Recent Gothic studies have increasingly looked into problems associated with the idea of delimitation, both in terms of material and media. This leads to the two sets of questions implied in this conference's title: Where are the limits of the 'classic' Gothic tradition? Where have these limits been reached or even transgressed? Can one speak about a 'post-Gothic mode'? What, if anything, is capable of replacing the Gothic? The second set of questions is prompted by the commercialisation and commodification of an increasingly romanticised Gothic and its diffusion among different media and modes: Is the Gothic dependent on 'literature'? Are there media-specific 'Gothics'? Which intermedial and intermodal forms are there? In other words, we are interested in all phenomena where the Gothic shades off into something else: cross-over genres, mash-ups, parodies, post-modern Gothic, Candy Gothic, the currently ubiquitous vampires, Gothic mangas, blogs, computer and role-playing games as well as more traditional literary formats that contest the range and concerns of the Gothic.

•    Gothic  origins.
•    Enlightenment Gothic.
•    Romanticism and the Gothic.
•    Defining the Victorian Gothic.
•    Genre/mode .
•    Romance and Realism.
•    Gothic Science/Science and the Gothic.
•    Liminality.
•    Domestic Gothic.
•    The national limits of Gothic.
•    Gothic media.
•    Gothic spaces.
•    Theme parks.
•    Neo-Gothic.
•    Games.
•    Modernism and postmodernism.
•    Cartoons.
•    The Goth.
•    Selling the Gothic/Sell out Gothic.

(posted 30 September 2010)

Between the National and the Transnational, 1980 to the Present: Masculinities in Britain and the U.S.: The Second of Three International Workshops

Kent State University, August 4-7, 2011

Recent scholarship in the study of masculinities suggests any number of ways in which this field has begun to move beyond the cataloging of pluralized masculinities that has characterized so much scholarship on this topic. The organizers of this workshop believe that masculinities should be examined at a number of different analytic levels, ranging from the most location-oriented and culturally specific, to the national, to the transnational.

In this context, this workshop will focus on the articulation of masculinities over the last three decades in Britain and the U.S. It especially wants to encourage scholarly and critical movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the field of masculinity studies and moves beyond it, toward more comparative kinds of analysis. What lines of interchange and influence in the cultural and literary imagining of masculinity can be traced between Britain and the U.S. during the last thirty years? How do recent articulations of masculinity reimagine established understandings of gender? How should we understand the ways in which relations between hegemonic and counterhegemonic masculinities operate both similarly and differently in these two locations? And how to understand the ways in which masculinity operates in relation to key issues mapped out by recent scholarship, from transgender, intersex, and disability studies, to research on space, geography, migration, neoliberalism, biopolitics, and warfare?

We seek innovative scholarship on masculinities in Britain and the U.S. from roughly 1980 to the present. We especially encourage comparative work, analyses that operate in simultaneously national and transnational terms.

Please e-mail an abstract of no more than 500 words, along with a c.v., to both:
The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2011.  Please direct inquiries to Kevin Floyd.

(posted 28 October 2010)

Southern African and African literatures are rich in representations and explorations of our extensive coastlines, their associated waters and denizens. Yet this zone and its symbolisms are thus far almost entirely absent from our literary critical studies. This colloquium seeks to begin to fill this gap. While the emphasis is on the Southern African region, coastal studies of other regions, especially with African and comparative perspectives, are welcome. "Literature" is to be regarded as including all genres, including non-fiction. The colloquium also seeks to draw in the scientific community, to begin an environmentally fruitful conversation between ecology, literature, and related disciplines.

The sea as presence and motif in Southern African literatures
Littoral zones and bioregional theory
Incoming and outgoing sea journeys as motif
Coastal journeys in early travel literature
The role of islands in our literatures
Adamastor revisited: Camoens to the present
Ships, shipwrecks and the ecology of shipwreck narratives
The beach and swimming as locale and metaphor
Fishing, fishermen and fishing literature
Littoral animals as presence and metaphor (both marine and landbased)
Seabirds as poetic motif
Littoral communities in literature
Estuaries as locale and metaphor in SA poetry and fiction
Coastal urbanisation and ports as presence and motif
Littoral zones and literary tourism
Littoral science, archaeology and ecology in and out of literature
The South African coast as integral to both the Atlantic seaboard and Indian Ocean littoral systems

(posted 9 March 2011)

(posted 16 September 2010)

This interdisciplinary conference seeks to revisit the prevailing discourses about the concepts of presence and absence and their correlation in the humanities and social sciences. We welcome proposals for individual papers, seminars, panels and workshops on any aspect of presence and absence in literature, cultural studies, film, visual culture, linguistics, methodology, history, philosophy and psychology.

Please send 200 word abstracts for individual papers of 20 minutes (with 10 minutes discussion time) or 500 word proposals for seminars (3 papers each), panels, round tables and workshops of 90 minutes to Dr. Janka Kaščáková at <kascakova@ff.ku.sk> by 20 May 2011. 

An official website of the conference will soon be available. In the meantime, for any further questions contact Dr. Kaščáková.

(posted 11 April 2011)

Technical and scientific advances sparked off fundamental changes in the Western world between the end of the 18th and the middle of the 20th centuries, enabling Europeans to roam the world in search of wealth, to wrest control from indigenous peoples, to exploit the Other. This exploitation was 'justified' by colonial discourse. It was also at this time that a new form of political organisation, 'the nation-state', was born in Europe.

The West came to believe in linear 'progress' and 'evolution', in the 'natural right' of the 'superior white race' to reign over 'inferior races', who were expected either to assimilate or to die out as a consequence of 'natural selection'. At the same time, the coloniser exploited exotic images of colonised peoples, sometimes acting to prevent the evolution of indigenous cultures, forcing them to become a kind of living museum. Such images supplied a counter-image, a kind of photographic negative, which helped to define a positive Western identity. Although the colonised were excluded from positions of authority, some subalterns were given administrative positions as middle-men between the coloniser and the colonised. Back in the Centre, the new national identities were consolidated on a basis of racial 'purity' and a binary opposition between inclusion and exclusion; national histories were written with a view to fostering social cohesion between the chosen citizens of the nation.

But modernity suffered its own identity crisis: eugenics lead to the Holocaust and technical progress to Hiroshima. European colonisation crumbled world-wide, ex-colonies attained independence and sought to reconstruct their own identity. Globalisation then began to eat away at the foundations of the national identities that had been so laboriously put together by the European nation-states. New forms of national identity began to emerge in an attempt to acknowledge the ethnic heterogeneity of national populations.

As the certainties of modernity came crashing down, the world entered an era where identity crises 'personal, group, community, national) may be considered the norm rather than an exception. The authority of 'official History' has been challenged and its content deconstructed by postcolonial authors who underline its gaps and silences and its use of stereotypes. Official History has also been deconstructed (e.g. by life-stories) in literary, filmic and other forms.

We will focus on representations of the other. By juxtaposing and comparing differing disciplinary approaches, we hope to uncover shared strategies of resistance to stereotyping. We are particularly interested in examining the role of hybridity/métissage and 'interculturality' in this process.

- identity construction,
- postcolonialism,
- trauma theory,
- whiteness studies,
- etc.

- literature,
- cultural studies,
- civilisation,
- history,
- film studies,
- semiology,
- anthropology,
- linguistics,
- etc.

- the Asia-Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand),
- the Americas.

- Sue Ryan-Fazilleau <sryan@univ-lr.fr>-
 and Martine Raibaud <mraibaud@univ-lr.fr>.

The conference is organized with the support of CRHIA (Centre de Recherches en Histoire Internationale et Atlantique), the University of La Rochelle, the Centre Intermondes cultural association and the Confucius Institute of La Rochelle.

(posted 3 February 2011)

The workshop aims at bringing together linguistic and literary knowledge and expertise to interpret selected literary texts. For this purpose we cordially invite graduate students from the fields of English Literature and English Linguistics who are interested in interdisciplinary research. Together we will explore and discuss in how far linguistic methods are profitable for the literary analysis of a text and to what degree linguistics can profit from using literary texts as a corpus and touchstone for linguistic theory.
The discussion will be guided by presentations of students and lectures of two invited scholars from the fields of linguistics and literature:
- Dr. Gary Thoms (Literary Linguistics Advanced Research Group, Strathclyde)
- Prof. Dr. Olga Fischer (Iconicity Research Project, Zürich/Amsterdam)
Students who wish to participate should apply with an introduction to their field of research as well as a proposal for a presentation (1-2 pages) until 7 August 2011. Applications should be sent to <carmen.doerge@uni-tuebingen.de>.

(posted 1 August 2011)

Venue: Transilvania University Brasov, Romania (Aula ”Sergiu T. Chiriacescu”, str. Iuliu Maniu nr. 41A)

· internationalization policies/strategies: institutional policies and positions in relation to foreign-language mediated programmes
· quality assurance for internationalization: international, European and national level strategies, mechanisms and tools. Adaptability of European quality assurance tools to the Romanian context
· examples of good practice: teaching methodologies, classroom interaction, assessment of and support for teaching staff and/or students in foreign-language mediated programmes
· position and recommendations of national and/or European professional associations in relation to studying languages and foreign-language mediated programmes
· role of languages in foreign-language mediated programmes
· cultural awareness and mediation in international programmes
· learning outcomes and the Bologna process: transparency, transferability, mobility, etc.
· syllabus design and materials development for foreign-language mediated programmes
· use of standard and electronic resources in foreign-language mediated programmes
· student/teacher exchanges/mobility in international programmes
· internationalization and employability

Submissions deadline: 12 August, 2011
Submissions to: <asigma@lett.ubbcluj.ro>
Applications will be reviewed by a scientific committee and applicants will be notified by 17th August, 2011.
The languages of the conference are English, French and German.

Recent works in literary and cultural studies, sociology, political science, anthropology, human geography, history, film and art history have chosen research agendas which reflect a spatial orientation, which testifies to the (re)emergence of space as being of immense significance to the understanding of the phenomenon of our world. This interest is reflected in diverse conceptual perspectives: heterotopia, rhizome, Third space, hyperreal, time-space compression, a symptom and extimacy, placelessness, non-place, contact-zone. For some spatialization even heralds the end of temporality, including various ends of everything (from the end of history and art to the end of any stable identities). Is there anything left outside of space and is there anything left in the space that can gesture towards different alternatives, alterities?

Drawing on McHale's concept of zone, who expands  it to postmodern fiction, as compendiums of parallel unrealized worlds, parallaxes, places of haunting, whirlpools of consumption and so on, we would like to discuss these questions on possible spatial alternatives and alterities. All of these zones signal a kind of ontological insecurity encapsulated in Foucault's term heterotopia.

