-conspirators? Three+ Decades in Autobiography Studies and the View from Here”
- 4:45-5:15 PM:
- “Speaking of Sid…”
- Anne Curzan (Michigan), Jane Johnson (Michigan), Susan Najita (Michigan), David Porter (Michigan), Sheri Sytsema-Geiger (Michigan)
- “Speaking of Sid…”
- 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:
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.
Please contact Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky at the White House Historical Association with any questions.
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
Shimon Azulay: shimon.azulay@mail.huji.ac.il
Len Capuli (Project Administrator): lisbonmeaning@progressiveconnexions.net
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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
—
Dr Trev Broughton
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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!
—
The Center for Biographical Research
Biomed B104
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
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:
- a cover letter providing contact information for the author(s), title, and format of the proposed work,
- 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.
- 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
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
American Elegy, Now
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:
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Environment: climate change; indigenous land rights; water and food chain contamination; anthropocentrism & animal studies
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Race & Ethnicity: Native sovereignty & tribal recognition; structural racism; the New Jim Crow & the carceral state; public monuments and memorials
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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
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Disability Studies: mobility impairment; sensory impairment; chronic pain and/or illness; neurodiversity; posthumanism
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Digital Media: memory and mourning through digital archives, social media, apps, and digital media and online fora
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Visual Arts: painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, book art; hybrid materials and forms
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Performance: music, dance, film, performance art
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Architecture: public and private memorials; funerary statues
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Fashion: customs of dress; sentimental & mourning jewelry
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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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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
Call for submissions–MLA Approaches to Teaching Volume on Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (11/1/2019)
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.
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
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:
- What are the genealogical origins and the defining characteristics of autoethnography and self-study?
- What are the strengths and limitations of autoethnography and self-study as education research methods?
- What are innovative and novel strategies for maximising the strengths and minimising the limitations of autoethnography and self-study?
- How do debates about and applications of autoethnography and self-study generate new insights into the character and significance of education research methods?
- How do autoethnography and self-study resonate with broader advances in theorising and understanding contemporary life and society?
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
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
Dr. Lynn Zubernis, West Chester University
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).
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.
Dr. Nawar Al-Hassan Golley
Professor in Literary Theory and Gender and Women’s Studies
American University of Sharjah
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
M/C Media/Culture Journal Call for Abstracts – ‘violence’ (15/10/2019)
‘violence’
We often think of violence in its most manifest forms: war, terrorism or massacres at schools. But violence also operates in more subtle forms. Some forms of violence are easily recognised, but others are decontextualised and depoliticised through complex cultural processes of normalisation and denial (Brison). Violence can become a spectacle, an aestheticised representation, or it can be reduced to banality when its horror and trauma is refracted through everyday lives and spaces which are shaped by violent systems and ideologies (Arendt). Notions of trauma, spectatorship, testimony, and witnessing circulate through narratives of violence. Ideas of “civilisation” implicitly and explicitly reference competing discourses of violence and put them to work in damaging ways, often in service of ideals (e.g. liberalism) that mask the very violence that support them. Even for those of us who feel generally safe, violence is all around us, shaping how we live, work, think, feel, and act. However, violence is not equally inflicted or experienced throughout the world. Ultimately, feeling safe is often a marker of privilege and this safety often comes at the price of violence enacted upon others.
This issue invites responses to the theme of “violence,” understood broadly, as it operates through various social, cultural, institutional, and affective domains.
Possible considerations include (but are by no means limited to):
- Symbolic violence and the discursive, political and social domination that shapes contemporary or historical realities.
- Pedagogical violence and the operation of power and control over the means of intellectual, social and cultural production in spaces of learning.
- Physical violence and the attendant damages that this entails.
- “Cartographies of violence” (Oikawa) and the production of subjectivities, histories and realities through spatial imaginaries (and regulation).
- The intersections of (racial, colonial, gendered, sexed, ableist) violence and the exclusions that this produces, depends on, and reifies.
- Political violence in the wake of polarisation.
- Technological violence and the ways in which media technologies facilitate or resist violence.
- Violence as a subject of public interest in forms including news media, true crime, and entertainment.
Prospective contributors should email an abstract of 100-250 words and a brief biography to the issue editors. Abstracts should include the article title and should describe your research question, approach, and argument. Biographies should be about three sentences (maximum 75 words) and should include your institutional affiliation and research interests. Articles should be 3000 words (plus bibliography). All articles will be double-blind refereed and must adhere to MLA style (6th edition).
Details
- Release date: 22 Apr. 2020
- Editors: Janine Gertz, Emma Maguire, Theresa Petray, and Bryan Smith
- Send us your 150 word abstract proposals as soon as possible, and preferably by 15 October 2019. Full essay deadline to be negotiated with editors but likely by 1 December.
Please submit articles through this Website. Send any enquiries to violence@journal.media-culture.org.au.
For Author Guidelines see here: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/about/submissions#authorGuidelines
Janine Gertz, Emma Maguire, Theresa Petray & Bryan Smith
James Cook University
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
Dear IABA-L Subscribers
Please note that the deadline for this, the major international IABA conference, HAS BEEN EXTEND TO OCTOBER 15, 2019
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Call for Papers
IABA World Turku 2020
Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future
9–12 June 2020
Turku, Finland
SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory warmly welcomes proposals to the 12th IABA World Conference, which will be held at the University of Turku (Finland), June 9-12, 2020. Through the theme of Life-Writing: Imagining the Past, Present and Future, IABA World 2020 will explore the multiple temporalities shaping the dimensions of life storying and life writing research. Temporality impacts the writing and shaping of life narratives, as well as the ways in which we analyze life narrative documents. The temporal is at the core of how we understand the centuries-long histories of how the self is written about and the genealogy of life writing research. Temporality, however, does not mean only gazing to the past, but also understanding how the present moment and orientation to the future are visible in life writing and/or how history makes its presence known in different moments and spaces. The temporal approach also invites us to explore how the future is imagined in life narratives and to discuss our visions for the future of life writing studies.
This interdisciplinary conference encourages dialogues across boundaries of theory, methodology, genre, place, and time. The Conference invites not only traditional conference papers and panels, but also unconventional presentation formats, creative sessions, as well as artistic performances. We encourage cross-disciplinary and transnational contributions. Proposed works may consider life storying through themes including for example:
- Narrating and imagining life courses (for example childhood, youth, and aging in life writing)
- Ethics of storytelling
- Cultural memory and societal change
- Non-human life storying / Life writing in posthumanism
- Autobiography, diary, letters, and life writing in historical research
- The histories and futures of different genres of life writing
- Digital history and the future of biographical and prosopographical research
- Sensory and/or Emotive narratives
- Life storying in popular culture (music, film, theatre, games)
- Visual life narratives (photography, graphics, visual arts etc.)
- Hidden/forgotten lives vs. Public/celebrated lives
- Interrelations: Family and life writing
- Life storying migrations, displacements, and belongings
- Life writing illness and wellness / disability and ability
- Imagining futures in life narratives
- Life writing and artistic research
- 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 proposed full sessions to be interdisciplinary and international. Creative sessions and performances can also be proposed and if you are uncertain about how to submit these, please contact the organizers: iabaturku2020@utu.fi
The conference language is English.
All presenters must submit a max. 300 word abstract and a 150 word bio.
Please note: when you propose a full session all the presenters must submit their own abstract to the system and mention that it is part of XXX session.
Link to abstract submission:
https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/1230/submission
Abstract submission guidelines:
- Register to Oxford Abstracts to submit
- You may amend your submission until the final submission deadline. Please note that uncompleted abstracts will not be reviewed.
- Remember to complete the abstract and answer all the required questions before the deadline.
- If you have any questions regarding the submission process, please contact info@aboaservices.fi
Practicalities and schedule:
Deadline for proposals 15.10.2019
Notification of acceptance: 1.12.2019
Registration opens: 1.12.2019 / Early bird fee until: 29.2.2020 / Final registration by: 15.4.2020
The Conference Fee will be ca. 200/150 EUR (early bird), 250/200 EUR (the exact amount will be notified when the registration opens)
Information about publication plans:
The conference team will publish a special issue of Biography in conjunction with the 2020 IABA Turku. Information will be available on the conference website by August.
Conference organizer:SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku
Conference co-organizers: Åbo Akademi University, the City of Turku, International Institute for Popular Culture, and the Finnish Literature Society
FAQ:
Individual proposal + panel: traditional academic session with 3–4 participants, 20 min presentation + 10 minutes discussion. In full panel, we propose that the chair is one of the presenters.
Roundtable: 4–6 participants, with short presentations and then questions from the round-table organizers, dialogue between participants and then open discussion from the floor
Workshops, creative sessions, performances: we are open for suggestions!
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
Special Issue of [Inter]sections onWar and Conflict in North American Autobiographical and Documentary Narratives
Our age is one of refugee crises, of wars where the civilian population is more exposed than ever before, and of terrorist attacks that can produce more victims than organized combat. Today, information about all of these events circulates faster than ever, particularly outside of traditional media outlets. Witnessing and reporting about destruction has never been easier, and cultural memory and social responsibility are more mobile and more complicated as a consequence. Similarly, at this time, our understanding of categories such as “victim” and “perpetrator” are unsettled by terrorism and the refugee crisis, news stories about American veterans who return home to perpetrate mass violence, as well as revelations about the treatment of war prisoners by the American military, and other human rights abuses within the military itself. In addition to this, memory and representation now circulate not only among cultural and national groups, but also among genres and media, in a constantly shifting hierarchy that is only partly reflected by traditional media. The mobility of memory and the recent growth of its transcultural dimension should have, it seems, worked towards increasing a sense of responsibility towards the fate of the more vulnerable, those who live in warzones or are fleeing conflict areas, but instead the effect seems to be much more ambiguous, as recent political and social developments indicate.
We welcome submissions that examine narratives that memorialize participation in war and conflict in a variety of North American auto/biographical and documentary genres (diary, memoir, autobiography, reportage, documentary film, oral testimony etc.) and media (traditional writing and reporting, but also multimodal media such as comics, video, and digital media etc.) in order to explore the complicated mobility of individual and group memory, as well as the complexities of witnessing, recording, and reacting to one another’s suffering. In a world where the United States is still perceived as one of the main players on the political, military, and cultural scene, as well as an increasingly selective refuge for those fleeing war and conflict across the globe, an analysis of American autobiographical and documentary narratives that bear witness to conflict and destruction (from both within and without US borders) is essential for the understanding of transcultural identity and memory, as well as the narrative patterns through which they are expressed.
This special issue asks questions such as: in the process of memorialization, how are concepts such as grief, trauma, and survival translated across cultures? How can the classification of participants in war and conflict into “victims,” “perpetrators,” “bystanders,” as well as “soldiers” and “civilians” be refined so that it contributes to a better understanding of what makes ordinary people commit evil deeds (Waller 2002)? How do mainstream definitions of concepts such as “genocide,” “heroism,” or “war crime” influence the way people experience and remember war and conflict? What counter memories are produced as a consequence? How do Western tropes of storytelling, suffering, and healing influence the narratives of both American and non-American stories? How do the requirements of a particular genre (such as memoir or documentary film) influence the way certain events are memorialized? What blind spots exist in the memorialization of war and conflict? How does suffering become sellable? Last, but not least, how do gender and sexuality play out in the context of war and conflict?
This special issue is co-edited by Dragos Manea and Mihaela Precup. Please submit all inquiries, as well as full articles to mihaela.precup@lls.unibuc.ro and dragos.manea@lls.unibuc.ro.
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[Inter]sections is a double-blind peer reviewed open access journal of American Studies indexed in the MLA Directory of Periodicals, Ulrichsweb, DOAJ, CEEOL, and EBSCO. For more information about us, see www.intersections-journal.com.
We publish academic papers, as well as relevant reviews and interviews. The language of the journal is English (US), so please edit your submission accordingly. Papers should be between 3,000 and 8,000 words (for book reviews, the suggested length is between 1,000 and 3,000 words), and written in accordance with the 7th edition of the MLA citation style. All submissions should also include an abstract, a list of 5-7 keywords, and a short bio.
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Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
Call for Papers
Conference
Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics
February 6 and 7, 2020 at the University of Vienna
Collaboration of Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP) Research Laboratory, George Mason University, Viriginia, and Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna
In the earliest documents of the genre transmitted from antiquity, biography and its reception are already associated with the creation of positive or negative personal reputations of politicians, artists,
scientists or military leaders. Autobiography, in turn, whetherspiritual since late antiquity or generally secular since the Enlightenment, has also been used to publicly create and negotiate reputations of its narrators and protagonists. The relation of such
reputations created in biography and autobiography to the author figures and historical persons has produced long-standing scholarly and popular
debates in terms of fictionality or nonfictionality, semiotic constructedness, and reliability. In the past decades, however, life writings – including biography and autobiography as much as diaries or letters and, more contemporarily, life narratives and egodocuments in media such as painting, cinema, graphic novels, digital formats andphotography, for example – have been critically discussed in terms of
cultural and national significations, affective patterns,
psychologically and legally coded constructions – relating to trauma studies, witnessing and testimonials – or narratological conventions including perspectives, temporalities or individual and collective memory. The discussion of life narratives and their genre conventions, patterns and protocols as established means of creating and destroying
reputations appears to have met with only minor interest in the field.
