National identity is a central point of enquiry that is repeatedly called upon in contemporary social and political rhetoric. Our conference, 'Emblems of Nationhood, 1707–1901', will address the roots of this theme by discussing depictions of Britain and Britishness in literature, philosophy, and art between the Act of Union in 1707 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. Over the course of this multidisciplinary conference, we aim to explore how expressions of nationalism have moulded both critical perspectives on national identity and their creative products.

Discussing emblems of nationhood in 2012 is a fitting way to mark the twentieth anniversary of Linda Colley's seminal account of Britishness, Britons: Forging the Nation, and coincides with the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Several broad questions could potentially be explored in the course of the conference: What did Britishness mean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and how was it represented and perceived? To what extent is nationalism tied with military events and empire building? How "British" was Britain before the launch of the Empire? How did concepts of nationalism enter the public consciousness, both within the British Isles and abroad? What is the impact of artistic and cultural depictions of Britain and Britishness in domestic and international contexts? How can these historical ideas of Britishness enhance our contemporary understanding of the concepts of nationalism and national identity?

Alongside panel sessions and a roundtable discussion on national identity in the period, public expressions of nationhood will also be represented: we are planning an exhibition of pictorial representations of Britishness in the form of cartoons, banknotes, war-landscapes, et cetera, as well as an evening of patriotic entertainment from the period.

Suggested topics for papers might include, but are not limited to:

•Britannia and definitions of Britishness
•Liberty and Empire
•Four nations, archipelago and Britishness
•The Auld Alliance
•Perceptions of Britain in France
•British history and histories of Britain
•Foreign and British taste
•Mother-nation and Commonwealth
•The Gothic revival, Gothic novels, and the ancient Gothic constitution
•Foreign perceptions of Britain and Britishness
•National anthems
•Expressions of Britishness in applied arts, satirical prints and cartoons
•The Great Exhibition of 1851
•The iconography of British institutions
•Positive and negative forms of national identity

We seek 250-word proposals for 20-minute papers from postgraduates and established scholars from across the Arts and Humanities. The deadline for submission is 1st March 2012.
Please email submissions to <EmblemsOfNationhood@gmail.com>.
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the conference organisers:

Conference website: http://www-ah.st-andrews.ac.uk/Emblems_of_Nationhood/Home.html

(posted 3 February 2012)

Proposals are invited for papers on any aspect of the life, work and thought of Thomas Hardy for the fourth International Postgraduate Symposium on Hardy which will take place in Dorchester, 18-26 August 2012, as part of the 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival.

Decisions will be made by the Symposium Convenors Professor Roger Ebbatson, Lancaster University, and Dr Angelique Richardson, University of Exeter.

Proposals of 250 words (max) for papers of 15-minute duration should be sent to <hardy-pgs@exeter.ac.uk> by 31 March 2012.

A small bursary will be offered to successful applicants to assist with the cost of attending the conference, and conference fees will be waived. Reduced rates will be offered to postgraduates wishing to attend the conference but not giving papers. This is a unique opportunity to share and debate ideas on Hardy with other new and established scholars. A selection of these papers will be published in the peer-reviewed Thomas Hardy Journal. All attending postgraduates will be expected to join the Thomas Hardy Society at a reduced subscription rate.

Conference delegates (including speakers) are responsible for finding their own accommodation and are advised to do so as soon as possible as accommodation is likely to be scarce in August in view of the Sailing Olympics (29th July to 11 August). Accommodation queries can be directed to Rebecca Welshman, the Thomas Hardy Society Student Representative, University of Exeter, <hardy-pgs@exeter.ac.uk>.

(posted 1 November 2011)

The Conference aims to give an impetus to the research into universals and typology in word-formation by a joint effort of both morphologists and typologists. Papers discussing cross-linguistic correlations between individual word-formation processes, between WF processes, on one hand, and genetic types and/or geographically related languages, on the other, are most welcome. Space will also be given to any other typologically oriented research into word-formation as well as papers discussing the scope of word-formation and the relation between word-formation and other linguistic disciplines.
Abstracts of papers (500 words max.) clearly defining the topic and the objectives pursued in the paper should be submitted by e-mail as WORD attachments to Dr. Lívia Körtvélyessy <livia.kortvelyessy@upjs.sk> by March 31, 2012.
Form of abstracts:

- Page 1: Title of the paper, Name of the author(s), Affiliation of the author(s), E-mail address, Postal address, Phone number
- Page 2: Title of the paper, Abstract text
- Page 3:     References

Authors of all submitted papers will be advised on the decision of the  Scientific  Committee by May 21, 2012.
Each of the selected participants will have 20 minutes for presentation to be followed by a 15-minute discussion.
Selected papers will be published in the Word Structure journal.

Important dates:

* Submission of abstracts: March 31, 2012
* Notification of acceptance: May 21, 2012
* Submission of a registration form: June 15, 2012

Further information on the SKASE website: http://www.skase.sk/ (follow the link "Košice 2012 Conference").

(posted 9 March 2011)

Sponsored by Gylphi: Arts and Humanities Publisher
Part of the Gylphi Contemporary Writers Series
Keynote Speakers:

Maggie Gee
Dr John Sears (Manchester Metropolitan University, UK)
Professor Susan Alice Fischer (The City University of New York, US)

This two-day international conference aims to bring together scholars for the first academic conference dedicated to Maggie Gee's writing. Gee is one of Britain's most prolific and critically-acclaimed novelists: the author of 12 novels, as well as collections of short stories, edited anthologies of contemporary writing and, most recently, an autobiography -- My Animal Life (Telegram Books, 2010).

Since she was selected for Granta's first list of Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 (in company with Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain), Gee has worked in publishing, academic research (gaining a PhD in the twentieth-century novel from Wolverhampton Polytechnic in 1980) and was the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently working as one of the Society's Vice Presidents, as well as acting as Visiting Professor of Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to her publishing and academic responsibilities, Gee is also highly critically acclaimed: her eighth novel, The White Family (2002), was shortlisted in 2002 for the Orange Prize for Fiction as well as the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2004.

Ceaselessly inventive and astonishing, Gee's writing is distinguished by ambitious scope and aesthetic innovation, tackling political themes and writing across a broad range of subjects and genres. Intertwining intimate domestic dramas with grand-scale, seismic shifts in cosmic balance, several of Gee's novels imagine global disaster, apocalyptic futures and environmental catastrophes. Meanwhile, Gee is also concerned with exploring issues of racism, prejudice, cultural difference and class inequalities. Her body of work confronts political attitudes in contemporary Britain through satire, comedy, family saga, thriller and romance.

The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Maggie Gee’s writing. Topics might include, but are not limited to, Maggie Gee's writing and:

- genre, science fiction, thriller, autobiographical fiction, romance, family saga, political satire
- war, terrorism, violence and political activism
- (post-)apocalypse and ecocatastrophe
- inter-generational conflict, familial relationships
- utopian and dystopian thinking
- the urban and the rural
- racism, migration and multicultural Britain
- the role, and representation, of women
- the environment and new ecocritical directions
- class, social mobility, poverty and social inequality
- modernism and its inheritances
- death, suicide and posthumous narrative voices
- the representation of time and imagining the future
- nuclear weaponry
- society, nature and the cosmos
- cosmopolitanism, Africa, Japan
- contemporary women’s writing and publishing
- translation, the British publishing industry

The conference welcomes papers from any discipline, a variety of theoretical perspectives, and those which engage with media beyond that of the written text. Submissions are welcome from both research students and academics. Please send a title and 300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper along with your name, affiliation and 100 word professional biography to <gee_at_glyphi.co.uk> by 1st February 2012.

The conference is organised by Dr Sarah Dillon, Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction, School of English, University of St Andrews and Dr Caroline Edwards, Tutor in English Literature, Department of English, University of Surrey. For more information on the research and professional activities of Dr Dillon and Dr Edwards, see their homepages:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/people/academicstaff/dillon/
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/people/caroline_edwards/

For more information regarding the St Andrews School of English and its activities, as well as the Department of English at the University of Surrey, see the homepages:

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/english/
http://www.surrey.ac.uk/english/

The conference is sponsored by Gylphi Arts and Humanities Publisher. Selected papers from the conference proceedings will be published as Maggie Gee: Critical Essays, with a foreword by Gee, as part of Gylphi's Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series (Series Editor: Dr Sarah Dillon). For more information regarding the Series see:

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/criticalessays/index.php

The Gee conference website will launch in July 2011:

http://www.gylphi.co.uk/gee

(posted 24 June 2011)

Scholars are invited to submit abstracts for papers dealing with the literary, cultural and historical representations of Ireland and Irish identity in Ireland and abroad today or at any period in history. As the concept of 'Representations' is to be understood in a broad sense, papers discussing the linguistic and sociolinguistic aspects of the above topics will be welcome. Likewise, interdisciplinary approaches to the representations of Ireland and Irish identity will also be appreciated.

