CFP: MVSA '15 "Sense and the Senses" (10/31/2014; 5/1-3/2015)

MVSA 2015

University of Iowa

May 1-3, 2015

Deadline: October 31, 2014

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association seeks papers for topics related to the conference theme of “Sense and the Senses.” The committee encourages papers on any aspect of this topic in art, music, history, science, philosophy, theater or literature: senses and the invisible; sounds and soundscapes; listening/depictions of listening; the relationship between the body and mind; the five senses; the representation of sense or reason; rationality and embodiment; the relationship(s) among sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste; the conflict or accord between reason and the senses; the scientific, psychological, philosophical, or empirical study of the senses; the role of the senses in the creation of ideas or knowledge; the relationship between sense and emotion; empiricism and the imaginary; the disarray or unreliability of the senses; synaesthesia; mesmerism, hypnotism, and extrasensory perception; sensory textures of spaces and lived experiences; sensory extensions/alterations catalyzed by technologies.

MVSA’s 2015 Jane Stedman Plenary Speaker will be Linda M. Shires (David and Ruth Gottesman Professor of English, Yeshiva University). Her talk is entitled "Coming to our Senses: Colors in the 19th Century.” She is the author of Perspectives: Modes of Viewing and Knowing in 19th-Century England (2009), co-author with Steven Cohan of Telling Stories, A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction (1988; 2002), and editor of Rewriting the Victorians (1992; 2012) and From Romantic to Victorian: Essays by U.C. Knoepflmacher (forthcoming).

For the second year, MVSA will feature three seminars open to graduate students, faculty and independent scholars led by senior scholars on topics related to the conference theme. Seminar participants pre-circulate 5-to-7 page papers. More information will be available in the seminar CFP on the MVSA website soon.

Special events include a dramatic performance and a demonstration of Highland dancing in the Iowa Old Capitol Senate Chamber. A publication of selected essays from the conference is planned.

The Midwest Victorian Studies Association is an interdisciplinary organization welcoming scholars from all disciplines who share an interest in nineteenth-century British history, literature, and culture. Send a 300-word abstract and 1-page vita (as Word documents) by October 31, 2014, to conferencesubmissions@midwestvictorian.org. Even if you do not submit a paper, please plan to attend!

For more information, please visit www.midwestvictorian.org.

CFP: MLA '14 Women in Literature (5/9/2014; 1/8-11/2015)

MLA 2014, Section: Women in Literature

Vancouver, Canada

January 8-11, 2015

Deadline: May 9, 2014

Topic: Gendered Spaces; Gendered Places: Women’s Lives in the City

“Places are not merely discrete, rooted phenomena; they are ever evolving outcomes of social relationships that span and link regional, national, and even global geographies” (Altha J. Cravey and Michael Petit, “A Critical Pedagogy of Place: Learning Through the Body” 108).

In Space, Place and Gender, Doreen Massey rejects the idea that space is fixed and apolitical. Drawing in part on Marxist feminists, she posits instead that “space is constituted through social relations and material social practices” (254). Not only is space constructed through the social for Massey, but the converse is also true: “the social is spatially constructed too, and that makes a difference…in its broadest formulation, society is necessarily constructed spatially, and that fact—the spatial organization of society—makes a difference to how it works” (254). In other words, the spaces we inhabit produce the societies in which we live—all the while the societies in which we live socially construct the spaces we inhabit. This establishes the kind of web of intra-action between humans and others that can be traced through the recent theoretical work of Donna Haraway and new materialist feminists like Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo. It also holds major implications for thinking about how spaces and places are active in women’s lives and women’s literature.

Using the concept of spaces and places as active participants in the lives of humans, and in accordance with the conference’s theme of “The Lives of Cities,” this panel seeks papers that explore the issues of space and place in women’s literary texts. Possible topics may include, but are not limited to: gendered spaces and/or places, queer spaces, metaphorical spaces, urban autobiography and/or memoir, representations of gender within the space/place of a narrative, globalization and gender, historical representations of urban spaces in women’s literature, issues of performance and performativity in relation to urban space, and place-based approaches to teaching women’s literature.

