Conferences, Symposia and Public Lectures

UCL English Graduate Conference: Intersections
Time: 09:30 - 18:00

The UCL English Graduate Society invites abstracts for 20-minute papers for this year's Intersections conference. The day will be a forum for discussion of cultural and ideological exchange, both within literature and between literature and other disciplines. Proposals are invited for contributions that deal with any of the following:

Literary influence
Collaborative authorship
Interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies
Cross-cultural exchange
Polyglot studies
Interactions between authors and their readers, publishers and editors
The intersection as an image in literature

The Intersections conference aims to solicit a range of papers united by a common view of literature as built upon collaboration, influence, and interchange. Unique literary experiences occur at 'point[s] at which the world's phenomena intersect': these points might be located in the confrontation between literature and science, at a crossroads in a literary landscape, or on a page annotated by its readers.

We hope that delegates will relish this opportunity to interrogate such diverse types of intersection both with and within English literature. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND FURTHER INFORMATION.

The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium
Time: 14:30 - 19:30

The London Anglo-Saxon Symposium (LASS) aims to provide a forum for the multidisciplinary discussion of Anglo-Saxon topics in a relaxed and engaging atmosphere. LASS will bring together internationally renowned experts and interested members of the public, an interaction that promises to be highly informative and enjoyable for everyone involved.  This year the focus will be on the origins of the Anglo-Saxons and the beginnings of their culture.  CLICK HERE FOR DETAILS.

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Visions: Sixth International Conference of Iconographic Studies
Time: 00:00

At the University of Rijeka, Croatia.

This conference seeks to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue as well as to continue the cycle of sessions for scholarly discourse on significant subjects in iconographic studies. The conference presentations will deal with different subjects concerning “visions” with an emphasis upon the relation between mysticism and art in the European Middle Ages (other periods in Art history are included as well). CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: www.ffri.hr/pu/ikon

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The Power of the Word: Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities
Time: 00:00

The second Power of the Word conference focuses on the theme of poetry and prayer. It seeks to promote further the dialogue, begun successfully at Heythrop College in last June's conference, between theologians, philosophers, literary scholars and creative writers about the following questions: What do poetry and prayer share? How do they differ? In what ways do they relate to each other? The conference, interdisciplinary and ecumenical in scope, encourages theoretical discussion as well as analysis of specific texts and reflection on the work of particular authors, poets and thinkers of different countries and religious traditions.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

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Literary London Conference 2012
Time: 00:00

Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers, comprised panels, and roundtable sessions, which consider any period or genre of literature about, set in, inspired by, or alluding to central and suburban London and its environs, from the city's roots in pre-Roman times to its imagined futures. While the main focus of the conference will be on literary texts, we actively encourage interdisciplinary contributions relating film, architecture, geography, theories of urban space, etc., to literary representations of London. Papers from postgraduate students are particularly welcome for consideration. While papers on all areas of literary London are welcomed, the conference theme in 2012 is 'Sports, Games, and Pastimes'.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies
Time: 00:00

Organised and sponsored by the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Linguistics and The Journal of Philology. The conference is devoted to the development of English and Russian studies, lexicography, sociolinguistics, English teaching in Russia, and the History of the Book. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

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Dante in the Nineteenth Century
Time: 00:00

As a number of historians have pointed out, the concept of the 'Renaissance' as a way of describing Italy from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries is essentially a nineteenth century idea. We look at medieval and early modern Italy through nineteenth-century spectacles. Indeed, the anglophone cult of Dante – in commentaries, translations, illustrations, and a host of literary references – belongs to this nineteenth century matrix. This conference aims to bring together literary critics (both English and Italian), historians, and art historians, with scholars from similar disciplines specializing in the nineteenth century.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Space and Place in Middlebrow: 1900-1950
Time: 00:00

This conference aims to investigate the complex relationship between middlebrow writing and categories of space and place. For the exploration of this topic we seek to encourage discussion along two main trajectories: firstly, we would like to invite participants to consider the spaces and places where middlebrow writing was supported. This includes the social geographies of middlebrow as well as the topography and archaeology of middlebrow production and consumption. We are interested in hearing about research on middlebrow culture that encompasses spaces of refuge, spaces of social power, and spaces of industry and production. We want to hear about loci for writing: areas in a country, a county, a town, a village, even of a building. Where did middlebrow happen?

