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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Deadline for Submissions June 3, 2019
Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic
Memory Lives On: Documenting the HIV/AIDS Epidemic is an interdisciplinary symposium exploring and reflecting on topics related to archives and the practice of documenting the stories of HIV/AIDS.
The task of documenting the history of HIV/AIDS and thinking about the present and future of the epidemic is daunting. The enormity and complexity of the stories and perspectives on the disease, which has affected so many millions of patients and families around the world, present significant challenges that demand continual reexamination. Questions of “what do we collect and from where” and “whose stories do we know best.” The ways in which we handle documentary evidence and produce knowledge from that evidence has profound effects on a huge range of social, economic and health outcomes. In examining and reflecting on our knowledge of the history of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic and its future, we hope to improve our understanding of the true effects of the disease, and what it can teach us about future epidemics.
The program committee invites submissions for presentations addressing the HIV/AIDS epidemic from the wide-ranging perspectives of historians, archivists and librarians, artists, journalists, activists and community groups, scientific researchers, health care providers, and people living with HIV. We invite proposals from individuals with diverse experience and expertise on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in scholarship, research and advocacy. Proposals will be considered in a variety of forms including paper presentations, panel discussions and posters.
The Symposium will take place in Byers Auditorium in Genentech Hall at the UCSF Mission Bay Campus in San Francisco, October 4th and 5th 2019. The program will be an afternoon session and evening reception the first day, followed by a full day of presentations the second.
The Program Committee has identified the following themes to consider when developing your proposal, though we encourage creativity and experimentation in exploring themes, partnerships, and narrative ideas.
- Documenting the epidemic: Gaps, silences and unheard voices
- Creating an interdisciplinary narrative of an epidemic
- Silent no more: Community, caretaker and patient stories
- The San Francisco Bay Area’s Response to the AIDS Epidemic
- Biomedical story: From mystery disease to cure
- From local to global: Learning from AIDS to address future epidemics
The Program Committee welcomes proposals for individual papers, panel discussion and posters. Individual papers with a similar focus will be assembled into a single session by the program committee. Usually 3-4 papers are included in a session.
To allow adequate time for questions and discussion, panels should be limited to four participants in addition to a chair/facilitator.
Please include the following in your complete proposal
- Session title if submitting a full panel proposal (of no more than 20 words)
- Session abstract if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 500 words)
- Short session abstract for the program if submitting a full panel proposal (up to 50 words)
- Paper or poster or presentation titles (if any), and names of corresponding presenters
- Biographical paragraph for each presenter
- E-mail address for each participant
- Affiliation, city, state, and country for each participant
- Social media handles or web addresses for each participant (optional)
- Audiovisual needs
- Special accommodation needs
The deadline for submissions is June 3. We will notify presenters if their proposal has been accepted by July 22.
Memory Lives On Program Committee
Monica Green, Ph.D., Professor of History, Arizona State University
Victoria Harden, Ph.D., Director (retired) of the Office of NIH History
Richard McKay, DPhil, Director of Studies for HPS at Magdalene College
Barbara A. Koenig, Professor of Medical Anthropology & Bioethics in the Department of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Institute for Health & Aging and Head of UCSF Bioethics Program
Jay Levy, MD, Professor UCSF School of Medicine
Eric Jost, Digital Marketing Manager, SF AIDS Foundation
Jon Cohen, Staff writer for Science Magazine
Mark Harrington, Executive Director, Treatment Action Group
William Schupbach, Wellcome Library
Jason Baumann, Susan and Douglas Dillon Assistant Director for Collection Development and Coordinator of Humanities and LGBT Collections
Polina Ilieva, Head of Archives & Special Collections, UCSF Library
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Deadline for Abstracts is June 1, 2019
Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life (Radical History Review call for proposals)
Critical Histories of Aging and Later Life
Issue number 139
Abstract Deadline: June 1, 2019
Issue editors: Amanda Ciafone, Devin McGeehan Muchmore, and David Serlin
In 2017, the United Nations estimated that the share of the world’s population over the age of sixty will have doubled between 2000 and 2050. Politicians, corporate executives, and popular commentators warn of a “crisis” produced by population aging, variously invoking concerns about slowed economic development in the global south, strained pensions and welfare systems, a shrinking labor force, and a care deficit. Concomitantly, academic gerontologists have produced a paradigm of “active” and “successful” aging, conceiving of a physically “healthy,” socially enriched, and economically productive old age that is both a product of, and a solution to, human longevity. These narratives of a “New Old Age” rely upon an overly tidy and teleological account of aging’s history, decrying a simple vision of the bad old days of prejudice and dependency.
The Radical History Review seeks to foster critical perspectives on the histories and politics related to these contemporary understandings of aging and what has been called “later life.” We need radical histories that bring age and aging to the center of analysis and probe the deep past to elucidate antecedents, critiques, and alternative frameworks for making sense of both the “aging crisis” and possibility for thinking about aging and longevity in broader historical perspective. Old age has long bubbled beneath the surface in radical history scholarship: in articulations of kinship and political authority; within transformations of intergenerational relationships wrought by colonialism, industrialization and long histories of migration and settlement; within social welfare and capitalist, socialist, and post/colonial state building; within the ongoing struggles of caring labor and the biopolitical management of life itself; and within the brutal exclusions from old age and infirmity through global systems of inequality and deprivation.
We invite contributions from all time periods and geographies that investigate aging and later life and put them in historical context: as axes for multiscalar and intersectional identities or inequalities, as contested objects of knowledge and governance, as community formations, and sites of cultural and political struggle. We are especially interested in submissions that continue to push the boundaries of aging scholarship beyond Europe, East Asia, and North America, and/or explore histories before the nineteenth century. Such critical approaches would help challenge the narrowly-defined perspectives of the “longevity revolution” among contemporary policy makers and biomedical scientists.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to) histories of:
- Pre-modern and pre-industrial notions of aging, productivity, community, and selfhood
- Labor, consumption, and the lifecycle, wealth and poverty, and political economies of aging
- Aging through the lens of disability history and critical disability studies
- Biopolitics of populations, state formation, and welfare
- Ageism as a racial and colonial project, slow death, and necropolitics
- Death and dying, mourning, and widowhood
- Aging and heteronormativity, gender hierarchy, and eroticism in later life
- Elder activism and historical agency
- Decolonizing aging studies
- Care, kinship, and intergenerational relations
- Aging in relation to globalization and migration
- Archives, oral history, knowledge production, and the age politics of the university
The RHR publishes material in a variety of forms. Potential contributors are encouraged to look at recent issues for examples of both conventional and non-conventional forms of scholarship. We are especially interested in submissions that use images as well as texts and encourage materials with strong visual content. In addition to monographic articles based on archival research, we encourage submissions to our various departments, including:
- Historians at Work (reflective essays by practitioners in academic and non-academic settings that engage with questions of professional practice)
- Teaching Radical History (syllabi and commentary on teaching)
- Public History (essays on historical commemoration and the politics of the past)
- Interviews (proposals for interviews with scholars, activists, and others)
- (Re)Views (review essays on history in all media–print, film, and digital)
- Reflections (Short critical commentaries)
- Forums (debates)
Procedures for submission of articles:
By June 1, 2019, please submit a 1-2 page abstract summarizing the article you wish as an attachment to contactrhr@gmail.com with “Issue 139 Abstract Submission” in the subject line. Please send any images as low-resolution digital files embedded in a Word document along with the text. If chosen for publication, you will need to send high-resolution image files (jpg or TIFF files at a minimum of 300 dpi) and secure permission to reprint all images.
By July 15, authors will be notified whether they should submit a full version of their article for peer review. The due date for completed articles will be November 1, 2019. Those articles selected for publication after the peer review process will be included in issue 139 of the Radical History Review, scheduled to appear in January 2021.
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Deadline for Submissions June 1, 2019
Call for Papers–Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies (6/1/2019)
The purpose of Assay is to publish the best critical scholarship of nonfiction texts, to facilitate all facets of nonfiction conversations in a variety of disciplines, and to be a resource for writers, scholars, readers, and teachers of nonfiction. The deadline for full consideration for our Fall issue is June 1, 2019.
Assay seeks articles and pedagogy essays, as well as shorter discussions of nonfiction craft or individual works for our conversations section. Please find full submission guidelines here.
Our online format makes research materials more accessible to scholars, but it also utilizes the available technology to expand the discussion. In addition to the written expression of nonfiction criticism, Assay provides the space for both written and video interviews with writers, as well as providing for more informal discussions of reading and teaching in the genre.
For a helpful note about developing conference papers into an article for assay, read here.
Joanna Eleftheriou, MFA, PhD
Assistant Professor of Literature and Creative Writing
University of Houston – Clear Lake
2700 Bay Area Boulevard, Box 73
Houston, Texas 77058-1002
Office Phone: 281-283-3480
Office Number: Arbor 1307-15
Call for Proposals: Emerald Studies in the Humanities, Aging and Later Life
Sample topics might include (but are not limited to) immigration and aging, race and aging, claiming spaces beyond wisdom, the meaning of home and place in later life, and understanding personhood and self within changing subjectivies.
Deadline for Proposals May 31, 2019
Saturday 8th February 2020
Followed by a public exhibition event on Sunday 9th February 2020
University of Exeter, Devon, UK
Confirmed Keynotes:
Professor Maryanne Dever (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney)
Dr. Lucy Bolton (School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, Queen Mary University of London)
New developments in star studies have been led by a number of recent and innovative scholarly collections, such as Lasting Screen Stars (Palgrave Macmillan 2016); Revisiting Star Studies(EUP 2017); and the BFI’s recent Film Star Series publications, all of which challenge traditional Hollywood-defined models of stardom and foreground innovative new methods in star studies research.
Within this this newly energised focus on ways of ‘doing’ star studies, fresh attention needs to be given to the material as well as aesthetic legacies of star images: in particular, the way that heritage institutions, ‘unofficial’ organisations and individual collectors have preserved and made use of the material legacy of film stardom. Conventional critical discourse focuses overwhelmingly on the findings of archival research rather than the process with scholarship telling ‘a story about what you found, but not about how you found it.’ (Kaplan 1990: 103) The Stardom and the Archive symposium seeks to challenge this convention by centralising archival process and curatorial histories in researching stardom. The symposium aims to create opportunities for new collaborations and shared innovations by bringing scholars and archivists together.
Building on recent scholarship by critics such as Anne Helen Petersen and her work on Gloria Swanson (2013) at the Harry Ransom Centre archives, Jennifer Barnes’ research into Laurence Olivier (2017) in the British Library, and Maryanne Dever’s work on Greta Garbo’s archives and LGBTQ star histories (2017), the symposium seeks to explore the stories that archival objects tell about star meanings and legacies. In tandem, the symposium seeks to analyse the experiences of those whose creative and pragmatic labours have helped sustain such legacies. In doing so, the aim is to encourage participants to consider star history as a site of archival policy and discourse, and in turn consider the potential value of the archive as a way to ‘review received notions of what and who counts in film history’ (Callahan 2010: 3).
Specific topics for paper and presentation proposals might include, but are not limited to:
- archival correspondence and stardom
- business archives for performers
- stars and memorial
- archiving performance
- the star body and the archive
- star voice and material records
- ‘localising’ / locating stardom
- star museums / stars in the museum
- archiving transnational stardom
- curatorial practices for star archives
- dispersed collections
- non-‘star’ actor archives for film performers
- acts of collecting and preserving
- amateur archival practice / private collections
- television stars and the archive
- digital / digitising star archives
- gender, stardom and the archive
- stardom and archival ephemera
- feminist and queer approaches to stardom and the archive
- archiving star labour
- non-paper artefacts in star archives
- methods for locating collections
- impact and public engagement work with star archives
- questions of access
Proposals of 300 words for 20-minute papers should be sent, together with a 100-word biographical statement, tostardomandthearchive@gmail.comby 31 May 2019. Proposals for video essay presentations are also very welcome.
Panel and round-table proposals, particularly those that that seek to employ less conventional modes of presentation, are also encouraged.
x5 Postgraduate Bursaries at a value of £180 each are available for the event to support travel and accommodation. If you would like to be considered for a bursary, please submit a brief statement (no more than 500 words) about your research and its relevance to the symposium along with your proposal.
The symposium will be followed by a free public exhibition event on Sunday 9th February 2020, held at Exeter’s Digital Humanities Lab, which all delegates are welcome to attend, including a networking brunch. This event will showcase outputs from the AHRC funded Reframing Vivien Leigh: Stardom, Archives and Accessproject, including the launch of a new podcast series and StoryMap, and will feature archival items on display, readings, and talks from South West based archivists and curators.
Further event information can be found on the Stardom and the Archive blog: http://blogs.exeter.ac.uk/stardomandthearchive/. If you have any queries about accessibility, or any other queries about the event including transport and accommodation advice, please contact the organiser directly:
Dr. Lisa Stead, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies, University of Exeter, l.r.stead2@exeter.ac.uk
A two-day symposium on 18–19 October 2019, taking place at Christ Church, University of Oxford, UK.
Symposium Directors are Dr Sophie Duncan and Professor Mary Luckhurst
The event is jointly convened by the School of Arts, University of Bristol and Christ Church, University of Oxford, with support from The Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH).
Confirmed keynote speakers include Gilli Bush-Bailey (Central School of Speech and Drama), Jacky Bratton (Royal Holloway) and Fiona Gregory (Monash University).
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars and practitioners in theatre and related disciplines. Suggestions for topics include, but are not limited to:
- older actresses on and off stage: as performers, managers, stage-managers, playwrights, producers, directors, and teachers, 1660–present.
- older actresses – their approaches to acting and their creative and career strategies
- older actresses and the one woman show
- older actresses – stage v. film and television
- older actresses on ageism and the politics of transgression
- writing by older actresses, e.g. memoirs
- genealogies of female performance and concepts of female ‘succession’
- retirement and its alternatives
- ‘canonical’ roles for older women; repertoire and ageing
- older actresses and non-traditional casting
- the depiction of older actresses and/or fictional older actresses in criticism, journalism, literature, the visual arts, and film
- ageism, ageing, and the body in casting, rehearsal, performance, and reception
- older actresses with additional marginalised identities, including LBT older actresses, BAME actresses, and actresses with disabilities (including age-related disabilities); the intersection of age with other kinds of marginalisation
- the older actress in theatre historiography and as theatre historian
- retrospectives, gala performances, honours lists and becoming a ’national treasure’.
Proposals, which should be 300 words long and accompanied by a brief biography, should be sent to the symposium’s directors, Dr Sophie Duncan (sophie.duncan@chch.ox.ac.uk) and Professor Mary Luckhurst (mary.luckhurst@bristol.ac.uk) by May 31 2019.
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Deadline for Proposals May 31, 2019
Career Construction Theory and Life Writing – Special Edition of ‘Life Writing’
There is still space available for one or two very high quality papers in this special edition of Life Writing.
Over the last twenty years, a new form of career counselling practice has emerged, one that Mark Savickas (Career Counselling, 2011) refers to as career construction theory. Where earlier forms of vocational guidance utilised aptitude tests, statistical profiling and other forms of quantitative analysis, career construction takes a far more qualitative approach to employment counselling. By encouraging clients to see their careers as stories of which they are both the metaphorical authors and the main protagonists, career construction counsellors enable them to envisage the next chapter in those stories. Periods of troubling change or uncertainty, when people do not know what to do next in their lives, are thus treated as experiences akin to ‘writer’s block’, experiences which can be overcome first by imagining new character arcs, then by narrating them and finally by performing them. Larry Cochran (Career Counselling: A Narrative Approach, 1997) defines career construction theory as a ‘narrative’ based practice because it is all about elucidating life stories and using them as resources to endow vocational decisions with meaning and value to the individual in question.
Drawing on the field of career construction theory, this special edition will explore how diverse forms of life writing have been used to think about and portray careers in new ways. It will also examine the extent to which the construction of a vocational personality (Peter McIlveen, ‘Dialogical Self: Author and narrator of career life themes’, 2007) varies according to the social environment. Potential contributors might explore connections became career construction theory and the recently emerging genre of autofiction, since as Isabelle Grell points out (L’Autofiction, 2014), it is a form of life writing in which writers invent different serialised personae for themselves, rather than assuming a single, continuous sense of selfhood across different time periods and different works.
Because the field of career construction mobilises an authorial paradigm, it has the potential to be applied to discussion of literary careers in an especially illuminating way. This work was begun by Hywel Dix in The Late-Career Novelist (2017) and by Davidson and Evans’s Literary Careers in the Modern Era (2015). We welcome submissions that further such analysis.
Potential topics to be addressed include (but are not limited to):-
– the role of autobiographical reasoning as a resource that writers (and others) both draw upon when they make vocational decisions in their professional lives and deploy in the creation of new life narratives;
– the potential insight to be gained by bringing recent narrative-based theories of career development to bear on analysis of authorial careers;
– the distinction between writing as a profession and writing as a vocation; and what difference is made by approaching writing in either of these ways;
– the use of writing as a therapeutic process in addressing past events of a troubling, challenging or even traumatic nature;
– the tension between employment counselling practices that prioritise the need of the individual and autofictional theories that emphasise mutually supportive, collective and collaborative forms of solidarity;
– the question of whether vocational counselling can help writers develop forms of narrative that critique the neo-liberal social order; or conversely the question of whether or not career counselling aims to facilitate direct participation in neo-liberal economics in a way that might vitiate and undermine such critique.
Procedure for Submission
Full length articles of between 7-8,000 words of original, previously unpublished research addressing some of these (or related) questions should be sent to Hywel Dix at HDix@bournemouth.ac.uk by 31 May 2019. For the correct referencing style, please refer to a recent issue of the journal on the journal homepage. Please include a brief biographical note, institutional affiliation and 4-5 keywords.
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
34.1 Winter 2019
Special Issue: Trans Narratives
Guest Editors: Ana Horvat, Orly Lael Netzer, Sarah McRae, and Julie Rak
Introduction
Unfixing the Prefix in Life Writing Studies: Trans, Transmedia, Transnational
Ana Horvat, University of Alberta; Orly Lael Netzer, University of Alberta; Sarah McRae, University of Alberta; and Julie Rak, University of Alberta
Essays
Becoming Culturally (Un)Intelligible: Exploring the Terrain of Trans Life Writing
Evan Vipond, York University
Through an engagement with feminist theory and transgender theory, this paper offers a metatheoretical exploration of trans life writing. Specifically, it focuses on the technologies of trans life writing, which bring them into being as culturally intelligible subjects. Trans authors may risk unintelligibility, however, through counternarratives, which offer a more complex and nuanced account of trans subjectivities.
Posttranssexual Temporalities: Negotiating Canonical Memoir Narratives in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques’s Trans
Chiara Pellegrini, Newcastle University
Despite characterizations of the trans memoir as constricting for trans identities, Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw and Juliet Jacques’s Trans: A Memoir rearrange and distort the timeline of transition typical of this genre to undo from within the linear and progressive constitution of a stable identity that characterizes this genre.
Examining Trans Narratives in the Wake of Norway’s Gender Recognition Law
france rose hartline, University of Trondheim
This article argues that Norway’s law on gender recognition does not sufficiently empower trans individuals. Applying thematic narrative analysis to two interviews, the article demonstrates that the law’s reliance on the gender binary and a lack of improved medical access compel trans people to negotiate their identities along trans political lines.
Against a Single Story: Diverse Trans* Narratives in Autobiographical Documentary Film
Sarah Ray Rondot, University of Central Missouri
In opposition to the sensational, simplified, and pathological gender ideologies in twentieth and early twenty-first-century documentary film, Jules Rosskam’s Against a Trans Narrative and Gwen Tara Haworth’s She’s a Boy I Knew expand representational horizons for autobiographical trans* narratives films.
Transnational Digital Biography: The Forgetting and Remembering of Winifred Atwell
Pamela Graham, University of South Australia
This paper examines biography in the context of the transnational and digital turns. Through analysis of biographical data about Trinidad-born musician and celebrity Winifred Atwell, it examines processes of forgetting and remembering at the levels of individual and cultural memory. It suggests that the impact of the digital is irrevocably altering the mechanisms by which transnational biographical identities are constructed.
Critical Response
The Afterlives of Stars, Known and Unknown
Lily Cho, York University
This response engages with Pamela Graham’s essay on the life narratives of Winifred Atwell. It explores how the “digital turn” in biographic materials reveals the workings of a reconstruction of cultural memory that raises profoundly important questions about the transnational and transmedial effects of the formation of life narratives. In so doing, this response calls attention to the losses that are part and parcel of the process of unforgetting that the digital turn makes possible.
How Would You Teach It?
Potential for Healing and Harm: Teaching Trans Narratives to Trans Students
Erica Chu, University of Illinois at Chicago
Instructors teaching transgender narratives have the capacity to provide sustenance and relief within a system that erases gender variance, yet they can also build false hopes just to uphold that norm of cruelty. Preparation and continued research are vital, as is honesty about one’s limitations and a willingness to collaborate with one’s students.
Learning to Listen: The Power of Transnational Life Storytelling
Leila Moayeri Pazargadi, Nevada State College
This essay offers a personal reflection about the power of life storytelling, especially as it relates to empowering first-generation and transnational students, who are crossing physical and figurative borders. Drawing on anecdotal evidence, narrative methodology, and autobiographical theory, this essay explores the implementation of transnational life storytelling during the Nepantla Summer Bridge Program at Nevada State College.
What’s Next?
What’s Next Is the Past
Lucas Crawford, University of New Brunswick
This article rethinks the recent haste with which mainstream culture demands images of new and knowable trans futures. By explaining several ways temporal rhetorics can be played out on trans people, the article suggests differences between queer time and trans time and advocates for humanistic approaches to history, especially ones that are suspicious of linear narratives of progress and of seemingly sudden tipping points.
Reviews
Rev. of American Autobiography after 9/11 MEGAN BROWN. U of Wisconsin P, 2017 155 pp., $64.95 (Clothback) ISBN 978-0299310301. Shannon Finck, University of West Georgia
Rev of. Aux Origines du Journal Personnel: France, 1750–1815 PHILLIPE LEJEUNE. Honoré Champion, 2016 650 pp., €99.00 (Paperback), 978-2745330376. Arnaud Schmitt, University of Bordeaux
Notes on Contributors
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Writing Home: Literatures of Place & Belonging, c.1300-1600
25th-26th July 2019, University of Liverpool
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Wendy Scase
What makes a home? Is it our four walls and families, neighbours and neighbourhoods? Our parishes, towns, cities, and countries? Our values, cultural practices, and experiences? Or is home where we have come from, where we are, and maybe, hopefully, where we are going? Join us in July at the University of Liverpool for a two-day conference exploring how ‘home’ took shape in the literatures of the late medieval and early modern periods. We will explore the physical and conceptual parameters of home, and how these parameters changed over time in response to religious, political, and economic upheaval, civil unrest, and human and cultural migration.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Literary representations of domesticity and the household.
- The relationship between smaller and larger units of home & belonging (e.g. the household and the parish; the parish and the city; the city and the country, etc.).
- How the physical and/or conceptual parameters of home shifted in translations & redactions.
- Migrant experiences & home-building practices.
- Writing home abroad or in exile.
- Sensing home: somatic experiences of belonging.
- Reading homes in miscellanies (patronage, organising principles, signs of readership and manuscript culture).
- The ‘beginnings’ of home in origin narratives, foundation myths, and genealogies.
- Legendaria and folktales: literatures that enrich the history of home.
- Performing home on stage and at court.
We welcome abstracts for 20-minute papers related to the themes outlined above. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biography of around 100 words to homeuol@liverpool.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 28th May 2019.
Thanks to the generous support of the Society of Renaissance Studies and the Liverpool Centre of Medieval and Renaissance studies, we have a limited number of £80 bursaries available for PGR/ECR delegates to contribute to travel and accommodation costs. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please put a note in your bio. Applicants must not have access to institutional funding.
We are also delighted to confirm the first of our keynote speakers. Professor Wendy Scase, the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of the University of Birmingham, will be speaking about ‘Belonging, Scribal Practice, and Graphic Culture’.
We look forward to hearing from you.
“Traveling Bodies”
Call for Contributions
In contemporary research, travelers are frequently presented as characters who, while being on the road, resonate with but also negotiate culturally specific – individual and collective – discourses of encountering and constructing the foreign and ‘the other’ (including unknown spaces/terra incognita). In encountering the new and unfamiliar, travelers often experience and reflect on themselves, i.e. their (cultural) identity, their relation to the world, and not least their own bodies in new and unexpected ways. However, in contrast to recent approaches to traveling in (visual) anthropology, for instance, the body as a ‘medium’ of travel has so far been largely neglected in literary and cultural studies. This is even more surprising considering the fact that travelers are always also “traveling bodies.” The ‘lived’ body (“Leib”) is, in fact, a central aspect of each travel experience, intricately and inseparably caught up with the psychological and physical experience of traveling.
The editors are part of a larger international, interdisciplinary research network concerned with “Traveling Bodies” and thus, aim at closing this gap with the collection. We want to focus on traveling as an embodied cultural experience and practice, more particularly on the role that bodies play when traveling and, especially, in travel writing. Understanding the body as a “dynamic locus of human thought, action, and language” (Johnson 159) and – in a phenomenological view – as both, lived and physiological, objective body (Gallagher 1986), we propose to look at images, functions, and figurations that bodies and embodiment – including the travelers’ own sensory experience as well as their encounters of other bodies – can assume in historical and contemporary texts concerned with traveling. Aspects and topics to be discussed can include, but are not limited to:
- The body as a medium for the communication and negotiation of social norms and values (including discourses of dis/ability)
- (Bodily) practices of mobility and perception
- Images and (visual) metaphors of traveling bodies (e.g., gendering space in the context of orientalism and colonialism)
- The performance of ‘the body’ (own vs. other)
- Culturally specific body practices and how they challenge traditional notions about embodiment
- Representations of the obstinate or ‘ill-functioning’ body (e.g., the ‘resistant’ body, the power of the body over mind, bodily functions and control, discourses on health and hygiene)
- Limits and delimitations of bodily experience while traveling (e.g., norms and regulations, spatial experiences, thresholds, and borders)
- (Technological) body enhancement or modifications while abroad/ on the road
- Travelers and traveling as expressions of power structures (social, regional, political, sexual, etc.)
We welcome contributions from scholars regardless of their career stage, and encourage submissions from a range of disciplines, particularly those with interdisciplinary approaches to the topic. Please send chapter abstracts of no more than 3,000 characters, accompanied by a brief bio note, to nmschroeder@uni-koblenz.de; salthaus@uni-koblenz.de; schaffers@uni-koblenz.de by May 15, 2019. Accepted authors will be notified by June 15, 2019.
We are currently looking for an international publisher for this collection; therefore, we do not yet have concrete specifications or timelines. Contributions should be around 30,000 characters (excluding footnotes) and the estimated deadline for contributions is September 15, 2019 as we aim for a publication date around summer 2020.
Works Cited:
Gallagher, Shaun, “Lived Body and Environment.” Research in Phenomenology 16 (Jan. 1, 1986): 139-70.
Johnson, Mark, “What makes a Body?” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, New Series, Vol. 22, No. 3, Symposium II: Words, Bodies, War (2008): 159-69.
This session aims to interrogate how French and Francophone women’s narrative (texts or films) portrays the marginalized, the repressed, and/or the underrepresented. Presentations will investigate works of authors/filmmakers who made themselves a spokesperson for the voiceless, casting light on stories that otherwise would have remained unheard within their own communities as well as globally. What does it mean to be “voiceless,” and how do these authors/filmmakers give value to the experiences of these people who, for lack of authority, education, or economic means, are not able to convey them on their own? Topics may include but are not limited to life-writing, translation, postcolonial and gender studies. Please send a 250-word abstract in English or French to Viviana Pezzullo, vpezzullo2016@fau.edu by May 15, 2019, along with presenter’s academic affiliation, contact information, and A/V requirements.
Chair: Viviana Pezzullo, Florida Atlantic University, <vpezzullo2016@fau.edu>
Call for Papers
Women in French Sessions
2019 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
November 8-10, 2019
Please send presentation proposals in French or English—including presenter’s academic affiliation, contact information, and A/V requirements—to the panel chair by May 15, 2019.
For more information on SAMLA and the annual conference, please visit the conference website: https://samla.memberclicks.net/
In addition to registering as a member of SAMLA and also for the SAMLA conference, presenters must also be current on their membership in Women in French. You may visit (http://www.womeninfrench.org/) to become a member or renew your membership.
International Workshop: Ecocritical Life Writing in the Dystopic Present
University of Augsburg, Germany 5. / 6. December 2019
The fields of Life Writing and Ecocriticism closely intertwine, as has already been proven during the first ecological movements that gradually transformed into a global endeavor in the 1960s, so much so that Alfred Hornung argued in Ecology and Life Writing that ‘nature writing equals life writing’ (2013, p. x). Arguably, the “introspective quality of reflecting upon nature and one’s place in relation to nature make the act of commenting on the environment and writing about one’s experience inseparable,” (Tanya K. Kam, in Life Writing 13.3, p. 351), and writings by John Muir, Rachel Carson, Mary Oliver, Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, or Karen Tei Yamashita have substantiated this observation, as they are characterized by autobiographical impulses as well as their sociopolitical reflections on the natural world. By processing such ecologically situated narratives, readers can gain an insight into the crucial role the environment plays in their lives. At the same time, these engagements always point to a certain ecological age and are intertwined with their ecological moment.
This workshop sets out to re-visit the relation between ecocriticism and life writing in what might be called the “dystopic present.” First and foremost, this designation aims to differentiate texts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries from those of the late 20th and 21st centuries, by arguing that the latter are part of an age where the relation between nature and the human is largely seen as a dystopian one: While late 19th-century and 20th-century ecocritical life writing focused primarily on an anthropocentric, benevolent understanding of nature, the environment, or wilderness, in connection to the human being exposed to it, late 20th-century and 21st-century texts instead increasingly react to and criticize humans’ destructive interventions into nature and the environment. Moreover, the latter certainly play a crucial role in critically reflecting the interdependencies between nature and the human in the context of the contemporary Americas, by understanding them as either reciprocal or even indistinguishable.
We invite the submission of individual abstracts (300 words) of current projects that explore all aspects of this theme; possible subthemes may include, but are not limited to:
- – Econarratology
- – Ecocritical and Biopolitics of Reproductive Technologies
- – Ecocriticism and the Posthumanities
- – Ecocritical Science Fiction / Speculative Fiction
- – Ecocriticism and Social Activism
- – Ecocriticism and Technological Innovation
- – Climate Change Narratives
- – Ecofeminism / Feminist Ecocriticism
- – Performing Ecocriticism in Virtual Environments
- – Technoscience and Ecocriticism
- – Queer Ecocritical Life Writings
- – Postcolonial Ecocritical Life WritingsWe intend the workshop to be an intense discussion forum for the fields sketched above. Thus, the group of participants will be limited to a maximum of twenty scholars that represent all stages of the academic career. The workshop will furthermore be guided by several experts who have previous research experience in the fields of either Ecocriticism or Life Writing, and who will contribute to the workshop by not only giving feedback on individual projects but also by providing spotlight keynotes. The desired outcome of this format is the comprehensive discussion of individual proposals, in order to prepare these for a subsequent essay collection on the topic. Applicants should therefore be willing to prepare a 2000-word essay for distribution to all participants prior to the workshop.For further questions about the workshop theme and organization, please contact Ina Batzke, one of the members of the organizing American Studies team at the University of Augsburg. Abstracts amounting to approx. 300 words and a short biographical sketch should be submitted to ina.batzke@philhist.uni-augsburg.de by May 20, 2019. A limited amount of travel bursaries to support graduate students, independent scholars, and junior faculty members will be available; please indicate whether you would like to be considered for a travel bursary when submitting your abstract.
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Marie Cardinal’s 1975 autobiographical novel, Les Mots pour le dire, marked a turning point in the landscape of women’s life-writing projects within French culture. By employing a first-person voice to document the narrator’s analysis while at the same time to re-create or re-imagine her memories, this narrative broke the silence, shame, and guilt of a complicated mother-daughter relationship and, in so doing, allowed the author/narrator insight into her corporeal and subjective truths. Les Mots pour le dire also tied the personal to the political. All of these narrative pathways have since been explored to different ends by contemporary women writers who turn to life-writing projects to speak their truths about their identities, their families, their bodies, and their culture(s). This panel will consider the legacy of Cardinal’s text—the power of language in/and life-writing endeavors—in the domain of contemporary French and Francophone literature. How do contemporary women authors articulate “it” and in what words? What other types of voices (or languages) are woven into these stories of selfhood? Whom do these self-narratives address? To what extent do these literary examples offer catharsis? What can be said about women’s life writing and resistance as it pertains to language? Can the language of curative writing serve as a form of resistance? Please send 250-word proposals, in English or French, to Adrienne Angelo ama0002@auburn. edu by May 15, 2019.
Chair: Adrienne Angelo, Auburn University, <ama0002@auburn.edu>
Women in French Sessions
2019 South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference
Atlanta, Georgia
November 8-10, 2019
Please send presentation proposals in French or English—including presenter’s academic affiliation, contact information, and A/V requirements—to the panel chair by May 15, 2019.
For more information on SAMLA and the annual conference, please visit the conference website: https://samla.memberclicks.net/
In addition to registering as a member of SAMLA and also for the SAMLA conference, presenters must also be current on their membership in Women in French. You may visit (http://www.womeninfrench.org/) to become a member or renew your membership.
English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty
Edited by Aidan Norrie, Carolyn Harris, Joanna Laynesmith, Danna Messer, and Elena Woodacre
Revised Call for Contributors
The Editors have been delighted at the proposals we have received thus far, and hope that more will come in before the 1 May 2019 deadline.
With fewer than 2 months to go, however, we have decided to issue a revised Call for Contributors to advertise the consorts that we have received no abstracts for.
So, while we are keen to hear from prospective authors on any consort, we are especially looking for submissions on:
Norman to Early Plantagenet Consorts
Margaret of France (wife of Henry the Young King)
Isabella of Gloucester (wife of King John)
Later Plantagenet and Wars of the Roses Consorts
Isabella de Valois
Tudor and Stuart Consorts
Elizabeth of York
Katherine of Aragon
Elizabeth Cromwell and Dorothy Cromwell (a double-biography of the wives of the Lords Protectors Cromwell)
Hanoverian to Windsor Consorts
Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz
Caroline of Brunswick
Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother
Prince Philip, The Duke of Edinburgh
The Editors are happy to field questions and queries. We can be contacted at: englishconsorts@gmail.com
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The editors are seeking contributors for English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty, a four-volume series—intended for Palgrave Macmillan’s “Queenship and Power” series—that will provide short, focused, well-researched, and refereed biographies of all the English consorts since the Conquest.
The Penguin Monarchs series is the latest in a long line of publications that have focused on the monarchs of England. The Penguin series, in particular, has generally been successful in combining scholarly research with readability and accessibility, often because the authors have chosen a particular lens to view the monarch through, giving the biographies more focus.
The Penguin Monarchs series, however, shines a light on what is generally still missing from studies of the English monarchy: the role of the consort. While the last decade has seen a plethora of both scholarly and popular biographies published on England’s consorts, there is no single, scholarly compendium where all the consorts since the Norman Conquest can be consulted: it is this curious lacuna that English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty seeks to fill, creating a vital reference work for scholars, students, and the interested public.
English Consorts: Power, Influence, Dynasty will provide analytical biographies of all of the English consorts since the Conquest. Edited by a team of queenship experts and historians of monarchy, each of the volumes (Volume 1: Early Medieval Consorts; Volume 2: Later Medieval Consorts; Volume 3: Tudor and Stuart Consorts; Volume 4: Hanoverian to Windsor Consorts) will include biographical essays, as well as commissioned essays from leading experts on various thematic topics. We are interested in both male and female consorts, but can only include essays related to the spouses of a reigning monarch: as such, Anne Hyde and Sophia Dorothea of Celle will not be included, but we plan to include an essay on Margaret of France, wife of Henry the Young King.
Like the Penguin Monarchs books, however, each of the essays must have a lens through which the consort is viewed. Rather than simply replicating the consort’s entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, readers should come away from each essay with a sense of what was unique to, or ‘special’ about, a particular consort. For instance, the essay on Elizabeth of York could be sub-titled ‘The Unifier’, and focus on her role in the ending of the Wars of the Roses, or instead ‘Daughter, Sister, Niece, Wife, and Mother of Kings’, and focus on her political, social, and religious influence during her life. Likewise, the essay on Philip II could be sub-titled ‘The First Male Consort’, or instead, ‘King and Consort’.
Potential authors may submit abstracts for more than one consort. We ask, however, that the abstracts all be sent as attachments to the same email, with the chapters ranked in preference. Proposed chapter titles should take the format of the consort’s name, followed by a colon, followed by a brief sub-title that signifies to the reader the chapter’s focus. We also plan to include some thematic essays that take a particular angle, and consider the consorts from an entire dynasty together. Interested authors may wish to also submit an abstract for one of these essays.
Please send chapter abstracts of no more than 250 words, accompanied by a brief biography, for essays between 6000 and 7500 words (including references) to englishconsorts@gmail.com by 1 May 2019. Accepted authors will be notified by mid-July 2019, and completed essays will be due to the volume’s editor by 1 June 2020.
We are keen to hear from scholars regardless of their career stage or situation, and encourage submissions from specialists from a range of disciplines.
Reminder Deadline for submissions April 30, 2019
IABA Asia-Pacific International Conference 2019
“Life Writing and Asia-Pacific Cultures”
(4/30/2019; 10/25-27/2019) Shanghai, China
Cultures and cultural change affect life writing and life writing gives impetus to cultural development. Global cultures have undergone fundamental changes in the 21st Century and the Asia-Pacific region has attracted particular attention from the international community—particularly in relation to human migration and displacement, economic and technological growth, sustainability and the environment, and a host of other transforming events. Life writing has responded to these cultural developments with many different types of life narratives emerging across forms, genres and themes. To achieve a better understanding of these culturally topical life narrative texts and themes in the Asia-Pacific region, the Center for Life Writing of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU) will host “Life Writing and Asia-Pacific Cultures,” the International Auto/Biography Association Asia-Pacific Region conference from Oct. 25 to 27, 2019. This conference will offer plenary sessions on the following topics and feature six experts who will give keynote speeches:
Confucian Culture and Life Writing
With a long history and vast area of influence in Asia, Confucian culture’s emphasis on the importance of character development and achievements has exerted a profound influence on the emergence and evolution of Asia-Pacific life writing traditions. The plenary will discuss how Confucianism shapes the representation of the biographical subject’s character, and how life writing genres have responded into modern times.
Migration, Displacement, and Asylum Seeking
These global concerns have always been crucial in the Asia-Pacific region, and for the life writing that has emerged within it. As perennial components of Asia-Pacific life writing, such mobilities impact our understanding of family and memories, immigration and settlement, and individuals’ and communities’ struggles, successes, and failures to succeed.
Cultural Hybrids and Life Writing
The many historical and geographic overlays experienced by Asia-Pacific cultures often result in multiple and uncertain cultural identities. Life writing often documents the tensions, conflicts, and achievements resulting from such cultural interchange.
Local Cultures and Life Writing
The Asia-Pacific Region boasts rich and complex local cultures that have developed ways for sustaining their own identities and integrity, often in the face of extreme external pressures and even actual interventions. Life writing’s contributions to defining and preserving such local cultures will be the subject of discussion.
Other Issues in Life Writing Associated with Asia-Pacific Cultures
Further information about the plenary related to these issues will be forthcoming; this general area creates further possibilities for discussing other significant aspects of Asian-Pacific cultures and life writing.
We welcome papers that broadly consider aspects of life narrative in this region. Possible themes include:
- Life narrative texts from or about the Asia-Pacific region
- Confucian Culture and Life Writing
- Life Writing of migration, displacement, and asylum seeking
- Regional life writing and local cultures
- Creative/life writing in the Asia-Pacific
- Hybrid cultures and life writing
- Life writing and digital media; social media
- Archives, history, and memory
- Family and personal histories
- Methods for working with life narrative
- Life writing and the politics of language and translation
- Affect and the representation of emotions in life narratives
Attendees will register on our website: http://www.sclw.sjtu.edu.cn/IABA2019. Scholars planning to give speeches at the conference need to submit abstracts on line before Apr. 30, 2019. Formal invitations will be dispatched afterwards according to online registrations and submitted abstracts. Travel and accommodation costs associated with this conference will be covered by attendees. As for conference fees, attendees who register before Jun. 30, 2019, will enjoy an early bird discount of 180 US dollars or 1000 RMB; after Jun. 30, 2019, the fees will be 200 US dollars or 1200 RMB. There will be a half discount for student partipants.
