April 2009

The 19th century witnessed large-scale migration from India to various parts of the world. Indentured labourers were recruited to work in the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917 (particularly Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad as well as Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Martinique), Fiji, Mauritius (as early as 1834), South Africa and a few other plantation colonies. Over one million Indians sold themselves into bondage before the system was made illegal in 1917. South Asians later worked in East Africa, to work on the railways and in other industries, going to Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania. The descendents of these peoples, along with those of other South Asian migrants, who have gone to Europe, North America and Australia since the Second World War, now constitute a substantial and fascinatingly diverse diaspora.

Representations of their notions of "Mother India" have been crucial to the shaping of identity among many of these diasporic peoples. As the stature of India as a potential world power has grown in the last ten years, there seems to be a resurgence of interest in India, which has contributed to enhanced self-esteem in these communities. Far from emphasizing the question of origin, the papers will focus on the interaction between Indians in India and those in the diaspora. If diasporic Indians have been transforming the countries they have been living in, it is legitimate to ask how India itself is being transformed by its peoples in the diaspora. The privileging of categories such as 'non-resident Indians' or 'persons of Indian Origin' by India enhances this line of enquiry.

In recent years outstanding works of the creative imagination, based on these diverse communities have emerged, in conjunction with an impressive body of scholarship. Yet, no major international, multidisciplinary and bilingual conference has sought to tap into this rich reservoir of learning. This conference seeks to redress this shortcoming.

This is a call for papers which explore all aspects of the Indian diasporic experience and its representations. Contributors are invited to participate in a conference that addresses the following areas: Cinema, Culture, Economics, History, Music and Dance, Photography, Religion, Sports, Women’s Studies. Literature and Comparative Literature will, of course, be prominent, and particular attention will be devoted to writers of Indian origin writing in English (one can think among others of Meena Alexander, Cyril Dabydeen, David Dabydeen, Mahadai Das, Amitav Ghosh, Ismith Kahn, Peter Kempadoo, Oonya Kempadoo, HS Ladoo, Jumpha Lahiri, Leelawatee Manoo-Rahming, Rohinton Mistry, Rooplall Monar, Shani Mootoo, Bharati Mukherjee, Lakshmi Persaud, Sasenarine Persaud, Vikram Seth, Ryhaan Shah, Rajkumari Singh, MG Vassanji…), or in French (Khal Torabully,  Ananda Devi…). For the cinema, one can think of Mira Nair, Deepa Mehta, Sandhya Suri, among others. English will be the language of the conference (except for works in French).

The conference will be held at Paul Valery University (Montpellier, France). It will be the result of collaboration between the Cerpac (Research Centre for the Commonwealth, EA 741, Montpellier 3), Desi (Diasporas : Research Centre on Indian Specificities / EA 4196 Climas, Bordeaux 3) and the Caribbean Studies Centre (London Metropolitan University, UK).

Those interested in participating should send their abstracts (between 250 and 300 words) as well as a short bio-bibliographical notice (200 words) to the two convenors: Dr Judith Misrahi-Barak <judith.misrahi-barak@univ-montp3.fr> and Dr Rita Christian <r.christian@londonmet.ac.uk>.

(posted 5 Apr '08)

"To have no national stamp has hitherto been a defect and a drawback", Henry James wrote to his friend T.S. Perry in 1867. Yet he also considered that being an American was "an excellent preparation for culture", insofar as Americans could deal, more freely than Europeans, "with forms of civilization not their own", could "pick and choose and assimilate and in short "aesthetically claim" their property wherever they found it.

The first conference organized by "The European Society of Jamesian Studies", will examine the various manners in which James achieved this aesthetic (re)appropriation - "the vast intellectual fusion and synthesis" he was dreaming of as a young writer. Conversely, what are the multiple ways in which he can be considered as part of a European heritage, interconnecting the culturally distinct European identities, (re)interpreting Europe, so to speak, "in the second degree", both ethically and aesthetically?

We mean to reevaluate the ethical quality of the whole process, situated as it was at the meeting-point between historical and inner culture.

