CFP: NCSA 2014 Urbanism and Urbanity "British and Continental European Romantic-era Writers" (9/30/2013;3/20-22/2014)

Urbanism and Urbanity

March 20-22, Chicago IL

Deadline: September 30, 2013

Maria K. Bachman and Maria Gindhart, Program Co-Chairs, ncsa2014@gmail.com

http://www.ncsaweb.net/

As part of the 2014 Nineteenth Century Studies Association gathering in Chicago, Arnold Schmidt is seeking papers for panels on British and Continental European Romantic-era writers treating the conference theme of the “Urban and Urbanity.” Related themes might include the following:

• the Romantic city
• the city and fashion
• the city and education
• the city and commerce
• the city as utopia or dystopia
• the city as nation
• the city and the citizen
• the city and the social season
• the city and the demi-monde
• the city and spectacle
• the city and popular entertainment

Papers might consider the “Urban” in writers including, but by no means limited to Coleridge, De Quincey, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles Lucas, Harriet Martineau, Hannah More, Amelia Opie, Sydney Owenson, Frances Trollope, Helen Maria Williams, Wollstonecraft, and Wordsworth. 

Scholars might also treat the theme of "urbanity" and hence focus on novels of manners and/or Romantic satirists like Austen, Byron, Edgeworth, Peacock, among others. These panels are not limited to British writers and particularly welcome papers about Continental European Romantics. 

Email 250-word abstracts for 20-minute papers, as well as one-page vitae, to my attention at aschmidt@csustan.edu by the deadline of September 30, 2013.  Please feel free to contact Arnold Schmidt with questions about the appropriateness of possible paper topics.

Graduate students and international scholars may compete for partial travel funding.  For more information, see the general call for papers below.

CFP: Journal of Victorian Culture Online "Neo-Victorian Studies and Digital Humanities" (7/15/2013; 9/15/2013)

This fall, the Journal of Victorian Culture Online will feature a week  of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and  digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise,
and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age.

Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements of how we teach and study Neo-Victorian culture, literature, and artifacts uniquely position this work to traverse disciplinary, cultural, and genre boundaries. To this end, we invite proposals for blog posts that discuss and/or enact the
intersections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities.

Please send all 75-word proposals with a one-page C.V. as a single attached file (MS Word document or Adobe pdf) to Lisa Hager (lisa.hager@uwc.edu) by July 15, 2013. Final submissions of accepted posts will be due on September 15, 2013.

For further information, please visit:
http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2013/05/24/cfp-neo-vict-dh-week/

www.victorianculture.com

PhD Studentship: University of Portsmouth has 3 fees-only PhD studentships (7/5/2013; 10/2013)

The University of Portsmouth has 3 fees-only PhD studentships available and would welcome applications from postgraduates interested in working on Victorian or Neo-Victorian subjects.

Fees-only PhD studentships within the Centre for Studies in Literature

University of Portsmouth

Application deadline July 5, 2013

Start date October 2013

Project description Applications are invited to three fees-only PhD studentships within the Centre for Studies in Literature at the University of Portsmouth. Each studentship is available for a three-year period of doctoral study commencing in October 2013. The Centre welcomes applications from students wishing to work on projects in one of the following fields of research: Early Modern Literature; Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture; Twentieth and Twenty-First Century British and American Literature, with interests in one of the following areas:

• 17thC Women’s poetry
• Early modern philosophical literature
• Victorian/modernist celebrity and popular culture
• Decadence and fin-de-siècle literature
• Victorian/Neo-Victorian literature and science
• Victorian or modernist literature and visual culture
• 19th/20thC literature and food
• 19th/20thC Anglo-American literary relations
• 19th/20thC detective fiction
• National Identity/Englishness
• Memory cultures/Narratives of loss

Please note that these awards are fees-only and will not cover maintenance costs. However, students will be entitled to financial support for conference attendance and paid part-time teaching hours may be available. For further details on the Centre, staff expertise and research specialisms please see:http://www.port.ac.uk/research/csl/

Informal enquiries contact details Informal enquiries should be made to Dr Patricia Pulham (patricia.pulham@port.ac.uk)

How to apply Further information on how to apply is available on: www.port.ac.uk/phdapplication

