CFPs: Conferences

1922 Turned Upside Down

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Texts and their Limits: Australia’s Triennial Literary Studies Convention 

The Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) 

20-24 July 2021 | Online

What is the nature of text – and how do we define where it begins and where it ends? How might such definitions influence the ways in which we read and accord significance to different kinds of textual production? And at a time of political, social and environmental crises, what roles have texts played in the deep cultural divisions we see around us, and what are the possibilities for texts to heal division, discrimination and despair? Are there limits to the social benefits that texts can provide in troubling times?

We seek proposals for papers which address these questions across a broad range of textual disciplines and practices from literary, historical, and cultural studies as well as languages, linguistics, and semiotics. This expressly includes exegetical work within creative arts fields of study. Some possible sub-themes which might be included under Texts and their Limits are:

• Limits around the texts that scholars deem worthy topics for Literary studies.
• The physical and psychodynamic limitations of texts and of the media that carry them.
• Spatial, diachronic, and cultural limits on the distribution and comprehension of texts.
• Ethical and legal limits around the production, reception, and exchange of texts.
• Limits to what is accepted practice in Literary Studies and related fields.
• Limits that bear on the teaching and learning of textual studies.
• Texts negotiating the limits to what is sayable, how, and to what ends.
• …And so much more.

In 2021, the Literary Studies Convention will be a fully digital event. Organisers are still developing the format and platform details. In this 1st CfP, we seek proposals for:

• Individual presentations (15 minute presentations) — please include all presenter names and affiliations, proposed title, and an abstract of up to 200 words.
• Interactive panels or workshops (60 or 90 minute timeslots) — please include all presenter and chair/facilitator names and affiliations, proposed title of the session, and an abstract of up to 600 words. This abstract should include a clear view of the session’s proposed interactive activities.

Please submit your proposals to [email protected] by Wednesday 27 January, 2021.

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New Work in Modernist Studies 10

11 December 2020 | Zoom

The tenth one-day graduate conference on New Work in Modernist Studies will take place online on Friday 11 December 2020, in conjunction with the Modernist Network Cymru (MONC), the London Modernism Seminar, the Scottish Network of Modernist Studies, the Northern Modernism Seminar, the Midlands Modernist Network and the British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS).

BAMS is dedicated to fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion. As in previous years, this conference will take the form of an interdisciplinary programme reflecting the full diversity of current graduate work in modernist studies; it encourages contributions both from those already involved in the existing networks and from students new to modernist studies who are eager to share their work. We particularly encourage proposals from BAME students, who we recognise are underrepresented in the field.

Usually the event is open only to students at British and Irish institutions as we offer each student a travel bursary. However, as the event will be held virtually this year we encourage PhD students from around the world to apply. The conference will be held during the working day in the UK (approx. 9.30am – 5pm, with regular breaks); please let us know if you are attending from elsewhere in the world and need that to be taken into account.

The day will include a plenary session with Dr Sarah Bernstein and Dr Patricia Malone (both University of Edinburgh) on the principle of difficulty as a theoretical concept and as an experience in constructing an academic career.

Proposals

Proposals are invited from registered PhD students, for short (10 minutes maximum) research position papers. Your proposal should be no more than 250 words. Please also include a short biography of no more than 50 words. If you are outside the UK and Ireland, please give your location and time difference to the UK.

Proposals for and questions about the event should be sent to [email protected]

Deadline for proposals: 9am UK time, Tuesday 20 October 2020.

Acceptance decisions will be communicated within seven days.

Applicants and delegates are encouraged to let us know about any access needs they might have, and if we are able to make adjustments to the application or presentation process, we will endeavour to do so.

Registration

We’ll host the conference by Zoom, and there won’t be any charge to attend.

Full details: BAMS

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41st Annual Meeting of the International T. S. Eliot Society

2-3 October 2020 | Zoom

Keynote lecturer: Robert von Hallberg

Call for Papers

Because of continuing concerns regarding the coronavirus, the Society has decided to hold our 2020 annual meeting online, using the Zoom platform. Panels will still be structured around three papers, but the papers will be slightly shorter than the usual 20 minute slot, and the discussion following the papers will unfold over Zoom. We hope to have panel participants share drafts of these shorter papers a week before the conference, in order to facilitate the most coherent, robust discussion possible.

We welcome clearly organized proposals of around 300 words, submitted as Word or PDF documents, on any topic reasonably related to Eliot, along with brief biographical sketches. These should be emailed to [email protected], with the subject heading “Conference Proposal,” by 15 June 2020.

For further information on the conference — including info on our awards for emerging scholars — please visit our website.

Call for Peer Seminar Participants

1. “Eliot and Racial Others,” led by Anita Patterson (Boston University)

2. “Eliot and the Avant-Garde,” led by Vincent Sherry (Washington University in St. Louis)

Participants will pre-circulate short position papers (5 pages) by 1 September; peer seminar groups will meet online to discuss the pre-circulated papers for two hours on the first day of the 2020 Society conference, Friday 2 October. Membership in each seminar is limited to twelve on a first-come, first-served basis. Please enroll by 15 July, by sending an email with the subject line “Peer Seminar” to [email protected] with your contact information.

For details on the two seminars — including info on our award for emerging scholars — please visit our website.

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Pandemic, Crisis, and Modern Studies: The Intersection of Your Research with the Pandemic/Crisis – A Twitter Conference

Countervoices, Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

12 June 2020 | Twitter

Over the past few months, the spread of Covid-19 has profoundly impacted the lives of people around the globe. Whether politically, through the ever-shifting government policies, culturally, by virtual access to cultural artefacts, or socially, through individual isolation, the rapid spread of the pandemic has changed how one lives in the world. Undoubtedly severe as the consequences of the virus are, it boosts new insights into human relation(ship)s, communities, and environment, with imaginative responses such as singing on balconies, and considerable drops in air pollution. For individuals, communication has become confined to the virtual space, forcing us to find original forms of expression.