At this juncture, Auto/Biography Studies and Reputation Politics Studies might benefit mutually and strongly from an interdisciplinary collaboration. For a range of studies of reputation politics and
reputation management in psychology, communication studies, political sciences and historical science, contemporary methodologies and theories of life writing and life narrative in literary, cultural and media studies provide refined terminologies and tested approaches in respect
of the determining effects of generic and narrative conventions, semiotic materiality and medial intransparency, as well as questions of agency, relationality and network structures; and, reversely, for the study of auto/biography, the recently developed categories and critical methods in the study of reputation politics provide new ways for ethical consideration of life narratives by addressing the creation or destruction of life stories in public.
Through reputation politics studies, as an emerging field that is revitalizing interests of rhetorical studies and political sciences since antiquity, human-rights approaches or memory studies in life writing research, for example, may be further detailed by address to the evaluative strategies behind the creation of specific structures of personalities and narrated characters and lives and, for example, the
seemingly returning attraction in these days of isolating identity images and discourses long considered defunct. The critical discussion of the textually produced relations between the individual and the communal or collective in the age of populist revival and resurging nationalism benefits from the joint address to life narratives and reputation politics. Conceivable for discussion, among others, are the
following questions:
• Has the term reputation lost relevance in the contemporary age of intense and deep mediatization and rapid globalization of life stories and their ever-changing, elusive evaluative reception?
• If processuality and relationality of agencies in production and reception of works of culture as well as the intransparency of the medium have become of guiding interest in contemporary auto/biography
studies, how might the medial production of a reputation be systematically considered in processual terms?
• What is the benefit of the continuing address to the ancient category of character in discussions of ‘character assassination’? Who or what is a character in relation to personality, self, individual, protagonist, narrator, author?
• Has the term reputation become part of an elitist discourse that collides with precepts of the race-class-gender and further categories of cultural-studies critiques? If there is an intersectionality of
reputation, is there a transversality, as well?
• When politicians write autobiographies, how do the self-images created in these autobiographies relate to historiography and biography?
• How are fiction and non-fiction in auto/biography and autofiction as well as their discussion related to reputation constructions and their criticism?
• What are the relations of private and public practices of life writing with reputation building?
• How is the discussion of the mediality of works of auto/biography freshly challenged by consideration of the multimodality of the medial channels and materialities through which reputations are generated and put to political use?
• How does historiography as a genre that is still often determined by descriptions of individual lives and personalities rather than relational perspectives, and as such still committed to its derivation from protocols of biography in antiquity, benefit from the critical combination of methods and theories of Auto/Biography and Reputation Politics Studies?
For a principal orientation regarding the two fields, respectively, and as a common ground for initiation of methodological discussion, we suggest Routledge Handbook of Character Assassination and Reputation Management, ed. Sergei Samoilenko, Martijn Icks, Jennifer Keohane and Eric Shiraev (Routledge, in print, fall 2019), or Samoilenko, Shiraev, Keohane and Icks, “Character Assassination (general)” in The Global Encyclopedia of Informality, ed. Alena Ledeneva (UCL Press 2018)
441–445, and Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, ed. Martina
Wagner-Egelhaaf (De Gruyter 2019). Please also see the websites of IABA, the International Auto/Biography Association, and of CARP Research Lab,
https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/home and
https://carplab.wordpress.com.
We welcome interdisciplinary and methodologically explicit papers that address critical questions across an international variety of works, genres, media and practices, with attention to theoretical premises of
both Auto/Biography Studies and Reputation Politics Studies. Conference language will be English. Several publishers, including Macmillan, Sage,
Routledge, and Taylor & Francis, have expressed interest in the publication of a volume comprising the results of the conference. Please send proposals (600 words maximum exclusive of references) plus a short academic biography to nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at and eshiraev@gmu.edu
by October 15, 2019. Notice of acceptance will be given by October 30, 2019.
The conference is co-organized by Nadja Gernalzick, Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna, and Eric Shiraev, George Mason University, Arlington, Virginia, U.S.A, with the assistance of Edwina Hagen, University of Amsterdam; Martijn Icks, University of Amsterdam;
Jennifer Keohane, University of Baltimore, and Sergei Samoilenko, George Mason University.
_____________________
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Nadja Gernalzick
Visiting Professor
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
University of Vienna
Campus, Hof 8.3
Spitalgasse 2-4
1090 Wien
Austria
Campus, Hof 8.3, Room 3E-02-08A
nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at
*
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
International Conference on Oral History
8-9 February 2020 – London, UK
organised by
London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research
For decades, oral history was considered less than scholarly, leading to its exclusion from several history books; thus valuable first-hand experiences and information that could alter historical truth were neglected and ultimately lost to oblivion. Our conference wishes to challenge the pervading view that oral testimony can lead to false representation of historical events and underline the significant support it can provide to historical research, especially in lieu of written documentation.
The journey of a memory through time may change, transform or even become distorted from its primary form. Oral testimony requires a multilevel examination and verification so it can be considered legitimate and useful as historical information, but despite these difficulties, oral tradition can have the power to present an entirely new perspective on an event, future generations can then interpret it freely.
The conference will focus on the connections between oral history, collective memory, and individual memory. Whether from a historical, social, or even psychological perspective, we wish to engage scholars in a multidimensional and interdisciplinary approach in order to deeply explore all aspects of this valuable and fascinating area. We are committed to creating a welcoming space for discussion, collaboration, and exploration of oral history’s potential as a tool for local, national and international projects that would enrich and even revise chapters of history.
Conference presentations will be related, but not limited, to:
- Oral history throughout history
- Oral historian: a public historian? Oral history as a form of social and communal activity; Promoting oral history and engaging public awareness
- Conducting oral history research; advantages and disadvantages; limitations and ways to overcome them
- Archiving oral testimony; examples and presentation of valuable archives
- Methodologies, techniques and methods in conducting and writing oral history
- Theories of oral history
- Re-examining and re-writing history through the lens of oral history; Oral history in the global historical arena
- The absence of historical facts and the role of testimonies
- Epistemological and ethical dilemmas in oral history
- Use and abuse of oral history on the Internet
- Oral history and the law
- Cases in which oral testimony changed historical truth
- Oral history as a form of therapy
- Collective memory and oral tradition
- The role of individual memory in oral history
- Oral history as a revealing or misleading tool
- Manipulation of memory and the role of oral history
- Oral history and trauma
- Oral history in war
- Oral history in the hands of social scientists
- Oral history as a tool of revealing/reliving a dictatorship/suppressing regime
- Altering, exaggerating or forgetting memories; the psychology of a survivor
- Can individual and collective memory be manipulated in order to present a particular side of an incident?
- Iconic cases of oral history
- Why is the oral history project needed? Goals, steps and priorities
- Oral history in teaching and teaching oral history
The conference will bring together scholars from different fields including history, philosophy, religion, sociology, international relations, literature, art, space studies, peace studies, cultural studies, minority studies, war and/or genocide studies, journalism, immigration studies, psychology and psychiatry, political and social studies, and those working in archives, museums and NGOs.
We are particularly interested in inviting those with first-hand experiences, amateur archivists and memory collectors to participate in our newly established session “Share your memories and change history.”
Submissions may propose various formats, including:
*Individually submitted papers (organised into panels by the committee)
* Panels (3-4 individual papers)
* Roundtable discussions (led by one of the presenters)
* Posters
Paper proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 15 October 2019
For fees and submission information please follow the link: https://oralhistory.lcir.co.uk
Provisional conference venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Bloomsbury, Malet Street, London WC1E 7H
Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2019
Call for Contributions
Semiotics in Cultural Studies/Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften
The collection Semiotiken in den Kulturwissenschaften/Semiotics in Cultural Studies opens a comparative and transdisciplinary discussion on the uses and critical methodology of semiotics in cultural studies.
Histories of cultural studies (Assmann 2017 [2006]; Bachmann-Medick 2016 [2006]; During 2005; During ed. 2001 [1993]; Fauser 2011 [2003]; Marchart 2018 [2008]; Musner ed. 2001; Nünning and Nünning eds. 2008 [2003]; Takahashi 2004; Kittler 2000; and many others) have usually not addressed the provenances of the semiotics employed in diverse cultural-studies approaches or have done so peripherally only. While poststructuralist influences are frequent and noted in cultural studies and imply a recourse to the history of structuralist semiotics of some kind, for example, the semiotic theories and models informing various schools and traditions of cultural studies are hardly critically discussed in terms of the role semiotics take in informing and shaping cultural studies methodologies. When cultural studies are understood as media studies, as they must be from a contemporary semiotic perspective, the need for coherent explications of semiotic assumptions and methodologies in diverse scholarly approaches to cultural products becomes even more felt. While histories and systematics of semiotics address areas of cultural-studies interest (Posner/Robering/Sebeok 1997–2004), a comprehensive cultural-studies review of semiotics has not
yet been developed. This collection is meant to offer a first stepping stone towards a systematic and critically methodological comparison of the diversity of applications of semiotics in cultural studies by providing, as incentives for a wider discussion, treatments of individual traditions and problematics of semiotics in cultural studies.
Including the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, there have been and are a variety of explicitly semiotic approaches in cultural studies since the late nineteenth century, for example from Ferdinand de Saussure and structuralism to semiotics of culture by Roland Barthes, or from poststructuralism to representationalism (Birmingham School) and the plurality of methods in so-called cultural semiotics (www.kultursemiotik.com). The investigation of visual signs after early iconology (Aby Warburg, Erwin Panofsky) or the diagrams and orders of signs developed for the notation of phenomena in myth studies and early anthropology (George Frazer) also employ diverse semiotic conceptions and methods that have been extended to and are referenced in these days.
How do tenets of Saussurian semiology inform structural anthropology?
When such methods are critically and comparatively studied, the position of discourse analysis after Michel Foucault on the spectrum also has to be investigated: what is historical semantics (Dietrich Busse) in relation to discourse analysis and cultural semiotics? How is the agency of actors, for example after actor network theory (Bruno Latour), integrated in models of signification and what is the semiotics of actor network theory? The models of signification and of actants are as diverse as are the semiotics and semiologies, even if individual areas
of application of semiotics prefer specific models like the notorious use of the differentiation of icon, index and symbol after Peirce in theories of documentary film and photography.
Contemporarily and continuingly, materiality and deixis appear to be important concepts in theories of signs, and the relation of semiotics and media studies is of particular interest in times of a phenomenologization of media studies as in approaches to a “semiotic phenomenology” (Malin Wahlberg) in film studies as well as in new materialism or posthumanism. Elaborations of deconstruction and grammatology, for example in image studies (Sigrid Weigel), call for conceptualizations of principal relationality and differantiality beyond identificatory reductions of signs to referents. Where is the connection of a materialist semiotics in diagrammatics (Matthias Bauer und Christoph Ernst), intermateriality (Andrea Seier) and the materialism of
posthumanism (Cary Wolfe)?
We welcome comparative methodological, theoretical and historical discussions of semiotics, investigations of specific problems in semiotics of cultural studies as well as sample applications of methodologically reflected semiotic approaches in cultural studies.
Possible contributions may address or include, among others, the fields of
semiotics and cultural studies, approaches and examples since the 1880s:
anthropology from James Frazer to Bronislaw Malinowski and Claude Lévi-Strauss; iconology and its extension to image studies, visual culture studies and semiotics of the image; semiotics after Charles Sanders Peirce: pragmatism; semiology after Ferdinand de Saussure: structuralism; …
semiotics and cultural studies, approaches and examples since the 1950s: discourse analysis and dispositives after Michel Foucault, historical epistemology, cultures of knowledge; semiotics of culture after RolandBarthes; grammatology after Jacques Derrida; …
schools and methods of cultural studies and their semiotics:
Frankfurt school (is there a semiotics of the Frankfurt School?);
Birmingham school; postcolonialism; pragmatism; mixed methods and grounded theory; cultural concepts of the body; cultural memory, memory studies; trauma studies; Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis; actor network theory; posthumanism; relationalism; Linienwissen, Liniendenken;
diagrammatics; new materialism; posthermeneutics; …
transdisciplinary semiotics in cultural studies:
history and theory of art and architecture; media theory, media
philosophy, media ecology; design theory; aesthetics of reception; neurobiology and cognitive science; neuronal networks and artificial intelligence; theater studies, theories of ritual and performance studies; film studies; queer theory; comparative literature; narratology, narrative environments; translation studies; archaeology; historiography; auto/biography and automediality studies; social
semiotics; approaches to multimodality; communication studies; numerology; sound studies; media archaeologies; theory of technics and technology; …
The collection is intended as a bilingual volume, and we accept original contributions in English or German. The collection is scheduled to appear with transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, Germany, in a new series on cultural studies under the general editorship of Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (KWG).
Please send proposals (about 400 words) in English or German plus a short academic biography to the volume editors by October 15, 2019: nadja.gernalzick@univie.ac.at and thomasmetten@me.com.