CFP: Neo-Victorian Humour: The Rhetorics and Politics of Comedy, Irony and Parody (2/28/2014; 9/1/2014)

The editorial board for Neo-Victorian Studies invite contributions on the theme of Neo-Victorian Humour for the fifth volume in Rodopi’s Neo-Victorian Series, to be published in 2015. This edited collection will examine the manifold modes, functions, and implications of humour across neo-Victorian media, such as literature, film, anime, graphic novels, videogames, visual art, performance and lifestyle (e.g. steampunk). The volume will explore neo-Victorianism in the light of contemporary aesthetics as the art of indirect speech, what Umberto Eco famously described as   “accept[ing] the challenge of the past, of the already said” to “consciously and with pleasure play the game of irony” (Reflections on The Name of the Rose, 1994) – but also to engage in more aggressive games of parody, aesthetic travesty, confrontation and denunciation. The omnipresence of a humorous awareness tends to insist on a crucial difference and distance between neo-Victorianism and its nineteenth-century referent, thus seemingly arguing against a nostalgic stance. Yet humorous devices can also be employed to recycle invidious ideologies (e.g. racism, imperialism, classism, sexism) under the politically correct guise of comical debunking or subversion, even to the point of carrying forward a pro-nostalgic agenda. From a technical point of view, humour also implies the establishment of a complicity with the audience, involving readers/viewers in complex games that may finally have less bearing on the diegetic world than on the textual, intertextual and metatextual nineteenth-century worlds being re-imagined. We encourage chapters to investigate the inherent contradictions of neo-Victorian humour’s aims and effects, both as a means of self-consciously creative experimentation and adaptation of historical events, figures, and artifacts and as a self-defeating nihilistic or anti-historical project. Possible topics may include, but need not be limited to the following:

• humour’s shaping of contemporary views of ‘the Victorian’ and the long nineteenth century
• the postmodern features and implications of neo-Victorian humour
• the technical distancing devices of neo-Victorian humour: anachronism, parody, comedy, irony, structural counterpoint, double or multiple narratives, mise en abyme, and all forms of metatextuality
• comic modes, audience complicity, and resistance
• neo-Victorian humour and the Gothic
• the politicisation of neo-Victorian humour
• neo-Victorian humour, empathy, and its limits
• comic innovation and the principle of ironic reprise
• the role of playfulness and narrative games
• ethical and non-ethical humour in neo-Victorianism
• humour’s functions within and across neo-Victorian genres and media
• neo-Victorian humour and trauma
• the principle of humour  in adaptations and adaptive practice
• neo-Victorianism, symbolic justice, and having the last laugh

Please send 300-500 word proposals (for 8,000-10,000 word chapters) by 28 February 2014 to the series editors, Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian  Gutleben (m.l.kohlke@swansea.ac.uk and Christian.GUTLEBEN@unice.fr). Please add a  short   biographical  note  in  the  body of your email. Completed chapters will be due by 1 September 2014.

Essay Prize: The Gaskell Journal's Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2014 (1/10/2014)

The Gaskell Journal
Joan Leach Memorial Graduate Student Essay Prize 2014
Deadline for submissions: January 10th 2014

The Gaskell Journal runs a biennial Graduate Student Essay Prize in honour of Joan Leach MBE, founder of the Gaskell Society.

Aims of the Prize:

The essay competition is open to all graduate students currently registered for an MA or PhD in Victorian Studies. Entries are welcome which consider Gaskell's writings within Victorian cultural, religious, aesthetic and scientific debates, and which have an inter-disciplinary aspect. Also welcome are essays that offer innovative and focused close readings of Gaskell's works, including those enlightened by critical theory. In all cases, clarity of argument and control of expression are paramount, and the essay must clearly offer an original contribution to the field of Gaskell studies.

The Prize:
The winning essay will be published in The Gaskell Journal and its author will receive £200 from the Gaskell Society, and a complimentary copy of the Journal. High quality submissions other than the winner will also be considered for publication in the journal.

Conditions:
Essays should be no longer than 7,000 words, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. We request that you use the MHRA system of referencing, with endnotes rather than footnotes.

Judging:
Essays will be judged by members of The Gaskell Journal Editorial Board, with the final decision being made from a shortlist by a leading scholar in Gaskell studies.

