Monthly Archives: October 2016

Entangled Histories: Australian Historical Association Annual Conference 2017 – Call For Papers

Entangled Histories: Australian Historical Association Annual Conference 2017
Newcastle, Australia
3-7 July, 2017

The AHA is pleased to invite abstracts for panel sessions and individual papers for its annual conference at the University of Newcastle. This year’s theme is ‘Entangled Histories’ in reference to the growing use of ‘entanglements’ as a key theoretical term in the humanities and social sciences. It reflects the increasing move away from narrowly defined ‘national’ histories towards an understanding of History as an interlinked whole where identities and places are the products of mobilities and connections. The conference theme will explore the ways in which peoples, ideas and goods circulated across the boundaries of empires and nations. ‘Entangled History’ views all cultures and societies as connected. We welcome submissions that consider the value of entangled frameworks for historical analysis from all historical periods, themes and research areas. We especially encourage proposals for panel sessions of three papers.

Keynote Speakers:

Conference Themes: Indigenous histories; histories of violence; migration and refugee histories; Mobilities, transnational spaces and borders in history; histories of sexuality; digital histories; histories of health, illness and disability; intimate histories of families and localities; public histories and cultural heritage.

If your abstract does not fit into any of the above themes, please submit to the General Conference Program theme.

Affiliated Conferences and Special Strands: the conference will include a number of strands:

1. The Australian Women’s History Network Symposium, “Symbiotic Histories.” For at least forty years, feminist historians in Australia and elsewhere have documented intimate histories, guided by a belief in the personal as political, a desire to challenge grand narratives, traditions and borders, and a commitment to acknowledging the dynamics of intersectionality. Feminist historian Mrinalini Sinha has emphasised the importance of contextualising intimate histories, noting how gendered discourses have a “symbiotic” relationship to local and global histories of dispossession, colonisation and nation building. We see this conference as an opportunity to build on her analysis. If historians are asked to consider how gender has been historically articulated in the local and the transnational – as well as the national – then, much like “entanglements,” we might uncover the underlying connections, contradictions, and interdependencies between and among our subjects. For this symposium we invite speakers – individually or on panels – to contribute papers that speak to symbiotic histories of women and gender. We especially invite papers that explore the potential for symbiotic histories of women and gender. For more information contact the conveners: Dr Chelsea Barnett, Isobelle Barrett Meyering, James Keating and Sophie Robinson: auswhn@gmail.com

2. Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network, “Green Stream.” We invite submissions of papers and panels in what has become a broad interdisciplinary field since Roderick Nash coined the term in 1972. We welcome submissions across a wide range of research topics as well as in environmental historiography. We are especially interested in looking at the intersection of histories of technology and the environment. For inquiries contact: Dr Nancy Cushing (Nancy.Cushing@newcastle.edu.au).

3. Religious History Association Conference. The RHA invites papers and panel proposals that address religious history from any time period and geographical location. In addition to this broad call, we would like to invite papers or panel proposals in three specific areas: critical engagement with missionary activity; Moravian missions; and papers which engage questions of sexuality and/or marriage and religion. For further information and inquiries contact: Dr Christina Petterson (christina.petterson@gmail.com), or Dr Laura Rademaker (Laura.Rademaker@acu.edu.au).

4. Oral History Australia and the National Oral History Association of New Zealand (NOHANZ), “Working with Memories”. This strand will bring together presenters and papers that explore the opportunities and challenges of working with memories as sources for historical research and production. Presenters in this strand will be invited to submit their papers to the Oral History Australia Journal. For inquiries contact: Professor Alistair Thomson (alistair.thomson@monash.edu), or Dr Nepia Mahuika (nmahuika@waikato.ac.nz).

Submission and Presentation Guidelines

Each presenter will have 20 minutes presentation and 10 minutes discussion time. Delegates can present only one paper across the AHA and affiliate conference streams. Conference registration is open to everyone, but all presenters must be members of the AHA or its affiliate organizations.

Each author may only submit ONE presentation proposal.

Presentation proposals must be submitted by the 1 March, 2017.

You may submit one of two presentation types:

1. Single paper proposal

OR

2. Panel or Roundtable paper proposals

 

1. Single paper proposal must follow the guidelines below:

  • Title: Maximum of 10 words
  • Biography: No more than 50 words
  • Summary of Abstract: Maximum of 30 words. This will be the only description of your paper in the conference program, so please choose your words carefully.
  • Abstract: No more than 250 words. This abstract will be posted on the conference website in a PDF file with all other abstracts, but will not be published in the conference program.

