Daily Archives: 31 January 2014

2014 Environmental Humanities Conference – Call For Papers

Affective Habitus: New Environmental Histories of Botany, Zoology and Emotions
The Fifth Biennial Conference of The Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Australia and New Zealand (ASLEC-ANZ)
Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra
19-21 June 2014

An Environmental Humanities collaboratory with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and Minding Animals International.

Convenor: Dr Tom Bristow, ANU Research Fellow (June 2014).

Perceptions, values and representations of our relationship with the physical environment have been read anew in the Anthropocene century through the lens of ecocriticism and affect theory. At present we are witnessing a turn in ecocritical theory to the relevance of empathy, sympathy and concordance, and how these move across flora and fauna; yet ecocriticism has not thoroughly considered whether human and non-human affect are reducible to a theory of the emotions. This conference both seeks to refine the theoretical turn and to address the interdisciplinary shortcoming, while ecocritically articulating the contemporary expansion of the analysis of the humanities.

Invited speakers include: Tom Griffiths, Michael Marder, John Plotz, Will Steffen and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.

Areas for consideration include:

  • Anthropocene aesthetics
  • Archives, encyclopaedias and images of the natural world
  • Colonialism: pre-histories and the present
  • Cultural studies: art, dance, film, literature, music, new media, photography, theatre
  • Ecocriticism and Critical Animal Studies: theory and practice of empathy
  • Ecopsychology
  • Emotions and the environment: learned feelings and historical variability
  • Environmental history: from the Middle Ages to the present
  • Global Ecologies
  • Green pedagogy: agency, senses and the lifeworld
  • Indigenous ecologies
  • Open to others: more-than-human worlds in non-western spaces
  • Seeds and seed banks
  • Studio based inquiry in one of the following fields: (i) climate change; (ii) botany; (iii) fauna – either extinction or migration

ASLEC-ANZ membership comprises writers, artists, cinematographers, and musicians as well as academics working in and across several areas of the Environmental/Ecological Humanities, including ecocritical literary and cultural studies, environmental history and the history of science, anthropology and ecophilosophy.

Inquiries, and paper and panel proposals to: josh.wodak@anu.edu.au

The deadline for submission of abstracts (c. 200 words) is March 30, 2014.

Selected conference papers will be published in Animal Studies Journal, and Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology.      

Essay Collection on Grief and Gender in the Middle Ages – Call For Paper

This proposed collection seeks to explore the intersections of grief and gender in the Middle Ages across a variety of texts and disciplines, including literature, history, medicine, law, art, and religion. Perhaps the most commonly held assumption about the expression of grief by men and women in the Middle Ages is that men express their grief through violence or stoicism, while women grieve in a much more emotional manner, namely, through the shedding of tears. While these two representations of gendered grief reflect, to a certain degree, well-established gender norms, they are too reductive of the human experience of loss and its attendant grief. The expression of grief in the Middle Ages, as one would expect, assumed a variety of forms, some of which conformed to established gender norms and some of which did not. This collection will examine the question of how grief relates to gender identity in the Middle Ages and how men and women perform this grief within the seemingly rigid gender framework constructed by medieval culture. Of interest are papers that explore not only how men and women grieve in medieval texts, but also how this grief affects their gender identity.
Among the questions the collection will address include but are not limited to: How is grief represented in the literature; art; medical, historical, and legal documents; and religious writing of the Middle Ages? How are these representations informed and/or constrained by gender? What role does gender play in public and private displays of grief? How do representations of grief reveal dissonances, contradictions, and anxieties surrounding culturally sanctioned gender norms?
While the primary focus of the collection will be on the Middle Ages (1000-1500), a few essays investigating these concerns within the context of the early modern period will be considered.
Please submit a proposal of approximately 300 words, as a Word attachment, by Friday, March 14, 2014 to:
Lee Templeton, Ph.D.,
North Carolina
Wesleyan College