Abstracts of not more than 300 words should be submitted to the following e-mail address: <representations@kre.hu> by the 15th of June 2012. Acceptance of papers will be indicated by the 25th of June 2012.

The organizers plan to publish a collection of selected papers in the Károli Könyvek (Károli Books) series by L’Harmattan publishers.

Invited plenary speakers:

- Professor Joseph Falaky-Nagy, University of California in Los Angeles
- Professor Tom Hubbard, University of Aberdeen

Registration fee:
For the whole conference:

35 Euros before the 1st of August 2012 (late registration: 45 Euros - after the 1st of August)

Student registration fee for the whole conference:

15 Euros before the 1st of August 2012 (late registration: 20 Euros - after the 1st of August)

For a single day:

20 Euros before the 1st of August 2012 (late registration: 25 Euros - after the 1st of August)

Student registration fee for a single day:

10 Euros before the 1st of August 2012 (late registration: 12 Euros - after the 1st of August)

The registration fee for the whole conference includes participation in the academic programme, tea and coffee during the breaks, some of the cultural programmes, and the reception. The daily registration fee includes participation in the academic programme and tea and coffee during the breaks, and some of the cultural programmes.

Károli Gáspár University is located in the very heart of Budapest and is served by two underground lines (M2, M3) and various bus, tram and trolley routes.

You are kindly requested to arrange accommodation individually. Budapest offers a large variety of places to stay, and currently the organizers are negotiating with some hotels about a special conference rate. The list of recommended hotels, apartments and hostels will be sent out to participants soon.

The website of the conference can be found at http://www.kre.hu/btk/index.php/representations-of-ireland.html
Dr. Tekla Mecsnóber and Dr. Dóra Pődör, Institute of English Studies
On behalf of the organizing committee of the conference
The Conference is sponsored by the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs.

(posted 5 June 2012)

2012 marks the 250th anniversary of the election of John Tompson as the first Professor of English at Goettingen University. His English Miscellanies was one of the first English publications ever in Germany, and was also the first anthology composed in an academic context for the purpose of the mediation of English literature and culture to German students of English. The Miscellanies was therefore an important watershed in the development of British-German literary and cultural transfer.

The department for British Literature and Culture and the department for English Didactics will celebrate this important anniversary with a jointly organised conference on the origins, forms, methods, practices and multiple histories of English literature teaching, language teaching and cultural mediation in a European context from the 18th century to the present.

We invite 300-word proposals for 20-minute papers that relate to the following topics:

- the problem of disciplinary origins and the historical and political imperatives that have informed both teaching of English and the mediation of British literature and culture;
- the role of the genre of the anthology and questions of canon formation in the context of the mediation of national literature and culture;
- literary translation and the translation industry as factors in cultural transfer processes;
- the relationship between literature and language teaching;
- the relationship between literature and culture in teaching contexts and questions of methodology;
- the role of literature in language teacher education;
- teaching English in the age of globalisation.

The conference will be hosted by Barbara Schaff and Carola Surkamp, Seminar für Englische Philologie. Keynote speakers will be Susan Bassnett, Terry Eagleton, and Konrad Schröder.

The conference fee will be € 50.
Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words by January 30th 2012 to
- <bschaff@uni-goettingen.de>
- and <carola.surkamp@phil.uni-goettingen.de>.

(posted 9 November 2011)

To mark the close of the three-year Nordforsk funded project on Literary Transculturation, an international conference open to all interested will be held at the University of Bergen. This conference aims to bring together the concerns previously explored in the Network's research seminars/symposia, opening them up to a wider conceptualization of transculturalism.

The meaning of the transcultural and the aesthetic expression of this is the site of much contemporary thinking in the wake of postcolonialism. Issues of borders and border-crossings are of central interest, be they geographical, epistemological, cultural, personal, temporal, or symbolic. The notion of writing history "to reconstruct on entirely new terms" (Attwell) is fraught with theoretical perplexities. This is very much what underlies theories of globalization processes, and of course it is not coincidental that precisely postcolonial theories of culture and identity politics have so strongly influenced how we understand our own current and interconnected realities. This interconnectedness, of routes/roots and cultures, is not a phenomenon "elsewhere;" it increasingly circumscribes and describes the realities and lives lived in our own contemporary societies, evident in the processes of migration, border crossings and responses to an integrated Europe.

The literary expression of this is a key element in understanding this world, not least since literary transculturation is linked to other cultural phenomena from folklore to film, further emphasizing the need for creating and developing interdisciplinary approaches. The emphasis on the simultaneity of multiple sites, heterogeneity and heterochronos is important in helping to create an understanding of the contemporary cultural and social aspects of everyday life.

Papers or panels (of three) are invited on topics including but not limited to: 

• Theories and methodologies of transculturalism
• The aesthetics of literary transculturation
• Memory and storytelling
• Identity and border-crossing
• Transcultural v. postcolonial
• Translated identities and cultures
• Place and dislocation
• Configurations of belonging and identity
• Mismatching perspectives
• Transcultural indigeneity

Deadline for abstracts of up to 300 words: 11 April 2012.
All abstracts should be sent to <Anne.Ronning@if.uib.no>.

Registration fee for non-network members: €150/NOK1500, which includes lunch and coffee breaks all days, reception Friday, and conference dinner Saturday.

Accommodation: The conference takes place at historical Hotel Grand Terminus. For room reservations please contact the hotel directly at http://www.ght.no/en/

The conference starts at 10.00 am on Friday, 31 August and ends at 4.00 p.m. on Sunday, 2 September 2012. The City of Bergen will host a reception on the Friday evening at 7.00 pm for the conference participants at the historic Schøtt stuene.

If there is sufficient interest in a Norway in a Nutshell tour either the day before or the day after the conference, this may be arranged. Please notify the organisers if you wish to book a trip.

For queries regarding the conference, please contact <Anne.Ronning@if.uib.no> or <lene.johannessen@if.uib.no>.

(posted 26 January 2012)

(posted 13 October 2010, updated 23 January 2011, updated 16 October 2011, updated 24 October 2011)

Studies of revolts during the modern era associate their causation to the extensive social transformations that accompanied the birth and development of states. The theme of this conference is the relationship between memories of insurrections during the early modern period of European history and their audiovisual transmission; visual productions, whether theatrical or documentary representations of the past, should be analyzed, for purposes of this conference, as akin to contemporary historical texts.

Consistent with the perspectives of history and of cultural anthropology, this conference seeks to examine the context out of which these audiovisual works were produced andthe context of their reception, thus extending discussion of them beyond considerations of narrative and aesthetics. The aim is essentially to explore contemporary society's historical  imagination as it has been constructed around the phenomenon of revolts and revolutions.

Finally, in order to avoid focusing too much on the major revolutionary ruptures that took place after 1789, and which feature so prominently in the pantheon of collective memories, we invite contributors to reflect onthe contests for authority and revolutionary movements before 1789 which have dotted the histories of European peoples: often left out of textbook accounts, these  peoples  have been historically reincorporated in the cinematographic and televisual productions dealing with these events. The revolt does not need to be the central subject of the chosen films  provided that the corpus covers it in sufficiently significant manner.

Papers should examine the motivations of, and methods employed by, insurgents, in addition to representations of their demeanours, their objectives, their targets, their modes of action, and the responses of  political authorities. How do the works incorporate ideology? How were these productions diffused and received? In what ways did they express and reflect contemporary issues? How do we understand the divergences, when they exist, between the visual representation and the state of historiography? That being said, itwill of course beequally pertinent and fruitful o address both successes and failures, as well as  aborted projects.

Proposals should be around 300 words and should be sent before 15 September 2011 to:
<colloquerevoltes@yahoo.fr>.
Papers can be delivered in either French or English.
Équipes de recherches : CRHQ-UMR 6583 CNRS ; HiCSA - Histoire Culturelle et Sociale de l’Art, EA Paris I ; Mica Bordeaux III ; Institut Universitaire de France ; Laboratoire Communications et Politiques UPR 3255 CNRS ; GRHIS ; Equipe ISOR du CRH (Paris I).