Deadlines and Conference Schedule:
Deadline for Abstracts (about 300 words): Apr. 30, 2019
Notification of Acceptance: May. 30, 2019
Deadline for Registration: Sep. 30, 2019
Conference Dates: Oct. 25-27, 2019.
The working languages for this conference are Chinese and English; paper abstracts can be written in either language. We will provide translation service between the two languages. Papers will be considered for publication in our journal, Journal of Modern Life Writing Studies.
IABA Asia-Pacific
Center for Life Writing, SJTU
Dec. 18, 2018
Contact Person: Chen FAN
E-mail：fanchen@sjtu.edu.cn
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Deadline for Submissions, April 30, 2019
Writing Home: Literatures of Place & Belonging, c.1300-1600
25th-26th July 2019, University of Liverpool
Confirmed Keynote: Professor Wendy Scase
What makes a home? Is it our four walls and families, neighbours and neighbourhoods? Our parishes, towns, cities, and countries? Our values, cultural practices, and experiences? Or is home where we have come from, where we are, and maybe, hopefully, where we are going? Join us in July at the University of Liverpool for a two-day conference exploring how ‘home’ took shape in the literatures of the late medieval and early modern periods. We will explore the physical and conceptual parameters of home, and how these parameters changed over time in response to religious, political, and economic upheaval, civil unrest, and human and cultural migration.
Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Literary representations of domesticity and the household.
- The relationship between smaller and larger units of home & belonging (e.g. the household and the parish; the parish and the city; the city and the country, etc.).
- How the physical and/or conceptual parameters of home shifted in translations & redactions.
- Migrant experiences & home-building practices.
- Writing home abroad or in exile.
- Sensing home: somatic experiences of belonging.
- Reading homes in miscellanies (patronage, organising principles, signs of readership and manuscript culture).
- The ‘beginnings’ of home in origin narratives, foundation myths, and genealogies.
- Legendaria and folktales: literatures that enrich the history of home.
- Performing home on stage and at court.
We welcome abstracts for 20-minute papers related to the themes outlined above. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short biography of around 100 words to homeuol@liverpool.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is Tuesday 30th April 2019.
Thanks to the generous support of the Society of Renaissance Studies and the Liverpool Centre of Medieval and Renaissance studies, we have a limited number of £80 bursaries available for PGR/ECR delegates to contribute to travel and accommodation costs. If you wish to be considered for a bursary, please put a note in your bio. Applicants must not have access to institutional funding.
We are also delighted to confirm the first of our keynote speakers. Professor Wendy Scase, the Geoffrey Shepherd Professor of the University of Birmingham, will be speaking about ‘Belonging, Scribal Practice, and Graphic Culture’.
We look forward to hearing from you.
Call for Submissions – AvtobiografiЯ. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture (Deadline: 30 April 2019)
The international, peer-reviewed and open access journal AvtobiografiЯ. Journal on Life Writing and the Representation of the Self in Russian Culture» is now accepting submissions for its eight issue, which will be published in the autumn of 2019. AvtobiografiЯ is a journal devoted to the representation of the self in Russian culture. Its Advisory and Editorial Board are comprised of internationally renowned scholars in the field of Russian Studies. The journal welcomes contributions on any topic related to Life Writing and Auto-Biography and related genres in Russian literature, history, art and culture. The editors are particularly keen to theoretical and interdisciplinary articles, and welcome contributions about other Slavonic cultures.
Proposals must be sent to the address: info@avtobiografija.com. The deadline for submissions is the 30th April 2019. All necessary information, including style notes and submission guidelines, are on the journal’s website: http://www.avtobiografija.com/
The seventh 2018 issue was published on 30 December 2018. It featured a special section edited by Elena Glukhova on the practice of letter writing during the Silver Age, with articles by Fedor Poliakov, Svetlana Fedotova, Anna Sergeeva-Kliatis, Ol’ga Bogdanova, Anastasia Gacheva, Dmitrii Torshilov and Elena Glukhova. It also featured an article by Irina Erman on Rozanov and 48 letters written by Mikhail Murav’ev, edited by Aleksandr Ivinskii, other than 7 book reviews. The issue can be consulted at the link:
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/issue/view/12/10
Below you will find the table of contents of the seventh issue.
The Editors
Claudia Criveller and Andrea Gullotta
No 7 (2018)
Letter Writing during the Silver Age as a Source for Unknown and Forgotten Names
Introduction
Claudia Criveller, Andrea Gullotta
5-8
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/284/283
Papers: Special Section
“An Inexorably Radiant Individual”: Memories of Childhood in Ellis’s Letters to Nikolai Zaretskii
Fedor Poliakov
11-30
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/285/284
‘Erotic Attitudes’ in an Epistolary Discourse (Based on Aleksandr Blok’s Correspondence with Liubov’ Mendeleeva-Blok)
Svetlana Fedotova
31-50
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/286/285
“I Answer Again ‘No’ to the Proposal You (…) Made”: The Correspondence between Vera Kommisarzhevskaia and Sergei Tatishchev
Anna Sergeeva-Kliatis
51-62
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/287/286
On the History of the Crimean ‘Literary Nests’ at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century: Letters from Vasilii Komarovich to Maksimilian Voloshin
Ol’ga Bogdanova
63-72
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/288/287
Eternal Themes, Eternal Questions and Eternal Images in the Correspondence between the Composer Vladimir Rebikov and the Philosopher Aleksander Gorskii
Anastasia Gacheva
73-134
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/289/288
The Myth of My Life: A Letter from Iakov Golosovker to Andrei Bely
Dmitrii Torshilov
135-146
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/290/289
The Autobiographical Discourse in Vera Stanevich’s Letters to Andrei Bely
Elena Glukhova
147-168
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/291/290
Papers
Autobiography of a ‘Living Plagiary’: Vasilii Rozanov’s Secret Dostoevskian Genealogy
Irina Erman
171-190
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/292/291
Materials and Discussions
Письма М.Н. Муравьева С.М. и Ф.Н. Луниным 1789 г. (по материалам ОПИ ГИМ)
Aleksandr Ivinskii
193-248
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/293/292
Reviews
A. Pristavkin, Inseparabili. Due gemelli nel Caucaso, trad. di P. Deotto, Milano, Guerini e Associati, 2018.
Giulia De Florio
251-258
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/294/293
M. Venditti, Il volo sospeso di Gajto Gazdanov. Vita e opere di uno scrittore russo emigrato Parigi, Mimesis, Milano – Udine, 2018.
Donatella Di Leo
259-264
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/295/294
Автобиография на фоне истории – И. Юров, История моей жизни, Редактор Антон Голицын, Издательский дом «Ры- бинск», Рыбинск, 2017.
Tatiana Kuzovkina
265-270
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/296/295
Н.Н. Козаков, Дневник. 1962, Глущенкоиздат, Москва, 2016.
Iaroslav Golubinov
271-276
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/297/296
Андрусь Горват, Радзіва “Прудок”: дзеннік, выд. Медысонт, Мінск, 2018.
Aliaksandr Raspapou
277-278
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/298/297
Л. Фризман, В кругах литературоведов: Мемуарные очерки. – 2-е изд., испр. и доп., Нестор-История, Москва; Санкт-Петербург, 2017
Bartosz Osiewicz
279-284
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/299/298
K. Hignett, M. Ilic, D. Leinarte and C. Snitar, Women’s Experiences of Repression in The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Routledge, London, 2018
Margarita Vaysman
285-288
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/300/299
Authors
291-294
http://www.avtobiografija.com/index.php/avtobiografija/article/view/301/300
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Deadline for Submissions April 28, 2019
MIGRATION, ADAPTATION AND MEMORY – 2nd International Interdisciplinary Conference in Gdańsk, Poland
13-14 June, 2019
How do we remember and represent our migration experiences? Who is involved in these processes? How does history remember these events? What helps migrants and societies to adapt? The significance of these and related questions have made their way into our daily lives, from the refugee crisis to policy decisions, individual psychotherapy to (re)building identities, communities, and memories.
During the conference, we are going to turn our attention to processes that are integral to human experience: migration, adaptation, and memory. We are interested in all aspects of migration and adaptation, in their individual and collective dimensions, in the past and in the present-day world. We would like to examine the role of memory, the processes of migrating and adapting to various dynamic life circumstances, across time, space, culture, language, and discipline.
Therefore, we strive to represent and discuss the crossroads of migration, adaptation, and memory in their multiple representations: psychological, social, historical, cultural, philosophical, religious, neurological, organizational, methodological, economic, political, and many others. We will also devote considerable attention to how these phenomena appear and transform in artistic practices: literature, film, theatre, and visual arts. This is why we invite researchers representing various academic disciplines: anthropology, history, psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, philosophy, economics, law, literary studies, theatre studies, film studies, design, project management, memory studies, migration studies, consciousness studies, dream studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, medical sciences, cognitive sciences, and urban studies, to name a few.
Different forms of presentations are encouraged, including case studies, theoretical inquiries, personal reflections, problem-oriented arguments, comparative analyses, and creative expressions.
We will be happy to hear from experienced scholars and young academics, doctoral and graduate students, as well as professionals from various disciplines. We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without giving a presentation.
Our repertoire of suggested topics includes but is not limited to:
I. Arts
– Literature, poetry, film, theatre, etc. as adaptive mediums
– Adaptation through artistic creation and destruction
– Artistic imagination and adaptation
– Migration as represented in arts
– Art created during migration
– Creative expression through memories
II. History
– Adaptation across history
– Memory processes in writing history
– Documenting history and memories in migration
III. Humanitarian work, Governments and NGOs
– Roles and responsibilities
– Management of temporary and transitory spaces
– Project management and evaluation
– Best practices
– Welcome contexts
IV. Medical sciences
– Genetics/epigenetics in adaptation processes
– Neurobiology and biochemistry of adaptation and memory
– Evolutionary approaches to memory, adaptation and migration
– Chronic diseases, memory, and adaptation
V. Philosophy and Worldviews (Eastern, Western, Indigenous…)
– Epistemology and metaphysics
– Existential and postmodern adaptation
– Ethics in migratory context
– Philosophy of memory
VI. Political Sciences and Law
– Policies related to migration and adaptation
– Human rights and migration
– Bureaucracy in relation to migration policies
– Judiciary systems
– Political agendas, memory and migration
– Objective vs. subjective memory in politics
– International politics and adaptation
VII. Psychology and Psychiatry
– Mental health and adaptation
– Abnormal behaviors and adaptation
– (Mal)adaptive memory processes
– Social and transcultural psychiatry
– Perception/cognition/attention
– Personality
– Psychoanalysis
VIII. Sociology and Anthropology
– Cultural determinants and adaptation
– Race/ethnic identity and adaptation
– Religion, adaptation and migratory experiences
– Gender, adaptation and migratory experiences
– Social networks and adaptation
– Language of adaptation, memory and migration
– Family relations and adaptation
– Urban planning and adaptation
– Diaspora and community development
IX. Economics and Business
– Adaptation and job security
– Private sponsorship and adaptation
– Adaptation in economics (Marxist, Capitalist…)
Deadline for paper proposals: 30 April 2019
Notification of acceptance: 3 May 2019
Deadline for registration: 28 May 2019
Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of your proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, by 30 April 2019 to:
Our website is: https://migrationadaptation.ug.edu.pl/
Deadline for Submissions April 28, 2019
The Textualities of the Auto/biogrAfrical
Guest Editors: Fiona Moolla (University of the Western Cape), and Sally Ann Murray and Tilla Slabbert (Stellenbosch University)
Following the founding colloquium of the IABA Africa chapter in October 2017, this special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies will both explore and provisionally consolidate examples of contemporary scholarship on the varied forms of ‘auto/biogrAfrical’ life storying that emerge from (and in relation to) African contexts.
Some questions this issue may consider:
- How do life narratives from (or about) Africa mediate the tensions of politics, history, and self within individual lives and in public contexts?
- What narrative and conceptual tropes, techniques, and traditions are emergent (and established) in contemporary life stories from Africa?
- What shifts in textuality, expressive form, and re-mediation of ‘the auto/biogrAfrical’ occur within and across generations of African imaginaries, in respect of race, class, gender, orientation, and other identity categories?
- What modes of scholarship are needed in order to address changing understandings and practices of autobiographical multimodality in African texts and contexts?
We invite contributions that expand disciplinary approaches to auto/biographical studies from and in relation to African texts, contexts, possibilities, and provocations. Relevant here are: theories and practices of life narrative in postcolonial, decolonial, and diaspora studies; migrant and refugee studies; digital studies; new media and communications; visual studies and art history; performance studies; disability studies; gender and sexuality studies, war and conflict studies, childhood and youth studies, and innovative autoethnographic studies.
Possible topics could include:
- autobiographical coming-of-age in exile/in Africa and the African diaspora, including digital diasporas
- intergenerational and intercultural conflict
- sexuality, orientation, LGBTQIA, trans life stories, queering a/b
- domesticating publics and publicizing domesticity
- prison writing and life narratives of institutional confinement
- the relational narration of animal life stories, posthumanism, and eco-auto/biography
- memory, official/vernacular archives, and ephemera (stories, images, material artifacts)
- accounts by/of displaced children and child soldiers
- autobiographical subgenres such as patriography, matriography, ecography, autogynography, gastrography, autography, autoethnography, autopsychography, alterbiography, autophylography
- blogs and #hashtag cultures, and experimental life writing
- testimony, witness, trauma, resilience, and re-storying the lives of refugees and migrants
- challenges of method, and pedagogy, in relation to auto/biographical texts
Submissions are due 30 April 2019. Please email your essays to all the co-editors: Fiona Moolla fmoolla@uwc.ac.za, Sally Ann Murray samurray@sun.ac.za and Tilla Slabbert mslabbert@sun.ac.zaEditors’ Biographical Statements
Associate Professor Fiona Moolla is a lecturer in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. She is the author of Reading Nuruddin Farah (James Currey, 2014), and is working on struggle life writing told through the prism of love.
Professor Sally Ann Murray is Chair of English at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. She has published academic autoethnographies and is the recipient of literary awards for poetry and fiction, most notably for the autobiographical novel Small Moving Parts (Kwela, 2009).
Dr Tilla Slabbert is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Stellenbosch University. She co-authored the biography of the musician David Kramer (Tafelberg, 2011).
Deadline for Submissions April 15, 2019
Heroes, Villains, and Victims: Hagiography, Demonization, and Narrative’s Role in Assessing Who Matters
Literature and history are rife with figures who are difficult to assess. For example, the television show Dexter was premised on the question of whether or not a murderer who only kills other murderers is a villain or a dark hero. Likewise, both historians and authors have attempted to determine whether John Brown was a hero, a terrorist, a victim, or a madman? Similarly, depending on the perspective from which he is analyzed, Che Guevara was a heroic revolutionary, a violent executioner, or, perhaps, a bit of both? Was Bertha Mason the madwoman in the attic as Charlotte Bronte would have us believe or a victim of the forces of both colonialization and patriarchy as Jean Rhys describes? What impact does rhetorical and literary production play in how these individuals are understood? What is the impact of our own subject position as we read and analyze these texts? How might we see beyond those subject positions?
This panel seeks to uncover how we understand such ideas as victim, enemy, revolutionary, and terrorist through a study of the language used to produce or encode each of these groups. What role does language play in developing the hero and castigating the villain? This conversation will, hopefully, open doors to help us understand how, in the polarized political world of the 21st century, language creates heroes and villains as well as unpack the implications of this type of rhetoric. It will also give us a lens by which to understand how individuals are either humanized or dehumanized in literature, media, and historical narratives. And it will force us to consider what role literature, media outlets, social media, and the classroom play in casting individuals and groups as either hero or villain.
This panel will accept papers that look at the construction of figures from both fiction and the world outside of the pages of the book.
* What constitutes an acceptable victim? Is it tied to notions of gender, race, or age?
* What are the hallmarks of a villain? What are the ethical implications of “humanizing” the villain? What are the benefits?
* How does language impact the ways in which figures are come to be seen as either a victim or the enemy?
* What is the purpose of hagiography and what needs does it serve? What is the role that demonization plays in the development of heroic figures and why do we seem to need villains as well?
* What is the impact of understanding both our heroes and our villains as morally complex characters? What is gained by engaging in the work of undoing hagiography even of those we personally revere? What is lost when we don’t do this work?
Please submit 300-500 word abstract with a short biography to erika.mccombs@elmhurst.edu by April 15th.
Deadline for Submissions, April 15, 2019
“Oral History and Life Stories Revisited”
CFP: Oral History and Life Stories Network of the European Social Science History Conference
13th European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC) at Leiden University, Netherlands, 18 to 21, March 2020
In recent decades oral history has stabilized its’ place in and beyond academia to the point, that it has been questioned if oral history has lost its radical roots? Also, the rise of the Internet and social media demands that we reflect on our work according to methodological questions and maybe new challenges in that context. Do the voiceless still need us to give them voice? Broadly, we want to encourage papers that explore methodological questions and challenges as well as the relationship between oral histories and the construction and analysis of life stories, both in terms of processes and outcomes. This, for example, might include the conceptual use and reuse of both oral histories and life stories in research, and/or considerations of the methods involved in both. We would encourage proposals that attempt to cross the oral history/life history divide (bringing the two research communities together).
We invite in particular contributions that address the following themes and issues:
- Oral history then and now: What is oral history today? What has changed/not changed over the years? What are the theoretical and methodological challenges of oral history today?
- Who is working with oral history and in what ways? What are the themes of oral history today? Whose memories are collected, analysed and archived?
- What are the impacts of the digitalization process on oral history materials and on doing oral history?
- Reusing and revisiting (archived) oral history materials – why, what are the challenges, what are the benefits?
- Oral history in and beyond the academia – is there a return to oral history’s “radical roots” and/or in which fields and communities is oral history used today?
- How does doing oral history differ in different countries and cultures?
- Relations of oral history to other fields (e.g. memory studies, social sciences, ethnology, anthropology)
- Reflections on combining oral history and life story methods – what has changed and what is new?
- Teaching oral history – experiences, challenges, teaching concepts
- Legal issues in oral history
- Ethical problems and reflections including the question of speaking for “the voiceless” and/or letting them speak for themselves
In addition to classic sessions consisting of individual papers, other kinds of presentations and sessions are also possible, for example “Meet the Author”-sessions (in which several experts comment on a recent and important book, after which the author responds), round table sessions (in which several experts discuss the same topic rather than present research results) or a film, introduced by the maker or an expert and afterwards discussed with the audience.
While we welcome proposals for panels these must be international in membership (and from different institutions), and each of their constituent papers must be of a high quality. The over-riding criterion for selection is strength of papers; if a proposed panel is not strong enough en bloc, the organisers will consider the merits of papers individually.
Our Network does not favour discussants; if a panel proposal includes a discussant it should indicate why they wish to follow this format (and that if they do, the panel must comprise a maximum of four speakers plus a discussant). Sessions can have a maximum of five papers.
The deadline for the required pre-registration of a paper or session proposal at the ESSHC-website is 15 April 2019. Please refer to the ESSHC guidelines at https://esshc.socialhistory.org/guidelines.
2020 Oral History and Life Stories Network Chairs of the ESSHC:
Anne Heimo, University of Turku, Finland, anheimo@utu.fi
Andrea Strutz, LBI for Research on Consequences of War / University of Graz, Austria, andrea.strutz@uni-graz.at
Malin Thor Tureby, University of Linköping, Sweden, malin.thor.tureby@liu.se
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Textual Transactions and the “Non-Fictional Turn”
- 250-word proposals due April 10, 2019
- Essays of 2,000-3,000 words due July 1, 2019
- Publication: Spring 2020
The guest editors of a special issue of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies seek proposals for essays that address non-fictional forms in relation to multiply mediated concepts of truth and reality.
This special issue builds on the queries initially posited during a special MLA 2019 panel on textual transactions in non-fiction. As such, it proposes to investigate the theme of what we might call “a commerce of textualities” by reading literary/creative/narrative non-fictional works constituted in mixed modes of writing— situated on the one hand at the intersections of journalism, life-writing, history, urban-studies, and archival reconstruction, and on the other, increasingly in the twenty first century, at the crossings of new technologies of smart telecommunication, real-time television programming, and cybernetics.
The theme of the issue will be significantly informed by the interventions of such critics as Rob Nixon, Henry Twidle, Walter Benn Michaels, and Ian Jack, who have each accounted for a late 20th and early 21st century “boom” on the global stage of non-fictional forms of engagement. However, unlike these scholars, the editors of this issue seek to understand not why a particular narrative form emerges at a particular time, but what its effects are in its particular context. What, they ask, do the kinds of textual transactions that constitute the nonfictional turn have to do with what Rob Nixon has called “the cultural industrialization of the real”: who do they speak for, why do they matter, and to whom?
A central concern of this issue is with the ethical and methodological payoffs of investigating the significance of nonfiction in a world that increasingly places a great premium on making shows of reality. This may be mapped by attending to how non-fictional textual transactions have in historically and culturally specific instances attempted to induce and redirect what is constituted as reality. In the face of authoritarian appropriations of reality, nonfictional textualities foreground the crucial idea that reality does not exist outside the regimes for its own production and circulation—and they demonstrate how those regimes may in fact be transformed to constitute a new politics of reality.
Proposed papers may address, but certainly should not be limited to, the following topics:
- the long-standing tradition of colonial/anti-colonial travel writing
- the impact of Tom Wolfe and the new journalism (1970s)
- the significance for investigative journalism of the ‘history from below’ series at the University of Witwatersrand (1980s)
- the influence of Slavenka Drakulic’s Café Europa (1996) in altering Soviet-era assumptions of the essay as a self-interested form
- the increasing demand for a dynamics of testimony, globally, in the shadow of the HIV/AIDS crisis
- the honoring of Svetlana Alexievich’s “polyphonic writings” with the Nobel prize for literature in 2015
- the emergence of graphic memoirs and graphic reportage (e.g., Joe Sacco, Igort)
- the significance of epistolary forms and diaries
- critical methodologies in archival research
- the emergence of new approaches to Indigenous literary and cultural forms (e.g., the peoplehood matrix)
Please send proposals, including keywords and a brief bio, to Anastasia Ulanowicz (aulanow@ufl.edu).
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Deadline for Submissions, April 8, 2019
The Australasian Association of Writing Programs’ 24th Annual Conference
University of Technology Sydney
25-27 November, 2019
Writing Through…
Creative writing never occurs in a vacuum – there are hurdles to negotiate, whether emotional, physical, psychic or temporal. The theme of this year’s AAAWP conference is ‘Writing through …’. The ellipses are pointedly loaded, and we hope by November, will be laden and rich with the knowledge and generosity of your own writing space. Whether your ellipses are thoughts unfinished, hesitations, omissions; whether they are moody, angry, joyful or echoing; whether they are about prejudice, paternalism, or pain, we want to hear how you get through them; how (and why) you write through…
We invite presentations — from pedagogy, research, and practice in creative or professional writing, editing and publishing — that interrogate the numerous ways you write through … and the various pathways your work is disseminated, enabling voices (both marginal and mainstream), perspectives, and notions to emerge, form, and animate. Presentation themes may be drawn from (but are not limited to) the following:
- Experiments
- Limitations
- Subjectivities
- Exegetical obstructions, both real and imagined
- Indigenous concepts and experience
- Minority writing (disability, LGBTIQ, refugee…)
- Regional writing
- Performative writing
- Writing together, both creative and scholarly
- Uncertainty (creative, scholarly, employment)
- Professional and industrial parameters
- Austerity
- The ‘class ceiling’
- Orthodoxies
Proposals for individual papers or pre-formed panels (three panellists only) are both welcome. Proposals may be a work of scholarship on or about creative practice, or one engaging with the conference theme in any way, or may be a creative work which incorporates a scholarly framework to be presented along with the creative element. Individual papers will be 15 minutes long, allowing for 15 minutes of questions within the hour; panels are the same time format. Proposed papers will not be subject to peer review but there will be discussion of publication points after the conference. Postgraduates are particularly encouraged to submit to the conference and a postgrad masterclass will be held on the morning after the conference (28 November)—more information soon.
Proposals, both individual papers and pre-formed panels, should be submitted here: https://www.uts.edu.au/about/faculty-arts-and-social-sciences/events/24th-aawp-annual-conference-2019, both by April 8, 2019. Queries to: aawp2019@uts.edu.au
Conference Committee: Dr Sue Joseph; Dr Sarah Attfield; Professor Craig Batty; Professor John Dale; Mr Michael Stranges
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Deadline for submissions, April 5, 2019
Apply for the TDA Travel Grants to the 2019 IABA Americas Conference in Kingston, Jamaica
In the autumn of 2014, the life narrative community lost an exceptional scholar and a great friend, Tim Adams. Tim was one of the founding editors of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies and his outstanding scholarship—including the two books, Telling Lies in Modern American Autobiography and Light Writing and Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography—have had a lasting impact on the field. As a way to honor his life and work, the editors of a/b created the Timothy Dow Adams Award. This prize supports emerging and underrepresented scholars in the field with mentorship and small grants.
Beginning with the 2018 IABA Brazil Conference, we extend this award through the TDA Travel Grants. These travel grants have been designed in collaboration with the IABA Student and New Scholar Network, and will be made to support graduate students; independent scholars; and, contingent, underfunded, and underrepresented faculty members attending an IABA global conference.
The application packet should be emailed to editorsatab@gmail.com and they should include:
- A cover letter explaining how your research, scholarship, and previous experiences support and extend the themes that year’s conference, as well as how these attributes contribute to diversifying the work of the event;
- Your biographical note;
- A copy of your accepted conference abstract from the conference; and,
- A copy of your conference acceptance letter.
Donations to support and expand this effort are very welcome and information regarding tax-deductible contributions may be found on the a/b webpage atwww.auto-biography.org/awards
*Deadline for submissions, April 5, 2019
Call for Papers Visualizing the Self in Flux 25th – 26th October 2019
The Liberal Arts Collective at the Pennsylvania State University, University Park campus invites scholars and professionals to submit presentation proposals around issues of visuality and the self in flux, the self in search of identity, in transformation, or the self which is in process. We borrow the word flux from metallurgy where it is used as an agent to promote melting and de-oxidize the surface of a metal so that it can be joined with another metal in the process of soldering or welding. Likewise, we hope to encourage flowbetween disciplines and promote discussion on transformative processes. How can this process of joining, via the agent flux, be applied to thinking of identity formation and the self in visual and literary forms? What are these “flux points” where different aspects of identity, old and new, are mixing and new flows are created? What is at stake in visualizing the self and the performance of the self? What role does performance have in visual representations of the self (Taylor, 2003) and who has “visual sovereignty”? (Hokowithu and Devadas, 2013) Who has the right to look at these images and to produce them? What do these visual performances of the self do? Critiques of visuality as inherently imperial (WJT Mitchell, 2005) or of the ways that “visuality sutures authority to power and renders this association ‘natural’” (Mirzoeff, 2001) can also be useful in investigations of the self in flux. This conference encourages submissions that reflect on visuality in these spaces of in-betweenness, contradiction, process, becoming, and spaces of metamorphosis.
Entry points to this discussion may include discussion of self:
- As depicted in the media
- As nexus of contradictory ideologies or cross cultural currents
- As racialized and gendered
- In intersectional representations
- In premodern and pre-colonial contexts
- In displacement
- Virtual selves and performance
- Other negotiations of self in non-western thought, field specific commentary or interdisciplinary investigation
All presentations that consider questions of visuality and identity/subject formation in process will be considered. Possible fields of work may include but not be limited to Languages and Literatures, Visual Studies, Media Studies, Art and Art History, Geography, Digital Humanities, Medical Humanities, Early Modern Studies, Philosophy, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Archaeology, Anthropology, Religious Studies, and Ethics.
Abstract Submission
The deadline for the submission of paper and panel proposals will be April 5th at 11:59pm EST. The Organizing Committee will respond to potential presenters by April 20th . Travel and accommodation information will be provided once proposals are accepted and can be found on our sites as well. The Liberal Arts Collective is unable to accommodate requests for specific presentation dates and times.
The Liberal Arts Collective Organizing Committee will be accepting two types of proposals:
- Individual Paper and Creative Project Submissions: The individual paper submission will consist of a 250-300 word abstract and five keywords. The submission will have a cover page that consists of: name, affiliation, email, and phone number.
- Pre-organized Panel Submissions: Panel submissions will consist of a document including: panel title, 250-500 word abstract, a list of titles and short abstracts (100-250 words) of papers, and a list of participants (with affiliation and contact information). Proposed panels will have between three and five presenters (which will affect the amount of time available to each person). Four presenters per panel is recommended. Diversity within panels is recommended as well – language, gender, institution, and seniority. If you are the chair/organizer of the panel, please note the following: You will become the main point of communication between the Organizing Committee and your panel. You will be responsible for relaying information to the members of your panel in a timely fashion.
Please submit all proposals and direct any inquiries to libarts.co@gmail.com with your last name and LAC 2019 included in the email subject.
The Liberal Arts Collective
Victoria Lupascu (member)
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Deadline for submissions, April 5, 2019
Call for Reviews – Lifewriting Annual
Lifewriting Annual: Biographical and Autobiographical Studies (published online by the Open Library of Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London) seeks reviews of recent publications, including autobiographies, memoirs, letters, and so on. We don’t accept reviews of critical or cultural theory. Word length: 1000-1500 words. Citation style: Chicago, 16th edition (author/date). Deadline for submission: April 5th, 2019. Please contact the Reviews Editor, Robert Ward, with short proposals and questions (Robert_P_Ward@brown.edu).
Deadline for Submissions, April 1, 2019
Call for Papers – The Migrant as an Eye/I. Transculturality, Self-Representation, Audiovisual Practices
A Special Issue Cinergie: Il cinema e le altre Arti
Edited by Alice Cati (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore) and Mariagiulia Grassilli (Sussex University)
Experiences such as those of exile, immigration, and transnationality are central in the current political and cultural debate. Several filmic works and visual artistic projects focus their narratives on life stories, as shaped by distance (either geographic or memory-related) and motion (in terms of travel, border crossing and disorientation). Meanwhile, a focus on exilic and diasporic identities may lead potential audience to perceive migrant works merely on the basis of personal traumas of displacement.
This special issue of Cinergie aims at scoping the plurality of cross-media productions that define non- dominant forms of ethnic subjectivity, in the awareness of both the dynamic contamination of cultural models and the crisis of the ancient dichotomy between Self and Other. Challenging both the assimilationist logic and the processes of othering (Rings), we witness now the reclaiming of identities that have already internalised their ethno-cultural roots. In light of this, it appears urgent to revisit the value of certain terms, such as “Migrant/Post-Migrant” (Rings, Leal) “Third [World]” (Gabriel, Guneratne-Dissanayake), “Accented” (Naficy) – first applied to cinema productions, ethnographic films, experimental and visual-anthropological texts, and now including all other media productions (i.e. Bennett’s idea of ‘Accented Media’) – which are still defined by a hierarchy of values that place the Other in a condition of cultural subalternity.
In this sense, despite the intention to use media practices as a way to promote ethnic diversity and intercultural dialogue, the chance to actually access real forms of self-representation from the side of the Other is still to be verified. On the one hand, fueled by the political concern about the so-called ‘migrant or refugee crisis’, media seem more interested in embracing products about ‘migration’ to ‘Europe/US’, rather than the cultural background of professionals who work within the cultural and creative industries (filmmakers, producers, photographers, artists, writers, performers). On the other hand, the lack of recognition at the local national level, and the scarcity of provision for cultural diversity within many countries’ cultural policies, still impact at the level of identity and self-confidence, as necessary qualities for encouraging creativity to expression.
From the Seventies/Eighties on, the influence of post-modernism, feminist theories, and postcolonial studies has led to the emergence of life-writing as a tool to explore a multifaceted range of objects and processes, namely narratives, representations and performances of the Self. As Moore-Gilbert notes, there is an implicit opposition between auto-biography and life-writing: the former derives from a modernist perspective centered on the male/white/Western subject, who is often seen as a pure abstract state of consciousness; the latter is defined as a room of expression for an embodied and relational subject situated in historical, sexual, social terms, who is usually worn out by experiences of loss, vulnerability and displacement.
Despite the marginalization, repression and forgetfulness put forth by hegemonic political systems, the opportunity to for minorities to freely express themselves seems finally emerging, as well as the possibility
to let counter-memories arise. Different conception of psyche and selfhood in the West can be reframed within non-western cultures, ideologies and epistemologies. Clearly enough, contemporary globalization has inevitably affected the sense of self and subjectivities in different social, political and cultural contexts, as well as the devices adopted for the self-construction and self-understanding (Tianqi Yu). The contemporary visual culture surrounding the subject enables thus to introduce a broad conception of ethnicity, intended as cultural formation determined by a media-based imaginary that is culturally contaminated (Russell).
In this age of highest expansion of new autobiographical forms made possible thanks to audiovisual and digital practices (autobiographical fiction and documentary films and videos, digital storytelling platforms, self-portraits and selfies, Vlog, Facebook and Instagram accounts, etc.), it is not only possible for anyone to produce and circulate self-representations as a banal and everyday practice, but it allows for current self- representations to challenge established discourses that reflect power relations at both social and geopolitical level (Thumim, Chouliaraki). How could thus ex-/post-colonial subjects and their antecedents/descendants represent their selves, tell their own stories and subverting the stereotypes of Western culture? How are hierarchies re-inscribed when the Other’s self-image is re-mediated in the Western media system? When and how does the Other actually have the possibility to really represent her/himself?
A cohesive exploration of the contemporary multiplicity of expressive forms as well as the various auto/biographic discursive regimes, may allow for the emergence of a plural identity, which is dynamically questioning itself and its own idiosyncrasies, by means of its own cultural and ethnic background.
Contributors are invited to take into consideration theoretical issues as well as specific case studies related (but not limited) to these themes:
- Theory and history of non-Western subjective/autobiographical/first person audiovisual works, which can help to reassess the predominantly Western-oriented scholarship on this field.
- Family and personal images (small-gauge films, videos, pictures, mobile camera images) taken and collected by non-Western individuals for private use or recycled in artistic projects.
- Genealogy and ancestry research devoted to identities that had been hardened by decades of racial categorization.
- Migrant and refugee filmmaking in between autobiography, self-representation, as well as (co)productions, collective creativity and participatory projects.
- Negotiation between written and audio-visual biographies in the narration of the migrant Self (memoirs, videotestimonies, interviews, talks, visual presentations etc.).
- The re-mediation of migrant and refugee self-representation, geopolitical power relations and mainstream media.
- Auto-ethnographies: creative analytical practices aimed at exploring personal experiences and understanding one’s own first-, second- or third-generation cultural background.
- Digital storytelling platforms and digital archives as useful tools to establish a plural view on past and present, enabling at the same time the preservation of ethnic groups’ memories otherwise excluded from the dominant political logics.Submission details
Please send an abstract and a short biographical note to alice.cati@unicatt.it and m.grassilli@sussex.ac.uk by April 1, 2019 — [subject: CfE #19 — The Migrant as an Eye/I abstract submission + name surname authour(s)].
Abstracts should be from 300 to 500 words of length (English).
If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the full article by June 30, 2019. The articles must not exceed 5,000/6,000-words.
Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.
The issue number 19 of Cinergie will be published in December 2019.
Deadlines
- Submission of proposals: April 1, 2019
- Acceptance notified by: April 15, 2019
- Submission of full articles: June 30, 2019
- Publication: December 2019
*
Deadline for Submissions April 1, 2019
2019 Summer Institute | Columbia Center for Oral History Research | Oral History from the Margins to the Center: Narrating the Politics of our Times
What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when the President of the United States, supported by numerous members of congress, tells blatant lies and strives to undermine our access to traditionally reliable sources of information and democratic processes? What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when scientific knowledge is dismissed as mere opinion? What do oral historians, journalists and scholars of contemporary history do when false information is knowingly transmitted with the precise aim of enhancing distrust?
The 2019 Summer Institute in Oral History will focus on the challenges we face in documenting the political present when secrecy and distortions of truth threaten the most vulnerable in open societies. What role does public memory and the search for meaning play in rescuing and preserving the stories that we most need to hear? Specifically, we will explore what journalists, oral historians, advocates and scholars of the present can learn from each other, as we sharpen our skills and awareness of how to document the stories that we most need to record and disseminate.
The overarching goal of the 2019 Institute will focus on the role of oral history in opening up multiple accounts of truth and the search for meaning that otherwise may remain marginal – moving them to the center of our political discourse.
The 2019 Institute will take place from June 17th until June 28th at Columbia University.
Faculty:
- Doug Boyd, a leading oral historian and digital expert will speak to the promise and risks of the digital age: including protection in a time of enhanced surveillance.
- Mary Marshall Clark, director of the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, who has directed several projects on contemporary political history, including the Guantanamo: Rule of Law Project.
- Sheila Coronel, Academic Dean of the Columbia Journalism School and past Director of the Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, who began her career reporting in the Philippines for the underground opposition press.
- June Cross, a documentarian at Columbia Journalism School whose work highlights the stories of the dispossessed and the importance of community dialogues.
- Terrell Frazier, whose work directly addresses the intersection of sociology, oral history and political organizing.
- Ronald Grele, director emeritus, Columbia Center for Oral History Research.
- Alessandro Portelli, whose pioneering oral history work and writing has demonstrated the intersections between memory, history and literature in searching for multiple, diverse memories.
- Linda Shopes, whose history as an editor and publisher has often focused on unheard stories.
- Gabriel Solis, Executive Director of the Texas After Violence Project dedicated to telling stories about violence, mass incarceration, and the death penalty as an urgent health issue;
- Amy Starecheski, Director of the Oral History Master of Arts program at Columbia, and an activist urban oral historian who focuses on low-income communities.
Click here for the application:
Priority deadline: February 28, 2019
Application deadline: April 1, 2019
Admissions decisions will be released by April 10th.
Early decisions are available upon request.
For inquiries, please contact Institute Co-Directors: Mary Marshall Clark (mmc17@columbia.edu) and Terrell Frazier (tf2292@columbia.edu).
Deadline for Submissions, March 31, 2019
Autobiography : Banqueting, GM Food, Vampirism
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Seminar of autobiographical story and media competence
Oriented by Diego Leandro Marín Ossa, research professor at the Technological University of Pereira, Colombia
Location: Department of Journalism and Communication Sciences, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain
Date: April 2019
In April, the third cycle of the International Seminar on Research and Creation of Autobiographical Story and Media Competition begins in Barcelona, Spain.
Professor Diego Leandro Marín Ossa, researcher at the Technological University of Pereira, Colombia, has been invited to guide the seminar in the Master in Communication and Education of the Autonomous University of Barcelona where he is doing his doctorate under the direction of José Manuel Pérez Tornero.
This seminar will have as students professionals from different areas and disciplines, who come from different countries including Spain and Colombia.
Cycles one and two were carried out in Pereira with students of the School of Spanish and Audiovisual Communication of the Technological University of Pereira in the second semester of 2017, and with students of the Degree in Educommunication of the University of Sao Paulo Brazil, in the second semester of 2018 with the tutorial of the teacher Ismar de Oliveira Soares.
Deadline for submissions March 30, 2019
AICED-21
THE 21st ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT,
UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES SECTION
CALL FOR PAPERS
The English Department of the University of Bucharest invites proposals for the Literature and Cultural Studies section of its 21st Annual International Conference:
Trauma, Narrative, Responsibility
Dates: 6–8 June, 2019
Venue: The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
Str. Pitar Mos 7–13, Bucharest, Romania
Confirmed keynote speakers:
Prof. Sean Cotter (University of Texas at Dallas)
Prof. Susana Onega (University of Zaragoza)
Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)
In recent years, since Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and Dominick LaCapra’s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), trauma studies has developed continuously as a field of research. This follows primarily the increasing recognition of the Holocaust and its intergenerational aftermath, as well as of the victims of genocide, mass persecution, war and terror (see especially Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 2012 and Astrid Erll, “Generation in Literary History,” 2014). In Eastern Europe after 1989, the need to rewrite history in a “truthful” way, free from the ideological contamination of left-wing dictatorships, has foregrounded the importance of remembering, unveiling, narrating and repairing the collective and individual traumas embedded in the memory of the contemporary world (see Uilleam Blacker, Alexander Etkind and Julie Fedor’s Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe, 2013; Georges Mink and Laure Neumayer’s Memory Games, 2013).