2. Panel or Roundtable paper proposals must follow the guidelines below:

The panel chair or one of the panellists must submit each paper individually in the name of the author of each paper.

Within the submission process please indicate the following:

  • The name of the panel chair
  • The email of the panel chair
  • The title of the panel session
  • Affiliated conferences strand (if relevant)

Please note the above details must be the same for each paper on the panel.

The following must be included for each paper:

  • Title: Maximum of 10 words
  • Biography: No more than 50 words
  • Summary of Abstract: Maximum of 30 words. This will be the only description of your paper in the conference program, so please choose your words carefully.
  • Abstract: No more than 250 words. This abstract will be posted on the conference website in a PDF file with all other abstracts, but will not be published in the conference program.

Enquiries:

Professor Philip Dwyer
Email: aha2017@newcastle.edu.au
Tel. 61 (0)439426218

Pembroke College (Cambridge): Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences – Call For Applications

Pembroke College, Cambridge
Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences

Location: Cambridge
Salary: £22,494 to £25,298
Hours: Full Time
Contract Type: Contract / Temporary

The College hopes to elect not later than 14 March 2017 to a Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences, with appointment from 1 October 2017. Candidates for the Research Fellowship should have recently completed or be about to complete a doctoral degree, and should be able to conduct research of outstanding quality on aspects of the human propensity for violence and aggression and its amelioration, from within the disciplines of history, philosophy, international relations, and human, political and social sciences. The duration of the Fellowship will be for three years. Like all Pembroke Research Fellows, the holder will be expected to do a limited amount of teaching for the College, but would require the permission of the Governing Body to undertake other paid work. The stipend will range from £22,494 to £25,298 and is reviewed annually.

Research Fellows are offered subsidised accommodation, in College or in College-owned flats or houses; where accommodation is not required the Harry F. Guggenheim Research Fellow will be provided with a study in College.

Applications, which are due by 25 November, 2016 should be made online at http://www.pem.cam.ac.uk/the-college/job-vacancies, where further particulars and relevant links are available. Informal enquiries can be made to the Senior Tutor’s Assistant, Sally Clowes, at sts@pem.cam.ac.uk.

Cultures of Exclusion in the Early Modern World: Enemies and Strangers, 1600-1800 – Call For Papers

Cultures of Exclusion in the Early Modern World: Enemies and Strangers, 1600-1800
University of Warwick
18-19 May, 2017
Conference Website

When walking through the streets of London, Joseph Addison urged readers of The Spectator to ‘make every face you see give you the satisfaction you now take in beholding that of a friend’. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the ways early modern people embraced sociability, and created new spaces and ‘languages’ of interaction. Yet, not all strangers who met became ‘friends’. Most remained relative strangers, and others became ‘enemies’. How did people determine who was a potential friend, ally, or enemy? Why, how, and in what ways, were individuals and groups socially ‘excluded’? Did physical appearance and conduct, status, occupation, religion, ethnicity, gender, and place of origin, determine whether one was ‘in’ or ‘out’?

Many early modern historians of social relations, popular print, urban history, gender history, criminality, material culture, and the history of the body, senses and emotions, have recently touched upon these issues. Nevertheless, many fundamental questions about the ways men and women understood and managed their social interactions remain. This timely two-day interdisciplinary collaboratory takes the idea of ‘cultures of exclusion’ as a starting point to explore how social relationships were theorised and constructed, and how and why certain groups and individuals were excluded from particular social interactions and spaces.

We welcome abstracts and/or proposals for panels from postgraduates, early career researchers and faculty staff whose research intersects with these themes, as well scholars from any discipline working on Britain, Europe or the wider world.

Professor Garthine Walker (University of Cardiff) is our confirmed keynote speaker. Her paper (title TBC) will hosted in the Zeeman Building at the University of Warwick on the 18th May 2017, held in conjunction with the University of Warwick’s Early Modern Seminar and Eighteenth Century Seminar.

Topics can include, but are not limited to:

  • Theories of inclusion and exclusion
  • Social relationships and identity formation
  • Sociability and spaces for social encounters
  • ‘First impressions’ – first meetings and encounters
  • Visual and discursive representations of outsiders and social outcasts
  • Exclusionary objects and material artefacts
  • Senses and emotions – smell, touch, sound and sight
  • Disguise and deception
  • Appearance – beauty, ugliness, dirt, disease, and disability
  • Conflict and quarrels
  • Rumour, gossip, slander, libel
  • Regulating and managing friendship
  • Religious affiliation, belief and belonging, inter-denominational conflict and/or cooperation
  • National and Ethnic inclusion and exclusion
  • Gendered representations of inclusion, conflict or ‘otherness’
  • Social deviants, beggars, runaways, slaves and criminals

Publication of a selection of papers is envisioned. Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words for a 20-minute paper to culturesofexclusion@gmail.com by 12 December, 2016, along with a brief biography. Panel proposals are also welcome. Please include the full name, affiliation and email address of all participants.