(posted 6 April 2011)

New:
The program for the international conference "Languages in Motion: Language Learning/Teaching and the Performing Arts" is now online:
http://www.languageinmotion.univ-nantes.fr/77963862/1/fiche___pagelibre/&RH=1327677682750&RF=1327677934817
The registration form is available at:
http://www.languageinmotion.univ-nantes.fr/77873630/1/fiche___pagelibre/&RH=1327677934817&RF=1327677797297

An international conference organized by CRINI (Centre de Recherche sur les Identités Nationales et l'Interculturalité)
Organizers: Joëlle Aden, CREN, UNAM, Le Mans et Andy Arleo, CRINI, UNAM, Nantes

As shown by a number of recent conferences and publications (see references below), innovative practices aiming to  integrate esthetic experience and the arts with foreign language teaching have been gaining ground. These practices often involve collaboration among performing artists, linguists and language/literary teaching specialists. In addition to reviewing recent developments in this area, this international conference aims to examine these practices within different institutional and cultural contexts, to spell out their theoretical and methodological underpinnings, to carry out cross-cultural comparison, and to describe their evolution.  In order to create a coherent framework for the conference, we are targeting artistic practices linked to the performing arts, in particular theater, music, dance, mime, opera, circus, etc. as well as cinema and video, which have a close relationship to these arts. We invite approaches that engage the action of the learner (enaction and co-action) and that also take into account the role of the body and emotions in the development of language and cultural skills. In addition, in order to complement traditional academic papers, we also look forward to proposals involving hands-on workshops, which connect language and action in a concrete way, for instance by carrying out short language-teaching simulations that are then analyzed by the participants.

Themes that might be explored during the conference are suggested below:

- empirical studies that document the benefits that artistic practice offers in the development of specific linguistic and cultural skills, and in attitudes promoting the capacity to learn foreign languages;
- reviews of recent research on the theoretical and empirical grounding for these approaches, stemming from disciplines that support language teaching methodology in this area: cognitive science, education, linguistics, musicology, performance studies, psychology, sociology, etc.;
- indepth qualitative case studies, in particular longitudinal, that demonstrate the effects of artistic practices in specific contexts;
- studies showing the benefits of such practices for learners with specific educational needs;
- comparative studies that analyze these practices within different cultural and linguistic contexts, in particular in different countries;
- the analysis of how cross-curricular practices regarding the performing arts and foreign language teaching are taken into account in institutional frameworks (such as official instructions for teachers), and their application in the field;
- studies on the links between such practices and the assessment of the linguistic, cultural and artistic competence of the learner, including proposals for creating or improving relevant tools of assessment.

Papers or workshops may be presented in English or French.

Please send the title and a 200/250-word abstract (in Word format) before 15 March 2012 (new extended deadline) to:

- Joëlle Aden <j.aden@numericable.com>
- and Andy Arleo <Andrew.Arleo@univ-nantes.fr>

Please indicate after the title whether you are submitting a proposal for a workshop (50 minutes) or a paper (30 minutes including 10 minutes of discussion).

(posted 26 October 2011, updated 18 February 2012, updated 25 June 2012)

The 17th annual SERCIA conference will be held at the Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France, from Wednesday September 5 to Friday September 7, 2012. It is organized by the Centre Interlangues (EA 4182). Keynote speakers will be Thomas Elsaesser (University of Amsterdam) and Marc Vernet (Université Paris 7 ? Denis Diderot).

Unlike literary studies, film studies have rarely focused directly on intimacy as such, as the bibliography included below suggests, and English-speaking cinema might itself seem an unlikely candidate for this topic. Most film scholars and critics have tackled the question indirectly, by studying, for instance, the representation of the family or specific genres such as the biopic in which private lives occupy center stage. And yet as a photographic and aural medium that enables us to see and hear the bodies of actors, cinema is very much based on intimacy, although perhaps intimacy of a different nature from the kind literary scholars examine when studying letters and diaries as expressions of a human subject?s inner life. Clearly, what is at stake in the question of intimacy in cinema is the relationship between outside and inside, the outer and the inner life, the body and the self, the private and the public. This concerns not only the medium itself, but the industry as a whole. With its star system and movie tie-ins, including everything from Marilyn Monroe biographies to Luke Skywalker pyjamas, cinema undoubtedly occupies an intimate place in people?s lives, although, television, as it is positioned at the heart of domestic life, might arguably appear a more intimate medium.

The 17th SERCIA conference warmly invites film scholars to tackle the subject of intimacy from various angles and through different approaches, be they aesthetic, cultural, historical or economic. Proposals should deal either with English-speaking cinema or films dealing with English-speaking countries. Comparisons with non-English-speaking films are, however, welcome, as well as proposals that mean to assess differences between films and TV series.

List of possible topics (other suggestions will, of course, be considered):

- historical, sociological, etc. approaches to the representation of the family, the couple, the inner life, the body;
- the question of censorship: how censorship or self-regulation has influenced screen representations of intimacy;
- the treatment of confession, therapy, letter- and diary-writing; the process of adapting the epistolary form to moving images- - film genre studies: the biopic, the family melodrama, (mock-)documentaries, naturalist films; what Linda Williams calls 'body genres,' e.g. melodrama, horror and pornography;
- questions of form and aesthetics: how can inner life be expressed? The use of the close-up or voice-overs; acting methods; cinéma vérité; visual effects; music; diegetic cameras; digital technology;
- intimacy in foreign English-speaking films versus the dominant Hollywood model;
- star studies: the intimacy of stars; biographies, diaries, correspondence; the use of their star-image in film;
- questions of spectatorship, reception and fan studies: how do viewers and/or fans ?use? the films and/or stars they love?
- market studies: how have studios marketed the intimate lives of stars? how have they sought to advertise products for use in the daily lives of audiences?

Deadline: March 31, 2012. Send abstracts (circa 300 words) in English or French to:

- David Roche <mudrock@neuf.fr>
- Isabelle Schmitt <Isabelle.Schmitt@u-bourgogne.fr>
- and Melvyn Stokes <melvynstokes@hotmail.com>.

SERCIA is a non-profit European association that aims at promoting research on English-speaking cinema. You can visit the website at: http://www.sercia.net.

(posted 22 November 2011)

This international conference will explore the frontiers of humanity at the dawn of the post-human. Even though the dichotomy between organic/natural beings and artificial ones dates back to the early 19th century, this conference will focus on the contemporary period and will welcome papers on both literature and the visual arts. Theoretical reflection on the post-human emerged after the second world war, when the possibility of a global death of humanity became a potential reality. The third industrial revolution then became synonymous with renewed technological evolution, characterized by experiments on the living. Through biotechnologies, computer technologies and nanotechnologies, the automaton has been replaced by cyborgs, clones and artificial intelligence.

Thus we propose to question the definition of humankind and the human species when faced with the trans-human or post-human which hint at an imminent disappearance of humanity as we know it. In a society which increasingly looks beyond the human (whether gendered or not), human identity is questioned through alterity, replication, hybridity and mutation. In addition, the encroachment of the virtual and of simulacra on the real has left a deep imprint on contemporary authors and artists who convoke the imagination to illustrate potential drifts of societies founded on images and illusions. Mapping humanity will thus also mean trying to ponder the emergence of a resistance of bodies (individual, collective, political, social) which would hint at a possible resistance of the human.

We will welcome papers ranging from traditional gothic or fantastic literature to post-modernist writing, speculative fiction, dystopias and post-cataclysmic novels or films as means of representing the frontiers of humanity and emphazing the potential threat against the human. Papers may be rooted in various sociocultural contexts and should explore the ontological, epistemological, aesthetic, economic and political facets of the interactions between the human and the post-human. Theoretical texts ranging from Foucault to Baudrillard, Jameson, Virilio, Badiou or Nancy reveal a weakening of the human and the possible disappearance of humanity in a world in which the very nature of reality is also questioned. In recent years, numerous texts have also introduced the mirror of the post-human as a mode of mapping humanity. Haraway's Manifesto, Fukuyama or Dominique Lecourt's thoughts, the polemics around Sloterdijk's Regeln für den Menschenpark reveal that the issue of possible mutations of the species questions the very possibility of a common mode of representation of the human.

Guest speakers : Peter Childs (University of Gloucestershire), Thierry Hoquet (Université Paris Ouest), Gaïd Girard (Université de Bretagne Occidentale)
Proposals should be sent before the 30th April 2012 at :

- <helene.machinal@univ-brest.fr>
- or <gaid.girard@univ-brest.fr>.

Organization committee : Hélène Machinal (Professor), Gaïd Girard (Professor), Annick Cossic (Professor)

Scientific committee : Hélène Machinal, Pierre Cassou-Nogues, Jean-François Chassay, Paloma Bravo, Sylvie Crinquand, Laurence gaida, Gaïd Girard

Contact : <francoise.dourfer@univ-brest.fr>.