Zone as a specific locality (local/global, suburbs as zones, tourist zones...)
Zone as a supplement to "the Whole" (world system, urban space...)
War zones, urban zones, zones-within-zones, private zones (private matrixes, virtual worlds…)
Zone as a non-place (shopping malls, airports, motorways...)
Military zones (ghettos, occupied territories, frontiers, borders...)
Concentration camps and asylum centers (the zone as spatialised state of exception)
Gothic and fantastic spaces/zones
Contact-zones (museums, borderlands... )
Radical zone as Third space, created and populated by the marginalized
Zone as a symptom (a particular spatial entity subverting its broader foundation, its own genius...)
Zone as the site of political struggle
Zones and the construction of identity
The history of spaces/zones
Virtual zones (games...)

Proposals (300 words max) from scholars from different fields and disciplines of humanities and social sciences for individual papers (30 minutes including discussion time) should be sent to <rhss.conference@gmail.com> by 1 June 2011.

(posted 4 March 2011)

The Philosophy of Communication Sectioni of the European Communication Research and Education Association and the Literary Communication Project of Åbo Akademi University invite papers for a symposium on Literature as Communication to be held in Turku, Finland from 2nd to 3rd September, 2011

Not only among literary theoreticians and critics, but also among students of rhetoric, communication and media, stylisticians, discourse and dialogue analysts, historians of the book, and social and cultural philosophers and historians, there is a growing tendency to see literary activity as one among other forms of human communication. The Symposium will provide a forum in which to assess both the broader and more detailed implications of this trend for our understanding of literature’s place within the lives of individuals and communities.

The Symposium will assume a nominalistic and broad definition of literature. Literature, that is to say, will be viewed as consisting of all those texts which, either now or in the past, have been referred to as literary, and as not necessarily restricted to merely poems, plays and novels.

•    Literary-communicational insights in current work within any of the disciplines mentioned above: new paradigms.
•    Literary communication as community-making.
•    Literary communication as philosophical reflection.
•    Literary-communicational ethics; for instance, the relevance of Keats’s remark that “we hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us”.
•    The communicational workings of implied writers and implied readers
•    Communicational similarities and contrasts between singly, collectively and anonymously authored texts
•    Manuscript culture, book culture, digital culture: the consequences for literary communication.
•    The politeness (or otherwise) of literary writers
•    The communicational dimensions of literary styles and / or genres

Proposals (max. 300 words) for papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments to the Conference Secretary, Gunilla Ritkaew <gunilla.ritkaew@abo.fi>, before March 31st, 2011.
Requests for practical information about registration, travel and accommodation should also be directed to the Conference Secretary.

(posted 8 September 2010)

"Do I love what others love?" was the proud motto (from Goethe) on West's personal bookplate (designed by S.J. Perelman). It captures the creative and critical antagonisms his work excited in his contemporaries and in each generation of readers and critics who have felt themselves obliged to rescue him from frequent episodes of unmerited neglect and critical misunderstanding. A radical modernist, embracing avant-garde experimentalism in the 1930s just as many of his friends on the left were bowing to the dogmas of socialist realism, West has always been gloriously at odds with dominant literary trends. Considered by some in the years following his death to be the equal of Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, his critical reputation has suffered over the years, partly owing to his relatively slender oeuvre, and partly to the difficulty of situating his work in relation to the literary, political, and cultural currents of his day. Traduced as nihilist in the 1950s, he was later condemned as misogynist by fundamentalist feminism, and then selectively rehabilitated by the postmodernist enthusiasm for cinema and mass-culture. West's work no longer languishes out of print, and it is over a decade since the Library of America published its extensive selection of his works. With a new biography just published (Marion Meade, 2010), it his high time to take stock once more of this perennial genius of critical rediscovery.

A thorough reappraisal of the works of Nathanael West is long overdue. In the 1990s, studies of West tended to situate his novels within co-ordinates bounded by modernism and its fixation with 'high' art; avant-garde movements (surrealism in particular) and their tendency towards radical experiment; and the mass culture phenomena of the 1930s including cinema, comic strip, and journalism. Whilst the debate in each of these fields has moved on thanks to recent scholarship, no re-evaluation of West's work has accompanied these developments. Equally, trends in twenty-first century literary, cultural, and gender theory have yet to apply themselves to Nathanael West, and historicist perspectives on the print culture and material culture of the period have largely passed him by.

This conference will therefore attempt to address the recent neglect of West’s works, and to re-establish his voice as one of the most intriguing and distinctive of the 1930s.

(posted 23 November 2010)

There are contesting versions of autobiography. We’ve travelled far since Georges Gusdorf traced the origins of autobiography back to the origins of language itself, saying "the very first man who set out to speak and write his name inaugurated a new mode of human presence in the world. Beginning with the very first one, any inscription is an inscription of the self." Philippe Lejeune was more circumspect in placing Rousseau in the vanguard of self-representational writing, and reading the Confessions as marking the emergence of specifically modern concept of selfhood in the Enlightenment period. But in the same year as the publication of Lejeune's Le Pacte Autobiographique (1975), Roland Barthes published Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes which signaled the end of the classical Enlightenment subject of autobiography, and the beginning of a radical autobiographical practice. Michel Foucault's work on self-surveillance within structures of coercion opened up further vistas.

The last ten years have introduced a further element to this debate: in an era in which self-expression has undergone an exponential growth fuelled by technological innovation, most importantly, perhaps, the creation of an internet that hosts an ever-increasing number of blogs, tweets, personal webpages and other forms of audiovisual self-expression such as YouTube, it seems timely to think again about the phenomenon of writing, filming, recording and, indeed, publishing or publicizing the self: what innovations in self inscription have recent decades witnessed, what continuities and discontinuities can be traced, what changes in attitudes to the self and to self-revelation or exposure have been witnessed, how have developments in the channels of broadcasting altered how, what and why we engage in various, if always elusive acts of self-expression, are there now new practitioners of self-inscription because of these changes, and, finally, with so many outlets and such a market for narratives of self, how is such material consumed?

The organizers of this conference on self inscription invite papers that consider new media, film, the avant-garde and new theoretical approaches to autobiography that are post-Lejeune. The call particularly welcomes, but is not restricted to, papers on the following themes:

•    New theories of Autobiography: Thinking beyond Lejeune
•    Technologies and self-inscription: The internet and new media innovations
•    The avant-garde: Experimentation and the changing boundaries of the Self
•    On-line writing and freedom of expression: The blogosphere as political third space
•    Auto-ethnographies: New ways of recording the Self in its sociocultural context
•    Issues of veridicality
•    Consuming selves: The appetite for self expression

(posted 24 February 2011)

It is often asserted that neoliberal globalisation had the liberating effect of breaking down boundaries as barriers to free trade were swept away. Yet, 'actually existing neoliberalism' (Brenner and Theodore, 2002) has in reality seen the erection of a host of new boundaries and the reinforcement of old ones. Boundaries continue to be a salient feature of the contemporary political, geographical and social landscape. National boundaries have been reinforced, particularly in the European security state as ever-stricter immigration controls are adopted. Boundaries are also being redrawn between those considered to be 'deserving' of citizenship and those who are not, leading to the reinforcement of class distinctions and the persecution of minority groups.  As Jock Young asserted in 1999, there has indeed been a distinct move towards an 'exclusive society' in which divisions are actively promoted and exploited by politicians seeking short-term electoral gain. The aim of this conference will be to challenge the politics of fear and to move beyond boundaries of all kinds. How can we transcend traditional academic boundaries in favour of an interdisciplinary approach to problems of crime and punishment capable of encapsulating notions of social harm? How solid are the boundaries which exist between the 'deviant' and the 'normal'? How can we promote freedom of movement of peoples across physical and metaphysical boundaries? How can justice be promoted in an exclusive society?

· Fortress Europe and the reinforcement of borders
· The persecution and exclusion of minority groups (notably Roma and Traveller people)
· Cosmopolitan justice
· Immigration and the 'war on terror'
· The ‘other’ in divided societies

· The politicisation of crime and disorder
· Freedom and justice in the security state
· Challenges to multiculturalism
· The problem of risk discourse

· Moving beyond criminology towards a social harm approach to deviance
· Examining ecological degradation from the perspective of deviance
· Defining ‘deviance’ and 'normality'
· Education and the logic of marketisation

· The social and environmental consequences of capitalism and consumerism
· The crimes of the powerful
· State violence
· Deregulation and hyper-regulation

· The demonisation of children and young people
· The criminalisation of poverty
· Racism and the State
· Gendered critiques of the application of  criminal law

· Prisons in the age of austerity
· The security-industrial complex
· Civil liberties and human rights behind bars
· Decarceration and abolitionist critiques of prison
· Alternatives to detention (such as community punishment)

Please submit all abstracts to Emma Bell at <emma.bell@univ-savoie.fr> or <bell.emma@neuf.fr> by 31 January 2011. Note: the email address that had been originally given was not valid.

(posted 12 October 2010, updated 25 November 2010)

The academically enjoyable and collegially enriching contacts between the Centro de História da Cultura (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) and  Centrul de Excelenţă pentru Studiul Identităţii Culturale (Universitatea din Bucureşti) in recent years have secured a firm basis for wider cooperation between our institutions, with jointly or mutually organized events having become part and parcel of our agenda.

- Lisbon: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the venue of the Conference proper, in the interval Tuesday-Wednesday, 6-7 Sept., 2011
- Ponte de Lima, in the north of Portugal, where a Festival of gardens takes place every year. A Round Table will be organized here on Friday, 9 Sept., 2011, in which some of the speakers will take place, while everybody interested will be welcome to make arrangements for a couple of days stay.

The occasion will bring together academics, scholars and free lance colleagues from philological and cultural studies to cultural anthropology, from history of ideas to material culture, from visual arts to art history and so forth, in an interdisciplinary and intercultural attempt to look into the multifarious beauty, the inexhaustible symbolism and the endless benefits which flowers have bestowed upon humans.

The cultural history of the race, East and West, is replete with floral motifs, illustrations and representations which make the pride of legends, myths and other foundationalist texts. Fundamental concepts at work in various cultures gravitate round such rich identitary topoi. There is a taxonomy of floral species to associate with distinct cultural identities, as there are favourite flowers or onomastic preferences in each and every tradition. Undissociable from cultural history, the very history of knowledge, of writing and of the book has deep roots in floral history, were it only to recall such fundamental concepts as: paradise, the garden, (the) culture (of the land), or pastoral. Anthologies or florilegia are as many symbolic bunches with which we operate in our professions, as are the so many collections of flowers charming our humanist endeavors.

The conference invites papers exploring flowers in cultural texts and contexts with marked focus on their value and use in/as cultural institutions along the following possible lines:

While these are topics for general orientation, the organizers will be happy to welcome various other suggestions and proposals from colleagues interested in attending the event.

We are extremely pleased to announce that Prof. Roger Chartier (Collège de France, University of Pennsylvania) has accepted to be our general keynote speaker, and that Prof. Mick Hattaway (University of Sheffield), Prof. Stephen Prickett (University of Kent, Canterbury), Prof. Ana Hatherly (Universidade Nova de Lisboa), and Prof. Mircea Martin (Universitatea din Bucureşti) have accepted to act as session keynote speakers. Session keynotes will cover the main topics and papers given in these sessions will follow in the respective track.