For young Henry James, the American artist abroad possessed the unprecedented advantage of his "national cachet", "moral conciousness", an "unprecedented lighntess and vigour", which generated an active relation with the old continent - compared to the seemingly passive relation of the European to his own history and heritage. How did this energetic conception of art as an active cultural force evolve, from the early interpretation of the international theme, the staging of American identity as innocence beguiled, to the arcane poetics of redemption specific to the major phase? If art was indeed "making life", creating values, as James himself later reasserted in his famous reply to H.G. Wells, didn't those values prove to be at times, as again James enigmatically put it in his NYE preface to "The Turn of the Screw", "positively all blanks"?

The process of aesthetic (re)appropriation is what we more specifically refer to by borrowing Genette's conception of transtextuality as "all that puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts" (/Palimpsests/). The survey will draw on the whole of HJ's lifetime - the genesis of his  works of fiction, the question of literary influences, and his reinterpretations  and reevalutions of European literary traditions (through his fiction and critical essays). As transtextual relations "stop nowhere", we also mean to highlight HJ's symbolic "life after death", from a receptionist and transdisciplinary perspective - so as to include the multiple and multiform reverberations of his own work in modern and contemporary European fiction, literary theory, theatrical or film adaptations.

(posted 6 May '08)

With the bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth (February 12, 1809) and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species (November 24, 1859), the time has come for a re-assessment of the legacy the famous English naturalist left in Europe. No thinker born in the 19th century, except perhaps Freud and Marx, has had such a decisive influence on our present cultural frame as Darwin, who broke away with both Creationism and Lamarckism, to establish the role of natural selection in the evolution of all living organisms. Yet, even today his theories are violently criticised both by the American neo-Conservatives and by left-wing intellectuals. The former blame him for his atheistic materialism and his rejection of any intelligent design while the latter hold him responsible for the introduction of Social Darwinism. In Europe, many studies and scientific publications devoted to Darwinism are still being published yearly, to say nothing of the media coverage of recent polemical debates.

In the literary realm, Darwin's posterity is no less remarkable. As early as the 19th century, many novelists took an interest in his works (George Eliot and Thomas Hardy among others). More recently, literary criticism, following Gillian Beer's and George Levine's ground-breaking studies, started applying Darwinian paradigms to fiction (e.g. the Darwinian Tree or the metaphor of the entangled bank). Even Darwin's own style is of interest to specialists of rhetorics or stylistics. And the many current rewritings of 19th century literature (notably the neo-Victorian novels) refer to Darwin and to his neo-Darwinian descendants like Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge.

This conference aims at a comprehensive evaluation of the Darwinian legacy in European cultures. It is both comparatist, as it purports to initiate fruitful dialogues between European cultures and interdisciplinary, by bringing together specialists of civilisation, cultural studies, history, epistemology, literature, biology and translators of Darwin's works.

Georges Letissier <georges.letissier@univ-nantes.fr>
Françoise Le Jeune <francoise.le-jeune@univ-nantes.fr>
Michel Prum <prum.michel@wanadoo.fr>

(posted 29 Aug '08)

Up until the early 1990s Ireland remained on the fringe of Europe in psychological as well as geographical terms, often perceived as little more than 'the other island' in the Atlantic Archipelago. Since then, however, EU initiatives like the Erasmus and Socrates exchange programmes and the elimination of work barriers have caused a spectacular increase in intra-European mobility and have brought European countries closer than ever. 'The other island' has finally come into its own as one of Europe's most popular destinations for workers and tourists alike. The world of Irish historiography is no exception to this trend. Many European scholars have begun to engage with Irish history, bringing in their own social, intellectual and cultural backgrounds to provide fresh and illuminating insights. Unfortunately, intra-European networks are difficult to establish in the world of academic research; language barriers, physical difficulties of access to foreign archives, and high levels of specialisation, tend to enclose national histories within their own self-contained cocoons. Still, even such emblematic themes in Irish historical discourse as religious conflict, nationalism, republicanism, revolution, emigration and exile, diasporas and the reinvention of national culture, are by no means exclusive to the Irish context. By the mid-nineteenth century, long before the foundation of the European Union, a rich network of social, economic and cultural links had already been established among European countries, and phenomena like Daniel O'Connell’s liberal Catholicism, the Young Ireland insurrection of 1848, the successive emigration waves and the cultural revival of the late nineteenth century cannot be understood without the influence of contemporary European events.

In order to help bring Irish studies out of their national-history shell, and at the same time strengthen the links between European postgraduate students and scholars, the proposed conference aims at re-evaluating nineteenth-century Irish history by placing it in its European context, while bringing all participants together into an online research network.