Please submit 250-word abstracts and a brief 100-word bio to Meg Gregory at magrego@ilstu.edu by May 9, 2014.  Chair: Meg Gregory, Illinois State University

CFP: PAMLA 2014 "Literature and the Other Arts" (5/15/2014; 10/31-11/2/2014)

PAMLA 2014: Literature and the Other Arts

Riverside, CA

October 31-November 2, 2014

Deadline: May 15, 2014

Proposals for papers are invited on any subject relating to the session theme of literature and the other arts. PAMLA 2014’s special conference theme is “Familiar Spirits,” so papers that consider the familiar, familial, and the commonplace in relation to the paranormal, strange, and uncanny, or reference spiritualism, spirits, hauntings, manifestations, conjuring, or magic will be particularly appropriate, but proposals on any topic related to literature and the other arts are equally welcome.

Please submit your proposal via the PAMLA website (http://www.pamla.org/2014). For questions about the session, please contact Judy DeTar at jsdetar@sbcglobal.net.

The 2014 PAMLA conference will be held Friday, October 31st through Sunday, November 2nd at the Riverside Convention Center in Riverside, California. More information is available at the PAMLA website, http://www.pamla.org/2014. Conference guidelines and procedures and the answers many frequently asked questions can be found at http://www.pamla.org/2014/guidelines-and-procedures.

CFP: MMLA '14 "The City and the Aesthetic" (5/31/2014; 11/13-16/14)

CFP for English II: English Literature 1800-1900
MMLA 2014

Detroit, MI

November 13-16, 2014

Deadline: May 31, 2014

Please consider submitting an abstract to the nineteenth-century section of the Midwest Modern Language Association's annual conference.

"The City and the Aesthetic"

From William Wordsworth’s “Upon Westminster Bridge” to William Morris’s horror at modern cityscapes, from the craze for Aesthetic housewares to debates over working-class access to art museums, the nineteenth-century city presented both aesthetic problems and aesthetic opportunities. How did urbanization transform both the aesthetic experiences that were available and the categories through which these experiences were understood? Implicit in this question is a recognition that the city may provide an especially fertile ground for exploring negative aesthetic reactions like distaste or disgust, which remain comparatively under-theorized.

Papers that approach “The City and the Aesthetic” through the lens of perception, affect, or pleasure are welcome, as are papers that connect aesthetics to politics, consumption, or class.

Send abstracts to Julia Bninski (jlbninski@gmail.com) by May 31. Abstracts should be approximately 250-500 words. Please provide the following information: your name, institutional affiliation, email address, and paper title. For more information visit http://www.luc.edu/mmla/index.html

CFP: The "Exotic" Body in 19th-century British Drama (5/25/2014; 9/25-26/2014)

The ‘Exotic’ Body in 19th-century British Drama

University of Oxford

Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford

Funded under the 2011 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships scheme, European Commission

September 25-26, 2014

Deadline: May 25, 2014

Convenor: Dr Tiziana Morosetti (Oxford)

Confirmed speakers:

Professor Ross Forman (Warwick), Dr Peter Yeandle (Manchester),

Dr Hazel Waters (Institute of Race Relations, London)

Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the representation of the Other on the 19^th-century British stage, with key studies such as Acts of Supremacy: The British Empire and the Stage, 1790-1930 (Bratton et al. 1991), The Orient on the Victorian Stage (Ziter 2003), Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Brooks 2006), Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Waters 2007), Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (Gould 2011), China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Forman 2013). Building on these, the conference aims at exploring the concept, politics, and aesthetic features of the ‘exotic’ body on stage, be it the actual body of the actor/actress as s/he performs in genres such as the ‘Oriental’ extravaganza, or the fictional, ‘picturesque’ bodies they bring on stage. A term that in itself needs interrogation, the ‘exotic’ will therefore be discussed addressing the visual features that characterize the construction and representation of the Other in 19^th-century British drama, as well as the material conditions, and techniques that accompany the ‘exotic’ on stage on the cultural and political background of imperial Britain.

One of the dissemination activities for the two-year project ‘The Representation of the “Exotic” Body in 19th-century English Drama’ (REBED), funded under the 2011 Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowships scheme, the conference also hopes to function as a site for discussing the state of the art on the ‘exotic’ in the theatrical cultures of both Romantic and Victorian Britain; contributions on ongoing research and/or recently completed projects are therefore particularly encouraged.

