Conference Calls for Papers

Page last updated June 30, 2010

Posted: June 30, 2010
Deadline: July 15, 2010

Civil Rights, Social Justice, and the Midwest

THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES 35th Annual Meeting

***DEADLINE EXTENDED:  July 15, 2010 ***

Hilton Milwaukee City Center
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
October 28-31, 2010

http://www.utoronto.ca/utopia/meetings.html

Milwaukee in the 1960s and 1970s was a key site for civil rights marches, particularly around the open housing movement. From 1897 through much of the 20th Century, the city was governed by a succession of Socialist mayors, elected on their platform of practical, "sewer socialism." And Wisconsin itself and its Midwestern neighbors have long been home to experiments inintentional community.

We encourage papers, panels, presentations and performances on literary, political, social, and architectural aspects of the civil rights struggle, intentional communities, and practical socialism with a Midwestern focus for the 2010 conference. We also welcome papers on other aspects of the utopian tradition - from the earliest utopian visions to the utopian speculations and yearnings of the 21st century, including art, architecture, urban and rural planning, literary utopias, dystopian writings, utopian political activism, theories of utopian spaces and ontologies, music, new media, or intentional communities.

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Milwaukee has a rich array of museums, restaurants, theaters, parks, and universities for conference attendees to visit. The city boasts the first U.S. commission by Santiago Calatrava, at the world-class Milwaukee Art Museum; Frank Lloyd Wright buildings; an excellent opera company; microbreweries galore; award-winning chefs; 19th Century beer baron mansions; Lake Michigan, and more.

Please send a 100-250 word abstract by July 15, 2010 to:

Brian Greenspan
Department of English
1812 Dunton Tower
Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive
Ottawa, ON, Canada K1S 5B6

Or e-mail submissions to: brian_greenspan@carleton.ca (please put "sus submission" in the subject line). As you submit your abstract, please indicate if you have any scheduling restrictions, audiovisual needs (overhead projector; DVD/VHS player), special needs, or a need for a written letter of acceptance of your proposal.

For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact the Conference Coordinator, Peter Sands, at: sands@uwm.edu

Posted: June 16, 2010
Deadline: September 15, 2010

Material Cultures

May 6-8, 2011
Department of English, University of Ottawa

How do objects circulate in our social, imaginary, and textual worlds? What are the politics of material culture and how does this inform our reading of historical and contemporary texts?  In what ways do we perceive and come to know the material world, and in what ways does the material make and unmake this "we"?  Proposals for papers are invited for a conference on Material Cultures in Canadian and Transnational Contexts, the 2011 edition of the Canadian Literature Symposium at the University of Ottawa.  Interdisciplinary, hemispheric, and theoretical approaches to the conference theme are welcome.

Proposed papers may consider, but are not limited to:

Keynote speakers:

For further details and updates visit: www.canlit-symposium.ca

Send electronic or paper proposals of 300-400 words by September 15th to:

Tom Allen: tallen@uottawa.ca, and
Jennifer Blair: jennifer.blair@uottawa.ca

Department of English
Arts 338
70 Laurier Ave. E
Ottawa, ON
K1N 6N5

Posted: May 1, 2010
Updated: June 30, 2010
Deadline: July 7, 2010

Ut Pictura Poesis: Thinking about Representation in Late Medieval and Renaissance England

1-2 October 2010, Queen's University, Kingston

We are pleased to announce that the keynote speaker for the conference will be Dr. Steven Mullaney, renowned author of The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Additional featured scholars include Dr. Mary Silcox (McMaster University), Dr. Jamie Fumo (McGill University) and Dr. Katherine Acheson (University of Waterloo).

