MAY 2011
<< There’s only one thing in the world worse than being talked about and that is not being talked about >>
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A monthly page advertising Conference and Journal Calls, of interest or potential interest to our readers.
Please contact us if you would like a Call for Papers included here.
page updated 22nd April 2011
For the Table of Contents, click | To hub page | To THE OSCHOLARS home page
We all will find this a useful link - http://melbourneartnetwork.com.au – the CFP section is quite comprehensive. Thanks to Anuradha Chatterjee for the information.
Beginning with the Spring, 2010 issue, The Victorian Newsletter has offered a new column featuring reviews of films, televised series (novel adaptations, for example), art exhibits, musical and stage adaptations, and web resources relevant to Victorian texts and contexts. Such recent films as ‘Creation’, ‘Young Victoria’, and ‘Sherlock Holmes’ come most readily to mind; other extra-literary treatments of Victorian literature and culture are most welcome. Please address electronic submissions (approx. 1500-2500 words) to: deborah.logan@wku.edu or victorian.newsletter@wku.edu.
Calls for Papers once e-mailed to and by the University of Pennsylvania are now only to be found on-line. Instead of emailing cfp@english.upenn.edu, see the web form submission at http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/submit.html. Submissions will appear on the website archive within 24 hours. Links to the archive and more information are on the main CfP page http://cfp.english.upenn.edu/. Announcements will be made on the main CfP website.
The English Subject Centre at Royal Holloway College administers a JISCmail service called LIT-LANG-CULTURE-EVENTS@jiscmail.ac.uk. One can join LIT-LANG-CULTURE-EVENTS by visiting http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/LIT-LANG-CULTURE-EVENTS.html. (One must be a list member in order to post.) Announcements sent to LIT-LANG-CULTURE-EVENTS will be distributed to members once they have been approved. If you have any enquiries please email esc@rhul.ac.uk.
Calls here are posted in a rolling list, in chronological order of deadline, with the Table of Contents in alphabetical order of subject, linked directly to each CfP. Calls are removed on expiry. The list will run three months ahead. Those without deadline have the month of entry printed and will remain posted for three months. The Conferences to which they refer will in turn be listed when their programmes are published, on our Conferences & Seminars page.
All details should be checked for changes with the organisers, not with THE OSCHOLARS.
Please send any Call you want us to include to oscholars@gmail.com and please mention THE OSCHOLARS if you are offering a paper. Readers who give papers may publish their abstracts in THE OSCHOLARS.
Click for quick access to any of these calls. Any calls in bold have a specific reference to Wilde.
New Woman, Theatre, and Art History calls will be found respectively in our sister journals , and VISIONS . Click their logo’s to reach them.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
This month’s additions are marked
Æsthetic Lives		Nietzsche
Artists and Designers in Modern Paris, 1870-1914		Opera
Debussy		Sport
The European Sound in the Era of Liszt: The Musical Tour in the 19th Century		W.T. Stead
Fashion and Socialism: between utopia and reality		Bram Stoker
Le Grenier des Goncourt		Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences
Monsters		Utopia
		Wilde
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MAY
AESTHETIC LIVES
« [C]reating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be »
University Paul-Valéry Montpellier, France
23rd-24th September 2011
In 1873, citing Hegel’s vision of the Greeks, Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance: « They are great and free, and have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be. » This Paterian celebration of autonomy and self-fashioning was read with delight, cultivated, and variously implemented by the actors of the Aesthetic Movement. Not only did Aestheticism create new objects, but it enabled singular lifestyles to be born. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the facts of existence ceased to be perceived as heteronomous. Life itself was gradually envisioned as a work in progress for an individual at once more aware of his/her freedom as subject and more conscious of changing societal constraints. New lifestyles flourished and novel representations of life emerged. From the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (which immediately preceded the Aesthetic Movement) to James Whistler, Oscar Wilde, William Morris, ‘Ouida’, ‘Michael Field’, and Edward Carpenter, many were those who devoted themselves to practicing and writing about literature and art while evolving a lifestyle which early twentieth-century critics would later identify with the « men [and women] of the nineties ».
Fashioning one’s own life became both conceivable and technically and politically possible as individuals gradually ceased to acquiesce in given social configurations of power and value and started interrogating the status quo. Such questioning was often the source of original individual choices and collective interventions such as the creation of clubs, guilds, presses or journals. Within given social, economic and political structures/strictures, of which writers and artists were highly conscious, ‘Aesthetic’ living became an important embodiment of subjective experience and individual experiment.
After our first trans-disciplinary international conference entitled « British Aestheticisms », our 2011 conference on « Aesthetic Lives » hopes to focus on issues of Aesthetic subjectivity, on the lived experience of Aesthetic individuality or difference, and on original trajectories in the context of Aesthetic practices. How did writers and artists turn their existence into an artwork? What does it mean to found a club, an artistic community, a new journal when one is (or claims to be) an Aesthete? What were the cultural, social, economic, religious or political constraints which hindered or enabled Aesthetic projects, aspirations, conversions and itineraries?
Importantly, the notion of ‘Aesthetic life’ is not meant in the limited biographical sense, but should be taken in the broad sense of a personal negotiation and a carving of one’s chosen itinerary or ethical choices in the context of Aestheticism. What kind of ethics can arise from Aesthetic choices? What are its daily manifestations, practically speaking? What were the obstacles or aporiae encountered by those who followed Pater’s ideas about self-fashioning and life as a work of art? How were these subjective choices received? And how do they anticipate the choices made by the figures of Modernism?
We welcome papers (in French or in English) studying individual artists and writers, specific formal or informal groups, and various arts of Aesthetic living. Descriptive and hagiographic approaches are to be strictly avoided. A selection of papers will be published. Please email your proposal by 1st May to bncoste@free.fr AND Catherine.delyfer@univ-montp3.fr. Guest speakers to be announced soon.
Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker Centenary Conference 2012 : Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations
Keynote Speakers: Prof Sir Christopher Frayling, Professor Clive Bloom, Professor Luke Gibbons, and a special presentation by Professor Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker
Organised by the University of Hull. Locations: Derwent Building, University of Hull and Whitby, North Yorkshire, 12-14 April 2012.
‘My revenge has just begun! I spread it over centuries and time is on my side.’ (Dracula, 1897)
Count Dracula’s declaration from Bram Stoker’s iconic 1897 vampire novel is, in many ways, descriptive of the Gothic genre. Like the shape-shifting Transylvanian Count, the Gothic encompasses and has manifested itself in many forms since its emergence in 1764 with the publication of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Its revenge has just begun. It has spread over centuries and time is on its side.
When Stoker wrote Dracula the genre was well over a hundred years old but the novel marks a key moment in the evolution of the Gothic – the text harks back to early Gothic’s preoccupation with the supernatural, decayed aristocracy and incarceration in gloomy castles in foreign locales. Dracula speaks to its own time but also transforms the genre – a revitalization that continues to sustain the Gothic today.
On the eve of the centenary of Stoker’s death, which occurred in April 1912, the University of Hull’s Department of English and School of Arts and New Media, in association with the Centre for Victorian Studies, will host a three-day international conference, Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations. The conference will take place at the Hull Campus of the University and in Whitby.
In Dracula Mina describes Whitby as a ‘lovely place’ but it soon becomes a site of horror, when Dracula lands from the Demeter in the form of a dog to make his first appearance on English soil. At Whitby Abbey, Lucy becomes the Count’s first English vampire bride.
The conference is interested in the iconic significance of Stoker’s vampire novel and seeks to reappraise Stoker’s work within its fin-de-siècle cultural climate.  It is also interested in exploring the broader context of the changing nature of Gothic productions from the late eighteenth century to the present. Using Dracula as a key point in the evolution of the genre, it seeks to explore the novel’s Gothic predecessors and influences, and the manner in which Stoker’s work renewed the Gothic for future generations.
How do the Gothic’s early themes of despotic rulers and fathers, grim prophecies, supernatural embodiments, incarceration, labyrinthine passages and corridors, threatened females, and sexual deviancy transform in subsequent cultural outputs from novels, theatre, films, television and computer games? How has the Gothic in its modern manifestations and variations sustained itself into a fourth century?
‘At once escapist and conformist,’ Clive Bloom argues, ‘the Gothic speaks to the dark side of domestic fiction: erotic, violent, perverse, bizarre and obsessionally connected with contemporary fears.’ How does the new Gothic of the twenty-first century engage in fantasy and fear?
Please send an abstract of 250-300 words for a 20 minute paper to Dr Catherine Wynne (c.wynne@hull.ac.uk) by 1st May 2011.
Topics may include, but are not restricted to, the following areas:
Stoker’s work in its social, political and cultural context — The development of the Gothic from Otranto to the twenty-first century — Stoker’s influence on the genre — Irish and British Gothic — Gothic theatre and drama — Gothic visualities — Gothic technologies — Gothic bodies — Gothic monstrosities — Gothic sexualities — Gothic psychologies — Gothic narratives — Gothic Intertextualities — Gothic places and spaces — Hauntings and spectrality — Criminality and the Gothic — Science and the Gothic — Reincarnations of Dracula — Vampirism and the ‘Young Vampires’ of the twenty-first century — Anti-Gothic, Gothic Parody, Comic Gothic
The conference committee (Chair: Dr Catherine Wynne; Dr Charles Mundye; Dr Anna Fitzer;  Dr Sabine Vanacker, Victoria Dawson and Sara Williams) welcomes delegates to the University of Hull and Whitby to mark Stoker’s centenary and to celebrate his contribution to the Gothic.
Contact Details: Dr Catherine Wynne, University of Hull, Cottingham Road, Hull HU6 7RX
Conference website: http://www2.hull.ac.uk/scarborough/conferences/bram-stoker.aspx
Fashion and Socialism: between utopia and reality
Vienna, World Handicrafts Organization, September 22-23, 2011
The conference „Fashion and Socialism: between utopia and reality’ will be organized by World Handicrafts Organization in Vienna, Austria in cooperation with University of Applied Arts Vienna (Cultural and Intellectual History). The conference will be devoted to the research of relations between fashion and politics, clothing consumption and aspiration for distinction in the socialistic system.
If you are interested in participating, please, submit us your proposal in the maximal length of one page.. It should include title, brief presentation of your topic as well as personal information.
Deadline: 3rd May 2011.
Working language: English and German. Conference dates: 22.09.2011-23.09.2011. Conference venue: A-1010 Wien, Franz-Josefs-Kai 5.
We are going to (online) publish a collection of all papers after evaluating Conference’s results.
All supported documents and papers should be sent to Dr. Elena Huber, President, World Handicrafts Organization, Konrad Frank Weg 14, 2191 Pellendorf. info@worldhandicrafts.org
If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences
Between 25-28 April, 2012 ALMSD will be hosting a second International conference, ‘Symbolism, Its Origins and Its Consequences’ with the theme Light and Shade or Light and Obscurity in Symbolism, its origins and its consequences. The organization would like to invite you to submit a proposal which will address the theme of the conference in art, literature and music. The proposal should be about 300 words and should be sent to symbolismabstracts@uis.edu before 10th May 2011. Please include a short version of your CV. If you have questions, please contact Rosina Neginsky at rnegi1@uis.edu.