This conference attempts to initiate a robust and meaningful discussion on how the pandemic or crisis shapes our past, present, and future. We invite discussions about the pandemic as a global crisis from passionate and creative intellectuals in different disciplines of modern studies (from 1830 to present). Featuring an opportune interdisciplinary response to the contemporary changes and new experiences brought about by the crisis, this conference will spark new debates over ontological issues, shed new light upon research in humanities and sciences, and engage and inspire a broad range of audiences in and beyond this country.

The conference welcomes submissions of abstracts for twitter-papers consisting of 10-15 tweets (with pictures/slides) about the way your studies intersect with the pandemic or crisis. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Physical and mental health: vulnerability, fragility, illness, health, care, death, and resilience, therapy, and recovery.
• Cognition and memory: trauma, recollection, history, erasure, monument, and memorials.
• Space: architecture, geography, regions, nations, transnation, and globe.
• Identities, groups and agents: identities in relation to crisis (victim, survivor, volunteer, helper, expert, hero, scapegoat, whistleblower, etc.), groups and authorities in operation, effects on particular groups in the population (gender, race, class and human rights), creation of new groups and new identities.
• Changes and reactions: changes to habits (shopping, behaviour, social norms), cognition, human relationships, cities, businesses, economies, and policies that initiate (or do not initiate) such changes.
• Communication and language: rumours, fake news, instructions, slogans, hashtags, and new words.
• Apocalyptic/post-apocalyptic, utopian/dystopian visions.
• Material objects and metaphors: necessities (food, toilet roll), tools of self-preservation (masks, hand-sanitizer, vaccines, ventilators, and weapons).
• Animals and the environment: non-human, ecology, environment, and post-human.
• Representation in literature, music, art, cinema, documents, archive, or records.

Please send your abstract (200 words), a short bio (50 words), and your twitter account (@XXXX) to [email protected] by 15 May 2020. Participants will be invited to present their papers (thread of tweets) on 12 June using the hashtag #Cmodspan2020 and tagging the Countervoices (@cmodspgforum1) and CModS (@cmods1) twitter accounts according to the conference programme and handbook, which will be updated at the end of May. We will host the conference and retweet your tweet-papers in a single thread, under the title of the conference. For those who don’t have a twitter account, we can help you tweet your discussion. The best papers presented in this conference will receive Amazon vouchers worth up to £50. We are grateful to the Centre for Modern Studies for making it possible for us to offer these awards.

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Fay Bound Alberti (York) & Dr. Beryl Pong (Sheffield)

Find us on Twitter , Facebook or our website.

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Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference 2021 

18-22 July 2021 | University of Mississippi

“Faulkner, Welty, Wright: A Mississippi Confluence”

The forty-eighth annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference will interrupt its long history of focusing on a single author to take up a trio of Mississippi giants who have left an indelible mark on American literature and modern intellectual life: William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Richard Wright. Together they have shaped, and moreover embodied, what we might call a “Mississippi modernism” that has yet to be fully reckoned with by literary scholars. And they have collectively bequeathed to us a bold imaginative encounter with history, society, power, and indeed the range of life in the state, region, nation, and beyond, over a timespan that reaches from settler colonialism and the Middle Passage to decolonization and the Civil Rights Movement. This legacy, still vital today, invites, and should richly reward, comparative study, so proposals that approach the authors’ work in dialogue and context will be particularly welcome. Topics might include but are not limited to:

Authorship

• transnational currents in the authors’ lives and careers: itineraries, encounters, constellations
• authorship, publishing, and the literary marketplace: negotiation, frustration, censorship, remuneration, etc.
• histories and patterns of critical reception
• the writer as public intellectual, as celebrity, as political figure
• personal encounters, correspondence, or other exchanges between/among the three authors and/or their common contemporaries and shared cultural brokers

Aesthetics

• convergent/divergent modernisms: aesthetics, themes, genres, commitments
• structures of feeling: textual or authorial affects, emotions, temperaments
• historical fiction, historical consciousness across/among the three writers
• non-fiction: memoir, poetry, screenwriting, reviewing
• nonliterary media in the creative life: painting, drawing, photography, film, music

History

• representations of poverty and/or/in the Great Depression
• literary and intellectual engagements with Cold War culture and politics
• civil and human rights in the writer’s life, work, and world
• intersections of racial, gender, class, and sexual identity; intersectional performances
• accounts/experiences of war or other forms of global conflict; the role of violence and death in the authorial imagination
• migration, mobility, rootedness in the lives and works of the three authors

Geography

• senses of place: shared visions or competing versions of the plantation, the farm, the school, the prison, the church, the neighborhood, etc.
• senses of (existing) place: shared visions or competing versions of Jackson, the Delta, the Natchez Trace, the Mississippi River, Memphis, etc.
• glimpses of alternate, emergent, or possible Mississippis
• Faulkner, Welty, Wright and/in the environmental humanities
• scaling up: literature at geological, global, planetary, or cosmic scales

The program committee, which will consist of Wright, Welty, and Faulkner scholars, especially encourages full panel proposals for 60-minute conference sessions. Such proposals should include a one-page overview of the session topic or theme, followed by 400-500-word abstracts for each of the panel papers to be included. We also welcome individually submitted 400-500-word abstracts for 15-20-minute panel papers. Panel papers consist of approximately 2,500 words and will be considered by the conference program committee for possible expansion and inclusion in the conference volume published by the University Press of Mississippi.