Prof. Dr. Nadja Gernalzick
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
University of Vienna
Austria
Dr. Thomas Metten
Transfer Center
University of Passau
Germany
with the assistance of
Nora Benterbusch M.A.
Art History and Cultural Studies
European Comparative Media Studies
Saarland University
Germany
Dipl.-Biol. Filip Niemann
Psychiatry and Psychotherapy III
Section Neuropsychology and Functional Imaging
University Hospital Ulm
Germany
New Series (Bordeaux University Press): Contemporary Autobiographical Practices
This new collection publishes original manuscripts (monographs and collective volumes in French or English) that examine :
- Self-referential narratives, and the way they are published and read (and the increasing role of new technology, more particularly phenomena like blogs or social networks, but also the resurgence of more ancient forms such as diaries)
- The ontological and psychological dispositions that lead us to tell about ourselves and our lives to others—and the communicational structures entailed—and their possible pathological or curative dimension.
- Outstanding contemporary autobiographical ventures (mostly from the anglophone world—Henry Roth, Edward St. Aubyn, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Nelson…—but they can be compared to similar works from other linguistic areas such as Elena Ferrante or Karl Ove Knausgaard) and what they reveal about current publishing policies, formal and aesthetic evolutions and reader responses.
- Self-representation for commercial purposes (from an author’s picture on a dust cover to authors’ personal websites) or political ones.
- Self-representation in visual arts (painting, photography, cinema and graphic memoirs).
- And more generally theoretical approaches to the issue of the fact/fiction border and the line separating self-portrait and self-reinvention.
Our aim is to publish texts by authors who have a good knowledge of contemporary stakes and concepts linked to self-narration, and whose approach is not limited to literature but branches out into other fields (sociology, cognitive sciences, psychoanalysis…) in order to better understand a will, a need—to narrate oneself, to narrate one’s self—intrinsic to human beings.
Edited by Arnaud Schmitt (arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr) and Stéphanie Ravez (stephanie.ravez@u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr)
*
Deadline for Proposals October 13, 2019
Prof. Dr. Alfred Hornung
Department of English & Linguistics
Johannes Gutenberg University
Jakob-Welder Weg 20
Deadline for Proposals October 5, 2019
by Daniel Aureliano Newman, University of Toronto
International Society for the Study of Narrative in New Orleans, USA, March 5–8, 2020
Neonarrative is a term coined by Robyn Warhol (2005) to describe the emerging narratability of socio-cultural processes or events that were formerly unspeakable, unacknowledged or unintelligible—in short, it is the process by which the “narratable” emerges from the “unnarratable” (a term Warhol borrows from Gerald Prince 1988). H. Porter Abbott likewise adopts, in a distinct but not unrelated sense, the term “unnarratable” to describe processes so complex that they “resist representation in narrative form” (Abbott 2009); unnarratable processes include the behaviour of stock markets and subatomic particles, evolution by natural selection, and various statistical or emergent phenomena (Abbott 2008). Though such processes are arguably more resistant to narrative than sociocultural processes, they too may eventually become more narratable, over time, growing familiarity, and the efforts of cultural interpreters (among others, journalists, science popularizers, historians, psychologists, explorers of various kinds). Neonarrative thus extends beyond reversals of the hitherto-unspeakable, into the realm of what once eschewed narrative comprehension altogether. To cite just one example: Richard Dawkins’s figure (or character, if you like) of the “selfish gene” gave significant narrative shape to the processes of Darwinian evolution, which Abbott considers the non plus ultra of the unnarratable (2003).
This panel focuses on how nonfiction might contribute to neonarrative’s replacement or displacement of the formerly unnarratable. Fictive narratives certainly participate in this expansion of the narratable; but nonfiction arguably raises the stakes because its truth-telling imperative clashes to a lesser or greater extent with the counterintuitive, experimental, defamiliarizing (Iversen 2019), strange (Caracciolo 2016) or unnatural (Richardson 2015) techniques required to tell a story that couldn’t be told before. Furthermore, understanding the potential narratability of very complex real-life processes might serve to better counter the simple but powerful narratives that play such insidious roles in public misinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism.
The ideal composition of the panel will be three or four papers featuring different forms of nonfiction neonarrative (for example, government reports, history, journalism, medicine, narrative essays, science, thought experiments, travel writing…). I am especially interested in papers that focus on a single narrative device (or a cluster of interrelated devices) and its function, formal and rhetorical effects, and relations to neonarrative. The selected papers will be gathered as a panel proposal for the upcoming conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in New Orleans (March 5–8, 2020).
To be considered for the panel, please submit a proposal outlining your paper (max. 200 words) and short biographical note to Daniel Aureliano Newman (University of Toronto, daniel.newman@utoronto.ca) by October 5, 2019.
Panel organizer’s bio: Daniel A. Newman is Assistant Professor (Teaching Stream) in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. His book, Modernist Life Histories: Biological Theory and the Experimental Bildungsroman, was publishedin 2019 by Edinburgh University Press, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Style, Twentieth-Century Literature, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Frontiers of Narrative Studies.
Deadline for Submissions October 1, 2019
Cold War Voices: Stories, Speech and Sound, 1945-1991
Conference
Department of Historical Studies
University of Bristol, UK
22-23 January 2020
Voices were an integral element of the Cold War: from political speeches to surveillance technology, the spoken word took on a political, cultural and social significance in the post-1945 world. But voices could also be used to express anger or dissatisfaction with Cold War politics; to express fear or uncertainty for the future; or used to disseminate alternate viewpoints on current affairs.
Historians too have turned to voices to understand the history of the Cold War period, interviewing policymakers, diplomats and officials, but also “ordinary” people who lived through tension and conflict.
This conference aims to explore the relationship between the Cold War, voices and oral history in more detail, examining not only the gathering of voices during the Cold War, for cultural, political or intelligence purposes, but also historians’ use of voices, oral histories, oral culture and sound in writing histories of this period.
Taking a deliberately broad view of Cold War ‘voices’, we welcome papers on the following topics:
- Surveillance, ‘listening in’ and recording voices during the Cold War
- Voices from war, conflict and violence during the Cold War period, including the Korean War, Vietnam War and conflicts associated with decolonization
- Speaking out for peace: oral histories of nuclear disarmament and the peace movement
- Cultures of orality, folk culture, sound and song during the Cold War
- Narratives of subjectivity and selfhood during the Cold War
- Cold War anniversaries and the memory of the Cold War
- The use of oral history to understand the domestic, local or regional impact of the Cold War, across the world
- Oral histories with policymakers, diplomats or officials, or other ‘elite’ political actors
- The use of archived oral history interviews or official histories
- The dissemination of ‘voices’, via broadcast media and the politics of Cold War interviewing
- Innovative technologies for accessing, disseminating or displaying Cold War voices
Proposals on other topics relating to the central themes are also welcomed.
Proposals must include a title and a 350-400 word abstract, plus a 200-word biography or one-page CV. Please send your proposal to grace.huxford@bristol.ac.uk and joel.morley@bristol.ac.uk by 1st October 2019. We welcome applications from researchers from all career stages and disciplines. Successful speakers will be contacted by 1st November 2019.
The conference will take place at the University of Bristol, UK. For more information on the University of Bristol, see: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/maps/ Support for travel and accommodation will be available for early career researchers.
The workshop is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of Dr Grace Huxford’s AHRC Early Career Leadership Fellowship on ‘British Military Bases in Germany: Living with the Cold War and its Legacies, 1945-2000’ and is organized by Dr Grace Huxford and Dr Joel Morley. For more information on the wider project and the conference, see britishbasesingermany.blog
For further information please contact: grace.huxford@bristol.ac.uk and joel.morley@bristol.ac.uk
Deadline for Submissions October 1, 2019
Call for Papers: Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature
In the past fifty years, a growing body of literature written by the children of Holocaust survivors has emerged, along with scholarship that explores this second-generation literary oeuvre. In its turn, over the last three decades, the writings of grandchildren of survivors have bourgeoned—e.g., Ivan Jablonka’s A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, Noah Lederman’s A World Erased, Jérémie Dres’ We Won’t See Auschwitz. And from Esther Jilovsky et. al.’s In the Shadows of Memory to Alan L. Berger and Asher Z. Milbauer’s “The Burden of Inheritance,” so too has scholarship on these third-generation writings begun to develop. Beginning with Dan Bar-On’s Fear & Hope and most recently with Victoria Aarons and Berger’s Third-Generation Holocaust Representation, various scholarship has probed the contours of third-generation identity/identities broadly defined.
Despite how, as Jilovsky explains in Remembering the Holocaust (2015), “there is a little consensus on [the third-generation’s] collective experience and attributes,” there is also no denying that the Holocaust has impacted a host of members of the third-generation. And though third-generation identity is in no way homogenous, we seek to put together a volume that explores the various ways in which the Holocaust has indeed impacted the grandchildren of survivors; how the legacy of the Holocaust endures in their lives; and how these individuals have shaped and continue to shape how we honor the memory of the Holocaust.
Our collection, Emerging Trends in Third-Generation Holocaust Literature, aims to explore the range of third-generation literary works and films, particularly those written/produced in the past ten years and texts that have received little to no scholarly attention. For the purposes of this volume, literary works refer to poetry, drama, fiction (for adults and children), life writing, graphic narrative, and creative nonfiction. Though it is certainly not requisite, we encourage consideration of the following questions:
- What are emerging trends in recent third-generation writing/film?
- Are there any specific phenomena that we can define as distinctly part of a third-generation experience as expressed in third-generation literature/film?
- How does literature/film explore third-generation identity and how it differs across national boundaries—say, between Israel and Germany or between the U.S. and France?
- How has the third-generation come to interact with the Holocaust differently than the second-generation?
- How does third-generation literature/film reveal how the third-generation relates nostalgically to their grandparents’ pre-War lives and Holocaust experiences?
- Can we understand the third-generation’s relationship to the Holocaust as a form of postmemory, or might it be qualitatively something different?
- How is the third-generation literature/film carrying forward the legacy of the Holocaust?
Essays should be 6,000–7,000 words. Please submit inquiries to both editors—they will be glad to answer any questions. Please submit essays electronically to both editors by 1 October 2019.
Alan L. Berger: aberger@fau.edu
Lucas Wilson: lucas.fww@gmail.com
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
CFP for panel at NEMLA 51st Annual Convention (Boston, March 5-8, 2020)
Narrative Voice in Autobiographical Graphic Novels
The creation of the genre category “graphic novel” seems inextricably linked to the experimental writing of autobiography in comics since the 1970s, from the groundbreaking work of Justin Green, Harvey Pekar, Will Eisner, and Lynda Barry, to the “big three” now most popular in classrooms: Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home. Outside of the European tradition, manga artists in Japan have also used the medium of comics to recount stories of traumatic personal experience, including Shigeru Mizuki’s works on Japanese history and Keiji Nakazawa’s Barefoot Gen series. In these texts, the “co-mixing” of words and images in panels across the page allows the autobiographical narrative to move smoothly, and multi-directionally, between past, present, and future. How does the first-person narrative voice (or lack thereof) work in graphic memoirs? And how might the medium of comics prompt us to reconceptualize life writing in our contemporary media environment?
Cross-cultural or comparative discussions are particularly welcome.
Please submit an abstract of around 250 words to the NEMLA website https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18325
Please see general guidelines for submission here http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html
For further inquiries, please contact Shang-yu Sheng (Assistant Professor, University of Tokyo) at shangyusheng [at] gmail.com
*
CFP–Special Edition of Humanities–Deflating the Dictators: Satire, Humor, and Twenty-First-Century Tyranny (9/30/2019)
After the opening of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, hopes were high that other dictatorships around the world might fall as well. The new millennium ushered in a further domino effect after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the wars that led to the elimination of Saddam Hussein and the dispersal of the Taliban. And yet many tyrants have stayed in power, waging war and violating human rights. When tools of diplomacy and weapons of war fail, what ammunition remains to fight them? Historically, satirists have provided some answers to this question. Despite threats of censorship, incarceration, or execution, satirists such as the journalist Kurt Tucholsky, playwright and novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, and actor Charlie Chaplin have openly criticized even the worst despots like Hitler and Stalin. Who are today’s challengers?
The upcoming issue of the journal Humanities seeks to publish international analyses of current efforts by satirists and humorists to call attention to the injustice and abuse inflicted by autocrats. Which satirists are engaging in a national or international struggle for justice against repressive leadership and with what means? How are satire and the related mode of humor currently functioning, despite censorship, in oppressive regimes? How do current satirical or humorous texts depicting oppression incorporate facts and artefacts that generate countercultural memories and thereby fill gaps in other historical or mass media narratives?
A few examples of such artworks include the novel Day of the Oprichnik by Vladimir Sorokin (2006); the essay collection United States of Bananaby Giannina Braschi (2011); the Masasit Mati acting group’s finger-puppet show series “Top Goon: Diaries of a Little Dictator” (2011-2012), created to deflate Syrian president Bashar al-Assad; and Trevor Stankiewicz’s mixed genre satirical play The Darfur Compromised (2015).