(posted 5 March 2012)

'But the most eminent instance of the flourishing of learning in absolute governments is that of France, which scarcely ever enjoyed any established liberty, and yet has carried the arts and sciences as near perfection as any other nation. The English are, perhaps, greater philosophers; the Italians better painters and musicians; the Romans were greater orators; but the French are the only people, except the Greeks, who have been at once philosophers, poets, orators, historians, painters, architects, sculptors, and musicians. With regard to the stage, they have excelled even the Greeks, who far excelled the English. And, in common life, they have, in a great measure, perfected that art, the most useful and agreeable of any, l'Art de Vivre, the art of society and conversation.' (Hume, 'Of Civil Liberty')

'Our jealousy and our hatred of France are without bounds; and the former sentiment, at least, must be acknowledged reasonable and well-grounded' (Hume, 'Of the Balance of Trade')

Through a series of plenary lectures, regular sessions and round tables, this colloquium proposes to explore a subject that has never been treated with the attention it deserves: the specific relations with France that helped make David Hume into the philosopher, man of letters, political author, economist and historian that he was.

Papers in either English or French are invited in three fields:
Whether the approach is philosophical, political, historiographical, economic, literary, sociological, etc., it is hoped that all papers will represent Œstate of the art‚ contributions to Hume studies.

This colloquium is organized by

One-page proposals for papers should be addressed by 1 October 2011 to both organizers.

(posted 15 July 2011)

"Behind this mask there is more than just flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea… and ideas are bulletproof."
(Alan Moore, V for Vendetta)

This inter- and multi-disciplinary conference aims to examine, explore and critically engage with issues in and around the production, creation and reading of all forms of comics and graphic novels. Taken as a form of pictographic narrative it has been with us since the first cave paintings and even in the 21st century remains a hugely popular, vibrant and culturally relevant means of communication whether expressed as sequential art, graphic literature, bandes dessinees, tebeos, fumetti, manga, manhwa, komiks, strips, historietas, quadrinhos, beeldverhalen, or just plain old comics. (as noted by Paul Gravett)

Whilst the form itself became established in the 19th Century it is perhaps not until the 20th century that comic book heroes like Superman (who has been around since 1938) became, not just beloved characters, but national icons. With the globalisation of publishing brands such as Marvel and DC  it is no accident that there has been an increase in graphic novel adaptations and their associated merchandising. Movies such as X-men, Iron man, Watchmen and the recent Thor have grossed millions of dollars across the world and many television series have been continued off-screen in the graphic form, Buffy, Firefly and Farscape to name a few.

Of course America and Europe is not the only base of this art form and the Far East and Japan have their own traditions as well as a huge influence on graphic representations across the globe. In particular Japanese manga has influenced comics in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, France and the United States, and have created an amazing array of reflexive appropriations and re-appropriations, in not just in comics but in anime as well.

Of equal importance in this growth and relevance of the graphic novel are the smaller and independent publishers that have produced influential works such as Maus by Art Spiegleman, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Palestine by Joe Sacco,  Epileptic by David B and even Jimmy Corrigan by Chris Ware that explore, often on a personal level, contemporary concerns such as gender, diaspora, post-colonialism, sexuality, globalisation and approaches to health, terror and identity. Further to this the techniques and styles of the graphic novel have taken further form online creating entirely web-comics and hypertexts, as in John Cei Douglas' Lost and Found and Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl, as well as forming part of larger trans-media narratives and submersive worlds, as in the True Blood franchise that invites fans to enter and participate in constructing a narrative in many varied formats and locations.

This projects invites papers that consider the place of the comic or graphic novel in both history and location and the ways that it appropriates and is appropriated by other media in the enactment of individual, social and cultural identity.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to (but not limited to) the following themes:

- Just what makes a Graphic Novel so Graphic and so Novel?:

- Sources, early representations and historical contexts of the form.

- Landmarks in development, format and narratology.

- Cartoons, comics, graphic novels and artists books.

- Words, images, texture and colour and what makes a GN

- Format, layout, speech bubbles and “where the *@#% do we go from here?”

-The Inner and Outer Worlds of the Graphic Novel:

- Outer and Inner spaces; Thoughts, cities, and galaxies and other representations of graphic place and space.

- Differing temporalities, Chronotopes and “time flies”: Intertextuality, editing and the nature of Graphic and/or Deleuzian time.
- Graphic Superstars and Words versus Pictures: Alan Moore v Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) Neil Gaiman v Jack Kirby (Sandman).
- Performance and performativity of, in and around graphic representations.
- Transcriptions and translations: literature into pictures, films into novels and high/low graphic arts.

- Identity, Meanings and Otherness:

- GN as autobiography, witnessing, diary and narrative
- Representations of disability, illness, coping and normality
- Cultural appropriations, east to west and globalisation
- National identity, cultural icons and stereo-typical villains
- Immigration, postcolonial and stories of exile
- Representing gender, sexualities and non-normative identities.
- Politics, prejudices and polemics: banned, censored and comix that are “just plain wrong”
- Other cultures, other voices, other words

- To Infinity and Beyond: The Graphic Novel in the 21st Century:

- Fanzines and Slash-mags: individual identity through appropriation.

- Creator and Created: Interactions and interpolations between authors and audience.
- Hypertext, Multiple formats and inter-active narratives.
- Cross media appropriation, GN into film, gaming and merchandisng and vice versa
- Graphic Myths and visions of the future: Sandman, Hellboy, Ghost in the Shell.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with Graphic Novels. This project will run concurrently with our project on Fear, Horror and Terror -- we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Fear, Horror and Terror and Graphic Novels for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the Graphic Novel or in relation to crossover panel(s).

For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti’' comment that "the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous." Our focus then will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from which time or place that future is viewed. So whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance, Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by Moretti, a "new order of beings" makes manifest the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.

As such the monster becomes not the return of the repressed but an immanent Imaginary that constantly harasses and harangues the borders of the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dr. Moreau's creatures and the clones from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid future that blurs the borders between human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the converse is equally true where the tomorrow they envision is as much degenerative as it is evolutionary. Here, as in Wells' the Time Machine, or Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, the future is in fact a portal to the past and that the true anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire, will lock us forever in a never-ending present (not unlike Wittgenstein's immortality of the never-ending moment). This then is a call for monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a new and alien land or one that is only too familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the  Undead.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:

~The city, the town, the home of the future.
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito.
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la. Eldorado

Human Monsters:

~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction.
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human and beyond human.
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation, surgical modification and bodies without organs

Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:

~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors, Martians, heavenly or alien life forms.
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M. Banks’ The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences

Monstrous Generations:

~The glorification of Youth, Logan's Run and In Time.
~Monstrous adolescents.
~Demonic children and alien babies.
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance, dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries and Dexter.

Monstrous Politics:

~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration.
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g, District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with specific monsters. This project will run concurrently with our project on The Erotic -- we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).

Mapping the field of the erotic is a complex and frustrating endeavour; as something which permeates lived experience, interpersonal relationships, intellectual reflection, aesthetic tastes and sensibilities, the erotic is clearly multi-layered and requires a plethora of approaches, insights and perspectives if we are to better to understand, appreciate and define it.

This inter- and trans- disciplinary project seeks to explore critical issues in relation to eroticism and the erotic through its history, its emergence in human development, both individual and phylogenetic, as well as its expression in national and cultural histories across the world, including issues of transgression and censorship. The project will also explore erotic imagination and its representation in art, art history, literature, film and music. These explorations inevitably touch on the relationship between sexualities, gender and bodies, along with questions concerning the perverse, fetishism and fantasy, pornography and obscenity.

Papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are also invited on any of the following themes:

* the erotic and identity
* disability, ethnicity, gender, class and eroticism
* the erotic in education and the education of the erotic
* eroticism in popular culture and media: cinema, tv, theatre, radio, newspapers and magazines, the internet in all its forms
* the erotic in literature and on the screen exploitative eroticism, e.g., pornography
* the erotic, ethics and philosophy the eroticised (or de-eroticised) body
* absence, control and excess of the erotic
* the erotic and sexuality: is there a difference, and if so, what? the erotic in representation
* the erotic and (post- neo-)colonialism
* eroticism in the making of the exotic
* the erotic in mythology
* the erotic and the non-human’ (vampires, zombies, cyborgs, etc)
* eroticism and technology: sex toys and other turn-ons

This project will run concurrently with our project on Monsters and the Monstrous -- we welcome any papers considering the problems or addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in relation to crossover panel(s).

We welcome submissions from within specific disciplinary boundaries, but we are also particularly interested in interdisciplinary contributions that balance the scope of insight that disciplines bring with the limitations that disciplinary boundaries create in failing to recognise cross-disciplinary connections, which neglect important historical and cultural perspectives on the development of the 'erotic' as a locus of attention. Consequently, we are particularly keen to encourage submissions that are not subsumed within disciplines, but cut across and between disciplinary vocabularies to provide new synergies, domains and inter-disciplinary possibilities. We warmly welcome proposals which go beyond traditional paper presentations and encompass also panels, performances and workshops.

300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012.