Session proposals and panel paper abstracts must be submitted by 31 January 2021, preferably through e-mail attachment. All manuscripts, proposals, abstracts, and inquiries should be addressed to Jay Watson, Department of English, C-135 Bondurant Hall, University of Mississippi, P.O. Box 1848, University, MS 38677-1848. E-mail: [email protected] Decisions for all submissions will be made by 15 March 2021.

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Between the Waves: British Women Writers 1930 to 1960 Redux

12 June 2020 | The University of Hull

This conference aims to rekindle the energy unleashed at the inaugural conference on British Women’s Writing 1930 to 1960: Revision, Revival, Rediscovery in 2016 at Hull University that was taken forward in conferences at Chichester University in 2017 and 2018. The fourth conference seeks to gather more research and discussion from scholars of women’s literature of this period and to continue the re-evaluation of women’s writing occupying a liminal place in ‘the canon’ of British literature as taught by the academy.

The conference will also launch the publication of Liverpool University Press’s essay collection British Women Writers 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves, that arose from the first conference, edited by Sue Kennedy and Jane Thomas.

This fourth conference in the series offers speakers and audience a forum to give new life to readings of more works by neglected women authors. We offer a space to consider the problems lamented by Kristin Bluemel and Phyllis Lassner in the first issue of the journal Feminist Modernist Studies in 2017 that are still faced by scholars of early and mid-twentieth-century writing by and about women that is ‘not modernist in terms of style, politics or coterie’ in the face of the preferences of publishers and academic institutions for research on topics admitted to a modernist canon.

The emphasis on the work of neglected women writers celebrates their non-canonical and middlebrow status; works that Elizabeth Maslen describes as among the ‘texts which we neglect to our very great loss’, of which there remain too many.

A distinguishing feature of these conferences has been the interest of an increasingly appreciative section of the reading public in women’s writing of this period, aided by the steadfast work of recovery performed by publishing houses, notably Virago, Persephone and most recently, Handheld Press and cultural commentators and journalists like Lucy Scholes.

Keynote speakers include Dr Kate Macdonald and Dr Lucy Scholes.

Call for papers

We welcome papers that approach a wide range of forms and genres: fiction, poetry, drama, life writing, film, particularly the lesser-known contributions of women writers to what might be seen as ‘untypical’ of female authors, extending and augmenting the excellent contributions to the first three conferences.

We invite abstracts of up to 250 words for papers of no more than 20 minutes or panels of 3 associated papers.

Examples might include the following, although other topics are most welcome:

• Writing about war and the aftermath of two world conflicts
• Writing against war; interwar political consciousness
• Domestic fiction; gender, class, families
• Race
• Post-colonial writing
• Queer writing; writing against the norm
• Science fiction, speculative fiction and fantasy
• Life writing/autobiography
• Fiction for children
• Historical fiction
• Crime fiction
• Periodicals/magazines
• Poetry
• Drama
• Adaptation for film or stage

Please include a brief personal biography (about 50 words). The conference is co-organised by Dr Sue Kennedy and Professor Jane Thomas. Contact email: [email protected]

Closing date for submissions: 17 March 2020.

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Katherine Mansfield on the French Riviera

An international symposium organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship. Hosted by the Town Hall of Menton, and supported by the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship.

24-25 September 2020 | Menton, France

The New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923) spent all her adult life in Europe, of which approximately three years in total were spent in France, where she later died. For much of this time she was on the French Riviera, firstly in Bandol and subsequently in Menton during the spring of 1920, and then staying at the Villa Isola Bella from September 1920 to May 1921.

Both Bandol and Menton proved fertile ground for Mansfield’s creativity. During two sojourns in Bandol (1916 and 1918), she completed ‘The Aloe’ and wrote ‘Je ne parle pas français’, ‘Sun and Moon’, and ‘Bliss’. The time she spent at the Villa Isola Bella in Menton resulted in ‘The Singing Lesson’, ‘The Young Girl’, ‘The Stranger’, ‘Miss Brill’, ‘Poison’, ‘The Lady’s Maid’, ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, and ‘Life of Ma Parker’.

Mansfield’s life in the south of France also engendered comments in her notebooks and diaries, as well as in her letters. For example, near the end of a letter to her husband, John Middleton Murry, written from Menton, she wrote, ‘You will find ISOLA BELLA in poker work on my heart’. Domestic issues, friendships, visitors from England, descriptions of the Mediterranean, all feature in her personal writing. On her first visit to Menton, staying with her cousin Connie Beauchamp, she wrote to Murry: ‘Oh, could I bring the flowers, the air the whole heavenly climate as well: this darling little town, these mountains – It is simply a small jewel’. In January 1922, high up in the snowy Swiss Alps, she wrote in her new diary: ‘I love, I long for the fertile earth. How I have longed for the S. of France this year!’

In the fifty years since 1970, the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship has celebrated the connection between New Zealand’s most iconic writer and the town of Menton, allowing a New Zealand writer to live and write for three months or more in the town which Mansfield loved so much. Previous recipients include C. K. Stead, Margaret Scott, Paula Morris, Carl Nixon, Kate Camp, Anna Jackson, Mandy Hager, Greg McGee, Justin Paton, Chris Price, Ken Duncum, Damien Wilkins, Jenny Pattrick, Stuart Hoar, Dame Fiona Kidman, Ian Wedde and other prestigious writers such as Bill Manhire, Janet Frame, Witi Ihimaera, Elizabeth Knox, Lloyd Jones, Roger Hall, Marilyn Duckworth, Michael King and Allen Curnow.