Nous vous invitons à envoyer une proposition à communication pour le Colloque International ‘Symbolism, ses origines et ses conséquences’ qui aura lieu entre le 25 et le 28 avril, 2012 à Allerton, University of Illinois Conference Center, USA. http://www.uis.edu/hosted-orgs/ALMSD/conference.html
L'appel à contribution se veut ouvert à toutes sortes de propostions concernant les aspects de la littérature, de l'art et de la musique qui sont à l'origine du mouvement symboliste, qui en font partie et qui ont influencé les mouvements littéraires et artistiques ultérieurs. Le thème du colloque est la lumière et l'ombre. Le colloque permet de se pencher sur les manifestations variées des idées du mouvement symboliste dans la littérature, l'art et la musique de fin de siècle et tout spécialement sur la manifestation de la lumière et de l'ombre dans le mouvement symboliste, ses origines et ses conséquences.
Les propositions (de 1000 à 1500 signes – 300 mots) deveront être envoyées à symbolismabstracts@uis.edu avant le 10 mai, 2011. Merci d'inclure une version courte de votre CV. Les questions peuvent être adressées à Rosina Neginsky, rnegi1@uis.edu.
International Conference
THE EUROPEAN SOUND IN THE ERA OF LISZT: THE MUSICAL TOUR IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
ORGANISED BY: Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca, and Villa Medici Giulini, Briosco (MB)
in association with: Palazzetto Bru Zane - Centre de musique romantique française, Venice
under the auspices of: Fondazione Istituto Liszt, Bologna
DATES: 30 September - 2 October 2011
LOCATION: Villa Medici Giulini, Briosco (Monza/Brianza)
The Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini of Lucca (<http://www.luigiboccherini.org>) and Villa Medici Giulini (<http://www.villamedici-giulini.it>), in association with Palazzetto Bru Zane-Centre de musique romantique française of Venice (<http://www.bru-zane.com>), and under the auspices of the Fondazione Istituto Liszt of Bologna (<http://www.liszt.it>), is pleased to invite submissions of proposals for the symposium on «The European Sound in the Era of Liszt: The Musical Tour in the Nineteenth Century» to be held in Villa Medici Giulini, Briosco (MB), from Friday 30th September until Sunday 2nd October 2011.
The Symposium aims to investigate different facets of the musical tour in Europe as a phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Taking as its point of departure Franz Liszt’s career as a touring piano virtuoso, composer, conductor and teacher, the conference will explore various composers’ and performers’s European tours; these tours’ relationships with the most important musical centres during the period; the influence of various instrumental approaches and their impact on the development of taste, and Liszt’s own performing style, together with his role as a teacher and as a conductor.
Villa Medici Giulini contains an important collection of keyboard instruments that illustrates the history of the modern pianoforte.  The collection traces the development of the harpsichord, organ and fortepiano within the two major Viennese and French schools. The collection is housed in the halls of the Villa, constructed in 1643 for the Attendolo-Bolognini family and acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by the Medici di Marignano. The Villa is now owned by the Giulini family.
This collection offers a unique experience, namely the opportunity of hearing the different instruments: these sound different and new each time.
Further information on the collection can be viewed via the following link:
<http://www.villamedici-giulini.it/villa/collezione-strumenti-eng.htm>
Although other topics are welcome, the programme committee encourages submissions within the following areas:
v · The Musical Tour in Europe during the Nineteenth Century
v · European Instruments and Sound: the Development of the Musical Taste
v · The Piano Industry in the Nineteenth Century: Organological Matters, Piano Markets, Musical Business
v · The European Piano Schools and the Virtuosity
v · Liszt and the Concert Life in Europe
v · Franz Liszt’s Performing Style
v · The Legacy of Franz Liszt
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Alexandre Dratwicki, Venice;· Nicolas Dufetel, Weimar-Jena/Angers;· Lorenzo Frassà, Lucca;· Roberto Illiano, Lucca;· Fulvia Morabito, Lucca;· Luca Sala, Paris/Poitiers;· Massimiliano Sala, Pistoia.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS: Florence Gétreau (CNRS/IRPFM, Paris) ; Pierre Goy (Haute École de Music/HEMU, Vaud Valais Fribourg) ; Leon Plantinga (Yale University, New Haven, CT)
The official languages of the conference are English, French, and Italian. Papers selected at the conference will be published in a miscellaneous volume.
Papers are limited to twenty minutes in length, allowing time for questions and discussion. Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and one page of biography. All proposals should be sent by email by no later than Saturday 14th May 2011 to: <operaomnia@luigiboccherini.org>.
With your proposal, please include your name, contact details (postal address, e-mail and telephone number) and, if applicable, your affiliation.
The committee will make its final decisions on the abstracts by the 30th of May 2011 and contributors will be informed immediately thereafter.
Further information about the programme, registration, travel and accommodation will be announced by the end of June 2011.
For additional information about the conference, see <http://www.luigiboccherini.org/europeansound.html>
If you have any questions, please contact Dott.ssa Fulvia Morabito, Via delle Tagliate di San Marco 617F, 55100 Lucca. <operaomnia@luigiboccherini.org>
nietzsche
According to some critics, Nietzsche opts out of the dialectic of Enlightenment and appeals in Romantic fashion to the Other of reason, whether in the form of the ancient Greek Dionysian or archaic ideals of nobility. Others highlight the ways in which Nietzsche’s unique style of critique deploys reason against the claims of Enlightenment reason, undermining the latter from within so as to extend our concept of reason. The purpose of this conference is to examine the place of Nietzsche’s thought between Reason and Unreason by focusing on its relation to the modern traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. What is Nietzsche’s relation to the Enlightenment in the different phases of his work? Is he, as critic of Enlightenment reason, a representative of the counter-Enlightenment – or rather of an intensified form of Enlightenment critique? In what sense(s) can Nietzsche be characterised as a Romantic? Is his recourse to art an appeal to Other of reason – or is art rather the medium in which the claims of Enlightenment reason can be realised? In line with the venue of the conference at the Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, special attention will be given to Nietzsche’s relations to the German and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The 2011 conference will follow the standard FNS conference format of five parallel sessions and five plenary sessions with well-known speakers in the field. In addition, it will include the 2nd international workshop on Nietzsche and Kant, on the topic ‘Nietzsche and Kantian Aesthetics’. This will involve invited speakers, but there will also be space for other relevant papers submitted through this call for papers.