Narratives of and discourses on trauma – as a result of, for example, abuse, accident, illness, oppression, war – have become pervasive in global culture and they circulate in a wide variety of forms including blogs, films, videos, social media postings, legal testimonies, print articles and books. They often evoke strong emotions and provoke action, as perhaps best reflected in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw’s edited collection Extremities. Trauma, Testimony and Community (2002). Many scholars have especially developed these directions of research by conducting analyses of the representations of trauma in literary and media culture (see especially Ann Kaplan’s Trauma Culture, 2005 and Anne Rothe’s Popular Trauma Culture, 2011). Furthermore, Leigh Gilmore (“‘What Was I?’ Literary Witness and the Testimonial Archive,” 2011; Tainted Witness, 2017) has focused on how literary narratives of trauma contribute to legal and human rights discourses of trauma with genre-specific and gender-specific alternative forms of witnessing and agency. Such scholarly concerns give rise to significant questions that AICED 2019 will address: how should those involved in the analysis of both past and present factual and fictional narrative and discourse, as cultural and literary critics, historians and scholars, understand and analyze them in ways that are both sensitive to the experiences narrated and discussed, and intellectually and ethically responsible?
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:
– narrating collective trauma, mass repression and genocide
– parallel histories of collective trauma: the Holocaust, African American slavery, communist repression
– responsible responses to trauma and forms of exclusion (race, gender, ethnicity, religion)
– personal trauma as reflected on the human psyche
– the impact of individual trauma upon family and community
– repressed trauma – a generator of inadequacy and suffering
– trauma, memory and recovery
– narrative as reparation of trauma
– genres of narrative and trauma (specifics of literary, visual, legal, oral, human rights narratives)
– reflections of trauma in the visual and performing arts
– physical, emotional and spiritual reverberations of trauma
– individual, collective and institutionalized accounts of trauma
– the ethics of representing personal and collective trauma
– the affective dimension of trauma representation and reception
– the transcultural, transnational and transgenerational transmission of trauma narratives and discourses
– the representation of perpetrators and perpetrator trauma
– the politics of trauma, narrative and responsibility in a globalized world
– the trauma of exile and its impact over generations
Conference presentations should be in English, and will be allocated 20 minutes each, plus 10 minutes for discussion. Prospective participants are invited to submit abstracts of up to 200 words. Proposals should be in .doc or .docx format, and should also include (within the same document) name and institutional affiliation, a short bio (no more than 100 words), and e-mail address. Proposals for panel discussions (to be organized by the participant) will also be considered.
We look forward in particular to hosting a panel organized by the Romanian Studies Association of America, applying a Romanian Studies perspective to aspects of the conference theme.
A selection of papers from the conference will be published in University of Bucharest Review (ISSN 2069–8658; listed on Scopus, EBSCO (Literary Reference Centre Plus), CEEOL, and Ulrichsweb; CNCS category B). See the guidelines for contributors at https://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/ .
Deadline for proposals: 30 March 2019
Please send proposals (and enquiries) to conf.eng.litcult@lls.unibuc.ro
The conference fee of 50 euro (or 200 lei if paid in Romanian currency)is payable in cash on registration, and covers lunches and refreshments during the conference, but not evening meals.
For further details and updates, see: https://engleza.lls.unibuc.ro/conferinte/ .
(Enquiries regarding the Theoretical and Applied Linguistics section of the conference, which will be running at the same time, should be sent to bucharest.aiced21@gmail.com.)
We look forward to welcoming you in Bucharest,
The Organizing Committee:
Dr Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru
Alexandra Bacalu
Dr Alina Bottez
Dr James Brown
Antonia Gîrmacea
Dr Eliana Ionoaia
Dr Dragoș Manea
Prof. Mădălina Nicolaescu
Dr Cristian Vîjea
Dr Ioana Zirra
Advisory Board:
Dr Nazmi Ağıl (Koç University, Istanbul)
Prof. Bart Eeckhout (University of Antwerp)
Prof. José Manuel Estévez-Saá (University of A Coruña)
Dr Felicity Hand (Autonomous University of Barcelona)
Prof. Michael Hattaway (New York University, London)
Prof. Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow)
Prof. Thomas Leitch (University of Delaware)
Dr Chris Louttit (Radboud University, Nijmegen)
Prof. Domnica Rădulescu (Washington and Lee University, Lexington)
Prof. Kerstin Shands (Södertörn University)
Prof. Nicolas Tredell (University of Sussex)
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Life Writing and the Life of Faith
Session Hosted by the Conference on Christianity and Literature at the 2020 MLA Convention,
Seattle, WA, 9-12 January 2020
Through more than four decades of writing, poet Marilyn Nelson, the Conference on Christianity and Literature’s 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, has limned the shapes of life and faith. This work includes explorations of her own life in personal lyric and the childhood verse-memoirHow I Discovered Poetry, but it has also, perhaps even more typically, involved writing other lives. Carver: A Life in Verseexamines the inseparability of scientific vocation, racialized experience, and Christian faithfulness in the extraordinary character of George Washington Carver. The Homeplacetells a family history populated by figures all the way back to Nelson’s great-great-great grandmother. The sonnet sequence A Wreath for Emmett Till memorializes the “mutilated boy martyr” while condemning “the blasphemies pronounced to justify / the profane, obscene theft of human lives.” In these and other books, Nelson has undertaken a concerted project of poetic life writing that is at once faith-filled and searching.
Nelson’s project raises questions of genre and purpose: what difference does poetry make to biography and autobiography? What risks haunt versified hagiography? What possibilities arise in the interstices of Christian struggle, self-narration, and aesthetic form? How do writers negotiate private and public purposes in life writing, including disciplines of contemplation and prophetic calls for justice?
Nelson’s project also raises questions of history and reception. Life writing has been a Christian endeavor from at least Augustine’s Confessionsand Athanasius’s biography of Anthony of the Desert, not to mention the Gospels; how have twentieth-century developments like confessional poetry, the 1990s memoir boom, digital life writing, and the ongoing unfolding of (post)secular contexts complicated contemporary life writing and its relation to the tradition? How do we theorize readers’ and writers’ unflagging interest in both ancient and new life writing texts and their place in Christian practice?
Inspired by Nelson’s poetry of lives and faith, the Conference on Christianity and Literature invites papers that explore these questions. We welcome papers on Nelson’s engagements with faith in her life writing as well as papers on our topic more broadly construed.
Please send 250-word abstracts and brief C.V. to Cynthia Wallace (cwallace[AT]stmcollege.ca) by March 22, 2019.
*
Deadline for submissions March 18, 2019
CMCS 8th International Conference
Bridging Gaps: Re-Fashioning Stories for Celebrity Counterpublics
The Terrace Club / Club Quarters (across NBC)
New York City, USA
August 30 – September 1, 2019
Abstract deadline: March 18, 2019
Keynote Speakers:
Dr Andrew Zolides
Communication and Media, Xavier University, USA
Dr Basuli Deb
English and Gender Studies, Rutgers University and CUNY, USA
Dr Alex Symons
Fashion Media, LIMS College, USA
Best presented papers will be published in the Journal of Applied Journalism and Media Studies @IntellectBooks. Individual subscription options are below.
CALL FOR PAPERS:
In the recent past, there has been an increased interest in exploring intersections of life writing and studies of celebrity culture. Storytelling is central to effective branding in fame. Furthermore, the use of biographical elements has been recognized as a rhetorical device in writing op-eds, personal essays, and public speaking that often raise awareness on critical issues in popular media. Biography, as Lola Romanucci-Ross points out, is mainly a useful symbolic tool for reflecting, rotating and reversing real-life situations. Like biography, autobiography, memoirs, and testimonials play crucial roles in mapping social facts.
The impacts of glamorous forms of storytelling in scandals, gossip, and rumor become so crucial that they are often studied as sociological data, regardless of whether they enable actual social change. For pop culture enthusiasts and social observers, celebrities may or may not be actual role models in telling meaningful stories and constructing subjectivity. Yet, fans and students often invest affective and intellectual labor when it comes to accepting, negotiating or contesting what appears to be significant in understandings of popular figures. Celebrity scholars are equally familiar with the complexities of engaging with and researching “glossy topics”. As Sean Redmond (2014) has shown, acknowledging one’s own celebrity attachments can produce innovative ways of (re)writing fame. Conversely, these first-person accounts may also contribute to the celebritisation of individual academics. What is the critical and pedagogical potential of personal takes on fame within the field of celebrity studies?
Celebrity narratives are perceived to have real power whether or not celebrities are “important” people in the academic or moral sense. Drawing on current affairs, celebrity politicians have used personal claims and outrageous stories to push political agendas in divisive ways. Many other famous personas use extravagant fashion as expressions of their luxurious lives and build persona brands at the cost of ethics. For Elizabeth Wissinger, the “glamour labor” involved in self-fashioning, surveillance, and branding is often an inevitable and unfortunate outcome in the production of consumer values and desirable bodies in fashion industries. Public personas still self-fashion themselves and promote their brand by extending text(ures) of language that sells to consumer tastes. However, the challenge remains to sell the values of social justice. Can public intellectuals learn narrative strategies from celebrity storytelling and fill this gap?
What appears to be a shared reason behind the success of most popular narratives, verbal (including oral) and non-verbal, is a persuasive ‘strategy’ to effectively tell life stories. If studying celebrity biographies/autobiographies, best-selling memoirs, and other popular forms of life-writings and self-expressions carry cultural worth, then biographical elements of rising and celebrated public intellectuals, academics, critics, and activists are equally important to consider in disciplinary and interdisciplinary practices and understanding of fame. For instance, real-life first-hand accounts, such as testimonies and visual evidence, together with literary/artistic representations of gendered oppression provide meaning for progressive thinking and practice. Anecdotal accounts of famous sports personalities, actors, best-selling authors, and top models among other public figures are often useful rhetorical tools that help us to understand popular culture better. With this in mind, we need to extend popular storytelling beyond celebrity culture and persona branding, and use it to empower social change in academia, politics, and other spheres.
The Centre for Media and Celebrity Studies (CMCS) Bridging Gaps conference series uses a reflective practice paradigm and asks an urgent question: Can we learn popular strategies and re-fashion celebrity stories into tools for public intellectualism and social transformation, in addition to studying them? What enables or disables the public to tell personal stories in studies and practices of celebrity culture? Can different forms of storytelling from the lives of rising and celebrated academics, public intellectuals, critics, and activists enable urgent social change? The conference problematizes what it means to be a popular “storyteller” and invites all academics, journalists, publicists, activists and models and guests to attend, collaborate and publish valuable and purposeful work around this key question and related topics in our conference.
The format of the conference aims at being open and inclusive of interdisciplinary academic scholars and practitioners involved in all areas of celebrity culture, fandom, fashion, and journalism. The conference combines paper presentations, workshop panels, roundtables, slideshows, and interviews that aim to bridge gaps in celebrity activism, persona branding, and fashion education. Working papers, media productions, and personal stories will be considered for the conference.
Extended versions of selected best papers will be published in an edited collection.
Registration includes: Your printed package for the complete conference, professional development workshop, all-day coffee & bakery, access to evening PR reception, complimentary evening drinks, consideration for publication, and the CMCS $100 best paper and $100 best screen awards.
Abstract Submission Guidelines:
- 250-word abstract or workshop / roundtable / book talk proposal
- Include a title, your name, e-mail address, and affiliation if applicable
- Submit abstract to chairs at celebrity.mediastudies@gmail.com: March 18, 2019
- Notification of acceptance: March 31, 2019
- Early bird deadline for hotel booking & conference registration: April 30, 2019
- Conference reception and presentations: August 30 – September 1, 2019
Celebrity Chat video Submissions Guidelines:
- Video length should be 10-20 minutes
- Include a title, your name, e-mail address, and affiliation if applicable
- Submit to Celebrity Chat producer Jackie Raphael at email address: media.celebstudies@gmail.com
- Conference reception and presentations: August 30 – September 1, 2019
Topics include but are not limited to:
- Celebrity
- Fandom
- Audience
- Persona
- Life Writings
- Oral storytelling
- Fiction
- Fashion
- Photography
- Performance
- Publicity
- News
- Interviews
- Social Media
- Film and video
- Theory and Methods
- Research Agenda
- Business Models
- Ethics and Morality
- Media Literacy
- Education and Advocacy
- International Relations
- Community Building
- Business and Community Partnerships
Conference Chair: Dr Samita Nandy
Conference Committee: Dr Jackie Raphael, Kiera Obbard, Sabrina Moro, and Diana Miller
Conference URL: http://cmc-centre.com/nyc2019
Conference Twitter @celeb_studies #CMCS19
Consider submitting abstracts for the 2020 MLA GS Forum in Life Writing panels!
Modern Language Association Convention (3/15/2019; 1/9-12/2020) Seattle USA
https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2020
Life Writing on Contested Ground
How do life and land intersect in auto/biographical texts engaging legacies of settler colonialism? How is life writing mobilized in struggles over land ownership and use? 300-word abstracts and bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu) and Emily Hipchen (ehipchen@westga.edu)
Un/Bound
Lives that cross borders to narrate stories from multiple places and spaces are important threads in autobiography studies. How are these lives and life stories altered by interrupted or thwarted movements? 250-word abstracts and bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Ricia Anne Chansky (ricia.chansky@upr.edu) and Emily Hipchen (ehipchen@westga.edu)
Music Lives
Whose musical lives get told, and how? Musicians’ memoirs connect performance, multiple modes of storytelling, cultural industries, and celebrity. How does personal history shape music? How does music influence memoir? 300-word abstracts; bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Laurie McNeill (laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca) and Gwendolyn Pough (gdpough@syr.edu)
Comic Lives
Recent comedy specials showcase comedians’ intersection of the comic and autobiographical, mining lives for social commentary as well as jokes. How to read comics’ life stories as auto/biography, testimony, performance? 300-word abstracts; bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Laurie McNeill (laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca) and John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu)
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CFP for “Editing the ‘I’” session at MLA 2020 (3/15/2019; 1/ 9-12/2020) Seattle, USA
Jerome McGann famously said, “When you edit, you change.” The Association for Documentary Editing invites proposals for a guaranteed session on editing first-person nonfiction narratives for MLA 2020 in Seattle. How might McGann’s statement pertain to preparing first-person documents (other than correspondence) for public consumption in print or other media? In keeping with the Presidential Theme, how might this editing (“changing”) enhance or obscure the humanity of the first-person subject?
“Editing the ‘I’” will discuss the challenges of editing nonfiction texts claiming to be told in the first person singular. For editors, how might such a text differ from one using the second or third person? Do special editing protocols pertain if the document purports to be told by its protagonist?
Many scholars of lifewriting find themselves editing documents they discover, to make them ready for publication—or at least citation. What are the challenges of working with another person’s life text to make it citable, or marketable, or better understood by readers unfamiliar with the situation in which the text was created? What is the personal evolutionary history of a particular text? These and related questions are basic to the discipline of documentary editing (yes, it’s a field!), which has developed protocols and practices for engagement with such issues. Especially given the idiosyncrasies of various forms of lifewriting (excluding correspondence in this consideration), there are always exceptions and special challenges.
There also is the recent trend for scholars of lifewriting to author or edit their own life stories for presentation. For a host of human reasons—some subconscious, perhaps—might they edit accounts of their own lives to fit a genre or political reality? Does knowing the subgenres of lifewriting subtly prejudice what is revealed (or not)?
In summary:
What editing challenges do first-person narratives (other than letters) present?
How might editing these differ from editing other texts?
How might editing enhance or obscure the humanity of the first-person subject?
For consideration, please send a 300-word abstract, half-page CV and contact information to Carol DeBoer-Langworthy, CDBL@Brown.edu by 15 March. Queries to same address.
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Deadline for Abstracts March 15, 2019
Call for papers: Beyond Boundaries. Authorship and Readership in Life Writing
A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019
In ‘The Limits of Life Writing’ David McCooey (2017) argues that in life-writing studies, the concept of limits or boundaries plays a central role. Since the rise of auto/biography studies in the 1970s and 1980s critical attention has been paid to generic limits and the limits concerning the auto/biographical subject. With respect to the former, discussions have evolved in particular around the boundaries between literary and factual writing, and between verbal, graphic, audio-visual and digital forms of life writing. In regard to the latter, academics since the 1990s have given attention to the expansion of auto/biographical subjects previously marginalized, which has deepened, among other things, the cross-cultural understanding of experience and identity. This expansion of auto/biographical subjects, but also the rise of social media as a medium for life writing have contested the limits of selfhood.
However, some other limits have gone largely unnoticed in life-writing research so far. Two of them will be the center of attention during this conference, one having to do with readership, and the other concerned with authorship. Until now little attention has been paid to the boundaries between life writing for adults on the one hand and life writing for young readers on the other. Crossing these boundaries can provide fruitful debates about how the reader matters and how studying the reception and addressed audiences of life writing is important.
Another issue that has not received much attention in life writing research is the boundary between life writing by adult authors and life narratives by young people. As Douglas and Poletti (2016) argue, the contribution of young writers to life writing has so far been largely overlooked. How do they relate to narratives by adults? How similar or different are the ways in which adult and young writers engage in modes of self-representation? And what is the influence of social media on life writing by young people?
We welcome presentations on authorship and readership in different forms of life writing by adult and young authors, marketed to adult and young readers. To what extent do authors use life writing to put issues of power, voice and agency on the public agenda? How do readers matter in the way authors of life writing address themselves to them? What are the similarities and differences between life writing for an adult audience and for young readers? What aspects define (successful) dual-audience life writing?
As life writing is relevant for academic disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, in particular children’s literature, literature and culture studies, ethnography, anthropology and philosophy, we look forward to receiving proposals from researchers working in these fields, and to discussing disciplinary boundaries at the conference.
Subthemes are
- Cultural diversity
- Transnational life writing
- Life writing in text and images
- Offline and online life writing
- Gender issues in life writing
- LGTBQ life writing
- Dual-audience life writing
- Creating childhoods through life writing
Keynote speakers (confirmed): Prof.dr. Anna Poletti (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and prof.dr. Lydia Kokkola (Luleå University of Technology, Sweden)
Conference organizers: Prof.dr. Helma van Lierop (Tilburg University), Dr. Jane McVeigh (University of Roehampton), Dr. Monica Soeting (European Journal of Life Writing)
Abstracts consisting of a maximum of 250 words, a title, an indication of the subtheme your abstract fits in best, name, institutional affiliation or status as independent scholar, email address and a short bio of no more than 150 words should be sent before 15 March 2019 to Prof.Dr. Helma van Lierop at h.vanlierop@tilburguniversity.edu.
The acceptance of the abstract will be notified around 15 April 2019
Conference fee: early bird fee (before 1 June 2019): 140 euros; standard fee (after 1 June 2019) 175 euros; early bird fee (before 1 June 2019) for students, unemployed, and retirees 70 euros; standard fee (after 1 June 2019) for students, unemployed, and retirees 87,50 euros.
Conference registration will be possible after 15 April 2019.
Deadline for Submissions, March 15, 2019
Consider submitting abstracts for the 2020 MLA GS Forum in Life Writing panels!
Modern Language Association Convention (3/15/2019; 1/9-12/2020) Seattle USA
https://www.mla.org/Convention/MLA-2020
Life Writing on Contested Ground
How do life and land intersect in auto/biographical texts engaging legacies of settler colonialism? How is life writing mobilized in struggles over land ownership and use? 300-word abstracts and bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu) and Emily Hipchen (ehipchen@westga.edu)
Un/Bound
Lives that cross borders to narrate stories from multiple places and spaces are important threads in autobiography studies. How are these lives and life stories altered by interrupted or thwarted movements? 250-word abstracts and bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Ricia Anne Chansky (ricia.chansky@upr.edu) and Emily Hipchen (ehipchen@westga.edu)
Music Lives
Whose musical lives get told, and how? Musicians’ memoirs connect performance, multiple modes of storytelling, cultural industries, and celebrity. How does personal history shape music? How does music influence memoir? 300-word abstracts; bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Laurie McNeill (laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca) and Gwendolyn Pough (gdpough@syr.edu)
Comic Lives
Recent comedy specials showcase comedians’ intersection of the comic and autobiographical, mining lives for social commentary as well as jokes. How to read comics’ life stories as auto/biography, testimony, performance? 300-word abstracts; bios.
Submissions due: Friday, March 15, 2019
Contact: Laurie McNeill (laurie.mcneill@ubc.ca) and John David Zuern (zuern@hawaii.edu)
*
Deadline for Submissions, March 15, 2019
Militourism: Travel Literature and Empire
Inspired by Teresia Teaiwa’s definition of “militourism” as a “phenomenon by which a military or paramilitary force ensures the running of a tourist industry, and that same tourist industry masks the military force behind it,” this panel seeks to consider practices of “militourism” in a long historical context by soliciting papers with critical approaches to militarization, travel, and tourism from antiquity to the present day. We invite papers that engage questions of conquest, colonization, and empire; battlefield/memorial tourism; memoirs by soldiers, soldiers’ wives, and support staff; the intersections of military and tourist industries. This is a guaranteed session. Please send 250-word abstracts and a cv by March 15 to Erin Suzuki (esuzuki@ucsd.edu).
*
Deadline for Submissions, March 15, 2019
Prison Literature and Mass Incarceration (3/15/2019; 1/9-12/2020) MLA Convention, Seattle USA
The relationship between prison literature and mass incarceration has received relatively little discussion. With at least 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, prisons have generated a major and prolonged wave of writing. This Special Sessions panel seeks papers that will address prisons as a site of literary production from the immediate post-Attica years until the present. Scope includes single or multiple authors, ex-prisoners and currently incarcerated, and all genres – poetry, fiction, non-fiction prose, autobiography, drama, erotica, and more. Send 250-300 word abstracts and a short bio to Joe.Lockard@asu.edu before March 15, 2019.
Joe Lockard
Associate Professor
English Department
Arizona State University – Tempe
Deadline for Submissions March 15, 2019
Call for papers: Beyond Boundaries. Authorship and Readership in Life Writing
A two-day conference held at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, 24 and 25 October 2019
In ‘The Limits of Life Writing’ David McCooey (2017) argues that in
life-writing studies, the concept of limits or boundaries plays a central role. Since the rise of auto/biography studies in the 1970s and 1980s critical attention has been paid to generic limits and the limits concerning the auto/biographical subject. With respect to the former, discussions have evolved in particular around the boundaries between literary and factual writing, and between verbal, graphic, audio-visual and digital forms of life writing. In regard to the latter, academics since the 1990s have given attention to the expansion of auto/biographical subjects previously marginalized, which has deepened, among other things, the cross-cultural understanding of experience and identity. This expansion of
auto/biographical subjects, but also the rise of social media as a medium for life writing have contested the limits of selfhood.
However, some other limits have gone largely unnoticed in life-writing research so far. Two of them will be the center of attention during this conference, one having to do with readership, and the other concerned with authorship. Until now little attention has been paid to the boundaries between life writing for adults on the one hand and life writing for young readers on the other. Crossing these boundaries can provide fruitful debates about how the reader matters and how studying the reception and addressed audiences of life writing is important.
Another issue that has not received much attention in life writing research is the boundary between life writing by adult authors and life narratives by young people. As Douglas and Poletti (2016) argue, the contribution of young writers to life writing has so far been largely overlooked. How do they relate to narratives by adults? How similar or different are the ways in which adult and young writers engage in modes of self-representation? And what is the influence of social media on life writing by young people?
We welcome presentations on authorship and readership in different forms of life writing by adult and young authors, marketed to adult and young readers. To what extent do authors use life writing to put issues of power, voice and agency on the public agenda? How do readers matter in the way authors of life writing address themselves to them? What are the similarities and differences between life writing for an adult audience and for young readers? What aspects define (successful) dual-audience life writing?
As life writing is relevant for academic disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, in particular children’s literature, literature and culture studies, ethnography, anthropology and philosophy, we look forward to receiving proposals from researchers working in these fields, and to discussing disciplinary boundaries at the conference.
Subthemes are
– Cultural diversity
– Transnational life writing
– Life writing in text and images
– Offline and online life writing
– Gender issues in life writing
– LGTBQ life writing
– Dual-audience life writing
– Creating childhoods through life writing
Keynote speakers (confirmed): Prof.dr. Anna Poletti (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and prof.dr. Lydia Kokkola (Lulea University, Sweden)
Conference organizers: Prof.dr. Helma van Lierop (Tilburg University), Dr. Jane McVeigh (University of Roehampton), Dr. Monica Soeting (European Journal of Life Writing)
Abstracts consisting of a maximum of 250 words, a title, an indication of the subtheme your abstract fits in best, name, institutional affiliation or status as independent scholar, email address and a short bio of no more than 150 words should be sent before 15 March 2019 to Prof.Dr. Helma van Lierop at h.vanlierop@tilburguniversity.edu.
*
Deadline for Abstracts, March 1, 2019
Modernist Afterlives and the Politics of Literary Inheritance
Panel proposal for MSA Toronto, 17-20 October 2019
This panel investigates how the decisions of literary heirs and estates, the management of archives, the dissemination of permissions, and/or the movement of surviving manuscripts influenced the literary afterlives of those modernist authors who, before their “reclamation” and “rediscovery” in the 1970s, had all but slipped out of public and scholarly consciousness. What happens to the work of the woman writer who has been writing “ahead of her time” in a world where the inheritor of her papers and the disseminator of her legacy is, say, a disapproving husband, son, or nephew? Or to the work of the woman writer who lacks the financial means or legal status to formalize a literary estate, whose works are “orphaned” after her death and locked in copyright limbo for decades to come? This panel will pay special attention to the racial and gender underpinnings of intergenerational inheritance, copyright management, and publishing and to how these factors have influenced our understanding of the landscape of literary modernism today.
We welcome proposals that draw on interdisciplinary methods including, but not limited to, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race/ethnic studies; disability studies; law and literature; material/cultural history; and book history. Submissions are encouraged, but not required, to engage with the following areas, as they pertain to a specific author or set of authors: the growth and management of archives; archival discoveries and access; literary estates and executors; copyright management and publishing permissions; legalities of inheritance; and print and publication history. Submissions might also consider how these factors and questions bear upon the evolution of literary studies, revisions of “canon,” and disciplinary, institutional, or departmental priorities, and reflect upon the methodological implications for literary studies that follow from these questions. Papers focusing on authors who lived and wrote outside the interwar period, and for whom these questions are relevant, are welcome as well.
Please submit a 300-word paper proposal and brief bio to abp77@cornell.edu by March 1.
*
Deadline for Abstracts, March 1, 2019
Call For Papers
A Step Closer to Heaven:
Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Theologies of the Afterlife. An Anthology of Essays.
Contacts:
Jennifer McFarlane Harris, Xavier University
Emily Hamilton-Honey, SUNY Canton
Contact e-mails:
mcfarlaneharrisj@xavier.edu, hamiltone@canton.edu
While a great deal of scholarly work has been done to recover the writing of nineteenth-century American women, and sentimental fiction has become its own scholarly category, the explicitly theological nature of these texts is often overlooked. Even spiritual autobiographies and sermons are too often read through the lens of religion as only a coping mechanism for women to deal with racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression, when these texts are also expressions of the lives and dynamic minds of women who developed sophisticated, systematic spiritual and textual approaches to the divine, to their denomination(s) or religious tradition(s), and to the mainstream culture around them.
Authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Julia Foote, Martha Finley, Amanda Berry Smith, Isabella Alden, Zilpha Elaw, Susan Warner, Julia Collins, Maria Ruiz de Burton, S. Alice Callahan, Maria Cummins, and others wrote not only as a commercial venture, not only to survive, but also to have a voice in the moral debates that were consuming churches and national politics: social issues like slavery, temperance, suffrage, the basis of marriage, domestic abuse, divorce, child custody, land ownership, missionary ventures, and colonialism. Each of them, regardless of religious sect, believed that religion was necessary to maintain a morally healthy nation – even while they put forward ideas about revising their particular religion. Though they each believed in different ways to reach the afterlife, they were all working to make earth a step closer to heaven, to convert others to a life after moral reform. They sought to level race, level social class, level gender differences, and create social change in ways that were unprecedented.
This anthology seeks to put lived theologies at the center of discussion of nineteenth-century women’s writing. Women do not simply apply, or live out, theologies authored by men. Rather, this anthology is grounded in the radical notion that the theological principles crafted by women and derived from women’s experiences, intellectual habits, and organizational capabilities are foundational to American literature itself.
Please send proposals of 250-300 words and a brief bio to Emily Hamilton-Honey and Jennifer McFarlane Harris at the e-mails above. Deadline for proposals is March 1, 2019; finished chapters of 4,000-8,000 words will be due by August 15, 2019.
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Deadline March 1, 2019
Hazel Rowley Prize for First-Time Biographers (3/1/2019)
Sponsored by Biographers International (BIO), the Rowley prize offers $2,000 for the best book proposal from a first-time biographer, plus introduction to a literary agent. Submissions due March 1, 2019. Guidelines and entry forms are available on the BIO website:
http://biographersinternational.org/award/hazel-rowley-prize/
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Deadline for Proposals, March 1, 2019
BSA Auto/Biography Summer Conference 2019, (3/1/2019; 7/18-20/2019) Oxford, UK
We are very pleased to announce that we will be holding our next Summer Residential Conference at Wolfson College, Oxford. The dates are 18-20 July, 2019.
The conference theme is
Auto/Biography and Childhood.
We are delighted to say that Prof Andrew Sparkes will be our Keynote Speaker.
We are now calling for papers – please supply titles and abstracts of 200 words max and send to me as a Word attachment or in the body of an email. Deadline for receipt of offers of papers is 1st March 2019. However we will be pleased to accept good abstracts now. Places are limited and there is likely to be much interest in the conference so an early response is recommended. (The cost of the conference, depending on membership category, will be between £360-£390). Non paper givers are most welcome.
Do not hesitate to contact us on any matters.
Conference organisers are Jenny Byrne and Michael Erben.
As always,
Michael.
ps Those who have already submitted abstracts need not respond to the above.
Michael Erben
Organizzatore BSA Auto/Biography SG
21 Dorchester Court
OXFORD
OX2 7DT
UK.
tel:+44(0)1865 552609
mob: +44 (0)7968-958110
email:michaelerben@gmail.com
…. ><((((:>…
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Deadline for Early Registration, February 28, 2019
2019 BIO Conference
BIO at Ten: What’s Next?
BIO welcomes biographers, editors, agents, publishers, and publicity professionals from across the nation and around the world to the Tenth Annual Biographers International Conference (#BIONYC2019), May 17-19, in New York City. BIO is honored to partner with the Leon Levy Center for Biography for this year’s conference, which will be held at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, between 34th and 35th streets. During the conference weekend, biographers have the opportunity to network, compare notes with fellow biographers, and deepen their knowledge of and commitment to the craft of biography.
Through February 28, the registration fee is $199 for BIO members and $280 for nonmembers. Starting on March 1. the fee increases to $250 and $340, respectively
Deadline for Submissions February 28, 2019
BLACK LIVES
SUBMISSION DEADLINE EXTENDED TO FEBRUARY 28, 2019
Conference date: Friday, April 12, 2019
CUNY Graduate Center
New York, NY
KEYNOTES BY:
Michelle Wright, Emory University
Rafael Walker, Baruch College
“Black Lives” has emerged in recent years as a conceptual touchstone following the wake of Black Lives Matter, a galvanizing social movement of public protest against the persistence of institutionalized forms of anti-black violence that besiege Black individuals and communities on a daily basis, both within the United States and across a range of geopolitical contexts. The phrase implicitly challenges nationalist and global concepts of humanity that do not include blackness as a viable sign of life and citizenship. As critics such as Paul Gilroy, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Robert Reid-Pharr and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have noted, “universal humanism” has been historically built upon a constitutive rejection of black being. To push back against such entrenched conceptual repudiations of black particularity, we take a cue from Jamaican philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter, who argues that black particularity paradoxically retains a utopian impulse for recognizing “our collective agency and authorship of our genres of being human” (2006). We intend for the conference to respond to the urgent need to think about the impact and meaning of “Black Lives” both as a touchstone for contemporary activism as well as a scholarly heuristic for research across a range of fields and disciplines. By doing so, we hope to make resonant the potentiality of blackness to signify as a radical node of meaning and being across a range of identitarian and relational articulations.
We seek papers and panel proposals that take up any aspect of “Black Lives” understood broadly as an entry point into research in, but not limited to, any of the areas listed below. We are especially interested in workshop proposals that address the necessary rituals and habits for self-care, success/pushing back in a hostile workplace, building and maintaining your village, and contemporary radical Black artists/activists:
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Regional and global Black activisms and cross-struggle affinities
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African-American and African Diasporic Literary Studies
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Contemporary theory regarding blackness and black subjectivity, including Afro-Pessimism, Afro-Futurism, Black Atlantic Studies, Black Pacific Studies
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Critical Archive Studies
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Critical Science Studies
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Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and Biopolitics
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Black cultural histories and Blues historiography
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Blackness and “modernity”/globalization
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Middle Passage theory
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Black sovereignty and selfhood
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Critical Race studies
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Blackness, Brownness, and Affect
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Black, Queer and Trans Feminisms
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Queer Sexualities
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Queer of Color Critique, Queer Theory, Critical Trans Studies
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Native-American/First Nations studies
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Blackness and Jewishness
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Postcolonial studies
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Disabilities studies
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Performance studies/Body as Archive
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Prison abolitionism
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Critical interventions in Post-Humanism, New Materialism, and Object Oriented Ontology
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Black utopianisms and Marxisms
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Black aesthetics and/or aestheticism
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The Black Radical Tradition, Black Power and the Black Arts movement
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The New Negro (Harlem) Renaissance/The New Black (post-Civil Rights)
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Intersectionality
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White Feminism/Womanism
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Black literacies and critical pedagogy
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Blackness and religion
Please submit an abstract of up to 250 words, a short biographical description, and your contact information by February 28, 2019. Proposals and questions should be sent to conference organizers at blacklivesconferencecommittee@gmail.com.
Conference Organizers: Makeba Lavan, Ryan Tracy, Shoumik Battacharya, LeiLani Dowell, Daniel Hengel
Deadline for Submissions, February 28, 2019
Victoria’s Self-Fashioning: Curating Royal Image for Dynasty, Nation and Empire
International Conference
Kensington Palace
20-21 May, 2019
Co-organized by Historic Royal Palaces and the University of Warwick, in partnership with the Royal Collection Trust, the Bodleian Library, the University of Oxford and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, to mark the bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth.
Queen Victoria’s name is used to identify an era. Over her long reign the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe. The birth of photography, and an explosion in print culture and the press, allowed her image to touch its furthest reaches. Her image, painted and sculpted, still dominates public spaces scattered throughout every continent. The narrative of Victoria’s life has been rehearsed continuously since her death, testament to the enduring significance of her legacy. However, these narratives have not cast her as the focus of a culturally political study. Instead, orthodox approaches have set her up as a curiously inert figure, detached from public life and from the political shaping of the monarchy.
This symposium seeks to challenge these orthodoxies by examining Victoria herself as a proactive political agent in the construction of an image for nineteenth century monarchy, and therefore directly implicated in what would become the Queen Victoria phenomenon. The ambition is to explore Victoria’s creation of her own image, and examine the ways in which she managed her conflicted role, as a Queen Regnant, but also as a wife and mother, including through the mediums of painting, photography, sculpture and dress.
It seeks to map the journey of this self-curated image from Victoria’s private sphere to the public realm, and particularly across the British Empire, exploring its dissemination through print culture and a burgeoning press, and its movement and use through many contexts, locally and globally. This will include the ways in which the image was used to counter critical responses to Queen and Empress in attempts to quench the flames of colonial resistance to British rule in ceremonial events or to challenge republican sentiment.
Papers that explore the following themes are invited:
• Queen Victoria’s self-fashioning
• Queen Victoria as a political agent
• Queen Victoria and her management of new media
• The journeys of Queen Victoria’s image: revision and new meanings
• Queen Victoria’s image as image of Empire
• Queen Victoria as a global figure: responsibilities and challenges for curators today
The conference will take place on the 20-21 May, 2019, at Kensington Palace. Please send proposals of 400 words maximum, for papers of twenty minutes, together with a short biography of 100 words maximum, to Dr Sara Ayres (sara.ayres@hrp.org.uk). The submission deadline is 28 February 2019.
Deadline for Submissions–February 28, 2019
Sacred Journeys 6th Global Conference, Maynooth, Ireland, July 10-11, 2019
Call for Papers
More than 400 million people embark annually on pilgrimages with numbers steadily increasing. Pilgrimage is one of the most ancient practices of humankind and is associated with a great variety of religious and spiritual traditions, beliefs and sacred geographies. As a global phenomenon, pilgrimage facilitates interaction between and among diverse peoples from countless cultures, occupations, and walks of life. In the 6th Global Conference, we will continue to explore pilgrimage’s personal, interpersonal, intercultural, and international dimensions. This includes similarities and differences in the practice in Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Taoism, and other traditions, as well as secular pilgrimage. The impact of the internet and globalization, pilgrimage as protest, and pilgrimage and peace building, among others, are all topics of interest, as are the concepts of the internal pilgrimage and the journey of self-discovery. Other potential topics include: (1) pilgrimage and the marketplace (2) the metaphor of the journey as explored by writers, artists, performers, and singers, including humanists, agnostics, atheists, and musicians (3) pilgrimage and ‘miracles’ and the related topic of thanksgiving, and (4) ‘dark’ pilgrimages to sites of remembrance and commemoration.
Submitting Your Abstract
Proposals should be submitted no later than Thursday, 28 February 2019to:
Ian McIntosh, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI): imcintos@iupui.edu
Chadwick Co Sy Su, University of the Philippines Manila: ccsysu@up.edu.ph
E-Mail Subject Line: Sacred Journeys 6 Proposal Submission
The following information must be included:
Author(s), Affiliation as you would like it to appear in the conference program, Email address, Title of proposal, Abstract (maximum of 300 words), Keywords (maximum of ten)
Evaluating Your Proposal
All abstracts will be double-blind peer reviewed and you will be notified of the Organizing Committee’s decision no later than Thursday, 14 March 2019. When a positive decision is made, you will be asked to promptly register online. Accommodation is available onsite. The conference registration fee is $250 US and $200 for students. You will be asked to submit a draft paper of no more than 3000 words by Saturday, 01 June 2019.
Publishing Your Work
We have established linkages with the International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage, the journal Religions, and the University of the Philippines Manila’s The Reflective Practitioner. You will have the opportunity to expand your draft paper for submission to one of these three journals. If there are sufficient papers on a single theme or group of themes, we can consider a book proposal to a major publishing house.
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Special issue of “Life Writing” for publication 2020, edited by Jane Simon and Nicole Matthews, Macquarie University, Sydney
Deadline for submission of abstracts: Thursday Feb 28, 2019
Full manuscripts for submission by Friday June 14, 2019
This special issue will map interiors and the way they are shaped by institutions, histories, architectures and objects. We are interested to explore a range of types of interiors including domestic spaces, intimate relationships, subjectivities and bodily experiences. Our aim is to foreground connections between material, visual and performance cultures and selves.
Contributions will explore the way interiorities might be traced and articulated through archives, performances, artefacts and images as well as more familiar forms of literary life narratives. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcomed, and we anticipate contributions emerging from or bringing together multiple disciplinary perspectives.
Life Writing publishes both “essays” and “articles”; essays allow for a more self-reflexive or creative approach to scholarship while articles are more conventional academic works. A large part of this special issue will be devoted to essays. Life Writing’s guidelines on the essay form should be consulted before completing your submission. They can be found at: https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?show=aimsScope&journalCode=rlwr20
Abstracts of 300-500 words, plus a short bio of less than 150 words by Thursday Feb 28, 2019 to nicole.matthews@mq.edu.au with the subject line “Animating interior worlds”.
If you plan to submit an essay to the special issue please include as part of your 300-500 word abstract a rationale for your choice of this form. Conventional academic papers are also welcomed.
Feel free to contact me for more info at nicole.matthews@mq.edu.au
Nicole Matthews and Naomi Sunderland (2017) Digital storytelling in health and social policy: listening to marginalised voices (Routledge)
Deadline for Submissions February 25, 2019
Epistolary Bodies: Letters and Embodiment in the Eighteenth Century
A Midlands Eighteenth-Century Research Network (MECRN) one-day conference
Held at the University of Leicester
24th May 2019
Organised by Sarah Goldsmith (Leicester), Sheryllynne Haggerty (Nottingham) and Karen Harvey (Birmingham)
This interdisciplinary one-day conference explores the relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, and the information that can be found about ‘embodiment’, or experiences of the body, in letters. What can letters add to our understanding of eighteenth-century bodies? How might letters allow us to ‘embody’ activities such as work, trade, sociability and worship? How did the form and style of letters shape the knowledge about the body that they communicated? As material objects themselves and often carried on the person, what relationship did letters have with the body? Can bodily states, such as illness, be discerned from the mingled intellectual and mechanical act of writing? Alternatively, consideration might be given to the metaphorical role of bodies in letters in the eighteenth century, in for example, bodies of correspondence or the body politic.