This two-day symposium will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Fellowship in 2020.

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

• The influence of the south of France on Mansfield
• Mansfield, travel and France
• Mansfield’s French legacy
• The French reception of Mansfield’s works
• Translating Mansfield
• France and the French as sources for Mansfield’s imagination
• Teaching and studying Mansfield in France today
• The influence of French literature on Mansfield
• Analysis of any of the stories Mansfield wrote in the south of France
• The legacy of Mansfield in New Zealand writing today.

NB: All other topics relating to Mansfield will be considered.

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a 50-word bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organiser, Dr Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK), at [email protected]

Submission deadline: 30 April 2020

The Symposium will feature a keynote panel of prestigious New Zealand authors, all former Mansfield Menton Fellows.

Full details: Menton 2020

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Surrealisms Paris 2020

International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)

6-9 November 2020 | Paris

‘Surrealisms Paris 2020’ is the third conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS). It is organized by the American University of Paris, Centre allemand d’histoire de l’art (DFK Paris), Université Lyon-Saint-Étienne, and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3.

Building upon the success of the inaugural ISSS conference at Bucknell University (Pennsylvania, USA, 2018) and the second at the University of Exeter (England, 2019), we seek proposals for SURRÉALISMES PARIS 2020. Along with academic sessions and roundtables, the conference will include film screenings, poetry readings, and exhibitions. ISSS aims to facilitate cross-disciplinary and inter-regional exchange by organizing events and facilitating channels of information worldwide. The mission of the ISSS is to incorporate and promote new scholarship on global surrealism, as well as to introduce new ways to approach its various literary and artistic expressions. In addition, we seek to foster exchanges between practicing artists, writers, surrealists, and the scholarly community for whom surrealism (past and present) is a field of ongoing inquiry.

The year 2020 is an anniversary year for surrealism, marking the publication of Les Champs magnétiques by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, as well as the second version of the journal Littérature which, inspired by Dada, provided the foundation for the surrealist avant-garde.

In 1935, Benjamin Péret wrote that “to avoid its own desiccation,” Surrealism had to “bypass the narrow borders of France and adopt an international presence.” Our transversal and interdisciplinary Parisian conference will be the occasion to interrogate broadly, without reducing it to a narrow theme, this internationalization of surrealism, up to and including the emergence of global surrealism on the globalized market today. The international audience of Surrealism, in Europe and beyond, raises multiple questions: Where and by what means did the movement spread? What resistance or adherence did surrealist ideas meet in different cultural contexts? What were the modalities of surrealism’s reception in Europe and on the other continents? How did the relations between the supposed “center” (Paris) and the “peripheral groups” develop? How did the ideas of surrealism evolve due to this international expansion? Did the latter contribute to the loss of its initial nature or, on the contrary, to its necessary and vital renewal? Did the progressive commodification, aestheticization and museumification of surrealism undercut the political revolt and the poetic exigency the movement embodied? In other words, what is surrealism today: what poetic subversion, political revolt, or opposition does it still nurture and express?

Proposals for individual presentations (20 minutes) must include an abstract of 250 words, a title, professional affiliation (if applicable), email and postal address, and a short bio of the presenter. We strongly encourage proposals for pre-organized panels consisting of 3-4 papers; these proposals must include a supplementary paragraph explaining the panel’s rationale with a title. Roundtables and other alternative formats are also welcome. We warmly encourage proposals from graduate students who work on topics related to surrealism, as well as from independent artists, filmmakers, poets, and writers interested to present their work in a scholarly context.

Presentations may be given in French, Spanish, or English. Please submit proposals to [email protected] by 31 March 2020.

Full details: ISSS Paris 2020

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Special Session on ‘Modernist Literature and Mathematics’ at MLA 2021

7-10 January 2021 | Toronto

Modernist Literature and Mathematics: Tropes, Forms and Discourses

How do mathematical modernisms encounter literary modernisms? Do they seek systemic autonomy? Let’s explore European and Non-European Modernist literatures’ appeal to mathematical tropes, forms and discourses to make/unmake knowledge-claims.

Please submit your 400 word abstract by 15 March 2020 to Arka Chattopadhyay ([email protected]).

Full details of MLA Convention: MLA 2021

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Spatial Modernities: Mapping the Physical and Psychological World Symposium

16 May 2020 | Centre for Modern Studies, University of York

Keynote Speaker: Professor Ian Gregory (Lancaster University)

Since the ‘spatial turn’ in the 1970s, scholars, theorists, scientists, and intellectuals across the globe have been carving out new critical, theoretical, and methodological concepts to expand and redefine the scope of space. Inspired by the fantastic ways that space and modernity interact, scholars have been bringing new experiences and interpretations to understandings of spatial modernity or modern spatiality. The borders of modernities and spatiality blurred and the spark of inspirations flickered.

This poses exciting opportunities and challenges to modern studies: What are ‘spatial modernities’ and how are they developed in and beyond humanities? How do the meanings and implications of space and modern evolve across the global world? How does the physical and psychological modernity respond to these modernities? How do we define, clarify, complicate, and push the debate over the borders forward? How does the map work or fail in the mysterious unfamiliar place?

The principle aim of this symposium is to encourage a robust, diverse, and interdisciplinary conversation on place, space, or map in the modern world. The CModS annual symposium invites proposals for 15-minute papers. We wish to push the limits of how we interpret and understand spatial modernity as a categorical term. We encourage physical or material perspectives on architecture, geography, landscape, territory, region, area, and city, discussions on the invisible, imaginative, and psychological worlds, explorations of psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space, and conversations about the roles of maps in the modern era.

