On The Road: Travels, Pilgrimages and Social Interaction
University of Tampere, Finland
6-8 August, 2015

Conference Website

The sixth international Passages from Antiquity to the Middle Ages conference will focus on social approaches to travelling, mobility, pilgrimages, and cultural exchange. Interaction between society and space has been a key interest of scholars after the ‘Spatial Turn’. Nevertheless, larger comparisons between eras and cultures are mainly missing. The archetypal journey of Odysseys served as a metaphor and model for later narrations of travelling. In both Ancient and medieval worlds, religious
reasons were significant motivations for travelling; these travels confront the traditional idea of these periods as eras of immobility. However, the challenges of setting out for a journey, as well as the dangers of the road, were not dependent on the incentive but rather on distance and other geographical settings, social status of the traveller, and political climate.

The conference aims at concentrating on social and cultural interaction before, during and after travelling. What kinds of motivations were there for ancient and medieval people to get on the road and what kind of negotiations and networks were inherent in travelling? We welcome papers, which have a sensitive approach to social differences: gender, age, health, and status. Actors, experiences and various levels of negotiations are of main interest, and our focus lies on society and the history of everyday life, on the differences and similarities between elite and popular culture, and on the expectations linked to gender and life cycle stage, visible in the practices and policies of travelling. We encourage proposals that integrate the theme of travelling into wider larger social and cultural contexts. We aim at a broad coverage not only chronologically but also geographically and disciplinarily (all branches of Classical, Byzantine and Medieval Studies). Most preferable are contributions that have themselves a comparative and/or interdisciplinary viewpoint or focusing on a *longue durée* perspective.

If interested, please submit an abstract of 300 words (setting out thesis and conclusions) for a twenty-minute paper together with your contact details (with academic affiliation, address and e-mail) by e-mail attachment to the conference secretary, passages@uta.fi.

The deadline for abstracts is September 15th 2014, and the notification of paper acceptance will be made in November 2014.

Conference papers may also be presented in French, German or Italian, however, supplied with an English summary (as a hand-out) or translation if the language of presentation is not English. The sessions are formed on the basis of thematic coherence of the papers and comparisons between Antiquity and the Middle Ages, thus session proposals focusing on one period only will not be accepted.

The registration fee is 100 € (doctoral students: 50 €). For further information, please visit http://www.uta.fi/trivium/passages or contact the organizers by sending an e-mail to passages@uta.fi. The registration opens in November 2014 on this website.

Literature and Affect
Annual conference of the Australasian Association of Literature held in conjunction with the Centre for the History of the Emotions
University of Melbourne
2-4 July 2014

Conference Website

Confirmed keynote speaker: Heather Love (University of Pennsylvania)

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 Jody Greene suggests, as “an attempt to theorize pleasure”. On the other, after Kant, criticism is predicated upon the separation of feeling from judgment. Apotheosizing this separation, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley coined “The Affective Fallacy” (1949) to name the shame of an emotional entanglement with the literary text. In such ways, as Steven Connor contends, the aesthetic has been “constituted as a conceptual mechanism for separating pleasure and value from each other”. 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 to what James Chandler has called “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. (A dramatic statement of the inseparability of history and affect comes from the Marxist cultural historian, Fredric Jameson, no less, who claims 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 energise this turn.

We invite 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; analyse the relationship between affect and the literary aesthetic; engage affect and emotion to explore (or indeed contest) the singularity of literature. We also invite 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 by Friday 28 February 2014 via the submission form.

Koinonia Forum 2014 // Wealth And Poverty
Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey
April 21-22, 2014

Keynote speaker: Willis Jenkins, University of Virginia

The dynamic between poverty and wealth has informed human relationships and social organization from earliest history, and it continues to shape relations between individuals and societies around the globe. Koinonia Forum, the graduate student conference of Princeton Theological Seminary, invites paper proposals for its spring 2014 forum on wealth and poverty.

Topics from a broad thematic range are welcomed, including but not limited to:

• Religious ideologies
• Philosophy
• History
• Politics
• Theology
• History of Science
• Ethics
• Sacred texts
• Technology
• Eco-criticism
• Music
• Art history
• Sociology
• Literature
• Spirituality
• Medicine
• Population studies
• Geography
• Media

Please submit a 150 word proposal to courtney.palmbush@ptsem.edu by February 1, 2014.

Worlds Within
ASAL 2014 Conference
University of Sydney
9-12 July 2014

In 2014 the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) will be hosted by the Australian Literature Program at the University of Sydney: the convenors are Brigid Rooney (Sydney) and Brigitta Olubas (UNSW). The conference theme , Worlds Within , invit es engagement with Australian literature in relation to the world . It will be linked with Robert Dixon’s ARC DORA project, Scenes of Reading: Australian Literature and the World Republic of Letters . The project asks how Australian literature – both as a field of cultural production and as an academic discipline with a cultural – nationalist legacy – can best be located in relation to world literary space while seeking at the same time to provincialise such overarching concepts as world literature.

Keynote speakers: Vilashini Cooppan , Kim Scott (Barry Andrews Lecture), and Suvendrini Perera (Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture).

The conference theme  is drawn from Vilashini Cooppan’s Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing (Stanford UP, 2009). Interrogating narratives of modernism, nationalism and globalization, Cooppan undertakes a rethinking of the ontology of nation, arguing that nations ‘are fantasmatic objects knotted together by ambivalent forces of desire, identification, memory, and forgetting, even as they simultaneously move within, across, and beyond a series of spatial and temporal borders (us/them, territory/flow, present/past, life/death).’ Such a ‘broad understanding of the nation makes it the mark of a certain locality, rootedness, and even oppositionality, in contrast to the mobility, routedness, and expansive cosmopolitanism that defines the “world”in world literature.’ For Cooppan, to imagine ‘worlds within’is to think about nations
not before or against but in their interrelations with globality. Some questions that Cooppan’s work
raises for the study of Australian Literature include:

• How does a work that arises from a specific place and time, travel?
• How do bounded identities coexist with global connections?
• What happens when a text marked by specificities of time and place is relocated? 
• How can Australian literature –as a field of cultural production andas an academic discipline –
  best be located in world literary space?
• How are texts grounded in settler,indigenous, migrant or diasporic configurations located in relation to the national and the global?

Revised Due Date: Please send 200-word abstracts & brief bio by 14 February 2014 to Brigid Rooney brigid.rooney@sydney.edu.au AND Brigitta Olubas b.olubas@unsw.edu.au. Please use ASAL2014ABSTRACT in the subject line of your email.

Papers addressing the following issues are encouraged.We also welcome offers of papers on other aspects of Australian literary studies:

• worlds within: uncanny spaces of nation and/or globe
• globe as national outside, nation as global inside
• relations between interiors and exteriors
• provincialism and world literature, provi n cialisation of world literature
• ‘always localise’: location – oriented studies
• reanimations in/of national/world literature
• worlding settler, indigenous, migrant texts and experiences
• writing careers: cosmopolitanism, expatriatism, repatriation
• modernism and colonialism, modernism in the world
• modes of memory in national literature
• trauma and reconcili ation in national literature
• the poetics of relation ality
• questions of untranslatability and the incommensurable
• the spectre of comparisons: double consciousness as writing or reading method
• rhetorics of belonging, poetics of longing
• linear and nonlinear movement – e.g. of narratives, genres
• lost objects and oscillating identification