Literary Studies Convention
University of Wollongong
7 – 11 July 2015

Theme: Literary Networks

Literature is a meeting point for intersecting lines of thought and feeling about the world. As the German critic Theodore Adorno observes in his Aesthetic Theory: “Art is autonomous and it is not…. The great epics, which have survived even their own oblivion, were in their age intermingled with historical and geographical reportage.”

Like its object of study, the discipline of literary criticism survives by making connections to other disciplines and to other ways of thinking and feeling about the world. Literary thinking, in this sense, is networked thinking. It is intermingled with other modes of discourse such as the philosophical, the linguistic, the political, the social, the geographical, the theological and the sexual.

We invite papers that engage with literature and literary criticism as a network where a network, is understood very broadly as a group or system of interconnected people or things. Given that this conference seeks to bring together scholars who work in and between a variety of national literatures, literary, media and cultural histories, we encourage submissions that engage with and exemplify the rich variety of critical and creative practices currently being undertaken under the aegis of ‘literary studies’ in a contemporary Australian context.

Deadline for abstracts: 31 January 2015.

For guidelines and further information visit lha.uow.edu.au/lit-net2015

“Changes in Fashion in the Middle Ages”
Center for Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference
University of California, Santa Barbara
Saturday, April 25, 2015

Keynote Speaker: Professor Maureen C. Miller, Department of History, UC Berkeley

“ché l’uso d’i mortali è come fronda in ramo, che sen va e altra vene.”

“The custom of men is as leaves on a branch, some of which go and others come.”

Dante Aligheri, Paradiso, XXVI, 137-138

Change is inevitable in a period as long as the Middle Ages. Changes in dress, surely, but also political changes as kingdoms and dynasties rise and fall, changes in ritual as Christianity’s influence waxes and heterodox thought comes and goes, changes in aesthetic preferences as artists of all varieties develop new colors, media, and techniques. As we currently struggle to exchange entrenched biases for new attitudes and to adapt to changing modes of information dissemination, the plethora of medieval “Changes in Fashion” provides an opportunity to critically engage with the intersections of history, literature, art, and religion.

The UC Santa Barbara Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference (April 25, 2015) on “Changes in Fashion” looks to analyze fashion at its broadest, spanning not simply clothes and literary genres, but questions of materiality, techniques, politics, and courts. We invite 250-300 word proposals for 15-20 minute papers—in English, French, Italian, or Spanish—which take “changes in fashion” as their point of departure.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

– Political fashions

• changes in governing bodies and methods
• attitudes toward individuals, intellectual movements, and/or religion
• patronage and censorship
• civic ritual
• how the political and cultural fashion each other

– Texts

• textual representation of self and other in one or several genres, including didactic texts, poems, proto-novels, political/parliamentary meetings, elegies, sermons
• changes in modern approaches to medieval texts
• trends in popular literature

– Aesthetic

• city planning, public space
• painting, sculpture, architecture

– Travel

• including pilgrimage, as a fashionable undertaking
• traveling manuscripts and knowledge, e.g. Arabic medical knowledge’s arrival and influence in Western Europe

– Trade

• in the Mediterranean and/or from the East, e.g. the Silk Road
• pirates and piracy
• exotic animals, courts, and menageries

– Food

• culinary fashions
• changes in diets and medicinal knowledge
• introduction of foreign foods such as spices, oranges, tea, dates

– Technological innovations

• material changes as in the making of the book
• stage-craft (scenery, props, etc.)
• agricultural technology and methods
• artistic media and modes

– Language

• shifts in names and place names between languages and/or over time
• learning of secondary languages

– Clothing

• as a manifestation of court ritual and protocol
• its role in royal entry processions and political identity
• its representation in illuminations
• clothing’s link to textile production
• cross-dressing

The plenary speaker this year will be Maureen C. Miller (UC Berkeley).
Professor Miller explores the extraordinary capacity of individuals and societies for change, using the rapid transformation of Europe over the eleventh and twelfth centuries as a lens to interrogate contemporary understandings of life choices and the social, economic, political, and cultural forces conditioning them. Her most recent publication is Clothing the Clergy: Virtue and Power in Medieval Europe, c. 800-1200 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

This conference is open to all scholars of the medieval period. Please submit your name, email, university, and departmental affiliation with your abstract of 250-300 words to the conference committee at UCSBMedievalConference2015@gmail.com by February 2nd, 2015.

Australian Women’s History Network Symposium 2015
Good and Mad Women: Histories of gender, then and now
University of Sydney
8 July, 2015

Just over three decades ago, Jill Julius Matthews published Good and Mad Women: The historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia (1984), her path-breaking feminist history. This important book pre-dated Joan W. Scott’s proclamation of gender as a ‘useful category of historical analysis’ (1986) and continues to be influential. The Australian Women’s History Network celebrates the book’s anniversary by calling for papers that historicise gender and/ or reflect on the historiography of gender. In particular we seek work that aims to trace and analyse, as Matthews did in Good and Mad Women, the specific meaning and experience of becoming a woman, whether in twentieth century Australia or elsewhere in time and place.

The symposium also offers a platform for speakers – individually or on panels – to revisit classic works of gender history, examining how these were foundational and for whom, or to survey contemporary currents in gender history. The AWHN welcomes broad engagement with the field of gender history; other possible topics and themes include:

• Gender and sexualities
• Gender in cross-cultural comparison
• Gender, politics and resistance
• Transgender
• Feminist critiques of gender
• Gender and embodiment
• Gender, race and ethnicity
• Men and masculinities
• Gender and pleasure
• Class and gender
• Gender and colonialism; gender and nationalism

The AWHN Symposium will be held on Wednesday 8 July as part of the 2015 Australian Historical Association conference “Foundational Histories” to be held at the University of Sydney 6-10 July 2015. The keynote speaker will be Professor Jill Matthews. The annual general meeting will be held at lunch time with a reception and dinner to follow the symposium.

Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words (for individual papers and panels) to the symposium convenor Zora Simic at z.simic@unsw.edu.au  by 28 February 2015. Please send as word or RTF files with an author bio of no more than 50 words. Papers that are not selected as part of the AWHN program will be considered for the AHA program. Each paper will run for twenty minutes with ten minutes for question time. Panels are allocated 90 minutes in total.