30 May - 01 June 2012 |
Visions: Sixth International Conference of Iconographic Studies
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). Conference website: www.ffri.hr/pu/ikon
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15 June 2012 |
The UCL Festival of London and Literature: "One Day in the City"
“One Day in the City” is a celebration of London and Literature organised by the Department of English, at University College London. The day and evening is free to the general public and is a rare opportunity to listen to and share thoughts with authors, poets, and academics in all things London. At a time when student fees are rising and funding is being slashed in Arts and Humanities faculties across the UK, this day will demonstrate, on a practical and visceral level, the importance of creativity and its non-quantifiable value within the city. CLICK HERE FOR REGISTRATION AND MORE INFORMATION. |
16 June 2012 |
Irish Studies Symposium: Censored Ireland
Speakers include: Donal O'Drisceoil, Maurice Walsh, Peter Martin, Lauren Arrington, Ben Levitas, Steve Nicholson, Catherine O'Leary, Niall Carson, Frank Shovlin, David Rockett, David Nash, Richard West. Lunch will be provided. Free and open to all. If you would like to attend please email IESEvents@sas.ac.uk by 11 June.
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29 - 30 June 2012 |
The Power of the Word: Poetry and Prayer: Continuities and Discontinuities
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 FURTHER DETAILS.
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04 July 2012 |
Literary London Conference 2012
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.
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09 - 10 July 2012 |
Language, Culture and Society in Russian/English Studies
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. |
11 - 13 July 2012 |
Victorian Popular Fiction Association 4th Annual Conference
Keynote speakers: Regenia Gagnier: 'The global circulation of British literature and culture: British fiction, economics and the marketplace', and Deborah Wynne: 'Hades! The Ladies! Male Drapers and Female Shoppers' Guest Speakers: David Waller, author of The Perfect Man: The Muscular Life and Times of Eugen Sandow Victorian Strongman, and Helen Rappaport author of Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street – Cosmetician, Con-Artist, and Blackmailer The VPFA conference is now an established event on the annual conference timetable and offers a friendly and invigorating opportunity for established academics and post graduate students to share their current research. Our theme this year is Hard Cash: Money, property, economics and the marketplace in Victorian Popular Culture. This theme enables us to develop the interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century popular culture, and changing attitudes to money and economics across the period. |
06 - 08 September 2012 |
Dante in the Nineteenth Century
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.
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13 - 14 September 2012 |
Space and Place in Middlebrow: 1900-1950
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.
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15 September 2012 |
Weird Council: an International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville
Papers are invited for the first academic conference dedicated to the work of China Miéville. Despite the cricial acclaim of Miéville's fictions - as well as his prominence as a literary and cultural critic - there is little scholarly work on Miéville's already substantive oeuvre. The organisers welcome papers on any topic related to Miéville's writing from any disciplinary position. |
21 - 22 September 2012 |
First International Djuna Barnes Conference
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.
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27 - 29 September 2012 |
Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End: Modernism and the First World War
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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12 October 2012 |
Brave New World and its Legacies
When Brave New World first appeared in 1932 it caused a sensation. It was obvious that Aldous Huxley was intent on testing the boundaries of propriety (sailing especially close to the wind in terms of sexual and religious obscenity), but what kind of novel had he published? A satire, like his earlier novels; a horrified warning of things to come, or a vision of how things might be, for better or for worse, following a number of scientific, political and social adjustments to the Britain of his day? While the novel’s title has become embedded in the English language as a catchword for anything that is far-fetched, faddish, futuristic or forbidding, the possible meanings Brave New World have only proliferated over the past eighty years and its relevance to our own world has only increased with time. Certainly, the novel’s significance for our own concerns with eugenics, globalisation, dystopias, urbanisation, population issues, technological innovation, authoritarianism, anarchism, educational theory, mass society, liberty, control, Americanisation, constructions of culture, and the ongoing crisis of capitalism, could not be more obvious. Proposed papers that are keyed to any of these categories are encouraged, but we also look forward to receiving proposals that engage with any of Brave New World’s historical contexts, contemporary resonances and manifold legacies. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS. |
13 October 2012 |
Dickens Day 2012 Dickens and Popular Culture
Dickens Day, now in its 26th year, is celebrating 2012 with a theme that explores Dickens’s popularity and his engagement with non-elite cultures from his own time to the present. On the evidence of bicentenary Dickens fervour, the author is as popular now as he has ever been. This year has been punctuated by Dickens serials on TV, heartfelt tributes from popular writers, mass-selling biography, collective reading projects, Dickens hip-hop performances, and a global read-a-thon. How can we account for this continuing engagement, across different genres and various cultural contexts? What is it that allows Dickens’s work its particular “portability” (to use Juliet John’s term)? And what are the political and personal investments in forms of Dickensian popularity? How does this relate to Dickens’s own aspirations, and to the forms in which his work first appeared? These are some of the questions that the day seeks to address. |
26 - 27 October 2012 |
Cosmopolitan Animals
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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03 November 2012 |
South-Asian Fiction: Contemporary Transformations
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
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08 - 09 November 2012 |
The Marginalised Mainstream: Literature, Culture & Popularity
Keynote Speakers include: Professor Phillip Tew (Brunel University), Professor James Chapman (University of Leicester), Christoph Lindner (University of Amsterdam) The Marginalised Mainstream seeks to discuss the growing interest in and importance of mainstream culture and the popular as ways of engaging with cultural products of the late nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries, the long twentieth century, 1880–2010. Specifically, we seek to bring together postgraduate students, early career academics and established researchers working in the fields of Literature, Cultural Studies and elsewhere in the Humanities, to explore why mainstream culture and objects of mass appeal are so frequently marginalised by the academic community. CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS.
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23 November 2012 |
The British Monarchy on Screen
Co-sponsored by the departments of the History of Art and Film, Birkbeck; Media Arts, Royal Holloway; the University of London Screen Studies Group; and the Institute of English Studies. With Madonna’s W.E on the Wallis Simpson-Edward VIII romance attempting to exploit the Oscar-winning success of The King’s Speech and The Queen, and a film drama on Diana’s romance with heart surgeon Hasnat Khan in production, this Diamond Jubilee year seems the appropriate time to consider the historic past and current effusion of film and television representations of the British monarchy. |
30 November - 01 December 2012 |
Wyndham Lewis: Networks, Dialogues and Communities
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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14 - 15 December 2012 |
Captivity and Culpability: The Disciplining Subject in the Literary and Cultural Imagination
Keynote Speakers: Bob Brecher (University of Brighton), Anthony Downey (Sotheby's Institute of Art) Societies often have ambiguous and even conflicting attitudes towards state institutions that fulfil normalising, reformatory, punitive or disciplinary functions. This conference aims to interrogate literary, filmic, popular cultural and artistic representations of the agents of those institutions, specifically in terms of guilt and culpability. The conference is organised by Alex Adams (Newcastle University) and Cornelia Wächter (University of Paderborn, Bielefeld University) in cooperation with the Institute of English Studies (University of London) and the Human Rights Consortium (University of London). CLICK HERE FOR CALL FOR PAPERS. |
16 February 2013 |
Jane Austen Society 2012: Jane Austen's Men
Rescheduled from 2012. |
15 - 16 March 2013 |
Writers and their Libraries
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.
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