Confirmed plenary speakers: Marco Brusotti (TU Berlin / Università del Salento, Lecce, Italy); Rüdiger Görner (Director of Centre for Anglo-German Cultural Relations, Queen Mary); Beatrix Himmelmann (University of Trømso, Norway); Nicholas Martin (University of Birmingham)
The Friedrich Nietzsche Society welcomes proposals for 30-minute papers on all topics bearing on the conference theme, including the following:
v Nietzsche and Reason / Nietzsche and the Irrational
v Nietzsche’s relation to both the Enlightenment and Romanticism
v Nietzsche and the Enlightenment / Nietzsche contra the Enlightenment
v Nietzsche and Romanticism / Nietzsche as Romantic
In line with the venue, abstracts on Nietzsche and individual thinkers or representatives of either tradition will be given preference where they address German and/or Anglo-Saxon figures; or equally, where they address understudied figures (e.g. Hoelderlin, Novalis, Schelling, Herder inter alia).
Abstracts should be submitted by 15th May 2011. They should be sent as attachments to friedrich.nietzsche.society@gmail.com with the following in the subject box: FNS2011_ABSTRACT_NAME_AFFILIATION
In addition:
Abstracts for the 2nd international workshop on Nietzsche and Kant, on the topic ‘Nietzsche and Kantian Aesthetics’ are also welcome. The workshop format will involve the pre-circulation of papers and brief presentations, to allow as much time as possible for discussion. Abstracts for the workshop should also be submitted by May 15 2011, as attachments to friedrich.nietzsche.society@gmail.com. Please put the following in the subject box: FNS2011_WORKSHOP_ABSTRACT_NAME_AFFILIATION
Dr. S. Rebecca Bamford, Assistant Professor, Center for Learning Innovation, 300 University Square, 111 South Broadway, Rochester, MN, 55904. Phone: 507-258-8212 Fax: 507-280-2820 www.r.umn.edu. sbamford@r.umn.edu
Sporting Victorians
In the light of the forthcoming 2012 London Olympics, the journal `Critical Survey' seeks proposals for 4,000-6,000 word articles discussing some of the cultural, national, social and political issues that sport encompassed in Britain in the years 1800-1914. The nineteenth century saw the rise of professionalism in sport and the emergence of women as participants. The topic of sport also engaged a wide range of novelists, poets, dramatists, painters and journalists - both as commentators and participants - from Byron's swimming to J.M. Barrie's cricket team. It is hoped that the topic's multi-disciplinary appeal will be apparent in some of the submissions.
Subjects might include but are not limited to the following:
sport and literature — sporting writers — sport and gender — sport and nation — sport and the theatre — empire — the professionalization of sport — sport and the countryside (including hunting) — sport and the city — sporting heroes — sport and entertainment (including gambling) — sport and crime — sport and the body (including `Muscular Christianity') — Hellenism — sport and ethnicity — sport and health
Please email proposals (of approximately 500 words) by 16th May 2011 to Andrew Maunder, Editor, Critical Survey, a.c.maunder@herts.ac.uk (http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/cs/). Final essays will be due in by 31 December 2011 and the journal issue will be published in spring 2012.
Queries about this special issue of the Journal are welcome.
W.T. Stead
W.T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary, British Library, 16-17 April 2012
The organizers welcome proposals for papers that address any aspect of W.T. Stead’s life, career, influence, or times. Proposals (500 words) should be sent to stead2012@googlemail.com by 20th May 2011.
Further details on the website: https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/cfp or as a download (pdf): http://goo.gl/Nq7M3
When William Stead died on the maiden voyage of the Titanic in April 1912, he was the most famous Englishman on board. He was one of the inventors of the modern tabloid. His advocacy of ‘government by journalism’ helped launch military campaigns. His exposé of child prostitution raised the age of consent to sixteen, yet his investigative journalism got him thrown in jail. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late Victorian and Edwardian society.
This conference marks the centenary of his death. We aim to recover Stead’s extraordinary influence on modern English culture and to mark a major moment in the history of journalism. In 2012 the British Library will open its state of the art newspaper reading rooms. In Stead’s spirit we will also investigate our own revolution in newspapers and print journalism in the age of digital news.
With Stead as a focal point, we will use aspects of his career to develop multiple avenues into the history of his time and ours. This is not a narrowly focused specialist conference, but one that aims to adopt wide cultural perspectives.
We welcome proposals on the following, in respect of Stead and/or related topics:
v Stead’s ‘New Journalism’. The Pall Mall Gazette, Review of Reviews and other journals were crucial in the emergence of the modern day broadsheet and tabloid press. Stead provides the opportunity to re-assess some of the key phases in the influence and structures of the press in modern Britain.
v Stead and technology. Stead was one of the best recorders of the second industrial revolution of the late Victorian period, when telegraphs, gramophones, microphones, telephones, Kodak cameras, wireless telegraphy, horseless carriages, typewriters and new printing technologies transformed everyday life.
v Stead and the New Imperialism. Stead’s support for English colonies was part of his advocacy for a white commonwealth that would be united through journalism and new communication technologies. We welcome papers on specific elements of Stead’s imperialism, from the support for General Gordon, his opposition to the South African War, to his friendship with Cecil Rhodes.
