Early Career Researchers

Graduate Conference: 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

CFP for 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

Schulman and Bullard Article Prize

Hosted by the Association of Print Scholars

The Association of Print Scholars (APS) invites applications for the sixth Schulman and Bullard Article Prize.

The Prize is given annually to an article published by an early-career scholar that features compelling and innovative research on fine art prints or printmaking. The award, which carries a $2,000 prize, is generously sponsored by Susan Schulman and Carolyn Bullard. Following the mission of the Association of Print Scholars, articles can feature aspects of printmaking across any geographic region and all chronological periods.

Articles will be evaluated by a panel of advanced scholars for the author’s commitment to the use of original research and the article’s overall contribution to the field of fine print scholarship.

The Association of Print Scholars invites nominations and self-nominations for the 2020 Schulman/Bullard Article Prize meeting the criteria outlined below:

Nomination Criteria:

  • Authors must have graduated with an MA, MFA, or PhD fewer than 10 years prior to article publication and have less than 10 years of experience as a practicing professional in an academic or museum institution or as an independent scholar.
  • Authors must be current members of APS.
  • Articles must have been published in a journal, exhibition catalogue, or anthology between January 1, 2019 and December 31, 2019. Online publications will be considered on a case-by-case basis.
  • Articles must be between 3,000 and 10,000 words, inclusive of footnotes and references.
  • Entries for consideration must be in English, though the text of the original article may be in any language.

To submit an article for consideration, please send the completed nomination form along with an electronic or hard copy of the article to Angela Campbell, the APS Grants Coordinator ([email protected]).

The extended deadline for submissions is 15 February 2020.

Full details: APS Awards.

2020 Postgraduate Roundtables at the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA) Conference 

14-16 May 2020 | Fudan University, Shanghai

The second postgraduate roundtable sessions organized by the Modernist Studies in Asia Network (MSIA) will take place as part of our annual international conference, “Retrospective Modernism”. The MSIA 2020 theme investigates Pound’s famous dictum to “make it new”. MSIA 2020 asks us to interrogate if anything can be truly made new. The persistent intrusion of the past in modernism is subject to further question when a transnational oeuvre is brought into play. While the main conference considers the connections between past, present and future; and how a retrospective emphasis may contribute to or complicate the development of global modernist studies, this postgraduate event builds on another facet of retrospection – Belatedness.

To be belated, is to be delayed, detained or outside of a customary or expected time. The idea of belatedness contests modernism’s prioritizing of a non-chronological, psychological present. When is a text classified as belated? How can interrogating the ascription of cultural ‘untimeliness’ be productive? How can we rehabilitate the idea of belatedness in relation to transnational reception, translation or re-configuration? How does the idea of the antique, the classical, the passé distort our notion of the individual in the present when we read? What does it tell us about periodization?

The question of the value of anachronism, whether intentional or unintentional asks us to consider re-interpretations of planetary, mechanized or eco-critical scales of time and periodization. Does belatedness still hold weight if we consider a de-centered vision of global modernism? Alternatively, is deliberate anachronism political, cultural or subterranean capital?

Each roundtable will consist of 4-6 presenters and last for 90 minutes. Proposals of similar theme will be grouped at the organizer’s discretion.

Please submit 200 word proposals for 3000 word papers, along with a short bio, to [email protected] by 1 February 2020.

Before you submit to this event, please note the following:

  • All presenters will be required to prepare for the event by familiarizing themselves with the papers submitted by the other members of their session.
  • During the roundtable, each presenter will be allotted 10 minutes of individual speaking time. They may use this time as a summation of their paper, to raise further questions or highlight themes for discussion. The remaining time will consist of open discussion between the roundtable members and the audience. The aim of this format is to encourage critical and personalized discussion which will benefit each participant.
  • Should your proposal be accepted, your full paper and an accompanying handout (1 or 2 A4 pages) must be submitted in soft copy prior to the event. The deadline for this submission is 1 April 2019. The organizers will then circulate the full papers to the appropriate recipients.
  • The handout is for the benefit of the audience members and should acquaint them with the key points, writers or quotes from your paper. This is to facilitate the discussion in the second half of the roundtable.
  • This is a separate submission from “Retrospective Modernisms” (MSIA 2020). If you wish to participate in BOTH the postgraduate roundtables and the main conference, your proposed papers must be substantially different in content or topic. You may not submit the same proposal multiple times.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Personal, Collective and Ascribed Memory
  • Time
  • Science Fiction and Futurity
  • Modernism and Tradition
  • Affect and the Perpetual Present
  • Ritual and Play
  • Surrealism
  • Poetry or Word/Image
  • Reform and Revolution
  • Texts in Translation
  • The Politics of Modernity
  • World Literature and Globalization
  • Diaspora
  • Gender or Sexuality
  • Performance and Movement
  • Cultural Production
  • Mechanization and Technology
  • Eco-criticism
  • Orientalism or Fetishization
  • Racial Identity and Anxiety
  • Literature as Object or the archive

MSA Research Travel Grant

The MSA is pleased to announce its 2019-20 Research Travel Grant program. These grants aim to help scholars of modernism conduct their research through visits to archives, collections, and other pertinent sites. Applications will be selected on the basis of the merit of the proposed research and demonstration of need. As this grant is supplementary to other sources of support, applicants should also apply for any available support from their home institutions and the target archives.

Purpose: The funding is designed to supplement other existing sources of support, enabling scholars to travel to archives or other pertinent sites to conduct original research. Scholars may apply for up to $1,000 in funding.

Eligibility: All scholars are eligible, regardless of stage of career, employment status, institutional affiliation, or lack thereof. However, preference will be given to members of the MSA, early career researchers, scholars in contingent academic positions, and those who have sought other sources of support for the proposed research. MSA Board members are not eligible to apply. Applicants may apply more than once, but preference will be given to those who have not been awarded a previous grant. All applicants must be members of the MSA before they can receive research travel grant funds.

Deadline: January 1, 2020

How to Apply: Submit a two-page CV and the application form (including 500-word research statement and short budget) to [email protected] by January 1, 2020. The subject line of your email must read “MSA Travel Grant Application 2020.”

Applications will be judged by a committee comprised of three members of the MSA Board. Grants will be announced in early spring. All applicants will be notified.

Successful applicants will be asked to spend their funds within the 2020 calendar year and will be required to provide a 500-word research report for publication on the MSA website within one month of completing the research trip.

Full information and contact details: MSA Research Travel Grants

New Work in Modernist Studies: Graduate Conference

Friday 6 December 2019 | University of Liverpool

Registration is now open for the ninth one-day graduate conference on New Work in Modernist Studies, which will take place on Friday 6 December at the University of Liverpool, 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).

See more here: New Work in Modernist Studies

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.

The day, which also marks the relaunch of the Northern Modernism Seminar, will include a plenary session with Dr Beryl Pong (Sheffield) and will close with a discussion of the legacies of modernism, for which we’ll be joined by writers Preti Taneja (We That Are Young, 2017) and Chris McCabe (Dedalus, 2018), and Eloise Millar, editor and co-founder of Galley Beggar Press. This will be followed by a drinks reception.

The main part of the day will run from roughly 10am-5.30pm, followed by the evening plenary session and drinks, which will finish by 8 pm. A full programme will be released soon.

Registration deadline: Monday 25 November.

To join BAMS, and receive a discounted rate to attend New Work in Modernist Studies, please visit BAMS Membership

If you have any questions about the conference, email: [email protected]

BAMS Essay Prize 2019

The British Association for Modernist Studies

The British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) invites submissions for its annual essay prize for early career scholars. The winning essay will be published in Modernist Cultures, and the winner will also receive £250 of books.

 The BAMS Essay Prize is open to any member of the British Association for Modernist Studies who is studying for a doctoral degree, or is within five years of receiving their doctoral award. You can join BAMS by following the link on our membership pages: https://bams.ac.uk/membership

Essays are to be 7-9,000 words, inclusive of footnotes and references.

The closing date for entries is 31 December 2019. The winner will be announced in early March 2020.

Essays can be on any subject in modernist studies (including anthropology, art history, cultural studies, ethnography, film studies, history, literature, musicology, philosophy, sociology, urban studies, and visual culture). Please see the editorial statement of Modernist Cultures for further information: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/mod.

In the event that, in the judges’ opinion, the material submitted is not of a suitable standard for publication, no prize will be awarded.

Instructions to Entrants

Entries must be submitted electronically in Word or rtf format to moder[email protected] and conform to the MHRA style guide.

Entrants should include a title page detailing their name, affiliation, e-mail address, and their doctoral status/ date of award; they should also make clear that the essay is a submission for the BAMS Essay Prize.

 It is the responsibility of the entrant to secure permission for the reproduction of illustrations and quotation from copyrighted material.

Essays must not be under consideration elsewhere.

Enquiries about the prize may be directed to Tim Armstrong, Chair of the British Association for Modernist Studies, at [email protected]

Full information: BAMS Essay Prize