Worldmaking
37th Congress of AULLA (Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association).
University of Queensland, St Lucia.
10-12 July 2013

Conference Website

Keynote speakers: Prof. Simon During (UQ), Prof. Elizabeth Schafer (Royal Holloway UL), and Prof. Anthony J. Cascardi (UC Berkeley).

The theme of the 37th Congress of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA) is ‘Worldmaking’.

In 1978 Nelson Goodman explored the relation of ‘worlds’ to language and literature. He asked how a world is made, what it might be made of, and how the process of making a world relates to understanding it. Ways of Worldmaking showed that there was no one language to express and understand the world, but many languages, many ways in which ‘universes of worlds as well as worlds themselves may be built’. Goodman’s pluralistic vision has been taken up in a range of disciplines concerned with issues of globalisation from Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern and the process of ‘worlding’ to Pheng Cheah’s exploration of the value and limits of ‘world literature’.

This Congress will explore how worlds and worldmaking feature in language and literature and in humanities scholarship. It asks what our various disciplines identify as the worlds we make in connection to ‘the world’ at large. How is worldmaking defined and articulated? What is at stake in the process? What does it mean to make, unmake, or remake a world, to experience, feel, or belong to a world? How might we understand – or make bridges between – natural, political, cultural, fictional, literary, linguistic and virtual worlds?

AULLA invites submission of abstracts for papers and panels relating to ‘Worldmaking’. There will be opportunities for delegates to have their papers considered for refereed publication.

Please submit a 200-word abstract for papers and any themed panels online. Abstracts due by 31 January 2013.

Italian Voices: Oral and Written Cultures in Early Modern ItalySchool of Music, University of Leeds
Thursday 5-Friday 6 September, 2013

This conference is being organized as part of the project ‘Oral culture,manuscript and print in early modern Italy, 1450-1700’, funded by the European Research Council. It will investigate how Italian oral culture was related to written culture in this period and how far it was independent of writing. For further information on the project, please visit our website: http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/italianvoices.

Confirmed speakers: Peter Burke (Cambridge), Elizabeth Cohen (Toronto), Thomas Cohen (Toronto), Massimo Firpo (Turin), Rob Henke (St Louis), Robert Kendrick (Chicago), Françoise Waquet (Paris).

Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

• Performances of texts in public and private spaces
• Musical settings of texts
• Reading aloud to others
• Improvisation of texts
• Religious and political oratory
• Orality in learned and popular culture
• Linguistic variety and usage in performed texts
• Transcribing performed texts

To propose an individual paper of twenty minutes, in English or in Italian, or a session of three papers, please send a title and 200-word abstract for each paper, and contact information and a brief (one-page) curriculum vitae for each speaker, to italianvoices@leeds.ac.uk. Round-table sessions relating to methodological issues may also be proposed. Any queries should also be addressed to the same address.

Deadline for receipt of proposals: 31 January 2013.