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.

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Biography Lab 2023: An Online Forum on Craft

BIO is excited to announce Biography Lab, which will be held via Zoom on January 21, 2023, from 10:30 am – 5 pm New York time. BIO invites participants at all levels of interest and experience in the craft of biography to participate in three sequential 90-minute forums led by prize-winning biographers. A social hour concludes the day.

The distinguished plenary speaker will be Hermione Lee, who will give a talk entitled “Biographical Choices.”  The three widely celebrated forum leaders are Caroline Fraser, Pulitzer-Prize winner for Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder; T.J. Stiles, a double Pulitzer-Prize winner, most recently for Custer’s Trial: A Life on the Frontiers of a New America; and Eric K. Washington, winner of the Herbert H. Lehman Prize for New York history for his recent Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal.

Registration:
Free to BIO members and students; $60 for nonmembers (fee includes a year’s BIO membership). Register here.

What to Expect:
Forum leaders will present on a specific issue of craft followed by questions and discussion with participants.  Forums will not be recorded to protect the privacy of participants about their own works-in-progress.

For more information about Biography Lab 2023, click here. To register, click here.

Linda Leavell
President, Biographers International Organization
president@biographersinternational.org
biographersinternational.org

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CFA: 2023 American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives Fellowship Program

Deadline for Applications: January 23, 2023

by Isabelle Rohr

The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) Archives is pleased to announce that it is accepting applications for its 2023 fellowship program. In 2023, three to six fellowships will be awarded to senior scholars, postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and independent researchers to conduct research in the JDC Archives, either in New York or in Jerusalem. The fellowship program is open to scholars pursuing biographical research. Topics in the fields of twentieth century Jewish history, modern history, social welfare, migration, and humanitarian assistance will be considered, as well as other areas of academic research covered in the JDC archival collections. Our finding aids can be consulted to identify relevant areas. The fellowship awards are $2,500 and the deadline for submission is January 23, 2023.

Fellows are expected to make a remote public presentation on their research upon conclusion of their fellowships.

 The areas of research and lectures of previously awarded recipients can be viewed here.

• Read more or reply

he GRACEH (Graduate Conference in European History) series was launched in Budapest in 2007 and is co-organized since 2010 by Central European University, the European University Institute, University of Vienna, and the University of Oxford. The conference is hosted annually by one of these institutions, and in 2023 its 17th edition will be hosted by Central European University in Vienna. The theme of GRACEH 2023 is: 

“Voices Heard and Unheard: Authority, Truth, and Silence in Historical Perspective,” 17-19 April 2023, Central European University

The past—mediated through written, visual, or material sources—is filled with empty spaces. Incomplete versions of what happened have been taken at face value, passed through time as representing the “real,” and validating particular kinds of the historical understanding devoid of (un)documented actors, practices, and processes.

Over the past few decades, scholars have been increasingly interested in voices from “underneath”, lending their ear to, for example, oral histories, messages between the lines, hints, clues, symbols, humor, satires, gestures, or objects to unearth that which has been doomed to non-existence or silence. This approach to historical sources could be labeled as relying on “weak evidence,” for even though it breaks the silence, it escapes clear-cut explanations. How can we retrieve voices from the past? When is “weak evidence” evidence enough to challenge or even replace dominant and established historical interpretations and narratives? To what kind of evidence do we grant higher authority over the other and why? How is authority attached to a piece of evidence? What is the purpose of establishing authority? Is it to state that something actually happened? Or to create an authentic world that looks as veridic as possible? How can a source be used to represent or construct truth? 

We invite graduate students working on any topic or period in European history and/or Europe in global perspective to delve into these questions and consider the multiple layers conveyed by the notion of historical authority and its implicit elements in historical perspective.

We welcome submissions dealing with oral history, popular history, history of science, material history, intellectual history, history of ideas, book history, literary history, art history, social history, political history, legal history, historical anthropology, history in public sphere, archeology, museum studies, media history, and gender history.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Voices and truth from below: voices of minorities, marginalized, oppressed/suppressed groups (on the basis of race, class, gender, religion and many more);
• Establishing and identifying authority and truth in written, visual, material sources: expressing agency, creating authenticity, authorial practices and authorship, self-fashioning;
• Whose authority? Whose truth?: Practices, regimes and actors of authority, crafting official scientific and historical discourses, forms of erasure, violence, (un)truth, and (in)justice;
• Mediality and materiality: displaying authority, emblems/signifiers of authority, objects as tokens of authority and truth, “making history” through objects, fakes, distortions, and reproductions;
• Historical truth in/and literary evidence: the status of historical fiction, the power of myths, propaganda, literature as a historical source, reimagining history across genres (fiction, non-fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, drama, poetry, folktale, and so on);
• What happened? What is said to have happened?: Layers of authority, “meta” methodological approaches to history writing, critically engaging with historical narratives and historiography, the issue of objective past, “making history” and institutions (institutes, archives, museums, and so forth).

Keynote speakers are:
Clio Doyle (Queen Mary University of London)
James Kapaló (University College Cork)

This conference is open to all graduate students. We particularly encourage submissions from those who have not presented their work at conferences before or are from underrepresented regions and/or institutions. We hope to be able to support travel and/or accommodation for a limited number of presenters without access to institutional funding.

Please send abstracts up to 300 words and a brief biography (max 100 words) to graceh2023@ceu.edu by 17 January 2023. Participants will receive a notification of acceptance by 17 February 2023. Final papers (up to 2000 words) should be submitted by 17 March 2023 for pre-circulation. More information can be found at https://graceh2023.wordpress.com/ 

Contact Info: 

On behalf of the GRACEH 2023 Organizing Committee: Olga Petrova petrova_olga@phd.ceu.edu 

Contact Email: 

graceh2023@ceu.edu

URL: 

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British Women Writers Conference: Liberties

May 25–28 2023

University of Virginia

deadline for submissions: 

January 15, 2023

contact email: 

bwwc2023@gmail.com

The organizers of the 2023 BWWC invite papers and panel proposals interpreting the theme of ‘Liberties’ in global and transatlantic British women’s writing from the long eighteenth century to the present. We ask participants to consider ‘liberties’ not only as a political abstraction but also as part of material and experiential subjectivity. Interpreted broadly, liberties include (but are not limited to) legal rights and freedoms, liberty of the person and bodily autonomy, liberties of creative and artistic expression, liberty of profession and vocation, freedom of movement both physical and social, and self-determination in the private and public spheres. How far did these liberties extend to women at different historical moments? Were liberties granted by the state and other institutions or taken despite them? How were they imagined and realized differently by women across categories of race, class, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, age, ability? We invite presenters to contextualize ‘liberties’ in terms of both its capacities and practices as well as its limits and exclusions.

British history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries poses conflicting and contradictory narratives of liberty. The abolition of the slave trade did not end indentured labor in the colonies. The expansion of the franchise through legislation did not extend the vote to women and the poor. Free trade and market liberalism increased Britain’s wealth but also aggravated socioeconomic inequalities. The rhetorics of emancipation at home contrasted with the realities of imperial rule abroad. How can we make sense of these partial and conditional liberties using literary history? Whose liberty is centered in literary, historical, and political narratives? How is liberty represented in women’s writing — as aspiration, transgression, fantasy, lack? We welcome scholarship that puts the construct of liberty under critical scrutiny and interrogates its relationship to ongoing and incomplete struggles for liberation. We also welcome presentations and panel proposals on pedagogy. How can we draw connections in our teaching between literary history and the liberationist movements of the present? Short talks on pedagogical methodology, classroom practices, use of digital and other media tools, or collective and community-facing projects are highly encouraged.

Possible topics for papers and panels include:

Political liberties

Women and nationhood, women’s civic participation, women and human rights, anti-slavery and abolition, empire and anti-colonialism, suffrage and women’s liberation

Social liberties

Women’s education, women’s work and the professions, women travelers and migration, women’s associations and societies, liberty and domesticity

Liberties of the body

Reproductive liberties, sex and sexuality, desire and consent, queer bodies, women’s physical cultures, women and disability

Liberties of expression

Gender and performance, women’s self-fashioning, women’s art and aesthetics, women and publicity, women and print culture, women’s intellectual histories

Please visit the conference website for more details and to submit your abstracts: http://bwwc23.com/

REMINDER

IABA Europe 2023
Life-Writing in Times of Crisis
5–8 July 2023
University of Warsaw, Poland

We are pleased to announce that the next IABA Europe Conference will be held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 5th to July 8th 2023. The conference will be held on-site only. The theme of the conference, Life-Writing in Times of Crisis, relates to the challenges we have had to face in Europe and all around the world in recent years. A lot has changed since the 2019 IABA Europe conference in Madrid. The accelerating climate crisis, the COVID–19 pandemic, and then the war in Ukraine have significantly influenced not only our perception of the world, but also the ways in which we record autobiographical experiences (the practice of writing about one’s own life). A crucial component of the difficult situation in Europe and other parts of the world is the refugee crisis. In recent years, inhabitants of countries affected by wars and terrible conflicts – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or African states – have been seeking peace among European communities. Today, millions of Ukrainians are in the same situation.

Contemporary crises may take place on a collective scale and concern events such as war, extermination, the pandemic or economic troubles (rising inflation, unemployment, difficult housing markets), but they can also happen on an individual (personal) scale: illness, the passing of loved ones, imprisonment, forced confinement, hunger, houselessness, unemployment, or changing one’s place of residence… Circumstances of unwanted change, sudden rupture, and discontinuity, which could be described as a sense of living in a previously unknown, utterly changed world, often mark the experience of crisis. In all of these situations, different practices of life-writing emerge – and all of them will interest us. How do dynamic sociopolitical processes shape the stories we tell about our everyday lives? What is the relation between the fragmentation or consolidation of entire social systems and the experimental modes of autobiographical narratives put forward by individuals?

Since our conference will be organised in Warsaw, we would like to refer to historical and academic experiences that are specific to Polish and Central European contexts, such as the surprisingly rich tradition of memoir competitions organised in Poland since the 1920s (a total of about 1,500 different competitions were held, with millions of memoirs and diaries collected). Another example would be the tradition of collecting autobiographical documents during the war and the Holocaust, which resulted in the creation of the monumental Ringelblum Archive,
among others.
 
Overall, we aim to examine the relationship between crisis situations and writing one’s life. How and why does autobiographical writing happen during crises, when the established order of the world suddenly collapses and everyday life becomes strange, unpredictable, and threatening? How do we talk about our lives, how and why do we record our experiences in difficult conditions?

We invite proposals focused on archival records or material records in general (diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs), as well as various electronic, virtual life-writing practices that may be performed or kept on-line, on various websites or social media platforms. The theme of the conference may also be analysed from the perspective of life-writing in visual forms (photography, drawings, comics, films and video recordings, among others). Finally, participants may discuss records/reports about the experience of crisis created at the request of journalists or researchers, reporters, sociologists, psychologists, and historians (audiovisual, spoken, written accounts, important oral history tradition). All of the above-mentioned ways of “recording” life in a crisis situation are of great interest to us.

During the IABA Warsaw Conference we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Life Writing.

Submissions:

We welcome 20-minute individual presentations and 90-minute panel sessions (preferably interdisciplinary and international).

The conference will be held in English.

Abstracts should not be longer than 300 words; bios should not be longer than 150 words.

Practicalities and schedule:

Conference website: https://iabawarsaw2023.eu

Conference e-mail: iabawarsaw2023@uw.edu.pl

Online submissions will open on October 15, 2022

Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2022

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by January 31, 2023

Registration and conference fees: February 1–March 31, 2023

Preliminary programme: May 1, 2023
 
Detailed programme: June 1, 2023

Conference Fees:

Participants

220 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)

The participation of 5 researchers from Ukraine, free of charge

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Family Archives and their Afterlives, 1400-present

June 27, 2023 to June 28, 2023

Deadline for Submissions–Dec. 31, 2022

United Kingdom

From the muniments rooms of country estates to scrapbooks, photo albums, and boxes of papers and ephemera stored under the bed: our homes are sites of intergenerational collection and curation. We act as archivists, deciding which materials to keep, both for ourselves and for future generations who will, in time, face the same question. In the early modern period, anxieties over the loss of precious family paperwork were widespread. The sixteenth-century yeoman Robert Furse implored his son to ‘keep sure your wrytynges’, and the resolution of many an eighteenth-century novel – including Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) and a whole host of gothic fiction – turned on the adequate preservation (or otherwise) of family papers and the secrets contained therein.

Documents were kept in special vessels (initialled chests, boxes tied up with a loved one’s hair), they were bequeathed in wills, and, as public repositories became more widespread, some collectors attempted to imitate the practices of institutional archives in their own homes – or fought to get their materials included in (or excluded from) these collections. Today, we have the capacity to store an almost infinite quantity of material online – but many of us continue to prize the physical artefact, and books and readymade albums that purport to help us create and store our family archives are widely available.

Though in recent years the ‘archival turn’ has led to a renewed interest in the collections compiled by states and institutions, we know rather less about the materials accumulated by families and households. In the absence of the apparent hallmarks of modern archival practice – catalogues, indexes, and, perhaps most pertinently, professional authentication of their historical value – family papers are rarely approached as ‘archives’ – but, when they are transferred into local and national record offices, these same collections go on to form a significant part of our archival heritage. This conference seeks to bring together academics, archivists, and family historians to explore the family archive, in all its forms, from the medieval to the modern period.

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

• Approaches to the family archive: definitions, challenges, opportunities
• The contents and curation of specific family collections
• Access, circulation, and the ‘social life’ of archives
• Muniments and legal papers
• Exclusion and absence in the archive
• Archives and emotions
• The matriarchive and women as archivists
• Arrangement and organisation: cataloguing, inventories, storage, furniture
• Objects in/and the archive
• Visual and literary representations of family collections
• The relationship between family and institutional archives, including bequests, loans, and donations to local and national collections
• Destruction and dispersal

Please send a title, short bio, and abstract (c. 200-300 words) to: familyarchivesconference@gmail.com.

The deadline for submissions is 30 December 2022. We would be grateful if you could also let us know if you have any access requirements (e.g. online/hybrid attendance).

All papers will be considered for inclusion in an edited collection, estimated date of submission for chapters December 2023. Please make it clear on your submission if you do not wish your paper to be considered.

This conference is part of the ‘Family Archives in Early Modern England’ project, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. Visit us at www.family-archives.co.uk.

Contact Info: 

Please send a title, short bio, and abstract (c. 200-300 words) to: familyarchivesconference@gmail.com.

Contact Email: 

familyarchivesconference@gmail.com

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READING WOMEN’S LIFE WRITING: A Critical Appraisal

In her book Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), the late Carolyn Heilbrun expressed the need for original scripts for women to live by; stories that press beyond the convention and closure of the marriage plot. Men have always had narrative stories, such as the quest motif and the warrior exemplar, on which to base their lives and within which to tell their life stories. But, Heilbrun argues, such stories of action and accomplishment have been denied to women; the behavior praised by these stories has always been branded “unwomanly”. What we need to do is to move outside that male-centered, binary logic altogether. We need to ask not how Woman is different from Man. We need to know how women have come to be who they are through history, which is the history of their oppression by men and male-designed institutions. Only through an analysis of the power relationships between men and women, and practices based on that analysis, will we put an end to our oppression-and only then will we discover what women are or can be. Only in the last third of the twentieth century have women broken through to a realization of the narratives that have been controlling their lives. Women poets of one generation—those born between 1923 and 1932—can now be seen to have transformed the autobiographies of women’s lives, to have expressed, and suffered for expressing, what women had not earlier been allowed to say.

Please send your papers at drsunitasinha@gmail.com.The deadline is 30th December, 2022. The Wordlimit is between 3500 to 5000 words. The book shall be published by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors New Delhi.

Prof.Sunita Sinha

Email: drsunitasinha@gmail.com

Website: www.sunitasinha.com

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Deadline for Submissions December 31, 2022

University of Warsaw, Poland

5–8 July 2023

Life-Writing in Times of Crisis

IABA Europe 2023

We are pleased to announce that the next IABA Europe Conference will be held in Warsaw, Poland, from July 5th to July 8th 2023. The conference will be held on-site only. The theme of the conference, Life-Writing in Times of Crisis, relates to the challenges we have had to face in Europe and all around the world in recent years. A lot has changed since the 2019 IABA Europe conference in Madrid. The accelerating climate crisis, the COVID–19 pandemic, and then the war in Ukrainehave significantly influenced not only our perception of the world, but also the ways in which we record autobiographical experiences (the practice of writing about one’s own life). A crucial component of the difficult situation in Europe and other parts of the world is the refugee crisis. In recent years, inhabitants of countries affected by wars and terrible conflicts – Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan or African states – have been seeking peace among European communities. Today, millions of Ukrainians are in the same situation.

Contemporary crises may take place on a collective scale and concern events such as war, extermination, the pandemic or economic troubles (rising inflation, unemployment, difficult housing markets), but they can also happen on an individual (personal) scale: illness, the passing of loved ones, imprisonment, forced confinement, hunger, houselessness, unemployment, or changing one’s place ofresidence. Circumstances of unwanted change, sudden rupture, and discontinuity, which could be described as a sense of living in a previously unknown, utterly changed world, often mark the experience of crisis. In all of these situations, different practices of life-writing emerge – and all of them will interest us. How do dynamic sociopolitical processes shape the stories we tell about our everyday lives? What is the relation between the fragmentation or consolidation of entire social systems and the experimental modes of autobiographical narratives putforward by individuals?

Since our conference will be organised in Warsaw, we would like to refer to historical and academic experiences that are specific to Polish and Central European contexts, such as the surprisingly rich tradition of memoir competitions organised in Poland since the 1920s (a total of about 1,500 different competitions were held, with millions of memoirs and diaries collected). Another example would be the tradition of collecting autobiographical documents during the war and the Holocaust, which resulted in the creation of the monumental Ringelblum Archive, among others.

Overall, we aim to examine the relationship between crisis situations and writing one’s life. How and why does autobiographical writing happen during crises, when the established order of the world suddenly collapses and everyday life becomes strange, unpredictable, and threatening? How do we talk about our lives, how and why do we record our experiences in difficult conditions?

We invite proposals focused on archival records or material records in general (diaries, letters, autobiographies, memoirs), as well as various electronic, virtual life-writing practices that may be performed or kept on-line, on various websites or social media platforms. The theme of the conference may also be analysed from the perspective of life-writing in visual forms (photography, drawings, comics, films and video recordings, among others). Finally, participants may discuss records/reports about the experience of crisis created at the request of journalists or researchers, reporters, sociologists, psychologists, and historians (audiovisual, spoken, written accounts, important oral history tradition). All of the above-mentioned ways of “recording” life in a crisis situation are of great interest to us.

During the IABA Warsaw Conference we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the European Journal of Life Writing.

Submissions:

We welcome 20-minute individual presentations and 90-minute panel sessions (preferably interdisciplinary and international).

The conference will be held in English.

Abstracts should not be longer than 300 words; bios should not be longer than 150 words.

Practicalities and schedule:

Conference website: https://iabawarsaw2023.eu

Conference e-mail: iabawarsaw2023@uw.edu.pl

Online submissions will open on October 15, 2022

Deadline for proposals: December 31, 2022

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by January 31, 2023

Registration and conference fees: February 1–March 31, 2023

Preliminary programme: May 1, 2023

Detailed programme: June 1, 2023

Conference Fees:

Participants
220 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)

The participation of 5 researchers from Ukraine, free of charge

PhD student participants
170 EUR (includes conference lunches and a dinner)

The participation of 5 PhD students from Ukraine, free of charge

IABA Warsaw 2023 Organising Committee

Teresa Bruś
Marcin Gołąb
Joanna Jeziorska-Haładyj
Artur Hellich
Maciej Libich
Lucyna Marzec
Joanna Piechura
Paweł Rodak
Agnieszka Sobolewska
Honorata Sroka

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Exile at State U: Stories from the Outer Edges of Academe

deadline for submissions: 

December 31, 2022

Douglas Higbee/University of South Carolina, Aiken

contact email: 

douglash@usca.edu

Seeking abstracts for an edited collection of essays about life on the tenure track, especially for those working in the humanities and social sciences at non-R1 colleges and universities.

Because full-time, tenure-track jobs in the humanities and social sciences are hard to come by, we are often told to be grateful and to be quiet. And indeed, there is much to be grateful for and relatively little to shout about. But there are still important stories to be told, and relatively little nonfiction has been written about the subtle but life-changing personal and professional vicissitudes of a career spent in the academic hinterlands of branch state campuses and non-elite private colleges. Especially for those from highly rated grad programs, often in metropolitan locales, a career in a rural area or small town is an eye-opening and life-altering experience.

The goal of the collection is to tell it like it is, warts and all. Essays should be autobiographical, not scholarly, and can be focused on a particular career episode (and thus relatively short) or broader in scope and longer in length. The most important thing is to be compelling, or at least interesting. Humor is more than welcome. Writers are welcome to publish under a pseudonym, or anonymously.

Possible topics or areas of focus

–job application process: interview and campus visit stories; first impressions; deciding whether to take the job

–on the tenure track: the challenges (or lack thereof) of meeting tenure and promotion requirements; interactions with other faculty, administrators, community members; networking and conferences; deciding to stay or leave

–community in exile: relationships with colleagues; relations with neighbors; location details

–after tenure/the middle years: career evolution; putting down roots, professionally and personally; non-academic pursuits; changing jobs

–toward retirement: taking stock; successes and regrets

Please email 1-2 pp. abstracts and a short bio or CV to douglash@usca.edu by Dec. 31, 2022.

Douglas Higbee

University of South Carolina, Aiken

Deadline for Submissions December 15, 2022

Colonial Letters and the Contact of Knowledges: Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Colonial Correspondences

April 11, 2023 to April 14, 2023

University of Bayreuth, Germany

Written correspondence (e.g. letters, diaries, telegrams, etc.) were one of the major means of communication during the 19^th – 20^th Century British colonialism of Africa. Through them, the instructions, intensions, decisions, complaints, justifications and agenda of resident British colonial officers, local colonial administrators and collaborators, colonial officials in Britain and colonised subjects (individuals, villages) were transmitted across time and space. These letters offer extraordinary access to the mindset and overall agenda of the entities producing them. The ways of life of these entities, their patterns of social order, repertoires and constellations of knowledges, linguistic voices, world views and cosmologies are projected, both directly and indirectly, in these letters. In themselves, these letters embody the contact zone of colonial-precolonial structures, coloniser-colonised entities, indigenous-foreign knowledges, cultural and linguistic practices, etc.

Letters written during British colonialism of Southern Cameroons were the object of study of the research project “Colonial Letters and the Contact of Knowledges” funded by the Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence at the University of Bayreuth, Germany (https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/en/Projects/Knowledges/Knowledges_Colonial-letters/index.php). The aim of the conference is to present the major findings of the project. We also invite perspectives on British (and other) colonial correspondences in other territories and periods.

Call for papers

We invite submissions that describe, from multidisciplinary perspectives (within the humanities and social sciences, especially linguistics, history, literature, communication studies, anthropology and sociology), the instantiations of colonial contacts, conflicts, contestations and eventual coalescence, co-habitations and or hybridisations of ‘knowledges’ during colonialism that are embodied in, and transmitted through, letters written during British colonisation of Southern Cameroons (1916-1961) and beyond. Other colonisations, especially in Africa, form part of the focus of the conference. Several lines of investigation fall within the scope of the conference including, but not limited to:

• Colonial correspondences and the construction of multiple identities
• Colonial correspondences and the discursive enactment of (social, religious, political, hereditary) power
• Colonial correspondences and the coalescence, cohabitation and hybridisation of colonial and precolonial social norms (interaction, hierarchy, respect forms, kinship affiliation)
• Colonial correspondences and the contact of languages
• Colonial correspondences and patterns of language stratification: official, native, local, dialect, etc. languages
• Colonial correspondences and the production, consolidation and contestation of ‘knowledges’
• Colonial correspondences and the role of letter writing agencies
• Colonial correspondences and the concealment of, and access to, knowledge, information and rights
• Colonial correspondences and colonial social and power structures of stratification
• etc.

What patterns of knowledge production are adopted in colonial correspondences? How are these different in letters written by colonial administrators and those written by colonised subjects? What repertoires of knowledges drive their production, rejection and perhaps co-construction? To answer these questions, we invite submissions that adopt multidisciplinary, trans-disciplinary or inter-disciplinary approaches.

NB: Selected papers from the conference will be published in the series Africa Multiple: Studies of Africa and its Diasporas (Brill Academic Publishers).

Submission Guidelines 

• Deadline for receipt of abstracts: 15 December 2022
• Feedback on abstracts: 31 December 2022
• Maximum abstract length: 500 words 
• Submit abstracts to: colonial.letters@uni-bayreuth.de

Partial scholarships

We offer per diems of up to 300€ (i.e., 100€ per day) for participants whose abstracts are accepted.

More info  at: https://colonial-letters.de/#

Contact Info: 

Conference organisers 
Eric A. Anchimbe (University of Bayreuth)

Glory Essien Otung (University of Bayreuth)

Contact Email: 

colonial.letters@uni-bayreuth.de

URL: 

https://www.africamultiple.uni-bayreuth.de/

Narrative Matters Conference 2023
Instrumental Narratives: Narrative Studies and the Storytelling Boom
Tampere University, Finland, 15–17 June 2023
https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/
CALL FOR PAPERS

NB! Deadline for proposals extended until the end of November 2022!

Welcome to the 11th Narrative Matters conference at Tampere!

The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?

Featured topics:

  *   storytelling boom and its social relevance
  *   novel ways of storytelling today
  *   emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies

The social events include a lake cruise to Viikinsaari island – dinner, sauna & swim!
TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION
–  2 hour train ride from the Helsinki airport
–  direct flights to Tampere via 11 hubs
–  strong hotel capacity in the campus area
 
Conference webpage / CFP and submission link: https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/call-for-papers/
CFP OPEN UNTIL NOVEMBER 30, 2022!
Conference fee EUR 220 (faculty) / EUR 120 (student)

Pre-conference workshops, hosted by Jens Brockmeier, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Stefan Iversen & Ann Phoenix, will take place on Wednesday, June 14th.
NB! Narrative Matters 2023 is an on-site conference with no hybrid sessions and no recording of presentations. We will however include two online sessions in the programme, one early in the morning and another late in the evening (Helsinki time). The conference fee for online participants, who will only have access to these two online sessions, will pay a reduced conference fee of EUR 150 / 100 (students).
Main organizers:

Maria Mäkelä, Matti Hyvärinen & Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Narrare)
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, SELMA)
Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki)
The Academy of Finland Consortium Project Instrumental Narratives https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com

Full CFP:

The eleventh Narrative Matters conference is hosted by Tampere University (Finland) and co-organized by the Instrumental Narratives consortium project, SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies. The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?

The conference will provide a platform for scholars to both seek new applications that might appeal to diverse audiences and to critically reflect on the instrumentalization of narrative studies. Most narrative scholars agree on the rich affordances of storytelling: narrative is a compact and intuitive form for sharing detailed, personal experiences as well as collective, community-forming ideas and outlooks. Thus narrative studies approaches lend generous support to the instrumentalization and commercialization of narrative form in business, politics, media, and personal development. Yet narrative may just as well be put to uses that are dubious if not dangerous. The widespread, uncritical use of narratives of personal experience in journalism and social media may have unintended and unanticipated consequences. Experientiality may come at the cost of informativeness. Furthermore, while narratives are ideally suited to conveying the complexity of human experience, the complexity of large social interactions or material processes, such as climate change, easily exceeds the capacity of storytelling. Now that the benefits of storytelling have caught the public imagination and are recognized in various professional practices, narrative scholarship is in a good position to disseminate critical practices for the analysis of the forms and contexts of storytelling as well.

We should also look into future narrative possibilities. The 21st century will no doubt be the era of social media and shared personal narratives, and therefore we should look for productive ways of connecting the personal with the political. How, for example, to bridge the gap between individual particularity and supra-individual concerns at the limits of narrative, such as the climate crisis and global inequality? How to conceptualize and control the afterlife of narratives determined by digital forms of narrative agency? Will new forms of narrative speculation direct our actions as citizens, consumers, and collectives? Which roles will be allotted to specific artistic, digital, and quotidian genres of storytelling? Are these new narrative genres and practices changing the ways people share their experience and use stories in the everyday? Are new affordances for narrative meaning making evolving?

We invite narrative scholars across disciplines to address the following (and related) issues:

  *   storytelling boom and its social relevance
  *   novel ways of storytelling today
  *   emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies
  *   sociological analysis of curated storytelling
  *   the study of storytelling rights and privileges; re-thinking of empathy
  *   narrative and post-truth
  *   narrative consultancy business; storytelling self-help and manuals
  *   story-critical reading in narrative studies; story-critical tools for audiences
  *   popularizing narrative theory and practices
  *   social life of narratives vs. analysis of individual texts
  *   narrative and action: political narratives, positioning and counter-narratives
  *   professional narratives and narratives of professions refigured
  *   the limits and affordances of narrative in making sense of illness and health
  *   the limits and affordances of narrative in addressing the environmental crisis
  *   uses and risks of viral storytelling and social media sharing
  *   discourse on well-being and cognitive benefits of literature
  *   the potential of fiction in analysing and resisting the narrative boom

Please send your paper and panel proposals by November 30, 2022! The abstract for an individual paper should be 250-300 words. A panel proposal (in the case of a traditional research panel, 3-4 speakers) should be approx. 600 words, including a brief general description + short abstracts of each paper. In addition to the proposal text, please include a 100 word biographical statement for every speaker. If you only wish to present in either of the online sessions, please indicate this in your proposal. Here is the link to the submission form.

 Narrative Matters 2023 is an on-site conference with no hybrid sessions and no recording of presentations. We will however include two online sessions in the programme, one early in the morning and another late in the evening (Helsinki time). The conference fee for online participants, who will only have access to these two online sessions, will pay a reduced conference fee of EUR 150 / 100 (students).