v Stead and the Titanic. Rumours about Stead’s manly self-sacrifice and Christian acceptance of death in the last hours of the boat were still being repeated as late as the film A Night to Remember (1958). How was Stead’s death reported? What was his cultural significance in 1912? We also particularly welcome papers on any aspect of the Titanic, especially on the role of newspapers in securing the mythic place the sinking has in our culture.
v Stead and the occult. Stead tended to report Spiritualism favourably, as part of the non-conformist world of religion. He became active in the movement in the 1880s and tried to foster support for the Society for Psychical Research. He ran the journal Borderland from 1893-7, which reported on ghosts, psychical experiments, hypnotic rapports, astral doubles and messages from the dead.
v Stead and religion. We aim to trace his early non-conformity, conversion to secular Evangelicism, and his advocacy of a National Church through investigative annuals, such as If Christ Came to Chicago. We also hope to examine his alliance to William Booth, founder of the Salvation Army, whom he helped compose In Darkest England and the Way Out in 1890.
v Stead’s non-conformist, Northern origins. Stead’s career, which includes the editorship of the daily Northern Echo in Darlington for eight years in the 1870s offers an opportunity to investigate the trajectories of regional journalists, Stead’s career at the Echo, and the provincial press in the late nineteenth century.
v Stead and women’s rights. Stead employed women journalists and writers and championed their role in public life. Typically conflicted, this support derived in part from a Christian sense of women’s benign influence on public purity (so that he was disturbed by the overtly sexual New Woman literature of the 1890s). Stead is an exemplary figure to explore the anxieties and contradictions of the gender and sexual liberations of the late nineteenth century.
v Stead’s ‘invention’ of the tabloid moral campaign. Through his famous campaigns (‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’, the relief of General Gordon, British re-armament) Stead interceded into contemporary political and social debates and pioneered this major journalistic genre.
v Stead and politics. Stead’s political radicalism put him at the centre of events in the 1880s, including the ‘Bloody Sunday’ riots of 1887 and the Match Girl Strike in 1889. He was also a notable campaigner for world peace, speaking at international gatherings in the United States and Russia.
v Stead and the industry of print. As journalist, editor, publisher, proprietor, with a career that includes regional as well as metropolitan dailies, various monthly magazines, annuals, and a stream of serialised works in part issue, including his ‘Penny Poets’, Stead is a rich node for new research.
v The continuing newspaper revolution. 2012 is the date when the British Library Newspaper Library moves from Colindale to new, state of the art reading rooms. What will the new digital archive mean for historical research? And what will be the future of print journalism?
We put out a call for expressions of interest in 2010. In the light of the positive response, we would now like to ask for proposals for 20 minute papers. Proposals should be no more than 500 words and sent to stead2010@googlemail.com by the 20th May 2011. Further details are here: <https://sites.google.com/site/stead2012/>
Conference Organisers: Professor Laurel Brake (Birkbeck College): expert in nineteenth-century journalism, with extensive publications relating to Stead’s career and milieu; Ed King (British Library): Head of Newspaper Collections; Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College): expert in late nineteenth-century culture, who has written on Stead’s interests in technology and the occult; Dr James Mussell (University of Birmingham): author of work on nineteenth-century press and science, and an editor of the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition.
opera
The National Opera Association is pleased to announce its Twenty-Seventh Scholarly Papers Competition, 2011, for outstanding scholarly papers on operatic subjects
ELIGIBILITY: The competition is open to any interested author. Membership in NOA is not required. No registration fee is required. Deadline for submission: 30th May 2011. Author notification: after September 1, 2011.
GUIDELINES: Detailed guidelines for submission and information pertaining to the award may be found here on the website of the National Opera Association: http://www.noa.org/competitions/scholarly-paper-competition.html
Submission Procedure There is no application fee for the competition. Submission may be by mail or email attachment. Papers will not be returned. Submit entries and any inquiries about the competition to: Dr. Robert Hansen National Opera Association PO Box 60869 Canyon, TX 79016-0001 email: rhansen@mail.wtamu.edu.
Le Grenier des Goncourt
Université de Bordeaux III 26-27 janvier 2012
Deadline: 30th May 2011
Le Centre TELEM de Bordeaux III, en partenariat avec la Société des Amis des frères Goncourt, propose l’organisation d’un colloque en janvier 2012 consacré au salon littéraire et mondain d’Edmond de Goncourt, « le Grenier », aménagé par Frantz Jourdain et inauguré en janvier 1885, dans la maison d’Auteuil.
Cette « parlote littéraire » du dimanche réunit des écrivains dont les orientations variées, voire contradictoires, invitent à reconsidérer les lignes de partage traditionnellement reçues par l’histoire littéraire : les naturalistes (Daudet, Maupassant, Alexis, Céard, Huysmans, Rosny, Bonnetain, Descaves, Hennique, Zola etc…), y côtoient des auteurs de sensibilités littéraires diverses, (Jean Lorrain, Ajalbert, Rodenbach, Henry de Régnier, Heredia, Edouard Rod, Francis Poictevin, Montesquiou, Rollinat, Proust etc…), des critiques, des éditeurs et des journalistes (Gustave Geffroy, Henry Bauër, Roger Marx…) ainsi que des artistes (Bracquemond, Carrière, Paul Helleu, Rafaelli, Rodin, Tissot, etc…). On y retrouvera « les Hommes de lettres de talent » qui constitueront, après la mort d’Edmond, la première académie Goncourt. Le Grenier constitue un phénomène complexe, dont il s’agit ici de mesurer les visées, les implications et les procédures sur le plan littéraire, mais aussi esthétique.