We expect proposals of 20-minute papers to be submitted by 31 May, 2011 in the form of abstracts not exceeding 200 words. Participants are kindly asked to limit their presentation to their time-slot, to allow for Q&A sessions at the end of each session.

- Prof. JOÃO LUÍS LISBOA <lisboa.jl@gmail.com>
- Prof. MIHAELA IRIMIA <irimia.mihaela@clicknet.ro> or <mirimia2003@yahoo.com> 

(posted 30 December 2010)

The third conference in this series will explore comparative, historical and transnational perspectives on crime and violence through a focus on Law, Order and Individual Rights, aiming to contextualise the concepts of individual or ‘human’ rights in the modern state utilising a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, but with a particular interest in promoting the historical dimension. We invite papers that, for example, seek to:

•    explore state agendas and the use of law to define 'deviance' etc
•    explore the changing comprehensions of an 'orderly' society, across chronological and territorial boundaries
•    map differences, interconnections and movements through space and time.
•    explore the differentiated social, cultural or political meanings of violent or criminal acts and ways in which violence is legitimised (or not) by states
•    explore the impact of gender, race/ethnicity and other forms of social identification/exclusion
•    religion, blasphemy and heresy, and other moral challenges to state authority
•    the role of moral panics and other tools for voluntary or involuntary social control
http://www.essenglish.org/Istambul-leaflet.jpg
•    the management of crime and violence by the state, particularly reflecting on responses by individuals.

In line with the previous two conferences (Crete, 2007, University of Rethymno; St Petersburg, 2009, Herzen State University) the impact of social imaginaries of cultural identity, as well as conceptualisations of nations and empires, will be important considerations. We will also pay particular attention to comparative national or regional dimensions, and papers exploring the extent to which the actions of the modern state may clash with traditional cultural perceptions of deviance and violence in different communities will be of particular interest.

- Judith Rowbotham <judith.rowbotham@ntu.ac.uk>,
- David Nash <dsnash@brookes.ac.uk>,
- or Neil Davie <ndavie@mail.univ-lyon2.fr>.

(posted 12 August  2010)

The "11th September", as a world event par excellence, received different treatment and was perceived variedly throughout the world. For long after, images of the event saturated the world's media. Hyperbole in the comment remains and "9/11" continues to feed into debate and conflict -- not just within American society and in political discourse in the country, but also beyond. Numerous states in Europe and elsewhere, have been led to revise their American policy radically, taking the collapse of the Twin Towers as a symbol of the implosion of the American Empire, and the end of the United States of America as a "superpower". Others have backed away from the image of a "post-American" world, and remain attracted by the idea, or the need, of an Atlantic hegemony. These positions feed into discourse and practice -political, economic, military- which contribute to the emergence of an new "Other", a new polarisation.

What precisely was the nature of the "break" created by 11th September? When trying to go beyond the excess and outpourings, the omnipresent superlatives, how can one evaluate the event? What were the nature and the degree of its real impact in the world, in geopolitical, economic, social and cultural terms? What parallels can be established with other events of the same nature and world scale?

- The event: images, perceptions and representations
- A post-American world?
- Otherness and gender
- The individual and the collective
- Redefining "living together"
- Political action, violence, fear
- Instrumentalisation, denial, plots

Papers which will allow analyses comparing different geographical, political and cultural areas, are encouraged, as is the participation of young researchers.                                       
The conference will be transversal and pluridisciplinary, a characteristic of the research groups involved. It will also be the occasion to underline the specificity of area studies.

- argument, issues: originality and stakes
- the existing literature: state of the research
- nature of the paper: theoretical, empirical
- methodology : corpus and tools
- state of advancement of the research (for work in progress)
- a selective bibliography.

Scientific committee : Susan Finding (Poitiers), Dominique Gay-Sylvestre (Limoges), Timothy Whitton (Clermont-Fd), Estelle Epinoux (Limoges), Gérard Grelle (Limoges), Elvire Diaz (Poitiers), Martine Spensky (Clermont-Fd), Bertrand Westphal (Limoges), Saïd Ouaked (Limoges).

(posted 10 January 2011)

From the first, Cinema was motivated by a sense of adventure, a desire to create and explore new territories and technologies in its quest for modernity. Cinema has continued, ever since, to question, provoke, and shock; to push back existing limits and to cross perceived frontiers. The Bath conference will both celebrate and embrace the adventurous spirit of the medium, and will encourage creative and innovative contributions that make the most of the freedom to explore the open-ended theme of Cinema and the Crossing of Frontiers.

- Crossing cultural and/or geographical and spatial frontiers: issues of identity, migration, journey
- Crossing generic frontiers: ways in which films exploit and subvert traditional genres
- Crossing technological frontiers, past innovations and  the new technologies
- Crossing artistic frontiers between film and art, film and photography, film and literature, film and music, or the self-referential frontiers between one film and another
- Crossing frontiers between documentary and fiction; reality and fantasy
- Crossing psychological frontiers: dream, imagination, madness and desire
- Crossing temporal frontiers: memory, history, sci-fi, time travel
- Crossing traditional frontiers of production, finance, exhibition
- Crossing the frontiers between screen and spectator: new concepts of reception and identification

Proposals for papers (200-250 words), which may be in English or French, should be sent as an attachment in Word or Rich Text Format no later than Friday 18 March 2011 to all of the following:
Please provide full name, email and postal address, and affiliation.

A conference organised by Laboratoire EA3224, Littérature et Histoire des Pays de Langues Européennes, Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France

This conference aims at studying representations of margin and periphery, or arising from the margin and periphery in the English-speaking world -- Great Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa etc. The dialectical relationship that exists between centre and periphery has found itself increasingly the focus of academic debate in recent years, with colonial studies, gender studies and post-structuralism all challenging hitherto commonly-held certitudes. The present conference proposes to explore these different perspectives and standpoints as they may be apprehended in literature, civilisation and the visual arts.

If the margin may be conceived as different from an established norm -- be it political, geographical or attitudinal -- the norm continues to be posited as an identity with to conform to or emulate. The margin and alterity (these two terms are not necessarily synonymic) then offer the possibility of another space where different concepts, practices and languages may find sanctuary and expression. Yet while otherness may be severely repressed, condemned or belittled,  -- rarely is it accepted or valorised --, the norm cannot be conceived without it.

This conference will be of particular interest to researchers in and from the following fields and approaches : feminism and gender studies, linguistic and religious minorities, national and cultural identities, identity and individuation, regional literatures, post-colonial studies, international relations, diasporas, cultural hybridity, multiculturalism, post-structuralism, subaltern studies, urban geography, cultural studies.

- Margaret GILLESPIE <margaret.gillespie@univ-fcomte.fr>
- and Philippe LAPLACE <philippe.laplace@univ-fcomte.fr>
- and Michel SAVARIC <michel.savaric@univ-fcomte.fr>.

(posted 2 February 2011)

2011 marks the ten-year anniversary of the French Taubira law of 21 May 2001, which recognized the slave trade and slavery perpetrated in the Americas, the Caribbean, the Indian Ocean and Europe as a crime against humanity. This key date provides an opportunity to examine responses to memories of slavery which have emerged in France and internationally over the past decade. It enables us to reflect upon the recent substantial body of research that has been conducted into the cultural processes of remembering and representing slavery and the slave trade. Importantly, however, it also leads us to question whether this "memory law"‚ has opened up a space in which to explore memories of other, interconnected forms of colonial exploitation, such as indentured and forced labour. Has the emphasis on the need to defend the memory of the enslaved equated to a failure to recognize other forms of colonial and post-slavery exploitation?

The focus of this two-day conference will be on comparing the continuities and discontinuities between the ways in which slavery, indenture and forced labour have been remembered, narrativized and commemorated. It will bring into dialogue academics working on memories of slavery with those working on memories of indentured and forced labour systems, particularly in France and the former French colonies, but also extending to other global contexts. Confirmed keynote speakers are Dr Françoise Vergès (Goldsmiths, University of London), head of the Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery in France, and Professor Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French at the University of Liverpool. Taking a comparative, interdisciplinary approach, the conference will call into question the chronological and semantic divides between slavery and indenture by fostering debate around key questions, such as:

· Historical and contemporary definitions of slavery and forms of enslavement, indenture and forced labour: where to draw the lines?
· Processes of remembering, forgetting, commemorating and memorializing that have shaped representations of slavery, indenture and forced labour (in historiography, museums, literature, film, etc.)
· France‚s Œmemory wars‚: colonialism, slavery and the problem of the "devoir de mémoire"
· Constructing identities and cultural memories of slavery and indentured labour in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (for example, literary and political movements such as négritude, créolité, coolitude)
· Ongoing economic, cultural, social and political effects of slavery, indenture and forced labour in former colonial contexts

Individual papers should be no longer than 20 minutes. Please send a 250-300 word abstract and a brief biography by 29 April 2011 to:

- Nicola Frith <n.frith@bangor.ac.uk>
- or Kate Hodgson <K.Hodgson@liverpool.ac.uk> .

(posted 18 March 2011)

"I am never too busy to think of S & S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child," wrote Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra in April 1811.
The year saw the publication of Sense and Sensibility. To mark this event, we are hosting a conference that reflects upon two-hundred years of readership and opens up new interpretations of the novel. We invite proposals for individual 20-minute papers and round tables on any aspect of Sense and Sensibility.

- Social and historical context
- Reception of the novel
- Tradition of Sensibility/contemporary aesthetic theory
- Literary influences
- Sibling relationships
- Feminist readings of the novel
- Adaptations of the novel
- Re-writings, sequels and appropriations
- The novel's place in the canon

Keynote speakers: Kathryn Sutherland (St Anne's College, Oxford), Paula Byrne (Liverpool).

More information available on the Conference website: http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/200sensibilities
Registration is now open:
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/200sensibilities/Registration.html

- Dr Hugh Denard (King's College, London) is currently working on a project which aims to visually reconstruct the Abbey Theatre as it was in 1904 by means of computer modelling (http://blog.oldabbeytheatre.net/).

- Dr Ben Levitas (Goldsmiths, University of London) has published widely on J.M. Synge, W.B. Yeats, cultural nationalism and the history of the book during the Revival.

Reconstructing the Revival: Interdisciplinary Approaches is a two-day conference which seeks to examine the current state of research on the Revival and the direction in which it is moving. The conference aims to reconstruct a crucial moment of Irish cultural self-determination through innovative scholarly approaches which will privilege an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis. It will also consider the role of digital media in both cultural reconstruction and research dissemination within the humanities.

•    Revivals: parallel and/or counter-hegemonic, central and/or peripheral
•    The Irish language, activism, education and sports during the Revival
•    Science and technology, Periodicals & print culture during the Revival
•    Music and visual arts (painting, photography, arts and crafts etc.)
•    Travel, translation, mobility, European connections and the Revival
•    Ethnography, anthropology, folklore, mythology and the Revival
•    Issues of race, gender, national identity, place, landscape and cultural memory in Revivalist literature and drama
•    History and criticism about the Revival
•    Remembering and reconstructing the Revival: cultural memory, digital humanities and new challenges for research areas

The conference is aimed at graduate students and early career researchers (postdoctoral fellows etc.) in the arts and humanities. Abstracts of no more than 300 words for 20 minute papers should be sent before Friday 20 May 2011 at <reconstructingtherevival@gmail.com>. Please include a short bio and contact details. We also welcome proposals for thematic panels.