For further details about the conference, including travel and accommodation information please visit our conference website: https://culturesofexclusion.wordpress.com

The organisers of this event are Naomi Pullin (naomi.wood@warwick.ac.uk) and Kathryn Woods (k.woods@warwick.ac.uk).

Parergon – Call for Proposals for Future Themed Issues

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Call for proposals for a themed issue of Parergon

http://www.parergon.arts.uwa.edu.au

The journal Parergon, in print since 1971, regularly produces one open issue and one themed issue annually.

The most recent themed issues have been:

2014, 31.2 Medieval and Early Modern Emotional Responses to Death and Dying, guest-edited by Rebecca McNamara and Una McIlvenna

2015, 32.2 A Road Less Travelled: The Medieval and Early Modern World Reflected in New Zealand Collections guest-edited by Chris Jones

2015, 32.3 Religion, Memory and Civil War in the British Isles: Essays for Don Kennedy, guest-edited by Dolly MacKinnon, Alexandra Walsham, and Amanda Whiting

2016, 33.2 Approaches to Early Modern Nostalgia, guest-edited by Kristine Johanson (in print)

2016, 33.3 Poetry, the Arts of Discourse and the Discourse of the Arts: Rethinking Early Modern Poetic Theory and Practice, guest-edited by Zenón Luis-Martínez, Attila Kiss and Sonia Hernández Santano (forthcoming)

 

We now call for proposals for future themed issues, most immediately for 2018 (35.2)

Parergon publishes articles on all aspects of medieval and early modern studies, from early medieval through to the eighteenth century, and including the reception and influence of medieval and early modern culture in the modern world. We are particularly interested in research which takes new approaches and crosses traditional disciplinary boundaries. Themed issues contain up to ten essays, plus the usual reviews section. The guest editor is responsible for setting the theme and drawing up the criteria for the essays.

Proposals should contain the following:

  1. A draft title for the issue.
  2. A statement outlining the rationale for the issue.
  3. Titles and abstracts of all the essays.
  4. A short biographical paragraph for the guest editor(s) and for each contributor.
  5. An example of a completed essay if available. (This is not essential).

The editorial process

Once a proposal has been accepted:

  1. The guest editor will commission and pre-select the essays before submitting them to the Parergon editor by the agreed date.
  2. The Parergon editor will arrange for independent and anonymous peer-review in accordance with the journal’s established criteria.
  3. Once the essays have been peer-reviewed, the Parergon editor will communicate the feedback to the guest editor.
  4. The guest editor will then be asked to work with the authors to bring the submissions to the required standard where necessary.
  5. Occasionally a commissioned essay will be judged not suitable for publication in Parergon. This decision will be taken by the Parergon editor, based on the anonymous expert reviews.
  6. Essays which have already been published or accepted for publication elsewhere are not eligible for inclusion in the journal.

Time line

Proposals for the 2018 issue (35.2) are required by 30 January 2017, and completed essays by 30 November 2017 for publication in late 2018.

Preliminary expressions of interest are welcome at any time.

Proposals will be considered by a selection panel drawn from members of the Parergon Editorial Board who will be asked to assess and rank the proposals according to the following criteria:

  1. Suitability for the journal
  2. Originality of contribution to the chosen field
  3. Significance/importance of the proposed theme
  4. Potential for advancing scholarship in a new and exciting way
  5. Range and quality of authors

Parergon, is available in electronic form as part of Project Muse, Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Wilson’s Humanities Full Text (from 2008); it is included in the Thomson Scientific Master Journal List of refereed journals and in the European Reference Index for the Humanities (ERIH), and is indexed for nine major database services, including ABELL, IMB and Scopus.

Please correspond with Anne Scott anne.scott@uwa.edu.au.

Anne M. Scott, Editor Parergon

The University of Western Australia

Professor Carolyne Larrington, Public Lecture @ The University of Melbourne

“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Monday 7 November 2016
Time: 12:30-1:30pm
Venue: John Medley Building, 4th Floor Linkway, The University of Melbourne

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.