IMPORTANT:
All judging will be anonymous. Please keep your name and affiliation separate from your article. Complete the below form, and send with your anonymised essay to The Gaskell Journal editor, Rebecca Styler rstyler@lincoln.ac.uk by/on January 10th 2014. All entrants will be informed of the outcome of their submission. These details are also available though the journal website: www.gaskelljournal.co.uk 

Bursaries Available: The Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference (7/1/2013; 7/19-20/2013)

Bursaries Available for the Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference
Birkbeck, University of London
19-20 July 2013

The conference committee are delighted to announce that four bursaries are now available to enable postgraduate and early career researchers (within three years of the PhD viva) to attend the conference, generously supported by the British Association of Victorian Studies (BAVS):www.bavsuk.org.

The bursaries will cover the conference registration fee as well as a contribution of £40 towards travel expenses (please note this does not include the conference dinner). In order to apply for a bursary, applicants must provide:

• A brief (500 word) outline of how attending the conference will contribute to their research
• A short (2 page) CV
• A brief note stating any access to institutional research funds to support conference attendance currently available.

Applications will be assessed on the quality of outline proposals, with priority given to shortlisted candidates with limited access to institutional research funds. Please note it is not necessary to be presenting a paper at the conference to apply for a bursary.

As part of the bursary conditions, successful applicants will be asked to produce a short report on the conference by 20 August 2013, with the opportunity to develop this into a forum piece for a special edition of the open-access online journal 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century (www.19.bbk.ac.uk) in 2014.

Please email applications to Dr Heather Tilley at victoriantactileimagination@gmail.com by 9am, 1 July 2013. Successful applicants will be informed by 5 July 2013.

Key information:

Address for queries/submission of applications: Dr Heather Tilley, victoriantactileimagination@gmail.com
Deadline for applications: 9am, Monday 1 July 2013
Outcome announced: Friday 5 July 2013

For more information on the Victorian Tactile Imagination conference please visit the conference website:
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/the-victorian-tactile-imagination

The Victorian Tactile Imagination conference is organised by Birkbeck, University of London’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, and supported by the British Academy: www.britac.ac.uk and the British Association for Victorian Studies (BAVS): www.bavsuk.org

Registration Open: The Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference (7/19-20/2013)

Registration is now open for:
The Victorian Tactile Imagination Conference
19-20 July 2013
Birkbeck, University of London

Keynote speakers:

Professor William Cohen (University of Maryland), on Arborealities: The Tactile Ecology of Hardy’s Woodlanders

Professor Gillian Beer (University of Cambridge), on Dream Touch

Dr Constance Classen (author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch), on Victorian Intimacies: Love, Death, and the British Museum

Professor Hilary Fraser (Birkbeck, University of London), on Touching Pictures: Victorian Art Writing and the Tactile Imagination”

For more information, the full programme, or to register for the conference (spaces are limited), please visit the website at: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/research_cncs/our-events/the-victorian-tactile-imagination

Prospective PhD: Apply to Victoria University Wellington (7/1/2013)

Victoria University of Wellington is currently inviting prospective PhD students to apply for the 1 July application round (there will be another in November). Two areas of expertise in the English Programme may be of particular interest to Victoria-List members: colonial literature of the nineteenth century, and, within the field of children’s literature , the late Victorian concept of adolescence. Victoria University was rated first in New Zealand in the recent national research rankings (PBRF) and the English Programme was ranked first amongst English programmes in New Zealand. The 2013 QS World UniversityRankings rank Victoria as one of the top 50 universities in the world in four subjects, one of which is English Language and Literature. For information on how to apply, please see How to Apply for a PhD on the Faculty of Graduate Research website. A number of scholarships are available for students of exceptional academic merit, open to New Zealand and international students in any discipline. All offers of Victoria Doctoral Scholarships from 2013 will consist of a $23,500 per annum stipend plus domestic tuition fees for up to three years.