(posted 10 May 2011)

The September 11 attacks have not only been the catalyst event that marked the beginning of a new era outlined by a redefinition of geostrategic priorities on a global scale. They have also put into question the identities of subnational, national and supranational communities.

In Canada, this questioning can lead us in two directions. The first one relates to the ambiguous relationship the country has had with the United States -- a long-standing ally but also a foil to the development of an identity built on opposition (unilateralism vs. multilateralism, melting-pot vs. multiculturalism, private vs. universal health care, etc.).

The Canadians responded to the terrible events of 9/11 with heartfelt sympathy, and swiftly acted by committing to the war on terrorism in Afghanistan. However, this didn’t prevent their neighbours from reconsidering the special relation that had united them for decades. Hence, the United States, unnerved by rumours indicating that the terrorists had planned their actions from Canada, decided to reinforce the Canada-U.S. border, which considerably reduced its permeability but also adversely affected cross-border trade. Canadians, in turn, grew increasingly uneasy about Washington’s inordinate reactions in the campaign against the “axis of evil”, and refused to participate in the invasion of Iraq. To outside observers, the divorce between the two nations, or the two communities, seemed to have been pronounced.

Ten years after 9/11, how are the United States and Canada living together? From a diplomatic or economic standpoint, have the attacks modified the balance of power in a significant way, or have they had, with hindsight, a limited impact compared to the changes brought, for example, by the election of Barack Obama in the United States, or Stephen Harper in Canada?

Looking at domestic policy, how did the main political parties in Canada position themselves in the post-9/11 environment? Did they use the event for political gain? How did reactions differ at the federal, provincial or local levels? Has 9/11 shed new light on the geostrategic importance of the Arctic region?

Another dimension that needs to be taken into account relates to the consequences of the terrorist attacks on the ways Canadians are living together in a society made up of several ethnic groups. This is of course linked to the issue of multiculturalism, since this policy – which was adopted in the 1970s as an answer to the questions raised by pluralism -- has progressively become one of the pillars of Canadian national identity, though it has been questioned several times since the 1990s.

While it was proved that none of the September 11 terrorists had operated or come from Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service has acknowledged that a great number of terrorist organizations are active in Canada, not only because of the proximity to the United States, but also because of the pluralism of Canadian society. From here, a link is often made between the Canadian policy of multiculturalism, which enables groups to preserve their cultural traits, and the development of religious fundamentalism or terrorist networks, which are said to be more checked in countries based on assimilation. If we also take into account the association of terrorism with religion or ethnic origin in some people’s minds, the general tendency to cultural isolationism, or the debate surrounding demands from specific groups (i.e. the introduction of Sharia law in the Canadian legal system) it is easy to understand why the issue of living together should be of such importance in today’s Canada.

Ten years after 9/11, how are the different communities present in Canada living together? Have community relations, especially between mainstream and Arab/Muslim groups, changed in any way? How do minorities see their integration into Canadian society? Can 9/11 alone explain why multiculturalism is being reconsidered in Canada, or is this phenomenon linked to some deep-seated reasons which may also account for its decline in Europe?

More widely, can we say that 9/11 has had an impact on contemporary issues in Canada? Did it affect in any way the debate on reasonable accommodation in Quebec, or the organization of the Vancouver Olympics, for example?

This international conference seeks to analyse the ten years that have gone by since 9/11 in a critical way, and to evaluate, with hindsight, the impact of this event on the relations between the different communities living in Canada and between Canada itself and its southern neighbour. Contributions can come from a variety of fields: political science, law, economy (the consequences of 9/11 on law, geostrategic relations or trade), anthropology (9/11 as a societal trauma), linguistics (the new grammar of international security) or literature (9/11 in fiction).

- Alain Faure <alain.faure@iep-grenoble.fr>
- Eric Tabuteau <eric.tabuteau@u-grenoble3.fr>
- and Sandrine Tolazzi <sandrine.tolazzi@u-grenoble3.fr>

A conference organised by Centre d’Études Canadiennes de Grenoble (CEC38) with the participation of CEMRA (EA 3016) and of PACTE (UMR 5194).

(posted 19 February 2011)

The distance between the universe of poetry and that of politics is so great, the mediations which validate the poetic truth and the rationality of imagination are so complex, that any shortcut between the two realities seems fatal to poetry / And yet, the radical denial of the Establishment and the communication of the new consciousness depend more and more fatefully on a language of their own as all communication is monopolized and validated by the one-dimensional society […] Today, the rupture with the linguistic universe of the Establishment is more radical: in the most militant areas of protest, it amounts to a methodical reversal of meaning. Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation

This two day postgraduate led conference will bring together poets and researchers to engage in a conversation about experimental, innovative and alternative approaches to poetic form. While many poets self-report that political objectives underlie their practice, in the realm of, but not limited to, ideology critique, the assertion or negation of identity and/or a confrontation with mainstream publishing, charges of elitism, passivity and inaccessibility can be levelled. Taking this point of tension as our catalyst, and adopting a trans-historical perspective, we wish to consider what "experimental" poetry is, and what it is for.

We are calling for twenty minute papers which: discuss poetry of any period or genre which challenges or aims to challenge convention through formal innovation and/or interaction with political, social and cultural realities; explore the labels we use to denote "experimental", "avant-garde" or particular stylistic modes of verse; question whether political objectives and/or antagonisms can be articulated or furthered through radical approaches to composition and language; consider how readers engage with experimental poetry. Inseparable from these themes is the issue of what we perceive as 'the political', what counts as a political act and whether the writer has a responsibility to assert political agency; we are particularly interested in papers in which this question is at the forefront of discussion.

- Methods of formal innovation in poetic practice; their motives, precedents and desired modes of engagement
- The materiality of the poem, including work at the threshold of poetry and other mediums, such as media and hypertextual poetry, visual, sculptural and sound poetry
- Experimental methods of production and dissemination
- Different manifestations of the authorial subject in experimental poetry, including poetry whose "experimentalism" is rooted in the poet(s sense of their cultural identity
- The interdependence of creative work and criticism in experimental poetic movements, and the boundaries between the two fields.
- The definition and problematic of "political" and "experimental" poetry; the tension between formal introspection and political engagement in "experimental" poetry, and between political engagement through form and content
- Sociological and historical analyses of poetic "avant-gardes", including issues of the self-definition of schools, styles and movements, and cultural and economic ghettoisation.
- Formally and politically subversive gestures in "conventional" poetry; retrospection and recuperation.
- Readings of non-poetic material as poetry.

Please send 250-300 word abstracts as a Word attachment to <conversifyconference@gmail.com> by 16th May 2011.

We are also holding two poetry readings, one at the Scottish Poetry Library on Saturday, and the other in a location TBA on Sunday. Please mention when you submit your abstract whether you would be interested in reading.

We intend to keep the conference affordable and expect admission fees to be no more than £25 for delegates, possibly less.

(posted 28 March 2011)

The representation of identities in literature, arts and the media in general have oscillated between rationalistic, mimetic and more complex postmodern understandings, the latter especially in recent decades.

Nations, societies and cultures now exist multiply, necessitating the consideration of how realities are perceived, understood and represented by different constituencies. All this is well-accepted in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, but requires the factoring in of the connections between the increasingly cross-border real, imaginary and desired projections of the future generated by border-stretching media technologies and scientific discourses of the alterable and re-created self? How do these new technologies relate to the contemporary formation of Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific? Do they in fact reprise the disturbances associated with earlier technological advances or do they present entirely new challenges? How do they relate to current understandings of memory as articulated in such practices as oral storytelling, truth and reconciliation commissions, the use of visual technologies to establish entitlements or records, or even the recourse to DNA testing, means of recording or re-constructing reality and the past in different genres?

This inter-disciplinary and inter-discursive conference accordingly seeks to discuss but is not limited to issues and such themes as:

•    Reality, desire, and imagination in Australian, New Zealand, and the Pacific
•    National-Ethnic-Gendered-Local-Migrant perceptions of reality and the future
•    Crossing the borders of Identity: how real, how imaginary?
•    Crossing Reality Borders – Reality as Fiction, Fiction as Reality
•    Colonial, Imperial, Colonized and  Native Realities, Fantasies, Dreams and Imaginations
•    Reality virtual, hyper-real, simulated and media(ted)
•    Memory and storytelling – how real, how imagined?
•    Real, Imagined, Dreamed and Mediated Objects and Phenomena-literature, memory, story-telling, media, technology (computers, internet, facebook, DVD, cell phones...)  in contemporary culture
•    Real and Imagined fears of reality and of terror (ism)
•    Reality, desire and imagination across the genres (realistic-modernist-fantastic-postmodern and....?)
•    Reality of the Possible and Actual Worlds- Actual, Fictional, Possible and Other Worlds in Literature and Arts
•    Central and East European Vision of Australian, New Zealand and the Pacific Realities
•    Unified or diverse images of contemporary and future Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific?

All these topics can be treated from interdisciplinary and/or interdiscursive perspectives,calling upon disciplinary areas such as Cultural, Gender, Indigenous, Sociology, Philosophy, Media and Film, History, Literary, Linguistics, Art or other relevant Studies. The conference will also host writers (to be announced) who will be reading from their work during the conference.

One of the aims of the conference is to attract doctoral scholars from Central and Eastern Europe to exchange views on Australian, New Zealand, the Pacific and post-colonial studies in general, with a view to discussing further co-operation under the aegis of EASA.

As has become a tradition of this conference, there will be a meeting and a seminar for post-graduate students dealing with these fields of study. This is still provisional, and is based around lectures and reading specific texts. The seminar may be taken as part of university studies equivalent to a course with a particular number of credits, to be acknowledged by participants’ institutions. Doctoral students are further encouraged to present their papers at the conference (these presentations will not coincide with the seminar programme which will be conceived as a separate activity).

Writers, conference participants, or representatives of publishers will have the opportunity to present their works at the conference.

Deadlines:

Participants requiring earlier processing may send in abstracts when ready, indicating their specific needs in this respect.

Jaroslav Kušnír (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Howard Wolf (State University of New York at Buffalo, USA)
Anton Pokrivčák (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia)
Silvia Pokrivčáková (Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra, Slovakia)
Eva Pavličková (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Magdaléna Rázusová (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Eva Eddy (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Anna Ritlyová (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Miloš Blahút (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Ivan Štrba (University of Prešov, Slovakia)
Michal Tatarko (University of Prešov, Slovakia)

(posted 25 October 2010, updated 11 April 2011

An international conference in Cardiff organised by Dr Márta Minier (University of Glamorgan) and Dr Ruth J. Owen (Cardiff University)

Shakespeare's Hamlet and its innumerable rewrites and intertextual traces have been shaping literary and cultural production for centuries. This multidisciplinary conference will bring together scholars of literature from Modern Languages, English, Drama, Translation Studies and Creative Writing to reflect on the rewrites and traces in poetry. It will focus on the interrelationships between Hamlet and poetry in terms of influence, allusion, intertextuality and transposition. Whilst Hamlet has made possible some great modern poems, the ramifications of Shakespeare's play for poetry and poetics have been considerably less charted than the narrative and dramatic rewrites. This conference seeks to redress the balance by examining how, and to what ends, poetry has recourse to Hamlet, its fragments and its translations.