La réflexion, centrée sur le dispositif esthétique que représente le Grenier, pourra s’orienter vers des approches diverses : socialité du lieu, configuration du champ littéraire, influences littéraires et esthétiques, recherche poéticienne à l’exclusion de toute approche exclusivement monographique. On pourra notamment réfléchir à partir des axes suivants :
- Quels sont, dans la stratégie d’Edmond de Goncourt, les enjeux (implicites ou explicites) assignés au « Grenier » ? S’agit-il de faire école, ou particulièrement de constituer le vivier de la future Académie Goncourt ?
- Est-il possible de penser une articulation entre l’écriture du journal et le phénomène du salon ?
- Certains modèles prégnants (dîners Magny, « dîners Flaubert », les jeudis de Champrosay ou les mardis de la rue de Rome) ont-ils pesé sur la pensée du « Grenier » par Edmond ? Quelle posture y tient-il, comment s’y pense-t-il ? Dans quelle mesure se pose-t-il comme un maître à penser, ou est-il considéré comme tel ?
- Qui fréquente le « Grenier », pourquoi, qu’y cherche-t-on, de quelle distinction sa fréquentation est-elle le signe ?
- Comment le dispositif du Grenier se conjugue-t-il à l’entreprise de collectionneur d’Edmond de Goncourt ?
- Ce lieu constitue-t-il une stratégie offensive pour la création d’un phénomène littéraire ? Devient-il une instance de légitimation ? On pourra envisager la réception dans la presse, (articles, iconographie), dans les milieux littéraires ou chez les familiers du Grenier (mémoires ou journaux intimes). Quels discours sont tenus dans le monde artistique, à propos du « Grenier » ?
- Emane-t-il de cet espace de réflexions un discours homogène, des recherches multiples, des tensions esthétiques ? S’agit-il d’un laboratoire avant-gardiste ou d’un espace de discours réactionnels, voire réactionnaires ?
- Le ou les discours du « Grenier » sont-ils en congruence avec la pensée littéraire et esthétique de l’époque ? Dans quelle mesure les dimanches Goncourt donnent-ils une photographie des grandes tendances du temps, ou au contraire invitent-ils à des réévaluations ?
- Qu’y défend-on (genres, formes, conceptions de l’art) ? Quel est le point d’intersection (littéraire, esthétique, social, politique) entre les acteurs du « Grenier » ? S’agit-il d’un cénacle ?
Les propositions de communication sont à envoyer pour le 30 mai 2011 à Béatrice Laville (beatrice.laville@u-bordeaux3.fr) ou à Vérane Partensky (verane.partensky@u-bordeaux3.fr) ou à Jean-Michel Pottier (jean-michel.pottier@uinv-reims.fr)
june
The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity
A three-day conference De Montfort University, UK 18, 19, 20 November 2011
Keynote Speakers: David Punter, University of Bristol Andy Mousley, De Montfort University, Leicester
From the 12th-century Old French mostre, meaning a prodigy or marvel, the general use of the word ‘monster’ has been derogatory: something large, gross, malformed or abnormal. The monstrous creates fear and loathing, and includes difference through race, culture, society, ideology, psychology and many other Others. This fear is not produced by something entirely alien but by the recognition of ourselves within the Other. In his Introduction to Cogito and the Unconscious Slavoj Zizek argues that the Cartesian Subject has at its heart the monster which emerges when deprived of the ‘wealth of self-experience’. The ease by which the border between ‘human’ and ‘monster’ is transgressed has long been debated in literature; Frankenstein makes a monster by trying to perfect the human, both nineteenth-century Flora Bannerman, in Varney the Vampire, and twenty-first-century Sookie Stackhouse recognise the human origins of the vampire. At the heart of the monster is the human; at the heart of the human is the monster.
This conference seeks to understand the relationship between the human and the monstrous across the centuries and across disciplines. In what ways and to what ends have the human and the monster been defined and polarised? How has the monster been subdued, and with what success? How do definitions and separations of the human and the monstrous change and through what pressures and motivations? How does the emerging field of posthumanism enable us to conceptualise the monstrous in relation to the human and humanism?
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers which may address, but are not limited to:
** Monstrosity in the humanities ** The monster and criminality ** Psychology and the monster ** Monstrosity and the internet ** The human and the monster in the post-national world ** Monstrosity and miscegenation ** Liminality and transgression ** Theories of monstrosity and/or the human ** Historical monsters ** Humanism, the post-human and monstrosity
Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Deborah Mutch, Department of English, Clephan Building, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, email: dmutch@dmu.ac.uk
Deadline for abstracts: 1st June 2011
THE SOCIETY FOR UTOPIAN STUDIES - 36th Annual Meeting
Archiving Utopia – Utopia as Archive
The Nittany Lion Inn on the Penn State Campus State College, Pennsylvania October 20-23, 2011
The 2011 Society for Utopian Studies Annual Conference celebrates the ongoing evolution of one of the world’s largest—and best--collections of utopian materials in the world. The Arthur O. Lewis Utopia Collection is housed in Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Penn State’s Paterno Library. The Society’s own archive resides here, as do thousands of titles, primarily in British and American utopian literature, published from 1516 up to today. In addition to the usual stimulating schedule of papers, this conference will feature an exhibit highlighting some of the collection’s most valuable treasures. Participants will have the opportunity to acquaint themselves with the many research opportunities here.
The conference will not only highlight the breadth and depth of the Lewis Collection, but also the importance of the archive as broader theme within Utopian Studies. This refers not only to actual physical spaces, but also the significance of the archive in utopian literature, archival practices in utopian movements, and the archive as utopian space itself. We ask for papers, panels, presentations and performances on the cultural, political, social, architectural, and managerial aspects of the archive as utopian space. 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.
Finally, in advance of a special issue of Utopian Studies on the theme of ‘utopia and education,’ we also highly encourage papers on any aspect of that topic: utopian pedagogies (in utopian fictions or in actual practice), utopia as an educational process; education as a utopian process; the university as (intentional) community; geographies of utopian education.