This interdisciplinary conference will examine the question of recycling, remaking and resuming in TV series. Bearing in mind that this television genre can be regarded as an aesthetic, ideological, narrative and sociocultural object, we welcome paper proposals focusing on the connections between the following aspects:

Sociocultural approaches and ideological issues

- the recycling of stereotypes and clichés, potentially with a view to subverting them (contributors may address the circulation of a type of character or a type of location through several series); the recycling of external discourses (such as media discourse, academic discourse) within the context and narrative of a series;

- more generally, the ways series reflect the societies which both create and watch them by echoing, reviving and revisiting contemporary or past events (through background allusions, explicit references or the insertion of archival images, for instance). Which worldview is thus conveyed by the conjuring up of this or that collective memory?

Intertextuality and interpictoriality

- adaptation, transposition, appropriation, remake: re-mediations (such as the adaptation of a novel, a comic strip or a film into a series, and vice versa); new versions of older or successful series (cult series, foreign series); reshuffling, reworking and “re-imagining”; narrative blossoming and dissemination (sometimes resorting to other media), spin-offs, webisodes, continuations of specific sub-plots; parodies and echoes of certain TV, filmic and artistic genres;
- more pointedly, the reprocessing and integration of external cultural elements (for instance in opening and end credits): verbal and visual quotations from the literary, cinematic or television heritage; references to a shared musical culture (in the sound track, or the diegesis, through cover versions, etc.); crossovers (when one or several diegetic elements "cross over" from one series to another); re-casting of the lead actor or actress of another series or film; playful interactions with the audience (so that one may wonder whether these more or less explicit hints give birth to a form of bonding with a particular category of viewers, somehow reproducing "distinction" strategies within mass culture).

Seriality: Special attention will be paid to what differentiates the series from other visual or narrative forms, i.e. the seriality of series. The following dimensions may be explored:

- strategies meant to resume the main narrative thread after the series has been interrupted for a few minutes or a few months (by a commercial break, by the time span separating two episodes or two seasons); playing with the viewer's memory (through intratextuality and intrapictoriality, through the use of different timelines, the manipulations of the "previously on" and motifs cropping up in the credits);
- proposals may study how TV series, whether they follow an endlessly repeated pattern (as in formulaic shows or case-of-the-week series) or belong to the more recent trend of serialised dramas, combine the reiteration of similar narrative plots, characters and locations with the necessity to insert new elements, unexpected events and revelations;

- recurrent consumption rituals: how is the seriality of TV series redefined by new modes of viewing (DVD, Video On Demand, streaming, downloading) or by the grafting and thriving of the diegetic universe in other media (and on the Internet in particular)?
- reflexive echoes: mise en abyme (TV screen within the TV screen and series within the series as self-reflexivity); the way the series pulls itself together and starts again after momentarily wandering off track to picture the hypothetical development of a given character or situation; repetition or allusion supporting a self-definition.

Papers may be given either in English or in French. Selected and peer-reviewed proceedings will be published in the journal TV/Series.

(posted 14 July 2011)

Confirmed keynote speaker: Professor Patrick Williams, Nottingham Trent University

Around the time of Frantz Fanon's famous articulation in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) of the 'massive psychoexistential complex' created by colonisation, such writers as Octave Mannoni and Albert Memmi were also thinking about colonisation's damaging psychological effects. In more recent years, the work of trauma theorists, including Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, Marianne Hirsch, Dominick LaCapra and Dori Laub, has been both embraced and rejected by postcolonial theorists and critics. Whilst, for some, trauma theory has provided a helpful way of conceptualising the often painful and difficult legacies of colonialism, others have been all too aware of what Stef Craps and Gert Buelens (2008) have recognised as the 'Eurocentric blind spots that trauma theory will have to confront if it is to have any hope of delivering on its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement'. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to reflect on this promise and explore new ways of thinking about postcolonial trauma.

Conference participants will be invited to submit extended versions of their papers for an edited collection.
Topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Slavery and indenture
• Colonial legacies
• Neocolonial trauma
• Apartheid
• Genocides
• Survival and resistance
• Tourism and eco-trauma
• Migration and displacement
• Asylum
• Witnessing and testifying
• Memory and trauma
• The ethics of trauma studies

Please send 300-word abstracts and 50-word bios to Abigail Ward by Friday 13th April 2012 <abigail.ward@ntu.ac.uk>.

(posted 28 March 2012)

The aim of the conference is to bring together scholars and teachers engaged in the analysis of subtitles from the perspective of second/foreign language learning/acquisition. We welcome contributions on the following subjects:

The deadline for abstract submission has been extended to 30th April 2012.
Please visit the conference website: http://www.unipv.it/sllconf
e-mail: <subtitles@unipv.it>
Please find us on Facebook.

(posted 7 November 2011, updated 8 November 2011, updated 27 February 2012)

The HUSSDE 4 Conference, organised by the Hungarian Society for the Study of English and the Institute of English and American Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic University invites papers from academics and postgraduate students of English studies, investigating any aspect of dramatic adaptations, ranging from stage adaptations of prose or poetry, through the recontextualisation or reinterpretation of drama in any other medium. Possible areas of interest may include the relationship between printed text and performance; the adaptation of dramatic texts into other media, such as film, television, or music (including musical, opera or ballet); theoretical issues, analyses of the adaptation process, examinations of genre or performance theory; theoretical or practical approaches to the changed textual and publication environment, the Internet, digital technologies and the virtual world and their impact on adaptation and our understanding of it.

Confirmed plenary speakers:

- Pavel Drábek (Masaryk University, Brno, Head of Department of Theatre Studies)
- Gabriella Reuss (Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Senior lecturer, Institute of English and American Studies)

We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations or roundtable discussions.
Abstracts of 150-200 words should be sent to <hussde4@gmail.com> by 15 April, 2012.
Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 May, 2012.

(posted 22 March 2012)

We are looking for contributors to a transdisciplinary symposium on the didactical implementations of ecocriticism, critical animal studies and green cultural studies.
With a special emphasis on transdisciplinary perspectives, we would like to discuss how the tenets of these academic fields can be incorporated into the daily practice of teaching the humanities and arts -- without either breaching the topics' complexity, falling into the mode of environmentalist propaganda or succumbing to warnings and claims to catastrophic urgency which are hard to reconcile with an ethos of critical and democratic pedagogy.

We hope to enable truly transdisciplinary dialogues and therefore, we welcome teachers just as well as theoreticians from academia whose topics may comprise, but do not have to be restricted to, environmental and animal studies, green didactics, eco-composition, posthumanism, the sciences, and related fields. With this broad focus and the variety of topics that it allows, we hope to provide a basis for transdisciplinary connections in an inextricably interconnected world.

We plan to publish the essays and proceedings in early 2013.
Key note speakers include:

- Greg Garrard (Bath Spa University)
- Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer (Universität Tübingen)
- Uwe Küchler (Universität Halle-Wittenberg).

Deadline for proposals is March 10.
Please send your abstract (max. 250 words) and a short bio (150 words) to <roman.bartosch@uni-koeln.de>.

 (posted 28 January 2012)

Invited speakers:

- Eve V. Clark (Stanford University)
- Geert-Jan M. Kruijff (DFKI-Saarbrücken),                           
- François Récanati (Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure)

The SEMDIAL series of workshops brings together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue in fields such as artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, formal semantics/pragmatics, philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience (information on past SemDials: http://www.illc.uva.nl/semdial/

In 2012 the workshop will  be hosted by Université Paris-Diderot (Paris 7). The Semdial workshops are always stimulating and fun, and Paris is of course one of the greatest cities to visit, especially in September.

SeineDial will be immediately preceded by a workshop on Dialogue and Contextualism (a separate announcement on this will appear in due course.) and will feature a special session on The Acquisition of  Dialogue.

We invite papers on all topics related to the semantics and pragmatics of dialogues, including, but not limited to:

- models of common ground/mutual belief in communication
- modelling agents’ information states and how they get updated
- multi-agent models and turn-taking
- goals, intentions and commitments in communication
- semantic interpretation in dialogues reference in dialogues
- ellipsis resolution in dialogues
- dialogue and discourse structure
- interpretation of questions and answers
- gesture  in communication
- intonational meaning in dialogue
- humour in dialogue
- natural language understanding and reasoning in spoken dialogue systems
- multimodal dialogue systems
- dialogue management in practical implementations
- categorisation of dialogue moves or speech acts in corpora
- designing and evaluating dialogue systems
- contextual factors  underlying child utterances in dialogue
- repair in child/adult interaction

Important dates:

May 1, 2012: Paper submissions due at 23:59 UTC-11
June 15, 2012: Author notification for full papers
June 30, 2012: Poster and demo submissions
July 10, 2012; Author notification for posters and demos
August 20, 2012: Camera-ready copies

Organizing Committee: Jonathan Ginzburg (chair), Anne Abeillé, Margot Colinet, Philip Miller, Gregoire Winterstein
Programme Committee co-chairs: Staffan Larsson (Gothenburg University), Sarah Brown Schmidt (University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign)
SemDial Presidents: Raquel Fernández Rovira (University of Amsterdam), David Schlangen (Bielefeld University)
Sponsors: CLLILAC-ARP, Laboratoire Linguistique Formelle, LabEx Empirical Foundations of Linguistics (EFL).