We invite twenty-minute papers in English on Hamlet-related poems in any language. We welcome papers on a particular poem, poetic genre, style, trend, national poetry, or authorial oeuvre; and on the role of translation. Selected papers will be published in a guest-edited issue of the peer-reviewed journal New Readings before the end of 2013.

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Neil Corcoran, (University of Liverpool), author of Shakespeare and the Modern Poet (2010)

Please email your proposed title and 250-word abstract as an attachment in Word to both <mminier@glam.ac.uk> and <owenr12@cardiff.ac.uk> with the subject-line "Hamlet and Poetry".

(posted 6 October 2010)

Conference topics

•    European Language Portfolio and Common European Framework of Reference for Languages
•    Why to teach foreign languages at higher education institutions?
•    New trends in teaching foreign languages for specific purposes -- distance education, e-learning, etc.
•    Other methodological issues – project learning, presentation skills and workshops in foreign language learning.

Further details are available on the conference website: http://web.tuke.sk/forlang/index_EN.html

(posted 16 April 2011)

The etymology of the word "corruption" (lat. co-rruptum) indicates either an alteration, or an act of seduction, but in any case it leads toward a rupture. In a broader meaning, corruption is understood as the behavior of a person who derails another one from his/her way, customs or duties, through the promise of money, honors or security. History shows that this phenomenon has generally been manifesting in different kinds of cultures and societies starting with the most ancient times. Today corruption is still a reality, generated by the particular economic, cultural and political conditions in both developing and developed countries.

We are seeking contributions on different forms of corruption and on special aspects of corruption in different cultures, historical times, and juridical systems. The major questions which will be discussed during this international conference are: Do phenomena of corruption evolve over time, or remain as primitive as in their first manifestations? What is the impact of these phenomena on forging the identity of certain individuals, communities or nations? Is the ideal that corruption disappear one day utopian?

CORHICS International Conference will take place in Paris from 14 to 16 September 2011 at Paris 1 Sorbonne University and it is organized by Ars Identitatis Cultural Research Association.

Possible topics (only indicative list) include: corruption and the writing of history, corrupted laws, corrupted political or religious figures, corruption in political systems, totalitarianism and corruption, 'false' cases of corruption, iconic corrupted figures, the 'angels' and 'demons' of corruptions, positions of secret societies in history on corruption, specific laws on corruption and their different effects in different historical times, race and corruption, corruption during wars, sexual scandals, the theatre and/or the literature of corruption, implementation of state policies and corruption, the psychology or philosophy of corruption, corruption during revolutions, corruption and economy, manipulation, brain washing techniques, 'enhanced' interrogation techniques, medication and side effects, religious fundamentalism, censorship, millenarian politics, utopian politics and corruption, postcolonial society and corruption, representations of corruption in art, translations and corruption, film depictions of corruption cases, rhetorics of corruption, etc.

The proceedings will be published (after the peer reviewing process): some in paperback format, the others in electronic format.

Ars Identitatis encourages interdisciplinary debates, that is why we are inviting anyone who can contribute to this debate (Professors, Researchers, Journalists, NGO activists, Lawyers, Clerics, etc.). Submissions from graduate students are also encouraged.

We accept both Panel proposals and Individual abstracts. Each panel proposal should contain at least three abstracts. The person who submits a panel proposal is kindly requested to send us her short Curriculum Vitae (one page) together with a presentation of the panel, the abstracts and the bio-notes of the contributors to the proposed panel (450 words).

Those who intend to send individual abstracts are kindly requested to submit also a short bio note.

The deadline for sending abstracts is August 1st, but we encourage early submissions, in order to allow the selection commission to have enough time for deliberation.

We will acknowledge receipt of your abstract. In case you don’t receive any reply from us after 3 days, please resend your abstract.

The deadline for registration is August 20. Ars Identitatis is an independent non-profit association. We are making efforts to keep as low as possible the logistics costs related to the conference and to the publication production process.

Please send your materials and address your enquiries to Ms. Silvia Stoica (President of Ars Identitatis), Mr. Ionut Untea (PhD candidate, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes) and Ms. Teodora Rogozea (Paris 1 Sorbonne University) at <registration[at]identitatis.org> or <ars.identitatis[at]yahoo.com>.

(posted 31 May 2011)

Scientific committee : Constance Bantman (University of Surrey), Yann Béliard (Université Paris 3), Fabrice Bensimon (Université Paris 4), Karine Bigand (Université Paris 13), Dominique Fraboulet (Université Paris 13), Neville Kirk (Manchester Metropolitan University), Donald MacRaild (Northumbria University).

Kindly supported by the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH), the conference is organised by the CRIDAF (Centre for Intercultural Research on the Anglophone and Francophone Areas, Paris 13 University) in collaboration with the CREW (Centre for Research on the English-Speaking World, Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3 University). Both research teams belong to the recently created Sorbonne Paris Cité PRES ("Alliance for Higher Education and Research").

Please send your proposals (300 words), as well as a short bio/bibliography, to all three conveners simultaneously:

- Constance Bantman <c.bantman@surrey.ac.uk>
- Yann Béliard <yann.beliard@univ-paris3.fr>
- Karine Bigand <bigandk@yahoo.fr>

The time seems right, a century after the outbreak of the "Great Labour Unrest", to revisit a strike wave that historians have rather neglected during the last two decades. The sheer size of that unprecedented unrest and its destabilising effects on British society hardly need emphasising: in 1911, about one million workers were involved in labour disputes; in 1912, 40 million days of work were "lost" through strikes; during the first six months of 1914, the number of strikes soared to reach almost one thousand; in less than four years, trade union membership increased from 2.5 to 4 million. The causes and the meaning of the upheaval have been repeatedly disputed, some historians favouring what might be a termed a "catastrophist" approach (e.g. George Dangerfield or Elie Halévy in the 1930s), while others offered a "relativist" reading (e.g. Jonathan Zeitlin in 1989). At a time when popular reactions to the worldwide crisis of capitalism are so difficult to predict, the organisers of the conference believe that much can still be learnt from the study of the 1911-1914 events.

Here are some suggestions as to the perspectives that may be adopted to cast a new light on the topic. The form taken by the workers' agitation in London, Liverpool or Glasgow has been extensively mapped. But what about the struggles that occurred in smaller cities or towns, in places where people not so famous as James Sexton or Ben Tillett came forward? The male workers' strikes have received substantial academic treatment. But the movement was not limited to the initiatives taken by seamen, dockers, railwaymen or miners. What part did their wives take in the fight? What role did women workers at large (factory girls, servants, teachers, shop assistants…) play in the Great Labour Unrest? Much has been written about the words and deeds of labour leaders and their organisations during the 1911-1914 period. But we still need to pay more attention to how businessmen and statesmen dealt with the proletarian rebellion. Another path worthy of exploration could be the relationships between labour activism and other social movements, notably the women’s revolt and the troubles in Ireland.

To rediscover the Great Labour Unrest, a questioning of the insular geographical frame in which it has long been confined could also prove fruitful. To what extent was it a "British" strike wave? Should the adjective not be understood in a broader sense than before, embracing not only Ireland, but also the British world in general? The imperial dimension of the phenomenon surely deserves to be analysed. After all, between 1911 and 1914, British Columbia was repeatedly under tension, there was a general strike in New Zealand (1913) and the labour disputes in South Africa almost turned into a civil war. It therefore makes sense to search for mirror effects, or indeed cases of contagion, between metropolis and colony. Militant experiences were exchanged across the oceans, and what better way to understand the workings of that dialogue than by scrutinising what the British labour press made of the events in the colonies and, similarly, how the metropolitan turmoil was perceived from the antipodes?

More generally, it is the transnational character of the Great Labour Unrest that needs to be reassessed. In June 1911, the seamen’s strike was an international initiative, uniting the British with their Belgian, Dutch and German comrades. Historians have been able to trace the steps taken "at the top" to make that action possible. But the nature of international industrial action "at the bottom", in the ports and on the docks, is still largely a terra incognita. Did other professional groups, apart from the seamen, transform the principle of international solidarity into an efficient tool? The ambiguity of “internationalism” should also be stressed. The word did not convey the same message when used by Havelock Wilson or by Tom Mann. The attitudes of trade unionists towards coloured workers in those troubled times were not necessarily dictated by class solidarity and the march towards the Great War only made the case for cross-border fraternity more fragile. The age of empire saw the "nationalisation" of the European working classes and a simultaneous "internationalisation" of labour networks and struggles: can the Great Labour Unrest be said to have followed one tendency more than the other?

The change of scale in space is an obvious invitation to a change of scale in time. Contrary to what is often heard, the 1911-1914 fire did not appear from out of the blue: as early as 1906, the electoral breakthrough of the Labour Representation Committee had already signalled, as well as encouraged, a change in the workers' political mood. Nor did it die out overnight: in spite of the August-September 1914 social truce, there was a renewed appetite for strike action from 1916 onwards, which culminated in 1919. Using Charles Tilly's notion of "social movement repertoire", it would be of the highest interest to identify what forms of action the 1911-1914 strikers borrowed from their predecessors and which of their practices were recycled by the 1926 or even the post-1945 generations. If some transmission took place, we need to spot who was responsible for it.

The representation of the Great Labour Unrest is yet another aspect labour historians need to dig into more deeply. How did its observers (in particular cartoonists and photographers) choose to represent it? How was it commented upon by foreign observers, be they journalists or intellectuals, politicians or activists? Retrospective representations of the events should also be studied, especially in "official histories" of the mainstream labour organisations such as the TUC, the TGWU or the Labour Party. That should not exclude the representations to be found in museums, history textbooks, radio or television documentaries, or even in works of fiction (such as novels or films).

(posted 9 March 2011)

Special Guest: Thomas Lehr, currently holding the Heiner-Müller-Gastprofessur at Freie Universität Berlin, will be reading from his much acclaimed novel September. Fata Morgana (2010).

"Ils ont souffert 102 minutes -- la durée moyenne d'un film hollywoodien."
(Frédéric Beigbeder: Windows on the World)

Ten years after 9/11 this conference seeks to offer a European perspective on the September 11 attacks. Current research on topics such as the novels of the outsider looks at 9/11 as a "European event" (Versluys), thereby pointing to strands that are worthy of further investigation. The attacks have been described as the act of "performance artists" (Rushdie), a "semiotic event" (Versluys) and "the greatest work of art" (Stockhausen). However morally questionable these terms might be when applied to the deaths of thousands of people, they draw our attention to the fact that 9/11 concentrates and catalyses questions of aesthetic representation and the virtuality of reality in the 21st century in an unprecedented way. Symptomatically, theorists such as Derrida, Baudrillard and Zizek have commented on the attacks. It thus seems promising to focus on a literary corpus that is unencumbered by incorporating "national trauma" into cultural memory, but more likely to take 9/11 as a starting point for meta-reflection on representational conditions challenged by a transnational media event. With recent calls to release the photograph of the dead al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, the question of who is in power of iconographic coinages in a modern war of information has become more topical than ever.