Topics might include:
- Family letters on domestic, medical or corporeal practices
- Doctor/patient correspondence
- Business letters related to trades for the body (dress, food and beauty)
- Differing discussions of the body as relating to age, gender, religion, politics etc
- Foreign bodies in travel letters
- Letters in novels
- Representations of letters and reading in artwork
- The material letter
- The physical act of writing and/or reading
- The body as a metaphor in letter writing
Please submit abstracts (max. 300 words) for 20-minute papers to epistolarybodiesconference@gmail.com by 25 February 2019. We also encourage postgraduate students to submit proposals (max. 100 words) for 3-minute lightening talks.
Conference Website: https://epistolarybodiesconference.wordpress.com/
The event is open to all, and we particularly encourage proposals from the MECRN universities: Birmingham, Birmingham City University, Derby, Nottingham, Nottingham Trent, Leicester, Warwick and Worcester.
This conference is a grateful recipient of funding from the Royal Historical Society and the Economic History Society.
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Deadline for Submissions, February 20, 2019
Modernist Afterlives and the Politics of Literary Inheritance
Panel proposal for Modernist Studies Association, Toronto, 17-20 October 2019
This panel investigates how the decisions of literary heirs and estates, the management of archives, the dissemination of permissions, and/or the movement of surviving manuscripts influenced the literary afterlives of those modernist authors who, before their “reclamation” and “rediscovery” in the 1970s, had all but slipped out of public and scholarly consciousness. What happens to the work of the woman writer who has been writing “ahead of her time” in a world where the inheritor of her papers and the disseminator of her legacy is, say, a disapproving husband, son, or nephew? Or to the work of the woman writer who lacks the financial means or legal status to formalize a literary estate, whose works are “orphaned” after her death and locked in copyright limbo for decades to come? This panel will pay special attention to the racial and gender underpinnings of intergenerational inheritance, copyright management, and publishing and to how these factors have influenced our understanding of the landscape of literary modernism today.
We welcome proposals that draw on interdisciplinary methods including, but not limited to, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race/ethnic studies; disability studies; law and literature; material/cultural history; and book history. Submissions are encouraged, but not required, to engage with the following areas, as they pertain to a specific author or set of authors: the growth and management of archives; archival discoveries and access; literary estates and executors; copyright management and publishing permissions; legalities of inheritance; and print and publication history. Submissions might also consider how these factors and questions bear upon the evolution of literary studies, revisions of “canon,” and disciplinary, institutional, or departmental priorities, and reflect upon the methodological implications for literary studies that follow from these questions. Papers focusing on authors who lived and wrote outside the interwar period, and for whom these questions are relevant, are welcome as well.
Please submit a 300-word paper proposal and brief bio to abp77@cornell.edu by February 20th.
Deadline for Submissions February 20, 2019
Queen Victoria & George Eliot: Lives and Afterlives, 1819-2019 (2/20/2019; 5/24-25/2019) Conference UK
This conference will focus on the lives and afterlives of Queen Victoria and George Eliot, both born in 1819 and both defining figures in our understanding of the Victorian period. The double bicentenary also offers an exciting opportunity to reflect on how academic and public attitudes to the Victorian period have changed, and this conference will bring new research on Victoria and Eliot together with explorations of questions around periodisation and interpretation from leading academics and heritage sector professionals. How have biographies, fictionalisations and new discoveries about Queen Victoria and Eliot informed our understanding of their lives and afterlives? What was the effect of different literary, social and political networks and communities on Victoria and Eliot’s reputations, both during their lifetimes and after? How can new methodologies in the analysis of literature and history change our understanding of these women, and the Victorians more broadly? What do Victoria and Eliot represent today, and how have they become emblematic of the Victorian era itself?
How has our understanding of what it meant to be a ‘Victorian’ and a ‘Victorianist’ transformed in the past two centuries?
The anniversary of Victoria’s birth is 24 May 2019. The conference will commence on this day and feature an innovative double structure, with the first day focusing on Victoria and Eliot as living figures in the nineteenth century, and the second day centring on representations of these figures in museums and heritage sites, biography, literature, and media (including new media such as video games, film and TV).
Through this dual focus we aim to foster dialogue between a range of disciplines, as well as bearing in mind the potentialities of these figures for outreach work, public engagement and alternative academic careers. How can we responsibly bring these two long-dead women to life for twenty-first century audience
We invite abstracts from a range of disciplines. Applications from postgraduates and early career researchers are particularly encouraged.
Topics might include, but are not limited to:
* Queen Victoria – lives, afterlives, biographies, adaptations, fictional representations
* George Eliot – lives, afterlives, biographies, adaptations, fictional representations
* New methodologies in Victorian studies
* Defining ‘the Victorian’, problematising the term ‘Victorian’
* Periodisation
* Victorian generations – relationships between older and younger generations
* Afterlives – biographies and fictional representations (across media)
* Networks and communities – publishers, biographers, memoirists
* Neo-Victorianism
Please send proposals of 250-300 words and a bio of 150 words to EliotVictoria1819@gmail.com by 20 February 2019.
Organised by Emily Bell, Eleanor Dumbill and Sarah Parker, as part of the Cultural Currents, 1870-1930 research group. This event is generously supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies, Loughborough University.
More information can be found at
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Deadline for Submissions, February 18, 2019
ICLA 2019 panel: Global Narratives of Slavery (2/18/2019; 7/29-8/2/2019)
Deadline for Submissions, February 15, 2019
Silence, Speech, Memory, Message, Understanding – AFTER 75 YEARS
2019, November 14th – 16th.
Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Germany
This conference invites papers on the latest developments in Holocaust research, especially in relation to contemporary political and cultural trends in Europe. These include the rise of right-wing governments, of nationalist and racist discourses, and Holocaust revisionism and denial, in the context of greater emphasis being placed on the use of new technology in memorialisation and education as we face the end of the survivor generation.
We will ask what the practical and theoretical implications are for Holocaust research and education in the light of these new trends, and how the work of researchers, museologists, teachers and others can attempt to answer back to their negative political implications.
We welcome abstracts from scholars, students, professionals, teachers and others working in any relevant field, including history, philosophy, politics, journalism, anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, history of art, religious studies, literature and film, as well as professionals from museums, memorials and archives, school-teachers and creative writers and artists.
Our concern will be with the spheres of family memory, public discourse and historiography, and the changes that have occurred in these realms since 1945. We will analyse the relationship of the Holocaust’s legacy to national memory in countries both within and outside the European Union, those which underwent Nazi occupation (such as Poland, Hungary, the former Czechoslovakia and the territories of Ukraine, Moldova and Romania), and those which were not occupied but fought against the Nazis and took in Jewish exiles and refugees (including Britain, Canada, the USA and present-day Israel). We will consider how such occurrences as the Cold War, its post-1989 aftermath, civil war in the former Yugoslavia, and the contemporary refugee crisis can be viewed in relation to the Holocaust, as well as other genocides that have since taken place in Africa and Asia.
The conference is a designed as a continuation of discussions held at the 2016 National Holocaust Conference at the University of Szeged in Hungary, now offering the chance for scholars to compare findings with those from other national contexts.
The conference will be held at the Faculty of Philosophy II (Humanities, Modern Philologies, Comparative Literature) and in cooperation with Middle and East European Studies (Aleksander Brückner Centre for Polish Studies) of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
The conference will be organized in cooperation with the Faculty of Philosophy II (Humanities, Modern Philologies, Comparative Literature of the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Prof. Werner Nell), the Comparative Literary Department of the University of Szeged, Hungary (Prof. Zoltán Kelemen), the School of English of the University of Sheffield, UK (Prof. Sue Vice), the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Queen‘s University, Kingston/Ontario, Canada and the Aleksander Brückner Centre for Polish Studies (Prof. Yvonne Kleinmann), supported by Professor Thomas Bremer (Romanistik Department, Martin-Luther-Universität).
Abstracts of around 250 words, with a brief biography, should be sent to Dr Werner Nell at the email address below, by 15 February 2019:
Werner.nell@germanistik.uni-halle.de
Prof. Dr. Werner Nell, Chair of Comparative Literature, Martin-Luther-University Halle Wittenberg; Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Queen‘s University at Kingston, Ontario Canada.
15. 01. 2019
Prof. Werner Nell, Chair of Comparative Literature
Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Germany)
Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Queen’s University, Kingston ON (Canada)
Deadline for Submissions, February 15, 2019
“Re-imagining Female Disabilities in Luso-Hispanic Women’s Cultural Production”
Contributions are requested for the special issue 45.1 of Revista de Estudios de Genero y sexualidad (before Letras femeninas) for 2019. This issue will delve into the representation of female disability, based on the artistic and cultural production carried out by women from a transhistorical perspective that encompasses both sides of the Atlantic. Priority will be given to research proposals that study how, in the different periods and cultures of Luso-Hispanics, creative women with and without disabilities have approached the topic of disability, as well as how it has been stigmatized and abused by the patriarchal society. Feminine disability filtered through the eyes of the creator also offers the opportunity to re-evaluate the intrahistory of many women who, as a result of their participation in different political and social causes, suffer physical or mental disabilities and remain, unjustly, relegated to the darkness of history.
We invite collaborators who are researching this topic to propose essays that consider one of the following lines of inquiry:
• Disability as a social phenomenon in socio-cultural conventions.
• Disability and public space.
• The space, place and temporality of the disability.
• Disability activism and social justice.
• Identity, subjectivity and self-realization.
• The body and the discourses of well-being.
• Inaccessibility and marginalization / Accessibility and inclusion.
• The intersectionality in studies of disability
Proposals (250-300 words) can be written in English, Spanish or Portuguese. With the submission of the proposals, a brief biography of the writers is requested. In order for proposals to be considered for this special issue, you must be an active member of AEGS. (i.e. have paid the membership of 2019. If you are not a member, the proposal would not be considered or accepted).
Send the proposals to Esther Fernandez (ef14@rice.edu) and Victoria Ketz (ketz@lasalle.edu). The deadline for abstract submission is: February 15, 2019.
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Deadline for Submissions, February 8, 2019
At the Table: Mediated Narrative Experiences of First Generation Americans
Immigrants and their children (referred to as first and second generation) have contributed significantly to American narratives and popular culture overall. Programs like Fresh off the Boat, Master of None, Jane the Virgin, and films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 and Crazy Rich Asians have emerged telling stories which resonate with the intergenerational and intercultural characteristics of American identity. In addition, entertainers like Hasan Minhaj, Anik Khan, Kumail Nanjiani, Yvonne Orji, and Issa Rae have gained access to spaces (a seat at the table) which have yielded increased turnout of audiences with similar heritages, other immigrants, and White Americans as well. Their popularity is of particular interest given the increased hostile sentiment towards current immigrants, their children and those migrating to the United States for asylum. Through film, television, books and music, immigrants and their children have told personal, collective, and universal stories. Not only do their narratives give voice to non-dominant groups, but mediated narratives of the immigrant experience also offer insight into both the ideal and reality of living in the United States. In addition, these narratives highlight the acculturative experiences shared among minorities regardless of racial background.
The purpose of this anthology is to gather essays which 1) engage questions of representation of immigrants and their children, 2) offer analysis of first and second generation American produced texts and their audiences, and 3) share reflective essays from minoritized first-generation Americans about their assimilation experience, and if possible their connection to any first-gen narratives. While there are different definitions for first-generation, for this anthology, first-generation is being defined as children of parents who immigrated to America as adults or who immigrated to America themsleves as children.
Submissions may include textual or audience analysis, autoethnographies, personal essays, survey or experimental methods. Creative and non-academic submissions are also welcome. Texts of interest include film (mainstream and independent), television, original series, books, online magazines, and music which speak to the first-generation experience. Essays written by those who are first or second generation are encouraged. The topics of submitted papers include but are not limited to:
Narratives centered on first-generation individuals or families | Intergenerational immigrant experience or conflict as related to media | Minoritized first-generation American media creators | Web-Series about the First-Gen Experience| Fresh Off the Boat | Halal in the Family| Jhumpa Lahiri | Chimamanda Adichie | Margaret Cho | Yaa Gyasi | Teju Cole | Khaled Hosseini | Junot Diaz | Master of None (Netflix) | Hasan Minhaj | Issa Rae Diop | Yvonne Orji’s First Gen TV show | One Day at a Time (Netflix) | Coco (film) | Vida (film) | Jane the Virgin | Kevin Kwan | Anik Khan | Wale | Jidenna | Any other first generation media creator whose work speaks to the acculturation or hybrid culture experience.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
1. Deadline for chapter proposals (approx. 500-1000 words excluding citations): February 8,, 2019
2. Include a cover page with all of the authors’ contact information, key terms, and an abridged c.v. for each author
3. Submit proposals to Omotayo Banjo via email to omotayo.banjo@uc.edu with “First Gen Media” in the subject line.
4. Invitations to submit full manuscripts will be sent by February 22, 2019
5. If selected, a draft of your chapter submissions must be original works of at least 3000-6000 (estimate) words, references included. Chapter deadline: July 26, 2019
About the Editor
Omotayo Banjo, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in Communication at the University of Cincinnati who focuses on representation and audience responses to racial and cultural media. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Communication Theory, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, and Race and Social Problems. In addition, she is the editor of Media Across the African Diaspora: Content, Audiences, and Influence (Routledge) and co-editor of Contemporary Christian Culture: Missions, Messages and Dilemmas (Rowman & Littlefield).
Deadline for Submissions February 1, 2019
“Kinship as Critical Idiom in Oceanic Studies”
Special thematic issue of Atlantic Studies: Global Currents
Katharina Fackler and Silvia Schultermandl (University of Graz, Austria)
In the context of the recent “oceanic turn” (DeLoughrey 2016), the world’s oceans have not only been (re-)valued as objects of study, but they have inspired a range of formative new theories and methodologies in literary and cultural studies. On the metaphorical level, the oceans’ watery ways provide models for “nonlinear or nonplanar thought” (Blum 2013: 152), placing notions of circulation, fluidity, mobility, and mingling at the center of attention. Thereby, they also beckon a (re-)consideration of “transoceanic connections” (Burnham 2016: 154) between different bodies of water, their cultures, and histories (e.g. DeLoughrey 2007). Increasingly venturing below the ocean’s surface, scholars immerse themselves in the sea’s material and nonhuman dimensions, inquiring into the realm of the biological, the geophysical, and the ecological (e.g. Steinberg 2013).
This special issue sets forth from Hester Blum’s argument that we may “find capacious possibilities for new forms of relationality through attention to the sea’s properties, conditions, and shaping or eroding forces” (2013: 152), investigating its particular applicability to questions of kinship. More specifically, it uses the notion of kinship as a critical idiom and conceptual lens to examine the oceanic turn’s potential for rethinking forms of (human and nonhuman) belonging. In other words, it considers kinship a particularly salient concept through which to explore the new concepts and ideas coming from oceanic studies.
Following anthropologist Linda Stone, we depart from a notion of kinship as first and foremost “an ideology of human relationships” (2000: 6) and are interested in the various representational and affective strategies through which oceanic texts and performances attend to questions about kinship. In so doing, we do not think of kinship as signifying common ancestry but as a multi-dimensional social practice, not, to borrow from David Eng, as characterized by “racial descent, filiation, and biological traceability, but through the lens of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency” (2010: 13). By invoking kinship as our methodological approach, we seek alternatives to concepts such as imagined communities and families of nations which reference nation-bound and anthropocentric ideologies of human relationships. Instead, we are interested in the particular intersections between oceanic studies’ emphasis on “mobility across transoceanic surfaces” and theories of “oceanic submersion” (DeLoughrey 2017: 32) and kinship studies’ notions of a “mutuality of being” (Sahlins 2013: 2).
Conceiving of kinship as a particular kind of affect best described as the “feeling of kinship” (Eng 2010) and a formation of solidarity synecdochically referencing the social writ large (Berlant 2011), we are interested in questions such as the following:
° What constitutes this ideology of (human) relationships in the particular realm of oceanic studies and in what capacity can it make sense of the critical interventions scholars in oceanic studies have put forth?
° To what degree can oceanic studies, perhaps implicitly, help rethink kinship as a concept to address forms of being in common within and beyond the boundaries of the human explored within the fields of new materialism, postcolonial studies, and ecocriticism?
° How can different forms of representation help negotiate and constitute kinship in the context of oceanic im/mobility, affiliation, and attachment?
° How do the formal features of certain media or genres shape and inflect theories of oceanic kinship?
° How do these texts and performances “do kinship” (Schneider 1968) both aesthetically and politically?
° What are the material and ecological dimensions of claiming heritage and how can we study them through the lens of kinship, presently and historically?
° How can kinship as a methodological approach productively analyze the historical continuities put forth in light of the oceanic turn?
We invite 500-word abstracts and working bibliographies that outline the valence of kinship as a critical idiom within oceanic studies by February 1, 2019.
Please send abstracts and working bibliographies to both katharina.fackler@uni-graz.at and silvia.schultermandl@uni-graz.at.
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Ass.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Silvia Schultermandl
University of Graz
Department of American Studies
Attemsgasse 25/2
8010 Graz
AUSTRIA
Deadline for Submissions February 1, 2019
University of Portsmouth
6th-7th June 2019
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Richard Dyer (King’s College, London)
Professor Jack Halberstam (Columbia University)
Dr Michèle Mendelssohn (University of Oxford)
The focus of celebrity studies on the cultural mediation and function of a diverse range of public personalities has foregrounded an ever-growing archive of queer celebrities. This conference aims to explore how the entry of queer figures into the public imagination, in different historical periods and geographical locations, has had a transnational, even global, impact, changing perceptions, attitudes and the way individuals live their lives. LGBTQ figures, for example, have risen to public prominence and become positive role models, while negotiating their fame alongside cultural associations of homosexuality with crime, scandal and blackmail. The refusal of closeted celebrities to come out underlines the detrimental effects of homophobia on popularity, but also celebrity culture’s preoccupation with the open secret. ‘Straight’ celebrities have become queer icons by tapping into LGBTQ subcultures, codes and identities, bringing that which is hidden into the open to become part of everyday life. These cultural and historical trajectories point to the queer nature of celebrity itself and how celebrities have unsettled cultural norms, binaries and oppositions.
This conference will consider how the cultural visibility of queer celebrities has reshaped and expanded norms and expectations relating to gender, sexuality and identity. How have, for instance, queer identities influenced celebrity culture throughout history and across all media forms, society, and politics? How does queer theory complicate our understanding of celebrity studies and vice versa? Through what mechanisms and to what ends have LGBTQ public figures, including queer theorists, become celebrity figures?
Topics for papers may include, but are not limited to:
- Queer Celebrities; Queer Icons
- Celebrity, Sex, Gender
- Histories of LGBTIA+ Celebrity
- Queer Celebrity, Race & Ethnicity
- Queer Fame; Queer Infamy & Notoriety; Queer Celebrity Scandal
- Celebrity, Norms & (anti)normativity
- Transnational Queer Communities
- Celebrity Sexologists, ‘Sexperts’, Practitioners
- Celebrity and the ‘closet’; Visibility & Invisibility
- Queer Celebrity, Time & Space
- The Politics of Queer Celebrity
- Queer Celebrity and the Public Domain
- Queer Style, Queer Form
- Queer Celebrity ‘Texts’
- Queer Celebrity Objects
- Queer Celebrity & Masculinity/Femininity
- Celebrity Failure; Failed Celebrity
- Queer Celebrity Children
- Queer Celebrity, Citizenship & Status
Please send paper abstracts (of no more than 300 words) or panel proposals (of no more than 600) words, with a brief biographical note (50-100 words) to ccs@port.ac.uk by 1st February 2019.
*
Deadline for Proposals–January 28, 2019
Call for Papers—IABA Europe Conference 2019
Knowing the Self: Auto/Biographical Narratives and the History of Knowledge
June 19–21, 2019
UNIVERSIDAD COMPLUTENSE DE MADRID (SPAIN)
IABA Europe was founded in October 2009, with the aim of encouraging European scholars to participate in the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA) by organizing biennial conferences, publishing an e-journal, and facilitating contacts via various means of communication. Following five successful conferences in Amsterdam (2009), Tallinn (2011), Vienna (2013), Funchal, Madeira (2015), and London (2017), the 2019 conference will be hosted by Complutense University, Madrid.
The sixth IABA Europe conference proposes to examine the interrelation between life writing and the history of knowledge. Insofar as all life writing is concerned with human self-understanding, it is necessarily entangled with diverse fields that produce knowledge about humans, whether the narration aims at rendering a seemingly given knowledge of the self or at acquiring it, at questioning it or at staging it. Any “knowledge of the self” is inscribed in a broader history—or histories—of knowledge. Yet, to which bodies of knowledge and which theoretical languages do auto/biographical narratives refer in order to gain or communicate a specific “knowledge” of the self? Which historically and culturally diverse fields of knowledge have contributed or are contributing to shaping ideas of “the self,” and how do these fields affect the modes of production, the forms and the rhetoric of life narratives? And vice versa: Which role do auto/biographical narratives play for knowledge production and the evolution of disciplines?
While certain fields of the humanities have been widely recognized for their importance for auto/biographical self-fashioning and self-exploration, such as historical and psychoanalytic hermeneutics, the conference encourages an interdisciplinary exploration of the relationship between auto/biographical writing and a wide range of fields of knowledge and of disciplines. At the same time, not least in view of the rapidly growing number of “expert autobiographies,” it aims at stimulating research on the role of life writing in the development and shaping of disciplines.
On a further level, the conference aims at sparking methodological reflections on how to go about examining interrelations between life writing and the sciences or the humanities. Are connections to be described as a matter of influence, or can we identify epistemic currents that equally encompass autobiographical writing and the generation of knowledge, scientific, theoretical, or other? With which notion of knowledge do we and with which notion do the media studied operate? Especially with regard to autobiographies, this involves also the question: to what extent we are to distinguish between “subjective” autobiographical and “objective” theoretical writing—if at all. And how is the relation between autobiographical and theoretical writing negotiated by the narratives themselves? Do they confirm, subvert, blur or contest established distinctions between scientific facts, evidence-based knowledge and theoretical writing on the one hand, and individual self-observation and personal writing on the other? What is their “poetics of knowledge”?
We welcome proposals for individual papers, full panels, workshops and round tables, which address such themes as:
- the multiple interrelations between historically and culturally diverse fields and forms of knowledge and life writing, the ways in which auto/biographical texts adopt, strengthen, question, negotiate, challenge, contest, or anticipate intellectual tendencies, theoretical positions, and epistemic orders of their time;
- life narratives as counter-stories: contesting legitimate knowledge;
- history of academic/expert autobiographies and the interferences, repercussions, and demarcations between professional/theoretical and autobiographical writing;
- history of auto/biographies of academics, thinkers, and experts, biographical approaches to the histories of science and scholarship;
- the internet and the private/public self: digital narratives of testimony, blogs, intermediality;
- auto/biographical writing as source of historical, social, and cultural knowledge, and as generative tool in theproduction of such knowledge; forms of self-inscription in academic/professional writing;
- New disciplines: corpus building, enhancing empirical language and ageing research from a multidisciplinaryperspective; compilations of authentic samples of language/multimodal data covering life narratives, ageing andlanguage issues;
- the role of first-person writing in the development of disciplines, e.g. “field diaries,” auto-ethnographic and “ego-historical” accounts, scientific travelogues;
- trauma/illness studies and life writing: Scriptotherapy, Medical Humanities and auto/biography: caregiving andcaretaking, suffering and resilience, illness experience to explore the self, life stories for physicians to understandthe patients’ clinical history;
- epistemic contexts of specific auto/biographical forms, styles, and rhetoric; connections between life writingtechniques and technologies of specific disciplines, between auto/biographical and scholarly discourse;theoretical, methodological and practical interrelations between specific disciplines and life narratives;
- life writing and affect: emotions, theory, practice;
- knowledge and authority constructions in life writing; “knowledge communities,” questions of power and speakingpositions in life writing;
- experimental forms of life writing: innovative poetics of the self.Conference languages: English and Spanish Suggested formats:- Individual papers (abstract max. 300 words)
– Full panel (90-minutes slot, 3 participants including chair, abstract max. 900 words) – Round Table (90 minutes slot, 3/4 participants, abstract max. 900 words)
– Workshops (90 minutes slot, 3/4 participants, abstract max. 900 words)Deadline for proposals: 28 January 2019 Notification of acceptance: 22 February 2019 Conference Fees:PARTICIPANTS AND ATTENDEES: EARLY BIRD 200€; AFTER MAY, 15TH: 250€ STUDENTS: EARLY BIRD 120€; AFTER MAY, 15TH: 150€
* Deadline for Late Bird registration is June, 10th.Conference website:https://eventos.ucm.es/26045/detail/iaba-conference-2019.-knowing-the-self_-autobiographical-narratives-and-the-history-of-knwoledge.html(Be sure to check ‘English’ in the ‘IDIOMA’ tab on the upper-right corner of the site) Abstract submission:(Be sure to check ‘English’ in the ‘IDIOMA’ tab on the upper-right corner of the site) Registration:(Be sure to check ‘English’ in the ‘IDIOMA’ tab on the upper-right corner of the site)
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Deadline for Nominations, January 31, 2019
Call for Nominations for the 2019 Roy G. Neville Prize in Bibliography or Biography
We are now accepting nominations for the 2019 Roy G. Neville Prize. The prize is presented biennially by the Science History Institute to recognize an outstanding published bibliography or biography in the areas of chemistry and related sciences, technologies, or industries (including such topics as alchemy, biomedicine, molecular biology, etc.). The prize will be presented on October 17, 2019, at the Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. The author of the prize-winning work receives a cash prize, a certificate, and travel expenses to accept the award.
Please keep in mind the following criteria for nominees:
- The prize may be given to either (1) a monograph that contributes to our bibliographical knowledge of chemistry and related sciences technologies, or industries, in the tradition inaugurated by Henry Carrington Bolton and exemplified in the lifetime achievement of Roy G. Neville; or (2) a major work of biography in the field of chemistry and related sciences, technologies, or industries.
- The work must be published during a period of five calendar years immediately preceding the year of competition (2014-2018 inclusive).
- The Neville Prize must be accepted in person by the author (or one of the authors if it is a multi-authored work) at the Institute on October 17, 2019, and may not be received in absentia, except under extraordinary conditions as approved by the president of the Institute.
- The recipient author is expected to deliver an address at the award ceremony.
- The work must be originally published in English.
- The work may not be a reprint of an earlier work, a new or amended edition of an earlier work, or a translation.
- If a biography, it must be an original work with new insights to offer and should present a full picture of the life of one or more individuals (or things); it may not be a short biographical memoir or an encyclopedia or dictionary compilation or entry.
- If a biography, the work may be a collective biography on more than one individual (though they should have some obvious connection). Histories with short biographical sections will not be considered.
- Biographies of “things” (commodities, diseases, animals, buildings, etc.) may be considered for the prize if they relate to chemistry and related sciences, technologies, or industries.
- The work must be written for an adult audience; purely juvenile-oriented works will not be considered.
- Five copies of the work must be provided to the prize committee in order for the work to be considered for the prize.
We are accepting nominations until January 31, 2019. Nominations must include the following information and be sent to Nevilleprize@sciencehistory.org:
- Title of Bibliographical/Biographical Work
- Author’s Name
- Publisher
- Date published
- Author’s Contact Information
- Brief description of the nominated work and why it is worthy of prize consideration
- Contact information for copies of the work
Nominations can come from the authors or publishers of the work. Nominating a work for the 2019 Neville Prize does not guarantee that the work will be included among the finalists for the prize. The prize committee will determine a short list of finalists from all of the nominees. If the work is among the finalists, the committee will request five copies of the work for consideration.
Previous prize winners include:
- Inventing Chemistry: Herman Boerhaave and the Reform of the Chemical Arts (University of Chicago Press, 2012) by John C. Powers
- Pure Intelligence: The Life of William Hyde Wollaston (University of Chicago Press, 2015) by Melvyn C. Usselman
- Michael Polanyi and His Generation: Origins of the Social Construction of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2011) by Mary Jo Nye
- Boyle: Between God and Science (Yale University Press, 2009) by Michael Hunter
- William Crookes (1832-1919) and the Commercialization of Science (Ashgate, 2007) by William H. Brock
- A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table (Basic Books, 2004) by Michael D. Gordin
- The Enlightened Joseph Priestley: A Study of His Life and Work from 1773 to 1804 (The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), by Robert E. Schofield
For more information about the Neville Prize please visit our website at https://www.sciencehistory.org/roy-g-neville-prize
ABOUT THE SCIENCE HISTORY INSTITUTE
Formed by the merger of the Chemical Heritage Foundation and the Life Sciences Foundation, the Science History Institute collects and shares the stories of innovators and of discoveries that shape our lives. We preserve and interpret the history of chemistry, chemical engineering, and the life sciences. Headquartered in Philadelphia, with offices in California and Europe, the Institute houses an archive and a library for historians and researchers, a fellowship program for visiting scholars from around the globe, a community of researchers who examine historical and contemporary issues, and an acclaimed museum that is free and open to the public. For more information, visit www.sciencehistory.org.
ABOUT ROY G. NEVILLE (1926-2007)
A consulting chemist by profession, in 1973 Roy G. Neville founded Engineering and Technical Consultants, Inc., in Redwood City, California, of which he was president until his death in 2007. He was also a passionate bibliophile by avocation. Neville began collecting books as a teenager in Bournemouth, UK, and amassed one of the largest private collections of rare books in the fields of science and technology, and chemistry in particular. The Roy G. Neville Library of Chemical History was acquired by the Science History Institute in 2004 and is available for research in the Institute’s Othmer Library.
Ronald Brashear
Arnold Thackray Director of the Othmer Library
Science History Institute
Deadline for Submissions January 31, 2019
Call for Papers
Autofiction – Theory, Practices, Cultures – A Comparative Perspective
19th/20th October 2019 – Wolfson College, University of Oxford, UK
Keynotes: Max Saunders (King’s College London), Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (University of Münster)
The term autofiction, coined by Serge Doubrovsky in the 1970s, has entered the theoretical vocabulary of literary studies as a way of describing the interplay between autobiography and fiction. Seen through the prism of 20th century literary theory, autofiction participates in the critical dialogue about authorship and identity and about the referentiality and truth value of autobiography. While the conjunction of factual and fictional modes in autobiographical writing has a long history, in recent decades authors have increasingly integrated self-reflexive commentary on the partly fictionalised constitution of the autobiographical self into their work. This has created new possibilities and conditions in artistic practice: the author seems to navigate freely as an orchestrating authority, making at times conflicting claims to factuality and fictionality in the text itself, and in paratextual commentary or performance.
There is no critical consensus regarding the term autofiction. Some see it as describing any novel with autobiographical elements, others apply more restrictive definitions. This conference seeks to bring together different theoretical approaches to autofiction, to explore the validity of the concept, and to think about how different definitions and traditions influence our reading of works at the intersection of fiction and autobiography. We invite papers on theoretical approaches and traditions, and on case studies from a comparative perspective. The discussion has been taking place mainly in Francophone, German, Scandinavian, and Anglophone theory and concerning case studies from these contexts. We invite papers that consider these traditions in comparison and that extend the discussion to other languages and geo-political areas. In this context, we are particularly interested in exploring how autofictional texts negotiate and challenge concepts of gender, race, and cultural and national identity. We also welcome papers that look at different terms for the interplay of autobiography and fiction, including autobiografiction, surfiction, and faction, and papers that question the usefulness of the terminology or of the concept of autofiction itself.
Possible topics include:
- Definitions and terminology
- Autofiction and/as genre
- Autofiction across different media
- Autofiction and theories of the self
- Autofiction, gender and sexuality
- Autofiction and national/cultural identity
- Fictionality, referentiality, mimesis
- Autofiction between criticism and practice
Submissions:
Please send the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing, your name, institutional affiliation, and a brief bionote to all three organizers by 31 January 2019.
Contact:
Dr. Alexandra Effe – alexandra.effe@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
Marie Lindskov Hansen – marie.lindskov.hansen@fu-berlin.de
Hannie Lawlor – hannie.lawlor@wolfson.ox.ac.uk
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Deadline for Submissions, January 31, 2019
The Ethics of Roles: Public, Professional, Personal — Graduate Conference at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics
The Graduate Associates at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics are soliciting papers for their 7th annual graduate student conference. The conference theme is “The Ethics of Roles: Public, Professional, Personal.” We will use this opportunity to explore the place of roles within our ethical lives, such as the ways in which roles can alter our moral duties, improve or corrupt our moral character, and shape our understanding of others. We will also consider the ethical dimensions of specific roles, for example: public servants, lawyers, medical professionals, business professionals, academics, artists, religious or spiritual advisors, citizens, parents, siblings and friends. The hope is for this breadth of focus to reveal common questions and further our understanding of roles and their ethics.
The conference will feature a public keynote address by Arthur Applbaum, Adams Professor of Political Leadership and Democratic Values at Harvard University. Applbaum is the author of Ethics for Adversaries: The Morality of Roles in Public and Professional Life. His work has appeared in journals such as Philosophy & Public Affairs, Journal of the American Medical Association, Harvard Law Review, Ethics, and Legal Theory.
The Graduate Associates invite participants to present their work in an interdisciplinary environment that takes a deliberately broad approach to ethics. We welcome submissions from a variety of fields, including, but not limited to: political science, philosophy, bioethics, literature, law, sociology, economics, religious studies, and history. Accepted submissions will be paired with a discussant from the Centre for Ethics community.
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Ethical conceptions of roles and the “good life”
- Philosophical analyses of roles and their relation to moral responsibility
- Contributions to sociological role theory
- Literary and artistic perspectives on roles and their ethics
- The ethics of public service
- The ethics of lawyering and the adversary legal system
- Business ethics
- Bioethics
- The ethics of academia and/or journalism
- The ethics of family roles and friendships
Interested participants should send an abstract of their paper, not exceeding 300 words, to graduateassociates@gmail.com with the subject line “Graduate Conference Proposal 2019”. Submissions must be prepared for blind review. In your email, please include your name, abstract title, and institutional affiliation. Submissions are restricted to persons currently enrolled in a graduate or professional program. We can only accept one submission per author. Submissions should be suitable for a 15-20 minute conference-style presentation.
Successful applicants will be contacted in February. Following acceptance, a paper version of the presentation will be requested, for use by discussants.
The deadline for submissions is January 31, 2019
For further information, please contact us at graduateassociates@gmail.com.
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Deadline for Submissions, January 31, 2019
(Dis)Connecting Links: Historical and Contemporary Violence in Caribbean Women’s Novels
The conceptualization of violence in contemporary societies has often been parochially limited to wars, human rights abuses, police brutality, gang riots, gun violence, racial conflicts, political corruption, without much attention to micro-aggression, gender-based violence like rape, wife battery, domestic violence, polygamy, and absent fathers in nuclear family structures. This book seeks to delineate a wide gamut of violence ranging from the physical to the emotional and the psychological (and even linguistic, cultural, and epistemological) that affects human relationships in the Caribbean archipelago. However, a lot of recent scholarships on violence in the Caribbean seem to postulate that there is a connecting link between historical and contemporary violence.
This research seeks to engage, examine, and interrogate such narratives about violence in the Caribbean, especially as represented in the novels of Caribbean women writers such as Edwidge Danticat, Jamaican Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Curdella Forbes, Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Zee Edgell, etc. How have Caribbean women writers engaged with this narrative of the (dis)continuity of violence? What attempts have they made, if any, to break the chains of violence that continue to oppress, especially women in the Caribbean? In light of the above, the editor of this collection calls for engaging chapters on any of, but not limited to, the following issues in the novels of Caribbean women:
- The link between violence and identity
- Trans-generational violence
- (Dis)connecting links of violence and agency/personal responsibility
- Linguistic violence and subject formation
- Ideological and cultural violence
- Women as victims and agents of violence
- The violence of trauma in contemporary Caribbean society
- Poverty as violence
- Political, economical, and institutional violence
- The family at the center of violence
- The effects of violence on children
- Violence and the construction of vulnerability
- Violence and insecurity/fear/anxiety
- The violence of trans-nationalism and diasporation within/out the Caribbean
- Echoes of historical violence and the destiny of nation/characters
- The violence of classism, racism, sexism, nepotism, and croniesm
Deadline for submission of chapters is the 30th of May 2019. All submission must be sent to Dr. Samuel Kamara at Samuel.kamara@themico.edu.jm. Please submit a 500 words abstract and biography to Dr. Kamara on or before January 31st 2019.
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Events begin on January 22, 2019, and continue through term
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Events begin January 15, 2019, and continue through March 12, 2019
Contemporary Cultures of Writing Spring 2019 Seminar Series–University of London
This is to advise you that the Open University Contemporary Cultures of Writing Research Group are holding a series of three seminars, as outlined below, on “Life Stories” in Spring 2019.
The seminars are free and open to all. They take place on Tuesdays from 18.00 – 20.00 in January, February and March. All seminars will be held at Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London.
SEMINAR 1: Writing the self
Tuesday January 15th, The Court Room
This session will be concerned with writing about and constructing a sense of self. It will consider whether this might best be done through factual or fictional means, whether there is such a thing as an authentic self, or whether all accounts of self are necessarily fictions to a greater or lesser degree. It will also consider issues of culture in relation to modes of self-narration.
Novelist and film-maker Xiaolu Guo will discuss the construction of self in her recent memoir, Once Upon A Time in the East, and in relation to her previous fiction. Fiona Doloughan, Senior Lecturer in English (Literature and Creative Writing) at the Open University will contextualize some of the questions the series hopes to address and refer to Guo’s work from a literary critical perspective.
SEMINAR 2: The lives of others: research and writing
Tuesday February 12th, Room G26
This session will look at what it means to research and write about the lives of others. As well as considering a writer’s/biographer’s process, it will consider what her/his role might be, including the notion of “to give someone a fair hearing, to do them justice” (Holmes, 2017). It will also address the issue of how to create a dialogue with the past and why it might be important to revisit the lives of others and to reflect on the interplay between a writer and her/his subject. To what extent are the lives of others a foil for aspects of our own lives?
Professor of Poetry at the University of Roehampton Fiona Sampson will discuss her recent work including In Search of Mary Shelley: The Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein and forthcoming biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She will be joined by Dean de la Motte, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Salve Regina University, Newport, Rhode Island. Dean will be discussing his love affair with the Brontës and will be reading from his novel Oblivion: The Lost Diaries of Branwell Brontë.
SEMINAR 3: Multimodal life stories
Tuesday March 12th, Room G34
New and old technologies afford opportunities for inscribing life stories in different media. This session will consider modes of narration that go beyond the textual and/or combine modes to create a multimodal account of a life or lives, looking at diverse approaches including narrative textiles, collective biography and micro-blogging. What are the implications of such methodological innovations in telling people’s stories?
Katherine Collins, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Oxford’s Department of Education from 2019, will read from and discuss a new piece provisionally entitled ‘I remember once I was a fine art student’, while Heather Richardson, Lecturer in Creative Writing at the Open University, will discuss her text and textile project, A dress for Kathleen, which has involved the creation of a garment-as-text to explore family and social history.
Organized by the OU’s Contemporary Cultures of Writing Research Group in collaboration with the Institute of English Studies, University of London.
If you have any queries regarding this seminar series, please contact the series convenors, Dr Fiona Doloughan (Fiona.Doloughan@open.ac.uk) and Dr Heather Richardson (Heather.Richardson@open.ac.uk), Department of English and Creative Writing, the Open University.
IV International Conference on Medical Humanities (3/16/2019)
IV International Conference on Medical Humanities 16 March, 2019 – London, UK London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research and Faculty of Health & Social Sciences, School of Applied Social Studies, University of Bedfordshire
“Wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity”
Hippocrates
The conference will explore the social, historical and cultural dimensions of medicine. It will promote an interdisciplinary perspective on health, illness, health care and the body. The conference will also focus on the issues relevant to medical knowledge, public health policy, the experience of being ill and of caring for those who are ill.
Papers are invited on topics related, but not limited, to:
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history of medicine
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medical anthropology
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bioethics
-
sociology of medicine
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medicine in literature and cultural studies
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medicine and art
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medicine and philosophy
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health geography
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medical education
We also welcome poster proposals that address one of the conference themes.
The conference is addressed to academics, researchers and professionals with a particular interest related to the conference topic. Proposals up to 250 words and a brief biographical note should be sent by 25 November, 2018 to:medhumconf@lcir.co.uk. Download Paper proposal form.