As Martha C. Nussbaum writes, “the ability to imagine vividly, and then to assess judicially, another person’s pain, to participate in it and then to ask about its significance, is a powerful way of learning what the human facts are and of acquiring a motivation to alter them” (Poetic Justice 91). This issue of Humanities delves into the political outcries and aesthetic innovations of satirical and humorous responses to twenty-first-century oppressive regimes.
Please send completed article of approximately 9,000 words, including references, to Jill Twark, East Carolina University, twarkj@ecu.edu by September 30, 2019.
Dr. Jill E. Twark
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline of Sept 30, 2019.
Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript.
Keywords
- satire
- satire in literature
- satire in film
- satire and dictatorship
- Vladimir Sorokin
- Giannina Braschi
- Charlie Chaplin
- satire and justice
- twenty-first-century satire
- humor in literature
- humor in film
- twenty-first-century humor
- Special Issue Editors
- Special Issue Information
- Keywords
- Published Papers
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
NeMLA 2020: Alternative Narratives of Trauma in Recent Latin American Cultural Production
We are seeking abstract submissions for a roundtable to be held at the 51st NeMLA Annual Convention during March 5-8, 2020 in Boston, MA. Abstracts are due September, 30th.
Alternative Narratives of Trauma in Recent Latin American Cultural Production:
Throughout the twentieth century, the push toward modernization across Latin America has responded to a long-standing tradition of paternalism, drawing upon classic discussions of civilization and barbarity. Such a dichotomy rests upon the association of the barbaric with communities and subjectivities deemed too uncivilized to speak for themselves. The dictatorships, civil wars and armed conflicts that arose across Latin America in an effort to bring the continent out of savagery and into civilization have inevitably evidenced vestiges of colonial domination, making paternalism a doomed initiative by which Latin America continues to repeat mistakes of the past. The recent emergence of previously marginalized and silenced voices seeking to share their experiences of trauma, violence and repression offer an opportunity to break from this cyclic repetition of failure. Precisely through a redefinition of their identities and communities, these new actors advance the ultimate goal of achieving a revitalized future for Latin America, at the very least as defined through the emergence of new cultural production. In creating a counter-archive of contestatory testimonies, these narratives are shaping the collective memory of recent history and challenging the patriarchal constructs that have traditionally sought to relegate them to the sidelines of the very conflicts whose violence they have suffered firsthand. In encouraging the formation and study of these bodies of work, we hope to help visibilize these previously silenced voices and explore the potential impact of non-hegemonic responses to violence, trauma and repression. Our roundtable seeks to open discussion of this emerging counter-archive, with a focus on the diversity of actors and experiences it may contain.
We welcome papers in English or Spanish that explore alternative narratives of trauma seeking to build a counter-archive that draws marginalized identities to the forefront of contemporary discussions on mourning, memory, and diversity across Latin America. We frame this diversity through a plurality of gender identities, sexual orientations, racial and ethnic backgrounds, linguistic modes, religions, belief systems, political affiliations, and socioeconomic inequalities fighting for a voice.
Abstracts are to submitted through the NeMLA website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/CFP
To find our submission page, click here: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18023
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
Call for Papers
Touring Travel Writing: Between Fact and Fiction
International Conference
Venue: NOVA FCSH, Colégio Almada Negreiros (Campus de Campolide)
Date: December 5-7 2019
In this year of 2019 the world is celebrating the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its literary legacy. Daniel Defoe’s work, which combines fact and fiction, not only marked the beginning of realistic fiction, but it also evidenced the intimate interrelationship between the novel and travel writing.
CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, Universidade Nova, Lisbon) and CELIS (Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique, Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand) join the celebrations by organising this international conference which aims to be a locus of debate on the many facets of travel writing, a research area that has emerged as a relevant topic of study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the last few decades.
Papers on the following topics are welcome:
Anglophone travel writing on the Portuguese-speaking world
Lusophone travel writing on the Anglophone World
Travel writing and Robinson Crusoe’s legacy
Travelling to write
Travel writing and the novel
Travel writing as report
Travel and visual culture
Travel writing, Humanities and the Social Sciences
Travel writing, gender and power
Travel writing, (post)colonial discourse and decoloniality
Travel writing and (forced) migration
Travel writing, imagined communities and imagology
Travel writing and tourist culture
Travel writing and (in)tangible heritage
Travel writing and exploration
Travelling as gentrification
Travel writing, censorship and surveillance
Travel writing and (auto)biography
Travel writing and Otherness
Travel writing, politics and ideology
Travel writing and ethics
Travel writing, mobility and conviviality
Maps as travel narratives
Travel, Children’s Literature and Young Adult Fiction
Sound/Food/Smell/Touch/Visual/Ecoscapes in Travel Writing
Travel writing in/as translation
Utopian and dystopian travel narratives
Science and travel writing
History of Travel Writing
Travel writing: theory and criticism
Intertextuality in travel writing
The rhetorics of travel writing
Teaching Travel Writing
Keynote speakers:
Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University/Centre for Travel Writing Studies)
Catherine Morgan-Proux (Université Clermont Auvergne/Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique-CELIS)
Teresa Pinto Coelho (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa)
4th Keynote speaker: to be announced
Papers and pre-organized panels:
The conference languages are English and Portuguese. Speakers should prepare for a 20-minute presentation. Please send a 300-word abstract, as well as a short biographical note (100 words), by September 30th, to: ttw.dec2019@gmail.com and mzc@fcsh.unl.pt
Proposals for papers and pre-organized panels (in this case please include also a brief description of the panel) should include full title of the paper, name, institutional affiliation and contact details.
Notification of abstract acceptance or rejection will take place by October 10 2019.
Registration fees:
• Full fee: 100 Euros
• Students: 30 Euros (ID required)
Payment has to be made until October 20 2019. After this date proposals will no longer be considered.
Payment:
Payment by bank transfer
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CETAPS 610245 International Conference (Touring Travel Writing).
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PT + EURO zone: 3,4% + 0,35€
Rest of the World: 4,90% + 0,35€
Full Fee: 103,75 € (PT & EURO zone)
105,24 € (Rest of the World)
Student Fee: 31,37€ (PT & EURO zone)
31,82€ (Rest of the World)
Please send a copy of your confirmed payment to: cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt
Event website: www.travelwriting2019.wordpress.com
Event on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/events/561695www.travelwriting2019.wordpress.com 847696394
Organizing Committee:
Maria Zulmira Castanheira
Rogério Miguel Puga
Isabel Oliveira Martins
João Paulo Pereira da Silva
Scientific Committee:
Alexandra Lopes (Faculdade de Ciências Humanas — Universidade Católica Portuguesa/CECC)
Ana Rita Padeira (Universidade Aberta / CETAPS)
Carlos Ceia (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Gabriela Gândara Terenas (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Isabel Oliveira Martins (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Isabel Simões-Ferreira (Escola Superior de Comunicação Social – Instituto Politécnico de Lisboa /CETAPS)
João Paulo Pereira da Silva (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Jorge Bastos da Silva (Faculdade de Letras — Universidade do Porto/CETAPS)
Maria da Conceição Castel-Branco (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Maria de Fátima Outeirinho (Faculdade de Letras — Universidade do Porto/ ILCML)
Maria Leonor Machado de Sousa (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Maria Zulmira Castanheira (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Miguel Alarcão (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Rita Baleiro (Escola Superior de Gestão, Hotelaria e Turismo da Universidade do Algarve/ CEC and CETAPS)
Rogério Puga (Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas — Universidade Nova de Lisboa/CETAPS)
Administrative support:
Cristina Carinhas: cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt
Social and Self-identity in the Early Modern Spanish Picaresque (9/30/2019; 3/5-8/2020) NeMLA, Boston USA
Early Modern Spain witnessed the birth of the literary and culturally significant picaresque genre with protagonists that existed in liminal spaces that allowed society to fashion them and in turn these pícaros to refashion themselves. Through autobiographies, letters and dialogues, they became manifested not only as beggars, buffoons, thieves, card sharks and prostitutes, but also as animals, actors, rich runaways and academics. This panel seeks papers in English or Spanish that examine how society fashions the picaresque genre’s protagonists and/or how pícaros shape themselves. Due to this proposed topic’s depth and breadth, this panel hopes to reinvigorate interest in a broad range of historically and socially significant works from Spain’s early modern period from various theoretical perspectives. The proposed topic´s richness will allow panelists to address questions related to contemporary fields of cultural studies such as self-representation, gender, social class, race, religion and animal studies. Some possible presentations might include papers on the following topics:
Writing from Inquisitorial Exile
Autobiographical Pícaros?
Ecclesiastical Criminal Societies
Crafting the Racial or Religious Other through Genealogies
Questioning the Picaresque “Novel” through Theatrical Works
The Noble Pícaro?
Prostitution in the Picaresque
‘An Animal with speech’: Dogs, Humans and Cynicism
We firmly believe that the topic’s concern with literary works’ cultural and formal characteristics will allow panelists to reassess and criticize dominate theories related to the picaresque that continually direct how the genre is discussed in academic literature and taught in university courses. With this approach, we believe that the call for papers should attract many rigorous treatments of the topic.
Submissions are welcome in Spanish or English. Please submit paper proposals of up to 250 words and a brief bio through the NeMLA submission portal:https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17878
Deadline for submission is September 30, 2019.
NeMLA 2020 will be in Boston, MA on March 5-8, 2020 (https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html). You can review the guidelines for proposal submission here: https://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html.
Please direct any questions to the panel chairs John Giblin and Ignacio D. Arellano-Torres via email (jgiblin@wisc.edu and iarellanotorres@gmail.com)
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Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
NeMLA 2020 Roundtable – Writing Bios: Biopolitics in 20th-century Literature and Beyond
Conference March 5-8 2020 Boston USA
Since the biopolitical turn, scholars across disciplines have attempted to make sense of the encounter between life (bios) and politics. This attention paid to the topic of biopolitics shows a cultural ethos that revolves around an awareness of power connected to the body. This roundtable invites papers that analyze how literature engages with biopolitics, particularly in the conceptualizations and depictions of the body in relation to power in 20th- and 21st-century literature. Roundtable participants are encouraged to submit abstracts that engage with the following questions: “How is life (and the body) culturally inscribed with meaning and definition,” and further, “What is a consequence of that inscription?”
By contemplating the many contexts and depictions of the body-power relation, this roundtable will not only gain a better understanding of the multiple connotations and manifestations of biopolitics in literature but will also contribute to the overarching theme of NeMLA’s 2020 convention, “Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages and Cultures.”
Possible approaches to investigating biopolitics in literature may include, but are not limited to, the following:
-Bodies in relation to race, gender, sexuality,
-The Production of Art
-Technology / Technological Bodies
-The Environment and the Body,
-Medical Humanities
-Posthumanism and Tranhumanism
-Object Oriented Ontology
-Materialism and New Materialism
-Necropolitics
For more information please visit NeMLA’s website: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla.html
Submit abstracts via NeMLA’s webportal: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers/submit.html
Forrest Johnson
Female Power, Memory, and Subversive Narratives
This panel seeks to understand the relationship between Memory, Female Power, and Subversive Narratives. This is an important area of interest as the world continues to struggle with the growing voices of women who were intimidated, were forced to keep quiet or powerless, and how memory places a function in that role. World literature has long explored power in all its nuance yet it is important to understand how female power has taken control of a male dominated narrative. Literature can include areas where women had unexpected roles of power, the place of fear and memory, or the unusual place of being able to control their destiny or the fate of others. Going outside the comforts of known social orders can be for pleasure or filled with fear which creates paradigms for people and allows for better understanding of self, perhaps freedom from restrictive societal rules, or unwelcomed sexual attention or aggression. This panel wants to understand the differences the female power has in the actions of memory as well as unexpected freedom from oppression.
Cross disciplinary papers are welcome.
Topics include but are not limited to:
§ Travel
§ Borderlands
§ Migration/Refugees
§ Sexuality
§ Rape Culture
§ Subaltern
§ Dominant/submissive subjects
§ Sexual awakening
§ Feminism
§ Non-traditional roles
NeMLA
March 5-8, 2020
Boston, MA
http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention/callforpapers.html
Date for proposal submission – Sept. 30, 2019
Renee Garris
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
Seeking World History Authors 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 not only provide biographical profiles of women from all parts of the world, but also will address the contexts in which they overcame obstacles 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 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. Deadlines are somewhat negotiable, with the preferred due date prior to September 2019.
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 WWCTW in the subject line and provide your areas of expertise and a brief cv with your inquiry.
Dr. Candice Goucher
Washington State University
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Deadline for Submissions 9/30/2019
Women and Children in Oral Literature (9/30/2019; 11/13-16/2020) Nigeria
Nigerian Oral Literature Association announces its 6th Conference which will take place at Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, November 13 – 16, 2019, on the theme “Women and Children in Oral Literature.” Speakers include: Helen Yitah (English, University of Ghana) and Asabe Kabir-Usman (Modern European Languages & Linguistics, Usman Danfodio University, Sokoto, Nigeria).