As such, we welcome papers from PGs and ECRs working in literature, archaeology, language and linguistics, philosophy, history, music, art, media, geography, and other fields. Some thematic prompts include, but are not limited to:

• physical, metaphorical, embodied ways to explore modernity and space, place, and/or map
• critical and creative approaches to the connection between modernity and space
• time and space in modern studies
• spaces and places of the future or fantastical spaces
• the commodification of place, space, and/or map
• psychogeography and modernity
• psychological, psychoanalytical and affective space
• politics of place, space, or map (territory sovereignty, colonialism, and empire, etc)
• space, place, and/or map & gender, sexuality, religion, race, migration, animal, and environment

We welcome proposals from postgraduates and ECRs. Please send an abstract (300-500 words) along with a brief bio (100 words) to ([email protected]) by 8 March 2020. Queries can be directed to this email address also. We are open to receiving standard presentations and encouraging non-traditional forms of participation. HRC (Humanities Research Centre) has generously funded the travel bursaries of £150 for non-funded PGs (MA or Ph.D.) or precariously employed ECAs who are in need.

Full details: Spatial Modernities Symposium

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Feminism and Technology: A Depth Psychology Enquiry

Endorsed by the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex and the International Association of Jungian Studies with support of a grant from The Chase Feminist Network, London

25 June 2020 | Amnesty International Building, Shoreditch, London

Embodied life for the female body is compromised by the ways and means of giving birth, raising children, displaying and living out identities, and gender. We want to explore this in ways that include social media, fictional and dystopian future ways of living too within oppressed and colonised communications, and in difficult terrains. 

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Hope Mirrlees’ Paris: A Poem at 100

10 June 2020 | Maison de la Recherche Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, France

2020 marks the 100th anniversary of “modernism’s lost masterpiece,” Hope Mirrlees’s Paris: A Poem. Published by Hogarth Press in the spring of 1920, and typeset by Virginia Woolf herself, this ground-breaking long poem maps the range of continental avant-garde aesthetics of the 1910s even as it both engages and anticipates the mythical methods and epic conventions of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot.

This one-day conference aims to present new work that reassesses the singularity of Mirrlees’s poem as well as its place within the broader network of literary modernism. While scholars such as Julia Briggs, who produced the first annotated edition of the poem in Gender in Modernism: New Geographies, Complex Intersections (2007), and Sandeep Parmar, who edited the first critical edition of Mirrlees’s Collected Poems (2011), have done the important archival and recovery work that restored Paris to critical attention, Peter Howarth solidified Paris’s position within the modernist “canon” with his chapter, “Why Write Like This?,” in The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011), which introduces readers to the disorienting pleasures of modernism’s most famous poems through an extended analysis of Mirrlees’s “difficult” work (16). Building on these approaches, this conference seeks to initiate a “new” wave of Paris scholarship that complicates and extends the poem’s aesthetic, cultural, and socio-political import on the occasion of its centenary.

We therefore welcome papers that both pay tribute to the exceptionality of the poem and insist on the “complex intersections” that resist canonical trends of exceptionalizing marginalized writers like Mirrlees. We invite proposals that consider any aspect of the poem, its influences, or its legacies as well as papers focusing on Mirrlees’s work more generally and in relation to her contemporaries.

The conference will include a panel discussion with Deborah Levy, Sandeep Parmar, Lauren Elkin, and Francesca Wade as well as a reception celebrating the launch of a new edition of the poem (forthcoming May 2020 by Faber & Faber).

Abstracts due 15 February 2020 to Rio Matchett ([email protected]) and Nell Wasserstrom ([email protected]).

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Panels at the American Literature Association (ALA) Annual Conference: Ernest Hemingway, William Carlos Williams

21-24 May 2020 | San Diego, CA

Full details of ALA Conference: ALA CFP.

The Paratextual Hemingway

The Ernest Hemingway Society will sponsor the following panel at the upcoming ALA Conference:In his recent essay in the Hemingway Review, Michael Thurston argues that the paratexts (covers, title pages, dedications, chapter headings) and bibliographic texts (paper, typefaces, print layout) of Ernest Hemingway’s 1924 in our time “sometimes produce a hermeneutic effect, resonating with themes that arise from the texts, and sometimes produce what can be thought of as a positional effect, inviting certain protocols of reading that suggest to the reader the kind of book in her or his hands” (9). In light of this inventive new attention to the material features of in our time, this panel proposes to examine the paratexts and bibliographic texts of Hemingway’s literary production. What meaning can we draw from these physical artifacts? What signifying properties can be found in the dust jacket, the title page, or even the paper upon which Hemingway’s work is printed? How might these material features help us rethink Hemingway’s modernism and his place in the matrix of early twentieth-century modernist literary experimentation?Please direct your 250 word proposal and a short professional bio to Jace Gatzemeyer at  [email protected] by 15 January 2020.

This international conference explores the diversity of connections, inspirations and influences in the work of modernist writer, May Sinclair (1863-1946). It will be held at the University of Nantes (France) on Thursday 18th and Friday 19th June 2020.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, May Sinclair was one of the most successful and widely known of British women novelists (Wilson, 2001). She produced over twenty novels and six collections of short stories and collaborated with many modernist writers and poets, including Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D. and Richard Aldington. Her life was also exceptionally rich. She took an active part in the women’s suffrage movement and published several pamphlets for women’s rights between 1908 and 1917. In the early 1910s, she got involved in medico-psychological research, and wrote half a dozen psychoanalytical research papers. In 1915, she spent two weeks near the Belgian front with an ambulance unit and her Journal of Impressions in Belgium was one of the first wartime women’s diaries published in Britain (Raitt 2000, 163). She was also the acclaimed author of two major philosophical essays on idealism (1917 and 1922) that led to her election to the Aristotelian Society. Last, she was an influential literary historian and literary critic and wrote several much-quoted articles and prefaces on the stream of consciousness, the Brontë sisters and imagist poetry.

Many reviewers and critics have shown that May Sinclair’s modernism was not so much a derivation of other contemporary aesthetics but was rather a product of her idiosyncratic articulation of her many research interests and experiences. In addition, “the interdisciplinarity of Sinclair’s output […] eludes straightforward categorisation and this has arguably contributed to the traditional critical neglect of her writing” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 1).

As May Sinclair is now “gaining critical legitimacy” (Raitt 2016, 23), this conference seeks to explore Sinclair’s texts and contexts and aims to shed light on her place in literary history and on her contribution to “the radical modernist challenge to traditional assumptions about what it means to be human” (Bowler & Drewery 2016, 14). Papers comparing Sinclair and other writers are thus particularly welcome; suggested topics might include (but are not limited to):

• May Sinclair and her contemporaries: Thomas Hardy, Henry James, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, Charlotte Mew, H. D., Richard Aldington, T S. Eliot,
  Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth
  Bowen, Mary Butts, Olive Moore etc.
• May Sinclair and modernity/the modern/modernism
• May Sinclair & WW1 writers
• May Sinclair and Victorian and late nineteenth-century authors: the Brontë sisters,
  George Eliot, George Meredith etc.
• May Sinclair and romantic poets: Shelley, Byron etc.
• May Sinclair and philosophy: Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Baruch Spinoza, T. H. Green, Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Butler, Francis Herbert Bradley etc.
• May Sinclair and psychology: William James, Sigmund Freud, C. G. Jung, Pierre Janet, Melanie Klein, Ella Sharpe, Joan Riviere, Alfred Adler, Charles Myers etc.
• May Sinclair and mysticism: Evelyn Underhill, the Society for Psychical Research, etc.
• May Sinclair and first-wave feminism
• Contemporary reception of May Sinclair
• May Sinclair and her literary legacy
• May Sinclair in translation
• May Sinclair and music
• May Sinclair and films or TV adaptations

Proposals no longer than 350 words, together with a 200-word biography, should be sent to the conference organisers before 15 February 2020.

Conference organisers:
Leslie de Bont, Université de Nantes [email protected]
Isabelle Brasme, Université de Nîmes [email protected]
Florence Marie, Université de Pau [email protected]

Full details: Networking May Sinclair

Future States explores the projection of modern national identities in magazines from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. The scope of enquiry is global: we are looking to capture the distinct and intertwined histories of magazines in all corners of the world, and to bring together a worldwide community of magazine researchers. But we are doing so in a radically new way.

The event is a nearly carbon-neutral conference (NCNC), a model pioneered by UC Santa Barbara in 2016, and developed in a series of environmental conferences over the past three years. This will, to our knowledge, be the world’s first NCNC in the history of art/visual culture. Running for two weeks (23 March – 5 April 2020), the conference has no physical venue, and its participants do not, on this occasion, meet in person. In place of the concentrated spatial and temporal unity of a conventional conference, Future States offers a more expansive (asynchronous) online event: panellists record a 20-minute video or PPT recording, which is submitted to the organisers in the weeks leading up to the launch. Over the two weeks of the live event, the conference website will host multiple keynotes, panel presentations and curated Q&As; web pages will include a comprehensive database of publications in magazine studies, links to global research centres and archives, and a noticeboard for worldwide research projects. Future States will be a landmark event in magazine studies, and provide a permanent online resource for twenty-first century scholarship.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, ideals of technological modernity and American consumerism had a normative influence on cultures across the globe: magazines in Europe, the US, Latin America, and Asia, inflected a shared internationalism and technological optimism. But there were equally powerful countervailing influences, of patriotic or insurgent nationalism, and of traditionalism, that promoted values of cultural differentiation. Future States explores these dialectical constructions of ideal modernity in the magazines of different countries, exploring how national cultures drew on – or resisted – currents in international modernism, and also informed and constituted this global culture: for example, Garcia Cabral’s extraordinary covers for the Mexican weekly Revista de Revistas brought Art Deco to Latin America, and also presented a distinctive Latin American modernism to an international audience. Modern magazines embodied these dynamic cultural dialogues in their visual images and textual culture, offering a vision of what Partha Mitter calls the “decentred” modernism of the global twentieth century.

Under the general theme of modernity and national identity, and the visual and textual projection of these ideals, Future States will present an eclectic, broad-based enquiry. Conference panels will explore periodicals from the late nineteenth century through to the end of the Second World War, taking in both mass-market and specialist titles.

Please send an outline (ca. 300 wds) of a 20-minute presentation, and a copy of your current CV to: [email protected] by 4 November 2019. Conference presentations can be in any language (but would need to be professionally subtitled in English); Q&As will be in English. If you have any queries, please feel free to contact us at: [email protected]

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Retrospective Modernism​

The Third Annual International Conference of the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA)

14-16 May 2020 | Fudan University, Shanghai

Keynote Speakers: Rebecca Walkowitz (Rutgers) | Simon During (Melbourne) | Matthew Hart (Columbia)

Modernism is often characterized by an acute sense of a break between the past and the present. “We are sharply cut off from our predecessors. A shift in the scale,” remarked Virginia Woolf, “has shaken the fabric from top to bottom, alienated us from the past and made us perhaps too vividly conscious of the present.” The aesthetic and political projects of modernism, however, remain inextricable from engagement with literary and intellectual traditions in various parts of the world. Ezra Pound’s phrase “make it new,” one of the most famous slogans associated with modernism, derives from renderings of Confucian thought and teachings. James Joyce’s reinvention of the Odyssey in Ulysses embodies much more than parodies and ironic gestures. And while T. S. Eliot advocated “the historical sense” that “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence,” many modernist writers in non-Western contexts such as Lu Xun, Premchand, and Yasunari Kawabata, to name just a few, have depicted with poignancy the clutches or ongoing ravages of the past.

​Perspectives on modernism entail a retrospective effort of the imagination, even as they are inevitably informed by issues and concerns that are contemporary to ourselves. The continued growth of scale – spatiotemporally, archivally, and textually – in modernist studies at once paves the way and makes demands for understanding the complexities of cultural and intellectual history across geographical boundaries. It also calls for a renewal of attention to approaches to traditions and aesthetic practices that vitally strengthen or disrupt connections between the past, the present, and the future.

This conference invites papers that explore retrospective modernism from diverse angles and contexts. In what ways is modernism related to or disconnected from specific intellectual and living traditions? How do modernism’s revolt against and reconfiguration or revaluation of the legacy of the past bear upon its transcultural reception, adaptation, and evaluation? How do modernist scholars around the world today tackle modernism’s retrospective moments, themes, and practices? And how might a retrospective emphasis contribute to or complicate the development of global modernist studies? We welcome papers that focus on textual analysis, cultural studies, historiographical discussions, theoretical and methodological reflections, as well as interdisciplinary work on art, cinema, theater, and other cultural products.

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Invention and evolution of ideas of Modernism
• Modernism and tradition
• Rupture, continuity, and resonance
• History and memory
• Formal experiment and innovation
• Reform and revolution
• War and violence
• Nostalgia, imagination, and fantasy
• Retrospect and prospect
• Primitivism, Futurism, and Presentism
• Personality and impersonality
• Self, character, and identity
• Globalization, modernization, and world systems
• World, globe, and nature
• Translation, communication, and confrontation
• Modernism and the Enlightenment
• Modernism and epistemology
• Modernism and sentimentalism
• Modernism and Romanticism
• Modernism and realism
• Modernism and feminism
• Modernism and phenomenology
• Modernism and liberalism
• Modernism and conservatism
• Modernism, socialism, and communism
• Modernism, nation, and empire
• Modernism and cosmopolitanism
• Modernism and forms of humanism
• Modernism and orientalism
• Modernism and the Canon
• Modernism and folklore
• Modernism and the mass media
• Modernism and pedagogy

Please send abstracts of approximately 250 words, together with short bios, to [email protected] by 15 December 2019. Participants will be notified in January, 2020. Further information: https://modernismasia.wixsite.com/main/conference

Conference Organizers:

Nan Zhang (Fudan University)
Liang Chen (Fudan University)
Yuexi Liu (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)

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Katherine Mansfield: Germany and Beyond

An international conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society and hosted by the Bad Wörishofen Mayorality and Tourist and Spa Bureau

21-22 March 2020 | Bad Wörishofen, Germany

It is  well known that Katherine Mansfield’s first book of stories, In a German Pension (1911), was inspired by her eight months’ stay in the Bavarian spa town of Wörishofen in 1909 at the age of 21, but the importance of Germany and all things German in her writing has not been explored in any depth until recently. Although Mansfield did not return to Germany in the same way as she kept visiting France, her spiritual home in Europe, Germany continued to hold a fascination for her long after her 1909 sojourn, and myriad associations can be traced in her fiction as well as her notebooks and letters.

This two-day conference aims to open up to new scrutiny the impact of Germany on Mansfield’s work and life: its language, peoples and cultures. These range from the setting in Munich of her story ‘The Little Governess’, to her passion for music by composers such as Beethoven, Bruch, and Wagner, her love of the poetry of Heinrich Heine, and literary influences such as the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Indeed, her longing for her German classes at Queen’s College in Harley Street because of the dashing Professor Walter Rippmann, reveals her early devotion. Another influence on her love of German and Germany is the writing of her cousin, the writer Elizabeth von Arnim, widow of Graf Henning von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a member of the Prussian aristocracy, and her friendship with Elizabeth, which developed during her stay in Montana,  Switzerland in the last two years of her life.

It is entirely fitting that this conference will be held in Bad Wörishofen, a Bavarian spa town that honours Mansfield as one of its most famous residents and a significant cultural icon, in fostering local civic pride and identity. Last year, on the occasion of her 130th birthday, a specially commissioned statue of Katherine Mansfield gazing out over the Iceberg Pond in the Spa Park, was unveiled.

The Katherine Mansfield Society is therefore delighted to host, together with the Bad Wörishofen Mayorality and Tourist and Spa Bureau, a conference that aims to explore and celebrate what Germany meant to Mansfield and what it points to in her vision of the world.