Dr. Maria Mäkelä
Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature
Tampere University, Finland
+358 40 8325635
https://www.tuni.fi/en/maria-makela

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The Ecocritical First Person

American Society for the Study of Literature

This CFP is for a guaranteed panel sponsored by the Thoreau Society
2023 ASLE + AESS Conference: “Reclaiming the Commons”
July 9-12, 2023 in Portland, Oregon

deadline for submissions: 

December 1, 2022

What is the role of the personal voice in contemporary ecocritical scholarship? As Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued, conceptualizing climate change demands an awareness of both personal and planetary scales of transformation, yet traditional academic discourse has tended to discourage the use of personal history, anecdote, and the first-person voice. Our roundtable asks what’s at stake in the personal turn and a more intimate mode of literary-critical address. For this roundtable, we seek both excerpts from ecocritical writing in the personal voice and reflective/critical proposals that might trace the historical genealogy of the personal; consider the politics of voice vis-à-vis race and ethnicity, class, gender, and region; discuss marginalized efforts to bear witness; or offer reflexive meditations on our ties to the university and what more informal scholarship has to offer “lay” audiences.

This panel has a guaranteed slot on the conference program. Proposals (maximum 200 words) for either/both creative or critical presentations and short CVs due by December 1st to Deanna Kreisel at deekaykay@icloud.com.

Travel and Wonder, 1450-1750

Conference 27-28 April 2023 to be held at the University of York

deadline for submissions: 

November 20, 2022

Call for Papers

We invite proposals for conference papers on wonder in early-modern travel writing. Papers are welcome to discuss any geographical area. They may explore (but are not restricted to) the following questions: how did early-modern travellers express wonder? What is the role of the senses in descriptions of wonder? Did travellers doubt their own senses? How did they address the problem of credibility and readers’ doubts when describing wondrous phenomena in their writing? How does wonder in early-modern travel writing relate to scholarly themes such as race, gender, colonialism, material culture, religion, knowledge or scientific discourse?

Keynote speakers are Joan-Pau Rubiés (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) and Lauren Working (University of York).

While preferring in-person presentations, we welcome a limited number of online papers. Please indicate in your proposal whether you plan to present in-person or online.

Please submit a brief CV and proposal of 250-300 words for 20 minute papers to Dr Jaska Kainulainen, Docent of history at the University of Helsinki and a research associate at the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies (CREMS) at the University of York, at jaska.kainulainen@helsinki.fi by 20 November 2022.

The conference is generously supported by the KONE FOUNDATION in association with CREMS, University of York.

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Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative

Southwest Popular and American Culture Association
February 22-25, 2023, Albuquerque, New Mexico

deadline for submissions: 

November 14, 2022

Melinda McBee / mcbee58@verizon.net

Paper proposals on any aspect of biography, autobiography, memoir, and personal narrative are welcome. Literary papers as well as creative works will be accepted.  Send a 500 word abstract by November 14, 2022, to to conference’s database at

http://www.southwestpca.org

Directions: Once you have accessed the above web site, you will have to create an account.  After creating you account, on the web site choose Conference, then from the drop-down menu click Call for Papers/Submit Proposal.  Scroll down to the Language and Literature section to Biography, Autobiography, Memoir, and Personal Narrative.  Click the + sign under the Biography area, then choose Submit Proposal.  

SUBMIT PROPOSAL

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As some of you know, I host a monthly webinar series,  “Let’s Talk Books at NMU” (Northern Michigan University).  On November’s episode, I’ll be talking with Etta M. Madden about her book, Engaging Italy: American Women’s Utopian Visions and Transnational Networks. The webinar will occur on Friday, Nov. 18, at 1:00 Eastern time. Registration is required but easy, and can be found here: 

https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dnXEzUN8QMmJcIvo8AyMvw

Please join us if you’re free, and also feel free to forward this announcement widely.

Thanks,

Lynn Domina

Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022

The College English Association, a gathering of scholar-teachers in English studies, welcomes proposals for presentations on Travel and Literature for our 52nd annual conference, March 30-April 1, 2023, in San Antonio, Texas. Submit your 250-500 word abstract at https://www.conftool.pro/cea2023.  

The Travel and Literature area at CEA is seeking submissions on any aspect of travel and literature, including but not limited to travelogues; travel and ecocriticism; regionalism; travel and identity; intercultural perspectives; etc. Theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, as are papers concerning various genres and historical periods of literature. Of particular interest will be presentations that actualize the conference theme, Confluence, as it applies to travelers across America, around the world, and through time and space. How do writers explore, engage, and articulate Confluence within the places, spaces, experiences, texts, and selves of their travels?

Conference Theme: CONFLUENCE

CEA welcomes proposals for presentations that move to the general conference theme: Confluence. The conference will be held in San Antonio, a city that itself is a kind of confluence: it has been the home of multiple cultures; it has seen the rise and fall of famous missions and military presidios; and it honors in its daily life today its Hispanic heritage and cowboy culture alike. It is no wonder, then, that it is recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

General Call for Papers

CEA also welcomes proposals for presentations in any of the areas English departments typically encompass, including literature criticism and scholarship, creative writing, rhetoric, composition, technical communication, linguistics, and film. We also welcome papers on areas that influence our work as academics, including student demographics, student/instructor accountability and assessment, student advising, academic leadership in departments and programs, and the place of the English department in the university.

Panels and Roundtable Sessions are also welcome. If submitting a pre-formed panel, please create a user ID for each participant, and identify the panel in the submission. Roundtables will feature presentations and discussion of 500-word essays, an opportunity to engage with other scholars, discover other resources, or begin imagining the next steps towards developing ideas into longer, more typical conference papers or articles.

Abstract Submissions Accepted until November 1, 2022

For more information on how to submit, please see the full CFP at www.cea-web.org.

Format

Presentations must be made in person at the conference venue. Neither proxy nor “virtual” (Skyping, etc.) presentations are permitted. Presentations will be limited to 15 minutes.

Membership

All presenters at the 2023 CEA conference must become members of CEA by January 1, 2023. To join CEA, please go to www.cea-web.org.

Other questions? Please email cea.english@gmail.com.

Sincerely,

Katrina J. Quinn, Ph.D.

Special Topics Chair, Travel and Literature

(724) 738-2430 | katrina.quinn@sru.edu    

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Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022

Call for Proposals – Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau

The editors of the proposed Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau seek proposals for essays on any aspect of Thoreau’s works, life, or reception that significantly reframe an aspect of his scholarly, political, or popular legacy. For more than a century, the dominant image of Thoreau was that of a solitary figure who happily turned his back on social ties and political matters to head off into the woods. In both public and scholarly writing, Thoreau was held up as an exemplar of a certain type of white, able-bodied masculinity: one where wilderness was preferable to domestic and social spaces, and where independence and communion with the self in nature superseded other forms of relationality, community, and solidarity. In recent years, scholarly work on Thoreau, including a major biography and several bicentennial volumes, has challenged these long-held critical perceptions with consideration of his work in relation to gender and sexuality, abolition, indigeneity, race, environmental justice, and other issues.

We aim to collect and expand these new directions in Thoreau studies in a comprehensive volume designed to inform the next generation of Thoreau scholarship. We seek contributions from disciplines, traditions, and perspectives that have been previously excluded from or that have been marginalized within Thoreau studies. We are particularly interested in writings that engage with a range of traditions, including anti-racist work and prison abolition; disability justice, LGBTQ+ activism; climate justice; radical politics; as well as experimental or innovative approaches to Thoreau’s life, writings, and legacies.

Please send abstracts of 300 words or fewer to kristen.case@maine.edu and james.finley@tamusa.edu by November 1, 2022. In addition, we welcome queries and would be happy to discuss ideas prior to the deadline.

Contact Info: 

Kristen Case, Professor of English, University of Maine Farmington, kristen.case@maine.edu

James Finley, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University – San Antonio, james.finley@tamusa.edu

Contact Email: 

james.finley@tamusa.edu

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Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022

Call for Papers

Out of the USSR: Travelling Women, Travelling Memories

2–3.2.2023 University of Turku, Finland

Travelling has always been connected with fundamental social and political changes taking place in societies. Throughout history, one of the countries that people have chosen to leave, move away or have been expelled from, but also a country which they have been going back to, is Russia/the Soviet Union. There is an obvious link between the large transformations that have taken place in Russia since the time of perestroika in the 1990s until the ongoing war in Ukraine and the restrictions of civil rights such as freedom of speech, and the increased mobility out of Russia.
 
The conference takes these transformations as starting points in examining how individuals reflect on and recall the Soviet/Russian home country in literary presentations, addressing the history of mobility, emigration, family, gender, ethnic or religious background in face of their collective memory in their new place of residence. The meeting points for the proposals are the concepts of travelling/mobility/exile and (post-, trans-/cross-cultural) memory. The focus is on women’s fictional texts and memories from the 1980s until today that allow the presentations to address and to acknowledge [e]migrating women writers as mediators of ideas and memories in trans-/cross-cultural contexts. The aim of the conference is to focus on gender in the process of the transformation of cultures through ideas that travel, and to pay special attention to women’s contribution to the cultural transfer and mobility of ideas and memories which have not been sufficiently studied and documented. We expect presentations addressing published fictional texts by women who have moved from the Soviet and Russian territories into new areas, and by writing they have created and processed memories of moving and of resettling in a new country/location of residence. We are especially interested in memories of women emigrants and travellers to the Nordic countries, Germany, Great Britain, the US, France and Israel.
 
The organizers plan to publish an edited collection of papers presented at the conference.
 
We invite researchers to a two-day conference that provides a platform to reflect upon the themes that address the following issues and more:

● What is recalled, and how the history of leaving/migration is experienced, recalled and narrated?
● Ideas, ideologies and memories (e.g. national myths) which women carry along to their new country/location of residence, and how they change in regard to the home country vis-à-vis thenew country?
● The creation and production of post-memorial recollection of family history
● Motives for leaving and emigration
● The constitution of matrilinear narratives and transformation of individual, family- and collective memory through travelling
● Carriers, media, contents, practices and forms of travelling memory
● Recollection of Soviet terror (e.g. Stalinist genocide and Holodomor) in the face of the prevalence of Holocaust memory in the new site of residence
● The understanding of one’s “own” culture, its possible changes, and the kind of presentation / narrative forms the change of location / culture /context produces
● Narratives of lived experiences in the new location
● The form that the social and cultural background (age, profession, gender identity, family background, etc.) takes in the texts
● Cultural memories (family, generation, gendered, etc.) that are carried along and created in the new country of residence, and what is their relation to the new location of residence?
● Narration of the journey, departure and arrival at the new location of residence
● Sites of memory in transition

Keynote speakers are:
Eva Hausbacher, Professor of Slavic Literature und Culture at the University of Salzburg, Department of Slavic Studies.
“Close distances: Narratives of the Soviet Past in Russian-German Women’s Writings”

Simona Mitroiu, PhD, Senior Researcher at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Department of Interdisciplinary Research in Social-Human Sciences
“Generations of Memory in Women’s Narratives: Literary (re)workings of Transnational
Disruptions, Intersections, and Transformations”

Please submit your abstract (title, ca. 250 words, names and affiliations of the presenters) by 1. November 2022 to Viola Parente-Čapková (viocap@utu.fi) and Arja Rosenholm (arja.rosenholm@tuni.fi).

Acceptance letters and the final programme will be sent by the end of November 2022.
 
The conference has its background in the research project Texts on the Move
https://tekstitliikkeessa.com/, examining how Russian women’s texts and ideas have been travelling and moving across the border to Finland in 1840–2020.


Organizer:
Texts on the Move: Reception of Women’s Writing in Finland and Russia 1840–2020 (Emil Aaltonen Foundation), and University of Turku, and Tampere University

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Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2022

Women Writing Women’s Lives Kathy Chamberlain Research Awards

Women Writing Women’s Lives (WWWL), a women’s group dedicated to the writing of women’s lives, is pleased to offer five research awards to women who are furthering the group’s mission. The awards are funded by a generous gift from Edith Penty, a veteran activist in the civil rights and women’s movement, who wished to express her gratitude for the work of WWWL and to honor Kathy Chamberlain. A long-time WWWL member and author of Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World, Kathy Chamberlain served as WWWL steering committee chair for ten years.

Each recipient will be awarded five hundred dollars ($500) to help defray expenses incurred while working on a memoir or biography of a woman, in print or other media, such as film, podcast, bibliography, database, or website. Awardees will also receive a one-year membership in WWWL (including dues). Awards must be used between February 1, 2023 and February 1, 2024.

Awards may be used to fund:
● Travel to archives or relevant research locations
● Copying or digitizing materials
● Purchase of books for research
● Computers, software, or other technology needed for the project

Eligibility:
We welcome submissions from women who are current masters and doctoral students; adjunct and/or unaffiliated scholars who received their PhD in the last six years; assistant professors working towards tenure; and independent researchers. WWWL members are not eligible.

How to Apply:
Send an email to ChamberlainAward@gmail.com with the subject line “Chamberlain Award Application.” Attach the application, which consists of one PDF document. The document must include the four items below:
Name the document with your last name, first name [LAST NAME, FIRST NAME].
1. Contact Information: Your name, telephone number, permanent address and e-mail, current employer or academic affiliation, and title of project.
2. Proposal: A 500-word proposal describing the project and how it advances the WWWL mission (see below).
3. Budget: List how the funds will be used.
4. Curriculum Vitae: Provide a 1-page Curriculum Vitae.

Due Date:
Applications will be accepted from September 6 to November 1, 2022 by 11:59 pm. Email the application, which should consist of one PDF attachment to: ChamberlainAward@gmail.com.

Please do not include the application in the body of the email. It must be just one attachment. Award recipients will be notified by February 1, 2023.

Email or call Allysha A. Leonard, Chamberlain Award Administrative Assistant, if you need assistance: ChamberlainAward@gmail.com  (831) 345-9849.

Women Writing Women’s Lives Mission Statement

The places, cultures, and communities in which women live their lives change, as do women’s roles, status, interests, and opportunities. Our purpose as a group is to identify these changes, understand their impact, and explain and portray the complex realities of women’s lives. In biographies and memoirs of women, created in writing or other media, we hope to call attention to the reciprocal dynamics between our subjects and society, to find new ways of looking at and presenting women’s stories, and ultimately to influence the way women’s stories are perceived and written.

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Seminar Title: Reimagining 21^st Century Realisms

American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago (March 16-19, 2023) 

Organizer: Jenny Rademacher, Professor, Babson College (vrademacher@babson.edu)

Paper proposals can be submitted at this link from Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 2022 at this link: https://www.acla.org/reimagining-21st-century-realisms

How are we rethinking genres that grapple with the increasingly ambivalent boundaries among truth, fact, and invention?  The past three decades have produced myriad efforts to name the wide range of forms that aim for greater veracity and anchoring to documented realities, while simultaneously equivocating—metamodernism, post-irony, new sincerity, auto/biofictions, and the awkwardly phrased post-post modernism, to name only a few. While the field is still very much in play, there is a common shift away from purely ironic approaches toward the connectedness of language, humans, and reality, and a newly dominant engagement with the capacity of literature and other forms of creative expression to reshape how we live and create. If postmodernism’s perception of language as a self-referential game has played itself to exhaustion, neither are we witnessing a return to literature that naively observes and strives to mimetically represent external reality. Rather than a mirror, contemporary realisms extend beyond materiality to expose the complex and often vexing realness of emotions, perceptions, and ethical obligations to one another and the world we inhabit. In so doing, such speculative realisms experiment with derivative identities and claims to truth, incorporating uncertainty while still trying to speak meaningfully to the realness of human experience.  With attention to their contradictions and confluences, this seminar explores the patterns of reimagined realisms in contemporary narrative— what forms they may be taking, how they are reconfiguring what we may understand as realism, and why. Considering the interaction among these diverse modes and how their growing popularity speaks to the experience of contemporary life, possible topics include (but are not limited to):  

• What is the nature and function of new realisms in shaping what comes after postmodernism?
   
• How can fiction be used to experiment with the real and to create alternative ways of seeing and being in the world?
   
• If realism has become more speculative, how does it challenge post-truth? How might these forms reveal a common thread for fostering an ethical relationship with truth?
   
• How do auto/biofictions explore uncertainties among biographical, fictional, and authorial subjectivities that we navigate in real life and not only in these texts?
   
• What do fictions that tread the borders between situated realities and invention provide us that neither non-fiction nor fiction alone might?
   
• How do changing concepts of technology impact technique and form, providing thresholds for re-examining what we think we know?
   
• Why have these new realisms become so popular with writers and readers?
   
• How can a specific writer’s work illuminate important features of contemporary realisms?
• In what ways do the varied forms of new realisms share a common zeitgeist that extends across multiple geographies (or how do they differ)?  

Virginia Newhall Rademacher, PhD
Professor, Hispanic Literature and Cultural Studies
Babson College
Babson Park, MA 02457
vrademacher@babson.edu
WebEx personal room: https://babson.webex.com/meet/vrademacher
Author Page: Derivative Lives (Bloomsbury, 2022)

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American Comparative Literature Association’s Annual Meeting in Chicago (March 16-19, 2023) 

Seminar Title: Literary Biography

Co-organizers: Sara Kippur (Trinity College, CT) and Julia Elsky (Loyola University Chicago, jelsky@luc.edu)

Paper proposals can be submitted at this link from Oct. 1 to Oct. 31, 2022: https://www.acla.org/literary-biography

This panel seeks to explore the topic of literary biography as both theory and practice. Literary studies since the New Critics have long registered a suspicion of biographical approaches to criticism, yet our contemporary moment–in which scholars and students seem to agree that there are ethical and political stakes to recognizing an author’s lived experiences and actions–pushes us to revisit the terms and stakes of biography in scholarship and in the classroom. To what extent should biography be centered in literary studies and in the comparative literature classroom? How has the form and practice of literary biography evolved? How might we, as practitioners, responsibly take on the task of writing literary biographies? These are some of the questions that motivate our panel and that we hope to address from a range of perspectives.

Recent publications suggest the expansiveness of literary biography as a genre: it encompasses, of course, the biography of a person; the biography of a novel, such as Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Stranger about Camus’s text or Michael Gorra’s Portrait of a Novel about Henry James’s novel; and dual biographies that feature multiple figures, such as Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. This seminar seeks participants who will discuss the form of literary biography in a theoretical framework as well as those who will present the frameworks of the literary biographies they are in the process of writing. 

The seminar will also be a forum for discussion of how biographers write for general and academic audiences. How do approaches and forms change when looking to publish with an academic press, including those that aim at a broader readership, or a trade publisher? The wide range of approaches, as well as the interest in publishing biographies of women, are evinced by recent publications such as Ann Jefferson’s biography of Natalie Sarraute (Princeton, 2000), Caroline Weber’s Proust’s Duchess (Penguin, 2018), and Ruth Franklin’s biography of Shirley Jackson (Norton, 2016), among others. We would welcome scholars and critics who have or are currently considering writing for a more general audience. We also plan to invite an editor who straddles academic and trade audiences and who could discuss norms in their area of publishing.

Julia Elsky, PhD

Associate Professor of French 

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Loyola University Chicago

jelsky@luc.edu

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Call for Papers

STARDOM AND FANDOM

Southwest Popular / American Culture Association (SWPACA)

44th Annual Conference, February 22-25, 2023

Marriott Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

http://www.southwestpca.org

Submissions open on August 15, 2022

Proposal submission deadline: October 31, 2022

Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 44th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.  For a full list of subject areas, area descriptions, and Area Chairs, please visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/

The Area Chair for Stardom and Fandom invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of stardom or fandom. The list of ideas below is limited, so if you have an idea that is not listed, please suggest the new topic. We are an interdisciplinary area and encourage submissions from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Topics might include:

Studies of individual celebrities and their fans, both current and historical

Studies focused on specific fandoms – films, television programs, books, bands, etc.

Fandom and loss – how fans cope when beloved things come to an end

The reciprocal relationship between stars and fans

Impact of celebrity and fame on identity construction, reconstruction and sense of self

Reality television, YouTube celebrities, Influencers and the changing definition of ‘stardom’

The impact of social media and various platforms on celebrity/fan interaction

Celebrity/fame addiction as cultural change

The intersection of stars and fans in virtual and physical spaces (Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, conventions)

Celebrity and the construction of persona

Pedagogical approaches to teaching stardom and fandom

Fans, Stans, Antis and ‘haters’

Fan shame, wank, fandom policing, and purity culture in fandom spaces

Gendered constructions of stars and fans

Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction

All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca

For details on using the submission database and on the application process in general, please see the Proposal Submission FAQs and Tips page at http://southwestpca.org/conference/faqs-and-tips/

Individual proposals for 15-minute papers must include an abstract of approximately 200-500 words. Including a brief bio in the body of the proposal form is encouraged, but not required.  

For information on how to submit a proposal for a roundtable or a multi-paper panel, please view the above FAQs and Tips page.  

The deadline for submissions is October 31, 2022.  

SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2023.  SWPACA also offers travel fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/

Registration and travel information for the conference will be available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/conference-registration-information/.

For 2023, we are excited to be at a new venue, the Marriott Albuquerque (2101 Louisiana Blvd NE, Albuquerque NM 87110), which boasts free parking and close proximity to dining, shopping and other delights. In addition, please check out the organization’s peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, at http://journaldialogue.org/

If you have any questions about the Stardom and Fandom area, please contact its Area Chair, Dr. Lynn Zubernis, Professor, West Chester University, at lzubernis@wcupa.edu. If you have general questions about the conference, please contact us at support@southwestpca.org, and a member of the executive team will get back to you.

We look forward to receiving your submissions!

Contact Info: 

Lynn Zubernis, PhD

Professor, West Chester University

1160 McDermott Drive, Ste 102

West Chester PA 19380

Contact Email: 

lzubernis@wcupa.edu

URL: 

http://www.southwestpca.org

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Deadline for Submissions October 31, 2022

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Deadline for Submissions Oct. 31, 2022

Call for Papers
Narrative Matters Conference 2023
Instrumental Narratives: Narrative Studies and the Storytelling Boom
Tampere University, Finland, 15–17 June 2023
https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/

Welcome to the 11th Narrative Matters conference at Tampere!

The eleventh Narrative Matters conference is hosted by Tampere University (Finland) and co-organized by the Instrumental Narratives consortium project, SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, and Narrare: Centre for Interdisciplinary Narrative Studies.

The conference positions narrative scholars in the midst of the storytelling boom. Everyone is urged to share their story today, from consumers to multinational corporations, from private citizens to nation states. Storytelling consultants are thriving in today’s storytelling economy, but where are narrative scholars? Do the professional analyzers and theorizers of narrative have a say in the current storytelling boom? How to engage in a societal dialogue and debate as a narrative scholar?

The conference will provide a platform for scholars to both seek new applications that might appeal to diverse audiences and to critically reflect on the instrumentalization of narrative studies. Most narrative scholars agree on the rich affordances of storytelling: narrative is a compact and intuitive form for sharing detailed, personal experiences as well as collective, community-forming ideas and outlooks. Thus narrative studies approaches lend generous support to the instrumentalization and commercialization of narrative form in business, politics, media, and personal development. Yet narrative may just as well be put to uses that are dubious if not dangerous. The widespread, uncritical use of narratives of personal experience in journalism and social media may have unintended and unanticipated consequences. Experientiality may come at the cost of informativeness. Furthermore, while narratives are ideally suited to conveying the complexity of human experience, the complexity of large social interactions or material processes, such as climate change, easily exceeds the capacity of storytelling. Now that the benefits of storytelling have caught the public imagination and are recognized in various professional practices, narrative scholarship is in a good position to disseminate critical practices for the analysis of the forms and contexts of storytelling as well.

We should also look into future narrative possibilities. The 21st century will no doubt be the era of social media and shared personal narratives, and therefore we should look for productive ways of connecting the personal with the political. How, for example, to bridge the gap between individual particularity and supra-individual concerns at the limits of narrative, such as the climate crisis and global inequality? How to conceptualize and control the afterlife of narratives determined by digital forms of narrative agency? Will new forms of narrative speculation direct our actions as citizens, consumers, and collectives? Which roles will be allotted to specific artistic, digital, and quotidian genres of storytelling? Are these new narrative genres and practices changing the ways people share their experience and use stories in the everyday? Are new affordances for narrative meaning making evolving?


We invite narrative scholars across disciplines to address the following (and related) issues:

  *   storytelling boom and its social relevance
  *   novel ways of storytelling today
  *   emergent methods, ideas, and issues in narrative studies
  *   sociological analysis of curated storytelling
  *   the study of storytelling rights and privileges; re-thinking of empathy
  *   narrative and post-truth
  *   narrative consultancy business; storytelling self-help and manuals
  *   story-critical reading in narrative studies; story-critical tools for audiences
  *   popularizing narrative theory and practices
  *   social life of narratives vs. analysis of individual texts
  *   narrative and action: political narratives, positioning and counter-narratives
  *   professional narratives and narratives of professions refigured
  *   the limits and affordances of narrative in making sense of illness and health
  *   the limits and affordances of narrative in addressing the environmental crisis
  *   uses and risks of viral storytelling and social media sharing
  *   discourse on well-being and cognitive benefits of literature
  *   the potential of fiction in analysing and resisting the narrative boom


The social events include a lake cruise to Viikinsaari island – dinner, sauna & swim!

TRAVEL AND ACCOMMODATION
–  2 hour train ride from the Helsinki airport
–  direct flights to Tampere via 11 hubs
–  strong hotel capacity in the campus area

Conference webpage / CFP and submission link: https://events.tuni.fi/narrativematters2023/call-for-papers/
CFP OPEN UNTIL OCTOBER 31, 2022!
Conference fee EUR 220 (faculty) / EUR 120 (student)

Pre-conference workshops, hosted by Jens Brockmeier, Alexandra Georgakopoulou, Stefan Iversen & Ann Phoenix, will take place on Wednesday, June 14th. More information on registration and participation will be available by the end of September 2022!

Main organizers:
Maria Mäkelä, Matti Hyvärinen & Mari Hatavara (Tampere University, Narrare)
Hanna Meretoja (University of Turku, SELMA)
Merja Polvinen (University of Helsinki)
The Academy of Finland Consortium Project Instrumental Narratives https://instrumentalnarratives.wordpress.com/

Please send your paper and panel proposals by October 31, 2022! Here is the link to the submission form<https://www.lyyti.in/narrativematters2023cfp>

On behalf of the organizing team,

Hanna Meretoja


———————-
Hanna Meretoja
Professor of Comparative Literature, Director of SELMA: Centre for the Study of Storytelling, Experientiality and Memory, University of Turku, Finland
MAE (Member of Academia Europaea)
Tel. +358 50 329 1783
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ethics-of-storytelling-9780190649364?lang=en&cc=us

Call for Papers: “Am I Invisible?” Voices Society Silences  

deadlines for submissions: 

October 15, 2022 (Pre-Submission Ideas, Proposals, and Abstracts Deadline)

November 15, 2022 (Deadline for Drafts) 

contact email: 

SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com 

In this special issue of _Survive and Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative Medicine_ (Vol. 8, slated for publication 2023; full schedule below), we ask students, educators, caregivers, victims/survivors, advocates, first responders, and all others who feel they are invisible to bring light to their experiences for others to see. 

In an era of “me first” and social media filters that make snapshots seem like a perfect life–it is easy for people to feel and question if they are invisible in their pain. It is easy for people to feel the weight of society silencing your cries for help, and the increasing burden making the air too heavy to breathe. We seek to provide a microphone for those who wish to lighten their weight by acknowledging their experiences, to help others feel validated in knowing they are not alone, and to help folks know they are not invisible.

In this project, we are inspired by the work of the What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Survivor podcast (available at https://menaspeacemakers.podbean.com/), whose mission is to empower survivors/victims, and help people know they are not alone in what they are going through. The types of traumas discussed on the podcast are not limited to any specific type of trauma. 

Contributors might explore these questions and other questions of their own: 

• What would I say if the world would listen?
• What would I share if I didn’t fear the shame of ____?
• What would I say to those who are starting the journey, I am healing from?
• What is my story from trauma to healing?
• How might my journey have gone if people would have helped me when I needed it?
• What makes me feel invisible while in plain sight?
• What lies beneath the mask I feel obliged to wear?
• What is it society silences me from saying about___?
• How can I help others who are enduring what I have?
• How can we help others from experiencing the trauma I am?
• What has healing been like for me?
• How does my trauma weigh me down still?
• What they don’t tell you about being a survivor?

We especially would like to hear from people who have/are experiencing trauma (please note: authors can use a pseudonym). The truth is that the majority of us have or will experience trauma; the unfortunate truth is also that people tell us our trauma is not actually trauma. Trauma is trauma, and we want to help folks know they are not invisible, that we see you and you are not alone. We also want to give hope to others through sharing the journey of healing. Providing validation for those who might be hearing “It’s in the past move on.” or something else that minimizes their experience(s). Not asking folks to reopen wounds, but rather name them and share how the trauma has impacted your life. We encourage folks to share the ups and downs of their personal story on surviving and thriving. 

SUBMISSION DEADLINE

-October 15, 2022:  Deadline for Ideas, Proposals, and Abstracts.  Authors who submit by October 15 will receive early feedback to help them grow, expand and develop ideas.

Submit to: SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com and to dbeard@d.umn.edu

-November 15th, 2022:  Deadline for Completed Work.  You do not need to have submitted an abstract to submit work on this deadline.

Submit to: https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/survive_thrive/ 

Summer 2023:  Projected Publication

SUBMISSION REQUIREMENTS

“Submissions” may include text (poetry, essay, creative nonfiction, scholarly argument) video, audio, or image files that express the aims and scope of the journal. Submissions cannot have been previously published.