(posted 28 January 2012)

Organisers: University of Gdańsk, Poland and Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil

What is the phenomenon of solidarity in the current world? What is the sense to talk about it with the increase of violence around the globe? What is its role in shaping identities -- of cultures, nations, individuals? Is it born from memory or from oblivion? Questions such as these gave rise to the idea of our interdisciplinary conference. It is going to be devoted to solidarity in all its multiple aspects, in the broadest contexts possible -- historical, cultural, artistic, psychological, philosophical. In the age of rapid socio-political changes, with deepening ethic and religious conflicts on one hand, and, on the other hand, a diminishing feeling of identification with the community, there seems to exist a strong necessity for a reflection on the idea of solidarity. It would be difficult to think of a more inspiring place for such a reflection than the city of Gdańsk. It was here that in the 1980 "Solidarity" was born: a social movement which, in less than a decade, brought about the fall of the communist regime in Poland and played an important part in the historic changes in Middle-Eastern Europe. Yet we do not want to make Polish "Solidarity" the dominating theme of the conference or privilege it in any way. On the contrary, we intend to present as fully as possible the broad spectrum of solidarity-related themes. Thus, we heartily invite academics from all sides of the world, representing various research fields: anthropology, sociology, philosophy, history, psychology, cultural studies, literary studies, film studies, theater studies, memory studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies. Both experienced scholars and young academics at the start of their careers are most welcome. We also invite all persons interested in participating in the conference as listeners, without presenting their papers. We are sure that we will have important reflections and fruitful discussions about Solidarity, Memory and Identity.

The following list of suggested conference topics is open:
I. Contemporary World

America and Europe in the face of the "Arab Winter of Nations" 2011, solidarity after September 11th, the rage and the pride: the world in the face of terrorism, the difficult coexistence: Islam, Judaism, Christianity, post-communism: being European in Middle-Eastern Europe, solidarity and violence, solidarity and multiculturalism, solidarity and globalization, solidarity and political correctness, solidarity and nationalism, solidarity and racism

II. Memory and Oblivion

the Holocaust: righteous among the nations, genocide: the solidarity of  the perpetrators, the solidarity of the victims, post-war coexistences: between memory and vindictiveness, memory and trauma: solidarity of the expelled, postmemory: solidarity of late grandchildren / solidarity with the forebears / solidarity with the dead, the terror of memory, solidarity and amnesia

III. Forms of Identity

cosmopolites and patriots, local communities, solidarity as a generational experience, solidarity of women / solidarity of men, solidarity between genders, identity of the minorities (ethnic, religious, sexual), professional solidarity, solidarity and individualism, solidarity and identity crises

IV. About Ideas

homo solidaritus, solidarity and postmodernity, solidarity with the Other, solidarity and tolerance, solidarity and resentment, solidarity and loneliness, solidarity and betrayal, solidarity and irony

V. About Literature and Art

novels/ films/ performances that shook the world, literature, art, film, theatre as memory "media", solidarity as a literary motif, solidarity and representation, solidarity and fiction, in the realm of spectacle: the solidarity of spectators and participants, socially engaged art: artists in defense of human rights

VI. Everyday Life

solidarity and free market, solidarity and media, support groups, strikes, rallies, demonstrations, equality parades, silent marches, solidarity and mourning, solidarity in the animal world, solidarity and environmentalism, solidarity and lobbying, solidarity of sports fans, solidarity of the mediocre

Please submit abstracts (no longer than 300 words) of proposed 20-minute presentations, together with a short biographical note, until 30th April 2012 to:

- Prof. Wojciech Owczarski, University of Gdańsk, Poland: <wowczarski1@tlen.pl>
- and Profa Maria Virginia Filomena Cremasco, Federal University of Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil: <mavicremasco@hotmail.com>

The confirmation of acceptance will be sent by 15th May 2012.
The conference language is English.
A selection of presented papers will be published in a post-conference volume.
For further details please see the conference website at: http://solidaritymemory.ug.edu.pl

(posted 30 March 2011)

In association with EMMA (Montpellier 3 Center for English Studies), the 2012 international SAIT conference will focus on the point / dot / period... to pursue its ongoing exploration of the relationship between text and image. The punctuation mark on the written page and the mark on the image (whether it be painting, drawing or photography) will be approached as two forms of silent expression that can shed light on each other despite, or thanks to, their singularity. Rather than restricting the field of definition, we suggest that connections be drawn and signifiers allowed to play -- in the spirit of what Roland Barthes does with the punctum in Camera Lucida where punctuation "proper" finds itself associated with various other meanings derived from the Latin word: "punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole -- and also a cast of a dice. A photograph's punctum is that accident that pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)".

As an instrument of syntactic articulation and accentuation, the punctum mainly points to a crucial difference between text and image: the opposition between a space which is cut out into meaningful units forming a linear arrangement and a space free of such segmentation and  sequential organisation. One may object that images sometimes divide and multiply, make up series or possess a narrative configuration. One also has to take into account the case of the moving image which can be broken down into shots and sequences. But more importantly, perhaps, this punctuation, which allows multiple articulations, leaves open the question of what really works as a stop / full stop in the process of reading or watching. "How do you decide to stop looking at something?": couldn't this question, voiced by one of A.S. Byatt's characters, be relevant to the reader as well as to the viewer (in analogous and, for that reason different, terms), even when a definite order and direction informs the reading or the viewing? Doesn't the pleasure of reading also lie in what blurs the configuration or scansion of the text, in what prevents the closure of meaning, in the very absence of a nodal or anchoring point that can put a stop to the slipping of the signifier? Isn't it true that narratives which leave us with the question "Qu'est-ce qui s'est passé? / What has happened?" have a special grip on us?

Whether one concerns oneself with the text, the image or their mutual attraction, one might care to pay attention to a paradox emphasized by the geometrical definition of the point. A portion of space precisely determined by coordinates, the point is, at the same time, a portion of space whose dimensions are null. In that perspective, one may also find that what serves as a support to the eye of the viewer or of the reader (the salient, culminating, critical point) can simultaneously turn out to be a vanishing point or a blind spot. Barthes's punch or puncture which marks a point of intensity, the piercing of affect, is also the elusive point where all meaning dissolves. In front of what both juts out and vanishes, one may remember that in French "point" is a mark of negation, synonymous with "pas" (not). Whilst considering the various extensions that can be given to the notion, it is also worth sticking to the point as material, physical, mark.
As such, it does not stop slipping through the net. The question of the visibility of the point, and of the desire to enhance it, can be raised. In the case of the image, one can reflect on the role given to the point by pointillism or by abstraction -- not to be confused with a mathematical abstraction (to take but one example, Kandinsly's point possesses extension, form and colour). As far as the text is concerned, one may consider that the point (or full stop or period) is both indispensable and meant to pass unnoticed. Yet, the point does occasionally draw attention to itself through excess (parataxis), or lack (logorrhea), untimely and abrupt intrusion (aposiopesis), or expansion and multiplication (suspension points). On can pay attention to the special language of the point, to its contribution to expressivity through its various modulations (colon, semi-colon, question mark, exclamation mark). If a special meaning may be attached to this silent language, what resonates most is sometimes nothing but its muteness, the resistance of affect to meaning.

The point both separates and links. One may think of it as a break or a stitch. Its emphasis invites us to look into aesthetics or poetics centered on the fragment, on fracture and disruption -- on a lack or excess which may signal anxiety or jouissance. The point may also be envisaged in terms of equilibrium. Details or "points of detail" sometimes seem to take on an unexpected and disproportionate importance: the shard may turn out to be bigger than the whole, thus threatening the entire balance of the text. Next to Barthes's punctum, one may think in that respect of Georges Didi-Huberman's "pan", inspired by Veermeer's View of Delft, that "little patch of yellow wall" first pointed out by Proust. The question of the extension, effect, or resonance of the point also invites us to consider it together with the line ("A line is a dot that went... for a walk"), the void, and the blank.

Please send a 250-word abstract and a short (100-word) biography as a Word attachment to:

- Pascale Tollance <pascale.tollance@univ-lille.fr>
- and Laurence Petit <laurence.petit@univ-montp3.fr>.

Submissions must be received by 30 April 2012.