Although attention will be paid mostly to the non-European Other, papers addressing a European ‘exotic’ are also welcome. Topics include the following: 

Definitions of ‘exotic’:

• Is the non-European Other on stage really ‘exotic’?
• Are any genres more ‘exotic’ (or more liable to convey ‘exotic’ stereotypes) than others?
• Do different dramatis personæ and/or settings convey different degrees of ‘otherness’?
• Can the British on stage be ‘exotic’, and, if so, to what extent?
• Is the spectacular on stage itself ‘exotic’?

Staging the ‘exotic’ body:

• How are costumes, make-up, scenery, movements employed to construct the ‘exotic’?
• Are any visual features more recurrent than others?
• To what extent is the visual representation of the ‘exotic’ body historically accurate?
• How does music contribute to the staging of the Other?
• Who embodies the ‘exotic’? Is the acting career informed by bringing the Other on stage?
• Who were the audiences? Did their composition have an impact on the performance of the ‘exotic’?
• Are any experiences abroad relevant to how managers staged the Other in Britain?
• In what ways were representations of the ‘exotic’ body informed by venues?
• The Other on the London stage and the provinces

Cultural and political backgrounds:

• To what extent did audiences’ expectations affect theatrical representations of the Other?
• In what ways do class, gender, race inform the acting and managing of ‘exotic’ pieces?
• To what extent did scientific and anthropological accounts inform theatrical portraits of the Other?
• Were illustrations of (European and/or) non-European countries informed by theatre?
• In what ways have political narratives influenced (or been influenced by) the ‘exotic’ on stage?
• Has the legal frame for the theatre influenced the staging of the Other?
• Visual points of contact between popular entertainment and theatrical representations of the Other

The travelling ‘exotic’:

• How do texts such as Arabian Nights, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Mazeppa ‘travel’ between dramatic and non-dramatic genres?
• Survival of a Romantic ‘exotic’ in the Victorian staging of the Other;
• Is Othello on the Romantic and Victorian stage ‘exotic’?
• How do translations/adaptations from other languages contribute to the construction of the Other on the British stage? Can we define a British specificity when it comes to the ‘exotic’?
• Has the theatrical representation of the ‘exotic’ in Britain had an impact on non-British stages?

The legacy of 19^th-century ‘exotic’ body:

• Contemporary plays/performances addressing the Other on the 19^th-century British stage (e.g. Lolita Chakrabarti’s Red Velvet)
• The ‘exotic’ body on the British stage in a diachronic perspective
• The non-European Other in the 20^th- and 21^st-century Christmas pantomime

Abstracts of no more than 300 words and a short bio should be sent to rebedconference@gmail.com by May 25, 2014. Speakers whose abstracts have been accepted will be notified by June 15.

CFP: “Dickens and Conviviality” (5/31/2014; 10/11/2014)

Dickens Day 2014

Senate House, London (WC1)
Saturday October 11, 2014
Deadline: May 31, 2014

“Dickens and Conviviality”
Dickens’s works are famously convivial, depicting sociability in myriad forms: from the famously boozy Pickwick Papers, through the Crachits sentimental festive celebrations in A Christmas Carol, to the miserable family gatherings of Martin Chuzzlewit and Great Expectations, and the skewering of upper-class social pretentions and false conviviality in Bleak House, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. Dickens’s works were famous from the outset for their emphasis on humor, celebrations, family gatherings, theatrics, eating and drinking, and good cheer. Dickens was also himself famously convivial and sociable, accruing a wide circle of friends across the social spectrum and notorious for his love of parties, jamborees, practical jokes, theatrics, and other forms of high-spirited sociability. Yet Dickens was also a chronicler of the flipside of bonhomie, exploring loneliness, isolation, poverty and want, social aping and pretension, and the feelings of inadequacy, anxiety and exclusion that may fuel conviviality.

How do conviviality, sociality, and humor operate in Dickens’s work, and how and why do such depictions continue to amuse and entertain? What critical, biographical and psychological frameworks can the committee apply to analyze Dickensian good feeling? These are some of the questions the day seeks to address.