We welcome papers from a wide range of disciplines, from social to political, economic and cultural history. Possible paper topics include: social and economic patterns, ethnic and/or religious conflict, nationalism and other ideologies, emigration and exile, and the history of science and technology. However, this list is by no means exhaustive, and all papers covering aspects of Irish history within a European framework will be considered.

Papers should not exceed 1,500-2,000 words in length (20 minutes' delivery). A 250-word abstract, along with a short author profile, should be submitted by 22 December 2008 to <europeconference@nuim.ie>.

Pierre Ranger (Queen’s University Belfast)
Brian Heffernan (NUI Maynooth)
Zsuzsanna Zarka (NUI Maynooth)
Marta Ramón, PhD (NUI Maynooth)

(posted 22 Sep '08)

Following the success of the First International Conference of English as a Lingua Franca in Helsinki earlier this year, we are pleased to announce the second conference in the series. As everyone who attended the Helsinki conference can confirm, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has become both a vibrant field of research, and one of the most frequently discussed and hotly debated topics of our time. The 2009 conference will provide a forum for researchers to present updates on their work in this fast-moving field; for further discussion of  the implications of ELF research for language policy, teaching, testing, standards, and the like; and for the ideological debates to continue.

Anna Mauranen, University of Helsinki
Barbara Seidlhofer, University of Vienna
Henry Widdowson, Emeritus Universities of London and Vienna

Proposals for papers and colloquia: We invite submissions of proposals for individual / joint papers and colloquia, on any aspect of English as a Lingua Franca: linguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic, and/or relating to issues of language policy, language teaching, and language ideology that concern ELF.

Papers will be 20 minutes in length plus 10 minutes for questions and comments. Colloquia will be 2 hours in length, involve up to four speakers, and include at least 30 minutes for discussion.

For each submission, provide a title, an abstract of 150-200 words for papers, 250-300 words for colloquia, and the name, title, and affiliation of each presenter.

Organising committee: Jennifer Jenkins (co-chair), Alasdair Archibald (co-chair), Robert Baird, Will Baker, Jill Doubleday, Liz Hauge, Caroline Hyde-Simon, Victoria Long, Mary Page, Chris Sinclair.

(posted 14 Jul '08)

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Thomas Keymer (University of Toronto), Professor Nicholas Rogers (York University, Toronto).

2009 sees the 250th anniversary of the events and publications of 1759, a crucial moment in British and global history, culture and ideas. To mark the occasion, the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Queen’s University Belfast will be hosting an interdisciplinary conference on the theme of 1759. The conference will present an opportunity for discussion and critical assessment of a year that, according to Frank McLynn, should be 'as well known in British history as 1066'.

In the international realm, 1759 represented the turning point in the Seven Years' War and a watershed moment in Britain’s drive for colonial dominance over France, with British military and naval victories making national heroes of men such as Pitt the Elder, General Wolfe and (to a lesser extent) Admiral Hawke. In literature, 1759 also saw the publication of 3 canonical novels of ideas: Voltaire's Candide, Samuel Johnson's The Prince of Abissinia (later Rasselas), and the first two volumes of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. In the arenas of moral philosophy and aesthetic theory, Adam Smith outlined a rational model of sympathy in the first edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, while Edward Young published his Conjectures on Original Composition, Alexander Gerard an Essay on Taste, and Edmund Burke the second edition of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with its important new introduction on 'taste'. Elsewhere in culture and commerce, 1759 also saw the opening to the public of the British Museum; John Harrison's completion of chronometer Number 4 (the eventual Board of Longitude prize-winner); the formal suppression of the Encyclopédie; the deaths of Handel and William Collins; and the founding in Dublin of the St James' brewery, by Arthur Guinness.

The 1759 conference will enable discussion of all of these topics and anniversaries, and of the possible relationships between them. 300-word proposals are invited, for 20-minute papers. Proposals should be emailed to the conference organiser: Dr Shaun Regan, School of English, QUB <s.regan@qub.ac.uk>. The submission deadline is 31 July 2008. For further information and a conference flyer, please see the Centre’s website:

(posted 10 Apr '08)

The conference is jointly organized by Celal Bayar University, Department of English Language and Literature, and English Language and Literature Research Association of Turkey (IDEA). The conference will cover the following four main areas of studies in English: Literature, Language and Linguistics, Translation Studies, and Cultural Studies. The conference venue is Manisa, which is a neighboring city to İzmir in the Western part of Turkey. One of our keynote speakers is Terry Eagleton; the other(s) will be announced in due course. Excursions to historical sights in Manisa, to Sardes, and Pergamon will be included in the programme.