Contributions are invited in the following areas: Theories and Discourse on Women and/or Children; Research and Documentations on Women and/or Children; Gender, Class, Politics and Power; Orality, Women, Children and the New Media; Language and Juvenile Education; Women, Children and Performance Arts; Folktale, Fantasy and Science Fiction; Cartoons, Animation, Visual Arts and Digital Narratives; Women, Children, Religion, Myths and Legends; Women, Children, Jocular Arts and Popular Culture; Rites of Passage, Rituals, Women and Children; Women, Children, Folklore, the Internet and Cyberculture; Women, Children and the Economy; Women, Children, Entertainment and Tourism; Women, Family and Sexuality; Women, Children and Public Health; Women, Children, Festivals, and Poetry.
Proposed papers and panels should have clearly defined thesis, show familiarity with research trends, and address the Conference theme. Abstracts of no more than 250 words, bearing the author’s name, institutional affiliation, e-mail address, and a brief bio note should be sent not later than September 30, 2019 to: nolaifeconf2019@gmail.com. Participants are responsible for their own travel, lodging and meal expenses.
Olusegun Adekoya, Department of English, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria.
Deadline for Submissions 9/30/2019
“American Literacy Narratives”
Panel chair, Dr. Filiz Turhan, Suffolk Community College
Literacy Narratives have been a cornerstone of American life writing since the earliest times of American literary production. From Frederick Douglass’s “learning to read” segment in his Narrative of the Life (1845) to Tara Westover’s Educated (2018), literacy narratives have been linked toself-determination and the pursuit of liberty as the subject of the memoir becomes a Reader. What is salient in many of these memoirs is the awakening of a particular kind of consciousness in the Reader, one which is painful, shocking and even at times life threatening. When the Reader reads, he or she is not only culturally influenced but also transformed. The Reader enters a new and uncharted territory and this change is at first so powerful and threatening that the subject experiences depression, loss, anger, fear and most especially self-doubt. Both Douglass and Westover describe how becoming a Reader may induce a wish to recuperate the previous state of ignorance. Furthermore, in both case, the Reader risks serious bodily harm from others. When the Reader accesses books, the surrounding power structures (whether those of legal slavery in the 19th century for Douglass or Westover’s experience of domestic violence), literally threaten to murder the Reader as a way to keep him or her from fully transforming into a “free” Reader thus breaking the oppressive structures that had previously controlled them.
This panel invites papers which explore these and related issues in regard to American literacy narratives. Papers may focus on the experiences of immigrant groups, non-native English readers, differently abled learners, and those from a variety of class and socioeconomic perspectives as well as gender and sexual identities. Papers that also explicitly connect to the experience of the presenter as a professional reader and teacher of the humanities are also welcome.
250 word Abstracts may be sent to Dr. Filiz Turhan deadline 9/20/2019
Inquiries may be sent to Filiz at: turhanf@sunysuffolk.edu
Submission page Link: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18088
General conference link: http://www.buffalo.edu/nemla/convention.html
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
Call for Papers: Sylvia Plath and Disabled Women’s Life-Writing as a Tool of Resistance (9/30/2019; 3/5-8/20120) NeMLA, Boston USA
This panel is part of the Northeast Modern Language Association conference being held in Boston, MA, from March 5-8th, 2020.
Abstract: At the end of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the speaker calls for a disabled feminist future, as she has “a self to recover, a queen.” Largely ignored by disability studies scholars, this panel will explore how Sylvia Plath’s works call for a reclaiming of disabled women’s voices and community. From The Bell Jar to Ariel, Plath’s writing has enabled a canon of literary works that describe the workings of patriarchal institutions, such as the asylum, and how these institutions affect disabled women’s bodies. Through writing, Plath has created a space where disabled women are able to own and control their voices and stories, which can be seen in the production of disabled women’s life-writing such as Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind. This panel seeks presentations that explore the nature of disabled women’s writing and how Plath has enabled a disabled feminist future through her works.
Description: This panel will explore how Sylvia Plath’s works have enabled a disabled feminist future through creating a space where disabled women are invited to write about and control their own narratives. What is the importance of reading Plath’s body of work as a facilitation of disabled women’s life-writing? How can life-writing empower the voices of disabled women?
Please submit a 250-word abstract to Maria Rovito at mrr354@psu.edu by September 30th, 2019.
Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2019
Religion and (Proto)Feminism in Early Modern Women’s Lives and Works, 1500-1800 (9/30/2019)
There is a tendency among some contemporary feminists to place religion (especially monotheistic religion) and feminism on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum — as belief systems and sets of practices that contend with and / or threaten each other. Feminist activist Gloria Steinem gave voice to such a perspective in an answer to an interview question about what she wished she had been more responsive to over the years. She professed, “What I should have been more in an uproar about is monotheism and religion…I mean, religion is, too often, politics you’re not supposed to talk about,” though she clarifies she is open to the more “democratic” category of “spirituality.” The “feminist and trade union activist” Cath Elliott is more explicit about her belief that religion is hostile to the feminist cause, “Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality, but it’s certainly not alone in this. Whether it’s one of the world’s major faiths or an off-the-wall cult, religion means one thing and one thing only for those women unfortunate enough to get caught up in it: oppression. It’s the patriarchy made manifest, male-dominated, set up by men to protect and perpetuate their power.”
In this interdisciplinary collection, we wish to evaluate, from a historical perspective, the statements made by Steinem and Elliott (among others) on the relationship between religion and (proto) feminism, particularly Elliott’s claim that “Christianity is and always has been antithetical to women’s freedom and equality.” We will accomplish this end by closely analyzing the lives and works of women creating cultural artifacts in Britain and the Americas between 1500 and 1800 — that is between the Renaissance and the inception of the Romantic period. Essays that take into account the intersectionality of women’s identities and works in this historical span are particularly welcome.
In writing their essays, contributors will be expected to pay close attention to the material culture in which women lived and produced a range of works (poetry, plays, prose, drawings, paintings, sculpture, musical compositions, etc.). They will also be asked to draw on the growing body of scholarship on feminism and religion that complicates or troubles (but does not necessarily disprove) the view that feminism and religion are antithetical forces.
300-500-word proposals, along with a CV, should be submitted by e-mail to Dr. Holly Faith Nelson, Professor and Chair of English and Co-Director of the Gender Studies Institute, Trinity Western University, on or before 30 September 2019.
Strong interest in the collection has been expressed by a university press for the series on Early Modern Feminisms.
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Deadline for Submissions September 25, 2019
The Other #MeToos
Proposed Panel for the American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting (3/19-22/2020) Chicago, USA
Ever since the inception of #MeToo, conversations have largely circled around the movement as it evolved and exists in the United States. Despite multiple sessions on #MeToo at multiple conferences, I failed to find any that specifically focuses on the reception, translation, and adaptation of #MeToo in non-Western and postcolonial contexts. To fill this gap, this session, “The Other #MeToos,” aims to explore how #MeToo, a popularly Western-centric feminist movement, translates to religiously, geographically, politically, and academically Othered places and Othered women.
Though we can extend the transnational and postcolonial conversations to #MeToo, the movement’s situation in the fourth wave feminism makes it methodologically different. This session is rooted in the following important political and critical ideas: #MeToo has become a transnational feminist movement; #MeToo, like other feminist movements, works effectively through adaptation and provisions rather than replication; #MeToo assumes a different face in postcolonial, transnational, and Islamic feminism, hence requires different theoretical approaches; these theoretical approaches need be closely connected with feminist praxis.
I am looking for panelists who, via eclectic, intersectional, and interdisciplinary approaches, bring together their personal and academic experience of the reception, translation, adaptation, and praxis of #MeToo in diverse political and academic locations. I hope that this seminar can spark significant newer conversations within existing postcolonial, transnational, indigenous, and Islamic feminisms – help build feminist alliances and inform feminist praxis in non-Western peripheries.
I invite speakers to submit 300-words paper proposal and 150-200-word long bio via the ACLA submission portal or directly to:
The deadline for proposal submission is September 25th, 2019. Should you have any questions, please feel free to email me at the same address as above.
Deadline for Submissions September 23, 2019
Call for Seminar Papers American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2020
March 19-22, Sheraton Grand Hotel, Chicago
Paper Proposals open now until September 23, 2019.
Modern Wars, Genocide, Survival, and Life Writing
Seminar co-organizers: Phyllis Lassner and Ravenel Richardson
Although war has always inspired powerfully innovative writing and art, the incessant global wars and genocides of the 20th and 21st centuries continue to revolutionize life writing and art. For example, disillusionments resulting from the Great War’s catastrophic losses inspired modernist innovations. The Nazi drive for global domination inspired the urgency to bear witness to what was later recognized as crimes against humanity. Twentieth and twenty-first century war life writing merges personal accounts, observations, and testimony with imaginative and self-critical voices and narrative structures that lend immediacy and reflection to affective experience. Critically, war writers have expressed doubts about the extent to which conventional or traditionally appropriate tropes and linear narrative development could depict horrors that have become increasingly inconceivable and traumatizing over the course of the 20th century through today. Complicating these doubts, the instability of traumatic, partial, and decontextualized memory challenges the historical accuracy and evidentiary value of survivors’ accounts and their oral and legal testimony.
Responding to these challenges, survivors of modern wars and genocides have created hybrid genres in which poetry and fictional forms merge with official and personal documentation, photographs, reportage, or archival research. Individual subjectivity and agency have been expressed in fractured voices of imagined narrators, protagonists, perpetrators, bystanders, and victims. Whereas Wilfred Owen’s poetry recounts his horrific trench experiences during WWI, Charlotte Delbo imagines life stories her lost comrades might have told about their Holocaust experiences. More recently, Latin American testimonio literature of the 1980s and 1990s Central American wars and refugee memoirs such as The Girl Who Smiled Beads, co-write with native English speakers. Most recently, technology has facilitated a range of personal representations of war and genocide via the internet and social media including personal video testimonies of the military slaughter of Sudanese civilians on Instagram, many of which, like earlier testimonies are conveyed in poems and songs.
This seminar seeks proposals on life-writing accounts of the wars and genocides spanning the 20th and 21st centuries that represent a variety of narrative forms and voices, including hybrid and graphic self-representations. We encourage papers that offer critical, historicized approaches to experiences and memories of state, regional, and global conflicts, forced migration, incarceration, mass killings, and refugee experiences. Among theoretical and experiential approaches to consider are gender, family life, community contexts, citizenship, minority status, statelessness, and human rights.
How to submit an abstract:
ACLA follows a distinctive format, where papers are grouped into seminars that meet for two hours a day for 2-3 consecutive days of the conference. This CFP will result in our selection of 8 papers to comprise a proposed seminar. You can submit a paper proposal via the acla.org website between now and 9:00 AM September 23, 2019. Once we have selected the 8 seminar papers by October 4, 2018, the proposed seminar is reviewed by the ACLA. Seminar acceptance will be finalized and participants notified by November 1, 2019.
We encourage you to email us if you are interested in proposing a paper, or if you have any questions.
Phyllis Lassner (phyllisl@northwestern.edu) and Ravenel Richardson (mrr82@case.edu)
https://www.acla.org/seminars. Follow the link to select this seminar and after you have clicked on it, you will find a link at the top saying “Submit a paper for this seminar.” Please fill out all necessary fields in the online form to propose a paper.
*Migration Narratives CFP for ACLA Chicago (Abstract due 9.23.19; Conf: 3.19 – 3.22.2020)
This seminar seeks to explore narratives from writers moving in and out of Southwest Asian and North African countries, particularly, as they experience themes of loss, displacement, exile, and im/migration. When considering both fictional and non-fictional works resulting from regional flashpoints necessitating movement, these narratives can take on a sense of urgency as they attempt to reconcile the writer’s relationship with the nation. While literary discussions about SWANA migrant narratives point out that works do not necessarily have to engage the political, the lines between personal and political are often blurred throughout the creation of exilic cultural production. Whether expressed in dramatic, prose, poetic, or autobiographical forms, SWANA writers have meditated on questions concerning the nation, identity, exile, im/migration, assimilation, and acculturation as they reconcile what it means to be “othered” elsewhere. From a literary perspective, formal questions about aesthetics arise throughout these narratological cycles. How do the aesthetics and the vehicle for storytelling change throughout the thematic search for home? Do varying national and transnational literary oeuvres take on similar or recognizable aesthetics as they seek to simultaneously juxtapose the loss of home with the search for belonging? Moreover, how are regional works and their formal aesthetics impacted by the colonial and postcolonial histories of Southwest Asia and North Africa? Much like the physical borders they must negotiate, SWANA writers often play with the permeability of formal limits, at times opting for hybrid genres. In this vein, this panel seeks to explore narratives that pay particular attention to form as they ruminate on themes of identity and belonging occasioned by both historical and current experiences of displacement, migration, and loss.
In addition to papers that explore the formal qualities of texts, we invite papers that examine how SWANA narratives of migration challenge our conception of the world literary space. In other words, how do these texts of and about movement travel themselves? Can the literature of migration evade the colonizing forces of the Western literary canon? How do national literary languages fare within the politics of these texts’ circulation? In more recent years, as “diaspora” is replaced by “migration” in providing an ontological framework for understanding displacement, do we still find examples of literary transnationalism that reject the assimilationist drive of border politics?