Selected papers will be published in the post-conference volume. Those who are interested in contributing will be required to submit full papers by 20 December 2018.Registration fee – 100 GBPProvisional venue: Birkbeck, University of London, Malet Street, Bloomsbury, London WC1E 7HX
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Deadline for Proposals–January 15, 2019
On the edges: Autodidacts, forgotten thinkers, silenced women in 20th-century South Africa –
We invite papers for this conference to be held at the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town on 22-23 April 2019.
Although South African historiography has been dominated by university-based intellectuals, many intellectuals operated outside universities, only to be marginalized and hidden from history. This conference places those marginalized intellectuals centre stage, exploring their hitherto neglected work in all its originality and variety. Intellectuals active outside universities ranged from socialist autodidacts to participants in workers’ night schools and radical discussion groups to women sitting silently at political conferences to political activists and trade unionists. Often organic intellectuals from working-class backgrounds, they produced remarkable creative and critical work in many different genres – newspaper articles, political manifestos, popular histories, letters, literature, memoirs, songs and art work.
The conference invites papers addressing the activities and achievements of twentieth-century marginalized intellectuals (both individuals and groups). It will consider the following questions:
- How did twentieth-century South African universities define and constitute intellectuals?
- What individuals were identified as ‘intellectuals’, and what credentials did they require?
- Who was denied the identity and status of ‘intellectual’ and what formal and informal processes excluded them from this status?
- Sidelining and silencing – what were the processes, who were the individuals and how were they affected?
- What constituencies did marginalized intellectuals engage with – political parties, civic organizations, popular movements?
- What was the role of discussion clubs, fellowships, forums, societies and study groups as alternative sites of intellectual development? What types of knowledge and intellectual cultures did they create?
- What was the relationship between university-based intellectuals and intellectuals beyond the academy during the last century?
- What has been the impact of this marginalization on our understanding of intellectual work and the relationship between intellectuals and institutions?
- How do the histories of intellectuals active outside universities illuminate current debates about access to universities?
The recent unrest and ferment at South African universities has highlighted the theme of decolonization. The marginalized intellectuals that the conference will discuss were decolonizing South African history and culture long ago. The conference will broaden the understanding of intellectual work and of the relationship between intellectuals, institutions and society and will illuminate the possibilities offered when historically marginalized intellectuals are brought into the mainstream.
Interested participants should send paper title and abstracts of 250 words by the deadline of 15 January 2019 to conference conveners Allison Drew and Lungisile Ntsebeza at ontheedges2019@gmail.com. We encourage contributions from independent scholars, postgraduate students, academics and activists.
Professor Allison Drew at allisonvictoriadrew@gmail.com
Professor Lungisile Ntsebeza at lntsebeza@gmail.com
We are sorry for the inconvenience and hope to see at least some of you in Pamplona!
PhD Assistant Professor
University of Navarra
Spain
Dear colleagues,
We are pleased to announce that the University of Navarra will be hosting The Society for the Study of Narrative annual conference.This will be the first time the annual International Conference on Narrative comes to Spain, so we hope you may be interested in visiting us and contributing to the discussion. We welcome proposals for papers and panels on all aspects of narrative in any genre, period, discipline, language, and medium.Proposals for Individual Papers:
Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing, name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief bio note (no more than 100 words).
Proposals for Panels:
Please provide a 700-word (maximum) description of the topic of the panel and of each panelist’s contribution; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers; and each participant’s name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief bio note (no more than 100 words).
Please send proposals by email in PDF or Word to: narrative2019@gmail.com
Please note: All participants must join the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN).
You may find more details on our website.
We look forward to receiving your contributions and to seeing you in Pamplona next year.
Best regards,
Ana Belén Martínez García
On behalf of the organizing committee (Rocio Davis and Rosalía Baena)
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Deadline for Proposals, January 20, 2019
CFP: “Pilgrimage and the Senses” Conference (Oxford, 7 June 2019)
“Pilgrimage and the Senses”
7 June 2019
University of OxfordWith the release of its inaugural issue in 2006, The Senses and Society journal proclaimed a “sensual revolution” in the humanities and social sciences. The ensuing decade has seen a boom in sensory studies, resulting in research networks, museum exhibitions, and a wealth of publications. This interdisciplinary conference hosted at the University of Oxford aims to shed light on how sensory perception shapes and is shaped by the experience of pilgrimage across cultures, faith traditions, and throughout history.
Pilgrimages present an intriguing paradox. Grounded in physical experiences—a journey (real or imagined), encounters with sites and/or relics, and commemorative tokens—they also simultaneously demand a devotional focus on the metaphysical. A ubiquitous and long-lasting devotional practice, pilgrimage is a useful lens through which to examine how humans encounter the sacred through the tools of perception available to us. Focusing on the ways in which pilgrimage engages the senses will contribute to our knowledge of how people have historically understood both religious experience and their bodies as vehicles of devotional participation. We call on speakers to grapple with the challenges of understanding the sensory experience of spiritual phenomena, while bearing in mind that understandings of the senses can vary according to specific cultural contexts. While the five senses are a natural starting point, we are open to including papers that deal with “sense” in a more general way, such as senses of time and place.
Sample topics may include (but are not limited to):
- the role of beholding (places, relics, miracles, mementos) in the pilgrimage experience
- haptic encounters with relics
- ways in which pilgrims are seen: wearing specific clothing and/or badges, public acts (or affects) of devotion, how pilgrims are depicted or described
- pilgrims’ auditory expressions: wailing/crying, chanting, singing, reciting prayers
- bathing and purification in preparation for devotions
- food as a ritual element or means of experiencing cultures along a pilgrimage route
- the place of music on the pilgrimage route and/or at pilgrimage destinations
- pain as a facet of the pilgrimage journey
- the sensory spectacle—visual, auditory, olfactory—of pilgrimage processions
- devotional objects that require handling, such as prayer beads and prayer wheels
- psychosomatic sensory experiences as a means of engaging with the divine
- the evocation of sensory participation through works of art and/or written accounts
Professor Kathryn Rudy of the University of St. Andrews will deliver a keynote address.
We invite 20-minute papers from any discipline on topics related to the themes outlined above, especially in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art history, history, literature, musicology, religious studies, sociology, and theology. We welcome submissions relating to aspects of pilgrimage of any faith or historical period. Doctoral students and early career researchers are particularly encouraged to apply.
Contact Info:Please submit a title, abstract (max. 250 words), and brief bio to pilgrimagesenses2019@gmail.com by January 20th. Successful applicants will be notified by February 5th. All submissions and papers must be in English.
Contact Email:
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Dear colleagues,
Proposals for Individual Papers:
Please provide the title and a 300-word abstract of the paper you are proposing, name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief bio note (no more than 100 words).
Proposals for Panels:
Please provide a 700-word (maximum) description of the topic of the panel and of each panelist’s contribution; the title of the panel and the titles of the individual papers; and each participant’s name, institutional affiliation, email address, and a brief bio note (no more than 100 words).
Please send proposals by email in PDF or Word to: narrative2019@gmail.com
You may find more details on our website: https://www.unav.edu/en/web/narrative-2019.
We look forward to receiving your contributions and to seeing you in Pamplona!
Best regards,
Ana Belén Martínez García
On behalf of the Organizing Committee
Deadline for Submission January 11, 2019
IABA Americas Conference in Kingston, Jamaica
Deadline for submissions extended to January 11, 2019!
La fecha límite para las presentaciones se extiende hasta el 11 de enero de 2019!
Prazo para envio de inscrições até 11 de janeiro de 2019!
La date limite pour les soumissions est prolongée jusqu’au 11 janvier 2019!
CALL FOR PAPERS
“Lives in Transition: Negotiating the Currents in a Changing World”
The 4th Biennial Conference of the IABA Americas Chapter
The Department of Literatures in English
University of the West Indies, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
June 13-15, 2019
The conference conveners invite papers that explore means by which auto/biographical subjects explore lives ‘in transition’ and/or in the process of ‘transitioning.’ How do life narratives explore the kinds of adjustments, challenges, and negotiations made in ‘transitional’ periods? How do we as life narrative scholars, teachers, and practitioners metabolize and incorporate ideas of transitioning in our approaches to our respective disciplines and methodologies?
Possible topics include how these transitions may have been brought on by trauma, natural disasters, wars, referendums and other legislative changes, social policies, scandals, illnesses, medical procedures, body politics, gendered lives, migrations, or the relocations of Indigenous and other communities. We are also interested in papers that explore life, death, kinship, consciousness, and mourning in the ongoing aftermath of violence, which Black cultural studies scholar Christina Sharpe encourages us to imagine, in her work on slavery’s legacies, as living “in the wake.”
Papers addressing all genres of life narratives (written, visual, performed, multimodal, interdisciplinary, digital, etc.) are welcome.
We invite abstracts of 250-300 words accompanied by brief biographies (no more than 100 words) on topics that are not limited to, but may include:
Citizenship and records
Refugees, points of entry/departure
Health, rehabilitation, and recovery
Rites of passage
Legislation
Translation
Sexuality and advocacy
Family and generational conflict
Transgender lives
Extradition, detention, and deportation
Embodied politics
Teaching as transitional tool: methodology, internship, practicum
Discursive practices: movement, migration and diaspora
Constructing and deconstructing gender
Please send abstracts and biographies via email to IABAA876@gmail.com by December 1, 2018.
CHAMADA DE TRABALHOS
“Vidas em transição: Conciliando as correntezas em um mundo em mutação”
IV Conferência Bianual da IABA – Sucursal Américas
Departamento de Literaturas – Língua Inglesa
Universidade das Índias Ocidentais, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
13 a 15 de junho de 2019
Os organizadores da conferência convidam à submissão de trabalhos que investiguem as formas através das quais temas auto/biográficos lidam com as vidas “em transição” ou em processo de “transição”. Como as narrativas de vida exploram os tipos de ajustes, desafios e negociações feitos em períodos de “transição”? Como nós, pesquisadores, professores e praticantes de narrativas de vida metabolizamos e incorporamos ideias de transição nas abordagens de nossas respectivas disciplinas e metodologias?
Os possíveis tópicos incluem as formas como essas transições podem ser advindas do trauma, de desastres naturais, guerras, plebiscitos ou outras mudanças legislativas, políticas sociais, escândalos, enfermidades, procedimentos médicos, corpo político, questões de gênero, migrações ou deslocamentos indígenas ou de outras comunidades. Estamos também interessados em trabalhos que explorem temas como a vida, morte, afinidades, consciência e luto como consequência da violência, de acordo com o pensamento da pesquisadora de Estudos Culturais Negros, Christina Sharpe, que nos incentiva a imaginar o viver como um estado de vigília, assim como ilustrado em sua pesquisa sobre os legados da escravidão. Serão também aceitos para análise temas como manifestações de triunfos políticos ou pessoais, conquistas e celebrações.
Trabalhos que lidem com quaisquer formas de narrativas de vida (escrita, visual, performática, multimodal, interdisciplinar, digital, etc.) serão bem-vindos.
Convidamos à submissão de resumos de 250 a 300 palavras, juntamente com uma breve biografia (no máximo 100 palavras), sobre os seguintes tópicos, mas não limitados a eles:
Cidadania e registros
Refugiados, pontos de entrada e saída
Saúde, reabilitação e recuperação
Ritos de passagem
Legislação
Tecnologias de transição
Sexualidade e militância
Família e conflitos geracionais
Vidas transgêneras
Políticas do corpo/no corpo
Ensino como um instrumento de transição: metodologia, estágios e prática
Práticas discursivas: movimento, migração e diáspora
Construindo e desconstruindo o gênero
Favor enviar resumos e biografias por e-mail para IABAA876@gmail.com até 1 de dezembro de 2018.
Translated by Sergio da Silva Barcellos
Convocatoria de propuestas
“Vidas en transición: Negociando cambios en un mundo cambiante”
4 Conferencia Bienal del Capítulo Americano IABA
Departamento de Literaturas en Lengua Inglesa
Universidad de las Indias Occidentales, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
Junio 13-15, 2019
Los organizadores de la conferencia convocan propuestas que estudien los métodos usados por sujetos auto/biográficos para explorar sus vidas ‘en transición’ y/o procesos de ‘transición.’ ¿Cómo se exploran este tipo de cambios, retos, y negociaciones hechas en periodos de transición a través de narrativas de vida? ¿Cómo podemos metabolizar e incorporar ideas de transición en nuestras respectivas disciplinas y metodologías como investigadores, profesores y escritores de auto/biografía?
Posibles temas incluyen el estudio de los procesos que causan estas transiciones, como traumas, desastres naturales, guerras, referéndums y otros cambios legislativos, leyes sociales, escándalos, enfermedades, procedimientos médicos, políticas del cuerpo, vidas de género, migraciones, o traslados de comunidades indígenas u otras comunidades. También estamos interesados en propuestas que exploren la vida, muerte, afinidad, consciencia, y luto en secuelas de violencia siguiendo a la investigadora de estudios culturales afroamericanos, Christina Sharpe, quien nos anima a imaginar estas repercusiones como vivas, “en vigilia.”
Se invita a enviar propuestas que aborden todos los géneros de narrativas de vida (escritas, visuales, teatrales, multimodales, interdisciplinarias, digitales, etc). Por favor, envíe resúmenes de propuestas de 250-300 palabras acompañadas de una breve biografía (100 palabras máximo) relacionadas con los siguientes temas:
Ciudadanía y registros civiles
Refugiados, puntos de entrada y salida
Salud, rehabilitación y recuperación
Ritos de paso
Legislación
Traducción
Sexualidad y derechos
Familia y conflictos generacionales
Vidas transgénero
Extradición, detención y deportación
Políticas encarnadas
Enseñanza como técnica transicional: metodología, periodos de prácticas
Prácticas discursivas: movimiento, migración y diáspora.
Construcción y deconstrucción de género
Favor de enviar propuestas y biografías por correo electrónico a IABAA876@gmail.com.
Plazo de recepción de propuestas: 1 de diciembre de 2018
Translated by Ana Roncero-Bellido
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Deadline for Proposals–January 10, 2019
Humanities special issue: “Medical Narratives of Ill Health”
The field of literature and medicine has been steadily growing over the past four decades, solidifying itself as a vital component of the medical and health humanities. The intersection of literature and medicine enriches how we view issues of health, disease, and care, particularly in how we value the individual’s narrative of health and ill health to help with diagnosis, treatment, and the relationship between the practitioner and the patient. In an attempt to wade through the difficult terrain of defining disease and health, Kenneth Boyd provides the following medical definitions (adapted from Marshall Marinker’s earlier work): “Disease […] is the pathological process, deviation from a biological norm. Illness is the patient’s experience of ill health, sometimes when no disease can be found. Sickness is the role negotiated with society” (Boyd, 1997). What Boyd reveals about these definitions is that one allows for the individual’s experience of ill health (illness), while the other two rely on others’ perceptions of ill health. Thus, he concludes, a clear definition of disease (and even sickness) is elusive: “to call something a disease is a value judgement, relatively unproblematic in cases when it is widely shared, but more contentious when people disagree about it” (Boyd, 1997). This contentious space has widened during the modern medical era (early nineteenth century to the present day), as medical reliance on technology favors an objective identification of disease. However, literary works, through both personal accounts and fictional scenarios, challenge this singular narrative of disease and ill health provided by the medical community.
For this special issue of Humanities, we seek to explore how literature from the early nineteenth century to the present day engages with and challenges modern medical authority when it comes to understanding disease, illness, and sickness. Papers for this special issue of Humanities should focus on narratives—fictional and/or non-fictional (such as medical realism, science fiction, pathographies, medical reports, etc.)—that explore the contentious space of disagreement between medicine, society, and the individual. Authors might consider topics such as: disease as metaphor; social vs. medical definitions of disease; patient agency and individual experiences of illness; challenges to medical technology’s presumed objectivity; representations of contagion and/or public health—or any other topics that relate to better understanding literary representations of disease, illness, and/or sickness.
Articles should be no more than 8000 words, inclusive of notes. The deadline for submission of articles to the guest editor is January 10, 2019: please email articles directly to Amanda M. Caleb at acaleb@misericordia.edu. The deadline for final drafts is February 28, 2019, with expected puplication in early Summer 2019. Please consult the journal’s webpage for formatting instructions: http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities/special_issues/contagion.
Dr. Amanda Caleb
Guest Editor
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(Dis)ability and Comics: Fifth Annual Dartmouth College Conference on Illustration, Comics, and Animation
How do comics and related visual media such as illustrated books, comic strips, and animation represent disability differently from other media, and what new possibilities do they propose for thinking about or visualizing ability?
Of particular interest are papers that consider comics as graphic medicine, comics and ableism, comics and neuro-divergence, autism in graphic novels and comics, disability and graphic memoir, creative titles or series by comics artists and writers who identify with or include ability-challenged perspectives, disability studies/theory approaches to contemporary comics and/or issues in comics studies, race and /or gender and sexuality and disability in comics, and comics and pictorial literacy as tools within developmental education studies.
To participate in the conference, please send a two hundred-word abstract of your talk along with a short professional bio to
Michael A. Chaney
Conference Director
Please be sure to submit your materials before January 7, 2019.
We hope to see you at Dartmouth College next April!
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Deadline for Proposals–January 7, 2019
Leon Levy Center for Biography Resident Fellowships (1/7/2019) New York City, USA
The Leon Levy Center for Biography offers four resident fellowships at the Graduate Center for the academic year, beginning each September. Awards include writing space, full access to research facilities, research assistance, and a stipend of $72,000. The application period for 2019–2020 begins on October 15, 2018, and closes on January 7, 2019. Fellowship decisions will be announced, and all applicants notified, in mid-April 2019.
http://llcb.ws.gc.cuny.edu/fellowships/biography-fellowships/
Applications require a brief CV or resume (three pages maximum), a narrative account of the applicant’s career (250 words), a project description (750 words), a sample of the proposed biography (maximum 2,500 words), and four letters of reference, which must be postmarked by the deadline. Applicants are discouraged from seeking letters from their agents, editors, or publishers. Only online/digital applications will be accepted. You can apply here. Email any questions about the fellowship to Thad Ziolkowski, Associate Director of the Levy Center.
Here are the biography projects of the current fellows:
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Deadline for Submissions, January 4, 2019
(Re)membering Africa: Women’s Narratives on the Continent and Beyond
deadline for submissions:
January 4, 2019
full name / name of organization:
Empire Studies Collective, English & Creative Writing Departments at University of Houston
contact email:
Keynote Speaker: Susan Andrade
Featured Speaker: Tsitsi Dangarembga
March 28 – 30, 2019
University of Houston
In his book, Re-membering Africa, Ngugi Wa Thiong’o states that
“the history of Africa has not simply been one of deprivation, dispossession and exploitation but also one of resistance and struggle. At the centre of this struggle has been the quest for re-membering Africa so brutally dis-membered…”
(Re)membering Africa: Women’s Narratives on the Continent and Beyond is a workshop for African literary and media criticism and it seeks to engage in this continuing quest to counter “deprivation, dispossession and exploitation” and to prioritize engagement with history, politics, critical theory, postcolonial theory, feminist theories and theories of literature in order to center African discourse in the long struggle of African people to reclaim and recover the continent.
(Re)membering offers rich potential for creative and critical innovations:
- the awareness of something that is known, but unemphasized
- the revolving, dialectic relationship of the past and the present
- the recollection or reconciliation of the members/parts, of a whole, separated historically or intellectually.
Through (Re)membering, we seek to focus our discourse on Africa and African diasporic communities, both on the continent and around the world. We recognize that the criticism of African literature and film is a necessary component in the creation and communication of African letters and media. The criticism of African literature and film has enjoyed periods of vogue and emphasis in North America but, often the work of scholars is done in insolation and across the expanse of geographical separation from other critics, thinkers and writers. Our intensive workshop, (Re)membering Africa brings together advanced graduate students and early-career scholars to workshop papers that African literature and film, by and/or about women.
Because women’s creative and critical production is often under-evaluated and un-critiqued within academia and, to some extent, within the cultural nexus of the woman/women’s creative/critical production and because our graduate student cohort consists mostly of African, female writers, based on the continent and North America, (Re)membering will focus on the work of women of/from Africa and the African-diaspora. We also welcome work about feminist themes, epistemes, and work about female characters regardless of gender of the author/auteur/director of the text.
We are involved in two modes of (Re)membering and thus two modes of interaction will be used during the conference. The academic workshops will focus on academic papers (see the themes below). Each workshop will be moderated and consist of three participant-scholars. Workshop papers will pre-circulate one month in advance and participants must prepare written feedback in advance. In line with high standards of critical production, we expect papers to utilize African history and political, economic, postcolonial and literary theories. The workshops will be observed by auditors (i.e. other conference participants and faculty) who may ask questions during the last 20 minutes of each session.
We invite proposals for academic papers about literature and film from Africa and/or the African diasporas that think critically about:
- Feminist Epistemologies in Narrative and/or Film
- (Re)membering Africa through Literature and/or Film
- Afrofuturism in Narrative and/or Film
- Reading Women’s Political Engagement in Narrative and/or Film
- Ideological engagement in female-authored and/or feminist novels
- Post/Modernity in the African Narrative and/or Film
- Post/Colonialism in the African Narrative and/or Film
- Representations of Sexuality in the Narrative and Film
- Representations of Women in the Narrative and Film
- Anglophone literature and/or film
- Francophone literature and/or film
Submit individual abstracts (250 – 300 words) and a brief bio (up to 150 words) by the deadline of January 4, 2019 to https://goo.gl/forms/R3ZLXbLEkU7R0tuI2
We welcome differently abled persons. Please indicate specific accessibility needs and preferred accommodations.
For more questions about the academic workshop, please contact Maurine Ogbaa (moogbaa@uh.edu).
We welcome differently abled persons. Please indicate specific accessibility needs and preferred accommodations.
The second mode of interaction will be a creative writing workshop. We invite short stories from writers to our creative writing workshop.
Submit a writing sample of creative fiction or nonfiction (10 pages or less), a one-page personal statement and a brief bio (up to 150 words) by the deadline of January 4, 2019 to https://goo.gl/forms/XVlNtL4T8AYlY2O13
For more questions about the creative writing workshop, please contact the workshop convener, Novuyo Tshuma (nrtshuma@uh.edu).
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Deadline for Proposals, December 31, 2018
BLACK LIVES
Thursday, April 11 – Friday, April 12, 2019
CUNY Graduate Center New York, NY
“Black Lives” has emerged in recent years as a conceptual touchstone following the wake of Black Lives Matter, a galvanizing social movement of public protest against the persistence of institutionalized forms of anti-black violence that besiege Black individuals and communities on a daily basis, both within the United States and across a range of geopolitical contexts. The phrase implicitly challenges nationalist and global concepts of humanity that do not include blackness as a viable sign of life and citizenship. As critics such as Paul Gilroy, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Robert Reid-Pharr and Henry Louis Gates Jr. have noted, “universal humanism” has been historically built upon a constitutive rejection of black being. To push back against such entrenched conceptual repudiations of black particularity, we take a cue from Jamaican philosopher and novelist Sylvia Wynter, who argues that black particularity paradoxically retains a utopian impulse for recognizing “our collective agency and authorship of our genres of being human” (2006). We intend for the conference to respond to the urgent need to think about the impact and meaning of “Black Lives” both as a touchstone for contemporary activism as well as a scholarly heuristic for research across a range of fields and disciplines. By doing so, we hope to make resonant the potentiality of blackness to signify as a radical node of meaning and being across a range of identitarian and relational articulations.
We are especially interested in workshop proposals that address the necessary rituals and habits for self-care, success/pushing back in a hostile workplace, building and maintaining your village, and contemporary radical Black artists/activists. We also seek papers and panel proposals that take up any aspect of “Black Lives” understood broadly as an entry point into research in, but not limited to, any of the following areas:
- Regional and global Black activisms and cross-struggle affinities
- African-American and African Diasporic Literary Studies
- Contemporary theory regarding blackness and black subjectivity, including Afro-Pessimism, Afro-Futurism, Black Atlantic Studies, Black Pacific Studies
- Critical Archive Studies
- Critical Science Studies
- Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Deconstruction and Biopolitics
- Black cultural histories and Blues historiography
- Blackness and “modernity”/globalization
- Middle Passage theory
- Black sovereignty and selfhood
- Critical Race studies
- Blackness, Brownness, and Affect
- Black, Queer and Trans Feminisms
- Queer Sexualities
- Queer of Color Critique, Queer Theory, Critical Trans Studies
- Native-American/First Nations studies
- Blackness and Jewishness
- Postcolonial studies
- Disabilities studies
- Performance studies/Body as Archive
- Prison abolitionism
- Critical interventions in Post-Humanism, New Materialism, and Object Oriented Ontology
- Black utopianisms and Marxisms
- Black aesthetics and/or aestheticism
- The Black Radical Tradition, Black Power and the Black Arts movement
- The New Negro (Harlem) Renaissance/The New Black (post-Civil Rights)
- Intersectionality
- White Feminism/Womanism
- Black literacies and critical pedagogy
- Blackness and religion
Please submit an abstract of up to 400 words, a short biographical description, and your contact information by December 31, 2018. Proposals and questions should be sent to conference organizers at blacklivesconferencecommittee@gmail.com.
Conference Organizers:
Makeba Lavan, Ryan Tracy, Shoumik Battacharya, LeiLani Dowell, Daniel Hengel
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Introducing the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies Book Series
Series Editor: Ricia Anne Chansky
The Routledge Auto/Biography Studies book series publishes outstanding new work from preeminent scholars and emerging voices in autobiography, biography, life writing, life narrative, and identity studies. This series is an interdisciplinary project that maintains interest in all forms of auto/biographical narrative analysis related to understanding varied constructions of the self. While centered in literary studies and the larger field of the humanities, books in this series engage with scholars and theories from such disciplines as anthropology, biology, linguistics, pedagogy, psychology, and sociology, among others. The emphasis on exploring the innovative authors, genres, and methodologies of auto/biographical narratives appeals to scholars, students, and practitioners alike. Emerging from Routledge’s longstanding commitment to auto/biography studies, this series makes a substantial contribution to the burgeoning global study of lives and life stories.
Inquiries welcome at ricia.chansky@upr.edu
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The MLA Genre Studies in Life Writing Forum is excited to invite you to it’s annual social. The event will take place on Friday, January 4 at 7:15 in Ricia Chansky and Emily Hipchen’s suite at the Fairmont Chicago at Millennium Park. The room number will be posted on the a/b: Auto/Biography Studies Facebook page on the 3rd. All are welcome! Please email Ricia with any questions: ricia.chansky@upr.edu
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Deadline for Proposals, December 19, 2018
me too
Special Issue of Rejoinder
The “me too” movement, founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke to help young American women of color heal from sexual assault, has gone global. Survivors around the world are giving unprecedented voice to stories of violence and abuse. The next issue of Rejoinder will explore the history, present, and future of me too as it relates to contemporary feminist mobilization and theorizing. We welcome contributions that explore any aspects of me too, such as how the movement travels across different contexts (such as the home, the academy, the workplace), through different forms of media and face-to-face interactions. What are the most pronounced effects of me too? And what difference does adding the hashtag make? Submissions (including essays, commentary, criticism, fiction, poetry, and artwork) should address this theme from feminist, queer, social and racial justice-inspired perspectives. We particularly welcome contributions at the intersection of scholarship and activism. For manuscript preparation details, please see our website at: http://irw.rutgers.edu/about-rejoinder. Rejoinder is published by the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers University in partnership with the Center for Women in the Arts and Humanities.
Please send completed written work (2,000-2,500 words max), jpegs of artwork, and short bios to the editor, Sarah Tobias (stobias@rutgers.edu) by December 19, 2018.
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Deadline for Submissions, December 10, 2018
Experimental Narrative in Nonfiction (Part II)
The proposed panel aims to build on enthusiasm for the “Experimental Narrative in Nonfiction” panel, held at the ISSN conference in 2018. It will continue to explore how and why nonfiction uses “experimental or unnatural devices,” and the differences that obtain when such devices are used in nonfiction as opposed to fiction.
Unnatural and otherwise strange narrative devices are often used in nonfiction, in apparently contradiction with nonfiction’s imperative of truth-telling. Thought experiments in philosophy and physics routinely deploy impossible situations in order to clarify problems or paradoxes in current theory. Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah eschews chronological telling in order to repudiate notions of historical causality and inevitability; Richard Dawkins’ history of life on earth, The Ancestor’s Tale,uses similar manoeuvers—for very different reasons. Edna O’Brien’s memoir Mother Ireland deploys a dizzying range of tenses while shifting between first, second and third person narration; Jamaica Kincaid’s essay A Small Place addresses a tourist directly, implicating the reader in Antigua’s legacy of colonialism. Bart Layton’s The Imposter uses alienating metalepsis and ambiguous instances of re-enactment in ways that simultaneously complicate and complement the documentary’s thematic focus on authenticity, solubility and objectivity. And so on.
Papers presented in the 2018 panel focused on autobiography, journalism, political discourse and biology. Ideally, papers in the 2019 panel will add new genres and discursive fields to the conversation; that said, proposals pertaining to any nonfiction genre will be considered. The ideal composition of the panel will be three or four papers focusing on different forms (for example, government reports, history, journalism, medicine, narrative essays, science, thought experiments, travel writing…). I am especially interested in papers that focus on a single narrative device (or a cluster of interrelated devices) and its function, formal and rhetorical effects, and relations to the fiction/nonfiction divide.
The selected papers will be gathered as a panel proposal for the upcoming conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative in Pamplona, Spain (May 30 – June 1, 2019). To be considered for the panel, please submit a proposal outlining your paper (250 words) and short biographical note to Daniel Aureliano Newman (University of Toronto, daniel.newman@utoronto.ca) by December 10, 2018.
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Deadline for Submissions 12/14/2018
Oral History @ Work. British Oral History Society (12/14/2018; 7/5-6/2019) Swansea UK
The Oral History Society (in association with Llafur and Britain at
Work) will be holding its 2019 annual conference at Swansea University
on the subject of ‘Oral History @ Work: Recording Change in Working
Lives’. The conference will take place on 5-6 July 2019.
We are currently seeking proposals for conference papers (closes on 14
December 2018) and would appreciate it if you could forward this email
to friends, colleagues and mailing lists who may be interested.
Note on proposals
The deadline for submission of proposals is 14 December 2018. Each
proposal should include: a title, an abstract of between 250-300 words,
your name (and the names of any co-presenters, panellists, etc), your
institution or organisation, your email address, and a note of any
particular requirements. Most importantly your abstract should
demonstrate the use of oral history or personal testimony and be
directly related to the conference theme. Proposals that include audio
playback are strongly encouraged. Proposals should be emailed to the
Oral History @ Work conference Administrator, Polly Owen, at
polly.owen@ohs.org.uk. They will be assessed anonymously by the
conference organisers, and presenters will be contacted in
January/February 2019.
Further information on the conference can be found here:
http://www.ohs.org.uk/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/OHSconf2019_CfP_web-1.pdf
Deadline for Applications, December 7, 2018
‘Industrial Relations’: the teenage Railway Queens 1925-1975
WRoCAH funded Collaborative Doctoral Award between Department for English and Related Literature at the University of York and the National Railway Museum, York
Are you passionate about giving a voice to the overlooked? About discovering untold histories? About realigning gender narratives? About putting the experience of working-class teenage girls at the heart of a national museum?
The project explores the unexamined role, representation and experience of the UK ‘Railway Queens’ (1925-75): the teenage daughters of railway employees chosen as icons of industrial progress. Often seen as mere pawns between unions and industry, the Queens were at the heart of a rich culture of working-class celebrity. Affording a window onto a changing industrial landscape, their stories suggest unexpected possibilities for agency and ambition. Working with the National Railway Museum (NRM) you will analyse archival records of the Queens, and may pursue first-hand accounts where possible. You will play an active role in presenting these stories to the public.
The initial research will focus on the collections of the NRM. The Museum’s Library and Archive hold relevant records, particularly the papers of the Southern Railway publicity officer who helped create the scheme. The internal publicity of the companies, such as their magazines, and the wider railway press also documented the activities of the Queens. Material related to the scheme is spread throughout many of the museum’s small personal archives of railway workers, much of which has never been researched before. The collection also includes objects, such as tiaras, a ceremonial gown, and the chain of office passed from one Queen to the next at their ‘coronation’ at the Railway Carnival in Manchester each year. There is ample scope for the student to take the project further – utilising the Trade Union collections at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick, for example, or online newspaper and film archive resources, or oral histories.
Leading questions could include:
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What were the backgrounds, functions, and trajectories of the Railway Queens?
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In what ways, and with what consequences, were these young women imagined and promoted, nationally and internationally, as the face of a heavily male-dominated industry?
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To what extent –and how — did the Queens forge their own public identities amid competing corporate, social and familial influences?
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What can the Railway Queens and their surrounding culture of celebration and celebrity tell us about the nature and use of pageantry in industrial, local and national contexts in this period?
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To what extent did their experiences intersect with contemporary debates about the place of women in society? Did — for instance — the enfranchisement of women, the changing division of labour before and after WW2, and the rise of second wave feminism post-war, change the meanings of the Railway Queens or the experiences of the women themselves?
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How can the NRM reflect upon, and refresh, the stories it tells about women?
This PhD would suit an excellently qualified student with an interest in any of the following areas: Gender and Class, twentieth-century British history, women’s history, celebrity cultures, industry and industrial relations, oral narratives, working-class girlhood, museums and archives, images of women, pageantry, leisure and work, public engagement.
This PhD opportunity comes at an exciting time in the development of the National Railway Museum, York. The NRM is currently developing its new Masterplan and the successful applicant will have the opportunity to participate in the radical overhaul of the Museum’s offering.
Financial support and eligibility
Full-time AHRC Competition Studentships for doctoral research are 3 years in duration (or 5-6 years part time). Awards are subject to satisfactory academic progress. Awards must be taken up in October 2019. No deferrals are possible. Awards will comprise UK/EU fees at Research Council rates and, for eligible students, a maintenance grant (£14,777 in 2017/8).
Applicants should have a strong academic record, including a Distinction (or equivalent) at Masters level in a relevant discipline
Please note that all applicants should meet the AHRC’s academic criteria and residency requirements (http://wrocah.ac.uk/new-student/2019-cda/).
How to apply
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Before applying for any WRoCAH Studentship, please first ensure that you have read the WRoCAH webpages about Collaborative Doctoral Awards, the WRoCAH training programme and requirements |
Please note that the selection of Collaborative Doctoral Award applicants is a two stage process:
STAGE 1
Expressions of interest should be sent to Dr Trev Broughton by 7 December 2018.
Deadline for STAGE 1 applications
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7 December 2018 |
Date of interviews
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13 December 2018 |
STAGE 2
Apply for funding to WRoCAH
Candidates selected after Stage 1 then liaise with the project supervisory team to submit a WRoCAH studentship application via the WRoCAH online application form by the 5pm on Wednesday 23 January 2019 deadline.
NB: Candidates who have been unsuccessful in Stage 1 can submit a separate WRoCAH application as a non-CDA applicant.
For more information about this project contact
Dr Trev Broughton (trev.broughton@york.ac.uk)
Dr Oli Betts (oliver.betts@railwaymuseum.org.uk)
Karen Baker (karen.baker@railwaymuseum.org.uk).
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Deadline for Registration December 4, 2018
Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life-Writing
Symposium Friday, 7 December 2018, 9.30 – 17.00 Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
09.30 – 10.00 Welcome with coffee/tea
10.00 – 11.00 Opening keynote address
Prof. dr. Ann Phoenix, University College London
“Changing life stories? The place of intersectionality in narratives of transnational lives”
Introduction: Prof. dr. Sawitri Saharso, University of Humanistic Studies Utrecht; Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Respondent: Dr. Katrine Smiet, Utrecht University
Chair: Prof. dr. Susan Legêne, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
11.00 – 11.30 Research pitches
Prof. dr. Giles Scott-Smith, Leiden University
Yvette Kopijn, University of Amsterdam
Widya Fitria Ningsih, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
11.30 – 12.00 Coffee/tea
12.00 – 13.00 Prof. dr. Ismee Tames, Utrecht University and NIOD Amsterdam, “’For our freedom and yours’: Transnational resistance against fascism, 1936-1948”
Respondent: Dr. Marleen Rensen, University of Amsterdam
13.00 – 13.30 Lunch and poster presentations
13.30 – 14.30 Dr. Pia Wiegmink, Obama Institute for Transnational American Studies, University of Mainz: “Mobility, belonging, and antislavery critique in antebellum African American women’s travel accounts“
Respondent: Dr. Marijke Huisman, Utrecht University
14.30 – 15.30 Dr. Leonieke Vermeer, Groningen University: “Little crosses in the margins. Self-censoring in diaries as international practice”
Respondent: Dr. Ernestine Köhne-Hoegen, independent researcher
15.30 – 16.00 Coffee/tea
16.00 – 17.00 Panel Discussion: Transnational Celebrities
Dr. Jaap Kooijman, University of Amsterdam: “Not just a country, but an idea: Bono’s promotion of the American Dream”
Dr. Dennis Kersten, Radboud University: “There’s a place in Beatle biofiction: John Lennon’s Irish odyssey in Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone.”
Dr. Gaston Franssen, University of Amsterdam: “Geert Wilders as a transnational celebrity politician.”
Respondents:
Lonneke Geerlings, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Prof. dr. Maaike Meijer, biographer and emerita professor Maastricht University
Dr. Anneke Ribberink, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Chair: Prof. dr. Diederik Oostdijk, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Venue: Campus Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, OZW Building, De Boelelaan 1109 (the rounded, red-brick building next to the Main Building)
Room 6A01 (6th floor)
Free of charge but please register before 4 December 2018 by sending an e-mail to b.boter@vu.nl
Dr. Babs Boter
Lecturer in American and English Literature , Department of Language, Literature, and Communication
Faculty of Humanities
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Deadline for Submissions December 1, 2018
Call for Papers: Comparative Lenses:
Video Testimonies of Survivors and Eyewitnesses on Genocide and Mass Violence
The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention, Yahad – In Unum, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, and the AGBU Nubar Library are organizing an international interdisciplinary conference on the scholarly uses of video testimonies for understanding genocide and mass violence. The conference will be held in Paris on June 6th and 7th 2019.
The conference
Victim testimony as a source for the study of genocide and mass violence has been the subject of longstanding debate in the social sciences and humanities, especially among historians. This conference aims to deepen the discussion by inviting participants to present on three areas of focus:
1. video testimonies collected from the late 1970s up to the present-day
2. video testimonies of victims as well as eyewitnesses
3. video testimonies documenting the Holocaust and other mass atrocities
The history, philosophy, technical features, as well as the pedagogical and scientific uses of some of the most substantial collections of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors have already been explored. Such is the case for the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies and the oral history collection of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and even more so for the Visual History Archive, whose testimonies on the Holocaust are now being increasingly searched and analyzed.
Since the 2000s new collections of video testimonies of Holocaust survivors have been created. Several video testimony projects have been undertaken outside the United States as well. The origin, methodology, goals, and potential uses of such new collections of video testimonies have yet to be explored.
Moreover, research and documentation that take into account not only the perspectives of victims but those of eyewitnesses to violence has expanded. Such scholarship has broadened our understanding of the crimes perpetrated in Eastern Europe during the Second World War. Nevertheless, few scholars have addressed the benefits and limits of conducting research on the video testimonies of witnesses to mass violence, such as the ones interviewed by Yahad – In Unum.
The scholarly value of the video testimonies of the Visual History Archive and other collections documenting crimes other than the destruction of European Jewry (for example, those crimes committed during the Second World War against the Sinti and Roma and homosexuals or the atrocities in the former Ottoman Empire, Rwanda, Nanjing, Guatemala and in the Central African Republic) have been, for their part, little analyzed and merit careful scholarly treatment.
The goal of this conference, then, is to deepen our understanding of video testimonies documenting genocide and mass violence by exploring the following questions:
What are the challenges of collecting testimonies on genocide and mass violence? To what extent have technological advances altered the recording and subsequent exploitation of video testimonies? How has collecting video testimonies on genocide and mass violence changed the categorization and scope of the witnesses and their narratives about genocide and mass violence? Do we need a new lexicon to convey the scope of all the perspectives and points of view on genocide and mass violence?
What are the characteristics of the collections of existing video testimonies of genocide and mass violence? What is their scholarly, technical, and memorial potential? The Visual History Archive, due to its wide accessibility and enormous scope, is prominent among the corpus of Holocaust testimonies, but to what extent is it also a relevant source for the study of the other crimes that it documents?