The committee  warmly invite proposals for 20-minute papers from scholars of all backgrounds and career stages. We are always keen to feature new work from postgrads, postdocs, early career teachers and researchers, and those working outside the academy. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to, the following:

• Humor, laughter and good cheer
• Food and drink
• Christmas
• Picnics, outings, excursions, holidays, parties
• Class and representations of conviviality
• Dickens’s reputation – then and now – as a comic novelist
• Humor, satire and Dickens’s radical politics
• The adaptation of Dickens’s humor into other mediums – theatre, film, television
• Amateur theatrics
• Bodily expressions of the convivial: laughter, smiling, glowing and other non-verbal, physical cues and manifestations
• Biography – Dickens’s famous conviviality and many friendships
• Conviviality’s ‘others’: social anxiety and isolation, shyness, poverty and want
• False conviviality: masks, social climbing and pretension
• Religion and Victorian social and moral attitudes towards conviviality
• Dickens’s relationship with his community of readers
• Dickensian good feeling: how the work and life of Dickens encourage conviviality and good feeling amongst the academics, enthusiasts and readers of his work. The purpose, history and success of the Dickens Fellowship and similar organizations and groups that celebrate Dickens and his work through social events.

Please send proposals (maximum 500 words) to Bethan Carney, Holly Furneaux and Ben Winyard at bethan.carney@gmail.com, hf35@le.ac.ukand benwinyard@hotmail.com. The deadline for paper proposals is 31st May 2014.

CFP website: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/news/cfp-dickens-day-2014-dickens-and-conviviality

CFP: Creativity and Commerce in the Age of Print (5/5/2014; 7/26/2014)

“Creativity and Commerce in the Age of Print”

Centre for the History of the Book

University of Edinburgh

July 26, 2014

Deadline: May 5, 2014

Hosted by the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh, this interdisciplinary conference will explore the sometimes-fraught connections between the ‘art’ and ‘trade’ of books from the Western invention of printing to today. Are the interests of authors and publishers always opposed, or can they lead to productive forms of collaboration? Does work undertaken for the marketplace necessarily compromise its moral and cultural standing? How does literature become property, and how has authorship evolved between the starving writer of ‘Grub Street’ and the modern book festival circuit? Can the requirements of the printing and bookselling industries constitute a form of de-facto censorship, determining the types of work that are published and circulated?

The organizers are currently seeking papers from postgraduate and early career researchers interested in questions such as these, with potential topics including (but not limited to):

• Authorship and other creative professions
• The printing and bookselling industries
• Author-publishers relationships
• Dissemination networks
• Subscription and patronage
• Book advertising, illustration
• Serial publication
• ‘Tie-ins’, merchandise, and material culture
• Libraries and book collecting
• Commerce and censorship
• Originality, copyright, and intellectual property
• Book piracy and its national boundaries
• Creative work and gender
• The impact of new technologies for production and dissemination
• The ‘rise’ or ‘death’ of print.

Proposals in all relevant subject areas and historical periods post-1450 are welcome. Please send a 200-word abstract to N.Simonova@ed.ac.uk by May 5, 2014. Limited travel bursaries may be available; indicate if you would require one to attend. The conference will take place in Edinburgh on July 26, 2014, with registration opening in June.

Extended Deadline: Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920 (4/8/2014; 6/17-18/2014)

Cosmopolitanism, Aestheticism, and Decadence, 1860-1920

University of Oxford

June 17-18, 2014

Deadline: April 8, 2014

Plenary Speakers:
Dr Stefano Evangelista (Trinity College, Oxford)
Professor Jonathan Freedman (University of Michigan)
Dr Michèle Mendelssohn (Mansfield College, Oxford)

Over the past twenty years, the term "cosmopolitanism" has been the focus of intense critical reflection and debate across the humanities. For some, it represents a potential remedy for oppressive and antagonistic models of national identity and a means of addressing the ethical, economic, and political dilemmas produced by globalisation. Others consider it a peculiarly insidious form of imperialism, and argue that it advocates an untenable ideal of a privileged, rootless observer, detached from — and disposed to romanticise or commodify — very real injustices and inequalities. Meanwhile, the "transatlantic" has emerged as a popular critical framework and field of inquiry for historians and literary scholars. But the "transatlantic" is also sometimes perceived as a problematic category insofar as it can serve to reinforce the narrow focus on Anglo-American culture that the "cosmopolitan" ideal aspires to overcome. 