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

• Wörishofen and artistic inspiration:  Mansfield’s In a German Pension 
• Bavaria and the German Pension stories: nationality, gender and satire
• German poetry in the works of Mansfield (e.g. Heinrich Heine)
• German music: classical and modernist
• German art, architecture and visual culture in Mansfield’s writing
• German/Prussian family connections: Elizabeth von Arnim
• Mansfield, travel, Germany and ‘beyond’
• Mansfield and fairy tales
• The gothic and fantastic: Germanic sources and influences
• The legacy of Mansfield in German writing today
• The German reception of Mansfield’s works
• German influences in Mansfield’s education (e.g. Walter Rippmann)
• Translating into German / German translations of Mansfield’s work
• Teaching and studying Mansfield in Germany today
• Mansfield, Sebastian Kneipp, naturopathy and other holistic therapies
• The Germans and Germany as sources for Mansfield’s imagination
• Mansfield and Frieda von Richthofen (wife of D. H. Lawrence)
• Mansfield as icon and inspiration for German cultural production

NB: All other topics will be considered

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a 50-word bio-sketch, should be sent by 23 January 2020 to the conference organisers:

Dr Delia da Sousa Correa (Open University, UK), Dr Gerri Kimber (University of Northampton, UK), Monika Sobotta (Open University, UK) and Professor Janet Wilson (University of Northampton, UK) at [email protected]

Further details: katherinemansfieldsociety.org/bad-worishofen-2020/

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CRiSiS

7th biennial conference of the European Network for Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies

17-19 September 2020 | University of Leuven, Belgium

Keynote Speakers: Boris Groys (NYU) | Christine Poggi (NYU) | and more…

Notions of crisis have long charged the study of the European avant-garde and modernism. Throughout their history, avant-gardists and modernists have faced crises, be they economic or political, scientific or technological, aesthetic or philosophical, collective or individual, local or global, short or perennial. Modernists and avant-gardists have in turn continually stood accused of instigating crises, whether artistic or cultural, sensorial or conceptual, incidental or intentional, far-reaching or negligible, representational or other. The very concepts of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘modernism’ are time and again subject—or subjected—to conceptual crises, leaving modernism and avant-garde studies as a field on the perpetual brink of a self-effacing theoretical crisis.

The 7th biennial conference of the EAM intends to tackle the ways in which the avant-garde and modernism in Europe relate to crisi/es. Although we welcome panel, roundtable and paper proposals on any aspect of this relationship, we are particularly interested in new research on three topics.

First, we want to explore the theoretical complexity of the notion of crisis. For what is a crisis, really? The term is defined very loosely at times in modernism and avant-garde studies, and a quick survey illustrates that we seldom talk about crises of the same scale, import or impact. By clarifying what exactly counts as a crisis, surely we can gain a better understanding of the European avant-gardes and modernism. So what precisely do we mean by ‘crisis’? Is crisis above all a narrative device? Is there ever no crisis? Are there types of crisis, artistic or otherwise, that we have thus far neglected in our study of the avant-garde or modernism? And what (other) view(s) of crisis do avant-gardists and modernists themselves project?

Second, we are interested in proposals that touch upon the crises-laden historical trajectory of the avant-gardes and modernism. For while we often claim that a notion of crisis is key to a proper understanding of (late) modernity, the European avant-gardes and modernists faced different historical crises throughout their development. To what extent do all these crises, which span several centuries, share common denominators? What role do national and regional differences play over time? Does the project of the avant-garde and modernism, along with their critique of crisis, change fundamentally over time or not? Proposals touching upon a historical case study or submissions comparing several historical cases from different times or regions in Europe are therefore particularly welcome.

Third and finally, we wholeheartedly encourage proposals that look at the practical side of things, across all areas of avant-garde and modernist activity: art, literature, music, architecture, film, artistic and social movements, lifestyle, television, fashion, drama, performance, activism, curatorial practice, design and technology. How do European avant-gardists and modernists give aesthetic shape to crises? What representational strategies and tactics do they use in their practices? What affective (and other) experiences of crisis does their work allow for? What crises do their experimental practices yield—in fact, do the avant-gardes and modernism create types or modes of crisis of their own?

The official languages of this conference are English, French and German. You may submit a proposal as a panel chair, as an individual or as a roundtable chair.

1. You may propose to be the chair of a panel. A panel consists of three or four speakers. One of the speakers is the chair who makes the submission and supplies the details and proposals of all of the proposed participants. You may also submit a double or triple panel. Panels should not consist only of doctoral students and panels composed of participants from a single department at a single institution are less likely to be accepted.

2. You may submit an individual proposal without specifying a panel and the organisers will assign your paper to a panel if accepted.

3. You may propose to be the chair of a roundtable. Roundtables consist of a maximum of 6 participants who each write brief “position papers” (4 pages) that are read and circulated before the conference. During the roundtable, participants briefly present position statements, after which a discussion takes place moderated by the chair. Roundtables can consist only of doctoral students yet roundtables composed of participants from a single department at a single institution are also less likely to be accepted.

Roundtable proposals (deadline 1 January 2020) should include:

• Title of the roundtable and language (English, French, German – one only)
• A 500-word summary of the roundtable’s topic and rationale.
• The chair’s name, a one-page curriculum vitae, and contact information (address and email).
• Name, postal address and email contact of at least 5 (maximum 6) participants in the roundtable.
• Short biography of individual participants

Panel proposals (deadline 1 February 2020) should include:

• Title of the panel and language of the panel (English, French, German – one only)
• Name, address and email contact of the chair
• A summary of the panel topic (300 words)
• A summary of each individual contribution (300 words)
• Name, postal address and email contact of individual contributors
• Short biography of individual contributors

Individual proposals (deadline 1 February 2020) should include:

• Title of the paper and language of the paper (English, French, or German)
• Name, address and email of contributor
• A summary of the contribution (300 words)
• Short biography of the contributor

Please submit your proposals in Word format only to [email protected]. Acceptance will be notified via email by the end of May. A detailed conference programme will be available on the EAM website before summer. With any questions, please always make sure to check this page first, as it will be updated in due course. Full details: www.eam-europe.be/2020-conference

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Virginia Woolf: Profession and Performance

The 30th Annual International Conference on Virginia Woolf