A FEW SUGGESTED READINGS, in alphabetical order:

• A Road Accident
  • https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/5olpi9/
• A Buoy and a Lifehouse
  • https://youtu.be/zuBV-9_9bII
• Am I Invisible?
  • https://youtu.be/k-2PslNeWjA
• After Trauma: Survivor Stories
  • https://www.aftertrauma.org/survivors-stories/survivors-stories
• Blog Stories: Our Wave
  • https://stories.ourwave.org/
• Inmates learning and dealing with their own childhood trauma
  • https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/public-safety/2021/09/12/prison-project-teaches-inmates-about-childhood-trauma-and-its-effects
• Podcast: What They Don’t Tell You About Being a Survivor
  • https://menaspeacemakers.podbean.com/
• Poems About Abuse
  • https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poems/sad/abuse/
• Virtual Exhibit: Capturing My Healing
  • https://discover.ourwave.org/exhibit/capturing-my-healing

ABOUT SURVIVE AND THRIVE: A JOURNAL FOR MEDICAL HUMANITIES AND NARRATIVE AS MEDICINE

Survive & Thrive: A Journal for Medical Humanities and Narrative as Medicine aims to provide opportunities for sharing research, artistic work, pedagogical dialogue, and the practices of medical humanities and narrative as medicine. The journal serves a mission in education and the practice of humanities as they relate to illness, injury, and trauma. One of the primary aims of the journal is to bring medical humanities and narrative medicine to patients, survivors, and caregivers. Its emphasis, therefore, is on patients and survivors and their needs, and while aware of and supporting professional medical education, the journal is most concerned with an audience broader than an academic audience. We encourage physicians and others in the medical profession to practice Narrative as Medicine by submitting their work, especially when it encourages them to be artists – visual, performance, and literary. 

Project co-edited by:

Laura Anderson, SurviveAndThriveHealing@gmail.com

David Beard, DBeard@d.umn.edu 

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Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2022

I am thrilled to announce that my fabulous colleague Tripthi Pillai and I are co-editing a new Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing (to be published in summer 2024). Please see the cfp below, consider sending us an abstract, and/or share widely with your networks!

Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing 
Editors: Tripthi Pillai and Ina Seethaler 

We invite abstracts for chapters of previously unpublished and original work to be included in the new Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing, which is under contract to be published in July 2024 as part of the Routledge Literature Companions series. 
Covering both established and emerging topics and methodologies, The Routledge Companion to Global Women’s Writing equips readers with interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches to women’s writing in the global context. Movements and experiences shaping the twenty-first century assert the urgent need for expanding and re-envisioning existing academic and social definitions as well as cultural perceptions of gender, location, and creative expression. In response to this growing need felt by diverse communities across the world, the collection forges new directions in and conceptualizations of identity, experience, and practice. Specifically, we welcome contributions that engage the three principle aspects informing the collection—“global,” “women,” and “writing”—in inclusive ways that not only broaden readers’ understanding of these key identities and concepts but also enable them to explore the underappreciated connections among them. Towards this end, the editors seek a multiplicity of voices from a variety of disciplines and geocultural landscapes. Similarly, we welcome with enthusiasm diverse perspectives, positionalities, and approaches, ranging from commentary on dominant/key debates to exploratory work on budding and innovative practices of global women’s writing.  
Each section of the handbook offers a broad range of topics that are globally applicable and provide critical and creative access to the nexus of women’s writing.  
Possible sections and topics include but are not limited to: 

1. Bodies: 
   1. Disability and women’s self-expression 
   2. Global perspectives on healthcare 
   3. Spirituality, religion, and ritual  
   4. Transgender poetics and politics 
       
2. Locations: 
   1. Language, borders, and migration 
   2. Domesticity and negotiations of home 
   3. Ecologies and environments 
   4. Carceral experiences  
       
3. Media Landscapes: 
   1. Body art as authorship and activism 
   2. Graphic writings 
   3. Women in gaming 
   4. Social media and global communication  
       
4. Disruptive Canvases:  
   1. Textiles as texts  
   2. Storytelling through graffiti/murals/poster art  
   3. Global foodways 
   4. Artifacts and experiences of war 
       
5. Movements of Resistance: 
   1. Global writing and #metoo 
   2. Grassroots activism and movements 
   3. Education and liberatory/oppressive practices  
   4. Law, justice, and policy
   5.  

We are especially interested in contributions from authors at various stages of their careers who embrace interdisciplinary approaches and/or adopt practices of citational justice.  
Please send an abstract of up to 350 words as well as a 200-word biography to tpillai@coastal.edu and iseethale@coastal.edu by October 15, 2022. Contributors will be notified by 15 November 2022 of their abstracts’ acceptance. Completed chapters of up to 6000 words will be expected by May 15, 2023. Some flexibility exists regarding word count, especially in the case of contributions that discuss non-dominant identities, geographies, and/or writing practices. Feel free to reach out to the editors with any queries.  

Ina C. Seethaler, Ph.D. (she, her, hers)

Associate Professor/Director of Women’s and Gender Studies

HTC Honors College
Coastal Carolina University
Kearns 104B
PO Box 261954, Conway, SC 29528
iseethale@coastal.edu
843-349-6919

The land on which Coastal Carolina University stands is part of the traditional territory of the Waccamaw Indian People.

We honor them and express our gratitude to the ancestors who lived here in the past,

the Waccamaw Indian People today, and the generations to come

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Disobedient Lives, Disorderly Archives: Social Justice Agency in Archival Spaces and Arts

ROUND TABLE at the 54th Annual NEMLA (Northeast Modern Language Association) Convention, to be held March 23rd-26th in Niagara Falls, NY, US.

deadline for submissions: 

September 30, 2022

contact email: 

jlmason1@buffalo.edu

Abstract: This roundtable will bring together scholars interested in developing and studying archives that push the boundaries of what we consider the archive. At the roundtable, through our work, we will consider questions that arise within archival practices and arts, such as: what constitutes or counts as an archive, what kinds of archival delineations should be drawn, pushed back against, or ruptured, and, perhaps most importantly, what is or should be the role of the archive in combating systemic injustice and advancing social justice? The roundtable seeks to bring together scholars across disciplines and community activists and archivists who are interested in the relationship between social justice activism and the archive, those who are building archives or deconstructing archives or imagining new and different archives with the goal of helping communities and those whose lives have been hidden or suppressed or ignored completely within archives.Archivist-activists and scholars interested in the political and social role of the archive, especially those whose projects are geared toward utilizing the archive as mechanism or space for social justice activism are invited to submit proposals that demonstrate the connection between their social justice concerns and their archival work and interests. The roundtable will be geared toward scholars and activists engaging the archive, in both material, corporeal and immaterial, conceptual senses. It will allow archivists and scholar-activists alike to come together to share and make wisdom concerning the use of the archive as a space for shaping and advancing social change, and for changing the social and material conditions of communities that have been marginalized, historically.
 

LINK to CFP/to submit: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/1979

Contact: jlmason1@buffalo.edu

Organizers/Co-Chairs: Nicole Crevar and Jessica Lowell Mason

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The Art of Non/Resilience for People with Disabilities
 

Northeast Modern Language Association Conference

March 23-26, 2023. Niagara Falls, NY

deadline for submissions: 

September 30, 2022

contact email: 

mariaguarino07@gmail.com

Submit abstract here: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/20018

What is resilience for people with disabilities? What is recovery? 

Narratives of illness, trauma and disability are often framed to emphasize recovery. Reflecting on resiliency, constructed ideas of normalcy, and “crip time,” Ellen Samuels writes: “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” (2017). 

In working with disabled performers, disability scholar and artist Petra Kuppers notes the connection between the material oppression experienced by people with disabilities and the performance space. She writes:

“Many of the performers’ physical experiences mirrored their silencing in, and exclusion from, representation. Some had no space for themselves, their bodies, their movements in the social and physical environment. They are excluded from life alone, from getting an apartment; conformed to a timetable of contact with medical practitioners, or the even more rigorous timetable of pills and injection. Their bodies can be invaded, as the law allows them to be drugged against their will and involuntarily hospitalized. Their physical and mental privacy is often under threat” (2005).

Kuppers suggests there may be an added level of invisibility for people with disabilities because of the likely invasion of privacy through the process of disclosure. In offering up this context, Kuppers raises many questions about the production and spectacle of arts by people with disabilities. How do we see disability? How can we understand the tension of disclosure and hypervisibility? How do we build safer and more comfortable spaces for people with disabilities to present their art? How do relationships change after disclosure, and/or how do we recognize the need to pivot in states of crisis and illness? How do we recognize the work of disability artists? 

In his poem, “I am too pretty for some Ugly Laws,” Lateef McLeod speaks to these experiences of both invisibility, hypervisibility, and historical oppression. He says: “My mere presence//of erratic moving limbs//and drooling smile//used to be scrubbed off the public pavement” (2018).

Through writing, poetry, acting, and many other mediums, we have the opportunity to convert the disabled bodymind from being solely what disabled performer Catherine Cole calls a “performer in a script [they] did not write” (2003). We can engage further and sit, stand, walk, seize, lay, etc in these spaces of disability, and ask what resilience and recovery means. We can also ask not only how disabled bodyminds are resilient, but how they are not.

This is a call for creative submissions that explore representations of disability, resilience, and recovery. Submissions can include, but are not limited to: poetry, art, film etc. What is resilience? What is recovery?

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Deadline for Submissions Sept. 30, 2022

Call for Chapter Contributions

Diaspora/Diasporas: Cross-cultural Ibero-Caribbean Texts and Context
Editors: Irene M. F. Blayer (PhD), Brock University; Jo-Anne Ferreira (PhD), UWI Trinidad and Tobago; Dulce M. S. Scott (PhD), Anderson University
 
We envision this edited collection to be interdisciplinary and multidimensional, thus incorporating a set of diasporic areas of research within the Ibero-Caribbean context. Chapters are double-blind peer refereed. An invitation to submit a paper in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; this is dependent on the review process. Unpublished and original papers, in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French are welcome. Proposals that treat other topics not included below but that are of thematic relevance are welcome.

• Storying the Ibero-Caribbean diaspora
• Cultural histories in the context of diasporas and globalization
• Place, history and collective memories /
• Textualized identity
• Testimonies, diaries, chronicles, letters, autobiographies
• Migration and identity: the role of geographical place 
• The diasporic imaginary: Self in the textual narrative

• Interfacing literary dialogues
• Circulation and reception of diaspora literature
• Bilingualism and multilingualism
• Language and cultural identity
• Translation and the trials of identity
• Tradition and social change
• Material and non-material culture
• Sociology and psychology of the migrant experience
• Oral vs. written narratives
• Cross-generational narratives/ diaries, chronicles, letters 
• The economics of language policy in immigration
• Language, dislocation, and exile
• Cross-generational narratives
• Ethnography of language
• Re-imagining Ibero-American Insular spaces/worlds

Submissions
The deadline for the receipt of abstracts (450-500 words) and a biographical note (300-350 words) is September 30, 2022.  Those invited to submit full chapters will be notified by December 30th, 2022.  
Complete chapter drafts should be approximately 4,500-6,500 words including endnotes and bibliography. Chapters must follow the MLA style rules, and will be due June 30, 2023. 
Prospective contributors should email all inquiries and submissions to: ibero.caribbean.diaspora@gmail.com

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Studies in Travel Writing is seeking an Editor-in-Chief.

Routledge–Taylor and Francis

Applications must be submitted by 30 September.

Think this could be you? Read more and apply today.

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/WhctKKXgmLchNXmqgZMSGRFJPZqmWpvbPVpVcLKRxRGWrwzxBjlbpxKgchKwHRXFTCwHGwL

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Deadline for Submissions September 30, 2022

Call for Chapter Contributions

Diaspora/Diasporas: Cross-cultural Ibero-Caribbean Texts and Context

Editors: Irene M. F. Blayer (PhD), Brock University; Jo-Anne Ferreira (PhD), UWI Trinidad and Tobago; Dulce M. S. Scott (PhD), Anderson University
 
We envision this edited collection to be interdisciplinary and multidimensional, thus incorporating a set of diasporic areas of research within the Ibero-Caribbean context. Chapters are double-blind peer refereed. An invitation to submit a paper in no way guarantees that the paper will be published; this is dependent on the review process. Unpublished and original papers, in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French are welcome. Proposals that treat other topics not included below but that are of thematic relevance are welcome.

• Storying the Ibero-Caribbean diaspora
• Cultural histories in the context of diasporas and globalization
• Place, history and collective memories /
• Textualized identity
• Testimonies, diaries, chronicles, letters, autobiographies
• Migration and identity: the role of geographical place 
• The diasporic imaginary: Self in the textual narrative

• Interfacing literary dialogues
• Circulation and reception of diaspora literature
• Bilingualism and multilingualism
• Language and cultural identity
• Translation and the trials of identity
• Tradition and social change
• Material and non-material culture
• Sociology and psychology of the migrant experience
• Oral vs. written narratives
• Cross-generational narratives/ diaries, chronicles, letters 
• The economics of language policy in immigration
• Language, dislocation, and exile
• Cross-generational narratives
• Ethnography of language
• Re-imagining Ibero-American Insular spaces/worlds

Submissions

The deadline for the receipt of abstracts (450-500 words) and a biographical note (300-350 words) is September 30, 2022.  Those invited to submit full chapters will be notified by December 30th, 2022.  
Complete chapter drafts should be approximately 4,500-6,500 words including endnotes and bibliography. Chapters must follow the MLA style rules, and will be due June 30, 2023. 

Prospective contributors should email all inquiries and submissions to: ibero.caribbean.diaspora@gmail.com

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Resilient Bodies: Beyond the Margins of Life Writing

deadline for submissions: 

September 30, 2022

Northeast Modern Language Association

contact email: 

kasia.peric@gmail.com

Recent discussions in autobiography studies have increasingly shifted their focus to non-conventional forms of self-expression. In broader terms, life writing, which aims to reveal the self in all of its complexity, has inevitably evolved from a highly conventional genre to an open and ever-expanding practice that connects writing with other modes of representation. Discussions on autobiography have progressively become inclusive of non-literary forms of expression, such as performance, body and endurance art.

The works of artists such as Marina Abramovic, Abel Azcona, Cindy Sherman, and Sophie Calle, just to name a few, experiment with various conventions of visual and live art to push self-expression beyond the margins of writing and into the public domain. Many of these artists, such as Marina Abramovic and Abel Azcona – in particular through their “endurance art” installations – deal with themes of physical and emotional resilience to address the question of personal identity. Similarly, the performance art installations of Cindy Sherman and Sophie Calle question the stereotypes of self-representation and test the limits of autobiography by experimenting with different identities in different social contexts.

This session encourages the study of French and Francophone performance artists who work in the autobiography field which is an area that has been explored very little to date. Its purpose is to stimulate an interdisciplinary research and exchange between scholars from different fields and to promote French and Francophone art and culture.

This session welcomes interdisciplinary research that examines various forms of self-expression from different fields of inquiry such as literature, the visual and fine arts. Proposals should be submitted in 250 words max.

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Deadline for Submissions Sept. 30, 2022

Jean Monnet University, Saint-Etienne, France
 
Thursday, 11 of May 2023^th and Friday, 12^th of May 2023
 
“Virginia Woolf: For a Poetics & Politics of Intimacy”
 
International Conference – Société d’Études Woolfiennes

Call for Papers
Organised by ECLLA (Études du Contemporain en Littératures, Langues, Arts)

with the support of the SEW and of CORPUS (UR-UPJV 4295)


Confirmed keynote speakers:
Elsa Högberg, Uppsala University and
Christine Reynier, Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University



“They’ve just sent the second batch of proofs [of Passenger to Teheran] which I have swallowed at a gulp. […] I kept saying ‘How I should like to know that woman’ and then thinking ‘But I do’, and then ‘No, I don’t– not altogether the woman who writes this.’ I didn’t know the extent of your subtleties […]. Indeed it is odd that now, having read this, I have picked up a good many things I had missed in private life. What are they, I wonder, the very intimate things, one says in print? There’s a whole family of them. Its [sic] the proof to me, of being a writer, that one expresses them in print only […].” (The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 3, 290-291)

This excerpt from a letter written to Vita Sackville-West on the 15^th of September 1926, while Virginia Woolf was proof-reading her intimate friend’s account of journeying through Persia prior to its publication by the Hogarth Press, is a telling illustration of the rich entanglement between intimacy and writing opening onto the numerous ways in which Woolf explores this question. She expresses here the fundamental difficulty of knowing the other (even when the other is an intimate friend), which is also at the core of her reflection upon characterization, and the necessity of turning to the written word both to express one’s own mind and to grasp the subtleties of the human mind. The paradoxical necessity of going public in order to express one’s private thoughts explains Woolf’s reticence to commit herself to autobiography: “Also I’m uneasy at taking this role in the public eye – afraid of autobiography.” (TheDiary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 5, 141). Yet at the same time, intimacy is defined as being beyond words; intimacy is “knowledge” says Lily Briscoe as she conjures up the figure of Mrs Ramsay while resting her head on the woman’s lap, “but nothing that could be written in any language known to men.” (To the Lighthouse, 305). Yet again, that type of knowledge proves to be equally fallacious: “Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy? This is knowledge?” (To the Lighthouse, 390).

Expressing life, the mind (her own and the others’) is indissociable from Woolf’s modernist project to reshape the novel and injunction to both the reader of modernist fiction and the writers of her own spiritual generation to “look within.” In her effort to define “the proper stuff of fiction” she claims that the spirit of life should be conveyed with “as little mixture of the alien and external as possible,” (“Modern Fiction” Essays 4, 160) enjoining her contemporaries to stress the inward life of their characters, in keeping with the etymology of the adjective “intimate” (which stems from the Latin “interior” and from the superlative “intimus”, the most interior or the inmost.)
It is precisely with this injunction in mind that we propose to analyse intimacy and its political and ethical ramifications in Woolf’s oeuvre. For intimacy is as central to Woolf’s essays as it is to her fiction, and particularly her feminist essays. Both genres work through the political fabric of the intimate and in this respect might be seen to produce an original form of materialist feminism. Woolf’s radical endeavours flourished when she also had to navigate the atmosphere of “fear and suspicion” (VW in Marshik 3) that prevailed until the late 1920s, when censors and moralists still held a strong power over authors, printers and publishers as well as the general public (see Pease, Potter, Marshik & Pease). The literary strategies Woolf developed to circumvent censorship affect her representation of an embodied intimacy, turning the expression of the personal into an inevitably political gesture.

In A Room of One’s Own she voices women’s experiences and concerns by adopting the guise of a persona, a certain Mary Beton, giving her a woman’s body in direct contact with the issues she seeks to theorise. It is also obvious that the privacy of the room of one’s own is in fact spurious as the outside world keeps impinging upon it, just as the letter written in answer to a middle-aged educated man in Three Guineas is in fact a very public kind of address. The frontier between inside and outside, confidentiality and publicity is very porous indeed, and Woolf’s political commitment is deeply rooted in her own personal experience as an educated man’s daughter.

The question of intimacy has been central to Woolf studies and to modernist studies since the late 20^th century (Bagguley and Seymour, Berlant, Frost, Illouz, Minow-Pinkney among others), but it seems to have gained momentum in recent years with the emergence of the field of affect studies, with publications ranging from Jessica Berman’s 2004 article, to Elsa Högberg’s 2020 Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy, to Jane Goldman’s 2021 chapter in Högberg’s Modernist Intimacies. Focusing primarily on four of Woolf’s modernist novels, Högberg’s 2020 study compellingly shows that the writing of intimacy and interiority is “configured as an aesthetic, but also ethical process.” In the wake of this thinking, arguing that Woolf “places intimacy at the centre of public and political as well as private relations”, we propose to examine how Woolf’s conception of intimacy, of human relations and of the self informs not only her fiction, but also her essays, auto/ biographies, diaries and correspondence. Woolf’s texts convey an ethical and a political stance which is inseparable from her poetics foregrounding introspection in a complex nexus of tensions and paradoxes which may be expressed in terms of the Woolfian concept of “vacillation” between within and without, secrecy and revelation, concealment and disclosure, the private and the public, the personal and the impersonal, the self and the other. These questions might equally be extended to consider the reception of Woolf’s work in France and the nature of the imprint of the intimate in the French response to Woolf, as it meets contemporary feminist thinking anachronistically (see Favre, Gérard, Jones, Lasserre, Meyer)

This conference intends to bring together Woolf scholars ready to engage with the subject of intimacy from diverse theoretical standpoints. We therefore invite papers on the literary, aesthetic, ethical, political, philosophical and more broadly cultural aspects of Woolf’s œuvre, its origins, conception and reception both then and now.


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

*Following the first definition one finds in the OED of the word “intimacy” as “the state of being personally intimate, intimate friendship or acquaintance, familiar intercourse, close familiarity”: relationship between Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury; an ethics of intimacy. Influence of George Moore’s Principia Ethica, the “Memoir Club contributions”, the Bloomsbury group founded on the idea of friendship and truth telling. Thursday evenings as a catalyst for the group’s politics of style. In connection with the new domesticity invented by Bloomsbury, one could also look at real or imaginary places of intimacy, Hyde Park Gate, Monk’s House, Charleston, etc.

Virginia Woolf and friends/family: emulation and influence of Leslie Stephen, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa and Clive Bell, Roger Fry, etc. Role played by Leonard Woolf in her literary career, in furthering her fame even posthumously (the way he shaped her diaries in A Writer’s Diary, how he represented her in his own lengthy autobiography). The Hogarth Press and its impact on Woolf’s work.
*Life-writing and autobiography: how to represent the other’s/one’s own intimacy. How Woolf’s conception of intimacy led her to revolutionize biography: the New Biography and her poetics of the individual. Diary writing vs letter writing: confessional aspect of these laboratories of the self and of her fiction.

Role played by the editors of her correspondence/diaries, by her biographers, in shaping an “intimate” Woolf. The way her papers were published (trimmed and censored or published in their entirety), the way we are given access to Woolf’s innermost thoughts and what different literary critical periods have made of them, what these editorial processes say about Woolf, but also about our own reception of her texts/images and about our own era.

*The fascination exerted by Woolf’s intimacy in recent works “recycling” her: her madness, her same-sex friendships are presented as a filter through which we are invited to read her fiction and essays. The way novelists have used her life as an inspiration; the modernist icon revisited (cf. The White Garden, a Novel of Virginia Woolf by Stephanie Barron, The Hours by Peter Cunningham or the recent movie Vita and Virginia, which, although they give a fictional, warped, partial and possibly erroneous version of Woolf, nevertheless add a complementary touch to the way Woolf is seen as part of the canon).

*Woolf’s photographic practice and conception of photography: Reticence towards self-portrayal and intimacy but photography as a necessary means to record private daily life. Visual apprehension of the self/of the other, role of her albums in her creation of a family romance. Link with Julia Margaret Cameron, role of her father’s Mausoleum Book in creating a visual genealogy redefining familiarity.
*Woolf’s aesthetic experiments and post-impressionism: towards an embodied formalism.

*Corporeality, body and mind, the question of “incarnation”: how intimacy, love, the body are represented, or transcended, negated or circumvented but always fundamental in her oeuvre as sensory experience is seen as necessary to artistic creation. The imprint of the intimate in contemporary readings of Woolf and feminist responses to Woolf.

*Woolf’s feminism as deriving from her ethics of intimacy, link between political space and private space. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas: the narrator is embodied, telling her story rather than his story, the personal is political: gender and sex, the androgynous mind as the naturally creative mind. Giving voice to women’s private experiences.

*Literature and psychoanalysis: relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis, simultaneous development of modern psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis and literary modernism. Resonances with Lacan’s concept of “extimité.” Woolf’s fiction as exploration of the unconscious (cf. “Modern Fiction” in which she claims that her generation should explore “the dark places of psychology.” (Essays 4, 162). Links with Kristeva’s definition of intimacy as a “continuous copresence between the sensible and the intelligible – a true continuity, beyond division.” (Intimate Revolt, 47)

*Intimacy also means “closeness of observation, knowledge or the like” (cf. OED definition 1c) which may trigger reflections upon the intimacy between reader and writer: the reader’s affective investment in the novel’s content, link with the theory of reception. Intersection between the reader’s quest for meaning and the narrator’s quest for character. How reading and writing as intimate acts are possibly conducive to politically subversive acts of revolt. Woolf’s own practice as a reader, reviewer, and its effects on her writing.
*Modernizing characterization: “Life and the Novelist” or how to express the character’s interiority, how to cope with the unknowability of the other in a creative way. Woolf’s “tunnelling process” and her “digging out beautiful caves.” (Diary 2, 272, 263).
*Intimacy and modernism: looking within, expressing the modernist inward strand. The stylistic revolution of the stream of consciousness in promoting interiority, introspection and free indirect speech as a mode of intimate story-telling and in the twenties circumventing censorship.

We welcome proposals for papers preferably in English on the above-mentioned topics or any other topic which you may find relevant to the theme of the conference.

Please send abstracts of about 300 words together with a short biographical notice to woolfintimacy@gmail.com by 30^th September 2022.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15^th  November 2022.


Contact :

Floriane Reviron-Piégay floriane.reviron.piegay@univ-st-etienne.fr
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio annemarie.dibiasio@gmail.com


Scientific committee:

Elizabeth Abel (University of California, Berkeley)
Catherine Bernard (Paris-Cité)
Anne Besnault (Rouen)
Rachel Bowlby (University College London)
Adèle Cassigneul (Toulouse)
Claire Davison (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Chantal Delourme (Paris-Nanterre)
Nadia Fusini (La Sapienza, Rome)
Maggie Humm (East London)
Mark Hussey (Pace University-New York)
Catherine Lanone (Sorbonne Nouvelle)
Marie Laniel (Picardie, Jules Verne)
Frédéric Regard (Paris-Sorbonne)
Floriane Reviron-Piégay (Jean Monnet, St Etienne)
Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio (Institut Catholique de Paris)


Works of reference:

BERLANT, Lauren. Intimacy. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2000.
BERMAN, Jessica. “Ethical Folds: Ethics; Aesthetics, Woolf,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 50, n°. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 151-72.
BERSANI, Leo & PHILLIPS, Adam. Intimacies. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2008.
DELOURME, Chantal. Et une phrase… Virginia Woolf, écrire dans l’entre-deux-guerres. Paris : ENS Éditions, 2021.
FAVRE, Valérie. Virginia Woolf et ses “petites sœurs” : Relire A Room of One’s Own au prisme de sa postérité littéraire, critique et féministe dans l’espace atlantique anglophone des années soixante à nos jours, PhD Dissertation, Lyon 2, 2021.

GÉRARD, Valérie. Les Formes du chaos : sur l’art politique de V. Woolf. MF Éditions, 2022.
GOLDMAN, Jane. “Burning Feminism: Virginia Woolf’s Laboratory of Intimacy” in HÖGBERG, Elsa, ed., Modernist Intimacies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021, pp. 52-73.
HÖGBERG, Elsa. Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy. London: Bloomsbury, 2020.
—, ed. Modernist Intimacies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021.
HUMM, Maggie. Talland House: A Novel. Berkeley, CA: She Writes Press, 2020.
ILLOUZ, Eva. Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. London: Polity Press, 2007.
JONES, Clara. Virginia Woolf: Ambivalent Activist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2017.
KRISTEVA, Julia. Intimate Revolt. The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, 1997. Trans. HERMAN, Jeanine. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
LASSERRE, Audrey. Histoire d’une littérature en mouvement : textes, écrivaines et collectifs éditoriaux du Mouvement de libération des femmes en France (1970-1981), PhD Dissertation, Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3, 2014.
LIGHT, Alison. Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury. London: Penguin Books, 2007.
MARSHIK, Celia.  British Modernism and Censorship. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.
MARSHIK, C. & PEASE, A. Modernism, Sex, and Gender. London: Bloomsbury, 2019.
MEYER, Suzel. Écrire l’histoire au féminin : autour de The Years de Virginia Woolf et des Années d’Annie Ernaux, PhD Dissertation, Strasbourg, 2020.
MINOW-PINKNEY, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers UP, 1987.
PEASE, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
POTTER, Rachel. Obscene Modernism. Literary Censorship & Experiment 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.
REYNIER, Christine. Virginia Woolf’s “Good Housekeeping” Essays. New York and London: Routledge, 2019.
SANGER, Tam & TAYLOR, Yvette, eds. Mapping Intimacies: Relations, Exchanges, Affects. London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013.
SEYMOUR, Julie & BAGGULEY, Paul, eds. Relating Intimacies: Power and Resistance. London: Macmillan, 1999.
WOLFE, Jesse. Bloomsbury, Modernism and the Reinvention of Intimacy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011.

(FWF-Project “Co-Producing and Using Identity Documents. Habsburg Monarchy/Austria ca. 1850-1938”)

The workshop deals with the co-production and use of identity documents from a historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Establishing the identity of persons was (and still is) fundamental for a variety of tasks and operations of the state. In the course of the last centuries, various forms of identification and registration became subject to ever more precise state regulations and were adapted or fully taken over by state authorities. Yet, at the same time, practices of identification, registration and categorization of individuals were never exclusively a matter of statehood and citizenship, subject to governmentality, bureaucracy, surveillance and migration control. Identity papers were not exclusively produced and used by or vis á vis state authorities. Historically, various parties could be (and remained) involved in practices of identification and registration, ranging from religious organizations, trade or occupational associations, employers, unions, political organisations, landlords, welfare organizations, companies, creditors, or recreation clubs. Such parties provided information, produced data, checked documents, or even issued their own papers. They fulfilled tasks assigned to them, while following or adopting regulations issued by authorities with (greater or lesser) enthusiasm or accuracy. At the same time, the parties involved in such tasks often pursued their own agendas, producing and using papers for their own purposes. Individuals – who in most cases are seen as wholly subjected to identification, surveillance, or control – contributed to the production of their official identities in a variety of ways: by complying with official directives and cooperating with authorities; by initiating administrative processes themselves, (co-)producing information, forging documents or dealing with missing or incoherent documents; and by avoiding or boycotting identification. It is not always apparent or conclusively established where in such entanglements state bureaucracy started or ended.

In order to investigate why certain forms of identification functioned historically as successful or failed, or were altered, or varied in an international context, the workshop will reflect on the diversity of contexts and constellations in which documents were produced and used and in which the parties involved interacted in consensus or conflict.