One of the authors to address these questions is Thomas Lehr, who will read to us from his novel September. Fata Morgana, one of the most intriguing literary reactions to the attacks; certainly the most important in the German language. His text alternates between the depiction of the attacks and the war in Iraq, and analogizes literary references to One Thousand and One Nights and the fictionality of modern mediaspaces.

As it is one major goal of the conference to enlarge the corpus of researched texts, papers providing access to texts in less widely spoken and researched languages are especially welcome.

9/11 highlights questions about the relationship of literature to other systems of representation as well as the absorption of reality by the simulacrum. It is not the attacks themselves but the medially transmitted images that are shared by the vast majority. Thus, the undeniable symbolism and the utter surreality of the attacks are recurrent themes. Deliberately blurring the boundaries between the "raw Real of a catastrophe" (Zizek) and mediaspace, some of the text-- in a deeply problematic way -- locate the attacks in the realm of the aesthetic or even the sublime. How do the representations deal with this intermediality and second order observation and how do they "frame the framing" (Butler)? How is an unprecedented pictorial over-representation turned into text? How do the virtuality of the real and the reality of the virtual come together?

The depiction of the September 11 attacks will be looked at within the aesthetics of atrocity. In how far do these representations draw on an existing iconography of war, violence and catastrophe or create their own? Have the texts found media-specific ways of reproducing shock (Benjamin) in the urban experience? How do terrorism and state violence interrelate in these texts? When is life framed as grievable (Butler) and when is it not?

With the transnational nature of the media coverage on the one hand, 9/11 on the other heightened the perception of national, ethnic and religious otherness, presumably even triggered a turn in postcolonial theory (Schüller). How do the European 9/11-texts perceive cultural difference such as Islamophobia and Anti-Americanism in their depiction of the attacks and the resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Are these texts in themselves representations of cultural difference? The restriction to a European corpus allows us both to investigate the European perspective, as distinct from the reception of the events elsewhere, especially in US literature and also to look at nationally specific paradigms, one of which has been put forward in the case of several French novels (Porra). How do the representations of the semiotic event vary depending on the national literary tradition and to what extent are they deliberately reminiscent of the national memory of war or state oppression?

- Svenja Frank <svenja.frank@mod-langs.ox.ac.uk>.

(posted 31 May 2011)

Having examined the inscription of the private sphere in women’s literature, FAAAM will now turn its attention to the notions of environment and territory, two aspects of the public sphere that paradoxically contradict and complement each other.
The concept of environment, unlike that of territory, is prior to human desire and serves as a broad-based sphere of inclusion. Depending on how it is defined, environment may thus refer not only to the ecosystem as an object of scientific study, but also to nature as a poetic construct of the human imagination, and even to the microcosm, the boundaries of which are only marked out by a feeling of belonging. Territory, on the other hand, requires demarcation and definition by human actors, social, political and intellectual influences, a desire to possess and to name. Territory divides and excludes, though it may also affirm and lay claim to roots and shelter: it both imprisons and emancipates.

Therefore, we will consider how gender is mapped out and how space is divided up in women’s literature. We would, for example, welcome an analysis of the methods used by women authors to attain a position of power vis-à-vis their territories or to control their environment, or an analysis of the extent to which women authors work with their environment. Through various critical approaches (gender-based, ecocritical, ecofeminist, postcolonial, etc.), we will attempt to show how women’s literature constructs gender within its environment or, conversely, how it uses territory to construct gender. The tension inherent in the relationship between woman author and the environment or territory that she deals with or constructs in writing will allow us to challenge essentialist attempts to identify similarities between woman and nature. An analysis of certain texts (novels, poems, essays etc.) produced by women will aim at showing that spatial division is a literary construct resulting from a gender-based perspective in order to account for a specific position regarding the environment (including both the organization and the appropriation of territories).

•    the construction of space or place
•    the symbolic relation to space
•    the concept of conquest
•    appropriation and reappropriation
•    nature, the public sphere, etc.

Paper proposals, which are to be between 200 and 300 words in length and include a short biography, will be considered if received before 15 May 2011.

After reviewing the proposals, the organizers will make a joint decision and inform each contributor by June 1st at the latest. After the conference, a selection of papers will be published in our review Textes & Genres.

(posted 3 February 2011)

Born in Cornwall, William Golding returned to his native county late in life, finding what he called "a little bit of heaven" at Perranarworthal, a hamlet just a few miles from what is now the University of Exeter's Cornwall campus. In September 2011, the campus will mark the centenary of his birth by holding a major conference in his honour. Events will include a tour of his family home, a film screening, and an exhibition of unpublished manuscripts and memorabilia.

Although he is still best remembered for Lord of the Flies, Golding wrote across a variety of genres. His published works comprise a dozen novels, a play, short stories, essays, poems, and a travel book. Interest in Golding is now undergoing a strong revival, most recently marked by John Carey's biography.

Papers are invited on any aspect of William Golding's life and work. Topics which may be covered include, but are not restricted to:

Lord of the Flies and its afterlives
Golding and women
Golding among his contemporaries
The rational and the religious
Golding and the state of the nation
Golding's non-fictional writings
Childhood and innocence
Golding and war
Golding's narrative techniques
Golding and travel
Golding's influence/influences on Golding

Please submit proposals (approximately 250 words for 20-minute papers) before 31 March 2011 to the conference organisers:

(posted 22 Sep '09)

Postgraduates in the University of Exeter's Centre for Victorian Studies will be holding a one-day conference for postgraduates and early-career researchers on the 17th of September, 2011. The conference is in collaboration with the Reader Organisation and will take place in the historic setting of the Devon and Exeter Institution, which was founded in 1813 as a private library.

Professor Regenia Gagnier (University of Exeter)
Professor Philip Davis (University of Liverpool)

"The Reading Cure", presented by The Reader Organisation

In Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle conceives of modern "This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new Today?"

This conference is intended to elicit papers that respond to the generative effects of the perception of crisis in the Victorian period.  Awareness of crisis stimulated intellectual enquiry in new disciplinary directions: in history and historiography, archaeology and classicism, evolutionary biology, economic and social theory, in literary expressions of cultural critique, and in personal and psychological narratives.  Such intellectual productivity -- and the insistence upon circulating the new analyses of crisis within a public realm of discussion -- constitutes a response that we might wish to draw upon in our own times of perceived crisis.

The commemorations of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the returns to Marx for explanations of the current economic crisis exemplify a revival of interest in how thought from the Victorian period lives on in the contemporary world.  This conference is an opportunity to investigate the productive and prolific nature of the Victorians' response to the idea of cultural and personal crisis -- as theorists or as writers whose literary works could help us grasp the meaning of our "strange new Today".

Please send proposals (of approx. 250 words) for 15-20 minute papers to <southwestvictorianists@exeter.ac.uk> no later than Friday the 27th of May. Any queries regarding the conference can be directed to the same address.

(posted 10 May2011)

This conference aims to study cultural reactions to social, economic and philosophical crisis in several linguistic and cultural areas. Whether it be America of the 1930s or today's financial meltdown, crisis affects both cultural production as well as ways of imagining society.
Themes of transformation, instability, the unexpected, hope and menace will be addressed by papers preferably in French or English (but German and Spanish are also possible). The conference is open to topics related to Cultural Studies in English, Contemporary German Studies, Contemporary Spanish Studies,

- <martine.piquet@dauphine.fr>
- <elena.lizon@dauphine.fr>
- <anne.quinchon@dauphine.fr>

(posted 10 June 2011)

The Department of English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, invites you to the international conference addressing a broad range of perspectives concerning Harold Pinter's literary heritage set abroad, in a non-British context. Therefore, proposals for papers are invited in the following subject areas:

• Reception and reviews of Pinter abroad
• Pinter on international stages
• (Inter)cultural studies of Pinter
• Pinter in translation (linguistic, stylistic and other aspects)
• Teaching Pinter abroad
• Pinter and international politics

Our (so far confirmed) keynote speakers will be distinguished scholars:

Please send an abstract of between 150 and 250 words to <pinterabroad2011@uni-mb.si> before 10th April 2011.
The preferred method is by e-mail. Abstracts should be sent as Word attachments.
Please provide your full name (including academic title), affiliation, postal address, e-mail address, subject area, and the title of your presentation.
E-mail notifications of acceptance will be sent to authors by 10th May 2011.
Presenters will be allotted 15 minutes for their talk plus a 5-minute question session.
Conference fee:

(posted 25 October 2010)

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof. Samuel Weber, Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, Chicago-Evanston, IL, USA, and Co-Director of the Paris Program in Critical Theory.

Hosted by the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Szeged (in association with the Section of Language and Literature of the Szeged Branch of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), the conference will focus on the multifaceted and at times uncanny relation between the political notion and discourse of terror(ism) and the tradition of aesthetic thought from antiquity to the present.

The prime goal of the conference is to provide new critical perspectives and conceptual tools for the analysis of the complex and controversial phenomenon called "terrorism" from the direction of aesthetic theory, and thereby to displace the far too militarized rendering of the issue. The insights of historical and political studies, as well as the practical demands of security politics are fully acknowledged. However, an aesthetic approach might complement and critically enhance such investigations and efforts. Aesthetics is to be understood here in a broad sense, including theories of passion and affect, as well as theories of rhetoric and mediation. The scope of the conference will therefore not be limited to "artistic" representation, but inversely, the "artifactuality" implicit in all modes of representation will be rigorously considered.

This implies, among others, an analysis of the diverse theorizations of "terror" and of related concepts (catharsis, sublime, sympathy, fear, distance etc.) in ancient poetical and rhetorical discourse (Plato, Aristotle, Demetrius, Cicero, Longinus etc.), in early modern aesthetic speculations (Hobbes, Milton, Boileau, Le Brun, Diderot, Addison, Baillie, Burke, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Kant, Schiller etc.), as well as in 19-20th century modernist theory and praxis (Jarry, Artaud, Bataille, Blanchot, Newman, Hajas etc.). Contemporary critical discourse, including acknowledged political experts (Jenkins, Schmid, Laqueur etc.) as well as philosophers or theoreticians (Derrida, Habermas, Baudrillard, Weber, Redfield etc.) will, of course, also be involved in the discussions.

- politics of feeling (pathos, sympathy, telepathy, apathy)
- terrorism as figural rhetoric (dissimulation)
- terrorism as performative rhetoric (symbolic action)
- poetics (verbal, visual, auditory, and performative modes of terror)
- theatricality and performance art
- calculation (scripts, scenarios, effects)
- the event and its mediation (or the event in and of mediation)
- aesthetic distance,  negative pleasure
- danger and safety
- networking (franchise, proliferation, metastasis), and its relation to language
- asymmetry (war/terrorism, conventional/unconventional warfare)
- suicide and autoimmunity

- movement in politics and art (the question of -isms)

Other points of focus, including literary and artistic works as well as individual analyses of specific critical notions or texts, are also welcome.