What insights do video testimonies of victims and eyewitnesses contribute to documenting and understanding the Holocaust and other crimes? What are the possibilities and what are the limitations of video as a medium compared to other media used to record testimony? What do we gain by analyzing video testimony through the lens of different theoretical approaches, such as comparative history, histoire croisée, or multidirectional memory?
We welcome proposals from scholars in any discipline who seek to examine such questions about video testimonies and mass violence. Papers focusing on video testimonies that have so far received little scholarly attention are particularly welcome.
Organizing committee: Patrice Bensimon (YIU), Caitlin Bertin-Mahieux (AUP), Constance Pâris de Bollardière (AUP), Brian Schiff (AUP)
Scientific committee: Boris Adjemian (AGBU Nubar Library), Patrice Bensimon (YIU), Michal Chojak (YIU), Alexandra Garbarini (Williams College), Wolf Gruner (USC), Constance Pâris de Bollardière (AUP), Brian Schiff (AUP)
Application procedure
Papers and proposals can be submitted in English or French. Applications for grants for speakers from outside the Parisian region will be considered.
Proposals for presentations must include an abstract (no more than 500 words) and a short biography (no more than 250 words) and be sent to schaeffercenter@aup.edu and p.bensimon@yahadinunum.org by December 1, 2018.
Letters of acceptance will go out in January 2019.
For questions about the conference, please contact us at schaeffercenter@aup.edu and p.bensimon@yahadinunum.org.
The organizers
Founded in 2016 at the American University of Paris, the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention is dedicated to addressing some of the most pressing problems of our times, notably, the following: (1) understanding the social, historical, and cultural dimensions that lead to the systematic destruction of human groups; and (2) devising innovative strategies for resolving and deterring mass violence and the violation of human rights. One of the Center’s assets is access to the complete Visual History Archive, which it makes available to researchers, students and public.
Yahad – In Unum identifies the execution sites of Jews during the Second World War, records and films the testimonies from witnesses of these massacres. To this day, Yahad has led research on 2,447 execution sites and has gathered 5,958 testimonies in eight countries (the Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Romania, Moldavia, Lithuania and the Republic of Macedonia). These testimonies of eyewitnesses provide a new historical source shedding light on the specificity of the genocide at the local level. Following its original interview methodology of witnesses to the Holocaust, Yahad has started the collecting of testimonies of Maya victims of the armed conflict in Guatemala (118 to date) and of Yezidi victims of Isis in Iraq and Syria.
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, founded in 2014, is the research and scholarship unit of the USC Shoah Foundation. The Center is dedicated to advancing new areas of interdisciplinary research on the Holocaust and other genocides, while promoting the scholarly use of the 55,000 video testimonies of the Holocaust, the Armenian, Guatemalan, Rwandan and Cambodian genocide, the Nanjing massacres and other historical and current mass atrocities in the Visual History Archive. The Center organizes annual international conferences, hosts a speaker series on genocide and mass violence, and offers a competitive international research fellowship program.
The AGBU Nubar Library was founded in Paris in 1928. Its first director, Aram Andonian, had been one of the few survivors among the leading Armenian intellectuals and notables arrested by the Ottoman authorities on 24 April 1915. He dedicated the rest of his life to documenting the Armenian genocide, by gathering a great number of materials into a major archive. Conceived as a home for Armenian and Oriental studies, in a context marked by the destruction and dispersal of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire after the genocide, the Nubar Library has been assigned the role of preserving the memory and heritage of Ottoman Armenians and has made a major contribution to the historiography of the Armenian genocide. The Library, the sole major archive in Europe of its type, contributes to the shedding of light on the nineteenth and twentieth century Armenian experience and serves as a hub providing unfettered access to researchers, academics and others.
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The George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention
The American University of Paris
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Deadline for Proposals, December 1, 2018
CALL FOR PAPERS
“Lives in Transition: Negotiating the Currents in a Changing World”
The 4th Biennial Conference of the IABA Americas Chapter
The Department of Literatures in English
University of the West Indies, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
June 13-15, 2019
The conference conveners invite papers that explore means by which auto/biographical subjects explore lives ‘in transition’ and/or in the process of ‘transitioning.’ How do life narratives explore the kinds of adjustments, challenges, and negotiations made in ‘transitional’ periods? How do we as life narrative scholars, teachers, and practitioners metabolize and incorporate ideas of transitioning in our approaches to our respective disciplines and methodologies?
Possible topics include how these transitions may have been brought on by trauma, natural disasters, wars, referendums and other legislative changes, social policies, scandals, illnesses, medical procedures, body politics, gendered lives, migrations, or the relocations of Indigenous and other communities. We are also interested in papers that explore life, death, kinship, consciousness, and mourning in the ongoing aftermath of violence, which Black cultural studies scholar Christina Sharpe encourages us to imagine, in her work on slavery’s legacies, as living “in the wake.”
Papers addressing all genres of life narratives (written, visual, performed, multimodal, interdisciplinary, digital, etc.) are welcome.
We invite abstracts of 250-300 words accompanied by brief biographies (no more than 100 words) on topics that are not limited to, but may include:
- Citizenship and records
- Refugees, points of entry/departure
- Health, rehabilitation, and recovery
- Rites of passage
- Legislation
- Translation
- Sexuality and advocacy
- Family and generational conflict
- Transgender lives
- Extradition, detention, and deportation
- Embodied politics
- Teaching as transitional tool: methodology, internship, practicum
- Discursive practices: movement, migration and diaspora
- Constructing and deconstructing gender
Please send abstracts and biographies via email to IABAA876@gmail.com by December 1, 2018.
CHAMADA DE TRABALHOS
“Vidas em transição: Conciliando as correntezas em um mundo em mutação”
IV Conferência Bianual da IABA – Sucursal Américas
Departamento de Literaturas – Língua Inglesa
Universidade das Índias Ocidentais, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
13 a 15 de junho de 2019
Os organizadores da conferência convidam à submissão de trabalhos que investiguem as formas através das quais temas auto/biográficos lidam com as vidas “em transição” ou em processo de “transição”. Como as narrativas de vida exploram os tipos de ajustes, desafios e negociações feitos em períodos de “transição”? Como nós, pesquisadores, professores e praticantes de narrativas de vida metabolizamos e incorporamos ideias de transição nas abordagens de nossas respectivas disciplinas e metodologias?
Os possíveis tópicos incluem as formas como essas transições podem ser advindas do trauma, de desastres naturais, guerras, plebiscitos ou outras mudanças legislativas, políticas sociais, escândalos, enfermidades, procedimentos médicos, corpo político, questões de gênero, migrações ou deslocamentos indígenas ou de outras comunidades. Estamos também interessados em trabalhos que explorem temas como a vida, morte, afinidades, consciência e luto como consequência da violência, de acordo com o pensamento da pesquisadora de Estudos Culturais Negros, Christina Sharpe, que nos incentiva a imaginar o viver como um estado de vigília, assim como ilustrado em sua pesquisa sobre os legados da escravidão. Serão também aceitos para análise temas como manifestações de triunfos políticos ou pessoais, conquistas e celebrações.
Trabalhos que lidem com quaisquer formas de narrativas de vida (escrita, visual, performática, multimodal, interdisciplinar, digital, etc.) serão bem-vindos.
Convidamos à submissão de resumos de 250 a 300 palavras, juntamente com uma breve biografia (no máximo 100 palavras), sobre os seguintes tópicos, mas não limitados a eles:
Cidadania e registros
Refugiados, pontos de entrada e saída
Saúde, reabilitação e recuperação
Ritos de passagem
Legislação
Tecnologias de transição
Sexualidade e militância
Família e conflitos geracionais
Vidas transgêneras
Políticas do corpo/no corpo
Ensino como um instrumento de transição: metodologia, estágios e prática
Práticas discursivas: movimento, migração e diáspora
Construindo e desconstruindo o gênero
Favor enviar resumos e biografias por e-mail para IABAA876@gmail.com até 1 de dezembro de 2018.
Translated by Sergio da Silva Barcellos
Convocatoria de propuestas
“Vidas en transición: Negociando cambios en un mundo cambiante”
4 Conferencia Bienal del Capítulo Americano IABA
Departamento de Literaturas en Lengua Inglesa
Universidad de las Indias Occidentales, Mona
Kingston, Jamaica
Junio 13-15, 2019
Los organizadores de la conferencia convocan propuestas que estudien los métodos usados por sujetos auto/biográficos para explorar sus vidas ‘en transición’ y/o procesos de ‘transición.’ ¿Cómo se exploran este tipo de cambios, retos, y negociaciones hechas en periodos de transición a través de narrativas de vida? ¿Cómo podemos metabolizar e incorporar ideas de transición en nuestras respectivas disciplinas y metodologías como investigadores, profesores y escritores de auto/biografía?
Posibles temas incluyen el estudio de los procesos que causan estas transiciones, como traumas, desastres naturales, guerras, referéndums y otros cambios legislativos, leyes sociales, escándalos, enfermedades, procedimientos médicos, políticas del cuerpo, vidas de género, migraciones, o traslados de comunidades indígenas u otras comunidades. También estamos interesados en propuestas que exploren la vida, muerte, afinidad, consciencia, y luto en secuelas de violencia siguiendo a la investigadora de estudios culturales afroamericanos, Christina Sharpe, quien nos anima a imaginar estas repercusiones como vivas, “en vigilia.”
Se invita a enviar propuestas que aborden todos los géneros de narrativas de vida (escritas, visuales, teatrales, multimodales, interdisciplinarias, digitales, etc). Por favor, envíe resúmenes de propuestas de 250-300 palabras acompañadas de una breve biografía (100 palabras máximo) relacionadas con los siguientes temas:
- Ciudadanía y registros civiles
- Refugiados, puntos de entrada y salida
- Salud, rehabilitación y recuperación
- Ritos de paso
- Legislación
- Traducción
- Sexualidad y derechos
- Familia y conflictos generacionales
- Vidas transgénero
- Extradición, detención y deportación
- Políticas encarnadas
- Enseñanza como técnica transicional: metodología, periodos de prácticas
- Prácticas discursivas: movimiento, migración y diáspora.
- Construcción y deconstrucción de género
Favor de enviar propuestas y biografías por correo electrónico a IABAA876@gmail.com.
Plazo de recepción de propuestas: 1 de diciembre de 2018
Translated by Ana Roncero-Bellido
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Deadline for Proposals December 1, 2018
Sex and Journalism: Beyond the ‘Dirty Dons’ and Randy Royals’ Syndrome
Edited by Sue Joseph and Richard Lance Keeble
Paradoxically, while sex is everywhere in the media the research into the coverage of sexuality by journalists hardly exists. A vast body of work considers gender issues (stereotyping, discrimination, the ‘male gaze’, male/female presence in media organisations, strategies for promoting equality etc). But the media’s handling of issues relating to sexuality (consensual intercourse; heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality; feelings about our bodies; sexual feelings, thoughts, fantasies, experiences; prostitution; rape; nudity) is almost totally ignored by the academy.
The text aims to be international in focus – and incorporate studies of both print (corporate and alternative; online and off-line) and broadcasting. Topics in this innovative and important text could include:
- Titillation and sleaze: The tabloid media’s handling of political sex scandals.
- The ethics of covering sex trafficking.
- How the media handles disability and sexuality.
- The activist media’s handling of lesbian/bisexuality issues in Muslim countries.
- Critical studies of the reporting of rape as an instrument of war; sex tourism in Asia; prostitution in Peru etc.
- Analysis of sex advice columns/explicit sex confessional blogs.
- Orwell’s essay on the sexy seaside postcards of Donald McGill.
- Angela Carter’s exploration of sexual issues in her journalism.
- Sex and humour in the media.
- Playboy and the myths of masculinity.
- Social media’s ‘sextalk’.
The text is likely to be published by Bite-Sized Books, London (https://www.bite-sizedbooks.com/). It publishes books (paperback and on Kindle) of around 24,000 words for just over £4. The idea is that their shortness means that they are actually read! So we are looking for tightly written, lively, original chapters. All articles will be rigorously peer-reviewed.
Abstracts of 100 words should be sent to Richard Lance Keeble (rkeeble@lincoln.ac.uk) and Sue Joseph (sue.joseph@uts.edu.au) by 1 December 2018. Chapters, of 3,000 words (including references) will be required by 1 May – with publication later in 2019.
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Deadline for Proposals: November 30, 2018
Un)Like
Intermedia Portraying Practices, c. 1700 to the Present
CLWR/CESK
The Centre for Life-Writing Research & The Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King’s King’s College London
3 May 2019
Portraiture and life-writing have long been understood as genres that, for all their differences, share key concepts. As both genres are concerned with the individual figure, they rely on particularities and specificities, on telling events and characteristic anecdotes and, most importantly, on a representative depiction of the subject in question which was similar or like. Resemblance, similarity, likeness – these were the terms by which works were judged. A letter to the Daily Gazetteer remarked in 1742: ‘I think it is agreed on all Hands that in Biography, as it is in Portrait Painting, a Likeness is to be preserved, if we would give satisfaction in either Science.’ Importantly (and to complicate the study of likeness), the media concerned with likeness were likewise considered to be alike. The art theorist Jonathan Richardson famously wrote in 1715: ‘to sit for one’s Portrait is like to have an Abstract of one’s Life written and published, and to have one consigned over to Honour or Infamy’. Richardson referred to the long tradition of inter- or multi-media portraying and life-writing practices, the linking of literary with visual portraits for mutual benefit and the reciprocal bolstering of genres by providing additional information or another perspective. Next to resemblance and medial proximity, Richardson introduces a third aspect: appreciation or emotional response to portraits and biographies. Samuel Johnson would later write in the Idler no. 45 (1759) that ‘Every man is always present to himself, and has, therefore, little need of his own resemblance; nor can he desire it, but for the sake of those whom he loves, and by whom he hopes to be remembered’. Likeness, it appears, therefore intersects with the representation’s potential to make a person not only like, but also likeable, to have third parties appreciate both the individuals and their representations. This notion of recognition – understood as identification – being closely linked with respect and social approval still shows in such phenomena as Facebook and Instagram, where ‘to like’ equals acceptance, affirmation, or recommendation, signalling approval of the online persona.
This one-day workshop on 3 May 2019 seeks to address the different layers of likeness – resemblance, multimediality, appreciation – in portraits and life-writing in Europe since the beginning of the eighteenth century. We welcome studies on established genres but we are particularly interested in papers that explore hybrid, informal or unusual portraying practices while considering their socio-historic implications.
Topics may include:
‘portraying’ as a multimedia concept
portraiture negotiations and portraits as negotiations
the notion of ‘character’ and ‘the self’ in different media
the role of character sketches, descriptions of persons, and drawings in social interaction and the public sphere
the ‘good likeness’ and adjacent terms and concepts
recognition, appreciation, sympathy, affection, or antipathy in discourses on likeness reversing concepts: unlikeness, dissimilarity, difference, dislike
economies of production
portraiture in paratexts
publicity, celebrity and portraying
Proposals that draw on materials from the King’s College London/Royal Archives collaboration Georgian Papers Programme (http://georgianpapersprogramme.com/) are especially welcome.
We look forward to receiving abstracts (c. 300 words) for papers not exceeding 20 minutes or proposals for preformed panels and a brief academic bio by 30 November 2018. Contributors will be notified by December 15, 2018. Please direct your proposals and any enquiries to pahl@mpib-berlin.mpg.de.
Convenors:
Professor Clare Brant
Co-Director, Centre for Life-Writing Research King’s College London
Department of English
22 Kingsway
London WC2B 6LE
Kerstin Maria Pahl
Max Planck Institute for Human Development Lentzeallee 94
14195 Berlin
Germany
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Deadline for Proposals November 30, 2018
Portrayals of the Bride in Screen, Stage and Literary Productions, and Pop Culture Narratives.
This call is for abstracts for an international edited collection entitled Portrayals of the Bride in Screen, Stage and Literary Productions, and Pop Culture Narratives.
To whatever degree, every culture in the world is different to all others. Yet one figure that consistently features in almost every culture is the bride. The bride is a central figure in the wedding ceremony, a ritual that symbolizes the psychological and real foundation of marriage or committed union and expresses both the promise of happiness, security, safety, protection, and peace and unity in the home and the most exalted aspects of frith—the sanctity of the unionized state and human life. From antiquity to the present, brides feature in stories, witticisms, anecdotes, jokes and in both high and low culture. The concept of the bride symbolizes the promise of renewal and growth of the family and is an important part of social and cultural history and ritual in all societies, world-wide, yet it would seem that there are no published academic books on portrayals of the bride from the angle suggested in this cfp.
It can be said that in any culture, the role of the bride differs to that of a wife. The act of becoming and being a bride is also vastly different to being a wife. This collection will reveal how the bride, and how the actual and the social and cultural realities of the role of the bride, are perceived in the popular and social culture of various cultures, as represented in screen, stage, and literary productions and pop culture narratives (including zines and comics).
Questions that could be addressed may include but are not limited to:
- What are the cultural and social duties of the bride, what are the cultural expectations, what are the realities, and what are some of the ways in which the bride is portrayed in the popular/social culture of a particular culture/society? Are there differences or sameness between the fictionalized portrayals and the realities and social dictates of that culture?
- How might the bride be viewed in a given culture? How do class, ethnicity, culture, race, gender, and possibly history, shape these representations?
- Are there cultural or socially historical antecedents for consideration of portrayals of the bride in popular/social culture, as screen, stage, and literary productions and pop culture narratives?
- How is the bride portrayed in pop culture narratives, and what are the underlying cultural, historical, or production motivations in each case?
- What are the distinctions between how the bride has been typically represented in wedding jokes and anecdotes, and in other forms in popular and social culture, such as screen, stage, and literary productions and pop culture narratives of various cultures?
- How often, if at all, are these portrayals told from the point-of-view of the bride herself?
This collection of scholarly essays will make an intervention in the field. It will be the first of its kind to explore whether or not there are characteristic features and definitions within the portrayals of the bride in popular culture; to document and record how our western and non-western societies perceive and represent the socially and culturally important figure of the bride in screen, stage, and literary works and pop culture narratives; to indicate if there is agreement or difference between the various cultures on how the figure of the bride is represented in popular-culture to the viewing/reading audiences; to establish a new and dynamic area of theoretical research in social history, gender studies, familial studies, cultural and social studies, behavioral studies, women’s studies, and the humanities in general; to point the way to possible future work in an ever-expanding field of cross-disciplinary fields through examining various portrayals of the bride in popular culture; and to permit scholarly consideration of the extent to which writers of screen, stage, literature and pop culture narratives establish popular representations of a figure who is an intrinsic part of every culture as a whole.
Submission Instructions:
Abstracts should be written in English, no more than 1000 words in total, excluding the references list and the keywords. At the top of your abstract, after the word “Keywords,” please add five keywords for your abstract.
Full-length chapters (of no more than 6000 words each, including notes but excluding references lists) will be solicited from these abstracts. The abstracts should carry the same title as intended for a full-length chapter.
Please use Times New Roman, point 12, 1.5 spacing. Fully reference all work in-text and in a Reference list.
Use the Chicago Manual of Style 16th Edition (with in-text parenthetical referencing and a References list at end of document).
Use endnotes not footnotes, use counting numbers not Roman numerals, and keep the endnotes to a bare minimum, but work the information into the text where possible.
At the same time as submitting your abstract, please include a short biographical note with your covering letter, and give your affiliation, and your contact details, and include your c.v. These may be attached to your abstract. No need to send separate documents.
Papers should be forwarded to:
Jo Parnell Jo.Parnell@newcastle.edu.au alternatively annette.parnell@newcastle.edu.au or joandbobparnell@bigpond.com
Deadline for abstracts: 30 November 2018.
Editor: Dr Jo Parnell, Conjoint Research Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Science, Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle, Australia.
Deadline for Abstracts November 18, 2018
Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies: Subaltern Women’s Narratives
Abstract length: 200 words
Abstract submission deadline: November 18, 2018
The edited collection is entitled Strident Voices, Dissenting Bodies: Subaltern Women’s Narratives. It will bring together scholarship that explores marginalised women’s narratives of resistance and subversion. The focus is two-fold: to look at the lived experiences of women as they negotiate their lives in a world of political flux and conflicts; and to examine women’s dissenting practices as recorded in texts and archives. The collection will not be limited to a gendered (re)reading of alternative historical narratives, but will rather rethink newer definitions for resistance and subversion. At its core, this collection will explore intersections of gender, race, and place. It will push the boundaries of scholarship on decolonial and postcolonial feminism and subaltern studies, reading women’s subversive practices especially in the categories of:
- displacement and migration
- silences
- representation and re-presentation
- bodies and sexualities
- identity
We are looking for contributions from scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences who work on these and related areas. The collection is aimed for ‘Dissident Feminisms’ series published by University of Illinois Press.
Selected abstracts will be notified by the end of November 2018, and full chapters should be submitted by March 31, 2019. Complete chapter lengths should be between 6000—7000 words.
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Deadline for Proposals, November 30, 2018
International conference on the occasion
of the 10th anniversary of the Polish Oral History Association
Oral History in Action
Poland, Cracow, March 28-30, 2019
Polish Oral History Association (PTHM), established in 2009 in Krakow, brings together people and the circles that use oral history in their work in various areas of academic, cultural or social life. On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the POHA, together with the Institute of History of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and the Wrocław “Remembrance and Future” Centre, we would like to invite you to take part in the international conference Oral History in Action, that will take place in Krakow on 28-30 March 2019.
The history of oral history started from practise of first recorded interviews. Therefore, oral history, like no other branch of the humanities, is intrinsically linked to social, civic or interpersonal engagement of an oral historian and oral history itself. Because of that we would like to pose a question whether oral history do (or should do) change social reality: for good or for bad, intentionally or accidentally? Reflection about that engagement, its characteristics, problems and consequences, especially in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, is located in the centre of the conference’s topic. Profiting from the transdisciplinary character of oral history, we hope that our meeting in Krakow will create a space for confrontation and discussion about different approaches to oral history presented by the academia, museums and other cultural institutions, or by NGOs. We are convinced that this multitude character of oral history in historiography, sociology, anthropology, psychology etc., as well as in our contemporary (digital) culture and public life, is both the biggest chance and main challenge for oral historians and their discipline.
We are seeking for papers reflecting oral history as an activity and considering its consequences, touching at least one of the following topics:
- oral history in contemporary social sciences and humanities: innovative projects and approaches, interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary character as an epistemological challenge;
- practical and conceptual challenges of doing oral history in minority groups (e.g. discriminated, advanced aged etc.)
- oral history as a public history: local, national and international level;
- oral history and politics, or political dimension of practising and promoting oral history;
- oral history as a tool of intentional social change vs. researcher’s neutrality: epistemological and ethical dilemmas;
- oral history as a formof social and communal activity;
- oral history as a form of therapy;
- place of oral history in theory and practise of contemporary museums and NGOs;
- interviewees in the education projects: aims, forms and limits of engagement;
- new media and oral history: usage and abusage of memories in the Internet;
- legal problems of doing oral history.
To apply with a paper please send an abstract in English (approx. 300 words) along with your presentation title and your short bio to: oralhistoryinaction@pthm.pl
Deadline for submissions: 30 November 2018.
The list of the chosen participants will be announced on 20 December 2018.
There is no fee for taking part in the conference. Chosen texts will be published in peer-reviewed journal “Wrocław Yearbook of Oral History”(https://wrhm.pl/wrhm/about).
Organisers:
Polish Oral History Association
Institute of History, Jagiellonian University in Krakow
The “Remembrance and Future” Centre in Wrocław
Partners:
Fundacja “Dobra Wola”
The honorary committee:
Zbigniew Gluza (The Karta Center in Warsaw)
Professor Kaja Kaźmierska (Institute of Sociology, University of Łódź)
Dr hab. Grażyna Kubica-Heller (Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow)
Dr Wojciech Kucharski (The “Remembrance and Future” Centre in Wroclaw)
Tomasz Pietrasiewicz (The “Grodzka Gate ‐ NN Theatre” Centre in Lublin
Organising committee:
Katarzyna Bock-Matuszyk, Alina Doboszewska, Jakub Gałęziowski, Marcin Jarząbek, Dobrochna Kałwa, Wiktoria Kudela-Świątek, Agata Stolarz, Karolina Żłobecka
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Deadline for Applications: November 15, 2018
Character Assassination and Populism: Challenges and Responses
Character assassination (CA) is the deliberate destruction of an individual’s reputation. This is a timeless phenomenon that appears in many shapes and forms in every cultural, political, and technological epoch. Various CA practices such as lies, insinuations and ridicule have been effective means of persuasion and influence in power struggles for centuries.
As a field of scholarship, the study of character assassination has been experiencing a remarkable academic renaissance. An increased academic interest in the issue led to the formation of the Research Lab for Character Assassination and Reputation Politics (CARP), hosted at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. CARP’s inaugural conference, dedicated to the theory and practice of character assassination and reputation management, was held at George Mason University in March 2017.
One primary characteristic of today’s global society is the growing public distrust in many traditional authorities, including political institutions and the mass media. In the context of institutional legitimacy crisis, there is a great demand for new voices to trust. These changes provide opportunities for populists and charismatic opinion leaders of all kinds to promote their agendas and influence public opinion. There is no generally accepted definition of populism, but a claim to speak for “the people” against a corrupt “elite”, a preoccupation with national identity, and a preference for emotional appeals over rational arguments are often counted among its key characteristics.
Populists frequently use character attacks strategically to shock their audiences and steal the media spotlight. Their inflammatory rhetoric conjures political ratings, generates hype, and manipulates public consensus. Populist persuasion practices are directly related to social judgment formation and may distract people from deliberating on alternative and relevant campaign arguments. Importantly, populist politicians become primary newsmakers for clickbait content in the media that proliferates personal opinions, falsehoods, and unwarranted ad hominem attacks. Belligerent rhetoric also normalizes the culture of incivility which has negative consequences for civil debate in a well-functioning democracy.
We invite scholars to submit research and works in progress which will discuss character assassination and populism from a variety of disciplinary and cultural angles. We welcome both theoretical work and case studies.
Suggested Topics:
- CA and populism in a historical perspective;
- Belligerent populist rhetoric and hate speech;
- Populist psychology, charisma, and underlying conditions;
- Populist persuasion and impression management;
- Political incivility and polarization issues;
- Ad hominem attacks in political debate;
- Framing wars in policy debate;
- CA and mediated public scandals;
- CA and information warfare in international relations;
- Character attacks on science and scientists;
- Personalization and infotainment issues in mass media;
- Memes, caricatures, and visual distortion online;
- CA, image repair, and inoculation strategies;
- CA as strategic deception and deliberate misinformation;
- Legal aspects of libel, slander, and defamation.
Please submit a 250-word abstract of your paper by 15 November 2018 at the latest. Email the abstract as an attachment to Sergei A. Samoilenko at ssamoyle@gmu.edu
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Deadline for Applications: November 15, 2018
Position Open: SNS Social Media (Twitter and Facebook) Coordinator – Volunteer (11/15/2018)
The International Auto/Biography Association Students and New Scholars Network is looking for someone to take our social media game to the next level.
We are a network of emerging scholars and artists whose work is dedicated to auto/biography and its study. We regularly publish diverse, original, scholarly, and creative content on our website–https://iabasns.wordpress.com/. We need someone to help us promote our content, but more importantly, to make sure that our audience know about key events and conversations they may be interested in. This is a volunteer position and would suit someone who is keen to contribute to the life writing community via social media.
The social media coordinator would be responsible for:
- Liaising with SNS coordinators and website managers
- Sharing announcements about IABA SNS original essays and events
- Regularly sharing posts that can be of interest to emerging and established life writing scholars and artists
- Livetweet life writing events and conferences you are attending
Ideally, we’re looking for someone who is:
- Keen to contribute to the life writing community
- Social media savvy and Facebook- and Twitter-active
- Creative
- Organised and self-motivated
- A good collaborator
If you think this position would suit you, please send us an email with the following info:
- Your name, institution, and contact details
- A bit about you: brief descriptions of your research interests and current projects, your interests in life writing, and your current career stage (Masters, PhD, Early Career Researcher, etc)
- Your reasons for desiring this position and what you will bring to it
- Your approximate start date, and how long you anticipate dedicating to this work (in terms of duration – 6 months, year, two years)
IABA SNS work is performed on a voluntary basis and we do not want it to become a burdensome service task. As social media coordinator you will manage your schedule and workload. We are happy to consider collaborative applications. Applications should be sent to iabasnsnetwork@gmail.com by November 15, 2018.
We look forward to hearing from you!
Sophia Brown, Orly Lael Netzer, and Valerie O’Brien
IABA SNS Site Coordinators
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Call for Entries, Biography Annual Annotated Bibliography of Lifewriting (11/5)
Dear IABA List Members,
We are working on our annual annotated bibliography of critical and theoretical work on Life Writing, and before finalizing it, we want to make sure it is as timely, inclusive, and extensive as possible.
So if during the last year (from November 2017 to December 2018) you have published, edited, or co-edited a book, written an article for a journal or an essay for an edited collection, or completed your doctoral dissertation, we would appreciate having that information, so that we can incorporate it into the list. (There is of course a very good chance that we have already included it–we work on this all year!–but this will make sure your work is noted.)
We would request the following information:
- Full bibliographic information for each text, formatted as per MLA 8
- A one-sentence annotation per text
We are especially committed to noting publications in languages other than English. If you could provide a translation of the annotation, however, that would be helpful.
We would appreciate getting the information by Monday, November 5. Please send your information to Aiko Yamashiro (aikoy@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!
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Deadline for Applications, November 9, 2018
2nd Global Conference: The End of Life Experience – Dying, Death and Culture in the 21st Century
Saturday 13th April 2019 to Sunday 14th April 2019
Bruges, Belgium
Join us for a fast-paced, interdisciplinary fueled two days of learning, sharing and connection as we engage with one another, across disciplines, practices and professions to transform the end of life into a person-centered experience.
This inclusive interdisciplinary conference explores dying and death and the ways culture impacts care for the dying, the overall experience of dying, and how the dead are remembered. Culture not only presents and portrays ideas about “a good death” and norms that seek to achieve it, culture also operates as both a vehicle and medium through which meaning about death is communicated and understood. Sadly, too, culture sometimes facilitates death through violence.
Given the location of this year’s conference, a central theme in our proceedings (augmenting those listed below) will involve tracing on-going and profound shifts in contemporary attitudes toward death. Hospices or almshouses (in Dutch: Godshuizen) are charitable housing that were usually built for needy or elderly people. The initiative often came from crafts organisations or rich individuals ordered their establishment. In Bruges these houses already start to appear in the 14th century. Generally they consist of groups of small, soberly furnished houses that are gathered around an inner courtyard. The houses are usually not more than one story high. Luckily some 40 of those complexes still survive in Bruges today. Most of them still serve a social purpose (as housing for elderly, poor, disabled people,…). Our conference explores these connections, and those between contemporary technologies, social media hubs, and current health care delivery systems that impact current end-of-life issues and decisions, including the experience of bereavement and grief, and particularly how patients, staff, and survivors intersect amidst newly emerging care settings.
We welcome submissions that engage medical, therapeutic, cinematic, historical, ethnographic, ethical, literary, anthropological, philosophical, theological, political, artistic or performance oriented approaches to relationships between death, dying and culture, such as:
~ How might health care systems integrate empathic design principles across the entire spectrum of the end of life experience? ~ How might new technologies offer new propositions for models of care?
~ How might we implement best practices in high-quality, patient-centered care?
~ How do options such as Physician Aid in Dying (sometimes called Physician Assisted Dying) factor into contemporary dying trajectories, and how best might we consider the quality vs. quantity balance?
~ How might cultural, spiritual and traditional belief systems and practices more fully empower our relationship with mortality, both in personal and professional settings?
~ How are cultural attitudes toward death and dying currently depicted across various artistic and media platforms?
We welcome all those who struggle and strive to address questions such as these, and those that seek to analyze, re-imagine and/or improve the end of life experience. Augmenting our rich conversations, our ethos aspires to create essential partnerships that can drive local visions for patient-centered, high-quality care that can help transform the end of life experience in differing geographic environments. To that end, we invite collaboration with organizations and individuals ready to change the conversation about living and dying with a view to forming a publication to engender further collaboration and discussion.
Progressive Connexions also invites papers from caregivers, artists, therapists, theologians, thought leaders, stake holders, medical professionals, entrepreneurs, designers, patients, activists, journalists, policy makers, developers, technologists, and academics from across these and other disciplines that respond to or innovatively (re-)frame any of the following additional core conference themes listed below:
1: Health Care Systems: Patients, Staff, and Institutions
Modern Health Care Delivery Systems and Care for the Dying
Palliative Care
Hospice
Elder Care/Ageing in Place Models
Trauma and Emergency Care
Nursing Homes/Skilled Facilities/Residential Care Facilities for the Elderly (RCFEs)/Assisted Living
Clinical Competencies in Pain Management and Symptom Control
Measurements, Incentives, Regulatory Statutes, and Recommendations
Continuity of Care Across Treatment Settings
Interdisciplinary Care
2: The Caregiver-Patient Relationship
Caregiver’s (Physician’s?) Obligations and Virtues
Medical Paternalism and Respect for the Patient, Autonomy
Truth-Telling/Truth-Hearing
Informed Consent
Medicine in Multicultural Societies
Contested Therapies Within the Physician-Patient Relationship
Conflicts of Interest; Problems of Conscience
Caregiver Stress/Caregiver Burnout/Compassion Fatigue
Being With Someone Who Is Dying
Assessment Challenges/Barriers
3: End-of-Life Issues and Decisions
Defining Death
Organ Transplantation and Organ Donation
The Interplay of Ethical Meta-Principles at the End of Life
Nonmaleficence
Beneficence
Autonomy
Death Anxiety
Choosing Death
Advance Directives/Advance Planning/Physician Order for Life-Sustaining Treatments (POLST)/Do Not Resuscitate
Considering End-of-Life Issues and Decisions and Legislation
4: Relationships Between Death and Culture
Death and the internet
Death and social media
Death and music
Death in literature
Death in film
Death and broadcast media
Death and athletics
Death in comic books
Death and television
Death and radio
Death and print media
Death and popular art / architecture
Death and advertising
Death and consumerism
Our conference is a dynamic convening of design, tech, health care, policy, media, the arts and activist communities committed to generating human-centered, interdisciplinary innovation for the end of life experience.
What to Send
The aim of this interdisciplinary conference and collaborative networking event is to bring people together and encourage creative conversations in the context of a variety of formats: papers, seminars, workshops, storytelling, performances, poster presentations, panels, q&a’s, roundtables etc.
300 word proposals, presentations, abstracts and other forms of contribution and participation should be submitted by Friday 9th November 2018. Other forms of participation should be discussed in advance with the Organising Chair.
All submissions will be minimally double reviewed, under anonymous (blind) conditions, by a global panel drawn from members of the Project Development Team and the Advisory Board. In practice our procedures usually entail that by the time a proposal is accepted, it will have been triple and quadruple reviewed.
You will be notified of the panel’s decision by Friday 23rd November 2018.
If your submission is accepted for the conference, a full draft of your contribution should be submitted by Friday 1st March 2019.
Abstracts and proposals may be in Word, PDF, RTF or Notepad formats with the following information and in this order:
a) author(s), b) affiliation as you would like it to appear in the programme, c) email address, d) title of proposal, e) body of proposal, f) up to 10 keywords.
E-mails should be entitled: End of Life 2 Submission
Where to Send
Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to the Organising Chair and the Project Administrator:
Dr Nate Hinerman: nphinerman@usfca.edu
Project Administrator: brugesendoflife@progressiveconnexions.net
What’s so Special About Progressive Connexions Events?
A fresh, friendly, dynamic format – at Progressive Connexions we are dedicated to breaking away from the stuffy, old-fashion conference formats, where endless presentations are read aloud off PowerPoints. We work to bring you an interactive format, where exchange of experience and information is alternated with captivating workshops, engaging debates and round tables, time set aside for getting to know each other and for discussing common future projects and initiatives, all in a warm, relaxed, egalitarian atmosphere.
A chance to network with international professionals – the beauty of our interdisciplinary events is that they bring together professionals from all over the world and from various fields of activity, all joined together by a shared passion. Not only will the exchange of experience, knowledge and stories be extremely valuable in itself, but we seek to create lasting, ever-growing communities around our projects, which will become a valuable resource for those belonging to them.
A chance to be part of constructing change – There is only one thing we love as much as promoting knowledge: promoting real, lasting social change by encouraging our participants to take collective action, under whichever form is most suited to their needs and expertise (policy proposals, measuring instruments, research projects, educational materials, etc.) We will support all such actions in the aftermath of the event as well, providing a platform for further discussions, advice from the experts on our Project Advisory Team and various other tools and intellectual resources, as needed.
An opportunity to discuss things that matter to you – Our events are not only about discussing how things work in the respective field, but also about how people work in that field – what are the struggles, problems and solutions professionals have found in their line of work, what are the areas where better communication among specialists is needed and how the interdisciplinary approach can help bridge those gaps and help provide answers to questions from specific areas of activity.
An unforgettable experience – When participating in a Progressive Connexions event, there is a good chance you will make some long-time friends. Our group sizes are intimate, our venues are comfortable and relaxing and our event locations are suited to the history and culture of the event.
Ethos
Progressive Connexions believes it is a mark of personal courtesy and professional respect to your colleagues that all delegates should attend for the full duration of the meeting. If you are unable to make this commitment, please do not submit an abstract or proposal for presentation.
Please note: Progressive Connexions is a not-for-profit network and we are not in a position to be able to assist with conference travel or subsistence, nor can we offer discounts off published rates and fees.
Please send all enquiries to: brugesendoflife@progressiveconnexions.net
For further details and information please visit the conference web page: http://www.progressiveconnexions.net/interdisciplinary-projects/health-a…
Sponsored by: Progressive Connexions
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Deadline for Proposals October 26, 2018
CFP: Forms of Migration: An International Conference on Transnational Literature & Innovative Aesthetics
May 2—4, 2019: University of Graz (Graz, Austria)
The Department of American Studies and the Centre for Intermediality Studies at the University of Graz (Graz, Austria), in conjunction with the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), announces a call for papers for an interdisciplinary, transnational conference on contemporary im/migrant literature and innovative aesthetics. Many important texts of the 21st century reflect complex processes of memory, migration, and identity formation from the margins of migrant communities globally. Exciting opportunities exist to integrate im/migrant literature from an interdisciplinary, transnational approach. This conference asks: what narratives are shaping our understanding of the dynamics and identities involved in and around im/migration processes and, more importantly, what forms do these narratives take? Through face-to-face interaction and hands-on work, this conference showcases how innovative literature is not simply abstract expressions of remote concepts, but is directly informed by and informing the material realities that shape human existence. Words have power.
While data driven social science research can inform important public policy debates and affect policy outcomes, such conversations and policy decisions should also consider the cultural values and criticisms expressed in literature and the arts more generally. This conference argues that thoughtful cultural and literary study can help to give voice to the voiceless and can create opportunities to unite, through readership and through a wider circulation of texts, communities which might not otherwise come into contact with each other. This conference’s emphasis on form argues (drawing on scholars such as Jameson, Nussbaum, Sontag, Spivak) that it is also because of form that the arts matter. It is the very materiality of texts and formal qualities of certain stories that impact readers and shape public knowledge. To read about migration and its effects not only through news media or online sources, but also through innovative storytelling creates opportunities for greater empathy, or at least understanding, with diverse audiences of readers. How literature’s formal attributes can bring us, as readers, into powerful experiences that we do not yet know how to name has been theorized variously by many scholars in recent times—as “empathy” by Nussbaum or “affect” by Jameson, for example. Yet by calling attention to what is not yet incorporated into the status quo, such a relationship between a text and its readers prefigures of the possibility of radical historical change, pointing towards the new and the unknown, beyond current forms of social life.
We seek proposals for individual presentations or panels that engage innovative/experimental/avant-garde literature that is transnationally engaged with im/migrant communities, identities, histories, experiences. Although the stated focus of this conference involves im/migrant literatures, we would welcome presentations on transnationalism and aesthetics more broadly conceived.
While work under discussion does not need to be written in English, presentations and discussions will be in English. Perspectives that engage gender studies, queer studies, ethnic studies, critical race theories, transnationalism, postcolonial studies, and disability studies are particularly appreciated. We are especially interested in presentations/panels that propose performance/workshop/discussion/digital interaction/audio-visual-kinesthetic opportunities for audience engagement as part of the presentation. However, traditional paper formats are also welcome.