Aestheticism and decadence, which flourished as broad artistic tendencies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, speak directly to the issues at stake in contemporary debates about "cosmopolitanism" and "transatlanticism". This is firstly because they evolved out of transnational dialogues between artists, writers, and critics. But it is also because aestheticism and decadence tended to celebrate an ideal of a disaffiliated artist or connoisseur whose interests ranged freely across history, language, and culture, and who maintained an ironic distance from the conventional determinants of identity. Over the last two decades, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism and decadence have become established and extremely lively areas of research in the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, and art history. Our conference aims to bring together established as well as emerging scholars in these fields, and to explore how the attractions and problems of "cosmopolitanism" illuminate, and can be illuminated by, current scholarly debates about aestheticism and decadence.

Possible topics for papers include, but are not restricted to: 

• Border crossing/flânerie/tourism/expatriatism
• Aestheticism/Decadence and the Ideals of World Citizenship/Literature
• Cosmopolitan Communities and Identities
• Cosmopolitan Forms and Formalisms
• The Poetics of Cross-Cultural Influence/Translation
• The Politics of Aestheticism, Decadence, and/or Cosmopolitanism
• Networks of Artistic and Scholarly Exchange
• Anti-cosmopolitanisms: Nationalism, Philistinism, and Xenophobia
• Visual Culture and the Consumption of Art
• Salons, coteries, and clubs
• Print culture and the circulation of texts beyond national borders
• Exile, Hospitality, Assimilation, and Strangers
• Consumerism and Mass Culture
• Elitism, Democracy, and Culture/Kultur
• Transatlantic Fashion and the Circulation of Commodities
• The ethics of Aestheticism, Decadence and/or Cosmopolitanism
• World Religions, Alternative Spiritualities, and Cosmopolitan Secularisms
• Regional Writing/Forms of Localism/Homelands
• Cosmopolitan Detachment/Aesthetic Disinterest
• Decadent/Aesthetic Cities
• The aesthetics of particularity/universality
• The pathologisation of Decadence/Cosmopolitanism
• Transatlantic Celebrity/The Cult of the Artist

The committee will provide four fee-waiving places at the conference: two are reserved for graduate students who wish to attend and serve as conference reporters, and two are reserved for early career researchers (i.e., graduate students or scholars who have recently completed a PhD but do not currently have a supportive institutional affiliation) who wish to deliver a paper and would otherwise struggle to attend. If you would like one of these fee-waiving places, please write to us and briefly explain (in fewer than 500 words) how the conference relates to your research.

Please send proposals (of 500 words or fewer) as pdf or Word attachments to cosmopolitanism.conference@gmail.com by April 8, 2014. 

CFP: Readers, Purveyors, Creators, and Users (4/16/2014; 6/16-17/2014)

Readers, Purveyors, Creators, and Users: Studying Victorian Print Consumption in 2014
Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies

National University of Ireland, Galway
June 16-17, 2014
Deadline: April 16, 2014

Plenary speakers: Dr Stephen Colclough, Bangor University & Dr Niall Ó Ciosáin, National University of Ireland, Galway

Nineteenth-century studies continues to engender some of the most dynamic scholarship in the study of historical readership with works like Leah Price’s How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (2012) featuring some of the most thought-provoking commentary on reader encounters with print to emerge in recent times.  

Conceptualisations of the functions print commodities served for various groups of nineteenth-century consumers grow increasingly nuanced.  Much of this research into the history of reading has been fuelled by mass digitization endeavours like Google Books and digital humanities projects like The Reading Experience Database. However, while such resources offer significant possibilities, the conditions under which one now engages with this primary material can give rise to questions of context, materiality, and access.  Accordingly, this two-day conference will seek to appraise the current state of the field and offer a forum for twenty-minute papers that address any aspect of the consumption and production of Victorian print culture matter, historical or contemporary.  It is also envisaged that an edited collection published by an international academic house will result from the conference.

Possible topics upon which submissions are welcome include but are certainly not limited to:  

• Historical readers and reading practices of the Victorian period
• Readership and issues of gender and/or sexuality: e.g. constructions of “the woman reader”; “masculine” reading matter; and “queer” reading experiences. 
• Periodical and/or serial circulation and consumption in territories like nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, Canada, the Antipodes, and Asia
• The publication, dissemination, and consumption of books and/or series in nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, Canada, the Antipodes, and Asia
• Transnational print culture in the nineteenth century: national and global identities
• Methodological concerns in the study of the history of reading 
• Consumers, producers, and Victorian visual culture 
• Disposable literature and ephemera of the Victorian age
• Scholarly editing projects and nineteenth-century culture
• The planning, design, and use of digital resources in the study of nineteenth-century print culture, including debates surrounding open access and paywalls.