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Deadline for Submissions September 23, 2019
Writing the Self and its Shame
Before the confessional booth appeared in the 16th century, one of the confessors’ main tasks was to decipher, based on confessants’ bodily attitudes, what they were really ashamed of and potentially hiding, or whether they were truly ashamed of the sins that they were confessing (Foucault, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, 188). Paradoxically, while ostensibly proving their sincerity, confessants’ shame also signaled gaps in their narratives. As a legacy of the Christian tradition of auricular confession, the demonstration of shame in autobiography often produces the same contradiction. Although readers cannot observe autobiographers’ physical manifestations of shame, they can nevertheless sense shame’s ambivalent presence, which challenges autobiographical principles of completeness and authenticity.
This contradiction reflects the complexity of shame itself. According to Léon Würmser in The Mask of Shame, shame is the sign of a “broken self” forced to acknowledge a discrepancy between its “ideal” and “real self” (169). It elicits an impulse to disappear, hide, or mask oneself (84). Autobiographical writing might then function as a paradoxical opportunity to recreate a shameless, reunified, and fictional identity. But writing the self, or its shame, implies having overcome the pain or anxiety of being exposed, all the more so as shame’s most common outcome is silence; as Stephen Pattison contends in Shame: Theory, Therapy, Theology, “the experience of shame often reduces the shamed person to speechlessness” (41). Consequently – as many survivors of the Holocaust testified – shame becomes ineffable when it emerges in reaction to traumatic events or ethical dilemmas. Is it, then, possible to write about one’s shame?
This seminar will examine the relationship between shame and autobiographical writing. Papers may address, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- Is the demonstration of shame in autobiography a literary convention, or is it merely circumstantial? Would the origin of such convention be historical, or simply formal?
- How does an autobiographical text embody its author’s shame? Do autobiographers always confess their shame or are there other ways to thematize it?
- What roles does the demonstration of shame in an autobiographical text perform, from both the author’s and the reader’s perspectives? How might its role vary depending on the text’s subgenre (confessions, memoir, essay, testimony, philosophical text…)?
- If shame is symptomatic of a dysfunctional relationship with the self, to what extent does autobiographical writing offer a resolution?
- How does shame interfere with the very project of writing the self? Are narratives of shame mere demonstrations of shamelessness?
Interested participants may submit a paper proposal (1500 characters max) in English via the ACLA portal by Monday, September 23, 2019. The ACLA annual meeting will be held in Chicago, March 19-22, 2020. For any questions, please contact the seminar organizer, Chloé Vettier (PhD Candidate, Princeton University), at cvettier@princeton.edu
Deadline for Proposals September 22 2019
ACLA 2020: Literary Diagnosis and the Anti-Medical Humanities (9/22/2019; 3/19-22/2020) Chicago, USA
UPDATE: Work on international and/or non-English authors especially welcome!!
With Health Humanities programs on the rise and medical memoirs flooding our bookshelves, it is easy to forget that the alliances forged between literary representation and medical discourse are new and fragile. Writers from a multitude of traditions have frequently squared off against doctors for the right to diagnostic prominence, particularly in capturing the “essence” of disease and the dis-eased body/mind. Their motivations, meanwhile, have spanned from the starkly political to the intensely personal.
This panel for the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference seeks to explore the theoretical implications and methodological approaches of the Anti-Medical Humanities. Poets, playwrights and prose authors have long undermined and continue to challenge medical authority over the ailing body or mind, and to present literary “diagnoses” in their place. Whose discourse best captures the experience of being ill, mad, or otherwise dis-eased? What drives these writers to resist the assimilation of the literary into the medical, and vice versa?
Potential topics include, but are not limited to:
– Political and cultural motivations for the elevation of literary over medical discourse;
– New perspectives on clashes between the figures of the Doctor and the Writer;
– Whether literary tradition and medical narrative are indebted to, even infected by, one another;
– How this clash reveals the difficulty of “translating” pain, disease, and the ailing body;
– The implications of championing fictional representation as an authority on real bodies;
– Approaches that disturb set divisions between the the literary and the “real;”
– The reworking of traditional battles between the literary and medical in post-modern contexts.
Please submit your proposal (max. 350 words) through the ACLA portal https://www.acla.org/ by September 22nd. Expansions on this topic, and questions for the organizer, are welcomed.
Deadline for Submissions, September 15, 2019
Dear all,
I am interested in organizing a panel, roundtable, or workshop proposal for IABA Finland, June 2020, on digital methods in life writing studies. I would imagine the digital to be broadly defined, open to any kind of method that it is attempting to think through the affordances and limitations of digital tools for scholarship on life writing, whether that be through the creation of digital collections or archives, computational analysis, mapping, data collection and coding, or some other method. My own contribution would be on work to develop and analyze a textual corpus for early twentieth century US immigrant life narrative. My hope would be for the session to offer examples, in early or more finished stages, alongside critical reflections upon the choice to engage these methods.
Please contact me with interest or questions at rodrigue8@grinnell.edu by September 15. We can decide on what format (panel, roundtable, workshop) would make the most sense based on interest.
Grinnell College
rodrigue8@grinnell.edu
Deadline for Submissions September 15, 2019
CALL FOR PAPERS
Graphic Medicine
A Special Issue of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
Guest Editors: Erin La Cour (Free University of Amsterdam) and Anna Poletti (Utrecht University)
Submit: Abstracts of 300–500 words in length by September 15, 2019 to biographygraphicmedicine@gmail.com.
In recent years, Graphic Medicine has emerged as an important movement in changing attitudes to patient experience within the practice of Western medicine. Combining insights from life writing and comics studies, Graphic Medicine texts and scholarship evidence the efficacy of life narrative in the medium of comics for opening up new channels of communication between medical staff, patients, their loved ones, and the community; providing alternative sites for community building among patients and their loved ones in regards to specific conditions and their related treatments; and for educating medical practitioners about patient experiences within healthcare systems. Graphic Medicine also provides new opportunities for life narratives to be coaxed, collected, and published for the benefit of the wider community and for the education of medical professionals.
This special issue of Biography will bring comics practitioners and other artists who work within the field of graphic medicine and/or life writing together with scholars of graphic medicine, life writing, and comics to examine the rise of Graphic Medicine as a discourse and practice, and to consider its possible futures, limits, sites of expansion, and the challenges it may face in offering alternative perspectives on the lived experience of health, illness, and healthcare systems, and their attendant discourses.
The guest editors welcome proposals for scholarly articles and comics on any of the following topics:
The graphic in Graphic Medicine: Can Graphic Medicine help overcome stigmas regarding the body, affective states, and psychological responses associated with different forms of illness and disability? What are the possible limit cases for telling personal stories of illness, health, and death in Graphic Medicine? What role do images play when Graphic Medicine texts attempt to narrate experiences associated with healthcare—such as specific procedures, side effects, or elements of recovery—that may go against social and cultural norms of “good taste”?
Ethics: What ethical questions are raised when artists tell the stories of others in Graphic Medicine? What questions emerge when a patient’s illness story necessarily involves telling the stories of others?
Fictionality: Is there a role in Graphic Medicine for fictive stories of patient experience? Why might practitioners turn to invention and fictionality to tell true stories of health and illness? Does fictionality open up different avenues of critique of medical discourses and practices?
Mediality and terminology: Must the term “Graphic Medicine” only apply to life narratives about health and illness told in comics? Can personal zines, visual artworks, documentaries, live performances, site-specific installations, blogs, Twitter, and other forms of multimodal or intermedial life writing also be included under the banner of “Graphic Medicine”? How might current theorizing about what Graphic Medicine is and does change if other cultural forms were included in its rubric?
Graphic Medicine and disability studies: How do the principles, ideas, and practices of Graphic Medicine intersect with the field of critical disability studies?
Graphic Medicine and diversity: Can the focus on the experiences and expectations patients have when interacting with institutions and procedures in Graphic Medicine expand the recognition of and respect for bodily and psychological difference and neurodiversity within the medical establishment? Does this potential for increased recognition of diversity create a tension with the medical discourses that underpin the provision of healthcare and treatment?
Graphic Medicine and epistemology: What alternative forms of care and healing does Graphic Medicine need to address? Does it offer a means for communicating the importance and efficacy of non-Western and Indigenous practices?
Graphic Medicine and intersectionality: Can Graphic Medicine offer new insights into effects of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and age in informing access to the provision of healthcare? How might Graphic Medicine address the discourses that structure the scene of encounter between patient and medical staff and shape how patients’ experiences are interpreted?
We are interested in papers and articles that explore Graphic Medicine from creative practitioner and scholarly perspectives, and which may take the form of original artwork in comics or other text-image combinations, as well as more traditional scholarly formats.
Please submit 350–500-word abstracts or proposals for creative works to Erin La Cour and Anna Poletti by September 15, 2019 to biographygraphicmedicine@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent by November 15, 2019. Articles of up to 10,000 words or creative works of up to 10 pages in draft form will be due March 1, 2020, and will be workshopped prior to the International AutoBiography Association (IABA) world conference in Turku, Finland, June 9–12, 2020. Biography will reimburse workshop participants for accommodations.
*
Deadline for Submissions September 10, 2019
Performing Joan: Interpreting the Maid on Screen, on Stage, and in the Streets (9/10/2019; 5/7-9/2020) Michigan USA
Call for Papers sponsored by The International Joan of Arc Society/Société Internationale de l’étude de Jeanne d’Arc
International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS 2020)
May 7 to 10, 2020
Western Michigan University
Joan of Arc continues to captivate filmmakers, most recently Bruno Dumont, whose headbanging heroine mixes medieval and metal in Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc (2017) and Joan of Arc (2019). Joan has also made a Broadway comeback via three recent productions: David Byrne’s rock musical Joan of Arc: Into the Fire (2017) the 2018 revival ofShaw’s Saint Joan, and Jane Anderson’s Mother of the Maid(2018). Participatory street theater such as Orléans’ yearly Fêtes de Jeanne d’Arc or the procession’s campier New World cousin, a Joan-themed carnival parade in New Orleans, also shape the Maid’s evolving legacy.
This panel seeks papers that explore the origins, processes, and reception of Joan in performance. What performative aspects characterize the primary documents that inspired subsequent retellings of Joan’s story? Why do certain patterns emerge in Joan’s onstage and onscreen afterlives? And how do different authors and actors approach the creative task of communicating Joan’s relevance to new audiences? What purposes do these performances serve for those who conceive of or take part in them? Finally, how are the productions that Joan inspires received?
Please submit a 250-word proposal for a 15-minute presentation. Proposals should have an abstract format written in Word doc and be accompanied by a brief academic bio (or a CV), including email address, current affiliation, and title/name. Please submit all relevant documents by September 10, 2019 to Scott Manning (scottmanning13@gmail.com) and Tara Beth Smithson (tbsmithson@manchester.edu).
Preliminary inquiries and expressions of interest are more than welcome.
*
Deadline for Submissions September 1, 2019
Departures and Arrivals: Women, Mobility and Travel Writing (9/1/2019) Special Issue–Feminismo/s
Feminismo/s, from the Institute of Research in Gender Studies from the University of Alicante, is currently accepting submissions for its 36 issue, entitled “Departures and Arrivals: Women, Mobility and Travel Writing”. This issue seeks to approach women travel writing from a transhistorical and transnational perspective. Thus, we encourage submissions that deal with travelling and mobility in women’s writing from different cultural and national backgrounds and periods.
We are particularly interested in contributions that explore the intersections between gender, mobility and identity, including, but not restricted to the following aspects:
– Religious or spiritual pilgrimages.
– Transatlantic and transnational experiences.
– Exploratory journeys and pioneering experiences.
– Sea narratives, air narratives, railway experiences and road trip experiences.
– Travelling in/to/from war zones.
– Diasporic experiences.
– Enforced migration and refugee experiences.
– Uprootedness and in-between identities.
– Ecocritical approaches to travelling.
– Tourism and neo-colonial experiences of travelling.
– Travelling and the cyber-world.
– Mobility and ableism.
Submitted abstracts should be between 300 and 500 words in length, and should be sent to the issue co-editors by no later than 1 September 2019. Please also include an additional biographical statement, of no more than 100 words, that lists your educational level, current academic affiliation, previous publications and any other details you may feel are pertinent.
Applicants can expect to hear back about their proposals by 1 October 2019. Full articles (9,000 words) will be due by 1 February 2020. Notifications about acceptance or required changes will be provided in July 2020, and final articles will be required on 1 September 2020. Contributors must follow the journal’s editorial guidelines and style.
Should you have any further questions, do not hesitate to contact the issue co-editors, Sara Prieto (sara.prieto@ua.es) and Raquel García-Cuevas (r.c.garcia@kent.ac.uk).
Feminismo/sis an Open Acces Journal and is indexed in the following databases: Proquest (Gender Watch), DOAJ, REDIB, InDICEs-CSIC, ERIH PLUS, MLA, CIRC, MlAR, Latindex, Dialnet, Ulrich’s, Dulcinea, Google Scholar, SHERPA/RoMEO, RUA, DICE, REBIUN, RESH, OCLC WorldCat, Copac, SUDOC and ZDB/EZB.
Deadline for Submissions September 1, 2019
Jenny Diski: A Celebration
A Symposium, University of Oxford, 7th April 2020
Keynote Speaker: Blake Morrison
Jenny Diski sadly died in 2016, and the time is right for a celebration of her work.