* * *
State College, Pennsylvania is home to Penn State University’s main campus, with around 45,000 students. In addition to Penn State’s beautiful University Park campus, surrounded by farms and mountains, the town itself offers restaurants and shops. The University Park airport, serviced by Delta, United and US Air, is only 10 minutes from the conference hotel. State College is located between 3 and 5 hours by car from New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Please send a 100-250 word abstract by 1st June 2011 to:
Sonja Fritzsche Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Illinois Wesleyan University 201 E University Ave. Bloomington, IL 61702 USA
Or e-mail submissions to: sfritzsc@iwu.edu (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; digital projector; PC/Mac laptop, speakers, DVD/VHS player), special needs, or a need for a written letter of acceptance of your proposal. Note: All specific audiovisual requests must be included in the original abstract submission. Late requests cannot be fulfilled due to conference organizational deadlines.
For information about registration, travel or accommodations, please contact the Conference Coordinator, Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor at jaw55@psu.edu, or phone 814-867-0367.
‘DEBUSSY TEXT AND IDEA’ / ‘DEBUSSY : LE TEXTE ET L’IDÉE’
Thursday 12th – Friday 13th April 2012
To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Claude Debussy (1862–1918) Gresham College and the Institute of Musical Research of the University of London (IMR), The Royal College of Music and the School of Modern Languages at Bangor University present an international symposium centred on the links between Claude Debussy and the literary and visual arts. Other collaborators in this initiative are the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies of the University of London (IGRS) and the Literature and Music Research Group of the Open University Faculty of Arts.
The Symposium will run over two days and take place in Central London at Gresham College, Barnard's Inn Hall, Holborn, London EC1N 2HH.
CALL FOR PAPERS Presentations centred on the music of Debussy with textual associations are warmly invited from scholars worldwide as are papers concerned with his associations with the visual arts and the contextual ideas surrounding the composer’s work. The symposium aims to bring together musical and literary scholars as well as those in the visual arts. Presentations in these fields do not need specifically to enter into detail of musical analysis; papers essentially on the literature rather than the music are particularly welcome. Papers should be presented in English, and should last no longer than 20 minutes (inclusive of musical excerpts and/or performance, where relevant). The symposium will encourage extended discussions surrounding each of the presentations. Audio and video equipment will be on hand as well as a grand piano.
Six sessions will focus on the following themes:
v ‘Text without text’ (pieces which are closely linked with literary texts and visual imagery but do not present them: e.g. certain of the Piano Préludes; the Prélude à L’après-midi d’un faune, the Images)
v ‘From Text to Stage’ (issues involving Debussy’s stage works from all points of view including visual and production aspects)
v ‘Text into Song’ (Debussy’s Mélodies)
v ‘From Text to Performance’ (issues of Performance Practice in works of Debussy with textual associations)
v ‘Discarded Text’ (presentations concerned with the many unfinished projects of the composer)
v ‘Beyond Text’ (presentations concerned with wider contexts, ideas and particularly the visual arts).
The symposium will focus on the works of Debussy and his texts and the ideas behind them. Papers on the more general literary and artistic movements are also welcome. Presentations on Debussy’s influence on, or associations with, other composers are beyond the remit of this symposium as are analytical and theoretical papers which are not in some way centred on literary texts or visual comparisons.
Proposals following the above guidelines should be submitted in English in a font size no smaller than 10 point with a separate cover-page including the name, contact details and institutional affiliation (where relevant) of the proposer. (Papers will be assessed anonymously so names and affiliations should be restricted to the cover page). This should be followed by a brief abstract of the proposed paper (300-400 words), and a shortlist of previous publications. A concise bibliography should be appended, ignoring the principal general works on Debussy, and the whole (excluding cover page) should not exceed 2 pages of A4 paper. Deadline for receipt of submissions 15th June 2011.
Please submit proposals by email, in an attachment including your full name and contact details, to Mrs Valerie James: valerie.james@sas.ac.uk.
For further information visit www.sas.ac.uk
Organising committee: Professor Richard Langham Smith (RCM), Dr Helen Abbott (Head of French, School of Modern Languages, Bangor University, Wales), Director of the Institute of Musical Research. Co-ordinator to organising committee Mrs. Valerie James (IMR)
Reading committee : Richard Langham Smith (as above), Helen Abbott (as above), Mylène Dubiau-Feuillerac (Université de Toulouse II), François de Medicis (Université de Montréal)
Jack the Ripper Through a Wider Lens: An Interdisciplinary Conference
Friday, 28th October and Saturday, 29th October 2011 Bossone Research
Enterprise Cente,r Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
This one-and-a-half day conference will examine the larger significance of the Jack the Ripper case, including its historical, literary, psychological, and sociological implications.
Since the Conference will examine the broader issues connected with the Ripper case, the Conference Committee is seeking papers for panels on the following topics:
v What were the economic and social conditions that helped make women so vulnerable to the Ripper' violence and that of others during the Victorian era?
v What forms of detective work were used by the police during the period to identify suspects in the case?
v What were the theories of criminal investigation that framed attempts to capture the killers?
v What can contemporary psychology tell us about this kind of killer?
v In what ways did the media of the period affect the case?
v What do filmed and other fictionalized versions of the case tell us about how society has viewed this case over time?
v Why does Jack the Ripper continue to exert such fascination? What does this tell us about the lure of a certain kind of narrative?
v An outline of a paper for a panel presentation on any of these questions or others connected to this wider view of the Ripper case should be submitted by e-mail to:
Dr. Suzanne E. Rocheleau, Associate Dean, Pennoni Honors College, Drexel University. E-mail: rocheleau@drexel.edu
The outline should be no longer than one page and should be accompanied by a short bio. The deadline for submissions is 1st July 2011.
Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest: The Manner of Comedy
Edited by Michael Y. Bennett, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, bennettm@uww.edu.
Rodopi Press Amsterdam / New York continues its series of literary studies entitled ‘Dialogue’ under the general editorship of Michael J. Meyer. The series offers new and experienced scholars the opportunity to present alternative readings and approaches to classic texts (those which have received canonical acceptance in either American or Continental Literature).
The call for papers will work as follows: The series editor or a guest editor (in this case, Michael Y. Bennett, editor of Refiguring Oscar Wilde’s Salome [Rodopi, 2011]) will list several different topics or approaches to the text in question (in this case, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest). These topics should have in the past elicited a significant level of disagreement among critics or have an inherent controversial element. Ultimately, the editor will select 6 essays from younger scholars or those with limited publication or more recent PhD degrees and 6 from scholars who are considered experts in the field. The latter scholars may write an essay that responds to the topics listed or may be selected by the editor to respond to the paper of a younger scholar. The goal will be to pair the readings and to establish a dialogue between the two respondents. Another possibility would be to share the senior scholar's response with an emerging scholar to establish a sort of Point / Counterpoint reaction. The major goal of the series would be not only to open the door to voices which are already silenced by the selective nature of academic presses but to encourage new approaches and insights that will both enliven the text and promote further discussion of the work in question.
Emerging scholars will be defined by the following criteria: M.A., A.B.D., or recent Ph.D., Instructor, Lecturer or Assistant Professor status, publications limited to articles in journals and monographs and / or chapter studies; they will have 6 years or less from the awarding of a doctoral degree. Experienced scholars will demonstrate the following: teach at the Associate Professor level or above, have at least 7 years experience from the awarding of the Ph.D., be published in book length studies, and are considered to be an authority or well-known commentator on the title or author.
For inquiries, a list of topics, and/or abstracts (please include a c.v.), please contact Michael Y. Bennett at bennettm@uww.edu. Abstracts are due by 1st July 2011. Essays will be due by 1st March 2012.
Strangers in Paradise: Foreign Artists and Designers in Modern Paris, 1870-1914
Editors: Karen Carter and Susan Waller
We invite proposals for an edited volume of essays that consider foreign visual artists and designers and their social networks in Paris between 1870 and 1914.
Between the Franco-Prussian War and the First World War, Paris became a center of international cultural activity that attracted art and design professionals including painters, sculptors, architects, illustrators, art dealers, models, printmakers, and others involved in visual arts métiers. These ‘strangers’ included exiles, refugees, immigrants and expatriates— those with rich social and financial resources as well as the less fortunate forced to make their way in an alien culture—who were all drawn to Paris from Western and Eastern Europe, Asia and the Americas. Although Paris attracted artists and designers as tourists, this volume seeks to analyze the experiences and strategies of those who made a more permanent commitment to interacting with French artists and institutions throughout extended periods, if not over a lifetime. Therefore, the interactions between foreign and French artists and designers will be explored from the global perspective of Paris as the site of a thriving international arts community in which the interaction, mingling and even conflict of cultures, peoples and diverse traditions contributed to the development of a hybrid and multivalent modern art.
This volume, then, endeavors to analyze the relocation of, and presence of, foreign artists and designers in Paris, a global capital of the arts world. In recent decades, as issues of immigration and globalization have taken on heightened political and social salience throughout the developed world, definitions of national identity have been challenged and patterns of transnational migration have become increasingly recognized. National boundaries are today conceptualized as porous rather than discreet; cultural identities are seen as shifting rather than rigidly defined, and global networks of exchange have become a central focus in current scholarship. Despite these scholarly interventions in history and the social sciences, the discipline of art history has somewhat neglected the phenomenon of immigration and transmigration as a meaningful category for analysis. Although interventions that highlight the development of modern art in locales outside France and Western Europe have proliferated, the primacy of Paris as the center of modern art still persists as an important narrative that accounts for art of the period. While in many ways accepting the importance of Paris as an international center of the arts, this volume nonetheless seeks to challenge the primacy of a Franco-centric interpretation of the modern period by exploring the issues of international transmigration and networks of exchange within the transnational artistic community situated in Paris from 1870 to 1914. This internationalization of art, therefore, will be explored as one of the foundational aspects of modern art in West Europe.
The editors seek submissions that engage with a broad spectrum of questions relating to issues of immigration, identity, and globalization. We encourage in particular essays from multiple theoretical frameworks and perspectives that examine case studies of foreigners—groups or individuals—present in Paris from 1870 to 1914. Some of the questions to be considered might include, but are not limited to, the following. How did social networks and sub-cultures of foreigners within the Parisian artistic community foster or inhibit immigration? Did foreign-born artists and designers seek or resist assimilation into French society and how did this assimilation or resistance affect their work? Which strategies and institutions did these foreigners utilize in order to become successful? Did they deliberately cultivate personas—as outsiders, exiles, international bons vivants, or acculturated Frenchmen—in order to ease the transition into an alien culture and society? Was the work of foreign-born artists and designers received differently in the French press or by the members of exhibition societies that proliferated during this period? How does the myth of Paris as the birthplace of modern art and design intersect with myths of ‘Frenchness’ and patterns of immigration on the ground? Ultimately, the volume seeks to examine the contribution of non-French artists and designers to the development of modern art in Paris and to analyze art of the period (1870-1914) as the product of global exchange and cultural hybridity.
Please send a 400-word proposal and a CV as electronic attachments in MS-word to Karen Carter (klcarter2010@gmail.com) and Susan Waller (wallersu@umsl.edu).
The deadline for submitting a proposal is 30th July 2011. The deadline for completed papers will be determined later.
Karen Carter, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Art History, Kendall College of Art and Design, Ferris State University, Grand Rapids, MI 49503. (616) 451-2787
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