In his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney defines poetry as “an art of imitation”, a form of “mimesis”; he describes it as not only a “representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth” but more importantly as a “speaking picture.” This attribution of aural and visual elements to the poet’s pen delineates poetry as a medium able to integrate seemingly disparate elements: a site of necessary hybridity. As a “speaking picture”, poetry mirrors the visual arts by imagistically portraying the verba (signifier) or form which conveys, transmutes, or mimics the res (signified) or Platonic Idea. The visual arts, which mirror or embody the spoken word, serve to access this elusive signified. It seems that Sidney finds it more difficult to imagine a verbal construct shadowing forth an “Idea” than he does a picture.

This graduate conference questions the representation of art in literature and art as literature. These correlations between art, poetry, and performance become increasingly prevalent throughout the later Medieval and early modern periods, and self-reflexive preoccupation with artistic representation permeates each medium. With the advent of print culture and with the movement of alphabets, spelling and language towards standardization, the relationship between the senses (between what is seen, heard, spoken and written) and written language becomes a site for exploration.

How does one re-negotiate the boundaries between the visual and the “read”? How does this translate to the different mediums of poetry, drama, the visual arts and print culture—what are the interstices between literature as drama and drama as literature, for instance, and how can this help us reconfigure a hermeneutics of the “visual”? What is lost in translation and what is gained in a cross-pollination of artistic genres and methods of production? What is the aesthetic, didactic, fiscal or commercial value of art in these periods and how does this affect the desire to frame poetry as picture and vice versa? In light of new artistic technologies, to what extent does the intimate relationship between episteme and techne influence and motivate art in this period? The crucial question we seek to explore is: how do poets, playwrights and artists in the late Medieval and early modern periods understand the separation or conflation of media in mimetic representation?

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

The extended deadline for abstracts is now WEDNESDAY, JULY 7th.  Abstracts should not exceed 350 words and should be sent to queensrencon@gmail.com along with any A/V requirements. Presentations should be 15 to 20 minutes long. Please visit the conference website for more information: http://tinyurl.com/queens2010renaissance

Posted: April 12, 2010
Deadline: August 16, 2010

Wilfrid Laurier University Celebrates 100 Years

Memory, Mediation, Remediation:
An International Conference on Memory in Literature and Film

April 28-30, 2011

Memory Studies has recently been established as one of the most urgent contemporary interdisciplinary fields.  Wilfrid Laurier University’s Department of English and Film Studies is hosting an international conference on the theme of “Memory, Mediation, Remediation” as part of the university’s 100th year celebration. The conference examines   not merely the representation and redefining of memory (and history, and nostalgia, etc.) in both literary and filmic texts, but also the question of the degree to which either individual or social memory gets constituted, legitimized and ‘naturalized’ through narrative or visual media forms. Ultimately, this conference hopes to provide a venue for the exploration of literature and cinema as themselves veritable modes of memory, in the shape of allusion, adaptation, remediation, translation, intertextuality, and appropriation.

Today, the word ‘memory’ acts as a catch-all for: (a) the process of recollection or retrieval; (b) the form or ‘place’ in which memory-content is both stored and lost (the archive); and (c) the mnemic content itself, what is commonly referred to as a ‘memory’. This imprecision is exacerbated by the confusion and conflation of personal ‘natural’ memory and forms of collective ‘cultural memory’ which as often as not is another way of talking about ‘history.’ Modern theorists of memory recognize that in speaking of memory one is describing not a unitary subjective phenomenon but a grouping of cognitive functions – or, in terms more amenable to this conference, a constellation of interconnected metaphors. These metaphors continue to be both familiar and powerful, most notably in terms of modernity’s stubborn insistence on memory’s spatial nature.

This conference seeks to extend the exploration of received modes and theories of the representation of memory to a consideration of 21st century globalized values and ideas. ‘Collective,’ ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ memory are not new ideas, but we would encourage exploration what it means to think of  ‘culture’ itself as a global memory system; as both source of and storehouse for a society’s most cherished values, ideals, and ideologies.