Please submit proposals of about 200 words by December 5, 2008 to <idea2009cbu@gmail.com> or by post to IDEA Conference, CBU Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of English Language and Literature, Muradiye Manisa, Turkey. Tel: +90 236 2412151 / 211 – 144 – 437

(posted 2 Sep '08)

An international conference organised by the Faculty of English, University of Oxford, in association with the Bodleian Library, marking the 600th anniversary of the publication of Arundel’s Constitutions.

Plenary speakers to include: Jeremy Catto, Anne Hudson, David Lawton, Miri Rubin and Sarah Beckwith.
Please send 500 word abstracts (for 30 minute papers) by 1st May 2008 to <vincent.gillespie@ell.ox.ac.uk>,

Conference committee: Vincent Gillespie, Helen Barr, Mishtooni Bose, Kantik Ghosh, Annie Sutherland, John Watts.

(posted 10 Oct '07)

2009 will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, a story collection which has had a profound and pervasive impact on our understanding of and engagement with the fairy tale. 'The Fairy Tale after Angela Carter' will take the anniversary as the starting point for an assessment of the state of the fairy tale and of fairy-tale studies in the wake of The Bloody Chamber. It will take 'after' in both senses of the word, to suggest influence – both direct and indirect - as well as chronology. As such, the primary focus will be the critical and creative legacy of Carter's work as writer, critic, editor and translator of fairy tales. Fairy-tale studies is an inherently interdisciplinary field, in which there is a mutually enriching relationship between literary-historical scholarship and various forms of creative practice. The aim of the conference will be to stage and explore this relationship; to assess the state of current critical and creative practice and to pinpoint future directions for writing and research.

Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Marina Warner, University of Essex
Cristina Bacchilega, University of Hawai’i
Donald Haase, Wayne State University

New cultural, political and social histories of the fairy tale
Fairy-tale aesthetics after The Bloody Chamber
The theory and practice of fairy-tale fantasy in the wake of Angela Carter
The fairy tale and fiction after The Bloody Chamber
Identity politics and fairy-tale studies since the 1970s
The fairy tale after postmodernism
The fairy tale and contemporary opera (composers such as Heinz Holliger, Helmut Lachenmann and John Woolrich)
The fairy tale and contemporary visual art (artists such as Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, Vanessa Jane Phaff and Louise Bourgeois)
The fairy tale and contemporary children's literature, including illustrated books
The fairy tale and contemporary cinema
The fairy tale and contemporary theatre, dance and performance
The fairy tale and new media
Orality, textuality and virtual spaces
The fairy tale and translation

The deadline for submission of proposals is 3 November 2008. We also welcome suggestions for readings and related events.

Dr Stephen Benson
School of Literature and Creative Writing
University of East Anglia
Norwich
NR4 7TJ
<s.benson@uea.ac.uk>
01603 593819

(posted 15 May '08)

(posted 7 Jan '08)

The American and French Revolutions are generally considered as decisive episodes in the emergence of what we have come to know as modern democracy. Their displacement of time-honored models of hereditary rule and of monotheistic conceptions of sovereignty inaugurated Western modernity. The fall-out of these ruptures made the 19th century an era of unprecedented intensity in the history of politics and the political. As a time of massive demographic change, new patterns of production and distribution, seismic surges in geopoliticization, and relentless social differentiation and specialization, the 19th century became a ‘condition’ demanding to be addressed. This challenge was met by a multiplicity of discourses, few of which can be decisively told apart: poetry, political economy, cultural criticism, historiography, philosophy, and science in their different ways all attempted to measure the impact of the displacements that defined their modernity and to shape an adequate response to them.