Feel free to write to Anna Jackson with any questions about graduate study in this programme. Anna.jackson@vuw.ac.nz

Anna Jackson
Deputy Head of School 
School of English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies 

CFP: Gothic Studies Special Issue "The Gothic and Death" (12/1/2013; 3/31/2014)

Advanced by way of various conventions and symbols, memento mori — “Remember that you will die” — is Gothic literature’s greatest cautionary warning.  Although Peter Walmsley has suggested that this reminder to live with death in view is “the peculiar property of the British psyche,” it has required much repeating given what Edward Young identifies in his famous Night Thoughts (1742) as a universal tendency towards death denial:  “All men think all men mortal but themselves.”  Despite Geoffrey Gorer’s claim that death became the new pornography in the 20th century, uses of the Gothic mode continue to register an ongoing fascination with the Death Question that often vacillates, in various imaginative ways, between repression and acknowledgement.

Proposals for individual or collaborative papers are invited on the idea of the Gothic and death, decay, and the afterlife.  The editor is particularly interested in proposals that will theorize the Gothic’s engagement with this fixation trans-historically, trans-nationally, and trans-culturally.  Proposals from diverse theoretical perspectives ranging across different genres and mediums (poetry, fiction, film, graphic novels, etc.) are especially welcome.  Possible topics might include (but are not limited to):

• the afterlife and undead afterlives — zombies, angels, vampires, ghosts, etc.
• the corpse — abject, female, anatomized, and otherwise
• danse macabre
• acts/rites of mourning & memorializing — personal and national
• death of the author/reader
• dead women/deadly women
• the sanitization/medicalization of death
• decay and ruin
• live burial; gothic resurrections
• femme fatale/homme fatal
• spiritualism, séances, voodoo, and the Occult
• sex and death
• the aesthetics of death
• death and the visual arts/visual technologies
• Victorian necroculture
• manner of death:  suicide (self murder); homicide; the war dead; mass murder; sudden death; capital punishment (torture, executions, serial killings)
• elegies and epitaphs
• symbolic/figurative death
• death and the double
• death and/by technology
• graveyards and graveyard poetry
• the death drive
• ars moriendi — the “Art of dying,” death/consolation manuals
• the Good death/bad death
• dead children
• wills, funerals, wakes

Please send electronic copies of proposals of approximately 500 words and a 100-word bio by December 1, 2013, to Dr. Carol Margaret Davison, Professor and Head, Department of English Language, Literature and Creative Writing, University of Windsor (cdavison@uwindsor.ca).  Notices of acceptance will follow shortly thereafter with completed essays of approximately 6000 words (including endnotes) due by March 31, 2014.

The official journal of the International Gothic Studies Association considers the field of Gothic studies from the eighteenth century to the present day. The aim of Gothic Studies is not merely to open a forum for dialogue and cultural criticism, but to provide a specialist journal for scholars working in a field which is today taught or researched in almost all academic establishments. Gothic Studies invites contributions from scholars working within any period of the Gothic; interdisciplinary scholarship is especially welcome, as are readings in the media and beyond the written word.

For more information on Gothic Studies, including submission guidelines and subscription recommendations, please see the journals website: http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/journals/gs

To view Gothic Studies online, see here:http://manchester.metapress.com/content/1362-7937  

To sign up to alerts for Gothic Studies, see here: https://manchester.metapress.com/content/122707/toc-alert  

Symposium: New Approaches to the Victorian Short Story (7/4/2013)

Symposium: “New Approaches to the Victorian Short Story”

Thursday, July 4, 2013

University of Birmingham

This symposium aims to address the lack of critical attention that the Victorian short story has received by bringing together academics working on different aspects of the form. Owing to the popularity of the periodical press, the genre flourished throughout the period; Dickens, Gaskell, Collins, Eliot and James as well as lesser-known authors all produced short stories. The limitations of the form allowed for a degree of experimentation, which may have been too much of a commercial risk in a full-length work. As John Bowen writes, “The short story is in many ways a marginal form, which often takes marginal or outlaw figures as its central concern. It troubles itself, and thus its readers, with remarkable or strange events, with the inexplicable, disorderly or queer.” We aim to start a critical conversation regarding the nature and functions of the short story genre within the larger context of Victorian literature.

For more details please see  ':http://jimmussell.com/2013_new_approaches_programme.pdf. For inquiries, contact Lizzie Ludlow (e.ludlow@bham.ac.uk) or Maddie Wood (madeleine.wood@brunel.ac.uk).