Please send a proposal of no more than 300 words together with a short biography (c. 100 words) to victorianprintconsumption2014@gmail.com by April 16, 2014. Decisions will be announced in early May.  Postgraduates and early career scholars are particularly welcome. Questions about any aspect of the conference should be addressed to victorianprintconsumption2014@gmail.com

This conference is made possible by the generous support of The Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing.

CFP: MLA '15 "Literature that Sparks Social Change" (3/15/2014; 1/8-11/2015)

MLA 2015

Vancouver, Canada

January 8-11, 2015

Deadline:  March 15, 2014

“Literature that Sparks Social Change”
Scholarship often focuses on how fiction reflects social change, but what literary works have concretely led to social movements or specific social reforms, and how? 300-word abstract by March 15, 2014; Ursula McTaggart (ursula_mctaggart@wilmington.edu) and Laura Struve (laura_struve@wilmington.edu).

CFP: The Prosaic Imaginary (3/31/2014; 7/1-4/2014)

The Prosaic Imaginary: novels and the everyday, 1750-2000

University of Sydney

July 1-4, 2014

Deadline: March 31, 2014

http://novelnetwork.org/

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: 

Professor Maud Ellmann, Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English, Chicago Associate Professor Julie Park, Vassar Professor John Plotz, Brandeis

The conference will open up the nuances of the term ‘prosaic’ by exploring the privileged relationship between the novel genre and multiple and complex categories of the ‘everyday’. Building on John Plotz’s notion of the novel as exemplary ‘portable property’, the conference will address the relationship between novel-reading as everyday activity and the novel’s prosaic subject matter, whether this is conceived as material object, cultural practice, or speech act.

Suggested topics:  

• The novel and things
• The novel and film/and TV
• Readerships of the novel
• The novel and gender
• The novel and childhood
• Queer novels
• Psychologies of the novel
• Novel genres
• The odd or uncategorisable
• The secular imagination
• Book history and the novel
• The novel and the digital everyday
• Characters as quasi-persons
• Novel worlds
• The novel and the institutionalisation of affect
• The novel as political action
• Temporalities of the novel
• The novel and the forms of property
• The scale of the novel

Proposals for 20 minute papers or for 3 paper panel sessions should be sent to Vanessa Smith (Vanessa.smith@sydney.edu.au) by March 31 2014. Postgraduate submissions welcomed. 

CFP: MLA '15 "New Approaches to Science and Technology in Victorian Studies" (3/14/2014; 1/8-11/2015)

MLA 2015

Vancouver, Canada

January 8-11, 2015

Deadline: March 14, 2014

"New Approaches to Science and Technology in Victorian Studies"

This panel is seeking papers bringing new approaches to science and/or technology (including but not limited to those listed below) to readings of Victorian literature and culture, and in papers focused on the impact these new approaches may have for the field of Victorian Studies:

• Victorian literature
• culture and: STS (science, technology, society)
• philosophy of science/technology
• history of science/technology
• technoculture; etc.

Please send a 500-word proposal a 1-page CV by March 14, 2014 to Jessica Kuskey (jkuskey@ucsc.edu).

CFP: SCBS '14 (3/15/2014; 11/14-15/2014)

Southern Conference on British Studies & the Southern Historical Association

Atlanta, Georgia

November 14-15, 2014 

Deadline: March 15, 2014

Spearkers: The 2014 SCBS annual meeting will feature a plenary address by Susan R. Grayzel, University of Mississippi and a roundtable discussion featuring Michael P. Winship on his book, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims and a City on a Hill.

The SCBS construes British Studies widely and invites participation by scholars in all areas of British history and culture, including the Empire or Commonwealth and the British Isles.  Interdisciplinary approaches and proposals which focus broadly on teaching British studies are especially welcome.

Proposals may consist of individual papers or of papers grouped for a session.  For session proposals, two or preferably three papers should relate to a common theme, not necessarily bound by the usual chronological framework. For each paper proposed, please submit an abstract of 200 words, a CV, and contact information for each participant. Proposals should be sent to Dr. Katherine Grenier at: grenierk@citadel.edu or Department of History, The Citadel, 171 Moultrie Street, Charleston, SC 29409.