This conference will also offer include an evening of creative writing readings by select keynote speakers, who are also internationally recognized, practicing writers. All attendees will be invited to this event, which will include a Q&A with the authors. This event will be open to the public.
Possible topics include (but are not limited to):
*transnationalism and aesthetics
*comparative transnationalisms /comparative migration studies and form
*the American ethnic avant-garde
*the experimental novel (20th & 21st c)
*experimental poetry in the late 20th/21st c
*historical roots of current avant-garde movements, expressions
*experimental literature and the question of identity
*language as social artifact in the context of im/migrant communities
*postmodern, experimental, innovative, alternative, avant-garde? questions on terminology and its usefulness for 21st century literature
*cross-genre texts
*narrative forms (narratology)
*literary innovation/experimentation and social movements
*gender & literary innovation
*queer forms: sexuality and experimental texts
*experimental literature as it engages the material realities of race, im/migration processes, postcoloniality, decoloniality, nation, community, geography, etc.
*presses and publication: where does experimental literature come from? who is publishing these texts and why? role of self-publishing?
*experimental form and social media
*digital humanities and its relationship to boundary-defying literature
Please send individual presentation (200 words, suitable for 15-20 minutes) or full panel proposals (incl. panel abstract) along with a short bio statement to Dr. Jennifer A. Reimer (jennifer.reimer@uni-graz.at) by 26 October, 2018.
Questions?Please contact Jennifer Reimer (above) or Prof. Silvia Schultermandl (silvia.schultermandl@uni-graz.at).
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Deadline for Proposals: October 27 , 2018
CFP for Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies Conference 2019, March 21-24 at the Dallas Marriott City Center, on the theme Monuments and Memory.
Submissions due October 27, 2018. I will repost later, when I have a web page with a submission portal. Meanwhile, you may send inquiries to me directly at bnewman@smu.edu, or to INCS2019@smu.edu.
Keynote speakers:
Lauren Goodlad, Professor of English, Rutgers University; Neil Foley, Robert H. and Nancy Dedman Chair in History and Co-Director, Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University.
Ongoing public debate over politically charged public monuments reminds us how much is at stake in the shaping of cultural memory, whether through durable physical structures, portable or reproducible aesthetic works, or discursive representations. How were monumentality and the preservation of the past conceived in the nineteenth century? How might we reconceive our own ways of remembering the nineteenth century? We invite proposals for papers and panels that explore monuments in the broadest sense of the word—those from as well as those about the nineteenth century. We also welcome papers that consider the concepts of monumentality and/or memory as they pertain to humanistic disciplines and engage with nineteenth-century studies. Papers might nominate “monuments” (including scholarly ones) that are overvalued, under-appreciated, or ripe for dismantling; explore works, genres, or forms that encourage remembering; analyze nineteenth-century representations of or discourses about memory or monuments; consider the value of ephemera or the contested return to big ideas via digital means that outstrip human memory and cognition. Other topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
Public monuments
Antiques, relics, and ruins
Monumental texts, paintings, musical compositions
Monuments of conquest and empire
Museums and museum studies
Archives, records and record-keeping
Monuments, mass production and mass consumption
Countermonumentality and antimonumentality
Post-historicist and presentist approaches to the past
Canons and countercanons
Crafting a national history
Crafting global histories
Grands récits and the longue durée
(Monumentally) big ideas
Gaps, silences, and the historical record
Amnesia and repression
Trauma, memory, and forgetting
History painting and the formation of identities
Commemorative music
Pageants, anniversary celebrations, and local histories
People, places, and things remembered and forgotten
Ephemera
Postcards, celebrity photography, and souvenirs
Personal mementos (souvenirs, gift books)
Memory and 19th-century mourning traditions
Nostalgia and cultural myth making
The invention of tradition
Folk art, folk tales, and folk lore
Bodily mementos (tattoos, hair jewelry)
Monuments, gender, and/or sexuality
Memory and aesthetic form
Historical novels
The pastoral
Elegies, tributes, encomiums
Ekphrasis
Victorian medievalism, Victorian neo-classicism
Neo-Victorianism/steampunk as cultural memory
Pre-Raphaelitism
Tableaux vivants
Memorization and repetition
Deadline: October 27, 2018. For individual papers, send 250-word proposals; for panels, send individual proposals plus a 250-word panel description. Please include a one-page CV with your name, affiliation, and email address. Proposals that are interdisciplinary in method or panels that involve multiple disciplines are especially welcome. Send inquiries to INCS2019@smu.edu. For graduate student travel subventions, contact Shalyn Claggett (src173@msstate.edu).
Thank you—
Beth Newman
Southern Methodist University
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Deadline for Submissions November 1, 2018
Captivity Narratives (11/1/2018; 2/23/2019) Albuquerque, USA /Studies for Southwest Popular / American Culture Association
Southwest Popular / American Culture Association 40th Annual Conference
Albuquerque, NM February 20-23, 2019
Hyatt Regency Albuquerque
330 Tijeras
Albuquerque, NM 87102
Phone: 1.505.842.1234
Fax: 1.505.766.6710
Panels are now forming for presentations regarding all aspects (historical, literary, cultural, etc.) of Captivity Narratives. All topics and approaches to the genre are welcomed. Graduate students/future teachers are particularly welcome to participate (with monetary awards for the best graduate student papers) – or to simply register to attend the conference and its captivity narrative panels.
If your work does not focus on captivity narratives in particular but fits within the broad range of areas designated for the upcoming conference on American & popular culture, I still encourage you to participate. Please see the conference’s full list of subject areas (each with its own CFP) at http://southwestpca.org/conference/call-for-papers/
SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories. Submissions of accepted, full papers are due January 1, 2019. For more information, visit http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/
SWPACA also offers travel assistance to graduate and undergraduate students in the form of fellowships. For more information see http://southwestpca.org/conference/graduate-student-awards/
Registration and travel information for the conference is available at http://southwestpca.org/conference/registration/
Submit your abstract by 1 November 2018 at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca
Papers will not be due until the date of the conference.
You will need to create a user account in order to submit your proposal.
Visit http://journaldialogue.org for information about the organization’s new peer reviewed journal Dialogue: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy.
Please pass along this call to friends and colleagues, and feel free to contact the area chair with any questions.
Dr. B. Mark Allen, Captivity Narrative Chair
Associate Professor of History
South Texas College
PO Box 5032
McAllen, TX 78502-5032
Phone: 956-872-2037
Conference website: http://southwestpca.org/ (updated regularly)
Support for registration and payments: support@southwestpca.org
For General Inquiries:
Dr. B. Mark Allen, Captivity Narrative Chair
Associate Professor of History
South Texas College
PO Box 5032
McAllen, TX 78502-5032
Phone: 956-872-2037
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Deadline for Proposals: November 1, 2018
Call for Chapter Contributions about Diary Writing as a Quasi-literary Genre
Call for Chapter Contributions about Diary Writing as a Quasi-literary Genre
Book Title: The Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America
Editor: Angela Hooks, PhD
Purpose: This book focuses on diary writing as a quasi-literary genre that includes autobiography, biography, memoir, correspondence, travel literature, and more. The book will examine the diarist’s text because it speaks the truth of the appearance of things. The diarist’s account is imaginative writing, social and political history. Diary writing includes events that add up to a story with meaning, a theme, and style. Diary writing is creating “real” fictions of one’s self. For the diarist, the diary becomes a transnational space in which an intersection of cultures, languages, and peoples help the diarist understand self and the world they live in.
Joan Didion says in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” that writing in a notebook gets us “closer to the truth” about “how it felt to me” and to remember what it was to be.”
Through the lens of the diary, this book will discuss how diarists, writers, and poets reflect on multiculturalism and intercultural relations. Subjects and themes include identity, language, race, class, culture, gender, religion, sexuality, and nationality of American minorities who use the diary to help them find their own expressive language, explore their identity, and understand themselves, their intimate relationships, and the world around them. Since the diary is an autobiographical text the book will include the study of autobiography, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
For bell hooks, “autobiographical writing was a way for her to evoke the particular experience of growing up southern and black in segregated communities. It was a way to recapture the richness of southern black culture. The need to remember and hold to the legacy of that experience …”
Alice Dunbar-Nelson prefaced her unpublished novel “Confessions of a Lazy Woman” with: A diary is a serious thing; not to be undertaken lightly or to be spoken of in anything but a whisper. If kept in the right spirit, it means a record of things both seen and unseen, all recorded in strictly conscientious fashion? It means, too, that one must crystallize one’s secret thoughts and longings and desires into written words, thereby giving speech to hitherto inarticulaye [sic] voices.
Themes and ideas that could be examined in each chapter include:
- Socioeconomic and political matters in which the diarist lives in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation?
- Diaries that give voice to the identity of the diarist or illustrate a hidden identity.The diary as a confessional through the lens of Foucault: confessions turn both on what can be openly spoken about and what is forbidden to name.
- Diary writing that reflects the shadow self; the women’s voice is unique, different from another woman’s voice and does not conform to the images society creates for them; “a necessary stage in the psychic journey leading to recovery and the restoration of well-being.”
- Cultural authenticity in fictional diaries such as Maya’s Notebook, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and The Golden Notebook.
- The role of the diary as autobiography, a writer’s workshop, a companion, and as a creative space.
- Reading other people’s diaries that have passed from “hand to hand, generation to generation” because the content and purpose are based on terrible urgency or fragments of a life.
- Silence in the diary that causes a discrepancy between diary entries and the diarist’s actual life, and when the diarist is incapable of giving a complete picture of what she has gone through.
- The pages of diaries, journals, and notebooks that illustrate the strength, the resilience, and the resourcefulness of the American black male and female voices including their struggles and their constraints, and their victories and their joys.
- What is private and what is public when it comes to publishing a found diary?
- The legacy of diary keeping in families.
After the book has been conceptualized (after abstracts have been submitted) and proposal completed, I will send to the publisher. I do have an interested academic independent publisher who specializes in the social sciences and humanities.
Book Contribution Deadlines:
Submit a 500-word abstract with the title due on or before November 1, 2018, to angelarhooks@gmail.com
Receive a Notification for Acceptance on November 15, 2018
Submit book chapters, (5,000 words) on December 15, 2015
Revisions of final edited due on January 30, 2019
All authors will be asked to undertake peer reviews of colleagues’ chapters.
Please contact me if you have questions. I look forward to hearing from you.
Angela (angelarhooks@gmail.com)
Angela Hooks, Ph.D., Editor
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Deadline for Proposals: November 1, 2018
Stardom and Fandom, Southwest Popular Culture/American Culture Association Conference (11/1/2018; 2/20-23/2019) Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Proposals for papers and panels are now being accepted for the 40th annual SWPACA conference. One of the nation’s largest interdisciplinary academic conferences, SWPACA offers nearly 70 subject areas, each typically featuring multiple panels.
The Area Chair for Stardom and Fandom invites paper or panel proposals on any aspect of stardom or fandom. The list of ideas below is limited, so if you have an idea that is not listed, please suggest the new topic. We are an interdisciplinary area and encourage submissions from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Topics might include:
- Studies of individual celebrities and their fans, both current and historical
- Studies focused on specific fandoms – films, television programs, books, bands, etc.
- The reciprocal relationship between stars and fans
- Impact of celebrity and fame on identity construction, reconstruction and sense of self
- Reality television, YouTube celebrities, and the changing definition of ‘stardom’
- The impact of social media on celebrity/fan interaction
- Celebrity/fame addiction as cultural change
- The intersection of stars and fans in virtual and physical spaces (Twitter, Tumblr, conventions)
- Celebrity and the construction of persona
- Pedagogical approaches to teaching stardom and fandom
- Anti-fans and ‘haters’
- Fan shame, wank, and fandom policing
- Gendered constructions of stars and fans
- Historical studies of fandom and fan/celebrity interaction
All proposals must be submitted through the conference’s database at http://register.southwestpca.org/southwestpca
The deadline for submissions is November 1, 2018.
SWPACA offers monetary awards for the best graduate student papers in a variety of categories.
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Deadline for Proposals: November 1, 2018
Travel & Literature at CEA: March 28-30, 2019 (New Orleans)
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, VISION AND REVISION, as it applies to travelers across America, around the world, and through time and space. How do writers articulate vision (and revision) of and within the places, spaces, experiences, texts, and selves of their travels?
Conference Theme: VISION AND REVISION
New Orleans is one of America’s most culturally and historically rich cities. The birthplace of jazz and home of a proud literary and cultural heritage, it is also recognized for bravery and vision in the face of devastation after Hurricane Katrina. It is a city that has had to rebuild and reinvent itself.
The College English Association celebrates its 50th anniversary with its 2019 national conference, to be held in the heart of the French Quarter. We invite you to join us at our annual meeting to explore the theme of vision and revision. CEA invites proposals from academics in all areas of literature, language, film, composition, pedagogy, and creative, professional, and technical writing. We are especially interested in presentations that feature topics relating to vision and/or revision in texts, disciplines, people, cultural studies, media, and pedagogy.
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, 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.
Submissions Accepted: August 15—November 1, 2018
For more information on how to submit, please see the full CFP at www.cea-web.org.
Membership
All presenters at the 2019 CEA conference must become members of CEA by January 1, 2019. To join CEA, please go to www.cea-web.org.
Other questions? Please email cea.english@gmail.com.
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Deadline for Entries, November 5
Events for the Term in Sussex
Welcome to the new academic year from The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research!
You can find out all about us from our Annual Review 2017/18 – lots of pictures and news of collaborations, courses and cutting edge research.
To see what we have planned for the next twelve months please follow us on Facebook www.facebook.com/clhlwr/ or Twitter @CLHLWR, join our mailing list, or look at our website www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr.
We kick off the new season with two exciting free events. ALL WELCOME; DISABLED ACCESS. NO NEED TO BOOK.
Wed 17 October 2018:
The Missing List and Life Writing Projects: Quests for truth in the age of truthiness
University of Sussex, 4-5.30pm, Room 155, Jubilee Building
Clare Best presents her brilliant new memoir The Missing List. Clare Best has been haunted all her life by dark family secrets. When she agreed to help her dying father record his memoir, she embarked on an urgent quest for the truth. This brought particular ethical and aesthetic challenges, weaving together her father’s words, his ciné-film footage, her own journal entries and scraps of childhood memory.
Clare will be followed by Professor Lyn Thomas, curator of Life Writing Projects, which publishes creative and experimental representations of lived experience, and Jenni Cresswell, who will present her new collaboration with Lyn ‘The Black Beaded Dress’. LWP also includes Clare’s multi-media Breastless and excerpts from Lyn’s Clothes Pegs, in which stories of class and gender identity are ‘pegged’ onto items of clothing.
Together, we will debate questions of perspective, identity and art central to the task of life narration in any media, as well as the challenge of finding truth in an age when it is arguably threatened, paradoxically, by ‘truthiness’. There will be time for questions and discussion, followed by wine, soft drinks and nibbles till 6.30pm.
This event is jointly organised by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the School of Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex It is supported by the John Smith Bookshop and open access publisher REFRAME.
Thursday 13 December 2018
Moon Life Stories: Psychogeography beyond Earth
With James Attlee, Robert Massey, Alexandra Loske and Darren Baskill.
15.00-17.00, Venue: Room 4, Language Learning Centre, Arts A, University of Sussex, BN1 9QN
Please join us to celebrate winter shine and sparkle in exploring lives lived with and under the Moon. There will be seasonal drinks and nibbles.
Writer James Attlee explores what humanity loses in the perpetual day of contemporary society, drawing from his acclaimed Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight. We follow by considering the Moon’s own history, from its violent birth to the moon landings, to a red Moon at the time of climate change.
Proudly featuring art historian and CLHLWR researcher Dr Alexandra Loske in conversation with Dr Robert Massey, Deputy Executive Director at the Royal Astronomical Society, celebrating the launch of their beautiful book Moon: Art, Science, Culture.
Sussex astrophysicist Darren Baskill will respond – and bring his telescope!
We look forward to seeing you! (Directions to campus here)
Margaretta, Alexandra and Hope
Professor Margaretta Jolly
School of Media, Film and Music, Silverstone Building, Room 130
University of Sussex, Falmer, BN1 9RG m.jolly@sussex.ac.uk
Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research
Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project
Connected Histories of the BBC
The Business of Women’s Words
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Deadline for Submissions October 15, 2018
MELUS 2019 Call for Papers
Join us for the 33rd Annual MELUS Conference in Cincinnati, OH
Conference Theme: “Underground Histories”
Dates: March 21-24, 2019
Keynote Speakers: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Saidiya Hartman
Conference website: https://melus2019.com/
Hosted by the University of Cincinnati
Hilton Netherland Plaza, 35 W 5th St., Cincinnati, OH
Deadline for Abstracts: October 15, 2018
The theme of the 2019 MELUS conference begins from the premise that a subterranean history beats below every official narrative. What stories get told? What stories get erased or moved to the periphery? How do multi-ethnic literature, film, narrative media, and performance bring to light these critical narratives?
Cincinnati is a diverse and thriving Midwestern city with a deep connection to a variety of underground histories. The city has a storied past as a hub of the Underground Railroad, as well as a complicated, contradictory, and largely-untold ethnic and racial narrative of its own. Host to a huge wave of German and German Jewish immigration during the nineteenth century, Cincinnati is the site of the nation’s first Reform Jewish seminary and home to one of its most famous bootleggers, a German immigrant who provided Fitzgerald with the model for Jay Gatsby. Directly across the Ohio River from Northern Kentucky, the city has seen multiple waves of African American migration from the South—from the dangerous travels of runaway slaves escaping across the river to the later movements of those seeking an often-elusory emancipation in the city. A number of Japanese citizens were relocated to the city after World War II, carrying with them a tragic, and often untold, story of internment and state violence.
Recently, Cincinnati has seen an influx of Latinx immigrants and become a sanctuary city, opening its borders to refugees whose stories face erasure by Trump era immigration policies. At the same time, Cincinnati, past and present, hosts demographic groups and artists less acknowledged in conventional histories. Appalachian, Affrilachian and urban Appalachian narratives have shaped Cincinnati in the twentieth century, while intersecting groups, including African Americans, have experienced disparities in policing and medical treatment, including the sponsored radiation treatments of the 1960s. All of these narratives collectively represent Cincinnati’s underground histories—as well as the centrality of untold stories to American racial and ethnic history and aesthetics.
We welcome proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtables, as well as creative writing and pedagogical discussions, on the broad spectrum of underground histories in multi-ethnic literature, culture, and performance including, but not limited to:
- Representations of the underground railroad
- The collision between official and untold histories
- Erasure and writing back
- Disability and ethnicity
- Underground comics
- Refugee narratives
- The power of outsider narratives and subcultures
- Strategies for teaching unacknowledged histories in the classroom
- Uncovered archives
- Counter-canons in multiethnic literature
- Contemporary underground movements, such as Black Lives Matter and Dreamers
- Borderlands, migration, and other types of crossing-over
- Mining, fracking, and underground ecological disaster
- Transnational connections between writers and movements
- The experience of being a writer or critic of color
- Underground media (street art, oral storytelling, certain online communities)
- Centering African American feminist discourses
- Underground presses and publishing
- Hidden histories of foodways
- The erasure of LGBQ and Trans narratives from multiethnic histories
- Medical apartheid
- Visibility and disability
- Relationship between center and periphery communities in urban space (e.g. Appalachian and black communities in Ohio, gentrification, etc.)
- Performing otherness
- Counter-academic discourses
- Feminist and multiethnic intersections
- Cool-hunting, taste, and ideas of the underground
- Creative writing or conversations about teaching creative writing
- “Illegal” immigration before and after Trump
We also welcome proposals on all aspects of Multi-ethnic US literature and narrative media.
Send all proposals to melus2019@gmail.com by October 15, 2018. For paper and panel proposals: send a 250-300 word abstract and a short bio; for creative work: send 3 -5 poems or up to 5 pages of prose and a short bio. For more information about MELUS, The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States, visit www.melus.org; for more information about the MELUS journal, visit https://academic.oup.com/melus. For more information about the University of Cincinnati’s English department, and its graduate programs in Literature, Creative Writing, Rhetoric and Composition, and Professional Writing, please visit https://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/english.htm
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Deadline for Submissions–October 15
Changing Features? Performing the Self in Digital Culture. SIEF2019 Panel
Call for Papers SIEF Panel / Working Group Digital Ethnology and Folklore
Changing Features? Performing the Self in Digital Culture
Deadline: 15 October 2018, Proposal upload via SIEF website
14th SIEF Congress Santiago de Compostela/Spain 14-19 April 2019
https://www.siefhome.org/congresses/sief2019/index.shtml
Convenors
Fatma Sagir (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Robert Glenn Howard (University of Wisconsin – Madison)
Long before the emergence of Instagram and YouTube as digital platforms
for self-presentation and ‘self-re-presentation’ (Thumim 2015), Sherry
Turkle’s The Second Self (1984) explored the question how computers and
technology change our view of ourselves by recognizing computers had
begun shape our social lives. Today, not only our attitude towards
technology in our everyday lives seems to be profoundly changed but
also our understanding and the presentation of ourselves in digital
culture is shifting.
From soup to spa, digital culture shares everything of everyday life.
Objects, spaces and people are constantly being documented. Through
these practices, a huge global market has emerged. Digital culture
offers a space to position the user’s image, to arrange elements of
everyday life as if props for the performance of selves. Erving
Goffman’s ideas on the presentation of the self derive from the world
of theatre, where stage, actor and performance emerge inseparably
together. Taking perspective to the digital age emphasises the dynamics
between technology, users, and audience.
This panel seek to explore questions such as:
-What does the constant documentation of everyday life do to the self?
-Are private lives different from public lives, when the private is
made public through “broadcasting” from spaces that are generally
considered private, such as the bedroom?
-How does the digital in digital culture support these exposures of the
self?
We invite paper presentations (15-20 min) from different fields and disciplines. We are open to a variety of methods, theoretical approaches and topics.
For proposal uploads and further information go to the panel website
https://nomadit.co.uk/sief/sief2019/conferencesuite.php/panels/7231
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Deadline 15 October 2018
Empowerings and Victim Shaming: #Me too and its ambivalent repercussions
“MeToo” was originally phrased/used as a slogan by Tarana Burke in 2006 to raise awareness against sexual violence against women. However, it wasn’t until October 15, 2017 that the slogan/phrase/hashtag became known globally. In the aftermath of the Weinstein affair Millano tweeted “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.“ In less than 24 hours tens of thousands of people replied to her tweet. The continuing overwhelming response testifies to the urgency of the matter which had been silenced for too long. In this issue of gender forum we invite authors to critically engage with the current movement #metoo #TimesUp #MuteRKelly a and the questions it raises about 21st century sexual politics, from sexualised violence in the domestic sphere to the gender pay gap to the gendered abuse of power in international politics.
- Public trauma of victimhood
- Sexual harassment and sexual abuse in and beyond Hollywood
- Power relations: behind and in-front of the camera
- The role of social media platforms in spreading and constructing responses to the revelations of sexual abuse and harassment
- Cultures of misogyny in the film and media industries
- Wage discrepancies: politics, film and tv industry, free market etc.
- Representations of female lawyers, e.g. The Good Wife, Suits, Boston Legal, Angel
- Targeting sexual violence and crime: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Cold Case and other shows
- Jurisdiction, sexual harassment and rape in televisual contexts
- Industry and Public responses
- Speaking out: the legality of non-disclosure agreements
- Generations of victims
- The ‘Lock Her Up’ controversy (Trump)
- Different national/cultural responses
- Gender and #blacklivesmatter and #iammuslimtoo;
- …
Abstracts and a brief biography should be submitted to gender-forum[a]uni-koeln.de by October 15th. The deadline for the completed papers in MLA 8 (4000-6000 words) is November 15th.
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Deadline for Proposals October 10, 2018
The Usage of Ego-documents in Jewish Historical research (10/10/2018; 5/27-28/2019) Israel
The Usage of Ego-documents in Jewish Historical research – an International researchers’ workshop
The workshop will deal in the usage of Ego documents by historians. By ego-documents we refer to letters, diaries, life stories written by individuals. The workshop will concentrate of Jewish History in the last three centuries, especially the 20th century.
Since early modern hysterography, Ego-documents were considered sources unsuited for historical research. However, in the last decades the human aspect of history became incrementally important. Researching individuals changed the way historians regard Ego-documents. The workshop will concentrate on the methodological issues concerning these documents. We will concentrate on letters, testimonies and life stories (including ethical testaments). Special attention will be given to immigration, Holocaust, the early years of the State of Israel (1948-1960).
The workshop will take place at the Western Galilee College, Akko, Israel, between 27 and 28 of May 2019. Accommodation and partial travel costs will be covered. The workshop will include two keynote lectures and twelve to fifteen presentations.
We invite proposals (un to 500 words) short CVs.
Please send proposal & CV to Dr. Haim Sperber, Head of Department, Multi-disciplinary Studies: haims@wgalil.ac.il
Please send your proposal by 10 October 2018 the latest.
Haim Sperber, Head, Deparment of Multidisciplinary Studies
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Deadline September 28, 2018
Invitation to attend to a lecture cum workshop presented by Prof. Dr.
Julia Watson
Tuesday, 2 October 2018, 4 – 5 pm
Oudezijds Achterburgwal 185, Amsterdam, room 2.18
The Dutch Diary Archive invites you to attend to a lecture cum workshop
presented by Prof. Dr. Julia Watson:
The Archives of the Self: What and Where Are They?
Julia Watson published, with Sidonie Smith and solo, numerous books and
essays on genres as autobiography, autoenthnography, the Bildungsroman,
diaries, digital life writing, genealology, graphic memoirs, human
rights witnessing, graphic memoirs and manifestoes, engaging key
concepts of authenticity, performativity, postcoloniality,
relationality, and visibility. In 2016 Watson and Smith published Life
Writing in the Long Run, a collection of 21 essays, capturing decades of
developments in the field of life writing research.
If you would like to participate, please send an email before Friday 28
September to Monica Soeting: monica.soeting@huygens.knaw.nl.
Participation is free.
For the on-line, open access version of Life Writing in the Long run,
see: http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9739969)
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Registration Deadline September 30, 2018
Trans-nationalizing Identity and Space in The Orient: 19th Century Women’s Travel Writing Nemla 2019
The clash of people and civilizations from East to West has been a particularly rich, varied, and intense development in history. Formulating new identities, while being surrounded by foreign space and native people, the traveler reflects the changing modes, times, and equally shifting cultural attitudes that can be found in a European’s travel writing. For instance, a glimpse across time into the city of Istanbul, held as a popular travel spot by visitors for centuries, reveals varied cultures, groups of people and their diverse linguistic uses, food choices, social norms and religious customs. Whereas these observations do not necessarily express or focus on clashes and challenges between Europe and the Orient, distortions are common, and varied, depending on the orientation of the visitor. Yet there are instances where the familiar coexist with foreigners’ accounts of the Orient, and appear as an auspicious entity that awaits to be further investigated. From Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to Julia Pardoe, and Agatha Christie Istanbul and its people were described by travelers as the most exotic city of the Orient. Whereas the Montague letters were primarily accounts of Ottoman women’s lives, Pardoe wrote unperturbedly about the people she met in Istanbul and described life as she saw it during Sultan Ahmed IInd reign. In addition to Edward Said’s inexorably present “double perspective,” close critical readings of such works offer a transnational approach, and exemplify trans-culturation in American and British literature, as a characteristic of modernity. Please forw The clash of people and civilizations from East to West has been a particularly rich, varied, and intense development in history. A glimpse across time into the city of Istanbul reveals varied cultures, groups of people and their diverse linguistic uses, food choices, social norms and religious customs. In addition to Edward Said’s “double perspective,” close critical readings of such works offer a transnational approach and exemplify trans-culturation in American and British literature as a characteristic of modernity. From Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to Julia Pardoe, and Agatha Christie Istanbul and its people were described by travelers as the most exotic city of the Orient. Whereas the Montague letters were primarily accounts of Ottoman women’s lives, Pardoe wrote unperturbedly about the people she met in Istanbul and described life as she saw it during Sultan Ahmed IInd reign.Submit 200-word abstracts on any aspect of trans-nationalizing and intersectionality of culture, identity and space to: anadolu@temple.edu Due date: September 30, 2018.
Registration Deadline September 30, 2018
The Diary as Literature Through the Lens of Multiculturalism in America
Seeking abstracts for a roundtable discussion at the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) to be held March 21 -24, 2019 in Washington DC
The deadline for abstract proposals is September 30, 2018.
A diary is a serious thing; not to be undertaken lightly or to be spoken of in anything but a whisper. If kept in the right spirit, it means a record of things both seen and unseen, all recorded in strictly conscientious fashion? It means, too, that one must crystallize one’s secret thoughts and longings and desires into written words, thereby giving speech to hitherto inarticulaye [sic] voices.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson, “Confessions of a Lazy Woman”
This roundtable focuses on diary writing as a quasi-literary genre that includes autobiography, biography, memoir, correspondence, travel literature, and more. We will examine the diarist’s text because it speaks the truth of the appearance of things. The diarist’s account is imaginative writing, social and political history. Diary writing includes events that add up to a story with meaning, a theme, and style. Diary writing is creating “real” fictions of one’s self. For the diarist, the diary becomes a transnational space in which an intersection of cultures, languages, and peoples help the diarist understand self and the world they live in.
Joan Didion says in her essay “On Keeping a Notebook,” that writing in a notebook gets us “closer to the truth” about “how it felt to me” and to remember what it was to be.”
Through the lens of the diary, this roundtable will discuss how diarists, writers, and poets reflect on multiculturalism and intercultural relations. Subjects and themes include identity, language, race, class, culture, gender, religion, sexuality, and nationality of American minorities who use the diary to help them find their own expressive language, explore their identity, and understand themselves, their intimate relationships, and the world around them. Since the diary is an autobiographical text the roundtable includes the study of autobiography, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction.
For bell hooks, “autobiographical writing was a way for her to evoke the particular experience of growing up southern and black in segregated communities. It was a way to recapture the richness of southern black culture. The need to remember and hold to the legacy of that experience …”
Topics include:
- Socioeconomic and political matters in which the diarist lives in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation?
- Diaries that give voice to the identity of the diarist or illustrate a hidden identity.
- The diary as a confessional through the lens of Foucault: confessions turn both on what can be openly spoken about and what is forbidden to name.
- Diary writing that reflects the shadow self; the women’s voice is unique, different from another woman’s voice and does not conform to the images society creates for them; “a necessary stage in the psychic journey leading to recovery and the restoration of well-being.”
- Cultural authenticity in fictional diaries such as Maya’s Notebook, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and The Golden Notebook
- The role of the diary as autobiography, a writer’s workshop, a companion, and as a creative space
- Reading other people’s diaries that have passed from “hand to hand, generation to generation” because the content and purpose are based on terrible urgency or fragments of a life.
- Silence in the diary that causes a discrepancy between diary entries and the diarist’s actual life, and when the diarist is incapable of giving a complete picture of what she has gone through.
- The pages of diaries, journals, and notebooks that illustrate the strength, the resilience, and the resourcefulness of the American black male and female voices including their struggles and their constraints, and their victories and their joys.
- What is private and what is public when it comes to publishing a found diary?
- The legacy of diary keeping in families.
Angela Hooks
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Deadline for Abstracts Sept. 30, 2018
Call for Papers: BSA Auto/Biography Study Group 2018 Christmas Conference
“Autobiography: Past and Present Lives
Dear Friend
We are very pleased to announce that we will be holding our next Christmas one-day Conference at Friends House, Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ (opposite Euston Station) on the 7th December 2018.
The conference theme is ‘Auto/biography: Past and Present Lives’. We are pleased to say that our keynote speaker will be Josie Abbott.
This is the call for papers – please supply titles and brief abstracts (max 250 words) and send to me at anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk as a Word attachment or in the body of an email by 30th September. As well as completed contributions, “work in progress” is most welcome.
Information about registering for the conference will come out to you in early October. Costs will be between £90 and £110 depending on payment category and include lunch and refreshments. Non-paper givers are very welcome. Places go quickly as there is a limitation on numbers so an early response is recommended.
I look forward to receiving your abstracts. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any queries.
Best wishes
Anne
BSA Auto/Biography Study Group Annual Summer Residential Conference at Wolfson College, Oxford 20th to 22nd July 2019:
· The Topic is Auto/Biography and Childhood.
· Our Keynote speaker is Prof Andrew Sparkes.
· Michael Erben is now accepting titles and 250 abstracts (michaelerben@gmail.com)
Anne Chappell PhD MA BEd (Hons) SFHEA
Divisional Lead
Department of Education
E: anne.chappell@brunel.ac.uk T: 01895 266497
W: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/cbass/education/staff/anne-chappell
Brunel University London
College of Business, Arts and Social Sciences
Brunel University London, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom
T: 01895 274000 W: www.brunel.ac.uk
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Earlybird Registration Deadline September 30, 2018
The Bildungsroman: Form and Transformations
The Bildungsroman: form and transformations
A conference hosted by the Novel Network at the University of Sydney, 22-25 November 2018
This conference will explore the past and present condition of the Bildungsroman, with its myriad transformations and diversifications not only in the novel proper but also in memoir, film and long-form television. It will bring together exciting work in disciplines often separated by periodising and disciplinary paradigms and gather experts in prose fiction, film and television from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and from a range of language areas to concentrate on this key narrative form. The novel of the emotional and social development or formation of a young person as they learn to make their way in an often hostile world, the Bildungsroman was a key form taken by the European novel from the early 19th century. How has it made its way across transhistorical formations and transgeneric remediations?
Keynotes:
Nancy Armstrong, Gilbert, Louis & Edward Lehrman Professor of English, Duke
‘Why the Bildungsroman no longer works’
Joseph Litvak, Professor of English and Chair of Department, Tufts
‘Black Comedy and the Bildungsroman: Fran Ross’s Oreo’
Katie Trumpener, Emily Sandford Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Yale
‘Actors, Puppets, Girls: Little Women and the Collective Bildungsroman’
Registration Details:
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Archives, Blood, and Memory: Memoir in the Age of Digital Records and DNA
The digital age is changing the way we access the past. Previously, writers often accepted family lore, the recollections of elders, as a way to access the past. However, in the digital age, lore may be proven false. A recent post on a Facebook Ancestry.com group reported that a common disappointment for many users is that their DNA results indicate no Native American ancestry despite family legend of a great-grandmother “Cherokee Princess.”
Creative nonfiction writers will discuss how their use of family stories as a basis for personal narrative has changed in the age of online archives and $100 DNA testing. Panelists will read from their own work and then discuss how electronic archival and other newly available resources of the digital age influenced their work. The panelists and audience members will then discuss whether digital records might become the driving force that guides personal narrative, or whether, as Tobias Wolff says, “memory has its own story to tell.” Submit 150-200 word abstracts by September 30 to NEMLA https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login
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Deadline for Proposals: October 1, 2018
Call for Papers: 2019 Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Annual Conference—Biographies Area: Washington, DC (April 17-20, 2019)
Submission Deadline: 10/1/18
The Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual conference will be held on Wednesday April 17 through Saturday April 20, 2019 at the Wardman Park Marriott in Washington, DC. Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines will meet to share their Popular Culture research and interests.
The Biographies Area is soliciting papers that examine the connections between biography and popular culture. Papers and full panel presentations regarding any aspect of popular culture and biography are encouraged. Potential topics might include:
– Biography and entertainment, art, music, theater
– Biography and film
– Biography and criminal justice
– Television programs about biography
– Biography and urban legends
– Biography and folklore
– Biography and literature
– Scholarly Biography
– Controversial Biography
– Psychoanalysis and Biography
– Historical Biography
– Political Biography
– Autobiography
Sessions are scheduled in 1½ hour slots, typically with four papers or speakers per standard session. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. The deadline is October 1, 2018.
Proposals may be submitted on the conference website.
Please direct any queries to the Biographies Area chair:
Susie Skarl
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
Las Vegas, NV 89154
Susie Skarl, MLS
Associate Professor/Urban Affairs Librarian
UNLV Libraries
4505 South Maryland Pkway
Las Vegas, NV 89154
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Deadline for Proposals: October 1, 2018
“On the Road: Medieval Travel and Travelers” (March 22-23, 2019)
Indiana University Medieval Institute (MEST)
Medieval people were often on the move. Whether their travels were driven by commerce, religion, warfare, exploration, exile, or curiosity, travelers were key conduits of cultural knowledge and exchange in the Middle Ages, returning home with artifacts, stories, and myths. This symposium invites paper proposals that explore the varied geographical, aesthetic, imaginative, and psychological networks of travel in the global Middle Ages. Papers might consider trade routes, pilgrimages, exploration, crusades, imaginative journeys, metaphorical travel, cross-cultural encounters, spiritual journeys, translatio and travel, discoveries of new or fantastic worlds, maps and mapmaking, souvenirs and artifacts, medieval travel in the modern world, and many other related topics. The symposium will feature a keynote lecture by Suzanne Akbari (University of Toronto).
Paper proposals of 250-300 words should be submitted to
iumestsymposium@gmail.com by October 1, 2018.
craighow@hawaii.edu, biograph@hawaii.edu
Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa
On Facebook: facebook.com/CBRHawaiiInternational Auto/Biography Association Worldwide
https://iabasns.wordpress.com; on Facebook: facebook.com/IABASNS
Deadline for Proposals: October 15 , 2018
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Deadline for Submission of Proposals August 30 to September 20, 2018
Call for Papers American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) 2019
March 7-10, 2019, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Paper Proposals open August 30, 2018 – September 20, 2018.
World War II: The Cultural Production of its Historical Memory
Organizers: Phyllis Lassner and Ravenel Richardson
As current cultural production demonstrates – including the recent film Dunkirk, the French TV series A French Village, Alan Furst’s ongoing spy thrillers, and various portrayals of Winston Churchill’s wartime leadership – World War II remains imprinted on artists’ creative memory and retains broad popular and scholarly appeal. From the wartime period onwards, film, fiction, and other media have continued to represent, interpret, and revise cultural representations and ethical frameworks to fathom the complex political motivations, military practices, and individual and collective ethical and psychological responses throughout the global war, including the Holocaust, and the war’s aftermath. Wartime examples of the breadth of representation include filmmakers such as George Stevens and journalists Martha Gellhorn, Lee Miller, and Dorothy Thompson who reported the horrific sights they witnessed on the way from the D-Day Normandy landings to Berlin. In the aftermath, knowledge of the Holocaust transformed perceptions of total victory into recognition of the war’s totalizing tragedy with the publication of The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel’s Night. Such writers as Marguerite Duras (Hiroshima Mon Amour and The War) and W.G. Sebald (The Emigrants and Austerlitz) portrayed the instability of memory in the face of trauma. Today, debates about comparative genocides are founded on questions that reverberate from World War II and the Holocaust, such as who is historically, culturally, politically, and ethically authorized to speak of their war experiences, who is silenced, and what stories are told and left untold.
This seminar invites participants to share studies of past and present cultural representations of World War II in different media and genres such as literary, popular, and middlebrow fiction, life writing, oral and video testimony, written and photo journalism, film, TV, and the plastic arts. Our objective is to study the interplay of cultural and ethical representations of World War II in a comparative framework. Encouraged categories of analysis include traumatic and contested history and memory, victimization, complicity, collaboration, resistance, and gendered, racial, and religious implications. Our method will compare various iterations and artistic productions spanning the past 72 years to shed critical light on the persistent yet changing memory and memorialization of the war. Our interdisciplinary and transnational approach will illuminate how historical memory of World War II was created in political and aesthetic terms in various media during the war. In turn, we will interrogate the ways in which post-war interpretations and reinterpretations have conjoined aesthetic and ethical concerns that continue to resonate in today’s representations of global conflicts.
How to submit an abstract:
ACLA follows a distinctive format, where papers are grouped into seminars that meet for two hours a day for 2-3 consecutive days of the conference. This CFP will result in our selection of 8 papers to comprise a proposed seminar. You can submit a paper proposal via the acla.org website between 12:00 noon August 30, 2018 and 9:00 AM September 20, 2018. Once we have selected the 8 seminar papers by October 4, 2018, the proposed seminar is reviewed by the ACLA. Seminar acceptance will be finalized and participants notified by November 1, 2018.
We encourage you to email us if you are interested in proposing a paper, or if you have any questions.