CFP: NeMLA "Robert Burns and his Nineteenth-Century Literary Heirs" (9/30/2013; 4/3-6/2014)

45th Annual Convention 

Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA)

April 3-6, 2014

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

This panel interrogates the impact of the Scottish poet Robert Burns on nineteenth-century writers around the globe. How did his efforts in developing a poetry that deals with freedom and nationalism inspire later authors? How was his poetics of national identity transported beyond Scottish borders to influence how writers across a variety of nations articulate national identity? Please submit 250-300 word abstracts, along with a brief biographical statement, to Jessica Gray (jhgray@my.uri.edu) and Rebekah Greene (rebekah_greene@my.uri.edu) by September 30, 2013.

Please visit www.nemla.org for more information about the convention.

Registration Open: Travel and Mobility Studies Symposium “Contact and Connections” (6/27/2013)

Thursday 27th June 2013, 

University of Warwick

Keynote speakers:

Dr Cathy Waters (University of Kent)

Professor Tim Youngs (Nottingham Trent University)

The symposium aims to address the various connections and forms of contact produced through different forms and representations of travel practice. How does travel connect cultures? What new cultural formations are produced through the process of travel? What are the implications of connection across local, national and global mobile networks? How does travel connect people to the spaces around them and through which they move? What new theoretical connections are produced through the intersections of travel and mobility theory with other disciplines?

The full programme, which includes several Victorian papers, can be viewed on the website. Registration is free but attendance should be confirmed by Monday 24th June by registering online:

http://go.warwick.ac.uk/travelstudies 

For more information on the Network visit http://go.warwick.ac.uk/travelstudies or email Charlotte Mathieson c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk or Tara Puri T.Puri@warwick.ac.uk

Registration Open: Victorians Institute "Through the Looking Glass" (11/1-2/2013)

Registration now available online for

Victorians Institute 2013 Conference: Through the Looking Glass

The 42nd Meeting of the Victorians Institute

November 1-2, 2013

Middle Tennessee State University

Murfreesboro, TN

Keynote: Jay Clayton Vanderbilt University

Contact: Rebecca King, Rebecca.King@mtsu.edu

Follow links at:

http://www.vcu.edu/vij/Conferences.htmlhttp://www.vcu.edu/vij/Conferences.html

CFP: 1st Bi-annual Dickens North American Conference "Pickwickian Endeavors" (11/30/2013; 9/26-29/2014)

September 26-29, 2014
Salem State University
Keynote: Dr. John Jordan, University of California, Director of the Dickens Project

The Dickens Fellowship is seeking proposals for their first Bi-annual Dickens North American Conference a scholarly, serendipitous, and witty Dickens legacy, with local color. All aspects of Dickens classic wit, characters, the sea, spirited manifestations, all visual art mediums, social issues and views, human condition are welcome for discussion. Please submit a 350-500 word one-page PDF file by November 30, 2013.

For details and further information please visit www.dickensnorthofboston.com or contact dbenvie@deb-chuck.com or 978-979-0574.

CFP: Friends of Arther Machen "Faunus"

The Friends of Arthur Machen are inviting submissions to their journal Faunus. 

This hard-bound journal has appeared twice yearly since the
inauguration of the Friends in the 1990s, and consists of both
articles of interest to admirers of Machen and examples of his work,
often articles and pieces not easily available in any other form. It
is not peer reviewed and has a tradition of accessible though rigorous
scholarship. Articles of between 2,500 and 5,000 words are encouraged,
although those falling outside of these parameters will certainly be
considered. Contributors will receive copies of the relevant issue,
which is also distributed to members of the Friends. For membership
information, please see: http://www.arthurmachen.org.uk/machsoc.html#renew

Please contact James Machin at jmachi01@mail.bbk.ac.uk if you're interested in submitting or have any questions.