(posted 12 December 2011)

An international conference organized by CREW (EA 4399), Institut du Monde Anglophone, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3

The dissent and uprisings that spread through the Arab world during the Spring of 2011 occurred almost a quarter of a century after the fall of East European political régimes that saw the rise of "democracy" modeled on the Anglo-American representative system. This specific context which has come to characterize the past quarter of century calls for a renewed analysis of the models these political systems represent and of the processes that triggered them and led to their long-term establishment in the UK and the US. Since the 1990s, as a response to the story of the inevitable emergence of democracy in the aftermath of the Cold War, researchers on North-American politics have provided an alternative reading of events: that of a "contested democracy".

The CREW Paris-based research group is organising an international conference in order to reflect on the notion of a "contested democracy" and its role in the understanding of democracy as theory and practice. In inviting to a critical evaluation of this now commonly used phrase, the conference wishes to open up onto a wide-range of approaches and discourses relating to democracy in the English-speaking world, from individual expression to collective action, from infra-political practices to more explicit forms of dissent, from within political organisations or large-scale social movements, including local democracy and debates on community-building and social cohesion. This conference is aimed at specialists on the Anglo-American world (and beyond, on the English-speaking world) who are interested in these questions from either an historical or contemporary perspective.

The purpose of this conference is to encourage comparative analysis on participation, contest and contestation, as well as on phenomena such as adaptation and self-appropriation which characterise the exchange and transfer of ideas that can be observed in the different national contexts of the English-speaking world.

The conference aims at providing an overview and assessment of current research on new and innovative forms of participation in the English-speaking world, both in the contemporary period and in history, with an emphasis on alternative and critical approaches to power.

In this exploration of the meaning and practice of “contested democracy”, possible fields to be addressed, from either a historical or contemporary vantage point:

- local sphere, civil society
- political parties, social movements, associations
- communications, networks, new social media
- cultural diversity, identity politics and mobilisation
- governance, influence of public-private actors …

Please send a one-page proposal and a short bio-bibliography to:
Emmanuelle Avril & Naomi Wulf at <Contested-democracy@univ-paris3.fr> before December 10, 2011.
Confirmation will be given by February 15, 2012.

Conference organisers: Emmanuelle AVRIL, Paul BAGGULEY, Yann BELIARD, Jacques-Henri COSTE, Divina Frau-Meigs, Romain Garbaye, Hélène Le Dantec, Johann NEEM, Valérie Peyronel, Sarah Pickard, Andrew ROBERTSON, Naomi Wulf.

For more details, visit the conference webpage: http://www.univ-paris3.fr/contested-democracy

(posted 7 September 2011)

Markets are crumbling. States are (going) bankrupt. Power and politics are more and more estranged. Unemployment is rising. Social inequalities are growing. Amidst the general climate of anxiety, political discourses on culture, identity and difference are changing, in Europe as in the United States, often relegating social disparities and cultural diversity to "the status of 'collaterality' (marginality, externality, disposability, not a legitimate part of the political agenda)" (Bauman, 2011). This collaterality produces tensions and stereotypes -- the reenactment of a 'no future worldview' generates an overall loss of confidence which, in turn, feeds on new exclusions and old and new (ir)rational fears.

The financial crisis is affecting every layer of society, potentially changing the 'structure of feeling' and (re)creating personal and communal narratives of inclusion and exclusion, in which "individuals are now expected to seek biographical solutions to systemic contradictions" (Beck, 1992). Against a background of market volatility, current political and cultural discourses do increasingly point to a retreat from a culture of rights to a culture of values, where we are markedly different from them. In this context, multiculturalism as a "utopia of tolerance, peace, and mutual regard" (Gilroy, 2008) appears as a dream of the past, as social, aesthetic and critical discourses follow suit, privileging new forms of authority over diversity and relativism. The return of/to philology, the resurrection of the author, the reinvention of the canon, as well as the new celebrity culture promoted in and by diverse media, all point to a yearning for absolutes that may blur and/or erase alterity.

Conversely, the protester was named person of the year 2011, in the wake of movements such as "Occupy Wall Street" or "Occupy London". Mainstream culture is growing more and more inclusive of counter-hegemonic discourses and representations. Remix culture is spreading. Collaborative research and art forms both at national and international levels are developing at a staggering pace, as new media open up possibilities of social, political and economic networks and produce new forms of knowledge. Even though it can, and often does, mean displacement and dispersion, mobility also "enables people to be connected with each other, to meet and re-meet over time and across space" (Elliot and Urry, 2010), thus creating transnational communities which forcibly foster a sense of connectedness with the diverse.

This conference wishes to address the extant crisis as a landscape of cultural and aesthetic possibilities as well as of constraints and perils: how will financial instability affect the self-image of the Western world as well as its relationship with its many others?, how will fear and anxiety determine translatability both in a literal and in a metaphorical sense?, what images and representations of identity and alterity will literature, film, tv, music produce at a time of distress and unrest?, how will the new-found desire for authority and authenticity articulate with the plurality of contemporary societies?

Papers on the following areas will be welcome:

Culture and Representation
Gender Studies
Linguistics
Literature
Literary Theory
Film and Other Media
Peace and War Studies
Translation

Papers on other topics are also welcome.
Confirmed Speakers:

Simon During, University of Queensland
João Ferreira Duarte, University of Lisbon
Ana Gabriela Macedo, University of Minho
Lawrence Venuti, Temple University Philadelphia
Jessica Evans, The Open University

The conference languages are English and Portuguese.
Speakers should be prepared for a 20-minute presentation followed by questions.

Please send a 250-word abstract, as well as a brief biographical note (100 words) to <authorityvsalterity@gmail.com> by 30 April, 2012.

Proposals should list paper title, name, institutional affiliation, and contact details. Notification of abstract acceptance or rejection can be expected by 10 June, 2012.

Fees:
Early registration (by July 1st): Members – 75€
Non Members - 100€
Students (ID required) — 50€
Late registration (after July 1st):
Members – 90€
Non Members —120€
Students (ID required) — 60€
The registration fee includes coffee breaks on the two days of the conference and conference documentation.
For further information, please go to http://authorityvsalterity.blogspot.com/

(posted 21 April 2012)

An International Conference hosted by The Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, in association with Birkbeck College, University of London.

Guest Speakers:

Daniela Caselli (University of Manchester)
Melissa Jane Hardie (University of Sydney)
Scott Herring (University of Indiana)
Teresa de Lauretis (University College Santa Cruz, CA)

The work of author, poet, playwright, journalist, visual artist and sometimes reluctant modernist Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) has continued to beguile, excite and inspire readers and has, over the years, produced its own voluminous and varied critical history. While Barnes has often been treated as a somewhat peripheral figure in relation to modernism, recent studies, graduate research activity, and research focused on questions of literary history and modernism continues to reveal a deepening body of research that increasingly values Barnes’s importance as a central modern writer.

The First International Djuna Barnes Conference presents itself as a timely opportunity to reflect upon this complex critical history history and consider the shape and scope of Barnes scholarship and twentieth century literary studies today. International and interdisciplinary in focus, this conference hopes to reflect the diversity of Barnes's own art practice, cohering a diverse and dispersed research community of scholars and postgraduate students interested in Barnes either directly, tangentially, or in relation to other frames of cultural-historical studies which might open up further possibilities for investigation and discussion.

We warmly invite papers on any aspect of the work of Djuna Barnes. Topics could include, but are by no means restricted to the following:

- Barnes's Canon: anachronism, propriety, canonicity, legibility, narrative, genre
- Barnes’s Form: poetics of form, modes of reading, staging Barnes, esthetic approaches, a 'Barnesean' style?
- Teaching and Reading Barnes: close analyses, pedagogical issues, Barnes and the syllabus, difficulty
- Barnes and Others: Beckett, Stein, Woolf, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Emily Holmes Coleman, Mina Loy, Eliot, Joyce, little magazines and journals, publishers
- Barnes in Context: biography, trauma, history, gender, identity, race, sexuality, animality, alterity, feminist and queer poetics
- Barnes and Modernity: modernism, late modernism, questions of canon formation and canonicity, critical histories, methodological and theoretical approaches, new directions in research

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words in length for 15–20 minute papers (or 500 word proposals for panels of 3 papers). Please also include: affiliation and position, details if applicable of graduate work, and research interests to <djunabarnes2012@gmail.com> by 30th March 2012. Decisions will be announced by June 2012.

As this CFP is being circulated early, you may not wish to submit a proposal just yet, but please do email to be added to our mailing list for news and announcements, website and social media links to follow. We welcome all correspondence and input.
Please circulate to colleagues you know might be interested.
Main Organisers: Caroline Knighton & Cathryn Setz (University of London, Birkbeck College).
Organising Committee: Claire Conilleau (Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle), Alex Goody (Oxford Brookes), Elizabeth Pender (University of Cambridge), and Joanne Winning (Birkbeck College).