Papers might address such questions/topics as:

Please send a 500 word proposal and a one-page cv by August 16, 2010 to:
Russ Kilbourn or Eleanor Ty
Department of English and Film Studies
Wilfrid Laurier University
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5
rkilbourn@wlu.ca or ety@wlu.ca

Featured Speakers include:

Marlene Kadar, York University
Co-editor of Photographs, Histories, Meanings (Palgrave 2009) and Tracing the Autobiographical (Life Writing) (Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005)

Alison Landsberg, George Mason University
Author of Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (Columbia University Press 2004)

Sarah Henstra, Ryerson University
Author of The Counter-Memorial Impulse in Twentieth Century English Fiction (Palgrave 2009)

Posted: February 2, 2010
Deadline: October 1, 2010

Conference on "Aging, Old Age, Memory, and Aesthetics," University of Toronto, March 2011

Complete CFP available here:
http://sites.google.com/site/agingoldagememoryaesthetics/.

This conference is interested in theorizations and analyses of literature and the arts that consider how aging is portrayed and experienced in light of social, political, scientific and cultural contexts that support diverse speculations about old age, aging, memory and aesthetics.  In using the term aesthetics, we are drawing attention to the arts, aesthetic practices, theories of art, and modes of representation as they pertain to aging and memory. We look forward to presentations that analyze a variety of theoretical, thematic, and disciplinary approaches that remain linked by the consistent placement of old age and aging at the centre of concentrated investigation.

Please send your 300-word proposal to andrea.charise@utoronto.ca by Friday October 1, 2010.  This event is supported by the Graduate Department of English and the Institute for Life Course and Aging, Faculty of Medicine, at The University of Toronto.

Posted: February 2, 2010
Deadline: October 1, 2010

“Romanticism & Evolution”

www.uwo.ca/english/evolution

The Romanticism Research Group at The University of Western Ontario invites paper and special panel proposals for an international conference, “Romanticism & Evolution.” The meeting will convene at Windermere Manor next to Western’s main campus in London, Ontario, 12 - 14 May 2011.

Plenary talks by
Gillian Beer (Cambridge University)
Tilottama Rajan (University of Western Ontario)
Robert J. Richards (University of Chicago)

Special Seminars Conducted by Alan Bewell (University of Toronto), Denise Gigante (Stanford University), Noah Heringman (Unviersity of Missouri), Thomas Pfau (Duke University), Matthew Rowlinson (University of Western Ontario), and Joan Steigerwald (York University).

Though Romanticism is often imagined as the “age of revolution,” recent criticism has seen renewed interest in the general theme of “Romantic Evolution,” including the resurgence of such topics as organicism, vitalism, natural history, and natural philosophy. The objective of “Romanticism & Evolution” is to defamiliarize prevailing notions of evolution by tracing their origins to literary and scientific discourses of the transitional period 1775-1850, a time that witnessed the genesis of the modern idea of “literature” alongside the emergence of specialized disciplines, such as geology, biology, physiology, chemistry, psychology, and anthropology. Disenchanted with mechanistic science and Enlightenment rationalism, Romanticism also introduced a new organic image of the world, which displaced the older atomistic and static idea of nature with one that was dynamic and evolutionary. However, whether the organic mode of explanation replaced the mechanical philosophy as a radically incommensurable paradigm, or whether both coexisted in creative tension during and beyond the Romantic period, remains a matter for debate.

Revisiting important events and developments in the history of evolution prior to the publication of The Origin of Species, “Romanticism & Evolution” will focus critical attention on earlier, less recognized theories of change and transformation emerging in the cultural, literary, philosophical, and scientific debates of the Romantic period. Instead of searching through eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century science for “forerunners” to the Darwinian revolution, this conference aims to explore British and European Romanticism’s liminal position between the classical idea of an immutable “great chain of being” and the rise of modern discourses of historiography.

Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to):

Proposals for papers and sessions should be limited to 500 words. The deadline for the submission of abstracts for 20-minute presentations is 1 October 2010. Please include with your paper or session proposal, your name, e-mail address, and institutional affiliation. Abstracts should be e-mailed to romanticism@uwo.ca. For further information and conference updates, please visit the conference website listed above.