CFP: SCLA '14 "Nuance" (5/12/2014; 10/10-12/2014)

SCLA 40th Annual Meeting
Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida

October 10-12, 2014

Deadline: May 12, 2014

"Nuance"

For Roland Barthes, nuance named "an ethical project." "I want to live according to nuance," he declared. But what is nuance, and what possibilities might it open up for thinking about the arts and humanities today? What role might it play in interpretation, in teaching and scholarship, in reading and writing? Wayne Koestenbaum, the keynote speaker for this conference, suggests that nuance appears as "a trace, like dust on plush, [that] resuscitates a lost instant when someone…raptly concentrated on a stray interpretive detail." What does it mean to care about nuance, to overlook it, to suppress it? In addition to an ethics of nuance, might we speak of a politics, an aesthetics, a history of nuance?

At the 2014 SCLA conference we will explore what it means to read for (and with) nuance. Welcome avenues of inquiry could include, but are not limited to:

• the ethics of interpretation
• translation and its vicissitudes
• memory, trauma, and the trace
• the pleasures of the text
• mimicry and insubordination
• queer identifications and misidentifications
• (out)laws of genre
• margins and marginality
• aesthetic categories
• affect
• silence, illegibility, the intractable, the neutral
• styles of reading (close, distant, surface)
• nuance and the consumer society
• criticism and creativity

Please submit 250-word paper proposals or 500-word panel proposals by May 12, 2014 through the conference’s website: www.eckerd.edu/scla.

Graduate students submitting a paper proposal may also apply for an SCLA Travel Scholarship (guidelines provided on paper proposal form). The conference also plans to include two undergraduate sessions and welcomes undergraduate proposals.

For more information on the Society of Comparative Literature and the Arts and The Comparatist, please visit http://www.complit-scla.org./

New Deadline: Literature and Affect (3/14/2014; 7/2-4/2014)

Australasian Association of Literature
The University of Melbourne

July 2-4, 2014

Deadline: March 14, 2014

Confirmed keynote speakers: Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania), Sharon Marcus (Columbia University), & Gillian Russell (Australian National University)

What is “the affective turn” and where did it come from?  The relationship between literature and affect has long been a fraught one. On the one hand, the discipline of literary criticism derives from early eighteenth- century aesthetic philosophy that can be understood as an attempt to theorize pleasure. On the other, after Kant, criticism is predicated upon the separation of feeling from judgment. Enshrining this separation as a principle of critical practice, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley formulated “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) to name the shame of an emotional entanglement with the literary text. Here, the aesthetic functions as a conceptual mechanism for separating pleasure and value. And if pleasure is such a contested topic, what about pain, what about the ugly feelings? (to use Sianne Ngai’s coinage). And where is the body in all of this?

More recently, the so-called “affective turn” has turned a new attention upon the world of feeling. It returns literary criticism to New Criticism’s scandalous scene of the affective fallacy in order to re-evaluate the languages of feeling. A shaping force in illuminating the value of the affective has been queer theory, in its vital exploration of the transformative potential both of forward-looking utopian desires and backwards feelings such as shame. The affective turn has also been powered by the recognition that emotion and history are not opposed, and that emotion itself has a history. (Indeed, in a dramatic statement of the inseparability of history and affect, the Marxist cultural historian, Fredric Jameson, asserts that “History is what hurts”.) Perhaps paradoxically, new intensities of interest in literary form (e.g. as objectified and “unfelt” emotion) and in the cognitive dimensions of feeling also energize this turn and challenge the distinction between reason and feeling.

The committee invites papers that engage with any aspect of literature and affect; explore the significance for literature of the affective turn that has informed the humanities more broadly; analyze the relationship between affect and the literary aesthetic; engage affect and emotion to explore (or indeed contest) the singularity of literature. The committee also invites papers that consider literature and affect historically, and that consider affect, literature and the problem of evaluation (aka judgment).