Proposals are invited for 20-minute presentations. The primary language of the conference will be English, but proposals for papers in German or French are also expected and will undergo equal perusal. We envision the edited publication of the conference proceedings in both electronic and printed format. Proposals (with an abstract of max. 250 words, including name and affiliation, as well as the indication of AV needs) are to be sent via email to the chief organizer György Fogarasi <fogarasi@hung.u-szeged.hu>.

A notice of acceptance will be sent out by June 15, 2011. No registration fee will be required. All costs (travel, accommodation, and other) shall however be covered by the participants.

(posted 16 March 2011)

The Don Juan story is one of the most enduring of modern cultural myths, with retellings and versions spanning several centuries and occurring in the widest imaginable range of cultural forms and narrative media. This informal study day seeks to explore the diverse manifestations of this myth.

The day is open to graduate students, early career and established researchers. We aim to include papers addressing the potential for teaching and researching the rich inheritance of the Don Juan myth, in a wide variety of media. The event is organised by the Literature and Music Research Group of the Open University and will be hosted by the Institutes of Musical Research and English Studies. The convenors are Katia Chornik, Delia da Sousa Correa, Fiona Richards and Robert Samuels.

We warmly welcome proposals for papers on literary, musical and visual versions of the Don Juan story, and on the many cultural manifestations of the Don Juan figure. Graduate students and those with a teaching interest in this topic are especially encouraged to offer papers.

- Don Juan in literature, from the Golden Age Spanish Drama to the present day, from Molina's El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra to Derek Walcott's The Joker of Seville.
- Operatic and other musical versions of Don Juan from Mozart and Da Ponte to Lloyd Webber.
- Relationships between literary and musical realisations of the Don Juan myth.
- Topics in musical or literary theory and analysis, and topics in inter-medial studies or musico-poetics. Other interdisciplinary Don Juans.
- Don Juan from a psychoanalytical perspective.
- Don Juan in film.
- Romantic and/or pre-Romantic Don Juans, for example, the pre-texts and afterlife of Byron's Don Juan.
- Don Juan as an iconic figure at large within and beyond the Don Juan story.
- Don Juan in contemporary popular culture.

(posted 6 April 2011)

Guest speakers:
In 1873, citing Hegel's vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: "They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be."

This Paterian celebration of autonomy and self-fashioning was read with delight, cultivated, and variously implemented by the actors of the Aesthetic Movement. Not only did Aestheticism create new objects, but it enabled singular lifestyles to be born. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the facts of existence ceased to be perceived as heteronomous. Life itself was gradually envisioned as a work in progress for an individual at once more aware of his/her freedom as subject and more conscious of changing societal constraints. New lifestyles flourished and novel representations of life emerged. From the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which immediately preceded the Aesthetic Movement) to James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, 'Ouida', 'Michael Field', and Edward Carpenter, many were those who devoted themselves to practicing and writing about literature and art while evolving a lifestyle which early twentieth-century critics would later identify with the « men [and women] of the nineties ».

Fashioning one(s own life became both conceivable and technically and politically possible as individuals gradually ceased to acquiesce in given social configurations of power and value and started interrogating the status quo. Such questioning was often the source of original individual choices and collective interventions such as the creation of clubs, guilds, presses or journals. Within given social, economic and political structures/strictures, of which writers and artists were highly conscious, 'Aesthetic' living became an important embodiment of subjective experience and individual experiment. 

After our first trans-disciplinary international conference entitled "British Aestheticisms", our 2011 conference on "Aesthetic Lives" hopes to focus on issues of Aesthetic subjectivity, on the lived experience of Aesthetic individuality or difference, and on original trajectories in the context of Aesthetic practices. How did writers and artists turn their existence into an artwork? What does it mean to found a club, an artistic community, a new journal when one is (or claims to be) an Aesthete? What were the cultural, social, economic or political constraints which hindered or enabled Aesthetic projects, aspirations and itineraries?

Importantly, the notion of 'Aesthetic life' is not meant in the limited biographical sense, but should be taken in the broad sense of a personal negotiation and a carving of one’s chosen itinerary or ethical choices in the context of Aestheticism. What kind of ethics can arise from Aesthetic choices? What are its daily manifestations, practically speaking? What were the obstacles or aporiae encountered by those who followed Pater’s ideas about self-fashioning and life as a work of art? How were these subjective choices received? And how do they anticipate the choices made by the figures of Modernism?

We welcome papers (in French or in English) studying individual artists and writers, specific formal or informal groups, and various arts of Aesthetic living. Descriptive and hagiographic approaches are to be strictly avoided.
A selection of papers will be published.
Please email your proposal by July 1st (new extended deadline) to both:

A conference organised by the Department of English, University of Zagreb in association with the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

This conference will address the ways in which Central and Eastern Europe has been represented in Irish literature and culture and the impact of Ireland on the literatures and cultures of Eastern Europe. While chiefly literary in focus, this is an interdisciplinary conference which will draw in the work of cultural anthropologists, political and cultural geographers and art historians. Papers will survey the literary and cultural relations between Ireland and Eastern European countries and might address thematic concerns such as:

•    the writer in war and revolution
•    religion, diversity and literature
•    nationalist and anti-nationalist discourses
•    artists and borders
•    ‘Celticism’ and ‘Balkanism’
•    modern Ireland in a transitional Europe
•    contemporary Eastern European migration in Ireland
•    the economy of translation between Ireland and Eastern Europe

As well as offering paradigmatic comparative analyses of modern Eastern European and Irish cultures, individual papers might discuss the literary and political treatment of Eastern Europe in the work of Irish writers such as W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Hubert Butler, Seamus Heaney, Dervla Murphy and Colm Tóibín. Other topics that might be examined include: Eastern European re-inscriptions of Joyce, the impact of Beckett on Eastern European theatre and the place of Irish music in Eastern Europe. It is intended that the proceedings will lead to a book publication.

Organizers: Dr. Eve Patten (TCD), Professor Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan (U. of Zagreb), Dr. Aidan O’Malley (U. of Zagreb)

The list of hotels will be provided. The prizes for a single room range from cca 40 Euroes in *** hotels to cca 80 in **** hotels. Some cheaper accommodation on the campus will be also available.

(posted 16 April 2011, updated 31 May 2011)

(posted 13 May 2011)

The English Academy of Southern Africa was founded in 1961 and for the past fifty years has dedicated itself to stimulating interest in the English language and its literatures as well as promoting the effective use of English as a national resource in Southern Africa. The English Academy interests itself in English in education, promotes research and debate, organizes lectures, conferences and seasonal schools, makes representations about language matters, rewards excellence and fosters the creative, critical and scholarly talents of users (and would-be users) of English in Southern Africa.

The conference invites established and emerging researchers, teachers and policy makers to engage with challenges and issues in the three areas of English literature, literacy studies, and English language education.  While papers are welcome in any of these areas, there is a particular interest in their interrelationship.

•    The area of English Literature will include both papers on texts and theoretical analyses, especially in the areas of postcoloniality and global literature.
•    The potential that English has in literacy education in a multilingual society, with particular emphasis on reading and critical educational approaches in English teaching, is of pressing concern for contemporary southern Africa. The concept of literacy used here goes far beyond acquiring a set of technical skills for reading and writing, focusing on a capacity to use these skills in making sense of the world.  Literacy is at the heart of basic education for all, and is essential for eradicating poverty and ensuring sustainable development, peace and democracy.
•    Language education papers will address the wide repertoire of challenges and innovations in a range of educational/work contexts (schools; colleges; universities; workplaces).

Thoroughly researched papers dealing with topics and issues related to any of these areas are invited from colleagues throughout the world. There will be a 20 minute time slot for each paper with associated discussion. Presentations should not exceed 20 minutes. Selected papers will be published in the English Academy of Southern Africa's accredited and peer-reviewed journal, The English Academy Review. The first deadline for the submission of abstracts, which will be reviewed by an advisory committee, is 30 November 2010. An abstract should not exceed 300 words. Colleagues are encouraged to send their abstracts early as the conference can accommodate only a limited number of papers.

The conference will be organised around themes and issue-centred concerns, and there will be a core of invited contributions on these topics. We invite papers on the following or related themes:

•    Literacy and work/community/diversity;
•    Inequalities and epistemologies: exploring knowledges, oracies and literacies;
•    Literacy in schools and higher education;
•    Multi-modal literacies;
•    Postcolonial and global writings;
•    Literature in schools and universities;
•    English language education; and
•    English and Englishes.

Several outstanding speakers of international stature will deliver plenary addresses at the conference. The programme consists of three days of plenary presentations and a diverse range of concurrent workshops and parallel sessions for paper presentations.

The academic programme will be complemented by social activities including a welcome reception, a poetry reading festival and a closing gala dinner to celebrate the jubilee of the English Academy of South Africa.
This conference will be one of the most significant events on the education calendar for 2011.

Delegates from Southern Africa

Early registration (before 30 April 2011): ZAR1500
Late registration: ZAR1750

Delegates from overseas and outside Southern Africa

Early registration: $250 (US)
Late registration; $300 (US)

District Six is in the 'city bowl' of Cape Town and at the foothill of Table Mountain, so the campus is close to most of Cape Town’s main attractions. It is a fascinating area, known not only for its historic significance (forced removals during apartheid) and the District Six Museum, but also for its artistic vibrancy in terms of the arts, literature, music and culture. Artists from District Six include Alex la Guma, Richard Rive and Abdullah Ibrahim.

(posted 12 September 2010)

Afroeurope@s/Afroeurope@ns is an international research and development group funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacións, FFI2009-08948. The group is holding its third international conference in Cádiz, Spain from 28-30 September 2011. The venue will be La Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Cádiz. This third conference will be a focus for the many strands of this dynamic field of study, and aims to include presentations on both established and emerging research areas of a trans- and multidisciplinary nature. We recognise that this field cannot be confined to traditional textual representations and forms of expression and so we encourage submissions from a wide range of disciplines. These may cover not only literature, history or sociology, but also music, the visual arts, popular culture(s), sports, religion, film etc. We welcome submissions dealing with topics that are cross-genre in nature and use different expressive media, which may tackle the following:

• The myth of 'white' Europe and perceptions of difference
• What is ‘lost and found’ in translation?
• Afro-Arabic Europe
• Economic crisis/ a crisis in the community?

Presentations, which are not restricted to written academic texts, should be planned to last for no more than twenty minutes. The language of the conference for presentations will be English, French, or Spanish. We require an abstract of 400 words, and these abstracts must be written in the language of the presentation. 

<congreso.afroeuropa3@uca.es>.