The workshop will take place from 22.9.to 23.9. 2022 at the University of Vienna (Main building, Universitätsring 1, 1010 Vienna, TP, seminar room 1 and 4 in a hybrid format.

Participation is free of charge, but registration is required. To register, please send an email to sigrid.wadauer@univie.ac.at before 12.9.2022.

Program

With the kind support of:

FWF – Der Wissenschaftsfonds

Stadt Wien, MA 7 – Kultur, Wissenschafts- und Forschungsförderung

University of Vienna (FSP Global History, Department of Economic and Social History)

Contact Info: 

PD Dr. Sigrid Wadauer

Department of Economic and Social History

University of Vienna

Universitätsring 1

1010 Vienna

Austria

https://www.sigridwadauer.com/

Contact Email: 

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Deadline for Submissions Sept. 10, 2022

Uppity Medieval Women Across the Globe  

International Congress on Medieval Studies (Michigan USA hybrid), and other potential conferences

(9/10/2022; 5/11-13/2023)

In 1998, Vicki Leon published Uppity Women of Medieval Times, providing brief vignettes of primarily European medieval women fitting the description. As the field of Medieval Studies has been taking a global turn, this proposal seeks to put European uppity women into a deeper and more substantial conversation with their global sisters, such as the Japanese Lady Murasaki Shikibu, the Indian Nur Jahan, the Nigerian Queen Amina, and the Arabic Walladabint al-Mustakfi, to name a few. Uppity medieval women transgress their patriarchally assigned positions of immanence, often with the pen, the sword, and through sex. In an attempt to break new ground, we seek contributions that explore uppity medieval women––both historical and fictional–– from global perspectives. Comparative perspectives that trace similar experiences are highly encouraged. Reading the Middle Ages from a broader vantage point that illustrates how women worldwide were facing comparable experiences and challenges helps us understand the Middle Ages and feminism through a new lens. 

Please email your 200-word abstract and a 100-word biography to Anita Obermeier (aobermei@unm.edu) and to Doaa Omran (Domran@unm.edu) by the 10th of September 2022. 

We are having online and face-to-face sessions at the International Congress on Medieval Studies (ICMS). Our two panels are titled “Assertive Medieval Women Across the Globe I” and “Assertive Medieval Women Across the Globe II (A Virtual Roundtable).” The deadline for abstract submission on the congress website is the 15th of September 2022. Here is the submission link: https://icms.confex.com/icms/2023/cfp.cgi

We are also considering organising panels at Leeds International Medieval Congress (IMC) https://www.imc.leeds.ac.uk/imc-2023/ and the Medieval Association of the Pacific (MAP) https://www.medievalpacific.org/annual-conference/ .

Since we are trying to get a critical manuscript for an edited volume, we are proposing this session for several conferences, although in different formats.  

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Deadline for Submissions, Sept. 1, 2022

The Amsterdam School of Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity.

Postdoctoral researcher Amsterdam Diaries: Self-representation, Cultural Diversity, and Migration

https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Postdoctoral-researcher-Amsterdam-Diaries-Self-representation%2C-Cultural-Diversity%2C-and-Migration/751074902/

Faculty/Services:  Faculty of Humanities

Educational level:  Promoted

Function type:  Academic Staff

Closing date:  1 September 2022

Vacancy number:  9819

The Amsterdam School of Regional, Transnational and European Studies (ARTES) currently has a vacant Postdoc researcher position as part of the broader field Cultural Heritage and Identity. Within this field the focus is on material and immaterial heritage, including digital Humanities and on Cultural Heritage and societal changes. ARTES is one of the five Research Schools within the Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research.

What are you going to do

You will be part of an interdisciplinary research team that collects and analyzes diaries of ordinary people of the 19th and 20th centuries who wrote about their daily lives in Amsterdam. In the light of Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary in 2025, the team investigates what diaries can tell us about lived and narrated experiences of Amsterdam as a multicultural city. We will use a flexible conception of ‘diary’ in order to include other forms of self-representation, such as drawings or self-recorded stories on cassette tape.

First, you will help organize a diary donating campaign in cooperation with the Dutch Diary Archive and the Amsterdam Museum in order to collect new diaries. We will focus on migrant ego-documents because these are underrepresented in archives and scholarly research. The task is to involve local communities and gain support to help build a more inclusive and diverse diary-collection. Knowledge of the history of migrants, as well as relevant languages, will be an asset.

Second, you will study representations of self and the city in a selection of diaries from the newly gained materials as well as from archives such as the Dutch Diary Archive, Stadsarchief, Joods historisch Museum, Atria, Niod, Black Archives, IHLIA, and xpatarchive. The aim is to understand how individuals with diverse socio-cultural backgrounds express feelings of (non-)belonging, and in what ways they narrate their experiences of (intercultural) spaces, encounters and connections and their sense of what is familiar and foreign.

Third, you will help developing tools from Digital Humanities to store and map historical information about diaries and diarists in their spatial and temporal contexts. You will contribute to creating a digital resource, similar to (or as part of) the Amsterdam Time Machine, which will enable users to ‘travel back in time and navigate the city on the levels of neighborhoods, streets, houses and rooms’ (https://www.amsterdamtimemachine.nl/). Ideally, this will connect stories from multiple perspectives to particular places such as streets, parks, bars and buildings.

Your tasks and responsibilities:

• conducting research, presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences and publishing two single-authored, peer reviewed articles;
• participating in meetings of the project research group and developing a shared database;
• co-organising knowledge dissemination activities.

What do you have to offer

Your experience and profile:

• a PhD in the Humanities;
• excellent research skills demonstrated by a track record of publishing in high-ranking journals and/or with leading presses or a demonstrable capacity to develop such a record;

• a strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
• enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
• excellent command English.

What can we offer you

The Postdoc researcher will be appointed at the Department of History, European Studies and Religious Studies of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Amsterdam and will conduct the research in ARTES. The employment contract will be for one year. Contingent on a positive performance evaluation the contract will be extended with one year. The employment contract is for 30,4-38 hours a week. Preferred starting date is 01 October 2022.

The gross monthly salary, based on 38 hours per week and relevant experience, ranges between € 3,974,00 to € 5,439,00. This sum does not include the 8% holiday allowance and the 8,3% year-end allowance. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities is applicable.

What else do we offer

• excellent possibilities for further professional development and education, including participation in a dedicated Research Training group;
• an enthusiastic, inspiring and professional academic team;
• the opportunity to collaborate with leading researchers at research institutes that – partly as a result of their interdisciplinary approach – are world renowned.

About us

The University of Amsterdam is the Netherlands’ largest university, offering the widest range of academic programmes. At the UvA, 30,000 students, 6,000 staff members and 3,000 PhD candidates study and work in a diverse range of fields, connected by a culture of curiosity.

The Faculty of Humanities provides education and conducts research with a strong international profile in a large number of disciplines in de field of language and culture. Located in the heart of Amsterdam, the faculty maintains close ties with many cultural institutes in the capital city. Research and teaching staff focus on interdisciplinary collaboration and are active in several teaching programmes.

Want to know more about our organisation? Read more about working at the University of Amsterdam.

Questions

Do you have any questions or do you require additional information? Please contact:

• dr. Guido Snel

Job application

If you feel the profile fits you, and you are interested in the job, we look forward to receiving your application. You can apply online via the link below. The deadline for applying for this vacancy is 01 September 2022.

Applications should include the following information (submitted in one pdf):

• A letter of motivation.
• A research proposal of 800-1000 words, explaining how you would approach the project thematically, conceptually and methodologically, within the timeline of the 2 years appointment.
• A full academic CV, including a list of publications.
• The names and contact details of two references who may be approached by the selection committee.

Only complete applications received within the response period via the link below will be considered.

The interviews will be held in the course of the first weeks of September 2022.

The UvA is an equal-opportunity employer. We prioritise diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for everyone. We value a spirit of enquiry and perseverance, provide the space to keep asking questions, and promote a culture of curiosity and creativity.

If you encounter Error GBB451, reach out to our HR Department directly. They will gladly help you continue your application.

No agencies please *

Call for Contributors

Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 393 (Twenty-First Century Indigenous Fiction Writers in the United States and Canada), edited by Derek C. Maus (State University of New York at Potsdam, which sits on unceded Haudenosaunee territory)

deadline for submissions: August 1, 2022

I am seeking scholars – a range that includes doctoral students through emeritus/emerita faculty – interested in contributing to a new volume in Gale’s Dictionary of Literary Biography series. Upon its contracted publication in the summer of 2023, this resource will fill a massive gap in the biographical and bibliographic coverage of contemporary Indigenous authors of fiction living and working within the settler nations of the United States and Canada. It has been nearly a quarter-century since volume 175 of this series covered “Native American Writers of the United States” (1997) and although a handful of major figures from the latter half of the twentieth century have been covered in other DLB volumes, no comprehensive volume dedicated to a broad overview of post-“Native American Renaissance” Indigenous writing has yet been produced as part of this important reference source.

With the publication of When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (ed. Joy Harjo, Leanne Howe, et al.) in 2020, Indigenous poetry received a major boost in mainstream visibility. Although the intent of that volume and the Dictionary of Literary Biography is somewhat different, my hope is that this volume can shine a similarly bright light on a broad sampling of Indigenous authors who have published works of fiction since 1997, the last time DLB published a volume exclusively focused on Indigenous writers.

I would especially like to use this volume to cover a number of emerging or otherwise lesser-known writers who have not received previous attention within this series. For this reason, the list of names for whom I am seeking bio-/bibliographic entries includes numerous authors whose published body of work to date includes only one or two book-length works, often ones that appeared in the last few years. It is absolutely essential to recognize and to recontextualize such eminent authors such as Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Linda Hogan, Thomas King, and Gerald Vizenor, all of whom have all continued publishing fiction since their inclusion in vol. 175. However, no adequate overview of the full diversity of fiction published by Indigenous authors in the past two decades exists and this volume is well-positioned to fill that gap. Therefore, I have included more names of authors than can ultimately be covered in the volume, but I have done so with the hope of casting as wide a net as possible. If there are other authors who you believe merit coverage, please do not hesitate in suggesting them to me as there are surely gaps in my own experience of contemporary Indigenous fiction.

Alongside authors of fairly conventional “literary” fiction, I have also included some authors primarily known for “young adult” fiction as well as some whose work is primarily graphic fiction. I have also included a handful of figures (e.g., Tomson Highway) who are known far more for their work in other genres than fiction. The essays in this collection should focus only on their subject’s published works of fiction since 1997, though there obviously will be occasions for making reference to earlier works and/or works in other genres/media.

In recognition of the added logistical and mental/emotional complications brought on by the upheaval in academic working conditions, completed essays for the collection are due as e-mail attachments by August 1, 2022. The word-counts (which include bibliographic data) included for each entry in the linked spreadsheet are fairly firm, though they can be exceeded in some exceptional instances if negotiated in advance. Gale compensates authors in this series for entries at a rate of $40 per 1000 words (as listed in the spreadsheet); thus, a 3000-word entry earns $120, a 5000-word entry earns $200, etc. I sincerely wish this could be more, but I am grateful that any resources are being set aside to make this project a reality, because it is long overdue.

If you are interested in contributing to this project, please send me an email at mausdc@potsdam.edu and I will send you the current list of “unclaimed” authors. If you have the time, the inclination, and the mental energy to contribute to this project, I sincerely invite you to do so. I am happy to answer any additional questions about the book, the series, or any other aspect of the project via e-mail. Derek C. Maus, editor   contact email: mausdc@potsdam.edu

Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”

The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:

July 10, 2022

lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz

The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.

Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:

– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons

The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture

Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).

The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022

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Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2022

Call for Papers for proposed panel for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2022

November 11-13, 2022 in Jacksonville, FL

Autobiography: Changes in Form and Meaning

This interdisciplinary panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of change within life writing. With the proliferation of modes available for what Anna Poletti has termed “self-life-inscription,” and a concurrent rise in hybrid genres such as autofiction that challenge the assumed boundary between truth and fiction in autobiographical narrative, it is clear that the scope of what is considered autobiography is changing. This panel seeks to articulate these changes and explore how they are impacting our understanding of the meaning and significance of life writing. Papers might explore changes in the medium of autobiography, such as social media, photography, film, graphic narratives, material collections, or performance. Papers might also address changes within established forms such as confession, memoir, the personal essay, or the diary. Theoretical considerations of change, transformation, or conversion within autobiography would also be welcome. By July 15^th, please submit an abstract of 250 words, a brief bio, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Kimberly Hall, Wofford College, at hallka@wofford.edu

The SAMLA Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront. For additional conference information, please see the SAMLA website: https://samla.memberclicks.net.

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CFP: Out of Confinement: Creativity in Constraint

Women in French Studies Special Issue (2024)

July 15, 2022

contact email:

youna_kwak@redlands.edu

We invite article submissions for a special topics issue of Women in French Studies (2024) to explore work created by confined women and work that represents confined women, from the early modern period to the present-day. The special issue will explore how the confinement of women as depicted in fictional and non-fictional texts (in any media) informs, reflects and interrogates gendered conditions of existence. How have confined women been represented in literature, film and art? What kind of thinking or writing is produced by women out of conditions of confinement? What are the impacts of confinement on creative production? How does physical confinement change how we consume texts?

In March 2020, the word confinement suddenly became an unwelcome part of our everyday lexicon, as lockdown, quarantine, and stay-at-home orders were issued worldwide to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Within the household, mandatory confinement exacerbated women’s perennially uneven obligation to engage in invisible labor—whether middle-class women working from home, or working-class women compelled to risk their health so that others could abide by the imperative to stay in. Both within and outside the home, women were disproportionately tasked with “essential,” racialized and gendered, structurally invisible forms of labor, including childcare, cleaning, healthcare, food preparation, and eldercare.

Since the early modern period, accounts of women’s experiences in voluntary or forced confinement have been richly explored in works by French-language writers as diverse as Marie de France, Marguerite de Navarre, Assia Djebar, and Marie Darrieussecq, to name a few. On the one hand, representations of confinement can confirm that gender disparities are exacerbated when burdens are unequally shouldered by women during periods of confinement. On the other hand, representations of cloister or retreat that express the fantasy of liberatory or self-actualizing confinement, in explicitly repudiating familial or social obligations, can unsettle the caregiving roles traditionally assigned to women, as spouses, mothers, or daughters.

We invite proposals from all historic periods, genres, and geographic regions.

Suggested topics

• cloisters, convents
• imprisonment, incarceration
• internment
• segregated confinement (solitary confinement))/home confinement (house arrest)
• stay-at-home mothers (domestic confinement)
• the “hold” and conditions of enslavement
• COVID-19 “Stay-at-home” orders
• sanatoriums/illness/disease
• childbirth/bedrest
• anchorites and anchoresses
• hostage situations/kidnapping
• asylums
• disability, design and space
• bourgeois refuge, rural life, the “country house”
• artist studio, artist space, residency, retreat

Abstracts of 250-300 words, in French or in English should be sent to Youna Kwak (youna_kwak@redlands.edu) and Anne Brancky (anbrancky@vassar.edu) by July 15, 2022. Notification of acceptance will be made by September 1, 2022, with final drafts of selected articles due April 2023. Articles will be subject to peer review. Authors must be current members of Women in French at the time of publication.

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Call for Papers

Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory

Edited by Karen McNally

Abstract Deadline: Friday 15 July 2022

Responses to the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial prompt numerous questions about the reception of Hollywood movie stardom as legal cases of abuse play out in the combined ages of television and social media. Moreover, the layered gender dynamics can be contextualized within a contemporary framework of exposure and resistance that includes the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein on rape and sexual assault charges, and the pay inequalities publicized by actresses including Michelle Williams and Octavia Spencer. Amplified by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, as well as by organizations and initiatives such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, issues of inequality and various forms of abuse have become central to our understanding of the female experience of contemporary Hollywood.

Yet these narratives are far from revelatory, hidden or limited to a contemporary context. The power imbalances and mistreatment that have partly defined women’s careers in the American film industry are as long-established as they are persistent, built into the structure of Hollywood and stretching across its entire history. From the euphemistically- termed ‘casting couch’ to the control of stars’ reproductive choices, and from the indirect expulsion of female directors (O’Hara, 2021), to male ownership of women’s work (McLean, 2022) and the multiple limitations placed upon women of colour, the professional experience in Hollywood for women has consistently been different from that of their male colleagues. These inequalities have at the same time been both enacted and challenged in plain sight. Backstudio pictures (Cohan, 2019) and stardom films (McNally, 2021) disturb their promotion of Hollywood mythology with characters who negotiate their professional lives around these gendered obstacles; historical films and TV dramas revisit and revise these myths with alternative histories; and biopics, documentaries, press articles, television interviews, biographies, autobiographies and social media become sites of disclosure, resistance and activism. These storied spaces convey the extent to which abuse and inequality has become an historically pervasive and recognized aspect of women’s experience in the film industry and of the structural fabric of Hollywood.

This volume seeks a range of original essays that explore film, television and other media narratives depicting inequality and abuse as part of women’s professional and personal lives in Hollywood. The book aims to address both fictional and non-fictional narratives and to explore historical and contemporary case studies.

Areas of interest might include but are not limited to:

• Conflict between Hollywood mythology and exposure of female experience in backstudio pictures and stardom films
• Narratives of stars and other actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, costume designers
• Implicit and explicit exposure in scandal magazines
• The use of autobiography by female stars to construct alternative narratives
• Screen narratives of Hollywood as activism
• Documentary and alternative histories of Hollywood
• Intersectional inequality in the experiences of women of colour
• The male saviour and a patriarchal system
• Sexual abuse as professional control
• Depictions of the impact of ageism on women’s careers
• Fact and fiction boundary crossing in the biopic
• Specific eras of inequality for women in Hollywood
• Narratives of individual and/or collective challenges to inequality
• Press narratives of abuse cases
• The impact of social media on narratives of inequality and abuse
• Narratives of disappearance from the screen due to inequality or abuse
• Exposing vs normalizing inequality and/or abuse through its depiction
• Studio controls over relationships and reproductive choices
• Hollywood narratives framed through historical context
• The careless mistreatment of women’s bodies in narratives of Hollywood
• Hollywood’s emotionally abusive relationship with women
• The impact of women writers, directors and producers on the exposure of inequality and narratives of resistance

Chapter proposals should be submitted as a 300-400 word abstract to the editor, Dr Karen McNally, at womenandhollywoodbook@gmail.com by Friday 15 July 2022. Please include an author biography of 100-150 words. Final chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words and due by Friday 16 December 2022. Please feel free to email with any queries prior to submission of abstracts. A leading publisher is being approached for publication.

Works Cited:

Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford: OUP, 2019)

Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022)

Karen McNally, The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)

Helen O’Hara, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021)

—————————————————————

Dr Karen McNally

Reader in American Film, Television and Cultural History

London Metropolitan University

Recent Publications:

American Television during a Television Presidency (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2022)

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/american-television-during-television-presidency

The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-stardom-film/9780231184014

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Life Narratives: Self-referential Proclamations

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Life Narratives

Guest edited by Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2022

American life writing has a long tradition starting with the diaries, journals, and captivity narratives kept by Pilgrims and Puritans such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).

In their seminal book Reading Autobiography  (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out that “autobiography” refers to the traditional western mode of life writing that emerged during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Unfairly discrediting other life narrating forms, autobiography refers to the traditional representative self-writing of sovereign individuals. Thus, Smith and Watson prefer “life writing” or “life narratives” as an all inclusive umbrella term instead of “autobiography,” or the more flexible term “memoir.”

For postmodern and postcolonial critics, the “I” in self-representation is far from the coherent and unified essentialist individual of autobiographies. The self is a fragmented entity, created through the limitations of language and positioned in multiple discourses. In Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994), Leigh Gilmore observes the relationship between truth telling and agency as the core of all autobiographical narrations, complicated further by ideology, gender, identity, and authority. She views autobiographical acts as rooted in conventions and power relations by evoking Foucault’s conception of power, stating that self-referential narratives create “a cultural and discursive site of truth production in relation to the disciplinary boundary of punishment” (59).

In whatever form they may appear, life narratives are part of our lives in an increasing and overwhelming amount. The recent global (semi)forced pandemic lockdowns have  augmented the sharing and observing of daily life. Trying out recipes, body training, playing instruments, singing, or demonstrating various hobbies on web-based platforms have become statements of existence or acts of self-assertion. In response to destabilized and unsafe public spheres, domestic enclosures have transformed into permanent sites of renewed interest in autobiographical acts.

With this renewed “autobiographical turn” in mind, the guest editor of this issue of JAST seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts on American life narratives, dealing with any period or subject. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Politics and poetics of American life writing
• Critical studies on American life narratives
• The limits, challenges, and possibilities of self-referential portrayals
• The role of memory, agency, and authority in life narratives
• Life writing in American poetry, novels or theater (fictionalized lives)
• Life narratives in performance and the visual arts (autobiographical videos, street performance, photography, exhibitions, etc.)
• Life narratives in TV series, movies, web-based channels, etc.
• Online lives (digital life stories, social media, dating apps, etc.)
• Genres of American life writing (apology, autofiction, autothanatography, biomythography, captivity narrative, diary, eco(auto)biography, gastrography, jockography, journal, letters, memoir, periautography, prison narratives, scriptotheraphy, slave narratives, spiritual narratives, travel narratives, witness narratives etc.)
• Popular culture and life writing
• American women’s life writing
• Immigrant and ethnic life narratives
• Family life-writing or collaborative life writing
• Public figures and celebrity life writing
• Graphic life narratives (autographics)
• Life writing and consciousness raising
• Activism and life writing
• Hybridity, diaspora, and (forced) displacement in life narratives
• Dis/ability and life writing
• The global pandemic and life narratives
• Teaching life narratives

Full-text manuscripts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words in MLA style (with parenthetical internal citations, a Works Cited page, minimal footnotes, and in Times New Roman 12-point font), should be emailed as Microsoft Word attachments to Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş (bilge.mutluay@gmail.com) by July 15, 2022. Please include an abstract (150 words), keywords, and a one-paragraph bio (150 words, written in the third-person) with all manuscripts. Topic inquiries are welcome prior to full-text submission.

Contact Info:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Guest Editor

Contact Info:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş

Contact Email:

bilge.mutluay@gmail.com

URL:

http://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/jast/call-for-papers

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Deadline for Submissions: July 30, 2022

Spaces/Places of Growing Up:

Mapping the Geographies of Childhood

International Phygital Conference organized by

The Department of English,

Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan, Kolkata.

In collaboration with

The Critical Childhoods and Youth Studies Collective

15th and 16th September 2022

deadline for submissions: July 30, 2022

‘Growing up’ or the long and often arduous journey of (trans)formation from a child to an adult necessarily happens not only through developmental milestones (like important examinations or birthdays) but through countless exposures and experiences in the social/public and the personal/private worlds inhabited by the child. While parts of this process have been traditionally or normatively defined by aspects of child-rearing, pedagogy and cognitive psychology, the many and varied physical and virtual sites of this transformative journey have not drawn much critical attention or generated a scholarly discourse, particularly in the context of childhoods across the Indian subcontinent.

The conference wants to draw attention to and critically review the varied spaces and places, which the child inhabits during the years of growing up – areas which open up exposures and provide the experiences that are a crucial part of that complex and elusive process of moving towards adulthood. Broadly speaking, such sites include the physical and the material as well as the imaginative, the psychological and the liminal  – in short, any sphere that is a part of childhood and affects the growing-up of the child. Pedagogy and leisure, nation and family, school and home, fantasy and trauma all engender spaces/places within which lessons and skills are learnt, rebellions and/or allegiances are enacted and socio-cultural identities are formed. Also interesting is the fact that in practice, the lived experiences of children within these spheres, at times overlap with the so-called ‘adult’ worlds and such cracks, seepages and contingencies also have significant roles to play in the journey to adulthood. The conference aims to review and critique these sites of growing-up, to assess their roles and impact in childhoods past and present. Papers can address (but are in no way limited to) any of the following physical, material, social and psychological spaces of childhoods:

Homes, nurseries, kindergartens, schools, classrooms, playgrounds, parks, orphanages, refugee colonies, neighbourhoods

Games, picnics, holidays, excursions, adventures, travel

Books, comics, film and media, advertisements, songs, digital-games

Fantasies, dreams, nightmares, trauma, illnesses,

Nation, Race, Family, Caste, Gender

While studies based on textual analysis are not excluded, we are looking forward to papers that are interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature.  We welcome proposals from scholars, professors, doctoral and post-doctoral researchers, authors and practitioners from fields as diverse as Culture Studies, Psychology, Law, Human Rights, History, Sociology, Literature, Education, Design, Architecture, Media and Publishing.

Please submit abstracts (300 words) for papers (15 minutes presentation time) along with a short bio-note (150 words) via email to conference@rksmvv.ac.in by 30th July 2022. The conference will have a segment devoted to student papers. Students are welcome to submit abstracts (300 words) for mini papers/poster presentations (not exceeding 10 minutes) along with a brief bio-note (150 words) via email to conference@rksmvv.ac.in by 30th July 2022. All presentations will be in English. In case of any queries prior to your submission please don’t hesitate to write to us.

Conference venue:

(For physical presentation)

Auditorium, Ramakrishna Sarada Mission Vivekananda Vidyabhavan,

33, Sri Maa Sarada Sarani,

Kolkata – 700055

(For virtual presentations)

Zoom

Important Dates:

30th July 2022 – Last date for submission of abstracts

10th August 2022 – Notification for selected papers

30th August – Tentative schedule and details regarding conference registration, paid accommodation (if needed by participants) etc.

7th September 2022 – Submission of full papers (7000 words) and AV presentations

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Deadline for Submissions, July 30, 2022

CALL FOR CHAPTERS ‘STARS AND FRANCHISES’ EDITED COLLECTION

Sarah Thomas (University of Liverpool, UK) and Mark McKenna (Staffordshire University, UK)

contact email:

s.k.thomas@liverpool.ac.uk

This edited collection seeks to examine the intersections between two significant media systems: stardom and the franchise. It will explore the convergences, tensions and inter-dependences that star-driven texts and franchise cultures have constantly negotiated within the entertainment industry, on a global, historical and multiplatform scale. It aims to analyse franchise sites and strategies as significant nexus where an understanding of stars is created, managed and interpreted, and to analyse the place and value of the star to media franchise production.

Whilst not aiming to be exclusively contemporaneous in its outlook, the collection intervenes at a moment where Variety has argued that ‘IP, not actors, is the main attraction’ (Rubin & Lang 2021). A particularly Western-centric perspective, this statement is informed by – among other things – the increased dominance of Disney and the Marvel Universe and their pursuit of seemingly endless franchised, multiplatform entertainment that subsume countless Hollywood A-listers into those texts and contexts. From the digital de-ageing of established performers in the MCU, the rise of a young generation of stars (like Tom Holland) fluent in the fragmented media markets that often typify franchise cultures, to noteworthy conflicts around contract negotiations and image rights, and star ownership stakes in their franchise IP (Keanu Reeves and John Wick), significant shifts are occurring around star image, labour and agency in the midst of the asset value of media licensing and intellectual property.

The star-franchise intersection represents a tension between distinct forms of media marketing. Whilst these ‘two modes of product differentiation may converge [they] do not easily coalesce’ with contemporary stars ‘under pressure to support franchise world development, not supplant it’ (Lomax 2020: 188). In intellectual property networks like franchises, ‘stardom and celebrity persona take a back seat, replaced by character brands’ (Johnson 2008: 217). And yet star identities, where the actor-signifier is foregrounded over the character-signifier, have persisted across franchise texts, industries and cultures. In the contemporary era,  stars like Harrison Ford and Jamie Lee Curtis stand as authenticating devices to anchor franchises, conveying ideas of legacy and nostalgia or as a means of negotiating digital aesthetics (see Knee and Fleming [2020] and Golding [2021]). The video game FIFA has integrated playable star ‘icons’ in its recent editions, like David Beckham and Dua Lipa. Hindi superstar Salman Khan stars in the popular Tiger franchise, while Shah Rukh Khan owns major stakes in international sports franchises. Historically, star-driven franchise properties include Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s ‘Road to’ series, Peter Sellers and The Pink Panther series, and Tom Mix’s films, comics and radio shows. Cultural icons like Mexico’s El Santo, the UK’s Norman Wisdom or Carry On stars, and Hong Kong’s Kwan Tak-hing are all associated with a variety of franchised entertainment. These brief examples show the different relationships that can exist between star and property that the volume wishes to examine, each revealing how repetition, remediation and re-interpretation of stars through franchise properties work to extend a star’s economic and cultural value.

The proposed edited collection will be submitted to Edinburgh University Press (EUP) as part of the ‘International Film Stars’ series.  While the subject matter will undoubtedly attract scholars interested in exploring the increased dominance of franchise cinema as Hollywood’s primary mode of production, and this is something that we wholeheartedly encourage, we are also keen to hear from contributors interested in exploring franchises and stars that fall outside of the Anglo-American experience. If you would like to discuss your ideas, please feel free to get in touch.

Our collection seeks chapters that investigate the star-franchise intersection, including (but not limited to):

• Case studies of specific stars or franchise properties.
• Star-driven franchises.
• Franchises where the franchise IP exceeds that of the star(s).
• The paradoxical relationship between star identities and franchise texts where to support ongoing lives as multiplatform, historical entities, franchise properties often celebrate and dismiss the central star brands that exist within them.
• The impact of star persona and character creation over time where franchises provide a sustained environment to construct performance, image and identity through core texts, branded marketing content and other multiplatform extensions.
• Franchises in non-cinematic contexts
• Ideological and cultural readings of franchise stardom and star image.
• Absent or underdeveloped franchise stars and spaces, especially in terms of race, gender and sexuality
• Research that engages with questions of media industries and labour, thinking about what it means for star performers to work in a franchise environment.
• The impact of this on wider conceptions of star power and systemic entertainment infrastructures, economics, and legislations.
• Franchise stardom as product differentiation and marking/branding strategy, including promotional personae.
• The consideration of these (and other) issues within global, multimedia/multiplatform and historical contexts.
• Research that explores to what degree the contemporary Hollywood moment reflects broader uses and cultures in industries around the world and through different decades of production and cultural history.