Possible topics might include:

• Literary hedonisms and literary pleasure Practices of reading New formalisms Cultures of taste
• Memory and affective histories Affect and temporality Literature and public emotions Theories of affect and emotion Fandom, celebrity, scandal, Cognitive literary criticism, psychoanalysis and the neurosciences Pain and trauma
• Sensation and corporeality Sexuality and eroticism Literary and aesthetic judgment Aesthetic-affective moods, modes and tones (e.g. sentiment, melodrama, camp)
• Non-human, impersonal and animal affect Actors and performance Emotions and new media (e.g. memes, avatars, social networking)

Please submit a title and 500-word abstract for proposed papers by Friday February 28, 2014 via the submission form on the AAL conference website.

Conference organizers: Clara Tuite, Sarah Balkin, Sarah Comyn, Corey Wakeling (English and Theatre Studies, The University of Melbourne)

CFP: "Charles Dibdin and his World" (5/26/2014; 11/28-29/2014)

University of Notre Dame London Centre

British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
1 Suffolk Street, London, England
November 28-29, 2014

Deadline: May 26, 2014

CFP: "Charles Dibdin and his World"

2014 marks the 200th anniversary of the death of Charles Dibdin (1745-1814), perhaps the most versatile and talented actor, musician, playwright, and songwriter of the 18th and 19th centuries. Across his career Dibdin played the organ at St Bride’s in Fleet Street, collaborated with Isaac Bickerstaff on comic operas, acted at Drury Lane, Covent Garden and numerous other theatres throughout Britain, was director of music at Ranelagh Gardens, performed in blackface as Mungo in his opera The Padlock, translated French opera, opened his own theatre (twice), went to debtor’s prison, toured the country with a one man show, opened a publishing warehouse, wrote novels, memoirs, and a history of the English stage, published three music text books, and composed several thousand songs.

In addition, Dibdin’s sea songs were central to establishing the Royal Navy as the mainstay of British patriotism, in spite of mutiny, sedition, and the press-gang, playing a significant role in uniting a fractious nation after the upheavals of the 1790s. Charles’ private endeavours were also prolific. Family members included his daughter Ann Dibdin Dacre, a talented artist who provided illustrations for Dibdin’s Memoirs. His affair with the actress and dancer Harriet Pitt (1748?-1814) resulted in a daughter, and two sons: Charles Isaac Mungo Dibdin (1768-1833), who staged spectacular mock-sea battles in his aquatic theatre at Sadler’s Wells; and Thomas Dibdin (1771-1841), opera librettist, poet, composer and author of numerous theatre-pieces including Harlequin and Humpo, between them continuing their father’s legacy into the nineteenth century.

Such diverse careers touch on almost all aspects of musical and theatrical culture in the late Georgian period, and demand a truly interdisciplinary approach. The premise of this conference is that understanding the life and work of the Dibdin family necessitates a re-examination of the wider world of performance and literary culture of which they were so integral a part. To this end we invite proposals for papers in any discipline on any aspect of the life and work of Charles Dibdin and his family, or that illuminate the world of this subversive, patriotic, irascible, and glorious anarchic writer and performer.

Topics might include:

• Patriotism, propaganda and performance
• Orientalism and the staging of empire
• Blackface and representations of race
• Legitimate and illegitimate theatre
• Celebrity, biography, reputation
• Gender and the public sphere
• Performance practices
• The one-man show
• Music and morality
• Genre and composition
• Origins of the music-hall
• Book history and broadsides
• Theatrical and musical economies
• Music markets, copyright and piracy
• Forms of writing: the novel and the song
• Provincial and metropolitan entertainments

The conference will be in a workshop format consisting of a series of roundtable discussions of pre-circulated papers. Dinner, accommodation, and a performance of Dibdin’s songs will be provided for all participants. Papers will be circulated by November 14, 2014. These will form the basis of a collection of essays placing Dibdin in his world, providing new ways to conceive of the relationships between legitimate and illegitimate theatre, elite and popular entertainment, and provincial and metropolitan performance.

Abstracts (max 500 words) for 3-5,000 word papers should be sent with a short biography to Dibdin200@gmail.com by May 26, 2014. For more information please contact the organisers, Drs Oskar Cox Jensen (King’s College London), David Kennerley (Oxford) and Ian Newman (Notre Dame) at Dibdin200@gmail.com.

This conference forms part of the ERC-funded project “Music in London, 1800-1851”, led by Professor Roger Parker, King’s College London, with support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame.