Literature has always been a platform for reflecting upon reality. The world, as an 'imagined space' (Edward Soja), has, for instance, provided a fertile canvas for the creative imagination in a variety of literary genres. As more of the world has been explored, conquered and gradually perceived to be 'smaller', the need has also arisen to mould and conceive new world realities in fiction; especially as science still grapples with the blurring of categories intended to capture the global dimension of these realities. In this way, literature has always been intertwined with globalising realities and may figure as a fruitful source in an intellectual and cultural history of global consciousness. The proposed workshop, thus, intends to investigate literary texts which display a concrete sense of the 'global' or how it has evolved over time and been conceived in distinct contexts by specific fictional authors.

Literature, of course, explores, transports and communicates ideas to the reader in its own distinct ways and can also be seen as a wider part of certain societal debates that deal with political, economic and social transformations. The contribution it makes to these debates, then, rests, firstly, on the way literary texts remap and re-imagine supposed changing realities (e.g. utopian, post-/colonial, science fiction or popular adventure writing) and, secondly, on how they are received by the extended readership. Thus, papers may focus on the picture of the world created and depicted in certain literary texts or the way they are embedded in wider societal and cultural discourses. Moreover, literature consists of diverse narrative elements such as place, time, character, voice and linguistic style. How these key elements of literary texts are affected by dealing with the globality of their time, and the type of global consciousness they create are certainly intertwined with the general focus of the workshop.

Broadly, the workshop will concentrate upon the Anglo-German context, i.e. literature written in English and German, and especially encourages cross-cultural and diachronic comparative approaches. We invite you to submit proposals. They should include an abstract of the presentation (about 300 words in English) and a short CV of no more than two pages, including a list of relevant publications.

(posted 20 November 2009)

The 10th Conference of the European Society for the Study of English will be hosted by the University of Torino in the first capital city of Italy, which will celebrate 150 years as a nation in 2011.

Graced with a crown of hills and peacefully flowing rivers, Torino is set against a backdrop of snow-capped Alpine peaks. Destroyed by Hannibal and rebuilt by the Romans, the city has had a long and important history, from ancient to modern times. Indeed, its city centre still preserves the gridiron street plan of Augusta Taurinorum, the army camp founded by Julius Caesar. A wealth of monuments, museums and art galleries bear witness to the various stages in this long and complex history. Yet the baroque palaces, royal residences (declared a Unesco World Heritage Site) and historic cafés are in a city which in the late twentieth century saw its transformation from a "one factory town", with massive internal migration from other parts of Italy, social tensions and urban terrorism, into a successful post-industrial social laboratory. Turin's role as an Olympic city in 2006, alongside a host of other attractions and an increasingly multi-ethnic scenario, complements its fame as the centre of one of the world's most celebrated wine regions; and its traditional cuisine has developed into a philosophy through the Slow Food movement, which started here.

The University of Torino is located in the heart of the city. With 67,000 students, 4,000 academics and administrative staff, 7,000 postgraduate and postdoctoral students, 55 departments and 52 research centres, it features a dynamic "city within the city", generating a constant stream of culture, research, innovation, training and employment, and facing all challenges with the strength coming from six hundred years of tradition. Founded in 1404, the University has played a key role throughout the centuries in the intellectual and political life of the nation. Its fame, beginning with the Degree in Theology conferred on Erasmus of Rotterdam in 1506, was recently confirmed by world-known political figures including Luigi Einaudi, Antonio Gramsci, Piero Gobetti and many Resistance heroes -- and by Nobel prize winners: Salvatore E. Luria, Renato Dulbecco, Rita Levi Montalcini.

The academic programme for the conference will be supplemented by a range of pre- and post-Conference excursions, so that participants can make the most of the many attractions, both natural and cultural, located in and around the city, and explore the surrounding landscape.

Delegates are invited to visit the Conference website http://www.unito.it/esse2010. The site will be updated regularly over the coming months with details of the academic programme (including, in due course, the titles of papers to be discussed at the seminars listed below), registration procedures, a wide range of accommodation options, further information about Torino, and travel advice.

Please note that registration will open on 1 March 2010, by which time full details of how to register will be available on the Conference website. A flat fee will be charged for the entire Conference. There will be no daily rate.

Delegates from countries experiencing currency difficulties, or postgraduate students, may apply for a reduced fee or, in some cases, a fee-waiver, by submitting their case in writing by 1 April 2010. Such applications will be processed on a first-come, first-served basis, with a provisional list established during the course of the registration period.

Please note that neither the University of Turin nor ESSE can accept liability for travel, accommodation, or other expenses incurred by convenors, co-convenors, or those invited to participate in round tables or seminars.

The full list of lectures and plenary lectures, special events, round tables and seminars can be downloaded here.

(posted 10 September 2009)

An Interdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Conference hosted by English Research Institute, the MMU Writing School and The Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences Research.
Confirmed keynote speakers: Simon Gikandi, David Theo Goldberg, Bonnie Greer, Ato Quayson.
Readings from Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay and others.
Barack Obama's presidency is widely seen as the beginning of a new era, not only in world politics but also in global culture, with the present increasingly glossed as the 'Age of Obama'. Our conference will ask what the terms of this naming might mean by addressing the diverse range of representational forms attached to Obama in contemporary world culture - as a person, icon and phenomenon. The conference will map and explore the specific historical, political and cultural climates in which Obama('s) texts operate. It will interrogate the signifiers, signs and processes that circulate around Barack Obama, and explore his own contributions and interventions across diverse media. 
Proposals are invited for papers or panels that engage with these diverse textualities. Questions might include: In what ways do Obama texts 'travel' and under what conditions? How might travelling theory or diaspora theory engage with Obama texts? In what ways might attention to Obama texts interrogate or develop extant or emerging frameworks at work in postcolonial, globalisation, media and cultural studies? How might a focus on transnational Obamas include or obscure local or national politics and expressions of black activism? How ought we to theorise pronouncements of a 'post-racial' America or/and a 'post-Katrina' America? 
Possible streams might include: Postcolonial Obama: Kenya and Indonesia, Globalisation and Cosmopolitanism, Aloha Obama! Negotiating Hawaii, Obama and African-America, Rhetoric/Orature /Life writing, The Obama Families, Screening Obama, Obama and Hospitality, Black and Bi-Racial Masculinities, Race & Racial Politics, Obama in Europe, Publishing/Merchandising Obama, Ghosting Kennedy, Race and Fatherhood, Obama’s 100 days, Obama in the Academy, Law and Civil Rights, Black Activism, Obama’s Blackberry: New Technologies/Media and Race, Obama and Popular Culture: Watching The Wire, Obama and pedagogy.
Proposals should be emailed to <textingobama@mmu.ac.uk> by no later than 26 March 2010.
Organising Committee: Dr. Ellie Byrne, Dr. Julie Mullaney, Prof. Berthold Schoene, Department of English, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

(posted 22 September 2009)

The Centre for Irish Studies (Centre d'Études Irlandaises) based at the University of Rennes 2, France, is soliciting papers for an interdisciplinary conference, which will run from 9th-11th September 2010.

2009 has been marked by the publication on the island of Ireland of two high-profile reports on very different aspects of victims. The publication of the final Ryan Report on institutional abuse in the Republic, and the Eames / Bradley report from the Consultative Group on the Past set up in 2007 by the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, to "find a way out of the shadows of the past" have both sparked heated debate in academic and non-academic circles, in Ireland and abroad.

In the run-up to and following the Good Friday Agreement, the issue of how to address the grievances, demands and needs of victims of the 30 year conflict has proved highly sensitive, due to differing perceptions of who the victims really are, of how best to approach their needs, with some quarters even questioning the wisdom of "stirring up" the past. Indeed, the steady stream of reports and commissions investigating the victims of the Troubles is indicative of the difficulty in reaching consensus on the most appropriate way(s) to deal with the legacy of the past in order to provide for a more serene future.

Patricia Lundy and Mark McGovern outline three distinct threads in dealing with the past in post-conflict transformation today, all concerned with key concepts of truth, justice, memory and healing:

"The therapeutic, archival and judicial imperatives can be taken as defining the logic of post-conflict memory work today. They also establish the, at times, contradictory, ends of truth recovery processes: to find 'healing' for victims by giving them a public voice; to re-write the record of the conflict and establish a new, potentially shared narrative of the past; and to revisit past injustice in order to establish an accountable, rights-based regime in the future."

In a broader perspective, Ireland's past and collective memories are etched with examples of victims, victimhood, and victimisation: the Famine victims, those who have become martyrs or heroes in both nationalist and unionist narratives of the past, victims of the siege of Derry, the Easter Rising, the battle of the Somme, Bloody Sunday, the Hunger strikes and more recently, those groups left out of the economic boom, and victims of the growing fear of otherness which manifests itself in racism and hate crime.

It would now seem an opportune moment to devote a conference to this general thematic in an Irish context.

- differing perceptions and definitions of victims and victimhood,
- the plight of victims,
- the reluctance of the State and other parties to delve into the past,
- the input of civic society in representing victims,
- revisiting past wrongs to move forward in the future,
- closure and victims as survivors,
- conflict transformation and peace-building,
- the portrayal of victims in literature, film and the arts

The cross-disciplinary nature of Irish Studies provides a wide range of approaches from which to examine victims and victimhood. We welcome submissions for 20-minute papers in English (preferably) or French from numerous areas including Conflict and Peace Studies, Victims studies, Law and Human Rights, History, Politics, Comparative Analysis, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Migration Studies, Literature, Media and Film Studies, Visual Arts, Performing Arts...

Professor Marianne Elliott, O.B.E., F.B.A., Director of the Institute of Irish Studies, University of Liverpool
Patricia MacBride, Commissioner for Victims and Survivors
Rita Duffy, visual artist

<lesley.lelourec@univ-rennes2.fr>
<grainne.o-keeffe@univ-rennes2.fr>

(posted 26 October 2009)

The 4th International Conference on Modality in English will take place at the Facultad de Filología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 9-11 September 2010.
Conference website: http://www.ucm.es/centros/webs/se5065/
The conference is designed to be a follow-up to the:
Plenary Speakers:
The venue of the conference will be the Facultad de Filología, on the campus of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which is of easy access from the city centre and the hotels. (There are convenient bus links and an underground station on campus).
Papers and posters are invited on all topics belonging to the field of modality and evidentiality in English, including crosslinguistic studies.
Presentations of papers will be allocated 20 minutes plus 5 minutes for questions.
Authors of papers and posters should submit anonymous abstracts, together with a separate page specifying the author's name, affiliation, surface mail address and e-mail address. Abstracts should be between 600-700 words (excluding references), and should state research questions, approach, method, data and (expected) results.
All submitted abstracts will go through a double-blind reviewing process (at least two reviewers).

Abstracts should be sent by e-mail, as attachments, to ModE4 <mode4@filol.ucm.es>.
The new deadline for all abstracts (papers and posters) is 21 February 2010.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by 31 March 2010.
Conference Proceedings will be published either in a scientific journal or in a book. A special volume with selected papers will also be published.
Contact:

This international conference will take place at the old Castle of Schönburg near the enchanted rock of the Loreley in the Rhine valley. It is to mark the bicentenary of the death of Anna Gordon, Mrs Brown of Falkland, in 1810 and the publication of her ballad repertoire in 2010. Her ballads were edited by "Monk Lewis" in his Tales of Wonder (1801), Walter Scott in his Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-03) and Robert Jamieson in his Popular Ballads (1806). She is only one of the many women at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century who were, until now, not heard in their own voices. We would therefore like to invite papers that recover Scottish voices from that period in general and voices lost in Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border in particular. The main themes of the conference will be Mrs Brown of Falkland and Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and papers are welcome that deal with . . .

- Scottish culture and identity around 1800
- Ballad Singing, Collecting, Editing around 1800
- German and Danish Translations of Scott’s Minstrelsy
- Scottish voices from America, Denmark, Latvia ...
- Medievalism in the Romantic period
- Gothic ballads / novels (esp. Mrs Brown and Monk Lewis)
- Historical ballads / novels (esp. Walter Scott)
- Cultural Memory of the Scottish Border
- Women and Music in Scotland around 1800

(posted 10 November 2009)

- Division of Media, English and Culture, School of Arts, University of Northampton (UK)
- Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain)

Almost five decades have elapsed since the British writer Eva Figes began her literary career. Born in Berlin in 1932 into a family of assimilated German Jews and forced to emigrate to Great Britain in 1939 due to the outbreak of the Second World War, Eva Figes has contributed to the corpus of contemporary literature in English thanks to her prodigious output as both critic and novelist.  In 2009 the British Library decided to acquire the rights to her personal archives, and so we think that this is the moment to give Eva Figes the place she deserves in the contemporary literary canon by organising an international conference on her work.

Despite being an established writer and having won some important literary prizes and titles in England (The Guardian Prize in 1967, the Honorary degree of Doctor of Letters by Brunel University in 2002), her work has received relatively limited critical attention. Figes' life experiences -- her childhood experience of the Holocaust; emigration to a foreign country; being a woman trying to forge a literary career -- have left significant traces in all her works. Moreover, Figes' own writing career which spans the 1960s to the present in many ways reflects the evolution of British fiction in the post-war period. Her work resists classification within a single, unifying category. Whether seen as a feminist inheritor of Virginia Woolf, analysed as an Anglo-Jewish writer, or regarded as part of a postmodernist literary aesthetic, Figes' work represents a unique contribution to English literature. We welcome approaches to her work from any perspective which provides insight into Eva Figes’ wide-ranging and impressive oeuvre.

•    Dr. David Brauner (University of Reading, UK)
•    Prof. Thomas Michael Stein (University of Mainz, Germany)
•    Dr. Julia Tofantšuk (University of Tallinn, Estonia)
•    A Guest appearance from Eva Figes to be confirmed

•    Eva Figes in relation to Contemporary British Fiction and the literary canon
•    The feminist agenda and the construction of female identities in Figes' works
•    The question of Jewishness and the presence of the Holocaust in Eva Figes' literary world
•    The construction of identity in Figes' fictions
•    The persistence of modernism in Figes’ works
•    Eva Figes as a literary critic
•    Eva Figes' relation to  postmodernism
•    Eva Figes as inheritor of Virginia Woolf
•    Eva Figes and Trauma Studies
•    The autobiographical aspect in Figes' novels
•    Formal experimentalism in Figes' novels
•    The ethical dimension of Figes' literary production
•    The evolution  of Figes' literary career
•    Narrative and story-telling in Figes' works
•    The experience of motherhood  in Figes' writing
•    The experience of war in Figes' works
•    Writing as self-healing in Figes' literary career

Please submit paper proposals (abstracts of 300 words and short bio) to both conference organisers by 1st April 2010:

- Dr. Sonya Andermahr <sonya.andermahr@northampton.ac.uk>
- Miss Silvia Pellicer-Ortín <spellice@unizar.es>.

(posted 26 January 2010)

In what ways did South Asians impact on Britain’s cultural and political life between 1870 and 1950? To what extent did South Asian intellectuals and activists interact and exchange ideas with their British counterparts? What are the legacies of this early diasporic community?

This conference will explore the manifold ways in which the presence of South Asians in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries impacted on Britain and influenced the shaping of the nation. It will map out the various networks and affiliations South Asians and Britons formed across boundaries of 'race', 'nation' and 'class'. These can be traced in different areas of cultural and political life, from the elitist literary and artistic circles of Bloomsbury where friendships were forged between poets and painters; to the anticolonial organisations which brought South Asian and British activists together in the lead up to Independence; to the battlefields of the two world wars where Indian sepoys and volunteers fought alongside Britain's youth. Yet these interactions were also, at times, marked by hierarchies and dissent, with South Asians facing barriers in this chapter of their journey to negotiate the peripheries of Britain as well as its 'centre'. Whether through riot, strike or petition, they struggled for their rights as imperial citizens, shifting ideas of 'Britishness' in the process.

Held in partnership with the British Library, the conference will address the ways in which South Asians -- whether writers, politicians, students or lascars -- positioned themselves in Britain during this period, and, in turn, how they were depicted by the British public and in British culture. Further, it will examine the significance of their activities and their influence on the cultural-political make-up of Britain, the ways in which their interventions challenged the national imaginary, and how debates about citizenship and Britishness during the period continue to resonate with contemporary preoccupations regarding Britain’s multi-ethnic identity.

Invited plenary speakers include: Humayun Ansari, Antoinette Burton, Chandani Lokugé, Nayantara Sahgal, Amartya Sen and A. Martin Wainwright.

We welcome academics and practitioners from across the disciplines to excavate and examine the position, production and reception of this nascent South Asian diasporic community. Contributors are invited to consider the following -- by no means exhaustive -- questions:

    * How did South Asian writers, artists, intellectuals and travellers participate in re-imagining the nation in their work? In what ways did they help to shape debates around the nature of modernity?
    * In what ways did South Asian dancers, musicians and actors impact on British culture? Who were their audiences, and how were their performances received? Is there evidence of hybridized cultural forms dating from this period?
    * How were South Asians depicted in cultural, legal, state or media discourses? In what ways did 'race', class, gender or religion inform these depictions, and how did South Asians respond to or subvert them?
    * How did South Asians help shape Britain’s political culture? What modes and discourses of resistance did they use in their struggle for Indian independence? In what ways did they mobilize for equal rights and/or minority cultural rights?
    * How did South Asians -- British subjects and citizens of empire -- position themselves in Britain? In what ways did class and gender impact on their position? How did mixed-race subjects identify, and how were they perceived by mainstream British society?
    * Were religious identities prominent among South Asians during this period? In what circumstances did they come to the fore? Was religion practised in the public sphere, and if so, how did the British public respond to this?
    * What was the extent and nature of cross-cultural exchange and interaction among South Asian and British (as well as other minority) intellectuals, activists and workers? Were these exchanges shaped by hierarchies or conducted on an equal footing? Were they marked by collaboration or dissent?
    * What traces of the South Asian presence in Britain can be found in vernacular language sources? How did translations between English and other South Asian languages facilitate cross-cultural dialogue and the exchange of ideas?
    * In what ways did South Asians contribute to the two world wars? Did their role in the wars impact on their position within -- or their perception of -- the nation? Did it disturb the national imaginary -- and if so, how was this disturbance managed?
    * How else did South Asians contribute to the ‘making of Britain’ -- for example, through sport, science, education or cuisine; within the public sphere or the domestic sphere?
    * Which of their contributions have been silenced or 'written out' of the history of Britain, and why? What are the methodological issues and questions raised as we attempt to unearth their narratives and weave them back into the story of the nation?
    * How might this early presence of South Asians in Britain illuminate and/or disrupt contemporary understandings and theories of migration, diaspora or hybridity, for example?

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to Dr Florian Stadtler <f.c.stadtler@open.ac.uk>, with 'MB conference' in the subject line, by 30 September 2009.
The Making Britain website: http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/south-asians-making-britain

Plenary Speakers: Seamus Heaney and Jonathan Bate
Other speakers: Keith Sagar, Ann Skea, Neil Roberts, Terry Gifford, Stephen Enniss, Neil Corcoran, Jo Gill, Usha V.T., Chen Hong.
Ted Hughes went up to Pembroke College to read English in 1951, at the age of twenty-one. He later said that he regarded Cambridge as 'enemy country'. He felt alienated as a working-class student from Yorkshire (even though a third of Pembroke students in his year were from grammar schools) and more significantly he was hostile to the academic study of literature, which he felt stifled his creativity and prevented him from writing poetry. It was at Pembroke that he had his famous dream of a burnt fox that told him to stop writing critical essays because 'it is destroying us'. In his third year he changed to Archaeology and Anthropology, in which he got a Third in Part Two -- but he didn’t regret his decision. He published only two poems when he was a student, both under pseudonyms, and in the final month of his time there, although he considered neither of them worth reprinting in book form.
However, Cambridge was a deeply formative experience for Hughes. His anthropological studies were the foundation for his creative exploration of myth and religion; and it was there that he made some his most important and enduring friendships, with people such as Daniel Weissbort, Peter Redgrove, Daniel Huws, Terence McGaughey, David Ross and Lucas Myers. And it was of course at Cambridge, though after his graduation, that he met Sylvia Plath.
Cambridge is therefore an intriguing and resonant place at which to contemplate Hughes’s career, and to hold the latest in a series of international conferences, following Manchester (1980 and 1990), Lyon (2000), Atlanta (2005) and Edinburgh (2005). Over this period his reputation has sunk and risen again, and has never been higher than it is now. This is a time when his work offers a focus for a wide range of explorations in terms of themes, genres and contexts.
Papers (twenty minutes in length) are invited on any topic related to Hughes’s work. We suggest the following as guidelines and possible focuses for panels:

Please send an outline of not more than 200 words to Neil Roberts <N.J.Roberts@sheffield.ac.uk> by 1 February 2010. The conference will accommodate 25-30 papers, so it may be necessary to be selective. We plan to reserve a certain number of places for graduate students and younger scholars, so please let us know your academic status.

(posted 16 October 2009)

An international Conference in association with the UK Network for Modern Fiction Studies.

Contemporary British fiction is preoccupied with scenarios of violence, trauma and loss: destruction, guilt, traumatic experiences and apocalyptic anxieties are prevalent thematic and aesthetic concerns that seem to be related to incisive and far-reaching political events. With the postmodern fascination with fragmentation and the dissolution of meaning on the wane, the preoccupation with physical and psychological collapse has prompted some critics to postulate the 'traumatological' (Philip Tew) nature of contemporary writing and to detect a post-millennial aesthetic of responsibility and conscience. These trends and tendencies have been identified, but have not yet received due (and differentiated) critical attention. In particular, the concern with trauma, violence and loss has not yet been examined in its complexity and potential ambiguity: while narrative negotiations of these issues may be genuine and convincing, their compelling allure also means that they lend themselves to manipulation. The tension between the uses and abuses of trauma, violence and loss - their ethical relevance and their potential exploitation - opens a set of questions that need to be critically explored and investigated.

This conference seeks to contribute to the critical debate around contemporary British fiction, with the aim of more fully comprehending the meaning, aesthetics and ethical implications of its preoccupation with violence, trauma and loss. The conference will provide a forum where violence, trauma and loss can be discussed in their broadest sense, where these concerns can be variously conceptualised and where their inflections with identity, meaning, ethics, history, memory and related issues can be explored. Investigating narrative constructions of violence, trauma and loss, we are interested to trace the processes by which these issues have become cultural preoccupations and areas of fascination, and to ask what this means for our understanding of ourselves, our cultural moment and the role of fiction within it.

- How can we adequately conceptualise the current literary concern with violence, trauma, loss, guilt, apocalypse, etc?
- How are anxieties, traumatic experiences and apocalyptic scenarios fictionalised?
- What ethical uses, but also manipulative abuses may these concerns be put to?
- Which critical and theoretical approaches can help us shed light on these preoccupations?
- How do they reflect on our understanding of ourselves and our world?

Keynote speakers:

(posted 14 October 2009)

Woolf contemporaine / A Contemporary Woolf - International Conference organised by the French Virginia Woolf Society, in Aix-en-Provence (Université d’Aix-Marseille I), September 18-19 2010
"On or about December 1910, human character changed" : one century after this new beginning, we invite you to reflect on Virginia Woolf's relation to the contemporary, and on how she is inscribed in time, and in her time, "being that which we are, that which we have made, that in which we live" ("How It Strikes a Contemporary",1925).
If being contemporary means not abiding by the  strictures of the present, but rather, as Giorgio Agamben maintains in his essay "What is the Contemporary?" grasping the meaning of one's time from outside, what does this imply about Woolf's contemporaneity, both in terms of her own era, and in terms of our present? To what extent does her  fictional as well as non-fictional work reflect on or engage with those forms of untimeliness or out-of-timeness which enable an author to "see its shadows" or "perceive its obscurity"?
Our principal aim will be to explore the ways in which Woolf conceives of modernity. How do her texts display an awareness of the barbarity as well as of the culture of her century? How do they relate the present to the past and the future? And how might we today be "contemporaries" of her texts, and see in them figurations of our own century, our own times? How can we as readers define those moments in the text when Woolf's writing becomes contemporary now, and as such generates works to come? These are some of the questions which can incite us to reflect on Virginia  Woolf's contemporaneity at the same time as we contemplate our own.
Considering Woolf as a contemporary implies thinking about history outside chronological sequence and positing the present as a crossroads between epochs, between generations -- in other words conceiving the present caught in the tension of temporalities as Woolf describes it at the end of her essay "How it Strikes a Contemporary": "scan the horizon; see the past in relation to the future; and so prepare the way for masterpieces to come."
Papers can be given in French or English. Submissions (up to 250 words) should be addressed to Claire Davison-Pégon <davisonpegon@gmail.com> or Anne-Marie Smith-Di Biasio <Amdibiasio@neuf.fr> by January 15th 2010.  A final answer will be sent out by March 15th.

(posted 4 November 2009)

"And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you 
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; 
I will show you fear in a handful of dust."
(T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ll.27-30)

What Eliot voices here is, no doubt, his fear and, simultaneously, concern about the prospects of European civilisation as he saw it in the first decades of the 20th c. Eliot's lines carry eschatological overtones, too. Do we fear the end of our civilisation, or the condition it has reached at present? What is the connection between fear and civilisation? Are we still waiting for the barbarians? Do we have more fear of the real or the virtual? Should we, perhaps, opt for the positive senses of fear whose presence may testify to the mystery human life is, or brings to light the limitations which human life involves? Can we possibly conquer our fears by writing about them, and redefining their sources? Aren’t we -- as individuals, citizens, family members, superiors and inferiors, natives and strangers, bodies and spirits -- our own fears writ large?

This call for papers is not intended to alarm or intimidate anyone. We extend a cordial invitation to all scholars who take genuine interest in any of the issues raised in the title of the conference as well as those listed below. Our aim is to address a multiplicity of concerns which often coincide and intersect in modern discourses (including literary and cultural studies, psychology, sociology, religious studies, art and others). However, we propose to consider writing (both literary and non-literary) as a window onto, and a meeting ground for, the following themes:

• Arts and literature: the future of arts; literatures of terror; artistic (literary) modes (genres) of terror; the terrific/horrific sublime; (limits of) self-fashioning and self-expression; anxiety of influence in the age of parody, travesty and appropriation
• Civilisation and technology: fear of modernisation and of acceleration; clashes of civilisations; the fearful interplay between culture and nature; man vis-à-vis machine (e.g., threats to humanness, simulacra of the human as source of anxiety, "new" humanity)
• Politics and ideology: enslavement, subjection, subordination through discourses; the "fearful asymmetry": discourses and practices of the modern state (intersections of the political and the personal); democracy, liberty(ies), religion: from orthodoxy to fundamentalism and back, the self of ideology
• Discourses: thanatophobia and the postmodern condition; religious studies as a necessary/contingent by-product of recent traumas; fear and/of metaphysics; power and its institutions as forces prescribing discourses of the self
• Identity / the self: phobias of exposure to fear and trauma; the threatened/shifting selfhood & competing models of subjectivity; the sub/un/conscious; the Lacanian Real

We invite all delegates to deliver 20-minute presentations. Abstracts of the presentations should not exceed 200 words and should be submitted electronically to <civilizationandfear@gmail.com> by March 31, 2010.
Plenary speakers:

(posted 28 December 2009)

Organized by the CLEU research group of the University of La Coruna in northwestern Spain, this international conference, scheduled for September 23-25, 2010, aims to provide a forum for the exploration of the relationships between the ecological and the utopian in American letters and American culture at large. Combining politics and poetics, the conference intends to look at the convergence of both terms in different cultural and literary manifestations so as to bring out and debate the utopian element within the ecological and/or the ecocritical, as well as the presence of the ecological within contemporary utopian proposals, real or fictional. How does utopian discourse manifest itself within ecology-oriented writings? Is it a necessary or disruptive presence? As a literary genre, does it encounter difficulties in its formalization of an ecological perspective? Must ecologically-concerned texts, cultural and scientific assertions employ the modes and strategies of utopian discourse? Is the textual arena of the literary a privileged site for this encounter or are other textual and cultural forms more suitable to the articulation of the inherent political concerns of utopian and ecological projects?

Scott Slovic, University of Nevada
Lucy Sargisson, University of Nottingham
José Eduardo Pacheco Barreiros Reis, Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

- Utopian manifestations in American culture.
- Interrelationships between utopia and ecology, theoretical and practical.
- Utopian discourses, ecological/ecocritical textualities.
- The poetics and politics of the utopian/ecological text.
- Genre fiction and ecological utopianism.
- Eco-poetics: literary modes and ecology.
- Utopian communities and ecological concerns.
- Literary utopianism: history and form.
- Ecocritical theory and utopian politics.
- Dystopian manifestations in American culture.
- Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic cultural forms.

Abstracts (250 words) should be sent by May 1, 2010, and the full paper by July 25, 2010. Conference information will be available via the appropriate link on the CLEU web-page: http://www.udc.es/grupos/cleu/

(posted 30 January 2010)

The study of human emotions proves to be enormously interesting for neurobiologists and psychologists as well as for scholars in the fields of literary studies and media studies. Fear is a state which seems to have fascinated countless novelists, poets, playwrights and screenwriters. From a clinical perspective, fear is rooted in a response to (potentially) dangerous situations. In a situation causing fear, the body and the mind react intensely. Edmund Burke famously remarked that "[n]o passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear", and Charles Darwin described the physical consequences of what would nowadays be called a panic attack as follows: "[T]he eyes and mouth are widely opened, and the eyebrows raised. The frightened man at first stands like a statue motionless and breathless, or crouches down as if instinctively to escape observation. The heart beats quickly and violently, so that it palpitates or knocks against the ribs." (Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals)

The many facets of fear, including phenomena like anxiety, phobia, terror and horror, as well as the manifold strategies employed to cope with fear (avoidance, escape, etc.), have been explored in a wide range of literary texts, movies and TV series, such as Poe's short stories, Stoker's Dracula, Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, McEwan's Saturday, films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Sixth Sense and Vertigo. Addressing phenomena including sublime terror, teenage anxieties and panic in the face of death, literary texts and audiovisual media have tried to portray and analyse the manifold physical and psychological expressions of fear. The conference seeks to encourage a dialogue between various disciplines that are interested in the study of fear, including psychology, literary studies, media, film and television studies, gender studies and horror studies.

Prof. Dr. Marion Gymnich <mgymnich@uni-bonn.de>
Anja Drautzburg, M.A. <a.drautzburg@uni-bonn.de>
Miriam Halfmann, M.A. <halfmann@uni-bonn.de>.

(posted 30 December 2009)

Over the past thirty years a first generation of men's studies has offered a discussion of gender trying to uncover what Michael Kimmel has called 'invisible' or 'genderless' masculinity, and study men 'as men.' Within this time period, the notion of 'hegemonic masculinity', as defined by R.W. Connell, has dominated conversations within the field of men's studies.

First understood as a unified normative practice guaranteeing men's domination over women, hegemonic masculinity is now defined as 'a hybrid bloc that unites practices from diverse masculinities' (Demetrakis Z. Demetriou) and also ensures domination over subordinated masculinities.

This international transdisciplinary conference will allow us to re-examine the invisibility of masculinity in the English-speaking world through the notion of performance. While Judith Butler's principle that 'gender is performed' has been widely discussed, it still raises one fundamental question in relation to masculinity: if masculinity is invisible and 'nonperformative' (Judith Halberstam), how is it to be performed?

Concentrating on dominant forms of masculine identities such as white, straight and/or middle-class masculine identities, we shall focus on performances of masculinity through, although not exclusively, such notions as the body (including ageing, drag, evolution from childhood to manhood, sexuality), relationships and networks (including homosociality, male friendships, relationships in the workplace, marriage, family, fatherhood, domesticity) and conflict (including war, nationalism, politics).

We welcome contributions from different periods and different disciplines (history, literary studies, performance studies, anthropology, political sciences, cultural studies, men‚s studies, gender studies, media studies, sociology, etc.). The language of the conference will be English exclusively.

- Raphael Costambeys-Kempczynski <raphael.costambeys@univ-paris3.fr>

- and Hélène Quanquin <helene.quanquin@univ-paris3.fr>.

If your proposal is selected you will be required to send the full text of your presentation by 31st August 2010. The papers will be read in advance of each session. A facilitator will promote discussion of the papers following their presentation.

The GRIC (Groupe de Recherches: Identités, Cultures) invites submissions for individual papers (in English or in French) for a symposium on "The Woodstock Years"  (1965-1975), to be held from the evening of September 29 to October 1, 2010, at the University of Le Havre, Le Havre, FRANCE.
Papers may be on any subject related to the Woodstock years in the USA or elsewhere. They may include, but are not limited to:

 - The Woodstock festival
            - life at the festival
            - the performers
            - the music
- Music of the time
- Language of the time
- Hippie culture
- Philosophy of the time
- Political and economic context of the time
- Cinema
- Graphic arts and literature
- American Indian Movement
- Feminist movement
- Gay liberation movement
- Anti-war movement
- Civil rights movement
- Student movement

Papers should be not more than 20 minutes in length. Please send a 300-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note by April 1st, 2010 to the two following addresses:

<lois.nathan@univ-lehavre.fr>
<claire.bowen@univ-lehavre.fr>

(posted 30 January 2010)

Pascal Nicklas (Humboldt University Berlin),

Gesa Stedman (GBZ Berlin),
Eckart Voigts-Virchow (Siegen University)

The Centre for British Studies, Berlin (Großbritannienzentrum) will host an international conference on "Rewriting, Remixing, and Reloading: Adaptations across the Globe", in co-operation with the Association of Adaptation Studies and the Centre of Adaptations, De Montfort University, Leicester.

Translation, transformation, appropriation, assimilation, adaptation -- these processes of inter¬textual and intermedial contact have been 'Adaptation Studies' has been active in exploring adaptive processes, but we feel that the impact of a global reservoir of images as well as the need to articulate cultural and aesthetic specificity in a climate of universal access have yet to make their full impact on adaptation studies. We would like to bring into narrow focus the various aesthetic processes and cultural issues at stake in adapting texts in a globalized world -- responding both to the pressure of actualizing texts for a specific cultural moment and to the increasing globalization of cultures. We specifically seek to address media – from film and television to social media and platforms such as youtube -- that tend to erase borders and barriers both of a temporal and geographical nature. We are looking forward both to programmatic and theoretical overviews and to significant case studies from this ubiquity of rewriting, remixing and reloading across media and genres. There are no restrictions on issues we would like to address, but proposals in the following areas are encouraged:

- Theoretical perspectives and keywords in adaptation studies: adaptation, intertextuality, intermediality, remediation, translation, appropriation, re-writing, remixing, reloading.
- Genres of adaptation: fantasy, Gothic, horror, science fiction, western, crime, romcom, teen movies, etc.
- Adaptation and the canon.
- Intercultural adaptation and assimilation: globalizing the 'Anglosphere'.
- Adapting nations, cultures and ethnicities.
- Teaching adaptation across the globe.
- The role of translation in adaptation studies.
- Post-literary adaptation: cartoons, games, oral narratives.
- Adaptation and performance.
- Audiences of adaptation.
- Locations of adaptation: film, television. Web 2.0, YouTube and social media.
- Screens and sounds: adaptation, audiobooks and music.
- Dressing up adaptations: costumes and mise-en-scène.
- Adaptation and the stage: plays, theatre, performance.
- Confrontational adaptation: mash-ups and trailer edits.
- Cult adaptations and the cult of adaptation.
- Actualizing the classics: myths, antiquity, Shakespeare, etc.
- The auteurs of adaptation.
- Adapting authors: literary bio-pics.
- "Now a major motion picture" -- marketing adaptation.
- Adapting trauma and catastrophe.
- Heritage and history in performance on stage and screen.
- Remaking and rehashing: iterating, re-making and re-presenting film history on screen.
- Adaptation industries: Hollywood, Bollywood, Europe.
- Adaptation and gender: Masculinity, femininity, queerings.
- Adapting fiction and non-fiction, documentary formats.
- Adaptation and re-writing: Novels, novelizations, screenplays, storyboards.
- Adaptation, parody, pastiche.
- Metadaptation: Self-reflexive adaptations.

Abstracts: 200-word abstracts of suggested papers (20 minutes) plus short biographical note should be sent by June 1, 2010, to Prof. Dr. Eckart Voigts-Virchow <voigts-virchow@anglistik.uni-siegen.de>.

Only paid-up members of AAS are eligible to give papers at this conference. Membership subscriptions may be taken out during the conference.

(posted 24 December 2009)