Please send abstracts of 300 to 500 words and a brief biographical note of 150 words to s.k.thomas@liverpool.ac.uk

• Deadline for chapter proposals: 30 July 2022
• Notification of acceptance: 31 August 2022
• Full chapter submission: 31 June 2023

Further dates to be confirmed as the collection progresses.

Editor bios:

Sarah Thomas is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. She researches screen performance and industrial approaches to stardom, with a current focus on digital and immersive media and franchise production. She is the author of the monographs Peter Lorre – Face Maker (Berghahn 2012) and James Mason (BFI Bloomsbury 2018), and co-editor of Cult Film Stardom (Palgrave 2013).

Mark McKenna is Associate Professor of Film and Media Industries at Staffordshire University. His research focuses on media marketing and distribution, censorship and regulation and global media industries. He is the author of Nasty Business: The Marketing and Branding of the Video Nasties (EUP 2020) and the forthcoming Snuff (Liverpool University Press), and co-editor of Horror Film Franchises (Routledge 2021).

References:

Fleming, David H. & Adam Knee. 2020. ‘The analogue strikes back: Star Wars, star authenticity, and cinematic anachronism’, Celebrity Studies 11:2: 205-220

Golding, Dan. 2021. ‘The memory of perfection: Digital faces and nostalgic franchise cinema’, Convergence, 27:4: 855–867

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International Conference ‘Touring Travel Writing II: Between Fact and Fiction’

deadline for submissions:

July 31, 2022

full name / name of organization:

CETAPS (Nova University)

contact email:

touringtravelwriting@gmail.com

As indicated by the number in its title, this conference is the second in a series focused on travel writing studies. The first one, which took place in 2019, celebrated the 300th anniversary of the publication of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and its literary legacy. This second edition will celebrate the 100th anniversary of James Joyce’s modernist novel Ulysses (1922), which chronicles the itinerary of Leopold Bloom in Dublin in the course of an ordinary day.

CETAPS (Centre for English, Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies, Universidade Nova, Lisbon) and CELIS (Centre de Recherches sur les Littératures et la Sociopoétique, Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand) once again join efforts and organise this international conference which aims to be a locus of debate on the many facets of travel writing, a research area that has emerged as a relevant topic of study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in the last few decades.

Date: September 8-9, 2022

Papers on the following topics are welcome:

Anglophone travel writingon the Portuguese-speaking world
Lusophone travel writing on the Anglophone World
Travelling to write
Travel writing, the novel, poetry and drama
Travel writing as report
Travel and visual culture
Travel writing, Humanitiesand the Social Sciences
Travelwriting, gender and power
Travel writing, (post)colonial discourse and decoloniality
Travel writing and (forced) migration
Travel writing, imagined communities and imagology
Travel writing and tourist culture
Travelwriting and (in)tangible heritage
Travelwriting and exploration
Travelling as gentrification
Travel writing, censorship and surveillance
Travel writing and (auto)biography

Travel writing and Otherness
Travelwriting, politics and ideology
Travel writing and ethics
Travel writing, mobility and conviviality
Mapsas travel narratives
Travel,Fantasy, Children’s Literature and Young Adult Fiction
Sound/Food/Smell/Touch/Visual/Ecoscapes in Travel Writing
Travel writing in/as translation
Utopian and dystopian travel narratives
Science and travel writing
History of Travel Writing
Travel writing: theory and criticism
Intertextuality in travel writing
The rhetorics of travel writing
Teaching Travel Writing

Keynote speakers:
Carl Thompson (University of Surrey, UK)
Maria de Fátima Outeirinho (Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto)

Papers and pre-organized panels:
The conference languages are English, Spanish and Portuguese. Speakers should prepare for a 20-minute presentation. Please send a 300-word abstract, as well as a short biographical note (100 words), by July 31st, to:

touringtravelwriting@gmail.com

Proposals for papers and pre-organized panels (in this case, please also include a brief description of the panel) should include full title of the paper, name, institutional affiliation, contact details, a short bionote and AV requirements (if any).

Notification of abstract acceptance or rejection will take place by August 5, 2022.

Registration fees:
•Full fee: 80Euros
• Students: 40 Euros (ID required)

Payment must be made until August 20, 2022. After this date proposals will no longer be considered.

For further queries please contact:
cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt
or
touringtravelwriting@gmail.com
or
mzc@fcsh.unl.pt

Delegates are responsible for their own travel arrangements and accommodation.The conference website will soon provide useful information.

Payment:
Payment by bank transfer
Payment by Pay Pal
Reference: CETAPS CONGRESSOS–610245

BIC:TOTAPTPL

IBAN: PT500018 000321419114020 13

Tax identification number: 501559094

This is additional data your bank may require:
Account Owner: FCSHUNL-Research Units
Bank: BANCO SANTANDERTOTTA S.A.

For PayPal payments, use the email: dgfc@fcsh.unl.pt
Identify your payment referring to:
CETAPS 610245 International Conference (TouringTravel WritingII).
Please add PayPal international taxes:
PT +EURO zone: 3,4% + 0,35€
Rest of the World: 4,90% + 0,35€
Full Fee: 83,07€ (PT & EURO zone)
83,92€ (Rest of the World)
Student Fee: 41,71€ (PT & EUROzone)
42,31€ (Rest of the World)
Please send a copy of your confirmed payment to: cetaps@fcsh.unl.pt

Event website:http://www.touringtravelwriting.wordpress.com

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Deadline for Submissions: July 31, 2022

Communist Biographies – New perspectives, sources and discussions

A Special Issue of Securitas Imperii: Journal for the Study of Modern Dictatorships

More than thirty years ago, the possibility of research on the history of the communist movement and regime opened up in Czechoslovakia as well in other former state-socialist countries. The few attempts to produce scholarly biographies of politicians and other personalities associated with communist ideology and practice stood somewhat apart from the multitude of topics, research areas, and methodological approaches. Rather, the period demand for “filling in the blanks” prompted the rapid publication of the “secrets” hidden in the archives on partial issues and cases. Biography, as a method attempting a comprehensive and at the same time essentially individualized treatment of a person’s life set in a broad political and social context, required long-term research, that was often at odds with the priorities of research institution and grant agencies. In the Czech milieu, moreover, priority was given to learning about the lives and fates of democratic and non-communist personalities who belonged among those famous “blanks”. However, the few biographies, which began to be published ten or more years after the political change of 1989, showed the exceptional potential of the biographical method in the study of communism as a fundamental phenomenon in the history of the 20th century. By taking the lives of individuals, whether political leaders or cultural and artistic figures, as examples, it was possible to address the deep internal contradictions and ambivalences that communism contained.

The aim of the thematic issue is to provide a space for the discussion of the results achieved so far in the field of biography within the study of communism, both in the Czech and international context. It also aims to contribute to the debate on methodological problems and the future direction of this genre. In order to comprehensively understand the phenomenon of communism as an internationalist movement making a universalist claim, it is necessary to link different research contexts. We would be pleased if the forthcoming issue contributes to this goal.

Editors welcome contributions from different fields of research: history, political science, cultural studies, philosophy, sociology, gender studies or any other related areas of interest.

Topics may address (but are not limited to) the following aspects:

Biography as a method and genre of the history of communism

We welcome studies focusing on different aspects of the methodology of historical biographies, taking into account the context for the study of the communist movement in the national and international context. These aspects are in particular:

• implications of biographies for the study of the history of the communist movement and governance, including transnational perspective
• the limits and challenges of working with archival fonds and other types of sources such as personal papers, published diaries and memoirs or interviews
• trends, innovations and new impulses in the writing of historical biographies
• comparison of experiences and achievements in the field of biography in different national settings
• the development of professional and social demand for specialised biographies of communist figures in various countries of the former Western and Eastern worlds

Biographical studies focusing on various aspects of communism

We welcome biographical studies focusing on various aspects of belonging to the communist movement and identification with the communist ideology and its goals. These aspects are in particular:

• background, family and social origin
• biographies of the main personalities of the communist movement over time – their influence on the co-creation of personal history and the connection with the development of the movement
• shared identities and the relationship between them: nation, class, education, gender
• national, regional and local specifics in a universally defined movement; international experience of activity in the structures of the international communist movement
• motivation and context of involvement in the movement – the relationship between idealism and pragmatism, attitude to power and its use, the question of loyalty, conformity and party discipline and its limits
• devotion and willingness to self-sacrifice – experience of illegality, imprisonment and other forms of repression by anti-communist power
• experience of exile – political activity and living conditions of emigrants
• cases of apostasy, condemnation and party dissent – the experience of the victims of purges and repressions under Stalinism and further

We welcome both the elaboration of episodes and the evaluation of the overall life course for biographies of party leaders and top officials and communist intellectuals, artists and scientists, and ordinary rank-and-file.

Studies using collective biography and comparative biography methods are also welcome. Contact Info:

Adéla Rádková, Ph.D.

Editor-in-chief

Securitas Imperii: Journal for the Study of Modern Dictatorships

Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes

Czech Republic Contact Email:  securitas.imperii@ustrcr.cz URL:  https://securitas-imperii-journal.com/news/?lang=en

Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”

The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:

July 10, 2022

lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz

The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.

Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:

– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons

The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture

Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).

The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022.

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Deadline for Submissions July 15, 2022

Call for Papers for proposed panel for South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) 2022

November 11-13, 2022 in Jacksonville, FL

Autobiography: Changes in Form and Meaning

This interdisciplinary panel welcomes submissions on any aspect of change within life writing. With the proliferation of modes available for what Anna Poletti has termed “self-life-inscription,” and a concurrent rise in hybrid genres such as autofiction that challenge the assumed boundary between truth and fiction in autobiographical narrative, it is clear that the scope of what is considered autobiography is changing. This panel seeks to articulate these changes and explore how they are impacting our understanding of the meaning and significance of life writing. Papers might explore changes in the medium of autobiography, such as social media, photography, film, graphic narratives, material collections, or performance. Papers might also address changes within established forms such as confession, memoir, the personal essay, or the diary. Theoretical considerations of change, transformation, or conversion within autobiography would also be welcome. By July 15^th, please submit an abstract of 250 words, a brief bio, and any A/V or scheduling requests to Kimberly Hall, Wofford College, at hallka@wofford.edu

The SAMLA Conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Jacksonville Riverfront. For additional conference information, please see the SAMLA website: https://samla.memberclicks.net.

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CFP: Out of Confinement: Creativity in Constraint

Women in French Studies Special Issue (2024)

July 15, 2022

contact email:

youna_kwak@redlands.edu

We invite article submissions for a special topics issue of Women in French Studies (2024) to explore work created by confined women and work that represents confined women, from the early modern period to the present-day. The special issue will explore how the confinement of women as depicted in fictional and non-fictional texts (in any media) informs, reflects and interrogates gendered conditions of existence. How have confined women been represented in literature, film and art? What kind of thinking or writing is produced by women out of conditions of confinement? What are the impacts of confinement on creative production? How does physical confinement change how we consume texts?

In March 2020, the word confinement suddenly became an unwelcome part of our everyday lexicon, as lockdown, quarantine, and stay-at-home orders were issued worldwide to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Within the household, mandatory confinement exacerbated women’s perennially uneven obligation to engage in invisible labor—whether middle-class women working from home, or working-class women compelled to risk their health so that others could abide by the imperative to stay in. Both within and outside the home, women were disproportionately tasked with “essential,” racialized and gendered, structurally invisible forms of labor, including childcare, cleaning, healthcare, food preparation, and eldercare.

Since the early modern period, accounts of women’s experiences in voluntary or forced confinement have been richly explored in works by French-language writers as diverse as Marie de France, Marguerite de Navarre, Assia Djebar, and Marie Darrieussecq, to name a few. On the one hand, representations of confinement can confirm that gender disparities are exacerbated when burdens are unequally shouldered by women during periods of confinement. On the other hand, representations of cloister or retreat that express the fantasy of liberatory or self-actualizing confinement, in explicitly repudiating familial or social obligations, can unsettle the caregiving roles traditionally assigned to women, as spouses, mothers, or daughters.

We invite proposals from all historic periods, genres, and geographic regions.

Suggested topics

• cloisters, convents
• imprisonment, incarceration
• internment
• segregated confinement (solitary confinement))/home confinement (house arrest)
• stay-at-home mothers (domestic confinement)
• the “hold” and conditions of enslavement
• COVID-19 “Stay-at-home” orders
• sanatoriums/illness/disease
• childbirth/bedrest
• anchorites and anchoresses
• hostage situations/kidnapping
• asylums
• disability, design and space
• bourgeois refuge, rural life, the “country house”
• artist studio, artist space, residency, retreat

Abstracts of 250-300 words, in French or in English should be sent to Youna Kwak (youna_kwak@redlands.edu) and Anne Brancky (anbrancky@vassar.edu) by July 15, 2022. Notification of acceptance will be made by September 1, 2022, with final drafts of selected articles due April 2023. Articles will be subject to peer review. Authors must be current members of Women in French at the time of publication.

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Call for Papers

Women and Hollywood: Tales of Inequality, Abuse and Resistance in the Dream Factory

Edited by Karen McNally

Abstract Deadline: Friday 15 July 2022

Responses to the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation trial prompt numerous questions about the reception of Hollywood movie stardom as legal cases of abuse play out in the combined ages of television and social media. Moreover, the layered gender dynamics can be contextualized within a contemporary framework of exposure and resistance that includes the imprisonment of Harvey Weinstein on rape and sexual assault charges, and the pay inequalities publicized by actresses including Michelle Williams and Octavia Spencer. Amplified by the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, as well as by organizations and initiatives such as the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media and Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, issues of inequality and various forms of abuse have become central to our understanding of the female experience of contemporary Hollywood.

Yet these narratives are far from revelatory, hidden or limited to a contemporary context. The power imbalances and mistreatment that have partly defined women’s careers in the American film industry are as long-established as they are persistent, built into the structure of Hollywood and stretching across its entire history. From the euphemistically- termed ‘casting couch’ to the control of stars’ reproductive choices, and from the indirect expulsion of female directors (O’Hara, 2021), to male ownership of women’s work (McLean, 2022) and the multiple limitations placed upon women of colour, the professional experience in Hollywood for women has consistently been different from that of their male colleagues. These inequalities have at the same time been both enacted and challenged in plain sight. Backstudio pictures (Cohan, 2019) and stardom films (McNally, 2021) disturb their promotion of Hollywood mythology with characters who negotiate their professional lives around these gendered obstacles; historical films and TV dramas revisit and revise these myths with alternative histories; and biopics, documentaries, press articles, television interviews, biographies, autobiographies and social media become sites of disclosure, resistance and activism. These storied spaces convey the extent to which abuse and inequality has become an historically pervasive and recognized aspect of women’s experience in the film industry and of the structural fabric of Hollywood.

This volume seeks a range of original essays that explore film, television and other media narratives depicting inequality and abuse as part of women’s professional and personal lives in Hollywood. The book aims to address both fictional and non-fictional narratives and to explore historical and contemporary case studies.

Areas of interest might include but are not limited to:

• Conflict between Hollywood mythology and exposure of female experience in backstudio pictures and stardom films
• Narratives of stars and other actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, costume designers
• Implicit and explicit exposure in scandal magazines
• The use of autobiography by female stars to construct alternative narratives
• Screen narratives of Hollywood as activism
• Documentary and alternative histories of Hollywood
• Intersectional inequality in the experiences of women of colour
• The male saviour and a patriarchal system
• Sexual abuse as professional control
• Depictions of the impact of ageism on women’s careers
• Fact and fiction boundary crossing in the biopic
• Specific eras of inequality for women in Hollywood
• Narratives of individual and/or collective challenges to inequality
• Press narratives of abuse cases
• The impact of social media on narratives of inequality and abuse
• Narratives of disappearance from the screen due to inequality or abuse
• Exposing vs normalizing inequality and/or abuse through its depiction
• Studio controls over relationships and reproductive choices
• Hollywood narratives framed through historical context
• The careless mistreatment of women’s bodies in narratives of Hollywood
• Hollywood’s emotionally abusive relationship with women
• The impact of women writers, directors and producers on the exposure of inequality and narratives of resistance

Chapter proposals should be submitted as a 300-400 word abstract to the editor, Dr Karen McNally, at womenandhollywoodbook@gmail.com by Friday 15 July 2022. Please include an author biography of 100-150 words. Final chapters will be 6,000 to 7,000 words and due by Friday 16 December 2022. Please feel free to email with any queries prior to submission of abstracts. A leading publisher is being approached for publication.

Works Cited:

Steven Cohan, Hollywood by Hollywood: The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies (Oxford: OUP, 2019)

Adrienne L. McLean, All for Beauty: Makeup and Hairdressing in Hollywood’s Studio Era (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2022)

Karen McNally, The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)

Helen O’Hara, Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film (London: Little, Brown Book Group, 2021)

—————————————————————

Dr Karen McNally

Reader in American Film, Television and Cultural History

London Metropolitan University

Recent Publications:

American Television during a Television Presidency (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2022)

https://www.wsupress.wayne.edu/books/detail/american-television-during-television-presidency

The Stardom Film (New York: Wallflower-Columbia University Press, 2021)

http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-stardom-film/9780231184014

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Life Narratives: Self-referential Proclamations

Journal of American Studies of Turkey (JAST): Special Issue on Life Narratives

Guest edited by Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Hacettepe University, Ankara, Turkey

Deadline for Full-Text Submissions: July 15, 2022

American life writing has a long tradition starting with the diaries, journals, and captivity narratives kept by Pilgrims and Puritans such as Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), to more canonized life writings such as Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography (1791).

In their seminal book Reading Autobiography  (2010), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out that “autobiography” refers to the traditional western mode of life writing that emerged during the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century. Unfairly discrediting other life narrating forms, autobiography refers to the traditional representative self-writing of sovereign individuals. Thus, Smith and Watson prefer “life writing” or “life narratives” as an all inclusive umbrella term instead of “autobiography,” or the more flexible term “memoir.”

For postmodern and postcolonial critics, the “I” in self-representation is far from the coherent and unified essentialist individual of autobiographies. The self is a fragmented entity, created through the limitations of language and positioned in multiple discourses. In Autobiography and Postmodernism (1994), Leigh Gilmore observes the relationship between truth telling and agency as the core of all autobiographical narrations, complicated further by ideology, gender, identity, and authority. She views autobiographical acts as rooted in conventions and power relations by evoking Foucault’s conception of power, stating that self-referential narratives create “a cultural and discursive site of truth production in relation to the disciplinary boundary of punishment” (59).

In whatever form they may appear, life narratives are part of our lives in an increasing and overwhelming amount. The recent global (semi)forced pandemic lockdowns have  augmented the sharing and observing of daily life. Trying out recipes, body training, playing instruments, singing, or demonstrating various hobbies on web-based platforms have become statements of existence or acts of self-assertion. In response to destabilized and unsafe public spheres, domestic enclosures have transformed into permanent sites of renewed interest in autobiographical acts.

With this renewed “autobiographical turn” in mind, the guest editor of this issue of JAST seeks original, previously unpublished manuscripts on American life narratives, dealing with any period or subject. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Politics and poetics of American life writing
• Critical studies on American life narratives
• The limits, challenges, and possibilities of self-referential portrayals
• The role of memory, agency, and authority in life narratives
• Life writing in American poetry, novels or theater (fictionalized lives)
• Life narratives in performance and the visual arts (autobiographical videos, street performance, photography, exhibitions, etc.)
• Life narratives in TV series, movies, web-based channels, etc.
• Online lives (digital life stories, social media, dating apps, etc.)
• Genres of American life writing (apology, autofiction, autothanatography, biomythography, captivity narrative, diary, eco(auto)biography, gastrography, jockography, journal, letters, memoir, periautography, prison narratives, scriptotheraphy, slave narratives, spiritual narratives, travel narratives, witness narratives etc.)
• Popular culture and life writing
• American women’s life writing
• Immigrant and ethnic life narratives
• Family life-writing or collaborative life writing
• Public figures and celebrity life writing
• Graphic life narratives (autographics)
• Life writing and consciousness raising
• Activism and life writing
• Hybridity, diaspora, and (forced) displacement in life narratives
• Dis/ability and life writing
• The global pandemic and life narratives
• Teaching life narratives

Full-text manuscripts of between 6,000 and 8,000 words in MLA style (with parenthetical internal citations, a Works Cited page, minimal footnotes, and in Times New Roman 12-point font), should be emailed as Microsoft Word attachments to Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş (bilge.mutluay@gmail.com) by July 15, 2022. Please include an abstract (150 words), keywords, and a one-paragraph bio (150 words, written in the third-person) with all manuscripts. Topic inquiries are welcome prior to full-text submission.

Contact Info:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş, Guest Editor

Contact Info:

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilge Mutluay Çetintaş

Contact Email:

bilge.mutluay@gmail.com

URL:

http://www.asat-jast.org/index.php/jast/call-for-papers

Themed Journal Issue on “Narrative and Identity”

The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture

deadline for submissions:

July 10, 2022

lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz

The call for papers for the next issue of the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (Issue 11.1-2), on the general theme of ‘narrative and identity’, is now open.

Article submissions on any aspect of the theme are encouraged. The Issue’s Editors particulalry invite articles on the following topics:

– self-representation on social media
– representations of disability and neurodiversity in popular culture
– re-inventions of genre and viewership/readership in popular culture
– alternative realities and modes of storytelling in (video) games
– online fandoms and identity
– popular icons

The deadline for submissions of full articles (5-6k words) is 10 July 2022. The Journal is indexed in SCOPUS (among others), and its remit is broad and international. Further information about the Journal can be found here: https://www.intellectbooks.com/the-australasian-journal-of-popular-culture

Please submit your articles for consideration (together with a short bio and insitutional affiliation) to both editors: Professor Lorna Piatti-Farnell (lorna.piatti-farnell@aut.ac.nz) and Dr Ashleigh Prosser (ashleigh.prosser@uwa.edu.au).

The Issue will be published (both in print and electronically) in December 2022.

Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Symposium, 5-6 August, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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On (Re)Shaping Identity: Self-Portraiture and the Quotidian

PAMLA 2022 – Los Angeles, CA (November 11-13, 2022 – entirely in-person

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Please contact presiding officer for this session, Ariana Lyriotakis, with any questions: lyriotaa@tcd.ie

Special Session – CFP

Persona and confessional poetry of the Postmodern period enact an undeniable relationship with the quotidian. But how do these poems explore a visual depiction and an expression of self-identity in ordinary life? This panel will explore the methods by which poets manipulate and reject aesthetic production in their poetry, while calling into question subjectivity and truthful composition.

This special session will explore poetic self-portraiture and the shaping of identity within the bounds of the quotidian. John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is perhaps one of the more notable examples from this era; as a poetry firmly situated within the intermediality of poetic textual images and art, he addresses “the enchant of self with self” through personal depiction and aesthetic production. But what is revealed to the reader in these moments of vulnerability and self-appraisal? How can the poet be both subject and object, while constructing a poetic likeness amongst the commonplace? This panel seeks poetry of self-encounter, whether banal or familiar, to interrogate an inward/outward representation of the self within these constructs.

Contributions are invited relating to any of the following aspects, as well as broader interpretations of the theme which may illuminate and elucidate in greater detail. Please be in touch if you have any questions or require further clarification.

• Depictions of the domestic and the visual
• Intermediality of poetic textual images and art
• Interrogations of the actual and the self
• Orality and performance in poetry
• Visuality of text and experimentation
• Mimesis and the composition of ordinary spaces
• Interdeterminacy and temporality

Abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA website only.

The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18564

All panel participants/presenters must join PAMLA by July 1, 2022.

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022

Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023

The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/

The proposed volume will be dedicated to life writing. We use “life writing” as a broad term encompassing a wide variety of personal narratives. We also recognize the capaciousness of the term “world literature” and the accompanying challenges. By putting life writing and world literature into dialogue, we seek to explore their rich shared history, as well as new areas of research.

Authors are encouraged to explore, among others
the intersecting histories of the two fields
debates in world literature concerning auto/biographical genres
autobiographical texts outside the Western canons (East Asia, Latin America, Northern Africa, Middle East)
autobiographical works as they move in translation through global contexts
autobiographical works as they move across time and media (remediation, intermediality, etc.)
the role of materiality in life writing
visual narratives, new media, affective networks, and the role of life writing in participatory democracy
autobiographical texts in “world literature” courses and in cultural diplomacy
the role of autobiographical texts in eco or medical humanities
the homogenizing effects of autobiographical technology and data bias

Please submit abstracts of 350 words, along with a short bio, to the Editors: Helga Lenart-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Ioana Luca (ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw) by July 1, 2022.

Helga Lenart-Cheng
Associate Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Honors Program, Director
Saint Mary’s College of California
Book office hours here
Forthcoming in 2022: Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

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Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2022

Reimagining #MeToo in South Asia And the Diaspora (Edited Collection of Essays)

Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava

contact email:

shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu

This edited volume seeks to examine how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in the context of but, more importantly, in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. We seek to understand how the feminist movement has radically diverged from the assimilationist discourse of the #MeToo Movement and, consequently, the Global North. The #MeToo movement has not made an impact at the grassroots level because it is hinged on the victim-survivor to speak up. In an era where the Global North has been a model for influencing change in the Global South, there has been an inconspicuous absence of recognition and impact of the #MeToo Movement. In addition, survivors’ testimonies lie at the center of the #MeToo movement, which demystifies victim-shaming and victim-blaming, legitimizing the survivor’s testimony as the unquestionable truth.

Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been successful in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The #MeToo has had a significant impact worldwide on how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US. However, this global women’s movement has had little reach in South Asia, where access to virtual platforms is limited, and hashtags are still unknown. The #MeToo Movement in South Asia and the Diaspora was taken up briefly by the media and entertainment industry but has failed to make a concrete impact in many ways. This can be attributed to multiple reasons – there are several regionally specific movements, such as the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign and 2011 #WhyLoiter campaign, that have been radically popular within the sub-continent.

In the South Asian context, such testimonies are still taboo, which leads to survivors refusing to share and relive their experiences/narratives even if they have the means and access. Therefore, our edited volume seeks to problematize the #MeToo movement in order to reimagine and contextualize it in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as a much-needed intervention to examine the implications of a transnational feminist movement. We wish to explore questions such as: how the #MeToo movement can move away from Hollywood/Bollywood/workplace and elitist exclusivity. How can it be more inclusive of non-white and marginalized voices?

In light of the ongoing and increasing gender-based violence occurring in South Asia and the diaspora, our edited volume will reflect on these questions as we seek to understand new ways of formulating complex and nuanced gendered subjectivities vis-à-vis the lens of post-colonial feminism and intersectionality. Our focus shifts away from the traditional approaches of victimization to generate dialogue and hopefully create a new platform to break the silence and encourage discomforting narratives to normalize conversations surrounding this pivotal issue.

Themes include but are not limited to the following:

• Pedagogy and Transformative Learning via #MeToo in the Classroom
• Queer/LGBTQI+ Spaces within #MeToo
• New Masculinities
• Contemporary Gender Movements and Resistances
• Caste, Gender, Class, and Social Spaces
• Problematization of #MeToo and ‘Speaking Up’
• New Modalities of Testimonies
• Resistance and Digital Feminist Interventions
• New Feminist Mediations
• Militarized Feminist Modernities
• Ageism
• Viral Videos
• Censorship, Cultural Production, and Minority Literature
• Mythologies, Legends, and Sexuality

We welcome informal queries, and potential contributors may submit a 500-750 word abstract and 2 page CV by July 1, 2022. Please direct queries to Dr Nidhi Shrivastava (Sacred Heart University), shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu, Dr Ruma Sinha (Syracuse University), rumas1@gmail.com, and Dr Billie T. Guarino (Jamia Milia Islamia), thoidingjam@gmail.com. Acceptance of the final articles is subject to double-blind peer review. The final deadline for submitting 5,000- 6,000-word articles will be November 15, 2022.

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Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022

Representations of Border Crossings in Media, Literature, and the Arts

International Academic Conference:15-16 December 2022

MIDEX Centre, University of Central Lancashire

(Research Strand: Representations of Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Media, Literature, and Art)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Border crossings delineate movement from a place, nation, and culture, inter alia, to another. Border crossers, Jane Jackson (2014) writes, can move temporarily or permanently, and crossings can be forced or voluntary, successful or unsuccessful, contemporary or historical. They can lead to multicultural identity formations, or to experiences and feelings of exclusion and isolation (Martin and Nakayama 2008). Because they are embodied experiences, they are determined by race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion and gender, as well as by biopolitical and necropolitical practices, particularly, when deemed ‘irregular.’ Representations of border crossings play a key role in media, literature, visual, as well as performance arts. Historical and contemporary border crossings form a core segment of literary and artistic production as shown by the publication of literary and graphic migration narratives, museum exhibitions, installations in galleries and open public spaces, and via dance, music and theatre performances (Viljoen 2013). At the same time, representations of contemporary ‘irregular’ border crossings foreground the injurious implications of border control practices, as well as media responsibilities of a ‘crisis’ (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017).

For this conference, we invite papers that explore representations of border crossings in media, literature, and the arts. We seek to examine the kinds of narratives that can be told through media, artistic and literary attempts to speak about border-crossing subjects. We hope to determine the extent to which such representations cross borders themselves by being exposed to culturally different audiences (Friedman 2005). We further mean to investigate how border-crossing ‘selves’ and ‘others’, collective, or individual, become displayed in such representations and whether hegemonic, (neo-)colonial hierarchies become undone or reproduced through them. How can a person in the position of the ‘host,’ for instance, ‘imagine another without doing violence to [their] object of description’ (Black 2010: 1)? How can representations of liminal, border-crossing subjects disrupt narratives of modernity/coloniality (Schimanski and Wolfe 2013; Mignolo 2011)? Can such representations show ‘how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices’ (Wolfe 2014: 1; Schimanski and Wolfe 2007)? How do they illustrate that ‘as the border crosser crosses the border, new […] borders are created and crossed in the crosser’s own story, and in the story of the border itself’ (Schimanski 2006: 47)? What are the strategies that would enable nuanced interpretations of such representations (see Schimanski and Wolfe 2017)?