A full programme, including plenary speakers and all other participants, will be published by 1 June 2011 in our web page: http://www.afroeuropa.eu

(posted 14 December 2010)

In recent years there have been movements to establish what might be described as 'the new Silk Road,' which will help improve trade routes between countries in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. In October 2010 the Turkish and Chinese governments signed a new accord, establishing a framework for this new 'Silk Road' to be established. The significance of the Silk Road also extends to the cultural sphere: since 2007 the Turkish city of Bursa has hosted the Silk Road film festival, dedicated to showing short films and documentaries as well as feature films from countries once involved in trade on the Silk Road.

 The topic of this year's Association of Adaptation Studies conference will focus on adaptation as a site for cultural exchange, reflecting the importance of trading activities along the Silk Road as sites for the transmission not just of goods but of ideas and cultures. Possible issues to be addressed in this conference might include:

• Cross Cultural Theories of Adaptation: does the term 'adaptation' have different significances in different cultures?
• Filming Shakespeare or other western canonical authors in nonwestern cultures
• Adaptation as Transmission Between Cultures and Forms (e.g. print, radio, theatre, television, films, and video games, as well as cross-cultural stage and film adaptations)
• The Pedagogy of Cultural Exchange: Interdisciplinary or Cross-disciplinary approaches to teaching adaptation
• Occident and Orient: Adaptations across 'east' and 'west'
• Travel Adaptations, both fictional and nonfictional (documentaries, feature films as well as shorts) 
• Adaptation as a form of cultural (re-)negotiation
• The Mass Media and Cultural Exchange: globalization vs. localization
• Autobiography and Cross-Cultural Adaptation

It is hoped that this conference might underline the potential of adaptation studies to create new intellectual Silk Roads across cultures as well as across disciplines. However, we also welcome more general papers on the subject of adaptation studies, focusing on any kind of adaptation -- film, television, video game, as well as other media.

Yeni Yüzyıl University is a new university (opened in February 2009), established on the European side of Istanbul. It currently boasts ten faculties and two vocational schools. Its location seems especially suitable to the subject of the conference; the city of İstanbul has always been and continues to be a site for cultural, commercial and social exchange. In 2010 it was nominated as European City of Culture.

Proposals for presentations (20 minutes max + 10 minutes for questions) are invited to address the issues outlined above, either through individual case-studies or through more general theoretical approaches.

- Prof. Dr. Günseli Sönmez İşçi, Dean, Faculty of Science and Letters <gunseli.isci@yeniyuzyil.edu.tr>
- Laurence Raw, Başkent University, Ankara <l_rawjalaurence@yahoo.com>

(posted 24 February 2011)

EUROFAN: New Directions of the European Fantastic after the Cold War, Second Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (GFF), within the framework of the Salzburg Annual Conferences in English Literature and Culture organised by Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, Sarah Herbe and Markus Oppolzer.
Since the end of the Cold War a significant number of fantastic texts, films, artworks, and new media practices across Europe have raised social and political questions. We understand the fantastic to mean a dynamic process rather than a finished product and a distinctive mode of engagement with the real, usually disrupting the mimetic through supernatural, magical and visionary means. In this sense it breaks through boundaries of genre, space and identity and plays a crucial role in the exchange of ideas and concerns across national and political boundaries. The fall of the Berlin Wall thus signalled the start of a period of profound changes and reconfigurations in Europe involving a rethinking not only of capitalism and communism, East and West, but also of the national and trans-national, the indigenous and migrant, borders and flows, histories and futures, identities and communities, high culture and popular culture.
The aim of this conference is to define the share of the fantastic in the cultural traffic between European societies and communities after the Cold War. We are particularly interested in transformations of the fantastic in literature, life-writing, film, folklore, gaming, cultural infrastructures such as museums and museum-like venues, multi-sensory events and social practices. For this purpose we invite papers dealing with:

If you are interested in this conference and wish to offer a paper, please send an abstract of 350 words describing your project and bearing your name and institutional affiliation by 28 February 2011 (new extended deadline) to:
- Prof. Dr. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner, University of Salzburg, Department of English and American Studies
- Dr. Sarah Herbe <sarah.herbe@sbg.ac.at>
- and Dr. Markus Oppolzer <markus.oppolzer@sbg.ac.at>.

The goal of this international conference is to launch and make public a reflection on contemporary art in a given territory, i.e. the French Riviera, from the end of the Second World War to nowadays. What is expected during the seminars and plenary sessions is a discussion going beyond the usual temporary or generic landmarks and revealing the richness and variety of the local artistic production.

Matisse, Picasso, Chagall, Cocteau, Signac, Bonnard, Dufy or Léger and Dubuffet are so many key artists of the first half of the twentieth century whose names still produce a reverberating echo on the French Riviera which has been celebrated by art historian André Chastel as "the great workshop of modern art". This episode has been duly recorded by some thirty museums or cultural organisations in the form of an exhibition and a catalogue, La Côte d'Azur et la modernité, which continue to be a reference in the field.

The second part of this history uniting the French Riviera and the arts has started in 1951 through the impetus given by a group of young artists from the "Internationale Lettriste" after the projection of Isidore Isou's Traité de bave et d’éternité in the context of the Cannes festival. After that came the Nouveau Réalisme, then Fluxus and La Cédille qui sourit in Villefranche between 1965 and 1968, and also numerous other artists thanks to whom the French Riviera has become an extraordinary territory in terms of artistic exeperimentation. Several dozens artists (such as R. Hains, R. Filliou, G. Brecht, Arman, Ben, C. Viallat, N. Dolla, E. Duyckaerts, J.L. Verna, Ph. Ramette, P. Pinaud, N. Lesueur, A. Maguet, C. Boursier-Mougenot and many others) have thus built their work in, around or about the French Riviera -- and they continue to do so.

The institutions which have launched this project (the national museums of the twentieth century in the department of the Alpes-Maritimes, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nice, the Château and the Emile Hugues foundation in Villeneuve, the Jean Cocteau Museum, the national centre of contemporary art of the Villa Arson) will display all the research and all the experimentations of the last sixty years in the form of an exhibition taking place during the whole summer of 2011. They will be helped and enriched by some fifteen other structures in charge of spreading contemporary art. This "great workshop of contemporary art" will take place in the museums, the art centres, the art schools, the cultural associations and the galleries of the French Riviera from 25 June 2011 until 30 October 2011.

The international conference which will close and crown this formidable exhibition is organised in partnership with the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis and the association "L’art contemporain et la Côte d'Azur". In an attempt to broaden or bypass the usual aesthetic categories, this conference will endeavour to probe the question of artistic experimentation on the French Riviera by tackling it (also) through the perspective of anthropology and sociology. The conference would also like to deal with the experimentations in the fields of architecture, town planning, music or dance. The proposals will take adopt a transdisciplinary approach and take into account both the national and international contexts in terms of artistic experimentation.

Held as it twill be in collaboration with the various research groups of the University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis (LIRCES, CMMC, CRHI, CTEL, I3M, LASMIC, RITM), this international conference will accept proposals stemming from a great variety of academic fields such as:

- Anthropology
- Applied Arts
- Architecture
- Art Edition
- Artists' texts
- Cinema
- Drama
- Literature
- Museology
- Music and Sound
- Performative arts
- Philosophy
- Plastic Arts
- Semiology
- Sciences
- Sociology

- The territory (or territories) of contemporary art and the French Riviera
- The Urban and extra-urban environment
- The "great workshop" of the Riviera
- The role of the avant-garde on the French Riviera
- The links between Modern Art and the French Riviera; the question of heritage
- The notion of attitude art and gesture art
- Representational  or non-representational art
- A sound laboratory
- Carnival and street art
- The reception of contemporary art on the French Riviera

The paper proposals (1500 signs maximum), in French, English or Italian should be sent along with a short biographical note before 31 January 2011 to:  <colloque.acetca@gmail.com>.

The proposals will be examined (anonymously) by a committee including university teachers, museum curators, art commissioners, critics and art historians.

(posted 14 December 2010)

The Department of English Philology at Vilnius University, Lithuania, in cooperation with the Lithuanian Association for the Study of English (LAUTE), is pleased to announce the international conference Literature and Society, to be held in Vilnius on September 29 - October 1, 2011.

The text-world dichotomy has been a pivotal problem since Plato, implicating notions of mimesis and representation and raising a series of debatable issues. Do literary texts relate only to the fictional world and not to the real one? Do they not only describe but also perform and thus create and transform reality? Is literature a mere reflection/expression of society, a field and a tool of political manipulations, a playground to exercise ideological and social power?

Problematic relationship between literature and society has always been the focus of literary scholarship. Admitting that literature both reflects society and affects it, on what theoretical premises can we model the relationship between literature and society? And how do specific literary texts support the validity of these arguments?

The conference invites papers dealing with a broad range of issues -- representation, identity, the performative, reception – pertaining to the complex relations between Literature and Society.

Selected papers will be published either in the peer-reviewed MLA indexed journal Literatūra or as a separate volume.

- conference folder and badge
- refreshments during scheduled breaks
- lunches and reception

Interested participants are invited to submit one-page abstracts of their proposed papers ( with the name and affiliation of the presenter) before 1 April  2011 by e-mail  to:

(posted 12 January 2011)

Negotiating and constructing European identities across languages and cultures: the 4th ENIEDA Conference on Linguistic and Intercultural Education
Vršac, Serbia  -  29 September-1 October 2011
New extended deadline for proposals: 5 June 2011

The European Network for Intercultural Education Activities (ENIEDA) in cooperation with The Faculty of Culture and Society, Malmö University, Sweden, The Teacher Training College, Vršac, Serbia, are organising the 4th ENIEDA Conference on Linguistic and Intercultural Education: Negotiating and constructing European identities across languages and cultures
In an effort to consolidate and expand further its presence in the region of South-East Europe, and following a series of successful events that have already promoted ENIEDA and its achievements in the area of linguistic and intercultural education, we are pleased to announce that the 4th ENIEDA conference is poised to intensify and diversify these activities in both theory and practice.
Drawing on the pluralistic ethos expressed in the Council of Europe's 1982 Recommendations to the member states concerning language policy -- "that the rich heritage of diverse languages and cultures in Europe is a valuable common resource to be protected and developed, and that a major educational effort is needed to convert that diversity from a barrier to communication into a source of mutual enrichment and understanding" -- our main ambition is to strengthen the links between the north and the south, as well as the east and the west of Europe in order to identify new collaborative and networking opportunities, both of which will inform future directions of research and development. These links are to be further enhanced through the activities of ENIEDA members and associates, by being professionally active across Europe and establishing stronger and long-lasting relationships and collaborations.
Within this general thematic schema, the following frameworks and approaches are suggested:
(i) Theoretical/methodological frameworks
(ii) Applied/empirical approaches
The following keynote speakers confirmed their participation:
Official languages of the symposium are English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Russian.
The conference venue is Hotel Srbija, Vršac, Serbia (http://www.hotelsrbija.rs), and additional information about travel arrangements, accommodation, registration and other practical details will shortly be posted on the conference website (http://www.enieda.eu/ENIEDA4).
We look forward to welcoming you in Serbia!