Space and Emotion: the Places of Rome Study Day @ ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Melbourne Node)

Space and Emotion: the Places of Rome
A study day presented by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

Date: November 4, 2016
Time: 10:00am – 5:00pm
Venue: Arts West, Room 361, The University of Melbourne
Register here: http://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/s/1182/match/wide.aspx?sid=1182&gid=1&pgid=10086&content_id=7326
Convenors: Lisa Beaven and Mark Seymour

For westerners perhaps more than any other city, Rome has long been a place of richly emotional imaginings – political, cultural, and spiritual. This one-day workshop is conceived as an exploration of the links between space, place and emotion, reflecting on how Rome as myth and Rome as space and place interact. It brings together scholars who work in diverse disciplines and across a millennium or two of time. It will be experimental, imaginative and informal, allowing scholars to enrich their own analyses through cross-pollination with insights from a diverse range of work.

Speakers will include: Rhiannon Evans, Robert Gaston, Lisa Beaven, Katrina Grant, Mark Seymour (University of Otago), Flavia Marcello,
Angela Ndalianis.

Abstracts and speaker bios available to download here: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/events/space-and-emotion-the-places-of-rome

Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe – Call For Papers

Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe
Ertegun House, University of Oxford
10-11 March, 2017

This conference seeks to explore the relationship between space, identity, and religious belief in early modern Europe, through the correlative, yet distinct experiences of imprisonment and exile. The organisers welcome all paper proposals that explore the phenomena of imprisonment and exile in the early modern period, especially those that relate these modalities of control to the complex and evolving religious thought of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. At a time when incarceration or exile was a distinct possibility, even likelihood, for many of Europe’s innovative thinkers, how did the experience of imprisonment or banishment influence the texts—theological, political, and literary—produced in the early modern period? How did early modern individuals inhabit, conceptualise, and represent “unfree” space? How does the spatial turn help us to investigate the impact of the confines of prison or the exile’s physical separation from their community on the production and development of religious thought? Does imprisonment or exile exaggerate polemical language and heighten sectarian differences, or induce censorship and temper dissenting voices?

Keynote lectures will be given by Professor Rivkah Zim (King’s College, London) and Professor Bruce Gordon (Yale University).

We invite 20-minute papers, from literary, historical, theological, and interdisciplinary perspectives, on these themes. We are especially interested in papers connecting imprisonment and exile, and in those linking physical spaces with the world of ideas and texts. Potential topics might include, but are not limited to:

  • prison writings and literature produced in exile
  • the emergence of the prison as a mode of punishment, including responses to the work of Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, and other theorists
  • the utility of the genre of prison writings, alongside considerations of audience, reception, and intention
  • spatial confines of imprisonment
  • captivity, relationships between captor and captive, cultural issues arising from captivity
    mental and physical separation from community
  • distinctions and connections between imprisonment and exile
  • monastic prisons
  • literary consolation
  • literary and figurative conceptualisations of imprisonment and exile
  • mental and physical isolation, and afflictions experienced whilst incarcerated
  • imprisonment or exile as themes or images in theology and exegesis

The organisers, Spencer Weinreich, Chiara Giovanni, and Anik Laferrière, look forward to receiving proposals, particularly from postgraduate students and early career researchers, and are glad to answer any queries. Proposals should include a title and abstract of a maximum of 250 words, and should be sent to prisonexileoxford@gmail.com by 9 January, 2017.

Professor Adam Potkay and Associate Professor Vivasvan Soni – Joint Seminar @ The University of Melbourne

Adam Potkay and Vivasvan Soni – Joint Seminar

Date: 3 November, 2016
Time: 12:30pm-2:30pm
Venue: 2nd floor meeting room, John Medley Building, The University of Melbourne
Register: Register online here

“Something Evermore about to Be: The Transformation of Hope in the Romantic Era”, Professor Adam Potkay (College of William & Mary)

In my talk, I’ll sketch what happens to the Janus-faced figures of hope in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My argument is this: hope, once a theological virtue and potential secular vice, features in the eighteenth century as a neutral element of secular psychology. As a psychological mechanism, hope comes in the Romantic era to underwrite a new, semi-secularized virtue: the hope, more or less independent of revealed religion, for more life, a better or perfected condition of the individual or of the species in time or eternity. This new and indeterminate hope directs us, however, towards a receding horizon. It is hope that aims “beyond hope,” and beyond conceptualization: William Wordsworth’s “something evermore about to be”; Percy Shelley’s hope for a hope realized beyond “its own wreck”; John Stuart Mill’s imaginative hope that arises on the far side of his rebuttal of all arguments for immortality. While Romantic-era hope doesn’t supersede or displace the orthodox theological virtues, it does supplement or vie with them, and thus figures in what has been called the modern “differentiation” between religious and secular/poetic modes of authority.