Phyllis (phyllisl@northwestern.edu) and Ravenel (mrr82@case.edu)
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Deadline for Proposals: September 15, 2018
Making Stars: Biography and Eighteenth-Century Celebrity
A celebrity is not a person, exactly, but a construct established through the public discourse and representation that we now think of as celebrity culture. During the long eighteenth century, biography was key to an earlier form of celebrity culture that anticipates what we experience as modern celebrity. This volume proposes to explore the relationship between biography and celebrity in the long eighteenth century. In inviting essays, we keep that relationship open to definition: are biography and celebrity mutually constitutive? Does one drive the other? Are there contradictions as well as connections between biography as a genre and the celebrity culture that is manifest in a wide range of print, visual materials, and embodied performances? Similarly, we maintain an open definition of celebrity to include the many different variations in the period: theatrical, criminal, aristocratic, royal, and even the freakish.
We welcome work that clarifies and gives nuance to the prehistory of the celebrity bio as a genre and that thinks about ways in which particular material and ideological conditions shaped the formal and experiential effects of celebrity during the period roughly between 1660 and 1830. Essays might focus, for example, on comparing biography’s relationship to celebrity representation in other genres and media; a specific challenge or problem posed by a person or text or a particular form of representation; or contested representational forms. We also are interested in work that grows out of or reflects on the process of writing a modern biography of an eighteenth-century celebrity. How do biographies create celebrity? How do various rhetorics of biographical discourse contest or refuse celebrity? How might attention to the formal rhetorics of biographical studies provide us new ways to think about celebrity culture in the long eighteenth century and conversely how might the terms of celebrity studies allow us new insights into biography? What case studies allow us to see the constitutive work of celebrity and biography in action?
Questions regarding potential submissions should be sent to both editors:
Kristina Straub <ks3t@andrew.cmu.edu> and Nora Nachumi <nachumi@yu.edu>.
Abstracts of 300 – 400 words are due September 15, 2018. Please include a brief bio. (150 words max.) as well.
Kristina Straub
Professor of English
Director of Literary and Cultural Studies Program
Carnigie Mellon University
ks3t@andrew.cmu.edu
Nora Nachumi
Associate Professor
Department of English
Yeshiva University
nachumi@yu.edu
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Deadline for Proposals: September 15, 2018
C4: The Conference on Contemporary Celebrity Culture, Drake University (Des Moines, Iowa, USA), June 9-11, 2019.
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about,” opines the dissipated Lord Henry in the opening chapter of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Oscar Wilde’s novel of celebrity. Less blithely, however, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reminds us, in her TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” (2009), that the way we talk about others can also recapitulate cultural injustice: “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.” For Adichie, who kept her pregnancy very much out of the public eye, being talked about is often unwelcome, especially under pressure to “perform pregnancy.”
C4: The Conference on Contemporary Celebrity Cutlure (Drake University; June 9-11, 2019) will consider the problematic of being “talked about” nearly 130 years after Wotton’s prescient utterance, in what some might argue is a very different celebrity-cultural moment.
We invite abstracts for presentations on any aspect of celebrity culture in the 20th and 21st centuries, from any of a wide range of humanistic, creative, and social scientific perspectives. We particularly welcome playful, provocative, and experimental approaches and formats.
Topics may include:
- Readings and analyses of individual celebrities.
- Sociologies and anthropologies of celebrity culture.
- Historicizations of particular celebrity formations.
- Comparative cultural studies of celebrity.
- Celebrity influence and influencers
- The economics and politics of celebrity.
- Celebrity as it manifests itself beyond the entertainment industry.
- Anti-celebrity and alt-celebrity formations (Anonymous, Banksy).
- Effects of celebrity on everyday life.
- Celebrity practitioners (chefs, musicians, athletes, et al.)
- Cults of celebrity.
- Celebrity and its relationship to fame and notoriety.
- Micro- and niche celebrity.
- Fandoms and fan culture.
- Celebrities and mass & social media.
- Celebrity and “Reality.”
- Celebrity fashion and branding.
- The scholarship of celebrity.
- Celebrity as performance art.
C4 will feature up to 24 non-simultaneous, 20-minute plenary presentations over two days, in addition to an opening dinner, closing reception, and keynote presentation. Participants will be asked to attend all presentations and will be invited to submit article-length versions of their papers at the end of summer 2019 for inclusion in a peer-reviewed collection of essays.
Thanks to support from the Drake University College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for the Humanities at Drake University, a modest registration fee of $150 will cover all conference-related expenses, including daily breakfast, opening dinner, and audio-visual technology needs. Conference-rate hotel accommodations near Drake’s campus will be available to participants.
Please send proposals, including a 350-to-500-word abstract and a brief author’s biography, in the body of an email, to celebrity.conference@drake.edu by 15 September 2018. Please do not send attachments. Decisions will be announced by October 31, 2018; registration deadline: Februrary 1, 2019.
Questions may be addressed to the C4 organizers: Renee Cramer, Professor of Law Politics and Society (renee.cramer@drake.edu) or Craig Owens, Professor of English (craig.owens@drake.edu), both of Drake University. Please, however, do not send proposals and abstracts to these addresses.
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Deadline September 20, 2018
ACLA 2019: Imperial Performances: Self-Making in Travel Narratives
To broaden the conversation surrounding subjectivity, imperialism, gender and travel, this panel aims to advance the study of travel writing by considering performance as a category of significance to the understanding of the social production of travel narratives. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst, in their introduction to New Directions in Travel Writing Studies (2015), establish a connection between performance and travel, claiming that performativity is a driving force behind the development of travel writing as a genre. Building upon the shared premise that the acts of travel and writing about travel are inherently performative, we are interested in interrogating the ways in which travelers actively engage in the task of self-making in their travel accounts. This panel will explore the correlation between performances of imperial power throughout history, specifically within the genre of travel writing, and the process of writing the self.
We solicit essays that focus on the construction of imperial subjectivities within the broad genre of travel writing, including but not limited to epistolary accounts of voyages, travelogues, travel journalism, and guidebooks. How does the act of travel contribute to the construction, and subsequent performance, of identity? How does imperialism provide a protective shield for travelers, particularly women travelers? In what ways does the performance of an imperial identity reproduce or challenge hierarchies of power? Conversely, how are subjects who lack an imperial identity able to acquire authority in their travel narratives? In which kind of performance do they engage, if any? How does that performance differ from that of imperial travelers?
We are particularly interested in papers that take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of travel writing and literature and welcome papers from a broad spectrum of time periods, geographic locations, and national literary traditions. Interested participants may contact the the seminar co-organizers Shannon Derby at shannon.derby@tufts.edu and Michelle Medeiros at michelle.medeiros@marquette.edu. Please submit abstracts (100-250 words) via the ACLA website between September 1-20. Early submission is encouraged.
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Deadline September 20, 2018
Radical Elegy: Memorial Praxis for Precarious Life
ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association), March 7-10, 2019, Georgetown University, Washington DC
This seminar addresses elegy as a performative repertoire in political extremity. Elegy, at a radical pitch, occupies public space and public memory to resist forgetting, a second death. How have expressive practices to and for the dead generated ideas of justice, bonds of solidarity, ethical responses to violence, and communities of contested memory?
Radical elegy is a symbolic and material practice for precarious life to affirm community with the precariously dead. As memorialization, mortuary practice, and political tactic, at once, radical elegy asserts the value of the dead against the hostile symbolic systems presiding over vulnerable bodies. How can we describe the forms and techniques—improvised, emergent, jagged, thrilling—that afford elegy its most charged political functions? How is elegiac poetry in conversation with other political gestures and memorial acts? What cultural translations, folk recuperations, and media innovations have empowered elegy as a political tactic?
This seminar considers elegiac practice in terms of mortuary politics, under the rubrics of social crisis, state violence, cultural domination, and struggle for recognition. Papers can address any expressive practice to, for, or about the dead relevant to the seminar’s attempt to conceptualize radical elegy.
Possible topics:
- the politics of apostrophe
- corpses and representation
- Ubi Sunt traditions in new contexts
- grief, mourning, and public protest
- names as memorial objects; emergent aesthetics for saying the names
- elegy at the edge of poetry
- contested burial grounds
- imagining ancestors and political solidarity
- elegy as discourse of justice
- form and anguish; performance and despair; eloquence and anger
- repatriation and cultural politics
- elegy’s publics
- elegy and the politics of time; anticipatory elegy; radical historicisms
Send proposals by September 20, 2018, to David Sherman at davidsherman@brandeis.edu.
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Deadline September 20, 2018
Humanitarian Violence: Literary Humanitarianism and the Ethics of Witnessing Revisited (ACLA Panel, March 2019)
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Western nations began to outline foreign policy by drawing explicitly on a language of human rights that promised to be untainted by geopolitical ambition. So pervasive did this human rights ethic become that critics Kay Schafer and Sidonie Smith refer to the 1990s as the “decade of human rights.” While many see hope in such a “humanitarian turn,” scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Yen Le Espiritu, and Neda Atanasoski argue that human rights and the humanitarian discourses surrounding terms like “freedom,” “refuge,” and even “diversity” have perpetuated state violence in the post-Cold War era. As these and other scholars suggest, after anti-communism lost its value as justification for occupying the world’s more vulnerable nations, Western states began to authorize military aggression on humanitarian grounds.
This seminar invites papers that investigate how literature, broadly conceived, responds to and participates in debates about human rights discourses and the violence they may or may not perpetuate. Paper proposals might address:
- Human rights and literary forms
- Histories and politics of human rights before, during, and/or after the Cold War
- Human rights and theories of the state
- Human rights and liberalism and/or neoliberalism
- Human rights and marginalized communities
- Temporalities of human rights
- Geographies of human rights
- The ethics of witnessing in the era of Trump
- Reimagining human rights
- Radical alternatives to human rights
- Human rights and the Humanities scholar
Please email 300 word abstracts to Bryant Scott, at bls39@miami.edu, or Alaina Kaus, at aykaus@ua.edu, by September 20th, 2018.
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Deadline for Proposals: September 5, 2018
CFP – Biometrics: Mediating Bodies
Special issue #60 of PUBLIC: Art/Culture/Ideas
Publication Fall 2019
Biometrics refers to the way that bodies are measured and identified. It uses the logic of calculation to reduce the identity of a body to a set of data. In her work on facial recognition, Kelly Gates (2011) reminds us that biometric identification is a way of addressing the “problem of ‘disembodied identities,’ or the existence of visual and textual representations of individuals that circulate independent of their physical bodies,” a situation that has been particularly exacerbated with the rise of media technologies since the nineteenth century. This issue of PUBLIC works to understand the many ways that biometrics reinserts the body into mediated communication.
Signatures are one pre-digital example of the ways that we have isolated something produced by the body as a form of authoritative representation. Today, features of the body itself—such as the face, heartbeat, gait, fingerprint, DNA, voice—are used not only by humans to recognize each other, but also as a way to program computers, machines and electronic systems to read bodies and identify them, and thus to integrate the biometric body into digital networks of processing. This externalization of the body into information and data is part of the larger story of identification and verification protocols (Caplan & Torpey 2001; Robertson 2009), situating biometrics within practices of the security and surveillance apparatus that reduce identity to a set of “facts” that are assessed and processed “objectively.” Unable to escape our body and its biometric signature, we are on the one hand controlled by our inability to conceal ourselves and powerless in the face of this empirical self, all the while also falling for convenient applications that use our bodies, and extract its data along the way.
Biometrics are also part of the systems being developed to produce seamless and “natural” human-computer connections and interactions, and are especially articulated in areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), human-centered computing or programmed environments. The resulting responsive experiences, touted as improving everything from efficiency to safety to entertainment, have taken a central place in the imaginary of the technological future, but for some they are also examples of a dehumanizing form of communication. As is the case in the history of emerging technologies, reactions diverge between the enthusiastically uncritical and the cautious or even fearful. But what are some other ways that we can think biometrics? What kinds of speculations or possibilities are afforded by systems that can read and respond to individual bodies? In the realm of the media arts, for example, biometrics provides new ways to produce works that create empathetic or affective interactions between humans and computers. The surveilled body becomes the complicit body, offering a future in which the divisions between human and machine are increasingly blurred. Here systems that “recognize us” are working towards the dream of seamless connectivity, of natural connection with machines that see and know every body.
While the biometric body is a way to assess and distinguish individuals, the ability to measure is also an ability to standardize. Computer-generated humanoid bodies produced for games or cinema are one example of the way that digital representations may circulate as models and templates for what then become normalized and legitimated bodies. But where is the line between modelling work and classification projects, such as those that motivated Bertillon’s activities or more recent attempts to associate certain physical attributes with personality traits or even sexual orientation (Kosinski & Wang 2017)?
Biometrics: Mediating Bodies will work across these diverse approaches to the body and its data by thinking about biometrics through diverse fields of use and application. We seek critical speculations, scholarly essays and creative projects that engage with the history, politics and practices of the machine-readable body. Topics can include, but are not limited to:
— Case studies of specific technologies or their applications
— Cultural and technical histories of the biometric body
— Theorizations of biometrics
— Representations and visualizations of the biometric body
— Creative and critical approaches to biometrics
— Biometrics in media art
— The biometric in human-computer interactions and responsive systems
— The biometric body in movement and circulation
— Identifying, surveilling and securing the biometric body
— The politics of biometrics
— Night vision, drone vision, facial recognition technologies and other vision machines
— Data gathering and processing as applied to bodies, including algorithmic methods
— Concealment, failure and the subversion of biometric assessment
Abstracts 350 words: 5 September 2018
Invitation to submit full papers: 1 October 2018
Text and project deadline (3-6,000 words): 1 February 2019
Please send abstracts and brief bio to: public@yorku.ca
Editors for issue #60 are Aleksandra Kaminska (Assistant Professor, Université de Montréal) and David Grondin (Associate Professor, Université de Montréal).
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Deadline for Proposals: September 7, 2018
CFP–Studies in Testimony
The peer-reviewed, online and open access journal Studies in Testimony is currently accepting submissions for an expected publication date of April 2019. The call for submissions is intentionally broad in nature, allowing for submissions that look at emerging areas of academic interest, in addition to those of continued and lasting relevance from a wide range of academic disciplines including, but certainly not limited to, literature, critical theory, history and psychoanalysis.
Subject areas could include, but are not limited to:
- Testimony of survivors
- Perpetrator testimony
- Testimony in the digital age
- Post-colonial testimony
- Hybrid forms of testimony
- Interdisciplinary approaches to testimony
- The future of testimony
- Testimony beyond trauma theory
- Forms of testimony
Articles should be between 6000 and 8000 words in length, including footnotes, be in MHRA style and emailed to editor@studiesintestimony.co.uk. Submissions should be in Word format to allow the review process as well as copywriting and editing. An abstract of no more than 500 words should accompany each submission along with a short author bio. The closing date for submissions is Friday 7th September 2018.
Additionally, ideas regarding possible guest edited editions that have testimony as their central theme would be welcomed.
To find out more about Studies in Testimony, submission guidance and general enquiries please visit the journal’s website: studiesintestimony.co.uk. Or for more specific advice please use the contact form on the site.
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Deadline for Proposals–August 31, 2018
Fellowship of Australian Writers NSW Walter Stone 2018 Life Writing Award
Closing date: 31 August 2018
Prize: $1,500
The Award is for a Life Writing, defined as a work of biography, autobiography, memoir, monograph, bibliography. Biography and autobiography may be an extract to meet the word count requirements which is a minimum of 10,000 and a maximum of 25,000. The competition is open to all residents of Australia 18 years and over.
Entry Fee: $25.00 per entry. For full Conditions of Entry please download the entry form
http://fawnsw.org.au/walter-stone-2018-life-writing-award/
The winner of this will be invited to attend the annual FAW NSW Awards Presentation Luncheon in Sydney on Saturday 3 November 2018.
Results will be published in Writers Voice and on the FAW website.
For further information, please email your enquiry to the Competition Convenor, Mrs Cate Plink compconvenor@fawnsw.org.au or phone her on 0458 375 256.
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Deadline for Proposals–August 30, 2018
Spaces between Fiction and Nonfiction in Literatures of Witness (NeMLA 2019)
“Something must be said. Must be said that has not been and has been said before.” —Minh-ha Trinh, from Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcolonialism and Feminism
Mainstream journalism and non-fiction reports on war and conflict often reinforce the same injustices they address, even when their goal is to critique human rights violations. On one hand, they can spectacularize suffering; on the other hand, they can de-emphasize individual suffering through “us versus them” rhetoric or distancing imagery, such as the US media’s focus on “shock and awe” tactics in the “war on terror.”
In contrast, literature based on testimony and witnessing can subvert these tendencies. Many contemporary global writers weave news reports and other forms of media into narratives of human rights violations to express multiple histories and perspectives, in line with Nadine Gordimer’s notion that fiction can be more truthful than nonfiction. In this way, they broaden existing frameworks for understanding violence and offer alternative lenses onto human rights conflicts.
This panel seeks papers on literature and film that subverts, challenges, or destabilizes mainstream news representations of conflict. We particularly welcome papers on texts that “challenge traditional notions of history, territory, and identity,” drawing on this year’s NeMLA theme. Focal areas may include any genre and medium, including film, prose, and poetry. Please send 200-300 word abstract and bio in a single document to Ann Reading and Lisa Propst through the NeMLA submission portal: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17468 .
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Rolling Deadline–Will Stay Posted until September 1
Books for Review – Life Writing
The following books are listed for review. Please contact the reviews editors included under each publication if you are interested in reviewing any of these books.
Alternatively, if there are any other relatively recent publications that deal with the theory, teaching and practice of life writing, which warrant a review in Life Writing, please let us know and we will consider including them.
The guidelines for reviewers follow this list.
Author: Elisabeth Krimmer
Title: German Women’s Life Writing and the Holocaust
Complicity and Gender in the Second World War
Publisher Details: University of California, PUBLICATION PLANNED FOR: September 2018.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/european-literature/german-womens-life-writing-and-holocaust-complicity-and-gender-second-world-war?format=HB
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Liam Harte (Ed)
Title: A History of Irish Autobiography
Publisher Details: University of Manchester, 2018.
http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/literature/irish-literature/history-irish-autobiography?format=HB
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Lucia Bodrini & Julia Novak (Eds)
Title: Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction Publisher Details: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319554136
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Jerry Palmer
Title: Memories from the frontline: memoirs and meanings of the Great War from Britain, France and Germany
Publisher Details: Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
http://www.warandmedia.org/category/publication/
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Aude Haffen and Lucie Guiheneuf (Eds)
Title: Writers’ biographies and family histories in 20th- and 21st-century literature [electronic resource]
Publisher Details: Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2018
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/writers-biographies-and-family-histories-in-20th-and-21st-century-literature
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Shahd Alshammmari
Title: Notes on the Flesh: An Arab disability narrative
Publisher Details: Faraxa Publishing, 2017.
http://faraxapublishing.com/en/books/fiction/notes-on-the-flesh-detail
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Claire Battershill
Title: Modernist Lives
Biography and Autobiography at Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press
Publisher Details: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/modernist-lives-9781350043831/
Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk
Author: Suncica Klass
Title: Americanization of Human Rights. Iranian, African, and Chinese Lives in American Autobiography
Publisher Details: Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2018.
https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-6818-0/Klaas_Americanization_of_Human_Rights/
Contact: Contact: Muireann Leech <muirleech@yahoo.co.uk>
Author: Mary Paniccia Carden
Title: Women Writers of the Beat Era
Autobiography and Intertextuality
Publisher Details: University of Virginia Press, 2018.
http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/5137
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Valerie Baisnée-Keay, Corinne Bigot, Nicoleta Alexoae-Zagni, and Claire Bazin (Eds)
Title: Women’s Life Writing and the Practice of Reading
Publisher Details: Palgrave, 2018.
https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319752464
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Mita Banerjee (Ed)
Title: Medical Humanities in American Studies. Life Writing, Narrative Medicine, and the Power of Autobiography.
Publisher Details: Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2018.
https://www.winter-verlag.de/de/detail/978-3-8253-7815-8/Banerjee_Medical_Humanities_PDF/
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades (Eds)
Title: Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodology and Practice
Publisher Details: University of Western Australia Press, 2018.
https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/offshoot-contemporary-life-writing-methodologies-and-practice
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph (Eds)
Title: Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir
Publisher Details: Routledge, 2017.
https://www.routledge.com/Mediating-Memory-Tracing-the-Limits-of-Memoir/Avieson-Giles-Joseph/p/book/9781138092723
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Justin Wolfers and Erin Riley
Title: Balancing Acts: Essays on Women in Sport
Publisher Details: Lifted Brow, 2018.
https://www.theliftedbrow.com/balancing-acts-women-in-sport/
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Maria Tumarkin
Title: Axiomatic
Publisher Details: The Lifted Brow, 2018.
https://www.theliftedbrow.com/axiomatic/
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
Author: Emma Maguire
Title: Girls, Autobiography, Media: Gender and Self-Mediation in Digital Economies
Publisher Details: Palgrave, 2018.
https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319742366
Contact: Lis Hanscombe <lis@hanscombe.com.au>
LIFE WRITING
Guidelines for reviewers
Life Writing carries book reviews of about 2000 words. We prefer to review works of analysis that draw on the life writing genre (e.g. Thomas Couser’s Memoir, reviewed by Susannah Mintz in Life Writing 10.3, 2013) but we also sometimes carry reviews of life writing itself (e.g. Jamie Bruce Lockhart and Alan Macfarlane’s Dragon Days, reviewed by Vyvyen Brendon in Life Writing 9.3, 2012).
We do not have specific guidelines for the content of a review, preferring to allow the reviewer’s opinions fairly free rein. However, there is an editing process in which the editorial team may request revisions.
We hope that a time frame of six months from receipt of the book is sufficient for a reviewer to get final draft to us.
We also ask the reviewer to provide us with a short biography of themselves that we will publish alongside the review, and to approach the publisher for a jpeg or tiff file and permission to carry an image of the book’s front cover. This is usually a very simple process of an email to the publisher, who is generally more than happy to provide permission. However, we do not require a cover image, especially if the reviewer feels the cover is not very interesting! In addition, we also need to ask that you please forward us the publisher’s permission to carry the cover image as well.
We welcome expressions of interest for books on our “Reviews List” and will also consider additional suggestions for titles.
Currently we use the in-text citation Chicago style.
When contacting us, please send a few sentences about why you would be particularly suited to the book you are interested in reviewing.
Reviews Editors
Muireann Leech: muirleech@yahoo.uk
Lis Hanscombe: lis@hanscombe.com.au
Deadline for Submission of Proposals August 30, 2018
CALL FOR PAPERS – Auto/Fiction
Guest Editor: Pierre-Alexandre Sicart
Submission of full essays due January 31, 2019
(Extended Deadline)Autobiography? Fiction? Autofiction. This portmanteau word, coined by Serge Doubrovsky to describe his own literary production, was borrowed by Jacques Lecarme to classify the works of other authors, such as Alain Robbe-Grillet (who accepted it nonchalantly) or François Nourissier (who rejected it violently). Since then, it has spread from the academic world to the mass media, and from literature to other arts (cinematography, painting, even music), though its exact definition is still a topic of fiery debate.For this special issue, however, we will gladly consider any paper on Doubrovsky—who, before he won awards as an author, was better known for his scholarly work on, notably, Corneille, Proust, Sartre, and psychocriticism.
The proposals submitted for this special issue are not required to even mention autofiction. A Corneille scholar, for instance, could choose to look back at Corneille et la dialectique du héros: Is this work still relevant today? Is it still read, and if so, how, and by whom? In retrospect, how much of it reflects Corneille, how much Doubrovsky, and how much a certain chapter in the history of literary criticism?Even scholars more interested in Doubrovsky’s autofictions should not feel compelled to make autofiction the topic of their article. Other aspects of Doubrovsky’s literary work can and should be explored, such as how he represents (his relationship with) women, masculinity, aging, or death.Finally, we would be interested in reading articles on the last book published under Doubrovsky’s name. Between 1970 and 1977, Doubrovsky typed around 9,000 pages of a “novel” that Grasset rejected until successive cuts left us with the 460 pages of Fils. Thirty-seven years later, thanks to Isabelle Grell, the original typescript was published as Le Monstre, but to this day, few scholars have dared wrangle with it.How does Le Monstre differ from Fils? What did Fils lose and gain from the cuts? Is there a pattern as to which passages were removed? Do those passages shed new light on Fils? on Doubrovsky’s whole creative production? Do they foreshadow the autofictions that followed Fils? Conversely, do they sketch stories or initiate themes the author never touched again? Is this huge book the one that “says it all” about its author?Proposals/abstracts of around 200 words should be sent to autofiction@hotmail.com before 31 August 2018. Once a proposal is selected, by 30 September 2018, authors will have until 31 January 2019 to submit an article of up to 10,000 words, notes included. (No lower limit.) All contributions must be in English, must adhere to the MLA style sheet (8th edition), and must be saved as .doc or .docx.
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Deadline for Proposals: August 30, 2018
On the Philosophy of Autofiction (NeMLA 2019)
NeMLA Annual Convention – Washington, D.C., March 21-24, 2019
“The contemporary autobiographical novel enjoys the prestige of confession and the freedom of fiction” (Edmund White, 1995). Considering the complex ways that selves are always entwined in the writing they produce, this panel asks presenters to scrutinize the ethics of the art and artifice that putting pen to paper necessitates, and autofiction foregrounds. While the nebulous genre of autofiction has garnered wide attention this decade in North American and British letters, particularly with the English-language translations of multivolume projects by Ferrante and Knausgaard, its European roots stretch back at least to Proust, if not much further, to the great confessionalists, Rousseau and Augustine. Originally a term coined by French critics in the 1970s to describe the rise of novels that troubled the facile distinction between truth and fiction, autofiction is yet another mode of self-writing, imperfectly falling somewhere between and beyond traditional publishing industry categories, such as, autobiography, essay, memoir, criticism, confession, and literary fiction.
These novels from life, created by otherwise dissimilar authors—including, Genet, Duras, Roth, Handke, Sebald, and, more recently, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Garth Greenwell—insistently stage the questions: What makes for a true story of the self? How does one write the story of a life? What is the relation of the author-subject to his or her history, or to history as such? The proposed session is specifically interested in the philosophy of the form and the diverse theoretical problems it raises: Aesthetically, how does autofiction bear witness to, capture, transform, and exceed the contours of existence or the feel of living? And, ethically, what responsibility to reality does autofiction bear, and how does its ambiguous truth status aid and impair judgment? Further, we ask: What are the politics of autofiction—“the fiction of solitude” (Nicholas Dames, 2016)—in this, the age of oversharing?
This session seeks to examine the theoretical questions generated by the autofictional impulse. Papers are sought that discuss the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of a form which radically calls into question the boundaries of the self and the nature of truth. What can autofiction reflect and reveal about the important philosophical issues of our time, including those raised by the acceptance of alternative facts in public discourse, and by the emergence of social media platforms through which public personae are crafted and confessions performed?
Please submit abstracts (250-300 words) and a brief biography through the NeMLA website portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/17475
Please contact the co-chairs directly with any questions:
cjb2190@columbia.edu (Campbell Birch; Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature)
va2280@columbia.edu (Valerio Amoretti; Columbia University, Department of English and Comparative Literature).
Deadline for Proposals August 20, 2018
CFP: EHS/SHA Panel on Biography
I’m putting together a panel focusing on biography for the European History Section of the Southern Historical Association meeting in Louisville, KY from 7-10 Nov 2019. I need one or two papers and a commentator; my paper focuses on a nineteenth-century British family of activists. Doctoral students, as well as faculty members and independent scholars, are welcome to submit.
If you are interested in participating, please email me directly by August 20: abelzer@georgiasouthern.edu
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Deadline for Proposals: August 15, 2018
Call for Papers: What’s Jewish about death? – A Special Issue of SHOFAR: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies
Guest Editors: Laura Limonic, Assistant Professor of Sociology, SUNY Old Westbury; Tahneer Oksman, Assistant Professor of Academic Writing, Marymount Manhattan College
Journal Editors: Eugene Avrutin, University of Illinois; Ranen Omer-Sherman, University of Louisville
In her foreword to Jack Reimer’s foundational 1974 edited collection, Jewish Reflections on Death, a book that explores Jewish death and mourning through assorted lenses, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross inquires, “I have always wondered why the Jews as a people have not written more on death and dying. Who, better than they, could contribute to our understanding of the need to face the reality of our own finiteness?” Certainly, from the Kabbalah to dybbuks, from Sholem Aleichem to Roz Chast, there is no shortage of Jewish liturgical, mythological, literary, and cultural works incorporating related themes: of the boundaries between life and death; of the different approaches to philosophical, ethical, and religious questions pertaining to “the end”; and of ways of dealing with the practical and mundane matters that crop up around loss of life and its attendant issues. But the secondary literature on Jewish death and dying, i.e. historical, analytical, and comparative explorations of practices, rituals, beliefs, and narratives that span across Jewish landscapes, remains, as Kubler-Ross noted, surprisingly sparse. In this volume, we seek to put in conversation interdisciplinary investigations into whether, and if so how, contemporary Jews think and do death differently.
We are especially interested in cross-discursive explorations and are open to papers addressing the topic from a wide variety of viewpoints, including but not limited to:
- fictional and non-fictional stories of death and grief (including poetry);
- visual representations (art, photography, film, comics, collage, and/or graphic novels) of loss and its aftermaths;
- variations within or across ethnic, sub-ethnic, and racial groups and/or different regions and populations in relation to death and grieving practices and beliefs;
- material culture approaches to death and dying, including music, food, ceremony, clothing, etc.;
- social and communal functions of traditional and/or contemporary death rituals, rites, and ceremonies;
- connections and/or tensions between spiritual and/or traditional customs and observances and psychological or other models of grieving;
- gender and/or sexuality in death and grief;
- individual and communal trauma and attendant grief (genocide, suicide, etc.); and
- death, grief, and the body.We welcome two categories of works: (1) short narrative-style pieces in the forms of poetry, visual narratives, and creative non-fiction prose; and (2) more traditional analytic research articles (in this category, hybrid-pieces incorporating first-person prose or creative non-fiction alongside research and analysis are also welcome).Deadline for 250-word abstracts (or illustrative excerpts): August 15, 2018. In your abstract, please indicate what category of work you are submitting, (1) or (2), and the target length of your final piece. Email submissions, including a short bio, to lauralimonic@gmail.com and toksman@mmm.edu.Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be notified in early fall and asked to submit final pieces by March 1, 2019. There is no target length for the shorter narrative pieces (category 1), though authors should aim for 1,500-4,000 words of prose or 3-4 pages for visual narratives. For analytical research articles (category 2), manuscripts should be 7,000 to 10,000 words and conform to the latest Chicago Manual of Style, specifically, the short note format with a full bibliography (see examples below). Essays will be sent for review.
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On August 13th, Philippe Lejeune has turned eighty. A Festschrift, published in the European Journal of Life Writing, honours the work Philippe Lejeune has done over a long and highly productive career as a scholar and promoter of life writing in all its forms, and the impact of this work on fellow scholars in the International Auto/biography Association—both its European chapter and more widely. It also celebrates Philippe the man—a colleague whose energy, inventiveness and warmth are repeatedly highlighted in the essays published in the EJLW
Vol 7 (2018): European Journal of Life Writing
Table of Contents
Cher Philippe. A Festschrift for Philippe Lejeune
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Contents Contents
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T.G. Ashplant, Clare Brant, Ioana Luca
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CP1-CP8
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Part I
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Julia Watson
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CP9-CP18
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Paul John Eakin
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CP19-CP24
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Alfred Hornung
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CP25-CP31
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Craig Howes
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CP32-CP38
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Jeremy Popkin
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CP39-CP44
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Christa Hämmerle
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CP45-CP50
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Part II
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Carole Allamand
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CP51-CP56
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Zoltán Varga
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CP57-CP65
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Postcards nr. 1
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T.G. Ashplant
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CP66-CP78
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G. Thomas Couser
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CP79-CP84
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Julie Rak
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CP85-CP89
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Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker
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CP90-CP110
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Part III
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Regine Strätling
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CP111-CP132
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Leonieke Vermeer
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CP133-CP150
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Gergely Kunt
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CP151-CP160
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Pawel Rodak
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CP161-CP169
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Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle
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CP170-CP175
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Gillian Whitlock
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CP176-CP182
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Monica Soeting
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CP183-CP199
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Clare Brant
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CP200-CP205
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Postcards nr. 2
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Articles
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Helma Van Lierop
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1-16
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Marie-Theres Federhofer
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17-33
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Karin Strand
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34-52
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Samira Saramo
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53-71
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Valérie Baisnée
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72-89
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Guadalupe Adámez Castro
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90-110
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Teaching Life Writing Texts in Europe
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Dennis Kersten, Anne-Marie Mreijen, Yvonne Delhey
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TL1-TL2
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Laurie McNeill
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TL3-TL10
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Sarah Herbe
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TL11-TL14
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Jane McVeigh
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TL15-TL28
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Marijke Huisman
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TL29-TL43
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Life Writing “from Below” in Europe
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T. G. Ashplant
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LWFB1-LWFB9
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T. G. Ashplant
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LWFB10-LWFB48
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Anna Kuismin
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LWFB49-LWFB66
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Nathalie Ponsard
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LWFB67-LWFB79
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Martyn Lyons
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LWFB80-LWFB87
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Creative Matters
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Jane Wildgoose, Roelof Bakker
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C1-C16
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Reviews and Reports
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Dennis Kersten
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R1-R5
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Clare Brant
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R6-R8
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Martyn Lyons
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R9-R20
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Jerome Boyd Maunsell
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R21-R26
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Patrick Hayes
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R27-R31
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Marijke Huisman
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Newsletter Biography Institute
August 2018 [PDF-version]
Registration conference Different Lives now open
It is now possible to register for the conference Different Lives: Global Perspectives on Biography in Public Cultures and Societies (19-21 September). The conference will be opened with a public lecture by Nigel Hamilton, followed by drinks. On the website the complete program can be found. It is also possible to register for different parts of the conference, such as the social program, the masterclass for PhD- and researchmaster students and Richard Holmes’s keynote speech on September 20.
Dutch Biography Prize awarded on September 18
The Dutch Biography Prize is a bi-annual prize, that is awarded to the best biography in the Dutch speaking world. It will be handed out on 18 September in the Haarlem Hodshonhouse. If you would like to attend, please send an e-mail to Carly Massier. The winner will be interviewed on 21 September, 14.00 hrs., during the conference Different Lives.
The ABC of Modern Biography will be presented on September 20
On 20 september, 16.00 hrs. the new book by Nigel Hamilton and Hans Renders will be presented in the Baptismal church, Groningen, titled The ABC of Modern Biography. There will be a Dutch and an English version of the book published by Amsterdam University Press. A copy can be ordered by sending a mail to the Biography Institute.
Nick Weber will defend his thesis on Piet Mondrian
The public defense of Nick Weber’s biography of Piet Mondrian’s early years will take place on September 20, 12.45 in the aula of Groningen University. Weber was working on his thesis as a PhD-candidate at the Biography Institute. His project was supervised by prof. Hans Renders and dr. Peter de Ruiter.
Sjoerd van Faassen and Hans Renders wrote article for Études biographiques.
The volume appeared under the auspices of the Biography Society, a collaboration between the Biography Institute and Université Aix-Marseille. In the volume, it is shown from different perspectives which value biographical research has for the humanities. The book can be ordered at Honoré Champion publishers.
More information can be found on the website www.biografieinstituut.nl.
For subscribing to and unsubscribing from this newsletter, please email biografie.instituut@rug.nl
Deadline for Submission of Proposals: 5 August 2018
The Future of Holocaust Testimonies V, 11-13 March 2019, Akko, Israel
The Holocaust Studies Program of Western Galilee College, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, University of Southern California, and the Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, announce the fifth international interdisciplinary conference and workshop on The Future of Holocaust Testimonies to be held on 11–13 March 2019 in Akko, Israel.
Survivors and their testimonies have been central to Holocaust research and memorial culture, but as fewer and fewer survivors remain among us, we need to consider how and in what forms Holocaust scholarship and the memory of the Holocaust will continue. One critical focus will certainly be the legacy that survivors leave behind in the forms of written, audio, and video testimonies, as well as in the transmission of their testimony to their children and grandchildren, who have their own stories to tell, as well as to researchers. In addition, those who are not survivors or their descendants seem destined to play an increased role in the transmission of the history and memory of the Holocaust.
We welcome proposals for papers on any aspect of the future of Holocaust testimonies, including, but not limited to, the following topics:
- methodological and theoretical issues
- “Holocaust testimony”—renewed analysis of conceptualization and meaning of the term
- limitations and boundaries in the use of Holocaust testimonies
- testimonies and historical context
- testimony classification and categorization by profession, occupation, age, gender, place, and time
- re-reading and reinterpreting early testimonies
- multiple testimonies by one and the same survivor
- second- and third-generation testimonies
- history, memory, and testimony
- post-memory
- intergenerational transmission of trauma and resilience
- how to remember what we did not experience
- the role of video-testimony in the future
- film as testimony
- the responsibilities of the scholar of the Holocaust
Scholarly work on survivor testimony is done today in many academic disciplines including history, literary analysis, linguistics, cultural criticism, psychology, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology. The rich and varied corpus of testimonies requires the collaborative efforts of researchers across disciplines to enable us to hear the voices of survivors articulated through their testimonies.
We aim for the conference to contribute both to Holocaust research and to public discourse. Therefore, one day of the conference will be open to the public, and two days will be for researchers only. The conference will be conducted in English. During the public day, presentations and discussions will be held in English and Hebrew with simultaneous translation.
Please send a one-page proposal and a short CV to: TestimonyConf@wgalil.ac.il. Doctoral candidates, please add a letter of recommendation from your advisor.
Speakers will be provided full hospitality – hotel and meals; travel will not be covered.
Deadline for Submission of Proposals: 5 August 2018
For further inquiries, please contact a member of the Steering Committee:
Dr. Boaz Cohen, chair, boazc@wgalil.ac.il
Dr. Miriam Offer, miriamoffer@gmail.com
Holocaust Studies Program, Western Galilee College, Akko
Dr. Wolf Gruner, gruner@usc.edu
Dr. Martha Stroud, mstroud@usc.edu
USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research, Los Angeles
Dr. Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, thomaspegelowkaplan@appstate.edu
Dr. Rosemary Horowitz, horowitzr@appstate.edu
Center for Judaic, Holocaust and Peace Studies, Appalachian State University, North Carolina
CFP in PDF: https://www.wgalil.ac.il/files/Holocaust_Studies/call176.pdf
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Call for Papers: The 2nd Peking University International Conference on Medical Humanities: Narrating Birth, Ageing and Death
Sponsored by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Peking University (15-16 November 2018)
Over the past century advances in biomedicine and the rise of secularism have profoundly changed the ways that we practise, experience, narrate, and theorise birth, ageing and death. In response to global health challenges brought about by rapid demographic shifts –– overpopulation, environmental sustainability, and healthcare expenditure –– this conference aims to explore narratives, myths, and other cultural representations of birth, ageing and death from a wide range of critical, ethical, and aesthetic perspectives to inform the development of healthcare services, economics, and policy.
Keynote Speakers include:
Rita Charon, Professor of Medicine and Executive Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University
Brandy Schillace, Editor-in-Chief of BMJ Medical Humanities
Ma Xiaowei, Director of the National Health Committee
Zhang Yanling, President of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association
Zhan Qimin, Director of Medicine and Vice President of Peking University
We welcome submissions from scholars, early-career researchers, and graduate students from a range of fields including health and medical humanities, medical anthropology, medical sociology, medical history, philosophy of medicine, medical ethics, literature, and linguistics.
Paper topics may include but are not limited to:
- The medicalisation of birth, ageing and/or death
- Gender and childbirth
- Postpartum confinement in China, Japan, Korea and other cultures
- Myths of birth, ageing, and/or death
- Symbols and metaphors of birth, ageing, and/or death in poetry, literature, life writing, science fiction, and comics
- Portrayals of birth, ageing, and/or death in film
- Narrative Medicine and birth, ageing, and/or death
- Gender, culture, and healthy ageing in different cultures
- Physical and mental health care in ageing societies
- Elderly care and Confucian bioethics
- Ageing and memory
- Palliative care in multicultural contexts
- Hospice care
- Traditional palliative care practises past and present
- Death and stigma
- Dying with dignity
- Last rites
- Indigenous death rituals
- Post-mortem photography
- Elegies and obituaries
- Burial practises among ethnic minorities
- Death education
Include a title, name, institutional affiliation, a short bio (100 words), email address, and a 300-word proposal.
Conference languages are Chinese, English and Japanese.
Deadline for submission: 31 July 2018 in .docx format to: pkumedhum2018@163.com
Please use the format of “Abstract+ the title of your paper” as the subject.
Selected submissions will be announced on 1 July 2018.
Conference registration fee: 1,000RMB.
Website: http://imh.bjmu.edu.cn/tzgg/195944.htm
For any inquiries regarding the program please contact: pkumedhum2018@163.com