Secondly, we invite papers that explore the literary representation of place and space in middlebrow writing. Participants are invited to discuss contribution of middlebrow writers to the spatial discourses that harbour the collective's sense of national, cultural and social identity. How do middlebrow writers image the places of gender, ethnicity, and class? What are their strategies for the appropriation of space and place for generating cultural meaning? We are particularly interested to learn about the experience of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and middlebrow conceptions of home and exile, the country and city, the centre and the margins. How does middlebrow reflect and negotiate the spatial practices of society?  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

First International Djuna Barnes Conference
Time: 00:00

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.

CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: Modernism and the First World War
Time: 00:00

Proposals are invited for an international conference on Ford Madox Ford's First World War tetralogy, Parade's End . First published as Some Do Not . . . (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up– (1926) and Last Post (1928), Parade's End has been described by Anthony Burgess as ‘the finest novel about the First World War', by Samuel Hynes as ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman', and by Malcolm Bradbury as ‘a central Modernist novel of the 1920s, in which it is exemplary'. In 2010–11, Carcanet published the volumes as major critical editions, providing for the first time reliable texts, detailed annotations and discussions of the textual histories. Also in 2011, the BBC and HBO embarked on a five-part adaptation, scripted by Sir Tom Stoppard. As we approach the centenary of the start of the Great War, this conference will examine and celebrate Ford's First World War modernist masterpiece.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: http://fordmadoxford-conference.weebly.com

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Cosmopolitan Animals
Time: 00:00

Keynote speakers: Donna Haraway / Simon Glendinning

In what ways can we conceptualise cosmopolitanisms which are not solely 'human', and where and how are such relationships made possible? This conference, under the theme of 'Cosmopolitan Animals', seeks to interrogate and decentre humanist metanarratives that have dominated our thinking and ways of living, while looking to the many non-human others who populate the cosmos.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Conference website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/english/cosmopolitan-animals.html

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South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
Time: 00:00

The South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations One-Day Symposium seeks to address emerging contexts and formal departures in South-Asian Anglophone fiction and, in the process, interrogate established critical and theoretical assumptions about this rapidly evolving body of writing. The conference will allow critics and scholars of South-Asian fiction to exchange ideas, challenge current paradigms in postcolonial studies, and map new areas of importance, especially where these involve recent economic and political developments in the region. CLICK HER FOR CALL FOR PAPERS

Wyndham Lewis: Networks, Dialogues and Communities
Time: 00:00

This conference's remit is to explore the numerous ways in which the modernist writer and painter Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) belonged to cultural networks of influence and inheritance.  Dedicated Lewis scholarship has, during the past decade, shown how key a part Lewis played in various communities of his time (e.g. the early twentieth-century avant-garde, ‘little magazine' culture, and modernist sociality), as well as how many important contributions he made to an impressive variety of intellectual traditions and critical practices (e.g. ethnology, political theorizing, Semitism, Bergsonism, cinema scholarship, nihilism, and postmodernism, among others).

In all this, Lewis was a profoundly dialogic thinker; his writings are suffused with quotations of, and references to, other figures (from previous eras as well as his own). This aspect of Lewis's writing forces responsible accounts of his significance to take into consideration the numerous ways in which Lewis positioned himself as a relational thinker and creator, not to mention the complexities of the lines of influence upon subsequent generations to which his creative energies gave rise. As a result, the conference calls for papers which take as their focus the dialogic, collective, and interpersonal sides of Lewis's oeuvre – in words as much as in paint. All topics will be considered.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

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Writers and their Libraries
Time: 00:00

This conference in the History of Reading will bring together scholars working on the private libraries of some of the major literary figures in world literature. The aim of the conference is to explore reading habits, note-taking practices, marginalia and other traces of reading experience and book collecting in a comparative context. At the same time, the conference will offer a forum for the discussion of theories and methodologies that underpin this kind of research, as well as the problems and challenges of reclaiming, representing and editing the evidence of reading writers and writing readers from the archive.  CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.

Jane Austen Society 2012: Jane Austen's Men
Time: 09:30 - 17:30

Rescheduled from 2012.