It is from this context that nineteenth-century discourses of the State derive their urgency. As strategies to imagine - and to actively pursue - forms of collectivity that can serve as a concerted response to the challenges of modernity, these discourses enlist (or reject) categories such as the nation, education, or the imagination in order to formulate a new rhetoric of community. What distinguishes the discourse on the State is its express ambition to contribute to an appropriate response to the modern condition by training its audience to become responsible citizens of the State. This typically involves the adaptation of models for the cultivation of the modern self, such as those inherited from the German discourse on Bildung, to contexts of increased scale and complexity that challenge these models to the core. Not only in Britain or Germany, but in every locality where the task of articulating the nation with the State is recognized as a discursive challenge, literary-intellectual discourse becomes an archive where many of the tensions and contradictions of the nineteenth century intersect in a particularly condensed way.

Because the imagination of the State, as a political and social unit, relies on rhetorical, tropological, and imagistic processes, disciplines that explicitly focus on textual and imagistic strategies are crucial in the analysis of the politics of the State. ‘Matters of State’ proposes to revisit significant instances of the literary-intellectual attempt to re-think the State, and relevant intersections of these attempts with related and/or competing political, literary, scientific, (crypto-)religious, iconographic, … discursive strategies to imagine the State. We are interested in papers that focus on explicit or implicit contributions to a public aesthetics of the State by way of new or modified rhetorics of community.

* What are the means of production, cultivation, preservation and reproduction of “moral sentiments” appropriate to an ethos of the State?

* How do available or emergent routines of identity formation in terms of class, gender or race relate to models of citizenship?
* How do concepts such as “region,” “country,” “nation,” and “Empire” find a place in a rhetoric of community centering on the State?
* What are the effects of the interaction of organic metaphors and an increasingly industrialized nineteenth-century reality?

* How do discursive constructions of the State differ in different countries, both in Europe and abroad?
* To what extent do literary-intellectual discourses exploit not only the educational but also the imagistic denotation of the term Bildung?
* How do constructions of the State construct the State’s other?

Amanda Anderson (Johns Hopkins University)
Karl Heinz Bohrer (Stanford University)
Eva Geulen (Universität Bonn)
Thomas Pfau (Duke University)
Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario)
Joseph Vogl (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, to be confirmed)

We welcome proposals for panels and for 20-minutes papers in English, French, or German. Please send your one-page proposal (two pages for panels), together with your contact data, in a separate word document to <matters.of.state@arts.kuleuven.be> before September 30. For panel proposals, provide a general introduction and short abstracts for the different papers (3 or 4). Notification of acceptance no later than November 15.
For more information, check the conference website: http://www.arts.kuleuven.be/matters_of_state.
The conference website will be updated regularly as more information becomes available.

 (posted 2 Jul '08)

Papers are invited on any aspect of the writing of Rosamond Lehmann (1901-1990) for a colloquium to be held in Cambridge on Saturday, April, 25, 2009. Confirmed speakers include Francoise Bort, Lucy Carlyle, Gill Frith, Clare Hanson, Wendy Pollard, Victoria Stewart, and Judy Simons. Please send a 250 word abstract for a 20 minute paper in the form of an e-mail attachment to both of the convenors by November 1, 2008 if you would like to contribute.

(posted 29 Aug '08)

This conference invites reconsideration of modernity, modernism and postmodernism from literary, cultural and a wide range of interdisciplinary aspects, aiming to broaden the current debates.

Panel proposals chaired by colleagues from different universities are especially welcome, along with individual papers, roundtables, workshops and performances either in English or Turkish. Please note that there will be no translations during the conference.

•    Modernities / Postmodernities
•    From tradition to innovation / modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism
•    Ethics of (post)modernity
•    Dialectics of enlightenment
•    Eradication, redemption or reconstruction of myths
•    Mechanism of (dis)belief
•    Aspects and limits of certainty
•    Primitivity and (post)modernity
•    'Biophilia' and biopolitics
•    (Post)modernity and (meta)narratives
•    (Post)modernity and time
•    Modernity and secularism
•    Aesthetics of modernity
•    Historical relativism
•    Modernity and the Body
•    Crisis in representation

The deadline for proposals: December 19, 2008. Please send a 250 word abstract for a 20 minute paper and a short bio in the form of an email 'word' attachment to the coordinator at <css2009ege@gmail.com>.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Şebnem Toplu
Dept. English Language & Literature
Faculty of Letters
Ege University,
35100-Bornova, Izmir
Turkey
Fax: +90 (232) 388 11 02
Selected papers will be published in the forthcoming proceedings. 
For further information the Symposium website will be online shortly at http://css.ege.edu.tr