We call for researchers and practitioners to submit proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute presentations exploring border-crossings in literature, media and the arts. We also invite creative practitioners to submit performances, readings, (video) installations, and exhibitions, inter alia. The themes that can be explored include, but are not limited to:

• Exilic, diasporic, migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking border crossers

• Border-crossing, gender, and sexuality

• Decolonial and postcolonial border-crossings

• Border-crossing traumas

• Border-crossing memories

• Affective border-crossings

• Border-crossing as an opportunity

• Metaphorical, cultural, and linguistic border crossings

Please submit your proposals to bordercrossing@uclan.ac.uk by 30th of June, 2022.

References:

Black, S. (2010), Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late-Twentieth Century Fiction, New York : Columbia University Press.

Chouliaraki, L. and T. Stolic (2017), ‘Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee “Crisis:” A Visual Typology of European News’, Media, Culture & Society, 39(8):1162-77.

Friedman, S. S. (2005), ‘Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, 192-205, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Jackson, J. (2014), Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication, London: Routledge.

Martin, J.N. and Nakayama, T.K. (2008), Experiencing Intercultural Communication: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mignolo, D. W. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, New York: Duke University Press.

Schimanski, J. (2006), ‘Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and Method’, Nordlit, 19: 41-63.

Schimanski, J. and S. Wolfe (2007), ‘Entry Points: An Introduction’ in J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics De-Limited, 9-26, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag.

____. (2013), ‘The Aesthetics of Borders’, in K. Aukrust (ed), Assigning Cultural Values, 235-250, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

____. eds. (2017), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, New York: Berghahn.

Viljoen, H., ed. (2013), Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Wolfe, S. (2014), ‘Border Aesthetics/Border Works’, Nordlit, 31:1-5.

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“’My strength, my comfort, my intense delight’: Women, Art and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.”

Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference Oct 27-29, University of Toronto.

Deadline for abstracts: June 30.

Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the “West” in the early 1800s for the “Orient,” recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative “Western” narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.

Per standard practice, you need to join UAAC if your paper is accepted – but you don’t need to join to submit a proposal. Questions? creeve@ocadu.ca

Application process and full conference CFP here.

Charles Reeve

OCAD University

Chair, Liberal Studies

Faculty of Arts & Science

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CALL FOR PAPERS
North-American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions

Aix-Marseilles University, 6/7 July 2023
Organizers: Sophie Vallas (Aix-Marseilles University, LERMA), Arnaud Schmitt (University of Bordeaux, CLIMAS)

Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022 Addressing the topic of autobiographical texts or memoirs published by novelists, what she calls “the literary writer’s autobiography,” Laura Marcus underlines that the reader’s awareness of the name and reputation of the author immediately confers a certain literary status on the autobiographical text: “Not all autobiographers are writers by profession, though there is a widespread assumption that the literary writer’s autobiography best defines the genre.” Far from the host of confessional memoirs, either by celebrities or unknown authors, a publishing phenomenon identified by Rockwell Gray as a “memoir boom” in his 1982 article “Autobiography Now,” and far from so-called autobiographical novels or autofictions which, according to Maurice Couturier, allowed many writers to “smuggle their own autobiographies,” this conference will focus on autobiographical texts—paratextually and unequivocally identified as such—published by American novelists, on “the literary writer’s autobiography” in other words, and on their influence on the perception of the overall work of their author. We will wonder how autobiographical acts happen, when they happen, in a career dominated by fiction, what their links with the fictional part of the work are or why they are often perceived as minor texts among a fictional body of major ones. Also, do they conjure up specific writing techniques, a separate creative space? The disruption caused by autobiographical texts in a literary work mostly devoted to the writing of fiction raises several questions concerning the artistic logic underlying them, the way they are embedded in the complete oeuvre of the author and the editorial and paratextual choices made for their publication.
It often seems logical that authors should turn to life writing at the end of their career, an introspective act embracing their whole life, revisiting their own work. Mark Twain, who published a few chapters of his autobiography in the years prior to his death, decided nevertheless that its publication would be a posthumous act, a hundred years after his death more precisely (The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 2010). Other texts, also published late in their authors’ life, focus on the death of a relative or a friend while offering authors the opportunity to reflect on their own life, inexorably drawing to a close: Joan Didion’s autobiographical diptych, The Year of the Magical Thinking in 2005 (simultaneously mourning the death and celebrating the life of her husband, John Dunne) and Blue Nights in 2011 (doing the same for Didion’s adopted daughter, Quintana, who died in 2005), belongs to this crepuscular tradition in which writing almost amounts to issuing legal, performative acts standing for marriage, adoption, death. Such is also the case for Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991). Conversely, some autobiographical texts herald the birth of an author: Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) delivered, in prose, the new voice of a poet and essayist who, from then on, would dedicate his career as a novelist to developing and fictionalizing many topics already present in this seminal memoir. Auster has gone on regularly publishing autobiographical narratives, each time revisiting his life from a different angle and adding new acts to the play of his life (The Red Notebook, 1995; Hand to Mouth, 1997; Winter Journal, 2012; Report from the Interior, 2013).
For other autobiographical texts, what is at stake is less the moment when they get written, either at the beginning or at the end of a career, than their capacity of exploring the very art of their authors. In that case, they tend to exist as so many comments on the fictional works which they occasionally revisit. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, has kept on analyzing the act of writing throughout the years ((Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, 1974; The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, 2003; A Widow’s Story. A Memoir, 2011; The Lost Landscape. A Writer’s Coming of Age, 2015). At the very opposite of Oates’ regular autobiographical practice, James Salter’s Burning the Days (1997) stands as a unique autobiographical text in a body of work otherwise entirely devoted to fiction, almost like a faulty act, even if the volume sounds like Salter’s powerful novels in terms of structure and voice, much to the delight of his readers. On the other hand, certain autobiographical texts, just like Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) for instance, can be seen as irreversible acts which eclipse the author’s fictional production.
Philippe Lejeune once regretted that “the dirty habit of publishing diaries has resulted into most people writing their privacy while decked out in their very best attire.” Is a novelist, and even more so an established one, not tempted, indeed, to write their autobiography in their best array, drifting away from spontaneous, supposedly authentic autobiographical acts which tend to be nowadays published on social networks? Autobiography indeed involves an element of risk and exposure since it may, whether purposefully or not, allow the reader to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of fiction, and thus disrupt the construction of the figure of the author. Proposals may address, among other issues, the following:
– The origin of the autobiographical act in a novelist’s career
– The minor works/major works dialectics.
– Stylistic specificities of autobiographical narratives versus fictional texts
– The balance in an author’s oeuvre, and more specifically the place occupied by the autobiographical texts in the overall work
– The reception of the autobiographical texts, often isolated or unknown
– The dialogue between fictional and non-fictional texts within a work (Laura Marcus: “The literary writer’s autobiography also bears on, and frequently comments upon, his or her other works”)
– The tools needed for analysis (similar, different?) to study the autobiographical texts
– The persistence of a distance between the narrator and the author, even in an autobiographical text, similar to that embodied by the concept of implied narrator whose presence Jim Phelan, for example, detects even in referential texts such as Joan Didion’s The Year of MagicalThinking.

• Please submit an abstract of approx. 400 words and a short bionote to sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr and arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr by 30 June, 2022 at the latest.

Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Symposium, 5-6 August, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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On (Re)Shaping Identity: Self-Portraiture and the Quotidian

PAMLA 2022 – Los Angeles, CA (November 11-13, 2022 – entirely in-person

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Please contact presiding officer for this session, Ariana Lyriotakis, with any questions: lyriotaa@tcd.ie

Special Session – CFP

Persona and confessional poetry of the Postmodern period enact an undeniable relationship with the quotidian. But how do these poems explore a visual depiction and an expression of self-identity in ordinary life? This panel will explore the methods by which poets manipulate and reject aesthetic production in their poetry, while calling into question subjectivity and truthful composition.

This special session will explore poetic self-portraiture and the shaping of identity within the bounds of the quotidian. John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is perhaps one of the more notable examples from this era; as a poetry firmly situated within the intermediality of poetic textual images and art, he addresses “the enchant of self with self” through personal depiction and aesthetic production. But what is revealed to the reader in these moments of vulnerability and self-appraisal? How can the poet be both subject and object, while constructing a poetic likeness amongst the commonplace? This panel seeks poetry of self-encounter, whether banal or familiar, to interrogate an inward/outward representation of the self within these constructs.

Contributions are invited relating to any of the following aspects, as well as broader interpretations of the theme which may illuminate and elucidate in greater detail. Please be in touch if you have any questions or require further clarification.

• Depictions of the domestic and the visual
• Intermediality of poetic textual images and art
• Interrogations of the actual and the self
• Orality and performance in poetry
• Visuality of text and experimentation
• Mimesis and the composition of ordinary spaces
• Interdeterminacy and temporality

Abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA website only.

The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18564

All panel participants/presenters must join PAMLA by July 1, 2022.

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022

Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023

The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/

The proposed volume will be dedicated to life writing. We use “life writing” as a broad term encompassing a wide variety of personal narratives. We also recognize the capaciousness of the term “world literature” and the accompanying challenges. By putting life writing and world literature into dialogue, we seek to explore their rich shared history, as well as new areas of research.

Authors are encouraged to explore, among others
the intersecting histories of the two fields
debates in world literature concerning auto/biographical genres
autobiographical texts outside the Western canons (East Asia, Latin America, Northern Africa, Middle East)
autobiographical works as they move in translation through global contexts
autobiographical works as they move across time and media (remediation, intermediality, etc.)
the role of materiality in life writing
visual narratives, new media, affective networks, and the role of life writing in participatory democracy
autobiographical texts in “world literature” courses and in cultural diplomacy
the role of autobiographical texts in eco or medical humanities
the homogenizing effects of autobiographical technology and data bias

Please submit abstracts of 350 words, along with a short bio, to the Editors: Helga Lenart-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Ioana Luca (ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw) by July 1, 2022.

Helga Lenart-Cheng
Associate Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Honors Program, Director
Saint Mary’s College of California
Book office hours here
Forthcoming in 2022: Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

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Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2022

Reimagining #MeToo in South Asia And the Diaspora (Edited Collection of Essays)

Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava

contact email:

shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu

This edited volume seeks to examine how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in the context of but, more importantly, in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. We seek to understand how the feminist movement has radically diverged from the assimilationist discourse of the #MeToo Movement and, consequently, the Global North. The #MeToo movement has not made an impact at the grassroots level because it is hinged on the victim-survivor to speak up. In an era where the Global North has been a model for influencing change in the Global South, there has been an inconspicuous absence of recognition and impact of the #MeToo Movement. In addition, survivors’ testimonies lie at the center of the #MeToo movement, which demystifies victim-shaming and victim-blaming, legitimizing the survivor’s testimony as the unquestionable truth.

Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been successful in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The #MeToo has had a significant impact worldwide on how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US. However, this global women’s movement has had little reach in South Asia, where access to virtual platforms is limited, and hashtags are still unknown. The #MeToo Movement in South Asia and the Diaspora was taken up briefly by the media and entertainment industry but has failed to make a concrete impact in many ways. This can be attributed to multiple reasons – there are several regionally specific movements, such as the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign and 2011 #WhyLoiter campaign, that have been radically popular within the sub-continent.

In the South Asian context, such testimonies are still taboo, which leads to survivors refusing to share and relive their experiences/narratives even if they have the means and access. Therefore, our edited volume seeks to problematize the #MeToo movement in order to reimagine and contextualize it in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as a much-needed intervention to examine the implications of a transnational feminist movement. We wish to explore questions such as: how the #MeToo movement can move away from Hollywood/Bollywood/workplace and elitist exclusivity. How can it be more inclusive of non-white and marginalized voices?

In light of the ongoing and increasing gender-based violence occurring in South Asia and the diaspora, our edited volume will reflect on these questions as we seek to understand new ways of formulating complex and nuanced gendered subjectivities vis-à-vis the lens of post-colonial feminism and intersectionality. Our focus shifts away from the traditional approaches of victimization to generate dialogue and hopefully create a new platform to break the silence and encourage discomforting narratives to normalize conversations surrounding this pivotal issue.

Themes include but are not limited to the following:

• Pedagogy and Transformative Learning via #MeToo in the Classroom
• Queer/LGBTQI+ Spaces within #MeToo
• New Masculinities
• Contemporary Gender Movements and Resistances
• Caste, Gender, Class, and Social Spaces
• Problematization of #MeToo and ‘Speaking Up’
• New Modalities of Testimonies
• Resistance and Digital Feminist Interventions
• New Feminist Mediations
• Militarized Feminist Modernities
• Ageism
• Viral Videos
• Censorship, Cultural Production, and Minority Literature
• Mythologies, Legends, and Sexuality

We welcome informal queries, and potential contributors may submit a 500-750 word abstract and 2 page CV by July 1, 2022. Please direct queries to Dr Nidhi Shrivastava (Sacred Heart University), shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu, Dr Ruma Sinha (Syracuse University), rumas1@gmail.com, and Dr Billie T. Guarino (Jamia Milia Islamia), thoidingjam@gmail.com. Acceptance of the final articles is subject to double-blind peer review. The final deadline for submitting 5,000- 6,000-word articles will be November 15, 2022.

Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022

Representations of Border Crossings in Media, Literature, and the Arts

International Academic Conference:15-16 December 2022

MIDEX Centre, University of Central Lancashire

(Research Strand: Representations of Migration, Diaspora and Exile in Media, Literature, and Art)

CALL FOR PAPERS

Border crossings delineate movement from a place, nation, and culture, inter alia, to another. Border crossers, Jane Jackson (2014) writes, can move temporarily or permanently, and crossings can be forced or voluntary, successful or unsuccessful, contemporary or historical. They can lead to multicultural identity formations, or to experiences and feelings of exclusion and isolation (Martin and Nakayama 2008). Because they are embodied experiences, they are determined by race, ethnicity, citizenship status, religion and gender, as well as by biopolitical and necropolitical practices, particularly, when deemed ‘irregular.’ Representations of border crossings play a key role in media, literature, visual, as well as performance arts. Historical and contemporary border crossings form a core segment of literary and artistic production as shown by the publication of literary and graphic migration narratives, museum exhibitions, installations in galleries and open public spaces, and via dance, music and theatre performances (Viljoen 2013). At the same time, representations of contemporary ‘irregular’ border crossings foreground the injurious implications of border control practices, as well as media responsibilities of a ‘crisis’ (Chouliaraki and Stolic 2017).

For this conference, we invite papers that explore representations of border crossings in media, literature, and the arts. We seek to examine the kinds of narratives that can be told through media, artistic and literary attempts to speak about border-crossing subjects. We hope to determine the extent to which such representations cross borders themselves by being exposed to culturally different audiences (Friedman 2005). We further mean to investigate how border-crossing ‘selves’ and ‘others’, collective, or individual, become displayed in such representations and whether hegemonic, (neo-)colonial hierarchies become undone or reproduced through them. How can a person in the position of the ‘host,’ for instance, ‘imagine another without doing violence to [their] object of description’ (Black 2010: 1)? How can representations of liminal, border-crossing subjects disrupt narratives of modernity/coloniality (Schimanski and Wolfe 2013; Mignolo 2011)? Can such representations show ‘how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices’ (Wolfe 2014: 1; Schimanski and Wolfe 2007)? How do they illustrate that ‘as the border crosser crosses the border, new […] borders are created and crossed in the crosser’s own story, and in the story of the border itself’ (Schimanski 2006: 47)? What are the strategies that would enable nuanced interpretations of such representations (see Schimanski and Wolfe 2017)?

We call for researchers and practitioners to submit proposals of up to 250 words for 20-minute presentations exploring border-crossings in literature, media and the arts. We also invite creative practitioners to submit performances, readings, (video) installations, and exhibitions, inter alia. The themes that can be explored include, but are not limited to:

• Exilic, diasporic, migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking border crossers

• Border-crossing, gender, and sexuality

• Decolonial and postcolonial border-crossings

• Border-crossing traumas

• Border-crossing memories

• Affective border-crossings

• Border-crossing as an opportunity

• Metaphorical, cultural, and linguistic border crossings

Please submit your proposals to bordercrossing@uclan.ac.uk by 30th of June, 2022.

References:

Black, S. (2010), Fiction Across Borders: Imagining the Lives of Others in Late-Twentieth Century Fiction, New York : Columbia University Press.

Chouliaraki, L. and T. Stolic (2017), ‘Rethinking Media Responsibility in the Refugee “Crisis:” A Visual Typology of European News’, Media, Culture & Society, 39(8):1162-77.

Friedman, S. S. (2005), ‘Spatial Poetics and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things’, in J. Phelan and P. J. Rabinowitz (eds), A Companion to Narrative Theory, 192-205, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Jackson, J. (2014), Introducing Language and Intercultural Communication, London: Routledge.

Martin, J.N. and Nakayama, T.K. (2008), Experiencing Intercultural Communication: An Introduction, New York: McGraw-Hill.

Mignolo, D. W. (2011), The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options, New York: Duke University Press.

Schimanski, J. (2006), ‘Crossing and Reading: Notes towards a Theory and Method’, Nordlit, 19: 41-63.

Schimanski, J. and S. Wolfe (2007), ‘Entry Points: An Introduction’ in J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe (eds), Border Poetics De-Limited, 9-26, Hannover: Wehrhahn Verlag.

____. (2013), ‘The Aesthetics of Borders’, in K. Aukrust (ed), Assigning Cultural Values, 235-250, Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

____. eds. (2017), Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections, New York: Berghahn.

Viljoen, H., ed. (2013), Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Wolfe, S. (2014), ‘Border Aesthetics/Border Works’, Nordlit, 31:1-5.

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“’My strength, my comfort, my intense delight’: Women, Art and Lifewriting in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.”

Universities Art Association of Canada annual conference Oct 27-29, University of Toronto.

Deadline for abstracts: June 30.

Like her contemporary Eugène Delacroix, British watercolourist Elizabeth Murray left the “West” in the early 1800s for the “Orient,” recording her adventures in extensive writings and images. However, while Delacroix’s journals and notebooks became widely celebrated, Murray’s account slid into obscurity—even though Delacroix’s journey lasted only six months and generated two articles, while Murray’s time in the region prompted her two-volume autobiography Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands. Moreover, accounts by other women from that century—Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; Elizabeth Butler—similarly languished, creating the sense that this era’s female artists neither left home nor published autobiographies. This panel aims to explode this misapprehension by convening discussions of lifewriting by women artists of the 1800s and earlier. We welcome proposals regarding all lifewriting forms (e.g. diaries, letters), with particular interest in accounts originating outside normative “Western” narratives, and/or regarding now-obscure autobiographies.

Per standard practice, you need to join UAAC if your paper is accepted – but you don’t need to join to submit a proposal. Questions? creeve@ocadu.ca

Application process and full conference CFP here.

Charles Reeve

OCAD University

Chair, Liberal Studies

Faculty of Arts & Science

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CALL FOR PAPERS
North-American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions

Aix-Marseilles University, 6/7 July 2023
Organizers: Sophie Vallas (Aix-Marseilles University, LERMA), Arnaud Schmitt (University of Bordeaux, CLIMAS)

Deadline for Submissions June 30, 2022 Addressing the topic of autobiographical texts or memoirs published by novelists, what she calls “the literary writer’s autobiography,” Laura Marcus underlines that the reader’s awareness of the name and reputation of the author immediately confers a certain literary status on the autobiographical text: “Not all autobiographers are writers by profession, though there is a widespread assumption that the literary writer’s autobiography best defines the genre.” Far from the host of confessional memoirs, either by celebrities or unknown authors, a publishing phenomenon identified by Rockwell Gray as a “memoir boom” in his 1982 article “Autobiography Now,” and far from so-called autobiographical novels or autofictions which, according to Maurice Couturier, allowed many writers to “smuggle their own autobiographies,” this conference will focus on autobiographical texts—paratextually and unequivocally identified as such—published by American novelists, on “the literary writer’s autobiography” in other words, and on their influence on the perception of the overall work of their author. We will wonder how autobiographical acts happen, when they happen, in a career dominated by fiction, what their links with the fictional part of the work are or why they are often perceived as minor texts among a fictional body of major ones. Also, do they conjure up specific writing techniques, a separate creative space? The disruption caused by autobiographical texts in a literary work mostly devoted to the writing of fiction raises several questions concerning the artistic logic underlying them, the way they are embedded in the complete oeuvre of the author and the editorial and paratextual choices made for their publication.
It often seems logical that authors should turn to life writing at the end of their career, an introspective act embracing their whole life, revisiting their own work. Mark Twain, who published a few chapters of his autobiography in the years prior to his death, decided nevertheless that its publication would be a posthumous act, a hundred years after his death more precisely (The Autobiography of Mark Twain, 2010). Other texts, also published late in their authors’ life, focus on the death of a relative or a friend while offering authors the opportunity to reflect on their own life, inexorably drawing to a close: Joan Didion’s autobiographical diptych, The Year of the Magical Thinking in 2005 (simultaneously mourning the death and celebrating the life of her husband, John Dunne) and Blue Nights in 2011 (doing the same for Didion’s adopted daughter, Quintana, who died in 2005), belongs to this crepuscular tradition in which writing almost amounts to issuing legal, performative acts standing for marriage, adoption, death. Such is also the case for Philip Roth’s Patrimony (1991). Conversely, some autobiographical texts herald the birth of an author: Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude (1982) delivered, in prose, the new voice of a poet and essayist who, from then on, would dedicate his career as a novelist to developing and fictionalizing many topics already present in this seminal memoir. Auster has gone on regularly publishing autobiographical narratives, each time revisiting his life from a different angle and adding new acts to the play of his life (The Red Notebook, 1995; Hand to Mouth, 1997; Winter Journal, 2012; Report from the Interior, 2013).
For other autobiographical texts, what is at stake is less the moment when they get written, either at the beginning or at the end of a career, than their capacity of exploring the very art of their authors. In that case, they tend to exist as so many comments on the fictional works which they occasionally revisit. Joyce Carol Oates, for instance, has kept on analyzing the act of writing throughout the years ((Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, 1974; The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art, 2003; A Widow’s Story. A Memoir, 2011; The Lost Landscape. A Writer’s Coming of Age, 2015). At the very opposite of Oates’ regular autobiographical practice, James Salter’s Burning the Days (1997) stands as a unique autobiographical text in a body of work otherwise entirely devoted to fiction, almost like a faulty act, even if the volume sounds like Salter’s powerful novels in terms of structure and voice, much to the delight of his readers. On the other hand, certain autobiographical texts, just like Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945) for instance, can be seen as irreversible acts which eclipse the author’s fictional production.
Philippe Lejeune once regretted that “the dirty habit of publishing diaries has resulted into most people writing their privacy while decked out in their very best attire.” Is a novelist, and even more so an established one, not tempted, indeed, to write their autobiography in their best array, drifting away from spontaneous, supposedly authentic autobiographical acts which tend to be nowadays published on social networks? Autobiography indeed involves an element of risk and exposure since it may, whether purposefully or not, allow the reader to get a behind-the-scenes look at the making of fiction, and thus disrupt the construction of the figure of the author. Proposals may address, among other issues, the following:
– The origin of the autobiographical act in a novelist’s career
– The minor works/major works dialectics.
– Stylistic specificities of autobiographical narratives versus fictional texts
– The balance in an author’s oeuvre, and more specifically the place occupied by the autobiographical texts in the overall work
– The reception of the autobiographical texts, often isolated or unknown
– The dialogue between fictional and non-fictional texts within a work (Laura Marcus: “The literary writer’s autobiography also bears on, and frequently comments upon, his or her other works”)
– The tools needed for analysis (similar, different?) to study the autobiographical texts
– The persistence of a distance between the narrator and the author, even in an autobiographical text, similar to that embodied by the concept of implied narrator whose presence Jim Phelan, for example, detects even in referential texts such as Joan Didion’s The Year of MagicalThinking.

• Please submit an abstract of approx. 400 words and a short bionote to sophie.vallas@univ-amu.fr and arnaud.schmitt@u-bordeaux.fr by 30 June, 2022 at the latest.

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Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Symposium, 5-6 August, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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On (Re)Shaping Identity: Self-Portraiture and the Quotidian

PAMLA 2022 – Los Angeles, CA (November 11-13, 2022 – entirely in-person

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Please contact presiding officer for this session, Ariana Lyriotakis, with any questions: lyriotaa@tcd.ie

Special Session – CFP

Persona and confessional poetry of the Postmodern period enact an undeniable relationship with the quotidian. But how do these poems explore a visual depiction and an expression of self-identity in ordinary life? This panel will explore the methods by which poets manipulate and reject aesthetic production in their poetry, while calling into question subjectivity and truthful composition.

This special session will explore poetic self-portraiture and the shaping of identity within the bounds of the quotidian. John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is perhaps one of the more notable examples from this era; as a poetry firmly situated within the intermediality of poetic textual images and art, he addresses “the enchant of self with self” through personal depiction and aesthetic production. But what is revealed to the reader in these moments of vulnerability and self-appraisal? How can the poet be both subject and object, while constructing a poetic likeness amongst the commonplace? This panel seeks poetry of self-encounter, whether banal or familiar, to interrogate an inward/outward representation of the self within these constructs.

Contributions are invited relating to any of the following aspects, as well as broader interpretations of the theme which may illuminate and elucidate in greater detail. Please be in touch if you have any questions or require further clarification.

• Depictions of the domestic and the visual
• Intermediality of poetic textual images and art
• Interrogations of the actual and the self
• Orality and performance in poetry
• Visuality of text and experimentation
• Mimesis and the composition of ordinary spaces
• Interdeterminacy and temporality

Abstracts must be submitted through the PAMLA website only.

The web address for this session’s CFP is: https://pamla.ballastacademic.com/Home/S/18564

All panel participants/presenters must join PAMLA by July 1, 2022.

https://pamla.ballastacademic.com

CALL FOR PAPERS: 

LIFE WRITING AS WORLD LITERATURE (book)

Deadline for abstracts: July 1, 2022

Deadline for final essays: January 1, 2023

The series Literatures as World Literature by Bloomsbury Publishing aims to “take a novel approach to world literature by analyzing specific constellations — according to language, nation, form, or theme — of literary texts and authors in their own world-literary dimensions.” https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/series/literatures-as-world-literature/

The proposed volume will be dedicated to life writing. We use “life writing” as a broad term encompassing a wide variety of personal narratives. We also recognize the capaciousness of the term “world literature” and the accompanying challenges. By putting life writing and world literature into dialogue, we seek to explore their rich shared history, as well as new areas of research.

Authors are encouraged to explore, among others
the intersecting histories of the two fields
debates in world literature concerning auto/biographical genres
autobiographical texts outside the Western canons (East Asia, Latin America, Northern Africa, Middle East)
autobiographical works as they move in translation through global contexts
autobiographical works as they move across time and media (remediation, intermediality, etc.)
the role of materiality in life writing
visual narratives, new media, affective networks, and the role of life writing in participatory democracy
autobiographical texts in “world literature” courses and in cultural diplomacy
the role of autobiographical texts in eco or medical humanities
the homogenizing effects of autobiographical technology and data bias

Please submit abstracts of 350 words, along with a short bio, to the Editors: Helga Lenart-Cheng (hl4@stmarys-ca.edu) and Ioana Luca (ioana.luca@ntnu.edu.tw) by July 1, 2022.

Helga Lenart-Cheng
Associate Professor
World Languages and Cultures
Honors Program, Director
Saint Mary’s College of California
Book office hours here
Forthcoming in 2022: Story Revolutions: Collective Narratives from the Enlightenment to the Digital Age

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Tasavvur Collective’s 2022 Symposium – ‘Writing Muslim Women in South Asia’

deadline for submissions: 

July 1, 2022

Tasavvur Collective, Universities of Edinburgh, St. Andrews and Exeter

contact email:

Tasavvurcollective@gmail.com

Symposium Concept Note and Call for Papers

From the Aurat March in Pakistan to the Shaheen Bagh protests in India, Muslim women have been at the forefront of political change and social upheaval, both in recent years and in the past. With Bangladeshi lawyer Sara Hossain as the recipient of the International Women of Courage Award in 2016 for reforming legislation on violence against women and Arooj Aftab as the first Pakistani woman to win a Grammy in 2022, these achievements are also not limited to any single sphere of cultural influence. And yet, the dominant narrative surrounding the experiences of Muslim women continues to focus on the oppressions they have faced, with little to no consideration given to the way they have overcome these challenges. As such, the category of ‘Muslim Woman’ has been essentialised in ethonographic, Orientalist and neo-liberal discourses since it began to be ‘studied’, a narrative that scholars and activists alike are seeking to challenge more and more every day.

This essentialist discourse was recently highlighted across South Asia, thus proving the necessity of challenging such narratives. On March 15th 2022, the Karnataka High Court in India upheld a government order to deny entry to Muslim women who wear the hijab into educational institutions by ruling that the “hijab is not essential to Islam”. Two separate incidents of auctioning Muslim women online for ‘deals’ were reported within 8 months of each other between 2021-22 and the perpetrators of both were let off by the Delhi High Court on “humanitarian grounds”. In Sri Lanka, a similar anti-Muslim sentiment has been reverberating through the appeals of Buddhist monk group Bodu Bala Sena (BSS) to ban the burqa as a “sign of religious extremism”. Across the border in Pakistan, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam-Fazl (JUI-F) organised a ‘Hijab March’ in solidarity with the Muslim women in Karnataka in February 2022. Rather than focusing on freedom of choice, party leaders used the opportunity to take a stance against the Aurat March, an annual demonstration for women’s rights held across Pakistan on 8th March to coincide with International Women’s Day. Aurat March was, and is, constantly accused of violating haya (modesty), with particular reference made to“objectionable slogans” such as #MeraJismMeriMarzi.