Diski wrote in many genres, from novels and short stories, to memoirs, travel narratives, and books on human-animal relationships and the 1960s. She was also a prolific reviewer, who contributed regularly to the London Review of Books. Diski herself, though, refused to classify her writings: ‘Something about the distinction between being a fiction and a non-fiction writer distresses me’, she declared, ‘So I think of myself as a writer. Period’. And it is as a writer, first and foremost, that Diski is appreciated by her many admirers. No reader of hers can fail to be dazzled by her style, or struck by her formal playfulness and innovation.
Yet, perhaps owing to her refusal to be confined by boundaries, Diski has tended to slip under the radar, or between the gaps, in academic discussions. This symposium seeks to bring her to the fore by recognising that it is precisely her difference from what we might expect that makes her so exciting, and by drawing together the many aspects of her work. How, for instance, does Diski extend our understanding of life writing, autofiction, and travel literature? How does she explore the individual mind and social institutions? Is it right to think of her as a Jewish writer, and how does Jewishness figure in her work? What do we make of her provocative interrogations of gender and sexuality? It is hoped that by addressing questions such as these, with a close attention to literary form, this celebration of her work will help to place Diski where she belongs: as one of the most important writers of our time. Period.
We welcome papers on topics including, but by no means restricted to:
- Diski as a life writer: autofiction, memoir, autobiography.
- Diski as a Jewish writer.
- Illness narratives and the cancer diary.
- Family relationships.
- Feminism and women’s writing.
- Travel and travel literature.
- London.
- Formal innovation.
- Humour.
- Sexuality and the erotic.
- Diski as a literary critic and a film critic.
- Journalism.
- Diski’s significance as a public intellectual.
- Psychoanalysis and psychiatry.
- Human-animal relationships.
- Diski and her times.
- Diski’s politics.
- Diski and postmodernism.
Please submit a short abstract (200-300 words) for a 20 minute paper to Dr Ben Grant (benjamin.grant@conted.ox.ac.uk) by 1st September 2019.
Dr Ben Grant (University of Oxford)
*
Deadline for Submissions August 23, 2019
Organizer: Yu Min Claire Chen
” Paris was the place that suited us who were to create the twentieth-century art and literature. Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.” (Gertrude Stein)
The post-war generation has been depicted as the lost generation, but it was also a time of vibrant cultural exchange between the US and Europe. Walking into the 27 rue de fleurus in the 1920s, you would see Gertrude Stein’s Saturday evening salon, where the most prominent modernist writers and artists met.
Among them included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Guillaume Apollinaire, Sinclair Lewis, James Joyce, Juan Gris, Sherwood Anderson, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and many others. In 1933, Gertrude Stein published her autobiography, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, writing about her years in Paris, Ernest Hemingway also wrote A Moveable Feast, and Woody Allen directed a film Midnight in Paris about life around the Salon. The panel solicits papers that delve into the richness of cultures, arts, music, and literature of this period and probe into cross-cultural influences of writers and artists’ works.
Topics include but are not limited to the following: ·
* Autobiography and memoir studies ·
* Arts and Literature ·
* Expatriates ·
* The Lost generation ·
* The Jazz Age ·
* Avant-Garde
Deadline for Submissions August 20, 2019
The Mann Family – Lives and Fictions (Dartmouth College, October 24-25, 2019)
This workshop is organized on the occasion of the Montgomery residence of Frido Mann at Dartmouth College. Its goal is to raise interest in research on the Mann family, to connect junior and senior scholars working in this field, and to move articles towards publication. Invited participants will submit an article length paper by October 1, 2019 (6000-9000 words in MLA format). Their papers will be pre-circulated and then discussed over the two days of the workshop. Confirmed project readers are Tobias Boes (University of Notre Dame), Todd Kontje (University of California-San Diego), Irmela von der Lühe (Freie Universität Berlin), Ellis Shookman (Dartmouth College), Robert Tobin (Clark University) and Hans Vaget (Smith College). Participants will also interact with writer and Montgomery fellow Frido Mann. Particularly welcome are projects with new approaches or material on Mann biographies and fictions, e.g., relating to film and theater, sexuality, global dimensions, visions of race, Jewishness, scientific discourses, fascism and exile. Preference will be given to advanced graduate students and junior faculty, but all applications with unpublished projects are welcome and will be considered. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered. This Dartmouth German Studies workshop is co-sponsored with the Harris Distinguished Visiting Professorship Program and the Montgomery Fellows Program. Please submit a one-page proposal for an article-length paper by August 20th, 2019 to Professor Veronika Fuechtner at veronika.fuechtner@dartmouth.edu.
Veronika Fuechtner, Ph.D.,
Chair, Department of German Studies
Associate Professor of German, Dartmouth College
Affiliated Faculty in Comparative Literature, Jewish Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies
Adjunct Associate Professor of Medical Education, Geisel School of Medicine
HB 6084, Dartmouth College
Hanover, NH 03755
Phone: (603) 646-2408
Fax: (603) 646-1474
Further Update on IABA Website, from Julie Rak
Hello Everyone,
Sorry, posted the wrong link for the 2020 CFP. Here is the one that
works: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/iaba/calls-for-papers?authuser=0
Thanks all!
Take care, Julie Rak
—
Julie Rak
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
Website: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home
Update on IABA Website, from Julie Rak
Hello IABA friends and fans,
Thanks to all organizers for the IABA Europe and IABA Americas sections for excellent conferences. I’m writing to let you all know that the Call for Papers for the 2020 IABA World conference to be held in Finland is now on the IABA web site. Please have a look, and share it widely with your colleagues beyond life writing studies. The Conferences section of the site is now updated–we can look forward to an IABA Asia-Pacific CFP soon, I hope!
https://sites.google.com/s/0B3LGuUnUnOHfR1VuSG5VNWx3VWc/p/0B3LGuUnUnOHfSF9HT0dBdVlaYUk/edit
Take care, Julie Rak
—
Julie Rak
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
Website: https://sites.google.com/ualberta.ca/julie-rak/home
*
Newsletter Biography Institute
August 2019 (PDF-version)
Richard Hoving will defend his thesis on Josef Kotalla
October 24, 14.30 hrs., Richard Hoving will defend his biography of Josef Kotalla in the aula of Groningen University. During the Second World War, Kotalla was an executioner at Amersfoort prison camp. De Beul van Amersfoort. De biografie van Josef Kotalla will be published by Prometheus publishers. The project was supervised by prof. Hans Renders and dr. Hinke Piersma.
Biography Institute hosts research seminar Biography & History
The course will be given by members of the Biography Institute during the first semester of the next academic year. For more information about enrollment (also for contract students) and the content of the seminar, see the flyer and the section Courses on the website of the Biography Institute.John A. Farrell writes biography Edward Kennedy Edward Moore Kennedy (1932-2009) was the youngest of three brothers who played instrumental roles in the landmark movements for social justice and the struggle for progressive, active government which transfused American politics in the 20th century. Farrell has written biographies of House Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill and U.S. President Richard Nixon. The project will be supervised by prof. Hans Renders and prof. Doeko Bosscher.
Frisian Biography Institute
There will be a Frisian Biography Institute. The aim of this initiative is to forge a cooperation, under the auspices of the Biography Institute of the University of Groningen, between different Frisian organizations, that should lead to an independent Frisian Biography Institute. With this initiative, boardmembers Bert Looper (Tresoar), Hans Renders (Biography Institute RUG), Steven Sterk (Bornmeer|Noordboek) and Geart de Vries (Historisch Centrum Leeuwarden) hope to mobilize other cultural organizations in Friesland to establish a widely supported institute, providing supervision of biographies of Frisian people. Follow this link for more information.
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
Deadline for Submissions August 18, 2019
Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe, International Conference (ABDD11)
On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committee, we are very pleased to invite you to attend the eleventh edition of “Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe, International Conference” (ABDD11), which will take place, as always, at the “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia, Romania, between 26th and 28th September 2019.
With its unique friendly atmosphere, our interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conference offers an excellent opportunity for academics, experts and practitioners from diverse fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, literary studies, theology, or architecture to network and to share knowledge, experiences and research findings on a variety of themes concerning death and dying, such as the followings:
- challenges of grieving in a digital age
- old and contemporary meanings of the ‘good’ death
- ageing well, dying well and their reverses
- death, dying and the postmodern search for meaning
- the great equaliser and the socioeconomic inequalities in dying
- death and dying within the entertainment industry
- dreaming, theorising and designing immortality today
- the rise of the undead in movies and game industry
- the art and rituals of photographing the dead nowadays
- (not so) changing attitudes towards death
- new theories and ideologies of death
- cultural memory and the landscapes of death
- death anxiety and the promises of new age movement
- the dying brain: mind, identity, agency
- medicalization and de-medicalization of death
- suicide and capital punishment in times of ‘happiology’
- enduring ethical challenges of organ donation
- personal narratives of death and dying
Those interested are invited to submit a proposal of roughly 250-300 words, followed by 3-5 key-words, no later than August 18, 2019 to both mrotar2000@yahoo.com and adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com. Please include also a short bio of yourself, indicating your academic title/affiliation, research interests, significant publications etc. Authors will be notified of the abstract acceptance by August 25, 2019.
Selected papers could be considered for publication in a collective volume or in an international journal.
As our tradition demands, the karaoke show will be part of this edition too.
You will find more details here: http://death-studies.ro/abdd11/.
Adriana Teodorescu
Associate Lecturer
Babeș-Bolyai University
Deadline for Submissions August 15, 2019
HISTORIES OF DEATH
AN INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
University of Turku, Finland
February 19–21, 2020
CALL FOR PAPERS
Our understandings of death come with long and complex histories, shaped by culture, place, time, power, and identities. Historical analysis allows us to better understand the paths that have led to the recent move toward “death positivity,” and the popularity of death doulas, “death cafes,” alternative and ecological burial solutions, and new understandings of grief. The interdisciplinary and rapidly growing field of Death Studies raises awareness about how we die and mourn, and the ways social factors – class, migrant background, and gender, among them – can result in unequal access to “good death” in many countries and communities today. This International Symposium seeks to delve into the many varied and interwoven Histories of Death to further explore the traditions, ideologies, and institutions that shape our experiences with death.
Death sets people into action, caring for the dying, the deceased, and the grieving in ways that range from the intimate to the professional. The Histories of Death Symposium invites researchers to share their work and engage in dialogue about the different ways people have approached dying, death, and mourning from everyday, cultural, and structural perspectives. The symposium calls for papers, posters, and creative works that may analyze:
- the social and everyday histories of death
- histories of death in the context of migration(s)
- narratives and/or life writing of death and mourning
- histories of emotion and mourning
- sensory and corporeal histories of death and mourning
- childhood and family histories of death
- health, gerontological, and palliative care histories
- art and craftwork in histories of death
- methods and ethics for the study of death in history.
Proposals across times and places are welcome. Though the focus is on death and mourning in historical contexts, the symposium is particularly interested in exploring inter/transdisciplinary approaches, and scholars from all backgrounds are welcome to participate.
Please email abstracts of 250 words, indicating whether you are proposing a paper presentation, poster presentations, or creative work, together with a max. 150-word bio, including name, institutional affiliation and position, and email address, to historiesofdeath@gmail.com by August 15, 2019. Information about registration, featured speakers, travel, and accommodation will be posted shortly on the Symposium website.
The Symposium is hosted by the John Morton Center for North American Studies at the University of Turku’s Department of Philosophy, Political Science, and Contemporary History. The Symposium in funded by the Academy of Finland.
Call for Book Proposals: Practicing Oral History
The Routledge book series Practicing Oral History is accepting proposals for new titles on applied oral history. Series editor Nancy MacKay will be at the Archives* Records conference in Austin, Texas, August 1-7 and happy to meet in person to discuss your book idea. Contact Nancy at nancymackay@gmail.com for a detailed prospectus or to discuss your project.
The series is devoted to applied oral history. Books should address one of three approaches to oral history: best practices for a specific stage or skill within the oral history life cycle, oral history adapted to a specific professional community, or using oral history to achieve a specific goal.
Nancy MacKay
Series Editor, Practicing Oral History (Routledge)
Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe, International Conference (ABDD11) (8/1/2019; 9/26-28/2019) Romania
On behalf of the Scientific and Organizing Committee, we are very pleased to invite you to attend the eleventh edition of “Dying and Death in 18th-21st Century Europe, International Conference” (ABDD11), which will take place, as always, at the “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia, Romania, between 26th and 28th September 2019.