CFP: Devouring: Food, Drink and the Written Word, 1800-1945 (10/31/2013; 3/8/2014)

Saturday 8^th March 2014, University of Warwick

Keynote speakers:

Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton)

Dr. Margaret Beetham (University of Salford)

This one day interdisciplinary conference will explore the place of food, drink and acts of consumption within the textual culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The years 1800-1945 are marked by food adulteration scandals, the growth of the temperance movement, and significant reforms in the regulation and legislation of food standards, as well as the influence of the colonies on British cuisine and a relationship with food and drink made increasingly complex by wartime paucity and rationing. These changes are both precipitated and responded to in a vast array of textual forms, including periodicals, the press, recipe books, household management manuals, propaganda, literature and poetry. This conference will therefore engage with the intersections of food/drink cultures and the written word

We are seeking papers that explore how food and drink were written experience and imagined during the period: as a commodity, a luxury item, a source of poison or nutrition, in its abundance or in short supply. We hope to attract all researchers who have an interest in the culinary cultures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including those working in the histories of medicine, art and food, as well as anthropologists, historians of the nineteenth century and war years, and those working in literary studies. By bringing together scholars from many disciplines, we hope to provide a space in which to open up dialogue about nineteenth and early twentieth century narratives of eating, drinking, consuming, and their worth, and to provide a timely examination of our relationship with food and drink at a moment when economic and ecological pressures herald a re-appropriation of the values of wartime thrift and Victorian domestic economy.

Possible topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Representations of food and drink in specific texts and their wider implications.
• Cultures of eating, drinking and cooking.
• Social histories of food and drink.
• The uses of food and drink in the articulation (or challenging) of community, nation or empire.
• Food or drink as metaphor/trope/structural device.
• The relationship(s) between reading and eating or drinking.
• The role of food and drink in cultural constructions of domestic space.
• Perspectives from ‘fat studies’/‘fat feminism’.
• Gendered practices of food and drink consumption.
• Food and drink in medical/psychiatric discourse: alcoholism, eating disorders, compulsive behaviour.
• The cultural legacies and/or persistence of Victorian and early twentieth century cultural imaging of food and drink.
• Recipe books, household management manuals and aspirational food.
• The narrating of gluttony or hunger.
• Textual representations of farms, breweries, pubs and restaurants.

Applicants should note that papers may also be considered for inclusion in a possible publication resulting from the conference.

Abstracts of no more than 300 words, accompanied by a brief biographical note of no more than 100 words, should be sent to devouring2014@gmail.com by 31st October 2013.

This conference is being organised by Mary Addyman, Laura Wood and Christopher Yiannitsaros (University of Warwick).

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/food/
http://devouring2014.blogspot.co.uk/

CFP: NCSA 2014 "Urbanism and Urbanity" (9/30/2013; 3/20-22/2014)

Urbanism and Urbanity

March 20-22, Chicago IL

deadline: September 30, 2013

to: Maria K. Bachman and Maria Gindhart, Program Co-Chairs, ncsa2014@gmail.com

http://www.ncsaweb.net/

We seek papers and panels that investigate elements of urbanism and urbanity during' the long nineteenth century, such as: urbanites (the flaneur, the prostitute,the detective, the criminal, etc.); urbanites and the rise of consumer culture; immigrants and urban communities: urban domesticity in literature and culture; architecture, urban design, and city planning; urban spaces and the gothic imagination; mobilities and forms of urban transport; the politics of urban space; the city and the natural environment; urban cartographies; urban crime and violence; urban spaces and urban peripheries (suburbs; ghettos, wastelands, industrial zones, dumps and other hybrid spaces); urbanism and public health; animals and urban environments; concert halls, opera houses, and other urban entertainment venues; restaurants, cafes, and urban eating and drinking; leisure and urbanism; city/country divides; and the anti-urban tradition in art and literature.

We welcome other interpretations of the conference theme as well. Please e-mail abstracts (250 words) for 20-minute papers that include the author's name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the heading, as well as a one-page CV, by September 30, 2013 to: Maria K. Bachman and Maria Gindhart, Program Co-Chairs, ncsa2014@gmail.com Please note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend the conference if the proposal is accepted.

All proposals received will be acknowledged, and presenters will be notified in November 2013. Graduate students whose proposals are accepted may, at that point, submit complete papers in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. Scholars who live outside the North American continent, whose proposals have been accepted, may submit a full paper to be considered for the International Scholar Travel Grant. (See the NCSA website for additional requirements -- http://www.ncsaweb.net/)

Proposal Deadline: September 30,2013