There is a long and often neglected history of Muslim women intervening in debates about ‘reform’, decolonisation and citizenship to assert their own interests and identities, pioneering the rise of feminist scholarship and activism in South Asia. From Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain to Kamila Shamsie, one can trace a history of Muslim women writers and thinkers who have fundamentally altered contemporary literary and political discourse. A careful examination of these narratives surrounding Muslim women’s intellectual and political existence validates the significant work of scholars like Shenila Khoja-Moolji and Yasmin Saikia, who have argued that attempts to emancipate Muslim women have had to contend with simultaneously imposing uniform, majoritarian models of femininity– whether it is colonial modernity or orthodox religiosity. Navigating these binaries of emancipation and oppression, Muslim women have carved their own identities to interrogate and subvert these categorisations. This symposium is an attempt to bring together scholars, thinkers, artists and activists to create such a discursive space for a timely conversation on Muslim women’s pasts and present.

Each of our panels foregrounds the agential capacity of Muslim women in writing themselves and others, as they contend with shifting dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and caste, within and with relation to South Asia. This symposium hopes to disrupt the essentializing discourse on Muslim women’s identity by exploring the polyphonic nature of human subjectivities.
Discussion topics may include but are not limited to:

• Narratives of gender, sexuality and queerness Agency and artistic expression in Muslim women
• Protest, resistance, and activism
• Nationalism, nation and gender; Partition(s) Space, place and temporality
• Purdah, privacy and public discourse
• Marriage, family, and domesticity
• Technology; social media; cybercrime
• Sair: narratives of travel, cosmopolitanism and mobility
• ‘Modern’ Muslim women; self-fashioning in the age of empire
• Sharif Ladki: reform, education and girlhood
• Zaat: intersections of caste and gender in South Asian Islam
• Begumati Zubaan: gender and multilingualism

We invite established academics and early-career/PhD scholars within the fields of humanities and social sciences, and outside of these realms, as well as non-academic voices working on and representing Muslim women’s perspectives with reference to South Asia to present 20-minute papers, mixed-media presentations or any other forms of discussion on or around the above themes. Please send 300 word abstracts/presentation outlines including a short biography of not more than 100 words to tasavvurcollective@gmail.com. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st July 2022, and selected participants will be contacted with the final schedule by 15th July 2022. The symposium will be held online via Zoom on 5th-6th August 2022.

Symposium organisers: Fatima Z. Naveed (University of Exeter), Sheelalipi Sahana (University of Edinburgh) and
Zehra Kazmi (University of St. Andrews) of the Tasavvur Collective. Follow us on Twitter: @tasavvurcollect for updates.

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Deadline for Submissions: July 1, 2022

Reimagining #MeToo in South Asia And the Diaspora (Edited Collection of Essays)

Dr. Nidhi Shrivastava

contact email:

shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu

This edited volume seeks to examine how sexual violence and feminist interventions in South Asia and the Diaspora have been articulated in the context of but, more importantly, in opposition to the #MeToo Movement. We seek to understand how the feminist movement has radically diverged from the assimilationist discourse of the #MeToo Movement and, consequently, the Global North. The #MeToo movement has not made an impact at the grassroots level because it is hinged on the victim-survivor to speak up. In an era where the Global North has been a model for influencing change in the Global South, there has been an inconspicuous absence of recognition and impact of the #MeToo Movement. In addition, survivors’ testimonies lie at the center of the #MeToo movement, which demystifies victim-shaming and victim-blaming, legitimizing the survivor’s testimony as the unquestionable truth.

Since 2017, the #MeToo movement has been successful in the conviction of Harvey Weinstein, who was at the center of the landmark trial. The #MeToo has had a significant impact worldwide on how we understand sexual harassment, rape, and gendered violence, especially in the US. However, this global women’s movement has had little reach in South Asia, where access to virtual platforms is limited, and hashtags are still unknown. The #MeToo Movement in South Asia and the Diaspora was taken up briefly by the media and entertainment industry but has failed to make a concrete impact in many ways. This can be attributed to multiple reasons – there are several regionally specific movements, such as the 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign and 2011 #WhyLoiter campaign, that have been radically popular within the sub-continent.

In the South Asian context, such testimonies are still taboo, which leads to survivors refusing to share and relive their experiences/narratives even if they have the means and access. Therefore, our edited volume seeks to problematize the #MeToo movement in order to reimagine and contextualize it in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora as a much-needed intervention to examine the implications of a transnational feminist movement. We wish to explore questions such as: how the #MeToo movement can move away from Hollywood/Bollywood/workplace and elitist exclusivity. How can it be more inclusive of non-white and marginalized voices?

In light of the ongoing and increasing gender-based violence occurring in South Asia and the diaspora, our edited volume will reflect on these questions as we seek to understand new ways of formulating complex and nuanced gendered subjectivities vis-à-vis the lens of post-colonial feminism and intersectionality. Our focus shifts away from the traditional approaches of victimization to generate dialogue and hopefully create a new platform to break the silence and encourage discomforting narratives to normalize conversations surrounding this pivotal issue.

Themes include but are not limited to the following:

• Pedagogy and Transformative Learning via #MeToo in the Classroom
• Queer/LGBTQI+ Spaces within #MeToo
• New Masculinities
• Contemporary Gender Movements and Resistances
• Caste, Gender, Class, and Social Spaces
• Problematization of #MeToo and ‘Speaking Up’
• New Modalities of Testimonies
• Resistance and Digital Feminist Interventions
• New Feminist Mediations
• Militarized Feminist Modernities
• Ageism
• Viral Videos
• Censorship, Cultural Production, and Minority Literature
• Mythologies, Legends, and Sexuality

We welcome informal queries, and potential contributors may submit a 500-750 word abstract and 2 page CV by July 1, 2022. Please direct queries to Dr Nidhi Shrivastava (Sacred Heart University), shrivastavan@sacredheart.edu, Dr Ruma Sinha (Syracuse University), rumas1@gmail.com, and Dr Billie T. Guarino (Jamia Milia Islamia), thoidingjam@gmail.com. Acceptance of the final articles is subject to double-blind peer review. The final deadline for submitting 5,000- 6,000-word articles will be November 15, 2022

Deadline for Proposals June 20, 2022

Autobiography: a matter of geometry?XXI International Symposium of the Scientific Observatoryfor Written, Oral and Iconographic Autobiographical Memory, organized by: Mediapolis.Europa, cultural association http://mediapoliseuropa.com/ and Mnemosyne, o la costruzione del senso, Presses universitaires de Louvain https://pul.uclouvain.be/review/Rome (Italy), 2, 3, 4 November 2022

This call for papers aims to invite proposals that examine the relationship between a subject who narrates him/herself and the spatial dimension. This is not about seeing oneself in space, or casting a glance on space, but presenting oneself through a mental space. The subject can choose an omniscient or a partial vision, can interpose obstacles by asking questions on his/her identity, can find a way of observing him/herself from the outside. This call for papers intends to consider not fictional works but rather autobiographical ones. Under the register of fiction, the category of space has in fact many points of reference that can be inscribed into defined pathways: think of the themes of wandering, nomadic thought, utopia (u-topos: non-place), Foucault’s discourse on heterotopia, Kafka’s vision, and much more. The autobiographical pact, which remains a fixed point, obliges one to take existential responsibility as a single focal point. (Ph. Lejeune, 1975). In archaic Latin, the word existence means exsistere, ex + sistere. According to the Enciclopedia Treccani, in the language of philosophy, it is the state of every reality as it is, or, specifically, the state of a reality that can be the object of a sensory experience. In our case, this means that the subject that recounts his/her own existence chooses a place in which to situate, envision, project, pro-ject him/herself. For those who engage in their own autobiography, the complexity lies in being able to avail of an external eye. In Life of Hernri Brulard, Stendhal writes: “… what eye can see itself?”
At the beginning of the 20th century, the expression biography of self underscores the distancing taken by the writer from him/herself. Dostoevsky talks about self-accounting regarding his novel The Double (1846).
In the past fifty years, many video artists have focused their research on the use of video as an external eye. They have intended to contrast the vision that, beginning from the Renaissance, had wanted to objectivise space; according to Christine Van Assche, the point of view of the spectator [N.B.: stimulated by some work of video art] is no longer the single and unperturbed point of view of the observer of Brunelleschi’s ‘tablet’; it is already perturbed, unstable, moving, but inevitably, physically, psychologically, and intellectually active. Van Assche refers to Rosalind Krauss’ essay The Aesthetics of Narcissism (1976). On this matter, see also issue n. 48 (1988) of Communication. The theme of defining the subject’s mental space is at the heart of a significant part of contemporary art and particularly video art.   The longitude and latitude of the self
‘Super-ego, subconscious, to emerge, to remove’ are words that highlight the subject’s vertical position in space. Psychoanalysis has given prominence to this geometry of the psyche. Freud compares memory to the stratification of Roman excavations, an archaeology of memory (Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]).
The subject’s relationship to space is one of the dominant themes, the very focal point, of existentialism, which, beginning with Kierkegaard, crosses our contemporaneity. In the chapter “The subjective truth, inwardness; truth is subjectivity” in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs (2009 [1846]), Kierkegaard places inwardness at the centre, which is a choice, a path, a posture, a centripetal movement. Even supposing an objective reality, to give a meaning to our cosmos, to our cosmoi, everything then returns to subjectivity: “for as Hamlet says, existence and non-existence have only subjective significance.” (2009 [1846], p. 163). The I = I (which comes from Fichte), is a constant in Kierkegaard’s thinking, which connects the subject’s identity to a permanent inward movement.  The Swiss psychiatrist Binswanger (1881-1966), defines Kierkegaard’s conception as ‘passion of inwardness’, meaning that one can assume oneself only beginning from within oneself. As already said, Kierkegaard insists upon the term ‘existence’ by underscoring how the self and only the self is in its isolation, in its being acontextual, it can determine itself by leaving external interferences at the margins. Little by little, Binswanger, a staunch follower of Kirkegaard, will come to Heidegger. Observing patients’ language and behaviour, he examines the “basic forms and perception of human Dasein” (1942), noting the importance of space in the vision that patients have of themselves. Binswanger observes that, in order to describe themselves, patients closely connect bodily sensitivity and affectivity to space. Thus Binswanger orients himself towards a method that he calls Daseinsanalysis, a term that clearly refers to Heiddeger’s Dasein. Heidegger writes: “Space is not in the subject, nor is the world in space. Space is rather ‘in’ the world in so far as space has been disclosed by that Being-in-the-world which is constitutive of Dasein. Space is not to be found in the subject, nor does the subject observe the world ‘as if’ that world were in a space; but the ‘subject’ (Dasein), if well understood ontologically, is spatial.” (Being and Time, 1972 [1927], p.145, Paragraph 24, “Space and Dasein’s Spatiality”). This way of thinking about space will represent a change compared to all previous philosophy, and it will be only the beginning of a series of reflections on the subject-space relationship. Sartre, Merleu-Ponty, Camus will undertake to develop aspects that go beyond Heidegger’s ontological discourse.   The space of the subject in language  In childhood and in pathological psychic states, it is through awareness of space that one manifests oneself. In The Psychology of Intelligence, Jean Piaget explains that space is a primary category of consciousness in children’s thinking (1967).
“To bring back to earth” or “to be over the moon” are expressions of our Dasein, our existence. And even though myths and poetry allow us – through a universalizing metaphorical language – sensations, feelings, psychic experiences, the self nonetheless remains the original subject of what climbs or falls. (L. Binswanger 2012, p. 42). Binswanger, who starts from Heidegger, moves away from the latter’s ontological conception, which is his own, to immerse it in concrete cases. A whole vocabulary situates in space the acts of the patient’s dasein: vertiginous height, climbing, aerial altitude, the infinite, etc. (L. Binswanger 1971, pp. 237-245).   Some linguistic expressions reveal how the self situates itself in the space that it constantly places in relation to his/her own persona.
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (2003 [1980]), in Metaphors We Live By (see paragraph “The ME-FIRST Orientation”], show how our way of recounting is modelled on a way of thinking in which the concept of up wins over that of down, front always precedes back, and here precedes there (Ibid., pp. 132-133). A whole cultural conception governs these forms of expression, in which the individual regards him/herself as at the epicentre in relation to the surrounding world that he/she modulates.
The order of words was studied by William E. Cooper and John Robert Ross, 1975, World Order.   The subject’s framing of the world  Man frames the world and frames himself in the world.
A metalanguage interprets the subject’s framing of the world, as Lotman writes. In particular, he talks about this in two essays on, respectively, the problem of artistic space in Gogol’s prose and the semiotics of cultural space, 1975 [1968]. The writing on Gogol constitutes an important methodological reference. The extremization of a longitudinal contextualization of existence is described by Borges in a paradoxical manner: “So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same”. (1974 [1943]. Borges highlights how, by longitudinally crossing a life, each time choosing only one aspect and ignoring the others, we would find ourself before many parallel lives of a single person. This reflection could be transposed as it is to autobiographical writing. Borges shows how fragile a linear description of existence is. In Lines–A brief history (2007), Tim Ingold calls ‘ghostly lines’ those that derive from abstractions and constitute points of reference in various cultures, especially the Western one. These lines have neither consistency nor colour (as a furrow in agriculture could be, for example). It is especially beginning from Euclid that the idea of the straight line dominates visual perception, from which geometric perspective will derive, which insists on presenting reality in a unidirectional manner. (2007, p. 159). Tim Ingold says that when we look at a starry sky, for example, we define the constellations of the stars by connecting them through abstract lines until we imagine structured figures. (Ibid., p. 49). This is completely normal in our Western vision. Moreover, the conviction that history is evolutionary has generated genealogical trees in which past generations, instead of being brought back to the roots, are placed on the branches. Instead of a lineage as it was in the representation of ancestors in ancient Rome, our Western civilization has created an upward progression, towards the future. (Ibid., pp. 104-109).   Lotman observes how, in the military field, front line is a watchword, an anticipatory geometry. And yet, those who experience war realize the difficulties in finding this vision, this geometry, in concrete experience. In the short autobiography Non-Memoirs (2001 [1994]) on the war years spent on different Soviet fronts, Lotman writes that it is difficult to write about war because only those who have never been to war know what it is. He argues that is like describing a huge space with no precise boundaries and no internal unity, pointing out that there is one war in winter and another in spring; one during retreat and another during defence and offence; one in the day and one at night; one in the infantry, another in the artillery, and a third one in the aviation; one for the soldier and another for the journalist arriving at the front. (Ibid., p. 50-51).
In other words, the meaning that the individual and the community attribute to space is the result of processes of mutual semantization.   Marginalia and opacity  Authors and writers can choose particular habitats to avoid situating themselves and being seen in spaces that are, so to speak, conventional. We consider only two examples: Edgar Allan Poe’s Marginalia and Rousseau’s Confessions as seen by Starobinski in his book La transparence et l’obstacle. At the beginning of Marginalia (1844), Edgar Allan Poe writes: “In getting my books, I have always been solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general.” And further on: “In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly – boldly – originally – with abandonment – without conceit”. [Bold is ours].
To put events into perspective also means to omit, to put aside spaces and aspects of one’s own life. Just as Starobinski highlights regarding Rousseau’s Confessions. It is possible to play with transparency (to see everything) and the obstacle. Starobinski calls this strategy Poppaea’s veil. Tacitus writes about Poppaea: “Her conversation was charming and her wit anything but dull. She professed virtue, while she practised laxity. Seldom did she appear in public, and it was always with her face partly veiled, either to disappoint men’s gaze or to set off her beauty.” Annals XIII, 45. Poppaea did not want to conceal herself, she wanted to be glimpsed. A painting by an unknown artist from the School of Fontainebleau (1550-1560), in the MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, 1839, shows Sabina Poppaea wrapped in gauze, in a falsely modest pose. Starobinski wrote a long introduction to L’oeil vivant (1961), “Le voile de Poppée”, in which he argues that it is possible to intentionally interpose obstacles to the space of communication with the other, pointing out that that which is hidden is the other face of a presence. He asserts that Poppaea’s veil, which is both an obstacle and an interposed sign, generates an alienated perfection that, through her own escape, demands to be retrieved through our desire. By virtue of the interdiction posed by the obstacle, he continues, there appears a whole depth that passes as essential. He goes on to argue that fascination emanates from a real presence that forces us to prefer what she dissimulates, the remoteness that she prevents us from understanding, at the very moment in which she offers herself. (Ibid., p. 10).
Starobinski’s subtle analysis takes into account our mental spaces, how they are constructed. Another important aspect concerns the influence on the construction of mental space due to circumstances less strictly subjective, so to speak: Foucault’s analysis of heterotopia (see Conference, 14 May 1967, Paris); the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of deterritorialization (1975) – ideas that allows us to understand the incidence of culture on the way of individually conceiving space.
In conclusion: if for Kierkegaard, come what may, introspection will never be a matter of geography, yet we know that conceiving oneself in space is certainly different for an American Indian, or an Eskimo, or a New Yorker. As Henri Lefèvre’s studies indicate, mental space does not correspond to either knowledge in space, or on space; that is, mental space is not external to the subject (1968). And yet, this individuality of mental space, as Lefèvre illustrates, is the long-term result of our interaction with the world and exposure to the universe, to the semiosphere, in which we find ourself living.   Bibliographic references  -Beatrice Barbalato, 2018, “Le ‘FRONT’ sémantique de Non-memorie de Lotman”, 61-77. in (ed.) Cathérine Gravet, and al., with Serge Deruette, Pierre Gillis, Katherine Rondou, Cahiers Internationaux de Symbolisme, n. 149-150-151.
-Raymond Bellour, Anne Marie Duguet, (dir.), 1988, Vidéo, Communication n. 48.
-Ludwig Binswanger, 1942, Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschliche Daseins, Zurich, Niehans.
– Introduction à l’analyse existentielle, 1971, translated from the German by J. Verdeaux and Roland Kuhn, preface by R. Kuhn and Henri Maldiney.
– Rêve et existence, 2012 [1930], translation and introduction by Françoise Dastur, afterword by E. Basso, Paris, Vrin.
-Caterina Borelli, 2018, «The House He Built : autobiografia in una casa», in B. Barbalato (dir.), Auto/biographie, polyphonie, plurivocalité, Mnemosyne n. 11, PuL, Presses universitaires de Louvain.
https://ojs.uclouvain.be/index.php/Mnemosyne/article/view/14123
-Jorge Luis Borges, “On William Beckford’s Vathek” [1943]
https://www.gwern.net/docs/borges/1943-borges-onwilliambeckfordsvathek.pdf
-William Cooper and John Robert Ross, 1975, “World order”, pp. 63–111, R. E. Grossman and al. (eds.), Papers from the parasession on functionalism, Chicago, Chicago Linguistic Society. -Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari 1975, Capitalisme et schizophrénie-L’AntiOedipe, v. I, Parigi, Éditions du Minuit.
-Michel Foucault 2004 [1967], Des espaces autres, 12-19, Érès “Empan” 2004/2, n. 54.
-Sigmund Freud, first published in 1930, Civilization and Its Discontents, translation by James Strachey, https://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/FreudS-CIVILIZATION-AND-ITS-DISCONTENTS-text-final.pdf
-Martin Heidegger, 1972 [1927], Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd. -Tim Ingold 2007, Lines – A brief history, London-New York, Routledge.
https://taskscape.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/lines-a-brief-history.pdf
-Søren Kierkegaard, 2009 [1847], “The subjective truth, inwardness; truth is subjectivity,” p. 163, in Conclusive Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs, edited and translated by Alistair Hannay, Cambridge University Press.
-Rosalind Krauss 1976, The Aesthetics of Narcissism, Cambridge. -Georges Lakoff, Mark Johnson, 2003 [1980], Metaphors We Live By, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press.
-Henri Lefèvre, 1974, La production de l’espace, Paris, Anthropos.
-Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique, Paris, Seuil, 1975.
-Yuri M. Lotman, 1975 [1968], “Semiotica dello spazio culturale”, 143-248, “Il problema dello spazio artistico in Gogol”, 193-248, translated by Sergio Molinari, in J. M. Lotman and Boris A. Uspenskij, Tipologia della cultura, edited by Remo Faccani and Marzio Marzaduri, translated from the Russian into Italian by Manila Barbato Faccani, Remo Faccani, Marzio Marzaduri, Sergio Molinari, Milano, Bompiani. -, 2001 [1994], Non-Memorie, Silvia Burini and Alessandro Niero (edited and translated), introduction by Maria Corti, Novara, Interlinea. Original Russian text “Ne-memuary”, 1994, in Lotmanovskij sbornik, I-C-Garant, Moscow.
-Jean Piaget, “L’élaboration de la pensée”, pp. 129-165, in Ibid., La psychologie de l’intelligence, Paris, Colin, 1967.
-Edgar Allan Poe, «Marginalia part I», 1844-1849, United States Magazine and Democratic Review, November 1844. http://pinkmonkey.com/dl/library1/marg.pdf
-Tacitus, Annals, from Tacitus, Complete Works of Tacitus, Alfred John Church, William Jackson Brodribb, Sara Bryant, edited for Perseus, New York. Random House, Inc., reprinted 1942.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D13%3Achapter%3D45
-Christine Van Assche 1992, Une histoire de vidéo, introduction to the catalogue of Musée d’Art moderne du Centre Pompidou, Vidéo et après, Paris, Éditions Carré.   Scientific Committee
Beatrice BARBALATO, Mediapolis.Europa  May CHEHAB, Université de Chypre
Fabio CISMONDI, Euro Fusion
Antonio CASTILLO GÓMEZ, Univ. d’Alcalà de Henares
Françoise HIRAUX, Univ. cath. de Louvain
Giulia PELILLO-HESTERMEYER, Universität Heidelberg
Anna TYLUSIŃSKA-KOWALSKA, Uniwersytet Warszawski
Organization
Irene MELICIANI, managing director Mediapolis.Europa   Symposium – Rome 2, 3, 4 November 2022Autobiography: a matter of geometry?Enrolments 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 20 June 2022. 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 information, please contact the following: beatrice.barbalato@gmail.com,
irenemeliciani@gmail.com.
Notification of the accepted proposals will be given on 30 June 2022.   B) In regard to enrolment in the colloquium, once the proposal is accepted the fees are the following:
Before 30 July 2022: 110,00€
From 1 to 30 August 2022: 130,00€
Enrolment cannot be accepted in loco.
Ph.D. students:
Before 30 July 2022: 75,00€
From 1 to 30 August 2022: 90,00€
Enrolment cannot be accepted in loco.
Participation only 30,00 €   Virtual: All conference activities will be available through our webinar format. You will receive the conference link through the email address you provide in your registration.
A) For information on registration fees, past symposia, the association’s activities, and the organising and scientific teams, please refer to our website:  http://mediapoliseuropa.com/
The association Mediapolis.Europa contributes to the publication of the journal Mnemosyne, o la costruzione del senso, Presses universitaires de Louvain, www.i6doc.com.
Indexed as a scientific journal in: https://dbh.nsd.uib.no/publiseringskanaler/erihplus/periodical/info?id=488665

Deadline for Application June 15, 2022

Vacancy for PhD researcher: “Broadcast Biographies. Innovations in Genre and Medium (1945-2020)”

by Birgit Van Puymbroeck

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Faculty of Languages and Humanities, Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, is looking for a four-year full-time PhD researcher in the field of literary studies as part of the FWO funded research project “Broadcast Biographies. Innovations in Genre and Medium (1945-2020)”.

1. Project

This project is situated at the intersection of life writing, literary radio studies and cultural memory studies. It examines the literary radio biography in Britain and (West-)Germany in the period 1945-2020 along three complementary lines: its production and reception history, its genre and media conventions and its cultural memory function. Despite the rich history of biographical writing on and for radio, little research exists on the radio biography as genre, let alone on its role as a potential catalyst for genre and media innovation. Neither the vast scholarship on life writing nor the field of radio studies have paid systematic attention to biographies created specifically for radio. Still, as this project aims to show, the radio biography gives us a unique insight in the ongoing mediation of life narratives and the history of radio itself. By writing lives for the radio, literary authors such as Alfred Andersch, Martin Esslin, Gerhard Rühm, Angela Carter and Tom Stoppard also chronicle the life of radio itself, reflecting on the possibilities and limits of both genre and medium.

In this project, we mainly focus on productions by (post)modernist and neo-avant-garde authors. We aim to study the genre and function of the broadcast biography, including its role in the transnational exchange between the two central national broadcasting cultures in this project.

2. Position

We offer a four-year full-time PhD position (subject to annual positive evaluation). The successful candidate will carry out the project as a doctoral researcher in close collaboration with the two supervisors at the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossing (CLIC) at VUB (https://clic.research.vub.be/en/home). The candidate will write a doctoral dissertation on the subject of the radio biography, carry out archival work on selected authors and productions (in the UK and Germany), (co-)publish the results of the research in academic articles and books, present at national and international conferences and co-host scientific meetings. The candidate will complete the doctoral training programme of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at VUB (https://student.vub.be/en/phd/doctoral-training#doctoral-schools) and is expected to defend their doctoral dissertation in 2026. Please be aware that the position requires you to be present in the department on a regular basis (3 days per week).

3. Profile

• You hold a master’s degree in (literature in) English, (literature in) German, comparative literature (or a comparable degree) or you will have obtained this by the start date of this position.
• You demonstrate excellent study results. Previous academic experience (publications, conference presentations, etc.) will be considered an asset.
• You have a demonstrable interest in twentieth-century and/or contemporary literature, life writing, biography studies, literary radio studies, sound studies, media history or cultural memory studies. Previous experience with archival research will be considered an asset.
• You are an enthusiastic researcher, capable of conducting research both independently and in team.
• You are willing to conduct research stays abroad in function of archival research and knowledge exchange.
• You act in accordance with the rules regarding scientific integrity, as described in the VUB charter for researchers: https://www.vub.be/en/violations-of-scientific-integrityinbreuken-op-wetenschappelijke-integriteit#information-in-english`
• You have excellent academic English-language skills (oral and written). A good command of the German language is highly desirable.

4. Offer

• We offer a four-year full-time doctoral position (requiring enrolment as a doctoral student at VUB), subject to an annual positive evaluation.
• The planned starting date is 1 September 2022, or as soon as possible thereafter.
• You will receive a salary in one of the grades defined by the Belgian government. Depending on previous professional experience, the monthly tax-free salary varies from approx. € 2541 to max. € 2704 (EU staff) / approx. € 2318 to max. € 2466 (non-EU staff). In addition, you are provided with a shared office space and work laptop, library access, social and health benefits, and free access to Belgian public transport for your commute to campus.
• As an employee of VUB, you will work in a dynamic, diverse, and multilingual environment. For this function, VUB’s Brussels Humanities, Sciences & Engineering Campus (Etterbeek) will serve as your home base. Our campus is a green oasis in the capital city of Flanders, Belgium, and Europe, and has an excellent restaurant and extensive sport facilities. It is within easy reach (twenty minutes by public transport) of the city centre of Brussels and has a direct train connection to Brussels National Airport. Childcare facilities are to be found within walking distance.
• For more information on what it is like to work at VUB, go to www.vub.ac.be/en/jobs.

5. Application procedure

Applications should include (in one PDF file):

(1) a cover/motivation letter;

(2) your academic CV with details about your bachelor and master qualifications (including grades) and your previous academic experience (if applicable);

(3) a short text on how you envisage your contribution to the project, especially the doctoral dissertation that you would be working on (max. 1000 words). Please mention your approach, research question and potential cases;

(4) the names of two referees.

Also include (in a separate PDF file) a writing sample (e.g. your MA thesis, a research paper or academic article). Clearly mention your name on your writing sample.

Please send your application by e-mail to both supervisors, Prof. dr. Inge Arteel (Inge.Arteel@vub.be) and Prof. dr. Birgit Van Puymbroeck (birgit.van.puymbroeck@vub.be). The deadline is 15 June 2022 (midnight, CET). Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in the week of 4 July 2022 on the Humanities Campus of Vrije Universiteit Brussel or online.

If you have any questions, please contact Inge.Arteel@vub.be or birgit.van.puymbroeck@vub.be.

Deadline for Submissions June 15, 2022

Call for Book Chapters: “Narrative medicine: trauma and ethics”

Deadline: June 15, 2022

Vernon Press invites book chapter proposals to be included in a forthcoming scholarly volume on “Narrative medicine: trauma and ethics” edited by associate professor Anders Juhl Rasmussen and professor, MD, Morten Sodemann, University of Southern Denmark.

Narrative medicine is a scholarly discipline based on narrative theory, close reading, phenomenological inquiry, and creative writing that fortifies clinical practices of all health disciplines with ways to honor the stories of people who seek and give care. Narrative medicine was created at Columbia University in 2000, and through partnerships the field has giving rise to narrative medicine courses worldwide that give students and clinicians the opportunity to read, write, and reflect on clinical experiences. In recent years, new art-based intervention studies with patients have evolved under the same heading as “system narrative medicine”.

Narrative ethics was introduced in the 1990’s, and shared decision making in ethical dilemmas will always have a crucial role in narrative medicine. This book seeks to ask broad questions about how traumas are narrated and known, how they are conceived in society trough art and treated in the health care system by methods of narrative medicine. These kinds of trauma could be adverse childhood events, sexual abuse, natural disasters, or trauma related to armed conflict, terrorism, persecution, etc.

We welcome proposals that are interdisciplinary in nature and can come from disciplines that include literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, psychology, psychoanalysis, history, philosophy, sociology, etc. We seek book chapters that range from approximately 5000-6000 words in length to include in this edited collection.

We invite chapter proposals that explore a wide variety of topics such as:

– to what extend can traumatic events be narrated, known, and measured?

– how does narratives in art shape commonly held beliefs in society about e.g. rape trauma?

– how may clinicians learn to ethically encounter trauma patients through literature?