With its unique friendly atmosphere, our interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary conference offers an excellent opportunity for academics, experts and practitioners from diverse fields such as history, sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, literary studies, theology, or architecture to network and to share knowledge, experiences and research findings on a variety of themes concerning death and dying, such as the followings:
- challenges of grieving in a digital age
- old and contemporary meanings of the ‘good’ death
- ageing well, dying well and their reverses
- death, dying and the postmodern search for meaning
- the great equaliser and the socioeconomic inequalities in dying
- death and dying within the entertainment industry
- dreaming, theorising and designing immortality today
- the rise of the undead in movies and game industry
- the art and rituals of photographing the dead nowadays
- (not so) changing attitudes towards death
- new theories and ideologies of death
- cultural memory and the landscapes of death
- death anxiety and the promises of new age movement
- the dying brain: mind, identity, agency
- medicalization and de-medicalization of death
- suicide and capital punishment in times of ‘happiology’
- enduring ethical challenges of organ donation
- personal narratives of death and dying
Those interested are invited to submit a proposal of roughly 250-300 words, followed by 3-5 key-words, no later than August 1, 2019 to both mrotar2000@yahoo.com and adriana.teodorescu@gmail.com. Please include also a short bio of yourself, indicating your academic title/affiliation, research interests, significant publications etc. Authors will be notified of the abstract acceptance by August 10, 2019.
Selected papers could be considered for publication in a collective volume or in an international journal.
As our tradition demands, the karaoke show will be part of this edition too.
You will find more details here: http://death-studies.ro/abdd11/.
Adriana Teodorescu
Associate Lecturer
Babeș-Bolyai University
*
Dear Reader,
On behalf of the editorial board of the European Journal of Life Writing, we are very happy to announce that the EJLW has published the first 28 articles of its eighth volume, which is now available at
Since the end of 2018, the European Journal of Life Writing is no longer published by the University Library of the VU Free University in Amsterdam, but by the University of Groningen Press.
We are very grateful to the people of the Library of the VU Free University, who have very skilfully and kindly helped and guided us when we first started our Journal. At the same time we are very happy to join the collection of interesting scholarly journals published by the no less skilful, helpful and kind staff of the University of Groningen Press at Groningen University, who have expertly remodelled the lay-out of the EJLW and introduced a new version of OJS (Open Journal System).
Please note that the European Journal of Life Writing is an open-access, scholarly e-journal, which is not funded by any governmental or other organisations. To support the ongoing work of the Journal, please visit https://ejlw.eu/donations. We are most grateful for any kind of financial support.
Another possibility to support the Journal is by purchasing a hard copy of the Festschrift we made for Philip Lejeune on the occasion of his 80th birthday. A copy can be bought for € 30 (Libraries: € 50).If you have any questions about submitting an article or about donating money to the Journal, or if you would like buy a copy of the Festschrfit, please contact the journal managers Monica Soeting (m.soeting@xs4all.nl) or Petra van Langen (ptvanlangen@gmail.com).Thank you very much for your support!
On behalf of all the editors of the European Journal of Life Writing,
Petra van Langen and Monica Soeting
*
Dear all,
I am interested in organizing or joining a panel proposal for IABA Finland, June 2020. For my own paper, I plan to present research on how the future (near, distant, and unknown) is imagined in diaries and letters written by Jews in France during the Second World War. I envision a panel on the future in diaries and letters – genres generally seen as positioned in the present. Alternatively, the panel could explore different temporalities in diaries and letters written in extreme circumstances (i.e. war and genocide). Please contact me at roseau_ka@mercer.edu.
Katherine Roseau, PhD
Assistant Professor of French
Mercer University
Deadline for Submissions July 31, 2019
Call for Applications: How to Approach Biographical Research? – Workshop for Young Scholars (7/31/ 2019; 11/30/2019) Warsaw, Poland
Biographical approach can provide insight into the way people thought and felt in the past, make us aware of the complexity of political and personal decisions and also of the scope for action of individuals in historical situations. It has a special place in the Jewish studies, since it allows to research and analyse complex identity choices. Similar processes also affect other ethnic and/or religious. However, it is also useful to scholars dealing with migration studies, social history and history of ideas.
In order to assist young scholars with biographical research projects and to provide them with a friendly space to discuss research questions and problems, the POLIN Museum invites early career scholars and especially PhD students to participate in a one-day workshop on 30 November 2019 in Warsaw. The workshop precedes the conference “Biographies and Politics. The Involvement of Jews and People of Jewish Origin in Leftist Movements in 19th and 20th Century Poland” (1-2 December 2019), jointly organized by the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Aleksander Brückner Center for Polish Studies, the Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University of Oxford and the UCL. The participants of the workshop are expected to also attend the conference.
Interested early career scholars and PhD students are invited to submit the completed application form to: geopconference@polin.pl.
The working language of the workshop will be English. Additional reading skills in Polish, Yiddish or German will be a plus.
Participation in the workshop is free of charge. The POLIN Museum will cover the costs of accommodation and meals during the Workshop and the subsequent conference. Participants without institutional funding may apply for a travel grant.
Deadline for application: 31 July 2019.
The workshop is organized within the Global Education Outreach Program.
The workshop was made possible thanks to the support of Taube Philanthropies, the William K. Bowes, Jr. Foundation, and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.
The workshop was made possible thanks to the support of the European Association for Jewish Studies.
Deadline for Submissions July 21, 2019
Call for Abstracts–Workshop “Non-Sites of Memory and Their Witnesses: The Testimonies of the Holocaust by Bullets”(7/21/2019; 9/23/2019) Krakow, Poland
The Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University and the Yahad – In Unum association kindly invite you to the workshop
Non-Sites of Memory and Their Witnesses: The Testimonies of the Holocaust by Bullets
23 September 2019, Krakow, Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University
More than 2 million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma were killed by German units in the occupied territories of Soviet Union and Poland between 1941 and 1944, in numerous executions across hundreds of villages and towns. This method of murder by special firing squads has come to be known as the “Holocaust by bullets”. The executions took place on the outskirts of human settlements, in fields, woods or swamps, in the view of neighbors, and sometimes with their complicity. Now, most these killing sites are invisible: unmarked and unmemorialized, overgrown and littered, repainted, demolished and repopulated. They are specific non-sites of memory: non-remembered but also unforgotten by the local communities, characterized by an ambiguous, unsettling status. In order to locate and recognize these sites, we need memory of eyewitnesses to the events that happened there. These witnesses, who are becoming harder and harder to find, have in most cases spent their entire lives next to the killing sites, yet nobody asked them to tell their story. They are our last link to the difficult heritage of the dispersed Shoah.
The Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University and the Yahad – In Unum association kindly invite students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs as well as early career researchers to the one-day workshop dedicated to the non-sites of memory and their witnesses.
The French organization Yahad – In Unum, founded in 2004 in Paris by Father Patrick Desbois, researches the “Holocaust by bullets” in Central and Eastern Europe by collecting video testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the Shoah and identifying the killing sites. Until today, Yahad – In Unum has gathered almost 6,500 accounts and created the biggest collection of Holocaust bystanders’ testimonies. The Research Center for Memory Cultures – within the research project dedicated to the unmemorialized sites of genocide (supported by the National Program for the Development of Humanities), led by Prof. Roma Sendyka – has researched on sites of this kind and their impact on local communities for three years.
The workshop (held in English) will have an open, seminar-like structure and will engage its participants in work with both archival documents and video testimonies related to killing sites. It will take a multidisciplinary approach to the sites of the dispersed Shoah and the testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the genocide. We will discuss the following issues: How to locate and identify a killing site; How to interpret archival documents related to them; How to find eyewitnesses and interview them; What is the relevance of space where an act of witnessing takes place as well as the language and gestures of a witness; How do the bystanders’ testimonies differ from the survivors’ accounts; Can only humans be witnesses; How to use eyewitnesses’ testimonies in transmitting the knowledge about the Shoah to the next generations; How do history (and oral history), sociology, as well as memory, cultural and performative studies help us understand video testimony; How was the Holocaust by bullets possible?
After the workshop, the participants are invited to a lecture by Father Patrick Desbois, the founder of the Yahad – In Unum. The lecture will open the two-day international conference (24–25 September) “Sites of Violence and Their Communities: Critical Memory Studies in the Era of the Post-Human”, featuring, among other guests, Prof. Ewa Domańska, Prof. Caroline Sturdy Colls, Prof. Erica Lehrer and Dr. Bryce Lease.
Applications, consisting of a 1-page CV and a short description (no more than 500 words) of the applicant’s research relevant to the topic of the workshop, should be submitted before 21 July 2019 to the address memorycultures@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent via email by 31 July 2019. Any questions regarding the workshop should be directed to the aforementioned email address.
The organizers will provide catering during the workshop as well as accommodation for the night of 23/24 September.
The organizing team are Dr. hab. Roma Sendyka, Aleksandra Szczepan, Dr. Kinga Siewior and Dr. Karina Jarzyńska from the Research Center for Memory Cultures, Patrice Bensimon and Michał Chojak from Yahad – In Unum and Dr. Stanley Bill from the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages of the University of Cambridge.
Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2019
The Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University and the Yahad – In Unum association kindly invite you to the workshop
Non-Sites of Memory and Their Witnesses: The Testimonies of the Holocaust by Bullets
23 September 2019, Kraków, Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University
More than 2 million Jews and tens of thousands of Roma were killed by German units in the occupied territories of Soviet Union and Poland between 1941 and 1944, in numerous executions across hundreds of villages and towns. This method of murder by special firing squads has come to be known as the “Holocaust by bullets”. The executions took place on the outskirts of human settlements, in fields, woods or swamps, in the view of neighbors, and sometimes with their complicity. Now, most these killing sites are invisible: unmarked and unmemorialized, overgrown and littered, repainted, demolished and repopulated. They are specific non-sites of memory: non-remembered but also unforgotten by the local communities, characterized by an ambiguous, unsettling status.
In order to locate and recognize these sites, we need memory of eyewitnesses to the events that happened there. These witnesses, who are becoming harder and harder to find, have in most cases spent their entire lives next to the killing sites, yet nobody asked them to tell their story. They are our last link to the difficult heritage of the dispersed Shoah.
The Research Center for Memory Cultures at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University and the Yahad – In Unum association kindly invite students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs to the one-day workshop dedicated to the non-sites of memory and their witnesses.
The French organization Yahad – In Unum, founded in 2004 in Paris by Father Patrick Desbois, researches the “Holocaust by bullets” in Central and Eastern Europe by collecting video testimonies of the eyewitnesses to the Shoah and identifying the killing sites. Until today, Yahad – In Unum has gathered almost 6,500 accounts and created the biggest collection of Holocaust bystanders’ testimonies.
The Research Center for Memory Cultures – within the research project dedicated to the unmemorialized sites of genocide (supported by the National Program for the Development of Humanities), led by Prof. Roma Sendyka – has researched on sites of this kind and their impact on local communities for three years.
The workshop (held in English) will have an open, seminar-like structure and will engage its participants in work with both archival documents and video testimonies related to killing sites. It will take a multidisciplinary approach to the sites of the dispersed Shoah and the testimonies of the eyewitnesses to genocide. How to locate and identify a killing site; How to interpret archival documents related to them; How to find eyewitnesses and interview them; What is the relevance of space where an act of witnessing takes place as well as the language and gestures of a witness; How do the bystanders’ testimonies differ from the survivors’ accounts; Can only humans be witnesses; How to use eyewitnesses’ testimonies in transmitting the knowledge about the Shoah to the next generations; How do history (and oral history), sociology, as well as memory, cultural and performative studies help us understand video testimony; How was the Holocaust by bullets possible?
After the workshop, the participants are invited to a lecture by Father Patrick Desbois, the founder of the Yahad – In Unum. The lecture will open the two-day international conference (24–25 September) “Sites of Violence and Their Communities: Critical Memory Studies in the Era of the Post-Human”, featuring, among other guests, Prof. Ewa Domańska, Prof. Caroline Sturdy Colls, Prof. Erica Lehrer and Dr. Bryce Lease.
Applications, consisting of a 1-page CV and a short description (no more than 500 words) of the applicant’s research relevant to the topic of the workshop, should be submitted no later than 15 July 2019 to the address memorycultures@gmail.com. Notifications will be sent via email by 31 July 2019. Any questions regarding the workshop should be directed to the aforementioned email address.
Organizers will provide catering during the workshop as well as accommodation for the night of 23/24 September. In some cases, travel grants may also be secured for the workshop’s participants.
The organizing team are Dr. hab. Roma Sendyka, Aleksandra Szczepan, Dr. Kinga Siewior and Dr. Karina Jarzyńska from the Research Center for Memory Cultures, Michał Chojak from Yahad – In Unum and Dr. Stanley Bill from the Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages of the University of Cambridge.
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Life Writing, Volume 16, Issue 3, September 2019 is now available online onTaylor & Francis Online.
This new issue contains the following articles:is now available online onTaylor & Francis Online.
This new issue contains the following articles:
Articles
Anna Menyhért
Pages: 311-327 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1455259
Walter Stefano Baroni
Pages: 329-344 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1469615
Olga Michael
Pages: 345-367 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1507416
Ellen O’Brien
Pages: 369-384 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1564216
Simon Featherstone
Pages: 385-396 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1522494
Diana Aramburu
Pages: 397-412 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1522231
Sam Meekings
Pages: 413-427 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1537048
Shahd Alshammari
Pages: 431-438 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1514240
Aoife Sadlier
Pages: 439-461 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1510288
Stewart Manley
Pages: 463-475 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2018.1470444
by Nina Fischer, London, Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2015, 262 pp., ISBN: 978-1-137-55761-2
Marta Bladek
Pages: 479-482 | DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2017.1361781
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