Adam Potkay is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Humanities and Professor of English at the College of William & Mary, Virginia, USA. His most recent books are Wordsworth’s Ethics (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) and The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism (Cambridge University Press, 2007), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Harry Levin Prize. The Story of Joy has been translated into Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, and Polish. Professor Potkay is currently working on a glossary of ethics/emotions in literature.


“”Gigantic Shadows of Futurity”: Some Modern Anxieties about Representing the Future”, Associate Professor Vivasvan Soni (Northwestern University)

Modernity is often characterized by a fascination with change, revolution, novelty and the future. One might think, for example, of Bacon’s proposals for a futuristic academy of science at the end of New Atlantis, or the aesthetics of novelty as it comes to be articulated in the eighteenth century. Moderns, we are told, are so obsessed with their orientation to the future, their desire to bring about the future, that they risk becoming unmoored from the past and tradition. Yet there is a paradox lurking here, namely that there is also within modernity a pervasive unease about representing the future. My paper will explore this unease, and some of the reasons for it. I will begin by discussing some examples from contemporary critical theory, such as Derrida’s messianism, Jameson’s “utopian archipelago,” or Edelman’s No Future. I will then consider how the aversion to representing the future might have its genesis in certain cultural and intellectual formations of the long eighteenth century: Bacon’s critique of final causes; Locke’s account of motivation in the Essay; Mandeville’s articulation of a market logic of cognition that becomes so pervasive in the period; certain aspects of realist representation in eighteenth-century novels; Romantic imaginings of the the future in Wordsworth’s Prelude or Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound.

Vivasvan Soni is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. His book, Mourning Happiness: Narrative and the Politics of Modernity (2010), won the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book. He is working on a project that probes the long history of our discomfort with judgment, tracing its genesis in eighteenth-century discourses of empiricism and aesthetics.

The Society for Theatre Research: Paul Iles Bequest – Call For Applications

The Society for Theatre Research annually makes Research Awards, which are wholly and exclusively for research into aspects of the British Theatre. However, the Society has received a substantial bequest from the estate of the late Paul Iles, the terms of which state that it is to be used: “specifically for research awards in the area of Australian theatre”.

Initial declarations of interest and outline proposals are invited. Although it is expected that projects dealing with Paul’s own interests (such as postcolonial/post-British dominated theatre in Australia, and in particular those companies he was closely associated with – the State Theatre Co at the Adelaide Festival, the Nimrod Theatre of Sydney and the North Queensland Theatre Co.) would be favourably considered, the field is open to other topics.

There is up to £10,000 available; it has not been decided whether there will be several small awards, just one major award, or a mix of larger and smaller. That will depend on the number and quality of the projects submitted. This is a one-off event, so there is likely to be more discussion possible around the development of the chosen project(s) than there can be over the normal STR Awards. There is no application form for awards from this Bequest and there is no specific closing date for these awards: applicants are encouraged to send in outline proposals as soon as may be convenient, after which there may be further discussion and development with the committee (via email). It is expected, nevertheless, that an announcement of successful proposals will be made in 2017. Please send submissions to awards@str.org.uk.

Art as Meaning: Redefining Communication – Call For Papers

Art as Meaning: Redefining Communication
School of the Arts & Media (SAM) Postgraduate Symposium
Robert Webster Building, UNSW Kensington
18 November, 2016

‘My work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance?’
Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes

Intentional or unintentional, an audience reads a message in the works we create. I ‘love it’ and I ‘hate it’ are visceral reactions to the messages conveyed. Regardless of the medium, and the tools used to create, they all share a commonality: the conveyance of meaning. What meanings are conveyed? How? For what purpose? The focus of this conference is to turn our attention to the messages that artists are sharing and to discuss the meanings, themes, and ideologies present within artistic works that are understood by viewers, readers, and listeners. Throughout these talks, we hope to share the many ways that meaning is imparted across disciplines, and broaden our definitions of communication.

Key note speaker: Emeritus Professor, Theo van Leeuwen, University of Technology, Sydney

Call for Papers

Please send an abstract to sampg@unsw.edu.au.

A proposal of maximum 250 words is expected.

We are welcome to various fields of Arts: Literature, Cultural Studies, Media, Music, Creative Writing, Performing Arts, Journalism, and so on.

Deadline for submission: 30 October, 2016.