– could an adoption of Trauma Informed Care practices supplement narrative medicine?

– how can art-based intervention studies address shared decision making with trauma patients, e.g. in ethical dilemmas?

– in which way can creative/expressive writing and close/shared reading help patients heal or repair from trauma?

Please send a 300-word abstract, project title, and a brief bio in English to Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodemann (Volume Editors) at: ajr@sdu.dk and msodemann@health.du.dk  by June 15, 2022.

Contact Info:

Anders Juhl Rasmussen and Morten Sodemann (Volume Editors) at ajr@sdu.dk and msodemann@health.du.dk

Contact Email:

ajr@sdu.dk

Deadline for Submissions–between March 1 and June 1, 2022

Dear colleagues,   We are pleased to announce the call for papers to the dossier The auto/biographical space in university culture and extension, of the Revista UFG.
Revista UFG is an international refereed journal based on the Federal University of Goiás, in Brazil, aimed at diffusion studies on different areas of knowledge applied to social practices, focusing on culture and extension at universities. Revista UFG welcomes article manuscripts, reviews, and visual essays submissions from all fields, including works from multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary areas.   The present call for papers departs from a critical-reflective movement that permeated many university practices since the pandemics, raising questions about individuals, groups, and institutions’ roles in teaching, research, and culture connected to communities beyond the academy. Creating spaces for active listening and sharing stories at the university has become essential in searching for innovative solutions and transformative narratives that may contribute to social justice and change beyond the university’s walls. This dossier welcomes reflections and expressions that stimulate the imagination about possible futures for post-pandemic university practices. We encourage texts departing from what we have learned so far, considering subjectivities, perceptions, and life stories that may point out other ways of doing and being in/with the world.   >> Submissions: from 1st March to 1st June 2022 >> Modalities: Articles, Essays, Reviews, Visual Essays >> Guidelines for submissions: https://www.revistas.ufg.br/revistaufg/about/submissions (please, on the website, click on the options on the right-side column for accessing translated content in English, Spanish or Portuguese).   If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us. We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Best,

Manoela dos Anjos Afonso Rodrigues – UFG (manoelaafonso@ufg.br)

Cláudia Mariza Mattos Brandão – UFPel (claummattos@gmail.com)

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ReStorying Ageing: Older Women and Life Writing

May 24^th, 2-6pm (Irish time; GMT+1), via Zoom (Booking link below)

This webinar brings together researchers, writers and the public as part of the Bealtaine Festival 2022. Through presentations, discussions and readings, the online event will explore the empowering potential of women’s creativity and life writing, and the importance of recognising the diversity of women’s experiences as they grow older, experiences which are so often stereotyped in literature and culture.

Speakers: Ashton Applewhite, Prof. Molly Andrews, Dr Mary McGill, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Dr Áine Ní Léime, Helen O’Rahilly, & participants from a life writing workshop for women aged 50 and older.

Organisers: Dr Michaela Schrage-Frueh (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, NUI Galway), Dr Maggie O’Neill (Irish Centre for Social Gerontology, NUI Galway) and Karen Hanrahan (University of Brighton / Moore Institute), in partnership with Age & Opportunity and with funding from the Irish Research Council.

Attendance is free but booking is essential: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/restorying-ageing-older-women-and-life-writing-tickets-311983570257

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In the Spaces Provided: Career Narratives and Academic Womanhood

Advance Contract: Routledge Press, Series in Auto/biography Studies

Deadline for abstract: June 1st, 2022

Contact: ortiz@tcnj.edu

In her introduction to Essays in Life Writing, Marlene Kadar suggests that self-expressive life writing can invite readers into the overwhelming “too muchness” of the subject’s life.[i] Career construction specialist, Larry Cochrane finds that the more functional career narrative minimizes the life story that individuals “may want and need to tell” in favor of articulating and promoting an academic brand. As Cochran quips, scholars must leave out “all that would captivate us in a good autobiography.”[ii] Ultimately, these two forms of self-representation are made to face opposite directions and academics are socialized to believe that these genres cannot trust one another. This thinking is more harmful than helpful for women academics who stand to benefit from inserting themselves into their work as a means to transform the historically male-defined terms upon which their disciplines and the profession at large have been built. As Alison Black rightly asserts of career narratives, “There is a richness to [women’s] individual experiences and stories that must not be reduced. From these can emerge a collective vision that speaks to our individual, emotional and embodied lives – lives which the neoliberal university too oft deems insignificant”[iii]

In the Spaces Provided is an edited collection of auto-theoretical essays by women life writing scholars who explore their early-career, mid-career, late-career, and “alt-career” experiences with the documents that shape their professional careers: the institutional auto/biography of employment letters, curriculum vitae, tenure portfolios, promotion dossiers, professional bios, academic website profiles, and other self-authored narratives required by institutions to self-promote for opportunities and resources.
I am seeking a diverse range of expert considerations of how life writing theory and practice enable our thinking about access to the highly regulated spaces of self-construction in academic career documentation. Contributors are invited to turn the lenses of life writing theory and methodology inward as self-aware subjects negotiating frameworks for writing and reviewing self-authored academic career documents. I encourage contributions that model a range of theoretical moves for exposing and subverting the traps of self-representation the repressive norms of professional review in which explorations of personhood – including experiences of gender, ability, sexuality, age, nationhood, race, and class – are inhibited.
I invite contributions attuned to engagements with:

[i] Kadar, Marlene. Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1992, 4.

[ii] Cochran, Larry R. “Narrative as a Paradigm for Career Research.” Methodological Approaches to the Study of Career, Richard A. Young and William Borgen, eds., New York: Praeger. 1990, 71-86.

[iii] Black, Alison, “Women Activating Agency in Academia: Metaphors, Manifestos and Memoir, Alison L. Black and Susanne Garvis, eds., New York: Routledge, 25.

Dr. Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle

[Pronouns: she/her/hers]

Professor of English, The College of New Jersey

Fulbright Research Chair in Society and Culture, Univ of Alberta, 2021-22

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Call for Papers

Reading old age, the ageing body and memory in British and American literature and texts of culture

Special Issue, The Polish Journal of English Studies

Deadline for Submissions, June 1, 2022

Age studies point to all life stages as culturally and historically idiosyncratic, and complicated even more by various intersectional perspectives. Within this age(s)-focused field of analysis, humanistic and critical gerontologists as well as historians of old age issued an ardent call to redefine old age as equally ephemeral and multi-layered as any other life stage. Addressing the existing studies of the formative and foundational quality of youth and adulthood, gerontologists of various subdisciplines objected to seeing old age as simply the end of life, and to defining it as a precise point in time rather than a nebulous period with no exact opening temporal bracket. Thane (2000) in particular stressed the difficulty in defining old age in term of chronology only, proposing to view it as a functional and cultural category as well. More precisely, scholars noted, one is sooner made (to feel) old by culture and society than one perceives oneself as being such. Consequently, even if it is an essentially intimate and embodied lived experience, old age must be seen as an experience with a set of socio-cultural prescriptive and proscriptive rules of conduct and decorum as well as social sanctions and rewards.
Addressing all of said emerging conceptual recalibrations, Gullette claimed that indeed age “could be the next analytic and hermeneutic concept to make cutting-edge difference” (2004: 106) in humanist research. . Having specifically worked on middle and old age in her research, she further noted that, just like with other necessary intersectionalities, to talk about ageing is to keep unravelling and disentangling “the din of representations, unseen internalizations, [and] unthinking practices” (Gullette 2004: 27). Old age can then be seen as simultaneously ”the culmination or the dreary denouement of life’s drama” (Cole 2006: xx), written as somatic and mental narratives of decline (Gullette 1997) as well as the most meaningful moment of human existence, “a time for recapitulating, connecting part to part, re-membering” (Carson 1987: xii), leading to wisdom only allowed to the members of this in-group. From such a dialectic other questions are engendered: Do we with age become the embodied repositories of knowledge and guardians of traditions? Do we need to properly perform old age as the various gerontideologies socialize us to do (Mangan 2013)? Are we our ageing bodies? How do our auto/self-narratives change with age? Can we “read the beginning in the end and the end in the beginning” (Baars 2016: 82)?

This themed volume aims to critically address and further identify the meaning(s) behind and potentialities of old age and ageing. As growing and/or being old are not only subjective and embodied experiences but also socio-cultural phenomena, the points of departure in this collection are the three fundamentals in gerontological research: 1) old age, 2) the (ageing) body and 3) memory, the latter understood not only as recollecting one’s spatio-temporal past but, in particular, re-membering one’s somatic “past-ness”. Such intertwining of old age with memory inevitably invites studies of nostalgia, seen as both positive and negative approaches to and perceptions of one’s embodied past. We thus welcome papers that engage in age and gerontological readings within British and American literature and paraliterary texts of culture (i.e. ego-documents, conduct texts, philosophical tracts, etc.) across all historical periods. Book reviews within the field of literary age  studies or literary gerontology are welcome as well.

Please send a 150-200-word abstract (titled Surname_PJES_Old age) together with a short biographical note to  Dr Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon at kbronkk@amu.edu.pl The deadline for submission of abstracts is 1st June 2022. Notifications about proposal acceptance will be sent by 20th June 2022. The deadline for submission of completed papers is 1st November 2022. Planned publication: 2023.

Bibliography

Baars, Jan. 2016. “Concepts of age and aging”, in Geoffrey Scarre (ed.), The Palgrave handbook of the philosophy of aging (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 69-86.
Carson, Ronald A. 1987. ‘Foreword’, in Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow (eds.), What does it mean to grow old? Reflections from the humanities. Durham: Duke UP, xi–xiv.
Cole, Thomas R. 2006. The journey of life: A cultural history of aging in America. Cambridge: CUP.
Gullette, Margaret M. Declining to decline: Cultural combat and the politics of the midlife.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997.
Gullette, Margaret M. 2004. Aged by culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Cole, Thomas R., and Sally Gadow, eds. What does it mean to grown old? Reflections from the humanities. Durham: Duke UP, 1987.
Mangan, Michael. Staging ageing: Theatre, performance, and the narrative of decline. Bristol: Intellect, 2013.

Contact Info:

dr Katarzyna Bronk-Bacon

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

Contact Email:

kbronkk@amu.edu.pl

URL:

http://pjes.edu.pl/issues/9-2-2023/

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Call for Proposals: The Routledge Companion to Latinx Life Writing

Extended Deadline for Submissions June 3, 2022

Contributions are invited for consideration to be published in a collection of critical essays introducing readers to studies of Latinx life writing, a prominent and essential pan-genre within Latinx literature since Latinx literature began to be conceived as such. Life writing is a broad umbrella term that encompasses a number of genres in which authors take life and lived experience as their core subject. Within Latinx life writing, these genres include memoir, autobiography, and testimonio most centrally. The proposed handbook provides literary criticism of Latinx life writing focusing on its history, key themes and questions, and genres. The handbook will feature chapters on the trends and concerns of Latinx life writers across different historical periods, providing insight into various thematic and generic concerns as they evolve throughout Latinx cultural production.  Although this book is scholarly in nature, the tone will be broadly accessible in order to make the book suitable for a wide audience including graduate students, undergraduate students in community colleges and four-year universities, and classroom instructors.

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LATINX LIFE WRITING is under contract with Routledge and is scheduled to be published in 2024.

Please note that we are seeking essays of literary criticism; we are not seeking creative works of Latinx life writing at this time. We are seeking proposals specifically in the following areas:

• 19th century and U.S. occupation narratives (oral histories-narratives, correspondence, memories, diaries)
• Crónica, relatos, testimonios
• Fictionalized autobiographies/life writing in fiction/plays
• Corridos, folklore, oral forms
• Correspondence (in wartime or Latino veterans or because of family separation, etc.)
• Poetry of protest
• Coming of age autobiographical narratives
• Experimental autobiographical works
• Education testimonios
• Chicana and Latina “Third World” women of color feminist mixed genre writing
• Autobiographical narratives of exile
• LGBTQ+/Queer articulations
• Testimonios and new media (Digital Humanities, digital storytelling)
• Grief, trauma narratives
• Graphic narratives
• Undocumented narrative

We are seeking only original, never before published work at this time. Please submit a no more than two page abstract (approximately 500 words) of a chapter that you wish to be considered for this handbook by June 3, 2022 (the deadline has been extended), as well as a 2 page abbreviated curriculum vitae.

Contact Info:

For more information, contact co-editors Dr. Maria Joaquina Villaseñor, mvillasenor@csumb.edu or Dr. Christine Fernandez, chrfernandez@csumb.edu

Contact Email:

mvillasenor@csumb.edu

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Dear IABA List Members,
 
We would like to let you know that the deadline for the call for entries into Biography’s annual annotated bibliography has been extended to Monday, May 15. Please see below for information on submission guidelines.
 
Biography’s annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical works on life writing is the most extensive reference of its kind, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.
 
So if last year (from January to December 2021) you published, edited, or co-edited a book, wrote an article for a journal or an essay for an edited collection, or completed your doctoral dissertation, we would appreciate having that information, so that we can incorporate it into the list. (There is of course a very good chance that we have already included it, but this will make sure your work is noted.)
 
We would request the following information:
 
·      Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted according to MLA 9 style
·      A one-sentence annotation per text
 
We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you could provide an annotation in English, however, that would be helpful.
 
We would appreciate getting the information by Monday, May 15. Please send your information to Zoë Sprott (gabiog@hawaii.edu).
 
Thanks in advance. This bibliography usually has between 1,400 and 1,500 entries, and represents the most extensive annual critical survey of the field. We want to make sure your work appears within it.
 
Zoë E. Sprott (she/her/hers)
Editorial Assistant and Reviews Editor
The Center for Biographical Research
Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly
1960 East-West Road
Biomed B104
Honolulu, HI 96822
Tel: (808) 956-3774
Email: gabiog@aikoy

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The Epistolary Research Network (TERN)

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Stories of Women Who Lost Their Beloved Ones
  The University of Hawai`i is conducting a study:
 
If you identify as a woman, 18 years old or older, and who have lost a beloved one (e.g., significant other, child, parent, siblings) and were one of their caregivers, please share your stories
 
Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati would like to invite you to participate in a research study.
 
The purpose of this study is to learn more about how women cope with the diagnosis and death of their beloved ones. 
 
Study volunteers will receive $ 10 Starbucks or equivalent gift certificate
 
To learn more about the study,
please email Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati at luhp@hawaii.edu  
http://drsaraswati.com

Books:
Saraswati, L. Ayu. Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (New York University Press, 2021) 
     Click here for the Instructor’s Guide
Saraswati, L.A. and Barbara Shaw, eds. Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Saraswati, L.A., Barbara Shaw, and Heather Rellihan, eds. Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Second Edition. (Oxford University Press, 2020) 
Saraswati, L.A. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)

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The Stories We Tell Ourselves About Nice Things
 
Are you of Asian descent and are over 18 years old? 
Do you like to buy nice, luxurious, expensive items?
If the answer is YES…

The University of Hawai`i is conducting a study:

Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati would like to invite you to participate in a research study.
 
The purpose of this study is to learn more about why we buy nice, luxurious, expensive items, and whether gender, racial and class backgrounds shape our consumption pattern. 
 
Study volunteers will receive $ 10 Starbucks or equivalent gift certificate
 
To learn more about the study,
please email Dr. L. Ayu Saraswati at luhp@hawaii.edu
 
— http://drsaraswati.com
 
Books:
Saraswati, L. Ayu. Pain Generation: Social Media, Feminist Activism, and the Neoliberal Selfie (New York University Press, 2021) 
     Click here for the Instructor’s Guide
Saraswati, L.A. and Barbara Shaw, eds. Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Saraswati, L.A., Barbara Shaw, and Heather Rellihan, eds. Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Second Edition. (Oxford University Press, 2020) 
Saraswati, L.A. Seeing Beauty, Sensing Race in Transnational Indonesia (University of Hawaii Press, 2013)

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Colleagues,

The next of my monthly webinars, Let’s Talk Books at NMU, will feature Melissa Homestead discussing her recent book, The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis. 

The webinar will be Friday, March 18 at 1:00 Eastern time. I’d love it if you could join us. The registration link is below.

Lynn Domina

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Mar 18, 2022 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Let’s Talk Books at NMU – Melissa Homestead

Please register:
https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Rp0DfO6vR6GLA8u22e4cYg

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

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College Language Association and Black Auto/Biography

Modern Language Association Convention, January 5-8, 2023, San Francisco, USA

Deadline for Submissions: Tuesday, 15 March 2022

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Date of Event, February 18, 2022

Colleagues,

I’ve begun a new webinar series focused on scholars discussing their new books. The next episode will occur this Friday, Feb. 18, at 1:00 Eastern time. My guest will be Gail Okawa, discussing her book, Remembering Our Grandfathers’ Exile: US Imprisonment of Hawai’i’s Japanese in World War II. 

I’d love for you to join us if you’re free. Registration information is below. Feel free to share this widely.

Thanks,

Lynn Domina
ldomina@nmu.edu

You are invited to a Zoom webinar.
When: Feb 18, 2022 01:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)
Topic: Let’s Talk Books at NMU

Please register for the date and time that works best for you:
https://nmu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_bznT6dkhTp-HPDFngGdLSQ

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

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Telling (Jewish) Lives: Biographers’ Reports / (Jüdische) Leben erzählen: Biographische Werkstattberichte
All lectures in German

German version see below

Digital lecture series, winter term 2021/2022
Tuesdays, 6:15pm – 7:45pm (CEST/CET), online

Prior registration requested: events-js@uni-potsdam.de
Organized by Prof. Dr. Grażyna Jurewicz
University of Potsdam, Institute of Jewish and Religious Studies
Selma Stern Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg

On the topic
For some time now, there has been talk of a “biographical turn” in the historically working humanities. In Jewish Studies, too, the relevance of biographical research practice is continuously increasing. Based on this finding, the interdisciplinary lecture series held in German (Jüdische) Leben erzählen: Biographische Werkstattberichte [Telling (Jewish) Lives: Biographers’ Reports] offers insights into the historiographical and literary aspects of working on Jewish life stories.
Jewish lives often embody subject positions whose biographical accessing and analysis pose considerable challenges to researchers. These are rooted in phenomena such as exile, diaspora, transculturality, multilingualism, and intersectionality, which seem to be inherent in Jewish history and which result in potentially discontinuous or fragmented worlds of experience. The consequence is an often markedly complex constellation of sources, which on the one hand complicate biographical investigations, but on the other hand can prove particularly revealing for the methodology of biography. In the context of retrospective reflection on the processes of their life history studies, the speakers describe such challenges and possible ways of dealing with them, using concrete examples. In doing so, they touch upon a number of general methodological questions and practical research problems of biographical writing, such as: the choice of protagonists of biographical narratives; the presence of biographers in their representations of other lives and their possible identification with their own “objects”; the handling of gaps in knowledge or the abundance of knowledge; literary aspects of biographical work as well as its ethical dimensions; the representability of the connections between the life to be biographed and the specific form of creativity that was practiced in this life. Along these and other case-specific aspects of life writing, the lecture series will discuss the conditions of the possibility of transforming traces of past lives as conveyed by various media into written narratives in order to gain methodological yields for biographical research practice within and outside Jewish Studies.

Program
10/26/2021 Grażyna Jurewicz (Potsdam/Berlin): Prologue
11/2/2021 Beatrix Borchard (Hamburg/Berlin): Storytelling or Marking Gaps? Reflecting on the Handling of Biographical Source Material
11/9/2021 Ernst Piper (Potsdam): Between Intersectionality and Internationalism. Approaching Rosa Luxemburg
11/16/2021 Reiner Stach (Berlin): Kafka’s Life. A Research
11/30/2021 Verena Dohrn (Hannover): Family Biography as Literary Procedure. The Saga of the Oil Entrepreneurs Kahan from Baku
12/07/2021 Dominique Bourel (Paris/Kassel): Moses Mendelssohn and Martin Buber: Biography without Autobiography?
12/14/2021 Stefanie Mahrer (Bern/Basel): Salman Schocken. Topographies of a Life
01/11/2022 Katharina Prager (Vienna): “I can only understand it Hasidically…” – Jewishness in the Lives of Berthold and Salka Viertel
01/18/2022 Claudia Willms (Frankfurt am Main): Historiography from below? Franz Oppenheimer and Biographical Research from a Cultural Anthropology Perspective
01/25/2022 Efrat Gal-Ed (Düsseldorf/Augsburg): Nobody’s language. Itzik Manger – a European Poet. On the Biographical Textual Process
02/01/2022 Jacques Picard (Basel/Zurich): The Clock That Is Still Ticking. On Subjects and Objects in Biographical Research
02/08/2022 Philipp Lenhard (Munich): The Pitfalls of the Archive: On the Biography of Friedrich Pollock
02/15/2022 Christina Pareigis (Hamburg): Shamanistic Voyages. Review of the Making of an Intellectual Biography of Susan Taubes
02/22/2022 Stephan Braese (Aachen): To Biographize Hildesheimer: Workshop – Expedition – Laboratory
03/01/2022 Alfred Gall (Mainz): “I don’t belong anywhere, because I am from somewhere else”: Constellations of Biography and Science Fiction in Stanisław Lem’s Work
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German Version

Digitale Ringvorlesung, Wintersemester 2021/2022
(Jüdische) Leben erzählen: Biographische Werkstattberichte
dienstags, 18:15–19:45 Uhr (MESZ/MEZ), online

Anmeldung: events-js@uni-potsdam.de
Veranstaltet von Prof. Dr. Grażyna Jurewicz
Universität Potsdam, Institut für Jüdische Studien und Religionswissenschaft
Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg

Zum Thema
Seit geraumer Zeit ist in den historisch arbeitenden Geisteswissenschaften von einem „biographical turn“ die Rede. Auch in den Jüdischen Studien nimmt die Relevanz der biographischen Forschungspraxis kontinuierlich zu. Von diesem Befund ausgehend bietet die interdisziplinäre Ringvorlesung „(Jüdische) Leben erzählen: Biographische Werkstattberichte“ Einblicke in die historiographischen und literarischen Aspekte der Arbeit an jüdischen Lebensgeschichten.
Jüdische Lebensläufe verkörpern häufig Subjektpositionen, deren biographische Erschließung Forscher:innen vor erhebliche Herausforderungen stellt. Diese gründen in Phänomenen wie Exil, Diaspora, Transkulturalität, Mehrsprachigkeit und Intersektionalität, die der jüdischen Geschichte scheinbar inhärent sind und aus denen potenziell diskontinuierliche bzw. fragmentierte Erfahrungswelten resultieren. Das Ergebnis sind oft ausgesprochen komplexe Quellenkonstellationen, die biographische Untersuchungen einerseits erschweren, sich aber andererseits für die Methodologie der Biographie als besonders aufschlussreich erweisen können. Im Rahmen retrospektiver Reflexion über die Entstehungsprozesse ihrer lebensgeschichtlichen Studien schildern die Referent:innen an konkreten Beispielen solche Herausforderungen und den möglichen Umgang mit ihnen. Dabei berühren sie eine Reihe allgemeiner methodologischer Fragen und forschungspraktischer Probleme biographischen Schreibens, etwa: die Wahl von Protagonist:innen biographischer Narrative; die Anwesenheit der Biograph:innen in ihren Darstellungen fremder Leben und ihre eventuelle Identifikation mit den eigenen „Objekten“; den Umgang mit Wissenslücken bzw. der Wissensfülle; literarische Aspekte biographischer Arbeit sowie deren ethische Dimensionen; die Darstellbarkeit der Zusammenhänge zwischen dem zu biographierenden Leben und der je spezifischen Form der Kreativität, die in diesem Leben wirksam wurde. Entlang dieser und weiterer fallspezifischer Aspekte lebensgeschichtlichen Schreibens werden in der Ringvorlesung die Bedingungen der Möglichkeit diskutiert, medial vermittelte Spuren vergangener Leben in schriftliche Erzählungen zu transformieren, um damit methodologische Erträge für die biographische Forschungspraxis inner- und außerhalb des Faches Jüdische Studien zu gewinnen.
Termine
26.10.2021 Grażyna Jurewicz (Potsdam/Berlin): Prolog
02.11.2021 Beatrix Borchard (Hamburg/Berlin): Storytelling oder Lücken markieren? Nachdenken über den Umgang mit biographischem Quellenmaterial
09.11.2021 Ernst Piper (Potsdam): Zwischen Intersektionalität und Internationalismus. Annäherung an Rosa Luxemburg
16.11.2021 Reiner Stach (Berlin): Kafkas Lebenswelt. Eine Recherche
30.11.2021 Verena Dohrn (Hannover): Familienbiographie als literarisches Verfahren. Die Saga der Ölunternehmer Kahan aus Baku
07.12.2021 Dominique Bourel (Paris/Kassel): Moses Mendelssohn und Martin Buber: Biographie ohne Autobiographie?
14.12.2021 Stefanie Mahrer (Bern/Basel): Salman Schocken. Topographien eines Lebens
11.01.2022 Katharina Prager (Wien): „Ich kann es nur chassidisch begreifen…“ – Jüdischsein in den Leben von Berthold und Salka Viertel
18.01.2022 Claudia Willms (Frankfurt am Main): Geschichtsschreibung von unten? Franz Oppenheimer und die kulturanthropologische Biographieforschung
25.01.2022 Efrat Gal-Ed (Düsseldorf/Augsburg): Niemandssprache. Itzik Manger – ein europäischer Dichter. Zum biographischen Textverfahren
01.02.2022 Jacques Picard (Basel/Zürich): Die Uhr, die noch tickt. Von Subjekten und Objekten in der Biographieforschung
08.02.2022 Philipp Lenhard (München): Die Tücken des Archivs: Zur Biographie Friedrich Pollocks
15.02.2022 Christina Pareigis (Hamburg): Shamanistic Voyages. Rückblick auf die Entstehung einer intellektuellen Biographie über Susan Taubes
22.02.2022 Stephan Braese (Aachen): Hildesheimer „biographieren“: Werkstatt – Expedition – Labor
01.03.2022 Alfred Gall (Mainz): „Ich gehöre nirgendwo hin, denn ich bin anderswoher“: Konstellationen von Biographie und Science-Fiction bei Stanisław Lem

—
Prof. Dr. Grażyna Jurewicz
Universität Potsdam
Institut für Jüdische Studien und Religionswissenschaft
Am Neuen Palais 10 | 14469 Potsdam | Raum 1.11.0.04
Telefon: +49 (0) 331 977-1284
E-Mail: grazyna.zuzanna.jurewicz@uni-potsdam.de

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Re: REQUEST FOR PROPOSALS – Freelance Story Writer for Hispanic Access

Introduction

Hispanic Access Foundation is a national 501(c)(3) organization that connects Latinos with partners and opportunities to improve lives and create an equitable society. Our vision is that all Hispanics throughout the U.S. enjoy good physical health, a healthy natural environment, a quality education, economic success and civic engagement in their communities with the sum of improving the future of America.

In the spirit of our mission and vision, Hispanic Access wants to highlight 52 stories from our various networks. We work nationwide with faith leaders, conservation focused individuals, Black, Indigenous, Latinos, and other people of color, and other community leaders. With these stories, we want to
amplify the voices of those that we work with through our social media and website.

The Stories

Hispanic Access Foundation will provide its freelance writer with the story ideas, corresponding network members and their contact information. The writer will then take this information to conduct interviews in order to produce a total of 52 (400 – 700 word) stories. The breakdown of stories/networks
provided will be similar to this:

o Conservation (11 total Stories)

Por La Creación Faith-Based Alliance
Latino Conservation Week
Our Heritage, Our Planet Film Week

o Hispanic Leadership Network (11 total Stories)

HLN Retreat 2022

HLN Cohort Members

o MANO Project (11 total Stories)

US Fish and Wildlife Service
National Park Service
US Forest Service
MANO Alumni

o Organization (11 total Stories)

Latino Advocacy Week
Board Members
Staff

o Our Dreams Scholarship (4 total Stories)

o COVID Vaccine Initiative (4 total Stories)

What We Expect

Here are our guidelines for these stories:
● 400-700 words
● 3-5 high quality photos from the individual to attach to the story.
(We will provide guidance on what is needed for the feature photo and the quality of other images. Writer will not need to take the images, simply instruct the contact on what’s needed and coordinate their reception.)
● Written in the third-person perspective
● Bilingual (English and Spanish) — it is likely that some of our members prefer to be interviewed in Spanish.

Budget

We will pay $100 for each story written, budgeted up to $5,200 for 52 stories.
● Funds can be distributed after every 5-10 stories submitted or as a lump sum at the end of thecontract, depending on writer preference.

Timeline

Our preferred timeline is outlined below, however, it is open to modifications based on schedule and availability. Additionally, we would look to have a monthly 1 hour check-in beginning on February 1st.

● January 21 – Proposals Due
● January 25 – Contract Awarded
● February 11 – First 3-5 Stories Due
● March 11 –8 Stories Due
● June 1 – 8 Stories Due
● August 1 – 8 Stories Due
● October 1 – 8-10 Stories Due
● December 1 – Final 8 Stories Due

Submission Requirements

We’re not looking for a lengthy proposal.Your proposal should include the following items, which will inform the selection process:

● Writing Samples: provide PDFs or links to 3 examples that demonstrate your writing abilities when it comes to writing features/profiles..
● Budget: provide a budget proposal that includes your fees, as well as any additional costs that should be considered.
● Timeline: We outlined the tentative timeline above, please outline the timeline from your perspective.
● Spanish Language Proficiency: Please highlight your Spanish language capacity (native/bilingual, conversational, professional).

Point-of-Contact

For questions about the scope of work, please contact:
● Evelyn Ramirez, Digital Communications Associate, evelyn@hispanicaccess.org

Deadline for Submission

Proposals should be received no later than Monday, January 21, 2021. Submissions should beemailed to Evelyn Ramirez at evelyn@hispanicaccess.org.

Proposal Reviews/Calls/Selection
Proposals will be reviewed by staff. Calls may be scheduled by Hispanic Access Foundation if necessary.

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