(posted 26 January 2012)

Hosted by the British Residents Association and the English Department of the University of Geneva, together with the Katherine Mansfield Society
To be introduced by the New Zealand Ambassador
Keynote Speakers: Witi Ihimaera, Angela Smith, Gerri Kimber

In 1921 and 1922 Katherine Mansfield was in search of a cure for tuberculosis, travelling to both Switzerland and France.  She spent two separate periods in Switzerland during this time, totalling approximately twelve months. For four of these she stayed in hotels in Montreux and Sierre, and the remainder of the time she and her husband John Middleton Murry rented the Chalet des Sapins in Montana-sur-Sierre (now known as Crans-Montana). There she wrote some of her most celebrated stories, including 'At the Bay', 'The Doll's House' and 'The Garden Party'. It was also in Switzerland that she read the book Cosmic Anatomy, whose esoteric philosophy would ignite a desire for a spiritual cure from the physical symptoms of her tuberculosis, leading her ultimately to Gurdjieff's community in Fontainebleau, where she would die in January 1923, aged just 34.

This symposium seeks a reassessment of Mansfield's time spent in Switzerland. Possible topics for discussion might include, but are not limited to:

Mansfield and Switzerland
Mansfield's stories written during her stay at Montana.
Comparisons between Mansfield and other writers living at Montana such as S. Corinna Bille, Elizabeth von Arnim and Rainer Maria Rilke
The relationship between Murry and Mansfield in Switzerland
The relationship between Mansfield and Ida Baker (LM) in Switzerland
Mansfield and gender
Mansfield and spirituality
Mansfield and travel
Mansfield and tuberculosis
Mansfield's personal writing

Please send a 250 word abstract before 30 May 2012 to:

Simone Oettli at <simone.oettli@unige.ch>
or Farrol Kahn at <fkahn@aviation-health.co.uk>

(posted 27 March 2012)

The study of gender is an interdisciplinary field intertwined with feminism, queer studies, sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies (to name just some relevant fields).

This project calls for the consideration of gender in relation to various kinds of love (with regard, for example, to self, spirit, religion, family, friendship, ethics, nation, globalisation, environment, and so on). How do the interactions of gender and love promote particular performances of gender; conceptions of individual and collective identity; formations of community; notions of the human; understandings of good and evil? These are just some of the questions that occupy this project.

This conference welcomes research papers which seek to understand the interaction and interconnection between the concepts of love and gender; and whether, when, how and in what ways the two concepts conceive and construct each other.

Papers, presentations, workshops and pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to any of the following themes:

1. Love as a Disciplinary Force: Productions of Gender

* Love, Gender, Essentialism and Ontology
* Love, Gender and Narrative
* Love, Gender and the Law
* Love, Gender and Religion

2. Norms, Normativity, Intimacy

* Rituals and Rites
* Conventions, Commitments and Obligations
* Choices and Respect; Loyalty and Trust
* Transgressions and Taboos

3. Gendered Yearnings

* Personhood and Identity
* Body Politics and Belonging
* Love and Gender Performativity
* Transgender Desires
* Queer Kinship Formations
* Queer Conceptualisations of the State

4. Global Perspectives on Gender and Love

* Transformations of Intimacy in a Global World
* Sex and Choice
* Reproductive Rights
* Sexual Citizenship
* Gender, Love and Trans/Nationalism

5. Representations of Gender and Love

* Aesthetics and Intelligibility
* Gendered Narrations of Love
* Media, Gender and Love

For 2012, the Gender and Love project will meet alongside our project on "Skins" and Contemporary Culture. It is our intention to create cross-over sessions between the two groups -- and we welcome  proposals which deal with the relationship between gender and love and "Skins" and contemporary culture. The Steering Group particularly welcomes the submission of pre-formed panel proposals. Papers will also be considered on any related theme. 300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday 16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for the conference, a full draft paper should be submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts should be submitted simultaneously to both Organising Chairs; abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF formats with the following information and in this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d) title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to 10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: GL2 Abstract Submission.

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain from using footnotes and any special formatting, characters or emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline). Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts will be included in this publication We acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply from us in a week you should assume we did not receive your proposal; it might be lost in cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs:

- Dikmen Yakalı Çamoğlu, Department of Communication Sciences, Dogus University, Istanbul, Turkey
- Dr Rob Fisher, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, Priory House, Wroslyn Road,, Freeland, Oxfordshire OX29 8HR, UK

The conference is part of the 'At the Interface' series of research projects run by ID.Net. It aims to bring together people from different areas and interests to share ideas and explore various discussions which are innovative and challenging. All papers accepted for and presented at this conference will be eligible for publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may be invited to go forward for development into 20-25 page chapters for publication in a themed dialogic ISBN hard copy volume.

For further details of the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/gender-and-sexuality/gender-and-love/
For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/gender-and-sexuality/gender-and-love/call-for-papers/

(posted 1 December 2011)

Senior and emerging scholars, academics and researchers are invited to apply.

This conference is organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF) in partnership with Linköping University (LiU).

Grants available for successful applicants.
Further information can be found below and at: http://www.esf.org/conferences/12384
Chaired by:

- Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer - Eberhard Karls Universität, Tübingen, DE
- Elina Druker - University of Stockholm, SE
- Maria Nikolajeva - University of Cambridge, UK

Please circulate this announcement among your colleagues and contacts.
Download the Conference flyer.
Programme

Although the impact of avant-garde arts on the development of modern children's literature in different European and non-European countries has been stressed by several scholars, this relationship has been hardly investigated so far. Many renow ned artists belonging to avant-garde movements, such as Symbolism, Surrealism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and Constructivism, created aesthetically demanding works for children, ranging from picturebooks to poetry, fairy tales, and novels for children. To this group belong Salvador Bartolozzi, Karel Capek, Blaise Cendrars, Aleksandr Deineka, Lyonel Feininger, El Lissitzky, Vladimir Lebedev, Joan Miró, Bruno Munari, Nathalie Parain, Kurt Schw itters, and Arne Ungermann, to name just a few .

The modern concept of literature first emerged in the writings of the Jena Romantics. In L’Absolu littéraire, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suggest that Romanticism is the moment when philosophy invested literature, defining it as an object of speculation, and when writers strongly asserted the reflexive dimension of their practice, opening up the field of literary theory. Romanticism has redrawn the boundaries of genres and disciplines, and blurred the line that separates literature from philosophy and from the other arts, thereby widening the possibilities for crossovers and raising the issue of hybridization. As Shelley points out in A Defence of Poetry, Plato and Bacon were essentially poets, and Shakespeare, Dante and Milton were philosophers in their own right. During the Romantic era, art was defined as a major object for speculative thinking, but it also turned into an alter ego and a rival for philosophy, as it strove to offer thought experiments that could sublate the inner contradictions of philosophical systems from the outside.

The "philosophical poem" Wordsworth calls for in The Prelude, "yearning toward some philosophic song / Of truth that cherishes our daily life", is part of that endeavour. Truth, as well as life, can no longer be the objects of philosophy alone but also, perhaps above all, of art. As Emerson reminds us in "Experience", "Life is not dialectics", suggesting that life cannot be fettered by the constricting chains of philosophical systems but can be embraced by the supple and shifting lines of literary texts, in order to unfold, experience, test and understand itself. "Tell the truth but tell it slant", Emily Dickinson later wrote, as a tribute to the indirection and obliquity of poetic writing, in stark contrast to the so-called rectilinear catenations of philosophical thinking, as a celebration of the revealing opacity of tropes and figures, set against the misleading transparency of concepts. "A philosopher must be more than a philosopher" (Emerson again, in Plato, or the Philosopher), he must be a poet, because art also thinks, in its own terms and figures. A mutual relationship emerges as art vies with philosophy, while it opens up new speculative fields for later thinkers to elaborate some of their distinctive concepts, such as Heidegger's meditation on "poetic dwelling", inherited from Hölderlin's poetry, or what Stanley Cavell calls "the ordinary", after Wordsworth, Emerson and Thoreau.

The conference will explore the kinship and the conflicts, the elective affinities and the dangerous liaisons which bind art to philosophy during three major phases of Romanticism, in Germany, England and the United States. Papers on all art forms are invited.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

- The philosophy of Romanticism
- Romanticism and the philosophical tradition
- Romantic legacies in philosophy and literary theory
- The philosophy of poetics / the poetics of philosophy
- Tropes and concepts
- The Romantic subject
- Romanticism and literary theory
- Romantic aesthetics

Abstracts (300-500 words) should be submitted before 15 September 2011, together with a CV, to:

- Thomas Constantinesco <thomas.constantinesco@univ-paris-diderot.fr>
- and Sophie Laniel-Musitelli <sophie.musitelli@univ-lille3.fr>

Presentations will be expected not to exceed 30 minutes. Most presentations and papers will be in English. Final papers will be considered for publication following a peer-review process.

(posted 11 April 2011)